If we do not lose our incestuous desires, our desire for something we can never have, it may be because frustration is a constitutive human experience. Described in Freud’s Project, frustration is the link that led from the feeling of helplessness, to the moral act, which led to the momentous experience of satisfaction that we seem never able to obliterate from our memory. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxieties Freud writes about the biological factor—how, in comparison with most other animals there is such ‘long period of time during which the young of the human species is in a condition of helplessness and dependence’, (Freud, 1926: 161). Over and over that process, the chain of emotions set off by the state of helplessness, then frustration and so to satisfaction is, according to Freud, utterly essential for survival. It had to happen for the biological survival of the human race. What’s more, Freud suggests that frustration is integrally linked to the source of all moral motives.
The period of helplessness wasn’t only prolonged, it was intertwined with a process of seduction. Laplanche remarks that Freud ‘recognised late all that was positive and foreboding in the seduction theory’, (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973: 282). If we go with Laplanche’s theory of seduction; encouraged to hope, seduced into believing that the satisfaction of our desire had a potentiality then this prolonged situation of primal seduction with its implantment from the other of unconscious sexual signifiers, was necessary for survival. It was too lengthy, too embedded with undecipherable message, for there to be such a thing as an abolition of those feelings of memory and desire that Freud speaks of in ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’. ‘The process if ideally carried out is equivalent to a destruction and an abolition of the complex’, (Freud, 1924: 176) . But there’s little chance of abolition – the hope stays alive, and just as well because hope is not just about remembrance of things past, it can lead to new beginnings. We don’t give up on hope, not even if we want to.
Speaking of our unconscious oedipal desires Bollas coins the term ‘unthought known’ a sort of preverbal, unschematised early experiencing that’s barred to conscious thought but determines unconscious behavior. Ronald Britton describes how our oedipal desires are harbored in the unconscious; ‘The parental relationship has been registered but is now denied and defended against by what I call an Oedipal Illusion’, (Britton, 1989: 85). Laplanche and Pontalis describe ‘a fantasy world, not unlike a nature reserve, set up to preserve the original natural state of the country’, (Laplanche &Pontalis 1968). Life thrives in a nature reserve, the conditions are optimum, and perhaps that’s why Freud saw the Oedipus Complex as not limited to normal development, but also as something that was at the heart of psychopathology formation. Speaking of the obsessional’s ambivalence for his parent, Freud describes how ‘the hate, safe from the dangers of being destroyed by the operatives of consciousness is able to persist and even to grow’, (Freud, 1905: 116). Little Hans’ phobia lay in the fact that he repressed his fear of castration and oedipal rage against his father by developing a phobia instead for horses, but he kept his rage and fear alive in his unconscious.