Freud! (pre-blog ramblings)

I almost forgot to blog this week, and I've had this post saved up since last Sunday. I thought I'd post it anyway and come back to it later, just so I've got something up.

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I wanted to ramble a bit just to get a feel for some of these readings.

So Freud! Hey! Freud. And I quote: "...we only wonder why a man has to be ill before he can be accessible to a truth of this kind" (246). This is about melancholy, mind. But isn't that interesting? Dwelling on our (perceived) inadequacies is 1) a symptom (condition? state of mind?) of melancholy, and 2) it's this system of thought that enables us to be accessible to said truth.

And accessible! As in, we're open to the truth; we're able to perceive or accept the truth. That's interesting language on Freud's part.

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Right, so this finally makes some semblance of sense to me, and I'd like to jot that down before I forget it or get confused.

Mourning is healthy. Melancholy is not.

The thing is, I don't know how much of Freud I'm meant to take "seriously." Does that make sense? I mostly mean that much of what he says is very weird to me (in fairness, I am not a philosophy major, and I know surprisingly little about Freud). I understand that the point of mourning is to accept the loss of the opposite-gendered parent as the object of desire, but why are they the object of desire at all? I have a hard time accepting that, I guess.

ALSO. I realize there isn't a working Freudian model for homosexuality, but I have a lot of questions about that in the first place. Why couldn't a homosexual also experience mourning for the loss of the object of desire (assuming he is male, the father)? Would that mean he would identify with the opposite sex rather than his own? That almost forces a sort of feminine characterization on the subject, which is obviously problematic.

I've also finally wrapped my brain about the relation between incest and homosexuality, which is basically as simple as that they're taboos/failings of the system. That's really the two main groups you aren't meant to desire, isn't it? Incest in any form, because it means you've failed to redirect your desire to someone LIKE a family member who isn't one, and homosexuality because there isn't even a model for that. It's easy to try to explain it as simply being attracted to the same-sex parent, but that ultimately throws your relation with the other parent into chaos. And there's no clear answer to which parent the homosexual identifies with.