Newer currents in psychoanalytic criticism, and the difference "it" makes: gender and desire in the 'Miller's Tale.'

PRETEXTS:

1. La Psychanalyse, a supposer, se trouve.(1)

2. Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/passivity from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantas of woman as a "dark continent" to penetrate and to "pacify." ... Conquering her they've made haste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body The way man has of getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for th other but for his own, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory.(2)

I will begin with a text of Freud's, which will serve--at the beginning--as a horrible example of everything that is worst and hardest to take about what is, or used to be, thought of as psychoanalytic reading. It is a late text (1922) called "Medusa's Head," and it is short enough to quote entirely:

We have not often attempted to interpret individual mythological themes, but an interpretation suggests itself easily in the case of the horrifying decapitated head of Medusa.

To decapitate=to castrate. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto bee unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother.

The hair upon Medusa's head is frequently represented in works of art in the form of snakes, and these once again are derived from the castration complex. I is a remarkable fact that, however frightening they may be in themselves, they nonetheless serve actually as a mitigation of the horror, for they replace the penis, the absence of which is the cause of the horror. This is a confirmation of the technical rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration.