read this first passage and it reminded me (because of both the potential synergy and the explicit disagreement) of the second.
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex:
Let us take a look at this patriarchal nuclear family in which the Oedipus Complex appears so markedly. In the prototypical family of this kind the man is the breadwinner; all other members of this family are thus his dependents. He agrees to support a wife in return for her services: housekeeping, sex, and reproduction. The children whom she bears for him are even more dependent. They are legally the property of the father...whose duty it is to feed them and educate them, to “mold” them to take their place in whatever class of society to which he belongs. In return for this he expects that continuation of name and property which is often confused with immortality. His rights over them are complete. If he is not a kind father/master, tough luck. They cannot escape his clutches until they are grown, and by then the psychological molding has been accomplished: they are now ready to repeat his performance...
This then is the oppressive climate in which the normal child grows up. From the beginning he is sensitive to the hierarchy of power. He knows that in every way, physically, economically, emotionally, he is completely dependent on, thus at the mercy of, his two parents, whoever they may be. Between the two of them, though, he certainly prefers his mother. He has a bond with her in oppression: while he is oppressed by both parents, she, at least, is oppressed by one. The father, so far as the child can see, is in total control...The child then senses that his mother is halfway between authority and helplessness. He can run to his father if his mother tries anything unjust; but if his father beats him there is little his mother can offer except tea and sympathy. If his mother is sensitive to injustice, she may use her wiles and tears to spare him. But he uses wiles and tears himself at that age, and he knows that tears don’t compare to solid force. Their effectiveness, at any rate, is limited, dependent on many variables ( “bad day at the office”). Whereas physical force or the threat of it is a sure bet.
Felix Guattari & Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus:
The revolutionary is the first to have the right to say: "Oedipus? Never heard of it." For the disjointed fragments of Oedipus remain stuck to all the corners of the historical social field, as a battlefield and not a scene from bourgeois theater. Too bad if the psychoanalysts roar their disapproval at this point.
Fanon pointed out that troubled times had unconscious effects not only on the active militants, but also on those claiming to be neutral and to remain outside the affair, uninvolved in politics. The same could also be said with respect to apparently peaceful times: what a grotesque error to think that the unconscious-as-child is acquainted only with daddy-mommy, and that it doesn't know "in its own way" that its father has a boss who is not a father's father, or moreover that its father himself is a boss who is not a father. Therefore we formulate the following rule, which we feel to be applicable in all cases: the father and the mother exist only as fragments, and are never organized into a figure or a structure able both to represent the unconscious, and to represent in it the various agents of the collectivity; rather, they always shatter into fragments that come into contact with these agents, meet them face to face, square off with them, or settle the differences with them as in hand-to-hand combat.
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