Dialogues On Sexuality Gender and Psychoanalysis

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

edited by
Irne Matthis
KARNAC
LONDON NEW YORK
KARNAC
First published in 2004 by
Kamac Books Ltd. 118 Finchley Road, NW3 SlIT

Al"fan8nent, Prdace, Olaptef1 copyr ight2001, 116)(' Mallhis; dlapter 2 2004 Joy<.:e McDougal l; d mptt:r 3 (12004 Jul ia Kri5tt:va; dlaptl.. 4 (12004 Paul >J" Verhaeghe; chapter 5 2004 Juliet Mitchell; chapter 6 2004 Colette (hiland; c ha pter!5 2004 Bbba Witt-Hratwrom; c h apter 9 2004 Jessie<l Ht<!nyam in; d""'pt('J 102001Giseb. Kap l;\.n; chapter11 2001Nancy j. Chodorow
The rights of the &iitor and contributors to be identified as the authors of this work
have been asserted in accordance with Tl and 7!5 of the Copyrieht
Design and Patents Act 1988. All riehls rAServoo. No part of this pllblktltion may be reprorlucoo, stored ill a
medmnicill, photocopy ing , rordillg, orotht:rwi, without tl prior wrillt'9:1

permission of the publisher.
retr i eval system, or tra.nsmitl..-..:I, in any form or by any meanS, dcctron..ic,
British Lbr.uyCatalosu..ing in Publication Dala A C.!.P. for this book is available from the British Ubrary
ISBn
9781855753501
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
Edited, designed, and produced
www.kanlacbooks.rom
by Commlmication Crafts
In honour of Joyce McDougall
CONTENTS
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS PREFACE
ix xiii
CHAPTER ONE
Dialogues on sexuality and gender Irne Matthis

CHAPTER TWO
Freud and female sexualities Joyce McDougall

CHAPTER THREE
23
Some observations on female sexuality Julia Kristeva

CHAPTER FOUR
41
Phallacies of binary reasoning: drive beyond gender Paul Verhaeghe vii
53
viii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER FIVE
The difference between gender and sexual difference Juliet Mitchell

CHAPTER SIX
67
Gender and sexual difference Colette Chiland

CHAPTER SEVEN
79
From femininity to finitude: Freud, Lacan, and feminism, again Toril Moi
CHAPTER EIGHT
93
Femininity theory, theories of women, or feminist theory? Ebba Witt-Brattstrm

CHAPTER NINE
137
Revisiting the riddle of sex: an intersubjective view of masculinity and femininity Jessica Benjamin
CHAPTER TEN
145
The economy of freedom Gisela Kaplan

CHAPTER ELEVEN
173
Beyond sexual difference: clinical individuality and same-sex cross-generation relations in the creation of feminine and masculine Nancy J. Chodorow
INDEX
181 205
EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
JESSICA BENJAMIN, a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City, is a supervisor and faculty member at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She is a founding board member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, member of the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, and an associate editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of three books: The Bonds of Love (1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects (1995), and Shadow of the Other (1998).
COLETTE CHILAND
is a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, and professor emeritus at Ren Descartes University of Paris. She is the author of six books and co-author and editor of fourteen books and five special issues of journals. She has also authored some 200 papers. Some of these books and papers have been published in English. Her most recent paper, The psychoanalyst and the transsexual patient, appeared in February 2000 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.
ix
NANCY J. CHODOROW is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Oakland, California, a faculty member of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and clinical faculty, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Reproduction of Mothering (1978, 2nd. edition, 1999), Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989), Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities (1994), and The Power of Feelings (1999). She is North American Book Review Editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and an Editorial Associate of Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
originally from Berlin, is now research professor at the University of New England, Australia, in two disciplinary fields: social science (sociology, education, and psychology) and biological science (ethology) in the Faculties of Science and Education. She has published over 150 papers as well as seven books in the social sciences, including Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Judging, Freedom (1989), Contemporary Western European Feminism (1992), The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Womens Movement 1950s1990s (1996), and nine books on animal behaviour (orang-utans, birds, animal communication, etc.). Her latest book (with Lesley Rogers), is Gene Worship (2003).
JULIA KRISTEVA
GISELA KAPLAN,
is a professor at Paris 7 (linguistics and literature), a psychoanalyst, and a prolific writer. She is the recipient of many international awards. Some of her latest books published in English are The Female Genius, Vol. 1: Hannah Arendt (2001) and The Female Genius, Vol. 2: Melanie Klein (2002). is professor of psychoanalysis and assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Ume University in Sweden. She is a training analyst and teacher at the Swedish Psychoanalytic Institute (IPA) and is the Scandinavia Co-ordinator for IPACOWAP. She is a Board Member of the International Neuro-Psychoanalysis Society and editor of the Bulletin Section of the international journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis. She is the author of several books and papers, including, in Swedish: Det omedvetnas arkeologi [The Archaeology of the Unconscious] (1992); and Den tnkande kroppen [The Thinking Body] (1997); and, in English, Sketch for a Metapsychology of Affects, International Journal of Psychoanalysis
IRNE MATTHIS
xi
(2000); Finger-twisting and Cracked Voices: The Hysterical Symptom Revisited, in D. E. Scharff (Ed.), The Psychoanalytic Century: Freuds Legacy for the Future (2001); and Strangebody, in M. Alizade (Ed.), The Embodied Female (2002); she also co-edited, with I. Szecsdy, On Freuds Couch (1998). born in New Zealand, received her psychoanalytic training in London and Paris, where she has been a training analyst since 1961. She has published several books, including Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (1978), Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage (1982), Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytic View of Psychosomatic Phenomena (1989), and The Many Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality (1995). Co-author with S. Lebovici, she has also written Dialogue with Sammy (1961, new revised edition 1984). She has made numerous contributions to American, Brazilian, English, French, German, Scandinavian, and Spanish psychoanalytic journals.
JULIET MITCHELL is professor of psychoanalysis and gender studies in the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow of Jesus College. She is a Full Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association. Her most recent books are Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (2000) and Siblings, Sex and Violence (2003). TORIL MOI is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, North Carolina. She is the author of Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; second edition, 2002), Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1993), and What Is a Woman? (2000) and the editor of The Kristeva Reader (1986) and French Feminist Thought (1987). She is currently working on a book on Ibsen and planning more work on feminist theory. PAUL VERHAEGHE JOYCE MCDOUGALL,
is full professor at the University of Gent, Belgium, and head of the department for psychoanalysis and consulting psychology. He has published over 100 papers as well as four books: Does The Woman Exist? From Freuds Hysteric to Lacans
xii
Feminine (1997), Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire (1999), Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive (2001), and On Being Normal and Other Disorders (2004).
EBBA WITT-BRATTSTRM is professor of comparative literature and gender studies at Sdertrn University College, Stockholm. She is Swedish editor of Volumes 2 and 3 of Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria [Nordic Womens Literary History] (1993, 1996), and volume editor of The New Woman and the Aesthetic Opening: Unlocking Gender in Twentieth Century Texts (2004). She is the author of Moa Martinson: Skrift och drift i trettiotalet [Moa Martinson: Writing and Instinct in the Thirties] (1988), Ediths jag. Edith Sdergran och modernismens fdelse (Ediths Self: Edith Sdergran and the Birth of Modernism, 1997), and a book on feminism, psychoanalysis, and literature, Ur knets mrker. Litteraturanalyser [Out of the Darkness of Sex: Literary Analyses] (1993, 2003). She has edited books on, among others, Julia Kristeva (1990) and Lou Andreas-Salom (1995). Her publications in English include Maternal Abject, Fascist Apocalypse, and Daughter Separation in Contemporary Swedish Novels, in Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, edited by Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Sidonie Smith (1997), and Towards a Feminist Genealogy of Modernism: The Narcissistic Turn in Lou Andreas-Salom and Edith Sdergran, in Gender PowerText: Nordic Culture in the Twentieth Century, edited by Helena Forss-Scott (forthcoming 2004).
PREFACE
t seems that human beings are never fully satisfied with their lives. One way of dealing with this fundamental sense of dissatisfaction is to look for its sources, its roots: in short, an explanation. In this light, is it fair to say that femininity theories are created to make sense of womens dissatisfactions and frustration? Freud, reflecting on his experience with women a century ago, made sense of womens predicament through his theory of the missing penis, an explanation that was meaningful at the time to a great many people, women as well as men. Today, we usually regard this theory as a reflection of time-bound prejudices that prevailed in the specific environment of turn-of-the-century Vienna. But, rather than merely dismissing yesterdays theories as prejudices, we need to explore and investigate the new theories that are taking the place of the traditional models, and, consequently, to question our own prejudiced opinions and notions. One pleasant, and exciting, way of doing so is to gather people with different perspectives and allow them the space and the time to talk with each other rather than merely to each other. This was one of the ideas behind the Stockholm Conference on Sexuality and xiii
xiv
PREFACE
Gender (3031 August 2002), and in this book you will be able to partake in the dialogues that were born out of this gathering. The conference was organized by COWAP (Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis), a commission created in 1998 by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). From the beginning, the main purpose of COWAP was to study and discuss women issues, but slowly it shifted towards including mens issues as well. The idea of having the first European COWAP Conference in Sweden was planted by Joan Raphael-Leff, the first chair of COWAP, in the autumn of 2000. When Mariam Alizade took over the chair in 2001, she continued to strongly support the realization of the project. With speakers such as Jessica Benjamin, Colette Chiland, Nancy Chodorow, Gisela Kaplan, Julia Kristeva, Joyce McDougall, Juliet Mitchell, Toril Moi, Paul Verhaeghe, and Ebba Witt-Brattstrm, there was never any doubt that the difficult questions of sexuality and gender, of femininity and masculinity, would be analysed and discussed in new and stimulating ways. Old concepts were dismantled and new ideas brought forward. A conference so rich in ideas calls for documentation, and it became necessary to collect and publish the (reworked) contributions in the form of this volume. The COWAP conference on Sexuality and Gender was created with the conscious intent of bringing different ideas to bear on each other, in order to promote further research into this area that is so important to all of us. We were not necessarily looking for consensus, but for thoughtful elaboration. It is dialogue that makes us move forward. The conference depended on the volunteer work of many people. I want to thank all of those who generously made their contribution as chairs of panels and discussion groups, and as hosts of the groups: Mariam Alizade, Giovanna Ambrosio, Cecilia Annell, Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, Svein Haugsgjerd, Eva Hurtig, Sonja Hrdelin, Suzanne Kaplan, Magnus Kihlbom, Pirjo Lantz, Johan Norman, Lars-Gran Nygren, Joan Raphael-Leff, Beth Seelig, Mikael Sundn, and Maria Yassa. The conference was organized with the help of a local committee appointed by the Swedish Psychoanalytical Society and the Swedish Psychoanalytical Association. Their devoted labour during the year that preceded the conference was decisive in making
PREFACE
xv
the conference a success, and I warmly thank Christina Flordh, Daniela Montelatici Prawitz, Lena Necander-Redell, Agneta Solberger, and Mikael Sundn. Also, I am deeply grateful to Paula Barkay, at the Anna Freud Centre in London, whose knowledge and experience was invaluable. Irne Matthis
CHAPTER ONE
Dialogues on sexuality and gender

Irne Matthis
heory and practice are not always in harmony with one another, although the former is created and applied in order to achieve precisely that. There is a conflict between reality as we experience it and the theories that we apply to it. In the special case of sexuality and gender, we find that if wewhether women or menfail to conform to the (general) theory about what we are supposed to be (female or male), it is usually we who are in for trouble, and not the theory. This may seem unfair to us, but as humans we can neither understand nor make sense of our lives, nor exchange ideas about it, without having access to a theory of some kind. It follows that there are problems inherent in concept formation. Concepts are created at an abstract level to give us not the details, but an overview that our individual and limited experience cannot provide. But as soon as the concepts are applied to individual materialfor example, at an ordinary, clinical level in psychoanalysisthey seem to become misleading. Why is that? As abstract conceptsthat is, as part of a metapsychology they make universalizing claims. That is exactly why we value and need them. They seem to offer us a birds-eye view and, thus,
1
IRNE MATTHIS
insights that we could not otherwise have. At the same time, they structure the whole field in such a way that we feel there is a law, or at least a rule guiding the world. Applied to a real situation, however, this claim to universality may become problematic, when that which is unique and singular is judged and categorized according to a universal rule that might not be pertinent in the particular case. A patientanalyst relationship, for example, or a novel written in specific historical circumstances, may very well be mistreated and misjudged if we treat it in accordance with a given rule that we apply without consideration and thought. So we find ourselves having to make an impossible choice. We can choose to maintain the appeal of universal lawfulness by offering up the uniqueness of the specific case to the demands of uniformityor we have to let go of the claim to generalizability and make do with the truthfulness of each single case. If we choose the latter, we lose the much-cherished claim to scientific relevance and the possibility of creating theories by which we can orient ourselves in the world. In this volume you will find examples of both tendencies. For the reader, this may initially create confusion. Nevertheless, if you are prepared to suspend your desire to hear voices singing in concert, you may find that you start to enjoy the kind of harmony created by diverging voices. I have written this introduction in order to facilitate the reading. It offers a summary of the chapters in this volume in order of appearance, creating a kind of score for the reading of the book. This is, of course, a subjective attempt, but it is, nevertheless, an attempt to be true to the subject under discussion and to the eternal pursuit of knowledge. We start with Joyce McDougall. Freud and female sexualities (Joyce McDougall). There are conscious beliefs and manifest behaviours related to gendered sexuality. But equally important are the hidden agendas and sexual conduct rooted in unconscious fantasies and marked by archaic and pregenital erotism. This is a theme that has been explored thoroughly by Joyce McDougall, one of the most important postFreudian writers on women and sexuality. Freuds views on female
DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER
sexuality might have been misconstrued, she writes, but he was one of the first to listen to women, bringing into the open their unconscious desires and fantasies. It was, indeed, by listening to them that he reached the initial insights that led him to the concept of the unconscious. Joyce McDougalls contribution, not only to female psychology but to psychoanalytic thought in a broad sense, is important. She has, for example, dealt with the three fundamental traumas that everyone has to suffer: the fact that there are others; the fact that you can belong only to one sex; and, finally, the fact that you are doomed to die. The way in which we deal with these traumas will colour all later events in our lives. This idea, which Joyce McDougall presented in her book The Many Faces of Eros (1995), is also important in relation to male and female psychology, and the theme is elaborated by Toril Moi in her contribution to this volume. Moi relates it to the question of castration, the central point in both Freuds and Lacans theories of sexual difference and femininity, although these theories differ in many other respects. In Freud and Female Sexualities (note the plural), Joyce McDougall presents the Freudian background and outlines the revolution in social representations of sexuality and sexual relationships that we have witnessed during the last forty years. Although we talk of a sexual liberation, sexuality is in many respects as conflictual as it was before. Mens fear of women, which Joyce McDougall discerns both in Freuds writings on women and in male analysands today, may perhaps be a projection onto the woman of the mans fears of his own inner space and longings, fears related to unconscious pregenital fantasies. Mens projection of their own frightening ideas and longings is a line of thought that recurs in Jessica Benjamins chapter in this volume, but dealt with from quite a different angle. The ideas produced by these projections will, of course, be distorted. What Freud saw in the girl was very much determined by what the little boy wanted to see, or what he feared to apprehend. Thus Freuds metaphors became phallocentric, only giving significance to the clitoris. And the girls clitoris, defined as a diminutive male organ, had to be eliminated as an erogenous zone in the process of becoming a woman. Blinded by the little boys
IRNE MATTHIS
perspective, Freud missed an aspect that was especially important to the little girl: the motherdaughter relation. Joyce McDougall claims that this relationship will define and specify the feminine body and its erogenous zones as somatopsychic images, relating mouth and vagina to each other, especially in the early stages. (This theme is developed further in Kristevas contribution.) Looking back to Freuds theory of femininity, Joyce McDougall writes that [it] is hard to avoid the suspicion that Freud had elevated Victorian prejudices to the rank of a theory . . ., and she gives us an overview of the reasons, cultural and psychological, for such a phenomenon. Finally, Joyce McDougall brings into focus the issue of sexual deviation in women, and especially the question of perverse motherhood. As sexual perversion has usually been identified with male sexuality, interest and research has been deflected from the problems of female deviation. Joyce McDougall writes that not all mothers are goodas Freud would have itand if there is abuse, the pattern of abuse goes back three generations or more. She gives ample evidence of this and points to the research that needs to be done in the future on an arena of female sexuality that we have hardly even started to investigate. Primary and secondary oedipal phases (Julia Kristeva). The Oedipus complex is, as everyone knows, central to the question of female psychosexual development. In her contribution, Kristeva presents a revised interpretation that emphasizes the primary oedipal phase. Like Joyce McDougall, Kristeva claims that there is a crucial early relationship between the little girl and her mother. This period is mentioned late in Freuds writings (Freud, 1931b), and he describes it as difficult to analyse. For Lacan, it is nothing but impossible: it is irreducible by analysis because it eludes the ascendancy of phallic primacy. Kristeva elaborates on the significance of this early relationship between the infant and the mother, viewing it from a perspective influenced by Laplanches idea of enigmatic signifiers (Laplanche, 1987). In these early, dark ages of psychosomatic development, marked especially by orifices (mouth, anus, and vagina), we discern the basis for the female position, which will
become important in the sexual development of men as well as women, albeit in different ways. The little girls earliest sexuality, based on both a vaginal cloacal mobilization and a clitoral excitation, becomes structured as a psychic bisexuality. It is simultaneously passive and active, but it reveals something even more important than the passiveactive dynamics: an interactive subjectivity is installed, according to Kristeva. She argues that this pattern is confirmed in the treatment of adult women, and in her contribution to this volume Jessica Benjamin develops this theme and furnishes clinical examples. During this period the girl introjectively installs the seductive mother in the excited cavity of her bodyas an internal representation. But this psychization of the maternal object needs to be stabilized by a real link to the mother, who in a symmetrical way couples with her infant girl. The avatars of this process, Kristeva argues, can explain womens tendency to privilege psychic or loving representationidealization over erotic drive excitation. Women will tend to find lovers who understand them the way a mother would, rather than lovers who are partners in desire. Kristeva claims that due to the anatomical difference between the sexes, as well as for historical and cultural reasons, the girls later development will become both more fragile and more complex than the boys. She goes on to explore this theme, while emphasizing that she is not out to diminish the structuring role of phallic authority, but to remind us that it appears in the infants psyche through mediation by the parental seduction stemming from the first, early phase and thus only adds to something that is already there. Kristevas hypothesis stresses precisely this: the female position, formed during the primary oedipal phase with its emphasis on internal space and (symbiotic) relationships, is the bedrock of sexual psychizationmuch more so than castration anxiety. The phallic phase will, however, repress these significations, or, rather, will mask them by a reactional femininityperhaps the one we see displayed in todays beauty magazines. A psychoanalytic theory of sexuality is always based on the copresence of sexuality with thought, a web of both energy and meaning, and the phallic stage becomes the organizer of this
IRNE MATTHIS
dynamicin both sexes. There is a phallic pleasure in the access to language and the functioning of speech and thought, and the phallus thus becomes the privileged signifier of symbolic law. In this process, Kristeva believes that the girl is disadvantaged. Deprived of the penis and devalued by this fact in all patriarchal societies, she is excluded within the order and finds herself subject to a radical strangeness. Like the man, she is a phallic subject of speech, but she is also placed in the position of becoming the object of the father, by falling back not, Kristeva writes, on a passive position but, rather, on a receptive position related to the original excitation during the primary oedipal phase. This is a difficult route, but if the female subject can metabolize the cavernous receptivity of the primary oedipal phase and manage the narcissistic challenge of the secondary oedipal phase, Kristeva thinks she will have the chance to acquire a maturity that the man often lacks. On binary oppositions (Paul Verhaeghe). Kristevas writings constitute the springboard for Paul Verhaeghe to bring the all-inclusive issue of dualism and binary reasoning into the discussion. In Western dualistic thought, where two elements are always opposed to one anothernature versus culture, masculinity versus femininity, primary oedipal versus secondary oedipal, and so on a third term or position is required to ground the binary. God has often had to fulfil this role, and Freud did something of the sort when he constructed his myth of the primal father. Verhaeghe claims that this has an ontological effect at the level of the subject. The subject identifies with the father and believes this identity to be authentic and substantial (but, of course, it is not: it is a way of coping with life). However, binary thinking also implies a mirroring of the one in the other, as when we say that the psyche mirrors the body. In relation to the third term (e.g. God) the identification (man is constructed in the image of God) implies a reduction: man is a lesser God; the child is the image of the father, albeit a lesser form; and so on. This is nothing but a version of the mirror stage, by which the child acquires an imaginary identity. Related to gender, Paul Verhaeghe claims, this gives rise to a particular reading of (the) phallus (see below).
The binary reasoning often induces problematic analogies. The term gender, which implies a constructivistic approach, was introduced to help solve the problem of biological sex versus psychosexual identity. It was, however, soon invaded by the same binary oppositionthe division into feminine and masculine identityand the same discussion resumed. Paul Verhaeghe maintains that these analogiesand the list is seemingly endlessare based on a patriarchal binary way of thinking, where the woman is usually aligned with nature, the real, drive, body, and so on, while the man is aligned with culture, the symbolic, psyche, and so on. In clinical practice, however, these attributions do not stand the test. For example, women seem more symbolically inclined than men, who in turn expose more of a drive-ridden sexuality. Nor does motherhood, which appears to place a strong link between woman and Nature, stand the test: Verhaeghe has met many mothers who reject their children or have no interest in them. The maternal instinct is a myth, and maternal love is an effect of an obligatory alienation. At this point, Paul Verhaeghes discussion intersects with the ideas brought forward by Joyce McDougall in her contribution. The presumed connection between masculinity and the symbolic is the result of a particular reading of phallus within binary thinking. It is viewed as the grounding third term in gender dualism, based on the presence or absence of a penis. This was clearly so for both Freud and the early Lacan. This concentration on the phallic is not very helpful either for men or for women. It belongs in the field of psychopathology. What we find in it is the repetition compulsion, and Verhaeghe moves on to develop his ideas on this subject. He begins by discussing the concept of drive in Freuds theory, and especially the partial drives, directly linked to sexuality and focusing on various bodily orifices. The driving force is always heading towards a previous state, but the crux is that there seem to be two opposite states. Thus, Freud introduced his concept of the life and the death drives, Eros and Thanatos. Eros aims for synthesis and the symbolic, associating what is separate and aiming at (phallic) fusion and wholeness. This goal is, however, never reached, because of the presence of a drive in the opposite direc-
IRNE MATTHIS
tion: the death drive. This drive works in silence, beyond the symbolic, and without any connection to the signifier. It scatters the wholeness and explodes into an infinite universe. Paul Verhaeghe relates this opposition to the question of origins: more specifically, to the origins of sexually differentiated life forms. Asexual reproduction proceeds by cell division, meiosis, and it can be seen as representing the aim of Eros: eternal life. But with the introduction of sexual reproduction, death becomes a structural necessity. The individual must die for the species to survive. In asexual reproduction death is an accident. According to Paul Verhaeghe, the drive antinomy is fundamental, and the gender oppositions are but a consequence of this. Similarly, in the case of psychosexual development, the child is born with an innate tendency to attach to the other as closely as possible, incorporating as many parts as possible of the other (Eros) and thus trying to bridge the gap caused by birth. After a while the other diffusional tendency comes to the fore, and now individuation and striving for a life of ones own dominate the picture (Thanatos). It is not by chance that this happens at the same time as language is acquired and the child starts using I. In this scheme, Verhaeghe suggests that gender and sexuality are attempts to regain the original Eros fusion. They are thus only expressing a more fundamental element of drive, where failure is structurally built in. Aristophanes well-known fable of the original androgynous being that was bisected by Zeus can be understood as a description of this situation. Loss of eternal life is the loss of an original wholeness. At the same time this implies a gender differentiation, and when phrased in phallic terms the original loss is secondarily interpreted as a castration: a perpetual repetition of illusionary (Eros) longings! In this scenario, the female who seems to have lost her male part needs it in order to become whole again. According to Verhaeghe, this explains the female proclivity for fusion and Eros (and the symbolic). The male part, on the other hand, has differentiated itself and, by avoiding fusion, he will represent separation and Thanatos. This gender differentiation should, however, not be interpreted in a binary fashion. Like Eros and Thanatos, they are always combinedTriebmischung, as Freud called it.
Finally, Verhaeghe stresses that the relationship between the elementsthe dynamicsis more important than the elements on which it is based. One element always operates as a force of attraction for the other, leading to a circular but non-reciprocal interaction. In this never-ending process, where for life-as-such to continue individual life must meet death, the subject acquires gender identity as a sequel to the Oedipus complex, which, in a way of speaking, has interpreted the original loss in terms of castration. This phallic interpretation is retroactively applied to all preceding occurrences, which also implies the construction of the body: not the body we are, but the body we have. This body, writes Paul Verhaeghe, is clothed in a gender identity, a final working over of the original gap between life and death. This conflict penetrates not only society and every loving couple of whatever sex, but every individual. Rather than interpreting this opposition as masculine versus feminine, he suggests that it should be read as active versus passive. He concludes with words of wisdom: as long as we can fight with our partner, we need not address our inner division. . . . The difference between sexuality and procreation (Juliet Mitchell; discussant: Colette Chiland). Juliet Mitchells contribution takes the form of a question: What is the difference between gender and sexual difference? and her starting point is the fact that some people do not feel at home in the body with which they were born. Such a person, who is labelled transsexual, might even decide to change her or his body through radical operations, removing breasts, ovaries, and uterus or penis and testicles. On the remains, a new body is surgically constructed that analogues/mirrors the body of the opposite sex. Juliet Mitchell seems to argue, if I have not misunderstood her, that what the transsexual actually does is to create a sibling of the opposite sex, which represents the closest of kin, much closer than either father or mother. This is only a shade away from a narcissistic economy, she writes. In Mitchells book Mad Men and Medusas (Mitchell, 2000), two themes were central: the importance of sibling relationships and the refusal of the hysteric, whether female or male, to acknowledge sexual differ-
10
IRNE MATTHIS
ence. Here she relates both issues to the question of sexual difference and gender. In the group discussions that followed the presentation,1 the idea of lateral sexuality, with sibling relations as a point of departure, was seen as important, as it is a neglected area in psychoanalytic theory. The sibling relation becomes powerful not least because the arrival of a new sibling entails a serious injury and can be experienced almost as annihilation. But it was also argued that Juliet Mitchells idea introduces an ethical problem. A lateral gender society may be seen as a pre-oedipal society: a group of brothers that knows no generational boundaries. Generational difference was thought to be a necessary condition for an ethical culture.2 Sketching the history of the terms sex and gender, Juliet Mitchell argues that we need to distinguish between sexual difference and gender in our analysisnot because the terms can be or ever are kept distinctly apart in real life, but for the sake of analysis. When the terms are mixed up, as is often the case in Anglo-Saxon writings, this might lead to a repudiation of sexuality itself. Sexual difference isup to now, at leasta prerequisite for human reproduction. If reproduction is tied primarily to the mother, as is usually the case, motherhood becomes central. The attempts to make the mother not the object of the babys needs . . . but instead a subject in her own right does not, however, change the currency of traditional Freudian thought: it merely shows the other side of the coin. For Juliet Mitchell, sexual reproduction demands sexual difference, which entails both a subjectobject and heterosexuality. . . . Our egos are . . . always sexed egos, and they are sexed around reproduction. Implicitly, this reasoning seems to follow the line of thought presented by Verhaeghe. Mitchell argues that sexual and reproductive difference, although it may rest in biology, is no more natural than the ego of the mirror stage. It is constructed as a representation related to a subjectobject relationship. This aspect is missing in the (mostly) American perspective, and Juliet Mitchells viewpoint stands in sharp contrast to the one presented by Jessica Benjamin and Nancy Chodorow in this book. There is, however, an area of subject/subject construction; but this is the area of gender, Juliet Mitchell argues, not of sexual
11
difference. This area of gender is the area of sexual drive. Sexual difference is related to reproductive fantasies, but there is no reproductive drive, Mitchell writes. In the Western world reproduction has been related to woman and sexuality to man. The libido, as Freud claimed, is only one, and it is male. The greatest problem here, Mitchell argues, is not that Freudian theory is phallocentric, but that Western ideas equate the male with sexuality and the female with asexual motherhood. Juliet Mitchell wants to give back to sexuality its central place, because the sexual drive lies behind all symptoms, and a large part of this sexual drive is perverse. Freuds Three Essays on Sexuality (1905d) deals with human drives, and it is still path-breaking. Juliet Mitchell argues that the concept of gender could be developed to become heir to the Essays, since it is not constructed on the difference between the sexes but applies in the same way to both women and men. Gender is the polymorphously perverse child grown up. Juliet Mitchells radical suggestion is that gender, thus understood, deals with violence and murder. In traditional difference, related to sexual difference, the other offers the subject what she/he has not got: a penis, a baby, and so on. As we have already seen, this is an illusory exchange, doomed to miscarry, as we can never become whole. In the concept of gender there is no implication of something being missing; instead, this self-same other is both the same as self and other than self. Juliet Mitchells arguments reverberate closely with recent developments in genetics and reproductions of same-but-not-same organismsas in cloning. The social and technological changes that we are experiencing today do not have an immediate repercussion on our psychic life; instead, our psychic life may already contain something that corresponds to these changesindeed, that may have been part of their precondition. The separation of sexuality from procreation/sexual difference lies at the basis of Juliet Mitchells arguments. In her discussion, Colette Chiland wants to relate this dissociation to perversity, which she considers specific to human beings. Sexual difference, she argues, is not only a prerequisite for procreation; it implies so much more, relating to the genitals, to the position of each partner in sexual interaction, to psychosexual cycles (for women the menstrual blood and its connotations in particular), and, above all, to
12
IRNE MATTHIS
the interpretations of these in various societies. Consequently, she disagrees with Mitchell on some issues. Outlining the history of the term gender and the conceptual constructions related to it, Chiland ends up in a position that is quite opposite to Mitchells. Gender as such, she states, does not express any form of sexuality, reproductive or not. It is an expression of being. This being is related to self-experience and narcissism. Thus she opposes Mitchells claim that gender is heir to Freuds Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d). Rather, it is heir to cultural anthropology as exemplified by Margaret Mead. At the moment there is a great deal of confusion in the use and signification of various termsincluding the concept of sexuality itselfbut that might be part of the necessary renewal of the study of sexuality and gender across time and space. Colette Chiland finally turns to her long experience of working with transsexuals and argues that we can no longer avoid the question of what a male is and what a female isterms the meaning of which seemed so self-evident not so long ago. But even if the answers will be difficult to find, Colette Chiland thinks we do need some kind of sex compassthat is, an acknowledgement and acceptance of the sexual difference. What kind of gender theories does psychoanalysis need? (Toril Moi; discussant: Ebba Witt-Brattstrm). Toril Mois investigation of psychoanalysis and its relation to the riddle of femininity starts from a provocative question: does psychoanalysis need a femininity theory? The chapter is a tour de force on which she has worked for years. Her scrutinizing deconstruction of the writings of Freud and Lacan cannot be summarized in a page or two; I will, however, pick up some of the threads. The reader will notice that in this volume the traditional issue of essentialism versus constructivism, central to many discussions on femininity during the 1990s, is conspicuously absent. Toril Moi gives us, indirectly, an understanding of this transition. The concrete, living body (essential) is always embedded in a historical situation and thus open to change (constructed). Viewed from this perspective, the old opposition between essence and construction does not apply. It is an approach inspired not only by Freud and
13
Lacan, but by Simone de Beauvoir in particular, and, finally, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Since there is no quest for solving the riddle of masculinity but only the riddle of femininity, sexual difference and femininity have become lumped together. Men have become the selfapparent norm that need not be explained. Women are different and consequently a problem that has to be explained. Femininity theory is a kind of universally applicable theory that tries to do so. Such a theory of sexual difference does not serve psychoanalysis. Instead, psychoanalysis needs an understanding of the different ways of becoming a woman. Femininity theory goes awry since it predicts what is bound to happen, such as when a little girl discovers that she does not have a penis. Basing her argument on Freud, Moi emphasizes that psychoanalytic theory is not a predictory, synthesizing instrument but an analytic one. Toril Moi starts by posing simple, direct, seemingly naive questions, such as, Why does the phallus have to be called phallus if it has nothing to do with the penis? and Why does femininity have to be called femininity if it has nothing to do with women? These questions, however, deserve a close reading and some thorough thinking. To start with, they bring the relationship between symbols and bodies to our attention and, secondly, the relationship between symbolic function and social norms and ideology. Lacan, for example, claims that the relation to the phallus is set up regardless of anatomical difference. The phallus, defined as a symbol within a sophisticated theory, should never be confused or reduced to the penis. At the same time the phallus is the signifier that separates humankind into two sexes. These sexes are supposed to be entirely symbolic, entirely psychosexual, and not to be mixed up with men and women as such. In such a Lacanian reading, however, women should not take up a position as feminine more often than men. But even Lacan acknowledges that women will normally take up the feminine and men the masculine position. Why is this, if it has nothing to do with the concrete anatomical body? Moi believes that the confusion in the interpretation of Lacans writings on femininity might be related to the various meanings of the French word fminit. It is normally translated as femininity, connoting psychological and social categories, but in French the
14
IRNE MATTHIS
term has many more meanings. It also implies femaleness, which has biological connotationsthe bodies and genitals of the female human being. When femininity is a matter of castration, as it is for both Lacan and Freud, women will tend to mask the (anatomical) castration with a masquerade of femininity (hysteria). In the end she concludes that Lacans femininity theory is, structurally speaking, exactly the same as Freuds. Basically, this means that both writers hold that women are not bornthey become women. Simone de Beauvoir reasons along the same lines. However, problems arise when normative expectations are coded into such theories, and this is where Beauvoir differs from Freud and Lacan. She does not try to define a normative femininity, whereas Freud and Lacan do. The latter differ, however, in that Freud remains concerned with the concrete, phenomenological body, whereas for Lacan it is analysed as an entirely abstract and idealist concept. Lacans theory of sexual difference is also, according to Toril Moi, worse than Freuds. In Encore, Lacan (1975), writing on the question of woman and womans jouissance, even creates algebraic formulas for sexual difference, thus universalizing his own gendered experience. Then Toril Moi takes on the large and complex issue of speech and language. For Lacan, the phallus is the signifier not only of sexual difference but of meaningthat is, the instituter of symbolic discourse as such. All symbolic activity is thus labelled phallic. Toril Moi claims that the Lacanian introduction of post-Saussurean linguistics into psychoanalysis was a mistake. If the structural relationship of femininity to the phallus is made purely symbolic, patriarchy can never disappear. The content can change, but the structure remains. This critique, relying heavily on a Wittgensteinian tradition, is a frontal attack on the linguistic reading of experience so predominant within Lacanian discourse. The concept of jouissanceproper to woman, according to Lacanis a riddle that leaves translators mute (it is said to be impossible to translate). Toril Moi claims that what it actually does is to relegate the female/feminine to a mysterious sphere beyond language that can never really be known, understood, or explained. In these kinds of theories femininity has become a fullblown metaphysical concept, she writes. To try to think femininity within these theories is to think the unthinkablea
15
phrase she herself uses in her introduction to The Kristeva Reader (Moi, 1986). But, Moi continues, any attempt to think the unthinkable is meaningless. If there is a border between what is thinkable and what is not, this border is already transgressed by thinking the unthinkable. There cannot be a limit to thought, only to language. Sometimes things are difficult to phrase in an easily understood language, but that does not mean that they lie beyond language in some kind of mystical, unknown landscape of their own. Such a view makes a complete mystery of womens experiences, obscuring rather than clarifying. In this volume Kristeva herself offers an example of how to write about this area that is supposed to be unthinkable, as do Joyce McDougall and Paul Verhaeghe, each in her or his own way. Finally, Toril Moi tries to come to grips with the word and the concept of castration. For Freud as well as Lacan it became synonymous with femininity and sexual difference. Toril Moi finds this distressing, and she suggests that this conflation could be avoided. For Freud, in both sexes the repudiation of femininity has to do with the reluctance to accept the reality principle (the lack of penis in women). But the difficulty lies in giving up the dream of being all-encompassing, of having eternal life, and of narcissistic omnipotence. But why, asks Moi, does this repudiation of reality have to be called feminine?Because it is tied up with the concept of castration! Castration calls forth the notion of sexual difference, when, instead, we are dealing with a universal human predicament that engages both men and women. The use of castration as a general concept projects a deeply sexist notion of sexual difference onto every human phenomenon. In the end, Moi suggests that we simply replace it with a more neutral term. Basing her arguments on Joyce McDougalls suggestion that there are three fundamental traumas in human life (the discovery of the other; the discovery of one-sexedness; and the discovery of death), Toril Moi suggests the word finitude. Ebba Witt-Brattstrm, discussing Toril Mois chapter, thinks that replacing the term castration with the word finitude does not solve the problem, since the epistemological work needed to deal with these problems begins with the body. This was also heatedly discussed in the groups. In general, people agreed that
16
IRNE MATTHIS
castration was a problematic word, but some thought finitude was too general a concept to replace it, as it left out the bodily connotations of castration and the affects related to this, such as fear and envy. In order to solve the problem of the exclusively masculine connotation of the word castration while keeping the connection to the body, other terms were suggestedsuch as deheading or decapitationleaving us with the guillotine complex! In this context one is bound to wonder where and how the bodily metaphors used in psychoanalysis arise: do they originate with the patient or with the analyst? The discussion group agreed that if a patient feels castrated and uses the word, it is a proper use of the term. The word castration thus belongs only on the clinical level. Used as a theoretical concept, it fails. Here, it may help us to consider the difference between impossibility and incapability: impossibility implies a symbolic castration, whereas incapability refers to an imaginary castration: a feeling of not being complete. The term finitude, which belongs to a rational metalanguage, works well with symbolic castration, but not with an imaginary one; in the case of castration, it is the other way around.3 Ebba Witt-Brattstrm also had doubts about getting rid of femininity theory. Using her own experience as a professor of literature with special emphasis on womens literature, she asks herself how she would teach her students about women authors from various periods without using historically defined femininity theories? The theories might be patriarchal and misconstrued, but they are needed for the analysis, not as recommendations for living. Making herself an advocate for feminist theory as a combination of politics and subjectivity, she wants to dismantle patriarchal theorys claim to scientific objectivity. Witt-Brattstrm ends by invoking the founding mothers of psychoanalysis, whose opinions are often treated dismissively in the discussion. This her-story or collective memory represents a different epistemological tradition. A great part of womens literature brings testimony from this universe, which has been suppressed for too long in society. Witt-Brattstrm tells us that in their literature, women authors often refuse to choose between particularity and universality (being either individual woman or human)
17
and that they look at men as marked just as much by particularity as women. In the discussion Toril Moi responded that it is not enough to particularize menin order to even things upbecause it only means that we end up by reifying not only femininity but also masculinity. An intersubjective approach (Jessica Benjamin; discussant: Gisela Kaplan). Like many of the other contributors to this volume, Jessica Benjamin starts from the basic assumption that femininity is not a pre-existing essencewhether hysteric or passivebut a construction by the (male) psyche. Actually, the concepts of masculinity and femininity are both constructs created at the same moment, and for the same purpose. For Benjamin, it is a specific purpose: solving the problem of sexual passivity. Passivity, in the sense defined by Freud, is the key actor in Benjamins presentation. Passivity has often been seen as intolerable, especially in men, but Benjamin wants to show that it represents a failure of self-regulation based on deficient responses by the other. In her view, this failure to relate intersubjectively generates an experience of excess, which implies an overflow with which the psyche cannot cope. For Freud, this excess gave rise to a feeling of unpleasure or tension, defined from the perspective of a one-person economy: that is, it was, and is, an intrapsychic process. For Benjamin, however, pleasure and pain always arise within a two-person relationship. In this perspective failure of tension regulation, which she calls excess, is generally linked to failures in recognition by the other. Like Kristeva, Benjamin makes use of Laplanches idea of the enigmatic message, filled with sexuality and transmitted from parents to children. When this transmission includes affective tensions that are not understood, represented, or bound, it may later appear as if it was a self-created, one-person fantasy. Thus, for Benjamin the intrapsychic perspective (so basic in Freuds writings) comes to represent those processes that have to deal with undigested affects, more or less dissociated from other affective experiences. These undigested affects often relate to sexuality, and they contribute to a split in the self and between body and mind, where the sexual fantasy is then discharged physically.
18
IRNE MATTHIS
Discharge, which Benjamin links to a one-person economy in particular, is a means of solving the problem of mental excess, created by a failure of intersubjective exchange. In this context she places the handling and workings of passivity/activity. The little boy, separated from his mother by the intrusion of the father, experiences himself passively overwhelmed and abandoned. He fights this by identifying with the father/aggressor, and he projects the experience of passivity, associated with the baby he once was, onto the girl/other: the sister. In this way femininity is constructed: a projection from the oedipal boys psyche, creating a kind of daughter position. The daughter is given the role of passive container and caretaker (the incest victim of Freuds hysterical case stories). At this point in Jessica Benjamins discussion the question of passivity is turned upside-down. Passivity usually connotes helpand hopelessness. But there is, Benjamin claims, a pleasurable receptivity in passivity, which she goes on to describe. It is usually assumed that tension, which cannot be mentalized, has to be discharged. But tension in an intersubjective relation that is contained can, instead, give rise to mutual enjoyment. What is needed is a (re)claim of ownership to desire and ownership to a holding and receptive position, which need not passivize the other. To Benjamin, ownership implies a notion of sustaining tension rather than eliminating it. In this intersubjective exchange passivity in relation to the other can be refigured as surrendering to a process of joint exploration and recognition. This process transcends gender roles, Benjamin writes, and creates a space of thirdness. Throughout the chapter Jessica Benjamin generously supplements her theoretical reasoning and illustrates her ideas with case vignettes and examples drawn from film and literature. In her response, Gisela Kaplan points out that Jessica Benjamins arguments are anchored in a dynamics of spiral movements rather than one that is circular or linear. There is also a polymorphism rather than a dimorphism. In this context, Kaplan adds that we have to be aware of the fact that we are not only responding to stimuli from the surrounding world, but actually altering it in the processaccording to how we assess ourselves. She goes on to exemplify her suggestion.
19
She believes that this has a bearing on Benjamins exposition of the concept of desire. Tension has to be held and contained in order for desire to be ownedthis is Benjamins argument. Kaplan calls on Michel Foucault when she reminds us that sexuality does not exist beyond power relations. How can the intersubjective moment of communication and sharing, so strongly argued by Benjamin, free itself from power struggles? Power resides everywhere, and everywhere is male-defined, and thus, to Kaplan, Benjamins suggestions are contradictory. Kaplan feels that the intersubjective sharing described by Benjamin reflects a cultural pessimism illustrated by her choice of examples. Eros becomes linked to surrender and death, to loss and mourninga product of tensions between maleness and femaleness, between activity and passivity. It is in the gutter that we finally understand each other. Kaplans interpretation of Eros is different: she relates it to a lightness of being that exists for and in itself, without visible gain or purpose. Referring to the Islamic scholar Imam Ghazali, Kaplan states that virtue arises from a discharge of tensions and culture from the satisfaction of the sexual drive. In the Western world (in Freud and in Benjamins chapter) discharge is accorded only to the male, but in the Muslim tradition of Ghazali females, too, discharge tension. The polarization of human sexuality into two kindsfeminine and masculineis a Western idea. Finally, Kaplan argues, although the intersubjective moment the third spaceis a significant extension of earlier ideas, it still is dependent on the two gendered players or their emotional states. This space, in Kaplans opinion, seems to turn into a kind of prison: one is contingent on the other, and there is no escape, no freedom. With Martin Buber, she pledges for some nothingness. A viewpoint from the clinical scene (Nancy J. Chodorow). In the linguistic model inherited from de Saussure and developed for psychoanalytic purposes, by Lacan in particular, terms gain their meanings in relation to one another. Thus, male carries its meaning in relation to female, masculinity in relation to femininity, and conversely. In the Lacanian tradition, this is the Freudian reference point, and it deals both with genital difference (to have or not have a penis) and with developmental differences concerned
20
IRNE MATTHIS
with generational relationships (the Oedipus complex differs for boys and girls). In the final contribution to this volume Nancy Chodorow attacks this model at its rootsat the clinical leveland claims that sexual difference is not the organizing principle for men and women in her consulting-room. Chodorow chooses the clinical option, because, she argues, the sexual difference perspective ignores precisely what is implied in the clinical perspective: the uniqueness of each individual. This means, however, not that she abstains from generalizing, but that she opts for the generalizing assertions that tally with her own experience. In this light, it is same-sex, cross-generational relations and comparisons, which means that femininity defines itself as much through womangirl relationships as through malefemale ones, and vice versa in the case of masculinity. The mothering function is, of course, central to this view, and therefore the focus is on pre-oedipal relations and developments. This does not mean, however, that the traditional heterosexual oedipal constellation is repudiated. Nancy Chodorow takes for granted that the importance of these aspects is already sufficiently demonstrated. However, their importance is diminished. One basic component in Chodorows theory is that the emphasis on difference, whether it be the selfother distinction or male female difference, is a defensive theory produced by psychological conflicts that are characteristically male. Psychoanalytic phallocentric theory has conflated the universality of some problems that demand psychic representation with the almost infinite variety of unconscious fantasies met with in the consulting-room. Nancy Chodorow describes the creation of gender as a developmental product, where the masculinefeminine divide is no more fundamental in any universal sense than are many other forms of organization. Further, she argues that even when in a particular case it plays a fundamental role, it does not necessarily privilege the actually observed genital difference. As Nancy Chodorow wants to stay close to the experiences of each individual, she arrives at the conclusion that for some people gender is a non-central part of identity, and sexuality is relatively uncharged and unnoticed. (Others would, of course, challenge this point of view, claiming that this is the type of denial of sexuality and the unconscious so typical of some American writers.)
21
The perspective of Horney, Kestenberg, and others that established the theory of primary femininity was a great advance as a critique of the phallocentric viewpoint. However, according to Chodorow, it did not really free itself from the comparative male female difference perspective. It is as rooted in the anatomical comparisons as is the traditional conception. She argues that bodily (and external genital) configurations can be very important to an individual, but they have to be invested with affects related not to sexual difference but, rather, to same-sex cross-generational comparisons. Finally, she presents some case material to support her radical suggestion.
Some final words

After this survey it seems clear to me that there are multifarious ways to organize our self-experienceas women and as men. Does the term gender clarify or confuse in this process? Judging from the contributions to this volume, it does both. Could we talk about our different experiences in a sexed world without using the theoretical categories of femininity and masculinity? But if we do use them, how do we define them? Words carry as well as create history at the same time; it is therefore important not only to name things and experiences but also to analyse and take responsibility for what we have just said. There are more questions than answers in this bookquestions that are important and will continue to intrigue us. This book will be needed to remind us of the different opinions and to help us create tomorrows theories. Human experience cannot be reduced to sexuality, but there is sexuality in everything human.
NOTE
1. At registration all participants in the conference were divided into discussion groups (with anywhere from 15 to 200 participants per group). The groups met four times during the course of the conference to discuss the papers presented at the panel sessions. This was a much appreciated part of the conference.
22
IRNE MATTHIS
2. Reports from Group 1 (Cecilia Annell) and Group 6 (Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen). 3. Reports from Group 1 (Cecilia Annell), Group 4 (Svein Haugsgjerd), and Group 6 (Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen).
REFERENCES
Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., 7. Freud, S. (1931b). Female sexuality. S.E., 21. Lacan, J. (1975). Le Sminaire livre XX. Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller. Paris: Seuil. Laplanche, J. (1987). Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse. La sduction originaire. Paris: PUF. English edition: New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989. McDougall, J. (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. New York & London: Norton. Mitchell, J. (2000). Mad Men and Medusas. Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition. London: Penguin Books. Moi, T. (1986). Preface. In: T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva Reader (pp. vivii). Oxford: Blackwell.
CHAPTER TWO
Freud and female sexualities

