Freud’s Founding Myths: Extimacy, Ideology, Intersectionality

Exteriority of the Unconscious

If there were no myths, origins would be inaccessible. Sigmund Freud understood this and therefore resorted to two mythological constructions: those of Oedipus and the primal father (Freud, 1953a, 1953b). The first grants access to the birth of each subject, while the second leads to the threshold of culture.

These two Freudian founding myths are inseparable. There is a close connection here between ontogeny and phylogeny. The prehistory and history of humanity are, in a sense, repeated in the existence of each subject—as if each subject were humanity itself, as if there were a single myth with two expressions: one phylogenetic and the other ontogenetic.

In the Freudian myth, pre-Oedipal childhood recalls the prehuman animality of the primitive horde, with the all-powerful primal father who protects the children, monopolizes the women, and expels rivals. The murder of this primal father and the collective distribution of his women reappear in the fantasy of the child who wishes to kill his father and take his mother away. Every father occupies the place of the primal father—the natural, real father who must die to be symbolized and make way for culture, for humanity, and for each individual.

The connection between ontogeny and phylogeny illustrates one of the principal lessons of psychoanalytic methodology. This lesson can be summarized in a methodological rule: do not confine subjects within their individuality, but rather open their individuality to culture and history, revealing the universal character of the singular case and recognizing that all individual psychology is social. Here is the lesson Freud conveys to us when he teaches us that each configuration of the Oedipus complex is a singularization of universal history.

Freud reveals the human universe to us in each case, in each unconscious, in what Lacan (2018) describes as the exteriority of the unconscious. This cultural, historical, social, and political exteriority is the intimacy of subjects—an intimate external space that Lacan (2013) calls extimacy.

Mystification and Revelation

By discovering the extimate space of the unconscious’s exteriority, psychoanalysis aligns itself with the Marxist tradition, which has always recognized universal singularity and conceptualized the individual as an individualization of social relations and historical circumstances (Marx, 2024; Marx & Engels, 1998; Plekhanov, 1940). Yet, from this same Marxist perspective, we can criticize Freud for the way he connects phylogeny with ontogeny. By conceiving the origin of culture through the Oedipus complex, Freud seems to project the modern European bourgeois family onto human prehistory.

The primitive horde, with the father monopolizing the women, may be a mere ideological fantasy—one born of patriarchy and the bourgeoisie. The formation of this fantasy would occur in two successive stages. In the first, the possessive, aggressive, and competitive bourgeois of modernity would be reflected—as in an ideological mirror—in the Oedipal image of the child who desires to possess the mother and thus competes aggressively with the father. In the second stage, this modern ontogenetic myth would be dehistoricized, generalized, and naturalized by becoming the phylogenetic myth of the primal father: by being projected onto the origins of human history and used to explain the transition from prehistory to history, from nature to culture, from animality to humanity.

A Marxist may thus criticize Freudian bourgeois mythology for ideologically mystifying the origin of humanity, culture, and history. Yet, from the same Marxist perspective, we can also celebrate Freud not only for reasons already noted—for discovering universality in singularity, but also for revealing the particular structure of bourgeois subjectivation in his attempt to explain the genesis of universal human identity (Voloshinov, 2014). The myth of the primal father teaches us much about the constitution of subjectivity in capitalism: its possessive and accumulative nature, its aggressive and competitive tendencies, its vertical and hierarchical dimension, and its authoritarian, submissive, and adaptive personality. This, in turn, when applied to the psychology of the masses (Freud, 1955), also helps us understand the violence and submission of Nazi and Fascist masses to the paternal figure of the leader (Reich, 1946).

The mythical configurations of Oedipus and the primal father also teach us much about patriarchy—truths that we could not otherwise know, truths that require myths to be revealed (Mitchell, 2000). Myths thus function as what Freud (1955) called scientific myths and what Marx (1974) termed true stories. Some truths—often the most important and subversive—can only be expressed through stories and myths, as well as through dreams, slips of the tongue, and other forms of fiction.

The fictional structure of truth is one of the greatest contributions of both psychoanalytic interpretation and Marxist critique of ideology (Lacan, 2013). The purpose of both methods is not to refute lies and restore truth understood as adequatio rei et intellectus, but to analyze the lie, to criticize it, and to reveal the truth within it—a truth understood precisely as revelation, as aletheia (Heidegger, 2002, 2013; Lacan, 2006). This truth must be mystified and distorted to be expressed, because something prevents its expression—something that may be repression, whether political repression in Marxism or psychic repression in psychoanalysis.

Matriarchy, Fraternity, and Union with Nature

Something repressed in the founding myths of Oedipus and the primal father seems to be the decline of patriarchy (Federn, 2019; Lacan, 2002). Patriarchal authority must already have been greatly weakened and degraded for it to represent the father as he appears in Freudian myths: brutal, irrational, a rival to his children, challenged by them, and ultimately murdered—in fantasy or reality. This decline of the father inspires the hope of a return to matriarchy, understood not as female or maternal domination, but as the abolition of domination itself—as radical equality, as a form of communism that can thus ally itself with psychoanalysis (Federn, 2019; Urzaiz, 2020; De Andrade, 2023).

