Some considerations of Eros and Thanatos in the first three "Gor" novels
I'm not a psychiatrist; I don't even play one in my imagination. Neither have I read all the "Gor" novels; I'm going mainly on the excerpts generously provided by Bellatrys.
And I of course realise that Freud's work has been subjected to re-assessment, re-interpretation and a great deal of critical analysis since first formulated.
Nevertheless, some of his theories are useful tools in dealing with the embarrassment of psychological riches presented to us even in these excerpts.
John Norman's "Gor" novels are a steaming, heaving, seething hotbed of repressed desires. Not the desires associated with male dominance over female submissives - those are overt, upfront, and repeated to the point of ad nauseam , even for the apologists and fans of the series: "Yes, yes, we get it: men Masters, women Slaves. Now can you please get on with the action?"
But for Norman, this is the action. Speaking through his female POV characters (another puzzlement for the fans! but a psychological necessity as a safety-valve for Norman, as we shall see), he may express those desires that he consciously is unaware of or even denies.
Let us begin with some definitions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
"Dreams, which he called the "royal road to the unconscious," provided the best access to our unconscious life and the best illustration of its "logic," which was different from the logic of conscious thought."
Norman writes fantasy novels. Admittedly with a SF element, but nonetheless, the fantasy element is the predominating one. Fantasies, dreams - related categories. A dream is a fantasy, a fantasy is a dream.
These fantasies are Norman's dreams, which provide the access to his unconscious life.
"Freud's way of interpretation has been called phallocentric by many contemporary thinkers. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious always desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of castration - losing their phallus or masculinity to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus - an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs. For Freud, desire is always defined in the negative term of lack - you always desire what you don't have or what you are not, and it is very unlikely that you will fulfill this desire. Thus his psychoanalysis treatment is meant to teach the patient to cope with his or her unsatisfiable desires."
Both genders desire the phallus. Both. Yet it would have been unacceptable at the time of writing for Norman to have a male character, much less a male protagonist, express his desire for the phallus in such terms. Norman's females, however, mindlessly crave the phallus and are forced to express this craving; moreover, are forced to admit that this is what they crave. Thus, they become "real" women and their masters, at the moment of realising their mastery, become "real" men.
Yet these females, who provide so valuable a service to the males in enabling them to become "real" men and masters, are objects of derision and scorn, the lowest of the low. Again and again we are reminded that slaves are nothing, are not entitled to a will or desires of their own, are considered beasts, may be slain at the owner's whim.
What value, then, do they serve in Norman's psychic economy? The despised, hated - feared? - female is of use only as a means to articulate the craving for the phallus. To undergo the rape-fantasy that plays out over and over and over again in these novels. To be reduced from an independent agent who rejects and denies the phallus to the submissive who is forced to accept it, forced to articulate the desire for it, forced to take and be what (s)he really wants deep down.
"I can't help it; you're making me do this; I can't stop you; you're making me enjoy this; you are forcing me to do what I secretly desire to do; this does not make me a Bad Girl (Boy) because you are forcing me to experience the pleasure I have been denied in my former status and since I am bound and unable to resist It Is Not My Fault."
Which brings us on, handily, to defence mechanisms:
"The defense mechanisms are the methods by which the ego can deal with conflicts between the super-ego and the id.
The defense mechanisms include denial, reaction formation, displacement, repression/suppression (the proper term), projection, intellectualization, rationalization, compensation, sublimation and regressive emotionality.
- Reaction formation takes place when a person takes the opposite approach consciously compared to what that person wants unconsciously. For example, someone may engage in violence against another race because, that person claims, the members of the race are inferior, when unconsciously it is that very person who feels inferior.
- Psychological projection occurs when a person "projects" his or her own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings - basically parts of oneself - onto someone or something else. Since the person is experiencing particular desires, feelings, thoughts, or anxieties, s/he is more prone to attribute those same characteristics to the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others.
- Rationalization involves constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. For example, Jim may drink red wine because he is an alcoholic, but he tells himself he drinks it because it has some health benefits, in order to avoid facing his alcoholism.
- Sublimation is the channeling of impulses to socially accepted behaviours. For instance, an aggressive or homicidal person may join the military as a cover for their violent behavior."
I have excerpted these four - reaction formation, psychological projection, rationalization and sublimation - because I think they are of most use in this analysis.
