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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
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.
The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming still means an erection. Thus, in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.
This symbol of horror is worn upon her dress by the virgin goddess Athena. And rightly so, for thus she becomes a woman who is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires--since she displays the terrifying genitals of the Mother. Since the Greeks were in the main strongly homosexual, it was inevitable that we should find among them a representation of woman as a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated.
If Medusa's head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from their pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is familiar in other connection as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in oneself will produce the same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself. We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to flight when the woman showed him her vulva.
The erect male organ also has an apotropaic effect, but thanks to another mechanism. To display the penis (or any of its surrogates) is to say: "I am not afraid of you. I defy you. I have a penis." Here, then, is another way of intimidating the Evil Spirit.
In order seriously to substantiate this interpretation it would be necessary to investigate the origin of this isolated symbol of horror in Greek mythology as well as parallels to it in other mythologies.(3)
Though, as usual with Freud, this is complex, interesting and suggestive, it is also--as often with Freud--ruthlessly direct in the confidence with which it assigns meanings to the details of the myth. Despite the brief reservations expressed at the beginning and end, the passage is dominated by the image of th analyst as the man of authority who can tell you--try to stop him--what everything means and how it fits together. He forestalls objections to the more farfetched aspects of the interpretation--"if this is about castration, why doe she have lots of snakes?"--with a technical rule drawn from "analytical experience" the reader probably has not had, which asserts that it is routine for things to mean the opposite of what they say, commonly with the implication that it is a resistance--not Freud's problem--if the reader doubts it. If the last paragraph suggests that this authority-figure might sometimes recognize that generalizations like the one about Greek homosexuality could be more complicated than the piece as a whole accounts for, it is apparent that he does not let that stop him from the story he has to tell.(4) And that story is an awfully familiar one by now, because it seems to be the only one psychoanalysis knows. This familiarity would perhaps be all right if psychoanalysis did not also insist that all other stories were really just that story in disguise. One advantage of this short text, and one reason I have started with it, is that it sets out most of the important features of that story quickly and clearly. It i the story of the generic human child, what Freud characteristically calls "the little boy," perhaps adding "in the phallic stage," who is, if he is lucky, in the final throes of his oedipus complex, having just discovered that desires like the one he has for his mother can be punished in a particularly horrifying way. At the story's end he concludes that he had better stop competing with his father for her, identify with him instead and get another girl. It would not be hard to read the Miller's Tale that way, it could be thought of as Absolon's story, or even as Nicholas's, since neither of them escapes unscathed from the attempt, successful or not, to sleep with an older man's wife.
I am not trying to make fun of Freud here, though I am not trying to read the Miller's Tale that way either, or at least not to read it only that way. I am willing, though, to let this passage stand for now as an example of a set of tendencies that really are in Freud, even if they are not all that is there: I mean the way the biologism and the positivist "scientific" commitment to determinate and locatable meaning, tendencies that often render readers of societies and of texts uneasy, come together with a reductionism and male bias that seem pervasive in Freud's willingness to tell you what a woman means by reducing her to an essence, the genital mark of her sexual difference, and then to concentrate on what is important for men about that difference so reduced.(5
To help the old man's image out a little, I might point out that there is something he knows about the little boy, and knows precisely because he is a psychoanalyst, that works against or in tension with the tendencies I have been describing: he knows that boy's sexuality is not an essence or nature he starte out with, the way he did with a penis, but something he has to achieve--in part by the very processes Medusa represents and enacts. Freud knew that about littl girls, too: "We find enough to study in those human individuals who, through th possession of female genitals are characterized as manifestly or predominantly feminine.... Psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is--that woul be a task it could scarcely perform--but sets about enquiring how she comes int being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition."(6)
Freud is quite clear that from a psychological point of view what is odd is tha there are two sexes rather than one or many. He is thus faced with both the biological fact of anatomical difference, and with the analytical fact that though it appears one must take up a position as either a man or a woman, "such a position is," as Juliet Mitchell says, "by no means identical with one's biological sexual characteristics, nor is it a position of which one can be ver confident."(7) One's gender is not an essence but a construction, something tha has to be achieved with difficulty and seldom with complete "success," whatever that would mean. In this situation, historical and other factors do tend to commit Freud to foregrounding the biological side of the contradiction, which i one reason why developmental stages that can be thought of as somehow genetic and inevitable are so important in his account. "Anatomy is Destiny," as he say in so many words, and though he is aware that there is something biologically fishy about the destiny in a developmental stage that can fail or go wrong, he does tend to give that side of things much less emphatic expression.(8)
It is here that the "newer currents" of my title come in. In response to what the first followers of Freud made of psychoanalytic reading, the work of Jacque Lacan, and particularly the feminist inflections and extensions of that work have not resolved the contradiction between biological difference and social construction or gotten rid of the difficulty. Since, as I see it, the concentration on the scandal of embodiment and the insistence on the impossibility of resolving the relation between what Freud called the biologica instinct or drive and its mental representation is one of the crucial contributions of psychoanalysis, this failure is not to be held against it--and besides, I have agreed to suppose there is psychoanalysis. What these newer methods have done is to give the other side of the contradiction more direct expression, to focus more on the constructed character of the representations--linguistic, social, historical--that mediate instinctual drives, and the inescapable importance of that mediation. Thus, for Lacan, the unconscious (the IT of my title) is not something that is mysteriously (and metaphorically, biologistically) "inside" the heads of individuals, which somehow has archetypal contents called things like "castration" and "the oedipu complex," which are somehow "the same" for everyone. Instead, the unconscious i a process in language, a process in what Lacan calls the Symbolic: not just French or English narrowly understood, but any institutionalized organization o signs--gestures, facial expressions, kinship systems, economic status. What counts is precisely the detachment from bodies--from a determinate referent--that signification of any sort entails. Because a sign is not what it signifies, it prevents (or defers, as we say nowadays) direct access to the referent, and at the same...
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