Arguing with the Phallus Feminist, Queer and Postcoloniai Theory A Psychoanalytic Contribution
Jan Campbell
Zed Books LONDON AND NEW YORK
Arguing with the Phallus was first published in 2000 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N l 9JF, UK, and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA
[email protected] http://www.zedbooks.demon.co.uk Distributed in the USA exclusively by St Martin's Press, Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Copyright © Jan Campbell, 2000 Cover designed by Andrew Corbett. Set in 10/11 pt Adobe Garamond, by Long House, Cumbria, UK. Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn. All rights reserved The rights of the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85649-443-8 hb ISBN 1-85649-444-6 pb
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Campbell, Janet, 1958Arguing with the phallus : feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory : a psycholoanalytic contribution / Janet Campbell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85649-443-8 - ISBN 1-85649-444-6 (pbk.) 1.Psychoanalysis and feminism. 2. Homosexuality—Philosophy. 3. Postcolonialsm. I. Title. BF175.4.F45C36 2000 155.3-dc21
99-086750
Contents
Acknowledgements
^:B^v Introduction
vi
l
Postmodernism and the Bodily Imaginary
$fcv*3\4w Part I 1
Psychoanalysis and Politics
19
2
Between Realist and Narcissistic Ego, or between Experience and Text
48
3
Between Psychoanalysis and Feminism
76
4
Post-Lacanian Feminism: Reading the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real
102
&v:r^&-* Part I I 5
Queering the Phallus
131
6
Gay Desire and the Bodily Imaginary
159
7
Colonial Desires and the Postcolonial'Subject'
191
8
Situating the Cultural Unconscious: Reading and Recreating Myths and Memory
218
Index
243
Acknowledgements
The making of this book goes back many years. I want first and foremost to thank Jan Harbord for her intellectual companionship, friendship and editing skills; and for always sharing with me the humour involved in an academic life. I also want to thank and acknowledge: My extremely patient editor Louise Murray. Geff Hemstedt, for his initial enthusiasm for this project, and for helping me to write. Pete Nicholls for all his support and friendship. Gary Hall for reading initial drafts. Margaret Edwards, Anita Rupprecht, Chris Blake, Lucy Noakes, Sarah Kember, Stephen Maddison, Liz Hallam and Carol Kedward for sharing research and teaching, and for much needed friendship at Sussex. All my past students at Sussex University, whom I have enjoyed teaching. Peter Bermingham for his optimism in the face of my ambivalence and for all my years with him in therapy. Darrell Cohen for teaching me so well, and so much, about being a therapist. Andrew Samuels for his generosity, support and feedback, both as an academic colleague and in the analytic world. My friends who are in training or are psychotherapists, and who perhaps share most of this book with me, in their commitment to ethical and political practice - Prue Green, Pam Howard, Tricia Hynes and Rosie-Bardelle Carrier. All my friends who have supported me in differing ways, especially Roz, Karen, Lin, Adam, Kaushika, Helen, Monir, Candy, Celia, Heather, Teresa, Sadler. And finally all my new colleagues and friends at the University of Birmingham, especially my department of Cultural Studies and Sociology, for making it such a happy and valued place of work.
For Mike and Esme &&$m
INTRODUCTION Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism and the Bodily Imaginary
Psychoanalysis, in both its clinical and its academic expressions, has undergone much change in the last decade. Clinical psychoanalysis, historically situated within medical practice in both Britain and the USA, has become marginalised in terms of the National Health Service, giving way to the more 'scientifically' accountable narratives of cognitive and behavioural psychology. Indeed, as clinical psychology looks set to take over 'psychological services' in the NHS, the practice of psychoanalysis and analytical psychotherapy has become increasingly privatised, with analytical therapists having increasingly to compete with the mushrooming service provision of counselling and bodily therapies (the latter most basically characterised by weekly workouts at the gym). The reluctance of the clinical psychoanalytic profession to see itself either institutionally or in market terms has led, it could be argued, to a failure in adapting to and negotiating with the consumer society of late capitalism. Of course many critics and analysts would argue, quite correctly, that psychoanalysis has been one of the major discourses to interrogate and critique the sick narcissism of our late capitalist and Western world. The difficulty for psychoanalysis, however, is often its negative approach to contemporary modernity and subjectivity. Freud's view of the psyche and the unconscious is far from optimistic. The unconscious desire that underpins or, more accurately, deconstructs our postmodern identities is a psychic negativity revealing the narcissistic, divided and alienated roots of contemporary being. It seems then, for psychoanalysis, that the only positive alternative to our unconscious negativity is the law. Return from abject narcissism and borderline psychosis means the upholding of Oedipal law, and the ethical and religious principles that accompany this kind of patriarchal and colonial society. From Freud to Lacan and Kristeva, the Oedipal law is our only hope of a 'civilised' society; without it we are left to the ravages of our narcissistic
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and 'primitive' imaginaries that occlude ethics and difference with uncontainable aggressive identifications. One of the political premises of this book is that psychoanalysis needs to develop more positive ways of conceptualising and practising the imaginary. Of course the immediate problem with this statement is the assumption that psychoanalysis is a homogeneous entity, when it is actually made up of numerous discourses and identities. And there is also the additional assumption that all psychoanalytic discourses view the unconscious as a negativity, when in fact quite often they do not. The Oedipal narrative in the work of Freud and Lacan, however, signals an unconscious that is negative, placed in a binary opposition and repressed under the symbolic. Although both Freud and Lacan continually suggest the postmodern and deconstructive ways in which the Oedipal narrative and myth does not work, they do not posit an alternative at either an imaginary or a symbolic level. As such the Oedipal narrative remains a modernist, colonial and masculine myth that has been deconstructed in various postmodern forms, but still needs reimagining and rereading in a more active fashion. The project of this book is to explore a more positive, postmodern psychoanalysis in terms of a bodily imaginary that will remember and resituate the Oedipal myth: a cultural rememory and reimagination of the Oedipal imaginary and symbolic. The importance of reworking the psychoanalytic heritage in this way is the need to find political and more embodied narratives, which will not repress issues of race, class, sexuality and gender into an abject relation under the phallic signifier. On a more institutional level, it is important to find ways of answering and redressing the move away from psychoanalysis in the clinical domain. If cognitive and behavioural psychology have seriously critiqued (even debunked) psychoanalysis for its unscientific and unquantifiable methods, then humanistic therapies have been equally scathing of psychoanalysis's negative emphasis, its obsession with the past and its preoccupation with issues of power: the analyst as interpreter, parent, or knowledgeable master of the clinical situation. Of course these are stereotypes that are sadly too often acted out in real life, but nevertheless do a disservice to the majority of ethically minded practitioners. There is an issue of power and responsibility at stake, however, if we continually refuse to remember and recreate the old modernist narratives of Oedipal psychoanalysis. This means more than linguistic deconstruction! In the consulting room, anyway, ethics is an embodied affair that tells the stories of bodily experiences and everyday lives. The creative art of psychoanalysis as popular memory rereads lived history and moves the imaginary and symbolic into more negotiable postmodern stories and forms. Psychoanalysis has always been political, in both a conservative and a radical sense. But the more Marxist engagements with psychoanalysis have in the past twenty years died away, making room for the more sophisticated rhetoric of poststructuralist critique. One of the problems with this move (which I have
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3
documented elsewhere) is the increasing valuation of theory and language over experience and history (Campbell, 1998). Another important difficulty has been the subsequent division between practice and theory, with the clinicians not understanding, or indeed seeing the relevance of, a poststructuralist theory that linguistically and conceptually seems to transcend lived experience. On the other hand are the academics who remain ruled by the latest theories of Oedipal disjunction between the social and the psychic, and who in some ways seem too straitj acketed by the theory to connect their ideas with the politics of everyday life. Without the practice to remember and reimagine the theory, the theory becomes dead history. Within academia, this perhaps is most evident within literary and film studies, where the emphasis on textual analysis and the textual spectator at the expense of more embodied and 'real' audiences and readers has led to a gradual disappointment and turning away from psychoanalysis as simply another, ahistorical grand narrative. There is, then, a prevailing need to situate psychoanalysis in and connect it to the cultures of everyday life and to connect theory to bodily experience and practice. Although psychoanalytic theory has made efforts, in the last decade, to connect with political events and practice, it is interesting to note that, whereas Lacanian and poststructuralist analysis seem to end up merely deconstructing dominant Oedipal narratives, it is the more practice-orientated work of Jungian and intersubjective psychoanalysis that actually tries to remember the psychoanalytic heritage in terms of resistant tales and new narrative identities. Having said this, it is important to acknowledge the skill and the political vision, with which Lacanian thinkers like Jacqueline Rose have attempted to understand the Oedipal ambivalence at stake in contemporary social orders such as Thatcherism (Rose, 1993). Rose shows brilliantly how the abject violence inherent in Thatcherism works most destructively when it is embodied at the pinnacle of symbolic, repressive law. It is only by recognising the violence of our unconscious, as a society, that we can begin to withdraw our projections and act more ethically. The acknowledgement of complexity that informs Rose's work is important. What is more troubling, however, is her insistence that the death drive evident in the work of Lacan and Freud is the most persuasive psychoanalytic argument, albeit a negative one. Rose privileges the ambivalence of Freud's death drive over what she sees as the more destructive idealisations of Wilhelm Reich's bodily id. But the difficulty of Reich's ideas, as this book will suggest, lies not with his political vision of a creative bodily unconscious (as an alternative to the Oedipal death drive), but with his insistent refusal of the imaginary. While Rose has produced some of the best political and psychoanalytic work utilising Oedipal theory, there is no consideration of more positive forms of the unconscious within her project. If, as her more Kleinian essays seem to suggest, freedom from violence means only a withdrawal of our darker, but sexually gratifying projections,
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then what is gained is autonomy, but always from an ultimately negative unconscious. But unconscious projections are creative as well as destructive. And it is within the analytic session that this becomes most crucial, since learning to own destructive urges also leads to the manifestation of a much more creative, unconscious life. Self-healing, learning to love oneself, rather than depending on or withholding from others, is about accepting ambivalence and learning to inhabit a more creative, imaginative world. In so doing, the subject achieves a more fluid relation between registers of the imaginary, symbolic and real. Contemporary studies by Andrew Samuels, Stephen Frosh and Christopher Bollas all point to the different political and creative ways in which Jungian and intersubjective psychoanalysis is currently being thought through in more positive configurations of citizenship and ethical subjectivity (Samuels, 1993; Bollas, 1995; Frosh, 1998 ). What is the relevance, one might ask, of linking the Stephen Lawrence case or the war in Kosovo with psychoanalysis? We are living in a moment when nationalism and nation states seem to have receded in favour of a local and global economic market, only to become reinscribed in an ever more virulent fashion. Nationalism returns, then, in local heritage culture or the everyday violence of racism. On an international level Europe is perceived as part of one Western nation: its force, NATO, alternates bombing with acting as a world (national) peacekeeping agency. The racist rhetoric of British nationality and racism - structurally embedded in our institutions and clearly revealed in the Stephen Lawrence case - and the nationalistic ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo show a violence that is both social and psychic and can be analysed in fairly conventional psychoanalytic terms. But there is a confusion if you start to analyse these conflicts in terms of an Oedipal narrative or symbolic. For example, in an Oedipal analysis you might equate the racist thugs who murdered Stephen Lawrence with an aggressive imaginary. But where, then, do you place the ethical Oedipal law - surely not with the Metropolitan Police? Or how do you evaluate the Oedipal intervention of Blair and Clinton leading to war with Iraq and Serbia, and equate this with their absolute refusal to take up this so-called 'ethical' position of paternal law in relation to the genocide in Rwanda? One of the key concepts of this book is that the kind of ethical symbolic you rely on to narrate your world depends on the situated bodily imaginary that supports it. For the symbolic is only a social reproduction of the imaginary at an institutional level. And if we only have recourse to certain (Oedipal) stories, then there is no real social or symbolic reproduction. What we are left with is an Oedipal imaginary masquerading at a symbolic and linguistic level, carrying all the force of ethical law but at the same time colonising all other imaginary tales under one symbolic. The question of race and nationalism does not merely challenge the epistemological and ontological roots of psychoanalytic theory and discourse;
INTRODUCTION
5
it threatens to expose its supposed neutral, philosophical and theoretical paradigm of psychoanalysis as nothing more or less than white ethnography. Mary Ann Doane suggests as much: 'Psychoanalysis can ... be seen as a quite elaborate form of ethnography - as a writing of the ethnicity of the white western psyche' (Doane, 1991: 11). What then of psychoanalysis as a theory or as a knowledge discourse? In understanding psychoanalysis as experience, situated historically and geographically in space and place, we also have to acknowledge its practice. It is only by representing the bodily and experiential life stories that the analysand brings to the therapeutic session that we can evaluate and historicise the theory. Freud's concepts were rooted in empirical case histories. These analytic cases - Dora, The Wolfman, Little Hans - are all stories that have to be situated in a particular time and place. Freud's theory of the Oedipal complex, or Lacan's, cannot serve contemporary interpretations of social identities unless more experiential practices of story telling are connected to these institutionalised discourses. Several critics have suggested psychoanalysis as a form of narrative or story telling that bridges the gap between experience and language, history and the text, the body and discursive knowledge. My own work has argued for psychoanalytic concepts as narrative forms (Campbell, 1996, 1998). Peter Brooks, a literary theorist, challenges the linguistic bias of contemporary psychoanalytic theory within the academy. If the earlier psychoanalytic criticism in literary studies has been involved with over-psychologising the author or the characters in the text, then the more recent deconstructive versions of psychoanalysis claim it within an exclusively linguistic frame. For Brooks, this linguistic emphasis refuses 'to make the crossover between rhetoric and reference', which for him is the major reason for using psychoanalysis in the first place. I want to suggest that narrative is a much more useful model of representation than Oedipal linguistics for the understanding of psychoanalysis (Brooks, 1994: 26). Narrative is a much more fluid term and can be distinguished from linguistic structural definitions because it incorporates more primary, experiential stories as well as a secondary discourse of mental representation and language. These experiential stories are linked to Freud's notion of the primary processes, the bodily and affectual drives of the id, but they also refer to myths and dreams. Comprehending psychoanalysis as various forms of narrative, stories and ethnography brings me to a discussion of contemporary arguments between psychoanalysis and postmodernism.
Postmodernism and psychoanalysis wnmam Postmodernism and its meaning have been the subject of intense debate for several decades now. Some critics take postmodernism as an historical break with the period of modernism both in terms of ideas and aesthetics. Others see
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postmodernism as very much a continuation of modernist art and ideas. Jurgen Habermas, the social philosopher, argues that the project of modernity is still relevant today, and that its values of ethics, rationality and justice, developed in relation to the Enlightenment, are still pertinent to contemporary society. Habermas's defence of modernism, accentuating ideals of social justice and the public sphere, echoes the earlier Marxism of the Frankfurt School in its strident critique of modern mass popular culture and its commodified forms. Postmodernists counter this rather pessimistic view of contemporary consumer society, seeking instead to mark the end of the grand narratives of the Enlightenment. 'Truth', 'history' and 'reality' are the universalising truth claims problematised by postmodernity, where the textual world of late capitalist consumption and advanced technology swaps the real of history for images, arbitrary signifiers and simulacra. Two of the most notable postmodern theorists, Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, argue that 'authentic' notions of identity and society have made way for notions of textual worlds and fictional selves. Baudrillard's critique of Marxism suggests that in late capitalist society the distinction between surface and depth, or between image and reality, has imploded or collapsed. The ensuing hyperreality means that signs no longer relate to real-life referents; instead, autonomous and floating chains of signifiers signal a never-ending simulacrum of images and imitations (Baudrillard, 1981), The real is lost forever, along with meaningful experience. Reality is merely a relative term, internal to the media. Baudrillard has emphasised this point most controversially by his famous statement that the Gulf War in 1991 was unreal, a television spectacle. Lyotard also critiques Marxism, but from a different position. Lyotard, influenced by Nietzche, problematises Marxism's definition of history, that it is available to consciousness. Lyotard's notion of the 'figural' is of a three-dimensional, spatial and visual plane of desire that interacts with the semiotic and discursive landscape of language and conscious representation (Lyotard, 1971). The figural, for Lyotard, is the realm of the unconscious and multiple differences that have been repressed and foreclosed by the master narrative of modernism. A postmodern aesthetics that partakes in this expression of libidinal figural desire and difference can help displace the totalising closures of modernist thinking. In his famous text, The Postmodern Condition (1984), Lyotard claims that the seemingly neutral and universal 'truth claims' of modernist reason are in fact nothing more than contextualised and situated 'language games' (Lyotard, 1984). These language games, in line with other postmodern decentrings of both language and history, are seen as constituting micro-narratives and politics. How, then, is psychoanalysis understood in terms of the postmodern world? Freud's work, I will argue, is ambivalent, incorporating a modernist Oedipal narrative and a more postmodern understanding of the subject where the
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unconscious disrupts any notion of stable or unitary identity and any unmediated access to the reality of the historical event. Freud originally theorised neurosis and hysteria as symptoms resulting from the repression of child sexual seduction or abuse: the repression, then, of a real historical event (see Chapter 2). His subsequent abandonment of the seduction theory developed from an increasing realisation that he could not distinguish between the truth and fiction of his patient's memories. The patient's real did not necessarily coincide with the real historical event, because the trauma was repressed and not remembered at the time; it was only recalled subsequently, many years later, in the therapy session. Freud names this delayed experience of trauma 'deferred action' or nachtrdglichkeiu and his most famous case history in relation to these ideas is The Wolfman. In his analysis of this patient, Freud hypothesises that the Wolfman's trauma was located primarily at the age of eighteen months, witnessing a primal scene of parental sex. This scene only became traumatic through a later seduction of the wolfman by his sister. It is is only experienced by the patient in terms of his dream of wolves. Memory is not simply factual recall but also a fantasy or fiction, a story that is recreated or constructed to incorporate lost traumatic events (Freud: SE17). Freud's account of deferred action has been taken up by postmodernists, who argue that the 'real' of history can never be accessed as a truth or a reality, but is only available as a text or fiction. Lacan's work emphasises this point, that identity is only ever imaginary and the traumatic 'real' can never be represented. But the impossibility of remembering the real of history raises ethical problems. What does it mean to say the real twentieth-century Jewish Holocaust is inaccessible, only a fiction? The restoration of memory in the case of the Wolfman is problematic, as Tina Papoulias points out, because the traumatic scene or experience was only ever Virtual, not an actual past' (Papoulias, 1998:153). As she goes on to note, Freud subsequently does discuss his ideas of repressed trauma in terms of treating shell-shocked victims of the First World War. These soldiers, unable to recollect overwhelming experiences of trauma, were compelled to repeat and re-enact the horror of war over and over again in dreams and hallucinations. There is, then, a distinction between these two examples of repressed trauma, for in the Wolfman's case history the traumatic memory of the primal scene is a fantasy; the event is never recollected by the Wolfman and only hypothesised by Freud the analyst. In the case of the shell-shocked war victims, the traumatic experiences may not be available to memory but historically can be acknowledged consciously. But Freud's seeming confusion about what was real and what was fantasy actually fitted with his abandonment of the seduction theory: his realisation that what we remember, our histories, are always a mixture of the real and the imaginary. Critics of the Oedipal theory have argued that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory has meant that psychoanalysis has ignored the real sexual
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abuse of many patients. But perhaps the significance of traumatic memory does not lie in a debate about the real: Freud never doubted, for example, that the Wolfman's dreams of his primal scene were rooted in reality. Possibly the importance of traumatic memory lies in the explanation of unconscious fantasy. Jung always criticised Freud for a literal reduction of fantasy and the unconscious to sexual desire. Memories of the primal scene, for Jung, were not necessarily located in literal parental sex or incest, but were much more symbolic. The primal scene in a Jungian understanding is a symbolic representation of how the historical relationship between your parents is carried and experienced by you, internally and unconsciously. This is a mixture of the real and the imaginary and, of course, connects to ancestors: the parents' familial past. A Jungian reading of the Wolfman's primal scene would just as likely root the trauma in conflict between parents and a traumatic unconscious that has been passed on, communicated from parent to child, but never made conscious. This understanding of the historical transmission of the unconscious underlies Laplanche's rereading of Freud's seduction theory. Laplanche postulated that the seduction theory was not so much the real event, but the experience of an enigmatic and unconscious message, passed on from parent to child (Laplanche, 1987). Although Laplanche historicises the unconscious by making it the repressed desire of the parent that organises the internal world of the child (history is passed on through the unconscious of the other), there are difficulties with his theory, as Anthony Elliott and Jacqueline Rose have both suggested (Elliott, 1994:112). Both Rose and Elliott note that because Laplanche roots the origin of the child's unconscious world in the adult's enigmatic signification and sexual repression, everything is seen to originate in the external world and the child becomes some sort of passive tableau or slate, totally at the mercy of the parent's repressed sexuality. Nevertheless, Laplanche's work is important in terms of postmodern debate, because he provides a narrative of how psychic lives are transmitted historically. The idea that the unconscious is communciated and passed on between people also seems to suggest that our origins lie in the social field rather than in a simplified explanation of Oedipal familial repression. Indeed, Wilhelm Reich's explanation of Oedipal repression as an effect of social repression should not be forgotten. But is the repression of sexual desire, or indeed the return of the repressed, the most useful model for understanding contemporary postmodernism? In many ways the idea that history can be understood as repressed desire implies some kind of modernist master narrative that is preserved, waiting in the wings for representation and resolution. In the view of Laplanche and Pontalis, psychoanalysis is less concerned with discovering what is hidden than with interpretation or working through of the rememorised element in terms of a network of meaningful relations for the subject (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988). But is symbolic elaboration or
INTRODUCTION
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rememory of the past merely to be understood in terms of Freud's framework of mental representation and repression? Laplanche's work suggests a world of pre-verbal unconscious experience full of meaning and 'enigmatic signification', which remains at odds with the distinction drawn by Freud and Lacan between primary pre-Oedipal experience and secondary Oedipal processes of language and cultural representation. Most psychoanalytic interpretations of postmodernism have been in terms of frameworks of (repressed) desire. Lacan's work has been most famously lauded as the psychoanalytic theory of the postmodern because of his deconstructive notion of the subject as merely an imaginary fiction covering over the interminable negative lack or absence that characterises desire. An example of this is Frederic Jameson's work, The Political Unconscious, which resituates Freudian concepts of the return of the repressed at a collective level (Jameson, 1981). Ideology becomes the repression of revolution, and the repressive force that obscures historical change. For Lacan, however, it is the repressive and prohibitive force of paternal language and the symbolic, inscribing the subject within culture in terms of arbitrary signifying chains. In a similar attempt to read the present psychoanalytically, Deleuze and Guattari understand the Oedipal narrative as a master discourse of modernism and celebrate its overturning through their Anti-Oedipus: the positive flows and intensities of schizophrenic desire (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). So whereas Lacan posits desire as negative in terms of lack, Deleuze and Guattari articulate schizophrenic desire as a positive and anarchistic rebellion against capitalist hegemony and power. Through capitalism there has been a destruction of bourgeois culture and symbolic community, putting in its place cornmodified forms of exchange. Schizophrenic desire, like the commodity, knows no limit; capitalism not only deterritorialises old historical forms such as traditional bourgeois society, but also reterritorialises contemporary culture through repressive myths of the Oedipal family. The revolutionary alternative to capitalist hegemony is therefore a deterritorialisation of the social infrastructure through the liberation of pure productive desire. Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'schizoanalysis' is precisely this liberation of unfettered, multiple and schizophrenic desire. Jameson, however, takes a less positive view of the relation between schizophrenia and postmodernism. Whilst he acknowledges that schizophrenia does characterise the fragmentary nature of identity under postmodernity, he warns against celebrating it. To do so would merely confirm the dominant cultural logic of late capitalism. This warning that schizophrenic identity might be one of the less desirable faces of our postmodern, late capitalist world is also investigated by Louis A. Sass, who sees the illness schizophrenia as a symptom of our modern world. But unlike so many psychoanalytic thinkers who ascribe schizophrenia to some infantile world of the maternal imaginary before
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language and culture, Sass understands schizophrenia as a kind of hyperreflexivity, an extreme detachment from arenas of self-experience and desire. So instead of locating the schizophrenic in some instinctual, unthinking space of symbiotic bodily fusion, Sass puts forward the idea that schizophrenia is a flattening out of affect: an extreme alienation from bodily or intersubjective experience (Sass, 1992). Maybe the difference between the more negative view of schizophrenia taken by Jameson and Sass is the realisation that psychotic illness is about isolation from the world and the social. The Utopian vision of 'schizoanalysis' in Deleuze and Guattari does not acknowledge the importance of mediating the relationship between desire and the social in terms of the imaginary. Without such mediation, desire is not liberated into the social, but walled off from it, as an insular and psychotic space of the real. Lyotard is also wary of celebrating desire over cultural forms and signification. He understands all societies to mediate between levels of desire and social discourse. In this way he acknowledges both a negative concept of desire, where language and representation are figurative of the lost object, and a positive notion of the libido as a primary process and energising force that breaks through and disrupts language. It is important to note that Lyotard conceptualises desire as a force prior to representation and in this he radically departs from Lacanian thinking. Arguing that the dream work can paint but it can't think, Lyotard theorises desire not as a language or text but as an internalised object or thing. Disguised or condensed from the beginning, desire is a force scrambling signs, condensing them, squeezing signifier and signified together. Desire cannot be seen in this account to correspond to Lacan's description of the unconscious as structured like language. Rather, desire is something which transgresses and changes language, collapsing words into things. As an internalised object or thing, unconscious desire is opposite to language: Desire is a scrambled text from the outset. The disguise does not result from the alleged deceiving intent of desire; the work itself is disguise because it is violence perpetrated on linguistic space. There is no need to imagine that the id has an idea at the back of its head. 'The dream-work does not think.' The mobility of the primary process is deceptive in itself; it is what deceives, what sends the 'faculties' using articulated language into a spin: the figural versus the mind (Lyotard, 1991: 25). In Economie Libidinale Lyotard suggests that desire is infiltrated as a libidinal intensity in and around all cultural objects and forms. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari's Reichian notion of capitalist society repressing bodily desire, Lyotard sees desire as always already realised everywhere. Late capitalism does not need to be emancipated through desiring machines because it is already a gigantic machine of desire. The problem with Lyotard's position is that
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although he adds the sober brakes to Deleuze and Guattari's Utopian view of a radical schizophrenic unconscious, his understanding of the operations of desire within postmodern capitalism is ultimately devoid of any political or historical orientation. By separating the libidinal energy of desire from discursive representation, making the latter simply an effect of the former, Lyotard deprives psychoanalysis of any dynamic or dialogic negotiation of power. His universalisation of libidinal intensities lying at the root of cultural life leaves any agenda for effecting political change in discursive and social structures untouched. Implicit in Lyotard's thinking is a separation between the discursive and the affectual, mirroring all the Oedipal splits between language, experience, theory and history that a radical psychoanalysis needs to challenge. Although Lyotard's notion of the unconscious as a figural image or an internal object radically and convincingly displaces Lacan's argument of a linguistic unconscious, he ends by simply reversing the hierarchical balance. Whereas, for Lacan, society is fixed in terms of one universal symbolic, in Lyotard the imaginary becomes equally totalistic and determining.
The figural, experiential unconscious However, Lyotard's figural unconscious is very like the figural unconscious in Cornelius Castoriadis's work, the difference being that for Castoriadis the figural unconscious is not separate from representation and language but is representative from the beginning: T h e unconscious exists only as an indissociably representatative/affective/intentional flux' (Castoriadis, 1987: 274). As I will discuss in Chapter 6, Castoriadis perceives the relation between desire and the social in terms of primary and secondary identification. It is the secondary identification and reproduction of individual desire within a social setting that moves private fantasy into the realms of a social imaginary. And it is the social institution of such desire that then becomes regulated as the symbolic. The radical nature of Castoriadis's work is that he refuses the break between desire and representation, but still holds on to a tension between individual imaginative fantasy and the socio-symbolic. Although Castoriadis does not offer a particularly complicated analysis of how desire becomes social, he specifically analyses the difference of desire in terms of space and place. Analysing the unconscious in terms of the spatial and temporal location it inhabits, Castoriadis continually stresses the importance of private, creative imagination and the social and political community. The significance of a figural unconscious is that it represents unconscious experience. As we shall see in Chapter 2, Freud was characteristically vague about the more primary processes and ideas of unconscious experience. These ideas have been developed most recently and fruitfully by Christopher Bollas. In his exploration of the world of unconscious self-experience, Bollas differs
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from the Lacanian and Freudican excavation of the desiring subject. Unconscious self-experience, too complex and dynamic to be defined as a self state, Bollas describes as an 'aesthetic intelligence', a sense of the self, an inner object relation, where knowing the self cannot be thought, but can be felt (Bollas, 1995:166). This unconscious work of self-experience 'gives birth to the spirit of place within the individual, which is felt when it is there and terrifyingly missed when it seems to have departed' (Bollas, 1995: 166). According to Bollas, self-experience lies beyond representation: 'In the Lacanian lexicon it could be assigned to the real'(Bollas, 1995: 147). But the real for Bollas is not simply an arena of trauma. It can be traumatic if the elaborative passage between the real and the imaginary and symbolic is shut down, for example in the case of child sexual abuse where the child's experience of self is destroyed. The real for Bollas is a bodily and creative place of self-experience, and Bollas's notion of an experiential real which is not necessarily deadly, but potentially transformative is very similar to Luce Irigaray's resituating of the positive connection between the real and the imaginary in terms of a 'female imaginary'. In Chapter 4,1 put Irigaray's and Christopher Bollas's ideas into a dialogue, arguing for a more experiential and bodily imaginary. This bodily imaginary can, within the transference, transform the traumatic real into the registers of the imaginary and symbolic. For Bollas, the historian's text and the psychoanalyst's reconstructions can both be understood as a psychic function, where the imaginary and symbolic work upon the real, 'creating a space in the mind that gives special significance to the real' (Bollas, 1995: 143). Bollas links his theory of an experiential unconscious to Freud's notion of screen memories. Unconscious material, lost through trauma, can be liberated through tapping screen memories that yield inner images, between analyst and client. These creative images thus convert the destruction of the past into new stories of meaning (see Chapter 4). A postmodern concept of the bodily imaginary then focuses on this notion of the image which negotiates between unconscious experience and narrative, because, I suggest, the notion of an experiential figural unconscious as a bodily imaginary offers a more historical account of psychoanalysis, opening up not just the symbolic, but also the imaginary, to situated and creative change. In Bollas's model, traumatic forgetting can be reversed in the analytic session through revisiting screen memories which contain 'condensed psychically intense experience in a single object'. These screen memories contain forgotten memories which, once tapped, can liberate self-experiences into new visions, When these screen memories are revisited and elaborated in the analytical arena, trauma becomes converted to the play of a generative unconscious. For Bollas, the idea 'that the artist transforms trauma and psychic pain into an artistic object is a common psychoanalytic perspective on the nature of creativity' (Bollas, 1993: 79). However, the artist's internal abstract picture is
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characterised by Bollas as an internal object, rather than an internal representation or structure which is mentally sensed. The past is therefore liberated and transformed through the unconscious work of an object rather than a mental (and linguistic) representation. These internal objects as screen memories are captured by the image. Bollas cites imagist theory and the poetry of Seamus Heaney to illustrate 'inner images of psychic procreativity', which produce the shared generative structure between analyst and analysand (Bollas, 1993: 84). Inner images create a transference and countertransference between clinician and patient which, like the narrative act between the historian and his material, convert the destruction of the past and the self into new narrative meaning: Each time a historian approaches his material or the analyst listens to his patient, his prejudices are destroyed by the action of reading or listening. Each also taps the screen memories of the other; the clinician directs the patient to liberate himself from the bleakness of ordinary trauma - the deserts of time gone by - to gain access to unconscious meaning stored all the while in the secret subterranean source of the screen memory, (Bollas, 1995: 141) Bollas provides an explanation of the psychic rememory of history which is not based on the return of the repressed but, nevertheless, is identical to Freud's coining of the term nachtrdglichkeit: in psychoanalysis this past, transformed into history, gives the real a place that is open to the continuously transformative workings of the imaginary and symbolic, the very movement that Freud termed nachtrdglichkeit, (Bollas, 1995: 143) Bollas's theorisation of psychic history, which is based on a return and recreation of a lost, internal (maternal) object, understands the past as trauma which has been self-destructively obliterated through amnesia. This is very different from an account of psychic history based on linguistic repression by the phallus, where a lost maternal history is only ever restored or represented by the necessity of its unspeakability in relation to paternal mental representation and language. In a phallic account narrative is understood as a reflection of unconscious mental structures. However, narrative in Bollas's account is a vehicle for the mediation and elaboration of the image and the internalised object, between the experiential real event and language. In Bollas's view unconscious self-experience, as a more generative and creative unconscious, inhabits a different and earlier structure from the secondary Oedipal, or phallic, mental structures focused on by Freud and Lacan. However, my argument for a postmodern bodily imaginary, following Irigaray, does not recognise a hierarchical division between the Oedipal and the pre-Oedipal. The body as a lived body within culture is always within
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language, and the bodily unconscious or imaginary carries an historically transmitted form, as pre-linguistic stories, that is not fixed like the biologically determined Jungian archetype, but is like it in being a mythic, creative form. Following Frantz Fanon, I argue for this archetype in terms of a cultural unconscious, not a collective one. The imaginary is then elaborated through story telling, according to the different localised space and place in which it is situated. And it is the rereading or rememory of myths and archetypal stories through an imaginal, bodily imaginary that enables a cultural unconscious. This cultural rememory of myth is the work and practice of psychoanalysis, but it is also the rereading of dead traditions in terms of living history. Such a popular practice of rememory can be found in the writing and reading of literature, in the production and consumption of film and in the ethnographies of cultural history. In Arguing with the Phallus, I read Oedipal psychoanalysis as an ethnography of the white, Western psyche, and put forward a rereading of this phallic, symbolic law through a notion of the bodily imaginary. This bodily imaginary can be understood in terms of complex, theoretical mappings of the symbolic, imaginary and real, but it also has to be understood, in a very ordinary sense, as an act of imagination. Rememory of the imaginative image, through story telling, then, mobilises the bodily imaginary as a social narrative. This more corporeal imaginary is mapped in Arguing with the Phallus in relation to feminist, queer and postcolonial theory to argue for the presence of situated imaginaries which can represent and elaborate positive forms of identification and desire, for women, for Asian and Black communities, and for gays and lesbians. Throughout this book runs the premise that the bodily imaginary becomes a symbolic one when it has become socially and institutionally reproduced. In other words, the imaginary becomes symbolic when it has been made law. Of course this symbolic is reproduced historically, but it is not immutable. The notion that the symbolic is a universally fixed phallic one is a pessimism, giving ultimate power to the globalising reach of a masculine, Western imaginary, and denying the possibilities and the histories of other more marginal stories and identities in both their imaginary and symbolic forms. The final chapter focuses, therefore, on the work of the bodily imaginary in terms of a cultural rememory1 of myth, using particular writers such as Toni Morrison and Walter Benjamin. Morrison's and Benjamin's writings enable us to perceive, not just the work of psychoanalysis as popular memory and ethnography, but also how different ethnographies and historical works of rememory are equally valid narratives of a cultural unconscious. 1
My term 'rememory' is derived from the meaning in Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, where memory, together with imagination, recreates a narrative of the past.
