After glancing at this article I told myself that some rainy day when
I'm running a fever, I might bring it up and read it with more care.
But probably not.
Suffice it to say...for the record and for all to hear, I am not now,
nor have I ever wished to replace my father as my mother's lover.
After long years of fearing my mother and her unpredictable temper, I
did come to love her and to find common ground from where we could
openly express ourselves. But never in my wildest dreams would I take
my father's place. He had all he could handle. They shared a very
scrappy love affair for 63 years before cancer claimed my mother. As
I grew older, my dad and I came to a very close relationship. I
traveled a long and winding road before coming home, like the Prodigal
Son. And when I entered the Land of Mutual Understanding, my father
was waiting there to greet me and welcome me home. All that my
parents taught my sisters and me, I had to experience first hand for
myself. I had to embrace religion before I proved to myself that it
was Man Made. I tried Capitalism, only to find that I continually put
People First, thus making it impossible to embrace Greed. I smoked,
drank and chased wild, wild women before coming to my senses...well,
as far as smoking and drinking are concerned.
I learned that my dad had also spent time as a youth, drinking,
smoking and chasing and living for the now, before settling down to
the business of character building.
But for all the love and respect I hold for that man, I never, ever
wanted to take his place and bed my mother.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/1/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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Young Lesbians Triumph Over Freud's Grim Legacy in the Age of Trump
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/young_lesbians_triumph_over_freuds_grim_
legacy_in_the_age_of_trump_20161130/
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Posted on Nov 30, 2016
By John Ogden
A lesbian couple celebrates after getting married in Berkeley, Calif.
(Wikimedia
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Just_married_(9178119295).jpg) )
Now and then a scientific-sounding word will insinuate itself into common
use. Some prevailing trend will lend it currency and its utterance will
increase exponentially. In 2016, the term, misogyny, is just such a word.
We've heard it almost as frequently as "throwing [someone] under the bus"
or
"doubling down." And now our president-elect is transparently a misogynist,
and it's no mystery that the term has pushed its way into the vernacular.
Liberals want to think that the reflexive disesteem of women is on the
wane.
But before we become complacent, we should consider the case of
contemporary
lesbians who must tolerate outworn patriarchal attitudes even more fiercely
than their straight sisters. I find they are currently doing this with a
truly admirable gusto.
No view of lesbianism seems more ludicrous to contemporary sensibilities
than the one expounded by Sigmund Freud.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud) While Freud was certainly a
revolutionary, it is important to note he was also a late Victorian
gentleman, no freer from the sway of his age than Galileo, Shakespeare or
Socrates were from theirs. It is also essential that he be seen as a Jew, a
secularist, and a doctor trained in neurology: His Judaism nudged him away
from mainstream thinking. His secularism led him to mistrust spirituality;
and his neurology studies encouraged him to view his tenets as
scientifically based.
Although the debunking of Freudian theory has proceeded swiftly since the
early 1970s-most current psychology is eclectic-Freud dies hard. It's folly
to dispute him on the hostility behind jokes, the true meaning of
utterances
intended to obfuscate, the telltale signs in body language and slips of the
tongue and pen.
Freud was intensely interested in probing the psyche through language, and
this practice made him a fruitful subject among English professors and
literary critics in American universities. Freud's patriarchal, Victorian
attitudes were not unlike those of the post-World War II professorial class
before the feminist revolution in the 1970s. Many academics espoused his
position that male homosexuals could live well-adjusted, productive lives
in
society, while lesbianism was the harbinger of serious mental illness.
Odd then, that after Carl Jung renounced his ties to psychoanalysis,
Freud's
closest friend and intellectual companion became his daughter Anna,
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Freud) a lesbian. In addition, the
Viennese doctor violated his own strictures by analyzing her himself.
Earlier, he had formulated the theory of the Oedipus complex, a drama
occurring in the life of a male child roughly between the ages of 3 and 6,
when Freud found boys inclined to harbor unconscious wishes to replace
their
father and become their mother's mate.
His ideas of the genesis of lesbianism are wilder still, centered on the
murky world of the Electra complex,
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex) the flip side of the
Oedipal phase. Freud grew ever more convinced of the Electra theory through
his analysis of Anna. He hypothesized that through this episode the father
is the love object of the female child, and that the incipient lesbian will
ultimately retaliate against him for impregnating the mother, switching her
affinities and making the mother the object of libidinal attention. Such a
pattern shows the female child turning to other females as she moves into
her mature years, according to University of Melbourne professor, Barbara
Creed, author of "Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts."
