Fathers & Sons.1

[Terrance]

"It is this typical American teenager's own FATHER..."
GR.674




"He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The
Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There
is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old
worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here
are the sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are
40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and
never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them,
we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same
masochist fantasies THEY cherished in secret, and worse, we
are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power
our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the
place of, and fail....So generation after generation of men
in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the
Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying,
desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them,
however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life
defined for them by men whose only talent is for death. 
GR.747

When we read of perversions in the first series of Freud's
Introductory II Lectures we find that according to the old
coker first there are primitive, earlier forms of enjoyment,
then some progress toward genital organization and the deep
and intense conflicts and anxieties of the Oedipus complex,
and then a regression. And, remember, that Freud also said
that in a sense the neuroses are the negative of the
perversions. That is, what in the perversions is openly
enjoyed and consciously experienced becomes in the neuroses
the underlying layer against which the
symptoms are essentially, a defense and we should remember
Freud's ideas on the relationship between obsessional
neuroses and the anal-sadistic drive components that
underlie them.

Four case histories illustrate the influence of the imago of
the father on the
lives of the children. As the father's personality is
overwhelming in each of
these cases, it is postulated that the power derives not
from the individual
human being, but from the representation in him of a
preexistent instinctual
model or pattern of behavior, an archetype. This is the
imago charged with
dynamism that cannot be attributed to an individual human
being. The first
case, a woman who married a man much like her father and on
being
widowed remained so for years, provides an example of living
out a copy of
one's youth. The second case is a man whose life repeats his
masochistic
homosexual relationship with his father. The third presents
a woman who
sacrifices all present happiness on the altar of being
dutiful to a now dead
father. The last case concerns an 8-year-old boy who used
bed wetting to
separation mother from father. These cases show that the
parental influence,
even though repressed into the unconscious, directs the
maturing mind. The
role of the father imago is an ambiguous one, characteristic
of the archetype,
whose potentialities exceed human capacity in the
unconscious. 4 references. 

 Jung, C., Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 4.