Vicissitudes of the Oedipal Organization, and Their Impact on the Anticlerical Polemic

Abstract

The position within the Oedipal phantasy has become a basic organizer in social conflicts of XXI century society. This development is particularly apparent in the current confrontation between the Catholic clergy and anticlerical activists. Consistently with Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of the negative oedipal constellation, the two institutionalized groups share a basic unconscious feature: an incomplete cleavage of the pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother object. At puberty, a persistent regressive tie to the mother hinders the investment of age-appropriate female partners and maintains the adolescent within the mother’s embrace. Two options are available than in order to keep at bay father’s control and interpersonal power. The submission to Super-ego values and the repression of sexual drives warrants the father’s complacency and makes room for an ascetic life. On the other hand, a more eroticized identification with mother may bestow the adolescent a seductive interpersonal power over father’s representatives. Material from an analytic case allows the author to illuminate the severely traumatic primal scene experiences often underlying a passive Oedipal constellation. In this perspective, the current heated confrontation between the Church and anticlerical activists may be understood in terms of an unconscious fantasy where primal scene anxieties are reciprocally projected onto the political opponents.

1. Introduction

Over the last decades, gender studies have produced a deep transformation of socially shared conceptualization of gender and sexual identity. Judith Butler [1] has challenged the ontological value traditionally assigned to dichotomies such as male/female, or straight/gay. She has argued that there is no necessary link between our anatomy and our sexual identities. In Monique Witting’s view [2], heterosexuality is not a natural fact, it is a political regime, and categories such as man or woman are normative and alienating.

Gender studies have fostered an important antidiscrimination movement, which has had a substantial impact on politics and culture the world over. For anti-discrimination activists, Christian Churches and particularly the Catholic Church have been and are the focus of a particularly heated polemic. Traditional catholic views of sexuality are very likely the main base for such ideological confrontation.

The social and political basis of such strife lies outside the scope of our competence and interests. The reader can find a comprehensive discussion of the genesis of gender theory within XX century anthropologic and sociological culture in Le Sexe des Modernes, by Éric Marty [3], while Clotilde Leguil relies on Lacan’s thought to offer a psychoanalytic perspective on contemporary gender identities [4].

In the present paper, we will rather investigate the anti-clerical polemic in terms of psychodynamics of institutional groups. We will explore the unconscious phantasies and the developmental pathways underlying the commitment to a religious identity versus activism within the anti-discrimination movement. We will show how these conflicting human groups show surprisingly parallel unconscious object relationship patterns, particularly in the area of the Oedipal organization.

To illuminate our view, we will present and discuss a clinical case of a young man featuring both deep religious commitment and enhanced anxieties in the area of child sexual abuse.

2. A centuries-old strife

In order to illustrate our point of view, we will rely on a metaphor from the realm of physics. When water gets in touch with a different medium (maybe air or oil) through a definite surface, the two fluids do not merge. Rather, tension appears on the contact surface. Such tension is commonly explained in terms of an attraction among the molecules making up each fluid. In surface phenomena, we behold an attraction among equals and repulsion towards outsiders.

The parallel with human organizations is straightforward. A political border implies an inner alignment, and a reciprocally hostile attitude. The survival of larger or more restricted interpersonal systems requires intense cohesive forces. It requires the splitting and projection of interpersonal aggression towards an avatar located outside the group. Social elites have consistently exploited social aggression and intolerance towards foreigners and minority groups in order to foster the most lethal and dramatic of social phenomena: the war [5].

Over the last century, western society has gone through a piecemeal but apparently irreversible process: cohesive forces in groups have been weakening and then rapidly collapsing. The Communist Party, the trade unions, and the Catholic parishes have nearly disappeared and are now but shadows of what they were only forty years ago [6].

A parallel fragmentation process can be observed in family-ties-based groups. Intergenerational family is a memory, but nuclear family is getting slimmer by the day, due to dropping fertility rates, and even the sexual couple is slowly giving way to celibacy-oriented residential models.

As interpersonal ties seem to be colliquating by the day, aggression faces a unique fate: it is redirected from outside the social environment into the community itself. The immaterial chasm, which used to mark the border of the family, the village, and then the social classes, seems to be relocating inside the groups themselves and to split citizens according to preference in terms of ethical options and self-representations. Everywhere, enraged feminists confront allegedly male chauvinistic institutions and pro-family activists, while souverainistes oppose left-wing supported migratory policies and free speech advocates rail against contemporary cancel culture.

