Towards a structural theory of matricide: psychoanalysis, the Oresteia and the maternal prohibition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jacobs focuses on the untheorized status of matricide in psychoanalysis. She argues that, if matricide could be conceptualized in terms of a structuring function, then we could work towards the expansion of the symbolic economy to include a different mode of symbolization from that of the classical Oedipal/castration model. The key question with which she is concerned is whether or not the mother can be theorized within the terms of the underlying cultural laws that determine socio-symbolic organization. She argues for a return to myth as part of a strategy that seeks to undermine the monopoly of the Oedipus myth in the psychoanalytic theory that psychoanalytic feminism relies on. If we reread Freud’s engagement with Oedipus in relation to the matricidal myth of the Oresteia then we can begin to raise the possibility of theorizing more than one structural law. She goes on to demonstrate that, concealed within the Oresteian myth, we can find distorted versions of another matricidal myth, the myth of Zeus’ incorporation of Metis. By interpreting the myth of Metis as the latent content of the Oresteian myth Jacobs postulates a definition of matricide as incorporation rather than introjection, and argues that this conceptual definition can lead to the development of a hypothesis of a matricidal law. She suggests that the discovery of the unconscious structure belonging to matricide arrived at through this rereading of the Oresteia has important implications not only for the expansion of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice but for feminist cultural intervention and symbolic change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".