1990spleen-blog

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What are the implications of Freud’s revision of his theory of female Oedipality for our conception of psychoanalysis’ politics of gender?
 

Freud's text—and perhaps any text on hysteria—is 'hysterical' too: it tantalizes us, waving a cape that hides nothing behind it. But it is that illusion of power, that very blindness which, ironically, will allow Freud to move forward.--Kohon

In a passage from Freud’s late text, 'Female Sexuality' (Über die Weibliche Sexualität), from 1931, he partly exposes a link—described as a mere "suspicion"—that returns the new discoveries, about to be presented in this late text, to his some of his very earliest preoccupations on the aetiology of hysteria, work from the mid 1890s, at the very origins of psychoanalysis:

Among these [new ideas] is a suspicion that this phase of attachment to the mother is especially intimately related to the aetiology of hysteria, which is not surprising when we reflect that both the phase and the neurosis are characteristically feminine.

Freud is talking about the hitherto unnaccounted for intensity between the girl and the mother in the pre-oedipal phase. But Freud does not explicitly say more about the suspicion this discovery arouses, except for obliquely. We are left to wonder how pre-oedipal female sexuality and the aeitology of hysteria are related, what links the late discovery to the curiosity of the early work, and what is characteristic femininity. 

Unlike the connection between it and hysteria—which Freud tells the reader should not be surprising—the new discovery, is surprising for Freud, as it exposes a region of female sexuality that is seemingly both impossible to see and also paradoxically, abundantly present in his field of vision:

Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus, phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization behind the civilization of Greece.

Female sexuality is, for Freud here, a region hitherto hidden in plain sight, of which he is only now aware. The nature of Freud’s discovery is curious. It is not based on one single particular case history, but is seemingly built over innumerable observations over several decades of clinical practice. The discovery, with its element of 'surprise' seems sudden, with an important immanence. And Freud’s metaphor seems to be drawing our attention to his own unconscious mind, and the importance of his own role in not having been able to see the 'facts' about the pre-oedipal phase in girls until now. It seems to strike him at a particular moment, like an after-blow. He claims the main reason for his inability to see the facts was a lack of transference towards him—the analyst—by the female patient: 'It does indeed appear’, he writes, 'that women analysts—as, for instance, Jeanne Lampl - de Groot and Helene Deutsch—have been able to percieve these facts more easily and clearly because they were helped in dealing with those under their treatment by the transference to a suitable mother-substitute.' The paradox of this discovery therefore is that, as Freud concedes, it had already been discovered before, by female analysts. But it somehow still remains a palpable discovery on his part. The moment of discovery is Freud’s, but it is belated. As Gregorio Kohon reminds us of psychoanalysis' origins, bound up in the case of Dora, 'His exaltation is no longer that of a young doctor on an ambitious quest for a name and fame; there is now a persistent search for the truth—although we do not know whether it is Dora's truth or Freud’s.'

Gregorio Kohon’s article, 'Reflections on Dora: The Case of Hysteria', highlights the significance between the phenomenon of hysteria—a phenomenon as Elaine Showalter notes, that has now 'disappeared from consulting rooms, hospital wards, and psychiatric textbooks' [hystories]—with a particular moment in the oedipal drama for the girl. Against the backdrop of a disappeared, universally rejected notion of hysteria, Kohon, following Freud, makes a case for examining its essential link to women, clinging to the value of something persistent, common, and tragic, to 'female' sexuality in particular. In a moving passage towards the end of his essay, he describes Dora’s sad fate:

What Dora does is to get interested in the relationship between two people, never as two separate people. The identification with one of them only makes sense to her if seen from the perspective of the other one. That creates the game of multiple identifications, which ultimately leaves the hysteric empty and desperate: the labyrinths of her desire lead nowhere, except to the preservation of that very desire…In that blind alley the hysteric cannot answer the fundamental problem that is posed to her: since there is a difference between the sexes, who is she, a woman or a man?