Within contemporary society, the orientation of social aggression seems to depend on the position in the Oedipal phantasy, which each group values the most. Specifically, social identity appears nowadays to coalesce around community-shared father’s representations. For instance, Antifa activists smite statues of haughty, supercilious sadistic fathers of the nation, while conservatives reverently cherish the teachings of unlimitedly powerful but wise and fair community ancestors.

The heated confrontation between the LGBT community vs. conservative Catholic movements and institutions can offer a particularly straightforward example of a social conflict where such an Oedipal allegiance plays a major and thinly disguised role. The strife between Catholic clergy and LGBT community is an old one. While the Greek-Roman civilization showed a remarkable tolerance vis a vis the most diverse sexual practices, the Saint Apostles and the Church Fathers agreed that only those who resign to compulsory bodily gratifications, including homoerotic sexual pleasures, are able to reach genuine inner freedom. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas censored sodomy as the most serious of sexual misconducts ([7], IIa-IIae q. 154, a. 11 co.).

The confrontation between male Catholic clergy and advocates of free sexual life came to be even more heated in the following centuries, but the power balance piecemeal swung. Seventeenth-century libertines and freemasons led a particularly fierce campaign against Catholic institutions. We can date then the onset of modern anticlerical hate. During French Terreur, as well as in various revolutions the world over, Catholic priests were hanged, beheaded, or shot by the thousands.

In this social conflict, sexuality played a core role. Sexual misconduct was everywhere a favorite issue agitated by anticlerical polemicists. While from the pulpit Catholic priests used to rail against sexual freedom, sexual transgression of the clergy was the focus of an apparently inexhaustible public curiosity.

Male homosexual practices and adolescent and child sexual abuse by the clergy had historically been the focus of particularly prominent blame ([8, 9], p. 81–84). Nowadays, in the age of sexual freedom, clergy’s sexual misconduct is again a core issue in LGBT activists’ polemic against the Church [10]. According to the radicals’ perspective, sexual misconduct by the clergy would be the unavoidable product of the impossible striving to maintain sexual abstinence, which is inherent in Christian ascetics [11]. A powerful media campaign is on its way the world over against the Church, which would have covertly promoted child sexual abuse and protected perpetrators. Political supporters of the rights of homosexual people are everywhere on the frontline in this confrontation.

While the judicial fallouts of such a campaign are in the public eye, most advanced western countries are piecemeal including within their legislation some acts punishing those beliefs which could possibly foster sexual-preference-based discrimination. A similar law proposal (commonly referred to as “Zan” law) is now pending at the Italian Parliament. Such laws have elicited enhanced concern and downright opposition in many, often Catholic, traditional-family movements, which obviously perceive them as targeted to suppress their activity.

So, at the dawn of the XXI century, the Catholic Church and homosexual organizations seem to be trapped more than ever in a complex network of reciprocal suspicion and hostility. Which social and emotional forces may lie under such confrontation? Which conscious and unconscious dynamics may keep each opponent so close to and enraged at the other? Psychoanalysis can help us answer these questions.

3. The passive oedipal constellation

Within psychoanalytic theory “Die Anatomie ist das Schicksal” (“Anatomy is destiny”; [12], p. 400). In order to unveil the unconscious Oedipal organization underlying this unique social confrontation, we need to restrict our investigation to either of the two anatomical sexes. Since the male Catholic clergy plays a core role both in Church hierarchical organization and in the anticlerical polemic which has been flooding western media for some decades now, our investigation will focus on the male child’s Oedipal organization.

In Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse, Freud observed that “In der groβen künstlichen Massen, Kirche und Heer, ist für das Weib als Sexualobjekt kein Platz.” (“In the large artificial masses, the army and the Church, there is no place for the woman as a sexual object”; [13], p. 158). In fact, Catholic priests and people with homoerotic sexual preferences share a basic anthropological dimension: their object relation organization does not allow for the sexual cathexis of female objects. The harsh confrontation we behold every day in parliament, in the squares, and in the media might actually rely on this very parallel, which warrants a careful exploration of the Oedipal constellation underlying this minority interpersonal styles.

Freud believed separation from mother was a necessary condition for a child’s proper access to the Oedipal situation. In Eines Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci [14] he suggested a core factor in a passive Oedipus development could be an enhanced libidinal cathexis of the mother object:

Bei allen unseren homosexuellen Männern gab es in der ersten, vom Individuum später vergessenen Kindheit eine sehr intensive erotische Bindung an eine weibliche Person, in der Regel an die Mutter, hervorgerufen oder begünstigt durch die Überzärtlichkeit der Mutter selbst, ferner unterstützt durch ein Zurücktreten des Vaters im kindlichen Leben ([14], p. 169).