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Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulcra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bollas, C. (1993) 'Psychic Genera', in Being in Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience, London: Routledge. — (1995) Cracking Up, London and New York: Roudedge, p. 166. Brooks, P. (1994) Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Basil Blackwell. Campbell, J. (1996) 'Images of the Real: Reading History and Psychoanalysis in Toni Morrison's Beloved', Women: A Cultural Review, 7, 2 (Autumn). — (1998) 'For Esme' with Love and Squalor', in Psychopolitics and Cultural Desires, London: UCL Press. Castoriadis, C. (1987 ) 'Individuals and Things', in The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Deleuze, G. and F, Guattari (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, preface by Michel Foucault, London: Athlone Press. Doane, M. A. (1991) Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, London and New York: Routledge. Elliott, A. (1994) 'Postructuralist Anxiety', in Psychoanalytic Theory, an Introduction, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. Freud, S. SE:17 Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans, by James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press. Frosh, S. (1998) 'Psychoanalysis, Science and Truth', in Anthony Elliott (ed.), Freud2000, Cambridge: Polity. Jameson, F. (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Methuen. Laplanche, J. (1987) New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford: Blackwell. Laplanche, J. and J. B. Pontalis (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, London: Karnac Books. Lyotard, J. F. (1971) Discourse, Figure, Paris: Klincksieck. — (1984) The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press. — (1991) 'The Dream-work Does not Think', in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Papoulias, T. (1998) 'Psychoanalysis, Trauma and the Limits to Recollection', in Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord (eds), Psychopolitics and Cultural Desires, London, UCL. Rose, J. (1993) Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein, London: Oxford: Blackwell. Samuels, A. (1993) The Political Psyche, London: Routledge. Sass, L. A. (1992) Madness and Modernism. Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.
Psychoanalysis and Politics
The title of this book summons up a rather rebellious examination of the debates between psychoanalysis and feminist, queer and postcolonial theory, Arguing with the Phallus is, however, an accurate title, in that this book sets out to question and problematise the seemingly inevitable return to an Oedipal or phallic trajectory. By phallic I mean a masculine and hegemonic narrative that is privileged in psychoanalysis as the social represser and mediator of the asocial and private maternal dyad. Historically the Oedipal complex has been seen as the bedrock of Freud's theories, associated with the feminist dismissal of Freud as sexist, but more recently with the criticism of psychoanalysis for being an ethnocentric and a homophobic discourse that has coincided with the rise in influence of queer and postcolonial theory. From this point of view, psychoanalysis is perceived as a universal, ahistorical master discourse of the family, privileging a phallic, white and colonial heterosexuality that demonises women, people of colour and gays into a generalised category of the 'other'. At the same time, however, feminist, queer and postcolonial critics have both defended and utilised psychoanalysis as a valuable tool with which to deconstruct hegemonic theories of knowledge and power that position the white male subject as dominant. Influential thinkers in the poststructuralist tradition have argued cogently and forcefully for the place of psychoanalysis in interrogating identity. Nevertheless, these more decentred Freudian and Lacanian identities remain phallic ones. Therefore, it seems that however much psychoanalysis displaces a Cartesian, rational, white male subject, it always offers only a deconstruction of that identity. Psychoanalysis evidently cannot reconstruct an alternative to the Oedipal. Arguing with the Phallus charts the historical dependence of psychoanalysis on Freud's notions of the Oedipal complex, and the ahistorical ramifications of this allegiance to a configuration which makes the more marginal and 19
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political histories designated by race, class, sexuality and gender into relative categories of the 'other'. Arguing with the Phallus is not, therefore, dispensing with the Oedipal complex; but it does seek to situate it politically, both within psychoanalysis and within the trajectories of feminist, queer and postcolonial theory. The aim of this book is to open out psychoanalysis and to wrest it from a rather closed phallic trajectory which suggests that you can have a discourse of psychical inferiority or a discourse of external materiality/history, but you can't have both. As Robert Young so succinctly puts it, Marxism and psychoanalysis are incompatible discourses and this is what the Oedipal complex describes (Young, 1991:155). Another way of putting this is to say that psychoanalysis and politics are incompatible discourses, an assertion that certainly the most conservative institutions of psychoanalytic practice would support. But the history of psychoanalysis is anything but apolitical in either a radical or a conservative sense. What is perhaps excluded from the current acknowledged split between discourses that rely either on psychoanalysis or a more historical materialism, is how openly Marxist and political some of the early psychoanalysts actually were. As Paul Gilroy's recent analysis of the diaspora and the Black Atlantic shows, slavery is an indispensable origin to the history of modernism and postmodernism, Toni Morrison points out that the slaves were the first postmodernists and that the unacknowledged holocaust of slavery made the First World War and the Jewish holocaust of the Second World War possible (Morrison, 1993:178). If slavery and racism are unacknowledged origins of modernity they also belong to the repressed origins of Freudian thinking. Freud was by no means a cultural radical, although he often encouraged those who were. As Russell Jacoby has documented, Freud always retreated ultimately into the arms of the medical establishment: 'We are Doctors and wish to remain Doctors' (Jacoby, 1993: 40). Freud's desire to have psychoanalysis accepted as a positive and empirical science can be seen on one hand to frame a rather conservative thinking that has harnessed psychoanalysis to the medical establishment. On the other, it can be seen as a knowledge base developing from post-Enlightenment rationality, dividing the mind from the body. In this developmental and scientific model, the rational ego represses the irrational bodily and feminine relation to the mother under an Oedipal father figure, who promises citizenship and civilised society in return for giving up these 'irrational' bodily desires. Certainly Freud cannot be depicted as a Marxist or a radical, but he did have a radical side. His encouragement of mavericks and dissidents is exemplified by the strong influence the subversive political figure of Otto Gross exerted over him. Gross was a revolutionary libertine who left a deep impact on both Freud and Jung and can perhaps be seen as the first psychoanalytic rebel. Wilhelm Reich was another dissident psychoanalyst who followed in Gross's
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footsteps, belonging to the second generation of psychoanalysts. Reich deeply impressed Freud until he became a Marxist. Along with figures such as Otto Fenichel and Erich Fromm, Reich's career became dedicated to the dual causes of Marxism and psychoanalysis. Originating from Vienna, like Freud, Reich eventually moved to Berlin to join Fenichel and Fromm in a political psychoanalysis, forged to a large extent in reaction to the failure of socialism and the rise of fascism. Nazi rule forced psychoanalysis to flee to other parts of Europe and to the United States. Freud came to England, to join Ernest Jones and the British School. Out of the second generation of more political psychoanalysts, who had fled initially to Europe, Fenichel and Fromm eventually found refugee status in America, whereas Reich's increasingly extreme radical departure from Freudian psychoanalysis led to his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Nazism can be seen to have hardened the resolve of psychoanalysis to stay out of politics. The Cold War anti-communism of postwar Britain and America suppressed more political versions of psychoanalysis, and it became increasingly located in terms of a conservative medical profession. A great deal of contemporary feminist debate with psychoanalysis has focused on the status of the phallus or Freud's Oedipal theory of sexuality. The psychoanalytical arguments for and against the primacy of the phallic stage took place in the 1920s and 1930s between Freud, Klein, Horney and Jones. Freud advocated phallic primacy and the classical Oedipal position, reiterating the importance of the phallus in determining psychic bisexuality. By opposing Freud and arguing for a primary and positive awareness of femininity, Klein, Horney and Jones posited the phallus as secondary, but in doing so managed to make femininity a normative and biological condition. In contrast, Freud's theories were phallocentric, but they did explain sexuality as culturally mediated ideas rather than a biological entity. This opposition between a phallic, cultural psychoanalysis and a maternal essentialist account of psychic life has characterised the diverging and oppositional discourses of Lacanian and object relations feminism. Feminism introduced poststructuralist psychoanalysis via Lacan in the pivotal work by Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, But Mitchell's work was not just addressing the political potential of psychoanalysis for feminism; at least half of Psychoanalysis and Feminism critically addressed the political psychoanalysis of left-wing analysts, such as Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing. Mitchell's defence of Freud was as much a defence of Freud's psychic unconscious against a Marxism which sought through empiricism or ideology to eliminate the unconscious, turning psychoanalysis towards more overtly political or sociological agendas. Although Mitchell's critique of more positivistic, empirical models of psychoanalysis was made through feminism, it is important not to overlook the long and complex relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis that her book was addressing (Mitchell, 1974).
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Although Psychoanalysis and Feminism sought to marry psychoanalysis and Marxism through feminism, the outcome, as Robert Young has eloquently pointed out, has been a rather unhappy divorce. This chapter examines the relation of psychoanalysis to feminism and Marxism, looking back to the materialist arguments that have been mounted against psychoanalysis, and forward to a possible renegotiation. The contemporary 'divorce' between poststructuralist, Lacanian theories of subjectivity and a more culturally materialist analysis has done much to isolate psychoanalysis within the academy and to depoliticise it as a useful narrative for understanding marginal histories of class, sexuality and race. The case, then for feminism, becomes increasingly problematic. How radical can a Lacanian analysis of sexual difference actually be if this difference is asserted as primary, unattached to a simultaneous deconstruction and assertion of difference, with respect to race, class and sexuality? Without the quadruple analysis of race, class, sexuality and gender in relation to the unconscious, a feminist psychoanalysis runs the very serious risk of merely privileging a white feminine heterosexuality. Luce Irigaray, the French feminist and philosopher, calls this white feminine heterosexuality the feminine masquerade. It is what women do to join in with an Oedipal and social system of sexual exchange which is not theirs. A feminist psychoanalysis thus runs the risk of colluding in all the masterful, Oedipal metaphors of psychoanalysis, if the arguments are made without reference to a more materialist analysis of how race, sexuality and class all structure white, heterosexual difference, albeit it through an abject and excluded relation. Any analysis of sexual difference or gender within a feminist, psychoanalytic framework must, therefore, also entail a corresponding contextualisation within a situated historical narrative. We have to acknowledge not just dominant historical modes or discourse, but also the more marginal experiential histories, that do not necessarily circulate within our cultural symbolic in visible ways, but nevertheless are bodily narratives that have a potential voice, however abject or unconscious the dominant discursively makes them. This book thus begins with the historical debate between psychoanalysis and politics, leaving the more detailed debates between feminism and psychoanalysis for later. One reason for this is that feminism is seen as the larger and more originary debate in relation to psychoanalysis, and the aim of this chapter is in part to remind the reader of a history of political psychoanalysis that arose at least alongside the feminist debates in psychoanalysis, if not before. Mitchell's intervention for feminism is taken as the originary entry point for political psychoanalysis, at least within the frameworks of poststructuralist theory and cultural studies.1 Mitchell herself situates the political 1
Stuart Hall cites psychoanalysis as part of the rupturing effects of feminism which impacted on and changed the fields of cultural studies in the 1970s. See Stuart Hall (1992).
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debate for feminism within the earlier femininity debates of the British psychoanalytical school. But as Jacqueline Rose points out, her work was equally a rejoinder to the Marxist political debates, situated in the Vienna and Berlin schools. My discussion of both the materialist and historical critiques and forms of psychoanalysis is located in this introductory chapter because I think it provides the reader with a clearer sense of the difficulties and the possibilities that emerge in my subsequent discussion of the debate between psychoanalysis and feminist/queer/ postcolonial theory.
The Psychoanalytic and Feminist Critique of &s&ms&* Freud Some of the earliest feminist critiques of Freud's phallocentrism came from within the psychoanalytical institution itself. As I have said, the femininity debates of the 1920s and 1930s were conducted in relation to the questioned status of the phallus. Karen Horney, Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones objected to Freud's account of the centrality of the phallus, the Oedipal complex and the consequent inferiority of female sexuality. Karen Horney's feminist critique argued that penis envy was a secondary, cultural phenomena brought about by the prevalence of male power in society and the social subordination of women. Furthermore, male society's oppression of women was based on womb envy; an envy of women's superior biological capacity - to reproduce. Melanie Klein argued for a primordial, biological femininity in the little girl. Her emphasis on the pre-Oedipal sphere placed the early relation to the mother and the mother's breast in a position of prime importance. Today, Klein's work dominates much British psychoanalytic practice. She is well known for her conceptualisation of constitutional envy (of the mother's breast) in both sexes. Ernest Jones, like Horney and Klein, also subscribed to a biological base to sexuality: femininity as nature. Although Horney was seen as radical in her times for espousing a culturalist approach, Juliet Mitchell has shown that her work reverts back to biology as determining. Mitchell's return to and defence of Freud (in Psychoanalysis and Feminism) was based on the fact that his phallic sexuality emphasised the psychic and cultural construction of sexual difference and was therefore more useful to feminism than the debates on femininity that stressed biological determination. The first wave of the feminist movement is associated with figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, and Virginia Woolf. Simone de Beauvoir was an existentialist who believed that Freud's unconscious (based on instinctual drives) was irrational and therefore in conflict with existentialism's belief in the rational freedom and autonomy of the subject. De Beauvoir saw Freud as mimicking the patriarchal bias of society, defining the male as a human subject and the female as simply other. De Beauvoir's hostility to Freud was also reflected in
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the second wave of feminism, when feminists such as Eva Figes, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett were all deeply critical of Freud's phallocentric philosophy. Kate Millet critiqued Freud for what she saw as his biological determinism; his privileging of the penis and castration over the female organ or clitoris. Millet's famous book Sexual Politics epitomises the second-wave feminism, raising its battle cry, not just against psychoanalysis, but against the masculinist nature of historical, sociological and literary discourses.
iiiiiiiii Adding the psychoanalytic subject to Marxism Mitchell's return to Freud in Psychoanalysis and Feminism was based on her view that his phallic sexuality emphasised the psychic and cultural construction of sexual difference and was therefore more useful to feminism than the more biologically determined debates on femininity. In Mitchell's view, Freud's belief in women's phallic sexuality was not sexist, but evidence of his understanding of psychic bisexuality. Moreover, castration fear (in men) and penis envy (in women) showed how both sexes preferred an active phallic sexuality and rejected a passive feminine position. Mitchell, therefore, defended Freud against the psychoanalysts who advocated biological femininity and the feminists who critiqued Freud for his phallic bias. In turning to Freud she viewed him through a Lacanian and a Marxist (Althusserian) lens and her politics as a socialist feminist informed this perspective. Mitchell's interest in Louis Althusser's Marxist theory of ideology is based on its openness to reinscription with a gendered subjectivity. It is from Althusser's work that the concept of culture working at a subconscious or imaginary level to (re)produce subjects is derived, and the complexity of cultural relations becomes apparent. Althusser takes Jacques Lacan's model of psychical organisation to argue for a scientific account of history and class relations, Althusser argues for the construction of subjects by and in ideology, an ideology which is the imaginary representation of the individual's real relations. In other words, ideology is not the collusion or conspiracy of those in power, a power to which the majority subscribe, neither is it some false capitalist belief or myth which can be exposed to reveal the reality of existence underneath. Ideology is, therefore, the way in which we live in society as both agents and recipients. Its function is to interpellate and construct the biological human being as a social subject, a process dependent on an 'imaginary' or subconscious sphere (Althusser, 1971). Althusser's work influenced Marxist feminists (such as Juliet Mitchell) in Britain, who saw the opportunity to bring together a Marxist account of society with a more psychologically orientated account which was not based on economic determinism. Marxism, for Althusser, was compatible with the Freudian/
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Lacanian project: both were scientific models which had been misrecognised as such. For Marxist feminists such as Mitchell, Althusser and Lacanian psychoanalysis offered a structural account of women's oppression (which linked the personal with the political), and also provided a theory of the psychological subject which could be linked to a social theory of history. Mitchell argued that Freud had not prescribed patriarchal society, but had merely analysed it (Mitchell, 1974). Thus the Lacanian/Althusserian structuralist model produced the concept of a socially constructed subject which was posited through a linguistic model: the idea that language, like ideology, interpellates and speaks us. Robert Young describes how this happy marriage between feminism and Marxism through psychoanalysis was not to last. In fact, future alliances between feminism and Marxism were subsequently predicated on an exclusion of psychoanalysis. (Young, 1991: 155) In her book Women's Oppression Today, Michele Barrett acknowledged Marxism's lack of feminism, its privileging of class over gender, but was at the same time very critical of Mitchell's recuperation of Freud for a 'materialist feminist theory'. Barrett's critique of the kind of psychoanalysis Mitchell employed was twofold - that it was universalist and, second, that it saw ideological oppression of women as paramount, ignoring the material and economic realities of their subordination (Barrett, 1980).
Feminist mixes: ideology or material reality M M N H I Socialist feminism such as Barrett's was built on a Marxist analysis of the material and social relations of economic production. Analysis of the sexual division of labour and the question of domestic labour in relation to gender and class led to socialist feminism's analysis of historical materialism: how women were constructed and oppressed by a tripartite system of sexuality, the family and labour (paid and unpaid). Many of the feminist debates on housework in the late 1970s, early 1980s, were based on this analysis of historical materialism. Radical feminism, in contrast, defined women's oppression in terms of male sexuality and power. Patriarchal ideology oppressed women through a currency of women's bodies and the female body was the territory that society was built on. Because sexuality was political, links between heterosexuality and power were also made. From the vantage point of its historical materialist analysis, therefore, Marxist feminism critiqued both psychoanalytic feminism and radical feminism for an exclusive focus on ideas. Cora Kaplan proposes, following Barrett's :ritique of psychoanalysis, that Mitchell's theory and the radical feminist Kate Millett belong in the same ideologically bound camp. Kaplan writes: Moreover there is a peculiar congruence between Millett and Mitchell which stems from their common preoccupation with 'ideology'. Millett's already
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constituted 'free' female subject, who has only to throw off her ideological bondage, boards in the same house where Mitchell's internally bound 'lady' lives her ideological imprisonment in material ideology. Neither of them really works for a living, or at least not in the sense in which women who are considered more fully in terms of class and gender work. (Kaplan, 1986: 23) Of course, Milieu's and Mitchell's views of ideology were opposite in the sense that Millett posited a conscious, empirical ideology, whereas Mitchell's saw ideology in terms of unconscious, mental ideas. The elision between psychoanalysis and radical feminism in terms of ideology was also a very British affair. Psychoanalysis, through Mitchell, was imported through Lacan and Althusser; this structuralist approach has then dominated British psychoanalytic feminism, but this has not been the case in the USA. Psychoanalytic feminism in the States has been characterised historically by the object relations approach of Chodorow and Dinnerstein. This approach differs (see Chapter 3) from the Lacanian forms, not just in its focus on the mother, rather than the paternal phallus, but also through its materialist focus on gender. Robert Stoller (1974) had a great influence on the gender debates in feminism. His work was claimed as a breakthrough by those who wanted to advocate the social construction of sexuality. By arguing that an individual's gender identity was basically a product of post-natal psychological influences, he made biological arguments for sexual identity redundant. Stoller's work was not simply taken up by psychoanalytical feminists such as Chodorow and Dinnerstein, but also by radical feminists such as Kate Millet and socialist feminists such as Michele Barrett. What is interesting about this transatlantic mix of feminist traditions is the differing alliances between psychoanalysis, historical materialism and gender in the USA and Mitchell's legacy of psychoanalytic feminism in Britain with its emphasis on sexual difference, ideology and the unconscious construction of women's oppression. Whereas Barrett criticised Mitchell's 'ideological' psychoanalysis, her own work drew on the gender theorisations of psychoanalyst Robert Stoller. Chodorow's empirical and clinical approach is very dependent on Stoller's theory of gender. Although Chodorow's account is not based on a Marxist theory of historical materialism like Barrett's, nevertheless she does emphasise the situated, historical and political reality of women's experiences. Kate Millett, who is accused by Kaplan of boarding in 'the same ideological house' as Juliet Mitchell, actually takes a distinct empirical line, using Stoller's notions of socially constructed gender, to critique what she sees as Freud's biologism. Each of these different feminist traditions has thus aligned itself with methodologies of ideology, empiricism or historical materialism, and these modes of analysis all intersect with psychoanalysis along a divide, privileging either sexuality or gender.
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Historically the sex/gender distinction has been embedded within a debate on nature versus nurture, and also in the rationalist Enlightenment division between the mind and the body. Theorists employing this distinction have gone on to view the subject as a product either of hereditary biological genes or of the social environment. For the socialist feminists who have wanted to argue the latter case, the body and the unconscious become merely a passive object bearing the inscription of the environment. As we shall see, this is the fate of Chodorow's sociologically determined psyche, where the unconscious disappears in any dynamic or active form, leading to very essentialist and universal readings of gender identity.
Sexual difference &&&$£$ Lacanian feminism has made much of this problem of a fixed gender identity, not just within Chodorow's work, but within feminist theory generally (see Chapter 3). But if Chodorow's psychoanalysis collapses as a discourse of culturalism, leaving fixed gender rather than an unstable unconscious in its train, then Mitchell's structural Lacanianism can be seen as equally rigid, reducing the unconscious and sexuality to universalising notions of a patriarchal symbolic. Moving the debate forward, the Lacanian feminist Jacqueline Rose focuses on a more fluid interchange between psyche and society. Rose avoids both the culturalism of Chodorow and the more explicit ideological determinism of Mitchell, pursuing the Lacanian debate on sexual difference because of what she sees it can offer as a way of understanding the failure of sexed/gender identity. The phallocentric account is preferable, for Rose, because it provides a femininity 'which is there or precisely not there to be constructed', rather than an essential category of woman that is given (Rose, 1993: 244). Jacqueline Rose's work then focuses on the radical destabilising force of the unconscious both to sexual identity and to political and social life. Feminine identity exemplifies this disruptive unconscious: it figures the problematic nature of desire; the way gender is constantly disrupted; and how the symbolic in turn is not universally fixed, but always susceptible to flux. Rose's more radical reading of Lacan is made through her focus on the imaginary, rather than the symbolic - although, as I will show, Rose's analysis accounts for the negative difficulty of the feminine in terms of a phallic symbolic, but does not suggest, as Irigaray does, a more transformative politics built on a more bodily imaginary. Lacanianism and theories of sexual difference have dominated the psychoanalytic terrain of feminist criticism in British cultural studies and literary theory, and remained on the whole quite separate from a feminist analysis based on historical materialism. This has had the unfortunate result of separating psychoanalysis from a more historically situated empirical analysis. Feminism either serves up fixed gender identities within a situated, material
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and historical analysis, or provides a sexual subject remarkably unfixed by her material body or social circumstances and occupying a rather universal world of textual, linguistic theory. Of course, this division is crude and at specific junctures inaccurate. Several feminists have tried explicitly to bridge this gap between history and psychoanalysis, but as a general trend it has remained in place. One reason for this is the anti-empiricism of the Lacanian project which, whilst intentionally distinguishing itself from the more empirical, clinical forms of object relations theory, has also split itself off from a more historical empirical analysis. But if Lacanian psychoanalysis can be faulted for refusing the historical experience of the body, then a more socialist analysis may also be censured for situating that body so passively and refusing the unconscious a dynamic role. Jacqueline Rose's work,s arguably the most sophisticated Lacanian account, has done much to redress the ahistorical legacy of the structuralist tradition. Her work, especially recently, has turned to analysing the relationship between the psyche and history, between fantasy and the real event. She traces the relation between inner and outer worlds through ideas of a feminine, unconscious violence; a negative abject violence or death drive which she understands mainly through Melanie Klein and Julia Kristeva. I want to discuss Klein's work briefly at this juncture, not just for her relevance to an understanding of abject desire, which Rose utilises, but also because Klein's focus on the mother brings this debate (between the psyche and the social) back to a discussion of mothering psychoanalysis - the m (other) to a phallocentric account.
i s i i i i i i Klein Melanie Klein's work was influenced by Freud but her theories differ significantly; they should also be distinguished from the object relations school of Winnicott (Klein, 1952, 1975). In fact, if Klein was originally influenced by Freud, but moved to develop her own school of thinking, then Winnicott can be said to have likewise been influenced by Klein, but significantly revised some of her findings through his own work. Nevertheless, Klein can be seen as a forerunner to Winnicott, with her later work marking the beginning of object relations theory. Melanie Klein's views of psychical reality evolved into an account of the unconscious, that was different to Freud's. Whereas Freud's topography of the unconscious was concerned with childhood desire, repression and the Oedipal complex, Klein's notion of phantasy2 referred to the preOedipal world of the small baby, and to the primitive internal objects which 2
The spelling 'phantasy' will be used in relation to Klein's concepts, because for her phantasy = unconscious. Elsewhere in the text I use the term 'fantasy' as this denotes a more fluid relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.
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were the result of the baby's early and ambivalent struggle with its first external object - the mother. Klein developed Freud's concept of the life and death drives to posit biological instincts of love and hate which organised the baby's first, fragile identity in relation to the mother. If Freud focused on an Oedipal conflict which was dominated by the phallus, Klein's priority was the baby's struggle with the maternal breast; and in place of Freudian desire, Klein posited anxiety as the driving force in establishing the self. Early phantasies of the breast, both good and bad, are either incorporated or introjected by the baby, providing the first sense of self. As the baby is initially fused with the mother, these early phantasies show how our first primitive selves are created through a psychic internalisation of other people. The good, bountiful breast leaves the baby full, replenished and blissful, thus introjecting, through phantasy, a positive identity. But when the baby is left to feel hungry, deprived and insecure, phantasies of the bad breast are introjected and because the baby remains fused with the mother, it experiences both itself and her as bad and persecutory. Bad internalised objects are experienced as so dangerous that they have to be projected externally onto other people; these people in turn are then felt to be frightening because they contain the split-off, aggressive parts of the self. Introjection of the mother's part objects such as the breast can include other things the mother seems to have and represent, such as the penis or siblings; these objects are idealised or denigrated through love and hate, and through the processes of introjection and projection. Rather than castration anxiety it is the annihilation of self which presents as the primary anxiety (as a result of internalised aggression). Klein's world is developmental, in that it traces developmental stages in the baby's life, but it is also positional in a structural sense: these stages represent positions which not just children, but also adults can occupy at any time during their lives. The first of these positions is the paranoid-schizoid position led by persecutory anxiety, in which the baby (or the paranoid adult) is dominated by aggression and fear of retaliation, first by the mother and then by others. This position includes defences of projection and splitting (where the good and bad objects are separated), and can be characterised in terms of a fragmented inner world, and a persecutory external one. Klein's views have been criticised for her biological essentialism and her innate concepts of the death drive, her ideas that babies are born with a constitutional tendency to hate or be envious. Klein's views have been used very conservatively as evidence of a causal predetermined psyche, and indeed the Kleinian school has been dominant in the most institutionalised echelons of practice, where political discourse is either absent or conservative. Michael Rustin's work is best known for linking Klein's ideas with a Utopian social theory (Rustin, 1991). In Rustin's view the paranoid and envious Kleinian baby is always integrally interrelated with social others. Indeed, it is the social nature of the baby's relationship with another that accounts for all the
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defensive, projective splitting that characterises this early phase. Rustin is hopeful that people can work through this ambivalence, and the family is for him, a key site with which to develop more empathic and ethical ways of relating. Rustin understands the violence and prejudice in society in terms of Klein's notion of projective identification. For example, racism is when unwanted parts of the self are split off and projected onto other people. I will return to these ideas of racism and projective identification in the section on postcolonialism; it is important to note here, however, that for Rustin Klein's work is crucial to understanding the social, because of the primary importance she grants to emotional feelings and experience. Ambivalence, pain, despair and guilt all stress the social interactivity of people and Klein's theory is all about the emotional relatedness of individuals at a social level. But if this is so, then what of the seemingly pessimistic and innate characteristics of the death drive, the narcissistic envy, that for Klein seems part of our inherited constitution? As Stephen Frosh puts it, the terrors of modernity become explained, 'by theorising them as necessary elements of human nature'. (Frosh, 1991: 51) Are recent horrific wars such as the Gulf War and Bosnia simply to be understood as the projective results of our inescapable core hatred and paranoia? Can the violence of society be pinned down so easily to such instinctual constitutional elements?
iiisiiit The abject mother and the political Jacqueline Rose reads Klein's death drive alongside an analysis of abject violence that is indebted to the ideas of the poststructuralist thinker Julia Kristeva. In Rose's view, reading Klein and Kristeva together is useful because combining their notions of psychic violence provides a structural account of the interweaving between the unconscious psyche and the socio-political. This model does not examine the psyche in terms of objects or contents, which would then causally explain social and political events, but explores an interaction between fantasy and the real (historical) event. Klein's account of early destructive instincts and a primary negativity, or death drive, centre on a violent equation between hatred/death and mother/women. Kristeva's account of symbolic subjectivity uses Klein to highlight an internal violence of primordial psychic separation (from the mother) which precipitates subjects into language'. As well as situating this violence inside, however, Kristeva also puts it outside as a requirement of a (Lacanian) symbolic. This symbolic signifies the linguistic structures and institutions of society that are historically reproducible. Moreover, as the socio-symbolic imposes 'sacrifice as its symbolic base', it follows that society and social identity are constructed in a violent and sacrificial relation to the woman and the mother. Patriarchal society is founded on the structural abjection of the maternal.
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For Kristeva this violent femininity has to be expelled. But whereas Kristeva seeks refuge (from this feminine violence) within a loving, symbolic paternal father, Jacqueline Rose shows how this abject violence is revealed at the most rational pinnacle of male symbolic law (Rose, 1993: 55). Rose cites Margaret Thatcher as the woman who embodies the abject violence of femininity the most strongly when she is in the role of ultimate phallic law or government. The rationality of her discourse goes with the fantasy of abject horror which she embodies, a violence, let us not forget, that she enacts. As a Kleinian phallic mother, Thatcher represents early hatred of the mother, or more accurately the early hating and violence of separation which Kristeva sees as prerequisites of our symbolic. But Rose is not suggesting this violent fantasy of femininity as something which is simply causal or innate. On the contrary, using Kristeva, she argues that this violence is due to a sacrifice demanded by the symbolic which leaves women, hatred and death as the original or founding base of society. One of the questions Rose then asks is: where is this murderous femininity to be located is it something projected onto women, or does it correspond to their own psychic experience? Rose suggests that because of her hold on such real power, Thatcher embodied both - 'fantasy and a real event'. For Rose, this violent: femininity corresponds to a death drive which can't be seen simply as part of a causal psyche, any more than it can be located completely in the real or the social. Women are not simply innocent victims of patriarchy; they can't be seen only as masochists internalising the violence of male societal power. They also embody a dangerous sexuality, a psychic violence of their own. Seen in this way, the death drive can be used to explain a relationship between psyche and social which does not lend primary importance to either, but locates sexuality in a shirting mobility between inside and outside, masochist and sadist, and between fantasy and historical reality. Klein's negativity or death drive, together with a Lacanian analysis of desire and the symbolic, provides Kristeva with her account of an abject feminine violence. This feminine violence is then used by Jacqueline Rose to link psychic fantasy and the political without losing the crucial notion of the unconscious, on one hand, or the important cultural component of sexuality on the other. One way Rose helps us to understand this issue in terms of feminism is through debates on women and violence. Critiquing Dworkin's radical feminist text, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Rose argues that this feminist position, which collapses all notions of fantasy into reality, leaves all the violence and the power outside women, and with men; it therefore places women as total victims without agency. Rose certainly seems to provide a valid critique of the wall-to-wall patriarchal ideology, operating in certain radical feminist accounts. But troubling issues arise from her feminist view of a feminine violence which structures a
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two-way relation between the psyche and society. What does it mean to set up a violent relation to the mother as foundational, whether you place it in fantasy or in the social? It certainly gives us an understanding of misogyny at a deeper more unconscious level, but what about change? How can this violent and sacrificial relation to the mother be mediated for women, in a way that does not simply seek refuge in a paternal position? In other words, is the abject mother, the psychotic relation to the maternal body or the Lacanian real, always outside symbolic law, or can it found within language and culture, in a more mediated way, not just as violent feminine fantasy?
MHMH
Mothering psychoanalysis
If the relation to the mother is seen as too violent in phallocentric accounts of sexual difference, then it is arguably too benign in the more gendered focus of Winnicottian object relations feminism. Janet Sayers's Mothering Psychoanalysis, draws attention to a major problem within contemporary feminist object relations theory. She argues that both clinical therapy and theory celebrate and idealise mothering, parading women 'as more empathic and at one with others simply by the virtue of the mothering of their sex' (Sayers, 1991). Moreover, an idealised focus on the mother/daughter relationship ignores the wider determinants of patriarchal society: hence the importance for Sayers of a Lacanian and Freudian phallocentric account. This ideal focus on the mother also sets up a false belief that women identify with and meet all children's initial needs. Klein and Horney refute this, Sayers tells us, by placing this ideal mother as a product of infant fantasy. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges sum up this unease with object relations feminism when they argue that the movement away from Kleinian phantasy to Winnicott's good-enough mother has literalised and frozen the mother into a fixed and unified position; an ideal origin that is 'so congenial to a conservative political agenda' (Doane and Hodges, 1992). Object relations feminism has been characterised as setting up an all-good mother/daughter relationship, where connection is privileged over separation and an all-powerful and perfect mother wipes out the paternal figure. But if the ideal mother is a fantasy she is also the flipside to a Kleinian fantasy mother who is all-destructive and bad. This split between the ideal and abject mother is hardly redeemed in the phallocentric accounts that posit the abject mother's body as the founding sacrifice of our socio-symbolic. Indeed, it could be argued that Kristeva makes the violent fantasy of the abject mother a social necessity. Mediation of the split mother, for Kristeva, is not concerned with conceptualising a symbolic place for mothers. In fact there is nothing, in Kristeva's view, to suggest that a feminine ethics is possible. The ethical relation and solution to this violent splitting of the feminine lies only within the arms
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of a loving symbolic father. Feminist object relations, both the theory and therapy, have been too easily written off, perhaps, for celebrating the mother/ daughter relationship. More often than not, in fact, these ideas and practices are examining the ambivalence at stake. Feminist therapists from the women's therapy centre in London have used Winnicott and Klein to study both the envious hate and the guilty reparative love that daughters get locked into with their internal and external mothers. For instance, Maggie Maguire looks at how the internal fantasy of the child is affected by the environmental role of the mother. The social role of the mother still places her in the idealised and denigrated position of having to fulfil all children's needs. So it is a fantasy of the ideal mother, literalised within a patriarchal symbolic, which restricts real mothers, depriving them in a way which inevitably affects their ability to contain and modify their children's internal fantasy or rage.( Maguire, 1987: 66). Historical analysis of both the material and the ideological forms of motherhood within Western society becomes an important project for feminism. Until recently, this history has been difficult to chart because in the main it has not been written by mothers. In Western society motherhood has been relegated to the private and domestic sphere, and associated with the segregation of differing sexes into opposing spheres. The middle-class idealisation of mothers, illustrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, is followed through in the nineteenth-century 'angel in the house'. Mothers as pure spiritual guardians of the family were denied frivolous, feminine sexuality; instead they were seen as strong. Mary Wollstonecraft, in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1954), argued that good mothers must have sense, but if mothers had to be strong they also had to be sensitive and empathic. This overall picture of a strong but sacrificial mother, ultimately responsible for her child's needs, has been carried over into twentieth-century books on child rearing, with psychology and psychoanalysis as major public discourses that both monitored and created the domestic and social roles of mothers. The image of the mother passed on to us historically has been culturally situated and inflected by race, class, sexuality and gender. In the past feminism has analysed the social construction of motherhood as a patriarchal ideology which has oppressed women. More recently, other feminists have argued that the feminist movement failed mothers by not understanding the real joy and desire that mothering fulfils. Cultural constructions of motherhood in Western society, which have split the mother into idealised or debased, too good or all bad, have pervaded and informed the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and feminism. The power of this split image of the mother results in an inability to recognise the ambivalence of our cultural desires and fantasies in relation to mothers; this splitting also leads to a refusal to acknowledge the ambivalence of maternal desire in women who mother. Denial of one means non-recognition of the other. This paradox is central to understanding the
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ways in which our psychic selves and desires interrelate with culture, but it is also central to understanding how both the institutions of psychoanalysis and the increasingly institutional role of feminist theory continue to live out both the fantasy and reality of this split mother.