It is because of trauma, and of the knowledge of castration, that Dora realises the truth of sexual difference, but paradoxically because of the knowledge of this difference that she cannot know who she is. Her identity is always masked and eclipsed by the other two. Her oedipal drama, tragically, cannot be overcome. But why is this? And why does Kohon claim that: 'The hysteric cannot define herself as a man or as a woman because she cannot finally choose between her father or her mother'? And what is the difference between that claim and this other one?: 'a woman always at heart remains an hysteric. What I am referring to is not unknown to psychoanalysts in their practice: a female patient will say that she is in love with her male analyst but nevertheless make a maternal transference to him.' Both of these claims in Kohon’s essay inscribe the female gender in the subject who, as Kohon himself tells us, cannot choose her object, or her own gender. At the very least, these claims deploy a kind of erasure of the position of the analyst, whose own transference is not taken into account (as Josh Cohen notes 'in Freud’s accounts, transference-love is always that of a female patient for a male analyst'). At the most, they are violent exercises of patriarchal law. Saying that 'a woman always remains a hysteric at heart' is making a structural, categorical claim, that the category of identifying as female is itself a hysterical position. I will attempt to point to Kohon’s notion of 'divalence' in the 'hysterical stage'. I will then explore ideas of character and disposition and gender-identity as formulated by Judith Butler to see how these theories complicate oedipality and gender; In the second section of my essay I will attempt to perform a reading of a footnote from Freud’s essay 'Female Sexuality' in relation to Dostoevsky, to see how it might illuminate some of the questions raised.

Divalence

Kohon writes that 'Psychoanalysis truly began with women…the connexion between women and hysteria makes sense to me, and Freud never seemed to have abandoned this idea which in fact has been present in psychoanalysis ever since. Freud first mentioned it in 'Heredity and the aetiology of the neuroses' (1896); reaffirmed it in the 'Three essays ...' (1905b); and finally stated it in 'Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety' thus: "there is no doubt that hysteria has a strong affinity with femininity, just as obsessional neurosis has with masculinity"'. Now that hysteria is now so much outside of our own language for illnesses and disorders, it perhaps has an altogether different kind of value: it has been removed, just like a hysterical symptom itself, and we now have a psychoanalysis whose origins have been retroactively split: hysteria has vanished, but psychoanalysis—a field whose origins are in the study of hysteria, goes on without it. Perhaps this should leave us to question: what has happened to this lost object of psychoanalysis? Has it been incorporated into the very fibre of psychoanalysis, and does it allow us to read psychoanalysis afresh? 
 Kohon formulates the notion of an 'hysterical stage', 'a stage, not in a developmental sense, but more as a place where something happens, on which a performance takes place, a drama is developed, and at the same time, as a distance between two stopping places.' For Kohon, the distance between two stopping places is the decisive moment between the choice of father-as-object or the choice of mother-as-object in the oedipal drama which occurs simultaneoulsy as the gender-formation of the female subject. But it is a stage outside of a developmental or chronological viewpoint, and as such retains its own sense of time, and also a sense of being outside of a proper sense of time. It also fits with Freud’s thinking on hysteria, that hysteria is not merely the manifestation of symptoms, but an internal state. As such, it is hidden, and only reveals itself through symptoms, partially and in a occluded manner. Kohon also draws to our attention Freud’s separation of hysteria and biological sex as early as 1886, but, in continually re-affirming the link between hysteria and femininity, he argues that 'Freud’s attempt took him even further than he intended at the begining: hysteria is not just a psychiatric diagnosis which would include conversion hysteria, anxiety hysteria, etc., but is a human problematic, specifically female, present in all of us.' He concludes that what particularly characterises the hysterical stage as female is the divalence in the sub-oedipal phase, by which objects (mother, father) are constituted as 'whole' at the same time as the subject is required to choose between them, in the foundational moment of her oedipal drama. For Kohon, the 'ambivalence' which is primary in the case of the male child in his relation to his father in the model of the route to the 'normal' Oedipus complex, is secondary to the female child in this moment of confusion. For her, divalence is primary. This divalence points to the impossibly split sense of object-choice and its relation to her formation of gender-identity. The hysterical moment is therefore one of a return to this divalence, a time more primal than its inherited ambivalence towards only one figure. Female oedipility is perplexing, in part because it represents the precise place where the child, at the moment of their definitive libidinal choice at the foundational moment of their gender identity, encounters for the first time a kind of politics, and in which, the infant comes out badly (Freud talks about the unbound desires of the infant, and the impossibility, realised in the oedipal drama, of these desires reaching fulfilment). In female oedipality, the girl is presented with an additional problem in relation to her early erotic attachment to ther mother. According to Freud, she must either relinquish sexuality altogether; or fortify her masculinity complex; or transfer her early attachment to the mother over to the father, thereby abandoning the mother, her primary love-object. Whereas the threat of castration in the boy leads to the dissolution of the oedipal phase, in the girl it is responsible for leading her to it by a route which is itself foreshadowing of her own dissolution of the complex. In the 'normal’ outcome of the female Oedipus complex—by which the girl has tranferred her early attachment to the mother over to the father, the girl has reached the complex through the destructive manoevre of relinquishing the mother which has seen the boy (who relinqueshes the mother out of fear) escape from it.

