Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
This inopportune reappearance of the Oedipal triangle compelled Freud to admit that the
son might experience certain difficulties in repressing his Oedipus complex! In fact, it is
Freud himself who was having trouble disposing of the mimetic triangle. Haunted by the
mimetic rivalry, he repeatedly sketched out triangular formations he believed to
represent his complex, whereas in fact they depict a constantly thwarted mimesis -- an
interplay of model and obstacle that lingers at the edge of his thought but that he never
succeeds in articulating fully.
I limited myself to examining two or three passages whose comparison seems
particularly revealing; other passages could have been chosen
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7. Ibid.
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that would have suited my purposes equally well, including some from the so-called
clinical cases. In my chosen passages a term fundamental to Freudian speculation --
"ambivalence" -- reappears at frequent intervals. It seems to me that this term testifies to the existence of the mimetic pattern in Freud's mind and to his inability to express
correctly the relationship among the three elements of the structure: the model, the
disciple, and the object that is disputed by both because the model's desire has made the
object desirable to the disciple. The object represents a desire shared by both, and such sharing leads not to harmony, as one might suppose, but to bitter conflict.
The term "ambivalence" appears toward the close of the two definitions of the Oedipus
complex previously quoted. Here are the passages again:
His [the boy's] identification with the father takes on a hostile coloring and becomes
identical with the wish to replace the father in regard to his mother as well.
Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first.
His identification with his father takes on a hostile coloring and changes into a wish to
get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relation
to his father is ambivalent; it seems as if the ambivalence inherent in the identification
from the beginning had become manifest.
When we recall how the identification with the father is initially presented -- "This
behavior has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude toward his father . . ." --
we seem to be dealing with a unified relationship, free of ambiguity. Why then does
Freud, a few lines later and seemingly as an afterthought, attribute an underlying
ambiguity to this identification? Simply because he now senses (and his intuition does
not betray him) that the positive feelings resulting from the first identification --
imitation, admiration, veneration -- are fated to change into negative sentiments: despair,
guilt, resentment. But Freud does not realize
why
such things must happen. He does not
realize because he cannot accept a concept of desire based on mimesis; he cannot openly
acknowledge the model in the identification to be a model of the desire itself, and thus a
powerful force of opposition.
Whenever he encounters the effects inherent in mimetic desire and finds himself
struggling vainly to formulate its mechanism of rivalry, Freud takes refuge in the idea of
ambivalence. To label these effects as ambivalent is to confine them to a solipsistic
context, a traditional philosophic subject, instead of identifying them as a fundamental
trait of all human relations, the universal double bind of imitated desires. If we try to
grasp these effects of mimetic desire as individual pathology or psychology, they
become utterly incomprehensible; in consequence, we
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ascribe them to "physical" causes. Freud himself conveys this impression and managed
to persuade himself that in using the term "ambivalence" he had made a daring plunge
into the dark regions where the psychic and the somatic meet. In reality, he was simply
refusing to decipher a perfectly decipherable message. And because the "physical" is by
nature mute, no rebuttal is possible. Today everyone imagines himself tuned in to the
"physical," able to decode the body's messages after the example of Freud. Yet in all
Freud's work there is not a single example of "ambivalence" that does not have its
origins in the obstacle-model.
To attribute the conflict to the "body" is to give up on the logic of mimetic desire that
can account most intelligibly and economically for all phenomena. With Freud, the
"physical" aspect of the subject, the corporeal regions of the psyche, are endowed with a
more or less organic propensity to run head on into the obstacle of the model-desire.
Ambivalence becomes the main virtue of the physical insofar as it nourishes the psyche; it becomes the
virtus dormitiva
of modern scholasticism in the face of desire. Thanks to
this idea and a number of others, psychoanalysis has been able to grant a reprieve --
even apparently to grant new life -- to the myth of the individual, by reasserting the
claims of the physical. Yet this is the very myth it should be trying to demolish.
Freud's use of the term "ambivalence" reveals a genuine, if very limited, recognition of
mimetic desire -- which is more than can be said for many of his followers. The
interesting question is how Freud managed repeatedly to misconstrue such a simple
mechanism. In a sense its very simplicity served to camouflage its presence; but there is
something else at work here as well.
That something else is not difficult to identify; we have encountered it at every turn in
the course of our inquiry. It is, of course, the hard core of the Oedipus complex: that
brief interval of consciousness when the patricide-incest desire is felt to become a
formal expression of the child's intentions. It is clear that this Freudian view makes
Freud's full discovery of mimetic desire impossible. To persuade himself that the
patricide-incest desire actually exists, Freud was obliged to disregard the model, insofar
as it is responsible for awakening the desire and designating the object. Freud was
forced to perpetuate a traditional, retrogressive concept of the desire. The drift of his
thought in the direction of mimesis was perpetually checked by his strange loyalty to the
patricide-incest motif.
As an interpretative tool the concept of mimetic rivalry is far more serviceable than the
Freudian complex. By eliminating the conscious patricide-incest desire it does away
with the cumbersome necessity of the desire's subsequent repression. In fact, it does
away with the unconscious. The concept explains the Oedipus myth and does so with an
economy and precision lacking in the Freudian approach. Why then, we
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may well ask, did Freud renounce the superior utility of mimetic desire to lavish his
attention on the poor substitute of patricide-incest?