Joyce McDougall
n the Victorian era, sexuality was more or less regarded as a masculine privilege, whereas women were relegated to conjugal duty, sacrifice, frigidity, or simulated pleasure. This was Freuds epoch, and in this respect Freud was an eminent Victorian in that he tended to take the Victorian woman as the model of femininity. Todays woman would have astonished him and shaken many of his cherished beliefs concerning female sexuality. In point of fact the so-called sexual liberation has mostly concerned women, since in the past it was generally accepted that men could escape the constraints of conjugal life by having recourse to women who were, supposedly, exempt from the austerity of the Victorian pattern: prostitute or mistress. Womans sexual life today not only begins much earlier in adolescencefrequently with the complicity of the parentsthan would have been considered proper in Freuds day and age, but due to contraception and the legalization of abortion it is also released from the association of intercourse with pregnancy. Thus we are in the presence of a revolution in the social representations of sexuality and sexual relationships.
23
24
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
However, coming now to the unconscious, we still find repressed fantasies of archaic and pregenital sexualities and fierce prohibitions stemming for the most part from the interiorization of biparental fears and wishes. Then there is an added problem for todays woman in that she is, in a sense, obliged to feel guilty if she does not achieve a vaginal orgasm and, as often as not, is directed to a sexologist to resolve her problem. Thus this era of socalled liberated sexuality is as conflictual as it was in the past, even though the complaints and symptoms may have been modified. Let us now review Freuds concepts concerning the little girls accession to womanhood and motherhood. Many analysts, particularly women, have been highly critical of Freuds conceptual limitations in this field of research. This was, admittedly, an area in which Freud was particularly vulnerable. It is interesting to recall, however, that Freud owed to women the initial insights that led him to the concept of the unconscious: Anna O, Lucy R, Irma, Emmy von N, Dora, Katharina, and many others were the fountainhead of his inspiration. And of course it is noteworthy that, in his day and age, he actually listened to them and regarded everything they recounted as significant and important. In Freuds dominantly phallocratic epoch, this receptivity in itself was revolutionary. Of all explorers into the functioning of the human mind, he was the first to take a serious and scientific interest in womens sexuality, even if the ideas he came up with were to find disfavour among analystsparticularly women analystsfor decades to come. Obviously Freud was fascinated by the mystery of femininity and by the female sex itself: a characteristic, he claimed, that he shared with men of all centuries. But it is evident that Freud was also a little afraid of the objects of his fascination. His metaphors repeatedly revealed a representation of the female genital as a threatening void, a lack, a dark and disquieting continent where you cannot see what is going on. My own clinical observation with many male analysands leads me to wonder whether this fear of the unknown interior space is perhaps a projection onto the woman of mans fear of his own inner space and all the early libidinal longings with which it may be invested . . . such as the fear of a longing for the fathers penis, anxi-
FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES
25
ety over the wish to be able to bear a child, as well as many other potential pregenital fears that have been repressed since early childhood. Lets put all of that back into the women may be part of the message. Freud himself insisted that he was obliged to proceed from his knowledge of male sexuality. (In fact, the theory of the libido is an eminently male concept.) Thus we are not surprised at his deductions of the little girls extreme envy of the boys visible and interesting organ. In other words, Freud appears to be saying, If I were a girl, my only desire would be to possess a penis of my own. The notion that boys might also be envious of the girls vagina, of her capacity for bearing children, and of her potential attraction for the male precisely because she did not have a penis does not seem to have occurred to Freud. But it was also Freud himself, with his typical honesty, who first expressed feelings of deep dissatisfaction and uncertainty concerning his theories about women and their psychosexual development. In fact, he waited until 1931 to publish Female Sexuality, his first paper on the subject. He was then 75 years old! Perhaps at this stage of his life he felt less fear of the female and of revealing his theories about her. In his second famous and much criticized paper entitled Femininity, which was published two years later, he wrote: Psychology . . . is unable to solve the riddle of femininity and noted that . . . the development of a little girl into a normal woman is more difficult and more complicated, since it includes two extra tasks, to which there is nothing corresponding in the development of a man. The tasks refer to Freuds two major concepts concerning the difficulties in growing to womanhood: the little girl must first effect a change in the organ of excitement from clitoris to vagina and, second, she must effect a change of object. When and why does she give up her fixation to her mother in favour of her father? Freud asked. Although these two dimensions do present a certain challenge to the attainment of adult femininity and sexual pleasure, they are nevertheless far from exhaustive as explanatory concepts for the understanding of womans psychosexuality. Let us examine them more closely.
26
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
Anatomy as destiny?
Can we agree with Freud that the most authentic conception of women derives from the notion that penis envy is the motivating factor in inaugurating femininity? Perhaps we must look for the precursors of the era of penis envy, going back even to the beginning of life at which the earliest transmission of the sense of sexual identity is laid down. The essential relationship that infants normally share with the mother in the first months of life provides the baby girl, in contrast to the boy, with a double identification. The somatopsychic images that are destined to become mental representations of her feminine body and its erogenous zones are already being formed. It is at this early stage that mouth and vagina become linked in their erogenous significance and, along with other erogenic organs and internal sensations, are integrated into the somatopsychic representations. To these must be added the clitoral sensations stimulated by the mothers physical handling and cleaning of her baby. These specific sensations were the only erogenous body links to which Freud gave much attention in his theory of the development of feminine eroticism. For reasons of his own, Freud assimilated the female clitoris into the male penis, thus bisexualizing the female genitalia: the vagina is feminine and passive, the clitoris masculine and active. And to achieve femininity the clitoris is to be eliminated as an erogenic zone. Freud was unaware of the fact that the clitoris is an extremely complex organ and, in view of its considerable extensions into the female body, a relatively large structure.1 In addition to his anti-clitoridian stand, Freud further holds that the vagina will only be discovered many years later. So meanwhile we are left with the impression that the girl is in a genital desert from infancy to adolescence. Also, Freud makes no attempt to justify a theory of infantile sexuality in which there is only one genital organ. This suggests that, for the young Freud, severe repression may have taken place regarding the various possible representations of the female sex and the female body and its functions. It is tempting to attribute Freuds denigrating portrait of femininity to some unrecognized envy of woman on his partor indeed on the part of the Victorian era as a whole. Let us take his
27
description from the New Introductory Lectures, published in 1933, in which we read that woman suffers, from the beginning of childhood, from an initial sexual inferiority, and that jealousy and envy play a greater part in the mental life of women than of men; she also suffers from superego defects, because, lacking a penis, she has no longer to fear castration. Instead, Freud notes that her physical vanity [is] a compensation for her original sexual inferiority. Women suffer only conventional shame . . . and merely to conceal their genital deficiency. Moreover, they have made few contributions to . . . the history of civilization. Their love partners are chosen narcissisticallythat is, in accordance with the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl had wished to become. After this debased portrait of womanhood Freud continues by proclaiming that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice and are also weaker in their social interests [and display] less capacity for sublimating their instincts than men. He then goes on to propose that a woman of thirty often frightens us by her psychical rigidity. . . . Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development . . . as though . . . the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. He concludes with that is all I had to say to you about femininity. However, he adds: [womans] nature is determined by [her] sexual function . . . but we do not overlook the fact that an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well!
Motherhood
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Freud had elevated Victorian prejudices to the rank of a theory! The reference to woman as possibly possessing some human characteristics is perhaps a vague recall of Freuds beliefs regarding motherhood in which he states categorically that A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son (because he has the penis of which she feels deprived), and Freud continues by claiming that the motherson relationship is the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. Perhaps this tells us more
28
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
about Freud and how he hoped his mother felt about his birthin which the mothers attachment to the father appears to play no role since the son is now the centre of her universe. As Mary Jacobusprofessor of the Humanities at Cornell Universityphrases it: motherhood . . . was the only known Freudian cure for the neurosis of femininity (Jacobus, 1995). Thus Freuds theory of femininity may be summarized as follows: The little girl is at first a little boy, and her earliest libidinal wish is to possess her mother sexually; she then replaces this aim with the desire to possess a penis, then to have a child from her father, and, finally, to have a male child of her own. Apparently, it seemed to Freud that no woman would particularly want a daughter and that, once in possession of a son, she desired nothing further. The implacable logic of Freuds chain of signifiers suggests that the girls desire for a baby is merely a substitute for the penis she does not possess, and her love for her father a mere consequence of penis envy! This is admittedly a rather pitiful view of the place of the father in the little girls psychic universe. Furthermore, Freuds concept of object substitutions implies that the girl-childs profound homosexual ties to her mother are simply eliminated through penis envy! There were, of course, in psychoanalytic writings many extensions and additionsas well as criticismsof Freuds theories about women: the leading feminist psychoanalysts of that epoch being Karen Horney, Joan Riviere, and Melanie Klein. Today most analysts would agree that the envy of her fathers penis is a very partial explanation of the difficulties that lie on the path to mature womanhood. It should also be noted that boys as well as girls suffer from their own characteristic form of penis envy, invariably finding their penises too small in comparison with that of their fathers, and clinical experience confirms that the boys envy and admiration of his mothers body and sexuality is similar to the girls envy and admiration of her fathers penis and sexual prowess. Children of both sexes are aware that mother embodies the magical power to attract fathers penis and make the babies that both parents desire. I would like to point out here that, for both males and females, monosexuality remains one of humankinds major narcissistic woundsa scandalous affront to our childlike omnipotence! Inter-
29
nalizing a symbolic representation of the complementarity of the two sexes requires a renunciation of the childlike wish to be and to have both.
Female body image

I should now like to turn to certain aspects of femininity that have been of particular interest to me over my years of analytic practice (and of self-analysis!): first of all, the importance of the little girls experience of her body and the representation of her genital as an inner space, since this affects the global psychic representation of her femininity and of sexual relations to come. I would like therefore to explore the anatomical issues inherent in the girl-childs development of her sense of gender identity from this viewpoint. As the girls sex is a portal into her body, the vagina is destined to be equated in the unconscious with anus, mouth, and urethra and is therefore liable to share both the masochistic and the sadistic libidinal investments and fantasies carried by these zones. The little girland frequently the woman-to-beis more likely than her male counterpart to fear that her body will be regarded as dirty or dangerous because of these zonal confusions, in addition to the anatomical fact that there is no visible organ that can be controlled and verified. Even the adult woman frequently experiences her body as a dark continent in which anal and oral monsters lurk. Of course much of her unconscious representation of her body and her genitals will reflect the libidinal and narcissistic significance that the mother gave to her daughters physical and psychological self, as well as the extent to which she may have transmitted unconscious fears concerning her own bodily and sexual functions. The non-verbal sensuous and later verbal communications between mother and daughter determine, in large part, whether oral erotism triumphs over oral aggression and whether anal-erotic impulses become more important than, or combine harmoniously with, anal-sadistic ones. A further aspect of feminine anatomical destiny involves autoerotic experience. Since the little girl cannot visually verify her genitals, she tends to create an imprecise or zonally condensed
30
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
psychic representation of them, particularly since she has difficulty in locating the sexual sensations of which she has been aware since early infancy. In this way clitoral, vaginal, urethral, and other internal sensations tend to be confused. This blurring of sensations has important repercussions, among others, on female fantasies concerning masturbation.
Masturbation and femininity

Although masturbation is the normal sexuality of children, it is eventually inhibited by parental constraints. All children learn that it is not permissible to defecate, urinate, or masturbate in public. Even when these restrictions are imposed with kindness and understanding, they leave an imprint on unconscious fantasy life. When they are imposed harshly because of the parents own internal disquiet and subsequent need to diminish their anxiety through controlling their childrens bodies, the risk of later neurotic problems is notably increased. When told to give up masturbating publicly, a little boy is apt to imagine that if he fails to do as he is told, his father will attack his penis, believing also that father has guessed his sexual desire for mother as well as his ambivalent feelings towards his Dad. In the same phase of oedipal reorganization, the little girl is more likely to fear that her mother will attack and destroy the whole inside of her body as a fantasized punishment for her wish to take her mothers place, to share erotic games with her father, and to make a baby with him. In other words, the little boy fears that the punishment for his masturbatory fantasies is castration, whereas the little girl frequently equates the retribution for masturbation and erotic daydreams with death. In a panel on Female Sexuality at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Californian analyst Phyllis Tyson once remarked that failure in the integration of primary femininity frequently had an inhibitory effect on the normal masturbation of adolescence, and she pointed out that in masturbation the young girl not only derives new pleasure from her body but also further consolidates her feminine identification with her mother. I myself
31
have made the clinical observation that when the ban on autoerotic pleasure is lifted, there frequently follows a series of new introjections and new sublimations.
Woman and time

I would like to point out that woman has a specific psychological relationship to time as compared with man. It seems highly probable that, among other factors, women experience time differently from men in large part because of their biological rhythms: before each monthly period, during and after the period, the sudden stopping of periods when a new baby is on the way, and, of course, the drama of menopause, which all, in one way or another, are time-related and all require a mourning process. These biological psychological rhythms also underline the significance of blood for the woman and are inscribed in a symbolic register in which timebefore and afterplays an essential role. Genevive Say, a French therapist and research writer, once presented a paper entitled Pas de rgles, pas de corps [Without periods, no body], proposing that without the experience of menstruation there is no fundamentally feminine body; thus it is essential that these biological time-rhythms be integrated and given meaning in order to allow the adolescent girl to achieve what is termed genitality. In an article entitled Le temps des femmes [which we might translate as time and woman], Julia Kristeva describes womans sense of time as cyclic, monumental and symbolic and suggests that we might contrast this to time that is, as she puts it, lineal, chronological, historical, politicaland imprinted with masculine subjectivity . . . (Kristeva, 1993). I would like to add at this point that in many long years of supervision with candidates and also with quite experienced analysts, I have been struck by the fact that the majority of male analysts seem to avoidor appear highly hesitant aboutasking a female patient any questions concerning her menstrual cycle, perhaps because of a feeling that such interest may be received by the analysand as intrusive.
32
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
As Helene Deutsch pointed out long ago: puberty and menopause both encircle the presentone looking ahead, the other looking backwards (Deutsch, 1944). This is surely an important dimension of time requiring analysis and one that may be overlooked for countertransference reasons.
Sexuality and creativity

I should like in this context to quote a brief clinical example that illustrates the inhibitory effect on creative work in women for whom all manifestations of childhood sexuality have been severely condemned, and in whom primitive body fantasies have persisted in an unintegrated form.2 Tamara, a talented violinist, suffered such paralysing anxiety before a performance that she often had to cancel her engagements at the last minute. After many months of mutual research, in which we attempted to reconstruct the unconscious scenario that was being enacted before every anticipated concert, she was able to capture the following fantasy: I fool the whole world. Everybody will see that all I produce is excrement, and that I myself am as valueless as a pile of shit. In addition, she felt that she both hated and loved her musical instrument. Following a dream in which she was caressing her violin which then turned into a womans body, she became able, for the first time in her life, to love and caress her own body, and she subsequently came to experience her violin as an extension of her body, which she could now permit herself to touch and think about with affection. As the analysis proceeded, she began to feel freer to contemplate allowing others to see this libidinized extension of her bodily self into her musical instrument and even to imagine that she might give a performance with unequivocal affection one day. With the new investment of her corporeal being came a reevaluation of her bodys natural functions. At one session she announced, You know, you have led me to understand that there is good shit and bad shit. Why can I not accept that I want to offer good things to the public?
33
In the sessions that followed we came to understand that, beneath her fear that she would exhibit what she believed to be an ugly and sexless body, there slowly emerged another Tamara who was beginning to live within her body and to believe that she had valuable gifts to offer to the outside world. Once her primitive libidinal fantasies were well integrated in their positive aspects, her severe inhibitions stemming from these sources were alleviated. A year after the termination of her analysis, she sent me two tickets for a concert in which she gave a most moving performance.
Sexual deviations in women

The value of Freuds legacy to the topic of female sexuality and its relation to sexual perversion can be debated for several reasons. First of all there is the problem of his phallocentrism. His reasoning was founded entirely on a male standpoint from which came his over-emphasis on penis envy. In addition, his idealization of motherhoodin accordance with the social discourse of his erahas since played a role in impeding research into the question of perverse motherhood. Mothers are not universally good or even always good enough: the challenge to the psychoanalyst is to understand what lies beneath the behaviour of mothers who abuse their children either physically or sexually. Almost invariably the pattern of abuse goes back three generations or more. The mothers relationship to the child who is destined to be treated perversely can frequently be traced to factors that gave rise to traumatic events in the parents own childhoodsfactors often affecting the place or destiny that this child, even before her birth, is expected to fulfil. Sometimes the parents implicitly impose that the child pay for what they, the parents, have suffered, or that she embody certain aspects of the parentseither negative or positive qualities and attributesfor which they themselves do not assume responsibility. I am reminded here of a young girl of 13 years of age who testified that her father had had incestuous relations with her for a number of years. At the time I saw her, the father was in
34
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
prison, and the daughter felt very guilty about having denounced him. Later came an interview with the mother who, as is so often the case, was in complicity with the incestuous relationship but turned a blind eye. When asked why this was, she said, Well, these things do happen in families, dont they? And how was it in your family? My brother, three years older than me, forced me to have sexual relations with three of his friends while he watched from behind a curtain. . . . When I told my mother, she said that boys were like that, and that I should try to keep out of their way in the future. She also warned me not to say anything to my father. Coming now to the question of what might be deemed perverse motherhood, much of the pioneering work into this field of research has been initiated by Estela Welldon, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the Portman Clinic in Londona clinic founded by Edward Glover and set up to deal principally with individuals suffering from any aspect of their sexuality, as well as those involved with drug addictions. Describing her work with sexual inhibitions in women (Welldon, 1989), the author points out that mothers obviously occupy a unique place in the lives of their nurslings and therefore possess unique power over them. Welldon emphasizes that the misuse of this power frequently manifests itself through battering children, or through committing incest with them. Verbal abusewhich, I would like to emphasize, is frequently revealed to be even more damaging than physical abuseis another misuse of maternal power. Similarly, giving false or frightening information about gender and sexual realities may have effects as destructive as incest, with regard to the attainment of ones sense of sexual identity and gender role. One of the conceptual difficulties in discussing and exploring perverse behaviour in women stems from the fact that, since Freuds time, sexual perversion has been closely identified with male sexuality and the penis. Deviant sexual constructions were understood as defences against castration fears and the conflicts engendered by the male Oedipus complex. Thus the literature suggests that women have no need to create sexual deviations. Freud believed that the Oedipus complex of the little girl was
35
resolved once she accepted the fact that she could imagine receiving a child from her father instead of a penis. This view implies that women have no need of perverse sexual creationsthey simply have babies instead! In contrast to Freuds formulation, female castration anxiety as already indicatedis more intense and more pervasive than that of man, since a young girls fears are centred on her whole body with a particularly intense focus on her inner space where her genital sensations are experienced. In her remarkable book Mother, Madonna, Whore, Welldon states that, whereas in men perverse acts are aimed at an external part-object, in women these are usually carried out against their own bodies or against objects they see as their own creation: their babies. In both cases, babies and bodies are treated as part objects. There are nevertheless many features shared by both boys and girls. For example, in both sexes there is marked anxiety at the phase of oedipal genital wishes and fantasies, and beyond this we also find deep insecurity regarding ones subjective identity. These anxieties are one primal cause for the creating of deviant erotic scenarios; in addition, the insecurity that assails small children, and later the adolescent-to-be, invariably releases affects of anger and violence that must also find a solution and gratification in the sexual invention. It is perhaps observations of this kind that led Robert Stoller (1976) to define perversions as the erotic form of hatred. For both sexes, the original hate objectsor part-objectsare relatively unconscious. The little girl who in adulthood develops deviant forms of sexual acts or relationshipssuch as exhibitionism or sadomasochismoften felt unwanted, ignored, or smothered by her own mother. Others experience themselves as a part-object belonging to the mother and therefore treated as a narcissistic prolongation of her. Each of these forms of relationship creates raging hatred. From being victims, these women may sometimes become victimizers, in which case the otherchild or loveris, in turn, treated as a part-object. Such forms of relationship often serve as a manic screen against a deeply unconscious terror of losing the mother or the mothers love and consequently the loss of all sense of identity.
36
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
As already discussed, eroticization may often serve as a defence against shocking childhood experiences. This frequently gives rise in the adult woman to a search for partners who will join in deviant sexual practices in which pain, humiliation, or violent attack are coupled with intense erotic excitement. Thanks to the construction of such complex erotic games, childhood traumata may be rendered tolerableand not surprisinglysuch sexual inventions are usually marked by an inexorable compulsivity. This brings me to the consideration of the complicity of the couples involved in deviant sexual scenarios.
Couples and shared deviancy

I have observed that those of my female analysands who engage in sexual practices dominated by pregenital, fetishistic, or sadomasochistic acts frequently did so at the insistence of their lovers or husbands. Although each woman complained about this, in most cases we were able to reconstruct her infantile past in such a way as to understand why she had chosen this particular mate and how she, too, gained secret satisfaction from their sexual rituals. In my Eros I gave two examples of such unconscious complicity between couples: In the first case, a young woman complained from the beginning of her analysis of her dislike for her husbands insistence that she urinate upon him in the course of their sexual relations. She was eventually able to recapture a hitherto repressed memory in which a group of little boys had asked her to take off her panties, climb up a tree, and show them how girls urinate. This she did with alacrity and great excitement but was caught by the maid and severely reprimanded by her parents. In the second case, a woman who had received a daily enema from her father from early childhood until adolescence was married to a man who secretly engaged in a solitary fetishistic sexual game in which he administered an enema to himself while imagining that he was giving this enema to a woman partner. In each case the partners seemed to have chosen each other because of unconscious pregenital erotism of a rather intense kind.
37
Primary homosexuality
Before concluding, I would like to summarize briefly the elements of primary homosexuality in the girl-child. But first of all let us recall Freuds conception of the little girls accession to adult feminine sexuality: according to him, the girl-childs first wish is to take sexual possession of her mother; then follows the desire for a penis; this, in turn, leads to the wish to receive a baby from her father and finally to her deepest longingaccording to Freudto be the mother of a boy-child. As stated in my Eros, this chain of signifiers suggests that, for the woman, a baby is a mere equivalent of the penis she does not possess and, indeed, that her love for her father is little more than the consequence of her penis envy. From my own analytic work with children and many long years of clinical observation of adult woman patients, I would propose that not only does the little girl wish to possess her mother sexually, as Freud suggests, but she would also like to create children with her and be singularly loved by her, in a world from which all men are excluded. At the same time she also wants to resemble her father and possess his genitals, as well as the idealized qualities she attributes to him. In this way she dreams of fulfilling in her mothers life the important erotic and narcissistic role of the father in relation to her mother. It is obvious that, through lack of fulfilment, these drives tend to become associated with narcissistic injury. It is perhaps this additional factor that gave Freud the impression that penis envy was the predominant dimension in the psychosexual structure of woman. Although the universal bisexual wishes of infancy are equally strong in both sexes, the girls problem is more intricate than her brothers in that the girl-child and her mother are not sexually complementary. She is not able, as her little brother is, to believe that she has a uniquely different sexual configuration and perhaps a specific value for this reason in her mothers eyes. Thus it is conceivable that the little girl has more conflictual internal mothers in her psychic universe than does the boy-child. The mother is, at one and the same time, adored, desired, resented, and feared. This is one of the reasons that, during adolescence, the daughter typically rejects her mother in many ways but will turn towards her with renewed attachment when she herself becomes a mother.
38
JOYCE M C DOUGALL
It is at this point that many girls finally forgive their mothers for all their infantile resentments. Just as every child that a daughter bears represents, in unconscious fantasy, a baby she has made with her father, so too her babies are often felt to be a gift to the mother andin the deeper layers of her unconsciousa baby she has made with her mother. Some women identify with the mother as a sexually desiring adult but do not themselves desire children. In this case, they are liable to experience their professional, intellectual, or artistic activities as giving birth to symbolic children. But here again specific feminine problems arise. Many women in analysis reveal a fear that they must choose between motherhood and professional activities; others express a similar feeling of dichotomy between their lives as lovers and their lives as mothers. Accomplishing these three distinct feminine desiresthe sexual, the maternal, and the professionalrequires a delicate balance if women are to avoid the conviction that they are impelled to sacrifice their own narcissistic and libidinal needs in any one of these areas.
In conclusion
While I am aware that there are many aspects that remain to be explored concerning femininity, female sexuality, and the place of woman in todays world, may I say, paraphrasing Freud: That is all I have to tell you (today) about female sexuality.
NOTES
1. It is interesting to note that the complete clitoral organ with its internal appendices was neither charted, nor even named, until relatively recentlyas is clearly set forth in a remarkable book, A New View of a Womans Body, compiled by the Federation of Feminist Womens Health Centers (1981). 2. This vignette is taken from a work of mine entitled The Many Faces of Eros (McDougall, 1995).
39
REFERENCES
Deutsch, H. (1944). The Psychology of Women. New York: Grune & Stratton. Federation of Feminist Womens Health Center (1981). A New View of a Womans Body. New York: Simon & Schuster. Freud, S. (1931b). Female sexuality. S.E., 21. Freud, S. (1933a). New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. S.E., 22. Jacobus, M. (1995). First Things. London: Routledge. Kristeva, J. (1993). Les Nouvelles Maladies de lme. Paris: Fayard. McDougall, J. (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. New York and London: Norton. Stoller, R. (1976). Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Aronson. Welldon, E. (1989). Mother, Madonna, Whore. New York: Aronson.
CHAPTER THREE
Some observations on female sexuality

Julia Kristeva
The primary oedipal phase: seduction and invasion

emale psychosexual development involves two versions of the Oedipus complex, as several authors including Freud have stated, and I would now like to put forward a revised interpretation (cf. Kristeva, 1996a, 1996b). The earliest period, from birth to the so-called phallic phase starting at between three and six years of age, I shall term the primary oedipal phase. It is true that, in his concluding works on female sexuality (1923e, 1925j, 1931b), Freud emphasizes what is generally termed phallic monism: the main characteristic of this infantile genital organisation . . . consists in the fact that, for both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account. What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals but a primacy of the phallus (1923e, p. 308). In other words, psychically speaking there is an inherent masculinity in the child irrespective of its anatomical sex: the little girl is a little man. This axiom, which was initially considered to refer to infantileand not adultsexuality or to a fantasy, finally emerges here from Freuds pen as a sine qua non fact of all sexuality. 41
42
JULIA KRISTEVA
However, in his last writings, Freud reveals a particular clinging and intense relationship between the little girl and her mother that is not easily accessible to analysis because it is encysted in preverbal sensory experience, which the founder of psychoanalysis likens to MinoanMycenaean civilization behind the civilization of the Greeks (Freud, 1931b, p. 372). It forms the basis of psychic bisexuality, which comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men (p. 374). However, Lacan, who strongly emphasizes the primacy of the phallus, supporting the symbolic function and the name of the father [nom du pre] in the psychic organization of the subject of either sex, comments in passing that maternal instinct is a part of female sexuality that is irreducible by analysis because it eludes the ascendancy of phallic primacy.1 Finally, on the basis of contemporary clinical observation, several psychoanalysts suggest that at the origins of infantile sexuality the early maturation of human beings exposes the infant to adult, and especially maternal, intrusion. The protective nature of parental support does not make it any less seductive: straight away, infantile sexuality develops under the influence of these parental and primarily maternal enigmatic signifiers (cf. Laplanche, 1987, p. 125). These signifiers imprint the mothers unconscious on the childs erogenous zones, along with the erotic link she has with the father and the fathers own unconscious. This initial co-excitation between mother and baby thus seems a long way from the idyllic models of MinoanMycenaean civilization evoked by Freud, or from a serenity of being preceding the drive-related behaviour described by Winnicott. Infantile sexuality, which is not that of the instincts but that of the drives understood as psychosomatic constructions, pre-existent biology-and-meaning is thus formed from the outset in the newborns interaction with his two parents and under the ascendancy of maternal seduction. The fact that it is the mother who takes care of the child, thereby becoming the agent of the unconscious intrusion, does not prevent her female desire for the fatherthe father of the child or her ownor the childs fathers own actions and speech from being the means by which the father plays a part from the outset as the subject of this original imprinting, for the girl as for the boy, and differently according to the sex. The child, who allows himself to be seduced and seduces with his skin and his five senses, engages by the very fact of his orifices:
SOME OBSERVATIONS ON FEMALE SEXUALITY
43
mouth, anus; and vagina for the little girl. Usually this female organ is not appealed to, but it is hard to imagine that it should be covered in the only insensitive membrane, as Freud bizarrely and incautiously suggests in his simile of the harder wood (1905d, p. 143)unless this supposed insensitivity were to have a defensive function. The founder of psychoanalysis rightly points to the absence in either sex of an unconscious representation of the vagina, other than as something lacunar or cloacal, lent to the anus, as Lou Andreas-Salom (1980, p. 107) expressed it. But does this visual deficit not make the representative of cavernousparticularly vaginal or cloacalexcitation, by that very fact, more unfathomable and problematic for the future unity of the subject? The seduced, orificial, invaded child: At the origins of Minoan Mycenaean sexuality, we find a sexual being, the perverse polymorph, prefiguring the penetrated being of the woman. Throughout this first phase of psychic sexualization, the sexuality of the primary oedipal phase, abandoned to the maternalpaternal seduction, however passive, is nonetheless both reactive and active, as is aggressively emphasized by the expulsion of stools and of vocal and gestural expressions. In the boy, penile excitation later intensified by the phallic phaseis superimposed on the complex range of reactions that result from this original invasion seduction, underlying and structuring the feminine position of the male subject. This position continues to characterize the mans sexuality, specifically his desire for oral and anal possession of the fathers penis and for its destruction in the maternal breast, which is fantasized as containing this penis, and so forth.
Interactive subjectivity and psychization

For the girl, the primary oedipal phase contains some more complex ambiguities. On the one hand, her skin-ego (Anzieu, 1985) and orificial2 ego lend themselves to the seductionpassivization that simultaneously engages narcissism and masochism, with its sadistic abreactionsdevouring the breast with the penis, bombarding it with stools, and so on. Clitoral excitation, varying from subject to subject and naturally less intense than penile excitation,
44
JULIA KRISTEVA
is nevertheless also mobilized to direct the girl towards active possession of the first object that is constituted by the unconscious seducing mother. But this erectile activity seems to be heavily masked, and even surpassed, by orificial excitation and by the erotic participation of the oralanalvaginal cavernous body in the early link with the mother. Whereas Karl Abraham, followed by Melanie Klein and the English school, emphasized this early involvement of a vaginalanal femininity in the oedipal phase, particularly for the girl, Freud refers to it only rarely, for example in the case of Dora (1905e [1901]; 1919e). As Jacques Andr comments, it is highly significant that this text is contemporaneous with . . . Freuds analysis of his own daughter Anna! This was in fact an exceptional opportunity for an analyst, both as man and as father, to confront the little girls early genital seduction . . . by her father! The strong vaginalcloacal mobilization, like the little girls clitoral excitation, structure her earliest sexuality as a psychic bisexuality that is simultaneously passive and active. Thus bisexuality is more strongly accentuated in the girl than in the boy. More interestingly, what this perspective seems to revealas the treatment of adult women confirms, if only by discovering the defensive symptomsis that the primary oedipal phase with its location of the defensive symptoms is governed not by a simple passivization but, above and beyond this, by the installation of an interactive subjectivity that is not adequately accounted for by the activepassive dichotomy. The orificial invasion is compensated not only by clitoral excitation but also by the early elaboration of an identificatory and introjective link with the seductive and intrusive object constituted by the mother (insofar as she also relays the fathers desire). The girl introjectively installs the seductive mother inside her: the excited cavity of the inner body mutates into an internal representation. Thus begins a slow and long-lasting work of psychization that is later accentuated by the secondary oedipal phase, in which the female tendency to privilege psychic or loving representation idealization over erotic drive excitation can be recognized. This female psychization is, however, placed in difficulties by identification with the agent of the parental seductionan identification reinforced by the resemblance between girl and mother and by the projection onto the girl of maternal narcissism and depressivity.
45
For the girl, this process results partly in an early psychization of the object that the young ego introjects by identification and partly from this identification with the mother, the additional creation of a real link of possession and dependence with the same object. The little girls cavernous excitability and its attendant psychic interiority are stabilized by a clinging to the real external object. In other words, the sensory reality of the object and the real presence of the mother are demanded as a compensation for the invasion of the cavernous body and the psychic introjection that are constantly taking place. This real need for the link latches on to a place such as the cloacal interior, claiming an imaginary insatiable premium for the oral, anal, and vaginal pleasures that are undergone rather than taken by the little girl. The latters link with her maternal object is coupled with the mothers symmetrical attachment to her infant girl: rather than set up her daughter as a phallic substitute, as is generally the case with the boy, the female parent projects her own narcissistic fantasies and latent masochistic or depressive tendencies, echoing with the little girls orificial pleasures. The economy of the primary oedipal phaseinvasion and passivization of the orificial body by the other, aggression towards and oral, anal, and clitoral possession of the other, and compensation by psychic hypercathexis of the object that early on creates an interiority dependent on the objectproves to be more accentuated for the little girl than it is in the little boys monovalent oedipal phase. Because of the anatomical difference between the sexes, as well as for historical and cultural reasons determining the ambivalence of the parental seduction with regard to the second sex, the girls primary oedipal phase precipitates her into a later developmental stage that is both more fragile and more complex than the boys. The girl is more exposed to passivization because clitoral excitation does not eliminate orificial pleasure, unlike the boy, for whom phallicism is supposed to surpass, if not eradicate, oral and anal receptivity. However, the little girl already appears more protected by the formation of an early interiority in which the introjection of the other (of the mother as mediator of the father), relayed by the girlmother identification, transforms this maternal other into an indispensable object, as a vital co-presence of a link to others, experienced as a need that is ready and waiting, like an understudy
46
JULIA KRISTEVA
for desire, that is to be cultivated and maintained in external reality and that will endure as an absolute necessity of female psychosexuality. In other words, the little girls dependence on her mothers love directly prepares the status of the womans erotic object. Only rarely is the womans object a partner in desire, but, more exclusively, a lover whom she asks to understand her as if he were . . . a mother. The psychic link with him that the female lover requires is not easily interchangeable, and this asymmetry inexorably determines the discord between the sexes. As for the possibility of a woman blossoming in the erotic quest itself, she would need a very strong phallic identification to conceal her invaded interiority and need for a psychic link, so as to be satisfied with those thousand and one objects, petit a, which fail to gratify the fetishistic longings of Don Juan himself. Beyond the two pitfalls of narcissism and passivizing masochism, the complexity of the primary oedipal phase therefore establishes the little girl as a psychic being and a binding agent. With the emergence of the little girls sexuality, we witness the dawn of love and sociability. Of course, this economy is also the one that to varying degrees governs the mans femininity, which remains repressed by conquering phallicism, providing that it is not abreacted in a contrary manner by passage to the homosexual act. My reflections on the girls primary oedipal phase are not intended to diminish the structuring role that phallic authority and its attendant castration anxiety play in the psyche. My intention is only to assign them to their place as organizers of the unconscious while bearing in mind that they appear in the infants psyche by mediation of the parental seduction, adding to the reactive excitability of the seduced child.
The secondary oedipal phase: encounter with phallicism

In post-Freudian treatment, it is maintained that the structuring phallic component, participating in the repression of excess infantile excitation, is matched by an other libido that is not exclusively passive but is worked through with support from a stable link with
47
the object that founds psychic interiority and the link with others. The hypothesis I am putting forward, that the feminine position of both sexesand particularly the little girlsis immediately accompanied by the phallic experience in the primary oedipal phase, presupposes a bisexuality from the beginnings of the psyche. Is it not precisely this feminine position, taking shape from the primary oedipal phase, more violently than the castration anxiety that, strictly, appears in the phallic phase, that underlies the fact that the female is the more inaccessible, in Freuds words, to both sexes (cf. Freud, 1937c)? The female constitutes the first working out of the infants phobiasfears of passivization, of narcissistic and masochistic regression, of losing the visible reference points of identity through a sensory engulfment that risks dispersing the subject into an endogenous if not pathological autismand it is repressed by the subsequent accession to the phallic. In the woman, however, the polymorphous femininity of the primary oedipal phase remains a continent that is scarcely repressed. More precisely, it becomes masked by reactional femininity and the attendant displays of beautification or narcissistic reparation with which the womans later phallicism reacts to the castration complex. It is in the course of the phallic phase, which situates the subject in the oedipal triangulation between the ages of three and five years, that the female subject carries out a further psychic mutation by which the choice of sexual identity is definitively accomplished. There is a widespread view that so readily pictures psychoanalysis as a biologization of the essence of man that it is worth reminding ourselves at this point that the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality is a theory of the copresence of sexuality with thought. Optimal frustration, motherchild separation, the depressive position, lack, primary identification, sublimation, idealization, attainment of the ego ideal and the superego are only a few well-known stages by which the subject is positioned in the web of both energy and meaning, both excitability and law, that characterizes human sexuality in the analytic perspective. The phallic phase constitutes its exemplary experience, which I have for this very reason termed a phallic kairos, the Greek term kairos evoking a mythic encounter or a fated parting. How is this encounter organized?
48
JULIA KRISTEVA
Following neurobiological maturation and optimal experiences of separation from the object, the phallic stage becomes the central organizer of the copresence of sexuality and thought in both sexes. Having already developed language and thought, the child, not satisfied with cathecting his genital organs and their excitability, associates the cognitive operations that he applies to the external world with the interior movements of his drive excitability. An equivalence emerges between the pleasure of the phallic organ and access to language and to the functioning of speech and thought. At this stage of development, the subject in formation is able to establish that the father is not only the person he wants to kill in order to appropriate the mother. From now on, he perceives what must be termed the fathers separability: as a third figure, regulating the sensorial motherchild dyad, the father becomes a symbolic father, authority of prohibition and of the law. As bearer of the penis, the little boys cathexis of this organ of pleasure is only strengthened by the fact that it is first and foremost the fathers, whose organizing role in his familial and psychic world the child is now in a position to recognize. Many authors have noted the specific features that destine the penis to be cathected by both sexes to become the phallusthat is, the signifier of privation and lack of being, but also of desire and the desire to signify: all the components that make the phallus the signifier of the symbolic law. Visible and narcissistically recognized, erectile and laden with great erogenous sensitivity, detachable and thus culpable,3 capable of being lostthe penis is, by this fact, suited to become the medium for difference, the privileged actor in the 0/1 binarism that forms the basis of all systems of meaning (marked/unmarked), the organic maker (therefore real and imaginary) of our psychosexual computer. For the little girl as well, a decisive encounter [kairos] between the mastery of signs and sexual excitation fuses her being as a thinking and desiring subject. It is no longer oral or anal excitation but principally clitoral excitation, with or without the perception of the vagina, that predominates at this period that we will call the secondary oedipal phase and in which, unlike the boy, the little girl changes object: the father replaces the mother as the target of desire.
49
The ambiguity of the female secondary oedipal phase

Let us examine, however, the ambiguity of this change. On the one hand, like the boy, and like all subjects of speech, of thought and law, the girl identifies with the phallus and with the father who represents it: without this phallic assumption she would be unable to maintain her role in the universal human condition, a condition that makes her a speaking being according to the law. At the heart of this phallic position, however, the girl is at a comparative disadvantage to the boy. Deprived of a penis and devalued by this fact in all known patriarchal and patrilineal cultures, she adheres to the phallic order while carrying the unconscious trace of the primary oedipal phase, of its polymorphous sensoriality, dedicated to desire for the mother, which imprints on her an indelible mark of endogenous female homosexuality. From then on, the girl accomplishes her access to the phallic orderconstructed on the depths of the dark or MinoanMycenaean continentwithin the as-if, illusory modality of I am playing the game, but I know very well that I am not part of it because I do not have it. Accordingly, unless the woman freezes the phallic position in the pose of the virago, the feminine phallic position then establishes the female subject in the register of radical strangeness, of an intrinsic exclusion, of an irreparable solitude. Furthermore, as if this necessary but artificial phallicism were not already conflictual enough to accept, it then has to be modulated by a new psychic position for which the primary oedipal phase has already prepared the way but which is accomplished only during the secondary oedipal phase: as a phallic subject of speech, thought, and the law, the girl falls back not on the passive position, as is usually suggested, but on the receptive position to become the object of the father. As a speaking being, she is a phallic subject of the social symbolic order; but as a woman she nevertheless desires to receive the penis and obtain a child from the father, from the place of the mother with whom she is constantly settling the scores of the original coexcitation in the primary oedipal phase. By tracing the twists and turns required of the female subject by her accession to the secondary oedipal phase, we can understand the irreducible strangeness that a woman feels in the phallicsymbolic
50
JULIA KRISTEVA
order, and which leads to a display of anxiety or conversion symptoms in the hysteric when she settles for denial of the phallus and of castration. At best, this strangeness takes on the aspect of an antiauthoritarian dissatisfaction that is incomprehensible to social rationality; hence, what do women want?the insistent question that Freud is not alone in having posed. But this strangeness can be refined into revolt or insubordination, which Hegel acclaimed in women as the eternal irony of the community. If this exile that establishes the woman in the phallicsymbolic universe happens to turn out to be more irreconcilable, it can shift into chronic depressivity or even intractable melancholia. Alternatively, it can lead to anorexia and bulimia, those failed suicidal consequences of the rejection of femininity (that of the primary oedipal phase encountering the rejection of castration with which the hysteric reacts to the secondary oedipal phase), equally morbid symptoms in which the gaping excitability of the (passively erotized) cavernous body of the primary oedipal phase is accentuated, incapable of defending itself against the intrusion of the maternalpaternal seduction except by force-feeding or filling the erogenous zones. By contrast, when the female subject manages to negotiate the complex turnstile imposed on her by the primary and secondary oedipal phases, she can have the good fortune to acquire that strange maturity that the man so often lacks, buffeted as he is between the phallic pose of the macho and the infantile regression of the impossible Mr Baby. With the benefit of this maturity, the woman is able to encounter her child not as a phallic or narcissistic substitute (which it mostly is) but as the real presence of the other, perhaps for the first time, unless it is the only possible one, and with which civilization begins as a totality of connections based no longer on Eros but on its sublimation in Agape (Kristeva, 2001). Freud, who thought that only a small minority of human beings were capable of displacing what they mainly value from being loved on to loving (1930a, p. 291), interpreted this sublimation as a defence against object loss, without deciphering in addition to this a working through of narcissistic love, as suggested by the Biblical and evangelical injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself. He was more than willing to admit that it was mystics
51
such as Francis of Assisi who went furthest in the interior life created by such methods, but he stressed that this interiority with an inhibited aim (p. 291), this evenly suspended, steadfast and affectionate feeling, bore, however, little external resemblance [any more to the stormy agitations of genital love] (p. 291). Had he forgotten, in saying this, to consider motherhood? In fact, the founder of psychoanalysis separates this work of civilization (p. 293) that entails the readiness for a universal love of mankind (p. 291) from the interests of the family to which women commit themselves, criticizing these women who had nevertheless laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love (p. 293) for being incapable of a work of civilization on the grounds of an incapacity for instinctual sublimation (p. 55). Had he perhaps not analysed the experience of motherhood enough? When the mother manages to go beyond the dominion over the child as a phallic substitute and to calm the intensity of the link with others, beyond the time of desire which is that of death, the cyclical time of renewal and rebirth opens up for her.
The female and femininity

Henceforth, this woman is no longer playing a game of masquerade, however amusing and attractive, which constructs femininity as a simulacrum of the female. She has metabolized the cavernous receptivity of the primary oedipal phase into a psychic depth: this is the female. She is aware, however, of the femininity that knows how to pretend in order to protect itself from the female, by excelling at seduction and even in masculine competition. What we perceive as a harmonious feminine personality is one that manages to create a coexistence between the female and femininity, receptivity and seduction, acceptance and performancea mental hermaphrodite, diagnoses Colette. This calm polyphony of flexible connections confers a peaceful social and historical existence on the lacunar female of the origins. That is to say, in effect, that Woman does not exist: rather, there is a plurality of versions of femininity, and the female community is only ever one of women in the singular.
52
JULIA KRISTEVA
NOTES
Translated from French by Sophie Leighton, MA (Oxon), MA (Sussex). 1. It is worth mentioning here that it does not follow from the fact that everything that is analysable is sexual that everything sexual is accessible to analysis. What is not drained off by phallic mediation would in fact be the entire current of maternal instinct. (Cf. Lacan, 1966, p. 730.) 2. Cf. Jacques Andrs (1995) commentary and discussions. 3. Translators note: there is a pun in the French coupable, which implies cuttable [coup-able] as well as culpable here.
REFERENCES
Andr, J. (1995). Aux origines fminines de la sexualit. Paris: PUF. Andreas-Salom, L. (1980). LAmour du narcissisme. Paris: Gallimard. Anzieu, D. (1985). Le Moi-Peau, Paris, Dunod. The Skin Ego (trans. C. Turner). New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1989. Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E., 7. Freud, S. (1905e [1901]). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria, S.E., 7. Freud, S. (1919e). A child is being beaten. S.E., 19. Freud, S. (1923e). The infantile genital organisation. S.E., 19. Freud, S. (1925j). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. S.E., 19. Freud, S. (1930a). Civilization and Its Discontents. S.E., 21. Freud, S. (1931b). Female sexuality. S.E., 21. Freud, S. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. S.E., 23. Kristeva, J. (1996a). Encore ldipe, ou le monisme phallique. In: Sens et non-sens de la rvolte (pp. 141195). Paris: Fayard, 1996. Kristeva, J. (1996b). De ltranget du phallus ou le fminin entre illusion et dsillusion. In: Sens et non-sens de la rvolte (pp. 197223). Paris: Fayard. Kristeva, J. (2001). De la passion selon la maternit. In: La Vie amoureuse (Convention of the Socit psychanalytique de Paris, November 2000). Revue franaise de psychanalyse, Dbats de psychanalyse (July): 105120. Lacan, J. (1966). Propos directifs pour un Congrs sur la sexualit fminine. In crits. Paris: Seuil. Laplanche, J. (1987). Nouveaux Fondements pour la psychanalyse: La sduction originaire. Paris: PUF.
CHAPTER FOUR
Phallacies of binary reasoning: drive beyond gender