Maternal ambivalence Maternal ambivalence has been addressed in differing ways by different traditions in feminism. From a socialist, materialist perspective Denise Riley's War in the Nursery reviews child-care policies and the popularising of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, with its consequent effects on the mother and child (Riley, 1983). Examining the period at the end of the Second World War, Riley discusses how sociological and feminist reconstructions have falsely divided women into women who work and women who mother, proposing a simplified and collusory relation between theories of psychology and the state. Bowlby's popularised psychoanalysis focused specifically on separation between mother and child as inherently traumatic. Bowlbyism has come under sharp attack from those feminists who were hostile to psychoanalysis, and who saw the post-war movement of women from the job market back into the home as the result of an ideological conspiracy between the state and certain developments in psychology. As Riley shows, there was no such simple move back into the domestic sphere for women. This conspiracy theory falsely divides mothers from women who work, conjuring up a conservative image of a 1950s wife and mother, passively contained within her feminine role of maintaining a unified nuclear family. Riley's research shows that the situation was a lot more complex than this; women were not passive recipients of a collusory ideology, and a materialist/realist approach to history has to take on board, amongst other things, the contradictory desires of women who mother. Motherhood cannot be defined as conservative, anymore than it can be boxed as socialist or radical. The opposition between conservative motherhood and women's liberation has been a familiar theme. But as Maureen Freely has suggested recently, the feminist movement neglected mothers: both women who wanted to mother and women who actually were mothers and who experienced mothering as ambivalent in all its positive and negative aspects. Adrienne Rich is the radical feminist best known for her account of the ambivalence of motherhood, in her book Of Woman Born. For Rich, 'the woman's body is the territory on which patriarchy has been erected' (Rich, 1976: 55). Distinguishing between patriarchy's ideology or institution of the perfect mother, and women's experience of mothering, Rich describes the violent ambivalence of mothering which is caught between experience and institution, with the resulting split for women between their minds and their bodies. Healing this ambivalent division can only come about through the
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destruction of the institution, and a reclaiming for women of their relation to their bodies. Adrienne Rich adds an introduction to Of Woman Born ten years later in which she problematises universal concepts of patriarchy, specifying the need to include material and economic aspects of motherhood, in their situated relation to race, lesbianism and class. Although Rich touches only briefly on psychoanalysis, she is explicitly critical of its Oedipal and phallic criteria of locating separation from the mother in a culture of the father and son. She is, therefore, equally critical of Juliet Mitchell, who she says is 'more Freudian than Marxist'. But Rich's work is reminiscent of Irigaray's vision to reconnect the bodily roots of female sexuality with language and the symbolic, as in her question, 'I am really asking whether women cannot begin at last to think through the body?' More recently Rozsika Parker has approached the issue of maternal ambivalence more positively through a feminist psychoanalytic lens, Parker employs psychoanalysis, but instead of taking the traditional line of looking at the child's ambivalence towards the mother, she examines the mother's ambivalence towards her child. Ambivalence is not the same as hatred or an inability to love. If idealisation is a refusal to acknowledge any aggressive or destructive feelings, then ambivalence is an awareness of the existence of love and hate together. Klein's depressive position is a stage when the child's awareness of its ambivalent love and hate for the mother allows it to separate and make reparation for destructive urges. Parker explains how this ambivalent reparation is part of the mother's experience too 'just as a woman can make reparation to her own mother for her own destructive impulses, so a mother can make reparation to her own children' (Parker, 1995: 93). Creative mothering involves ambivalence and feminist sniping at Winnicott's good-enough mother for being too ideal has been mistaken, ignoring the reference to a positive maternal ambivalence in his work. In his chapter on 'Hate in the Countertransference' Winnicott suggests that mothers hate their babies from the beginning, while his chapter on 'Classification' states that the baby's separation 'demands of the mother the capacity to hate as well as to love' (Winnicott, 1982: 61) Winnicott develops Klein's concept of guilty reparation, formulating a 'stage for concern' as a hugely important milestone in the child. By acknowledging ambivalence the child can recognise and care for the mother, recognising her as a separate person. Parker applies this psychoanalytic understanding to mothering, observing how maternal ambivalence can actually increase the responsiveness of a mother to her child's needs. Maternal ambivalence, then, includes hatred as well as love, and acknowledgement of maternal ambivalence is the recognition of maternal desire. Mothers are not just selfless containers of their child's needs but have their own subjective fantasies and longings, which travel beyond the child to a wider culture. Maternal ambivalence, therefore, means an acknowledgement of maternal subjectivity. Maybe this maternal notion of unconscious ambivalence
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can be seen as an alternative to the political analysis of feminine violence and the death drive that characterises the phallic psychoanalysis of Kristeva and Rose? An analysis of culture that ultimately relies on a return to a primary and violent death drive is perhaps most persuasive when we cynically look at the selfish and narcissistic values that have been promoted by recent conservative governments. However, this is ultimately a rather frightening take on the regressive and violent fantasies that operate within institutions. Andrew Samuels is a Jungian analyst who has developed a theory of unconscious gender ambivalence to discuss a more mature and complex relationship between the psyche and the political world (Samuels, 1998). Instead of basing citizenship on the analytical model of the child or baby, Samuels suggests that we take a more adult view of citizenship. A maternal politics views the mother's need to separate and connect with her child. The relationship between mother and son does not need to be a bloody or deathly struggle, with the son's victorious and separate identity being based on an unconscious murder of the mother. Maternal ambivalence can help us understand a new way for sons to relate, to both their literal and metaphorical mothers. Implicit in this description is that the literal and metaphorical mother is connected, providing a two-way communication between self and other. Of course, Samuel's gender ambivalence is not restricted to understanding mothers and sons; his work is perhaps better known for its analysis of gender ambivalence in relation to the father. It is interesting to note here, though, how close Parker's and Samuel's ideas on maternal ambivalence are to Irigaray's insistence that maternal desire and subjectivity are acknowledged in relation to the child. For, as Irigaray argues, as long as the society does not recognise maternal desire, then the daughter is forced to enter the patriarchal Oedipal circuit, and the mother is known simply as an unconscious other. Collapsing the mother into an unconscious other, making her a narcissistic extension of the child's desires, denies the mother's desire to separate and enter the social world, and at the same time traps the child in a narcissistic imaginary which is ultimately selfreferential and unable to negotiate the 'reality' of the other's cultural difference and desire. Irigaray describes the pathological consequences of this denial of the M(other)'s subjectivity in her essay 'And One Doesn't Stir Without The Other'. Here the absence of the mother as a separate subject and her location as a narcissistic other means that the daughter experiences her as a dead m(other). This deathly experience paralyses the daughter, abandoning her to an ultimately self-destructive identity.
i i i i i i H Narcissism and the death drive Maternal ambivalence and the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of a symbolic maternal desire (providing the mother's separate subjectivity) can help us
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understand a less violent relationship between the psyche and the social, and potentially can provide an alternative model to the death drive. I have described how Kristeva and Rose both rely on an Oedipal reading of the social in terms of a violent death-drive, symbolically located in the early feminine relation to the mother. But these accounts, read through Freud, Lacan and Klein, all emphasise a primary narcissistic imaginary, abjecting the maternal into a sacrificial or murderous position outside culture. As Jacqueline Rose eloquently demonstrates, this abjected and unconscious feminine violence is never adequately repressed, returning in symbolic form, whether as the actual violence of the woman or as a violence projected onto her. This explanation is at its most persuasive in discussing the dominant authoritative law of society so caricatured in the figure of Margaret Thatcher, but it ultimately reinstates a negative and narcissistic outlook, where the woman remains as undifferentiated fantasy, rather than as a culturally differentiated identity. Finding another psychoanalytic model which will acknowledge maternal ambivalence and desire also means arguing for a more fluid, less oppositional relationship between the social and the psyche, an alternative, in other words, to phallic narcissism, Oedipal repression and the death drive. As I intend to argue, Luce Irigaray's work points to such an alternative, with her emphasis on a more fluid imaginary connecting the real and imaginary. Such an imaginary, involving a more positive self-love or narcissism, is traced by Irigaray in her essay 'Love of the Same, Love of the Other' (Irigaray, 1993a). Traditionally psychoanalysis has divided narcissism into primary narcissism and secondary narcissism with primary narcissism being characterised as part of a fairly undifferentiated relation between self and other. Often located in the early dyadic bond, this narcissism presents as a self-absorption where the other person is experienced as an unconscious extension of the self. For Irigaray, this narcissism typifies an historically dominant masculine imaginary, where the male subject's love of the other is often simply a love of the same. What Irigaray means by this is that the men's love for the other, the woman, takes her simply as a narcissistic extension of the self: a sort of material and unconscious base for his own subjectivity. Secondary or anaclitic narcissism is perceived as taking place within the object relation, where love of the self can exist in a parallel fashion to object love. Winnicott talks about this kind of narcissism as a defence within the object relation. A more differentiated and more relating self can often be hidden with the narcissism acting as a shield protecting the self from not finding a representative or differentiated other person. Freud suggests that it is men who are more capable of anaclitic love and secondary narcissism, whereas women are more primarily narcissistic, loving only themselves. Contrastingly, Irigaray proposes that the masculine imaginary is based on such primary narcissism or love of the same, and that it is women who are deprived of love of
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the same or themselves, because their bodies remain unsymbolised. Left in this unsymbolised state, women remain defined as a raw material, serving as a substrate for the male subject, and they are thus prevented from gaining access to their own imaginary. Irigaray suggests that in order to love themselves and each other, women need both love of the same and love of the other. This ethics of passion means there must be a symbolism between women that is lacking as long as the mother's body is utilised as a violent projection or death drive for the male universal subject. Irigaray's perspective, therefore, suggests a situated access to narcissism in terms of sexual difference and society, and it is fairly easy to see that narcissism is differently played out between men and women in our culture. The fairly typical stereotype of the caring, self-sacrificial mother/woman who compulsively gives what she needs away to others, and the equally stereotypical businessman/baby who cannot relate to women as separate individuals, perceiving them as mother things, are both examples of the extreme distortions of narcissism in late capitalist society. Writers such as Christopher Lasch, Stephen Frosh and Joel Kovel described the advent of narcissism with contemporary postmodern culture. Narcissism is a disease of contemporary times. More people currently present with narcissistic disturbance than when Freud was writing. Why is this? Lasch conservatively locates the problem in the loss of the patriarchal family and father. Frosh links it to the increasing fragmentation of the postmodern condition, and Kovel explicitly focuses on the commodification of the child. Increasingly children are separated from adult society and the world of work, and the separation and construction of a separate world of childhood enables adults to project their desires onto children in a way that denies the child's needs. Kovel states that 'pathological narcissism is then fundamentally the outcome when the family, so to speak, is not merely centred on children but collapses upon them as well, crushing them beneath its weight' (Kovel, 1988: 199). But does pathological narcissism and the death drive have to characterise contemporary society? Kristeva (rather like Lasch) sees the cure for narcissism in the return to a loving paternal authority , because for her the sacrificial and abject mother is an inevitable founding block of civilised society. The death drive and murderous hatred towards the mother, is the price women pay with their bodies for.the continuity of a paternal symbolic order. Irigaray's challenge to Lacan's topology of the subject disputes such a pact between the Oedipal phallus and a primary, omnipotent, narcissistic imaginary. Within this pact or opposition, the paternal symbolic and narcissistic self-love are seen as flip sides of each other. The loss of the paternal, nuclear family is thus seen by writers such as Kristeva and Lasch as directly responsible for the more destructive narcissistic tendencies of modern society. But does narcissism have to be undifferentiated and deathly? Does love of the self necessarily mean the elimination of the other's subjectivity and difference?
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Irigaray's alternative ethics of self-love frames a more healthy narcissism that can represent the body rather than abject it as a death drive. For Irigaray, this alternative model of narcissism can exist in relation to the other, with the debt and dependency to the other being recognised alongside a recognition and representation of the (mother's) body. Destructive forms of narcissism, those that are completely self-absorbed, repress the body or project it onto the other in a deathly or abject way. Racism and hatred of women are examples, where the woman or person of colour is perceived as a body, without subject or personhood. But a more bodily narcissism that recognises and represents the body would at the same time recognise and represent the other's subjectivity. Feminism and the more recent gay movement can be seen to represent more positive forms of narcissistic, emancipatory self-love. These subcultures resist the idea that the way out of a desociated narcissistic society is to return to the nuclear, patriarchal family and insist on a more bodily narcissistic resistance to capitalist society. This more material resistance is of course also found in Marxism and Joel Kovel points out how narcissism, like capital, is embedded in a dialectic that has a potential for socialist resistance: The resistance of narcissism is embodied in the myth of Narcissus evoked by Marcuse. In the capitalist world it surfaces as a rebellion of the body against its deformation into a machine (Kovel, 1988: 206 ). Can a more bodily understanding within a more materialist framework enable us to understand the relationship between the psyche and the social in terms which do not return us to the death drive? If so, what are the subsequent benefits for a feminist analysis? The history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism is a long one, reaching back to Freud's contemporary Otto Gross, whose radical Marxist leanings influenced Freud and Jung alike. Perhaps, though, as the beginning of this chapter implies, it was the second generation of psychoanalysts who were most notable for their political and Marxist leanings, figures such as Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel.
Reich's Materialism a@&&tt& The Lacanian feminism of Juliet Mitchell's and Jacqueline Rose's work can be seen as a discourse emerging out of, and in dialogue with earlier debates that interlace psychoanalysis and materiality, Marxism and feminism. Whilst the British school was immersed in the femininity debates and arguments around the centrality of the phallic stage in Vienna and Berlin the debate between Marxism and psychoanalysis, or the political import of psychoanalysis, was paramount. In parallel, then, to these early debates on femininity within psychoanalysis was an ongoing psycho-political debate centring around the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. The three key political psychoanalysts
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associated with the Berlin group - Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Otto Fenichel, each of whom would develop a distrinct approach to a political, Marxist psychoanalysis - were in the 1930s engaged in fruitful dialogue with one another. Reich's Marxism was forged in Vienna after the First World War and then in Berlin, where experience of working-class misery and the impotence of the political left (both factors instrumental in the rise of the Nazi Party) led Reich to join both the German Communist Party and the political Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin. Reich saw the liberation of sexual instincts as revolutionary. His attack on society's repression of sexual instincts, via the family, combined Marx and Freud to condemn the conservative family repression of the Oedipal complex, and call for a radical, instinctual dissolution of the family. Although initially very influenced by Freud, Reich's writing is increasingly critical of the Oedipal theory. Interested in the relationship between sociology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, Reich sees the Oedipal complex as characterising bourgeois repression of instinctual sexuality, leading to neurosis and ill-health. Although Reich's initial work tries to marry psychoanalysis and Marxism, thus providing a materialist view of psychic life, his later work comes to eschew both these disciplines and increasingly to celebrate an uninhibited, unrepressed genital sexuality. Cure, for Reich, is achieved through the releasing of bodily sexuality and libido, a life drive neurotically dammed up by the authoritarian structures of the capitalist family. Juliet Mitchell criticises Reich for his reduction of Freud's psychic Oedipal complex to a set of sociological positions. Widely criticised for the increasing extremity of his views, which matched his own increasing madness, Reich's escalating obsession with the biological body and his ultimate refusal to accept the psychic, fantasy nature of the subject increasingly leads to a functionalist position where getting the bodily energy moving - namely, for Reich, genital sexuality - is all there is at stake. In this way, as Juliet Mitchell suggests, Reich gets rid of any distinction between the ego, the id and the unconscious. The ego is merely the defence against the instinctual impulses of the id, and is therefore not differentiated from them, and the unconscious becomes so much repressed id and sexuality. Subjectivity is, therefore, stripped of all psychic content, being reduced to natural, biological heterosexuality. Reich's early Marxism led to a sociology of the unconscious, whereas his later orgone theory of the body collapsed the unconscious into essential notions of nature. A Reichian political psychoanalysis tends, as Jacqueline Rose points out, to form a binary of the internal and external spheres, where the external 'social' imposes problems on the internal 'subject'. Consequently, the psyche has no mechanism of its own, but is simply acted on; it then follows that the resolution of internal conflict is to change the social conditions, the external event, which in turn reconfigures the Freudian model of the unconscious from 'the site of a division' to 'the vision of an ideal unity to come' (Rose, 1986: 9).
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Otto Fenichel was a key figure who put psychoanalysis and Marxism together, without losing, like Reich and the culturalists, the unconscious and sexuality' (Rose, 1993: 105). Fenichel, who went on to lead the political Freudians of the Berlin Institute, retained a classical, orthodox Freudian position. Although initially in political and psychoanalytical allegiance with Reich, Fenichel eventually became extremely critical of him for a distorting reduction of Freud's psychic conflict between society and the unconscious drives of sexuality. Fiercely antagonistic to Reich's theoretical reduction of psychoanalysis to simple notions of libidinal repression, Fenichel wanted to retain the complexity of a Marxist analysis of society and a (classical Freudian) psychoanalytic exposition of the unconscious. Fenichel's work and his realisation that ideology operates at the level of psychic identity and drives can be seen as a direct precursor to Juliet Mitchell's feminist intervention in the 1970s. Mitchell's defence of Freud has to be seen in terms of both the early femininity debates and the psycho-politics of Fenichel. Mitchell's critique of the legacy of left: politics and psychoanalysis for an exclusive reliance on the 'reality principle' parallelled her critical response to a then contemporary (1970s) feminist socio-political attack on Freud. Psychoanalysis and Feminism signalled a crucial turning away from an empirically based, political psychoanalysis, and the introduction of a Lacanian reworking of Freud's radical ideas about sexual difference and identity which was to become the central psychoanalytic paradigm through which culture could be studied. Mitchell's quite harsh attack on Reich and R.D. Laing in Psychoanalysis and Feminism found them wanting for becoming psycho-political ideologists. By this she meant that they bypassed Freud's radical concept of a psychic unconscious to collapse their work into ideological and experiential accounts of either the body or society. But Mitchell's defence of Freud via Lacan was perhaps also too resistant to the way in which Reich and Laing insistently brought psychoanalysis back to the material conditions of the body and society, a materialism that has been sadly lacking in the contemporary high theories of Lacan. Paradoxically, the very success of Lacanian feminism within the academy has signalled a turning away from more materialist and political forms of psychoanalysis. Feminism has becomes divided between those who follow psychoanalytic theories of unconscious, sexual subjectivity and those that eschew psychoanalysis for its ahistoricism, choosing a more materialist analysis of women's cultural identities. Although Reich's work can be criticised so obviously for a retreat into essentialist, normative concepts of nature, his initial departures from Freud, based on a more materialist psychoanalysis, are worth considering a bit further. There were many radical and political turning points in Reich's work that mark significant departures from Freud in terms of explaining the relation between society and the psyche in a more positive way, and in enabling social
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change. Reich's comparison of Freud's Oedipal complex with the bourgeois family, his insistence that the Oedipal repression of the body was not culturally universal, and furthermore was damaging to women's sexuality, was linked to a notion that the body can be represented culturally rather than repressed. Notwithstanding the hard fact that Reich's celebration of the pleasure principle became a universalising ultimately normative view of nature, his understanding that the body can be connected and represented by the social, nevertheless, provides an interesting alternative to the rather totalising depression of Freud's repressive death drive. Reich's work contains perhaps the most significant critique of Freud's frequently disputed death drive from a psychoanalytic perspective. Winnicott flatly refuses the notion of a death instinct, seeing it rather as a dependency issue in relation to the early mother. Meanwhile, Irigaray understands it as a projective identification, emanating from a narcissistic imaginary that repressively refuses to acknowledge cultural representation of the mother's body. Reich, however, returns to Freud's original understanding of the death instinct as a frustration arising from the conflict between self and society. Freud later revised this initial view, to place the conflict between life and death drives, thus making masochism or the death instinct, primary and not secondary. Reich argues, in tune with Freud's early suppositions, that the death instinct is secondary, the damaging effect of society on the psyche; masochism is seen as hiding demands and disappointments in love (Reich, 1975). The striving for pleasure, which Reich believes to be primary to the individual, is disturbed by anxiety and fear of punishment, a fear that is directly related to the prohibition of a repressive society.
Between inside and outside: bodily repression or representation? For Jacqueline Rose, Reich's location of the death drive as an external event misses the crucial contradiction of Freud's death drive. Freud, in Rose's view, cannot distinguish whether death is located inside or outside. Just as the life instincts become transposed into death and vice versa, so the relation between psychic and social is in constant tension: the conflict of unconscious sexuality. For Rose, the death drive is radical because it explains the relation between the psyche and the social without introducing a reductive causality on either side of the equation. But what does it mean to make a primary masochism or death instinct central not just to sexual and psychic identity, but also to the abject founding moment of society and the symbolic? Irigaray makes it clear that the abject death drive, as a violent projection of a male imaginary onto the body of the woman, is a psychic and social phenomenon which is not inevitable. Using Rene Girard's work on Violence
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and the Sacred' (1977), Irigaray discusses how Western societies are based on a sacrificial relation to the mother. Mothers are expected to work for nothing in this society. Because they are expected to nurture without payment before and after birth, mother's nurturing forms a sacrificial infrastructure to society that represses women's desire to trade amongst themselves. Sacrifice of the mother is also a 'primordial sacrifice of natural fertility'. Irigaray suggests that as long as the mother remains 'a totem before any totem is designated, identified and represented', then the result is a violent castration or death drive, projected onto the bodies of women (Irigaray, 1993b). This projected violence affects men and women differently in pathologically narcissistic ways. One way of understanding this is to see the abject and the sacrificial mother as two sides of the same coin. Kristeva sees this binary opposition of the sacrificial mother (who has privileged access to the symbolic), and the murderous and deathly abject relation to the mother's body, as necessary counterparts in maintaining the stability of the symbolic. Irigaray, on the other hand, refuses this complicity between the mother's sacrifice and death, wanting to find cultural ways of representing the bodily debt to the mother. Irigaray's focus on the need to represent the mother's body culturally, can be seen as distinct from Reich's privileging of the life drives. Whereas Reich takes his allegiance to the body to its limit, ultimately collapsing culture and the unconscious into natural biology, Irigaray carefully argues for a cultural representation of the body, entailing (as I will show) a psychic fluidity between the categories of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. What is more, Irigaray's cultural representation of the body is centrally relational, because connecting the bodily real with the symbolic not only brings the excluded abject maternal within culture, but also establishes an ethical relationship between people, where sameness and difference can be realised. What are the implications for a materialist psychoanalysis that can positively represent the body, rather than repressing it? Reich's work can be seen to stand as an example of the dangers implicit in taking this Utopian vision too far. However, an alternative to the phallic insistence on the death drive, in terms of representing the body, can also hopefully construct different theories of cultural difference and the symbolic, in which the relation between real and imaginary, self and other, psyche and social are not narcissistically split, thus projecting violence onto some generalised phallic other. Recognition of difference in terms of gender, sexuality and race can imply a more positive narcissism or selflove that exists intersubjectively within the object relation, as well as being located in a pure fantasy (or intrapsychic) state. Gloomy theorists of the postmodern can map a fragmented breakdown of the ontological self, signalling the collapse of Oedipal society into a more destructive, primary narcissism. But maybe it is possible for narcissism to exist in a more bodily and a more related way, inviting a return to a more materialist and political psychoanalysis.
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The possibility of a more bodily and object-related narcissism would then threaten to collapse the opposition between narcissism and the object-relating ego in Freud's work. It would also threaten to collapse the oppositional primacy granted to the life or the death drives, dissolving the rather polarised difference between, on one hand, Reich's idealised life drive and bodily id, and, on the other, Freud's narcissistic death drive and Oedipally repressing ego. Jacqueline Rose points out how Freud's 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle' is radical precisely because of its dissolution of the dualism between the life and death drives (Rose, 1993: 112) - a scenario in which the repetition of instinctual drive in relation to the object finally moves beyond pleasure into an internalised death drive. Eros turns into Thanatos, Thanatos into Eros. Rose shows how the reversibility or oscillation between these two poles of the binary also enables us to rethink binaries between outside/inside and victim/aggressor, as well as the political binary between internal fantasy and the historical real event. For all its radical reversibility, however, this theory places masochism at its heart. Rose follows Freud in arguing that 'the fiercest, and in some ways primary, repression aims not for eros, but for death' (Rose, 1993: 130). Despite its ambivalence this theory ends up with a narcissistic deconstruction of the self that negatively represses the relation to a bodily other, culminating in either self-destructiveness or a projection of hate onto the body of the (m)other. As we have seen, this explains why Kristeva insists that hatred and murder (in fantasy) of the early bodily mother is so necessary for the avoidance of depression and the accession to separate subjectivity. Conversely, we have also seen that Irigaray's challenge to this accepted primary narcissism is based on the realisation that such acceptance of the death drive consigns the bodies of women to an excluded abject status, a status that grounds masculine identity whilst denying feminine subjectivity.
liiiiiiiii The dialogic relation The death drive seems to provide an adequate expiaination for the operation of dominant culture and subjectivity. For example, it fits neatly the model of a Freudian bourgeois subject repressively fearing and desiring the body, and thus projecting that abject bodily relation onto other 'lower' and more marginal identities and groups. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, in their brilliant exposition of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, read Freudian psychoanalysis to reveal the links between 'Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque'. The carnivalesque was a term elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the populist Utopian vision of the world seen from below - a festive critique, inverting the hierarchy of the 'high culture'. Society is divided symbolically into high and low in terms of the psyche, the body, geographical space and the social order. The high involves the classical, the world of ideas and what is
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perceived as the dominant cultural law, while the low is associated with the grotesque body, the bottom - signalling laughter, excess, sexuality. High culture is gendered masculine, white and middle class; the surbordinate bottom is characterised as feminine and working class. In this way, the high and low work in a dialogical relation to each other: one cannot exist without the other; and although the low will sometimes subvert the high, the high will always return to its position of dominance. But the dialogic struggle between high and low legislates that the dominant never returns in quite the same way. The symbolic transgression of this law, through the grotesque or abject body, is spoken or represented as a kind of bodily narrative in images. Kristeva has utilised this Bakhtinian opposition between high and low together with Lacan's symbolic and imaginary. But as Stallybrass and White point out, political subversion of the symbolic by the semiotic would have to address actual domains of power rather than the language of literary discourse, As we shall see, part of the problem is the all-encompassing nature of the paternal law operating within Lacan's and Kristeva's texts. Within this account of the law, the abject cannot be brought into the representation of culture, and it cannot therefore transform or have effect on the dominant. But in the Stallybrass-White elaboration of the carnivalesque the abject does have a transgressively symbolic power because it works dialogically within culture. The dialogic abject, therefore, operates as a narrative and does not occupy an ontological, pre-discursive place outside language. Stallybrass and Wliite return to Freud's early work with hysteria in female patients (see next chapter) to argue for an historical and cultural analysis of the abject, hysterical body in dialogic terms. In this account, hysteria is perceived as the repression by bourgeois culture of the grotesque body. But within the dialogic relation, the disgust and abjection associated with the hysteric's body can be liberated as the carnivalesque. Freud's initial cathartic method of treating hysterics, encouraging them to transform fear into cathartic laughter and comedy, becomes translated into the notion of hysteria as a kind of comic pantomime, where phobic fears and fantasies are acted out and mimed: When one psychoanalyses a patient subject to hysterical attacks one soon gains the conviction that these attacks are nothing but phantasies projected and translated into motor activity and represented in pantomime. (Stallybrass and White, 1986: p. 174) Miming and acting out desires and ph(fantasies) returns repressed fantasies and the abject body into a carnivalesque representation of the body. In this way, Stallybrass and White proceed to their definition of a dialogic and political unconscious. Although Freud's bourgeois unconscious is a repressive model that excludes the popular (outside culture and society) as a grotesque abject body, this repression can return through the production, at an imaginary level,
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of an abject body that is representative. Stallybrass and White present a dialogic reading of the return of the repressed, showing how the repressive death drive of dominant society can in turn be inverted in more popular and pleasurable forms. This dialogic model provides a much more cultural and political interpretation of the abject than, say, its rather negative position in a more classical Oedipal reading. The problem with confirming this dialogic understanding of the abject solely to a model of the return of the repressed, however, is that death and pleasure are so reversible, as either side of the same coin. In Freud's Oedipal model, Eros narcissistically returns to becomes its violent other - and, as Jacqueline Rose points out, within this binary the most primary repression is death. Again, the Oedipal repressive model seems to explain the domain of the dominant quite accurately, where the unconscious is what is excluded and repudiated, but this phallic model seems inadequate in describing more positive representations of the body such as the carnivalesque. Part of the problem of the repressive hypothesis of the death drive is, as we have seen, its narcissistic aetiology. Freud equated narcissism with asociality and objectrelation love with sociality. To explain the representation of the body political psychoanalysis thus has to break down or deconstruct the division between the object-relating and the narcissistic ego. The next chapter will explore the historical frameworks of psychoanalysis and the different traditions that have informed both clinical and theoretical arenas. It will also elaborate some of the topics raised in this chapter: in particular it will consider object relations and poststructuralist psychoanalysis in a way which will characterise similar tensions between psychoanalysis and politics. This chapter has made the political relation of psychoanalysis to class and a material analysis inseparable. The argument with the phallus progresses to debates in feminist, queer and postcolonial theory. Discussion of the tension between a more materialist analysis of culture and psychoanalysis has been an important introduction to these future debates, where the question of history and a bodily location of experience never ceases to problematise the 'dominant discourses' and representations of cultural identity.
r
References
Althusser, L. (1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books. Barratt, M. (1980) Women's Oppression Today, London: New Left Books/Verso. Doane, J. and Hodges, D.(1992) From Klein to Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the 'Good Enough' Mother, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Dworkin, A (1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women, London, Women's Press. Frosh, S. (1991) Identity Crisis: Modernity Psychoanalysis and the Self,London: Macmillan. Girard, R. (1977) Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Hall, Stuart (1992) 'Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical legacies', in L. Grosberg et al (eds), Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 277-86. Irigaray, L. (1993a) 'Love of the Same, Love of the Other' in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, London: The Athlone Press. — (1993b) 'Woman the Sacred and Money' Sexes and Genealogies, trans Gillian C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press. Jacoby, R. (1983) T'he Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians., New York: Basic Books. Kaplan C. (1986) 'Radical Feminism and Literature', in Sea Changes, London: Verso. Klein, M. (1952) 'The Emotional Life of an Infant', in Joan Riviere (ed.), The Developments of Psychoanalysis, London: Hogarth. — (1975) The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vols 1 and 2, London: Hogarth. Kovel, J. (1988) 'Narcissism and the family', in The Radical Spririt, London: Free Association Books. Maguire, M. (1987) 'Casting The Evil Eye - Women and Envy', in Living With The Sphinx, London: The Women's Press Ltd. Millet, K. (1970) Sexual Politics, New York: Doubleday. Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Morrison, T. (1993) 'Living Memory: a Meeting with Toni Morrison', in P. Gilroy (ed.), Small Acts, London: Serpents Tail. Parker, R. (1995) Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, London: Virago. Reich, W. (1975) Reich Speaks of Freud, ed. M. Higgins and C M . Raphael, London: Penguin Books. Rich, A. (1976) Of Woman Born,. New York: W. W. Norton. Riley, D. (1983) War in The Nursery — Theories of the Child and Mother, London: Virago. Rose, J. (1986) Sexcuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. Rose, J. (1993) 'Margaret Thatcher and Ruth Ellis' Why War, Oxford: Blackwells. Rustin, M. (1991) The Good Society and The Inner World, London: Verso. Samuels, A. (1998) 'Politics and Psychotherapy', in Campbell, J, and Harbord, J. (eds), Psychopolitics and Cultural Desires, London: UCL Press. Sayers, J. (1991) Mothering Psychoanalysis, London: Hamish Hamilton. Stallybrass, P. and White, A. (1986) ' Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque', in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen. Stoller, R. J. (1974) Sex and Gender, London: Maresfield. Wollstonescraft, M. (1954) A Vindication of the Rights of Women, London, Dent (Everyman's Library, No. 825). Winnicott, D. (1982) 'Classification', in The Maturational Processes And The Facilitating Environment, London: Hogarth Press. Young, R. (1991) 'Psychoanalysis and Political Literary Theories' in Donald, J. (ed.), Psychoanalysis & Cultural Theory: Thresholds, Macmillan/ICA.
Between Realist and Narcissistic Ego, or between Experience and Text
Freud's avoidance of politics in favour of a more medical and scientific position is evident in his writings, but it can also be traced in terms of his personal life. The Nazi occupation of Austria which occurred near the end of his life necessitated Freud's flight to England. Initially Freud was reluctant to leave Vienna and, as Ernest Jones notes, it was by no means certain that the Nazis would grant him an exit visa. Jones managed to get permission for Freud to come to England and President Roosevelt also intervened successfully. The Nazis granted Freud a visa on condition he signed a document declaring that they had treated him well. Freud added a sentence to the bottom which ran: 'I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.' Was this written out of irony, fear, or genuine ignorance? Anna Freud (Freud's daughter) had recently been arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned for a whole day. The danger of her deportation to a concentration camp was very real, and Freud was beside himself with anxiety. Despite the obvious danger, he naively asked Jones: 'Do you really think the Germans are unkind to the Jews?' Of course the Nazi persecution was still in its early stages and Freud didn't live to witness the murder of his four older sisters in the concentration camps, five years after his arrival in London. Perhaps Freud's rather naive political awareness can be seen to go hand in hand with the conservatism of the medical profession which had built his career. The poverty of Freud's life as a medical student, and the poverty of his immediate family, is not often discussed. Freud's early aversion to medicine as a profession and his love of more theoretical, artistic pursuits were, it seems, in contradiction to his meagre circumstances. The necessity of his chosen career as a doctor is recorded in his diary: By that time I had already passed all my medical examinations; but I took no interest in anything to do with medicine till the teacher whom I so
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deeply respected warned me that in view of my restricted material circumstances I could not possibly take up a theoretical career (Jones, 1953 :22). Freud's long struggle to establish himself materially and professionally can be seen to contrast with his more artistic, theoretical interests. And, of course, both these threads run through his psychoanalytic work: his methodological approach as an empirical scientist and his more theoretical and imaginative creativity that always took him beyond the confines of a scientific medical framework. Freud's desire to see psychoanalysis embraced as a science was not simply a wish to see it established and recognised professionally. His belief in psychoanalysis as a science was linked to an established tradition of Enlightenment, rationalist philosophy: the division and supremacy of the mind over the body. The fact that Freud's unconscious radically undermines this rational mind/body distinction, however much Freud seems at times to want to keep it in place, is evidence of a fertile contradiction in his work. This is a contradiction between practice and theory, between experience and ideas, and between the reality-bearing ego and the more narcissistic, pleasure-seeking id.
The realist and the narcissistic ego ^ M S H Freud's body of work is, therefore, inconsistent. He can be seen to have developed two theories of the ego, one realist and one narcissistic. The realist ego has commonly been taken as the more conservative, rational account, feeding into a scientific, positivist developmental schema, which provided a focus for institutional 'medical' practice in Britain and America. The narcissistic account of the ego can be seen to inform Lacanian poststructuralism as well as the current (psychoanalytically informed) discourses within feminist, queer and postcolonial theory. Freud's realist ego, discussed in 'The Ego and the Id', is compared to the rider of a horse. The reality-bound ego masters and controls the unconscious id in much the same way as a rider reins in a horse: In its relation to the id, the ego is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. (Freud, 1923: 1-66) Thus the ego's battle to master and steer the unconscious id, transforming its radical will, is a masterful action of taming the more animalistic, irrational and wild aspects of the psyche. The realist ego modifies the irrational id in terms oi the conventions and norms of rational society. Unifying and organising the chaotic unconscious, this rational ego is identified with superior mental functions which modify and mediate the unstable, pleasure-seeking, bodily id.
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The ego in this scenario is identified as the self which is naturally given or innately acquired. This ego primarily mediates between the opposing forces of the psychic id and social reality. The ego's role as mediator or arbitrator between the social and the psyche is responsible for the compromise of civilised society and also produces the more mental cultural sublimations commonly associated with 'high culture'. Freud's narcissistic ego, expounded in 'On Narcissism: An Introduction' and 'Mourning and Melancholia', forms the basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis. If the realist ego is seen as innate and biological, the narcissistic ego is the result of a more social and cultural intervention. In this account Freud conceptualises the primordial ego as a primarily narcissistic one, where the ego takes itself as its own libidinal object. In the realist model, Freud posits the ego instincts and sexual instincts as separate. With Freud's narcissistic ego, however, there is no clear distinction between internal relations (with the psyche) and external relations (with the world), and this more mixed relation causes problems for the realist ego which rationally distinguishes between ego and id. The concept of the narcissistic ego includes a distinction between narcissism and auto-eroticism. 'There must be something new added to auto-eroticism a new psychical action - in order to bring about narcissism.' Identification takes on an increased importance in this account. Identifications that are fluid and polymorphous and libidinal are internalised to gradually make up the ego. The narcissistic ego, unlike the realist ego, is not neurologically and biologically present from the start. Instead of the two separate components of the ego and the id, which fight it out with the innate reality-bearing ego vanquishing the pleasure-bound id, the narcissistic ego constitutes a fluid ego constructed through the id's pleasure-seeking identifications with the outside world. The narcissistic ego does not separate the internal world, where the ego takes itself as its own libidinal object, from the external world of reality-bearing objects. Reality is therefore not privileged as a relation for the narcissistic ego. If the realist ego finds its base in the experience, affects and sensations of the biological body, then the narcissistic ego is constructed in terms of its pleasureseeking identifications with others, and is libidinally invested and dependent on these others for its survival. This dependence is illustrated by Freud with the two examples of being in love and illness. In 'Mourning and Melancholia' (1917), Freud describes how falling in love is a projection of the narcissistic self onto another: the self is literally given away and ascribed in an idealised way to the other person. If love is mutual, then the love received can be introjected or internally taken in, so the identification with the other person becomes absorbed, to becomes part of the internal world. If love is not reciprocated, then mourning ensues, the grief for a beloved means the ego has to disinvest unreciprocated libidinal investments. Gradually, the ego starts to replace its libidinal reserves by means of a
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narcissistic re-cathexis with the subject's own body. So the narcissistic ego manages to take itself, its body as an object. Eventually, when the ego has reinvested itself enough, it can then find other external objects as substitute for the original loss. In illness the narcissistic ego replaces the external object with the pain of its own body. The narcissistic ego therefore implies not the unified whole ego of the realist account, but an ego which is primarily alienated and split from itself. This split ego where the subject takes itself as both subject and object, forms the basis of Lacan's narcissistic imaginary. Lacan's conceptualisation of the mirror stage develops Freud's narcissistic ego into a linguistic theory of the subject which radically displaces the Cartesian, enlightenment, humanist trajectory. Freud's famous Oedipal complex becomes in Lacan's work, not something which is biologically or literally given, but a structural and linguistic explanation of the social construction of identity and sexual difference. Lacan's work forms the basis of the psychoanalytically informed poststructuralist debates on sexual difference within feminism. The Lacanian imaginary and Freud's narcissistic ego are also taken up in various ways by queer theory and postcolonial critics. Freud's narcissistic ego explains, through the processes of unconscious identification, how the subject is culturally constructed through relationships with other people. This ego, unlike the unified realistic ego, is alienated, built on desire and loss, giving special importance to the construction of the self through fantasy and psychic life. This unconscious world of fantasy and desire not only displaces the rational ego of the Western philosophical tradition, but also enables us to understand the postmodern flux of late-capitalist society, in which politics and consumerism are most obviously underpinned by fantasy and desire. Freud's concept of the realist ego has developed mainly within institutional practice. In Britain, this reality-bearing ego can be traced through the object relation schools of Klein and Winnicott particularly. It is therefore easy to see a crude division between Freud's two accounts of the ego, with the realitybased ego informing the empirical realms of clinical practice and the narcissistic split ego forming an important base for the poststructuralist theories of language and representation. One of the central themes of this book will be its challenge to this division between the realist and narcissistic egos. Freud's body of work is not coherent in terms of a reality-bearing ego or a narcissistic one. That these two accounts are contradictory is not disputed, nor that they have been taken to bolster two very different theoretical, political and philosophical accounts of subjectivity. Certainly these two accounts of the ego have travelled across boundaries of theory and practice. Object relations theory has been incorporated into feminist theory, and at times into theories of the postmodern. Clinical practice in Britain is not wholly under the sway of the British object relations school, as
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the increasing influence of training organisations like the Philadelphia Association shows. Nevertheless, the political consequences of dividing Freud's work into either a developmental, empirical model or a theoretical poststructuralist one have been serious. With the former, the reality-bearing ego has been used to determine a literal Oedipal complex, promoting a white male heterosexual hegemony that has pathologised marginal groups of sex, race, gender and class. In the latter postructuralist account, the refusal of the real external event and the location of the subject within a purely narcissistic internal world refuses the material and bodily experiences that are inescapable within clinical practice.
The bodily ego and unconscious experience Freud's reality-bearing ego has been taken up most literally by ego psychologists in the United States such as Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson. Here the ego is seen as external to or autonomous of the unconscious, a legislating of normative social roles. Prominent object relation theorists in Britain have also subscribed to this position. The institutionalised homophobia of much clinical practice points to the success and the danger of reading Freud's ego in such an explicitly realist way. However, if we look again at Freud's reality-bearing ego and his description of its mastery over the id in T h e Ego and the Id' (1923), we can see that the relationship between the ego and the id is much less sharply divided than the example of the horseman might depict. Freud clearly defines the ego as 'first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself a projection of a surface'. In other words, the ego is a mental projection of the surface of the body. The ego is not simply a kind of consciousness based on biological and bodily affects; it also contains unconscious bodily affects or experiences. Freud states: Internal perceptions yield sensations of processes arising in the most diverse and certainly also in the deepest strata of the mental apparatus. Very little is known about these sensations and feelings; those belonging to the pleasureunpleasure series may still be regarded as the best examples of them. They are more primordial, more elementary, than perceptions arising externally and they can come about even when consciousness is clouded. (Freud, 1923: 1-66) As Andre Green explains, this seems to connect rather than conflate external and internal perceptions: 'What Freud underlines in this new formulation is the more primitive, more elementary character of this type of sensation, and hence their deep bodily location' (Green, 1986: 185). Emphasis on a primary experiential and bodily unconscious displaces the rather rigid contrast between a reality-bearing ego and a pleasure-driven id in favour of a model which clearly connects internal and external worlds. Instead of the ego con-
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trolling the affectual body, it can be seen to experience this body subjectively in a variety of ways. The affectual body is not constituted by biological phenomena, external to the psyche, but by our sensual and unconscious experiences. For Green, Freud's work suggests 'there are several modes of existence in the unconscious, which enables us to speak of an unconscious modality of affect' (Green, 1986: 186). The unconscious does not have to be understood simply in terms of unconscious ideas, it can also contain unconscious feelings. Freud, however, found it hard to compare unconscious ideas with feelings because the very concept of unconscious feelings seemed such a contradiction in terms. He thought that unconscious ideas reached consciousness through a pre-consciousness system, where the unconscious 'thing' became connected with word-presentations and language. With unconscious feelings, however, the distinction between conscious and pre-conscious drops and 'feelings are either conscious or unconscious' (Freud, 1923: 1-66). How then can we talk about unconscious feelings, when they cannot be defined as a structure within the psyche? Freud's thinking here seems to fit the Lacanian interpretation that the unconscious can only be known through language. But in a paper entitled 'Unconscious Emotions', Freud also acknowledges the presence of unconscious affects or feelings: Strictly speaking, then, and although no fault can be found with the linguistic usage, there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas. But there may very well be in the system Ucs. affective structures which, like others, become conscious. (Freud, 1915: 178) Again in 'The Ego and the Id', directly after his analogy of the rider and a horse, Freud states that differentiation between ego and id is not just brought about through the mental (pre-conscious/perception to conscious) system. The ego, for Freud, is also rooted in the body, 'A person's own body and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions spring' (Freud, 1923: 26). As primarily a bodily ego, the ego is derived from physical sensations, arising from the surface of the body. The ego springs from the body as well as being a representative of the mind. It can be seen as 'a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus' (Freud, 1923: 26). If we now compare this more unconscious bodily ego with Freud's narcissistic one, we find again that the old opposition been a realist experiential ego and a more internal narcissistic one breaks down. This bodily ego rewrites the normative script of a rational ego repressing the bodily id, but it also displaces internal concepts of narcissistic identification and mental representation onto a more external (object) relation with the body. In other words, deconstructing the division between Freud's so called realist ego and his narcissistic one also means dissolving the opposition between the practice of developmental psychoanalysis and the poststructuralist theories of language and mental representation.
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This split between theory and practice becomes mirrored in many other binaries such as mind/body, language/experience, theory/history, epistemology/ ontology and so on. Although the emphasis of Lacanian psychoanalysis has been to deconstruct the old positivist readings of Freud that hark back to the classic Enlightenment split between the mind and the body, it is one of the suppositions of this book that the Lacanian, theoretical, refusal of bodily affects within the object relation, and the subsequent negation of the real, collapses the subject back into internal, mental concepts of the psyche. Here, connections to the real of the body and to history remain largely absent. It is important to note that I am not talking about Lacan in terms of clinical practice. Within such practice, the relation to the body and the historical world literally exists within the transference. Historically, however, within the academic institution, Lacanian theory is understood in purely linguistic and textual terms, remaining largely untrammelled by questions of how the body is lived and experienced within culture.
ii«i«iii The Oedipal complex This split between language and the bodily real within Lacanian thinking and practice reflects the patriarchal cornerstone of Freud's thinking: the Oedipal complex. For the Oedipal complex signifies a classical Freud, where gender division is established and the phallic, mental repression of the mother's body mirrors the Enlightenment and Cartesian duality between the mind and body. Indeed, as I will argue, Lacan's return to Freud's theory of narcissism, phallic castration and the Oedipal complex makes a similar classical error in hegemonically privileging the phallus over the maternal body. However, the later Freud, in his analysis of the Wolfman, his concepts of 'deferred action' and 'Beyond The Pleasure Principle', defines an unconscious of radical temporality that subverts Cartesian binaries in postmodern fashion. Such later theorisations of the unconscious thus seem to move beyond the rigid splits of the Oedipal position to encompass an unconscious, radically undermining of the Enlightenment division between mind and body. This more 'postmodern' Freud can be seen to historicise psychoanalysis by connecting the 'infantile' pre-Oedipal relation with the mother to culture. Nevertheless, the classical Oedipal complex remains as the foundation of civilisation in Freud's thinking, forming the central point of sexual identity and development: it thus explains the process whereby the individual negotiates entry into society, and shows how it is the loss of the object of desire (the mother) which produces the formation of sexed identity and the social self. In other words the Oedipal complex explains how the psyche negotiates with the social by symbolically internalising the lost and prohibited object of desire the mother. This prohibition or symbolic law is signified by the paternal
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phallus and the associated castration complex which affects girls and boys in different ways. Freud's phallic explanation of sexual difference becomes paramount in understanding his notion of the unconscious: early polymorphous desires towards the mother's body, which are bisexual and contain multiple points of identification; become repressed through the Oedipal interdict to construct an unconscious repository of what society refuses. This scenario of desire, taboo and loss was presumed by Freud to be quite positive for the little boy. The boy's growing sexual awareness of his penis, together with his erotic fantasies in relation to his mother, is symbolically forbidden by the cultural figure of the father, who goes on to break and separate the child/mother dyad. The boy's murderous rage towards the father (for having the maternal body he wants) is checked by the threat of phallic castration, and the boy learns to forgo his desire, for the time being, in return for heterosexual identification with the all-powerful father. For the girl things are not so straightforward. Instead of repressing and resolving her desire, the castration complex (signified by the symbolic phallus) initiates her Oedipal desire for the father and she remains stuck in it, according to Freud, for the rest of her life. The girl's realisation that she lacks a penis corresponds to the realisation that like her mother she is already castrated. Turning away from her mother with hatred and disappointment she takes her father as the new love object, in the hope that one day he will give her a baby as a substitute for the longed for phallus or penis. Through penis-envy the girl renounces active desire and maternal love to embrace passive 'feminine' sexuality in relation to the father. Sexuality, in Freud's account, is therefore based on a masculine norm, and historically the feminist debate with Freud has focused on his privileging of a phallic sexuality with its consequent devalued and castrated account of the feminine. However, feminists have supported as well as challenged the status of the phallus within psychoanalytic theory. And psychoanalysts, in turn, have argued against the primacy of penis envy in Freud's work. Surprisingly, these theoretical arguments around the status of the phallus were situated first, not within feminism, but within the psychoanalytical institution itself. The psychoanalytic debates on female sexuality of the 1920s and 1930s were arguments for and against the primacy of the phallic stage. Karen Horney, Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones all argued against the Freudian centrality of the phallus. They argued that it was secondary and that an unconscious, but repressed knowledge of the vagina constituted a female sexuality of positive aspects, rather than an awareness of castration and lack (Horney, 1933; Jones, 1927; Klein, 1932). A crucial complexity of these debates concerns the important relation between the mind and the body, the social and the biological, and these complex differences can be traced forward to a more contemporary understanding of debates between psychoanalysis and feminism. Feminist debates which emphasise phallic monism are situated within
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Lacanian and Freudian discourses, reiterating the importance of the phallus and Oedipal father in understanding female sexuality. The other major branch of psychoanalytic feminism draws from the object relations school, particulalry Winnicott, and focuses on the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother. A comparison between these two different feminist approaches is the subject of the next chapter. But it is interesting to recap here how the classical and liberal trajectory of Freud's Oedipal complex posits an internal metapsychology, where the rational mind is privileged over the irrational body, a privilege which extends to masculinity over femininity and to thought over feeling. However, the subjection of the pleasure principle to the reality principle, or of id to ego, is time and again contradicted in Freud's work when he posits the construction of the self through fantasy and the body. Whether this involves the narcissistic and identificatory processes of'Mourning and Melancholia', or the bodily ego in 'The Ego and The Id', the rational Oedipal ego binary seems radically disrupted. Lacan later develops this fantastic ego constructed through pleasure, not reality, in his account of narcissistic identification. The paradox here is that by removing the reality principle from the ego, and by enshrining the fantasy of the hegemonic Oedipal phallus as the only symbolic law of culture, Lacan gets rid of the radical bodily ego and with it the relationship between narcissistic fantasy and external reality that Freud elicited in 'The Ego and The Id'. Moreover, Lacan's fixation on the Oedipal as the nodal stage for negotiation between culture and the psyche obfuscated the connections between the body and culture that a more pre-Oedipal analysis would deliver.
iiiiiiiii From intrapsychic to intersubjective: the post-Freudians Post-Freudian psychoanalysis, therefore, moved beyond Freud's internal intrapsychic emphasis on unconscious objects and repression, to concentrate on relationships between self and others. As several contemporary thinkers on psychoanalysis have pointed out, there has been a sea change in the type of patients presenting for therapy since Freud. Instead of the typical Freudian and Oedipal neurotic, suffering from internal conflict, due to the repression of forbidden desire, the more contemporary post-Freudian patient appears as more borderline, suffering narcissistic disturbance and the ontological breakdown of the sense of self and corresponding relatedness to others. In line with this, the post-Freudians replaced Freud's drive theory; emphasising the indepth psychological dynamics between subjects, their intersubjectivity. This move away from Freudian metapsychology has evolved in different traditions and geographical locations. In America, ego psychology, pioneered by such thinkers as Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson, focused on the adaptiveness of the ego to reality (A. Freud, 1936; Hartmann, 1939; Erikson,
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1965). The role of fantasy virtually disappears in this approach, with emphasis being placed on the relationship between the ego and external reality in terms of Freud's reality-bound ego. As a result, historically ego psychology has been associated with a rather conservative psychoanalysis, prescribing societal and normative roles. Another strand of post-Freudian thinking, known as the culturalists or neoFreudians, developed alongside ego psychology. The culturalists were situated in the United States and were associated with such names as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Harry Sultan. As their name suggests, these analysts took a more radical culturalist approach, critiquing Freud's metapsychology for its refusal to acknowledge the cultural underpinnings of psychic processes. In turn, the culturists have been critiqued for producing a rather popularised and woolly sociological account of the psyche, although it is too easily forgotten that Fromm's Marxist critique of Freud, and Horney's challenge to the primary status of the phallus, forged some of the earliest political attempts to align psychoanalysis with a theory of culture (Horney, 1933, Fromm, 1973). In Britain, the strongest and most lasting post-Freudian perspective has been object relations theory. Indeed, object relations theory rules the roost in Britain today, in terms of both psychoanalysis and analytical psychotherapy. Object relations theory focuses on the intersubjective relation between self and others. Prominent figures such as Melanie Klein, Donald W. Winnicott, W.R.D. Fairburn, Harry Guntrip, Michael Balint and John Bowlby have determined the direction of clinical practice and treatment in Britain. Although all these thinkers can be characterised by an overall adherence to the emotionally complex mother/child dyad, their differences are often passed over in a rather generalised perception of their focus on intersubjective and relational needs.
Object relations theory M ^ M As a consequence object relations theory all too often is seen as prioritising a psyche of relational needs, rather than Freud's drive-orientated desire. This rather generalised polarity obscures crucial differences in object relations theory, differences that trouble the rather easy division that is characteristically made between a demand or need for love and instinctual desire. Fairburn's work, for example, clearly privileges objects seeking love over pleasure, believing that the unconscious is fundamentally structured in terms of emotional connectedness with others and that the pleasure-seeking drives can only be understood in reference to this more basic pleasure of unconscious relatedness. Fairburn, along with Balint and Guntrip, thus posits the pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother as some kind of essential symbiotic unity, pre-dating the cultural intervention of the Oedipal father (Fairburn, 1952; Balint, 1957; Guntrip, 1961). The mother/child dyad, in health, constitutes a seamless
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harmony between self and other, forming an integral self or ego that is facilitated or harmed by early object relations to the external world. In these accounts it is the frustration and failure of external relationships, particularly mothering, that explain the construction of the unconscious. Inadequate parenting is met by the child's ego splitting (between the good and the bad mother), and unconscious fantasy objects are then produced at a fantasy level. Here, the unconscious is seen as a negative and distorting effect that the external world influences over the psyche. This model is closely linked to Freud's reality-bearing ego, in that the psychically healthy self is arrived at both through the conscious diminishing of fantasy and in terms of the external object relation. Although this object relational focus can be seen as positive in that it rectifies the over-emphasis on the phallus and the exclusion of the mother within Freud's thinking, it remains problematic for its essentialist framing of selfhood. The self, in this account, is constructed in relation to the external world, but at the same time located before it, with the role of culture positioned on the whole as detrimental and negative, impinging on the private pre-social realm of a sacrosanct mother-child relation, where the imaginary world of splitting and fantasy becomes the unfortunate unconscious response to the traumas of contemporary modernity and culture. By contrast Melanie Klein's object relational approach is based primarily within a rather negative world view of internalised fantasy and splitting. Unlike Fairburn, Guntrip and others, Klein did not emphasise the external object relation. Instead she focused on the internal one (Klein, 1932). And rather than seeing the unconscious as the negative effects of environmental failure, she focused on internal object relation as a fantasy. Returning to Freud's concept of drives, particularly the death drive, Klein theorised the internal world of the small infant as an innate, primordial arena of aggressive drives. These drives become situated and projected onto early part objects: the internalised mother or breast. Projection of these drives results in those part objects being experienced as persecutory or dangerous, and the internal mother is therefore split into good and bad. Klein named this frightening anxiety leading to a splitting of the world into good and bad, the 'paranoid schizoid position'. In this psychotic stage the mother is not experienced as separate, but as the child gradually learns to deal with the conflict between love and hate a more integrated self develops. As the infant comes to realise the mother as a whole and separate person, guilt and ambivalence lead to the mourning of the 'depressive position' where the infant can creatively make reparation and establish individuation. Klein's work is interesting because it seems to return the relational, need-based object relation back into Freud's world of fantasy and narcissistic desire. Although it is true that the negative, envious unconscious far outweighs the positive, reparative one in Klein's thinking, the world of unconscious fantasy is not subsumed under environmental concerns. In fact,
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Klein barely mentions the environmental mother. Comparing Klein with Freud's realist and narcissistic ego it is clear that she is in many ways much closer to Freud's internal world of a fantasy-based narcissistic ego than to the more positive focus on object-relational need and adaptiveness to external reality more commonly associated with object relations theory. This is perhaps emphasised most clearly in the controversial discussions between Klein and Anna Freud in the 1940s, where Klein's negative unconscious account of the psyche was set against Anna Freud's more reality-based ego. Donald Winnicott develops Klein's work, adding to it the figure of the external mother. Instead of focusing on either the environmental or the internal mother, he analyses the relation between them (Winnicott, 1971). However, unlike Fairburn or Klein, Winnicott does not insist on such a secondary or negative role for the unconscious. Returning to Freud's emphasis on the early fragmentation and unintegration of the ego, Winnicott sees the construction of the self as involving a positive notion of unconscious fantasy, which is in itself dependent on the external object relation. Concepts of the 'good enough mother' and 'primary maternal pre-occupation' describe a kind of external mothering which is responsive (in terms of love and hate), but is also undemanding, allowing the infant to develop a sense of being and aloneness in the presence of a non-intrusive mother. This non-intrusive presence initiates the child's fantasy world and the creative 'transitional space' which allows the child both a separate and dependent existence, providing a psychic environment where the infant can meet his dependent needs within the object relation and also develop a rich and creative unconscious world of desire and fantasy. So, for Winnicott, the object relation does not structure a psyche by making unconscious fantasy a disturbing or negative affect. Instead, dependent relational needs and a desiring fantasy life form intersubjective components of a healthy subjectivity. When dependency needs are unmet, or when fantasy life is restricted through intrusive or impinging mothering, then a 'false self develops. The 'true self, however, allows maximum fluidity of the transitional space, where the meeting of real needs and the development of a fantasy life can happily coexist. Winnicott's explanation of the 'true self as a kind of core, authentic being has been transcribed in quite essentialist ways. Humanist trajectories of the transcendental subject and feminist ideologies of core gender identity, therefore tend to read Winnicott's true self as legitimating a unitary, fixed and gendered whole, seemingly untroubled by issues of history or unconscious fantasy. This is dealt with in depth in the next chapter. However, recent analysts such as Christopher Bollas read Winnicott's 'self not as some fixed and unitary reality, but as a potential of multiple self-experiential states. Bollas develops Winicott's work, and Freud's notion of a more primary unconscious, to posit an experiential, generative unconscious associated with the bodily
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relation to the mother (Bollas, 1993; 1995). The true self is not some boundaried and fixed self, but a position or space that can be occupied, providing a renegotiation of object love, but also the recreation of a more generative unconscious, fantasy world. Traumatically buried and destroyed experiences of self (the false self) can be brought back to life to develop a more desiring, fantasy-based subject. Bollas distinguishes his model of early unconscious experience from Freud's secondary Oedipal unconscious. Oedipal or phallic structures of the unconscious are characterised by a return of the repressed, associated with hermeneutic meaning and narrative: the complex self. Bollas's experiential unconscious, or the simple self, is associated with the body and is concerned with transformative processes at an experiential level in relation to the object world. Whereas the simple self deals with the unconscious object world, the more complex self deals with an unconscious of mental ideas and representation. So although Bollas seems to divide the primary and secondary unconscious, one of the themes in Arguing With The Phallus is to reconnect them. Freud's work is contradictory on this point, moving from accounts of the realist ego to the narcissistic one, and more obviously focusing on a secondary, mental unconscious at the expense of a more primary bodily unconscious. Meanwhile, Bollas seems to maintain a significant difference between a pre-Oedipal world of unconscious experience and an Oedipal sphere of unconscious mental representation. But this division into different modes of unconscious life once again seems to separate the body from language and culture. The inability of object relations theory to explain how desire moves into language and representation has been the main reason why more Oedipal theories of the unconscious have been utilised in poststructuralist and postmodern theories of the self. Although Bollas's work provides a more postmodern picture of identity, perceiving the individual as containing multiple selves, rather than one unitary 'true self, his explanation of the experiential self seems to occupy an ontological, pre-narrative realm. Arguing With The Phallus intends to develop Bollas's self-experiential unconscious in narrative ways, arguing for a more dialogical and narrative displacement of the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal divide. Bollas's more postmodern reading of Winnicott, together with its conservative essentialist counterpart, will be dealt with throughout this book. If the theories of Freud and Lacan can look backwards to a classical, binaried subject as well as forward to a multiple postmodern one, Winnicott, too, can be read as collapsing the self back into trajectories of the white imperial subject, or forward to encapsulate historical, fantasy-based narratives. Whereas Lacan develops Freud's desiring, narcissistic ego in terms of language and mental representation, Winnicott's work develops the intersubjective world of object relations and fantasy, focusing on unconscious experience. Although this primary unconscious was not developed by Freud, Winnicott's work on
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unconscious self-experience, especially as it is read through contemporary writers such as Bollas, brings the body back in experiential ways, seriously troubling the rather universalising Lacanian and textual analysis of postmodernity. As we have seen, in Freud's work, notions of bodily affect and unconscious self-experience displace the rather imposed division between the realist and narcissistic ego. A psychoanalytical return to the body thus features in this book as a displacement between the rather rigid divisions separating developmental object relations practice from linguistic, poststructuralist theory. This return to the body also displaces these equally rigid the real/ imaginary, history/theory, experience/language divisions which have made the academic relevance of psychoanalysis so difficult to negotiate with respect to the situated politics of class, gender, sexuality and race. My suggested return to the body implies that it has been somewhat excluded in psychoanalysis, when in rather obvious ways psychoanalysis has been the discourse par excellence of the body, where the unconscious body speaks. But I want to qualify now and develop later what I mean by a return to the notion of the unconscious body in psychoanalysis. In Freud's Oedipal account the narcissistic ego deals with its bodily desire for the mother by repressing ij under the paternal threat of castration. The return of this repressed unconscious is equated by Freud to the death drive. In his story of the boy child with the cotton reel, Freud describes this death drive as the moment when the child tries to master the mother's absence, by throwing the cotton reel out of the cot and then pulling it back, thus making the lost object, the mother, disappear and then reappear. The child in this story is dealing with anxiety over the potential loss of his relational attachment to the mother. But, on another level, the child is also dealing with an anxiety in relation to a death wish against the father and forbidden desire for the mother, a desire that the castrating paternal law says he must give up. For Freud, death moves beyond desire, beyond the pleasure principle, its aim being to return us finally to an inorganic pre-natal state. Desire in this scenario is intricately bound up with death, an internalisation of the death wish against the father, finally and violently turned in on the self. Freud's death drive has been developed in a number of different ways. Interestingly, within the object relations tradition, very opposite views are taken. Whereas Klein built most of her theory on Freud's notion of an instinctual and innate death drive, Winnicott quite flatly disagreed with the notion of a death drive, analysing narcissistic destructive impulses as failed dependency needs and guilt that had arisen within the object relation. Winnicott's famous saying, 'there is no such thing as a baby', meaning a baby is always relating on one level to another - the mother - is evidence of his refusal to see primary narcissism as a structuring force outside the object relation. For Winnicott, narcissism and destructive feelings were a secondary
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defence against dependency in the object relation, and did not suggest any constitutional aggression or guilt. Self psychology in America has developed the interpersonal concerns of object relations thinking. Heinz Kohut is the major proponent of this theory and has attempted to move the analysis of narcissism beyond Oedipal frameworks. Kohut believes in the child's need for social relatedness. The parents, and the child's first social others, are crucial in providing empathic experiences, where the infant can develop creative and imaginary 'self objects' (these imaginary 'self objects' are similar to Winnicott's notion of transitional space). Self-love, in Kohut's view, was the key to healthy development and narcissistic deficiencies arose from failures in parental empathy. Crucially, Kohut saw aggression as secondary, brought about by inadequate parenting and lack of consolidation of self (Kohut, 1971). Otto Kernberg, a post-Kleinian thinker, has criticised Kohut for de-emphasising aggressive drives (Kernberg, 1984). Kernberg, following an intrapsychic focus on innate aggression and ambivalence, stresses how narcissism is a defence to cover deeper worthless feelings and a fragile sense of self. Winnicott's refusal of the death drive thus distinguishes him from Freud and Klein. Instead of seeing the unconscious as primarily a negative force, he saw it as potentially creative. This difference - whether the unconscious is perceived as negative or positive, and which comes first - is an important undercurrent in the various psychoanalytical approaches. One of Lacan's crucial insights concerned the way in which language mediates the body and provides an identity that can escape a collapse into the deathly castration associated with the mother's body. But the body in Lacan's and Freud's Oedipal story is always violently repressed, or just as violently returned as death. Winnicott's more creative unconscious is a promising alternative, but again the explanation of this unconscious in terms of either desire or language is missing. Nevertheless, a more creative unconscious that can represent the body rather than repress it is available in Bollas's work. The difficulty, however, is still that this creative and representative unconscious remains unconnected with more cultural narratives. The Oedipal complex remains the dominant account of how the body is mediated by language, and how the psyche negotiates the social. As we have seen, the Oedipal complex is theorised, not in terms of a creative unconscious, but in relation to primary narcissism and the death drive. This means that the most persuasive psychoanalytic accounts of culture are Oedipal ones, drawing on either Freud or Lacan. Maybe the death drive is the most developed explanation of how culture and the psyche meet, but this leaves us with a rather depressing picture of both people and society. Given the context of Freud's writing (two world wars), it is perhaps not suprising that he developed such a pessimistic view of civilisation. Again, in a more contemporary context, Jacqueline Rose has analysed
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Thatcherism and Margaret Thatcher in terms of the death drive. Such a reading is convincing and apt in view of such extreme and obvious forms of social and psychic violence, but it leaves debates of a more positive cultural unconscious out in the cold. As we shall see, a more positive cultural model of the unconscious remains dependent on finding a narrative to represent the body. Such a narrative, however, would have to mediate Winnicott's transitional psychic space in ways which were not Oedipal.
Poststructuralist psychoanalysis ^ ^ H B It is now easy to see why the cultural emphasis of more contemporary postmodern identities leans more strongly towards Oedipal psychoanalysis. Object relations theory has been characterised predominantly for its development of intersubjective relationships in terms of a relational need. Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, as the orginating script for postructuralist and postmodern approaches, focuses on the intersubjective space between people as one of cultural desire. As we have seen, Lacan develops the narcissistic ego, rather than Freud's realist ego, oriented to object relations. Lacan's theory of the ego, depicted in his account of 'the mirror stage', posits a developmental stage where the small unintegrated infant sees his bodily image reflected in a mirror, and then misrecognises that reflection, seeing itself as unitary and whole rather than fragmented (Lacan, 1977). Lacan's trajectory of the mirror stage can be placed in direct opposition to Winnicott's. Whereas Winnicott sees the mirror stage as reflecting back a more integrated self through the mirroring recognition of the mother, Lacan sees the mirror reflection of the imaginary ego as a narcissistic illusion. Such fantasies of ideal self-unity and omnipotence which characterise the imaginary can be seen to be played out in a variety of institutions in society, the family, education, politics and so on, where omnipotent self-mastery seems to distort the relationship between individuals and the social Moving out of this imaginary register of self-important narcissism can be done only through access to the symbolic register of language. Language in its postructuralist sense represents the symbolic plane of culture. Cultural identity and subjectivity can only be achieved by passing from the imaginary ego to the symbolic register of language, where infantile illusory desire can be given up for the more ethical and desiring intersubjective world of the cultural symbolic. But of course, the imaginary is never really given up. Hence its distorting operations within institutions such as the family, education and politics, where the imaginary and symbolic in fact work in relationship to each other, with the negative force of the unconscious imaginary constantly subverting the more cultural and conscious symbolic. Lacanian psychoanalysis has exerted a mainstream influence on the academic institution, with its popular ideas that cultural identities and subjects are
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constructed through language. Lacanian psychoanalysis, therefore, is rooted in a structuralist and postructuralist traditions of linguistics, originating with the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropological work of Levi-Strauss. Saussure argued that the world was structured according to a universal social system of semiotics or language. This system he called langue, distinguishing it from the individual speech utterance, which he termed parole. For Saussure, language is made up, not of words, but of signs. Each sign has two sides, the signifier and the signified, and the relation between these two is arbitrary. This means that the signifier does not point to a signified meaning or truth outside language. Instead the signifier and signified only have meaning in so far as they relate in a signifying chain. Therefore, father only means father in relation to mother, daughter, son, etc. In a similar manner Levi-Strauss argued for a structural and linguistic organisation of society in terms of the Oedipus myth. This mythic organisation of the world reflected, for Levi-Strauss, the structural make-up of the mind. Drawing on these linguistic theories, Lacan saw the unconscious as being structured like a language. Entry into subjectivity is dependent on the entry into language, as a system of signs, where a position is taken up in an Oedipally relational system. Unconscious desire governs this process, bringing the subject into language, but at the same time it also constantly disrupts the linguistic subject, making it inherently split and unstable. In terms of the imaginary and symbolic, this means that although the symbolic is a linguistic order which brings the subject into being, separating the I from the not I, the subject, because it is constructed by language, is also always disrupted by the unconscious desire of the imaginary. Lacanian psychoanalysis has thus been used to account for the 'decentred' subject within postmoderniry. Because the subject is always disrupted through unconscious desire, and because any inherent stability of the ego is imaginary and narcissistic rather than real, this fantasybased identity is able to critique and displace the realist authentic and classical accounts of a whole transcendental ego that have characterised so much of object relations theory. Other postmodern thinkers also theorise a decentred subject using psychoanalysis, but not all of them are in agreement with a Lacanian structural and linguistic account. As we shall see in the next chapter, Lacan's analysis of the unconscious as being structured like a language is inextricably tied to an Oedipal account of sexual difference. The phallus, as a linguistic signifier, constructs the subject, repressing the bodily relation to the maternal body. The body or the 'real' is very much excluded in Lacan's account, being always substituted by metaphorical symbolic language. But if the symbolic excludes the bodily real, so does the imaginary. Lacan's imaginary, as well as the symbolic, are completely divided from the real, sensual relation to the body. This exclusion of bodily affect in Lacan's work informs his dismissal of the more empirical emphasis on
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experience in object relations theory. Unfortunately this rejection has resulted in a dialogue between psychoanalysis and the academic disciplines of feminism, queer theory and postcolonialism which revolves around purely phallic constructions of subjectivity. Whether this is the feminist defence of the phallus by Mitchell and Rose, Judith Butler's lesbian phallus, or Homi Bhabha's phallic reading of Fanon, there is no alternative to an Oedipal construction of subjectivity. This has led many feminists, gay theorists and postcolonial critics to reject psychoanalysis, because of its universalising, ahistorical discourse. It is perceived as a discourse which subsumes all other experiential and marginal histories to a generalised and relational phallic 'other'. This book enters into a psychoanalytical dialogue with feminism, queer theory and postcolonialism, but instead of automatically assuming that dialogue to be a phallic one, it interrogates the relationship between the phallus and the body as it is played out in these debates, arguing for alternative and interdisciplinary models of the unconscious which do not automatically subsume the experiential body under universal, linguistic models. Other postmodern thinkers who have advocated a 'decentred' self have taken issue with Lacan's concept of a linguistic unconscious. Jean-Francois Lyotard accepts the structuring action of a linguistic symbolic, arguing that culture is made up of symbolic language games. But he takes issue with Lacan's view of a linguistically structured unconscious. For Lyotard, the unconscious cannot be understood in such a linear way; it cannot be seen as a language which 'thinks'. Instead the unconscious is a more libidinal, bodily trace, a condensation of images which can paint but cannot be organised as thought, or mental representation (Lyotard, 1971). Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus also criticises Lacan from a more 'bodily' perspective. Arguing against Lacan's and Freud's Oedipal psychoanalysis, they suggest that the paternal law represses libidinal bodily desire. Taking schizophrenia as a revolutionary example of unrepressed bodily desire that can represent a breakthrough rather than a breakdown of cultural subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari trace the postmodern potential of such primordial energy, presenting the free and circulating flow of desire overcoming the more despotic signifiers and laws of paternal, imperialistic modernity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). Thinkers in a more poststructuralist frame have revisited Lacanian psychoanalysis with a renewed emphasis on the body. Slavoj Zizek's ideological perspective is centred within a Lacanian Althusserian framework (Zizek, 1989). Taking Althusser's suggestion that ideology is an imaginary landscape which links unconscious desire to social and symbolic institutional forms, Zizek argues for an account of ideological discourse that is rooted in imaginary fantasy. But this imaginary has at its core a terrifying traumatic relation to the body. Fantasy and the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of ideological discourse are a means of escaping this traumatic and terrifying kernel of bodily
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desire. Culture and fantasy, for Zizek, represent not just a substitute, but a sublimated protection from the deathly embrace of the bodily real. So although ideology functions by reproducing socio-symbolic forms, the fantasy at the heart of ideology cannot be contained by the symbolic, but always threatens to overspill into a violent and traumatic bodily excess. Examples of this excessive and violent fantasy can be seen to operate within discourses of fascism and nationalism, and are most likely to occur when ideological identification is stretched to excessive limits, as the recent events of the Gulf or Bosnian wars demonstrate. In a rather similar post-Lacanian vein, Julia Kristeva, focusing on language rather than ideology, argues for a violent and sacrificial abject relation to the maternal body as a founding and unrepresentable material base for our current social and symbolic order (Kristeva, 1980). The body, in Kristeva's account, returns to trouble and subvert the Lacanian symbolic, but its violent and terroristic force can only be mediated by a loving paternal law. In this way Kristeva reverts to a classical Freudian account of the Oedipal as a civilising sublimation of the deathly drives associated with a primordial feminine body. The unconscious is essentially, at heart, a negative and destructive force. It is therefore no suprise that Kristeva's more bodily reinscription of Lacanian terms reverts back to Klein's object relations theory. An unswerving adherence to a primarily narcissistic ego characterises Kristeva's work, however, and the body consequently remains a largely unconscious and negative force as it cannot be represented in terms of an Oedipal social and symbolic reality. Kristeva's contemporary, Luce Irigaray, explicitly challenges the Oedipal discourse of both Freud and Lacan, arguing for a non-phallic representation of the mother's body within the symbolic (Irigaray, 1985). Irigaray quite clearly seeks an alternative to the narcissistic ego that founds Lacan's phallic theory in her depiction of an intersubjective and ethical imaginary between mother and daughter that is 'neither one nor two'. Although Irigaray does not seek recourse to a more realist, object relations depiction of the self, it is one of the explicit themes of this book that her theorisation of an intersubjective non-Oedipal desire can be linked fruitfully to an account of desire, in which the body can find positive representation in terms of symbolic and cultural 'reality'. Putting Irigaray's work into dialogue with Christopher Bollas's theorisation of a more bodily experiential unconscious - or the bodily imaginary - is one of the explicit ways in which this book will challenge the seemingly divided arenas of theory and history, theory and practice, language and experience. Jean Laplanche's poststructuralist theories move away from Lacanian linguistics to retrace a pathway to Freud's primal seduction theory (Laplanche, 1987). In doing so they mobilise a more historical reading through a focus on the real event. Freud originally thought that hysteria was a repression of child sexual seduction or abuse. The repression of this real event, he believed, led to
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the hysterical symptoms in the patients he treated. Later he revoked this theory in favour of a theory of infantile sexuality, fantasy and the Oedipal unconscious. Instead of really being seduced, his female patients had fantasised Oedipal seduction by their fathers. Jeffrey Masson famously attacked Freud for covering up the truth of child sexual abuse with the fiction of Oedipal psychoanalysis. Masson argued that the truth of the real event, child sexual abuse, had been concealed by Freud for political reasons. Consequently, Oedipal theory and psychoanalysis was not just a fiction for Masson, but a fraud (Masson, 1984). Laplanche, writing at the same time as Masson, did not dispute the presence of child abuse, but instead of constructing a simple dichotomy between fantasy and child seduction, argued that the fantasy world of the child is based on a structure of primal seduction. In this structure, the parents send an 'enigmatic signification' to the child; a message which is both conscious and unconscious, verbal and non-verbal. Here, prohibition and repressed sexual desire are instilled through the seductive other. It is the parents' enigmatic message (full of their own repressed sexuality) that is passed on and in turn founds the child's own desire. Laplanche's work provides a very different structural account of the unconscious to Lacan. Despite their differences, however, they are quite similar in their globalising reach. Whereas, for Lacan, the linguistic phallus structures the individual, for Laplanche, the self is structured in a universal way ultimately determined by the parents' sexuality. Jacqueline Rose has criticised Laplanche for rooting all unconscious life in the external world, providing an account of desire and subjectivity that is a theory of primal seduction: he thus brings the narcissistic fantasy ego together with the object relational emphasis on external reality, so dissolving the opposition between 'fantasy' and 'reality'. At the end of the last chapter I argued for a more political reading of psychoanalysis that would acknowledge a dialogic agency in both subjectivity and society. This dialogic model can politicise the notion of the abject, seeking not just to understand how abject categories of the feminine, homosexuality and race are structurally positioned in a negative way under dominant Oedipal readings, but also how they can enact different and more positive narratives of the body. Such a dialogic understanding cannot be traced within Freud's model of the return of the repressed, because in this scenario the pleasure principle narcissistically returns as a violent other, proving not just a primary repression of death, but the inescapability of the dominant and the impossibility of any oppositional discourse. This chapter has charted some of the polarisations in psychoanalytic thinking that have divided narcissistic accounts of the ego (and the complex theories of Lacanian textual identity that accompany them), from the more practice-driven realist ego of object relations theory. Finding a dialogic alternative to the death drive is dependent, however,
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on bridging the gap between the narcissistic and realist ego. Locating positive accounts of bodily narcissism that connect with the social and the ethical alterity of the other, or representing an imaginary that negotiates with the real, is an implicit agenda within this book, aimed at dissolving the historical binary divisions between practice/theory, history/theory, experience/language, and deconstructing in the process the division between the object-relating and the narcissistic ego.