Even if I am mistaken--even if I am blind to the virtues of the Oedipus myth as a
universal model for the human psyche--still my question remains valid. It seems
unlikely that Freud ever formally rejected the interpretation I am proposing here as a
substitute for his complex; in all likelihood, it never came to his attention. Had it done
so, Freud would surely have taken it under consideration, if only to reject it. My reading
brings together a number of clues that seem to play little part in Freud's texts; the
obstacle of the patricide-incest motif once removed, we can bring together elements that
remain disconnected in Freud's own work. Freud was dazzled by what he took to be his
crucial discovery. Loyalty to this discovery kept him from forging ahead on the path of
mimesis. Had he done so he would have come to realize the mythic nature of the
patricide-incest motif, as it appears in the Oedipus myth and in psychoanalysis as well.
The whole of psychoanalysis seems to be summed up in the patricideincest theme. It is
this theme that has won psychoanalysis its glory and its notoriety, that has provoked the
incomprehension, hostility, and extraordinary devotion we have come to associate with
the discipline. It is this theme that is invariably invoked whenever any rebellious spirit
dares to cast doubt on the efficacy of psychoanalytic doctrine.
Freud's intimations of mimetic desire never crystallized into a theory. The founder of
psychoanalysis brooded over the same themes throughout his lifetime, and his unending
struggle to reorganize the elements of desire never produced truly satisfactory results,
because he refused to abandon his object desire, his "cathectic" viewpoint. The various
structures and examples of Freudianism, theoretical concepts such as the castration
complex, the Oedipus complex, the superego, the unconscious, repression, ambivalence
-- all these are nothing more than defensive positions in his eternal battle to resolve the
problem of desire.
Freudian analysis should not be regarded as a fully articulated system, but as a series of
experiments dealing almost invariably with the same subject. The superego, for instance,
is only a recasting of the Oedipus complex; the more I examine the origins of the two
concepts, the more convinced I become that their differences are purely illusory.
Freud at his best is no more "Freudian" than Marx at his best is "Marxist." Nevertheless, uncomprehending critics did on occasion provoke him to adopt a dogmatic line of
argument that his followers blindly accepted and his opponents as blindly rejected,
therefore making it difficult for any of us to approach these texts with an open mind.
Post-Freudian psychoanalysis has clearly perceived what must be done to systematize
Freudianism -- or rather, to sever it from its living roots. To assure the autonomy of
desire it is only necessary to erase
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the last traces of mimesis from the Oedipus complex. Thus, the identification with the
father must be dropped. Freud had already pointed the way, after all, in
The Ego and the
Id
. Inversely, to establish the supremacy of the superego on a firm basis, one need only
eliminate all those elements that tend to implicate the object and the subject of rivalry in
its definition. In short, the post-Freudian psychoanalyst reasserts a system, an order of
things based on "common sense," such as only Freud himself ever challenged. In the
case of the Oedipus complex the father becomes a disgraced rival; thus there is no
question of his being a venerated model. Reciprocally, in the case of the superego, the
father is the venerated model, with no trace of the disgraced rival about him.
Ambivalence, it would appear, is good for patients, but of no use to psychoanalysts.
We are presented, therefore, with a rivalry devoid of preliminary identification (the
Oedipus complex) followed by an identification without rivalry (the superego). In one of
his earliest articles, "Aggression in Psychoanalysis," Jacques Lacan noted the
bewildering character of this sequence: "The structural effect of the identification with
the rival does not follow naturally, except perhaps in mythic thinking."
8. B
ut let us leave the myth aside; we will presently see that it can take care of itself. Moreover, the effect
noted by Lacan makes perfect sense in terms of the mimetic nature of desire, which
Lacan, too, failed to discover, forced as he was by his linguistic fetishism to reinforce
the more rigid and "structural" aspects of Freudian thinking.
The interest of Freudian analysis does not lie in its results, in its pretentious
accumulation of psychic agencies; nor does it lie in the spectacle of Freudian
apprentices clambering up and down the precarious scaffolding of Freudian doctrine
with an agility as remarkable as it is futile. It lies, paradoxically enough, in the ultimate
inadequacies of the whole system. Freud never succeeded in establishing the precise
relationship of the model, the disciple, and their common object, although he never
entirely abandoned the effort. Whenever he attempted to manipulate any two of the
terms, the third raised its head like a mocking jack-in-thebox, which his disciples made
haste to cram back in its box in the belief that they were doing something useful. In fact,
it is hard to imagine a more effective method of "castrating" the Master!
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8. Jacques Lacan,
Ecrits
( Paris: Seuil, 1966), 117.
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Both Nietzsche and Girard are "christocentric." That is, the real point of departure for both is the Crucified as the center of history. For Nietzsche, the Crucified is the center of
past
history but his reign over morality must end with the murder of God (
The Gay Science
, no. 125) and
the beginning of a new era. For Girard, the Crucified is the Innocent Victim who reveals the
scapegoat mechanism of human culture and the love that overcomes it.
From some point in the development of his thinking, perhaps in the late 1960s or early 1970s
in conjunction with his discovery of Dionysus* and
The Bacchae of Euripides
, Girard began
to see Nietzsche not only as the greatest thinker of the nineteenth century, but also as a
negative guide to the meaning of the Christian revelation. What Nietzsche intuited and
understood in Christianity he tried to exorcise from himself and his radical visions of a new