Ophiuchus Rising

"star" by Kiwi Tom is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Sadly, I think very few people bother to actually read Freud these days (which of course doesn't strike them as the least impediment in maintaining an often vociferous straw-man hatred of him).

Without knowing the first substantive thing about Freud's argument, writers glibly invoke him as jumping off point for all manner of inanities that he's said to be “the father” of. (Just what is meant by this attributed quasi-paternity would be worth pausing on: to be the father of something might mean many things, not least, if we follow Freud himself, and later Lacan who famously turned again to his writings. For the latter, the father—i.e. the Real father—is not just the beginning of jouissance as well as its guardian, but also the place of its prohibition.)

But not to digress, it's from straw-Freud the father in contemporary culture that we get so much quotidian advice column idiocy. Take for example this piece on “When Not to Ignore Your Subconscious” with its breezy opening invocation: “if Freud was right when he penned The Interpretation Of Dreams way back in 1899...”

Given how the article continues, one might well suspect that it's penned by someone who's never read even a chapter of the book she's invoking.

This is low-hanging fruit, certainly, and not to mention old news—the article in question was published three years ago, and certainly one does not need any particular critical credentials or great intellectual acumen to produce clickbait for The Stylist.

It simply happened, by chance, to be drawn to my attention in that way which things nowadays tend to be: by someone on a social media site linking to a source which links to another source which leads a reader through, click by click, along algorithmic paths, leaving a trail of data breadcrumbs in their wake.

"Round the zodiac" by blake_lennon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

What was it that first made me nibble? The equally clickbait announcement, “Sorry, astrology fans: you’ve been reading the wrong star sign all this time”.

Frankly, it turns out not to be much of an announcement, seeing as the article in question is itself also three years old and just conveniently bumped today by an “update” to “ensure its correctness.”

But why click at all? It's not as though I am anything like an astrology fan myself. A friend merely posts the “corrected” zodiac dates. And who could help but look: where do I fall in this revised twelve- (now thirteen-)part pie of the sky? (Like most people, my sign has changed, for all the meaning I feel that has.)

In any case, I don't click right away. Instead, I watch people remark, declaring their (dis)identifications. “That's bs. I'm the most scorpio of scorpios.” “I'm a taurus now.” “I've been a libra all my life, I'm not suddenly going to change!”

To give these people their due, I'm not suggesting that any of them believe that astrology is a hard science that determines once and for all what their destiny will be. What I'm saying, rather (and it's surely nothing that will realign the heavens) is that it's possible to identify (or not), and strongly, with damn near anything. It's possible to stake one's claim under whatever sign one will, not just an astrological one, and then to find a conflict when some authority, some law, some father (in this case, it turns out to be NASA speaking about the wobble of the earth's axis and the consequence of 3000 years) comes knocking.

It's possible to refuse a claim too (which tends, more often, to be my personal posture). But to refuse, as Lacan tells us, always takes place against a backdrop of prohibition. Without some law or authority, refusal would be incoherent. This is why the formula is not “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” But rather “If God is dead, nothing is permitted anymore.”

Reactions vary. People do different things with categories vis a vis the father. (Maybe some would find their explanation for that in the very zodiac assignment that is changing.) On an elementary level, we can say, people enjoy their categories. They enjoy having them, and they enjoy using them—the category is a structure; it's about limits. This thing is not that thing; A is not B. The category delineates, defines a place, like a coordinate on a map—a location beneath the vault of the stars.

How far is all this from The Interpretation of Dreams? Well perhaps not so close as all that. But also not wholly out of this world. Contra The Stylist and much popular straw-Freudianism, if there's one thing Freud emphatically does not say (either in that book or anywhere else) it's “listen to your subconscious”! He no more says that than he says “listen to your zodiac; it is your truth.”

#Freud #Lacan #TheInterpretationofDreams #identification #identity #zodiac #thefather

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