I agree with Jacqueline Rose about Freud’s continued relevance to our understanding of sexualities (What Sigmund Freud can teach us about the Middle East and #MeToo, 10 October). One could argue that the contemporary movement for marriage equality began with Freud, given his refusal to pathologise homosexuality. Many people assume that the Oedipus complex is meant to produce boys who will grow up loving women, and girls who will love men (I would call that “Oedipus simplex”).
I wish Rose had mentioned what Freud called “the complete Oedipus complex”, which suggests that every child forms both same-sex and cross-sex attractions. Little boys can have romantic feelings for Daddy as well as Mommy, as his famous case of Little Hans showed. For whatever reason, it does seem to be true that younger people are giving Freud a second look. In the past five years, 12 universities in the US have made it possible for students to obtain a minor – study a secondary subject – in “psychoanalytic studies”. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I have taught, these courses are attracting a surprising number of students.
Deborah Anna Luepnitz
Philadelphia, Pennslyvania, US
What Jacqueline Rose doesn’t tell us in her very interesting article is that in 1930 Freud wrote, in Civilization and Its Discontents, in an attempt to understand the barbarity of the first world war, that organised society and human drives are incompatible. Repressive sublimation, the notion that channelling our primitive desires into building society, fails when repressed aggression leaks out into rape and murder – war in other words. Marcuse attempted to address this incompatibility in Eros and Civilization 20-odd years later, in what came to be a clarion call to a would-be androgynous peace-and-love counterculture. Good news and bad news: the sexual identity thing seems to have worked, the end all wars thing definitely hasn’t.
Desmond Hewitt
Marlborough, Wiltshire