Despite all efforts, it still is alive, crawling, desperate, rotten. It would be useless in any other field, except on the treatment of madness. The treatment of madness is still Oedipal in its core, reducing everything to penis envy, sexuality, and family. This begs the questions of Why Oedipus? How was it born? Why Oedipus wants to treat madness? Do we have penis envy and that causes seeing the face of god? Is my schizophrenia caused by anal fixations? Does my mother want to replace my brain with fascist thoughts? or most importantly, What is Oedipus a reflection off?
Despite first impressions of seeing Oedipus. Creation and Integration of Oedipus into main society didn't occur until the Edwardian times and Interwar Periods, the separation of what id like to call the eras of industrial unconsciousness and obfuscated consciousness. Oedipus was not alone and was in fact the third in a triumvirate of descriptions, of criticisms against the industrial unconsciousness. The triumvirate of Capital, Myths, and Hysteria were the ones described, and despite their criticisms, they still hold strong to this day, and have even entered a type of symbiotic existence with eachother. The separation between industrialization and obfuscation relies on the creation of the symbiotic existence. In the former era we relied on the manufacturing of rationalisms and modernisms. The belief that the era we live in is the best one ever lived in by any being in history, because we discarded all that wasn't rational and rely on empirism and science for all objects and subjects. It still exists and is produced on obfuscation, however it isn't out of ignorance of a better method or way, it's by malice. Despite all advancements and criticisms made on rationalisms and modernisms our era is still filled with these thought processes, even unconsciously. The existence of better systems is hidden out of fear of destruction and reconstruction, of change. To be more specific, capitalism, religion and morals, and hysterics proliferate in our age by its unholy union. An alliance formed out of necessity, for the need of survival. Criticisms against the three have been made, and still the organism of society doesn't change, it even hides these criticisms, it has adapted itself to them, creating a new vermin that is contradictory and self sustaining. Marx's criticisms of capitalism, of labor and capital and class are used to fuel its unnatural existence; Nietzsche's criticisms of morals, myths, religions are targiversed into being "unrational" and "nihilist" as the Death of God was metaphorical and therefore ignored; and finally, Freud's criticisms of our mind and its supposed rationalism have been turned into the ramblings of a dementia ridden man, however, the family he had created has been absorbed and now stands in as the ideal. The system holds the critiques and the critiqued together, and Oedipus is the representative of the unholy being of contradictions.
Oedipus reflection is perfectly seen and reflected in the state of psychiatry, its most direct descendant. Psychiatry is the evolution of Oedipus with rationalisms. It holds itself to be a pure empirical science, held by experts who supposedly spent years studying the structures of the mentally ill, and the best way to help them. Yet it holds it subjects with the same childlike curiosity as psychoanalysis, the psychiatrist spends his sessions with patients monitoring a series of strict guidelines, that are arbitrary and irrational despite studies conducted dismissing them as pseudoscience. If the psychiatrist detects anomalies in the patient, it will proceed to restrict, cauterize and desinfect the "wound in the mind". It will quarantine the individual into modern leper colonies, or medicate it until the subject experiences cognitivedeath. What some call it murder and obfuscation, they call it a cure and treatment. As the descendant of Oedipus: it dismisses any concern by the patient, dismissing them as "hysteria"; holds the psychiatrist as the ultimate authority of the mind of others, even though in most cases they lack the understanding of the other; it treats the patient in isolation at a safe distance, a test subject rather than a being, an animal at a zoo rather than a human, a circus freak; and it reduces most desires and emotions to being merely the result of sexuality. As rationalist: allows itself to be absorbed by capital, treating the patient as a costumer; it treats itself as a serious science despite the average "lunatic" knowing more about their condition than the psychiatrist, and uses strict guidelines of "symptoms", like medical conditions even though medical symptoms of illnesses can still be easily confused with others, causing disastrous results even with the aid of empirical evidence, while psychiatry doesn't have empiricism and deals with philosophical subjects such as "sense of self"; allows itself to be targiversed by religion and conservatism, trying to erase all evidence that the contradictory system can't justify.
The transgender is a casualty of psychiatry, an anomaly that it cannot tolerate and will try to eliminate and obfuscate at all costs. Treating it as the previous critiques of capitalism. It's something that seems sexual but is merely about consciousness. It cannot be reduced to phallic fixations nor can it be dismissed as an irrational childish rebelion of religion and myth. It is an anomaly for the Oedipal structure, a threat to its power. It's the new schizophrenic, the boogeyman of Psychiatry. Schizophrenia cannot be explained by traditional psychoanalysis, the abstract experiences and beyond spirtualism that the schizophrenic goes under cannot be simply explained by abstracting everything to the thought processes of the hysteric, the psychosis and hysteric are not similar, and trying to explain one in the terms of the other is bound to failure. Similarly enough, one can't describe the thought processes of the transgender by merely thinking it's the same as a hysteric. The psychiatrist can't relate to the transgender, for the issue of the self has never been even raised inside the psychiatrist psyche. He, as all the cissexual population does, embraces Oedipus, merely thinking inside of its contradictions, seeing the system as perfect and beyond any critique. He assumes that modified modernist Oedipus is valid analysis, that our sense of self begins at the oral stage, that our mood is resolved within the anal fixation, that our genitals are the secret esoteric knowledge needed to understand the world. While the transgender has self before language to interpret it, its emotions part of the environment it finds itself in, and ignores the genitals until they bring discomfort to the self. The transgender doesn't merely reject Oedipus, it ignores it completely. The ignorance of Oedipus is the most clear evidence that Oedipus is not natural, it is not the endpoint of human development as modernisms and rationalisms seem to indicate. And most importantly, it signifies the existance of something beyond it. And that terrifies religion, for the myths it has created cannot explain the transgender, and neither can psychoanalysis. It's fringe to the extreme, and it is the symbol of change. Capital cannot absorb the transgender, bring it unto itself and transform it into a product, labor cannot distract the transgender from realizing it self, it cannot restrict and commercialize it.
