Views
Like everything which has about it a prestige of exoticism, the tall buildings of America lend themselves, with an insolent ease, to the tempting amusement of comparisons. The most immediate is, beyond doubt, that which transforms these edifices into modern towers of Babel. But trivial though such a comparison may be, it is nevertheless of interest (by the very reason of its immediacy) in confirming the psychoanalytic content of the expression "skyscraper."
One of the innumerable versions of the story of the struggle between father and son is the Biblical narrative concerning the erection of the Tower of Babel. As in the myth of the Titans, we find here the attempt to climb up to the sky – that its to say, to dethrone the father, to possess oneself of his virility – followed by the destruction of the rebels: castration of the son by his father, whose rival he is. Furthermore, the coupling, rash though it may be, of these two words, the verb "scrape" on the one hand, and, on the other, the substantive "sky," immediately evokes an erotic image in which the building, which scrapes, is a phallus even more explicit than the Tower of Babel, and the sky which is scraped – the object of the desire of the said phallus – is the incestuously desired mother, as she is in all attempts at the spoilation of the paternal virility.
To that degree, skyscrapers, the grandiose ornament of North American cities and the instruments of a luxury and comfort as yet unknown in Europe, are marvellous and modern symbols – as much by their name as their form – of one of the most important human constants: that which was the cause of Laius' murder by his son, of the final disaster of Phaeton, indeed of certain social upheavals and a fair number of inventions, the Oedipus complex which is, without possible contradiction, one of the most powerful factors in evolution or, if one believes in it, of "progress," since it implies a desire no less for substitution than for joyful demolition.(1)
(1) Laius was Oedipus's father. Phaeton, the son of Helios (the sun-god), sought to drive his father's chariot, came a cropper and thereby turned Libya into a parched desert and blackened the inhabitants of Africa; Zeus saved the world from being fire by shooting him down.