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Autor: Becker, Ernest Buch: The Denial of Death Titel: The Denial of Death Stichwort: Perversion; Ödipus-Komplex, Fortpflanzung; Streben nach Unsterblichkeit Kurzinhalt: Oedipus complex; in other words, perversion is a protest against species sameness; Textausschnitt: 231a In other words, perversion is a protest against species sameness, against submergence of the individuality into the body. It is even a focus of personal freedom vis-a-vis the family, one's own secret way of affirming himself against all standardization. Rhome/rolandank even makes the breathtaking speculation that the Oedipus complex in the classic Freudian understanding may be an attempt by the child to resist the family organization, the dutiful role of son or daughter, the absorption into the collective, by affirming his own ego. Even in its biological expression, then, the Oedipus complex might be an attempt to transcend the role of obedient child, to find freedom and individuality through sex through a break-up of the family organization. In order to understand it we must once again emphasize the basic motive of man, without which nothing vital can be understood -self-perpetuation. Man is divided into two distinct kinds of experience-physical and mental, or bodily and symbolic. The problem of self-perpetuation thus presents itself in two distinct forms. One, the body, is standardized and given; the other, the self, is personalized and achieved. How is man going to succeed himself, how is he going to leave behind a replica of himself or a part of himself to live on? Is he going to leave behind a replica of his body or of his spirit? If he procreates bodily he satisfies the problem of succession, but in a more or less standardized species form. Although he perpetuates himself in his offspring, who may resemble him and may carry some of his "blood" and the mystical quality of his family ancestors, he may not feel that he is truly perpetuating his own inner self, his distinctive personality, his spirit, as it were. He wants to achieve something more than a mere animal succession. The distinctive human problem from time immemorial has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms. This is one of the reasons that sexuality has from the beginning been under taboos; it had to be lifted from the plane of physical fertilization to a spiritual one. (231; Fs) (notabene) |