Danzig's Oedipal Strife

Anyone who hears about a conflict between a prospective suitor and his lady’s parents would not be shocked. This is one of the most common story formulas in history: boy meets girl, boy must prove to girl’s parents his worthiness, and parents either approve and consent or disapprove and reject. This formula in itself provides us with plenty of material with which to understand humans within a familial and social context, but when Glenn Danzig takes it a step further, we are able to see even deeper into human consciousness, unconsciousness, and the defense mechanisms we use to protect ourselves.






On a structural level, Danzig’s song appears to be a warped version of the ‘boy meets girl’s parents’ formula in that he is talking to her parents and mentioning his desire to take her out for the night. Danzig’s use of this typical formula as a means to convey a very atypical message is indicative of his own inner conflict and lack of resolution of the Oedipal stage. Danzig does not sing to the mother and father to convince them to let him take their daughter, but rather, threatens the daughter and father, and entices the mother. Hence, the singer reveals a manifestation of his repressed desire for his mother, and his continued struggle for dominance with his father. However, instead of playing out this conflict with his actual parents, he does so with the parents of a presumed love interest because the pain of the original conflict it too much for the ego to bear.

Sigmund Freud explains that “the tie of affection, which binds the child as a rule to the parent of the opposite sex, succumbs to disappointment” and concludes that “the lessening amount of affection he receives, the increasing demands of education, hard words and an occasional punishment—these show him at last the full extent to which he has been scorned” (435). This initial disappointment, as experienced by the child’s realization that the mother cannot and will not be his, is usually resolved by the child’s alignment with the father and the phallus. For Danzig, however, this conflict and disappointment is not necessarily resolved in the typical way. Rather than overtly challenging his own father and pursuing his own mother, he feigns interest in a heteronormative partner in order to pursue a different mother and challenge a different father. Indeed, Danzig is bitter towards his mother and yet still deeply desires her, and because he cannot quite have her, he is willing to settle for nothing less than another mother.

Danzig begins his song with words of warning and threats towards the mother’s children. He asks, “Can you keep them in the dark for life? Can you hide them from the waiting world?”, but he does this not to actually warn them, but rather to express his resentment and disappointment resulting from his separation from what Lacan calls the “motherer”. At some point, he was launched out of the ‘Imaginary’, where he was one with the motherer and completely safe from the “waiting world”, and dropped into the ‘Symbolic’, where he is acutely aware of his separation from her and of an overall ‘lack’ in his life. Rather than cope with this loss through repression or by connecting with his own father, Danzig latches on to another’s parents and attempts the entire Oedipal process all over again while simultaneously accusing the new mother of the crime of forcing her own children into this world of pain.

He then goes on to challenge the father by asking “do you wanna bang heads with me?”, and entices the mother by saying “if you wanna find hell with me, I can show you what it’s like.” Here, Danzig’s challenging of the father is representative of what Freud calls an “identification with the father” (439)—he would like to be the father. But rather than learn how to be the father with another woman, he attempts to be the father by defeating one. Conversely, his enticement of the mother shows his desire to have her rather than identify with her. She is his object, and the purpose of this song is to convince her to give up her role as mother to her children and wife to her husband, and to become mother and wife to him alone. He cannot achieve this with his own mother, and so, just like the little boy who throws his toys away, “by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, [...] he took on an active part” and made himself “master of the situation” (Freud 432-33). Whether he is successful in attaining a new motherer or not is irrelevant. The only thing that matters for this man is his ability to recreate his Oedipal stage over and over again so that he does not have to feel the loss of his original object, his mother.


Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Ed. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.

---“Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Ed. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.