In all our homosexual men we behold in the early, later by the individual forgot, childhood, a very intense erotic tie to a female person, as a rule to the mother, elicited or fostered by the mother’s herself excessive tenderness, further supported by the father’s withdrawal from the child’s life.

Freud’s theory of homosexuality undoubtedly offers intriguing insights into psychosexual development. In Freud’s view, too close an unconscious or preconscious erotized tie to mother would prevent the later investment of age-appropriate extrafamilial sexual partners. In the terms of object relation theory, we might state that access to the active Oedipal configuration is critically dependent on an adequate differentiation from the maternal object. Without a proper cleavage of oral dependence from the mother, she will never come to be the object of unconscious genital level libido cathexis. Therefore, Freud stated:

Endlich kommt doch nach vollendeter Pubertät die Zeit, die Mutter gegen ein anderes Sexualobjekt zu vertauschen. Da geschieht eine plötzliche Wendung; der Jüngling verläßt nicht seine Mutter, sondern identifiziert sich mit ihr, er wandelt sich in sie um und sucht jetzt nach Objekten, die ihm sein Ich ersetzen können, die er so lieben und pflegen kann, wie er es von der Mutter erfahren hatte ([13], pp. 119–120).

However, when puberty is completed, the time finally comes to change the mother with another sexual object. We behold then an abrupt turn; the youngling does not leave his mother, rather, he identifies with her, he transforms himself in her and seeks now objects, which can replace his Ego for him, which he can love and take care of, just as he had experienced from his mother.

Unable to leave their mother, the homosexual young man would incorporate her through introjective identification. In homosexuality, then, the same psychic mechanism Freud deemed momentous in the genesis of melancholy would be at work ([15], p. 435).

In summary, inner object relationships of individuals unavailable to libidinally cathect female objects would feature a mainly dyadic and pre-Oedipal quality. Within this configuration, the mother object cannot be clearly differentiated from the self-representation. The eroticized tie mentioned by Freud can more properly be reformulated in narcissistic terms. We typically behold here a poorly differentiated mother–child relation, where the subject and the object reciprocally exploit each other with the aim of supporting his or her own self-esteem and maintaining adequate well-being.

In as much as mother’s image is included in the self, her consistent emotional availability is a prerequisite for a minimal mental adjustment: she can never actually be experienced as emotionally missing. Therefore, in this interpersonal configuration mother cannot be invested with authentic erotic greed (as conceptualized by Melanie Klein, [16], p. 62).

The resulting Oedipus complex takes on a peculiar character. The father’s sexual access to mother’s interior is felt as harmless, inasmuch as it does not challenge the Oedipal collusive alliance with mother. Father will be perceived as weak and interpersonally meaningless. To him, the child spares the more customary unconscious murderous hate, while identification with him appears basically useless to the child’s core interpersonal aims.

On the other hand, identification with mother will be unavoidable, as the only cherished love object. The intensity and quality of such identification will depend on the severity of the object relations pathology. More primitive individuals, featuring enhanced autistic contiguous traits ([17], p. 47ff.), will inevitably turn to adhesive identification and mimic the mother’s behavioral style and attire.

Within this configuration, a genuine cathexis of adult female objects is clearly impossible. In the active male Oedipal constellation two forces drive the adolescent towards sexualized female objects: identification with father and the awareness of the unavailability of the mother object. Within negative male Oedipus, neither of these motivational components may prove consequential. Father is perceived as powerless and castrated, while separation from mother is felt as the utmost threat to the integrity of the self. From this perspective, attachment to the real mother cannot be given up as long as she is physically alive. Therefore, age-appropriate female partners appear particularly ominous inasmuch as they implicitly endanger the collusive alliance with her.

In essence, both Catholic clergy and male homosexuals are unwilling to establish deep permanent relationships with female partners. Psychoanalytic theory allows us to formulate the network of inner object relations underlying such specific manifestations in interpersonal terms. The sadomasochistic entanglement sticking priests and homosexuals in a centuries-old confrontation seems to depend on a specific, shared unconscious constellation: an incomplete cleavage of the relation to the maternal object.

The second set of questions stays unanswered, yet. What sets these two social groups apart? Which emotional needs and strategy lead them so far away at the time of adolescence, when sexual maturity compels them to make choices about their sexual identity and their interpersonal and social life?