fflmmm Between narcissistic and object-relating ego Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has recently reread the Freudian project in a way that deconstructs any opposition between the narcissistic ego and the object. Borch-Jacobsen posits identification as primary and constitutive of the subject. Desire, then, is an identification that does not aim to possess the object: 'Its basic verb is "to be" (to be like), not "to have" (to enjoy)' (Borch-Jacobsen, 1988: 28). For Borch-Jacobsen, then, identification as desire makes no distinction between ego and object. Self and other, inside and outside are always related. There is no desire for the object or the other that is separate from egoistic desire, because 'object orientated desire is also conceived as narcissistic' (Borch-Jacobsen, 1988: 99). The primary relatedness between self and other that Borch-Jacobsen suggests is interesting because it potentially undoes the Oedipal hierarchy which polarises phallic narcissistic desire in relation to a maternal bodily object. However, Borch-Jacobsen's notion that the 'object is a narcissistic object' still raises worrying difficulties for a cultural or political psychoanalysis. If the other can only be known narcissistically as the self, or part of the self, how can the other person's otherness be known without collapsing or annihilating it? In other words what happens to the recognition of difference? Borch-Jacobsen returns to the 'pre-history' of psychoanalysis and the understanding of hypnosis that Freud abandoned prior to constituting his theory of psychoanalysis. Hypnosis, Borch-Jacobsen tells us, did not disappear from psychoanalysis. Quite to the contrary, it reappears as the heart of psychoanalysis in the transference. Because transference is identical to hypnosis and because both figure the indissoluble emotional tie that constitutes the subject between self and other, or between ego and object, the transference can never be ended. The subject is formed out of the relation between ego and object. Not only is psychoanalysis originally rooted in the power of suggestion (from the other), but the subject is also constituted between self and other, and therefore between the internal fantasy world and the outside external relationship or event (Borch-Jacobsen, 1993). Gary Hall has recently used BorchJacobsen's work to argue for an opening up of the rather locked tension between Marxism and psychoanalysis (Hall, 1998: 31-50). Rethinking the
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'inside/outside dichotomy' between the ego and other has radical implications for a renewed understanding of the ways that history and psychoanalysis may be thought. There are some obvious links here between Borch-Jacobsen's reemphasis on hypnosis and the return Laplanche makes to Freud's seduction theory, where Laplanche locates the constitution of repressed desire in the seductive message or enigmatic signifier of the parents. But there are also very significant differences. For instance, Borch-Jacobsen disagrees flatly with the idea that desire is repressed through an external agency, whether that be the Oedipal complex, the linguistic symbolic or, indeed, primal seduction. Desires and wishes are not disguised because they are repressed by an interdictive law or prohibitive agency. Instead, desire is from the outset disguised or 'other' because it is mimetic.
Desire as identificatory mimesis M § i » Desire, then, is identificatory mime from the beginning between ego and object. This narcissistic mime or mimesis is thus the matrix of desire and, by the same token, the matrix of rivalry, hatred, and (in the social order) violence: 'I want what my brother, my model, my idol wants - and I want it in his place'. (Borch-Jacobsen, 1988: 27) Borch-Jacobsen, therefore, replaces Freud's repressive Oedipal father with a Kleinian notion of envy. The root of fantasies and wishes is to be found not in sexuality but in jealousy, envy and rivalry - a mimesis of the other, whom one does not wish to have but to be. In this way, Borch-Jacobsen disposes of the need to explain the relation between the psyche and society in terms of the life and death drives. Desire does not have an aim such as pleasure or unpleasure, because being mimetic it is without aim. Children playing at being Mummy and Daddy are not playing out their desire to be grown up. They are simply playing and miming because they identify. Their playing constitutes desire, it does not represent the desire to seek or have a goal or object. Understanding desire as mimesis provides another interesting perspective with regard to object relations theory and to Luce Irigaray's bodily imaginary, which she depicts as intersubjective, being 'neither one nor two'. If desire is rooted in mimesis, then the Oedipal hierarchies of having and being are displaced. Identification is something that happens before the Oedipal stage, not after it, and the Oedipal complex and the phallic stage, therefore, lose their centre stage as the prime moments of sublimation between the individual and culture. Borch-Jacobsen's account of mimesis and identification still remains problematic, however, in explaining the relation between the individual and society. The mimesis he describes subsumes the object into narcissistic identification, with the death instinct becoming, as he explains, merely the extreme
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ambivalence of identification as envy or hatred on a primitive level. BorchJacobsen explains how a Kleinian two-body account is always intrinsically social; there is no need, in his account, for a third phallic term or symbolic interdiction to separate or culturally sublimate the subject. But without this symbolic limit, how does the subject - and indeed society - avoid falling into a violent mimesis of the same? Surely some notion of the symbolic is important to acknowledge ethics, the Irigarayan difference between the same and the other? Although Borch-Jacobsen describes mimetic identification and ambivalence as a narcissistic movement that appropriates the object, other accounts of ambivalence (described in the first chapter) focusing on gender and maternal ambivalence, explain ambivalence operating not just in terms of a narcissistic one, but between two. Such an ambivalent identification, which would oscillate between narcissistic ego and object love without relinquishing one or the other, would constitute a more intersubjective and ethical imaginary for example, Luce Irigaray's depiction of the imaginary as being 'neither one nor two'. But this more ethical imaginary would (by reference to object relations theory) take more account of the relation to the external other, whether that means elaborating the reparation of Klein's depressive position or Winnicott's transitional space and the good-enough (because she is an ambivalent) mother. If repressive desire is understood as being constituted through violent mimetic identification, whereby the relation to the other is abjected and excluded, then within a dialogic explanation of the relationship between the body and culture the body can be represented more positively in terms of a mimetic identification that moves from one to the other. This more relational gesture between narcissistic ego and object is summed up by Irigaray in an important essay called 'The Gesture in Psychoanalysis' (Irigaray, 1993). Here Irigaray posits an alternative to Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' by rereading his story of the little boy and the cotton reel in terms of the little girl. Irigaray argues that girls can't enter the language of culture through a death drive or mastery that represses the mother as other, because to do this would be to eradicate the girl's subject identity that is the same as her mother's. Irigaray describes how the girl plays with her doll and mimes being and not-being like her mother. This mimesis or identification is not a narcissism that repressively masters the other. Instead the girl's identification passes backwards and forwards, miming and opening up a symbolic space for a desiring subjectivity. If the boy's narcissistic resolution is to master the mother as object, then the girl's dilemma is opposite. Unable to master the mother, the girl's problem is her lack of narcissism or autoerotic desire. If the girl's miming and identification fail to establish a symbolic space between her and her mother, the result is a failed identification or melancholia where the mother is incorporated as a dead object. This narcissistic lack, as we have seen, is often linked to both the experience and ideology of sacrificial motherhood in our society. But it is clear
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from this exposition, too, that ambivalent mothering (where the mother can subjectively own her desire) acts to contain and acknowledge identifications of both love and hate. Such identifications can provide the daughter with adequate narcissistic resources and the miming capabilities to represent her bodily self. Freud's narcissistic Oedipal phallus explains the repressive mechanisms whereby the body is excluded and abjected to a position outside culture and society, hysteria being accordingly the clinical name for this abjection. But in order to explain the dynamic way this model operates in society it is necessary to explore a more ambivalent model of identification (available within object relations theory) whereby mimetic identification is not tied primarily to a theory of repression or representation but is situated in a more experiential and affectual arena. This chapter has traced a contradiction, not just in Freud's work, but in psychoanalytic thinking as a whole; a tension that resides between theories of a realist and a narcissistic ego, but also in the difference between phallic theories of mental representation and other models of unconscious experience which call for a more positive experience of the affectual body. As we have seen this more life-affirming affectual positivity is present both within the bodily imaginary painted by Irigaray and the unconscious experience transitionally and transformatively located by Winnicott and Christopher Bollas respectively.
Dialogic mimesis of the affectual body Such an emphasis on the immanence of positive affectual experience disturbs the Lacanian, poststructuralist account of a desiring subject structured and split by desire and lack. Borch-Jacobsen has recently extended his work on hypnosis to the point of critiquing the whole Freudian, psychoanalytic model. Arguing that Freud covered up his work on hypnosis because of the seduction theory, Borch-Jacobsen argues that Freud's Oedipal theory was invented not to conceal the truth of the seduction theory (as Masson suggests), but as camouflage for Freud's own hypnotic role in suggesting seduction to his patients. The seduction theory, Borch-Jacobsen argues, was an extension of hypnosis and suggestion, from analyst to patient. Freud's work in this case was hardly original and had been explored before him by Charcot, Janet and many others. So rather than admit the unoriginality of his work, or his own culpability in suggesting/initiating the seduction of his patients, Freud chose to emphasise the psychic representation of fantasy and subjectivity. BorchJacobsen goes on to argue that the split desiring subject elucidated by a Lacanian reading of Freud understands the subject only as language, representation, discourse, etc. Suggesting that representation accounts for 'only one part of human experience', Borch-Jacobsen also argues that if a philosophy of representation can't account for the irrepresentable then we
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need another philosophy. 'What we need is a philosophy that accounts for experience, not one that denies VL (Borch-Jacobsen, 1997: 225). Although Borch-Jacobsen dismisses the negativity of a Freudian and Lacanian project because of its basis in the representationality of being, he ignores a considerable amount of work within object relations theory, and poststructuralist theories such as Irigaray's, where notions of unconscious affectual experience are explored. Klein's concept of envy, for instance, is identical with the ambivalent mimetic identification that Borch-Jacobsen puts in place of a repressive death drive. Of course, it is easy to see how envy can evolve into aggressive mastery and repression of the other, or a violent collapse into the same. But this ambivalence can also be experienced more positively as an identification which oscillates between envy and reparation, acknowledging sameness and difference. Whether this is played out in a fluidity of gender roles, in parenting or in the public sphere, the emphasis is not simply on an acknowledgement of difference, but on the transitional connection between spheres, gender roles and bodies, refusing both the realist authentic encapsulation of one identity or self, and the celebration of a violent, narcissistic, nonrelating ego. A more positive ambivalent mimesis or identification that can mime or play more freely between narcissistic ego and object can represent a dialogic possibility of representing the affectual body, thus bringing a materialist politics of psychoanalysis to fruition. The body does not have to be interminably repressed or split, it can be affectually expressed, transforming the symbolic and the law in various ways. No impossible tension here, between Marx and Freud or between history and psychoanalysis, but rather an ambivalent identification that can connect the language of theory with the politics of situated experience.
*
Conclusion
Freud's work has been the source of widely differing schools both in psychoanalytic thinking and in disciplinary practice. His seemingly divergent explanations of the narcissistic and realist ego have been developed in differing ways by Lacanian poststructuralist theory, on the one hand, and by the developmental schools of object relations theory on the other. Whilst academic institutions in Britain have focused mainly on a poststructuralist reading of Freud via Lacan, object relations theory has generally been discarded for its empirical and positivistic framework. Object relations theory focuses on the early mother infant bond, and the real experience of this early relatedness as determining identity. Alternatively, poststructuralist theory sees identity as a narcissistic illusion or a fiction of the self. The way this Lacanian concept of the imaginary self has been taken up institutionally can be traced through a history of feminist theory, literary theory and film studies. Where object relations theory
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has been used, for instance in feminist thinking, the poststructuralist emphasis on the decentred self has been lost in favour of more problematical renderings of core gender identity (see next chapter). One of the key themes in this book is that an emphasis on the body troubles distinctions between Freud's narcissistic and realist ego; it also troubles divisions between positivist object relations thinking and the more Oedipal, language-orientated poststructuralist accounts. Crucial to this discussion will be the narrative dimension of the body. Without a narrative account of the experiential relation to the body we are simply left with divisions between poststructuralist and developmental accounts and their respective allegiances to an Oedipal, linguistic script or a pre-Oedipal maternal realm outside language, culture and history. This book will trace the debates between psychoanalysis and the fields of feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory. Historically these debates have tended to become polarised between, on one hand, proponents of poststructuralist, Lacanian psychoanalysis - feminist critics such as Jacqueline Rose (1986), queer critics such as Judith Butler (1991) and postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha (1994) - and, on the other, critics who eschew psychoanalysis for its imaginary attention to the self, which is seen as being at odds with a more cultural and material emphasis on lived existence. Existing within these discussions is a crucial tension between notions of lived experience and representation, and between concepts of the 'real' and of the imaginary. Although these debates have been played out historically between Marxism and psychoanalysis, and later between cultural materialism and psychoanalysis, the advent of postmodernism has created serious problems for any understanding of the self that is outside language and textuality. Perhaps the most famous postmodernist to have pronounced a death sentence on the real and on any notion of history that is not mediated through language is Jean Baudrillard. The popularity of Lacanian psychoanalysis seems, perhaps, unstoppable within such a privileged textual arena. But increasingly psychoanalysis is being critiqued for its ahistorical analysis of subjectivity, and for being located in universal structures of the symbolic and language. For example, Elizabeth Grosz, a feminist and queer theorist, has recently rejected her former allegiance to Lacanian psychoanalysis because of its implicit phallic repression of the body (Grosz, 1994). But psychoanalysis can offer a more fluid connection between the body and cultural frameworks of thinking and subjectivity. Lacanian poststructuralism seems roqted in a linguistic analysis that represses or excludes the body, and object relations theory has been equally stuck in a kind of ontological essentialism of the true self. One of the central aims of this book is to draw together these two major strands of psychoanalytic thinking. If poststructuralist psychoanalysis has occupied the higher echelons of theory and in a sense has led to a more sophisticated and postmodern analysis of the decentred subject, then
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object relations theory has focused far more on the experiential aspects of practice and the affectual body. Although object relations theory has remained persistently trapped within a deadlock of positivist, developmental thinking, its focus on an intersubjective and embodied subject offers a much needed analysis of the affectual psychic landscape, an analysis that can, within a more postmodern frame, fill some of the material and political gaps left by what, for many political theorists of the subject, is an essentialist, linguistic Lacanianism. The remainder of this first section follows through this debate between poststructuralist and object relations theory in terms of differing feminisms. The next chapter deals with the specific dialogue between Lacanian and object relations feminism, while Chapter Four rereads French feminism through the lens of a more bodily imaginary. The reader of this book who is sceptical of psychoanalysis may wonder where indeed the political objections to psychoanalysis from the varied fields of feminism, queer theory and postcolonialism find, or are given, due place. These criticisms, with all their important and varied historicity, are put into dialogue within this book. Nevertheless, this is perhaps an apt moment to stress the refusal of this book to pit psychoanalysis against the political nature of feminist, queer and postcolonial identities. Psychoanalysis is, as I hope this book will show, a fundamentally political discourse that has hitherto not always served more marginal histories in terms of race, class and sexuality as well as perhaps it could. To leave psychoanalysis as a tool for consolidating or even deconstructing only dominant phallic models of subjectivity is to ignore perhaps one of the most neglected propositions of psychoanalysis: that the unconscious is not simply a sign of the repressed, or what has been abjected or excluded from the dominant symbolic; it is also a dialogic narrative of creativity. The unconscious, in other words, is situated history.
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Erikson, E. (1965) Childhood and Society, London: Penguin. Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, London: Routledge. Freud, A. (1936) The Ego and Mechanisms Of Defence, London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1915) 'Unconscious Emotions', in Standard Edition 14: 178. — (1917) 'Mourning and Melancholia, in Standard Edition 14 : 243. — (1923) 'The Ego and the Id', in Standard Edition, 19: 1-6. Fromm, E. (1973) The Crisis of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin. Hall, G. (1998) 'Between Marxism and psychoanalysis' in Campbell and Harbord (eds), Psycho-politics and Cultural Desires, London: UCL Press. Green, A. (1986) Conceptions Of Affect', in On Private Madness, New York: International Universities Press. Grosz, E. (1994) 'The Labors of Love. Analysing Perverse Desire: an Interrogation of Teresa de Lauretis's The Practice of Love\ in More Gender Trouble: Feminism Meets Queer Theory, issue of Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6, 2 - 3 . Guntrip, H. (1961) Personality Structure and Human Interaction: the Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory, New York: International Universities Press. Hartmann, H. (1939) Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, London: Imago. Horney, K. (1967) 'Denial of the Vagina (1933), in Feminine Psychology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 160. Irigaray, L. (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, trans Gillian C. Gull, Ithica: Cornell University Press. — (1993) 'Gesture in Psychoanalysis', in Female Genealogies, trans Gillian C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, E. (1927) 'Early Female Sexuality', in Papers on Psychoanalysis, Boston: Beacon Press, 495. — (1953) 'Book One: The Formative Years', in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols, New York: Basic Books. Kernberg, O. (1984) Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies, New Haven: Yale University Press. Klein, M. (1932) The Psychoanalysis of Children, London: Hogarth. — (1975) 'Sexual Development of the Girl' (1932), in The Psychoanalysis of Children Vol. 2, The Writings ofMelanie Klein, London: Hogarth. Kohut, H. (1971) The Analysis of the Self, New York: International Universities Press. Kristeva, J. (1980) Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection, trans by Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, J. (1977) 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the F, in ULcrits -A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1977. Laplanche, J. (1987) New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Oxford, Blackwell. Lyotard, J.F. (1971) Discourse, Figure, Paris: Klincksieck. Masson, J. (1984) Freud: the Assault on Truth - Freud s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, Boston and London: Faber. Rose, J. (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. Winnicott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality, London: Penguin. Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.
Between Psychoanalysis and Feminism
A great deal of contemporary feminist exchange with psychoanalysis has focused on the status of the phallus - from the early femininity debates discussed in the introduction, in which the phallus was used to emphasise mental and cultural representation and femininity became the marker of essential female nature, to the quite fierce encounters in the 1980s between Lacanian and object relations feminism, in which the phallus and a positive reclaiming of the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother's body seemed to occupy diametrically opposed camps. Although this chapter aims to represent these arguments, it also seeks to explore them discursively in a way which may help to undo the rather paralysed dichotomy with which they have been associated historically - on one hand heralding the paternal phallus as the only signifier of culture and symbolic identity, and on the other idealising the mother's body in terms of an essentialist mother/daughter bond.
Lacan Jacques Lacan's work returns to the aspects of Freud's thinking which highlighted narcissism, castration and the primacy of the phallus. Lacan's poststructuralist theory emphasises the illusory decentred fiction of the 'self and the polyvalent nature of unconscious desire which is structured like a language. Referring to Freud's emphasis on 'the talking cure' in The Interpretation Of Dreams and The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life, Lacan links what he sees as the centrality of language in Freud's text to structural linguistics, in particular the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Distancing psychoanalysis from empirical notions of the body and from a developmental, historical or diachronic approach, Lacan seeks to understand the subject within language in terms of structural internal laws which are ahistorical or synchronic.
\i\i\x,
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Whereas Freud discusses the mind's internal action in terms of the id, ego and super-ego, Lacan develops his own triadic structure of the mind in terms of the symbolic, imaginary and real. The imaginary can be understood as the first structuring event for Lacan's illusory self, located in the 'mirror stage' where the young child, previously unintegrated and fragmented, identifies its body image reflected in a mirror. However, this reflection is a mis-recognition, a deluded fantasy of selfhood and mastery which hides the narcissistic fragmentation of unconscious or psychic life. Although this narcissistic imaginary structures all relations between self and other, in other words all social life, it is only access to the symbolic order of language which can give birth to the individual as a sexual self-knowledgeable subject within culture. This is because language is necessary to intervene and separate the I from the not I, to establish the speaking subject as a cultural entity and to separate her/him from the undiflferentiated plenitude of the imaginary sphere. The linguistic signifier of separation and the symbolic is the phallus or the 'name of the father'. For Lacan, the phallus is a metaphor which does not refer to the bodily penis, although it operates identically to Freud's Oedipal penis by intervening between the pre-oedipal mother and child to liberate the subject from the unconscious drives of the maternal body. Lacan then spells out the symbolic action of the phallus: The phallus reveals its function here. In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a phantasy, if by that we mean an imaginary effect. Nor is it such an object (part, internal, good, bad etc.) in the sense that this term tends to accentuate the reality pertaining in a relation. It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolises. (Lacan, 1977: 281) The symbolic is a register of language and meaning which is linguistically mediated. Meaning becomes openly determined within a complex system of signifiers where one signifier is referenced to a chain of other signifiers and circulates freely, rather than being referred to a particular object or signified. The formative moment for the subject within Lacanian psychoanalysis is the structural position of the Oedipal complex, because it is at this point (which constitutes the subject and sexual difference) that the child, who hitherto has been the captive of the imaginary, accedes to the symbolic. If the symbolic is the realm of the Oedipal father and the imaginary corresponds to the preOedipal relation between mother and child, then the real in Lacan's account signifies an impossible, unrepresentable, psychotic relation to the mother's body. The real thus remains undiflferentiated for Lacan, outside symbolisation, residing at the heart of trauma. This is because the real partakes of the mental and material world. But just as material objects defy symbolisation, so does trauma. In this way the real can be seen to represent the impossible exigency of the body, abject and left over from identity and speech. But it also signifies the
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unrepresentable historical referent within postmodernism. Theorists of the postmodern argue not just for the collapse of the unified self and for the end of unifying discourses, but for the end of history itself. Lacan's real, then, is a seeming paradox, in that it portrays any unmediated relation or true reflection of the real as impossible. Access to culture and the social is only possible via the linguistic laws of the symbolic; the materiality of bodies or history which lies beyond this, is unspeakable and unrepresentable. For Lacan, then, the castration complex is crucial, because it is around symbolised castration, or lack, that his theory of the construction of sexual difference revolves. And the symbolisation of lack is the phallus, differentiating us from the mother and placing us within logic and language. The phallus has a two-fold meaning in Lacan's thinking. Although it still represents, as in Freud, castration and lack in terms of the mother, the phallus for Lacan also signifies the way in which meaning, sexual difference and identity are constructed through language and culture. By distancing his work from notions of materiality or the body, Lacan thus conceptualises the phallus as distinct from the biological penis. A complex relationship exists between the two, however, as Freud shows by using them interchangeably. In Freud's theory it is the sight of the mother's non-penis (her body), as well as the construed mental (and cultural) meaning which signifies castration or lack. The phallus, therefore, remains a privileged signifier of difference on a linguistic and a bodily level.
mmmm Winnicott and the object relation There are a number of basic differences between Lacanian psychoanalytic and object relations theory. The Lacanians occupy a narcissistic world, ultimately self-enclosed, referencing merely the self. Object relations theory, on the other hand, sees the basis of subjectivity as seeking and relating to objects. Whereas Freud concentrates on the repression of instinctual desire and the drives, and Lacan's work focuses on the linguistic basis for sexual identity and desire, object relations theory is concerned with the human relatedness which constructs the self. Particular emphasis is placed on the primary caretaking role of (usually) the mother. D. W. Winnicott exemplifies this emotionally nurturing bond (which brings the self into being) with his conceptualisation of the 'good-enough' mother. Like Lacan, Winnicott also posits the significance of a mirror stage, but instead of the illusory projected relationship with the m(other) described by Lacan, Winnicott emphasises the need for finding a real, not-fantasised relationship. Adequate reflection and mirroring by the mother of the child's potential true and loveable self permits the infant 'a moment of illusion', an experience of illusory or magical omnipotence. This experience is necessary for the emerging self and for negotiation with reality. The infant only needs a nearly perfect response in the first stage of life. To prepare for this, the
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mother enters a state of'primary maternal preoccupation' which lasts from the last weeks of pregnancy to the first few weeks of life. Separation for the infant occurs through a complex process of individuation which establishes differentiation from the mother. This optimum differentiation is a movement from inner to outer reality through a connecting transitional space. A good example of transitional space would be the child's ability to play. The mother's presence and her adaptation to the child is crucial for the infant's development of transitional space and subsequent apprehension of objective reality. Separation between child and mother occurs gradually and is activated by the necessary failure of good-enough mothering and the child's own internal impulses. For Winnicott, it is not the phallus or the 'name of the father' which invades the dyad to initiate the child into symbolic culture. Reality is not imposed in a repressive way, with the Oedipal complex holding instinctual impulses at bay. Symbolisation and culture, for Winnicott, are not oppositional or external to the self; they are produced out of a third transitional space. Movement into this transitional space between inner fantasy and the outer object world is dependent on 'good-enough mothering'. In other words, the mother's holding ability allows the illusory part of the child's world to construct, as well as discover, object reality. Construction of transitional objects such as a favourite toy, a sucked thumb, or a 'comfort' blanket form the basis of a potential and creative space between the child and the cultural world. Winnicott stresses the importance of not placing the transitional object either inside or outside the child: the question 'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' is not to be asked (Winnicott, 1974: 12). The child needs to be allowed to construct and discover the transitional object. An acceptance of this paradox is the acknowledgment of both subjective and objective components in discovering external reality. This space of play represents the transmission whereby the child places the mother first inside and then outside, or separate, from the self. This placing of the internal mother outside is a move from a projective identification with the mother, which Winnicott calls 'object relating', to a position which he calls 'object use'. This use of the mother is also her destruction. The baby must be allowed to destroy the mother in fantasy and the mother must accept his/her rage without retaliation. Survival of the mother or object from fantasised destruction enables the child to discover her as separate reality. The child can then recognise not just the mother's separation, but also the difference between fantasy and reality: The subject says to the object: 'I destroyed you', and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: 'Hello object!' 'I destroyed you!' 'While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy. (Winnicott, 1974: 80)
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v
Lacanian feminism
For Lacanian feminism the phallus is a central transcendental signifier; it represents patriarchal culture and the symbolic as the law or name of the father. By intervening and rupturing the imaginary pre-Oedipal bond with the mother, the phallus inaugurates and structures sexual identity and difference. As the phallus is synonymous with language and culture, it configures the Oedipal complex at a symbolic level. What this means is that the symbolic father prohibits and represses the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother and announces or signifies our sexed identities within culture. This paternal prohibition constructs the repressed unconscious; both sexes, therefore, enter the symbolic order of language as castrated. But as the symbolic is phallic, identity is constructed within the realm of the masculine; the feminine is left behind, situated as a negative, unconscious and bodily exclusion, outside culture, representation and sanity. As we can see, this reinscribes Freud's Oedipal scenario, not just in terms of the body but also at a linguistic and symbolic level. Lacan would argue that it is precisely this symbolic referencing of phallic desire which deconstructs sexed identities. The phallus deconstructs sexual identity because it reveals its own status as fraudulent, being merely a mask which covers over a fundamental splitting at the heart of identity. This split identity (signified by the phallus) reveals the fragmentation and lack of unconscious desire: the missing maternal object at the level of the imaginary. Gender identity is therefore a fiction constructed through the masculine phallus which masquerades in the place of the 'truth', covering up the impossible, contradictory nature of a feminine, negative unconscious. This unconscious disrupts any formulation of a fixed, coherent identity, be it masculine or feminine. Although this an unabashedly phallocentric model, Lacanian feminists claim its virtue lies in the displacement of phallocentric privilege, thus revealing coherent identity as a fraud. How much phallocentric power structures are displaced in Lacan's account is open to debate, and is a question which frames much of the argument in this book. Lacanian feminism has supported the Freudian and Lacanian position of phallic monism because it provides a cultural, non-biological account of femininity. These feminists return to the early controversy on female sexuality and critique the emphasis Horney, Klein and Jones place on the presence of an unconscious vagina; partially because of the implicit notion of innate heterosexuality or biological femininity which it carries, but also because of the normative emphasis on the ego which a refusal of the phallic term implies. The ^importance of Lacan for these feminists was his return and redefinition of the phallus within Freud's text, as this allows for an understanding of female sexuality as a socially constructed and linguistic entity, rather than some biological or essential (natural) essence.
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In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Juliet Mitchell defends Freud's phallocentrism, arguing that Freud analysed rather than prescribed patriarchal society. From this point of view, the importance of psychoanalysis for feminist thinking is the understanding of how we live the unconscious laws of society at the level of ideas and mental representation. Coming to Lacan from an Althusserian, Marxist background, Mitchell ties an exposition of gender to society, using Lacan to underline the significance of the unconscious mind in relation to culture: for Mitchell femininity and masculinity are mental, linguistic and therefore cultural constructions, which do away once and for all with the notion that gendered identities have a natural or essential equivalent in biological sex. Mitchell, like Freud, opposes the rejection of phallic castration as primary precisely because of the crucial notion of psychic bisexuality and phallic sexuality in women which the phallus implies. For her, the castration complex and penis envy designate a difficulty for both men and women in achieving femininity because of their 'identical fear of (and necessity for) the feminine position' (Mitchell, 1974: 64), Although Mitchell acknowledges the difficulty of the feminine position, she does not explore it; her interest lies in Lacan's symbolic and in an account of how gender inequality becomes reproduced, with men occupying the deluded position of self-knowledge and power, projecting their lack onto the woman as other. This scenario gives an immutable account of the symbolic order: the fiction of the phallus makes little difference as Oedipal authority becomes relayed and reiterated in a very real way. Jacqueline Rose is a Lacanian feminist who has followed Mitchell's adherence to the phallic term. Rose, however, places more emphasis on the difficulty of desire and subjectivity. These she links to the impossible nature of femininity in Freud's account. If we look back, Rose argues, to 'Jones's answer to Freud, it is clear that his opposition to Freud's concept of the phallic phase involves a rejection of the dimension of desire, of the loss of the object, of the difficulty inherent in sexuality itself (Rose, 1986: 64). Lacan's symbolic is radical because it returns the subject to the impossible question of desire. Whereas Jones posits identity as frustration or loss in relation to the mother, Lacan returns this question of identity to a maternal desire for the phallus, thus underwriting desire in place of the notion of satisfaction or need. For Rose, the rupturing of the asocial dyad by the phallus is a narrative which moves the debate on subjectivity away from accounts of mothering (which always frame the woman as responsible, either idealised or blamed) to focus on the meaning of desire in relation to identity. Thus, for Rose, what is radical in Lacan is his focus on maternal desire for the phallus. The implication here is that there is some recognition of the desire of women as mothers, but as I have argued elsewhere, Lacan's refusal to acknowledge the symbolic figuration of maternal desire (desire is always phallic) collapses maternal subjectivity within a solely imaginary, pre-Oedipal relationship.
