The Economics of Libido: Psychic Bisexuality, the Superego, and the Centrality of the Oedipus Complex

This book is an attempt to get beyond pluralism by embedding psychoanalysis in philosophy and returning to Freud as a psychologist to link the depths of the mind to the surface. The author argues that egoism and altruism are a more accurate representation of activity and passivity and that Freud’s work points to masculine and feminine drives on each pole, which, because of psychic bisexuality, can exist in either sex. The author argues that Freud places the Oedipus complex as the height of striving for personal happiness in passionate love or success. The subsequent father complex is snatched from obscurity and given its proper weight as the recreation of the parental incest taboo among siblings. Passionate love and success are mastered as the ideal to marry and seek fairness in one’s dealings with others. The author argues that Freud’s work suggests that the earlier forms of the superego are depersonalized to create different ontologies, or forms of being in the world, that reference the necessary subjective sense of Space, Time, the Superlative, and up to oedipal Prestige. Lastly, to justify this return to the drive, superego, and psychic bisexuality the author provides an explication of Wittgenstein’s private language argument.