Oedipus is nothing more than a representative, representative of pain, of all the pains of the last 200+ years. It is the pain of the amputee with lockjaw thanks to it having dirty hands, it is the pain of the black man being whipped to death by its hand, the pain of the black woman being raped and forced to bear its children, the pain of the soldier dying by its gun, the pain of man losing his last strengths by a disease of its creation, the pain of the lobotomized dying in all but name, the pain of the queer being lynched its hand, the pain of dying of starvation and typhus inside a concentration camp,the pain of children being bombed day and night by its hand. It stands for all of that evil.
One of the evils it stands for is the treatment of the "mentally ill", of what should be called mental conditions or divergences, and is instead pathologized and researched, treated like an animal. That is what we are in this system, in this very cog, we are the animal the other, the foreign thing that cannot be comprehended. Because that's what we are, misunderstood. Because no matter what hallucination and delusion I might have, I am still a person and as a person I need socialization, education, food and health just like any other person. But that's not how they see me. I'm only as important as my capacity to work is. If I can't produce then I should be discarded and forgotten, because I'm not useful.
That's what the difference between a healthy person and a mentally ill, one can work, the other can't. And how do you make the ill, the unworkable, go to work and be a "healthy individual". The answer is you alter the ill's brain to make it more normal, more stereotypical. In some cases, this has the byproduct of sometimes being actually useful, getting rid of someone's anxiety might be useful, someone with mood swings and emotional control issues might be better with medication.These are all might bes and not ises. Because they are not universal. There is a standard way, a procedure to follow strictly and with rigurosity. We diagnose and treat with checklists. Even the word diagnose is a give away of the way we see the mental.
We see it exactly the same way as we see medical treatment. And that has its own issues, from what classifies as a symptom or not, what symptoms are because of which systems failures, all the way to the diagnoses themselves. You can ask two doctors to diagnose the same patient, and they can come up with wildly different results, and still not be the illness that plagues the patient. And in the world of physical medicine, we have the benefit of empirical evidence, that is we can actually examine, explain, and sense the symptoms ourselves. There is no doubt as to a rash being a rash, a cut being a cut, an impaled leg being an impaled leg. If we go back to mental health, all of those signs you can see are all gone. The symptoms are not evident at all, and if we had doubt when we could sense them what happens when we can't. Take a look at some of those symptoms that psychiatrists refer to as their holy grail, "lack of sense of self" for example. Philosophers have grappled with the question of the sense of self for thousands of years how can one psychiatrist know if someone has a lack of sense of self, if we can't even define what's a sense or what's a self. "Magical thinking or delusions", what's the difference between a religious woman attributing something to God, and the schizotypal attributing an act to the deity they believe in, they might even believe on a religious figure too. The symptoms are subjective and prone to interpretation. If some people get mad because of the existence of the view that no literary interpretation is as good as any other and that they must be held to equal scrutiny, now imagine how they will react if something more closely related to wellbeing and health is held to the same standard.
Bring 10 psychiatrists to the same room to diagnose the same patient and each will give you a different list of disorders the patient has.
Treatment in comparison, despite the very diverse effects medication and talk therapy have in an individual, no scrutiny or doubt is placed in that area. The psychiatrist will assume SSRIs and anti psychotics are the magical cure for all disorders. Once again it might be helpful. But there are as many cases of someone's psychosis being worse after medication as there are cases of psychosis being improved. People might bring up a lot of benefits to the use of medications. But I will bring what I believe is the most important side effect of the same pills. What we call brain fog.
Brain fog, cognitive death, chemical lobotomy as I'd like to call it, is the state of partial connection with yourself and the world. Thinking is a slog, thinking is hard, recognizing and remembering objects and people is hard. You might the days pass you by, that suddenly you are somewhere you don't remember getting into. It's similar to Alzheimer's or dementia, or the state in which lobotomy victims were in. There is no self, or it has been heavily diminished. The world around you turns dull and disconnected. You aren't part of the world anymore nor part of yourself. You have been expelled from reality and into nothingness and you don't even realize. Thankfully this isn't temporary. If the chemical is removed then cognitive death will stop and reverse itself.
However the psychiatrist will induce cognitive death, chemical lobotomies for the sake of treatment, without question. And we return to the victim of the lobotomy. The "ill", the other, the feared. The ones who don't desire chemical death are seen as dangerous, as hazards, as animals in zoos outside of the cage. And therefore cages are built, where the other can be isolated and turned into normal. Where the ill is lobotomized until a shadow of themselves and returned to the world.
One of these "ills", others, is the transgender. The system, Oedipus, sees it as a threat, because it goes against all it represents. Once the transgender has the language to analyze themselves, they will define a new self. One that they will work to become or be more closely aligned to. The psychiatrist can see this as a lack of sense of self, as delusions, as dissociative identity, as many different symptoms. And will therefore arrive at every conclusion before deciding that the treatment is indeed what the transgender said from the start was the issue. A well informed transgender or any other "ill" understands more about the mind and the different mental conditions, sees the good and bad, the distressing and the wonderful. Interestingly enough, the treatment for transgender is doing what the transgender decides instead of the psychiatrist, the authority, the supreme, says, and standard procedure is not SSRIs or psychotics. The psychiatrist is irrelevant, the expertise they are supposed to have is fake, as the patient knows more about the condition, by lived experience or technical knowledge, than the distant academic figure. The treatments it so preaches as the only solution are useless or negligible at best and harmful at worst. The Oedipal system is inherently harmed by the existence of the transgender, the anomaly amongst anomalies, the "rational ill".