Against Monogamy

Caity Croft

SWMS 215

Friday, September 14^th, 2011

Against Monogamy

In his essay, Barsani explains the complexities of sexuality, Freud’s concepts of psychoanalysis, the Oedipal complex, identification, and how monogamy is not necessarily a natural human act, but rather a form of regression. Barsani claims that, “we call this regression “marriage “ or “partnership,” in which the person becomes part of a mutually interdependent couple that evokes and sustains the bodies of the mother and the father, the pre-Oedipal vision of life, before the solitary recognition of subjectivity grips the child” (Barsani, 13). He proposes that the regression to a monogamous state seems the only logical step for individuals who are struggling to maintain control of two worlds. This regression that emerged from the renunciation of multiple sexual partners would be considered (by Freud) to produce consciences within individuals (Barsani, 17). This conscience is created out of the policing of the Id by the Ego and the Superego. Barsani explains, “the subject-ego is being punished for its guilty desires, but the punishing energy is taken from the subject’s fury at the agent of punishment, who in fact also becomes its object”(Barsani, 18).

Monogamy is an externalized expression of one’s feelings for and respect towards oneself. Psychoanalysis is a way in which one can determine the complexity of feeling towards oneself and the world. Barsani proposes, “if psychoanalysis, it its account of the extraordinary mobility of childhood and, more specifically, even Oedipal desires, has itself described for us the original inconceivability of a monogamous fixity of desire, and therefore of a stable sexual identity, monogamy nonetheless is the relational figure most congenial to what we might call the psychoanalytic fidelity of the self to the self, its indifference to signs of self that are not signs of interpretation, and, finally, its profoundly immoral rejection of our promiscuous humanity” (Barsani, 21).