Paul Verhaeghe
aking Julia Kristevas chapter as a starting point, I would like to embroider on a number of ideas in her work. Like her, I agree that woman, or the feminine component of human sexuality, cannot be understood in terms of passivity. On the contrary, I will argue that femininity is more open to the symbolic than to the real. In this type of discussion, a form of binary reasoning is always in attendance in one way or another. As I read her chapter and her latest work, Kristeva is still attempting to take leave from it, but she does not completely succeed in this. Each of us continues to wrestle with this inheritance of our patriarchal social system. Here I will discuss three critical propositions concerning this dualism and how it affects our conception of gender. I will then advance four theses designed, in some measure, to provide an answer to them. My propositions regarding the gender/sex binary are as follows. First, classical dualism in generaland the division between anatomical sex and psychosexual identity in particularimply an endless mirroring that necessitates a final or ultimate element the function of which is to provide an ostensibly final ground and an ontology. Second, this dualistic mirroring process lends itself to a 53
54
PAUL VERHAEGHE
number of problematic analogies. Third, the focus on the phallus and masculinity itself is an artefact of this type of thinking. 1. Ever since Plato, Western thought has imposed some form of binary thinking in which two elements are opposed to one another: soma versus psyche, matter versus form, nature versus culture, semiotic versus symbolic, primary oedipal versus secondary oedipal, sex versus gender, masculine versus feminine. The system is created in such a way that it requires one final element to close and ground the binary. Without it, the system runs mad in an incessant mirroring process of ever more remote underlying elements, each resembling the other. This can easily be illustrated by a wellknown critique of homunculus theory: a mans headache is caused by a headache in a smaller man inside his head, indicating that this smaller man must have an even smaller man in his brain with a headache, meaning than an even smaller man in the head of the smaller man must have a headache, and so on (Lacan, 1946, pp. 160161, 1998, pp. 96100).1 For Aristotle, this final element was the unmoveable sphere, which was later interpreted as God: and, what is more, God the Holy Father. We can detect the same process in Freud, who was obliged to construct his myth of the primal father to ground the oedipal father. At the level of the subject, this has an ontological effect: through identification with the father, the subject copes with the drive and its divisive effects. Identity is experienced as substantial, authentic, pre-discursive, and so forth: Thats me!although, of course, it is not. It is a socially induced way of coping with the unbearable lightness of being. This form of reasoning furthermore implies a presumed identity between the two terms. The psyche mirrors the body and must therefore be identical with this body. But in relation to the grounding term, this identity implies a reduction: the subject is constructed according to the image of God, albeit in a lesser form; the child is the image of the father, albeit in a lesser form; and so on. In other words, the apparent correspondence between the two elements of binary thought is nothing but an imaginary implementation of the mirror stage through which the child acquires a hypothetical identity and unity from the big Other, if always in a slightly lesser form. As regards gender, this gives rise to a
PHALLACIES OF BINARY REASONING
55
particular reading of the phallus (see Point 3), as the missing element the presence of which would complete the subject and permit it to attain the status of the father. No wonder, then, that there is a confusion of the father and the phallus, as the former needs the latter to take up his position. 2. My second point concerns the analogies that this type of binary reasoning induces. When we examine the original binary of biological sex versus psychosexual identity, it is clear that gender and constructivism have had the upper hand right from the start. Psychosexual identity is considered an effect of discourse, independent of the biological body that from then on can be discarded. Nevertheless, it did not take long for the original division between sex and gender to reappear in gender itselfmore specifically, in the division of feminine and masculine identity. Woman became aligned with nature and the real, man stood for culture and discourse, and the same discussion resumed. In both binariesthe original sex/gender and the ensuing feminine/masculine within genderone term appears to be the primary one. Thus considered, the introduction of the idea of gender as a solution turns out to be nothing but another formulation of the same problem within the same dual line of reasoning. Closer scrutiny of the list of the usual binaries (nature/culture, etc.), moreover, reveals a number of curious analogies based on the patriarchal way of thinking from which we have not yet sufficiently extricated ourselves. It seems as if woman stands for nature, drive, body, semiotic, and so on, and man for culture, symbolic, psyche, and so forth. Yet this is not confirmed by day-to-day experience, nor by clinical practice. Both feminine eroticism and feminine identity seem far more attracted to the symbolic than are their masculine counterparts. Biblically or not, woman conceives for the most part by the ear and is seduced by words. In contrast, an unmediated, drive-ridden sexuality seems much more characteristic of masculine eroticism, whether gay or straight. Nor does motherhoods apparent linking of woman and Nature stand the test. In my clinical practice, I have seen far too many mothers who reject their children oreven worsehave no interest in them whatsoever. The maternal instinct is a myth, and maternal love is an effect of an obligatory alienation. Many new mothers must face the fact
56
PAUL VERHAEGHE
that their reactions to their new baby fail to coincide with this anticipated love. 3. The presumed connection between masculinity and the symbolic is the result of a certain reading of the phallus, which brings me to my third point. The exclusive focus on the phallus and its accompanying privileging of man misses the point and is again an artefact of the reasoning itself. As we saw previously, in binary thought, the two terms require a supreme or grounding term that provides them with substantiality. The fullness of the supreme term involves the presence of an exceptional characteristic missing from the ordinary terms. For Aristotle, this came down to the immovability of the supreme sphere. In gender, it is called the phallus. Freud put this down to the absence of a penis in women; the early Lacan interpreted this as the lack of a signifier to signify femininity. The later Lacan makes it clear that the phallic interpretation of this lack is, once again, an artefact of a patriarchal thinking that is founded on the master discourse. Clinical practice testifies to the fact that the only phallus that counts is the mothers phallusin other words, the missing phallus. The sum of the mother plus the phallus would be the unbarred or non-lacking Otherthat is, the phallic mother. Consequently, the phallus is always lacking, it is the One Thing that is not mirrored during the constitution of the subject. The reason is very simple: the Other also lacks the phallus, so there is no question of mirroring it. Such a concentration on the phallic is not very helpful, either for a man or for a woman. As a focal point, it belongs to the range of psychopathology. A man will never meet the phallic standard; the only result is an ever-increasing alienation because of the others assumed phallic demand. Under normalthat is, neuroticconditions, this leads to the typically masculine form of hysteria: the Guinness-Book-of-Records hysteria, with its emphasis on the biggest instrument. One step further, his desperate attempts to fuse with woman land us in the perverse structure (Lacan, 1974). That is, man identifies with the missing maternal phallus in a desperate attempt to make her whole. For woman, attempting to receive the phallus ends either in the phallic masquerade of the woman, or in
57
maternityas Freud long ago made clearalthough the emphasis must be more on pregnancy than on maternity, which already contains a loss. Where woman tries to unite with the phallic master himself, the result is mysticism or psychosis (Lacan, 1974, p. 63). In both cases, whether masculine or feminine, an endless Encore is put into play as an attempt to master what is lost. As we will see, this encore, which typifies the repetition compulsion, increasingly endorses the very problem it attempts to solve, providing an admirable illustration of the circular effects of this kind of binary thinking.
* * *
These are my three critical propositions regarding the gender/sex dualism. In answer to them, I would like to develop four theses. First, I aim to show how the main problem confronting the question of sex and gender is in fact the drive and its antinomical aims. In this respect, Freuds original conceptualization of Eros and Thanatos will prove indispensable. Second, within the dynamics of the drive, gender is discovered to be a secondary issue, along with castration. Third, in place of the binary dualism I propose to substitute a circular, non-reciprocal relationship between two elements, which are themselves less important than the representative relationship. Fourth, to the extent that a binary differentiation can be made, the main elements are considered not masculine/feminine but active and passive and are understood as such in the relation between the subject and the drive. 1. It is striking how little attention has been paid to the drive and to sexuality in contemporary gender studies. Freud himself provides us with two main points of entry: on the one hand we have the component or partial drives, most evident in clinical practice, which supply us with a direct link to sexuality. The aim of these partial drives is to recover and rejoin a supposedly original object through its different pregenital forms. By itself, the study of the partial drives is already enough to show the relative unimportance of the question of genderthere is no genital partial drive as such, the focus is on the various different bodily orifices. Nevertheless, what seems far more interesting to me is the second Freudian
58
PAUL VERHAEGHE
approachnamely, his concepts of the life and death drives, Eros and Thanatos. With these concepts, Freud addresses the question of the fundamental aim of the drive or, to be more specific, the fundamental aim of the drives primary elementthat is, its driving force. In answer to this, he postulates the existence of two primary drives the aim of which is to return to a previous state (Freud, 1920g). The problem is that each drive aims at an opposite state, with the result that they work against each other. The easiest one to understand is the Eros or life drive, which attempts to return to a previous stage of wholeness and fusion by linking together as many elements as possible, with coitus as the most salient example. It is striking how, even in Freud, the relation between Eros and the symbolic is clearly visible, together with its effect on identity formation. Freud first encountered it in his Studies on Hysteria, where he called it false connections: a word-presentation is wrongly associated with another word-presentation for lack of an original, accurate association with something that is inexpressible (Freud, 1895d, pp. 6770). He generalized this tendency, which he called the hysterical compulsion to associate. Later, he was to encounter a variation of this compulsion: the repetition compulsion, a primary characteristic of traumatic neurosis, which attempts to master the real by binding it to wordpresentations (1920g). Consequently he could no longer restrict it to hysteria but had to turn it into a general characteristic of the egothat is, its proclivity to synthesis, to associate separate things into an ever larger synthesis, the One of phallic fusion. The problem is that this Eros drive never succeeds in reaching its final goal. The failure of the pleasure principle has to do with the other drive: Thanatos, or the death drive, and its opposing aim. The death drive works against the tendency towards synthesis and induces a scattering of Eros. It disassembles everything that Eros brought together into One and makes this unity explode into an infinite universe. Moreover, this other drive works in silence; it has no connection whatsoever with the symbolic or the signifier (Freud, 1923b, p. 46, p. 56). In our post-Freudian era, the concepts of the life and death drives have almost entirely disappeared. One of the reasons has to do with their names, which are misleading in their imaginary
59
signification effect. As we will see, considering them from another perspective, one could just as easily say that the life drive aims towards death and the death drive towards life. Freud himself referred to another classic couple that implies a different signification effectthat is, Philia [love] and Neikos [strife]. By this it is clear that he is referring to something that supersedes mankind as such, something that must have to do with the bare properties of life (Freud, 1937c, p. 246). For me, this opposition does indeed have to do with the question of originsmore specifically, the origins of sexually differentiated life forms. The original state to which Eros tries to return is the eternal life, the classic Greek Zo, dating from before the introduction of sexually differentiated life forms through the particular form of cell division, meiosis. In principle, sexually undifferentiated forms of life possess eternal life; death is an accident for them. After the introduction of sexual differentiation, however, death becomes a structural necessity. Interpreted in this way, Eros or Zo aims at a return to a previous sexually undifferentiated state by fusing with the supposedly lost element. The price paid for this return is the disappearance of a sexually differentiated individual in the fusion; it must die so as to make the return possible. This explains the opposite tendency: aiming at the continuation of life as an individual through defusion from the originally undifferentiated whole. The continuation of this form of life is always limited, because of the structural necessity of death, as introduced by sexual differentiation. Freuds Thanatos drive ensures the continuation of individual life against its disappearance in the other. Interpreted in this way, the death drive is a bios drive, bios being the ancient Greek name for the individual life that dies but also for how an individual conducts his or her own life. Zo, on the other hand, is eternal life itself: the thread that runs through the limited bios and is not broken when the particular perishes. Read in this way, Freuds Eros is a Zo drive, and Thanatos is a bios drive. As I said, this antinomy in the drive is much more fundamental than the gender antinomy, which is itself a consequence of it. But before going into this, I shall address the question of the relation between the drive and identity formation. Reading Freud, it is clear that he links the formation of the ego to Eros and its tendency towards synthesis. This idea is confirmed both in Lacans theory of
60
PAUL VERHAEGHE
subject-formation and by contemporary attachment studies.2 Without going too far into this, let me just say that identity formation is based on the very same motives as those governing the two drives and implies the very same antinomy. Moreover, this connection permits us to discern a logical time sequence. The child is born with an innate tendency to stick to the other as closely as possible. This is why primary anxiety concerns the separation from this other. As a result of this tendency, the child incorporates and identifies with as many parts of the other as possible, thus trying to bridge the gap caused by birth. In the meantime, identity is acquired, which in my reading is an effect of Eros. Once this process has sufficiently taken place within a secure environment, the other tendency becomes patent, actively aiming for diffusion and autonomy from this other. It is not by chance that this takes place simultaneously with language acquisition and particularly with the emergence of the signifier I during the socalled period of negation. This is an effect of the Thanatos drive, privileging separation this time and a life of ones own. These two tendencies will continue to function alongside one another in a peculiar way, which will not be very well understood if we continue to name it dualism. Even for Freud, the two basic drives were almost always commingled in what he called the Triebmischung. We return to this admixture in my third thesis, but let us now address the relationship between the primary drives and gender. 2. My second thesis reverses this relationship. The drive is not one element within the problem of gender; on the contrary, gender is just one expression of the larger problem of the drive. My thesis is that gender and sexuality are an attempt to regain the original Eros fusion, albeit in such a way that failure is structurally built in. This is beautifully expressed in Aristophanes well-known fable in Platos Symposium. Reading the whole story, it is clear how gender and even sex enter the picture only at a secondary stage, being absent from the first part. Indeed, once the original double being was bisected, each half was perpetually searching for its corresponding half, but not, as we might think, for the purpose of having sex:
61
Now, when the work of bisection was complete, it left each half with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each others necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one. So much so, that they began to die of hunger and general inertia, for neither would do anything without the other. [Plato, 1994, pp. 543544]
Zeus took pity on them and introduced yet another change to their bodies: he moved their reproductive organs to the front (originally, they were placed on the outer side of the body), thus making sexual intercourse possible. This change, particularly the subsequent possibility for genital union, temporarily set the human being free from its longing and made it possible for it to turn to the activities necessary for survival. The beauty of this fable is that the transition thus described is not from a rounded whole to a bisection into a male and female differentiation, but from a rounded whole into two parts (of whatever gender), with a total longing for one another that renders all other considerations insignificant. The genitalsexual interest enters the scene at a later stage, turning the original total process into a partial one because of the lethal nature of this first process. Both gender and genital sex are a secondary although necessary issue, a kind of desperate solution for a primal divisionthis is Platos message. Looking at this fable from the perspective described above, it is clear that it corresponds perfectly with our previous thesis. The loss of eternal life is the loss of an original wholeness and simultaneously implies a gender differentiation. The solution for this loss is sought in phallic copulation; moreover, the original loss can be secondarily interpreted as a phallic loss or castration. The paradox of this solution is that this attempt re-endorses the original problem. Indeed, the differentiation into two different genders is precisely the cause of the problem. Trying to solve it through this gender differentiation is nothing but a repetition of the original loss. The net result is a never-ending repetition, because each phallic act repeats the loss and makes another attempt necessary hence Lacans stress on the Encore effect. One can even say that phallic sexuality in itself is aim-inhibited because it can never reach the original aim of enduring fusion.
62
PAUL VERHAEGHE
It is instructive to reconsider the theory of the phallus and of castration in this respect. The foundation of human fantasy is thatif one did indeed possess The Phallusit should be possible the reinstate the original union through The Perfect Sexual Relationship. Yet the phallus in itself is nothing but a reformulation of an original loss that was caused precisely by the introduction of phallic sexuality. As such, the phallus creates the illusion of a solution while at the same time reintroducing it. Whatever solution there might be, it has to be looked for beyond the phallic imaginary. If we return now to the relationship between the primary drives and gender differentiation, it can be said that the latter is a consequence of the death drive and its proclivity for defusion. Furthermore, it makes death necessary for every sexually differentiated individual life form. Sexual fusion and copulation are a consequence of Eros and are attempts to annihilate the differentiation. The relation between gender and drive is secondary, but nevertheless at a primary levelthat is, male and female as prior to masculine and femininethere must be some kind of link. It is as though the female had lost the male part and needs it in order to become whole again. This explains the female proclivity for fusion and Eros (and her propensity for the symbolic). The result is penetration and the swelling up of pregnancy, an attempt at fusion. Separation must be avoided. The male part, on the other hand, has differentiated itself from the original alma mater, hence its proclivity for separation and Thanatos: fusion must be avoided. The result is penetration and deflation. We find an echo of this in Freuds paper on the theme of the three caskets where he talks about the three women in mans life: the woman that gives birth to him, the woman he makes love to, and the woman to whom he returns after death (Freud, 1913f, p. 291). The same line of reasoning can be expanded to psychopathology. There is an evident link between Eros, fusion, identification, hysteria, and femininity, just as there is a link between Thanatos, separation, isolation, obsessional neurosis, and masculinity. Of course this may sound dreadfully politically incorrect [mais a nempche pas dexister, dirait Charcot3], but things are even more complicated than this. As I said above, gender differentiation is a
63
secondary item that ought not to be interpreted in a binary fashion. On the contrary, male and female are always combined, just like Eros and Thanatos, and it is the peculiarity of this combination that gets neglected in binary studies of it. This brings me to my third thesis. 3. The life and death drives are not two separate entities. What Freud called the Triebmischung, the admixture of the drives, boils down to a circular but non-reciprocal interaction between two elements. One operates as a force of attraction for the other, which simultaneously tries to return and move forward. Their interaction is staged on a different level each time, which establishes and reiterates the fact that there is no reciprocal relationship between them.4 First, we have the appearance of the sexually differentiated life forms at the moment of birth. This implies the loss of the eternal life, Zo. It functions as a force of attraction for the individual life, the Bios, that tries to return. The price that is to be paid for this return is the loss of individual life as such, and this explains the other tendency, the one that flees from it in the opposite direction. The usual solution reiterates the original problem, thus maintaining the interaction. Indeed, the Bios tries to join the Zo through sexual reproduction, which involves a repetition of the original loss. Second, we have the formation of the Ithat is, the primary identification of the mirror stage. The living being acquires an initial identity through the unified image of his body coming to him from the Other, but at the same time this I loses the real of its body: hence its never-ending attempts to join its body again but, conversely, the price to be paid for this fusion would be the disappearance of the Ihence the tendency to flee in the other direction as well. Finally, the solution will only provide the I with the body as prescribed by the Other, thus confirming the loss of its being. Third, we have the arrival of the subject. The subject attempts to fuse with the (m)Other, but if it were to succeed, the result would imply a total alienation, meaning the disappearance of the subject. Hence the other tendency towards separation. Again, this solution
64
PAUL VERHAEGHE
implies a structurally impossible relationship, because the subjects attempts to fuse with the Other necessarily must pass through the symbolic, thus repeating and endorsing the original deadlock. If we continue this series, we arrive at a fourth moment wherein the subject acquires a gender identity. This is what the Oedipus complex does, in its own peculiar waythat is, by interpreting the original loss in terms of castration. This phallic interpretation will be applied retroactively to all preceding occurrences, meaning that each loss is read in a phallic way. This process entails the construction of the bodynot the body we are, but the body we have, which is clothed in a gender identity. This identity is the final stage of this circular but non-reciprocal relationship. The original gap between life and death, between the body and the I, between the subject and the Other is reproduced and worked over in the gap between man and woman. Moreover, this repetition produces the same effect: no matter what efforts the subject makes to fuse his body by way of the symbolic, s/he will never succeed, because the gap is due precisely to the symbolic. Regardless of the masculine subjects efforts to fuse with woman by way of the phallic relationship, he will never succeed, because the gap is due precisely to the phallic signifier. The double-sided relationship between subject and drive reappears in the very same kind of relationship between a man and a woman. 4. More often than not, this relationship is conceived as a conflict, with patriarchy and female emancipation the landmarks of this battle. In light of what we saw above, this battle is just one expression of the way the two primary drives relate to one another in every subject. This brings me to my final thesis. Rather than interpreting this opposition as masculine versus feminine, it is much more illuminating to read it as active versus passive. However, this does not imply that passive represents feminine and active masculine. Freud describes a drive for mastery through which the subject tries to master the object. Both man and woman fear being reduced to the passive object of enjoyment of the Other because such a reduction entails the disappearance of a separate existence. As a result, every subject actively strives for independence and
65
autonomy. At the same time, however, everyonewhether masculine or feminineaims to fuse with the lost part and be reduced to its passive object. This explains why every subject suffers from separation anxiety as well. The resulting ambivalence is present in every individual as the expression of the two primary drives. Its enactment between two different subjects, whatever their biological sex, is indeed an enactment of a more original problem. For as long as we can fight with our partner, we need not address our inner division. . . .
* * *
By way of conclusion, let us return to the original problem. The tendency towards mastery and the fear of passivity has to do with our anxiety about death. All human activity, sexual or not, is directed against our final disappearance into the unknown, beyond the Symbolic.
NOTES
Julia Kristeva could not, at short notice and due to family reasons, personally attend the conference in Stockholm. Mariam Alizade, president of COWAP, presented a summary of her paper, and the full paper was distributed to all the participants. Due to the circumstances the organizers of the Conference asked Paul Verhaeghe not only to comment on Kristevas paper but also to present his own ideas. [I.M.] 1. The page numbers refer to the original French edition, included in the English translation. 2. For Lacan, see his theory on the mirror stage and on alienation and separation. For the attachment theory, see Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target (2002). 3. But that doesnt stop it from existing, Charcot would have said. 4. For a more detailed discussion, see Verhaeghe (2001), pp. 65133.
REFERENCES
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E., & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. New York: Other Press.
66
PAUL VERHAEGHE
Freud, S. (1895d). Studies on Hysteria. S.E., 2. Freud, S. (1913f). The theme of the three caskets. S.E., 12. Freud, S. (1920g). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E., 18. Freud, S. (1923b). The Ego and The Id. S.E., 19. Freud, S. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. S.E., 23. Lacan, J. (1946). Propos sur la causalit psychique. In: Ecrits (pp. 151 193). Paris: Seuil, 1966. Lacan, J. (1974). Tlvision. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX. Encore (1972 73). In: J. A. Miller (Ed.), On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge. New York: Norton. Plato (1994). The Collected Dialogues. In: E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), Bollingen Series, LXXI (pp. 543544). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Verhaeghe, P. (2001). Beyond Gender. From Subject to Drive. New York: Other Press.
CHAPTER FIVE
The difference between gender and sexual difference

Juliet Mitchell
n Monika Treuts film My Father Is Coming (1990), as he drives along, the hero repeatedly muses about his face in the car mirror. He shows a young woman a photograph: Is that your sister? she asks; closer than that, he replies. Brothers and sisters represent the minimal distance between people that must be preserved if incest is to be avoided. The photograph is not of the heros sister: it is of himself before he had a sex-change operation. I want to suggest that the term gender has come to prominence (at least in the Anglo-Saxon world) even within psychoanalytic discourse because what is being described is not the maximal difference between mothers and fathers but the minimal difference of sibling sexual relations, which themselves are only a shade away from a narcissistic economy in which the other is the self: closer than that. Treuts transgendered hero can stand as an icon of how psychically and physically close siblings can be. I shall argue that sexual differencethe correct term for psychoanalytic understanding of masculinity and femininityimplicates reproduction. Gender, which is now used indiscriminately, has been deployed unwittingly to express a sexuality that is not primarily or predominantly procreative. Sibling relations may 67
68
JULIET MITCHELL
beindeed, in some circumstances, such as Ptolemaic Egypt, must bereproductive, but I contend we should confine the word gender to non-procreative sexuality, to sexuality that is bound up with survival and hence violence. The prevalence of gender as a concept, in my argument, has come about because since the 1960s, dominant sexual modes in the West have been non-reproductive. Though it may seem to be stretching the point, I would include in this observation the new reproductive technologies, which seem to me to be in some ways about gender relations rather than sexual difference. It is not, of course, a case of the reproductive and sexual drive economies being distinct in real lifebut I believe that it will help us to understand a number of phenomena if we separate them analytically. As Freud wrote in another context, in the clinical situation the colours are blurred; after we have made them distinct like a primitive painting for the purposes of analytical understandingwe murder to dissectwe must allow them to merge together again. For Freud, reproduction is impregnated with sexuality because it is the result of channelling the explosiveness of sexuality into oedipal desires and then repressing them. But reproduction within psychoanalytic theoryand more generallyconstantly slips back into an ideology of an asexual dynamic. This asexuality probably arises because (again, in the modern Western world) reproduction is linked to women. Motherseven wives, and women generallyare not seen psychologically as subjects of desire. In the ideology women either have too much sexuality or none at all. The Victorian idyll of woman as asexual mother can be taken as the icon of reproduction. Confining sexual difference to the construction of reproductive relations and gender to the wider category of sexuality must, then, not be taken in an absolute sense. Yet, despite this caution, I believe the distinction is useful in a number of ways, not least because it helps to explain the question Andr Green (1995) addressed to psychoanalysis: What has happened to sexuality? and to return us to sexualitys insistent, if neglected, history. I shall contend that the clinical and theoretical subjugation of sexuality to reproduction is a hidden version of the repudiation of sexuality itself. Such a subjugation, which, Freud argued, was central to each and every deviation from psychoanalysis from Jung onwards, is, of
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GENDER AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
69
course, what is supposed to happen (at least hitherto) in human history: the polymorphously perverse infant must be transformed into the post-oedipal child. (This history overlooks deviants such as Wilhelm Reich. In other words, either we argue that opposition to psychoanalysis is opposition to sexuality, or we ignore the opposition of the psychoanalytic sexual radicals.) What is more, our theory and practice may be moving away from its focus on reproduction and sexual difference towards a concern with gender, but at a time when the notion of gender has itself become etiolated as far as sexuality is concerned. The historian Joan Scott writes of gender as a category of historical analysis; what she writes is: The use of gender emphasises an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but it is not directly determined by sex nor directly determining of sexuality (Scott, 1996). For a psychoanalyst to first substitute gender for sexual difference and then contemplate a notion of gender without sex or sexuality at the centre must be problematicyet that, I believe, is what has happened. In proposing that we reconsider both gender and sexual difference, one of my aims is to prevent us slipping away into psychotherapies that find no key role for sexuality in the construction of the psyche or ones that believe that sexuality is only out there in the actual world of abuse. Siblings show us just how crucial a force sexuality is in a psycho-social dynamics. Robert Stoller, the Californian psychoanalyst, notoriously introduced the distinction between sex as the biological factor and gender as the social contribution to a persons being (Stoller, 1968). Feminist sociologists, such as Ann Oakley (1972) in Britain, and anthropologists, such as Gayle Rubin (1975) in the United States, adopted the distinction. As the distinction entered sociology, the sexuality vanished. However, over recent decades gender has shifted meaning and come also to stand for the relationship between women and men (feminine and masculine; female and male) in any given context and on a par with race: it can thus have both a biological and a sociological dimension; this restores a possible place for sexuality. While I see this as a useful move, I think we need to try to specify gender further and we need, too, to interrogate it in the interests of sexualitynot to let sexuality slip out of the picture again. To do this, it is simpler to
70
JULIET MITCHELL
start with the concept it has largely replaced but which, I argue, should be retained while being distinguished from it: the concept of sexual difference. When Jacques Lacan returned to Freud, it was, in this connection, to emphasize the castration complexthe psychic play of a traumatic prohibition around which sexual difference came to be symbolized. Female and male were both equally subject to the possible loss of the phallus, but differently so. This distinct subjection depends on the future differences between mothers and fathers. In all instances it is sexed reproduction that necessitates psychic sexual differencewhether, as for some theorists, such difference is introduced by God (Ernest Jones) or the biological body or, as for others, it is enjoined by the conditions of human sociality. All children fantasize making and giving birth to babies. How our psyches construct the coming-to-knowledge of the postoedipal child that it takes two different beingsor, rather, two beings whose differences are conceptualized to do thisis the condition of sexual difference. Reproduction, in dominant discourses, is counted on the side of the woman, and the fantasies we hear from patients or observe in children endorse a preoccupation with the mother. If the child is Oedipus, then it will be his mother who is the focus of attention. The repeated claims that Freudian psychoanalysis is phallocentric and patriarchal forget that the preoccupation with motherhood with which it was hoped to counteract patriarchy is, instead, the other side of the same coin. The recent attempt to make the mother not the object of the babys needs and the childs enquiries but, instead, a subject in her own right and to see the task of the psyche as one of subjectsubject interaction corrects the subjectobject of oedipality and pre-oedipality, but only at the expense of taking sexual difference for granted rather than as constructed with difficulty. Where sexual difference is concerned, does not one sex always take the other as its object? Is not that the point? Subject subject interaction, I contend, takes place in the zone of siblinghood where gender difference also belongs. Subjectsubject interaction has long been the focus of feminist analyses, as in Simone de Beauvoirs phenomenological rendition of Hegel. This subjectsubject interaction is now attracting some psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic attention. However, sexual
71
reproduction demands first the attraction and then the overcoming, both in orgasm and in procreativity, of the otherness of the other, so that the otherness of the other turns into we are as one. That the feminine is constituted as in itself an object as a result of the identifications that follow from the absence of the phallus as a condition of the castration complex makes that fact a crucial problem for feminism. There seems to me no intrinsic reason why each sex could not take the other as object in a more egalitarian manner. But that is not my concern here. My point is simply that sexed reproduction demands some conceptualization of sexual difference, which in turn entails both a subjectobject dynamic and heterosexuality. There are other ways of having a child, but not as yet of procreating and giving birth to one. As soon as Freud had discovered and formulated the Oedipus complex, psychoanalytic theory entered the realm of object relations. And as the perspective was from the pre-oedipal or oedipal child, the focus would inevitably become the mother as object. From the very conditions of phallocentricity arose the focus on female sexuality that, it had been hoped, would be its obverse. Clinically we talk about our mothers: the effort to write about fathers is an attempt to right the balance, to bring the reproductive man in as object of our attentions. For this reason it has been male hysteriawhat happens to the boys wish to give birthrather than the female hysteric as a proto-feminist that has interested me. The ego is a body egofemale/male bodies are different, morphologically, hormonally, endocrinally, functionallyalthough, of course, they are very much the same if we compare them with giraffes. Sexual difference is not what leaps to mind when we first look at most animals. However, for humans with regard to sexual difference, the bodily difference is perceived representationally as a reproductive difference. Eggs, sperm, menstruation, menopause, vagina, clitoris, penis, womb, body-hair, voice timbre, pelvic shape, height, weight, and sizewhether or not they directly affect different reproductive rolesare given their meaning in relation to this: they contribute to the fantasies of sexual difference, to the representations of women and men in their difference from each other. So too do clothes, hair-cuts, verbal idioms, and a wide range of other cross-culturally and socially various insignia. Our egos are thus always sexed egos, and they are sexed around reproduction.
72
JULIET MITCHELL
The hysteric who has not taken on board sexual difference, nor that it takes two different sexes to reproduce, is, to that degree, also relatively ego-less, his I a wandering will-o-the-wisp, empty of himself or grandiose. This hysterical mirror stage precedes the symbolization of sexual difference. Sexual difference, reproductive difference, although it may find a resting-place in biology, is no more natural than the ego of the mirror stage: it is constructed as a representation; it is constructed in the mirror of the others desire. Why, asks Freud, when male and female are in all important respects alike, do we do so much to differentiate them? The answer, surely, is in order to mark psychically the sexual difference of sexed reproduction. I would argue, however, that there is no reproductive drive only reproductive fantasies. If reproduction is measured along the line of the woman, sexuality (in the West) is the province of the man. What did Freud mean by saying that there is only one libido and it is a male one, if not that this was so for women as well as men? Psychoanalytic (Freudian) theory is certainly phallocentric, in that Western ideologies equate the male with sexuality and the female with asexual motherhood. Because psychoanalysis has followed culture into subordinating sexuality to reproduction, it has lost sight of its own revolutionary insight into the importance of sexuality; it has necessarily moved from the understanding gained from grasping the psychic symptom as a sexual manifestation to following the interplay of fantasies. The clinical transference, which should represent the impasses produced by fantasies (Lacan, 1982), can become the beall and end-all of therapeutic resolution and theoretical research, to be or not to be married, to have or not to have a baby, the mark of the cure. To restore sexuality to its central place would entail resolving the symptom back into the unconscious representations of the sexual drive that composes it; a large part of this sexual drive is perverse. To re-read The Three Essays on Sexuality (Freud, 1905d) is to be confronted with a paradoxical sensation: the essays thesesin particular the presence of infantile sexualityhave long been completely accepted, yet one is faced with what is still today a brief but revolutionary volume. This is not only because what it argued in 1905 was path-breaking then, but because it still is today: the
73
argument has not now, nor ever in the past, collapsed back into common sense or acceptable ideologiesdespite apparently being accepted, it is as radical as it ever was. Octave Mannoni called The Three Essays the book of the drive (Mannoni, 1968). It is in this book that we can find the lost sexuality of psychoanalysis: a book that starts with the human being as necessarily perverse and puts into question any idea of natural and normal sexual desires, of sexual difference and reproduction. The radical implications of the concept of gender within psychoanalysis should be heir to The Three Essays, for gender does not imply the necessity of genitality nor of a fixed sexual object nor of reproduction. Although gender is deployed in the construction of difference, it is not structured around it. The difference between the sexes to which gender necessarily refers lies outside its framework, thus no explanation of hierarchy is called forthe term applies indifferently to women as to men. Analogously to race, gender produces its own differences; difference is not intrinsic to the concept as it is to sexual difference. Gender is the polymorphously perverse child, grown up. Its morality comes from elsewhere than the subjection of sexuality to reproduction. It comes from the relationship between sexuality and violence in the struggle for psychic survival which at a certain stage is interpreted as dominance. I suggest, then, that the morality of gender has to do not with accepting sexual difference but with the resolution of violence, being able to accept instead of murdering the other who is so like one. This self-same other is both the same as the self in human needs while simultaneously other than oneselflikeness in unlikeness, unlikeness in likeness. In reproductive sexual difference relationships, the other object illusorily offers what the subject has not got; that is not the case with gender. Gender does not revolve around what is constituted as missingsuch as the absent phallusnor implicate its replacement such as its compensation in the baby (the equation baby = phallus). The Three Essays are on the perversions, infantile sexuality, and puberty. There needs to be a fourth to complete the stress on non-reproductive sexuality, a fourth that might have been quite as shocking as the notion of infantile sexuality in its time: the sexuality of the postmenopausal woman. [This was noted early: Helene Deutsch (1947)
74
JULIET MITCHELL
recorded with pleasure a response of Princess Metternich when asked about sex in the elderly woman: You will have to ask someone else, Im only sixty. As with the discovery of infantile sexuality, everybody except the experts has known about it all along.] Since the 1960s reproduction and sexuality have become unlockedFreud once remarked that whoever found the means of achieving this would have accomplished something of untold benefit to mankind. In the Western world there are now very few countries that are replacing their populations through births; the higher the economic success of the woman, the greater the chance of childfree-ness. Where children are wanted, this can be socially detached from heterosexuality, from reproductive age even, partially, from life. This is not quite so biologically, although now reality is nearly in line with fantasy sex and the anus will be able to house the embryo. It is not, I believe, that these social or technological changes play out immediately into psychic life: it is, rather, that there is something latent in psychic life that responds to them, indeed that must have been part of their pre-condition because asexual reproduction is a prevalent fantasy with many versions, in time it can be realized technologically. Judith Butler, the promoter of gender trouble, asks questions that are pointing not so much to something universally radical as to a potentiality of a particular historical time in a very limited geographical place (Butler, 1999):
Is the breakdown of gender binaries . . . so monstrous, so frightening, that it must be held to be definitionally impossible and heuristically precluded from any effort to think gender? [p. viii] [This] text asks, how do non-normative sexual practices call into question the stability of gender as a category of analysis? How do certain sexual practices compel the question: what is a woman, what is a man? [p. xii]
For non-normative I believe we should substitute non-reproductive. More fundamentally, I would argue that we can challenge gender binaries, as Butler suggests, precisely because gender, unlike sexual difference, is not constructed as a binary.
75
A plurality of sexual relationships has been on the agenda since the very onset of second-wave feminism in the 1960s; that was the conclusion to my own first work in this field (Mitchell, 1966). I now believe that the very notion of gender came into being as an expression of this proposed pluralistic programme. However, where we have hitherto looked for a relationship between social change and the psyche along the lines of a very slow alteration in the content of the ego, I would now argue for a much greater interaction between the two spheres.1 At the end of the nineteenth century the patriarch was the most visible social forceFreuds theories of the mind implicated the father. However, subterraneously the period saw the rise of the overwhelming importance of the child and, with it, the mother. It was not only that this social change eventually impacted, some two decades later, on psychoanalytic theory with the so-called mothering of psychoanalysis (Sayers, 1991), it was that the child and its mother were always crucial aspects of psychic fantasy, which became more dominant with changing social practices. These latent psychic factors assisted the social change. So too with the recent use of a recognition of siblings. The point is obvioushowever, it is difficult for any of us to perceive what has not yet emerged. My argument is threefold, my third point being my greatest concern: (1) that the shift from the deployment of the concept of sexual difference to that of gender indicates a move from the dominance of reproductive object-relations, oedipal and pre-oedipalmaternal, to a gamut of polymorphously perverse sexual arrangements; (2) that the previous dominance of reproduction was, in part, responsible for the demise of the determinative role of sexuality within psychoanalysis; and (3) that, although there is always interaction, the perpetuation of the polymorphously perverse, non-reproductive sexuality takes place through lateral, not vertical relationships, starting with siblings in the context always of peers and later of affines. In other words, as the infantmaternal was latent in the heyday of patriarchal psychoanalysis, so the sibling/the lateral has been latent throughout the reproductive (inevitably more matriarchal than patriarchal) period. The evidence and suppression/repression of this can, I think, be noted in work arising from the two world wars.
76
JULIET MITCHELL
What would/will this lateral gender sexuality look like? How will it affect our theory? What follows are some suggestions for clinical research into this question. The advent of a sibling (or awareness of the older other who is so like the emergent infantile subject) produces ecstasy along narcissistic lines and despair occasioned by the sense of annihilation of being displaced/replaced or just not there. The baby, no less than the parent, is entranced by the childs self-sufficient playfulness. But the other child, usually the sibling, delights for its own reasons too. What are the psychic mechanisms involved? Instead of Oedipus Rex we will have Antigone: murderous brothers, a sister, Antigone, who knows the meaning of death, and one, Ismene, who does not. My suggestion of an Antigone complex negotiates the life-and-death conflict of the self and other. It implicates power, violence, love, and hate. Then instead of the fathers no phallus for the mother of the castration complex (and what earlier I have argued is the mothers no, you cannot be pregnant), we have a sister, Antigone, insisting that one must acknowledge two brothers, not just oneeven if they are different from each other and at war, they are equal in death. Instead of the hiatus of latency between Oedipus and puberty (dyphasic sexuality), lateral sexuality is subject to the social/educational enforcement of Antigones law: different but equal. Lateral desire does not involve the symbolization that comes about through the absence of the phallus (or womb): it involves seriality. As a part of a series, girls and boys are equilateralin other words, they are not defined by what is missing. Girls and boys explore what is there, not what is not. There seems to be no use of an intrinsic difference here in the way that marks the social construction of sexual difference for reproduction. Gender sexuality can be realized in transgendering, homosexuality, and heterosexuality. Latency has been noted to be less marked than in earlier historical periods; this may well be because the increasing role of the school in relation to the family privileges lateral and peer relations over vertical childparent ones. The dominance of a lateral peer-group facilitates non-reproductive sexual exploration of all kinds. But the violence that is the response to the danger of death or the subjects annihilation
77
marks the sexuality and may be what establishes the enforcement of male supremacy. Sisters and brothers mark the nuclear point of sameness and difference: is that your sister? Closer than that for the transsexual or transgender but further than that for the affine whom one might marry. At one end of laterality is a minimal differentiation, at the other much greater separation when brothers and sisters love, cherish and protect, kill, rape, or simply lose touch. An Antigone complex is only one aspect of laterality Shakespeares comedies can provide a playground in which we might search for the pleasures of sibling sameness and difference: the joy of the child in the child.
NOTES
This chapter has been adapted from a chapter in J. Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003). 1. In a forthcoming study, Mauthner (2003), claims that sistering contributes to feminine psychology as much as mothering and daughtering. This confirms my argument that the neglect of sibling relations underlies our blindness to this social shift. On the greater interaction of the social and psyche, see my own volume (Mitchell, 1984, Ch. 3); from the outset the neonate takes in the social as well as its own bodily experiences.
REFERENCES
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Tenth Anniversary edition. London: Routledge. Deutsch, H. (1947). The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Vol. II: Motherhood. London: Research Books. Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., 7. Green, A. (1995). Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76 (5): 871883. Lacan, J. (1982). Intervention on transference. In: J. Mitchell & J. Rose (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality and the cole Freudienne (pp. 6173). London: W. W. Norton. Mannoni, O. (1968). Freud and the Unconscious. New York: Pantheon Books.
78
JULIET MITCHELL
Mauthner, M. (2003). Sistering: Power and Change in Female Relationships. London: Palgrave, Macmillan. Mitchell, J. (1966). Women: The longest revolution. In: Women: The Longest Revolution. Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis. London: Virago, 1984. Mitchell, J. (1984). Women: The Longest Revolution. Essays on Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis. London: Virago. Oakley, A. (1972). Sex, Gender and Society. London: Maurice Temple Smith. Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the political economy of sex. In: J. W. Scott (Ed.), Feminism and History (pp. 105151). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Sayers, J. (1991). Mothering Psychoanalysis. London: Hamish Hamilton. Scott, J. W. (1996). Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. In: J. W. Scott (Ed.), Feminism and History (pp. 152180). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stoller, R. (1968). Sex and Gender. London: Hogarth.
CHAPTER SIX
Gender and sexual difference

Colette Chiland
or a full discussion of Juliet Mitchells very stimulating chapter (Chapter 5, this volume), several points would require further clarification and therefore deserve to be developed in much greater detail than is possible within the confines of one chapter; I shall therefore have to put many of these to one side. In reading her chapter, I found myself in complete agreement with certain of her statements and in disagreement with some others. It is not enough, of course, simply to say, I do not agree; we should try to understand what gives rise to this kind of disagreement. I am in complete agreement with Juliet Mitchell when she stresses the importance of sexual difference. I myself lay a great deal of emphasis on this in my book, Le Sexe mne le monde [Sex makes the world go round] (Chiland, 1999), though I would not define sexual difference only with reference to reproductive sexuality, as she does. As far as I am concerned, gender has not replaced sexual difference, nor does the subjectsubject construction lie within the area of gender and the sexual drive (therefore being linked more to the relationship between siblings than to the parentchild relationship).
79
80
COLETTE CHILAND
I have essentially five points that I discuss here: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. the importance of the sexual difference; the dissociation of sexuality from procreation; gender; gender and the sexual difference; what we mean by man and by woman.
The importance of the sexual difference

The importance of sexual difference was dismissed by a some feminists, in part because of the confusion that existed between facts and rights. As regards facts, the recognition of the reality of a particular difference between men and women is unavoidable; to designate it, I use exactly the same phrase as does Juliet Mitchell: sexual difference. But this fact does not and should not imply inequality of rights between men and women; this is the point of theperfectly legitimatestruggle that feminist movements have conducted. My impression, however, is that we have not thought deeply enough about the reasons why, in different cultures and over the centuries, women have allowed themselves to be debased and oppressedand still continue to do so in many placesand why they have consented to their destiny, a destiny that is not a direct consequence of anatomy or biology, but of the social interpretation of these elements. What, then, do we mean by sexual difference? Here, as I have indicated, my own point of view diverges somewhat from Juliet Mitchells. I would say that sexual difference involves not only the role of each partner in procreation (the man impregnates, the woman gives birth and provides milk), but also the position of each of them in actual intercourse (the man penetrates, the woman is penetrated); it involves also, even before intercourse and procreation come into the picture, the experience of ones body, the psychosexual cycle of life. All of this has to do with the genitals, but in a way that appears more complicated than at first glanceand than what used to be the case in the past: we must, after all, have a thought for the intersexed, transsexuals, and paraplegics, for ex-
GENDER AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
81
ample. It is not the actual performance of intercourse and subsequent fertility that characterizes a man or a woman, but the possibility or potentiality of thesethough it is true that some societies do demand actual performance: an unmarried woman is not considered to be a proper woman, a sterile man or woman is not considered to be a proper man or woman, a man without sons is not considered to be a proper man, and so on. Though the sexual difference is indeed based on bodily characteristics, it is always interpreted by the society in which we live. A womans experience of her body is obviously a little more complicated than the fact of not having a penis. Many different experiences have to be lived through and accepted, and there are marked caesuras: the menarche, menses, defloration, pregnancy and childbirth, and, finally, the menopausethe keynote sign in all of these stages being blood: from when it first appears to the day when it ceases to flow. Menstrual blood is tremendously important: the female genitals are interpreted in terms of a wound (we have only to look at the wall-paintings in prehistoric caves); menstrual blood is seen as dirty and dangerous, yet at the same time powerful because of its connection with fertility; women are ashamed and feel guilty, and this leaves the way open to all kinds of submissiveness. For indeed, a Baruya woman has merely to see blood start to flow between her thighs for her to hold her tongue and mutely consent to whatever economic, political, and psychological oppression she may be subjected (Godelier, 1982, p. 353; 1986, p. 233). There are no such occurrences in the sexual life of men; their first ejaculations are not a particularly dramatic event. Consequently, society creates rites of passage for men; these may at times be cruel in the extreme, for men have to prove their strength; they have to cut themselves off from the feminine world in which their mothers brought them up as young boys and expel any trace of femininity that they may still be carrying within.
The dissociation between sexuality and procreation