Relationship to paternal imago is here at issue. Within a passive Oedipal constellation father is not a competitor for mother’s unconsciously sexualized body. Rather, it is basically perceived as an ethical ruler, a Super-ego regulator. The handling of the relationship to such an annoying inner object may follow two different paths.

If the father’s power and authority are perceived as overwhelming, complacency is negotiated through submission: to interpersonal power figures, to Super-ego values, to powerful institutions. This first constellation fosters an ascetic access to adolescence. Sublimation may then appear as a valuable strategy to control both aggression and libidinal drives.

In some uniquely gifted individuals the explicit identification with the Ego ideal of an entire community, through the sacred orders, may offer a viable identity and a wide room for development and growth through a rich network of social relationships. Obviously, the conflict over libidinal drives is always enhanced and identification with parental ideals may sometimes be precarious and maintained through the primitive mechanism of adhesive identification.

In the other possible configuration, an identification with a seductive mother prevails, and father is radically kept at bay through manipulative strategies. The inner father, then, is castrated through frustration of sexual gratification and humiliated through the preference accorded to other younger and allegedly more attractive partners. In the manifest love relationship life, a homosexual identity is so established.

We have reported above that the Oedipal constellation typically detected in celibatary Catholic clerics and in individuals explicitly identifying with LGBT values shows an extended overlap. Inability to adequately detach from mother, intensified identification with her, inability to libidinally invest in a heterosexual object, and explicit giving up to any claim to a male powerful identification are among the most prominent features.

The Bible prophesied a perennial hostility between the woman and the snake, an obvious representative of the male genital. However, recent history gives wide evidence of a long-lasting enmity between advocates of free, unrestricted sexuality and the male Catholic clergy. The world over, LGBT movements advocate for dedicated anti-discrimination laws which appear to be specifically tailored to restrict Catholics’ and particularly Catholic clerics’ free speech.

According to the Kleinian model of unconscious mind, regression to paranoid-schizoid position is an available option all along the developmental path and beyond. The psychic apparatus would turn to primitive modes of functioning whenever anxiety is enhanced, and the cohesion of the self is threatened. The defense mechanisms of splitting and projection are often mentioned as the unconscious basis of hostility and reciprocal devaluation between social groups. They surely contribute to the confrontation between two parties whose intrapsychic organizations share a specific feature: an inadequate cleavage from the mother. As psychoanalysts, we are called to understand why psychic organizations which feature an uncleaved inner relationship to mother are unstable, and always liable to regressive phenomena. Some material from a clinical case will help us to illuminate the issue.

4. The dreamer

At the time he sought treatment, Carlo was a thirty-two year old academic statistician living in a small town in Northern Italy. Before entering psychoanalysis, Carlo had received somatic and poorly structured psychological treatment for about three years, due to a serious depressive condition.

Carlo had always been a lonely child. Anxiety had prevented him from meeting peers whenever his mother had not been at hand. He had committed all his emotional energies to school, and from his excellent school and then academic performance he had drawn wide narcissistic rewards. He spent his free time playing violin and singing opera arias.

Within interpersonal space, mother had for long been the only meaningful female object. The relationship with her was still very close, but at the same time somewhat stiff and cold. Within professional life, a maternal transference toward his senior female mentor doubled in a way his relationship with mother.

Carlo was unmarried. He never met his peers. His social life showed a definitely asymmetrical quality. He met only younger males or older women. He was particularly keen to establish supportive relationships with mentally ill individuals or early adolescents from deprived backgrounds.

Over the four years of treatment, he never mentioned a sexual interest in women. On the other hand, Carlo acknowledged he was not insensitive to male sex appeal but felt unavailable to homosexual relations. As for sexual interest in underage boys, he was keen to state that it would never be an acceptable option to him.

Carlo invested a lot of time and energy in local church life. In association with a young priest, he was the leader of the local section of a Christian association of preadolescents. At the time Carlo entered psychoanalytic treatment, the little community was troubled by an ongoing judicial investigation for a case of early adolescent sexual abuse. In the following trial, a younger volunteer was to be sentenced for child sexual abuse, and the priest in charge of the association for diffusion of child pornography material. No charge was laid against Carlo, though he had been unwittingly instrumental in getting the victim and the two perpetrators in touch.

At the time we began regularly meeting in session, Carlo’s family was going through substantial changes. Over a 6 months period, his two brothers established deep heterosexual relations and left the family house. Carlo’s interaction with parents became more and more close and somewhat suffocating. At the same time, meetings with the new couples were frequent and he was overjoyed by the birth of a nephew with whom he soon developed a deep affection.

