Article:

Einführung in «OEdipe africain»

In this contribution – after a short introduction to the discursive location of the text in anthropological, psychoanalytic and philosophical contexts – an excerpt of the aforementioned book will be presented for the first time in German translation. Psychological treatments and research conducted by the French psychoanalysts Ortigues in Dakar reveal different symbolic systems which do not correspond to what Jacques Lacan called the “Oedipus complex.” Since the fundament of this complex, the family triangle, cannot be identified in the extended African families who also designate other sorts of authorities, the authors present different Senegalese ethnicities and their divergent rituals of initiation, including dances of possession, denominations of spirits, so called “rabs,” and local determinations of altars, which they interpret as alternative symbolic orders with socially constitutive functions. They also explain the necessity to question their own epistemological schemas and their Western methods of treatment – without resolutely distancing themselves from the Oedipus complex. Deleuze and Guattari do not mention these descriptions of alternative symbolizations of socially constitutive processes when referring to Ortigues' text in ANTI-OEDIPUS, CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA (1972); rather, they only criticize their account of an «African Oedipus».