Madoka's Non-Oedipal Complex

[gaytog]

Madoka conceptualizes herself as trapped within the womb: she wants to grow up, to discover herself as a person, but she cannot do so while living under Junko's shadow. Thus, becoming God—the endgame of Madoka's character growth, the moment of her self-actualization—creates a universe in which Junko does not even remember Madoka. The two have been completely severed; the umbilical cord has been cut.

Other, subtler indications of this fantasy are peppered throughout the series. In Madoka's dream of the previous timeline, she exits a labyrinth (i.e., womb) and goes on to make a life-altering decision. And in the final episode, she abandons the red hair ribbon which Junko gifted her in episode 1.

For the first time, I'm actually reading about psychoanalysis—psychoanalytic film theory in particular, since that's the school of thought which influenced Malo's reading of Homestuck, in turn influencing my own reading of Madoka Magica—and this description of the Oedipal complex set off some bells in my head:

The male child is bonded to his mother through the breast, and imagines himself in a unity with her. This unity, however, soon breaks up when the child senses his difference from the mother ... The realization of his difference prompts the child to desire the lost unity but, as Freud insists, this desire sexualizes the mother ... The child also associates the power to castrate with the father because he sees that the mother "is not like him, she does not have a penis." Since the only person having access to her is the father, the child imagines that it was the father who castrated her possibly as a punishment. At this point, the child's desire for unification becomes problematic for him because if he chooses to identify with her and thus accomplish the lost unity, he becomes like her, he gets castrated, too ... To resolve this castration threat, the child identifies with the father ... Becoming like his father, the child moves towards social stability by adopting heterosexual orientation through redirecting his repressed desire for the mother toward other women in a socially acceptable manner.

It's easy to imagine Madoka's situation as the answer to the question "What if the child was female?" Hers is not a gender-swapped scenario in which the daughter identifies with and becomes attracted to the father, but rather:

• the female child, bonded to her mother through the breast, imagines herself in a unity with the mother
• the child does NOT notice a difference between herself and the mother, and so this unity is not broken
• the child does not desire to reclaim the unity, since the unity was never lost
• the child never develops a sexual attraction to her mother
• she experiences no castration anxiety, no identification with the father, no repression of incestuous desires...

...all because the fantasy of unity is never interrupted. In fact, it becomes antagonistic: Madoka wants to sever herself from Junko, but she lacks the willpower to do so.