Application

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)