I have the feeling that it is the question of the dissociation between sexuality and procreation that leads Juliet Mitchell to link, on the one hand, sexual difference with procreation, the parents, and the
82
COLETTE CHILAND
Oedipus complex and, on the other, gender with the sexual drive and the relationship with siblings. In fact, among mammals, the dissociation between sexuality and procreation is specific to human beings, given the disappearance of oestrus (the period during which fertilization is possible) as a prerequisite for copulation. That is one reason why some colleagues maintain that all human sexuality is perverse in nature: pleasure replaces procreation as its aim. Socially and psychologically, however, this dissociation raises various problems. There is no natural expression of drives in human beings; everything is regulated by society: human beings marchent la reprsentation [function by representation], wrote Maurice Godelier. We are frightened by the sheer power of our drives. It is for this reason that religion has had such an enormous impact; in the Christian world, sexuality is suffused with guilt, unless its primary aim happens to be procreation. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud (1905d) affirmed the existence of infantile sexuality, which has no connection with procreation, and integrated perverse sexuality within the wider domain of human sexuality. It is not only the brothersister relationship that has no connection with procreation, it is the whole of infantile sexuality. For Freud, children are polymorphously perverse, because their erotogenic zones are not under the primacy of the genital zone and the relationship with the object. But perverse children stricto sensu do exist, even though Freud made no mention of them; I suggest as an example a six-year-old boy who forced little girls to suck his penis in the stairway of the apartment block where he lived. According to Freud, the perverse adult is fixated at or regresses to infantile sexuality and can only reach orgasm by inflexible and exclusive acts that have little to do with normal adult sexual practice. I am using the term normal to designate the final stage of sexual development: union of the genitals with the aim of procreation. Other authors have linked perversion with the seduction of a son by his mother and his humiliation because of his impotency (Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, throughout her works), or with the humiliation of the boy as a male, with a consequent threat to his gender identity (Robert Stoller, throughout his works).
83
The brother-and-sister relationship does not represent the atom of kinship as defined by Lvi-Strauss. Lvi-Strausss atom of kinship consists of a man, his wife, and their sonan atom that combines kinship by descent and kinship by marriage. All of this authors descriptions focus on the male ego, perhaps because he affirms that men exchange women and not the converse; all rules as regards prohibited categories of marriage are described in terms of a mans choice of woman, never the other way around. I know of only one author who defines a family atom as a man, his wife, and their son and daughter, thus ensuring the reproduction of the species and the relationship with the universe: Bernard Saladin dAnglure (1985), who studied the Inuit and the importance they attach to the fact of having children of both sexes. This is linked to the importance of the brothersister pair in Inuit mythology (p. 141).
Gender
Gender was introduced as a concept in 1955 by John Moneynot by Stoller, as is often claimedwhen he wrote about gender roles in his study of the intersexed (Money, Hampson, & Hampson, 1955). Children have an ingrained feeling that they belong to the sex in which they have been reared. For example, mutatis mutandis, a child with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, XX chromosomes, an oversized clitoris, ovaries, and womb will, in fact, feel him- or herself to be a girl or a boy depending on his or her assigned sex; a child without a penis or with a micropenis and XY chromosomes will still feel him- or herself to be a boy or a girl, depending on his or her assigned sex. The crucial factor is the parents conviction as regards their infants sex, because they will bring him or her up in accordance with these innermost feelings. Traditionally, societies assigned sex on the basis of the appearance of the external genitalia. The assignment proposed by Money was based on the feasibility of plausible genitals; if I may say so though the precise reference escapes mesomeone once wrote something about a hole being easier to make than a pole. . . . If the parents have reared their child in the firm belief that he or she is a boy or, mutatis mutandis, a girl, that assigned sex is more
84
COLETTE CHILAND
important than biological givens. Where there is conflict between biological data and psychological forces, the latter may well prove stronger than the biological forces. After gender role appeared gender identity, a term first used by Evelyn Hooker, according to Money (1985); then came the division between sex and gender due to Stoller, again according to Money (1985). The concept of core gender identity was coined by Stoller and that of gender role identity by Ovesey and Person (1973). Robert Stollers two volumes entitled Sex and Gender (1968, 1975) are well known. Core gender identity is the feeling of being a male or a female (or a hermaphrodite, in rare cases), while gender identity is the feeling of being masculine or feminine. Sex is biological, gender is social and psychological. But, for Stoller, gender is not entirely distinct from sex. Masculinity and femininity are very difficult to define because they do not exist per sethey are culture-dependent, interpretations of maleness and femaleness (Stoller, 1980). Stollers study of transsexualism (a word coined by Harry Benjamin in 1953) followed on from his study of the intersexed. Gender holds a tremendous attraction for sociologists and for feminists, though they have gone beyond what was said by Money, Stoller, and others, by claiming that gender is wholly a creation of society. We may object that had the sexes not existed, society would not have invented genders; in fact, it did not invent genders: it gave arbitrary meanings to the sexesit invented grammatical gender, which is not strictly connected with sex and does not exist in every language (Corbett, 1991). Finally, sex itself came to be considered as an invention of society, because all our thinking about sex is filtered through social representations. Some go as far as to speak of biological gender, though this nullifies the original sense of the term gender. I prefer to speak, in addition to biological sex, of psychological sex, and societal or social sex (birth certificates in France specify sexe fminin or sexe masculinthat is, a reference to sex, not to gender), and I support the struggle for sexual equality. It can be seen that, instead of clarification, the idea of gender may generate confusion. Many of those who use the notion of gender are involved in the struggle against the dichotomy between the sexes as source of
85
discrimination; they are concerned also by issues such as the categorization of sexual orientation. I would surmisewithout any certainty, of coursethat Juliet Mitchell would tend to see in the sibling relationship, with its non-reproductive sexuality, the root of sexual variations (i.e. any kind of sexuality that is not heterosexuality). For me it is strange to think of the Oedipus complex as not related to the sexual drive. In general, the child feels excluded from the relationship between the parents, a relationship in which he or she wants to occupy one and the other position. For Freud, bisexuality, defined as involving both homosexual and heterosexual impulses, was related to this complete form of the Oedipus complex. For the person who refuses his or her gender, the way the parents experience both their sexed identity (gender identity) and their sexuality as a couple is important.
Gender and the sexual difference

I would argue that gender as such does not express any form of sexuality, reproductive or not. It is an expression of being. I find it important also to distinguish between sexed, which deals with sex differences, and sexual, which deals with sexuality. In my view there exists a sexed identity (gender identity), but it is problematic to affirm the existence of sexual identity, either hetero- or homo- or bisexual. Juliet Mitchell claims that the ego is always sexed, and is sexed as regards sexuality. I would argue that the self is always sexed, and sexed as regards narcissism. By self and identity I mean, following Winnicott (1958, p. 248): the individual human beings continuity of being. A childs sex is in the mind of his or her parents before he or she becomes aware of it; later, children interpret the experience they have of their body through the conscious and unconscious messages communicated by their parents. This is the register of narcissism and its development. Parents contribute to the development of healthy or pathological narcissism. I do not think, as Juliet Mitchell suggests, that gender is heir to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It is, rather, heir to cultural anthropology, as expressed in Margaret Meads seminal work, Male and Female: A Study of Sexes in a Changing World (1948). I wonder
86
COLETTE CHILAND
why that book is not referred to more often. Without employing the word gender, Mead shows that every society has a concept of how males and females should feel and behave and how, through the educative and other child-raising procedures it sets up, it shapes children in such a way that they become the men and women that society expects. Every behaviour and psychological feature has been labelled masculine in one culture and feminine in another, with the exception of war and motherhood; but even in these two cases, women have sometimes gone to war, and men have practiced the couvade, an imitation of pregnancy and childbirth. Freud did not pay much attention to social aspectsthey were merely conventional, he arguednor to psychological traits, since they were subject to individual variation. He made no distinction between heredity and inheritance, believing that acquired characters were in fact inherited. Feminine and masculine were defined by the characteristics of sexual cells and organs: the spermatozoid is active, the ovule is motionless and passive. Little girls were boys until puberty because they masturbated a masculine organ, the clitoris, considered by Freud to be an abortive penis. He was not helped by the fact that there is only one word in German for sex and gender, Geschlecht, and one adjective for male and masculine, mnnlich, just as for female and feminine, weiblich (the task of the translator into English or French is difficult: the concepts have to be interpreted, not simply translated). Also, the notion of personal identity was not used by Freud. I would not say that gender has replaced sexual difference. Gender as a social construct was first distinguished from sex as a biological given and now tends to replace sex, at least outside the field of psychoanalysis; sex also is now seen as a social construct. Within psychoanalysis, in object-relations theory, the search for the object replaced pleasure-seeking; then drives and instincts disappeared in relational psychoanalysis. In another context, the simple dichotomy between two sexes or two genders was called into question: hence the introduction of a third sex/gender. Nowadays the dichotomy between sex and gender is also being questioned (Herdt, 1994):
Of course, there are conceptual dangers involved in breaking precipitously with the past convention of distinguishing arbi-
87
trarily between sex (as biology and nature) and gender (as culture and nurture). However, we aim in this volume to renew the study of sexual and gender variation across time and space, critically looking at the pitfalls of continuing to objectify the dichotomy of sex and gender, which is probably culturally bound and scientifically misleading. [p. 21]
And, finally, transgenderism attempts to suppress gender, the dichotomy, and any categorization whatsoever. Let us take transsexualism as an example of another way of dealing with sexual difference. People may ask for hormonal and surgical sex reassignment: some are transvestites, others prostitutes, and so on. I will consider those whose main problem relates to their identity. They acknowledge the fact of a sexual difference and are ready to accept it . . . but over the sex border, as Georgina Turtle (1963) saidthat is, on condition that they be allowed to belong to the other sex. They acknowledge the sex of their body, but they claim that it is not their sex; their sex is that of their mind and their soul. They want the surgeon to give them their true body. This is a denial of reality, for it is impossible to obtain the true body or the true genitalia of the other sex. Nevertheless, for these individuals, their neo-sex (by this I mean the reconstructed genitals) is the proof of the truth of their discourse when they say that they belong to the other sex. They seem to have forgotten (sometimes they say they want to forget) the split that is operating here as regards their childhood, which they lived through as members of the abhorred sex. I have not seen Monika Treuts film. But, in my experience, no transsexual reveals anything of him/herself in the initial sex, the one assigned at birth (in this specific instance, female). Either they show photos of themselves proving that they have always been a member of their present sex, the target sex (in this case, a boy or man), or they destroy the hated photos that show them as members of the sex to which they refuse to belong. In the case of a female-to-male transsexual, the young man would hardly describe himself as closer than a sister; the female figure (himself as he was in the past) is hatedit is as though she had never existed, as though she were a complete stranger living in his body, as Domenico Di Ceglie and David Freedman (1998) put it.
88
COLETTE CHILAND
The transsexual puts us in a very difficult position. Transsexualism is still an enigma. It has been argued that the transsexual suffers from having a female brain in a male body (or the converse, as the case may be), because of the structure of a small nucleus such as the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, around 2 mm3, the development of which may have been influenced by prenatal hormones (the role of this structure is known in the behaviour of rats, but not in that of human beings, and of course we know nothing of the gender identity of rats). So the transsexual is an intersexed person who ought not to feel guilty for anything that has happened. If psychopathogenesis is evoked, transsexuals experience it as an accusation; they are not at all ready to explore what may be going on in their minds; what they want is a change of body. If parents consult for their young child who refuses his/her assigned identity without there being any sign of an intersex condition, we see changes occurring as the work we do with the child and his/her parents progresses. Thus gender identity disorder may be the consequence of problems in the parentchild relationship early on in life (only in rare cases is there evidence of siblings playing a role in gender identity disorder). There should be no more guilt attached to early psychological influences than to disharmony between the various biological components of the body. Nevertheless, transsexuals tend to be rejected, just as, in former times, the intersexed found themselves rejected.
What do we mean by man and by woman

Once upon a time, I was satisfied with the following definitions: a man is a male who, accepting himself as masculine and wanting to be recognized as such, broadly conforms to the masculine stereotypes of the culture of which he is part; a woman is a female who, accepting herself as feminine and wanting to be recognized as such, broadly conforms to the stereotypes of the culture of which she is part. I took for granted the fact that there were males and females, without the idea of betwixt and between ever crossing my mind; I wanted simply to emphasize that refusal of ones
89
assigned sex was different from the wish to fight the social prejudices and inequalities of ones culture. But the problems of the intersexed (1.7 % of the population) are such that we can no longer avoid the question: what do we mean by male and female? In clear-cut cases there is no problem, because every individual fits the criteria: chromosomes, gonads, internal organs, appropriate hormone level, sensitivity to hormones, genitals, secondary characteristics. But what about people who feel themselves to be men (or women) without being able to satisfy the requirements of the sexual difference? They feel themselves to be men without a penis, they cannot penetrate women, and they are sterile. Or they feel themselves to be women with no ovaries, womb, periods, fertility, or vaginathough, as Stoller (1968, second ed., 1974, p. 51n) wrote: If Freud had worked with a woman without a vagina, I think he would have seen that the only thing a woman wants more than a penis is a vagina. It is only when a woman has normal genitalia that she can afford the luxury of wishing she had a penis. To come back to transsexuals (who number anything from 1 out of 30,000 to 1 out of 1,000,000 in the general population). Had they remained within their initial sex, they could have led the perfectly ordinary life of a man or a woman (as the case may be). Surgery can give them the appearance of a changed body, but not the real body of the other sex. They identify with the cultural values of their target sex. Is it enough to be a man or a woman, a father or a mother (adoption, insemination by donor)? I am simply raising the question, with no pretence at having found the answer. Certainly we need another kind of treatmentother, that is, than hormonal and surgical sex reassignment. But to change what is in the mindwhich is what some patients hope for, since complete physical change is impossibleis still to invent (Chiland, 1997a, 1997b, 2000). In the meantime, are they to be condemned to live in a no mans/no womans land? They are, after all, human beings. We are tossed about like some frail skiff in a storm, as we oscillate between the desire for openness and the need, for the sake of mental well-beingour own as well as that of other peopleto hold on to what I call in French la boussole du sexe [the sex
90
COLETTE CHILAND
compass]: in other words, acknowledgement and acceptance of the sexual difference.
NOTE
Translation from the French revised by David Alcorn.
REFERENCES
Benjamin, H. (1953). Transvestism and transsexualism. International Journal of Sexology, 7 (1): 1214. Chiland, C. (1997a). Changer de sexe. Paris, Odile Jacob. English edition: Transsexualism: Illusion and Reality (trans. Philip Slotkin). London: Continuum & Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Chiland, C. (Ed.) (1997b). Approche psychothrapique du transsexualisme. Perspectives Psy, 36 (4): 256296; 36 (5): 388397. Chiland, C. (1999). Le sexe mne le monde. Paris: Calmann-Lvy. Chiland, C. (2000). The psychoanalyst and the transsexual patient. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 81 (1): 2135. Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Di Ceglie, D., & Freedman, D. (Eds.) (1998). A Stranger in My Own Body. Atypical Gender Identity Development and Mental Health. London: Karnac Books. Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., 7. Godelier, M. (1982). La production des Grands Hommes. Pouvoir et domination masculine chez les Baruya de Nouvelle-Guine. Paris: Fayard. English edition: The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya (trans. R. Swyer). Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Herdt, G. (Ed.) (1994). Third Sex, Third Gender, Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. New York: Zone Books. Mead, M. (1948). Male and Female: A Study of Sexes in a Changing World. New York: William Morrow. Money, J. (1985). The conceptual neutering of gender and the criminalization of sex. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 14 (3): 279290.
91
Money, J., Hampson, J. G., & Hampson, J. L. (1955). Hermaphroditism: Recommendations concerning assignment of sex, change of sex, and psychologic management. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 97: 284300. Ovesey, L., & Person, E. (1973). Gender identity and sexual psychopathology in men: A psychodynamic analysis of homosexuality, transsexualism, and transvestism. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 1 (1): 5372. Saladin dAnglure, B. (1985). Du projet PAR.AD.I au sexe des anges: Notes et dbats autour dun troisime sexe. Anthropologie et Socits, 9 (3): 139176. Stoller, R. J. (1968). Sex and Gender, Vol. 1: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity. New York: Science House; second edition, New York: Jason Aronson, 1974. Stoller, R. J. (1975). Sex and Gender, Vol. 2: The Transsexual Experiment. London: Hogarth Press. Stoller, R. J. (1980). Femininity. In: M. Kirkpatrick, Women in Context: Womens Sexual Development (pp. 127145). New York: Plenum. Turtle, G. (1963). Over the Sex Border: London: Gollancz. Winnicott, D. W. (1958). Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma. Collected Papers, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 243 254). London: Tavistock.
CHAPTER SEVEN
From femininity to finitude: Freud, Lacan, and feminism, again

Toril Moi
or a long time I used to think that feminists ought to choose Lacans femininity theory over Freuds. Although I consider Freud the greater thinker, his eternal harping on penis envy and motherhood as the solution to the problem of femininity struck me as intellectually wrongheaded, and misogynist too. In a passage that I particularly dislike, Freud claims that a woman of about thirty
often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. . . . Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influenceas though, indeed, the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. [Freud, 1933a, pp. 134135]
These words are terrifying. Freud appears genuinely to believe that at the age of thirty these women will never change.1 Their lives are deprived of transcendence, Simone de Beauvoir would have said, for she thought of the future as the horizon towards which all 93
94
TORIL MOI
human beings constantly reach. On this view, it is because the future is open, because we live in time, that human existence is a continuous becoming and not a fixed essence. This continuous becoming only stops at death. Deprived of a future, these rigid, unchanging women of thirty are the living dead, the Nosferatus of the soul. No wonder Freud finds them frightening. Compared to this, Lacan seemed positively upbeat. For him, femininity is a position constructed in language, a position that can be taken up by men as well as women. Here, I thought, there was more of a promise of freedom for women. Moreover, I have always felt particularly constricted by essentialist theories about womens nature: if the difference between Freud and Lacan was that Freuds femininity theory was essentialist whereas Lacans was constructionist, I knew which one I preferred. Over the years, however, I came to change my mindnot about Freuds theories about women, but about their relative merits compared to those of Lacan. Reading Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom the concrete, living body is a historically embedded situation, constantly created through interactions with others and the world, I came to see that Freuds general theory about the relationship between the body and sexed subjectivity (as opposed to his specific theory of womens difference) was not so different from theirs, that he, too, thought of the body as concrete, historical, and open to change. In such theories the opposition between essence and construction does not apply.2 Lacans famous linguistic turn, on the other hand, transforms the body into an abstract cipher, a purely idealist construct. Lacan does not explicitly reject Freuds theory about the way in which psychosexual subjectivity is developed in relation to the persons sexed and gendered body. Lacans work still presupposes that theory. Yet Lacan never really engages with this aspect of Freuds thought, and as he moves towards post-Saussurean linguistics, the concrete, living body is increasingly left unmentioned. This is a pity, for Freuds understanding of the body and subjectivity is promising material for feminists. (In my view, Beauvoirs analysis of how one becomes a woman draws on a very similar understanding of the body.3) When Freud himself tries to theorize women, however, the results are pitiful. He is, for example, mistaken about penis envy, clitoral and vaginal pleasure, motherhood as a com-
FROM FEMININITY TO FINITUDE
95
pensation for penis envy, womens general preference for sons over daughters, the unchangeability of women of thirty, and about much more too. (Is it really true, for example, that women have a less punitive superego than men?4) At the same time as I was reading Freud with Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty, I was also studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell. Their understanding of language and meaning made the post-Saussurean view of language that underpins Lacans theory appear flawed. I also came to feel increasingly uneasy about the opposition between construction and essence that had pushed me towards Lacan in the first place.5 Soon I reached the point where I could no longer understand something that had once seemed luminously clear: namely, exactly what it means to say that somethingfemininity, for exampleis outside language, or beyond the phallus. In this situation, the old feminist accusations against psychoanalysis returned to haunt me. Castration, in particular, has always been particularly troublesome to feminists. Women are castrated. Femininity is an effect of castration (often euphemistically renamed lack), woman is a void, a nothingness. Why would women have anything to do with a theory that makes such claims? Of course, the counterarguments instantly come to mind: dont worry, we are all castrated; femininity is nothing but a sliding signifier that can attach itself to any body. Yes, of course. But although we are all castrated, all marked by lack, women somehow come across as more castrated than men, just as the signifier of femininity gets attached to female bodies far more often than to male ones. And why are women, but not men, exhorted to be, remain, become feminine? If women fail to conform to the theorists particular picture of femininity, why is this always presented as a problem for women, but not for the theory? In short: the old certainties were gone. It was time to return to Freud and Lacan, yet again. This essay is the result of that rereading. But why reread Freud and Lacan on femininity today? The great majority of practicing analysts have long since abandoned classical Freudian and Lacanian femininity theories and quite rightly insist that they do not analyse women with such notions in mind. Some analysts, not least in France, nevertheless remain inspired by Lacans understanding of sexual difference. And even
96
TORIL MOI
analysts who have no time for Lacan may be interested in seeing what insights a new reading of some classic psychoanalytic texts will yield. In contemporary cultural and literary theory the situation is different. In these fields Lacans concepts of castration and femininity, as well as Lacanian ideas about what is or is not outside language, are still central, and every year all over the world professors teach Lacans texts on femininity to new generations of students.6 In this article I focus mostly on Lacan. But since Lacans theory is based on a close reading of Freud, before turning to the relationship between the penis and the phallus (yet again), I start by taking a brief look at some aspects of Freuds understanding of femininity that are not so frequently discussed. I pay special attention to Lacans post-Saussurean linguistic turn. I show that when the phallus becomes a signifier, an already dubious theory of femininity as an effect of castration is wedded to a theory that postulates the existence of a realm outside language, to which femininity and its metaphysical ghost, jouissance, are relegated. An important part of my argument is that Lacans post-Saussurean linguistics encounters serious challenges from recent interpretations of Wittgensteins philosophy of language. Then I show that the Lacanian concept of castration slides between three different definitions, in ways that make it both muddled and sexist. Finally, I suggest that we can become clearer on what work the concept of castration can and cannot do for us if we reconsider it in the light of a different conceptnamely, finitude. I take this concept from Cavell but revise it in the light of work by women analysts such as Joyce McDougall and Colette Chiland. This essay is based on the assumption that psychoanalysis does not need a theory of femininity at all. (Feminism does not need one either, but there is no space for that discussion here.) Freuds quest for the riddle of femininity is never matched by a similar quest for the riddle of masculinity. Both Freud and Lacan appear to think that psychoanalytic theory can get along fine without a theory of masculinity. In this way, femininity and sexual difference come across as synonymous terms. Men become the norm, women the problem to be explained; men embody humanity, women remain imprisoned in their feminine difference. Psychoanalysis does not need such a theory of sexual difference. What it does need is a
97
new understanding of the wide range of different ways of becoming a woman in the world.7 My critique of femininity theory does not presuppose a return to any kind of equality theory.8 As Beauvoir herself was the first to stress: to encounter the world in a female body is simply not the same thing as to encounter it in a male body. We note, for example, that when a man is described as feminine, whether by femininity theorists or by anyone else, the meaning of the word is no longer exactly the same as when a woman is described as feminine. We need more historically specific, more situated, and far more clearly defined accounts of womens lived experience and womens subjectivity than femininity theories can produce.9 To reject femininity theory, then, is not to reject the fact of sexual difference. It is to reject theories that equate femininity and sexual difference, as if women were the only bearers of sex. Femininity theories inevitably and relentlessly turn women into the other. A final introductory point: This is not an essay on the relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis in general. To develop the history and theory of that complex interaction would require a book, not just one essay. I take for granted that psychoanalysis has been and will remain an immensely useful theory for feminism. Psychoanalysis has given us a whole series of concepts that are invaluable to feminists and other cultural critics: the unconscious, desire, fantasy, identification, projection, transference, countertransference, alienation, narcissismthe list could continue for a long time. This essay is not about those concepts.10 The task I have set myself here is simply this: to work out a critique of two major psychoanalytic conceptsfemininity and castrationthrough a rereading of some fundamental texts by Freud and Lacan. I bring to bear on these texts a perspective informed by Beauvoir and Wittgenstein. As far as I know, this has not been done before.
Freud: the riddle of femininity

Freud recognized that he spoke about femininity in ways that did not always sound friendly to women.11 The most obvious reason for his churlishness is his failure to grasp the cultural and historical specificity of his own insights. Freud writes as if the women in
98
TORIL MOI
analysis with him embodied eternal femininity. Yet any clearheaded reading of his descriptions of women will find massive evidence of the time-bound nature of his views.12 His remark about the women of thirty is just one example. Of course, Freud was unhappy about the sorry psychological state of women of thirty. As therapists we lament this state of things, he writes (Freud, 1933a, p. 135). Yetand this is what I find hard to forgivehe is as unable to envisage change as the neurotic women he describes. Just as they horrify him by their rigidity, Freud horrifies me. When he writes that the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of these women, he is at once perceptive and blind. Yes, I want to say: these women are paying the price for having to play the part of normal women in a rigidly (hetero)sexist society. But it is their situation, not the intrinsic demands of their reproductive and sexual tasks, that has frozen their psyche.13 If Freud had acknowledged that he was talking about socially oppressed women in a historically specific situation, then he would surely have hesitated to generalize about some mysterious entity called femininity that necessarily exhausts women by the time they are out of their twenties. We need to distinguish between Freuds general understanding of psychosexual development and his theory of femininity. The idea, for example, that childrens discovery of bodily sexual differences is crucial to their development of a sexed and gendered identity does not have to lead straight to the claim that when a little girl discovers that her brother has a penis, then she will instantly feel inferior. Yet that is the claim that grounds the whole theory of castration and lack for Freud. One can object to this particular story without objecting to a more nuanced, historically and culturally specific account of the many different psychosexual options available to little girls when they discover that there are at least two sexes and that their own sex is only one of them. To reject this particular story is not to reject psychoanalysis, for nondogmatic psychoanalysts, whether feminist or not, have tried to develop a better story ever since Freud first launched his. Many feminists have tried to rescue Freuds story by saying that what girls discover is not the superiority of the penis, but the social inferiority of their own sex.14 But even this presupposes too much
99
homogeneity in culture and among women, for some girls grow up in families or in subcultures dominated by women. The discovery of sexual difference and the discovery of sexism are not necessarily simultaneous, and they certainly cannot always be summed up under the heading of lack or castration. A point that has not generally been noticed is that in so far as Freuds theory of femininity is based on a story of what all girls must feel when they discover anatomical sexual difference, it actually runs counter to his own understanding of the nature of psychoanalytic inquiry. This becomes clear if we look at the 1920 essay Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. In this essay Freud tries to find out why a specific young woman became a lesbian. Putting together quite a plausible narrative, he stresses the girls strong oedipal desire for her father, which suffered a bitter blow at the age of 16 when the young womans mother gave birth to her third brother. Freud then stresses that he would never claim that any girl in the same situation was bound to become a lesbian:
So long as we trace the development from its final outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to the final result, then we no longer get the impression of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have been otherwise determined. We notice at once that there might have been another result, and that we might have been just as well able to understand and explain the latter. The synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis; in other words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the result. [Freud, 1920a, p. 167]
To use metaphors occasionally used by Freud: the analyst is like a detective or an archaeologist: piecing together the analytic evidence, she is an expert at unravelling what has happened, not at predicting what will happen. (This makes analysis more like literary criticism and less like the social and natural sciences than Freud probably wanted to admit.) Insofar as femininity theory tells a story about what is bound to happen when a little girl discovers that she does not have a penis, it is a troubled attempt at synthesis and prediction, with predictably flawed results.
100
TORIL MOI
To be fair, Freud openly admitted that his femininity theory gave him trouble. Yet his most explicit admission of trouble does not refer to castration (on the contrary, as we shall see, his last word on the matter of femininity reaffirms the belief in castration as the bedrock of femininity), but to an earlier idea, first formulated in 1905 in Three Essays on Sexuality, that femininity was passivity. In a footnote added to the text in 1915, Freud writes: Masculine and feminine are used sometimes in the sense of activity and passivity, sometimes in a biological, and sometimes, again, in a sociological sense. The first of these three meanings is the essential one and the most serviceable in psychoanalysis (Freud, 1905d, p. 219). The obvious counterargument is that if Freud wants to speak of passivity, why cant he just do so? Why does he need to claim that femininity is synonymous with passivity, particularly when this has the unfortunate side-effect of implying that all women are passive and that no man is? Freud saw the force of the objection, for in the same footnote he writes: Every individual . . . displays a mixture of the charactertraits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character-traits tally with his biological ones (Freud, 1905d, p. 220). (This concession inspired many theories concerning bisexuality, a fact he later explicitly deplores, as we shall see.) But the concession does not clarify the matter. Rather, confusion now sets in. For if men and women do not display unmixed masculinity and femininity, how can we tell what qualities belong to either sex? If I see a bit of passive behaviour, how am I supposed to know that it is feminine even if it occurs in a man? Isnt the sex of the person in question, after all, the bedrock on which Freuds adjudications of femininity or masculinity rest? Or, to put it differently: on what grounds does Freud decide that the most fundamental meaning of femininity is passivity? Why is this not simply an arbitrary metaphor determined not by scientific insight but by sexist ideology? Despite his own misgivings, Freud nevertheless stuck to the theory of femininity as passivity for almost 20 years. Perhaps it had something to do with his steadfast conviction that women had to give up active clitoral pleasure for passive vaginal pleasure if they were to become fully feminine. However that may be, in the
101
1933 essay on femininity that contains the distressing passage on women of thirty, Freud finally acknowledged the force of the objection:
Even in the sphere of human sexual life you soon see how inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with activity and feminine with passivity. . . . Women can display great activity in various directions, men are not able to live in company with their own kind unless they develop a large amount of passive adaptability. If you now tell me that these facts go to prove precisely that both men and women are bisexual in the psychological sense, I shall conclude that you have decided in your own minds to make active coincide with masculine and passive with feminine. But I advise you against it. It seems to me to serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge. [Freud, 1933a, p. 115]
This is a strong indictment of his own previous theory. Yet Freud does not conclude that he should give up defining femininity. It is as if some picture of how things must be held Freud captive, forcing him to produce an account of femininity that did not correspond to the full range of his own analytic and theoretical insights.15 The Freudian quest for femininity is fuelled by the idea that all women simply must be psychologically different from all men. This difference is imagined to be something like an entity, a new element to be uncovered, analysed, and described by intrepid discoverers. We must conclude, Freud writes, that what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of (Freud, 1933a, p. 114). This unknown characteristic is the mysterious riddle of femininity (p. 116), the Holy Grail of psychoanalytic inquiry.16 But must we imagine femininity as a thing or a quality? Here I have reached the same terrain as Stanley Cavell, who notes that we have yet to determine how it is that the question of sexual difference turns into a question of some property that men are said to have that women lack, or perhaps vice versaa development that helps to keep us locked into a compulsive uncertainty about whether we wish to affirm or to deny difference between men and women (Cavell, 1996, p. 98). Simone de Beauvoir registers the same uncertainty as the experience of being offered an impossible
102
TORIL MOI
choice between being imprisoned in her sexed subjectivity or of being forced to repress it entirely.17 Freuds picture makes him believe that without a theory that explains womens difference, psychoanalysis is not complete. Yet psychoanalysts have never set off on a quest for the key to the riddle of masculinity. Freuds male patients are studied as cases of obsession, hysteria, sadism, or masochism, not as cases of more or less stunted masculinity, and they are never said to be feminine if, say, they choose not to have children. For Freud, to speak of sexual difference is to speak of femininity, and vice versa. Men are human beings, women are sexed; masculinity is universal, femininity particular. In The Second Sex Beauvoir ironically sums up the attitude: Just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: there we have specific circumstances that imprison her in her subjectivity; one often says that she thinks with her glands (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xxi18). The quest for femininity seriously damages the credibility of psychoanalysis.19 Descartes thought that the pineal gland was the site of the soul (or, to be specific, the place where the soul encounters the body). A century ago biologists were still trying to isolate the vital force [lan vital]. Just as philosophy has long since given up trying to pinpoint the soul, biologists have given up looking for a single essence to explain all biological mechanisms. It is time to give up the fantasy of finding the key to the riddle of femininity. Women are not sphinxes. Or, rather: they are no more and no less sphinxlike than men. There is no riddle to solve.
The phallus and the penis: bodies, norms, and symbols in Lacan
Since Lacanian theory defines femininity as a specific relationship to the phallus, no discussion of femininity in Lacan can afford to overlook what he has to say about this contested symbol. The first thing to note is that all who approach Lacan are ritually warned not to confuse penis and phallus.20 Feminists are usually singled out as particularly obtuse in this respect. Even the otherwise sensible
103
Joyce McDougall cannot resist a cheap shot: [T]he word phallus is often used indiscriminately in English to mean penis. Feminist writers engaged in detecting and denouncing denigratory attitudes towards women fulminate against the use of the word phallus. That they equate penis and phallus suggests, paradoxically, a hidden phallo-centric attitude on their part! (McDougall, 1995, p. 6). There appears to be a little psychoanalytic tradition here, for Freud too enjoyed making jokes at the expense of feminists who persist in asking for equal rights, as if they had not noticed the obvious morphological differences between the sexes.21 The taboo on confusing phallus and penis stems from Lacans own writing. In his famous 1958 essay The Meaning of the Phallus, Lacan insists that anyone can take up the symbolic positions labelled masculine and feminine: [The clinical facts] go to show that the relation of the subject to the phallus is set up regardless of the anatomical difference between the sexes (Lacan, 1958, p. 76). The word regardless [sans gard ]22 is a strong one. It has usually been taken to mean that anatomical configuration has absolutely nothing to do with symbolic position, or, in other words, that the relationship between phallus and body is arbitrary. This view has been particularly appealing to feminists looking for an anti-essentialist theory of sexual difference. But is it true? Does this interpretation find support in Lacans own text? And what about the more fundamental objection, which anyone who has ever taught Lacan will recognize, for there is always someone who asks: Why does the phallus have to be called phallus, if it has nothing to do with the penis? A variation on this question is: Why does femininity have to be called femininity if it has nothing to do with women? Such questions deserve more attention than they usually get, for both have to do with the relationship between symbols and bodies, and the second also raises the question of the relationship between symbolic function and social norms or ideology. What is one to reply? We can start by rereading The Meaning of the Phallus, where it appears that Lacan, too, transgresses the taboo on confusing the phallus with the penis: [T]his test of the desire of the Other is not decisive in the sense that the subject learns from it whether or not he has a real phallus [un phallus rel], but inasmuch as he learns that the mother does not, he writes
104
TORIL MOI
(Lacan, 1958, p. 8323). There is, then, such a thing as a real phallus, and the one thing we know about it is that mothers do not have it.24 The crucial explanation of why it is that the phallus is the privileged signifier in the first place (Lacan, 1958, p. 82) is equally revealing: One might say that this signifier is chosen as what stands out [le plus saillant] as most easily seized upon in the real of sexual copulation, and also as the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is the equivalent in that relation of the (logical) copula. One might also say that by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow [flux vital] as it is transmitted [passe] in generation (Lacan, 1958, p. 8225). Lacan chose the phallus as the privileged signifier because it juts out in sexual intercourse; because in that act it functions as a copula (a verb of predication, a verb conferring being); because its turgidity illustrates both the way in which semen is transferred in intercourse and the way in which the generations succeed each other. (The reference to generation, moreover, makes it obvious that throughout this chapter Lacan is thinking only of heterosexuality.)26 Now we can see that the question why is the phallus called the phallus if it has nothing to do with the penis? is somewhat off the mark. Lacan does not at all deny that the symbol of the phallus is based on the image of the erect penis; on the contrary, he flaunts the fact that it is. But so what? Lacan is simply inviting us to grasp the difference between the phallus as a symbol, as a signifier, and the penis as an ordinary part of male anatomy. Is this really too much to ask? Let us grant the case. It is obvious that the word phallus will conjure up images of penislike objects. It is also clear that some human beings have a penis, and others do not. But once the symbol has been defined in sophisticated, theoretical terms as something nobody has, then it is absurd to reduce the symbolic phallus back to the ordinary penis, supporters of Lacan might say. This is a perfectly reasonable point. It is obvious that in Lacanian theory the phallus soon comes to mean a lot more than just the (erect) penis. To deny this would be obtuse. What feminists object to is not, of course, the use of symbols, but the particular symbol chosen to signify difference and lack, as well as the theory of sexual difference that supports itself on the phallus/penis equation. However much we approve of symbolic uses of words for
105
body parts, we may still object that if the relationship between anatomy and symbol is entirely arbitrary, then there really is no reason to choose the phallus rather than the breast as the transcendental signifier of difference. Because the phallus represents the threat of castration, it produces sexual difference, the Lacanian theory goes. By taking up a position in relation to the phallus, we become at one stroke sexed and subjects. This is the entry into the symbolic order, into language, the subjection to the Law, our fundamental subjection to castration, to lack. (This sentence is based on the observation that Lacanians usually treat language, the Law, and the symbolic order in the same way. If this obscures some necessary distinctions, I am looking forward to being corrected, for a serious account of the way in which Lacan and Lacanians actually use these terms is much needed.) The phallus distributes humankind in two sexes, but the sexes we are talking about are entirely symbolic, entirely psychosexual. On this theory, however, women should not take up a position as feminine more often than men. Yetand this is what generations of students are struck byin The Meaning of the Phallus Lacan clearly thinks that women will take up the feminine and men the masculine position. What he means when he says that the relation of the subject to the phallus is set up regardless of anatomical difference, is that there will always be exceptions to the rule, not that there is no rule whatsoever. Feminine subjects, Lacan writes, will struggle in vain to be the phallus; masculine subjects will struggle in vain to have the phallus (see Lacan, 1958, p. 84). As a result, both sexes end up acting in a comedy, but femininity in particular is a masquerade, an endless performance in which women try to mask the lack of the phallus.27 Here I just wrote women. Shouldnt I say feminine subjects? not necessarily, for Lacan writes women too (or the woman, to be exact):
Paradoxical as this formulation might seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity [de la fminit], notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the one [celui] to whom she addresses
106
TORIL MOI
her demand for love. Certainly we should not forget that the organ actually invested with this signifying function takes on the value of the fetish. [Lacan, 1958, p. 84]
If I understand Lacan correctly here, he is saying that because the woman does not have a penis, she will perform a masquerade in which she aims to be the phallus. He then says that this entails rejecting an essential part of femininity [de la fminit]. But since femininity is defined as the masquerade the woman performs, how can that masquerade in itself be a rejection of an essential part of femininity? The answer can be found if we consider that the word femininity here is a translation of the French fminit.28 Depending on the context, that word can mean feminine, female, womens or of women. If we translate fminit here as femaleness, the sentence makes perfect sense, since it now introduces a difference between the psychosexual fminit acted out in the masquerade and the anatomical fminit disavowed by the same masquerade. What the woman rejects, then, is something specific to womens bodies or genitalsnamely, the absence of a penis. [This is exactly Freuds point in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Freud, 1937c), which Lacan invokes at the beginning of The Meaning of the Phallus and to which I shall return.] In this passage, Lacan speaks of women, not men. Women will take up the feminine position; by fetishizing the male organ, women will find the phallus they desire on the body of their male lover. This appears to contradict Lacans claim that the relation of the subject to the phallus is set up regardless of anatomical difference between the sexes. Yet the only word that causes the contradiction is regardless, which now appears as an overstatement. I am led to conclude that Lacans theory cannot live up to that regardless, for it seems to go as follows: The difference between the sexes turns on their different relationship to the penisone sex has it, the other does not. This fact, then, structures the relationship of each sex to the phallus. But anatomy is not the final arbiter of symbolic position, for it is acknowledged that exceptions to the rule will occur. Some men will take up a feminine position, just as some women will take up a masculine position. Lacans femininity theory, then, is based on normative expectations about the psychosexual position women will take up (as a rule), and the one men will take up (as a rule). In most cases the
107
presence or absence of a penis determines the relationship to the phallic signifier; to a very large extent anatomical sex does predict ones symbolic position. For Lacan, then, the relationship between body and sexed subjectivity is neither necessary (that would be biological determinism) nor arbitrary (that would be a form of idealism, a denial of the material structure of the body), but contingent. It is contingent and not necessary, because not all women will take up a feminine position, just as not all men will take up a masculine position, nor arbitrary, since there is a general expectation that women on the whole will take up a feminine position. Structurally, then, Lacans femininity theory is exactly the same as Freuds.29 There is nothing sexist about this kind of theory about the relationship between bodies and psychosexual identities. All it means is that for Lacan, as for Freud and Beauvoir, one is not born a woman but, rather, becomes a woman30: Psycho-analysis does not try to describe what a woman isthat would be a task it could scarcely perform, Freud wrote in 1933, but sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition (Freud, 1933a, p. 116). Problems only arise when normative expectations are coded into such theories; this is where Beauvoir differs from Freud and Lacan, for Beauvoir does not presume to define any kind of normative femininity, whereas Freud and Lacan do. Lacans understanding of the relationship between the body and sexed subjectivity, then, is neither better nor worse than Freuds: it is the same. Feminists who choose Lacan over Freud because they believe that Lacans theory is less essentialist are mistaken. Neither Freud nor Lacan are essentialists. They both consider the relationship between the body and the psyche to be contingent. The difference, as I have already stressed, is in their understanding of the body. Freud always remained concerned with the concrete, phenomenological body, whereas Lacan turns the body into an entirely abstract and idealist concept. Different critics have reacted differently to the connection between phallus and penis (I mean those critics who, like me, admit that there is one). Jane Gallops brilliant analysis of the intricate relationship between penis and phallus ends with a plea for confusion, perceived as a way to connect the body with history: To
108
TORIL MOI
read for and affirm confusion, contradiction is to insist on the thinking in the body in history. Those confusions mark the sites where thinking is literally knotted to the subjects historical and material place (Gallop, 1988, p. 132). Inspired by Gallop, Charles Bernheimer recommends that we insist on the phalluss penile reference since this would force psychoanalytic theory to account for historical specificity and bodily materiality (Bernheimer, 1995, p. 323). Lacans elevation of the phallus to universal signifying status, Bernheimer writes, amounts to the bodys strangulation by the signifying chain and the consequent elimination of such material factors as history, race and power from the theorization of subjectivities (p. 337). I have much sympathy for Gallops and Bernheimers general wish to reconnect the Lacanian body with history, but in my view Lacans concept of the body is so abstract that it can never be successfully historicized.31 Lacans theory of sexual difference also strikes me as worse than Freuds.32 While both Freud and Lacan make their stories of femininity turn on castration and lack, only Lacan gives the penis/ phallus a linguistic turn. For Lacan, the phallus is not just a symbol, it is a signifier, and not just any signifier, but the transcendental signifier, by which he means that the phallus is the signifier of signification, the very signifier that enables meaning to arise in the first place. Because the phallus is at once the signifier of sexual difference and of meaning, Lacans system is one in which femininity (a position that, as we have seen, Lacan expects most women to take up) can only ever be marginal to the symbolic. By definition, a womans symbolic activities will always be called phallic. (Any symbolic activity is phallic.) A woman who does not conform to the Lacanian idea of femininity will be called masculine, just as a deviant man will be called feminine. There is powerful social normativity embedded in such language, a social normativity that became only too apparent in the French debates in the 1990s over parit (equal political representation for women) and pacs (pacts of civil solidarity for gay, lesbian, and heterosexual couples), in which many Lacan-inspired analysts took extremely reactionary positions.33 From a feminist and historicizing point of view, Lacans introduction of post-Saussurean linguistics into psychoanalysis was a mistake. Precisely because the relationship of femininity to the
109
phallus is a purely symbolic equation for Lacan, patriarchy can never disappear. Lacans theory of sexual difference is a watertight system, one that will always impose its own normative language of sexual difference on whatever people actually do. The historical content of the structure will change, but the structure itself will remain forever intact.34 I may find that sixteenth-century notions of what counts as feminine are vastly different from our own, but the grid that produces the notion of the feminine in the first place remains unchanged. What I am objecting to, then, is that Lacanian theory is structured so as to formally require the gendering or sexing of a vast array of human activities. Lacanian theory is a printing machine for gender labels. It is incumbent on those who believe that this is an excellent thing for feminism and for psychoanalysis to justify their belief.
Jouissance, femininity, and the outside of language

