Maladies of the Legal Soul: Psychoanalysis and Interpretation in Law

And if for him the law guarantees an increment of pleasure, and power, it would be good to uncover what this implies about his desire he seems to get more sexual satisfaction from making laws than love.1 There is evidence that Freud hesitated over the possibility of studying law before he eventually undertook a career in medicine. One might say that the profession of law was repressed in favor of clinical science, and certainly the theme of law and its transgression constantly returns in Freud's work and was to become a foundational focus of the new science of psychoanalysis.2 Although positive law was never an explicit or conscious object of Freudian psychoanalysis, it is no exaggeration to observe that his work is structured by conflicts between desire and law, the pleasure principle and the reality principle, and at its most extreme, sexuality and death - eros and thanatos.3 The jurisprudential themes of authority and prohibition, of desire and transgression, litter his substantive elaborations of the workings of the human psyche. The legalism of Freudian thought is nowhere more evident than in his interpretations of the origins of the social order in the transgression of the authority or law of the father. This well known myth is elaborated in the story of Oedipus, the narrative of a son who kills his father and marries his mother. It is also elaborated in terms of the social anthropology of Totem and Taboo, the prehistorical story of the murder of a tribal father by jealous sons, which leads to the genesis of law. The conflict of desire and law, which Freud found exemplified in the story of Oedipus, can act as a guiding thread to the study of a psychoanalytic theory of law. Sophocles' story of King Oedipus, who was the son of Laius, King of Thebes, was itself, according to Freud, probably a reworking of a dream.4 Oedipus was exposed as an infant because an oracle had warned Laius that he would be killed by his yet unborn child. The child was rescued and grew up in an alien court. Uncertain of his own origins, he too questioned the oracle, who warned him to stay away from his home because he was destined to murder his father and marry his mother. While intending to travel away from his home, Oedipus encountered King Laius and in a sudden quarrel killed him. Oedipus then went to Thebes where he solved the riddle of the Sphinx and thereby liberated the city from plague and pestilence. The grateful populace made him king, and he married Jocasta his mother. A plague which the oracle reported would only end when the murderer of Laius had been driven from the land eventually interrupted Oedipus' peaceful and honorable reign. When he discovers that he is himself the unwitting murderer, Oedipus blinds himself and forsakes his home. The oracle has been fulfilled. The Interpretation of Dreams offers the fullest discussion of the myth of Oedipus, explaining the myth as a "typical dream" in which the subject expresses the desire to kill his father even though his father is dead.5 Freud interprets the story of Oedipus first and most forcefully in terms of the universal structure of a child's relation to its parents: His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours .... While the poet, as he unravels the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found.6 Freud argues that the individual psyche forms as a result of the Oedipal crisis or conflict. The myth is a story of the foundation of subjectivity through an originary repression. The son learns to orient and limit his desire by recognizing the father's authority through his interdiction or prohibition of the son's desire for his mother. In other words, through recognition of what Lacan terms the law of father, the subject enters the social or, for Lacan, the symbolic: "If Freud insisted on the Oedipus complex . …