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Contemporary Cultural Theory

all of us...to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother
and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our
father’ (Freud, 1976, p. 364). This is the most fundamental of
repressed desires for both boys and girls, he argued, though it is
resolved differently in the two sexes. Eventually, the male child
is driven through fear of castration to identify with the authori-
tarian father figure, so that his desire for the mother effectively
disappears. Lacking a penis, the female child can never identify
so completely with the father and therefore redirects her desire
from mother to father. She nonetheless continues to suffer from
‘penis envy’, which can only find resolution in giving birth to a
baby, as a replacement object for the initial constitutive lack. Later,
Freud famously reformulated this theory in terms of the tripar-
tite distinction between id, ego and super-ego, where the ego was
the self, the super-ego the social part of the self, and the id a new
term for what he had meant by the unconscious. The id, Freud
explained, ‘is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality ...we
call it chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations...It is filled
with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organi-
zation... only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of
instinctual needs . . . The id... knows no judgements of value: no
good and evil, no morality’ (Freud, 1973, pp. 105–7).
But what has all this to do with culture? The short answer is
everything, since culture is simultaneously the source of psychic
repression and fuelled by that repression. It thus becomes quite
fundamentally a matter of the regulation and control of desire.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud’s excursion into anthropology, he even
went so far as to argue that ‘the beginnings of religion, morals,
society and art converge in the Oedipus complex’ (Freud, 1985,
p. 219). In The Future of an Illusion, he identified two distinguishing
features of human civilisation: the control and exploitation of
nature and the rational organisation of relations among people.
The latter is achieved by coercion and the suppression of libid-
inal instincts. Human beings do not readily accept such social
control, since it requires so much in the way of instinctual renun-
ciation, but it remains necessary, to overcome the ‘destructive, and
therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends’ present ‘in all men’
(Freud, 1985a, p. 185). Historically, Freud observes, religion has

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