Giving over to femininity

Freud says we should not find it surprising that female pre-oedipal sexuality and the aeitiology of hysteria are 'intimately related', but perhaps this betrays an implicit sense of surprise at the stubborness and insistence of a common denominator between the new discovery and hysteria—namely, the shared character femininity. 

Ideas of 'charactology' in Freud, as James Stachey’s editorial note to 'Libidinal Types' suggests, are particularly rare; but Freud is keen to return to them at this stage in his thinking: he discusses character in 'Libidinal Types' which was written in the same year as 'Female Sexuality', as well as more implicitly in Civilization and its Discontents. He also makes speculations about Dostoevsky’s character, biography and neurosis in 'Dostoevsky and Parricide' from 1928, as we will see. In 'Libidinal Types', Freud lays out a schema that points to three main libidinal types: the erotic, the obsessional, and the narcissistic, within which there are further 'mixed' combinations (erotic-obsessional, erotic-narcissistic, narcissistic-obsessional). As such, these ideas of character are part of a libidinal economy, which does not permit, as Freud makes clear, for a mixed combination of all three types, (the erotic-obsessional-narcissistic), because such a type 'would no longer be a type at all: it would be the absolute norm, the ideal harmony.' Instead, Freud seeks to show how 'the phenomenon of types arises precisely from the fact that, of the three main ways of employing the libido in the economy of the mind, one or two have been favoured at the expense of the others.' The libido then can be seen to function as if set-up to be primarily out-of-balance, the result of a decisive choice, and only made manifest through this negative principle, which is based on an exclusion, as well as a giving-over. In this way, we may see how character-formation in Freud could be said to be based around an a priori lack, that brings it into being as a manifestation of positive attributes that is definitively lacking: character in this way, is like a ruin: a manifestation that points to its own sense of lack. This sense of lack as foundational to character would ring with associations regarding female infantile sexuality, oedipality and the castration complex in girls in Freud, Lacan and others, which sees the girl coming to terms with the fact of her castration, the trauma of her lack as the spur to the choosing of a love-object and the fixing of her gender identity. We may see the idea of character itself, following this route, as essentially feminine or at least as illuminating as to what 'femininity' might signify. What 'Libidinal Types' shows is that while the lack structures female sexuality, it is also a categorical lack that structures character types. In this way, just as in questions of hysteria, a principle in Freud that has an uncanny sense of femininity, has broader and more universal applications and schematic resemblances. In 'Libidinal Types', Freud proposes a possible question that may arise from his exposition of these types, and that is whether the particular libidinal types have a particular relation to the origins of pathology and neurosis. Here, he is sure to exclude any possibility of this: 'The answer is that the setting up of these libidinal types throws no new light on the genesis of the neurosis.' And he goes on to conclude in the essay that while the aeitiological preconditions or neurosis 'are not yet known with certainty', neuroses can occur due to 'conflicts arising within the libidinal economy in consequence of our bisexual disposition'. Our innate bisexual disposition, is, as his postulation goes, that the libido is made up of both masculine and feminine components, (each with a heterosexual aim), a point he re-states in 'Female Sexuality'. But it is significant to note that, in 'Libidinal Types’, Freud is careful not to propose a link between any particular character (here the libidinal types he has set out), and the aeitology of neuroses. Later, in 'Female Sexuality', we should note, he does so in regard to specifically gendered character—femininity, and a specifically gendered kind of neurosis—hysteria. This perhaps shows in what way he constructs hysteria an exceptional neurosis as femininity is an exceptional character. Judith Butler questions the implications of Freud’s notion of the inherent bisexual disposition in humans and its relation to character. By pointing to the notion, first put forward by Freud in Mourning and Melancholia, she notes that 'identifications substitue for object relations', and that the character of the ego is formed from loss, from the incorporation of the lost object into a part of the psyche, 'where the quarrel magically resumes as an internal dialogue between two parts of the psyche'. Character, is then, in Freud’s own terms, not just formed on the basis of object-relations, but also on the basis of loss, and of mourning. She shows that for Freud, there is no primary homosexuality, and that bisexuality 'is the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche', a formulation in which 'there is no homosexuality, and only opposites attract.' But she questions what is really involved in these dispositions. She compares melancholia to the oedipal drama, as each is potentially responsible for the loss of a love object as the precipitation for the fixing of gender, and exposes a taboo more primary than the heterosexual incest taboo—the taboo against homosexuality. Here she oultines the notion of a 'dsposition':

The language of disposition moves from a verb formation (to be disposed) into a noun formation, whereupon it becomes congealed (to have dispositions); the language of "dispositions" thus arrives at a false foundationalism […] dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by cthe complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal.

