So you’re in a relationship and stuff is going swell. He likes you and you like him and you’re both mad busy but making it work and it’s smiles all around. He met your friends and they all loved him because he’s got adorable dimples or a great fashion sense or a lovable demeanor. Now, it’s time to meet his friends.

One of the problematic after-effects of western maleness is a complete obsession with making sure everyone knows that we have no ‘feminine’ aspects. Whether it’s because we want everyone to know that we ‘totally aren’t a pansy‘ or because we watched G.I Joe too much (if that’s possible), aspects of our personality that might be construed as ‘female’ (of course, problematic since, as we all know, gender is performance) scare the crap out of us.

Guys eventually (usually) grow out of this, realize that everyone has their own stuff, and it doesn’t make you any less of a man to cry once and a while or to love something beyond ‘tail and cash!’ Maternal and Paternal instincts have many similarities, after all.

What totally sucks is this ‘phase’ strikes right around 18-24, and if you’re dating a college guy, there’s a decent chance he’s got a little bit of this in him. It doesn’t mean he’s a cretin in waiting, but it can make meeting his friends difficult at times because they are suffering from UBLS, or Unrequited Bro Love Syndrome (pronounced “Ubles“) Read More »

In the classic tragedy of OEDIPUS, in which we find an incestuous relationship at its core, Oedipus marries his mother, Queen Jocasta, after killing his father, King Laius of Thebes. Their true identities are only known to the reader, making the story all the more gruesome to read. They unwittingly marry one another, unaware that they are related by blood. When Oedipus realizes that he’s married his own mother and that he killed his true father, he stabs his eyes out.

It’s a classic tale of unnatural consummation, and the results are disastrous.

Fast forward to the early twentieth century. Location: Austria. Freud’s interest in the development of children vis-à-vis the “Oedipus complex” is immortalized. The concept is still discussed in highly intellectual circles, and the term is also tossed about in mundane, everyday life jabbering.

In simplest terms, Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of this complex is dichotomic – there are two opposing emotional poles. One pole is bent on a wish for one parent to die, while the other pole is the realm of love and absolute adoration for the other parent. This love is connected to sexual desires, albeit juvenile, for the other parent.

The hatred is directed toward the father, and the love is connected to the mother (the maternal source that granted the child life). These desires, i.e. the wish to kill their father in order to have complete access to their mother’s love and affections, are short lived. But what happens when this complex is inverted and, let’s say, the father goes after his own daughter? Read More »