Synthesis and Archetypes

Abstract

In a fundamental way Freud’s theories are based upon sexuality. However, such sexual theory as is to be found in Freud has been far too often tied to consequent attempts to anchor it in biological data. Freud’s sexual theories are valid, if valid at all, in as much as they deal not with biological realities but with phantasies or projections of a supposed sexuality assumed to exist both by himself and his patients. Freud’s sexual theories are primarily concerned with setting a series of relationships in an order that has a certain logical and significant sense (in as much as they are, like all theories, self-contained and exclusive) and in recognizing that sense as existing not in bodily function but between mental or psychological processes. Freud’s sexuality is literally of the mind. The phantasy then becomes fantastic because ungroundable empirically, rather it is a projection of an unchannelled desire. That Freud’s triangle may or may not be considered ‘true’ as objective fact is irrelevant when one can see that this triangular relationship has efficacy as theory to explain certain mental structures that may or may not display themselves blatantly in the ‘tics’ of physical distress brought about by a repression (one that is unsuccessful of course). Freud’s observations are based on things going wrong in the system, for if the ‘Oedipal crisis’ is successfully surmounted it remains hidden.

This monogram is a triangular pyramid; and as in geometry, the solidity of every polyhedral body may be computed by dividing the body into pyramids, the pyramid is thus considered as the base or essence of every polyhedran. The author then, after his own fashion, may mean to imply that his book is the basis of all solidity or wisdom — or perhaps, since the polyhedron is not only a solid but a solid terminated by plane faces, that the Doctor is the very essence of all that spurious wisdom which will terminate in just nothing at all — in a hoax, and a consequent multiplicity of blank visages. The wit and humour of the Doctor have seldom been equaled.

Edgar Allan Poe ‘Marginalia’