Anthropophagy and the human flesh in psychoanalysis

Abstract

Objective

This is an epistemological theoretical analysis that aims to show how the cannibal trope and the flesh are repressed in psychoanalysis.

Context

For this, I rescue the discussion that subdivides matriarchy and patriarchy, made by Freud in Moses and Monotheism. There, the abstraction and the negative facet of thought is taken as superior as the body and the sensitive field. In order to show the limits of this vision that marks psychoanalysis almost as a whole, I present reflections made by Oswald de Andrade in his noted essay The crisis of messianic philosophy.

Method

The procedure was the analysis of both texts (Moses and Monotheism and The crisis of messianic philosophy) with the flesh outline as a critic of the patriarchy.

Results

Instead of a negative and moral character, as it has been observed in Western culture, Oswald postulates the anthropophagy that devours elements of European culture, without allowing cultural aspects to be colonized. The anthropophagic model marks the culture of the Amerindian peoples, which incorporates aggressiveness and love in a single central gesture in religious and collective rituals that happen among them: anthropophagy.

Interpretation

The repression of the flesh and of the anthropophagic devouring return impetuously as violence in Western civilization, destroying in an unavoidable way all-civilized pretensions achieved by sublimation processes. The conclusion points to what we should learn from Amerindian models and autarchic cultures: an amalgamation of love and hate that drives to a less destructive cultural forms and to a better relation to nature and to humans.