(http://feministscience.blogspot.com/2008/01/lesbian-bodies-tribades-tomboys
-and.html)
In the unsophisticated milieu of the 17th century, when female "sodomites"
in Europe could be burned at the stake, men had imagined the clitoris as an
essentially phallic member, and women possessing large clitorises were
deemed to be either hermaphroditic or aspiring men. In the lurid
imaginations of males of the period, these oversize members were fully
capable of penetration. Freud, 200 years later, found the pursuit of
clitoral gratification an immature impulse-often indicative of nascent
lesbianism-while he considered contentment with purely vaginal
gratification
the sign of a healthy, mature heterosexual female.
Clearly, females were at far greater psychological risk than males.
Young boys, Freud thought, lived in mortal (albeit unconscious) terror of
castration by the father and hence were predisposed toward "obedience." But
females, whose sexual organs are internal, had no concerns about such
violence, he determined, and hence were inclined to promiscuous conduct,
impervious to the prospect of genital mutilation by some avenging angel.
Freud's theories, in league with the prevailing Victorian ethos, afforded
cover to the unschooled Anglo-American masses, who thought homosexuality
unnatural. So, with these imposing narratives in the book and the volume of
the 20th-century brain, how do contemporary lesbians cope with such
colossal
wrongheadedness?
Recently, I interviewed two lesbians living in Berkeley, Calif., whom I
will
call Sarindar and Tess. Both are 23.
Sarindar is a working actor and Tess a rock musician, with an album being
released. They are both erudite, having earned bachelor's degrees from
Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where they met and became lovers in
their senior year. I had known Sarindar when we were fellow actors in an
Aristophanes play in Los Angeles a year ago.
Sarindar's young life breaks the Freudian mold for lesbians in all kinds of
ways.
Her father spent his first 20 years in India, moving to America ultimately
to earn a Ph.D. in neurophysics. He and Sarindar have been close from her
earliest years. She grew up in San Francisco and recognized her sexual
leanings at age 13, coming out to her parents shortly thereafter. Her
mother
had made homophobic remarks when Sarindar was a child but accepted the
girl's statement and apologized for her disparaging attitude. Her father
expressed love, tenderness and support and does so nowadays in response to
her posts on social media, even those with gay material.
Sarindar is inclined to use the pejorative term, "queer." She claims that
owning the word eliminates its sting and celebrates her uniqueness. She is
a
proud lesbian with an intellectual seriousness that is refreshing in
anyone.
A gifted actor with a bell-clear voice, she is especially moving when her
character speaks with conviction about morality or injustice.
Tess was raised in a socially conservative small town in Tennessee. She has
a pretty, angular face, a slender tomboy's body, and long strong fingers,
strategically gifted for strumming on her "axe" or wrapping around the
grips
of a golf club (she's a scratch handicap golfer). Tess is a virtuoso with a
pop ballad, and she brings the goods with harder rock as well. She majored
in religion at Vassar and is keen when discussing matters abstract or
existential.
No doubt, her nimble intellect came to the fore in earning her straight A's
in high school, where she was something of a recluse. She stayed aloof from
the in crowd, never thought to be one of the "cool kids." A devout
Christian, Tess occasionally had to prod her parents into attending Sunday
worship. The experience of prayer had always been acutely emotional for
Tess, and throughout college, spirituality was a significant preoccupation,
prompting her to spend the fall semester of her junior year in an exchange
program in India. She and I discussed those four months and their
importance
in the evolution of finding her gay identity. The proximity of Bengalis at
prayer animated her own devotions, which would lead to a major personal
epiphany.
Last spring, Tess revealed her lesbianism to her parents, a watershed
announcement in her life, given their conservatism and the fact that she
had
only begun to embrace her proclivities as an 18-year-old college freshman.
They seemed to find the news unsurprising.
As a young musician in Berkeley, Tess has found her latent sociability and
loves musical, beer-soaked evenings with friends of every stripe.
The lesbians I observed in the "Everyone Welcome" bars of Berkeley's youth
mecca were jaunty, joyous, and seemingly in the full blush of lesbian chic,
a thing to celebrate with hallelujahs after such a cruel past.
The misconceptions and fantasies that have dominated anti-lesbian prejudice
over the centuries are breaking apart. As the bastions of resistance to gay
rights are toppling in this country like so many dominoes, it is the silent
majority that needs to pivot.
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