Rationalization - well, the turgid philosophy Norman has constructed and batters his readers over the head with time and again in his novels, to the detriment of plot, character, and action fits right in here. Faced with these unacceptable desires, which he has to first displace onto females, Norman must now secondarily construct a defence for their obsessive reiteration. He does this by a 'philosophy' of 'natural slaves'. It is unnecessary to waste more words on this.
Sublimation - while it is unacceptable for a male to express desires to be dominated by another male, these expressions may be put into the mouths of female characters since it is still unhappily widespread in gender roles that the female is submissive to the dominant male. Also, it permits Norman to relieve his envy of the despised female - who, after all, gets to openly express her desire for the powerful male even if she is only a lowly object of scorn, yet he cannot share this creature's freedom - by punishing her for (1) daring to express what he really wishes and so revealing him and exposing him to the scorn and obloquy of society and for (2) being permitted what he is not, being permitted to be what he is not permitted to be, having access to what he is not allowed access, being able to do and have all this and yet, sometimes, choosing to reject and deny it. Is it any wonder he wants to bring his haughty Earth women characters down a peg? They reject what he longs for, and in so doing, are better 'males' than he is.
And this brings us on to the entanglement of libido and death drive, Eros and Thanatos:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive
Freud begins the work considering the experience of trauma and traumatic events (particularly the trauma experienced by soldiers returning from World War I). The most curious feature of highly unpleasant experiences for Freud was that subjects often tended to repeat or re-enact them. This appeared to violate the "pleasure principle," the drive of an individual to maximize his or her pleasure.
…After hypothesizing a number of causes (particularly the idea that we repeat traumatic events in order to master them after the fact), Freud considered the existence of a fundamental death drive that would counterbalance the tendency of beings to do only what they find pleasurable. Organisms, according to this idea, were driven to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state-but they wished to do so in their own way.
In psychoanalytic theory, the death drive opposes Eros. Here Eros is characterised as the tendency towards cohesion and unity, whereas the death drive is the tendency towards destruction.
…The basic properties of this newly-introduced drive are that it aims towards “a return to the inanimate state”, that it is always fused with the sexual instinct, and that it is clinically silent, though when on the ascendance, still fused with sexual instinct, it can be clinically observed in behaviours like the ones mentioned above.
…What Freud did was to keep the 1915 instinct theory almost intact, but at the same time omit the property of “reversal of content” used to compensate for non-pleasure principle behaviours of the sexual instincts, replacing it with a separate instinct of destruction and aggression not influenced by the pleasure-principle. Thus, for example, masochism is no longer the “reversal of content” of the sexual/self-preserving instincts, but rather the “change of objects” of sadism from external to internal, notably to the ego. Sadism is thus considered “a direct manifestation of the death instinct.
…In particular he connects aggression directly with the “restriction of the instincts” from both religious and political institutions, and sums up his analysis by writing that “it is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression”. Following this thought he also makes a connection between group life and innate aggression, where the former comes together more closely by directing aggression to other groups, an idea later picked up by group analysts like Bion. But also making the point that “instinctual aggression [is] the greatest impediment to civilization, which is in the service of Eros” and continues “[whose purpose is] to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind”.
…The most important of them were: suggesting practical ways to mitigate the effects of the death instinct, like encouraging “emotional ties between men through love, though without having a sexual aim, and identifications” (Freud, 1932); also the suggestion that masochism is older than sadism, since “sadism is the destructive instinct directed outwards, thus acquiring the characteristic of aggressiveness” (Freud, 1933); and lastly, a connection between the predominance of the death instinct and the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ in analysis (Freud, 1937)."
An awful lot there to digest, but let us simplify it by parsing out (1) Eros and Thanatos are intertwined (2) Eros is "characterised as the tendency towards cohesion and unity", with "civilization, which is in the service of Eros” “[whose purpose is] to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind” (3) Thanatos is opposed to this and thus can be seen as the tendency towards disunity, the destruction of civilization, the scattering instead of combination into families, races, peoples and nations (4) masochism precedes sadism, and is the turning-inwards of Thanatos (5) Thanatos may be appeased by "emotional ties between men through love…and identifications"
So, how does this affect Gor in general and our protagonist, Tarl Cabot, in particular?
That will be covered in our next installment.