P's Mothers & Why should we kill Daddy?

[Terrance]

"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40 years out of date.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

Like Hamlet, men in the Zone are deprived of the one, classic option
open to the Oedipal son, that of patricide. He can't kill his father
because his father is already dead. Thus Hamlet is the filicidal child
learning that patricide, in whatever form, is a false solution. It may
yield short-term victory--Oedipus has the ambiguous pleasure of becoming
his mother's husband--but in the long-term the father's lesson of
violence prevails and you wind up dying from your own poisoned sword.


Oedipal Complex: the boy's tendency, around the age of five, to
experience his freshly awakened sexual strivings toward his mother while
wanting to replace his father in her affections. When successfully
resolved, these feelings are repressed, and the boy, afraid of
castration, learns to identify with his father. As a result of all this,
he internalizes his parents and acquires a superego whose ego ideal
replaces some of his early narcissism. The feminine equivalent has been
named the Electra Complex, but for Freud, women have inferior superego
development and
therefore an inferior conscience because they never have to disidentify
with mother as boys do. 

Freud saw an unresolved Oedipal Complex as the cause of every
significant neurosis. The name comes from King Oedipus, who killed his
father, married his mother unknowingly, and put his own eyes out (which
Freud interprets as symbolic castration) when he discovered the truth of
his origins.




"The effects of the mother complex differ according to whether it
appears in a son or daughter. Typical effects on the son are
homosexuality and
Don Juanism, and sometimes also impotence. In homosexuality, the
sons entire heterosexuality is tied to the mother in an unconscious
form; in Don Juanism, he unconsciously seeks his mother in every woman
he meets. The effects of a mother-complex on the son may be seen
in the ideology of Cybele and Attis type: self-castration, madness
and early death. This the reason why in every masculine mother
complex, side by side with the mother complex, a significant role is 
played by the image of the male's sexual counterpart, the anima."


(*The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,* Vol. 9,1, par.162).