Feminism and Psychoanalysis
Of the varieties of feminism that flowered in the twentieth century only one developed close links to Freudian psychoanalysis and contributed to its core theory: Lacanian feminism. It retained Freud's focus on the unconscious formation of sexual difference and viewed woman as a conceptual figure with its own psychic profile. *Object-relations feminism (the principal alternative orientation in psychoanalytic feminism) responded differently to Freud, preferring Klein and Winnicott. It emphasised gender (a social construction influenced by infantile nurturing) over sexual difference. To Freudo- Lacanian feminists sexual difference has an unconscious cause; to object-relations, perceptible infantile patterns of connecting to the mother shape gender-styles. Arch-feminist Virginia Woolf's husband owned the press that printed Freud's works in English as quickly as they were written. Yet nonpsychoanalytic feminism never deemed Freud its friend, even though his revolution in man's self-view opened a field that granted women greater standing than any previous scientific endeavour. Freud's dedication to knowing about something (the unconscious) formerly unknown to man and woman alike encouraged an unprecedented collaboration between the sexes. Women became psychoanalytic practitioners and those closest to Freud frequently made major theoretical contributions: Lou Andreas-Salomé (narcissism), Sabina Spielrein (death drive), Princess Marie Bonaparte (literature and analysis), Melanie *Klein (super-ego, guilt, mother-child dialectic), Anna *Freud (child psychology, ego defences), and Joan Riviere (femininity). Others (*Deutsch, *Horney, Mack *Brunswick) wrote classic case analyses. Yet these women would not now be considered feminists, simply because they subscribed to Freud's theory that the cause of woman-ness is unconscious.
Freud insisted the male sexual organ had primacy in the psychical distinguishing of sexes: sexual identification begins with a scene of *castration - the child's unconscious hypothesis about why boys have what girls do not. Freud's 'bedrock' (castration) decides all sexual difference; the anatomical absence of male genital attains inordinate command over the psychic destinies of male and female. In men, castration resolves their Oedipal complex; in women, it inaugurates a crippling envy that stunts development of their higher judgmental and reasoning powers. The emergence in woman of femininity is due to penis envy, her unconscious response to castration. The psychic cause of woman is thus not biological; it is an unconscious answer to a biological fact, re-inscribed on her body.
Historically, the represented *phallus indeed symbolises man's cultural priority over nature (and social dominion over women). Freud was not, however, historically relativist about his claims: the organisation of the body under the phallus is psychically immutable. The prestige in the psyche of the conceptual (imagined or symbolic) penis is set long before the child grasps social values. Woman's penis envy is not attributable to her lesser social evaluation; it is the unconscious significance she assigns to her body's privation. Feminism, struggling to overturn the phallic model, thus thought Freud no ally, and rejected his sexual identification inscribed unconsciously on the body. Before castration, psychical 'phallic equality' reigned between the sexes; disavowing castration hence became a feminist imperative.
Freud paid detailed attention to woman's great psychical complexity. She faced three conflicting imperatives resulting from the castration complex: femininity, the masquerade that cloaks her penis envy; female sexuality, not organised under phallic centrality and constrained only by social (not inner Oedipal) norms; and, maternity. Once she becomes a mother, woman encounters how restrictive a role it is that Oedipus concedes her (Freud says it demands the freezing of her libido). All three components arise from the way castration stamps her body.
Karen Horney fully subscribed to Freud's idea of the unconscious, but expressed feminist reservations: it was the vagina that decided the girl's psychic fate. Yet Horney reduced woman to a sub-function of her eventual maternity, and maternity could not alone account for female sexuality outside reproduction nor femininity's odd emergence.
The 1960s mantra, 'the personal is the political', epitomised the feminist strategy against the unjust after effects of the anatomical distinction between the sexes (socio-economic, legal, and political). No professions or women professionals (including psychoanalysts) were exempt from scrutiny for gender bias. Feminist Nancy Chodorow felt the need to apologize for the absence of feminist activism among early women analysts by invoking their dire political circumstances, which left them little time for the 'personal'. Feminist apologies for Freudians are however rare and psychoanalytic feminism has looked rather to Melanie Klein than to Freud. Klein provided a significant modification to Freudian theory and a corresponding revaluing of woman. Her followers rejected castration as the unconscious determinant of sexual identification in favour of Klein's powerful maternal super-ego.
Klein located infantile sexual development in the mother's body (sexed female, equipped with 'good' and 'bad' breasts); Chodorow linked gendered personality traits to the gender styles infants developed in response to a mothering provided primarily by females. Infant sons develop rigid egos; daughters, less able to detach themselves, form uncertain ego-boundaries. Freudians would judge a girl's incomplete detachment from her mother negatively; Chodorow views it as *attachment, a model even boys should emulate.
In stressing the mother's importance, objectrelations feminism hoped to raise the low psychoanalytic esteem for woman and to ally themselves with non-psychoanalytic feminists who reject gender establishment in infancy. Chodorow now pleads that gender, though formed in infancy, is not binary but a continuum, and urges psychoanalytic openness to the 'differently gendered' (lesbian, gay, bi- and transsexuals). Such moves blunt feminist antipathy to psychoanalysis, but they also widen object-relations' divide from Freudo-Lacanian feminism. To the latter, object-relations' refusal to engage unconscious drives voids the very psychoanalytic definition of sexuality and loses sight of the specificity of woman: hers becomes merely one of many 'gender troubles'. Freudo- Lacanian feminism engages the critique of patriarchy but argues that the unconscious is its best resource.
Post-structural and Freudo-Lacanian feminists have thus regrouped under the banner of sexual difference. For them, the Woman Question cannot be dealt away by subordinating it to gender reform; gender merely burgeons into Grosz's 'thousand tiny sexes' that drop the radical difference in Freud's human sexuation. Juliet *Mitchell was Lacanian feminism's first major representative. She reproved feminist critics for attributing to the messenger (Freud) the ills of his message (patriarchal domination). Mitchell deemed Freudian sexual difference equally crucial to psychoanalysis and to the feminist cultural campaign to dismantle patriarchy. Psychoanalysis and Feminism upheld Freud's claim that sexual difference is not a fashion to be discarded at will but an old phallic root whose operations require systematic analysis. Mitchell maintained Freud's castration as the keystone of psychical architecture, insisting that the ideological success of patriarchy cannot be accounted for without a theory of the phallocentric unconscious and drives.
To non-analytic feminists Mitchell's work seemed paradoxical: she advocated cultural revolution but adhered to the castration complex that they saw as the source of phallocratic conservatism. Mitchell saw phallocentrism instead as standing in need of a revolution, but failed to specify how to alter politically something brought about through indelible, unconscious markings on the body. In the years since Mitchell first wrote, certain psychoanalytic feminists have responded by viewing sexual difference through an advanced Lacanian lens. Psychoanalysis poses the problematic of castration as: 'How is the natural body inserted into the cultural one?' Lacan nuances castration differently: 'How does the body cope with unsupported meanings inaugurated by the signifier?' For Lacan, castration is the universal effect of the impact of language on the human organism, whose body is vexed by a linguistic logic that overthrows its original organic logic. Language carves the body up neatly, but what it carves off (*jouissance) returns to the body, inscribing it phantasmatically with 'letters' (*object a) marking the advent of drive. Drives are the after-image of a natural instinct lost to the signifier. Castrationby- language is a universal, but its solution is not single; it has two faces, masculine and feminine. In Encore, Lacan proposed that masculinity furnished only one possible solution to the drives.
Encore questioned the historic and psychoanalytic promotion of the phallic-masculine over the feminine solution, and feminists now saw Lacan less as espousing phallic ideology than as seizing for women the revolutionary potential of the signifier. Women were to be granted the same flexibility ('the signifier-ness of the signifier') the signifier offers men. The phallocentric ideal of a 'stable' order (Lacan cites Aristotelian-Thomist ideals) is a fiction created at women's expense; it puts the enormous energy of the signifier only at men's disposal, and makes woman representatives of the irrational Thing it diffuses. Women are made to stand outside or else serve the phallic order. But the signifier can free woman from being a mere differentia specifica (a biological, social or economic class member - Lacan writes 'Woman', not 'The Woman'). To Lacan, Freud was thus no apologist of patriarchy, but was driven by two questions: 'What is a Father?' and 'What does a Woman want?' These twinned questions permanently alter the phallocentric paradigm for gender relations. Freud rendered the pretensions of phallocracy imaginary. Freudo- Lacanian feminists, such as Copjec and MacCannell, thus consider Lacan's Encore inaugural to going beyond phallocentrism. Freudian feminism was important to French artist Hélène Cixous (who worked for two years with Lacan) and philosopher Luce Irigaray. Cixous originally titled her institute for Feminine Studies 'Sexual Difference Studies'; Irigaray, battling Lacan, still found his linguistic framing of the sexual divide had feminist potential.
- Chodorow, N. (1989) Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Copjec, J. (1994) 'Sex and the euthanasia of reason' in Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Freud, S. (1931) Femininity. S. E. 21. London: Hogarth Press.
- Freud, S. (1933).Female Sexuality. S. E. 21. London: Hogarth Press.
- Lacan, J. (1975) Encore: Seminar XX. Paris: Seuil.
- MacCannell, J. F. (1991) The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy. London: Routledge.
- Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Pantheon.
J. F. M.