Depressive complaints were briefly in the foreground at the beginning of our joint work, but soon faded out and were replaced by the patient’s pervasive and somewhat compulsive curiosity about his own oneiric activity.

In the segment of analysis which I will comment on here, the patient used to spend most of his sessions in detailed reporting of his dream experiences. Many dreams featured manifest sexual contents, which were restricted to autoerotism and same-sex reciprocal stimulation. In the latter case, adolescent partners were typically included. I will now report brief summaries from two not consecutive sessions in the first year of analysis.

SESSION A: Carlo opens the session with a couple of dreams. In the first one he is riding a bicycle, his legs are fatigued, and he is never able to reach his intended destination. A second dream immediately follows: “I was inside a garage. It was full of spiders, which used to scare me a lot. My male boss was with me. We were both naked. I would have liked to close the roller shutter, but I was unable to do so as something was getting in or getting out”. I feel a strong counter transferential pressure to interpret the obvious partial object material content but realize this will surely usher a manic atmosphere into the session and leave no more room for associations.

Then, he reports how he has recently spent a day at a community for antisocial adolescents. It has been an interpersonally rewarding experience.

Now I interpret the first dream as evidence of a feeling of loneliness. When he is away from the analytic room his efforts to take care of his own emotional pain prove unhelpful. As for the second dream, I draw a more explicit parallel between the two men in the garage and the psychoanalytic situation, where he feels unable to enforce control of communication, with the associated anxiety.

Now he talks about his parents. They are a very close couple and spend most of their time together. This lets him feel cut off and is a source of substantial distress. However, whenever he can be alone with his mother, he feels controlled and manipulated, and his emotional distress gets even worse.

SESSION B: The patient announces he will report two dreams. Here is the first one: “I am attending a bizarre striptease. A man and a woman perform on the stage. They cast all of their clothes down on the stage, then proceed to strip themselves of their external sex organs, which they hand out to the audience. Spectators, in turn, hand over the performers’ detached genitalia to each other. Now the patient stays silent, having apparently forgotten about the second promised dream. I interpret the dream in light of the session of the day before, where I had questioned him about his masturbatory activity. I suggest he had felt exposed by my curiosity. He now reports the forgotten second dream. In the dream, he is talking about his depressive symptoms with a priest and feels accepted. I interpret the second dream content with reference to the transference relationship.

We owe to angel Garma [18] a particularly valuable, though undeservedly neglected, integration of Freud’s dream theory. Freud believed the wish was the single necessary and sufficient force setting the dream process in motion. Garma called our attention to a second no less basic element in the genesis of human dreams. He discovered that at the very core of each dream narrative a traumatic situation lies in disguise:

In my opinion, the traumatic situation is at play not only in the dreams of traumatic neuroses and in those reproducing some child’s traumatic experiences, but in all dreams. I believe that a traumatic situation is an extremely important factor, maybe the most important of all, in the genesis of dreams ([18], p. 136).

In Garma’s view, a dream, like a bifront herm, would thrive not only on the wish to find drive gratifications but also on the memory of an upsetting past experience. Dreams from both Carlo’s sessions include obvious traumatic content. In the second dream of SESSION A, anxiety about control and self-boundaries is prominent, with a straightforward allusion to the transference situation. The first dream in session B shows Carlo’s severely traumatic experience of the primal scene and its massive impact on his Oedipal organization.

Awareness of the inner parents’ ongoing sexual interaction proved so unbearable to Carlo that repression had to strip their bodily representatives in dreams of their sexual characters. Carlo’s sexual identification proved so to be highly precarious and relied on purely surface identification processes. The dream narrative showed how he could easily shift between several identities: male and female genitals could be exchanged and manipulated at will, but never really integrated within the bodily self-representation.

Carlo’s extreme intolerance to the primal scene was obvious not only in the dream material but also in his conscious experience. As mentioned in the report of SESSION A, a transference interpretation allowed Carlo to acknowledge he was consistently upset by the awareness of his parents’ steady alliance and somewhat symbiotic relationship. In front of them, he constantly felt alone and cut off.

As mentioned above, Carlo’s depression had deteriorated at the very time his two brothers had entered a stable couple relationship. We need not underscore how much such events may have contributed to his feeling of loneliness, helplessness, and savage jealousy in front of the parents’ fantasized sexual relationship.