Freud alludes to matriarchy in his myth of the primal father. In a crucial but little-known passage, Freud (1953b) describes the situation immediately following the murder of the father as a regime of equality, fraternity, and maternal right, in which the mothers ally with the brothers expelled from the horde. Patriarchy then returns as the reappearance of the repressed primal father. Yet Freud acknowledges that only the fraternal-matriarchal regime could have had the strength to accomplish the leap from nature to culture. Freud thus contradicts all normative and conservative psychoanalytic theses that inextricably link culture with patriarchy and filial verticality—as if culture could only be patriarchal and vertical, and not matriarchal, horizontal, and fraternal.

The Freudian myth of the origin of culture is therefore also a myth of matriarchy and egalitarian community as primitive states of humanity. This myth coincides with the quintessential Marxist founding myth, the myth of primitive communism, which was likewise matriarchal (Engels, 2001). In both Marxism and psychoanalysis, culture has its mythical origin in matriarchy.

The matriarchal founding myth could be dismissed as a version of the dangerous, melancholic myth of das Ding: the myth of paradise lost, of the original incestuous fusion with the mother, with Mother Earth, with nature (Lacan, 2013; Kristeva, 1989). Yet this interpretation may be embraced by those of us who revalue and reclaim a melancholic political position—one that links communism with matriarchy and with efforts at reconciliation with natural territories (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2023). This vision leads us back to non-Western indigenous peoples, among whom we find other myths that can help articulate truths not expressed in Western capitalist modernity (Pavón-Cuéllar & Mentinis, 2020; Pavón-Cuéllar, 2021).

Colonization, Europeanization, Oedipalization

A founding myth that complements those of Oedipus and the primal father is the Aztec myth of Tlaltecuhtli, the god-goddess—as masculine as feminine—who was divided in two by Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca to create the earth and the sky (Moctezuma, 1997; Garibay, 2005). Everything thus originated in such a Thing, in which all that exists was—and still is—incestuously fused. The division of this body precedes any notion of castration, yet the body continues to exist in a kind of timeless, hermaphroditic unconscious that resists any heteronormative judgment on gender and sexuality. Moreover, this body encompasses nature, culture, and humanity, obliging human beings to respect and care for nature, for in damaging it, they would damage themselves at their most intimate, extimate core, where they are one with the exterior and with totality.

Unlike the Oedipus myth, the hermaphroditic myth of Tlaltecuhtli is not phallocentric, not adopting only the male perspective. Nor does it imply an individualized, selfish, possessive, aggressive, and competitive subject, but rather a communal subjectivity. Furthermore, it is not anthropocentric, since its focus lies not on humanity but on nature.

What is revealed in the myth of Tlaltecuhtli is a truth of the Mesoamerican indigenous peoples that may still operate in the heirs of cultural mestizaje who inhabit Mexico and Central America. For them—for us—it may be useful to consider a kind of Tlaltecuhtli Complex alongside the Oedipus complex inherited from Europe.

Of course, our colonial Europeanization was also an Oedipalization of our subjectivity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975). This Oedipalization gives meaning to the Oedipus complex for Latin Americans born of colonization, yet these subjects are also heirs to other cultures in which there is no place for the Oedipus complex. It’s time to resign ourselves to the fact that this complex is not necessarily found in cultures outside Europe (Fanon, 1970; Malinowski, 2003).

Furthermore, although the colonization of Mexico and Central America also imposed an Oedipus complex, this complex was itself overdetermined by colonialism. It was and still is a colonial complex. In this complex, the maternal figure appears indigenized and the paternal figure Europeanized—a historical consequence of miscegenation in which relationships between Spanish men and Mesoamerican women predominated (Ramírez, 1977). Identification with Europe thus underlies identification with the father. As a result, the Oedipal complex in Mesoamerican mestizo culture links patriarchal and colonial oppressions in a particular way unparalleled in the world, but also, of course, unique in each individual case.

Needless to say, the Oedipal intersection between coloniality and patriarchy also intersects in Mexico and Central America with the aforementioned bourgeois-capitalist overdetermination: the structural causality that shapes the possessive, aggressive, and competitive character of the child who desires to possess his mother and thus aggressively competes with his father. Accordingly, in the Mesoamerican particularization of Freud’s founding myths, we find an intersection between capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial systems. The situated study of this intersection should be further complicated by exploring other indigenous configurations—such as that of Tlaltecuhtli—to describe the drama of mestizo subjectivity.

The unique drama of each individual is inseparable from its specific historical and cultural determinations. It is particular—not merely singular or universal—and situated within the contingencies of time and place. Extimacy, therefore, is not only onto-phylogenetic; it also articulates itself through the histories of nations, regions, peoples, classes, and communities. Founding myths arise within determinate historical and cultural frameworks, rather than belonging to an abstract notion of culture or to humanity in general.