Paralogisms of psychoanalysis

This use rested upon a paralogism of extrapolation that in fact constituted Oedipus's formal cause - an extrapolation whose illegitimate nature weight on the whole operation: the extraction of a transcendent complete object from the signifying chain, which served as a despotic signifier on which the entire chain thereafter seemed to depend, assigning an element of lack to each position of desire, fusing desire to a law, and engendering the illusion that this loosened up and freed the elements of the chain

Double bind is the term used by Gregory Bateson to describe the simultaneous transmission of two kinds of messages, one of which contradicts the other, as for the example the father who says to his son: go ahead, criticize me, but strongly hints that all effective criticism - at least a certain types of criticism - will be very unwelcome. [...]. It seems to us that the double bind, the double impasse, is instead a common situation, oedipalizing par excellence. And although it would require formalization, the other type of non-sense spoken of my Russell is brought to mind by the double-bind situation: an alternative, an Exclusive Disjunction is defined in terms of a principle which, however, constitutes its two terms or underlying wholes, and where the principle itself enters into the alternative (a completely different case from what happens when the disjunction is inclusive). Here we have the second paralogism of psychoanalysis. In short, the "double bind" is none other than the whole of Oedipus. It is in this sense that Oedipus should be presented as a series, or an oscillation between two poles: the neurotic identification, and the internalization that is said to be normative. On either side is Oedipus, the double impasse.
AO79::1

One word here on the disgrace of psychoanalysis in history and politics. The procedure is well known: two figures are made to appear, the Great Man and the Crowd. One then claims to make history with these two entities, these two puppets, the Great Crustacean and the Crazy Invertebrate.

Oedipus is placed at the beginning.

• On the one side there is the great man defined oedipally: so he killed the father, in a murder without end, either to annihilate him and identify with the mother, or to internalize him, to take his place or reach a reconciliation (with a host of variations in detail that correspond to neurotic, psychotic, perverse, or "normal" solutions, that is to say solutions of sublimation). In any case the great man is already great because, for good or for evil, he has found a certain original solution to the Oedipal conflict.

  • Hitler annihilates the father and unleashes in him the forces of the Bad Mother;
  • Luther internalizes the father and reaches a compromise with the superego.

• On the other side there is the crowd, also defined oedipally, by means of parental images of a second order, this time collective; the encounter can therefore take place between Luther and the sixteenth-century Christians, or between Hitler and the German people, which corresponding elements that do not necessarily imply identity:
  - Hitler plays the role of father through "homosexual transfusion" and in relation to the female crowd;
  - Luther plays the role of woman in relation to the God of the Christians.
  Naturally, to ensure against the historian's justified anger, the psychoanalyst specifies that he is concerned only with a certain causal order, that one must take "other" causes into account, but that he alone cannot do everything. Besides, he deals just enough with other causes so as to give us a foretaste: he takes into account the institutions of a particular period (from the 16th-century Church to 20th-century capitalist power), if only to see in them parental images of yet another order, associating the father and the mother, who will then be dissociated and otherwise regrouped within the action of the great man and the crowd. It hardly matters whether the tone of these books is orthodox Freudian, culturalist, or Jungian.

Books like those are nauseating. Let's not dismiss them by saying that they belong to the distant past of psychoanalysis: similar books - a lot of them - a re still written today. Let's not say that it is merely a question of a careless use of Oedipus: what other use could be made of Oedipus? Nor is it a case of an ambiguous dimension of "applied psychoanalysis" for all Oedipus - Oedipus in and of itself - is already an Application, in the strictest sense of the word.
AO102:1
(restructured)

The Law tells us: You will not marry your mother, and you will not kill your father. And we docile subjects say to ourselves: so that's what I wanted! Will it ever be suspected that the law discredits—and has an interest in discrediting and disgracing—the person it presumes to be guilty, the person the law wants to be guilty and wants to be made to feel guilty? One acts as if it were possible to conclude directly from psychic repression the nature of the repressed, and from the prohibition the nature of what is prohibited. There we have a typical paralogism—yet another, a fourth paralogism that we shall have to call displacement. For what really takes place is perfectly fictitious in the order of desire or of the "instincts," so as to persuade its subjects that they had the intention corresponding to this fiction. This is indeed the only way the law has of getting a grip on intention, of making the unconscious guilty.
In short, we are not witness here to a system of two terms where we could conclude from the formal prohibition what is really prohibited. Instead we have before us a system of three terms, where this conclusion becomes completely illegitimate. Distinctions must be made:

• the repressing representation which performs the repression;
• the repressed representative, on which the repression actually comes to bear;
• the displaced represented, which gives a falsified apparent image that is meant to trap desire.

  AO114:2

And it is the Oedipus complex that is virtual, either inasmuch as it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor, or inasmuch as it is dismembered and dissolved in a psychotic formation as the direct effect of this same factor. It is indeed in this sense tha tthe idea of the afterward seemed to us to be a final paralogism in psychoanalytic theory and practice; active desiring-production, in its very process, invests from the beginning a constellation of somatic, social, and metaphysical relations that do not follow after Oedipal psychological relations, but that on the contrary will be applied to the underlying Oedipal constellation defined by reaction, or else will exclude this constellation from the field of investment constituting their activity. Undecidable, virtual, reactive or reactional (réactionnel), such is Oedipus. It is only a reactional formation, a formation that results from a reaction to desiring-production. It is a serious mistake to consider this formation in isolation, abstractly, independently of the actual factor that coexists with it and to which it reacts.

AO129:0