5. Traumatic primal scene

In his dreams, Carlo turned to the Oedipal fantasy whenever he was overwhelmed by feelings of worthlessness and helplessness. Carlo’s dreams show that the Oedipal imaginary can serve a basically defensive function. It shelters the child’s inner world from the excruciating jealousy elicited by the experience of the sexually interacting parental couple.

The constellation of wishes and fears haunting the active Oedipal phantasy entails a manic core: the delusional assumption to be able to gratify mother’s expectations and bodily drives and to get rid of father’s competitive threat. The omnipotent quality of such longing vis a vis the child’s chronic helplessness and dependence on internal and external parents is obvious.

To individuals unable to reach a substantial cleavage of the primary symbiotic relationship to mother, active Oedipal fantasies appear – and actually are – worthless. The tie to mother is basically unresolved. No imaginary power or control may be established on her. Rather, separation anxieties are eased by clinging even more to her through primitive identification strategies.

However, at the time of sexual maturity, the passive Oedipal constellation shows all of its frailty. Increasing involvement in social life pushes the adolescent in many respects out of mother’s symbiotic embrace. Wider narcissistic and competitive wishes come to be acted out in the extra-familial social environment.

These changes let a new set of fantasies surface within the individual’s inner world. In a typical unconscious phantasy, the mother evades the child’s control and is available to be penetrated in multiple ways by the internal fathers. In the adolescent’s external interpersonal life, this phantasy is activated inasmuch as peers and siblings begin dating and establishing deeper and deeper sexual relations. The traumatic experience of the inner primal scene is so endlessly replicated in the real world.

Carlo’s striptease dream shows how the reversible exchange of sexual identities through triangular seductive maneuvers may temporarily ease jealousy and rage, or rather project them into the father object. In a classical unconscious fantasy, father is helplessly poisoned by jealousy and despair, and mother is filled with envy, while their son invites the most abusive vagrants into the garden of earthly delight of his own young and eroticized body. However, while a passive Oedipal constellation may be suited to project anxiety into external objects and temporarily contain emotional pain, it is actually unable to permanently quench primal scene-related upsetting emotions.

Primal scene anxiety thrives on the experience of exclusion from the coitus of the inner parents. The core element, then, is the desperate effort to control the access to the inside of the inner mother. However, this aim is obviously unattainable in reality, outside symbiotic or severely sadomasochistic relations.

Only an adequate cleavage of the pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother object can enable the young male to enter deep relationships with female peers. The establishment of a sexualized object relation with an adult female has a substantial impact on the configuration of the inner primal scene. The subject may finally come to occupy in phantasy father’s position within the inner coitus. New interpersonal tasks can then be posed and shall be worked out, including the question of generativity and parenthood.

6. Conclusions

The human mind relies on projective identification as a way to evacuate distressing emotions ([19], pp. 89–94). Various interpersonal strategies can be relied upon in order to insert helplessness and pain feelings into suitable recipients. Within groups, this phenomenon is obvious whenever a racial or political minority gets to be the focus of irrational devaluation, hostility, or overt aggression. Within Bion’s conceptualization of group functioning, such interpersonal phantasy corresponds to the activation of a flight or fight basic assumption [20].

The Catholic clergy and the LGBT community confront each other within contemporary political scenarios. They feature one and the same relationship to the inner mother, but two different strategies to handle Oedipal anxieties. The Church ministers try to incorporate the goals of the parental couple. Repression withdraws the experience of the sexually interacting parents from both the individual and the community awareness. In a way, the Catholic ascetic’s choice replicates the interpersonal organization of latency when, within the family, parental sexual life is obvious, but never to be seen or acknowledged.

LBGT activists, on the other hand, are keen to make as public as possible their sexual experience. A particularly cherished goal is the exposition of the Catholic believer and clergyman to homosexual issues and ideals. Inasmuch as antidiscrimination laws generally include the enforcement of celebratory days and courses in all schools, implicitly including Church administered institutions, they seem to be designed to let the adversary group’s unconscious defensive strategy organization falter and yield, to confront them with a basic feeling of helplessness and exclusion from pleasure and enjoyment.

The omnipotent and narcissistic quality of such an unconscious strategy may not be completely concealed. No doubt, it offers short-term effectiveness and can sooth basic Oedipal distress. But it will never allow the individual to change position within the Oedipal chessboard of the inner primal scene.

As the case of Carlo shows us, social life gets us consistently in touch with couples: happy, unhappy, troubled. The experience of exclusion from the parents’ coitus gets replicated ad libitum in everyday interpersonal life. Although the father’s position in the primal scene is far from easy, the persistent pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother object will keep the individual feeling inadequate and left out for life.