So far, I have only discussed Lacans femininity theory as it emerged in the late 1950s, when it was characterized by two things: its close reading of Freud and its introduction of post-Saussurean linguistics (the phallus is a signifier). Fifteen years later, in the seminar on femininity entitled Encore (197273), Lacan takes the logic of his commitment to a post-Saussurean theory of language far beyond Freud (Lacan, 1998).35 In the 1958 Phallus essay femininity is still fundamentally a matter of castration and the attempt to mask that castration. In both texts the phallus is the transcendental signifier. But Encore casts femininity as inextricably linked with jouissance, understood as an experience or state beyond signification, beyond the phallus. (For the purposes of this chapter I take beyond the phallus, beyond language, and beyond signification to be fairly equivalent expressions.)36 But what exactly is jouissance? We have all heard that jouissance cannot be translated (I have certainly said so myself).37 Englishlanguage texts have usually left jouissance in French. The result is that the concept comes to look particularly esoteric and mysterious. From a purely linguistic point of view, however, it is difficult to understand how a word like jouissance has gained this reputation. When I compared the entry for jouir in Le Petit Robert to the entry
110
TORIL MOI
for enjoy in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, I found that both verbs can mean to take pleasure, to enjoy, to possess, to have the use of. Many of the examples in the two dictionaries are exactly the same (to enjoy a view, to enjoy good health). The major difference is that enjoyment no longer means orgasm in everyday English (although once it did), whereas thats exactly what jouissance means in everyday French. To any experienced translator, this is hardly an insuperable challenge. Readily available translations abound: enjoyment, pleasure, orgasm, and orgasmic enjoyment all have something going for them. Any remaining difficulties could be explained in a footnote, if it was felt to be necessary. All translation involves betrayal, no doubt, but when it comes to treachery, jouissance cannot be compared to Freuds Nachtrglichkeit, Derridas diffrance, and Hegels Aufhebung. So why has it gained a reputation for being so particularly difficult to convey in English?38 It may be not the word itself but what Lacan wants to do with it that makes jouissance seem untranslatable. Any conscientious translator would feel awkward writing sentences proclaiming that womens enjoyment or orgasm is beyond the phallus, something that cannot be spoken, and so on. Surely this cannot be all Lacan means by jouissance, she would think; he must have some kind of extraordinary phenomenon in mind, something that no ordinary English word could possibly convey. Better, then, to leave the word in French, so as to allow it to benefit from the mystery of the exotic and the unknown. My point is that any word said to denote something beyond the phallus would quickly come to seem untranslatable. There is no doubt that the enjoyment in question is ascribed to women. If we were in doubt, the picture of Berninis St. Teresa on the front cover of the French edition of the twentieth seminar confirms the point. In Encore, Lacan writes of a jouissance of the body which is . . . beyond the phallus (Lacan, 197273, p. 145). He also states that There is a jouissance proper to her and of which she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences itthat much she does know. She knows it of course when it happens. It does not happen to all of them (p. 145). Female/feminine jouissance is beyond the phallus, outside language, and therefore potentially threatening to the cohesion of the
111
symbolic/social order. But what, exactly, it is that escapes language and other social structures here? Are we being invited to believe that female orgasms, splendid as they are, belong to some mystic, extralinguistic, yet revolutionary realm to which male orgasms provide no access? And why is jouissance accorded this extraordinary status in the first place? Are female orgasms more extralinguistic than any other human experience? It would seem to be at least as difficult to capture in words the smell of a rose or the exact nuance of an experience of shame as it is to describe an orgasm. If one objects that orgasm is too pedestrian a word for jouissance, we have to ask what Lacan means when he says that we designate this jouissance, vaginal (Lacan, 197273, p. 146). It would seem that he still clings to the old myth about the difference between vaginal (truly feminine) and clitoral (masculinized) orgasm. In short: what does such a concept of femininity tell us about women? Femininity here becomes a full-blown metaphysical concept, rightly linked by Lacan to mysticism.39 Femininity and jouissance are imagined to be outside language, beyond the phallus. (This they have in common with a whole cluster of Lacan-inspired concepts that have enjoyed quite a vogue over the past twenty or thirty years, namely the unspeakable, the real, the beyond, trauma, psychosis, and so on.) There is a specific picture of language and meaning at work in such concepts. First of all, we are encouraged to imagine language as a kind of spatial territory, which can have an outside and an inside. This spatial imagery underpins the Lacanian theory of language and so comes to seem compulsory. But there are alternatives. We could, for example, think of language as a human practice that changes over time. As soon as it has been established, the picture of the outside and inside of language (of the symbolic, of signification, etc.) gives rise to an urge to deconstruct the inside/outside opposition. This urge is the effect of the spatial picture of language. If that picture loses its hold on us, then the deconstruction comes to seem less urgent. The belief in the beyond of discourse as well as the further belief that entities beyond discourse are always struggling and straining to disrupt it, always threatening to make our language nonsensical or meaningless, leads to an obsession with boundaries, borderlines, and limits, which will be proclaimed as the place where represen-
112
TORIL MOI
tation or intelligibility breaks down, where meaninglessness and chaos begin.40 But something else also emerges in this picture, namely the extent to which Lacanians and other post-Saussurean theorists imagine that language means representation. For if we ask how the spatial picture of language gets going, the answer seems to be that it arises when we think of language primarily as consisting in nouns. In post-Saussurean linguistics, nouns are always used as examples of language. Just think of all those primers in poststructuralism that first print tree for the signifier, then tree to illustrate the signified, and finally a drawing of a tree to explain what the referent is. That this is a horribly impoverished notion of what language is, is Wittgensteins starting point for the whole of Philosophical Investigations. In 1, he first quotes Augustines account of how he learned to speak (by hearing adults say words and then point to the things represented by the words) and then goes on to comment:
These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objectssentences are combinations of such names.In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands. Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of word. If you describe the learning of language in this way you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like table, chair, bread, and of peoples names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself. [Wittgenstein, 1953, 1]
The point, then, is not that Lacan and other post-Saussureans are wholly wrong. By definition, the referent of a noun is outside language. A tree is neither an acoustic pattern or black mark on a page, nor just a concept in our mind. In the language game called representation, it makes sense to distinguish between an inside and an outside of language. But representation is only one of the games we can play with language. In 25, Wittgenstein himself
113
mentions commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting as things we do with language. Think also of crying for help, praying, confessing, bargaining, promising, predicting, thankingthe list is, if not endless, at least very long. The point is, simply, that a theory of representation is not a theory of language. As Wittgenstein says, such a theory thinks primarily of nouns and a few other nounlike categories and leaves all the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself. In short: what would we draw to illustrate the working of words such as help!, albeit, or haphazardly? I do not imagine that this is a full-scale philosophical analysis of the question. My point is simply this: the Lacanian picture of language can no longer be taken for granted. Its very foundations require justification and defence. But even within the terms of a theory of representation it is difficult to follow Lacans mysticism about jouissance. If all referents are outside language, why would the jouissance of women be radically different from other nouns of sensation, such as the scent of a rose, the taste of a soup, the exact colour of a car? I get the impression that in Encore Lacan is overcome by the idea that womens experience of orgasm is beyond the reach of his knowledge. But if this is so, then Lacans quest for the unreachable jouissance of the woman is a version of scepticism. Again I find that I have reached the same ground as Cavell, who notes that in Encore Lacan is casting his view of women as a creed or credo (I believe), as an article of faith in the existence and the difference of the womans satisfaction (Cavell, 1996, p. 102). This, Cavell adds, means that Lacan is letting the brunt of conviction in existence, the desire of the sceptical state, be represented by the question of the womans orgasm. . . . So sceptical grief would be represented for the man not directly by the question Were her children caused by me? but by the double question Is her satisfaction real, and is it caused by me? (pp. 102103). On Cavells reading, the question of the womans jouissance is a question that arises specifically for men. His own highly pertinent examples are Othellos jealousy of Desdemona and Leontess ferocious suspicion of Hermione in The Winters Tale.41 Read in this way, Encore tells us something about the way scepticism can be gendered. It can tell us why some men find women deeply enig-
114
TORIL MOI
matic. It also throws light on Freuds conviction that femininity is a riddle, whereas masculinity is not. But this way of taking Encore also tells us that insofar as Lacan tries to turn his own perception of womens secret enjoyment into a general, universally valid theory of sexual difference (and he does: Encore is the text that contains all those algebraic formulas for sexual difference), he is universalizing his own gendered experience. Let me turn now to one other aspect of the claim that feminine jouissance is beyond the phallus. According to Lacanian theory, there is no meaning outside language, since meaning is an effect of the chain of signifiers in the symbolic order ruled by the phallic signifier. Nevertheless the entities beyond the phallus are said to threaten to return to break up, subvert, or undermine the precarious stability of symbolic signification. We are, then, asked to believe that in the outer darkness beyond representation dwell the shadows of potentially meaningful entities: jouissance, femininity, and so forth. That they are there is proved by the fact that they exert pressure on ordinary, organized symbolic language, sometimes breaking it down entirely. Given such a picture of femininity and the inside and outside of language, it may seem logical enough to argue, as Luce Irigaray once did, that women cannot express themselves in ordinary language but must instead utter contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason (Irigaray, 1977, p. 29). There is a strong implication that the language of reason is to be imagined as male or masculine. In everyday life, however, there is no evidence that women actually are more contradictory than men. But this has no impact on theories of this kind, for femininity has now become a full-blown metaphysical concept. There is another unformulated philosophical assumption here, one that James Conant succinctly defines (in a different context) as the doctrine that there are certain aspects of reality that cannot be expressed in language but can nonetheless be conveyed through certain sorts of employment of language (Conant, 2000, p. 178). Cora Diamond puts the same assumption in slightly different terms: [T]here are some sentences which are nonsense but which would say something true if what they are an attempt to say could be said. The unsayability of what they attempt to say precludes its being said, but we can nevertheless grasp what they attempt to
115
say (Diamond, 2000, p. 158).42 Irigarays contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, fit precisely into this category. The idea is that such language, mad from the standpoint of reason, tells us something about the nature of femininity, something that evaporates or disappears as soon as we try to rephrase it in the language of reason. But it is not self-evident that it makes sense to speak of meaningful yet incomprehensible language in this way. If we postulate the existence of a kind of mad language in addition to the usual rational language, we seem to end up with a version of the logic Wittgenstein refuses to recognize in the preface to the Tractatus:
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. Thus the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rathernot to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense [einfach Unsinn]. [Wittgenstein, 1922, p. 3]
If I understand this difficult passage correctly, Wittgenstein is saying that we can draw no limit to thought, for if we did, we should have to be able to think on both sides of the limit. But then the limit thought up by us would not be a limit; all such attempts are self-defeating. In other words: anything we can think is by definition thinkable. From this point of view, the post-structuralist attempt to think the unthinkable is meaningless.43 The limit in question, then, is not a limit in thought but a limit in language (the expression of thoughts). Wittgenstein, however, has in mind not a limit between language and some quasi-meaningful realm beyond language, but one between language that makes sense and language that does not. The passage denies that language that fails to make sense in the ordinary way actually still makes (extraordinary, hidden, metaphysical, profound) sense. Either language is meaningful or it is not. We do not have to read this as a defence of a rationalistic ideal of lucidity and transparency of meaning.44 It does not follow that Wittgenstein believes that it is always easy to find the sense of an utterance. Difficult language, language that requires
116
TORIL MOI
us to use all the procedures available to human beings looking for the meaning of words, is not meaningless. In other words: to make sense in the ordinary way is not a subcategory of sense-making. On Wittgensteins logic, Irigarays subcategory of language that sounds mad from the standpoint of reason loses its metaphysical status and becomes just one form of language use among others. Then it becomes open to analysis, not from the standpoint of reason but from the standpoint of the ordinary procedures we use to make sense of words.45 It is quite possible that in some cultures women are trained to listen for certain kinds of sense that men are not trained to listen for. But this would be a fact about some women and some men in a certain place and time, not about femininity and reason as such. There would, in particular, be no assumption that the womens strategies for interpreting certain utterances would be more mad from the standpoint of reason than the mens. The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the reification of sexual difference and returns us from metaphysics to the ordinary. Cavell makes a similar point about the tendency to postulate sexually different knowledge in men and womena tendency that we find in Encore:
The reification, let me put it, of sexual difference is registered, in the case of knowledge, by finding the question of a difference in masculine and feminine knowing and then by turning it into a question of some fixed way women know that men do not know, and vice versa. Since in ordinary, nonmetaphysical exchanges we do not conceive there to be some fact one gender knows that the other does not know, any more than we conceive there to be some fact the skeptic knows that the ordinary human being does not know, the metaphysical exchanges concerning their differences are apt to veer toward irony, a sense of incessant false position, as if one cannot know what difference a world of difference makes. [Cavell, 1996, p. 99]
If we come to doubt the post-Saussurean picture of language, some crucial concepts in Lacans psychoanalytic theory no longer sound so compelling. (Clearly, the critique does not affect the less linguistic areas of Lacans thought, particularly the theories concerning alienation, the mirror stage, transference and countertransference, and the subject presumed to know.) The post-Saussurean view of
117
language shared by Lacan has been normal science, institutionalized doxa, in departments of language, literature, and cultural studies for thirty years now. To speak of normal science and doxa is to speak of principles and assumptions that have come to be taken for granted. I think it is time for a reconsideration of the linguistic foundations of post-structuralist theory. A serious encounter between post-structuralism and the so-called new Wittgensteinians would do much to clarify the philosophical premises of post-Saussurean (Lacanian and non-Lacanian) thought.46
Muddling the meaning of castration

So far, then, I have claimed that it is useless to set off in quest for a general psychoanalytic theory of femininity and that it is sexist to assume that femininity and sexual difference are synonyms. I have claimed that the phallus is not unrelated to the penis and that it is not true that the relationship between psychosexual subjectivity and bodies is arbitrary in Lacanian theory. I have also claimed that the concept of jouissance is sexist, metaphysical, and bound up with a theory of language that there are serious grounds to doubt. Now, finally, I shall look at the ways in which Lacans concept of castration drifts between different meanings in ways that are not always friendly to women, to echo an expression of Freuds. The concept of castration got off to a bad start. Both Lacan and Freud define it in a way that makes it synonymous both with femininity and with sexual difference. This makes castration complicit with the othering of women denounced by Beauvoir. That this is so becomes clear if we turn yet again to Lacans 1958 essay on The Meaning of the Phallus, which begins with a discussion of castration, namely with a reference to Freuds 1937 essay, Analysis Terminable and Interminable.47 This is where Freud tries to explain why psychoanalytic treatment always fails to persuade a woman to give up her wish for a penis, and why it also fails to persuade a man that a passive attitude to men does not always signify castration (Freud, 1937c, p. 252). In women, Freud calls this syndrome penis envy, and in men he labels it masculine protest: We
118
TORIL MOI
often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the masculine protest we have penetrated through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock, and that thus our activities are at an end. This is probably true, since, for the psychical field, the biological field does in fact play the part of the underlying bedrock. The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex (p. 252). At this point, a footnote informs us that: In other words, the masculine protest is in fact nothing else than castration anxiety (pp. 252253). In both sexes, then, castration is violently opposed. The difference is that men fear castration, whereas women realize to their dismay that it has already happened. Repudiation of femininity is repudiation of castration, and this is a biologically based attitude in both sexes. This interpretation will be controversial to some. Surely I have not properly understood what castration means for Lacan. Castration, or the lack it opens up, is the entrance ticket to the symbolic order for everyone, a Lacanian would say. What is at stake here is the phallus, not the penis. In an attempt to explicate this doctrine, Juliet Mitchell once wrote: But because human subjectivity cannot ultimately exist outside a division into one of the two sexes, then it is castration that finally comes to symbolize this split. The feminine comes to stand over the point of disappearance, the loss (Mitchell, 1986, p. 393). This admirably concise formulation claims that all human beings are marked by lack. To have to belong to only one sex is a traumatic loss, for both sexes. So far, so good. But why is it the feminine that comes to stand over the point of sexual division? This only makes sense if we assume that the feminine means that which is castrated. But how do we get that idea? Why is that which is castrated defined as feminine? Why not call it masculine, just to drive the point home, particularly if we are speaking of a position that has nothing to do with anatomical attributes, as so many Lacanians claim? The answer can only be that the feminine is called the feminine and described as castrated because, well, because women do not have a penis. (The relationship between body and subjectivity is not arbitrary, it is contingent.) On this theory, women are doubly castrated: first by having to be only one sex (they are marked by sexual finitude, like everyone elsesee below), and second, by having to be the sex that does not
119
have a penis. Lacanian terminology thus creates the following set of distinctions between symbol (left-hand side) and social phenomenon (right-hand side): phallus | femininity | castration | penis women castration
We are sternly admonished to keep the two sides apart, to understand that anyone can be feminine, that nobody actually has the phallus, and so on. In this list, however, castration must show up on both sides: this is where the cohesion of the symbolic and the social, the psychic, and the anatomical surfaces. The human and ideological effects of conflating castration with femininity are distressing. Moreover, the conflation could be avoided. For what Freud describes as the repudiation of femininity in both sexes is the human reluctance to accept the reality principle, to give up the dream of being all, of living forever, of narcissistic omnipotence, of living in a world that never frustrates our desires. Why not call this a reluctance to accept our human condition? But what exactly has this got to do with femininity, let alone with women? Freuds own text shows that to call this general repudiation of lack femininity or castration is to place women in an impossible position:
[T]he females wish for a penis . . . is the source of outbreaks of severe depression in her, owing to an internal conviction that the analysis will be of no use and that nothing can be done to help her. And we can only agree that she is right, when we learn that her strongest motive in coming for treatment was the hope that, after all, she might still obtain a male organ, the lack of which was so painful to her. [Freud, 1937c, p. 252]
Given his conviction that to be a woman is to be castrated, Freud can only conclude that his depressed female patients are right to mourn the penis they will never have. For women who strive in vain to accept their so-called femininity, Freud counsels despair; to women who try to claw their way out of depression by doing something productive in the world, all he has to say is that they are phallic and suffer from penis envy. Lacans theory does not lead to
120
TORIL MOI
different conclusions. The problem, then, is that the very language of castration and femininity imprisons women in their sexual difference and blocks their access to general existential categories. If both men and women fear castration, and castration turns out to mean femininity, women cannot win. We need to find better and less sexist language for experiences shared by men and women. In one discussion of Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Cavell translates Freuds castration into victimization. This is a good example of how to avoid unnecessary gendering of general terms (Cavell, 1996, p. 111). In Freudian and Lacanian theory castration is used in three different senses, namely: (1) to signify lack as a general human condition; (2) to signify sexual difference or femininity; and (3) to signify the discovery of our own one-sexedness, that is to say, the discovery that we can only ever be one sex, in the sense that we can only ever have one body. (Desire remains as polymorphous and infinite as it ever was, but it is now confronted with the traumatic discovery of sexual finitude. I shall return to this.) Meaning 1 encourages us to believe that as soon as something can be called lack, it can also be theorized as castration. It is difficult to understand why this is considered a sign of theoretical sophistication. Meaning 2 is the clearly sexist theory of femininity with which this chapter has been concerned. Meaning 3, however, is just fine, but probably not very successfully conveyed by the word castration. The indiscriminate use of castration encourages us to roam freely between the three meanings, collapsing them into each other as we please. The resulting confusion of categories is responsible for a distinctly (hetero)sexist oversexualizing or overgendering of human existence. It also has a tendency to generate a lot of empty language. Imagine a cultural theorist who observes something that resembles a cut (a blank screen? a black screen? a sudden hiatus? a pause?) and starts the theory machine. A cut evokes castration, which evokes lack, which conjures up the womans sex, and from there we go to nothing, death, the real, the beyond, psychosis, madnessnothing can stop the machine. This is language on holiday.48 Such language produces far more problems than it solves, and the biggest problem of all is that it projects a deeply sexist notion of sexual difference onto every human phenomenon.
121
What we need, then, is a psychoanalytic theory that truly seeks to understand the consequences of human one-sexedness without thinking in terms of either castration or femininity, but also without denying the fact that male and female bodies are different. Many different kinds of analysts are producing such theories. This chapter is not trying to say that we do not need psychoanalysisit is trying to say that psychoanalysis does not need a femininity theory.49
From castration to finitude

Here is a beginning of such a theory. Joyce McDougall has provided an interesting definition of psychoanalysis. She considers psychoanalysis to be a form of thought that attempts to understand the psychic consequences of three universal traumas: the fact that there are others; the fact of sexual difference; and the fact of death.50 We note that only one of the three traumas has to do with the discovery of sex and sexual difference, yet Lacanian theory tends to use the concept of castration as a general term for all three traumas. As we have seen, this amounts to projecting an ideologically dubious notion of sexual difference onto the two other traumasthat is, to just about everything. Castration is simply too sexist a term to be useful as a general term for human limitation or lack. I want to propose that on this general level, we speak, instead, of finitude. Following McDougall, we can then understand psychoanalysis as a theory devoted to the exploration of the many different ways in which human beings deal with the traumatic discovery of their finitude, not as a theory that declares castration to be the key to human existence. I take the concept of finitude from Stanley Cavells analysis of scepticism in The Claim of Reason. In the face of the skeptics picture of intellectual limitedness, Cavell writes, Wittgenstein proposes a picture of human finitude (Cavell, 1979, p. 431). But Cavell is not the only one to speak of human finitude, in the sense of our finiteness, our limitedness, the fact that we are not all, not everything. A distinguished psychoanalyst of transsexuality also speaks of finitude (Chiland, 1997, p. 246). From different perspectives, then, philosophers such as Cavell and Wittgenstein and
122
TORIL MOI
analysts such as Chiland and McDougall claim that the discovery of our separate, sexed, mortal existence is traumatic, and that the human task par excellence is to try to come to terms with this discovery and this trauma. In a passage displaying striking affinities with psychoanalytic thought, Cavell writes:
If Rousseau can be said to have discovered the fact of childhood in human growth, and Wordsworth the loss of childhood, then romanticism generally may be said to have discovered the fact of adolescence, the task of wanting and choosing adulthood, along with the impossibility of this task. The necessity of the task is the choice of finitude, which for us (even after God) means the acknowledgment of the existence of finite others, which is to say, the choice of community, of autonomous moral existence [Cavell, 1999, p. 464]
To this fundamental insight I want to add something. I want to suggest that we need to distinguish between three different aspects of finitude. This is partly inspired by McDougalls three traumas, partly by Colette Chilands explicit reference to our ontological, sexed and temporal finitude (Chiland, 1997, p. 247). On this view, to acknowledge finitude would mean to undertake three different tasks. First we need to acknowledge our spatial finitudethat is to say, our bodily, existential separation from others.51 Then we need to acknowledge our sexual finitude, to understand that we cannot be more than one sex. McDougall writes of the traumatic discovery of our monosexuality (McDougall, 1995, p. 6). Chiland writes of the transsexuals refusal of sexed finitude (Chiland, 1997, p. 247). Intersexed people, bisexuals, transsexuals, transvestites, and other transgendered people are neither more nor less sexually finite than anyone else. Our desires may be infinite; our bodies certainly are not.52 The third task is to acknowledge the temporal finitudethe inevitable deathof those we love, and of ourselves. Of course, these tasks are beyond our powers. Only a saint could accomplish them all. Yet if we fail in them entirely, we will not be able to live. For over a hundred years now, psychoanalysis has patiently shown how difficult it is for human beings to accomplish the task of adolescence, to choose finitude. This is the strength and glory of psychoanalytic thought. We cling to fantasies of merger with or eradication of the other, we want to be all sexes or none, we want
123
immortality and omnipotence. His Majesty the Baby, as Freud calls this mightily egocentric creature, has no capacity for coexistence with others. Only those who have a sense of their own and other peoples finitude can hope to create something like a human community, Cavell writes. Lacan would perhaps have said that Only those who have taken up a position in relation to the phallus can enter into the symbolic order. My point is that the same fundamental idea is at stake in these two formulations, but that Lacans formulation is sexist (and philosophically unclear) in a way that Cavells is not. The realization of finitude is traumatic for everyone. Here it is crucial to disentangle relevant from irrelevant sexualization (or genderization) of psychic issues. I agree with Freud and Lacan that there is probably sexuality in everything. But to say this is not to say that there is sexually different sexuality in everything, nor to say that everything can be reduced to sexuality. It is unlikely, to say the least, that all women experience finitude differently from all men in all its three aspects. To use castration or the more euphemistic lack as a general term for finitude is to impose a generalizing theory of sexual difference on all three traumas. Apart from ideological obfuscation, I fail to see what is achieved by doing that. Freud himself writes: There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual function. To it itself we cannot assign any sex (Freud, 1937c, p. 131). Freud here acknowledges, if only for a moment, that there may be phenomena, even intensely sexual phenomena, that have no sex (or gender, if one prefers). This moment of wonderful promise is instantly squashed, and Freud never returns to the possibility of human as opposed to sexed drives.53 To summarize and clarify: I have said that Lacanian and Freudian theory uses castration in three different senses: 1. 2. 3. general human lack, finitude; specific feminine lack/sexual difference; discovery that we can only ever be one sex.
In this picture, sexual difference tends to become the difference, the lack, that grounds all other differences. Finitude, on the other hand, is the traumatic discovery of three irreducible facts:
124 1. 2. 3.
TORIL MOI
There are others. There are others of a sex that is different from mine. There is death.
In this scheme, finitude does not have to be figured as lack.54 Sexual difference is a crucial element, but it is neither more nor less important than the two other aspects of finitude. In particular, it is not the foundation or paradigm of all kinds of finitude and difference. Yet the discovery of ones sexual finitude, ones onesexedness, is a foundational human trauma and needs to be acknowledged. The big question is how to do this in ways that do not result in sexism and injustice. To eradicate awareness of sexual difference usually amounts to assimilating women to the male norm. To overemphasize sexual difference is usually tantamount to locking women up in their female difference. (My argument in this chapter has been that classical psychoanalytic femininity theory does both.) This scheme, moreover, gives us no grounds on which to go around gendering the world by projecting sexual difference on to all kinds of human qualities and activities. Analysts and theorists ought to reserve the term castration for cases where people actually do fantasize, fear, worry about losing their sexual powers. (It makes no sense to call a sexually powerful woman castrated just because the theory implies that she must be.) They should also stop speaking of castration when what they have in mind is the most general sense of lack, for this amounts to imposing a sexist and sexualizing term on all of human existence. For a philosopher of finitude, human psychic pain arises from the finitude of the human body. It is our bodies that are separate, sexed, and mortal. This is our human condition; and the task of finitude is to acknowledge it. No wonder that religions, vast philosophies, and innumerable works of art have arisen in the attempt. Psychoanalysis has always been a distinguished participant in the attempt to teach human beings to come to terms with finitude. But finitude is not the same thing as lack. Must the fact of finitude, the fact of being separate, sexed, and mortal, be figured as lack? A final point: Lacanians will inevitably find that I have misunderstood and misinterpreted Lacan. (To some Lacanians the very
125
fact of disagreeing with Lacan is evidence that one has failed to understand him.) They should bear in mind that my most fundamental critique of Lacan is external to Lacanianism and cannot be translated into Lacanian terms without significant distortion. Even if I have totally misunderstood what the phallus is and quite mixed up the meaning of femininity, masculinity, and jouissance, that would not invalidate my major claims. I have claimed that Lacans theory of sexual difference is a machine that churns out gender labels; that the spatial image of language that underpins Lacanian theory requires defence and justification; that Lacanian theory reduces language to representation and thus fails to have a theory of language; that Lacans gendered fascination with womens knowledge of sexual pleasure cannot yield a theory of women (or femininity). I have also claimed that the muddled and generalized use of the term castration is sexist and that the concept of finitude offers better and less sexist ways of theorizing the same aspects of human existence. Above all, I have claimed that psychoanalysis does not need a femininity theory, and that femininity theories inevitably turn men into the norm and women into the other. Anyone who wants to defend Freud or Lacans femininity theories needs to show that these claims are wrong, misconceived, or irrelevant.
NOTES
This chapter was first published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2004): 841878. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago. Copyright 2004 by the University of Chicago Press. 1. Freuds interest in the decay of women of thirty had deep cultural roots in Europe. The best example is probably Balzacs La Femme de trente ans [The woman of thirty],which the author started to write in 1842, at the age of twentynine. 2. In an essay called Is Anatomy Destiny? (reprinted in What Is a Woman?, Moi, 1999, pp. 369393) I show how I arrive at this conclusion. The present chapter returns to some of the questions left unanswered in Is Anatomy Destiny? 3. See Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1953), particularly the chapter, Childhood. 4. See, for example, Benjamin, 1988; Chodorow, 1993; Horney, 1973; McDougall, 1995; Mitchell, 1974, 2000, just to mention a few important works in English.
126
TORIL MOI
5. I write at length about this opposition in the title essay of What Is a Woman? (Moi, 1999, pp. 3120). 6. This is not just a Western phenomenon: Lacan is taught in humanities departments all over the globe. 7. Freud and Lacan are, of course, not the only psychoanalysts who try to theorize women. To investigate post-Freudian femininity theories from Karen Horney and Helene Deutsch through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray to Jessica Benjamin and Nancy Chodorow would be the task of a book. Perhaps this essay can be thought of as a kind of preface to such investigations. 8. I hope to write an essay about equality, difference, and feminist theory some day. 9. Beauvoirs The Second Sex is an example of the kind of investigation of womens lived experience that I am looking for. Beauvoir at once rejects femininity theories and tries to account for the specific ways in which the fact of being a woman comes to matter to the individual woman and to society. 10. Some of Lacans most brilliant ideas are not at all caught up in femininity talk and have nothing to do with the nature of language and the beyond. His account of subject formation as an effect of alienation in the mirror stage, for example, so impressed Beauvoir that she made it foundational to The Second Sex (see Lacan, 1938). William F. Brackens dissertation, Becoming Subjects: The Agency of Desire in Lacans Return to Freud, shows how philosophically interesting this theory is (Bracken, 1998). 11. That is all I had to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly, Freud writes in his 1933 essay on Femininity (Freud, 1933a, p. 135). 12. This is not just a feminist gripe, for many analysts have said the same thing. Joyce McDougall, for example, writes: Although he believed himself to be an objective observer, Freuds two renowned articles on female sexuality reveal, in limpid fashion, the extent to which he was imbued with the conventional, moralistic attitude of his day (McDougall, 1995, p. 220). 13. The best theorist of the concept of situation in relation to women is, of course, Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex. See also my discussion of the concept in Moi, 1999, pp. 5983. 14. The most famous exponent of this view is Juliet Mitchell (1974). 15. The kind of picture I have in mind is this: A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably (Wittgenstein, 1953, 115). 16. Anyone interested in further investigation of the concept of femininity in Freud should also look at the following texts, which I do not discuss here: Freud, 1908d, 1912d, 1918a, 1924d, 1930a, 1931b. 17. See my discussion of this dilemma in Moi, 1999, pp. 202207. 18. Translation amended. For the French text, see Beauvoir, 1949, Vol. 1, p. 14. Some people think that Beauvoirs ideas of femininity are as retrograde as Freuds. I cannot engage in that discussion here, but I have tried to show why this is wrong, for example in the title essay of What Is a Woman? (Moi, 1999). 19. In Mad Men and Medusas Juliet Mitchell claims that Freuds theory of femininity is a theory not of femininity but of hysteria. By the late 1920s,
127
Mitchell argues, all the features Freud used to consider characteristic of hysteria had been transferred to the concept of femininity: When at the end of his life, Freud claimed that the bedrock beneath which psychoanalysis could not penetrate was the more or less biological one of a universal tendency by both sexes to repudiate femininity, he was making the mistake that has been widely reiterated: it is hysteria that cannot be tolerated, the conditions of hysteria that everyone wishes to repudiate (Mitchell, 2000, p. 186). I do not know whether Mitchell thinks that there still could be a good psychoanalytic theory of femininity. 20. Jane Gallop puts it well: Probably all Lacans advocates somewhere make the point that his detractors misread him by failing to distinguish the phallus from the penis (Gallop, 1985, p. 134). 21. Here the feminist demand for equal rights for the sexes does not take us far, for the morphological distinction is bound to find expression in differences of psychical development (Freud, 1924d, p. 177). Colette Chiland succinctly rejects the belief that anybody who fights for equal rights for women must deny all sexual differences (see Chiland, 1999, p. 15). 22. For the French text, see Lacan, 1966, p. 686. 23. For the French text, see Lacan, 1966, p. 693. 24. Many readers of Lacan have stumbled over the real phallus. In Reading Lacan Jane Gallop proposes that we read it ironically, yet not without criticism: Thus his real phallus would be simply an ironic use of the term, his mockery of the way others understand it. So be it. But nonetheless I think that such subtleties of irony never leave their user uncontaminated (Gallop, 1985, p. 144). Irony is a matter of tone: I do not hear irony in the sentence in question. Be that as it may. Tim Dean thinks the real phallus has to do with the Lacanian real: The way in which the real functions as a logical limit prompts Lacan to speak of a real phallus, for jouissance is real, and the phallus signifies a limit to the jouissance we can access (Dean, 2000, p. 88). I think it is highly unlikely that Lacans reference to the real phallus in 1958 has anything to do with setting a limit to jouissance, which was only theorized in 197273. 25. For the French text, see Lacan, 1966, p. 692. 26. Lacanian theory has indeed been used to support heterosexist positions, for example in the French debates about the so-called pacs (pacts of civic solidarity, a form of marriage for homosexuals and heterosexuals). Tim Dean would disagree with me. He is critical of the concept of the phallus but nevertheless finds explicit criticism of heterosexuality in the essay I am discussing here. Lacan, he writes, consistently pokes fun at the heterosexist ide reu [sic] that genital relations between the sexes represent an idea for psychological maturity (Dean, 2000, p. 49). The passage he adduces for this claim is the following, which I quote in Roses translation: Admittedly it was French psychoanalysts, with their hypocritical notion of genital oblativity, who started up the moralizing trend which, to the tune of Salvationist choirs, is now followed everywhere (Lacan, 1958, p. 81). I think that Dean misreads this passage. The key phrase here is genital oblativity, which means something like self-sacrificing genitality. This is a critique not of heterosexuality but of Daniel Lagache. Lagache was Lacans contemporary and a leading French analyst in the 1950s. His two-volume opus La Jalousie amoureuse contains a
128
TORIL MOI
theory of different types of love (Lagache, 1947). One is oblative love [amour oblatif], defined as totally self-sacrificing, heterosexual love (Lagache makes patient Griselda look like the ideal wife). To criticize the idea that heterosexual sexuality is devotedly self-sacrificing is hardly to criticize heterosexuality as such. (For more information about Daniel Lagache, see Roudinesco, 1986, pp. 227235.) 27. Lacan writes: This follows from the intervention of an appearing which gets substituted for the having so as to protect it on one side and to mask its lack on the other (Lacan, 1958, p. 84). 28. For the French text, see Lacan, 1966, p. 694. 29. Received opinion is that whereas Freud was a biological determinist, Lacan theorizes gender in a more progressive manner. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan is one among many to voice such a view: Freuds error was to mistake a structural, symbolic, and representational drama for a natural one based on biology. . . . [Lacan] argued that a person becomes male or female by identifying (or not) as the phallic signifier, and not by any innate mechanism (Ragland-Sullivan, 1987, p. 269). My argument is that neither Freud nor Lacan are biological determinists but that Lacans structuralism makes him far more metaphysical than Freud. 30. Beauvoir drew on Lacan for her understanding of girls psychosexual development. The key Lacanian term for her was alienation and the key text a long encyclopaedia entry by Lacan from 1938, published separately much later as Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de lindividu (Lacan, 1938). 31. Judith Butler sets out in the opposite direction. She considers that the phallus both stands for the part, the organ, and is the imaginary transfiguration of that part (Butler, 1993, p. 79). To her, it follows that the phallus is an imaginary effect, which means that we are free to think of it as a transferable object of pleasure available to anyone, including lesbians. Indeed, the lesbian phallus is a fiction, but perhaps a theoretically useful one, writes Butler (1993, p. 85). Tim Dean thinks that the phallus is a giant red herring (Dean, 2000, p. 14)that is to say, a concept made obsolete by Lacans later theory (particularly the theory of the objet a, so that all we need to do is to move beyond interminable and increasingly sterile debates over the phallogocentric biases of Lacans account of the phallus toward a more interesting 60s Lacan of the object (Dean, 2000, p. 50). 32. Let me stress again that I think we should distinguish between three different theories in Lacan and Freudnamely, between their theories of (1) the body, (2) the relationship between the body and sexed and gendered subjectivity (here we should further distinguish between the general understanding and the specific story being offered as an exemplification of that understanding), and (3) sexual difference. 33. By far the best discussion of the connection between the pacs and parity debates is Anne F. Garrtas Re-enchanting the Republic: Pacs, Parit and Le Symbolique (Garrta, 2001). Joan W. Scotts essay remains the most thoughtful one on the parity debate (Scott, 1997); it was included as part of a special section on parity in the journal differences (1997), which also contained interesting papers by Franoise Gaspard (1997) and a very interesting roundtable discus-
129
sion (Rosanvallon, Collin, & Lipietz, 1997). The French journal Nouvelles Questions Fministes published two special issues on parity, one in favour and one against (see Gaspard, Viennot, & Lipietz, 1994; Le Doeuff, Varikas, & Trat, 1995). The sociologist Eric Fassins analysis of Mona Ozoufs successful and to non-French feministsdeeply annoying Womens Words: Essay on French Singularity contains a wealth of information on French discussions of American feminism (Ozouf, 1995), as well as an astute analysis of the sexual ideology at work in the parity debates in France (Fassin, 1999). Anyone interested in seeing examples of the reactionary uses of Lacanian theory in the parit and pacs debates may consult Agacinski, 1999; Anatrella, 1998, 1999; Lamizet, 2001; Sausse, 1999; Tincq, 1999; Trigano, 1998. A welcome Lacanian exception to the rule of sexism and heterosexism is Tort, 1999. Note that quotations from Le Monde without a page reference come from the Web. They can be found on two different websites by searching for the name of the author: Le Mondes own web archives (http://archives.lemonde.fr) and Lexis-Nexis Academic (http:// web.lexis-nexis.com). 34. In Antigones Claim, Judith Butler also refers to the reactionary Lacanian positions in the controversy over the pacs. On this point, her conclusion is similar to mine: The [Lacanian] structure is purely formal, its defenders say, but note how its very formalism secures the structure against critical challenge. . . . [This] structure works to domesticate in advance any radical reformulation of kinship (Butler, 2000, p. 71). 35. Lacan (1998) is the only complete English translation of Encore. Strangely, the translator makes no mention of Jacqueline Roses excellent and widely used 1982 translation of important excerpts (see Mitchell & Rose, 1982). 36. As mentioned before, I have yet to find a serious investigation into the differences and similarities of the uses of these terms. 37. In Beyond the Phallus, Gallop provides a nice set of quotations claiming that jouissance is impossible to translate (see Gallop, 1988, pp. 119 120). 38. Gallop rightly thinks this has something to do with Roland Barthess distinction between plaisir and jouissance in Le Plaisir du texte (Gallop, 1988, pp. 120121). For Barthess French text, see Barthes, 1973; for an English translation, see Barthes, 1975. The date of Barthes book is significant: he may well have attended Lacans, 197273 seminar. 39. Rose summarizes the problems arising from Lacans talk of womens orgasms as an ecstasy beyond the phallus: Jouissance is used . . . to refer to that moment of sexuality which is always in excess, something over and above the phallic term which is the mark of sexual identity. The question Lacan explicitly asks is that of womans relation to jouissance. It is a question which can easily lapse into a mystification of woman as the site of truth.This is why Lacans statements in Encore, on the one hand, have been accused of being complicit with the fantasy they try to expose, and, on the other, have led to attempts to take the otherness of femininity even further, beyond the limits of language which still forms the basis of Lacans account (Rose, 1982, p. 137).
130
TORIL MOI
40. Wittgensteins discussion of concepts with blurred edges is also relevant here, for it gives us reason to ask whether there are situations and concepts where boundaries and limits are not particularly useful metaphors (see Wittgenstein, 1953, 71). 41. Cavells essays on Othello and The Winters Tale are collected in Cavell, 1987. 42. This is Diamonds summary of Elizabeth Anscombes point. In the same essay Diamond argues that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus makes a powerful argument against the idea that there is a distinction to be drawn between good nonsense and bad, [between] illuminating nonsense and dark murky muddle (Diamond, 2000, p. 160). Whether or not this is a fair reading of the Tractatus is a question I do not feel equipped to answer. Diamonds other pathbreaking essays on Wittgenstein are collected in The Realistic Spirit (Diamond, 1995). 43. I note here that the very first sentence of my own preface to The Kristeva Reader is: To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristevas project (Moi, 1986, p. vi). 44. Wittgenstein does not declare, either, that only easy or simple or uncomplicated language makes sense. I imagine that he might agree that it is not always easy to determine whether or not language makes sense. Few writers are as difficult to read as Wittgenstein himself. Yet his difficulty is caused by an attempt to get clear on difficult issues. It is not caused by any underlying belief in the ultimate meaningfulness, let alone the revolutionary power, of foggy and incoherent language. 45. To refuse the idea that there is something called femininity that gives rise to some special kind of mad language is self-evidently not to reject the idea of the unconscious. Ordinary procedures for making sense of words include the techniques used by analysts and literary critics. The analyst knows only too well that the analysand can use all kinds of language as forms of defence and resistance. She also knows how to listen for the whole speech act: the context, the silences, the tone, the affect, the body language. The fundamental assumption of the analyst and the literary critic is always that the language in question is the way it is, whether highly organized or utterly fragmented, for good reasons. To say that some or all of those reasons are unconscious is to say that the speaker or writer in question does not know, or does not want to know, what they are. To listen for the unconscious is to listen to what we are actually saying, not to something else. Both Freud and Lacan take for granted that the unconscious shows up in language. The same is true for Julia Kristevas psychoanalytic linguistics, which are based on the assumption that desire is in language. Kristevas first collection of essays in English was called, precisely, Desire in Language (Kristeva, 1980). 46. For some thoughts on what it would take to bring about an encounter between psychoanalysis and philosophy in general, see Stanley Cavells essay Psychoanalysis and Cinema: Moments of Letter from an Unknown Woman, reprinted as Chapter 2 of Contesting Tears (Cavell, 1996). So far, the best attempts to bring about an encounter between post-structuralism and the new Wittgensteinian perspective are Cavells critique of Derridas reading of
131
J. L. Austin (Cavell, 1994, pp. 53127) and Martin Stones Wittgenstein on Deconstruction (Stone, 2000, pp. 83117). The earliest and most accessible introduction to these questions remains Cavells The Politics of Interpretation (1982). For a challenging presentation of the new Wittgensteinians, see Crary & Read, 2000. 47. Lacan writes: One of [Freuds] last articles turns on the irreducibility for any finite [endliche] analysis of the effects following from the castration complex in the masculine unconscious and from Penisneid [penis envy] in the unconscious of the woman (Lacan, 1958, p. 75). 48. Wittgenstein writes: For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday (Wittgenstein, 1953, 38). 49. Many contemporary analysts write about psychic pain and pleasure without indulging in generalizations about sexual difference or femininity. Names such as Jonathan Lear, Adam Phillips, Christopher Bollas, Nina Coltart, and Joyce McDougall instantly come to mind, but there are so many others. 50. I am elaborating on McDougalls brief formulation. She does not relate this brilliant thought to castration and sexual difference (see McDougall, 1995, p. xv). 51. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Cavell notes that in his reading of E. T. A. Hoffmanns The Sand-Man Freud explicitly denies the possibility that the question of our knowledge of the existence of other minds can be a source of the uncanny in the tale. Instead, Freud insists that the uncanny in Hoffmanns tale is directly attached to the idea of being robbed of ones eyes, and hence, given his earlier findings, to the castration complex (Cavell, 1996, p. 110). In this way Freud loses out on an opportunity to reflect on the wider consequences of human separation. 52. To me, this is one way of glossing Freuds famous speculation that Something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction (Freud, 1912d, pp. 188189). 53. I say the moment of promise is squashed because Freuds sentence does not stop here: To it itself we cannot assign any sex, he writes, if, following the conventional equation of activity and masculinity, we are inclined to describe it as masculine, we must not forget that it also covers trends with a passive aim (Freud, 1933a, p. 131). This comes only a few pages after his stern warning against equating femininity with passivity (see p. 115)! It is disheartening to note that Lacan converts Freuds half-hearted alignment of the libido with masculinity into a clear espousal of the primacy of the phallus: [O]ne can glimpse the reason for a feature which has never been elucidated and which again gives a measure of the depth of Freuds intuition, he writes, namely, why he advances the view that there is only one libido, his text clearly indicating that he conceives of it as masculine in nature (Lacan, 1958, p. 85; emphasis added). 54. The formulation owes something to a comment in a brilliant exam paper written in February 2003 by Magdalena Ostas, a graduate student in the Literature Program at Duke University, in the context of a discussion of Cavell, Wittgenstein, and Derrida: The fact of finitude does not have to be expressed as lack.
132
TORIL MOI
REFERENCES
Agacinski, S. (1999). Contre leffacement des sexes. Le Monde, 6 February. Anatrella, T. (1998). Une Prcipitation anxieuse. Le Monde, 10 October. Anatrella, T. (1999). A propos dune folie. Le Monde, 26 June: 17. Balzac, H. de (1842). La Femme de trente ans. Paris: Gallimard, 1931. Barthes, R. (1973). Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil. Barthes, R. (1975). The Pleasure of the Text (trans. R. Miller). New York: Hill and Wang. Beauvoir, S. de (1949). Le Deuxime sexe (2 vols.). Paris: Gallimard (Coll. Folio). 1986. Beauvoir, S. de (1953). The Second Sex (trans. H. M. Parshley). New York: Vintage Books. 1989 Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. Bernheimer, C. (1995). A question of reference: Male sexuality in phallic theory. In: Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre, ed. M. Cohen & C. Prendergast (pp. 320338). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bracken, W. F. (1998). Becoming subjects: The agency of desire in Jacques Lacans return to Freud. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University. Butler, J. (1993). The Lesbian phallus and the morphological imaginary. In: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (pp. 5791). New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2000). Antigones Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Cavell, S. (1982). The politics of interpretation (politics as opposed to what?). In: Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (pp. 2759). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Cavell, S. (1987). Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Cavell, S. (1994). A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1996). Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
133
Chiland, C. (1997). Changer de sexe. Paris: Odile Jacob. Chiland, C. (1999). Le Sexe mne le monde. Paris: Calmann Lvy. Chodorow, N. (1993). Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Conant, J. (2000). Elucidation and nonsense in Frege and early Wittgenstein. In: A. Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp. 174217). London & New York: Routledge. Crary, A. & Read, R. (Eds.) (2000). The New Wittgenstein. London & New York: Routledge. Dean, T. (2000). Beyond Sexuality. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Diamond, C. (1995). The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diamond, C. (2000). Ethics, imagination and the method of Wittgensteins Tractatus. . In: A. Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp. 149173). London & New York: Routledge. Fassin, E. (1999). The purloined gender: American feminism in a French mirror. French Historical Studies, 22 (1): 113138. Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., 7. Freud, S. (1908d). Civilized sexual morality and modern nervous illness. S.E., 9. Freud, S. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. S.E., 11. Freud, S. (1918a). The taboo of virginity. S.E., 11. Freud, S. (1920a). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. S.E., 18. Freud, S. (1924d). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. S.E. 19. Freud, S. (1930a). Civilization and Its Discontents. S.E., 21. Freud, S. (1931b). Female sexuality. S.E., 21. Freud, S. (1933a). Femininity. In: New Introductory, Lectures on PsychoAnalysis. S.E., 22. Freud, S. (1937c). Analysis terminable and interminable. S.E., 23. Gallop, J. (1985). Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gallop, J. (1988). Beyond the phallus. In: Thinking through the Body (pp. 119133). New York: Columbia University Press. Garrta, A. F. (2001). Re-enchanting the Republic: Pacs, Parit and Le Symbolique. Yale French Studies, 100: 145166. Gaspard, F. (1997). Parity: Why not? In: differences, 9 (2): 93104.
134
TORIL MOI
Gaspard, F., Viennot, E. & Lipietz, A. (1994). La Parit pour. Nouvelles Questions Fministes. 15 (4): 190. Horney, K. (1973). Feminine Psychology. New York: Norton. Irigaray, L. (1977). This Sex Which Is Not One (trans. C. Porter & C. Burke). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Kristeva, J. (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (trans. L. S. Roudiez). New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1938). Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de lindividu: Essai danalyse dune fonction en psychologie. Paris: Navarin, 1984. Lacan, J. (1958). The meaning of the phallus (trans. J. Rose). In: J. Mitchell & J. Rose (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne (pp. 7485). London: Macmillan, 1982. Lacan, J. (1966). crits. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (197273). God and the jouissance of woman (trans. J. Rose). In: J. Mitchell & J. Rose (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne (pp. 137148). London: Macmillan, 1982. Lacan, J. (1975). Le Sminaire livre XX. Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Encore, 19721973, ed. J.A. Miller (trans. B. Fink). New York: W. W. Norton. Lagache, D. (1947). La Jalousie amoureuse: Psychologie descriptive et psychoanalyse (2 vols). Paris: PUF. Lamizet, B. (2001). Lgalit, lidentit et le nom. Le Monde, 12 February. Le Doeuff, M., Varikas, E., & Trat, J. (1995). La Parit contre. Nouvelles Questions Fministes, 16 (2): 5140. McDougall, J. (1995). The Many Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality. New York: Norton. Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Mitchell, J. (1986). The question of femininity and the theory of psychoanalysis. In: G. Kohon (Ed.), The British School of Psychoanalysis: The Independent Tradition (pp. 381398). London: Free Association Books. Mitchell, J. (2000). Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria. New York: Basic Books.
135
Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.) (1982). Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne. London: Macmillan. Moi, T. (1986). Preface. In: T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva Reader (pp. vivii). Oxford: Blackwell. Moi, T. (1999). What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ozouf, M. (1995). Womens Words: Essay on French Singularity (trans. J. M. Todd). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Ragland-Sullivan, E. (1987). Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Rosanvallon, P., Collin, F., & Lipietz, A. (1997). Parity and universalism (I). differences 9 (2): 110142. Rose, J. (1982). Introduction to Lacan, God and the jouissance of woman. In: J. Mitchell & J. Rose (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne (pp. 137138). London: Macmillan, 1982. Roudinesco, E. (1986). Histoire de la psychanalyse en France. 2: 1925 1985. Paris: Seuil. Sausse, S. K. (1999). Pacs et clones: La logique du mme. Libration, 7 July: 6. Scott, J. W. (1997). La querelle des femmes in the Late Twentieth Century. differences, 9 (2): 7092. Stone, M. (2000). Wittgenstein on deconstruction. A. Crary & R. Read (Eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp. 83117). London & New York: Routledge. Tincq, H. (1999). Front commun des religions. Le Monde, 1 February. Tort, M. (1999). Homophobies psychanalytiques. Le Monde, 15 October. Trigano, S. (1998). Les Droits de l (autre) homme. Le Monde, 18 November. Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness). London: Routledge, 1994. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed.) (trans. G. E. M. Anscombe). New York: Macmillan, 1968.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Femininity theory, theories of women, or feminist theory?

