Castration Complex and the Nebenmensch Complex

difference, helplessness and violence

Abstract

The regressive identifications described in Freud’s Group psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921) lead to the question of the anxieties that lie under such regressive identifications and violent behaviors. When engaged in a big group, individuals develop an imaginary power that allows them to perform any violent action. The capacity for concern and the responsibility for each other are lost. Such situation invites a de-construction of the violence mechanisms that are at work through alienation toward a despotic leader. The origin of anxiety in Freud’s Inhibitions, symptoms and  anxiety (1926) is revisited through a reconsideration of the second theory of anxiety. Helplessness as an existential condition at birth is considered as an Urangst – an archetypical form of anxiety that serves as a model for future anxieties. Helplessness is related to a Nebenmensch Complex present in a footnote in Freud’s Project I (1895): a description of the ambivalent relationship between the newborn and the adults in care of him/her. Such original anxiety is related to castration anxiety, also viewed here as an archetypical model for all threats and traumatic events one is exposed to. The ideas of “repudiation of feminity” and the nature of a bedrock level of resistances in Freud’s Analysis terminable and unterminable’ are criticized.