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Rose sees the primary significance of the phallus as representing a fundamental splitting and therefore opposition between conscious and psychic life. Such splitting is crucial in understanding how the phallus divides the subject, initiating him/her into language and culture, repressing and repudiating femininity. This repression of the feminine therefore places a masculine position as the only viable option, relegating the feminine to an impossible, negative, ultimately unconscious, position. Psychoanalysis gives a political and feminist account of the path to femininity because, as Rose says, it demands 'through the concept of the unconscious that femininity is never simply achieved nor is it ever complete' (Rose, 1986: 7). This means that femininity is difficult for women. They cannot assume that role painlessly or without cost, for the feminine remains resistant to language and culture, and, in the sense that it fails, resistant to the very notion of identity. Inside the symbolic the feminine is defined as lack, absence, the repressed other, but outside it embodies a hysterical resistance to an Oedipal myth of passive subjectivity. The political force of Lacan's writing, for Rose, is how 'the phallus enjoins on the woman a definition in which she is simultaneously symptom and myth'. We can see, then, how the phallus and society work to define women as ideal or abject (inside or outside the symbolic), and the political difficulty for women in having to assume such an impossible feminine role (Rose, 1986: 81). Although Rose sees this negative feminine identity as a political escape from both pre-given biological assumptions of gender and a mere reflection of the patriarchal status quo, it is hard to see what is positive for women in Lacan's analysis. Although Rose moves beyond the immutable symbolic structures of Mitchell's work, we are still left with a masculine and phallic explanation of the unconscious and subjectivity. What does it mean always to insist that the feminine is negative, outside language - beyond culture? Why does the unconscious have to be understood in terms of phallic explanations, in terms of ideas and language? A great deal of clinical work in psychoanalysis focuses on what is pre-verbal but unconsciously experiential, what is experienced by the body but not necessarily spoken. Is this unconscious experience simply beyond representation or culture, as Lacan's account would seem to imply? For Lacan, the mother/child dyad is a pre-cultural symbiotic entity, utterly dependent on a violent intervention and rupture by the Oedipal phallus. But as the Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels points out, this gives little credit to the ability of either children or mothers to separate in a more autonomous way (Samuels, 1993: 141). Research by developmental psychologists such as Daniel Stern has paid heed to the early communications, or 'language', between mother and infant. This information seems to demand a rather more fluid interrelation between imaginary and symbolic, or between the unconscious and culture, than the narcissitic opposition the phallus implies (Stern, 1985). A more fluid connection between imaginary and symbolic would also
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potentially displace the dichotomy which positions the paternal as a symbolic repressive metaphor and the maternal or feminine imaginary as a negative lack outside of culture. Lacan's perception of the 'real' is also problematic. Why does the relation to the maternal body have to be psychotic and unrepresentable? What is at stake in making this traumatic kernel of the material body so resistant to mediation and symbolisation? Luce Irigaray is a post-Lacanian feminist who challenges Lacan's phallocentrism. Irigaray states quite boldly that the Lacanian 'real' is the material relation to the female body which has been repressed into a hysterical position by masculine institutions and discourse. It is, therefore, translatable and representable in symbolic terms, provided those terms are not a universal phallic symbolic. Irigaray's work is followed more closely in the next chapter.
Object relations feminism M « M Whereas the mother or the maternal body in Lacan's account is absent and frustrating, within Winnicott's work she represents a positive enabling presence. However, this positive presence within Winnicott's narrative precludes the mother from any separate subjectivity. In other words, although Winnicott stresses the importance of the mother, he does not characterise her as aggressive or desiring, or as having a libidinal force of her own. In Lacan's account the mother is absent or collapsed as an impossible, unrepresentable body; for Winnicott, she is present but inhabits a purely objective position. Feminists have criticised Winnicott for his concept of the 'good-enough mother', arguing that he returns real women and mothers to a myth and fantasy of idealisation, which of course is also a position of ultimate blame. This freezing of the external mother into a position of idealised blame ignores the internal or fantasy mother and the complexity of maternal desire. Indeed, the mother as a desiring being and being desired is missing from Winnicott's account, just as completely as the maternal subject of desire is banished by castrated lack within the writings of Freud and Lacan. Historically object relations theory has challenged Freud's Oedipal landscape of sexual difference. It stresses the bodily, pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother as an erotic connection which forms the basis for all future social and desiring relationships. As we can see from the early challenge to the primacy of the phallus, object relations theorists posit a core sense of gender identity. Whereas, in the phallic account, gender difference is only constructed through the later Oedipal stage, for object relations thinkers this identity is already in place. Likewise, in the phallic account identity is tied to sexual difference, whereas in object relations theory the formation of self is distinct from gender and sexuality, although it is linked in important ways. It would be a mistake, however, to align object relations theory with a purely biological, pre-cultural
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position. Although Mitchell and Rose critique Horney, Klein and Jones for their implicit assumption of a biologically based female sexuality, feminist object relations theory as a whole has been more focused on the environmental and cultural interaction with the mother-child bond and the consequences for the emergent self. Winnicott's writing has placed particular emphasis on the environmental mother and the interrelation between internal fantasy and external reality. Winnicott's emphasis on a mediation between inside and outside is thus in contradiction to Lacan's notion that the subject is irredeemably split by the unconscious and always radically lacking. The difference between Winnicott's core self and Lacan's lacking one has provided the divided territory for feminists who argue for and against essentialist and anti-essentialist notions of the self. Lacanian feminists, as we have seen, have taken the latter position, suggesting that any notion of a full or natural subjectivity is untenable. Nancy Chodorow is one feminist theorist who adopts objects relations theory and examines the pre-Oedipal bond in her attempt to explain the reproduction of mothering by mothers. Chodorow's work has been condemned by the Lacanian camp for essentialist notions of women's core gender identity. According to Chodorow, because women mother, they produce daughters with the desire and capacity to mother. On the other hand, sons are produced with nurturant qualities which are subsequently deeply repressed. Children develop a core self or identity by internalising their relations with the primary caretaker - usually the mother. By the time the father appears their identity is formed. The father is, therefore, a less significant figure. Mothering has different consequences for girls and boys. Girls have much more fluid ego boundaries because they cannot completely separate from the mother. The mother encourages identification and sees the female child as an extension of herself. Boys are experienced by the mother as different or 'other', they develop in opposition, radically separating and rejecting the mother in exchange for participation in the external world. Women's mothering therefore reproduces the gender division of labour whereby women mother to satisfy relational needs, whereas men follow their needs of disassociation and control of women in the world of work. Chodorow's writing thus gives a cultural explanation of why women are subordinated. Although she radically reverses Freud's masculine story of original lack, she comes under heavy fire, as we shall see, for proposing a determined and historically unchanging female identity which lumps all responsibility onto mothering. Dorothy Dinnerstein takes this responsibility on mothering even further. Attempting to explain the origins of the sexual division of labour through the dependency of the child on an all-powerful mother, Dinnerstein agrees with Winnicott's emphasis on the mother as the child's pathway to the external world. But unlike Winnicott, she argues that the current social arrangements in which women alone are responsible for child care have devastating effects,
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not just on the individual, but on the human's relation with nature and the fate of world history. For Dinnerstein, the memory of the all-powerful mother is repressed because it is so terrifying. Humans blame women because of infantile helplessness and fear of the mother. Men deny this helplessness and develop a dominant rationality which controls history and often destroys nature. Women, however, remain relationally based, in touch with nature and humanity, but peripheral or outside history making. This results in a dependent heterosexuality which perpetuates the imbalance in gender divisions. The only way out of this reproduction of mothering and gender roles, according to Chodorow and Dinnerstein, is the active participation of men in child care arrangements. Dinnerstein and Chodorow have been criticised heavily for biological determinacy and universalism respectively, Lacanian feminists, in particular, have judged Chodorow's work for its sociological determination. Chodorow is accused of producing a cycle of internalised social relations which endlessly repeats itself, collapsing the vital interplay between psyche and social. Jacqueline Rose, who has defended Lacan's theory (as we have seen) by insisting on the crucial meaning of the castration complex within his concept of the symbolic, cites Chodorow's work as an example of the difficulties raised by avoiding the significance of a phallic dynamic unconscious. In Rose's view, Chodorow's work is problematic because it 'displaces the concepts of the unconscious and bisexuality in favour of a notion of gender imprinting' (Rose, 1986: 60). The phallus, then, displaces essential categories of identity and gender, and signifies a crucial tension between the unconscious desire of the imaginary and the social world of the symbolic. Seemingly, Chodorow's work is flawed because it lacks a dynamic account of the unconscious, and such a dynamic explanation is needed to disrupt the endless repetition of gender role models which functionally reflect existing power relations. While Dinnerstein's work lacks historical specificity, Chodorow only focuses her analysis on white middle-class women within capitalist society. The criticisms of essentialism and universalism made against these women are, therefore, inevitable. There has been a curious tendency within psychoanalytic feminism to support either the paternal or maternal reference. As I have suggested this trend can be traced back to the early debates on the primacy of the phallus, with contemporary feminists valorising either a phallic mobile unconscious or a more essential femininity. Whereas in the early debate adherence to an early pre-Oedipal femininity culminated in a biologically pre-given and normative feminine ego, in later feminist writings the girl's object relational and preOedipal attachment to the mother reappears as much more cultural. Feminist advocates of the phallus have pointed out, however, that these accounts are just as normative, idealising the early relationship with the mother; she becomes fixed and frozen in her idealised external role, leaving the daughter's identity
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as culturally determined, with no acknowledgement of or access to the radical power of fantasy and the unconscious. Janet Saver's book Mothering Psychoanalysis critiques the practice and theory of feminist object relations thinking for its celebration and idealisation of mothering. This focus on the external mother ignores both the radical potential of the child's internal fantasy mother, and the interaction of this unconscious desire with the wider symbolic determinants of patriarchal society. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges also believe that the privilege of Winnicott's 'good-enough' mother emphasises positive reality at the expense of the radical role of fantasy and the unconscious. Their work can be seen to mirror the Lacanian feminist critique of Chodorow and object relations theory for prescribing gender roles and socialising the unconscious. Instead of the Lacanian phallus, however, Doane and Hodges propose Klein's object mother as representative of an internal world of radical fantasy and the unconscious. This Kleinian image of the mother, Devon and Hodges argue, is a 'fluid construction of the child's desires and anxieties', which focuses on the difficulties of sexual fantasy, rather than Winnicott's conservative underpinning of maternal responsibility' (Doane and Hodges, 1992: 16). In choosing a Kleinian unconscious mother, Doane and Hodges seem to undo the maternal and paternal polarity within psychoanalytic feminism; as an unconscious phallic mother, 'she is both inside and outside, both male and female'. However, their privileging of Klein's fantasy mother follows the emphasis, placed by Lacanian feminists on a phallic unconscious which is seen as a radical alternative to the real mother in object relations theory. I want to make two points here. First, if you refuse a position to the mother by giving her up to the shirting imaginary of the child's desires, she becomes identified as a negative unconscious lack with no subjectivity or desire of her own. Second, by choosing a theory which refuses to think through the external role of the mother, you give to that theory the power of fantasy, which can only idealise or denigrate the maternal position. Winnicott's focus on the 'goodenough' mother was radical precisely because he used it to mediate the projections of Klein's psychical mother. Winnicott did not ignore the unconscious, but he was interested in an unconscious that could be mediated m a reparative way with the environment. Object relations feminists cannot merely be ignored as essentialist. By underlining the mediating links between internal and external mother, they posit a viable alternative to the Lacanian feminist's adherence to a model of unconscious splitting. The Women's Therapy Centre in London exemplifies this Winnicottian mediation between psyche and culture. Sheila Ernst and Maggie Maguire focus on the harmful effects of an overweening identification between mother and daughter. This is linked in part to the lack of recognition mothering receives in the outside world; and also to the difficulty women experience in
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finding a separate identity outside of this role. Maggie Maguire points out how the internal fantasy of the child is affected by the environmental role of the mother. The social role of the mother still places her in the idealised and denigrated position of supposedly having to fulfil all her children's needs. The deprivation that results for many mothers inevitably affects their ability to contain or modify their children's internal fantasy or rage (Maguire, 1987: 117). It might be an idealistic fantasy that mothers identify and meet all children's needs, but it is an ideology which, in the main, is subscribed to by society. To summarise, then, some feminists see the theoretical emphasis on the mother as idealistic, essentialist and too unproblematic. Feminist Lacanians defend a phallocentric position through the importance they attribute to a social construction of sexuality. Their defence of Freud and Lacan is also made through an emphasis on the importance of psychical reality; a reality which, these feminists imply, is denied by other socialising aspects of psychoanalysis. This criticism holds some truth: Chodorow and Dinnerstein end up with a cyclical internalisation of social gender relations because they pay lip service to the presence of psychical reality, but don't really include it as a 'dynamic force' within their work. But although the Lacanian feminists stress the importance of psychical reality, there is no real argument over the model of the unconscious to which they adhere. One of the biggest stumbling blocks within psychoanalysis, for feminism, is the paternal Oedipal position. This triangular structure is the necessary third term which separates the child from the mother. Mitchell defends the position of the paternal phallus precisely because it symbolises the necessary 'third term'. Her adherence to the importance of the phallus lies in its significance as a signifier which culturally separates the asocial mother/child dyad, and as a signifier which constitutes the unconscious. The Oedipal and castration complex are the explanation, for Lacanian feminists, of how the social and the psyche are negotiated. Any alternatives fall back into the essentialist trap of advocating pure sociology or a world of unconscious, biological drives. A reappraisal of Chodorow's position in the light of more contemporary work by her and other feminist object relation thinkers in the field would address what I feel to be the rather unfair criticism which has been levelled at object relations feminism, and in particular at Chodorow. Such a re-evaluation is also important because a rethinking of the so called essentialist focus on the real mother in psychoanalytic feminism can help to undo the unhelpful splits which have privileged a phallic unconscious or a maternal reality. As we will see, these splits inform the relation of psychoanalytic criticism to the fields of queer theory, postcolonialism and postmodernism, and it is only by thinking through some of the essentialist and anti-essentialist binaries within feminist scholarship that we can also understand and analyse other tensions between
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culture, history and the psyche in an ongoing political way. Although contemporary feminists have left behind the stagnated debates of the 1980s with their entrenched essentialist and anti-essentialist binaries, discussion has moved on without resolving the rather polarised tension between the Lacanian and object relations factions. In fact, the difficulty in resolving this debate has been a factor in the reduced popularity of psychoanalysis, as though feminist psychoanalysis can only be thought through either in relation to a structural, ahistorical Lacanianism, or in terms of an essentialist object relations account, mired within positivistic frameworks. These either/or choices between poststructural fragmentation and positive notions of a 'core' self are not helpful in thinking through the difficulties of the relations between internal fantasy and external 'real' worlds. Moreover, such 'choices' become an easy option for academics, who then don't have to face the inherent problem of conceptual difficulty, and the interdisciplinary and institutional challenge of competing frameworks and philosophical traditions. It is easy to defend Lacan and criticise object relations theory from within a poststructural climate of academic debate. It is just as easy to relegate Lacan to the realms of high theory and jargon when you are approaching psychoanalysis from an empirical or practice-oriented tradition so heavily steeped in Winnicottian or Kleinian thinking. Although object relations theory has been critiqued by some feminists for idealising the external role of the mother, Chodorow uses this theory to show how feminist writing and criticism is enmeshed within cultural and psychic fantasies of the perfect (and debased) mother. In her later book Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Chodorow articulates a brilliant and lucid debate on contemporary feminist psychoanalysis, arguing for a dialogue between the differing psychoanalytic and feminist traditions. The first salient point Chodorow makes concerns the division between clinical psychoanalytic practice and psychoanalytic feminism. Whereas clinical psychoanalysis has concerned itself with the evidential and scientific proof claims of empirical reality, psychoanalytic feminism - within debates on literary theory, philosophy and epistemology - has often rejected notions of empirical reality, identifying instead with a postmodern scepticism of the truth. Psychoanalysts talk amongst themselves and ignore, on the whole, the feminist academy. But Chodorow points out the necessity for psychoanalytic feminism to listen to the clinical debates 'even if and as we want to say something different' (Chodorow, 1989: 179). Much theoretical feminism draws its psychoanalytic material straight from the early debates on Freud, but Chodorow shows the importance of listening to those contemporary psychoanalysts who have refuted Freud's claims of a phallic sexual monism. Analysts such as Chasseguet-Smirgel and Kestenberg follow Horney in arguing for a primary feminine sexuality. Others such as
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Kleeman and Stoller posit a cognitive development of gender identity which is primary and interpersonal, making sexuality and 'genital experience distinctly derivative' (Chodorow, 1989:182). Chodorow's work helps map an American institutionalisation of psychoanalysis, and it is interesting that the analysts she cites place an emphasis on either sexuality or gender, thus mirroring a similar split between the Lacanian and object relations feminists' focus on either sexual difference or a relational gender identity. Chodorow's work helps us to understand the complex history of object relations feminism in terms of its institutional and national differences. Object relations feminism is more influenced by empirical argument as it is often situated within the social sciences, although by no means in harmony with the positivist mainstream of these fields. Often such feminist thinkers are also practising clinicians such as Chodorow, Jane Flax and Jessica Benjamin. Lacanian feminism in the academy roundly rejects empiricism, analysing their material as a story or text, and on the whole rejecting the arena of clinical practice. Lacan's work is therefore used to interpret questions of theory, language and representation, with therapeutic practice (along with Lacan's notorious methods) being left outside the back door. Object relations feminism has also been used within literary theory (critics such as Marianne Hirsch, Coppelia Kahn, Elizabeth Abel), and these feminists share with their Lacanian colleagues a postmodern critique of empirical reality and truth. Chodorow distinguishes, but also aligns, object relations feminism with the interpersonal (cultural or neo-Freudian) group. Feminists such as Baker, Miller and Gilligan stress the same aspects of interrelational female psychology - such as the mother-daughter relationship - as their object relations sisters; but whereas the object relations stance focuses on the ambivalence of an inner object world, the interpersonal group posits more cultural, unproblematic and positive affiliative ties between women. Much of the work of the interpersonal group stems from clinical practice and Chodorow clearly advocates an allegiance between object relations and interpersonal feminism, an alliance which contrasts with Lacanian feminism in specific and important ways. For Chodorow, 'object relations and interpersonal feminists are concerned with questions of self as this is separate but related to gender identity' (Chodorow, 1989:189). Lacanians, on the other hand, posit identity and subjectivity as indivisible from the constitution of sexual difference. Chodorow takes Lacanian feminism to task for returning to an old Freudian view of sexual monism in which the cognitive and mental recognition of sexual difference is the universal key to identity. This phallic position ignores more contemporary psychoanalytic debate which has posited a developmental account of primary femininity and genital awareness: 'Lacanian feminists seem to claim that the phallus is the phallus is the phallus; primary femininity psychoanalysts imply that the development meaning of the female genitals is self-evident'
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(Chodorow, 1989:197). Of course this emphasis on a primary femininity is more essentialist, but Chodorow suggests a dialogue between this more fixed psychoanalytic account of female sexuality and an object relations feminism which stresses the mobility and fluidity of gender identity. In this way Chodorow puts sexuality and gender into play, but whereas for the Lacanians sexual desire radically destabilises gender, for Chodorow it is gender which adds fluidity to a sexuality which is fixed. Notions of primary femininity bring in the bodily and sexual experience that object relations has tended to downplay, but for Chodorow it is gender that signifies radical mobility, not unconscious sexual desire. A Lacanian feminist response to Chodorow's arguments would be to point out that the only path away from either sociological gender imprinting or fixed accounts of a biological unconscious is a phallic one. It is only the phallic or Oedipal model of sexuality, in Lacan and Freud, which has the power to destabilise fixed gender identities and provide the necessary oscillation between internal fantasy and cultural ideology. They would then view a primary developmental emphasis on the girl's awareness or experience of her genitals as essentialist, not only because of the normative equation between female sex and subsequent gender, but also because this emphasis on early sexual experience displaces the phallic bisexual mobility of unconscious desire, and the symbolic, cultural division of sexual difference. However, what the primary femininity psychoanalysts are stressing is that girls do have an experiential awareness of their bodies. This experience may hover between conscious and unconscious, but it does seem to somewhat negate the universal significance attributed to the phallus by the Lacanians. What is missing from Chodorow's emphasis on primary femininity and gender identity is an explanation of negotiation between female imaginary desire and the symbolic. How is female desire reproduced historically in our society and how does it become transcribed into our socio-symbolic?
Object relations feminism in a \m:ZM~* postmodern frame Contemporary object relations feminists have moved this debate on in a variety of ways. Jane Flax, as psychotherapist and postmodern thinker, returns to address the idealisation of the mother within feminist thinking, making specific reference to her own object relations practice (Flax, 1993). In arguing for a thorough deconstruction of the fantasies of an ideal mother, Flax lays out what she thinks are the stakes for the white middle-class woman's investment in this purely good, ethical and asexual mother. Belief in such a mother represses issues of desire, sexuality and aggression. Feminists do not have to
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worry about what motherhood or female sexuality mean to black women or working-class women; they simply subordinate other forms of female sexuality which do not live up to their maternal ideal. This ideal also gives white feminists the ambivalent privilege of an innocent victim by refusing to acknowledge the inclusion of women within circuits of power, with their needs and desires for aggression mastery and control. Distinctly critical of the celebration of the mother-daughter relationship in feminist thinking, Flax stresses how autonomy and relational qualities in both men and women are the necessary tools for communication and a restructuring of gender relations. Returning to Winnicott, Flax points out that the crucial transitional space of creativity between mother and child is actually dependent on the mother's refusal to mother: her ability to hate, walk away, desire other things. It is this crucial intermediate space that forms the basis for justice, reciprocity and culture, presenting for Flax a viable alternative to the Lacanian division by the phallus. One of the difficulties in using Winnicott's third world between mother and infant to explain culture and symbolisation is that there is no adequate explanation of how this transitional space interrelates with the deeper structures of a patriarchal symbolic. How does this space of play between inner and outer reality speak into and transform the language and power discourse of our cultural institutions? For Flax, justice, citizenship and reciprocity in the public sphere are all later instances of this early transitional phenomena (Flax, 1993). Here, Winnicott's transitional space seems to replace the idealised good mother that Flax critiques, as it single-handedly transforms all gender and power relationships. There is no explanation in Winnicott's work of the complex interplay between unconscious desire and the symbolic discourses of culture. The danger of using Winnicott's transitional space to explain the health or ills of society is that culture is read forward and back in terms of the right sort of mothering skills in the nursery. And this, in a quite literal sense, collapses Flax's vision of 'transitional phenomena' within society into idealised 'good-enough' mothering. Madelon Sprengnether's book The Spectral Mother (1990) directly confronts this ongoing polarisation or difficulty between an idealised mother or phallic symbolic. Sprengnether deconstructs the maternal in psychoanalytic thinking, pointing out how the mother has in Freud, Winnicott and Lacan simply occupied an object position as other. Arguing for a recognition of maternal subjectivity, Sprengnether proposes a maternal symbolic which will substitute the phallic name of the father with the pre-Oedipal body of the mother. For Sprengnether, this symbolically empowered pre-Oedipal mother can represent all the fluidity, difference and identity that has been repressed by the Oedipal phallus. This maternal symbolic thus provides an alternative subjectivity, placing the mother not just as an object of desire, but also as a 'self, and thereby rectifying the mother's subordination as other.
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Teresa de Lauretis, however, has criticised Sprengnether's symbolic figure of the pre-Oedipal mother, arguing that its nature is really that of a maternal imaginary. Substituting this maternal imaginary/symbolic for the phallus and all paternal functions might bring the mother's body into signification and culture, but it does so only by making the maternal all-powerful and allencompassing. In other words, the mother does not just represent the unconscious (as other), she also represents the law, displacing the phallus to set up a much more terrifying maternal omnipotence. As de Lauretis points out, there is no explanation in this account of how such a maternal symbolic constitutes sexual difference, interrelates with the unconscious, or constructs female subjectivity. This, then, is the question that de Lauretis aims not just at Sprengnether, but at all the object relations feminists who concentrate on female subjectivity as it 'is conceived of in relation to the maternal only as it effects social and gender reproduction, and not as it affects sexuality and desire, whether heterosexual or lesbian' (de Lauretis, 1994: 166). If object relations theory has played down sexuality and unconscious desire, however, then Lacanian theory has made them into a universal grid of reference for identity where, as Chodorow says, 'the phallus, is the phallus is the phallus'. Jessica Benjamin is an important analyst and critic who has returned to the missing paternal function and the absence of unconscious desire within object relations feminism. Benjamin's work manifests itself as a timely intervention for the seemingly interminable polarisations (see this chapter!) between Lacanian and object relations theory. Although Benjamin follows Chodorow's analysis of the reproduction of gender asymmetry, where boys are separate and autonomous and girls present as regressively identified with the mother, she swaps the term gender identity for gender identification. Gender identification suggests a much more unconscious process of desiring and relating, rather than a fixed 'core' identity, and Benjamin analyses the infant's identificatory love for the pre-Oedipal, or rapprochement, mother and father. This identificatory love establishes a developmental pathway to individuation, creating a more fluid transition between pre-Oedipal and Oedipal stages. These pre-Oedipal ideal loves for the mother and father can transform gender relations, giving the girl access to a more autonomous subjectivity and the boy more nurturing qualities. This potential scenario of equality nevertheless breaks down, because cultural ideology insists on placing the mother in a regressive position; ideal identification with her is impossible and active desire remains with the father. Boys go on to identify and separate via the phallus, whereas girls proceed masochistically to desire the male power that they lack. This, in turn, creates a master/ slave dichotomy in gender relations. Transforming this patriarchal status quo means promoting an ideal love for children in relation to both parents. But the problem for Benjamin seems to lie, not so much in how to restore nurturing
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fathers, but how to promote a socially autonomous role for the mother. Identification with a pre-Oedipal father, who is both exciting and empathic, inspires the girl with fantasies of power, providing her with the bodily desire necessary to move out and explore the world. But access to this exciting identificatory love for the rapprochement father is difficult for girls because they are also faced with their mother's lack of subjectivity. For Benjamin, 'the organisation of parenting alone is not the sole foundation of the gender division' (Benjamin, 1990: 123). In her view, the symbolic organisation of sexual difference within society does not reconcile femininity with active desire; therefore we are left with 'a fundamental structure of heterosexuality in which the father supplies the missing excitement, "beats back the maternal power", and denies the mother's subjectivity because it is too dangerous' (Benjamin, 1990:123). But a female alternative to the symbolic phallus is impossible, in Benjamin's view, for two reasons. First, because historically symbolic representation of the mother's body has been 'organised and dominated by the phallus'; and second, because the symbolic dimension of the psyche is already occupied by the phallus (on other words, the phallus represents castration anxiety and active desire in relation to a consequent objectified and passive maternal body) (Benjamin, 1990: 124). Benjamin opts then not for a female counterpart to the phallus, but for an altogether different psychic register of intersubjectivity which she locates in terms of Winnicott's concept of intersubjective and transitional space. Like Chodorow, Benjamin returns to an object relations focus on intersubjectivity and the experiential world, 'between and within individuals rather than just within (Benjamin, 1990:125). In contrast to the phallus, which figures symbolic separation and mental internalisation of activity and desire, this intersubjective space focuses on the space between individuals, not just on what is inside them. Here, real and imaginary, internal and external are not split by the phallus, and the subjectivities of both man and woman can meet and be recognised. This is the arena, then, where the woman can gain symbolic recognition of her desire, but it is a model which, following Winnicott, focuses on her inner being and space; an active receptivity rather than passivity. So, whereas the phallus signifies a locatable active desire, woman's desire finds representation within a spatial 'dance of mutual recognition'. As Benjamin herself admits, this sounds very much like a reinscribing of gender polarities but she insists that both psychic registers of the phallus and intersubjective space co-exist within each individual, even if they remain culturally reinforced as gender polarities, with the boy identifying with the exciting phallus and the girl with the more receptive and holding mother. The strength of Benjamin's account is that it theorises unconscious desire in relation to object relations feminism, bringing in the psychic processes of identification and idealisation as an available explanation of the developmental
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growth and individuation of the self. The intersubjective domain of the infant in the object relations perspective is not constituted by symbolic structures, or by sexual difference as phallic theory would have it. Only later does the self become entangled with symbolic structures and with sexual difference. To begin with it is formed through the processes of identification and separation which have been described. In this way, Benjamin makes sexual difference secondary and intersubjectivity primary, but she also suggest a dynamic interplay between the two, so that the sexually exciting father and the holding, receptive mother can play an equal role in the unconscious identificatory love of both men and women. Benjamin's ideas provide a bridge between object relations and Lacanian feminism. Her work can be seen to embody potentially the kind of dialogue Chodorow calls for, between different traditions of feminism and psychoanalysis. We are left with certain difficulties with Benjamin's project, however, which cannot be so easily dismissed. By seeing an intersubjective, object relations account as the key to understanding the formation of the self, Benjamin gives sexuality and the symbolic a more secondary role, and therefore leaves them with the father. In other words, Benjamin accepts the Freudian and Lacanian premise that the phallus represents active sexuality and the symbolic, but refuses the Lacanian premise that this symbolic is causative, or that it constitutes identity. But if the symbolic is immutably phallic, how can changes be made; how can women's sexual desire be recognised subjectively at a deeper structural level in society? For Benjamin, the rapprochement father has a special significance for the girl because he is her pathway to the exciting outside world and to bodily desire. Ideal love for the mother thus has to be abandoned, because under traditional parenting constellations the mother's subjectivity is denied, and she cannot be articulated as a sexual subject. Questions, nevertheless, remain. Why should the father be the exciting idealised figure and not the mother? Traditional parenting constellations are for many people nowadays not applicable. So what happens if in single parent or lesbian families the mother, and not the father, becomes that exciting idealised relation to the outside world? Does the mother then embody the paternal identification with the phallus, and, if so, what happens to her recognition as a woman and a sexual subject? If active desire is masculine, with the principal problem for the girl being a denied identification with the father, how does the symbolic interact with woman's desire, in Benjamin's account? Although Benjamin suggests a much more fluid interaction between Oedipal and pre-Oedipal spheres, she does not explain how the symbolic represents or interacts with female sexuality. As de Lauretis points out, it is not only heterosexual desire, but also women's homosexual desire which needs to be explored in relation to the phallus. For Benjamin, changes to the symbolic can come about through the child's construction of more fluid identifications
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between an empathic father and a socially autonomous mother; these ideal loves can mediate and transform the more rigid splits of patriarchal society. Joining with other object relations feminists, Benjamin consequently sees the sexual difference debates as the more conservative, and focuses instead on the radical unconscious mobility of gender. Lacanians, of course, would object, arguing that it is only by granting a primacy to the phallus and the associated interaction between sexual difference and the symbolic that inequality and change can be understood. Benjamin's emphasis, however, on the relation between processes of identification and the wider structures of symbolic power in society provides an important arena for thinking through the gap between identity and difference debates within feminist criticism. Benjamin's more recent work, in Like Subjects, Love Objects, has foregrounded the doubleness of intersubjectivity and the intrapsychic, so bringing together an object relations focus on the external object and the more narcissistic models of fantasy operating in postructuralist discourse (Benjamin, 1995). Benjamin brings together Freud's narcissistic and realist ego but instead of following a Lacanian explanation of how desire interacts with the sociosymbolic, she returns to Winnicott's view, where the psyche relates both to the other as an object of projection and identification and to the other as an autonomous anpl outside subject. In this scenario the self regards the other as part of the self and also as 'an equivalent and different centre of existence' (Benjamin, 1995: 6). As Benjamin asks, how can we distinguish between identificatory and object love, if 'in object love we desire what we might have once wished to be (like) but recognise that we cannot be' (Benjamin, 1995: 8)? Benjamin's focus on multiple identification as the basis for object love and indeed all sexual relations has the advantage over the Lacanian position, because it means sexuality and identity can be understood as arising in a nonpathological way from cross-sexed identification. Gender is not fixed, is not instituted by the phallus but through the multiple and fluid identifications of the pre-Oedipal period. Chodorow's dialogue between differing schools of feminist and psychoanalytic criticism seems important. The split between the sexual difference debates of the Lacanians and the gender identity focus of object relations feminism does, indeed, seem to polarise psychoanalytic thinking into an allegiance to the phallic father or the mother. But as Benjamin's work shows, this division between phallic difference and maternal identity is already being undone. Surely we need to take the Lacanian emphasis on sexuality and the symbolic seriously, as different parenting constellations are not enough to transform the deeper patriarchal structures in society. It is, therefore, necessary to continue to analyse how dominant gender divisions are reproduced socially by society and, of course, how they are not. The strength of the Lacanian adherence to the phallus and to the mobility of the unconscious drives
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becomes clear when we want to include and theorise bisexual and homosexual desire, and it is no accident that the majority of queer theorists who embrace psychoanalysis choose a Lacanian paradigm to back their arguments. Meanwhile, the Lacanian tradition does nothing to enhance or promote a feminine understanding of sexual difference; the phallus is all in this tradition, and it is left to object relations feminist to readdress the balance by the importance they place on the role of the mother. By focusing on issues of gender difference and identity in terms of the mother, object relations feminism highlights a crucial relationship between the real and imaginary mother in our society. This feminism thus shows the importance of understanding how the fantasy so often becomes a reality, as both men and women continue to elevate and denigrate female sexuality, denying women's difference through ideal fantasies of good mothering. The significance these feminists assign to the radical mobility of gender subsumes, however, the question of maternal desire and sexuality. Women's desire and the articulation of a sexed subjectivity is understood in terms of a pre-Oedipal gender identity and identification, rather than a symbolic account of maternal desire and sexuality. This, of course, is because of the tacit understanding that the phallus is the sole occupier of the realm of the symbolic. Sprengnether's attempt to reverse the terms by putting the pre-Oedipal mother's body in the place of the symbolic phallus is open to attack, not least because of the separatist and quite terrifying omnipotent female reign that is envisaged. The question of maternal desire in terms of the symbolic remains, however, a largely unaddressed issue in both Lacanian and object relations debates. Consequently, this question remains vital if the split between the sexually exciting father and the holding mother is to be confronted, on a psychic as well as social level. Benjamin's work is creative in linking unconscious desire to identificatory processes which will map onto and potentially transform wider symbolic structures. The relationship between unconscious gender identification and issues of sexual violence in today's society seems to add weight to Benjamin's thesis of a master/slave imbalance in gender relating. But her adherence to gender identity/identification, at the expense of ideas of female sexuality and sexual difference, returns us not to the Oedipal phallus, but to a much more bodily, empathic and exciting father. Although the importance of this for feminism cannot be underestimated, with the pre-Oedipal father doing much to mediate the repressive Oedipal father or phallus, nevertheless, here too, the identificatory sexual appeal of the father is privileged, leaving the ideal mother still largely unsexed. Without attention to the sexual difference side of the mothering debate, it is hard to see how this bias can be interrogated or readdressed. But even as I say this, the nagging question remains, is sexual difference the most useful way of understanding women's desire, both in relation to the
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mother and in relation to the symbolic? Jessica Benjamin's recent exploration of the occurrence of symbolic space in the early intersubjective maternal dyad balances her insistence on the identificatory appeal of the pre-Oedipal father. The best way to describe this notion of early symbolic space in relation to the mother is to give an example of the necessary but painful separations between mother and baby that must take place in order to provide both mother and child with healthy autonomy. As Winnicott tells us, the baby must be allowed to move from relating to the maternal object in fantasy to the use of the maternal object where she can be destroyed in fantasy in order to survive as an outside and external other. The mother must survive the child's destructive fantasies and murderous hatred. When the mother takes leave of the small child, whether it is to go back to work or just to fulfil her own symbolic desires in terms of the world, a power struggle develops between them. It is important that the mother survives her baby's rage, without collapsing or withdrawing, so that the baby learns not just to play with omnipotent fantasy, but also to begin to identify emotionally with the mother's position, 'an identification that includes the ability to reflexively articulate the difference' (Benjamin, 1995: 93). Shared mourning when mother and child 'miss each other' is a symbolic identification and differentiation during which the child can understand that the mother needs her space, just as the child needs hers or his. The symbolic then is not necessarily some external force of paternal law that breaks up the dyad, but an internal and intersubjective development of identifications between child and mother which is dependent on the mother's desire and interaction with the outside world. Benjamin's intersubjective model also provides a new way of understanding how death can be mediated between women. At the end of the last chapter I discussed Irigaray's critique of the Freudian death drive. Because this death drive is based on a mastery or repression of the mother's body, it cannot provide a way for the girl to separate, allowing her to play at being and not being like her mother. Benjamin's emphasis on the aggressive destruction of the omnipotent mother in fantasy, facilitating a more symbolically mediated identification with her in the external world, enables an understanding of how aggression between people can be mediated and changed, but also how sameness and difference can be negotiated symbolically between women. If the Freudian, intrapsychic model of the death drive can only understand separation from the mother in terms of a mastery where death becomes projected onto the body of the woman, then Benjamin's more intersubjective approach leads us to perceive how the woman can acknowledge her furious death wishes towards her mother in fantasy, but also symbolically identify with her (as a figure in the external world) in an empathic way.