Ebba Witt-Brattstrm
n What Is a Woman? Toril Moi argues that Freud may have been a man with biased views on women, but he was not a biological determinist, despite his belief that our anatomy and our biological needs will make psychic conflict inevitable (Moi, 1999, p. 380). This argument is the background to Mois chapter, From femininity to finitude: Freud, Lacan, and feminism, again (Chapter 7, this volume). Mois speciality as a scholar can be said to be appropriating (note the Marxist flavour!), in the name of feminist theory, appropriate supposedly gender-neutral, that is, patriarchal theories such as psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva), existentialist phenomenology (Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre), and Bourdieus sociology and philosophy of language (Austin, Cavell, Wittgenstein). In Chapter 7, one finds an excellent although short example of Mois appropriation method. Working from Freuds own methodological reflection in The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman (Freud, 1920a), Moi is able to show how the generalizing tendency of traditional psychoanalytic femininity theory becomes the antithesis to Freuds own psychoanalytic method, defined as an inquiry into individual cases, which looks backwards instead of 137
138
EBBA WITT - BRATTSTRM
forwards and therefore does not predict or regulate the subjects future. In a more edifying sense, Moi has been able to appropriate Simone de Beauvoirs theories in The Second Sex. I read as the woman I am, writes Moi in What is a Woman? (Moi, 1999, p. 205). This assertion is the distinctive feature of a typical Moi text: a theoretical, philosophical, feminist essay that is personal and theoretical at the same time. Moi has found Beauvoirs theory of the embodied, sexually different human being useful in her quest for a theory of subjectivity that does not exclude womens experiences or their agency: Subjectivity (and agency) has always been at the heart of my interests (p xii). So, when Moi confronts psychoanalysis, or specifically Freud and Lacan, with the question what is a woman? (defined in Beauvarian terms), she finds no answers aside from castration as a synonym for femininity. All his women patients wanted psychoanalysis to give them a penis, Freud stated in 1937the year Freud lost his dearest correspondent, Lou Andreas-Salom, for whom the concept of penis envy was culturally constructed, a token of mistaken modernity, when women started to compete with men on their premises (Andreas-Salom, 1928, p 241). With Lacan, women became doubly marked by absence, lack, and castration. Such theories of castration, penis envy, and the phallus are clearly sexist in Beauvoirs sense: they deny women universality as women, without losing their particularity. Mois critique of the self-willed use of the concept of castration is merciless, and her dismissal of femininity theory for the good of theories of women is stimulating. But what happened to feminist theory?
* * *
Let me first state that this is an exciting chapter, going straight to the core of feminisms problem with the holy Grail of psychoanalytic inquiry: the riddle of femininity. Although I definitely share Mois weariness of the patriarchal equation of woman with castration, I have my doubts about dumping femininity theory in the dustbin of history. Her solution to the problem of female particularity and her strategy for an egalitarian futurethe suggestion that psychoanalysis should be the theory and therapy of human
FEMININITY THEORY
139
finitudeis to me, despite its elegance, something like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Moi runs the risk of using human finitude as a political alibi, a moral shortcut through the swamps of femininity to the Valhalla of universality (at the cost of the particularity of both men and women, I would add). What is more, I do not believe that the three aspects of human finitude specified by Moi with the help of Joyce McDougallthe discovery of the other, the discovery of one-sexedness, and the discovery of deathare not gendered in any way. If, as Freuds concept of epistemophilia teaches usand Moi has written brilliantly about it (Moi, 1999, pp. 348368)intellectual work begins in and with the body, then the desire for knowledgeabout the nature of the other, about the meaning of sexual difference and procreation, about deathhas to be gendered since our bodies are gendered, which consequently makes psychic conflict inevitable, to quote again Mois rehabilitation of Freud in What is a woman? I would ask you to consider my own dilemma. Am I to follow Mois recommendation to stop studying femininity theories (and the Freudian is the most interesting one)? Trying to give my analytical attention to individual cases as they are put forward by the female literary tradition, I find it impossible to choose between femininity theories and theories of women. My own experience of thirty years as a literary scholar specializing in women authors of various periods has taught me that the material given to us by the literary tradition is hard to understand without knowledge of historically pervasive discourses on womens so called nature. In order to do theories of women, to understand their testimonies, if you like, in history, but also in contemporary literature, we need to apply femininity theory. And I would never want to choose between Freud and Lacan in this respect. Does one have to? I would rather stick to Juliet Mitchells recommendation of 1974: Freudian and Lacanian thought does not offer a recommendation for, but an analysis of patriarchal society. Mitchell (and Jacqueline Rose) offered to a whole generation of intellectual feminists a shift from a literal reading of feminine sexuality in terms of penis envy to the structural role of lack in the gender binary (Mitchell, 1974; Mitchell & Rose, 1982). Theirs might not be the solution for today, but it
140
marked a historical moment in our quest for an analysis of how sexual differences operate in society, for an understanding of the genesis of gender formation and an explanation for the asymmetrical power relations constituted by sexual difference. I do, however, agree with Moi that we now have to take a decisive step out of the grips of phallic feminism, but I will venture to propose another way for women to claim universality as women. Is feminist theory (this contradiction in terms) perhaps a synonym of theories of women? To me, feminism has to do with political advocacy and agency that questions the confusion of biology with culture when it comes to women, and theory is but a statement of the facts on which practice depends. (Theory, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, derives from the Greek word thea, which is the root for looking at, viewing, contemplating.) In the term feminist theory, politics and subjectivity combine to disrupt the scientific objectivity that patriarchal theory claims for itself. Thus, feminist theory, to my understanding, would be enough to solve the absurd choice between particularity and universality. Given its focus on particular cases and individual experiences, feminist theory should avoid the trap of undue generalization that, according to Moi, characterizes femininity theories. This, as Moi points out, is Beauvoirs method in The Second Sex, where she freely uses womens literature to exemplify different female experiences. Thus, Beauvoir, but not Moi (although herself an eminent reader of literary texts) seems to know what a treasurechest of female experiences womens literary tradition is for making theories about women.
* * *
This brings me to my last argument and my modest proposal for the future of feminist psychoanalysis. Allow me a methodological reflection. When we accept the debates around Freud as the privileged starting point of our feministphilosophical project, the concern with fighting against the phallus keeps us shut up in a picture that leaves us ignorant about everything outside it. Moi writes in Chapter 7 (note 15): A picture (penis) held us captive. And we could not get outside (beyond) it, for it lay (stood) in our language (theory) and language (theory) seemed to repeat it to us
FEMININITY THEORY
141
inexorably. In the picture in which we find ourselves today, where are the founding mothers of psychoanalysis and their dialogue with the phallic monism of this theory? Lou AndreasSalom, Karen Horney, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Melanie Klein, and all the otherswhat were their opinions on Freuds femininity theory, and why do we not bring their arguments into play? How long will we go on inventing the wheel, or the Anti-Phallus, in every generation? Why does psychoanalysis not have a female canon as well as a male? Why do we always have to go to Beauvoir in order to learn that feminist theory needs its foremothers experiences of being othered in order to avoid this fate for our granddaughters? Because of the discontinuity in the story of womens intellectual effort (Lerner, 1993, p. 275), are we not all, as Gerda Lerner has suggested, victims of amnesia when it comes to the development of a feminist consciousness, which has lived on for thousands of years in womens literature but has never been transmitted to us in terms of theories of women? This her-story or collective memory entails an epistemological tradition, a body of knowledge, figures, and other rhetorical strategies for depicting more or less repressed human experiences (childbearing, heterosexual as well as lesbian desire, female aging, and so on). While working as editor on Nordic Womens Literary History, I realized two things: First, women represent, historically, a different tradition of knowledge. The female author is a kind of political philosopher: she must produce her own system of understanding the world. Surprisingly, this system often turns out to be a universe of ideas, experiences, observations that differ from those of men. Second, this worldview often challenges and undermines patriarchal ideologies and calls into question traditional hierarchies of the sexes (and summons men to take responsibility for their gendered behaviour). The fact that such a great part of womens literature has been a literature of testimonyspeaking of structural subordination (for example, cultural representations of woman as sexual object) and individual oppression (for example, sexual violence)is a major reason for its suppression. Another is the fact that, although the subject positions offered to women in history have always been connected with the processes of othering, there is a tradition of resistance to being othered in authorships as
142
different as St. Bridget of Sweden (fourteenth century) and Doris Lessing, not to mention a thousand more. In womens literature the question What is a woman? can be answered in a thousand ways. More important to us today is that this situation applies to the question What is a man? as well.
* * *
In other words, most women authors refuse to choose between being a woman and being a human being (particularity and universality), and, to this end, they adopt different strategies. One way of resisting the false dilemma is to refuse particularity as a mark only of femininity. I call this strategy genderizing or particularizing men, often experienced by men as a degradation from universal to particular. Moi writes that men can be particular and universal at the same time, but I doubt that they are allowed to (except in literature and perhaps in love relationships), since there is no one there to recognize them as such. Beauvoir reflects on this in a wellknown passage of The Second Sex:
[W]oman is defined exclusively in her relation to man. The asymmetry of the categoriesmale and femaleis made manifest in the unilateral form of sexual myths. We sometimes say the sex to designate woman; she is the flesh, its delights and dangers. The truth that for woman man is sex and carnality has never been proclaimed because there is no one to proclaim it. Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth. [de Beauvoir, 1988, p. 174175]
Simone de Beauvoir points to the shocking truth that for women men are as much body as genderthat is, they are marked by particularity just as much as women are for men. In the female literary tradition, this is a forbidden or muted truth that has had to be given with precaution, in coded language, especially in historical times (when male particularity was often depicted with the defensive use of irony). To summarize: to do theories of women, or feminist theory, go to the foremothers in literature and in psychoanalysis. In order to create symmetry between the terms man and woman, create a
FEMININITY THEORY
143
new, particular entry for men (which would be much the same entry as for women who do not want to trade their particularity for universality). The time is (over)ripe to give the question What is a woman? its counterpart: What is a man?
REFERENCES
Andreas-Salom, L. (1928). Was daraus folgt, dass es nicht die Frau gewesen ist, die den Vater totgeschlagen hat. In: I. Weber, & B. Rempp (Eds.), Lou Andreas Salom. Das zweideutige Lcheln der Erotik, Texte zur Psyhoanalyse. Freiburg: Kore Verlag, 1990. Beauvoir, S. de (1988). The Second Sex. London: Pan Books. Freud, S. (1920a). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. S.E., 18. Lerner, G. (1993). The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and Feminism. London: Allen Lane. Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.) (1982). Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan & the cole freudienne. London: Macmillan Press. Moi, T. (1999). What Is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
CHAPTER NINE
Revisiting the riddle of sex: an intersubjective view of masculinity and femininity

Jessica Benjamin
n this chapter my aim is to show the consequences of the way Freud (1933a) posed and solved the riddle of the nature of femininity for our view of both sexuality and gender. I consider how the problem of excess generates the split between activity and passivity, which Freudfor all his warnings against equating them with gender positionsstill took as points on the compass. Here I am following up on some of my ideas (Benjamin, 1988, 1995, 1996) of how the complementarity of gender is the effect of splitting. I show how we can read Freuds own interpretation of femininity as the turn towards a passive attitude in relation to the father as the expression of the oedipal boys attitude. This view of femininity expresses the oedipal boys need to projectively create an object that can contain excitement and can hold the place of passivity. This projection, most particularly, into the figure of the daughter, is a clue to how Freud shifted from early writings about hysterical daughters with abusive or intrusive fathers to later writings in which he defined passive aims in relation to the father as the essence of the feminine. I will contend that femininity is not a pre-existing thing or essence that is repudiated by the male psyche: rather, it is actu145
146
JESSICA BENJAMIN
ally constructed by it. The daughter position, in which the girl functions as container, helps shore up a masculine self threatened by oedipal loss, exclusion, or over-stimulation. We might say that the daughter position is in a double sense the solution to the problem of sexual passivity as we find it represented by Freud and correspondingly expressed in the male psyche. Perhaps this is another way of showing why it is impossible to speak of femininity as a thing, separate from masculinity, for the two are truly constructs created in the same moment, for the same purpose. Finally, I close by suggesting another possible processing of passivity in an intersubjective economy based on working through rather than repudiating experiences of excess. An underlying premise of my argument is that passivity is not in itself intolerable: quite the contrary, it is often pleasurable, but it becomes so when there is a failure of self-regulation based on deficient responses by the otherresponses variously conceptualized as holding, containment, and mentalization. This failure, initially an intersubjective one, generates the experience of excess. By excess I mean, to begin with, more tension than is felt to be pleasurable or even bearable, particularly by the immature psyche. One aim of this discussion is to reconsider the experience of passivity in order to highlight underrepresented, intersubjective solutions to the problem of excess.
The problem of excess

Freuds notion of sexual pleasure and pain emphasized how we seek mastery over tension; he conceived of a one-person economy in which pain is defined as too much tension. But what is it that makes for too much? From an intersubjective point of view, pleasure and pain occur within a two-person relationship. They are psychic experiences having to do with how we register the responses of another and how the other registers us. Psychic pain in its intersubjective aspect is linked to failures of recognition and regulation, to arousal caused by inadequate or overwhelming responses, and to absence of mentalization (Fonagy & Target, 1996). Eigen (1993), in a viewpoint parallel to my own, stressed the
REVISITING THE RIDDLE OF SEX
147
overwhelming of the psyche by its response to the others stimulation. Without the outside other, the originally helpless self cannot process internal tension or external stimulation. Without the mothers containment of pain and excitement, the baby cannot self-regulate. But this is a two-way process: the individuals selfregulation of arousal and affect and the process of mutual regulation are interdependent (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002). Thus an individuals state of internal tension is inextricably tied to the intersubjective tension of recognition between self and other. Recognition includes not only gratifying but meaning-giving responses that hold affect as well as giving coherence to the selfs needs, intentions, and acts. From my perspective, the failure of tension regulationexcessis generally linked to failures in recognition. Laplanche helped to shape contemporary discussion of excess by emphasizing the general over-stimulation and mystery attendant on the adults transmission of the sexual in the enigmatic message (Laplanche, 1987, 1992, 1995). However, I wish to supplement Laplanches view with an intersubjective perspective on sexuality that also considers how excess results from both specific and structural misrecognitions: from the lack of direct interpersonal recognition of the childs sexual experience (Davies, 2001) as well as the general over-stimulation and mystery attendant on the adults transmission of the sexual in the enigmatic message (Laplanche, 1987, 1992, 1995). In Laplanches reframing of the seduction theory, the excess that is sexuality always begins with an unconscious communication from the otherthe parents sexuality as not yet comprehended by the child. Laplanche contends that Freud was too concrete in thinking that seduction must be either real or imagined and missed the category of the message, the transmission of affect and excitement without literal seduction. In Laplanches view, the enigmatic message is constitutive of the childs unconscious. Sexuality is inherently mysterious because the child cannot comprehend what the adult wants from the child. Stein (1998) has elaborated how the enigmatic message generates the poignancy of sex and how the excessive takes us beyond representation into an experience of otherness and mystery.
148
JESSICA BENJAMIN
My reading of the enigmatic message here is somewhat different from Steins because I want to distinguish more sharply between the otherness that is mysterious and that which is mystifying: in the mystifying aspect, affective tension that could not be understood, represented, or bound in dialogic exchange appears later as though self-originating, a one-person fantasy (a real appearance). Thus the position of passivity can be analysed as an effect of a particular relation to an other rather than seeing it as an innate instinctual position. For instance, Isabelle, a daughter who learned to be a container for her mother, tells of her mothers invasive excitement, dancing around the room while her daughter practiced piano. This message about her mothers internal state, which reappeared in Isabelles fantasies about herself, made her own desires confusingwere they mothers or her own? The vicissitudes of excitement and the ability to contain arousal is linked in complex ways to the conscious and unconscious aspects of communication with a specific other. This relational aspect, as Stein points out, disappears in Laplanches abstract conception of parental sexuality as a generalized other. Psychoanalysis has in recent decades elaborated a far richer understanding of specific experiences between self and other. Since the groundbreaking work of Stoller (1975, 1980) and McDougall (1989, 1995), we recognize how sexual fantasies can be used to solve problems of differentiation and gender identification, to express traumatic loss and pain, wishes for reparation and revenge, fears of fragmentation and destructiveness. They opened up our work to the insight that the peremptory nature of the sexual might be attributed to the intensity of object loss and not the paramount effect of the drive. We now think about how sexuality functions to contain otherwise unrepresented, unmentalized experiences with significant others, or how bodily contact can be metaphorically equated in fantasy with the entry into the others mind, the experience of being recognized or held, invaded or excluded. We consider the gradations of the desire to reach the other, the frustrated desperation to get in accompanied by urgent need to discharge, the different inflections of the wish to enter or be entered: from the wish to
149
be held safely to the urge to break in forcibly, from the wish to be known to the wish to be cracked open. We may think of sexuality as a means of expressing the need to get me into you, or get you into me; but conversely, we may think that the experience of excitement generates or intensifies the need to get in, as in, Help me contain this tension; let me put this tension into you. Thus we have a whole lexicon of experiences involving the causes and effects of uncontained sexual excitement and unmanageable arousal, in which we alternately see sexuality as a motive and as a vehicle of expression. Along these lines, Stein (1998) has suggested that we find sexuality suitable to serve as one of the most powerful coins in the mental trade between different levels and contents (p. 254). Analysts now work in both directions, not only discovering sexual themes and motivations behind the ostensibly non-sexual (p. 254) but finding other motives in the sexual. Thus the introduction of intersubjective considerations does not obviate a notion of the intrapsychic perspective: each is alternately valuable. But adding the intersubjective does delimit the place of the intrapsychic. Unprocessed, undigested affect can, in the absence of a transforming, regulating other, still be intrapsychically processed through forms of sexual excitement, more or less dissociated from other affective experience. Failures in affective containment may be reworked and translated into sexual tensionthey may or may not reflect some interpersonal transmission of unconscious sexual content. As Stein has put it, it seems that the human organism has the capacity to [use sexualization] to deal with the excess . . . in other words, sexualisation is a capacity, a positive achievement . . . (p. 266). Sexual fantasy, on this view, serves the needs of human creativity and expression. It often stands in for the outside other; it becomes an Other within. We may wonder to what degree sexuality serves this function precisely because, as Davies (2001) put it, a childs sexuality has not been embedded in procedural memories of interpersonal safety and containment, they reside in large measure in unformulated, oftentimes dissociated realms . . . unprocessed, unmetabolized (p. 764).
150
JESSICA BENJAMIN
Excess and the mindbody split

If sexuality provides an alternative register for processing tension and managing excess, when it functions in lieu of the outside other or substitutes for communicative and symbolic processes, this can only work by dint of a split in the self. Above all, by splitting mind and body, the self can play two parts, with the body as container for experience that the mind cannot process symbolically. The body can be employed as an alternative part-self to hold and discharge the tension of split-off experience with important others. Painful affect and overwhelming excitement that are left unprocessed and unrepresented in communicative dialogue can be represented in sexual fantasy and then discharged physically. In this manner the patient Isabelle, whom I have just mentioned and have described elsewhere (Benjamin, 1995), used desperate autoerotic activities and fantasies beginning in early childhood to process her mothers enigmatic message. Isabelle was referred for analysis by a doctor she had consulted because she feared that her sexual practicesputting hard objects inside herhad damaged her vagina. She felt her mother to have been intensely over-stimulating, transmitting enormous excitement and anxiety, using Isabelle as a container for her own excess. Initially, Isabelle would say that she wished I would be more stimulating and complained of not understanding why I did not give her direction. In one session she wished that I would say one really perceptive thing, would be like the consulting analyst who referred her, whose comments were amazingly pointed . . . and deep . . . hitting a nerve. Her agitation subsided somewhat when I articulated her fear that I was not potent enough to penetrate her and handle her sexuality, that it would overwhelm me. In effect, Isabelle felt that only if I entered her and structured her with my mind, containing the tension that had overwhelmed her mind, could she be safe. But while she expressed this in terms of being penetrated, it appeared that she needed to be held and taken into my mind as much as she needed to be entered. My ability to contact this longing was not unduly
151
affected by her invidious comparisons and her frustration because of the transparency of her wish to be recognized by me, one with which I could readily identify. In the following session, she began to describe her compulsive autoerotic activities, which had begun in early childhood. As she grew older, she felt that she took her mothers part in her sexual fantasy, reworking her mothers scolding assaults into her sexual experience. She would try to talk to her mother, she said, but when I did open up, shed attack me, but Id feel guilty, like I brought it on because I had wanted to talk to her. . . . If I opened up too much, shed attack me, so maybe I took on the role of my mother pushing me. In fact, when I masturbated, and even now, but then I mean, a voice of power that I take on tells me I have to do it, and then I endure a state of orgasm: Youre gonna do it. I was like master and slave . . . there was a giant split between the two sides, a nondescript voice with complete control versus one that just wanted. I could only open up to my own inner voice, I could not do it with anyone else. You are in the camp of anyone else. Isabelle describes, in effect, how she has created a split complementarity of mind and body within herself: the active doer allied with the observer mind, the passive body self having to hold a state of excitement, leading to dissolution of self. The active master is disembodied, and the embodied self serves or submits to it. All this within the omnipotence of her own mind, which cannot dare let the other in. The other is dangerous, both shutting her out (as she remembers her mother doing when her brother was born) or violently intruding (as she, Isabelle, might have wanted to in her rage at being left out). In the absence of intersubjective regulation by the other, the excited sexual body became a split off container for unrepresentable pain and for aggression. Both her mothers aggression, and her ownas well as the rage she experience in early adolescence which she was forbidden from turning back against her mother. It is only after this confession of her core anxieties that Isabelle was able to bear for the first time, at the beginning of the next session, a moment of silence, a space, a presence that is
152
JESSICA BENJAMIN
non-invasive. That is, she can imagine being held safely in an others mind, without penetrating or being penetrated, in such a way that her internal tension is regulated. Isabelle story illustrates a motherchild dyad in which excess is processed through sexualization, through fantasy that explicitly takes the body as a container for the unbearable. This sexualization takes the well-known form of complementarity between doer and done-to, enacted in the intrapsychic fantasy world, we might say, within the monadic sexual economy. The principal movement in this economy is not the exchange of recognition, the communication of affect between subjects, but, rather, a fantasmatic seesaw of activity and passivity. There is no mutual penetration of minds rather, a fantasy of a powerful doer and the one who submits.
The monadic economy

The regulation of tension in the monadic economy takes place through bodily discharge of tensionsometimes compulsively as for Isabelle. Dimen (2003) has proposed that discharge befits a oneperson model. Freuds economy of libido as opposed to the idea of pleasure [Lust] is associated with a kind of sexual hygiene in which discharge is the bridge between sexuality and sanity. I would distinguish discharge from the two-person economy insofar as the point is only to regulate ones own tension, not to enjoy the other or to contact another mind. Discharge, when it is detached from those purposes, means the use of the body to solve the problem of mental excess, that which cannot be held in the dialogically created mental space. I believe that these formulations about how we regulate tension might begin to contribute to a psychoanalytic idea of energy, moving it out of the instinctual economy of the isolate individual and recasting it in terms of the intersubjective economy. In introducing the term energy, I am trying to take a step in the dialectic beyond the relational reversal (e.g. Mitchell, 1988) according to which sexuality expresses relational configurations. I wish to develop an economic idea, that within relational configurations we produce somatic/affective tensionthat is, energythat becomes (materi-
153
alizes as) sexuality. Work in attachment theory and infancy research has related to the idea of organisms sharing information and signals as a basis for connection and for some kind of energetic transformation within the self (e.g. Sander, 2002). I am suggesting that the concept of energy as a mental, psychological phenomenon may deepen our intersubjective psychoanalytic understanding that the regulation of tension within the individual includes the transmission of tension and its regulation or recognition via communication between subjects (see Beebe & Lachmann, 2002). If we follow Sanders logic that more specific recognition allows the dyadic system to contain more complexity, we might conclude that greater specificity of recognition (understanding) allows more tension to be contained and processed. In terms of energy, we can conceptualize dyadic systems based on both intrapsychic and intersubjective economies, which interact with each other. But my argument is that phenomena that appear as solely intrapsychic productions in the individual should be understood in terms of intersubjective failures in the original dyadic systems that resulted in experiences of excess. For instance, when the other is absent or mentally missing, this may result in an excess of pain, loss, or flooding. In addition, I propose that action directed towards discharge on the part of one partner (a parent)as we saw with Isabelles motherincreases excess. It readily devolves into looking towards the child as a holding other reduced to the position of passive container. Such actions represent a version of discharge whether or not they are overtly sexual. Such actions, as when an adult conscripts a child to contain his sexual energy or tension, appears to me to be an important dimension of Laplanches enigmatic message, which, as he suggests, is to be distinguished from concrete seduction.
Activity and passivity

What are the consequences of uniting such economic ideas of tension and excess within an intersubjective framework of unconscious transmission? These ideas suggest how the polar complementarity of activepassive is a function of the intrapsychic
154
JESSICA BENJAMIN
economy of dischargeeither you put into me or I put into you. It implies some failure in the intersubjective economy of recognition and mutual regulation. It would follow that the templates we define as masculine and feminine and their corresponding appeals to our impulses towards activity or passivity may be traced back to the problem of transmission and the processing of excess. Activity and passivity in the realm of excess can generate a destructive cycle in which the other is experienced as shutting out, excluding, uncontaining, thus stimulating or provoking invasion. I will suggest that the traditional gender solutions to the problem of excess perpetuate this vicious cycle. Recently, viewing Berninis extraordinary sculpture portraying Apollo and Daphne, I was struck by the powerlessness and desperation of both male and female figures locked in an eternal vicious cycle. The male god enacts a violent grabbiness, as the violated young woman evades him by hardening her body into bark, her arms reaching away and upward as they transform into branches. How deeply are our past and present sexual mythologies, our templates of masculine and feminine, shaped by this dynamic of invasion and shutting out, shutting out and struggling to get in? In this light, let us reprise Freuds idea of seduction as a traumatic experience of helplessness in the face of over-stimulation or being shut out by the other. I suggest how this experience of excess leads to a splitting between an active part-self (phallic, mental) and a passive part-self (container, bodily). We can see how the construction of what Freud understood as femininity actually reflects an important aversion of the male solution to the problem of excess. To begin with, let us consider how the discharge of tension comes to be associated with activity and to acquire a gendered meaning as masculine. As I have discussed elsewhere (Benjamin, 1998a, 1998b), an insight into this process was suggested to me by a discussion of Freuds (1896b) Further Remarks on the Neuropsychosis of Defense (Christiansen, 1993). There Freud observed that the obsessional position of defensive activity is the characteristically masculine way of dealing with overstimulation. It rescues the child from the position of passivity, which is both intolerable and feminine. Indeed, Christiansen (1993) proposed that we read this to say that masculinity does not result in, but is first constituted by,
155
this repudiation of passivity in favour of defensive activity. In the same defensive move, as the male psyche expels passivity, it creates through splitting what is called femininity as a projected object that absorbs what it extrudes. Now this move is a key to decoding the core fantasy that infuses the gender positions organized in the Oedipus complex as described by Freud (1924d, 1926d)and less so by subsequent, dissenting theorists such as Klein. In the oedipal situation the boy is liable to feel over-stimulated by his own sexuality and his mothers, by her message and his unsymbolized response. At the same time he is in the grip of a disidentification from mother that often has severe sanctions, in that shame and humiliation are the lot of boys who wish to hang on to their mothers. Many forces, including his own need to separate, stimulate his longings for her yet make it impossible for him to turn to her for containment. The sense of loss may sound the dominant note, but then again impotence, shame, confusion, and a range of other affects may play their part. The experience of having the motherson couple separated by the father can be coded as the fear of being entered by the father (Elise, 2001). Thus the experience of being passively overwhelmed and abandoned needs to be defended against via projection and identification with the fatheraggressor. The boy establishes his own activity by projecting the experience of being the passive one onto the other, creating the split complementarity. He says, in effect: it is not I but the little sister, the girl, who must be the passive one. As I see it, this position of being passively stimulatednow associated with the baby he once washas traditionally been lodged by the oedipal boymind in the image of the feminine object. In David Grossmans (2001) epistolary novel Be My Knife, the writings of his desperate character Yair exemplify this dilemma. Yair, in letters that read like monologues on the couch, tells of his desperate desire to be understood and his fear that he is nothing but a screaming baby, a braying donkey foal, an infantile weirdo. He warns his epistolary lover Miriam to get back because (note the female body imagery) disgusting rivers are flowing out of all his orifices . . . the shedding layers of his slightly overexcited soul . . . Then again he writes, I have been the hole, how unmasculine. When he speaks of his longing to just once touch the target, touch, touch one alien soul, he sees himself becoming the screamer, who
156
JESSICA BENJAMIN
screams in his breaking, reedy voice, which continues to change throughout his life. Tellingly, his invocation of feminine hysteria includes identifying himself as the container, the one who has understood this scream not with my ears but with my stomach, my pulse, my womb . . . It is almost as if he is forced to be a container, who understands others but experiences this as emasculationnot unlike the gender-switching boy Coates (Coates, Friedman, & Wolfe, 1991) describes, whose cartoon depicts a cat screaming because he is being forced to turn into a lady. He ought, Yair says, to contain himself phallically: My father would say to me, the whole body wants to pee, but you know what to take out to do the job. At the books climax, in a power struggle with his little son, Yair tries to claim the position of that phallic father whose voice appeared earlier: You will return to me, crawling, as usual, says he dryly. He shuts his little sonhis little boy selfout of the house (the maternal container) until he gives in. Yair finally does require the understanding intervention of Miriam, his good mother-container, to rescue him from the tormenting alternatives of emasculated boy impotence or punitive paternal control. Grossmans story suggests how a boys sense of loss in relation to the mother impairs his sense of containment because it is compounded by the need to disidentify with both sides of the mother baby couple: the mothers womb, which hears and enfolds, the baby who cries out. Repudiation of identification with mother and baby contaminates, as we see in Yairs plaint, the previous identification with the organs that signify the internal container. It is a mark of weakness to identify with the womb that hears and recognizes the cry of the child for its mother, the scream of not being heard. Disidentification is necessitated by the threat of being belittled, castrated, or seen as the crying, leaky baby by the father. This disidentification can impair the integration of everything consolidated under the umbrella of maternal accommodating functionsreceptivity, holding, and responsibility for ones own regulationthus leaving the little boy uncontained, over-excited and leaky. This can only be counteracted, as his father says, by making the penis the sole and powerful container of discharge. Accepting this unattainable phallic ideal as a signifier of his own lack, he feels himself humiliated, effeminized. He is cut off by his shamethrown into catastrophic isolation, longing but unable to
157
touch even one other. Thus the problem of being heard and held, having ones excess contained, is expressed through gender signifiers as a problem of masculine and feminine identifications. In Grossmans narrative we see how complex a mans relationship to cast-off femininity becomes. I have been suggesting that the very norm of femininity was constructed to hold unwanted experiences of vulnerability and helplessness, and that this occurs through the defensive splitting of activity and passivity. This view of the feminine corresponds to the classic image of daughter, the one who, Freud insists, must switch to the father. Here we see the logic of Freuds (1931b, 1933a) insistence that this switch is what defines femininity. Of course, Horney (1926) had already pointed out how Freuds theory of penis envy and the girls sense of inferiority reproduced exactly the thinking of the oedipal boy. This thinking performs a double move: the daughter as passive feminine object now becomes, via a symbolic equation, a receptacle for the selfs active discharge; also (via projective identification) she now stands in as the sacrificial masochistic self whose sexual impulse is turned inward. She will take on the role of accommodating and absorbing unmanageable tensionlike a containing mother, only more controllable. Another feature of this move is that the mother is split, so that her accommodating aspect is attributed to the girl and her active organizing aspect is reformulated as male, fatherly (use your penis to do the job). This active part of the motherfor instance her anal control, often called phallic is what the boy identifies with and recodes as masculine. What the boy often abjects is her sexuality, her organs: hence the disavowal of the vagina, which Freud took to be normal.
The daughter position

The construction of femininity and the daughter position in the oedipal-boy mind operate culturally, instituted and evolved over the long history of patriarchy. How, exactly, they are created and transmitted, I could not claim to describe, but I think we see the residues of this process in the history of psychoanalysis and in many common clinical appearances. I have termed this construction of femininity the daughter position because its transmission
158
JESSICA BENJAMIN
is encoded in the shift to the father, the role of passive container, caretaker, or incest victim such as we saw in the hysterical daughters of Freuds famous cases. Culturally it functions to help constitute many versions of patriarchy. But it might also be called the sister position insofar as it is perceived laterally as the role of a younger sister by the oedipal boy. We must also recognize how the daughter position not only serves the boys repudiation of mother but also often works as the template for girls actual turn to father, allowing girls to separate from their mothers. Here is the sense in Freuds idea that the complementary relation to father, rather than the identification with mother, constitutes femininity. It is not that the girls identification and love for mother are superseded, as Freud suggested in speaking of a change of object. There has been much discussion (Chodorow, 1976; Ogden, 1987) of the fact that such a break with the mother is not necessary: rather, it is pathogenic. But a girls sense of her relation to mother will be differently inflected when/ if the girl imagines herself or her mother to be the fathers passive object. In many cases, the embrace of femininity seems to offer or define a girls path into the world of men. Of course, as Dinnerstein (1977) noted, the feminine escape from the maternal may turn liberation into another form of servitude. The feminine position can be mixed with other, contradictory stances, which I cannot elaborate here: tomboy, rebel, seducer, and mothers helper. This constellation of femininity also leads to many seemingly contradictory encodings of sexual excitement, such as the waif-like, boyish girl who barely disguises her impersonation of the oedipal fathers boy-self, the helpless child he used to be. Here I am merely emphasizing how the figure of feminine daughter functions in and, in a sense, originates with imperatives of the male psyche: to absorb the position of helpless, stimulated baby and retain the function of the early accommodating container mother. Unfortunately, insofar as the daughter embodies the males split-off helpless sexuality, she can be overwhelmingly stimulating to an adult man, to her own father. And so the solution repeats the problem for the incestuously stimulated father. But what about the girl who chooses the route of concealing her loss and longing for mother as well as her need to please father by adopting the role of denigrated, precociously sexualized feminine
159
object? Isabelle, feeling at once unloved and controlled by mother and adoring of her unavailable father, took refuge from her mother in her early teens by hanging out behind the skating rink, having sex with boys. When a girl, especially one who lacks identification with a holding mother, seeks access to men by accommodating and pleasing, formulaic versions of feminine masochism appear. Another woman, Deirdre, found her adolescent flight into femininity so disturbing and shamingso degraded in the eyes of her fatherthat she was entirely unable to integrate her early active tomboy self, developed in childhood when she was her fathers buddy, within her adult life as a woman. She retired from her aspirations as artist and teacher into the role of nurturing earthmother, giving to her children the attention her mother had always denied her. She yielded in everything to her artist husband, who increasingly turned to his fragile, waif-like female students for his sexual life. Deirdre, feeling she had forfeited her own sexuality and identity, sought analysis. Her wish to reclaim her sexuality and compete for the prize of femininity led her into affairs with inappropriate, scary men. Her sense of losing herself was exacerbated by a long period of nursing her father in his final illness. Deirdres memories of her father included one defining of a dramatic shift in their relationship from buddy to sexual object. Until age ten or eleven she had been a tomboy, as daring and adventurous as her troop of male cousins who went fishing and hunting with her father. Suddenly one summer day her father turned from her sharply, telling her that she was too old to come along with the boys, and she should put on a shirt! It was then that Deirdre shifted into her feminine persona, and her father began to treat her as a degraded objecthe would stare at her growing breasts, making comments about their size, but more painfully, would hike up her jeans at the waist, so that they cut into her crotch, and demand she dance on her toes like a Spanish dancer. Among the shameful memories of this time was one in which Deirdre had allowed herself to be groped by one of her fathers friends at a party. In treatment, Deirdre now dreams that a sexy but dangerous man is prowling the neighbourhood. He comes to her door, and even though she thinks she should not, she lets him in. As she runs away from the house, she realizes that she
160
JESSICA BENJAMIN
must rescue the kitten hiding there. For some reason it is a calico kitten, she says, and then realizes this refers to her fathers name, Cal. Confused, she wonders about whether the kitten is herself or her father. Who is it, actually, that she must take care of? Gradually we are able to formulate the link between her unmothered baby self and her fathers, allied in their exclusion by mother. She allows invasion by her father in order to create a repaired, loving motherbaby couple in which she is the mother of her father. We begin to explore the way she was mystified by having absorbed all the aspects of shameful helplessness that her father evacuated into her. This link between father and daughter, in which the girls role is to mother the hidden baby in the father alternates with the one in which the girl plays the mans lost child self. Along with the fear of causing harm through sexual aggression and the traditionally noted fear of uncovering the feminine identification as castrated, we also find a version of male fantasy, which includes an identification with the girl as the helpless child. When this identification is urgently sexualized, it takes the form we have increasingly recognized in cases of abuse. But there are countless less dramatic instances that come to our attention.
Masculinity and the struggle to get in

The identification with and over-stimulation by the passive, tantalizing girl appears, for instance, in the film American Beauty, in which the perverse father comes to see his abandoned child-self in the girl of his obsessional dreams. In the film, Lesters wife is impermeable and sealed, like the shining veneer in her perfect house. He cannot get into her mind or her body. His wish to enter her can only appear as attacking or as messy, invasive, and disgusting. Throughout the film, Lester fantasizes compulsively about the cheerleader friend of his daughter, an intentionally tantalizing nymph. But this irresistible stimulation shifts dramatically in the moment when she reveals that she is actually a virgin and a neglected child whose parents pay no attention to her. Suddenly, as if waking from the dream, Lester recognizes that this girl is a
161
subject with her own centre of feeling. He finds himself needing to feed and take care of her, as if she were the little child and he the mother. The bright lights of over-stimulation are shut off, and feelings of abandonment and grief bring about an identificatory connection to the girl as person. Lesters recognition of himself in the girl was an unusual ending for Hollywood. More commonly, the feminine role is to embody the unwanted, primitively feared experience of helpless over-stimulation and make of it an exciting invitationone that, to the relief of both men and women, the phallus can act upon, control, and structure. The phallic structuring is the function of the master in Isabelles autoerotic fantasies, controlling what might otherwise overwhelm the self. But this phallic role carries its own contradictions. Discharge into the other, though ostensibly active, also becomes reactive. For instance, early ejaculation expresses the fear of being overwhelmed by tension, personified as the feared/ desired object. Containing his own excitement through phallic control can be difficult for a man, and without phallic control discharge signifies feminine weakness: leakage in the containerself of the little boy who cannot attain the phallic control of the father. The catastrophe of being uncontained and over-excited becomes gendered: it signifies emasculation. These themes were replayed in a striking way by a male patient who identified strongly with the character of Lester. Himself an actor, the patient believed that I did not sufficiently recognize his aggressive and perverse character or the destructiveness of his fantasies about women. He reacted strongly to my interpretation, made in the form of a response to his comments on the film, along the lines of what I have just stated: that in the end Lester actually uncovered his identification with the abandoned baby part of the girl. The patient protested, telling me that I was a sucker for Hollywood endings, calling me nave and gullible. He was far more capable than I of taking a hard look at Lesters character. Indeed, I found myself wondering whether I was soft on aggression, afraid to confront my patient, ready to be gulled. However, as I listened to the contempt that infused his protestations and reminded myself that this session fell only a week before a scheduled absence on my part, I began to reflect
162
JESSICA BENJAMIN
on the feeling of being the one who is the needy baby. I wondered: was it I who cannot face the malevolence of the manin this case, my patients extremely contemptuous father who used to deride men who were dependent upon women? I suggested to him that in this debate we were enacting the very matter at hand: perhaps it felt to him more masculine and powerful to be the one who could see Lesters depravity. At the same time, as he persisted in identifying with a powerful though perverse father who despises the baby in himself and others, he could ensure that I be that baby. I would be the one who was in the position of the baby, the sucker who still needs a mother, who is dependent and gullible. He, with his hard clarity, surely did not need me to be his mother, did not feel abandoned; instead, he could impress me with his masculinity. Keeping at bay his feelings of loss and helplessness about my impending absence, he could impress me with his bad boy aspects of independence and transgression. Despite the availability of women to play the passive part, masculinity shaped around repudiation of dependency and fear of passivity is always threatened. And while the objectified body of the girl can take up the experience of helplessness and so become passivized, as Grossman illustrates and as Brennan (1992) has argued, Daddys boy can also figure as passive container for excess, being fixed in the position of mirroring and providing attention to stabilize the father. Mother as well as father can occupy the dominance position, using the child of either sex in this way. Isabelle became a container for her mothers excess, whose voice she was able to identify as the master. Yair became the despised weakling subject to his fathers contempt. Thus we are well reminded by Freud to regard masculinity and femininity as positions that can be assumed or fled by men or women. The constellation I have analysed here shows the identity known as masculinity to be associated with the position of defensive activity, dumping anxiety, mastering stimuli, and creating the abjected, containing other while the position of femininity is to be that accommodating, receiving and mirroring other. However, these positions, as Freuds contradictory statements show him struggling to articulate, are not the whole story about
163
activity and passivity. Too often, though, Freuds work seemed to take defensive activity and helpless passivity as the necessary forms of those trends. Too often his schemaas I (Benjamin, 1998a, 1998b) have said elsewheremisses the dimension of pleasurable receptivity and makes it seem that the position of receiving stimulation, holding tension, or directing it inward is necessarily unpleasure, and that the pleasurable thing is to expel tension, evacuate through discharge, rather than take it in. Unconsciously this view assumes that tension is experienced only as excess, that it will not or cannot be mentalized, recognized, and mutually held in an intersubjective relation. Such a viewpoint correlates, I suspect, with a traumatic experience of passivity as the condition of helplessness in the face of impingement, seduction, or abandonment. Trauma, I propose, is indeed the hidden, unrecognized face of the masculine defence against passivity (see below).
Re-visioning gender, reformulating passivity

My aim here is to suggest that when we reformulate our understanding of gender positions, we will see that they have arisen as an attempt to solve the problem of excess. To challenge these positions is to challenge that human beings cannot otherwise manage tension. So, on the one hand, we could say that the masculine feminine polarity has served important functions in managing excess, but also that psychoanalysis is continually exposing how it fails: how it arises through splitting, how much suffering and pain and internal contradiction such defences generate. Thus questions are raised that I can only mention here: for instance, regarding psychoanalytic assumptions about the necessary role of repudiating femininity or disidentifying from mother in male development.1 Such questions, I am arguing, are seen differently when we consider management of tension and individual self-regulation of arousal and affect to depend on the intersubjective context of mutual regulation and recognition. I have already suggested that the intersubjective economy requires a concept of ownership, which we arrive at through a selfconscious reversal that reclaims the feminine or maternal functions of containing and having an inside. Holding, traditionally ascribed
164
JESSICA BENJAMIN
to maternal or feminine selves, and ownership must be recouped and taken into our psychoanalytic notion of the sexual subject. A subject who owns passivity, with its pleasure and vulnerability, need not passivize the other. Such a subject can have desire for another subject without reducing the latter to a will-less or overwhelming object who, in turn, renders the former helpless before his/her own impulses. Insofar as being a subject is conflated with the grabby, defensively active Apollonian sexuality, it is no subject at all. As we have seen, the common flip-side of phallic control is a version of male sexuality as uncontained, controlled by the object, lacking ownership of desire. In one such version, sexual excitement takes on a dissociative cast, as the subject declares that the object is so compelling and tantalizing that he cannot even remember, let alone be responsible for, his actiona spectacle that unfortunately occupied much prime time in the United States during the Clinton Lewinsky affair. Agency, or activity, dissolves as the object becomes the doer/actor, the subject the done to/acted upon. The experience I desire you, in which the subject owns desire, must be distinguished from you are so desirableand certainly from being overpowered by the object of compulsion. This is not to say that the fantasy you are so attractive and so overpowering that I cannot contain myself, just the sight of you can drive me wild cannot be enjoyable within a mutual relationship. But the mutual enjoyment of fantasy is predicated on owning of desire, holding excitement inside the bodya capacity often debased precisely by its conflation with the feminine passive receptacle. To own ones own feelings while receiving an other is possible simultaneously. Ownership implies a notion of sustaining tension rather than eliminating itholding over discharge, surrender rather than mastery. It is not necessarily the same as containing a feeling for the other, which one may do without owning it in oneself. It develops within an energetic economy in which self-regulating action and mutual regulation are synchronized in a matrix of recognition (just once, hitting the target, touching an alien soul, as Grossmans Yair pleads). In this economy subject-to-subject recognition makes tension a source of pleasure. It is possible to play with complementarity and discharge without holding to rigidly fixed gender positions. It is possible to bear excitement and feeling in the sense of receiving, witnessing, and holding without
165
doing anythinga different experience of passivity. In the cocreating mutuality of union, both partners are receiving each other as well as transmitting. In addition, when we are able to alternate freely between complementary positions such as activity and passivity, when we can move in and out of symmetrical positions, we are relying on an orientation to a third, to a dance jointly created or recognized (Benjamin, 1999; 2002). This orientation to the third changes the relational pattern. One formulation of this third position in relation to activity and passivity offered by the relational analyst Emmanuel Ghent (1990) is the idea of surrender. It denotes a form of letting go of mastery and control that allows us to transcend the terms of dominance and submission, a letting go in which the person does not give over to the otheralthough perhaps with the other. Ghent suggested that submission was a look-alike, a perverse form of surrenderin effect, we could say that giving over to the other is the form taken by longing for giving over to the interaction in the presence of the other. Submission and domination are the forms recognition assumes when only the twoness of complementarity is available.
Trauma, surrender, and the third