She discusses how these dispositions 'are the result of a process whose aim is to disguise its own genealogy'; in other words, where Freud takes masculine and feminine dispositions for granted, each with a heterosexual aim, (as Kohon also implicitly does when he claims 'The hysteric cannot define herself as a man or as a woman because she cannot finally choose between her father or her mother'), Butler exposes the cultural prohibition that is productive of this compulsary heterosexuality. In the case of the girl caught in the Oedipus complex, Butler writes that 'In repudiating the mother as an object of sexual love, the girl of necessity repudiates her masculinity and paradoxically, "fixes" her femininty as a consequence.' Butler shows that this is a cultural compulsion, an operational feature of a cultural system of sexuality that 'both produces sexuality in the form of "dispositions" and appears disingenuously at a later point in time to transform these ostensible "natural" dispositions into culturally acceptable structures of exogamic kinship.' Thereby, the law 'forecloses the possibility of a more radical genealogy into the cultural origins of sexuality and power relations.' When the girl transfers her affection over to her father in the 'normal' course of the Oedipus complex, she is, as Parveen Adams writes, attempting to exit the complex through the door on which she reads "femininity", but, as she notes, for the girl, there is no door marked 'Exit from the Oedipus Complex'. She writes that 'Her sexuality, feminine or masculine, is going to be out of line. For her there is no ideal exit from the Oedipus complex; the Oedipus complex neuroticizes the girl. It is one thing to say that the Oedipus complex is the source of all neurosis; it is quite another to recognisze that the Oedipus complex pathologizes femininity and feminine sexuality.' Both Butler and Adams point us to the fact that the Oedipus complex is itself perhaps a disguise for its own geneaology, and that it is a political schema which itself produces prohibitions and pathologies in the subject, in this case, specifically the subject gendered 'female', who finds themselves trapped in it. 
 Regarding the more radical potentialities of Freud’s formulation of bisexuality, Jaqueline Rose writes:

Given a primary, universal bisexuality, sex, Freud said, is an act involving at least four people. The ‘cis’ – i.e. non-trans – woman or man is a decoy, the outcome of multiple repressions whose unlived stories surface nightly in our dreams. From the Latin root meaning ‘on this side of’ as opposed to ‘across from’, ‘cis’ is generally conflated with normativity, implying ‘comfortable in your skin’, as if that were the beginning and end of the matter.

Rose allows us to consolidate somewhat the position between Freud and Kohon on the one hand, and Butler and Adams on the other. By pointing to the multifarious nature of gender combinations that Freud’s theory of primary bisexuality permits, she enables us to see that only the 'cis' position is necessarily a mask for an innumerable number of gender-positions underneath. While Freud’s theory of primary bisexuality might be premised on heterosexual aims, as Judith Butler has shown, these aims would, as Rose shows, whether they are heterosexual, or indeed homosexual, still be 'the outcome of multiple repressions'. The oedipal drama, with its taboo structure, would signify that it would be impossible for any subject to feel 'comfortable in their skin' whatever the resulting gender-identity/object-choice combination; so in the case of female oedipality—an oedipality we are suggesting is linked to hysteria—in which the (female) subject faces, as we have shown an impossible situation, one could revise Kohon’s statement that 'a woman at heart remains an hysteric' to say 'everyone at heart remains an hysteric', but this would be the equivalent of using "all lives matter" in response to "Black Lives Matter"—a fundamentally reactionary position. Instead 'a woman at heart remains an hysteric' could be used to dramatise the many ways in which the subject is liable to fall into an impossible moment of divalence, as a result of the bisexality that constitues them, and the law that underlies the compulsary heterosexuality of this bisexuality. In other words, it could be used to point to the plight of the subject of whom it is demanded by the sub-Oedipal complex, that she becomes a woman, and loves a man.

"A knife that cuts both ways": Freud’s warning to feminists

At at critical juncture of his exposition of oedipality and how it pertains to character in 'Female Sexuality', Freud disrupts our reading, as he so often does, with a footnote, (with added commentary by Strachey):

It is to be anticipated that men analysts with feminist views, as well as our women analysts, will disagree with what I have said here. They will hardly fail to object that such notions spring from the 'masculinity complex’ of the male and are desiged to justify on theoretical grounds his innate inclination to disparage and suppress women. But this sort of psycho-analytic argumentation reminds us here, as it so often does, of Dosteovsky’s famous 'knife that cuts both ways'. The opponents of those who argue in this way will on their side think it quite natural that the female sex should refuse to accept a view which appears to contradict their eagerly coveted equality with men. The use of analysis as a weapon of controversy can clearly lead to no decision.—[The Dostoevsky phrase (a simile applied to psychology) occurs in the speech for the defence in the account of Mitya’s trial in Chapter X of Book XII of The Brothers Karamazov. Freud had quoted it already in his paper on 'Dostoevsky and Parricide' (1928b)..The actual simile used by Freud and in the Russian original is 'a stick with two ends'.]