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< v Conclusion
Finally, it is interesting to reflect on how the historical polarisation between Lacanian sexual difference and Winnicottian gendered identity has also mirrored how sex and gender have traditionally been carved up by feminist debate. This historical debate, privileging either identity or difference, is marked by Julia Kristeva as having two distinct phases in the twentieth century. The first phase, stressing equality or sameness between men and women, is characterised by Simone de Beauvoir's exhortation to women to find their true humanity and free themselves from the bonds of traditional femininity. Realising that 'one is not born, but rather becomes a woman' (de Beauvoir,1983: 295). De Beauvoir's legacy to feminism induced a conformism to a masculine ideal which denigrated motherhood. In this striving for a commonality between the sexes and an idealisation of a male sphere, the notion that gender is constructed and can therefore be changed was privileged over women's sexuality and difference (de Beauvoir,1983: 295). A reaction to this vision of equality was witnessed by the second wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw some women reclaiming their bodies and their sexualities in a celebration of mother nature and feminine difference. Radical feminists sought not the right to equality with men, but their commonality which each other through a sisterhood of difference. Of course, this confirmation of women's sexual difference and solidarity with each other ignored other differences which structured women's lives, such as race, class and sexual orientation - and the inherent problem, within feminist thinking itself, of racist, classist and heterosexist bias. These feminist debates between identity and difference can be seen to usher in the 1980s debate over essentialism and anti-essentialism, but the recourse to psychoanalysis gives these feminist arguments a significant twist. The Lacanian feminist position emphasises sexual difference, although for them it is the paternal position of the phallus that prevents recourse to the more celebratory readings of women's bodily sexuality and difference, which dominated radical feminist debate. The Lacanian feminist debate also needs to be understood, however, in relation to post-Lacanian 'French feminism', usually invoked by the names of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous although these writers do not form a homogeneous entity. Kristeva, who does not actively equate herself with the feminist movement can be seen as following on from the Lacanian advocacy of the phallus and the paternal position, whereas Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous challenge the phallocentric bias of Lacan's linguistic arguments, arguing for a language and identity which can be spoken or written from the mother's body. With the hindsight of 1990s post-feminism, these psychoanalytic debates on sexual difference seem rather outdated, and it is hard to remember quite
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how urgent they really were. On one level we can see how intransigent these issues of sexual difference still are, with the ongoing commodification and essentialisation of masculinity and femininity. But in other ways the debate on sexual difference has moved on. In the academic market place Judith Butler's work on performativity has shifted attention to the mobility of gender, and in cultural terms issues of transexuality and crossings between genders are all part of the postmodern fluidity where identity is increasingly accepted as performative, fleeting and multifaceted. As the following chapter will demonstrate, psychoanalysis has remained too mired in essentialist debates, particularly with its Oedipal abjection of difference in terms of gay sexuality and race. But there are more worrying factors in the 1990s retreat from psychoanalysis as a methodology for understanding subjectivity, that go beyond the ahistoricality of its terms. These lie in the increasing evacuation of inferiority by a contemporary, Western, postmodernism, in favour of more surface identities. This means more than the general trend of swapping weekly visits to the therapist for weekly visits to the gym. It signifies how power and value are no longer associated with reflexive subjectivities which can negotiate between sameness and difference - a reflexive subjectivity and ethics to which feminist psychoanalysis has been committed. In conclusion, advocacy of the phallus becomes the anti-essentialist position, which counters the essentialism of both maternal readings of sexual difference and the gender identity debates of object relations feminism. Chodorow and Benjamin defend their focus on the gender construction of identity, and the cultural or sociological determinants of the psyche, remaining suspicious of the sexual difference debates (either phallic or maternal) precisely because of the privileging of sexuality which, for them, ultimately fixes the debate into rigid categories of masculine and feminine difference. Again, there is a geographical location to these feminist perspectives, with the radical arguments for gender and identity arising out of an Anglo-American tradition historically privileging equal rights and sameness between the sexes, and the feminist debates on sexual difference developing from a French intellectual tradition of philosophy, phenomenology and poststructuralism. Of course, we should be wary of generalisations; Lacanian feminism was put on the map by Juliet Mitchell, who borrows from both French and Anglo-American traditions. The tendency to split theory and history between these critical modes, has, as RachelBowlby points out,---fixedthem 'into simple, homologous oppositions' (Bowlby, 1988:66). We are reminded of that opposition, however, as the essentialist/antiessentialist debates of the 1980s move into a concern with the historicisation and localisation of situated knowledges and identities in the 1990s. Psychoanalysis and feminist debates on sexual difference have come under attack for foregrounding the rubric of feminism over and above differences such as race
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and gay sexuality, which, it is argued, should take equal precedence. The growing fields of postcolonial and queer studies demand that feminism become more accountable to the historical differences that contextualise understanding of subjectivity. In order to do this, the debates between feminism and psychoanalysis must take more seriously the criticism of ahistoricism levelled against them and shed the anti-essentialist/essentialist paralysis of the 1980s which fixed sex and gender, or identity and difference, within opposing camps. This also entails initiating interdisciplinary debate between differing schools of feminism and psychoanalysis. Perhaps the most crucial issue that divides Lacanian and object relations feminists is not so much the status of the phallus, but the phallic status of language. As we have seen, at present we accord narrative status only to the masculine. Without a symbolic narrative or language, the mother's body seems doomed to an abject position outside culture. Recent work on the relation between gender and the pre-Oedipal, bodily father in such diverse thinkers as Jessica Benjamin and Andrew Samuels has exciting implications for mediating the rather immutable law of the phallus within sexual difference debates. Their emphasis on an identification with a bodily and imaginary father displaces the cut-off and idealised detachment of a wholly symbolic phallus. Benjamin's explanation of the symbolic intersubjective space between mother and child also seems to describe a narrative of maternal desire where imaginary and symbolic interact. These interventions are timely ones, interrupting the rather repetitive and split debates on mothering (whether they focus on sex or gender) that still remain targeted as either too ideal or too literal. This problem is not an exclusive one to feminism or psychoanalysis, but remains endemic to cultural discourses on motherhood, where thinking through sameness and difference in relation to the mother remains so difficult. Why is it that within all the historical debates between feminism and psychoanalysis, mothering and the relation to the mother's body is always somehow returned as essentialist, idealised, or abject, either too sociological or too biological? This book emphasises the ambivalence of identity with the mother and the difficulty of difference from the mother. Desire for the mother and the mother's desire constitute a crucial structure of cultural subjectivity which is continually denied and disallowed. Although feminist psychoanalysis is culpable in refusing maternal ambivalence by splitting the mother into good and bad, as overly present or absent, it nevertheless remains a necessary framework to acknowledge literal and metaphorical aspects of mothering. Thinking through the mother's body in terms of cultural metaphors that will connect it to language, rather than split it off within some essentialised space, is still a matter for urgent debate. The next chapter, therefore, specifically deals with this issue through a reading of the symbolic, imaginary and real in the work of the postLacanian feminists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.
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Benjamin, J. (1990) The Body of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination, London: Virago Press. Benjamin, J. (1995) Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays On Recognition and Sexual Difference, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bowlby, R. (1988) 'Flight Reservations', Oxford Literary Review 10, 1-2: 61-72. Chodorow, N. (1989) Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press, De Beauvoir, S. ( 1983) The Second Sex (1949), trans. H.M. Parshley, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. De Lauretis, T. (1994) 'The Seductions of Lesbianism', in The Practise Of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 166. Doane, J. and Hodges, D. (1992) From Klein To Kristeva: Psychoanalytic Feminism and the Search for the 'Good Enough* Mother, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Flax, J. (1993)\ Disputed Subjects: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge. Lacan, J. (1977) 'The Signification of the Phallus', in Ecrits - A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock, 1977. Maguire, M. (1987) 'Casting The Evil Eye - Women and Envy', in Living With The Sphinx, London: The Woman's Press Ltd. Mitchell, J. (1974) 'Introduction', Psychoanalysis and Feminism, London: Allen Lane. Rose, J. (1986) 'Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne' and 'Feminism and the Psyche' in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. Samuels, A, (1993) 'Fathers', in The Political Psyche, London: Routledge. Sprengnether, M. (1990) The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stern, D. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant: a View From Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books. Winnicott, D. (1974) 'Transitional Objects and Transference Phenomena', in Playing and Reality, London: Tavistock and Pelican.
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Post-Lacanian Feminism: Reading the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real
Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are both practising psychoanalysts and philosophers, known as 'French feminists', belonging to the ecriture feminine movement alongside other women philosophers - notably Helene Cixous, a philosopher and literary theorist. These women are also defined as postLacanians following Lacan's theorisation of sexuality and identity in terms of the symbolic and language: Western thought and knowledge is gendered and oppressive, with identity being structured within a patriarchal symbolic. Selfhood, thinking and representation are designated as male and the woman is defined in relation to him as other. Lacan states that language constructs our masculine and feminine identities, and that therefore, these linguistic constructions are always susceptible to the disruptive force of unconscious desire: in other words, the positions as 'male' or 'female' which we take up are always capable of change. Nevertheless, there remains an undisputable binary in Lacan's thinking between phallic language and the feminine, maternal body the feminine body is the unconscious and cannot be represented directly within language and culture, but must always be mediated in terms of the linguistic phallus. Sublimation of the maternal body, then, can only occur through the symbolic function of the masculine metaphor. The French feminists have all in different ways explored how a poetic unconscious relation to the maternal body can actually challenge the repressive masculine domain of the symbolic order. The notion of a 'women's language', women speaking from a maternal rather than paternal place, raises difficulties which can be explained in two ways. Either the woman speaks from a pre-Oedipal place outside language, associated with infantile symbiosis or fusion with the mother, and is thus collapsed back into a regressive states of madness and hysteria outside the symbolic. Or the woman speaks from the position of the mother within language and the symbolic as a feminine positivity, in which s*.*i's*.-
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case she risks merely reimposing, in the opposite form of a female symbolic, the truth claims of the phallus. Kristeva and Irigaray, broadly speaking, take different sides on this question of the woman's speaking position. For Kristeva, woman's language is inevitably collapsed into pre-Oedipal hysteria and madness because it refuses the paternal law of the symbolic. Irigaray, however, risks heavy criticism of essentialism by posing the possibility of a female symbolic within language. This makes for a very different post-Lacanian perspective. Whereas Irigaray engages with Lacan's work to overturn his basic concepts, Kristeva, especially in her later work, is a much more loyal follower of Lacan's paternal principles. In fact the stringent criticism Kristeva dishes out to feminism, coupled with the seemingly equal amount of support she awards to the symbolic dimension of patriarchal societies, makes the label of feminist rather inappropriate for her. In Julia Kristeva's earlier book Revolution in Poetic Language (Kristeva, 1984), she poses the 'semiotic' as oppositional and disruptive of the symbolic. Although the semiotic is linked to the maternal imaginary and the early call of the mother or 'chora', it cannot be simply reduced to a pre-Oedipal, imaginary order. But the semiotic is an area of pre-linguistic experience, which is residual from the early relation to the mother, containing bodily drives, feelings and affects. The semiotic is that pleasurable call and relation to the mother's body which has not been repressed by the patriarchal symbolic order and becomes subversively expressed in language through silences and rhythmic pulsations. This semiotic is not distinctive to women, being rooted in a pre-Oedipal feminine imaginary which is prior to sexual difference and identity, and therefore available to both sexes. Although potentially the semiotic can subvert the gender power inequalities of the symbolic, for both men and women, Kristeva's use of it has been notably problematic. Realigning herself with some of the binaries laid down by Lacan's phallus, Kristeva's semiotic seems to repeat the Oedipal division between masculine language and women's bodily experience. This is because she privileges the semiotic as a disruptive moment in the symbolic only in terms of male writers, naming avant-garde literary writers such as Joyce, Artaud, Mallarme and Lautreamont. Women writers are not accorded the same revolutionary function; their access to the semiotic is much more dangerous and liable to collapse into a maternal and deathly refusal of the symbolic. The semiotic for women is positive when it is linked to the bodily experience of mothering. Kristeva describes women's privileged re-experience of the pleasures of the maternal body through pregnancy and motherhood. In her essay 'Stabat Mater' Kristeva discusses how pregnancy, which is a threshold between nature and culture, can provide a re-experience of the semiotic for women, which cannot be represented in the symbolic but can provide women with a potential ethical relation to the other, thus making woman as mother
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into a sacrificial and moral guardian of the symbolic order. Kristeva, then, seems to reserve the world of language and culture for men, assigning women to their traditional roles as mothers. She has been criticised quite rightly for overestimating the political subversiveness of male literary practice and for an essentialist collapsing of woman and mother. Can the potential of the semiotic, as a maternal imaginary subverting patriarchal thought, have significance for men and women which goes beyond Kristeva's rather conservative positioning of male literature versus maternal experience? The answer to this depends on whether or not we can envisage an alternative to a death-driven, Oedipal unconscious.
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Kristeva's bodily imaginary
Central to Kristeva's understanding of the unconscious imaginary is her notion of the abject. The abject can be seen as the dark and destructive underside to the pleasures of the semiotic, a deathly embrace marked by the call of the mother which refuses the paternal legitimisation of the symbolic and cultural order. The abject, then is an early excessive relation to the maternal body, associated with disgust, putrefaction, waste and death. The abject is positioned before identity or object relations; as part of the imaginary it has to be expelled by the infant to create space for identity in the symbolic. Abjection is then a process which bases or subtends all identity, but is outside symbolic or cultural representation. For Kristeva, the pre-Oedipal mother is abject and necessarily hated (Kristeva, 1980, 1989). Survival of the omnipotent mother means matricide, killing her in fantasy so that separation from her can take place in reality. This aspect of Kristeva's work is very Kleinian, as we have seen in Chapter 1. It is important, however, to note the crucial role of the paternal phallus in Kristeva's work which definitely distances her from the more usual object relations focus on the mother. Kristeva's bodily semiotic has been seen by various commentators to be more subversive than Lacan's mental imaginary. Whereas, in Lacan, the relation to the maternal body is completely repressed, in Kristeva's work the semiotic desire for the archaic mother can never be held at bay totally and returns (as a more bodily imaginary) to subvert the mental, linguistic structures of our paternal symbolic. The semiotic is, therefore, a feminine pre-linguistic imaginary, available to both sexes, which can displace paternal structures of language. But, as we have seen, the semiotic displacement of language seems only to be awarded to the literary practice of male avant-garde writers. Mediated by the masculine, at an imaginary or symbolic level, Kristeva's bodily imaginary cannot be directly aligned with the kind of female bodily imaginary (between mother and daughter) which Irigaray envisages. Kristeva clearly adheres to a universal Oedipal symbolic, based on castration. What is interesting
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about her examination of the pre-Oedipal realm is how she roots it within object relations thinking. In this way, Kristeva adds on object relations thinking to Lacan and Freud, combining an object relations analysis of early and unconscious (maternal) experience with the Lacanian (Oedipal) structures of the symbolic, imaginary and real. Kristeva returns to the primary identification between mother and child and argues that this empirical, experiential landscape is always within the symbolic orbit, under the sway of language5 (Kristeva, 1986: 245). By pushing the Oedipal influence of the symbolic back into the pre-Oedipal realm, Kristeva suggests a semiotic imaginary which hovers between identification with the mother and a transference to the father. Kristeva, in fact, proposes a pre-Oedipal imaginary father who takes on the transferral role. Linking this semiotic imaginary to the clinical space, she suggests that identification with the mother is represented through a phantasmatic (metonymic) narrative desire, whereas transference to the father entails a proper discourse of (metaphorical) love. Of course, this explanation reinstates the function of the phallus more fully at a primary level and can be seen, against Irigaray, to mark an even stronger allegiance to castration. Although Kristeva theorises an early intersubjective narrative or discourse, thereby providing a narrative for the object-relational body, this narrative is always essentially phallic for a number of reasons. First, because, Kristeva's understanding of the unconscious object relation is a very negative one. It is, therefore, much closer to Klein's death instinct than to Winnicott's positive transitional space, with unconscious ties to the mother being murderous, psychotic and deathly. Mediation and rescue by narrative always relates to the axis of a paternal, metaphorical symbolic, even when that symbolic influence is staged at a much earlier, object-relating level. This Oedipal frame positions a violent relation to the mother's body that is repressed by the phallic law of language. But by bringing this Oedipal axis back into the maternal bodily realm, Kristeva explains how the phallus is not just a harsh prohibitive law but also mediates the violence of the maternal body through early identificatory, paternal love. So, however promising Kristeva's more bodily imaginary may seem to feminism, it is ultimately rooted in a feminine violence that can only be rescued through heterosexual love of the father. For Kristeva, desiring relationships directly expressed between women's bodies, and not mediated through the paternal axis, are violent and psychotic. Perhaps the most problematic issue of Kristeva's stance is illustrated by this example, where lesbianism comes to represent the most abject embrace of death and rejection of the symbolic. Kristeva sees Lacan's phallus as positively liberating, indeed her psychoanalytic stance and her rather untenable relation to feminism can perhaps be best understood through her belief in the paternal principle as saviour from the
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murderous and deathly power of the mother. Of course, Kristeva means unconscious power of the mother, but she condemns feminism and mother/daughter relationships which try and oppose or resist paternal law, because she sees them as self-destructively collapsing into a maternal other, which can only bring violence and destruction. 'Women's Time' shows very well the complexity of Kristeva's thought and can be seen to capture both the brilliance and the potentially reactionary nature of her ideas (Kristeva, 1986). Weaving a history of feminism, Kristeva defines the first strand as linear time, which she equates with patriarchal history and feminism's liberal struggle for equality, characterised by de Beauvoir, Her second strand, monumental time, cuts across linear time and is associated with eternal, universal traits such as maternity. Third comes cyclical time, which follows the cyclical Tightness of the woman's body and is connected with female subjectivity. Both monumental time and cyclical time figure sexuality and the symbolic, and are associated by Kristeva with the radical feminism of the 1970s. Rejecting exclusive reliance on paternal linear time or maternal sexuality and the symbolic, Kristeva argues for the necessary intertwining of these different concepts of time and links the debate to her central concepts of the semiotic, abject mother and paternal law. Motherhood is a privileged scene for the woman, where re-experience of the semiotic leads her to an ethical 'love for an other'. Ethical love for an other is 'rarely encountered' by women without children, and Kristeva is acceding here to Freud's notion that women love narcissistically: they desire to be loved rather than actively love. Mournfully lamenting this Utopian and sacrificial love as a burden contemporary women do not want to bear, Kristeva turns to examine how women do seem to desire to represent and re-encounter the semiotic within writing. Women's writing, however, unlike the sacrificial burden of mothering, returns women to their abject, hysterical relation to the pre-Oedipal mother, a place of narcissistic self-destruction and love. Rejection of the paternal function and the symbolic leads to 'ultimately generating psychosis'. Kristeva is intolerant of feminism, lesbians and single parents for their dangerous rejection of the paternal role, because for her this refusal signifies a failure to internalise phallic lack and castration, which is the basis for separate identity and subjective entry into our cultural symbolic. In summary, some of the main problems with Kristeva's concept of the semiotic are as follows. First, her belief that a subversive semiotic literary practice can stand in for real political action and change. Second, the privilege she seems to bestow on a semiotic utilised by men, specifically male avantegarde writers, whereas women's writing is regarded as too dangerously near the death call of the mother. The third difficulty with Kristeva's semiotic is the ideal/abject split she accords to motherhood and female sexuality. Her semiotic is positive for women when tied to their sacrificial role as mother, but
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in desiring relations with other women it collapses into psychosis and death: the ultimate rejection of patriarchal society. Ann Rosalind Jones highlights some of the main political misgivings appropriating Kristeva's theories for feminism. Outlining the conservative implications of Kristeva's relocation of the feminine in biological specificity, and the rather surprising revolutionary potential that she awards male avant-garde writers, Jones points out how problematic it is to privilege a textual subversion of the subject over a more overtly political belief in the transformation of social structures (Jones, 1984). This is, of course, why Kristeva prefers the individual focus of psychoanalysis, rather than the collective action of movements such as feminism. However reactionary (for feminism) some of Kristevas ideas undoubtedly are, it would be wrong simply to dismiss her work on that basis. Kristevas work remains faithful to a Lacanian phallic symbolic, but her concept of the semiotic differs. Whereas Lacan's imaginary is a mental counterpart of the symbolic, which subtends it, Kristeva's semiotic does suggest a more bodily imaginary, thus including the object relationship to the mother. A maternal imaginary and semiotic which could connect the body with our symbolic cultural narratives is a highly interesting and exciting proposition. Kristeva s concept of the maternal semiotic as potentially subverting patriarchal thought (the symbolic) has been regarded as inspiring and useful because it signifies an imaginary available to both sexes, the implication being that such a semiotic imaginary does not merely help women mother, or aid a subversive, masculine, literary practice. The semiotic can equally well serve men in a mothering role, as well as becoming a highly important symbolic representation for women within writing and language. I think, however, that this is a very optimistic reading of Kristevas imaginary. Through the Oedipal injunction on the mother's body, women's semiotic relation to writing and sexually to each other, is clearly unrepresentable and abject. Conversely, men's semiotic access to mothering is barred because they cannot get pregnant; they cannot experience the threshold between nature and culture, thereby providing them with an ethical love of the other. Men sublimate their (semiotic) desire by writing, and women have children, but not the other way round. Such a familiar and depressing conclusion to Kristeva's complex ideas nevertheless confronts us with the negative implications for women of relying on a phallic or Oedipal interpretation of the unconscious. There are, potentially, more political implications of theorising the abject, in that the abject does represent the boundary and the constructiveness of identity. The abject - be it the feminine, homosexuality or race - is excluded by an Oedipal symbolic. As we will see later in this book, such abject exclusions can be mobilised to provide different representations of the subject, thus having an effect on the symbolic. Nevertheless, in Kristeva's thinking the abject remains in an essential exclusion from culture, and as such reaffirms the
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privileged kingdom of the phallus. Luce Irigaray's work provides a positive alternative to Kristeva's because her interpretation of the unconscious both challenges an Oedipal model of the unconscious and theorises a relationship between female bodily desire and language. This movement from female (abject) bodily desire into language can be seen to characterise the Utopian core of Irigaray's work, but, as I will go on to show, it is a Utopian relation between women's bodies and language which is both real and imagined.
Specular, phallic knowledge In some ways, then, Irigaray is not a post-Lacanian: she overturns rather than simply extends or develops his ideas. Often characterised as a rebellious daughter, Irigaray was a member of Lacan's psychoanalytic school the Ecole Freudienne, but was expelled (by him) from her teaching position on the publication of her book Speculum of the Other Woman. This was a seminal feminist text which challenged basic assumptions of both Freud and Lacan in regard to the Oedipal and castration complex (Irigaray, 1985a). Speculum of the Other Woman was not just a deconstruction of phallic psychoanalysis, but also a deconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition. According to Irigaray, Western thinking has been produced through a specular, masculine knowledge, a product or mirror of a male imaginary. As an example of this, Lacan's male imaginary projects unconscious division, violence and death onto the body of the woman, thereby protecting his theories as a 'seamless whole'. For Irigaray, Lacan's account of symbolic subjectivity is simply the male imaginary which has been raised to the status of universal, phallic law. The visibility and presence that is signified by the phallus obscures the more concealed female genitals and an unacknowledged female imaginary. Such a female imaginary is not narcissistically focused on the phallus, but demonstrates the girl's or woman's pleasure as deriving from her whole body. Irigaray sees the Oedipal complex as no more than a culturally sanctioned phallic narcissism which denounces and denies its unconscious dependence on the mother and the woman. It is the exclusion of the mother and the relation to the mother's body, from culture and structures of power and knowledge, which acts simultaneously to bolster male identity from unconscious experiences of castration and lack (which he then projects onto the woman), thus leaving the woman outside culture and knowledge, entombed in a state of'dereliction'. Patriarchy remains unmediated and unconsciously dependent on the mother, refusing to acknowledge feminine difference, upholding love of the same (other men) rather than the difference of women. Although some critics writing on queer sexuality have taken this as a homophobic stance on the part of Irigaray, it should be remembered that Irigaray is theorising a complicity of
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masculine bonding and identification which has underpinned patriarchy by denying women's subject status. Patriarchal men have therefore split women into ideal or debased, but this splitting is rooted in a male lack and dependency on the mother. So although Oedipal theory pronounces the unmediated, preOedipal bond between mother and daughters, it veils and obscures its own violent, narcissistic identification with the mother. Men fear their loss of identity and unconsciously project this lack onto the body of the woman, who is then seen as castrated. The woman is seen, therefore, as a black hole or death-like abyss outside language and culture. The excluded woman and mother represents an abject residue that cannot be symbolised and is associated with the death of the 'male subject'. This is also Kristeva's notion of the abject mother. Women threaten men with this death and loss of identity, and for Irigaray this is the real meaning of Freud's death drive. Phallic mastery of language and identity means the projection of death onto the other; a deathly otherness which women come to represent (Irigaray, 1985a: 27, 53, 72, 94). This relation between woman and death also explains Lacan's notion that the real represents death outside the symbolic, summed up by his famous saying that 'there is no such thing as The Woman' (Lacan, 1982: 144). What Lacan is saying is that in the real no symbolic or subjective identity can exist, therefore the woman cannot exist. As Irigaray shows us, however, insofar as the real is also equated with the excluded, abject body of the woman, this Woman remains a masculine, bodily phantasy. 'The Woman' cannot be represented in culture or the symbolic because she materially constructs the condition of men's ethical and subjective identity. One way of looking at this is to see the Woman as part of the masculine unconscious, a body which is unthought. As such she is denied ethical subjectivity and language in her own right. Irigaray puts this masculine projection succinctly when she writes: 'This linguistic home that man has managed to substitute even for his dwelling in a body, whether his own body or another's, has used women as construction material, but (therefore?) is not available to her' (Irigaray, 1993a: 107). For Irigaray, women and mothers are left outside of culture in a no-man's land, external to the symbolic. To avoid this 'dereliction' they are forced to participate in terms of male Oedipal desire. This participation as the female masquerade is, in Irigaray's view, what women have to do in order to become 'normal' women. The masquerade signifies the entry of women into the female Oedipal complex, 'a system of values which is not hers' (Irigaray, 1985b: 136). An example, then, of the masquerade would be the stereotypical feminine flirtation or seduction of men; women who play the feminine and seductive games that men want in order to win power through surreptitious routes. But Irigaray also sees something joyful and excessive about women's sexuality, a sexual bliss or jouissance which is multiple and fluid, overtaking or exceeding
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the 'phallic norm' to potentially represent other forms of identity. An example of jouissance would be women's humour and laughter, or their sexual love and desire for each other. Excessive female sexuality which refuses Oedipal boundaries is also another way of describing hysteria. Now, in Western society hysteria is a psychological illness. The subordination of the feminine to the phallic repression of Western culture results in hysteria. But as Irigaray says, although culture constitutes the hysteric as pathological, hysteria also represents another language or production, 'a cultural reserve yet to come'. Hysteria is a protest at the denied bodily relationship to the mother. The daughter's protest if you like, at the Oedipal injunction, that she 'has to put love for her mother and for herself aside in order to begin to love men' (Irigaray, 1993a: 66). Sublimating the daughter's bodily relationship with the mother in ways which are not phallic or Oedipal can be seen as a core aim and problematic, ongoing within Irigaray's work. But such symbolisation of the daughter's imaginary in terms of the mother remains an impossibility within a cultural and social imaginary which has been based entirely on a masculine and phallic morphology. In Irigaray's view, there is an unacknowledged female imaginary, which would belong in a transformed symbolic, relating and representing women's specific feminine difference. This female imaginary has gone unrecognised for many reasons, partly because there are no mainstream cultural forms which represent this relationship (it is the mother/son relation which predominates), but also because the knowledge structures of the phallic symbolic divide language and identity from the female body. Irigaray asks whether, if a speech of both sexes were to emerge, hysteria would still be 'feminine'? Would speaking as woman still be identified as hysteria? Men also, in Irigaray's view, have 'a lot to gain by being somewhat less repressive about hysteria' (Irigaray, 1985b: 139). But how can a specific feminine difference find representation in the symbolic, and men refind some of their lost relation to their bodies (which they have projected onto women), as long as our cultural Western symbolic is understood as phallic?
MHHHi The female imaginary I now want to discuss Irigaray's female imaginary and the contingent debate on essentialism and anti-essentialism, which historically has prevented adequate discussion of the most fruitful parts of Irigaray's work. One of the major problems for feminists in discussing Irigaray's female imaginary is whether or not it is an essentialist proposition of pre-given female, biological sexuality. The most famous example of this is Irigaray's famous image of 'two lips' touching and retouching (Irigaray, 1985b: 205-18). The feminist debate on whether these lips connote an unmediated reflection of an essential (biological)
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female body, or whether they represent a bodily language (the body as metaphor), informed the central argument over Irigaray's work in the 1980s. The problem with the essentialist position was pretty obvious: Irigaray returned women to an oppressed binary of biologically determined female sexuality, outside history and culture. The difficulty with the anti-essentialist position is perhaps harder to disentangle as it becomes divided between the feminist Lacanians, who simply rejected Irigaray's work on the grounds of essentialism, and those who wanted to reread her work in terms of representation and metaphor, but then became stuck within a framework of subjectivity and language which was implicitly phallic. One of the ways out of this latter dilemma, as we shall see, was to perceive the female imaginary as a Utopian vision that presently does not exist. But although the notion that the female imaginary is only a Utopian possibility might square Irigaray's work with the seemingly indispensable notion of a phallic symbolic, it does little to ground her debates in the historical and cultural way they deserve. The French feminist debate on the imaginary still remains one of the most exciting, in terms of the radical potential it contains both to displace universal concepts of the Oedipal or phallic, and to contextualise the unconscious (and therefore psychoanalysis) politically! This might seem rather too optimistic, given Kristeva's reliance on Lacan's symbolic, and a feminist consensus that Irigaray's imaginary is only imaginary - a Utopian fantasy. But, as I intend to argue, the radical potential of the imaginary in Kristeva's and Irigaray's work is both more bodily and more raz/than has been acknowledged. Irigaray describes the female imaginary of the two lips as a double demand for both identity and difference from the mother; as a two-way mirror (replacing Lacan's narcissistic mirror), this imaginary would conceptualise the mother as both subject and object. She calls this imaginary 'neither one nor two', because, rather like Winnicott's transitional space, it engages internal and external worlds, between psyche and soma (or between mind and body). However, in Irigaray's account, instead of objectifying the mother as simply the bodily unthought or the unconscious, the mother's desire and subjectivity are included. So, she writes, 'we are luminous. Neither one nor two. I've never known how to count. Up to you. In their calculations, we make two. Really two? Doesn't that make you laugh? An odd sort of two. And yet not one. Especially not one' (Irigaray, 1985b: 207). This transitional 'neither one nor two' of Irigaray's female imaginary can be seen as refusing the Oedipal split between the mind and the body. In Lacan's work, this split is castration or the phallic division between symbolic and real which separates the female body from language. For Irigaray, then, the dilemma is how to discover a language for the maternal bodily encounter which won't simply replace or substitute it in the way that paternal language does. An alternative which can go along with it, words which do not bar the
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corporeal, but which speak the corporeal' (Irigaray, 1991: 43). We might see the dilemma that Irigaray's work presents in the following ways: Is it that there really is no outside, or alternative, to paternal phallic language and culture - in which case the body is barred and unspeakable, symbolic castration is truly universal, and the female imaginary remains a Utopian vision? Or is it that language has been reified to the status of an immutable male universal, that we have yet to find a language (and thinking) which will represent a present but unnamed female imaginary? If we take the latter case, then we are led straight back into the essentialist problematic, because it means that Irigaray is really positing the female imaginary as a viable alternative to symbolic castration. Is Irigaray's challenge to the phallus also a challenge to symbolic castration? For many, this is an impossible idea, as symbolic castration marks prohibition to the maternal body and is understood as a universal tenet of sanity and rationality,1 Symbolic castration (the phallus) divides language from the female body and is necessary to construct subjectivity. Jacqueline Rose believes that Irigaray is challenging the status of the phallus. For her, this challenge cannot be 'directly from the feminine body'. To refuse the phallus is to refuse the division between language and the real with the consequent psychotic collapse into the abject, maternal real (Rose, 1986). On the other hand, Margaret Whitford, who has done much to redress essentialist readings, provides an anti-essentialist reading of Irigaray by understanding her work within a psychoanalytic and philosophical framework which is based on a. concept of symbolic castration. So, Whitford argues, there is 'no real disagreement between Irigaray and Lacan here, for symbolic castration is the condition of sanity'. Any assumption that Irigaray is actually rejecting the phallic law of language and the symbolic would in Whitford's view simply feed the charge of irrationalism (Whitford, 1991: 69). Whitford understands the difficulty of making absolute correlations between the phallus and sanity because such accounts of culture and representation still take the male body as norm. Disagreeing with those feminists who try and align Irigaray's imaginary with a pre-Oedipal relation to the mother, Whitford maintains that the 'neither one nor two' 'is no desirable identity, but a pathological symptom' of a culture and language where the mother/daughter relationship cannot be spoken (Whitford, 1991: 82). Therefore, Whitford emphasises the representational symbolic over imaginary drives in Irigaray's work, proposing that Irigaray is trying to bring 'women as subjects into the symbolic', a pre-existing male 1
In psychoanalytic terms castration and the Oedipal are seen as universal tenets of sanity and rationality. Refusal or foreclosure of these leads to psychosis. Whether or not the Oedipal is universal is a question which has been followed up by anthropologists. For a discussion of this in relation to Lacan's Law of the Father, see Safouan (1981): 9.
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symbolic. There is no case, in Whitford's book, for an alternative account of psychoanalytic theory, or loss of maternal origin and the 'neither one nor two' of Irigaray's female imaginary is a pessimistic description of women's dereliction, outside the symbolic. Irigaray, in Whitford's view, provides an account of women's unequal situation with regard to the castration complex or, putting this another way, the difficulty they have in constructing separate identities. Whitford explains this by the link she believes Irigaray makes between the castration complex and the death drives. The man sublimates his own death drives by projecting them onto woman, where they become masochistically internalised by her. In other words, the man projects his own crisis of castration onto the woman and in this 'male' economy, no system of representation is provided for women to deal with their death drives, their 'castration'. Whitford's persuasive arguments ignore, nevertheless, how it was originally Freud who positioned the Oedipal phallus as the necessary saviour from the deathly re-encounter with our maternal origins. Yet, isn't Irigaray describing women's lack of sublimation in relation to the castration and the death drives in Freud's account? It is Freud who initially makes the connection between castration, death and women's masochism. Irigaray's reading of it in Speculum is ironic. If men master the death drive, through projecting death and castration onto the body of the woman, then women's dereliction is a result not of the inevitability of symbolic castration but of the universality of phallic theory.