I will suggest that in the space of thirdness, when excess is differently held and processed, what we call passivity can be refigured as surrender. In the re-appropriation of passivity, the internal experience changes from submitting to a complementary other towards surrendering to a process of exploration and recognition. This process transcends gender role reversal, although it may include it, as we shall see. What happens when the potentially traumatic experience of passivity is held, enjoyed, represented because it is experienced as surrender not to the other but to the process itself, to a third? How would the renewed integration of what we have called passivity change our imagining of sexual subjectivity? I have suggested that there is a space in which the reversal of the active/passive complementarity takes us out of the power relation and into the surrender to a process of mutual recognition.
166
JESSICA BENJAMIN
This surrender can be distinguished from what appears as or is labelled as passivity but is actually a feature of such traumatic experience with isolation or excessive stimulation. The attempt to bind, master, and represent such traumatic experiences has shaped our images of masculinity and femininity. In erotic life, as in analysis, when we open ourselves to the sexual fantasies and feelings surrounding these images, as we uncover their traumatic depths and edges, we come to see mutual recognition not as the erasure of such experience but the possibility of its expression and communication. Thus Grossmans Yair reveals his hole, his donkey-foal self, when he tries to reach out and transcend the damage of shame that has left the self in desperate isolation. His screams and cracks and holes, with their sexual connotations, already incorporate abraded longings for recognition that can only be reclaimed in a different relation to the other. His epistolary love-letter therapy seeks to use the erotic as a site of reparation. Returning to the analysis of excess and its relation to passivity, we can see how the erotic can become therapeutic when trauma, passivity, and psychic pain are integrated in the relation between self and other. The film theorist Katja Silverman (1990) has offered an interesting illustration of this issue. She was pursuing the question of what happens when defences are stripped by trauma, when phallic masculinity fails to protect men and women from the insinuation of death. Silverman, trained in literary criticism, takes up the notion of trauma as it appears in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920g) and uses it to discuss the collapse of phallic masculinity in films about the Second World War, as exemplified by The Best Years of Our Lives. As you recall, Freud portrays the protection from trauma as provided by an internal shield, a psycho-physiological barrier, rather than by another person(s). For Silverman, the idea of this protective shield becomes a metaphor associated with masculine armour and phallic self-holding. She compares its breakdown with the breakdown of the organizing gender constructs, the dominant fictions. The film portrays a double trauma: the individual men returning from the war have suffered trauma or shock, and the cultural schema of masculinity did not protect them. The fabric of the phallic fiction was torn, failed them. They lack any collective representation of suffering to enfold them.
167
The film shows how their wounding and symbolic castration results in a kind of gender reversal, in which women now gaze upon the spectacle of male lack. This spectacle is erotized, but not as humiliation or fetishistic denial. Without a fetish to embody and displace the wounding, the film nonetheless depicts the sexual excitement of this role reversal. As the woman undresses the veteran Harold Russell who actually lost his arms, his hooks now removed, she is aroused and will make love to him. The ex-pilot who suffers flashbacks and nightmares exchanges a gaze of mutual recognition with the woman who gazes on the scene of his social displacement. Silverman cites a contemporary critic of the film who said that it showed that now the man could be passive without guilt, that the film is a projection of the familiar Hollywood (and American) dream of male passivity. Apparently the critic failed to note that a woman might enjoy activity without guiltnot a dream but a real possibility. We might, rather, think that the scene of gender reversal seems to derive its erotic charge from an intersubjective process. The recognition of pain and vulnerability, the wound to the phallic version of masculinity, offers a release: a letting go of the destructive illusion of the phallic contract, which prescribes stoic loneliness and denial. In the film, as the couple face the abyss of breakdown together, they break the circuit of defensive activity and perverse passivity. The sign of the wound functions as the opposite of a fetish, it signifies the possibility of overcoming disavowal, representing vulnerability, witnessing pain and suffering the intersubjective moment of surrender. The film suggests a vision of trauma transformed into a therapeutic erotics of recognition, the energy of which derives not merely from reversing the old gender opposition, but from reclaiming what it sacrificed. Eros begins with mourning the loss of the intact body and the ideal of manhood, to which so much has been sacrificed. It is mourning in the presence of an other, a depressive solution, accepting passivity, loss, and death. Breakdown of the phallic fiction opens fissures in what would otherwise remain the seamless wall of repetition. It becomes possible to witness suffering and thereby bear mourning, to own desire and enjoy passivity.
168
JESSICA BENJAMIN
In this way loss itself, shared and represented, becomes a third to which the couple surrender, and in this surrender find a transcendence of suffering. We might say that accepting passivity in the process of intersubjective surrender forms a crucial element of what has been conceptualized as the depressive position. Passivity is recouped and transformed into an experience of surrender, of vulnerability in a therapeutic relationship. The very distinction between passivity and surrender only becomes possible when fear of passivity is lifted. This, in turn, depends on the joint creation of interpersonal safety, each persons gift to the other of a holding presence and an understanding witness, which ensures that vulnerability will not plunge us into traumatic excess. But this can occur only through awareness that strength derives not from denial but from acknowledging helplessness, damage, and the overwhelming of the psyche by suffering. This vision is significant for our larger understanding of what is therapeutic and transformational in erotic life. The integration of passivity in surrender to an erotic thirdthe dance of loveallows us to metaphorize psychic pain rather than act it out through a sadomasochistic complementarity. When erotic partners can transcend the fixed positions of gender complementarity, when passivity becomes an experience to be borne and integrated by both sexes, gender conventions no longer need be used defensively. Rather, they can become conventions of play, forms of expression. In this space of thirdness desire can flow through the circuits of pain and passivity, creating a new opening for the energetic exchange between self and other.
NOTES
1. It has largely been accepted that the disidentification with mother is necessary to constitute a masculine subject. But, as we explore the effects of traditional forms taken by the boys disidentification, we may reconsider: does this take place as early as Greenson (1968) suggested, and is such sharp disidentification pathogenic rather than essential (Benjamin, 1996; Corbett, 1996)? Elsewhere I have argued, along with Aron (1995), Bassin (1996), and May (1986), that renunciation of identifications with sexual organs and behaviours attributed to the other sex (such as Fast, 1984, proposed) is not necessary to consolidate ones own identity. Nor does it even necessarily provide a good
169
basis for integrating sexual subjectivity and activity. Rather, sexual subjectivity is enhanced by identification with the others bodily experience. Indeed, the capacity to hold in tension rather than splitting complementary aims and attitudesthe capacity for what I have called post-conventional gender complementarityallows us to play with and treat as metaphors the bodily concretes of sexual roles. Lacking this development beyond oedipal repudiation of the passive feminine side of the gender, complementarity lays the basis for anxiety about sexual union, with its ability to evoke repressed longings for merger and surrender. Contrary to common wisdom about masculinity, a more positive identification with a holding mother or with bodily receptivity can often diminish male heterosexual anxiety.
NOTE
An earlier versions of this chapter was presented at the Fiftieth-Anniversary Conference of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung Tagung, Frankfurt, November 2000.
REFERENCES
Aron, L. (1995). The internalized primal scene. In: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 5: 195237. Bassin, D. (1996). Beyond the he and she: Toward the reconciliation of masculinity and femininity in the postoedipal female mind. In: Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44 (supplement): 157191. Beebe, B., & Lachmann, F. M. (1994). Representation and internalization in infancy: Three principles of salience. In: Psychoanalytic Psychology, 5: 305337. Beebe, B., & Lachmann, F. M. (2002). Infant Research & Adult Treatment, Co-constructing Interactions. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism & the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. Benjamin, J. (1995). What angel would hear me? In: Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press. Benjamin, J. (1996). In defense of gender ambiguity. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 1: 2743.
170
JESSICA BENJAMIN
Benjamin, J. (1998a). Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York & London: Routledge. Benjamin, J. (1998b). The marriage of heaven and hell: Intersubjectivity and sexuality. Keynote Address, Division 39 on Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association, Boston, April 1998. Benjamin, J. (1999). Afterword: Recognition and destruction, In: S. A. Mitchell & L. Aron (Eds.), Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press. Benjamin, J. (2002). The rhythm of recognition: Comments on the work of Louis Sander. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12: 4354. Brennan, T. (1992). The Interpretation of the Flesh. New York & London: Routledge. Chodorow, N. (1976). The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Christiansen, A. (1993). Masculinity and its vicissitudes. Paper delivered at Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference, N.Y. Institute for Humanities, NYU. Coates, S., Friedman, R., & Wolfe, S. (1991). The etiology of boyhood gender disorder. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 1: 481524. Corbett, K. (1996). Homosexual boyhood: Notes on girlyboys. Gender and Psychoanalysis 1: 429462. Davies, J. M. (2001). Erotic over-stimulation and the co-construction of sexual meanings in transferencecountertransference experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 70: 757788. Dimen, M. (2003). Sexuality, Intimacy and Power. Hillsdale NJ: The Analytic Press. Dinnerstein, D. (1977). The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York: Other Books, 2000. Eigen, M. (1993). The Electrified Tightrope. Northvale, NJ: Aronson. Elise, D. (2001). Unlawful entry: Male fears of psychic penetration. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11: 499531. Fast, I. (1984). Gender Identity: A Differentiation Model. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1996). Playing with reality: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 77: 217233. Freud, S. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence. S.E., 3. Freud, S. (1920g). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E., 18.
171
Freud, S. (1924d). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. S.E., 19. Freud, S. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. S.E., 20. Freud, S. (1931b). Female sexuality. S.E., 21. Freud, S. (1933a). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: Femininity. S.E., 22. Ghent, E. (1990). Masochism, submission, surrender. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 25: 169211. Greenson, R. (1968). Dis-identifying from mother: Its special importance for the boy. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49: 370374. Grossman, D. (2001). Be My Knife. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Horney, K. (1926). The flight from womanhood. In: Feminine Psychology. New York: Norton, 1967. Laplanche, J. (1987). New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (trans. D. Macey). Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Laplanche, J. (1992). Seduction, Translation, Drives, ed. J. Fletcher & M. Stanton. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Laplanche, J. (1995). Seduction, persecution and revelation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 76: 663682. May, R. (1986). Concerning a psychoanalytic view of maleness. In: Psychoanalytic Review, 73: 175193. McDougall, J. (1989). Theaters of the Body. New York: Norton. McDougall, J. (1995). The Many Faces of Eros. A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality. New York: Norton. Mitchell, S. (1988). Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ogden, T. (1987). The transitional oedipal relationship in female development. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68: 485498. Silverman, K. (1990). Historical trauma and male subjectivity. In: E. A. Kaplan (Ed.), Psychoanalysis and Cinema. New York: Routledge. Sander, L. (2002). Thinking differently: Principles of process in living systems and the specificity of being known. In: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12: 1142. Stein, R. (1998). The poignant, the excessive and the enigmatic in sexuality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79: 253268. Stoller, R. (1975). Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. New York: Pantheon. Stoller, R. (1980). Sexual Excitement. New York: Simon & Schuster.
CHAPTER TEN
The economy of freedom