Freud’s address intimates a community of feminist analysts to come, and defensively, he pre-empts against criticism from them, which would designate his theories as arising from the 'masculinity complex' from a set of pre-conditions that will have constructed his views; Psychology, following Dostoevsky, is 'a knife that cuts both ways', the English phrase carries the lingering threat of castration, and of the danger of being-cut in the act of cutting. It combines the desire of the father to enforce the law against taboo, with the castration anxiety of the child. The use of psychoanalysis as a weapon for feminism, Freud warns, would backfire on feminism, and so he warns them to remain passive. By this gesture, Freud separates psychoanalysis from politics, but in doing so, completely effaces his position as the father, who in wielding the castrating knife, and simultaneously pointing to his own implied castration-anxiety, is an integral part of the psychoanalytical-political system.
 In The Brothers Karamazov itself, the 'stick with two ends' dramatises a phallocentric economy. But one whose phallic element is comic, arbitrary and undermined. The defence makes the joke:

While still in Petersburg, still only preparing to come here, I was warned—and I myself knew without any warning—that I would meet here as my opponent a profound and most subtle psychologist, who has long deserved special renown for this quality in our still young legal world. But psychology, gentlemen, though a profound thing, is still like a stick with two ends.” (A chuckle from the public.)

As in Freud’s footnote, the defence pre-empts the use of psychology as a weapon. He proceeds to turn a psychological reading of the overdetermined events of the murder of the father in the garden, in a way that favours Mitya, saying: 'There you have psychology; but let us take the same psychology and apply it to this case, only from the other end, and the result will be no less plausible….' Freud, using Dostoevsky’s metaphor seems to suggest that the hermeneutic potential and power of psychoanalysis is here being subordinated to the deterministic nature of events that have occurred: the power with which psychoanalysis can be used to interpret or justify our actions is great, but in excess of the truth of real events. But the deterministic reading of the events is also undermined by Freud:

This other person, [Smerdyakov, the 'real' murderer] however, stands to the murdered man in the same filial relation as the hero, Dmitri; in this other person’s case the motive of sexual rivalry is openly admitted; he is a brother of the hero’s, and it is a remarkable fact that Dostoevsky has attributed to him his own illness, the alleged epilepsy, as though he were seeking to confess that the epileptic, the neurotic, in himself was a parricide. Then, again, in the speech for the defence at the trial, there is the famous mockery of psychology—it is a 'knife that cuts both ways': a splendid piece of disguise, for we only have to reverse it in order to discover the deepest meaning of Doestoevsky’s view of things. It is not psychology that deserves the mockery, but the procedure of judicial enquiry. It is a matter of indifference who actually committed the crime; psychology is only concerned to know who desired it emotionally and who welcomed it when it was done. And for that reason all of the brothers…are equally guilty.  

These small details—a footnote, a quote by Dostoevsky, raise big questions. To what extent is psychoanalysis concerned with the 'real' events? With the 'real' scene of trauma? And to what extent does it account for the psychological forces which, in the subject, actually produce the trauma? The question of hysteria and female oedipality perhaps lies in between these two ends of the stick. Here, Freud is seen forbidding the activity of the feminist-analyst to come, with the same threat of an enforced punishment, the stick, the knife. In the words of Jessica Benjamin: 'How has the history of psychoanalysis been marked by the move from passivity to activity, and how is this move fundamental to the problems of the transference between unequal persons—doctor and patient, male authority and woman rebel? How did Freud’s way of formulating that move reflect his ambivalence about attributing activity to women?' 

Hysteria, female sexuality, a radical sense of internal activity, at the heart of a passive body, could be conceived in much the same way that Jean Laplanche understands 'Nachträglichkeit', the après-coup, (afterwardness), the latent phenomena in Freud, whereby, paradoxically, the later event constructs, and changes the earlier traumatic scene, disrupting our notion of chronological time, and with it, both the sense of being able to interpret both the 'real' events and the psychological forces that construe them. We may read the après-coup even more literally, as the cut that comes after it has happened: the girl realises the fact of her castration only after she has been castrated. Life, for the girl, is after the cut.