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PARTISAN REVIEW
up the real need to revise Freud, not in the neo-Freudian direction of
bowdlerizing or re-repressing his profound insights, but in putting them
undiminished into a context of our later knowledge. Thus, as Kenneth
Burke suggests in the section "The Temporizing of Essence" in
A Gram–
mar of M olives,
we must translate what Freud called his "vision" of
the Primal Horde from its characteristic nineteenth-century form as a
theory of prehistoric "origin" back into its true form as a statement
about the nature or "essence" of the Oedipal situation, generally recog–
nizing all such statements of temporal priority as actually statements
about logical priority. We must additionally replace the inherited
"memory traces" (with which Freud anticipated Jung's racial uncon–
scious) by cultural transmission, and adapt in general to new discoveries
in sociology, anthropology, and mythology, which would include throw–
ing out not only Freud's Moses the Egyptian (as Bettelheim does) but
Moses the historical figure (as Bettelheim does not).
Symbolic Wounds
points up equally the need for a serious recon–
sideration of the role and relationship of the sexes, transcending both
Freud's androcentric view and the gynocentrism of Bettelheim's author–
ities-Mead, Bateson, Ashley-Montague-the new Cybele cult seem–
ingly convinced that all the boys want to be girls and would achieve it
by surgery were it not for the mayhem laws. Here we would start from
the post-Malinowskian recognition of a universal Oedipus complex
shaped differently in different cultures, and seek to balance in our own
society the importance of the female-dominated childhood and the
male-dominated adult world. Finally,
Symbolic Wounds
suggests the
enormous importance of ritual. "Rudimentary forms of religious beliefs
and rituals were probably the first inventions of the human mind," Bet–
telheim says, aware of ritual origins; "envy must be hidden and ex–
pressed only through ritual," he adds, alive to function. In the last
paragraph of his book Bettelheim calls for "more civilized, less magic
and more satisfying institutions" as our equivalents for primitive rites.
These are, for some of us, the imaginative organizations of art, ritual
structures more significant than factors of ritual origin and function,
and they bring us whatever of psychic well-being our poor bedeviled
tribe has.