Gisela Kaplan
or the better part of two decades Jessica Benjamin has used psychoanalysis and her own creative impulses to theoretically explore the depth of the human psyche. She has perhaps given more emphasis to the affective domain than other writers, and one of her contributions to the ongoing debate is her development of the notion of intersubjectivity and the intersubjective moment. When a subjective position of self is surrendered to another only those two people alone know their situation in a manner no one else can. In the process, thirdness is created, as explained in Shadow of the Other, as a communicative relationship, and as a way of recognizing difference and tensions between self and another. In her chapter, Jessica Benjamin places before the audience a proposal on how one can intellectually and emotionally transform the dynamics of intrapsychic events (one-person economy, as per Freud) into a two-person economy. As I read her text, the notion of a seesaw comes to mind as an image of an interdependence that will make one or the other respond to each others emotional states. I come back to this later. Apart from her obvious address to an audience of professional psychoanalysts, her chapter is also firmly anchored in a particular 173
174
GISELA KAPLAN
strand of social theory tradition, and I want to offer some comments arising from these linkages. My first point is that the tensions and possibilities she describes in two persons is theoretically based on the notion of the dialectic, of a dynamic that is neither circular nor linear, that creates spirals rather than fields, tensions and surrender rather than opposites, and movements rather than structural dyads. This is consistent with her earlier work. In 1995, Jessica Benjamin argued that if we think of sex and gender as oriented to the pull of opposing poles, then these poles are not masculinity and femininity. Rather, gender dimorphism itself represents only one pole, the other pole being the polymorphism of all individuals (Benjamin, 1995, p. 141). In todays sometimes theoretically impoverished world, a theoretical position that is based on relational and dialectical models of thought gives credence to the view that the complexities of human emotions and actions are not entirely irrelevant to human existence. It is manifestly a hope that we continue to see the vast array of experiences, and of human interaction with its environment (Oyama, 1985, expands on such interactions) and consider these worthy of exploration; and that we do so despite a climate of beliefs that argues for simple linear and often genetic explanations of personalities and behaviour (Rose & Rose, 2000). Whether in the theoretical domain or in the applied fields of exploring the human psyche or, indeed, in everyday life, we ought to remain aware that we are not just responding to stimuli but often also altering the stimuli by our interactions with them; in consequence, we engage in dynamic exchanges that lead us to places where we have not been before. One of the few recent studies that have investigated this complex interplay between the sexes in some detail was concerned with human attractiveness. The study found that people who think of themselves as attractive opt for a partner who is more attractive in their own perception than they would have chosen otherwise. The study asked each group to rank another group according to a scale of attractiveness (Kowner, 1994). They were then given bogus feedback that they were ranked top in attractiveness by the group and asked to make their final choice. Immediately, they aimed for a different andin their judgementmore attractive person. One important finding by Kowner is the dialectic approach to a particular stimulus. The
THE ECONOMY OF FREEDOM
175
stimulus (another human as being a potential partner) is not just one to whom one responds statically as in a simple stimulus response pair. As we have argued elsewhere (Kaplan & Rogers, 2003), there is a process involved in terms of an evaluation of its intrinsic properties (an attractive male or female), but first it is processed according to how the observers intrinsic qualities rank with respect to the other, and only after that initial assessment is the judgement of attractiveness announced. Hence, the observer makes a judgement on the basis of how likely it is that access to the other will be possible and thus makes the preferred choice (and the ranking of the other) according to self-assessment. This example has some bearing on the second point I wish to raise in response to Benjamins chapter. A key to Benjamins exposition is the concept of desire. And here we suddenly find a tradition emerging that Benjamin may fight against but yet stays within. Males, so Freud believed, lack desire because they discharge and expel tensions, and this is uncontained and controlled by the object. If desire is to be felt, tensions must be held in order to create desire. Benjamin works with these concepts and changes them. However, one still feels bound by a powerful tradition, as is explained below. In traditional philosophyand also in legal structuresthe relationship between men and women resembles more closely an ideal of female subordination modelled on a masterslave relationship, than it does a mere contractual inequality, as so many feminist scholars have found. In studies on slavery, and on women, two words have been used regularly: exploitation and power. One important conceptual addition is sexuality. It is a third dimension in which exploitation and power are played out in more complex, at times interdependent, and often ambivalent ways. A slave could be but a slave, but similar power differentials when applied between men and women may be tempered or heightened by sexual relations. Even in the worst bondsand then against the will of the actorsdesire, dependence, and passion may be mingled in a brew of contempt, subjugation, and despair. Love is rarely a component of either slavery or exploitative sexual relationships, but power is its axiom. Since the publication of Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality (1978), we know that freedom from oppression and, much more deep-seated, from repression may not be just a matter of lifting a few prohibitions. Sexuality, he argued, does not exist
176
GISELA KAPLAN
beyond power relations and is not controlled by centralized power. It is actually produced by those power relations that both repress and saturate it. Foucaults famous dictum is Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere (p. 93). Everywhere, he would presumably agree, is male-defined. Hence, Benjamins explorations of desire and surrender, seen as two corner-stones of emotional states between two people that may lead to the subjective moment and to actual communication (thus to a relinquishing of power and control), are contradictory and provide a strange twist to the Western traditional notion of the feminine as the domain of affectivity and desire and the masculine of reason. Coming back to the study of attractiveness, I can now make another point in which the concept of desire (a concept that also appears to have been a favourite in much post-structural writing of the last decade) is modified by the social. The applied study of attractiveness raised before highlights that the social domain is a creator of desire as much as the self. Deborah Britzman argued recently that the self becomes a problem of desiring a self and hence is in need of a social. She continues:
Identification allows the self-recognition and mis-recognition. And through identification desire is made. But because identification is a partial, contradictory, and ambivalent relation with aspects of objects or dynamics of others, it may be thought of as a means to make and direct desire. Many positionings are possible: identification of, identification with, identification against, over-identification, and so on. [Britzman, 1998, p. 82]
The question, then, arises whether the creation of desire (the holding of tension) or its discharge is not also a question of identification (of self or mis-recognition). The citing of Katja Silvermans film The Best Years of Our Lives in Benjamins chapter is very appropriate in this context, but we may ask how we interpret the intersubjective moment in the context of identification and self-recognition. Heinrich Heine once wrote a brief but poignant poem: Selten habt Ihr mich verstanden, Selten auch verstand ich Euch. Nur da wir im Kot uns fanden, Da verstanden wir uns gleich.
177
[Rarely have you understood me, rarely did I understand you, But thrown together in the gutter (sewer), we swiftly understood each other.] It is possible to interpret Silvermans film in terms of negative conclusions rather than of a liberatory intersubjective moment that may have been created amidst misery. And this brings me to my third point. In my reading of Jessica Benjamins chapter, her tone seems to me to reflect a very deep cultural pessimism. The darkness of mood may well fit our times, and the citation of various dark films has not helped to lighten the burden that, one feels, has descended upon us. Although the subtleties of intersubjective moments provide interludes of understanding, it may be worth remembering that such moments can also be created in conversations with convicted felons on death row. Perhaps we live in an age when pessimism doesand even shouldhold pride of place, but it is not a mood to which I can subscribe. More importantly, its expression in Benjamins chapter suggests a path of therapy that is, in fact, not depressive but depressing. To exemplify this point, Benjamin interprets Silvermans exploration of a relationship by saying:
Eros begins with mourning the loss of the intact body. . . It is mourning in the presence of an other, a depressive solution, accepting passivity, loss, and death. . . . It becomes possible to witness suffering and thereby bear mourning, to own desire and enjoy passivity. [p. 167 herein]
The gendered positions are emphasized, forcing a different psychological solution to precede the emergence of Eros. On the subject of Eros, there are three rather immediate responses that can be made. In Benjamins chapter, Eros reads very much like a possibility, but one that is shadowy and belongs to the graveyard, to the night, to dark corners of our minds and souls. It is perhaps culturally not surprising that, in Benjamins chapter, as in Silvermans film, Eros is linked to surrender, death, loss, and mourning. The other response that is elicited here is my acknowledgment that Eros may well be the most taboo area of sexuality and emotional states in Western modern times. Indeed, the new lan-
178
GISELA KAPLAN
guage of evolutionary psychology has done away with Eros altogether by choosing to adopt a discourse of economics that speaks about desires and feelings in terms of costs, benefits, investments, and the like (Buss, 1994). My third query is that, in Benjamins chapter, we find Eros in a sense as a product of tensions of maleness and femaleness, and one may well query this implied dynamics. Frankly, Eros need not have anything to do with complementarity or with male and female, masculinity or femininity. Eros may involve subtleties of communication that may or may not be sexual at all (or even lead in that direction). One of the simplest and most powerful cinematographic vignettes of such expressions of Eros was shown in John Hurts performance in The Naked Civil Servant. The much-maligned and abused homosexual with an exaggerated make-up meets a group of sailors at night and, in this brief scene, they keep walking around him, smiling and relaxed, and he glows with quiet joy because he knows that nothing was going to happen. A fleeting moment of happiness, of suspension from social condemnation, and Eros can unfold its most attractive side: a lightness of being. Eros is almost the antithesis of reproduction because it exists for and in itself, without visible gain or purpose. Eros is fragile and pleasurable, but I doubt very much whether such mood depends on withholding stronger emotions and desires. It is a thorny path to travel even to arrive just at some agreeable basic definition, let alone one that can be operationalizedparticularly in the absence of cultural support for Eros. The suggestion, however, to attribute some assumed heterosexuality to the blossoms of Eros may be still more problematic (although I am not entirely certain whether this is a fair comment, judging by Benjamins previous work). Still, in case such an interpretation is not all too far-fetched, I feel that one needs to be reminded of arguments as old as the early part of the last century: Ralph Linton, in his classic The Study of Man (1936), argued that culture determines the perception of biological (and psychological) differences, not the other way around. It is not a new idea to claim the historicity of psychology and of masculinity and femininity as vital parts of cultural perceptions and cultural constructs at a given time. Indeed, psychic, erotic, and sexual energies may be present
179
without having to resort to parameters akin to the masculine and feminine. Let me exemplify this further by reference to a very influential eleventh-century Islamic scholar, Imam Ghazali. His philosophy exposes the polarization of human sexuality into two kindsfeminine and masculineas a Western idea. According to this early Muslim view, culture is not created by sublimation: only an emotionally and sexually fulfilled person is likely to be able to make a cultural contribution. Virtue arises from a discharge of tensions, and culture springs from the satisfaction (hence not the sublimation) of the sexual drive. Of course, that idea of discharge is, to some extent, also acknowledged in Western intellectual traditions (and in Benjamins chapter), but it is accorded only to the male and, as such, problematized. In some Muslim thought from Ghazali onwards, females, too, discharge tension and are sexually perceived as having ejaculations (Mernissi, 2002). Gender organization of sexuality is not a new topic, but it is a relatively recent phenomenon (cf. Rubin, 1984), at least in Western cultures, that sexuality and gender have finally been analytically separated and discussed as separate, albeit reinforcing, concepts (Nakano, 1999). One is reminded here of Dorothy Dinnersteins remark that the sexual realm is a wildlife preserve in the civilized word, a refuge within which inarticulate, undomesticated private creative initiative is protected from extinction (cited in Williams & Stein, 2002, p. 18).
* * *
Finally, at the beginning of this chapter I raised the possibility that Benjamins two-person economy, while a significant extension of previous ideas, creating literally a third space (the intersubjective moment), is still dependent on a field of tensions between the two gendered players or emotional states. One is contingent on the other, and in this field there is no escape, no individual breaking out. It is a seesaw from which, as I read her chapter, one ultimately cannot descend. My response was to look for an escape hatch, for freedom, for growth, for exploration which, in Benjamins seemingly pessimistic cultural explicative, I cannot find. One is missing some clue to a sense of hope and strength. My question is whether one cannot think with Martin Buber (1958) that
180
GISELA KAPLAN
relationships can go into nothingness, charting new territories and unknown fields.
REFERENCES
Benjamin, J. (1988). The Shadow of the Other. New York: Pantheon. Benjamin, J. (1995). Sameness and difference: Overinclusive model gender development. Psychoanalytical Inquiry, 15: 125142. Britzman, D. (1998). Lost Subjects, Contested Objects. State University of New York Press, Albany. Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou. New York: Scribners. Buss, D. (1994). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies for Human Mating. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, M. (1978). A History of Sexuality (trans. R. Hurley). New York: Pantheon. Kaplan, G., & Rogers, L. J. (2003). Gene Worship. Moving Beyond the Nature/Nurture Debate over Genes, Brain and Gender. New York: Other Press. Kowner, R. (1994). The effect of physical attractiveness comparison on choice of partners. The Journal of Social Psychology, 135 (2): 153165. Linton, R. (1936). The Study of Man. An Introduction. New York: Appleton-Century. Mernissi, F. (2002). The Muslim concept of active female sexuality. In: C. Williams & A. Stein (Eds.), Sexuality and Gender (pp. 296307). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Nakano, G. E. (1999). The social construction and institutionalisation of gender and race: An integrative framework. In: M. M. Ferree, J. Lorber, & B. B. Hess (Eds.), Revisioning Gender (pp. 343). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Oyama, S. (1985). The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rose, H., & Rose, S. (Eds.) (2000). Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Harmony Books. Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex. In: C. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (pp. 267319). Boston: Routledge. Williams, C., & Stein, A. (Eds.) (2002). Sexuality and Gender. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Beyond sexual difference: clinical individuality and same-sex cross-generation relations in the creation of feminine and masculine
Nancy J. Chodorow
n this chapter, I want to reflect upon how our theoretical thinking about the psychology of the sexeswhether we call this maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity, the problem of gender, or the problem of sexhas been limited by viewing the problem through the lens of sexual difference. The sexual difference perspective has been (over)determined by the way Freud initially posed the problem. It was selected especially by Lacan as the Freudian view,1 and it has been taken up in the recent rethinking of female psychology or femininity (there has been little rethinking of male psychology or masculinity) more by European and Latin American than by North American psychoanalysts. These psychoanalysts thus accept many of the Lacanian assumptions, whether or not they consider themselves Lacanian. The sexual difference perspective also characterizes much European and North American feminism, whether psychoanalytic or post-structuralist. I do not think that the specific observations I bring to bear in what follows are new; rather, I am trying to use these observations, that I and others have made, to locate a problem and frame a position.
181
182
NANCY J . CHODOROW
The sexual difference position takes as given that the sexes can only be and also are psychologically defined one in relation to the other, that male only gains meaning in relation to female, masculine in relation to feminine. It has both psychoanalytic and nonpsychoanalytic roots. From Freud, it locates femininity and masculinity in relation to the external genitals and to genital oedipal levels of development, deriving specifically from Freuds focus on genital differencethe presence or absence of the penis as the criterial experience in the boys and the girls development. The observation of genital difference, Freud suggests, leads to castration anxiety/penis envy as determinative and central to the psychology of the sexes and sexuality throughout life, and to presence/absence of the penis (castration fear or castration already accomplished) as generative of the boys versus the girls entrance into and resolution of the Oedipus complex, differential superego development, and so forth. This is familiar territory that does not need elaborating. Both Lacan and post-structuralism presuppose this Freudian psychoanalytic basis even as they move it from the realm of anatomy into the realm of fantasy. However, their formulation of this way of seeing sex/gender comes not only from Freud but, equally, from a common rooting in Saussurean structuralist linguistics and the closely related Lvi-Straussian structuralist anthropology. In these latter theories, that underlie or have been interlocutors for Lacan and post-structuralism, meaning never inheres in a term itself but only in the relation it has to other terms.2 Thus, by fiat masculine can only gain fantasy meaning in relation to feminine, and male in relation to female. This linguisticcultural theory is read back into psychology. Following its proponents, I am calling this the sexual difference perspective, though it could equally be called, for my purposes, the gender difference perspective.3 What is at issue for me is not whether we use the term sex or gender, or whether sex refers to the biological, unconscious fantasy, or sexuality, while gender refers to the preconscious or the sociocultural. What is at issue is whether, psychologically, in clinical and developmental lived experiencein the realms of unconscious fantasy, transference, the internal world, and affectsmasculine and feminine, or maleness and femaleness, must always be paired terms in which
BEYOND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
183
the dominant or exclusive meaning of one is in relation to the other. Although it is not relevant to my considerations here, I myself find the term gender useful in helping us to distinguish between sexed or gendered selfthe senses of femaleness and maleness,4 or femininity and masculinityand object choice, and in problematizing what is sometimes seen as a necessary linkage between these. As Freud puts it, the choice of object on the one hand, and . . . the sexual characteristics and sexual attitude of the subject on the other, as though the answer to the former necessarily involved the answers to the latter (1920a, p. 170). My inquiry takes us to our clinical consulting-rooms and thereby also to a reconsideration of how Freud posed the problem of difference in the first place. In what follows, I suggest that if we begin from the clinical from our experience and observation instead of from theoretical fiat or an a priori, unquestioned reliance on Freudand from there we try to understand how individuals experience and construct their subjective gender and sexuality, then we find that sexual differencethe contrastive set malefemale, or masculine/femininewhile it may certainly be a central part of the picture, is not more basic or more universally organizing than several other possible psychological configurations.5 In building my account, I first describe the constitutive components to femininity and masculinity that take these well beyond sexual difference. Secondly, I suggest that the sexual difference perspective ignores clinical individualitythe unique ways that individuals put together the various ingredients that go into their gender and sexuality. We can only know in the individual case how a particular person will put these components together. Finally, within this account of the constitutive components of sex/gender and of clinical individuality, I extract out and elaborate upon my clinical observation that same-sex, cross-generation relations and comparison are often as central to ordepending on the individual casemore central to the creation, definition, and experience of psychological sex than sexual difference, feminine/masculine, presence or absence of the penis. Insofar as we theorize difference, then, I would claim that on a theoretical level, femininity defines itself as much through womangirl as through malefemale, and that masculinity defines itself as much through man/boy as through malefemale.
184
NANCY J . CHODOROW
It is not surprising that I am sceptical of the sexual difference perspective, since my thinking has in some ways from the beginning indirectly implied an alternative stance. Family Structure and Feminine Personality (Chodorow, 1974) and The Reproduction of Mothering (Chodorow, 1978) begin their study of the psychology of women (and the contrastive psychology of men) from the internal object-relational world, especially the motherdaughter (or motherson) constellation within that world, rather than from Freuds focus on the genital distinction and its sequelae. I am led via a rereading of classical writings by Lampl-de Groot, Freud, Mack Brunswick, Deutsch, and others to an analysis of the development of maternality and mothering as fundamental to femininity, to a focus on pre-oedipal components within this femininity, and to an emphasis on the female Oedipus complex (a possible gender oxymoron that several have critiqued) as also a motherdaughter affair, in which heterosexual, oedipal, fatherdaughter components certainly play a part but are by no means exclusive.6 My work, of course, is partly reactive: I both take for granted as already sufficiently demonstrated, and thus I also minimize, malefemale, fatherdaughter elements in female development and psychology. As others pointed out over the years, and as I myself acknowledged (Chodorow, 1999c), psychoanalytic feminist thinking in the early and mid 1970s was overly leery and critical of any acknowledgement of the psychic role of biology and anatomy (which partially accounts for so many feminists attraction to Lacanian psychoanalysis in the first place, in addition to Lacans overlap, via text and language, with the feminist humanities).7 Like most subsequent American commentators, I acknowledge the potential role of penis envy in female development, but I am critical of the view that penis envy is either universal or the driving force in female psychology and development, including in girls and womens desires for babies. The motherdaughter dynamics I describe, rooted as they are in the pre-oedipal, would have led to a focus on pregenital as well as genital components of femininity, as well as to an elaboration of reproductive female sexuality and drives. In this sense (if I had not been critical of anatomical determinism in the first place), my recognition of the demands of genital anatomy would probably have led me more in the direction of primary femininity theorists like Horney and Kestenberg. (Though the
185
term was, I believe, first used by Stoller in 1976, the widespread and current usage of the concept of primary femininity comes after the 1970s period of which I am writing here.) In Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective (Chodorow, 1979), I take a more explicit stance, arguing that the sexual difference perspective derives from a more typically masculine than feminine consciousness, one that needs to separate male from female and see the two as radically non-overlapping. I was at the time only beginning to be familiar with either Lacanian feminism or its French feminist detractors, like Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous, who emphasized a female bodily-linguistic perspective on difference, and I was not yet a clinician, but I argued that a strong emphasis on difference, whether it be the selfother distinction or malefemale difference, was a defensive theory borne of psychological conflict. Circling back on my female-centred developmental theory, I claimed that the conflicts that required an emphasis on differencewhether difference inherent in a view of separationindividuation that stressed differentiation and difference over continuing but changing connection, or in a view that saw gender mainly in terms of sexual difference, masculine as notfemininewere characteristically male. Indeed, the sexual difference perspective itself (even in primary femininity or womens voice and body theorists!) already had a psychologically masculine rather than a gender-neutral cast to it. My early implicit and explicit difficulty with the sexual difference perspective came through my reading and interpretation of psychoanalytic texts, as I tried to understand and theorize femininity and masculinity. Clinical experience expanded and grounded my views. I have suggested (Chodorow, 1996, 1999b, 2003b) that we can best see lived intrapsychic gender and sexuality as composed of a number of constitutive ingredients, or components. These are on one level of abstraction universals, in that each person, developmentally and in their psychic experience and organization, brings a clinically individual rendition of these components to their gender and sexuality, but they are only lived in clinically specific combinations. In any individual, they are inextricably intertwined one with the other in a way that gives that individual his or her own particular experience. I am trying theoretically to render what I have discovered clinically and to avoid what I think
186
NANCY J . CHODOROW
is a problematic overgeneralizing and universalizing, on an inappropriate level of concreteness, in much of our theorizing about gender and sexual difference. For example, we are taught that the Oedipus complex is universal, or that all children pass through the stages of psychosexual development that Freud first described. But although we can find many boys (or former boys, now our adult patients) with the fateful combination of love for the mother and hatred for the father as a rival, for example, we do not know much about any of these boys or men unless we know the particularity of their particular love and their particular rivalry, and how these intermesh with their oppositeslove for the father and hatred for the motherand how these change and changed day to day, in particular manifestations. We learn about these particularities, not the generality Oedipus, from transferences and reconstructions, and we no longer read (or we are sceptical when we do read) in any case report that the patients oedipal fantasies were analysed and resolved. And we find that for one man oedipal fantasies are a driving force in his psychology, whether in the area of work or of love, and they are major themes in the transference, whereas for another such fantasies come up now and again. We also know that boys becoming gay typically bring a set of desires and fantasies to their oedipal love and rivalry that is different from that of boys who are on the way to heterosexuality (Corbett, 1993, Isay, 1989). Similarly, to say that each child goes through an oral phase, or an early Oedipus conflict, or has unconscious fantasies about the mothers breast or insides, does not tell us about the particularity of an individuals oral phase or early fantasies about the mothers breasts or insides or the particular constructions of self and object that these produce through projective and introjective identifications. To take my own work, The Reproduction of Mothering suggests that motherdaughter dynamics are central to feminine psychology and the reproduction of motheringan observation that has for many entered the taken-for-granted theoretical lexiconbut this knowledge only alerts us, in a way in which we might not have been alerted by classical theory, to notice a woman who does not bring maternal transferences or fantasies into her treatment. It does not tell us about what particular fantasies about the mothers or the selfs uterus or reproductivity, or what particular intrapsychic
187
motherdaughter fantasies and transferences, will emerge in a particular treatment and individual psychology. Psychoanalytic theory has conflated the universality of some problems that demand psychic representation or solution with the almost infinite variety of unconscious fantasies and compromise formations that represent or attempt to address these problems. A clinical individual employs a number of components in creating her personal gender and sexuality.8 These include, first, bodily experience: observation, arousal, comparison with others, changes in bodily configuration. Freud stressed the observation of genital difference in the just pre-oedipal child, but the affective tonality brought to bodily experience and bodily fantasies begin the minute the child is born, if not before: we now know that from the moment of birth there are subtle, unconscious transmissions of affect, feeling, and fantasy from mother to child that help to shape the childs earliest senses of body. This must include sexed, genital, and reproductive body as wellthe particular mothers complex of feeling and fantasy about her childs sex (itself not a generic sex, but the particularity of her own feelings and history, the other representations of the child in her inner world, in relation to her own family of origin, the unconscious and conscious early communications she received from her own parents, her own cultural location, her own conflicts and fantasies, etc.). Body and body experience in general, and because of their special physical intensity or startling absolutism genital and other sexualerotic experiences (a first period, breast development, excitement and orgasm, pregnancy, childbirth, etc.), particularly call forth affective fantasy representation. Body gets embroiled in sexualitydesire, practices, sexual fantasies, erotization, all of which are so specific to the individual which in turn gives further substance to the fantasy meaning of the sexed body. In theoretical shorthand, we might consider Freudian our recognition of the almost raw, self-evident demands of sexualbodilygenital experience and observation. The ingredients that go into bodily gender and sexuality will include some representation of sexual difference, but this may or may not be central in a particular clinical individual. A second element that goes into femininity and masculinity can be called, in shorthand, object-relational. Here, I mean that each person has a uniquely created internal world of unconscious fanta-
188
NANCY J . CHODOROW
sies, about self and other, mother, father, siblings, both whole object and part object, created through a history of projective and introjective affective fantasies. Freuds originally theorized inner world that relates to gender and sex is the oedipal world, but it is from Klein especially that we learn about the inner worlds complexity and infantile origins, and that every step in its creation will be imbued with particular fantasy meanings about self and object, so that the mothers breast, for instance, is unconsciously created as beneficent, aggressive, devouring, withheld, toxic, and so forth, and that the relation to it is one of manic control, omnipotent destruction, depressed longing, and so on. As with body experience, the internal world that helps to create gender begins at birth, well before the observation of or capacity to label the sexes or genital difference. We cannot think about the psychological experience of sex and gender apart from the cultural and linguistic, since these categories are both driven by ordinary anatomy and named and created within culture. From the point of view of the psyche, however, actual linguistic and cultural labelling is a latecomer. We know from the research of de Marneffe (1997) that children recognize which genitals belong to them before they know that they are a girl or a boy, and we also know of the primacy of parental filtering: any term that a child learns is learned in the context of the parents unconscious and her or his own particularized femininity or masculinity, which is itself emotionally cast, shaped by fantasy, and includes many elements of affective tonality and context that that parent has built into gender. As Loewald puts it,
language is typically first conveyed to the child by the parental voice and in an all-pervasive way by the mother in the feeding situation and in all her other ministrations to the infant. In these situations her speech and voice are part and parcel of the global motherchild interaction. . . The emotional relationship to the person from whom the word is learned plays a significant, in fact crucial, part in how alive the link between thing and word turns out to be. [1978, pp. 180, 197).
On the other side, all linguistic and cultural labels are themselves animated and tinted by unconscious fantasy and affect, which have to do with myriad experiences with body, self, and other that may
189
or may not have direct gender content. Thus, the role of masculine and feminine in the psyche, although having some basis in anatomic and parental reality, goes through what Klein (1940) calls doublinga filtering through fantasy and transference such that external reality is taken into account but only as it is internally reshaped and created.9 Affective tonality, with or without associated explicit connection to gendered or sexed fantasy content, as well as non-ostensibly gender-related fantasies, help to shape masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. One woman may imbue her sense of femaleness or femininity with a depressive casting, another with anxiety. Envy, narcissistic humiliation, reparative fantasies, or self-destructiveness and self-attack may shape the dominant affective fantasies connected to anothers sense of gender. In a set of patients from more patriarchal cultures, I have noticed that mournful guilt, weeping for the mother, affectively tints their sense of gender (Chodorow, 1999b), and I have suggested elsewhere that a fantasy of timelessness or defensive denial of time passing, which has a separate existence from gender-inflected fantasies and identity, nonetheless becomes constitutive of the sense of maternality in some women who have put off motherhood until it is too late (Chodorow, 2003c). These components of body, internal world, the transferential creation of language and culture, and affective tonality all come together in any persons sense of gender. Further, each person creates a personally individualized prevalent animation of gender (Chodorow, 1996, 1999b), a conscious and unconscious fantasy constellation that puts these different components together, with a characteristic affective tonality and an organization designed to manage and contain particular anxieties and defences. Anyones prevalent animation of genderan organization in which, out of many complex components of different sorts (body, internal world, language, affect, dominant fantasies of self and other), certain are selected, for reasons of fantasy and defence, to have overarching valencecould be thought of as a compromise formation. Prevalent animations of gender may bring to the fore particularly charged affects or particular representations of or relations to one parent alone. They may be so overwhelmingly driven by bodily experiencebecause someone has been born with par-
190
NANCY J . CHODOROW
ticularly strong genital, oral, skin, or other sensitivities, or because of a combination of innate sensitivities along with parental handling and the unconscious parental communications and responses that have gone along with this handlingthat from the point of view of the unconscious there is only one sexthat sex which brings with it all these myriad bodily experiences. For some, gender is a non-central part of identity and sexuality and the sexual divide uncharged and relatively unnoticed. Others may be obsessed, conflicted, and defined by sexual difference, the absolute of me as feminine in contrast to me as not-masculine, me with a female and not a male genital. Although anyones gender always includes some recognition of the difference between feminine and masculine, a particular persons prevalent animation of gender may or may not organize gender around the masculinefeminine difference, and genital awareness or feelings about the genital difference between the sexes may or may not form its centre. That is, masculinefeminine is not in any universal sense more basic than many other organizations, and even when it is basic in a particular case, the components of difference do not necessarily privilege the actually observed genital difference or its fantasysymbolic representation. Further, in those for whom the sexual difference dominates both the prevalent animation of gender and also the sense of self (where femininity or masculinity are highly salient in psychic life compared to other elements that might differentiate or relate self and other), non-ostensibly gendered elements may or may not be projectively organized into the feminine/masculine divide, so that the whole world is divided along gender lines. Here, culture, both as it is prelinguistically filtered and as it is learned, can help or hinder such projective fantasies, as cultures themselves differ in the extent to which they make the sexual divide and difference absolute, salient, and central. As many feminists have noted, Western culture projectively maps the binaries of emotion/reason, soft/hard, passive/active, and so forth onto sexual difference in what we might call in the individual paranoidschizoid fashion: the divide is absolute, with one side representing all that is good and desirable and the other all that is bad and to be devalued. Although I have described the creation of gender as a developmental product, I am thinking retrospectively, from the viewpoint
191
of the consulting-room. We discover our patients unconscious constructions and fantasies about gender in general and their own gender in particular, along with the psychodynamics borne of anxiety and defence that have helped to shape these and their personal prevalent animation of genderand I came to think in terms of these components of gender and sexualityin piecemeal fashion, over the course of years, and in the context of our attempts to understand shifting unconscious fantasies and transferences. In this context of multiple ingredients and individual creations of femininity and masculinity, it has seemed to me that two related creations of sex and gender especially take us beyond sexual difference. One concerns the multiple ways that the body is experienced, noticed, and fantasied about, and the other concerns the extent to which these fantasies and experiences seem to be organized around the generational rather than the sexual divide. My observation is that the difference focus, whether beginning from the presence or absence of the penis or from a non-biological fantasy system that organizes itself in terms of the differential relation to the phallus, does not reflect experiential and clinical reality for many patients, perhaps especially feminine experiential reality and the bodily senses of sexuality and self that we discover in women. It is not news that presence or absence of the penis and phallocentrism are male-centred, but I also fully expect that, if we were to bring back to the psychosexuality of men what we have learned from women, we would find that such a narrow definition does not match masculine experiential or clinical reality either. Beginning with Horney (1924, 1926, 1932, 1933), several clinicians and theorists have pointed out that Freuds original perspective did not accurately portray the girls primary sexual and self organization that emerges from her own body configuration and her direct bodily experiences. We now call this primary femininity theory. Following Horney and Klein (1928), Mayer (1986), Bernstein (1990), Richards (1996), Elise (1997), and others have argued that there exist specifically feminine genital representations and experiencesopenness, unseenness, diffuseness, a sense of internality or unboundednessand female forms of genital (rather than castration) anxieties, for example, fear of penetration, rupture, and diffusivity, that derive from what the girl has rather than what she does not have. These more specifically female experiences
192
NANCY J . CHODOROW
are also sometimes seen to lead to more typical elements in female character or experiences of the other (Mayer, for example, notes that women tend to fear being emotionally closed over and to notice emotional closedness in men). Following Kestenberg (1956a, 1956b, 1968), Fogel (1998), Elise (2001), and others suggest that men also have inner genital awareness or fears of penetration similar to womens. I would add the observation that what we would consider severe and driven penis envy, desire for a penis, or even a fantasy penis, may sometimes be found in women to defend against a much more profound, depressive sense of lack and incompleteness in comparison to other fully endowed females (for example, women with breasts or fully functioning internal reproductive organs). As critique, as theory, and in its closeness to clinical and developmental observation, the primary femininity perspective was a great advance. However, because it begins as an argument with Freud, it does not really get away from the comparative male female difference perspective, and it still for the most part retains a focus on the external genitalsfemale genital experience and genital anxieties. It assumes, that is, that the external genitals are psychologically the criterial defining organs of sex and have, in women as in men, exclusive or near-exclusive primacy in bodily femininity. Now, of course, we cannot overemphasize the centrality of genital configuration and experience to bodily awareness and representation, to arousal, excitement, and desire, and to unconscious fantasies, not only about body but about self in the world. But for many women, certainly (and perhaps in corresponding fashion for menwe do not know), even when we want to stay close to the body and to body experiences themselves, other organs equally define biological femaleness and are experientially and in unconscious and conscious fantasy as important and intrinsically defining for them of their femininity and (female) sense of self (see Notman, 2003, for an excellent overview of The Female Body and Its Meanings). Beginning developmentally, Notman points to the lack of breasts and subsequent breast developmentvisible to the little girl in comparison with her mother at least as early and as fully as the sexual genital difference (this paragraph draws throughout upon Notman). Our infant-centred theory has tended to refer to
193
the breast, but from the point of view of the girl and of women, it is the breasts, their size, their meaning, their early function in the infants life, and later, their responsiveness to nursing and sexual stimulation that matter (Notman observes that the girls breasts when they develop are a new organ, and we might add that they become a different organ again when they are used for nursing). The inner bodily potential to become a motherknowledge of the uterus, the sense that there is a great difference between a little girl who cannot get pregnant and a mother who canare important to a girl from very early on, and as she gets older, the girls knowledge of the inner bodily potential to become a mother becomes concretized and enveloped in fantasy through the experiences of puberty and menstruation. For some women and girls, reproductive drives seem as potent and organizing as sexual drives, and we are as likely to find difficulties and disorders around reproductivity and fantasies of the reproductive body (the uterus, the ovaries, menstruation) as of sexuality in women. A focus on the genital difference (especially as such a focus has been, with the exception of Kestenberg, mainly on the external genital, even if this genital has an opening to internality) misses all of these bodily experiences and their potential psychological concomitants, that are equally feminine, equally emerge from the body, and are developmentally and clinically central to what many women mean by and experience as their femininity. In addition, suggests Notman, we sometimes find women centring their femininity around weight, whose connection to sexuality and gender can, we know, follow different paths in different women. We could add that facial hair, pubic hair, and bodily hairiness, among other non-genital or reproductive features, may also play a role in womens sense of femininity or its lackfacial hair masculinizing women, pubic hair giving them the body of an adult woman as opposed to that of a little girl. Women vary in the extent to which they organize their bodily femininity around the genital difference, or even around genital experience and its representations over other aspects of body and reproductivity, and in the extent to which their prevalent animation of gender is bodily in the first place. In The Power of Feelings, I describe K. It was in thinking about K that I felt called upon to theorize how a woman could make bodily and even external genital configuration, but not sexual difference,
194
NANCY J . CHODOROW
central to her sense of femaleness (the following summarizes my case description, pp. 8486). For K, the most salient aspects of gender were not primarily organized around the malefemale polarity. Although these were present in her fantasy life, her comparisons of herself to men were not that salient and were centred mainly in conscious fantasies about men and women in the work world; whether or not she had a penis was not so noticed; and her desires for men and fantasies about what a relationship to a man might bring her (whether directly in terms of sexual gratification, for a sense of narcissistic completion or confirmation, for rescue, etc.) were not that elaborated. Yet although feminine versus masculine were not so central, K definitely organized her gender with reference to the genital body. She organized her bodily gender, with great feeling and fantasy elaboration, in terms of the little girl/ mother polarity. She felt herself to be an inadequate little girl with inadequate little genitals, but her locus of comparison was grown womenoriginally her motherwith adult genitals. She had images of this felt comparative inadequacy from as far back as early latency, and they were also active in early and middle adolescence. Shame and disgust were the affective tonalities that characterized Ks animation of gender and experience of her female body, whether she imagined herself as a little girl or as a grown woman. In one fantasy sense of body, she was an inadequate little girl with little-girl genitals, but both during development and currently, she also felt that grown womens bodies are intrinsically problematic. Pregnancy and menstruation, for example, give women cramps, make them weak, sluggish, and heavy, and remind women that they are tied to these uncontrollable bodies. Heterosexual relationships posed a conflictual solution to Ks shame. A strong, masculine man could help her appreciate her feminine body and make her feel successfully feminine, but he also by his presence served as a reminder of her weakness and the general shamefulness and weakness of femininity. But when she was involved with men whom she perceived as not so conventionally masculine, even though she was not so reminded of her own weakness, she felt inadequate as a heterosexual feminine woman, which was shameful in its own way. A further quandary for K was her conscious self-identification as a feminist, which made her, as she put it, hate to think that women are weak.
195
K, then, was focused on external genital configuration as central to femininity, and in this sense she followed the original Freudian claim. However, her locus of comparison was not the penis and sexual difference, but, rather, the difference between having a little girls and a grown womans genitals. A same sexdifferent generation comparison located in the external genitals constituted Ks prevalent animation of gender. Also according to the Freudian claim, dominant affective tonalities were involved in Ks sense of difference, but for her the comparison elicited shame and disgust, not envy. Shame was prevalent when she thought of herself as having an inadequate little-girl body in comparison to that of a fully formed woman, but the alternative was no better: when she fantasied the menstrual excretions, pregnancies, and sexual and maternal excess that come with the fully adult womans body that she also felt she had, she felt disgust and disdain for weakness, outof-controllness, and vulnerability. Different women may parse the body and difference divide in other ways. For some women, the comparison and main constituents of gender may also be bodily and, as with K, generational, but focused on the adult womanlittle girl difference more fully in terms of reproductive internality. For one woman, a uterus, cervix, and internal vaginal openingstructured and elaborated insides contrast with her own emptiness or nothing; for another, the alltoo-present maternal uterus, which has produced too many babies, is attacked through an attack on ones own all-too-present uterus, for instance, in multiple abortions (see Chodorow, 2003c; Pine, 1982, 1990). In these cases, body is internal and reproductive rather than external and genital, but the main locus of difference and relation remains same-sex. For still other women, the malefemale difference may be primary but body secondary: they organize gender predominantly through internal objects that meet or do not meet felt needs rather than through the bodywe might say anaclitically rather than narcissistically. I describe in The Power of Feelings one woman who animates gender predominantly in light of the man she cannot be, in terms of affective organization and behaviour (a projective fantasy of her fathers and brothers sense of entitlement) and another who animates it predominantly in terms of the man she cannot have (a depressively toned longing for a divorced and thereby lost and romanticized father).
196
NANCY J . CHODOROW
I am implying that, much as primary femininity theory is a major advance over the phallocentrism of the traditional sexual difference perspective, and much as it certainly describes the bodilysexual animation of gender for many women, even this non-male-centred sexual difference perspective bypasses two elements that I have found to be equally prevalent in sex/gender: first, difference, comparison, and relation that crosses generation but is single-sex and, second, sexed-gendered body that is not centred on the external genitals. Similarly, although malefemale will certainly enter into any womans construction of femininity, femininity for women always involves not only their relation to masculinity, but also (and sometimes with much more force) their relation to generational difference, to femininity as little girl or grown woman, mother or not mother, what mother has and little girl does not have. For men also, I have now come to theorize masculinity as not only not-female, as I had emphasized in The Reproduction of Mothering, and as would be consonant with Freuds centring sexual difference on the presence or absence of the penis, but also as involving the man/boy dichotomy. When the developing boy compares himself or fantasizes his masculinity, it is not only in relation to his female, vaginal (castrated) mother (with breasts, Klein would add). Difference also inheres in his comparison of himself, with his little penis and his small size, to his male father, with a large penis and testicles, pubic hair, large size, and seeming personal power, and in this comparison, humiliation and inadequacy, rather than castration, are the threat (similarly, our case reports suggest that male patients are as likely to feel inadequate and humiliated as they are to feel potentially castrated in relation to their male analysts). When a mans masculinity is threatened, it is as often because he feels like an inadequate and humiliated little boy vis-vis other (adult, masculine) men, created as a subordinate masculinity, rather than because he feels feminized, or castrated. As I put it in Hate, Humiliation, and Masculinity (Chodorow, 2003a), where I discuss some of the psychodynamics of masculinity that seem to underlie terrorism and homophobia:
I am suggesting that Freud was right, in Analysis Terminable and Interminable, when he suggested that mens conflicts about passivity with regard to another man are psychological
197
bedrock, but he was wrong to call this femininity: the superordinatesubordinate, malemale relationship is not reducible to a malefemale relationship [Chodorow, 2003a, p. 99]
If we return to Freud and the other classical theories, my clinical observations of same-sex different-generation components to femininity and masculinity are not completely a theoretical surprise. The theory of the Oedipus complex in both its simple and complete forms, while instigated by and in the classical account resolved through castration anxiety or the desire for a penis, in fact makes generation as well as gender central. This dual focus on the psychic role of gender and generation has been especially theorized by Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984, 1986) and McDougall (1986), but the terms themselves mitigate against seeing that generation itself may be intrinsically gendered. Both boy and girl evaluate the inadequacy, as well as the vulnerability, of their organ in relation to the same-sex parent, even as they also notice and make something of their organs difference from and capacity to satisfy the opposite sex (or, in the becoming-gay case, the same-sex) parent. In fact, same-generationsiblingdifference, which is often conventionally alluded to in discussions of differencethe little girl sees the little boy and knows that she wants what he hasseems a lesser component in the cross-sex comparison for most people. That same-sex different-generation components would be central to femininity and masculinity could be predicted from this originary theory: they are directly discussed in relation to fatherson and could be easily extrapolated in terms of motherdaughter bodily relations, difference, and comparison as well. When we add Kleins account of the early Oedipus conflict and her view that idealization of the penis develops in both sexes as a defence against the childs sense of the power of the maternal breast, we can especially see classical roots for the girls location in a non-phallocentric same-sex different-generation complex that does not centre on the external genitals. Of course, all of these classical theories have required major modification and critique, as I have discussed throughout this chapter. Especially, psychoanalytic and feminist critics have pointed to the need to emphasize the primary meanings of the female body for women and girls and to challenge the near-complete lack of attention to maternality in all the classic accounts, with
198
NANCY J . CHODOROW
the exception of Horney. It has been necessary to elaborate upon the intrinsic, non-phallocentric development of reproductivity and maternality in women and to rethink female sexuality to restore theoretically to women the undoubted clinical and experiential reality of female sexual passion and desire that cannot be elicited from Freuds aseptic account. But even with the need for these major modifications, the classical theories of the Oedipus complex that we inherit from Freud, Lampl-de Groot, Horney, Klein, and others, which include serious attention to generational object-relations as well as to gendered body, provide more of a foundation for the rethinking of femininity and masculinity than the sexual difference perspective tout court. I have suggested several problems with the sexual difference perspective: First, it universalizes what is clinically individual and variable, and it reduces to one component, through a structural linguistics rereading of Freuds emphasis on the presence or absence of the penis, the many constitutive components that go into anyones femininity or masculinity. Second, this perspective ignores other non-external genital but equally prominent bodily observations, comparisons, experiences, and fantasies that construct bodily imaged masculinity and femininity. Third, these other forms of embodiment often arise from and lead to a difference perspective that emphasizes same-sex cross-generation difference. My observations arise from the clinical consulting-room, but they result in a theoretical critique and an alternative theory. Femininity and masculinity are created through comparison with the other sex, but they are equally created through the psychic processing of directly powerful bodily experience, through the ways they are lived in the context of the entire psychic life of the individual, and through comparison with those of the same sex but of a different generation.
NOTES
1. In Freud on Women (Chodorow, 1994) and my recent Foreword (Chodorow, 2000) to Freuds Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality, I suggest that Freud had many approaches to the psychology of women and complex, nonpolarized understandings of the sexualities.
199
2. Butler (1990) is the leading post-structuralist feminist who also draws upon psychoanalysis, but Scott (1988), for example, also explicitly argues for the exclusively relational meanings of male and female or masculinity and femininity from a historicalculturalist post-structural perspective. 3. Scott would be an example of someone who uses the term gender more or less exclusivelythat is, except when she is specifically discussing sexualitybut who at the same time always thinks in terms of gender difference. 4. The terms sense of maleness and sense of femaleness are taken from Stoller (1965, 1968), but I am using them to mean not just core gender identity but all of the unconscious and conscious fantasies and constructions that go into a persons subjective gender. 5. My starting from clinical experience, from a pragmatic rather than theory-driven view, and from more iconoclasm towards Freud, may mark me as a North Americansee Goldberg (2002); Special Issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2004, Whats American about American Psychoanalysis?; also G. Klein (1973). Although many continental European, English, and Latin American analysts begin from the clinical and a more inductive view of theory, there is also perhaps within these non-North American psychoanalytic cultures a tendency towards more textual and theoretical fidelity to Freud. 6. In Freud on Women (Chodorow, 1994), I suggest that the Demeter Persephone story provides a better classical grounding for the FreudLampl-de GrootDeutsch account of the female Oedipus complex, though I note that such a reading minimizes the daughters hostility to the mother that these theorists also describe. (See also Foley, 1999, which reprints Chodorow, 1974, and Holtzman & Kulish, 2000, and Kulish & Holtzman, 1998.) 7. Within psychoanalysis itself at this point there was little rethinking of the psychology of women, with the very important exceptions of Kestenberg (1956a, 1956b, 1968) and Chasseguet-Smirgel (1964). 8. I use the term clinical individual to stress the distinction between the universals that our theory has tended to claim and the unique individuals whom we treat, whose particular instantiations of a theory will have been developmentally particular and will be created in historically particular ways in the transferencecountertransference and in other indications of unconscious fantasy over the course of treatment. 9. On the uses of Klein for understanding gender and sex, see BirksteadBreen, 1999, and Chodorow, 1999a.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, D. (1990). Female genital anxieties, conflicts, and typical mastery modes. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 71: 151165. Birkstead-Breen, D. (1999). Dana Birkstead-Breen on Melanie Klein: Holding the tension. In D. Bassin (Ed.), Female Sexuality: Contemporary Engagements (pp. 279286). Northvale, NJ: Aronson.
200
NANCY J . CHODOROW
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York & London: Routledge. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (Ed.) (1964). Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic Views. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984). Creativity and Perversion. New York: Norton. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1986). Sexuality and Mind: The Role of the Father and Mother in the Psyche. New York: New York University Press. Chodorow, N. J. (1974). Family structure and feminine personality. In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (pp. 4565). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, & Cambridge, UK: Polity. Chodorow, N.J. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Second Edition with a new preface, 1999. Chodorow, N. J. (1979). Gender, relation and difference in psychoanalytic perspective. In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (pp. 99113). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Cambridge: Polity. Chodorow, N. J. (1994). Freud on women. In: Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky; London: Free Association Books. Chodorow, N. J. (1996). Theoretical gender and clinical gender. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44 (Supplement): 215 238. Chodorow, N. J. (1999a). Nancy J. Chodorow on Melanie Klein: From subjectivity in general to subjective gender in particular. In: D. Bassin (Ed.), Female Sexuality/Contemporary Engagements (pp. 239 250). Northvale, NJ: Aronson. Chodorow, N. J. (1999b). The Power of Feelings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chodorow, N. J. (1999c). Preface to the Second Edition. In: The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chodorow, N. J. (2000). Foreword to Freuds Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality (pp. viixviii). New York: Basic. Chodorow, N. J. (2003a). Hate, humiliation and masculinity. In: S. Varvin & V. Volkan (Eds.), Violence or Dialogue: Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism (pp. 94107). London: International Psychoanalytic Press.
201
Chodorow, N. J. (2003b). Les homosexualits comme formations de compromis: La complexit thorique et clinique dune description et dune comprhension des homosexualits. Revue Franaise de Psychanalyse, 67: 4164. Chodorow, N. J. (2003c). Too late: Ambivalence about motherhood, choice, and time. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 51: 11811198. Corbett, K. (1993). The mystery of homosexuality. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 10: 345357. de Marneffe, D. (1997). Bodies and words: A study of young childrens genital and gender knowledge. Gender and Psychoanalysis, 2: 333. Elise, D. (1997). Primary femininity, bisexuality, and the female ego ideal: A re-examination of female developmental theory. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 66: 489517. Elise, D. (2001). Unlawful penetration: Male fears of psychic penetration. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 11: 499531. Fogel, G. (1998). Interiority and inner genital space in men: What else can be lost in castration. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 67: 662697. Foley, H. (Ed.) (1999). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Freud, S. (1920a). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. S.E., 18. Goldberg, A. (2002). American pragmatism and American psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 71: 235250. Holtzman, D., & Kulish, N. (2000). The feminization of the female Oedipal complex. Part I: A reconsideration of the significance of separation issues. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 48: 14131437. Horney, K. (1924). On the genesis of the castration complex in women. In: Feminine Psychology (pp. 3753). New York: Norton, 1967. Horney, K. (1926). The flight from womanhood. In: Feminine Psychology (pp. 5470). New York: Norton, 1967. Horney, K. (1932). The dread of woman. In: Feminine Psychology (pp. 133146). New York: Norton, 1967. Horney, K. (1933). The denial of the vagina. In: Feminine Psychology (pp. 147161). New York: Norton, 1967. Isay, R. (1989). Becoming Homosexual: Gay Men and their Development. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
202
NANCY J . CHODOROW
Kestenberg, J. (1956a). On the development of maternal feelings in early childhood: Observations and reflections. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 11: 257291. Kestenberg, J. (1956b). Vicissitudes of female sexuality. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4: 453476. Kestenberg, J. (1968). Outside and inside, male and female. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 16: 457520. Klein, G. (1973). Two theories or one? Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 37: 102132. Klein, M. (1928). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict. In: Love, Guilt, and Reparation, and Other Works (pp. 186198). New York: Delta. Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic-depressive states. In: Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works (pp. 344369). New York: Delta. Kulish, N., & Holtzman, D. (1998). Persephone, the loss of virginity and the female oedipal complex. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79: 5771. Loewald, H. W. (1978). Primary process, secondary process, and language. In: Papers on Psychoanalysis (pp. 178206). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mayer, E. L. (1986). Everybody must be just like me: Observations on female castration anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66: 331347. McDougall, J. (1986). Theatres of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage. London: Free Association Books. Notman, M. T. (2003). The female body and its meanings. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2 (3/4): 572591). Pine, D. (1982). The relevance of early psychic development to pregnancy and abortion. In: A Womans Unconscious Use of Her Body (pp. 97115). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pine, D. (1990). Pregnancy, miscarriage and abortion. In: A Womans Unconscious Use of Her Body (pp. 116133). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Richards, A. (1996). Primary femininity and female genital anxiety. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 44 (Supplement): 261281. Scott, J. (1988). Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press.
203
Stoller, R. (1965). The sense of maleness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 34: 207218. Stoller, R. (1968). The sense of femaleness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 37: 4255. Stoller, R. (1976). Primary femininity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 24 (5/Supplement): 5978.
INDEX
A Abraham, K., 44 abuse, 4, 160 maternal, 33 physical, 34 sexual, 69 see also incest verbal, 34 activepassive polar complementarity as function of discharge, 153 see also passivity affect(s): maleness and femaleness in, 182 undigested, 17 affective fantasies, introjective and projective, 188 affective tonality, and sense of gender, 189 Agacinski, S., 129 Agape, 50 Alcorn, D., 90 alienation: and mirror stage, 65, 116
obligatory, maternal love as effect of, 7, 55 Alizade, M., xiv, 65 Ambrosio, G., xiv American Beauty, 160163 anal-erotic/anal-sadistic impulses, 29 anatomical difference between sexes, 5, 13, 45, 103, 105106 anatomy as destiny, 2627 Anatrella, T., 129 Andr, J., 44, 52 Andreas-Salom, L., 43, 138, 141 Anna O [Freuds patient], 24 Annell, C., xiv, 22 anorexia, 50 Anscombe, E., 130 anthropology, structuralist, LviStraussian, 182 Antigone, 76 complex, 76, 77 law of, 76 Anzieu, D., 43
205
206
INDEX
Aristophanes, 8, 60 Aristotle, 54, 56 Aron, L., 168 arousal, individual self-regulation of, 163 asexuality, 68 attachment theory, 153 attractiveness, human, and desire, 174176 Augustine, 112 Austin, J. L., 95, 131, 137 autism, endogenous, 47 autoerotic activities, 29, 31 compulsive [clinical example], 150152 B Balzac, H. de, 125 Barkay, P., xv Barthes, R., 129 Bassin, D., 168 Beauvoir, S. de, 1314, 70, 9397, 101102, 107, 117, 125128, 137138, 140142 Beebe, B., 147, 153 Be My Knife (Grossman), 155157 Benjamin, H., 84 Benjamin, J., ix, xiv, 3, 5, 10, 1719, 125126, 145171, 173180 Bernheimer, C., 108 Bernini, G. L., 110, 154 Bernstein, D., 191 Best Years of Our Lives, The, 166171, 176 binary oppositions, 69 binary reasoning, 67, 5366 biological gender, 84 Birkstead-Breen, D., 199 bisexuality, 47, 85, 100 psychic, 5, 42, 44 Bjerrum Nielsen, H., xiv, 22 bodily experience, 77, 187193, 198 identification with, 169 body: ego, 71 experience of, 8081 female, 97
experience of, 194 primary meanings of, 197 as idealist construct, 94 image, female, 2930 mind split and excess, 150152 sexed, fantasy meaning of, 187 unconscious representation of, 29 Bollas, C., 131 Bracken, W. F., 126 breast: maternal, relation with, 188 as transcendental signifier of difference, 105 Brennan, T., 162 Bridget, St, 142 Britzman, D., 176 Buber, M., 19, 179 bulimia, 50 Buss, D., 178 Butler, J., 74, 128129, 199 C castration (passim): anxiety, 5, 27, 4647, 118, 182, 197 female, 35 central to Lacanian and Freudian theories of femininity, 3 complex, 47, 7071, 76 concept of, 15, 117121 Freuds, 117121 fear of, 34 as punishment for masturbation, 30 vs. finitude, 121135 Freuds theory of, 97135 imaginary, 16 Lacans theory of, 96135 repudiation of, 118 senses of, 123 symbolic, 16, 167 Cavell, S., 9596, 101, 113, 116, 120 123, 130131, 137 cell division, 8, 59 Charcot, J., 62, 65 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J., 82, 197, 199 Chiland, C., ix, xiv, 9, 11, 12, 7991, 96, 121, 122, 123, 127
INDEX
207
child, seduced, orificial, invaded, 4243 childbirth, 81, 86, 187 childhood trauma(ta), 36 Chodorow, N., x, xiv, 10, 1921, 125 126, 158, 181203 Cixous, H., 185 clinical individual(ity), 183, 187 clinical scene, view from, 1921 Clinton, W., 164 clitoris, 26, 86 excitation, 5, 25, 26, 4345, 48 significance of for Freud, 3 Coates, S., 156 Collin, F., 129 Coltart, N., 131 communication, 176 unconscious, 147 Conant, J., 114 concept(s): abstract: claim to generalizability, 2 claim to scientific relevance, 2 claim to universality, 1, 2 as part of metapsychology, 1 formation of, 1 congenital adrenal hyperplasia, 83 constructivism vs. essentialism, 12 constructivistic approach, 7 container, 156, 161 body as, for mind, 150152, 154 daughter position as, 18, 146, 148, 150, 153, 158 of discharge, penis as, 156 for excess, 162 maternal, 156 mother as, 158 containment: affective, failure of, 149 maternal, 147 of tension, 18 Corbett, G., 84 Corbett, K., 168, 186 countertransference, 32, 116, 199 couvade, 86 Crary, A., 131
creativity and sexuality, 3233, 149 cross-generational relations, 2021, 181203 cultural anthropology, 12, 85 cultural pessimism, 177 culture: man aligned with in patriarchal binary thinking, 7 vs. nature, 6 and perception of biological differences, 178 transferential creation of, and sense of gender, 189 D daughter position, 18, 146, 157160 Davies, J. M., 147, 149 Dean, T., 127, 128 death: as accident, with asexual reproduction, 8, 59 drive, 78, 5859, 6263 see also Thanatos as structural necessity, with sexual reproduction, 8, 59 as trauma, 121 defloration, 81 Deirdre [clinical example], 159 160 de Marneffe, 188 dependency, repudiation of, 162 depressive position, 47, 168 depressivity, chronic, 50 Derrida, J., 110, 130, 131 de Saussure, F., 19 Descartes, R., 102 desire(s): concept of, 19, 175, 176 feminine, 38 ownership of, 164 Deutsch, H., 32, 73, 126, 184, 199 development: psychosexual, 8 female, 4, 41 Freuds theory of, 25, 98, 186 psychosomatic, 4 theory of, female-centred, 185
208
INDEX
deviancy, shared, in couples, 36 deviation, sexual, in women, 4 dialectic, notion of, 174 Diamond, C., 114, 115, 130 Di Ceglie, D., 87 differentiation, 185 active/passive, 57 gender, 8, 61, 62, 148 Dimen, M., 152 dimorphism, 18, 174 Dinnerstein, D., 158, 179 discharge: of mental excess, 18 of tension, 1819 bodily, in monadic economy, 152 male, 154, 175 and virtue, 179 Dora [Freuds patient], 24, 44 drive(s): death (Thanatos), 78, 5859, 62 63 see also Thanatos Freuds theory of, 7, 11, 5760, 63 66 life (Eros), 7, 5859, 63 see also Eros; Zo reproductive, 193 dualism, 6, 57, 60 binary, 57 classical, 53 gender, 7, 53 E ego: body, 71 ideal, attainment of, 47 of mirror stage, 72 sexed, 10, 71 Eigen, M., 146 Elise, D., 155, 191, 192 Emmy von N [Freuds patient], 24 energy, concept of, as mental, psychological phenomenon, 153 enigmatic message, parentchild, 17, 147148, 150, 153
enigmatic signifiers, 4, 42 envy: boys vs. girls, 28 and sense of gender, 189 Eros, 78, 50, 5760, 6263, 167, 177 178 as antithesis of reproduction, 178 and fusion, 8, 60 identification, hysteria, femininity, 62 lightness of being, 19, 54, 178 scattering of, 58 and surrender and death, 19 see also life drive; Zo eroticization as defence, 36 erotics of recognition, therapeutic, 167 erotism: oral, vs. oral aggression, 29 pregenital: and archaic, 2 unconscious, 36 essentialism vs. constructivism, 12 evolutionary psychology, 178 excess, 145, 146 experience of, 17 mental, and discharge of tension, 18, 146147 and mindbody split, 150152 problem of, 146149, 154 and gender positions, 163 male solution to, 154 and splitting, 154 exhibitionism, 35 existentialist phenomenology, 137 exploitation, 175 F fantasy constellation, conscious and unconscious, and sense of gender, 189 Fassin, E., 129 Fast, I., 168 father: aggressor, identification with, 155 female desire for, 42
INDEX
209
girl as object of, 49 incestuous, 158 name of, 42 oedipal, 54, 158 passive attitude in relation to, as essence of feminine, 145 perverse, 160163 phallic, 156 primal, myth of, 6, 54 symbolic, 48 as third figure, 48 Federation of Feminist Womens Health Centers, 38 femaleness, sense of, 194 female position, 45 female subordination, modelled on masterslave relationship, 175 feminine body, 97 experience of, 194 primary meanings of, 197 somatopsychic images as mental representations of, 4, 26 feminine position, 47, 158 of female, 47, 106107 of male, 43, 47, 106 femininity: accommodating, receiving, mirroring, 162 as beyond phallus, 95 and castration, 14 as construction by male psyche, 1718, 145 Freuds theory of, 3, 97135 generalization in, 140 Lacans concept of, 3, 96, 97135 and phallus, 102109 and masculinity, 6 constitutive components of, 183 intersubjective view of, 145 171 as metaphysical concept, 14 model of, Victorian woman as, 23 normative, 14, 107 open to symbolic, 53
as outside language, 95, 109117 and passivity, 100 plurality of versions of, 51 polymorphous, of primary oedipal phase, 47 as position constructed in language, 94 pre-oedipal components, 184 primary: failure in integration of, 30 theory, 21, 184, 185 reactional, 5, 47 rejection of, 50 repudiation of, 15, 118, 119, 163 riddle of, 1213, 2425, 96102, 114, 138, 145171 vs. sexual difference, 13 theory(ies), 13, 16, 95, 97, 99, 121, 124, 125, 138 classical psychoanalytic, 12, 137 vs. feminist theory, 137143 Freuds, 14, 9394, 100, 141 Lacans, 14, 9394, 106107, 109 primary, 191192, 196 feminism, phallic, 140 feminist(s), 80 feminist theory vs. femininity theory, 137143 fminit, meanings of, 13, 105, 106 fertility, 81, 89 fetish, 106, 167 fetishism, 36, 46, 106 finitude, 15, 16, 96 aspects of, 122135 and castration, 121135 human, 139 as political alibi, 139 Wittgensteins picture of, 121 ontological, 122 sexual, 118, 120, 122, 124 spatial, 122 temporal, 122 Flordh, C., xv Fogel, G., 192
210
INDEX
Foley, H., 199 Fonagy, P., 65, 146 Foucault, M., 19, 175, 176 Francis of Assisi, 51 Freedman, D., 87 Freud, A., 44 Freud, S. (passim): Anna O, 24 bisexuality, 85 castration, concept of, 15 clitoris, assimilation of into penis, 26, 86 concept of the unconscious, 3, 24 debt of, to women, 24 denigration of femininity, 26 discharge as male, 19 Dora, 24, 44 drive for mastery, 64 drive theory of, 7, 11, 5760, 6366 see also death drive; Eros; life drive; Thanatos; Zo Emmy von N, 24 experience of excess, 17, 154 on female psychosexual development, 25, 98, 186 on female sexualities, 24, 2339 on feminine passivity, 100102, 146 on femininity: and castration, 14, 138 normative, 14, 107 theory of, 93135, 139, 141, 145171 focus on genital difference, 182, 184, 187, 196 idealization of motherhood, 33 interest in womens sexuality, 24 Irma, 24 Katharina, 24 libido theory of, 11, 123, 131, 152 Lucy R, 24 motherhood, preoccupation with, 70 Nachtrglichkeit, 110 Oedipus complex, 71
one-person economy, 17, 146 passivity, definition of, 17 patriarchal thinking of, 70, 75, 137 phallic monism, 41 phallocentrism of, 3, 11, 33, 70, 72 polymorphously perverse infant, 82 primal father, myth of, 6, 54 protection from trauma, 166 reproduction and sexuality, 68 repudiation of femininity, 15, 118, 119 riddle of femininity, 145 seduction as traumatic helplessness, 154 significance of phallus for, 7 theories of femininity, castration as central point of, 3 theories of sexual difference, 3 Triebmischung, 8, 60, 63 Victorian prejudices of, 23 elevated to theory, 27 Friedman, R., 156 G Gallop, J., 107108, 127, 129 Garrta, A. F., 128 Gaspard, F., 128, 129 gender: binary, structural role of, 139 biological, 84 as category of historical analysis, 69 complementarity, 168 as concept, introduction of, 8385 conception of, and dualism, 53 66 as developmental product, 20, 190 differentiation, 8, 61, 62, 148 as expression of being, 12, 85 grammatical, 84 identification, 148 identity, 9, 29, 64, 82, 8385, 88 core, 84 disorder, 83, 88
INDEX
211
intrapsychic, 185 as invention of society, 84 meaning of term, constructivistic aproach to, 7 organization of sexuality, 179 positions, 145, 163164 and Oedipus complex, 155 reversal, 167 re-visioning, 163 role, 18, 83, 84 attainment of, 34 reversal, 165 vs. sexual difference, 912, 6778, 7991, 186 signifiers, 157 as social construct, 86 theory(ies): vs. practice, 1 in psychoanalysis, 12 and violence, 11, 68 gendered sexuality, conscious beliefs vs. hidden agendas, 2 genetics, recent developments in, 11 genital representation of as inner space, 29 Gergely, G., 65 Geschlecht, 86 Ghazali, Imam, 19, 179 Ghent, E., 165 girl, target of desire of, 48 Glover, E., 34 Godelier, M., 81, 82 Goldberg, A., 199 grammatical gender, 84 Green, A., 68 Greenson, R., 168 Grossman, D., 155157, 162, 164, 166 guillotine complex, 16 guilt, mournful, and sense of gender, 189 H Hrdelin, S., xiv Haugsgjerd, S., xiv, 22 Hegel, G. D. F., 50, 70, 110 Herdt, G., 86
her-story, 16, 141 heterosexuality, 71, 74, 76 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 131 Holtzman, D., 199 homophobia, 196 homosexuality, 76 female, 49, 99 primary, 3738 homunculus theory, 54 Hooker, E., 84 Horney, K., 21, 28, 125126, 141, 157, 184, 191, 198 Hurt, J., 178 Hurtig, E., xiv hysteria, male, 56, 71 hysteric(s), 50, 72 female and male, and sexual difference, 9, 71 Freuds study of, 18, 145, 158 hysterical compulsion to associate, 58 I idealization, 5, 44, 47 identification: with father, 54 -aggressor, 155 feminine, 157, 160 forms of, 176 gender, 148 with girl, 160 and intersubjective moment, 176 introjective, 186 with mother: feminine, 30, 45, 158159 repudiation of, 155156 phallic, 46, 49 primary, 47 mirror stage, 63 projective, 157, 186 sexualized, 160 identity: vs. anatomical sex, 53 feminine and masculine, division of, 55 formation, and drive, 59
212
INDEX
identity (continued): gender, 84, 85 acquisition of, 9, 29, 64 core, 84 disorder, 88 role, 84 threat to, 82 imaginary, childs, 6 psychosexual, 7, 55 vs. biological sex, 55 sense of, loss of, 35 sexual, 26, 34, 85 choice of, 47 subjective, 35 incest, 18, 33, 34, 67, 158 individuality, clinical, 183, 187 individuation, 8, 185 infancy: research, 153 universal bisexual wishes of, 37 infant(s): phobias of, 47 polymorphously perverse, 11, 69, 73, 82 infantile sexuality, 26, 42, 72, 73, 74, 82 inner space: genital as, 29 girls fears centred on, 35 mans fears of, projected onto women, 3, 24 inner world, complexity of, 188 interactive subjectivity, 5 interiority, 4546, 51 early, 45 psychic, 45, 47 internal shield, 166 internal space, 5 internal world, maleness and femaleness in, 182 intersexed, 80, 8384, 8889, 122 intersubjective economy, 146, 152, 163 of recognition and mutual regulation, 154 intersubjective failure, 153
intersubjective moment, 19, 173, 176177, 179 intersubjective sharing, 19 intersubjectivity, 173 intrapsychic events, dynamics of, 173 intrapsychic gender, 185 Irigaray, L., 114116, 126, 185 Irma [Freuds patient], 24 Isabelle [clinical example], 148, 150152 Isay, R., 186 J Jacobus, M., 28 Jones, E., 70 jouissance, 14, 96, 109117, 125, 127, 129 beyond phallus, 110, 114 outside language, 111 vaginal, 111 Jung, C. G., 68 Jurist, E., 65 K K [clinical example], 193195 Kaplan, G., x, xiv, 1719, 173180 Kaplan, S., xiv Katharina [Freuds patient], 24 Kestenberg, J., 21, 184, 192193, 199 Kihlbom, M., xiv Klein, G., 199 Klein, M., 28, 44, 141, 155, 188189, 191, 196199 knowledge, eternal pursuit of, 2 Kowner, R., 174 Kristeva, J., x, xiv, 46, 15, 17, 31, 41 52, 5366, 126, 130, 137, 185 Kulish, N., 199 L Lacan, J. (passim): castration, concept of, 15 femininity: and castration, 3, 14 normative, 14, 107 theory of, 93135, 139 linguistic model of, 19 mirror stage, 126
INDEX
213
primacy of phallus for, 7, 42, 138 symbols in, 102 theories of sexual difference, 3 Lachmann, F. M., 147, 153 Lagache, D., 127128 Lamizet, B., 129 Lampl-de Groot, J., 184, 198199 language, 1415, 95, 105 access to, phallic pleasure in, 6, 48 acquisition, and individuation, 8 Bourdieus theory of, 137 development of, 48, 60 essence of, 112 femininity as position constructed in, 94 Lacanian theory of, 105, 111, 113, 125 limit to, 115 mad, 115117 normative, of sexual difference, 109 outside, 9596, 109117 post-Saussurean theory of, 14, 95, 109, 112, 116 of reason, 114115 spatial picture of, 111112 symbolic, 114 theory of, vs. theory of representation, 112117 transferential creation of, 188 and sense of gender, 189 Wittgensteins theory of, 96, 112 113 Lantz, P., xiv Laplanche, 4, 17, 42, 147148, 153 latency, 76 lateral gender sexuality, 76 lateral relationships, 10, 7576, 158 lateral sexuality, 10, 76 laterality, 77 Lear, J., 131 Le Doeuff, M., 129 Leighton, S., 52 Lerner, G., 141 lesbian(s), 99 Lessing, D., 142
Lvi-Strauss, C., 83 Lewinsky, M., 164 libido, 27, 46, 93 Freuds economy of, 152 male, 72 concept, 25 only one, 11, 123 life drive, 7, 5859, 63 see also Eros; Zo lightness of being, 19, 54, 178 linguistic model, de Saussures, 19 linguistics: post-Saussurean, 14, 94, 108109, 112 Lacans, 96 structuralist, Saussurean, 182 Linton, R., 178 Lipietz, A., 129 Loewald, H. W., 188 Lucy R [Freuds patient], 24 M Mack Brunswick, R., 141, 184 Mannoni, O., 73 masculinefeminine polarity, 163 masculine protest, 117 masculinity: defensive activity, 162 vs. femininity, 6 phallic, failure of, 166 riddle of, 13, 96, 102 and struggle to get in, 160163 and symbolic, link between, 7 theory of, 96 masochism, 43, 46 feminine, 159 masturbation, and femininity, 3031 maternality, 189, 197 development of: fundamental to femininity, 184 non-phallocentric, 198 maternal instinct, 42, 52 as myth, 7, 55 Matthis, I., x, 122 Mauthner, M., 77 May, R., 168 Mayer, E. L., 191192
214
INDEX
McDougall, J., xi, xiv, 24, 7, 15, 23 39, 96, 103, 121122, 125 126, 131, 139, 148, 197 Mead, M., 12, 85 meiosis [cell division], 8, 59 melancholia, 50 men, fear of women of, as projection of inner pregenital fantasies, 3, 24 menarche, 81 menopause, 31, 32, 71, 81 menses, 81 menstruation, 31, 71, 193, 194 mentalization, 146 Merleau-Ponty, M., 13, 94, 95, 137 Mernissi, F., 179 metalanguage, rational, 16 metapsychology, abstract concepts as part of, 1 Metternich, Princess, 74 mirroring, dualistic, 53 mirror stage, 6, 10, 54, 65, 72, 116 primary identification of, 63 Mitchell, J., xi, xiv, 912, 6778, 79 91, 118, 125129, 139, 152 Moi, T., xi, xiv, 3, 1217, 93135, 137 143 monadic economy, 152153 Money, J., 83, 84 monosexuality, trauma of, 28, 122 Montelatici Prawitz, D., xv mother: asexual, 68 daughter relationship, early, 4 feminine identification with, 30 rejection of, by daughter, 37 seductive introjected, 5, 44 motherhood, 7, 24, 2729, 51, 70, 86, 94 asexual, 11, 72 deferred, 189 Freuds idealization of, 33, 93 and human reproduction, 10 perverse, 4, 3334, 55 mothering: function, 20
fundamental to femininity, 184 reproduction of, 186 mourning, for loss of intact body, 167, 177 Muslim tradition, 19, 179 My Father Is Coming, 67 N Nachtrglichkeit, 110 Nakano, G. E., 179 Naked Civil Servant, The, 178 narcissism, 12, 43, 46, 85 maternal, 44 pathological vs. healthy, 85 register of, 85 narcissistic economy, 9, 67 narcissistic humiliation, and sense of gender, 189 narcissistic omnipotence, 15, 119 nature: vs. culture, 6 woman aligned with, in patriarchal binary thinking, 7 Necander-Redell, L., xv Neikos [strife], 59 neurosis, traumatic, 58 Norman, J., xiv Notman, M. T., 192193 Nygren, L.-G., xiv O Oakley, A., 69 object: choice, 183 link with, stable, 47 loss, 148 defence against, 50 relations, 10, 71 theory, 86 oedipal father, 54, 158 oedipal phase, 44 primary, 46, 4147, 4950 complexity of, 46 economy of, 45 receptivity of, 6, 51 vs. secondary, 6 secondary, 4, 6, 44, 4950
INDEX
215
ambiguity of, 4951 and phallicism, 4648 Oedipus complex, 4, 20, 41, 64, 71, 82, 85, 155, 186, 197, 198 female, 184 gender identity as sequel to, 9 girls, 34 male, 34 resolution of, 182 Oedipus conflict, 186, 197 Oedipus Rex, 76 Ogden, T., 158 omnipotence, narcissistic, 15, 119 one-person economy, 17, 18, 146, 173 oral phase, 186 orifices, significance of, 4, 7, 42, 57, 155 orificial ego, 43 Ostas, M., 131 Ovesey, L., 84 Oyama, S., 174 Ozouf, M., 129 P paraplegics, 80 parental sexuality, 148 passivity, 1719, 53, 65, 100101, 145148, 163168, 196 acceptance of, 177 and activity, 153157 split between, 145 experience of, 165 and failure of containment, 146 fear of, 162 male, 167 ownership of, 164 perverse, 167 projection of, boys, 18 receptivity in, 18 oral and anal, 45 reformulation of, 163165 sexual, 17, 146 and surrender, 165 working through experiences of excess, 146 patriarchal ideologies, 141
patriarchal social system, 6, 49, 53, 139, 189 patriarchal thinking, 7, 16, 5556, 137, 140 in Freudian psychoanalysis, 70, 75 penis: desire for, and primary homosexuality, 37 envy, 28, 33, 37, 9495, 117, 119, 138139, 157, 182, 192 Freud on, 93 precursors of, 26 role of in female development, 184 idealization of, 197 and phallus, Lacans theory of, 102109 vs. phallus, 13, 48 Person, E., 84 perverse, human sexuality as, 82 perverse motherhood, 4, 33, 34 perversion(s), 73, 82 as erotic form of hatred, 35 sexual, 4, 33, 34 perversity, 11 phallic authority, structuring role of, 5, 46 phallic component, structuring, 46 phallic fusion, 58 phallic kairos, 47 phallic loss, 61 phallic phase, 5, 41, 43, 47 phallic position, 49 feminine, 49 phallic primacy, 42 ascendancy of, 4 phallic stage, 5, 48 phallicism, and secondary oedipal phase, 4648 phallocentric metaphors, Freuds, 3 phallocentric theory, 3, 11, 2021, 7072 phallocentrism, 33, 191, 196
216
INDEX
phallus (passim): denial of, 50 identification with, 49 and penis, Lacans theory of, 102 109 vs. penis, 13 primacy of, 41 as privileged signifier, 104 real [un phallus rel], 103 as signifier, 13 of meaning, 108 of sexual difference, 108 of signification, 108 of symbolic law, 48 transcendental, 108109 Philia [love], 59 Phillips, A., 131 phobias, infants, 47 Pine, D., 195 Plato, 54, 6061 pleasure principle, failure of, 58 polymorph, perverse, 43 polymorphism, of individuals, 18, 174 Portman Clinic, London, 34 post-menopausal woman, sexuality of, 73 post-Saussurean linguistics, and Lacan, 14, 9496, 108109, 112, 116 post-Saussurean theory vs. poststructuralist theory, 117 post-structuralism, 112, 115, 181 182, 199 linguistic foundations of, 117 vs. post-Saussurean thought, 117 power, male, 175 power relations: asymmetrical, and sexuality, 140 and sexuality, 19, 176 pregenital fantasies, unconscious, mens projetion of onto women, 3, 24 pregnancy, 23, 57, 62, 81, 86, 187, 194 pre-oedipal society, 10
primal division, 61 primal father, 54 Freuds myth of, 6 procreation and sexuality, dissociation between, 912, 8183 projection, 3, 18, 24, 44, 145, 155, 167 projective identification, 157, 186 psychic bisexuality, 5, 42, 44 psychic pain, 131, 166, 168 as failure of regulation, 146 and finitude, 124 psychization, 4346 early, 45 of maternal object, 5, 44 sexual, 5 psychoanalysis and femininity theory, 12 psychology: evolutionary, 178 male and female, 3 psychosexual cycle of life, 80 psychosexual development, 8 female, 4, 41 Freuds theory of, 25, 98, 186 psychosomatic development, 4 puberty, 32, 73, 76, 86, 193 R Ragland-Sullivan, E., 128 Raphael-Leff, J., xiv reactional femininity, 5, 47 Read, R., 131 reality principle, 15, 119 receptivity, pleasurable, dimension of, 163 recognition: failure of, 147 mutual, 165, 166, 167 Reich, W., 69 relationships, lateral vs. vertical, 75, 76 reparative fantasies, and sense of gender, 189 repetition compulsion, 7, 57, 58
INDEX
217
representation, theory of, vs. theory of language, 113 reproduction: asexual, 74 human, 10 in psychoanalytic theory, 68 sexed, 70 sexual, 10, 63, 70 vs. asexual, 8 and sexual difference, 67 and sexuality, 74 reproductive drives, 193 reproductive fantasies, 72 reproductive sexuality, 79 reproductivity, 186, 193 development of, nonphallocentric, 198 Richards, A., 191 rights, inequality of, 80 Riviere, J., 28 Rogers, L. J., 175 Rosanvallon, P., 129 Rose, H., 174 Rose, J., 127, 129, 139 Rose, S., 174 Roudinesco, E., 128 Rousseau, J. J., 122 Rubin, G., 69, 179 S sadomasochism, 35, 36, 168 Saladin dAnglure, B., 83 same-sex, cross-generational relations, 20, 21, 181203 Sander, L., 153 Sartre, J.-P., 137 Sausse, S. K., 129 Say, G., 31 Sayers, J., 75 scepticism as gendered, 113 Scott, J., 69, 128, 199 seduction: as helplessness, 154 theory, 147 seductive mother, introjected, 5, 44 Seelig, B., xiv
self-destructiveness and sense of gender, 189 self-recognition, and intersubjective moment, 176 self-regulation, 147, 163 failure of, 146 passivity as, 17 sensoriality, polymorphous, of primary oedipal phase, 49 separation anxiety, 60, 65 sex: assignment of, 8384 as invention of society, 84 reassignment, surgical, 87, 89 as social construct, 86 sexed ego, 10, 71 sexed reproduction, 7072 sexes, anatomical difference between, 5, 13, 45, 103, 105 106 sexism, 99, 124 sexual development, 5 final stage of, 82 sexual difference, 20, 181203 anti-essentialist theory of, 103 concept of, 70 vs. femininity, 13, 15, 9697, 117 Freuds theory of, 3, 108 vs. gender, 910, 6778, 7991, 186 importance of, 79, 8081 Lacans theory of, 3, 95135 morphological, 71, 103 as trauma, 121 sexual deviation(s): in couples, 36 in women, 4, 3336 sexual drive, 11, 19 sexuality: containing function of, 148 denial of, 20 exploitation and power relations, 175 feminine component of, 53 gender organization of, 179
218
INDEX
sexuality (continued): human, polarization of, 179 infantile, 26, 42, 7274, 82 lateral, 10, 76 male, sexual perversion in, 4 non-reproductive, 73, 75, 85 parental, 148 polymorphously perverse, 75 and power relations, 19 and procreation, dissociation between, 912, 8183 psychoanalytic theory of, and thought, 5, 47 reproductive, 79 repudiation of, 10, 68 social representations of, 3, 23 theory vs. practice, 1 and thought, 5, 47, 48 as vehicle of expression, 149 and violence, 73 sexual liberation, 3, 23 sexual orientation, 85 sexual passivity, 17, 146 sexual perversion, 4, 3334 sexual relationships, plurality of, 75 sibling(s), 67 creation of, transsexuality as, 9 relationships, 10, 77 importance of, 9, 83, 85 sexual, 67 siblinghood, 70 signifiers, enigmatic, 4 Silverman, K., 166167, 176177 sister position, 158 skin-ego, 43 Solberger, A., xv split, mindbody, 17, 150152 split complementarity, 151, 155 splitting, 150, 155, 163 active/passive, 154, 157 and complementarity of gender, 145 Stein, A., 179 Stein, R., 147, 148, 149 stimulus(i): dialectic approach to, 174
responding to vs. altering, 174 Stoller, R., 35, 69, 8284, 89, 148, 185, 199 Stone, M., 131 structuralist anthropology, LviStraussian, 182 structuralist linguistics, Saussurean, 182 subjectivity: interactive, 5, 4346 theory of, 138 subjectobject relationship, 10 sublimation, 31, 47, 50, 179 instinctual, 51 Sundn, M., xiv, xv superego, 47 defects, of female, 27 development, 95, 182 surrender: intersubjective, 168 trauma, and third position, 165 171 symbiotic relationships, 5 symbolic activity as phallic, 108 symbolic discourse, 14 symbolic function, 42 and social norms or ideology, 103 symbolic law, privileged signifier of, 6 symbols vs. bodies, 13 T Tamara [clinical example], 3233 Target, M., 65, 146 tension: discharge of, 1819 bodily, in monadic economy, 152 male, 154, 175 of split-off experience, 150 and virtue, 179 regulation, failure of, 147 as source of pleasure, 164 sustaining of, 164 terrorism, psychodynamics of masculinity, 196
INDEX
219
Thanatos, 78, 5760, 6263 and separation, 8 isolation, obsessional neurosis, masculinity, 62 see also death drive theory of representation, 113 thirdness, 173 space of, 18, 165, 168 third position, 165 trauma and surrender, 165171 third space, 19, 179 time, womans relationship to, 31 32 Tincq, H., 129 Tort, M., 129 transcendence, 93 transference, 116, 186, 189, 191, 199 clinical, 72 intrapsychic motherdaughter, 187 maleness and femaleness in, 182 maternal, 186 transgendering, 67, 7677, 122 transgenderism, 87 transsexuality/ism, 9, 12, 77, 80, 84, 8789, 121122 transvestism, 87, 122 Trat, J., 129 trauma(s): childhood, 36 surrender, and third position, 165171 universal, 3, 15, 118, 120135 traumatic neurosis, 58 Treut, M., 67, 87 Triebmischung, 8, 60, 63 Trigano, S., 129 Turtle, G., 87 two-person economy, 152, 173, 179 two-person relationship, pleasure and pain in, 17, 146 Tyson, P., 30 U unconscious, the: Freuds concept of, 3, 24 repressed fantasies in, 24
unconscious fantasy, maleness and femaleness in, 182 V vagina: perception of, 48 as portal, 29 vaginalanal femininity, 44 vaginalcloacal mobilization, 5, 44 Varikas, E., 129 Verhaeghe, P., xi, xiv, 610, 15, 5366 Viennot, E., 129 violence, 35, 76 and gender, 11, 68, 73 sexual, 141 and sexuality, 73 W Welldon, E., 34, 35 wholeness, 7, 8 original, 58 loss of, 8, 61 Williams, C., 179 Winnicott, D. W., 42, 85 Witt-Brattstrm, E., xii, xiv, 12, 15 16, 137143 Wittgenstein, L., 13, 9597, 112117, 121, 126, 130131, 137 Wolfe, S., 156 woman/women: mens fear of, 3 phallic masquerade of, 56 sexual deviation in, 4 theories of, and femininity and feminist theories, 137143 unconscious desires and fantasies of, 3 universality of as women, 138 Victorian, as model of femininity, 23 womens literature, 16, 139142 as literature of testimony, 141 Wordsworth, W., 122 Y Yassa, M., xiv Z Zo [eternal life], 59, 63 see also Eros; life drive

Dialogues On Sexuality Gender and Psychoanalysis

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dialogues On Sexuality Gender and Psychoanalysis

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

First published in 2004 by

Kamac Books Ltd. 118 Finchley Road, NW3 SlIT

have been asserted in accordance with Tl and 7!5 of the Copyrieht

medmnicill, photocopy ing , rordillg, orotht:rwi, without tl prior wrillt'9:1

retr i eval system, or tra.nsmitl..-..:I, in any form or by any meanS, dcctron..ic,

In honour of Joyce McDougall

EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS PREFACE

Dialogues on sexuality and gender Irne Matthis

Freud and female sexualities Joyce McDougall

Some observations on female sexuality Julia Kristeva

Phallacies of binary reasoning: drive beyond gender Paul Verhaeghe vii

The difference between gender and sexual difference Juliet Mitchell

Gender and sexual difference Colette Chiland

Femininity theory, theories of women, or feminist theory? Ebba Witt-Brattstrm

The economy of freedom Gisela Kaplan

EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Dialogues on sexuality and gender

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

DIALOGUES ON SEXUALITY AND GENDER

Some final words

Freud and female sexualities

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

Female body image

Masturbation and femininity

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

Woman and time

Sexuality and creativity

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

Sexual deviations in women

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

Couples and shared deviancy

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

FREUD AND FEMALE SEXUALITIES

Some observations on female sexuality

The primary oedipal phase: seduction and invasion

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON FEMALE SEXUALITY

Interactive subjectivity and psychization

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON FEMALE SEXUALITY

The secondary oedipal phase: encounter with phallicism

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON FEMALE SEXUALITY

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON FEMALE SEXUALITY

The ambiguity of the female secondary oedipal phase

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON FEMALE SEXUALITY

The female and femininity

Phallacies of binary reasoning: drive beyond gender

PHALLACIES OF BINARY REASONING

PHALLACIES OF BINARY REASONING