From Freud to Poststructuralism: A Journal of a Re-Authoring Self

In the last two decades North American and European cultures have seen a consistent increase in the number of random mass shootings uniformly committed by socially isolated white males. This book hypothesizes the source of white male violence and locates it in the details of the parental relationship with the son, focusing on how a father responds to the son’s normative attachment needs. To this end the author recounts his experiences in graduate and post-graduate programs, with the focus on the final two years of psychotherapeutic training in which his initial interests in Psychodynamic (Structuralist) theories are abandoned in favor of the Poststructuralist ideas of Michel Foucault. These are applied by Narrative Therapists Michael White, David Epston, and Stephen Madigan, with the latter’s research in Narrative Therapy (APA Press, 2006) being the primary reference. In Part One the author applies Freudian theories of “normative” development to contextualize the challenges of his own childhood defined by the Patriarchal abuse enacted by his father. These childhood experiences led to his interest in depictions of child characters in 19th century fiction within the psychoanalytic critique while earning a Master’s degree in English literature. His criticism worked to advocate for the rights of children with a focus on their healing through the creation of a parallel liberatory narrative of textual criticism as the Postcolonial critique has done for people of color, as the Feminist critique has done for women, as Queer Theory has done for homosexual men and women. This research questioned the nature of white male power at the heart of each of these discourses’ complaints by asserting male aggression is not inherent but is rather learned within the first social system of the family. After the rejection of his ideas in the graduate program, the author began three years of post-graduate training in Freudian theories and therapeutic clinical practice. The author recounts having his personal reflections on psychodynamic theories rejected by faculty members when he shared with them earlier passages of this text which revealed the domestic traumas of his childhood. Part Two further details the author’s anxious sense of self narrated into existence by the Freudian theories of his program trainers that pathologized his contemporary choice to share his traumatic childhood history with them, galvanizing his conviction that white males need a critical space to have their experiences of Patriarchal abuse respectfully received. After being forced to leave the post-graduate program, his subsequent sense of becoming a subjugated docile body is revisited through elaboration of Freudian theories, yet his self-narrative later evolves into a revitalized subjectivity within the Poststructuralist frame.