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Life Arts    H4'ed 12/19/24

On Interpreting the Ubiquitous Mom-Son Porn on the Internet (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Thomas Farrell
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Instances of experienced rebirth may also be described as experiences of transformation - and the title of Jung's book is Symbols of Transformation.

Rebirth = Transformation.

Transformation = Rebirth.

Mom-son porn = Desire for rebirth.

Yes, as I have stated above, the fantasy skits of the ubiquitous mom-son porn on the internet are unrealistic. Which is why we should not interpret them by the standards of realism. Rather, we should interpret them as symbolic expressions.

As to whether or not, this interpretation of mom-son porn should be part of porn literacy, I will leave to others to debate.

Now, the time has come for me to discuss Ong's work further. As I have argued above that our cultural conditioning from our contemporary secondary oral culture resonates in the human psyche with what Jung refers to as the collective unconscious - the home in the human psyche of the repository of mythic images, mythic images that manifested in the unconscious as dreams when we sleep and in ego-consciousness as imagination and works and expressions of imagination.

Now, in Ong's 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press), he succinctly sums up the eight stages of consciousness that the Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neuman delineates in his synthesis of Jung's work in his 1954 book The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated from the German by R. F. C. Hull (Pantheon Books; orig. German ed., 1949):

"The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with it tail in its mouth, as well as be other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche's imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [such as Nietzsche's so-called overman] - or, more properly, personalism - of modern man [sic])" (Ong, 1971, pp. 10-11).

Ong also sums up Neumann's Jungian account of the eight stages of consciousness in his (Ong's) book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981, pp. 18-19; but also see the "Index" for further references to Neumann [page 228]), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University.

Now, "endogamous kinship libido" refers to the libido energy married within one's psyche to images one has of one's mother-figure and father-figure and the like with other family members. In the case of mom-son porn videos on the internet, the relevant endogamous image is one's mother-figure.

As you can see, Ong here sees cutting-edging thought today as manifesting stage "(8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism - or, more precisely, personalism - of modern man [sic]."

But misogynistic Trump and his misogynistic male MAGA supporters have not yet experienced stage "(7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [married within one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness)."

But "the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness" involves what the Jungian psychoanalyst Edward C. Whitmont refers to as the return of the goddess in the human psyched in his book Return of the Goddess (Crossroad Publishing, 1982).

As I have just indicated, I see misogyny as a decisive factor is blocking the experience of what Whitmont refers to as the return of the goddess in men and boys who are acculturated in misogyny and as blocking men acculturated in misogyny from experiencing stage (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [married with one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness."

Jung does not attach a specific age to the possible experience of any of the eight stages of Consciousness. Rather, he uses the expansive term mid-life crisis to refer to the psychological processes involved in experiencing stage (7) of the eight stages of consciousness.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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