The female symbolic S B I M Irigaray conceptualises the symbolic as merely signifying someone's (a male someone's) imaginary, which has been made law. For her, the symbolic order is simply the 'victorious imaginary system' which 'wins out over another one'. She insists that the female imaginary is a Utopian place because it still awaits that acknowledgement as symbolic law. However, it does exist: If to be Utopian is to want a place that doesn't exist yet in some of its modalities, I am Utopian. That said I only speak of this place from the sensory and corporeal experience that I have of it. Therefore it is not a simple of, I don't know what kind of dream; it is a place that already exists and that I wish could be developed, culturally, socially, amorously. (Irigaray, 1988: 164) What Irigaray seems to be saying here is that the female imaginary is a kind of sensory and bodily experience. I will return to this later, but it raises questions as to what model of unconscious is being utilised. The Oedipal model of the unconscious proposed by both Freud and Lacan focuses on mental
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representation, not the sensory experience that Irigaray suggests here. 2 The female imaginary, then, still has to be developed culturally. Irigaray states that the female symbolic or 'female god is still to come', but she also tells us that in order to make their gender divine, women must accept it and fulfil it as a limit that is also morphological' (Irigaray, 1993b : 71). The female symbolic, and an ethical relation between women, requires 'that both angel and body be found together' (Irigaray, 1993a: 17). How can the female symbolic include or connect with the body? Isn't the equation of the symbolic as the female body merely a collapse into essential notions of biology? Whitford's emphasis on women's derelict imaginary makes a positive, bodily configuration of women's desire impossible. In Whitford's Lacanian model the female imaginary cannot be a springboard for envisaging a different symbolic, because the symbolic comes first and structures the imaginary (Whitford, 1991:90). This imaginary then has a 'projective dimension': what women in a multiple sense 'become' as an effect of the symbolic. Thinking the female symbolic has to come first, but of course this has nothing to base itself on but the male imaginary (as the female imaginary does not yet exist). One can see in this scenario the hopelessness of the project, with the female symbolic becoming a male phantasy of an idealised mother/child relation. Now this might satisfy feminists who really believe there is no alternative to a patriarchal imaginary, but it downgrades Irigaray's concepts as simply wishful fantasy. Understanding the female imaginary from within a Lacanian framework pathologises it as women's dereliction. As Whitford declares, the female imaginary is impossible without a female symbolic, but this female symbolic is either Utopian, (in the sense that it does not exist yet) or it is an essentialist presence, predicated on a male imaginary. Caught within this double-bind, the female symbolic and female imaginary are not realisable in any non-essentialist way, and their Utopian prospects seem pretty impossible so long as they ultimately reside within a structure of a universal phallic symbolic. Whitford's account announces the Utopian vision, rather than real possibility, of conceptualising an alternative sublimation of the feminine, because her argument is based on a (Lacanian) assumption that the imaginary and symbolic are both structurally androcentric and immutable.
2
What does it mean to argue for a model of the unconscious which is not Oedipal? I argue that Irigaray departs from Lacanian definitions of the unconscious. As part of her project is to connect the female body with language and the realm of the empirical with the discursive/symbolic, the female imaginary occupies a different space to the pre-Oedipal narcissism of Lacan.
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The female symbolic as writing M ^ M Whitford's reading of Irigaray's imaginary (as dereliction) is challenged by Drusilla Cornell. Cornell sees the Utopian nature of the female imaginary as realisable, but not 'in the symbolic as defined' (Cornell, 1991: 78). The female imaginary can be written and symbolised as other (or as different) to the masculine (castrated) subject. Realisation of this Utopian imaginary is achieved, in Cornell's view, through feminine writing. Feminine writing, or remetaphorisation of the female imaginary, is not essentialist or primary as a female symbolic would be; instead, it promises to rework the myths and metaphors of the feminine, transforming our existing symbolic. One of the first feminists to understand the female imaginary as writing was Jane Gallop. She defended Irigaray against her essentialist critics by arguing that the two lips are always metaphorical and 'can never be simply taken as the thing in itself (Gallop, 1988: 94). The difficulty of reading the female imaginary as a metaphor is that, in a Lacanian reading, metaphor substitutes for the body, so the phallus substitutes for the mother's body. To have a maternal metaphor substituting for the maternal body simply repeats the hegemonic mastery of the phallus; the female body would simply become repressed under a female phallus, rather than a male one. 3 Diana Fuss tries to get round this by redefining a figuration of the two lips as a metaphor for metonymy (Fuss, 1989: 66). Because metonymy signifies the fluid unconscious of the mother's body, Fuss opposes the phallic metaphor with the figure of metonymy, asking whether the play of metonymy as the feminine can be seen as a 'specific operation within the unconscious?' For Drusilla Cornell, Fuss's metonymic figure is 'too neat' (Cornell, 1991: 184). As metonymic refiguration must also be metaphorical, the attempted opposition must fail. Cornell proposes a metaphor of the feminine as transformative, but for Cornell this is not a positive figuration of the female imaginary within language, There is no ontological, or unconscious female body which is transformed into the symbolic. Instead, the female imaginary is read as a linguistic performativity and reiteration, re-articulating the feminine as metaphor within a phallic symbolic. This is seemingly impossible within a Lacanian framework where the metaphor is phallic, but Cornell revises the hegemony of the Lacanian phallus, and deconstructs it through a Derridean play of language. Cornell, seemingly, holds on to a Lacanian linguistic account of identity and the unconscious, but then gets rid of Lacan's gender hierarchy through a performative play of language. Derrida, in Cornell's view, can undermine 'Lacan's political pessimism' by showing us that although gender 3
The danger, of course, in arguing for a substitutive maternal metaphor is the institution of some early repressive and frightening female super-ego.
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hierarchy is constituted in language, it is always susceptible to the slippage of meaning inherent in linguistic structures. The phallus cannot remain as a master metaphor, because in Derridean deconstruction language is always reiterated differently (as difference). So the phallus as metaphor is always reiterated and performed in a different way. Cornell's Derridean deconstruction of Lacan takes place through language. Cornell is not, therefore, arguing for a female body as the symbolic to take the place of the phallic metaphor within language. There is no female essence that can be given voice. Rather, Cornell argues for a remetaphorisation of the feminine through myth, a reworking or replaying of feminine myths through language. Cornell sees the feminine imaginary as a Utopian metaphor which can replay and rearticulate the feminine myths of negativity, castration and lack. Derrida himself is suspicious of metaphor because of the dangers of retrieving some metaphysical truth,of woman, for instance. Cornell acknowledges this difficulty, but gets beyond it by using Irigaray's concept of mimesis. The feminine imaginary is, therefore, a Utopian moment and metaphor that constantly mimes, replays and performs the feminine within the hierarchy of sexual difference, in order to move out of our current gender system circumscribed by the phallus. Although myth can be seen as another naturalised truth claim, Cornell points out that myth, like metaphor, is subject to constant rearticulation: myth can be retold and told artificially, to transform figurations of the feminine into something new. Retelling the myths and metaphors of the feminine does not describe what is real but imagines a Utopian difference: a figuration of the feminine which is symbolic but beyond the phallus and castration. An example of this would be writing by women such as Toni Morrison and Angela Carter. Both these women writers performatively replay or mime feminine myths in order to bring the excluded abject status of the feminine, black body into representation. The difference between Cornell's Irigarayan formulation of feminine writing and Kristeva's is that, for Cornell, women's writing is not attached to a pre-Oedipal semiotic with its close affinity to the maternal body and psychosis. By firmly locating feminine writing within the realms of metaphor and language proper, Cornell's model also escape the masculine privilege awarded by Kristeva and Lacan to the symbolic. Similarly the privilege attributed to male modernist writers by Kristeva would not stand up in Cornell's analysis. Indeed, women writers would be foregrounded in the performative writing of the feminine.
iiiiiiiiii Writing the body But is Irigaray's strategic mimesis only a linguistic phenomenon? Feminist critics do not agree and whereas writers such as Cornell, Whitford and Judith Butler interpret Irigaray's mimesis as operating only within linguistic forms,
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other critics such as Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed risk a more ontological and essentialist definition of Irigaray's mimesis. Drusilla Cornell and Margaret Whitford both read Irigaray within a Lacanian framework, and in doing so rescue her from the dangers of an essentialist collapse into biological or ontological notions of the body. Whereas Whitford concentrates on the derelict female imaginary, and the difficulty of women escaping the identificatory projection of men's death drives, Cornell looks to a Utopian, linguistic (female) symbolic. Neither of these critics entertains a female imaginary, which would designate a more ontological and essentialist body in Irigaray's writing. They therefore agree with other deconstructive critics who posit the impossibility of anything outside textual representation. Judith Butler's reading, like Cornell's, centres on the performative power of Irigaray's miming language. Irigaray's use of mime is an act of displacement which shows Platonic discourse as a phallocentric ruse. As the Platonic account is only a displacement of a maternal origin, Irigaray's work shows the feminine not as an alternative maternal origin, but as a figuration £which calls into question the power of origination that Plato appears to claim for himself (Butler, 1993: 45). In Butler's view, the feminine as a textual practice would not represent an alternative female symbolic, grounded in a 'rival ontology'. Instead, this textual feminine 'inhabits - indeed, penetrates, occupies, and redeploys - the paternal language itself (Butler, 1993: 45). These feminist critics therefore refuse any essentialist reading of Irigaray's work, a course which limits the debate to a rewriting and reoccupation of Lacanian phallocentric discourse. There is no need, in this approach, to theorise an alternative psychoanalytic theory: we simply reverse, redeploy and examine the 'phallic' one that already exists. But is this the only possible and logical way of examining concepts of the female imaginary and symbolic? What seems to get forgotten in these accounts is the status of the body. The female imaginary is understood in Lacanian terms through a grid of mental and linguistic representation, and the more troubling parts of Irigaray's work which focus on the body and the real are conveniently forgotten. What does it mean to focus on language at the expense of the body? Irigaray's challenge to Lacan in 'Cosi Fan Tutti' argues that the Oedipal complex and the truth of female sexuality become even more rigidly inscribed when psychoanalysis 'takes discourse itself as the object of investigations'. Female sexuality thus becomes an effect of phallic logic, or language, which 'is transcendent with respect to bodies'. As Irigaray puts it: language rules as a master and the woman threatens - as a sort of 'prediscursive reality' — to disrupt its order (Irigaray, 1985b: 86). If we look at what she says, Irigaray does seem to propose rethinking metaphor in ways that ground the female imaginary much more within the real than within the abstracted notion of a linguistic symbolic:
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But there again, we would have to reconsider the status of the metaphorical. We would have to question the laws of equivalence that are operative there. And follow what becomes of 'likeness' in that particular operation of 'analogy' (complex of matter-form) applicable to the physical realm, and required for the analysis of the properties of real fluids. (Irigaray, 1985b: 110, note 4) Locating the female imaginary back in the real is not only essentialist, but also - according to the rubric of symbolic castration - positively psychotic! Recent feminists such as Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed, however, 'run the risk of essentialism' in reading Irigaray. Linking the (real) fluids and the feminine, they argue that the ontological or material body of the woman is replayed in Irigaray's style or mimesis, to refigure the split between phallic language and the female body (Schor and Weed, 1993). Schor and Weed reread Irigaray in relation to questions of mimesis and style, focusing on the real, material or fluid properties of the feminine. Unlike Cornell, they read Irigaray's mimesis as a positivity which has to be understood beyond the deconstructive project. Diana Fuss and Rosi Braidotti have also seen Irigaray's essentialism as a political and strategic displacement of Lacan's phallomorphism and phallic essentialism. Fuss points out how, in Aristotelian metaphysics, 'woman does not have an essence, she is the Essence' (Fuss, 1989: 71). In Lacan's theory this leads to the assumption that the woman as essence cannot exist. Irigaray's essentialism is to give woman back her essence, so she can own her specificity as a subject. Rosi Braidotti has consistently argued for the importance of the ontological aspect of Irigaray's work. Like Fuss, Braidotti reads Irigaray's feminine imaginary as an attempt to reclaim the female body in its specificity for women. This means that, in owning their bodies, women can gain access to subjectivity. For Braidotti, Irigaray's thinking through the body is not biological or sociological, but ethical. If the female imaginary can incorporate both sameness and difference from the mother, then it must also connect the epistemological representation of woman in language with the political and situated experience of women. Joining women's lived bodily experience with their discursive representation within the symbolic means reconnecting the feminine with the female, thus refusing, in Braidotti's words, a separation of 'the empirical from the symbolic, or of the material from the discursive, or of sex from gender' (Braidotti, 1994: 177).
liiiiiiiii A question of translation Some of the problems of interpreting Irigaray are, of course, due to translation, and to the ironic play of Irigaray's style. The question of translation is heavily
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implicated in whether or not the reader decides Irigaray is essentialist; or whether the reader aligns her with a Lacanian framework, even though (probably) acknowledging that she is challenging its phallic bias. Differing interpretations of Irigaray's work can show quite opposite conclusions on the nature of the female imaginary. Whitford reads a certain passage from Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference as describing women's derelict and aggressive, unsymbolisable relationships with one another: Love for the mother, for women, perhaps must only or could only exist in the form of a substitution} Of a taking her place? Which is unconsciously suffused by hate? (Whitford, 1991: 78) And here is the same quote translated in the Burke and Gill translation: Does this mean that love for the mother, among women can and may be practised only through substitution? By a taking the place of? Which is unconsciously coloured by hate? (Irigaray, 1993a:) The second quote puts into question women's derelict condition, which is undoubtedly where it is left in Freud's and Lacan's accounts of the imaginary, Whitford seems to be in no doubt that Irigaray subscribes to a female imaginary which is coloured with hate for the mother. As I have discussed, Whitford's adherence to a derelict female imaginary (within a Lacanian system of the symbolic) is rooted in a project which desires to read Irigaray at the level of representation rather than drives, because of a need to redress essentialist criticism of Irigaray's work. If we take the second quote, the meaning of the female imaginary is left much more open, and it is down this more fluid, though essentially risky, path that the rest of this chapter will follow.
Between theory and experience: between &&££&$* Lacan and object relations Irigaray challenges the concept of symbolic castration in Lacan's work, a concept which heralds a split between the female body and language. For Irigaray this symbolic castration is nothing more than an essentialisation of Freud's literal Oedipal complex, within language. So there can be no logical distinction (in Irigaray's view) between Freud's literal, and Lacan's symbolic account of castration. In fact, Irigaray explicitly links her discussion of psychoanalysis with the early debates of Horney, Klein and Jones, who challenged the primacy of the phallic stage, arguing for castration as a secondary phase which obfuscated a more primary identification with the mother's body. The problem, however, with locating Irigaray's female imaginary in this object relations account of a primary identification with the mother, is that it is seen to become lost in some pre-linguistic, pre-Lacanian libido of pre-given female
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sexuality. I suggest that a much bigger problem lies with the limits of Lacanianism. Lacan, for all his brilliance, excluded the relation to the maternal body. Or rather, like Freud, he forgot, chose not to look, decided that if psychoanalysis was to be a science it couldn't risk refinding its (maternal) origins in the experience of the body, or the empiricism of case histories. Of course much of Freud's work is grounded on the empirical case history where, let us be honest, he is most wide open to attack. Lacan was quite direct in his disparagement of empiricism and of the reductive narrative of practice and technique which in his view dominated British object relations psychoanalysis. Andre Green is very critical of Lacan's refusal to analyse the bodily affects, and it is Green's return to the object relations theory of Winnicott and Klein that was so influential for Kristeva, as Andre Green was both Kristeva's analyst and her teacher. Although Whitford, Cornell and Butler produce lucid, scholarly and inspiring accounts of Irigaray's project, their reliance on a predominantly philosophical framework leaves the psychoanalytical understanding of Irigaray's work within a rather limiting perspective of Lacanian theory. A comprehensive understanding of Irigaray's work, in terms of psychoanalysis, needs to acknowledge the huge debt that Irigaray and Kristeva owe to object relations theory - and by object relations theory, I don't simply mean Chodorow or Winnicott, but the whole range of clinical psychoanalytic debate which includes an understanding of the maternal object relation. Andrew Samuels has recently criticised contemporary psychoanalysis, especially in Britain, for an excessive maternalism and a reliance on object relations theory in which 'a numinosity of sex has been replaced by the numinosity of feeding' (Samuels, 1993: 274). Everything becomes explained in terms of the maternal function and the understanding of society and institutions becomes reduced or collapsed back into a narrative of the nursery and the baby. But if clinical practice is maternalistic, and has been too developmentally oriented and too concerned with baby needs, then poststructuralist theory focuses far too much on the paternalistic structuralist accounts of language and the symbolic. Both of these poles, maternal practice and phallic theory, ontology or epistemology, eliminate the ambivalent nature of an Irigarayan imaginary which would incorporate the body and language, or sameness and difference from the mother. Neither Whitford's emphasis on dereliction nor Cornell's concept of Utopian metaphor captures this difficulty. If dereliction is where paternal discourse leaves the woman, then a Utopian concept of the imaginary has to mean more than a vision or mythical rewriting beyond an abject state. As Irigaray herself points out, the female imaginary is a dream, but it is also a sensory and bodily experience, 'it is a place that already exists and that I wish could be developed, culturally, socially, amorously' (Irigaray, 1988: 164). But the problem of thinking through the bodily roots of subjectivity, or the
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ontological basis of sexual difference, is precisely how to think it as a difficulty, rather than as a prescriptive or pre-determined origin. As Rosi Braidotti points out, the 'problem of the articulation of the empirical with the symbolic, the material with the spiritual and the libidinal, the political with the subjective, is common to both feminist theory and psychoanalysis' (Braidotti, 1994: 182). Psychic notions of sexuality and gender do not coincide with anatomical biology. Psychoanalysis posits this non-coincidence through the notion of the unconscious, whereas feminism proposes it in terms of the situated, social and historical construction of identity. I suggest that this non-coincidence (between psychic sexuality/gender and biology) within psychoanalysis and feminism is central to understanding Irigaray's figurative imaginary (the neither one nor two), as a threshold connecting empirical with symbolic. The female imaginary, then, is not separable from a female symbolic: they both represent a threshold which reconnects the female body with language. Understanding of this threshold cannot be undertaken within a purely Lacanian framework because this framework rejects empiricism and unconscious experience in favour of a system which concentrates on symbolic and linguistic representation.
The threshold mmmmm Irigaray's concepts of the female imaginary and the female symbolic cannot be clearly divided. The 'neither one nor two' of the female imaginary also includes (potentially) the female symbolic. This refusal to distinguish between the symbolic and the imaginary can also be seen as a challenge to the opposition or split in Lacan's work between language and the female body. But how does Irigaray's threshold posit an alternative to the seemingly inevitable, divisory phallus? Irigaray's threshold does not just connect the imaginary with the symbolic; it also connects with and transformatively represents the real. The 'neither one nor two' or the female imaginary traverses the gap between the body and language, or between what Irigaray terms the carnal and the transcendental. This threshold can then be seen as a kind of political imaginary, common to feminism and psychoanalysis, articulating that difficult encounter between psychic sexuality/gender and the body. As a bridge between the symbolic and the real, this imaginary potentially negotiates between all those binary oppositions - material/spiritual, empirical/linguistic, subjective/political - that are so relevant to psychoanalysis and feminism. We can then understand how images of the female imaginary in Irigaray's work, however biological they may seem, occupy a transitional position between the body and language, and evolve as inseparable from each other. One way of surmounting the biologistic nature of Irigaray's terms is to read them as tropes or even metonyms of the body. The image of the female imaginary as the placenta is described as a veil representing the first unconscious
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dialogue between mother and child. This placental veil, 'recalls something of the angel'. The angel in turn is related to another very bodily image - the female mucus: 'The mucus should no doubt be pictured as related to the angel' (Irigaray, 1993a: 17). All of these images seem to form a bridge or threshold connecting the female imaginary with the symbolic and the bodily real. However, this leaves a big problem with how we understand the bodily real to operate within Irigaray's thinking. In Lacan's account the bodily real is a psychotic place, an abject relation to the mother which cannot be represented. This traumatic, impossible place is not mediated with the symbolic. On the contrary it is a dark hole or abyss that an individual can fall into if entry into the symbolic is incomplete. Psychosis occurs when there are gaps or rents in the symbolic, the subject falls out of the symbolic; and into the real. Attempts by Irigaray to align the female imaginary with the real of the maternal body have thus been seen as problematic because they seem to return women to the primitive instinctual death drives of the maternal body. Choosing between psychosis and a phallic symbolic is, however, a Lacanian dilemma and further reading of Irigaray's more bodily imaginary can perhaps locate it within a sublimated, more narrative position, beyond the phallus.
i i i i « i i i Irigaray's bodily imaginary Irigaray's argument for a female imaginary which will mediate between real and symbolic, connecting the experiential and sensual relation to the mother's body with cultural representation and subjectivity, is worked out in two different papers on the analytic practice of psychoanalysis. In a paper entitled 'The Poverty of Psychoanalysis', Irigaray attacks the Lacanian institution for a theory and practice which projects violence and castration onto the body of the woman. For Irigaray, 'trying to find a new possible imaginary for women that brings the two lips into contact', does not involve a retreat to biology or 'genital norms', but entails the need to 'break out of the autological and tautological circle of systems of representation and their discourse so as to allow women to speak their sex' (Irigaray, 1991: 97). This move away from theories which are based on a male imaginary involves 'an imaginary of the sexuate body whose form never detaches itself from the matter that generates it' (Irigaray, 1991: 98). Irigaray points out that the imaginary and symbolic value of the phallus becomes all-powerful precisely because in Lacan's account there is no sexual relation in the real. She asks 'whether the real might not be some very repressed-censored-forgotten "thing" to do with the body' and suggests 'there is no question of underestimating the real if we interpret its effects' (Irigaray, 1991: 86). Here, Irigaray is arguing for the transformative potential of the real relation to the maternal body in terms of the symbolic. Irigaray also conceptualises her more bodily imaginary within
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the clinical space, and in the paper, 'Flesh Colours', she argues for a creative space between analyst and analysand which will mediate between literal and symbolic. She suggests that an exclusively analytic perspective on the transference destroys the potential to imagine and create. Whereas writing and language seek to contain and repress bodily identity, a more figurative imagination, linked to the senses, can express it. Irigaray distinguishes between a mental imaginary and a bodily imaginary which can access the creative imagination and represent the senses. In the more mental imaginary the imagination is in conflict with the affectual relation to the body, a scenario in which the imaginary is at war with the real and 'corresponds to a pathos of the senses'. In a more creative and figurative imaginary, the bodily senses becomes accessed through the image and painting. Utilising the senses of the real, this bodily imaginary provides the analytic encounter with a 'power of imagination', an imagination necessary for completion of analysis. Transference, in other words, cannot be resolved simply by deconstructing the analysand, through a linguistic, mental framework which analyses, but leaves no room to recreate. The difference between a mental and bodily imaginary is that, with the first, the real returns as a threatening and destructive death drive, but, in the second, becomes liberated as an imaginative recreation of the self. The more mental imaginary exemplifies the conflict of the hysteric. It is, therefore, of vital importance that the hysteria which remains between the woman and the mother in tension, 'must not be destroyed but allowed access to the imagination and creativeness' (Irigaray, 1985b: 138). Hysteria is indisputably constituted as pathological within Western culture, but it also contains, in Irigaray's view, a 'cultural reserve yet to come' (Irigaray, 1985b: 138). The hysteric's relation to the real of the maternal body is not simply as a question which can be subsumed under Oedipal and castration law, but can be seen as a key to understanding a more culturally located female identity. I want to end this chapter by mapping Irigaray's imaginary onto a Winnicottian notion of a creative unconscious. Kristeva's bodily imaginary, as I have suggesteded, is interesting in that it combines the Lacanian structures of the symbolic, imaginary and real with an object relations account. But because of her Oedipal analysis, ultimately rooting the unconscious in feminine violence, there cannot be a creative sublimation of the woman's relation to the mother's body, within language. An understanding of the Lacanian notion of the real illustrates this point. Lacan understands the real to be the traumatic, psychotic and unrepresentable relation to the mother's body that lies outside culture and the symbolic, and this is also precisely Kristeva's reading of the abject. Irigaray rejects the idea that the real is necessarily abject, and argues for a more representative unconscious with which to connect the real to culture and the symbolic. Although Irigaray does not explicitly utilise an object relations theory of the unconscious, as I have said elsewhere, there is a clear
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unacknowledged debt to it in her work. There are some obvious connections between Irigaray's notion of a more creative, representative unconscious and Winnicott's. I want, therefore, to consider Bollas's generative account of the unconscious, in terms of Irigaray's notion of the symbolic, imaginary and real, in an exploration of a more creative and narrative bodily imaginary.
Transforming the real into narrative Christopher Bollas, is a contemporary Winnicottian analyst who has recently marked out a difference between early, maternal, unconscious experience and a secondary unconscious of mental representation which is governed by the repressive Oedipal phallus. Such a split between an early and more complex unconscious can of course be traced back (as Bollas acknowledges) to Freud's primary and secondary unconscious. Although Winnicott does not explain how the libidinal desire for the mother becomes translated into the symbolic, Bollas significantly develops Winnicott's ideas by arguing for a generative, experiential unconscious which can transform the traumatic real into imaginary and symbolic registers. Bollas's more postmodern reading of Winnicott does not accept the notion of a real or true self. The true self is merely a set of idiomatic or potential selves which seek elaboration through significant objects. Selection of objects is, for Bollas, a form of self-expression where 'objects, like words, are there for us to express ourselves' (Bollas, 1993: 30). Bollas discusses, therefore, how the early experiential relation to the mother partakes of what he calls a generative unconscious. Bollas calls the early wordless transference between child and mother 'the unthought known'. This experiential relation is known but not thought, because the child cannot process it through mental representation. The mother is the first object to be identified with. If she is 'good-enough', to use Winnicott's phrase, then she can be transformatively used to bring potential parts of the idiom or self to life. However, much of this early ego relating remains an unconscious potential. When this process is re-enacted within analysis, the patient can use the analyst as the 'transformational object' or early mother to transform previous unthought aspects of potential selves into mental representation (Bollas, 1989: 12). Elaboration of the unthought known leads to the development of psychic genera, and Bollas links this elaborative and generative unconscious to a theory of reception. It is the movement from this latter world of unconscious self-experience to a complex mental state which enables the unthought known to be reflected on and represented within narrative. If the return of the repressed is understood as symbolic repetition, then Bollas poses psychic genera as symbolic elaboration (Bollas, 1993: 66-75). Bollas suggests that future selves arise due to an evocative transformational process, a form of self-experiencing (beginning with the mother and extending
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to the world) in which objects are used to bring potential parts of ourselves to life. Traumatic abuse can lead to a cessation of symbolic elaboration, where there is an inability to use objects generatively. For BoUas, the 'fact' of the real might be unavailable to mental representation, because we can't think or narrate it, but we can still revisit this traumatic real within the clinical encounter and reconstruct (bring to life) destroyed self states. For BoUas, the historian's text and the psychoanalyst's reconstructions can both be understood as a psychic function, where the imaginary and symbolic work upon the real, 'creating a space in the mind that gives special significance to the real' (Bollas, 1995: 143). In his view 'psychoanalysis errs if it turns away permanently from the presentation of the real, taking refuge either in a theory of narrative or in a misplaced empiricism' (Bollas, 1995: 113). Generative transformation of the real, from experience to language, mobilises the relation to the body, connecting it and representing it within the registers of the imaginary and symbolic. Bollas is not talking, here, about an Oedipal model of repression. He distinguishes between trauma which has resulted in repression, and trauma which results in a forgetting; an amnesia which is the result of intra-psychic destruction of self-experience. Freud's theory of repression is, for Bollas, about preserving the past and is very different from the idea of the past as forgetting: 'what I am talking about is equivalent not to repression or denial but to that amnesia which Freud writes about - the oblivion of self destruction' (Bollas, 1995: 118). Whereas a Freudian, phallic repression of desire means desire is repressed and preserved, a traumatic amnesia is the result of intra-psychic destruction, and Bollas suggests that it is this latter amnesia that explains deathwork in the psyche. So, although a phallic account of repressed desire means it has been hidden somewhere in the unconscious, the amnesia that Bollas speaks of signifies psychic self-destruction. However, traumatic deaths of early, unconscious experience can be generatively reconstructed within the analytic space. This generative work, which recreates a lost maternal (internal) object relation, can transform parts of the real into imaginary and symbolic registers. Irigaray argues for a figurative imaginary to express the senses creatively. Bollas, too, argues for an experiential unconscious, where transformation of the deathly real is achieved through the representative function of the image. Bollas describes how images can be liberated in the analytic transference through the free association of hidden memories. Free association is where the patient says whatever comes to mind. In the analytical session, childhood memories that seem inconsequential or trivial are elaborated through the use of free association and this work in turn liberates powerful and aesthetic images. Freud called these seemingly trivial memories, covering deeply significant desires and anxieties, screen memories. Linking the screen memory with his own analysis of unconscious experience, Bollas explains how unconscious
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material, lost through trauma, can be liberated through tapping screen memories that yield inner images, between analyst and client. Such creative images thus convert the destruction of the past into new stories of meaning. Bollas's theorisation of unconscious experience provides us with a more creative model of the unconscious, which potentially can represent Irigaray's bodily real. Indeed, if we return to Irigaray's notion of women's imaginary dereliction, we can now understand how potentially it can be recreated through an experiential and generative unconscious. One of the biggest difficulties in mapping Irigaray and BoUas together is the absence of a different model of unconscious narrative. Bollas doesn't accord a narrative function to the imaginary in the way, for instance, Kristeva does. For him primary unconscious experience is separate from a secondary Oedipal and narrative unconscious. By severing primary unconscious experience from a more complex narrative self, Bollas refuses a narrative function to the imaginary, leaving it mired in a pre-Oedipal, pre-verbal position. But Bollas's discussion of the unconscious image does point to a representative, primary unconscious that remains rather inconsistent with a secondary Oedipal narrative. For instance, how exactly does Bollas's generative object relation manage to represent the body within language, if the Oedipal theory of language is geared to repressing it through the death drive? The opposition between bodily experience and language, so integral to an Oedipal narrative, seems at odds with Bollas's positive imaginary. Although Bollas does not use his ideas to subvert an Oedipal model of language, there exists within his work, a potentially more narrative account of the experiential unconscious than he himself acknowledges.
The imaginary and symbolic as narrative What does it mean to talk about the imaginary and symbolic as connective registers which can transform and represent the real? We are clearly moving outside Lacan's tripartite, but oppositional, structure which is governed and organised by the phallus. For Lacan, the real is a traumatic and psychotic space, unrepresentable and impossible. Envisaged as a black hole in the narrative fabric of the symbolic, the real is that unthinkable space that the psychotic falls into foreclosing the name of the father or the metaphorical phallus. But this psychotic relation to the maternal body, which in Lacan's world remains always external to the symbolic and to culture, can be seen as an unspeakable historical place, not just a psychic space, occupied by those suffering from 'madness' - or psychoses. For Lacan, the aim of analysis is to introduce or reestablish the patient's place within language - patching the hole in the symbolic order by providing the Oedipal and paternal metaphor, which has been refused. Irigaray's understanding of the imaginary, symbolic and real as mediating between literal and metaphoric, challenges this phallic opposition
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between the female body and language and provides a representative, imaginal imaginary. In a similar move to Bollas's, Irigaray proposes a transformative real which ultimately can be realised within symbolic and imaginary registers. But this passage from unconscious experience to mental representation, or should I say between, only makes sense if you perceive the imaginary (as well as the symbolic) as a form of narrative. Other psychoanalytic critics have argued for the notion of psychoanalysis as narrative and for the unconscious as representative. The analyst and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis argues for a radical, creative unconscious which is essentially self-transformative and representative. For Castoriadis, the imaginary is not, as Lacan would have it, a mirrored image of the self; instead it is a socio-historical and psychical 'creation of figures/forms/images' (Castoriadis, 1987: 3). Anthony Elliott has developed Castoriadis's concept, seeing the unconscious as a constant 'intertwining of representational wrapping, imaginary and socio-symbolic forms' which explains the interdependent construction of our psychical selves, relations to others and the internalisation of social and cultural meaning (Elliott, 1995: 48). According to Elliott's theory, relationships between the imaginary and cultural are not cemented into a 'fixed reality' by the symbolic phallus (Elliott, 1995: 50). If we can accord to the so called preOedipal, maternal imaginary a more narrative and symbolic function, then not only is there no clear dividing line between the imaginary and the symbolic, but a viable alternative to an Oedipal model of the unconscious can perhaps be envisaged. Maybe, too, the many oppositions which have served to distance feminism from psychoanalysis can be renegotiated. Perceiving this bodily narrative imaginary in terms of a poetic or a painterly image reflects Irigaray's description of the 'painting' between therapist and client in analytic practice. Narrative, in this more bodily sense, becomes linked to music, poetry and painting and cannot be encapsulated within Oedipal linguistic definitions. The Oedipal trajectory announces the incompatibility of the bodily psyche with culture or the social. Historically this has meant, for many feminists and Marxists, that psychoanalysis is incompatible with a culturally materialist analysis of society. The next chapter will therefore examine some of the more recent debates between psychoanalysis and Queer theory in a discussion of how political psychoanalysis can really be: is there really a dialogue, or just an impasse, between the psyche and the social?
Bollas, C. (1989) 'A Theory for the True Self, in Forces Of Destiny, London: Free Associations. — (1993) 'Aspects of Self Experiencing' and 'Psychic Genera', in Being in Character, London: Routledge. — (1995) 'Functions of History', in Cracking Up, London: Routledge.
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Braidotti, R. (1994) 'The Politics Of Ontological Difference', in Nomadic Subjects, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, New York and London: Routledge. Castoriadis, C. (1987) 'Individuals and Things', in The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cornell, D. (1991) 'The Maternal and the Feminine' and 'Feminine Writing, Metaphor and Myth', in Beyond Accommodation, New York and London: Routledge. Elliott, A. (1995) 'Affirmation Of Primary Repression Rethought', in Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (eds), Psychoanalysis In Contexts, London: Routledge. Fuss, D. (1988) 'Lip Service', in Thinking Through the Body, New York: Columbia University Press. — (1989) 'Luce Irigaray's Language of Essence', in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, London: Routledge. Gallop, J. (1988) 'Lip Service', in Thinking Through the Body, New York: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, L. (1985a) Speculum of The Other Woman, trans Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — (1985b) 'Cosi Fan Tutti', 'Questions', 'The Mechanics of Fluids', and 'When Our Lips Speak Together', in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. — (1988) 'Interview with Luce Irigaray', in Elaine H. Baruch and Lucienne J. Serrano (eds), Women Analyse Women, New York: New York University Press. — (1991) 'The Bodily Encounter With the Mother' and 'The Poverty of Psychoanalysis', in Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — (1993a) 'Sexual Difference' and 'Love of the Same, Love of the Other', in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, London: The Athlone Press. — (1993b) 'Divine Women', in Female Genealogies, trans Gillian C. Gill, New York; Columbia University Press. Jones, A.R. (1984) 'Kristeva on Femininity: the Limits of a Semiotic Polities', Feminist Review 18 (November). Kristeva, J. (1980) Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection, trans by Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. — (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press. — (1986) 'Womens' Time' and 'Stabat Mater', in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. — (1989) The Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press. Rose, J. (1986) 'Feminine Sexuality', in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. Safouan, M. (1981) 'Is the Oedipal Complex Universal?', MIF 5-6: 9. Samuels, A. (1993) The Political Psyche, London: Routledge. Schor, N. (1993) 'This Essentialism Which is not One', in Margaret Whitford (ed.), Engaging With Irigaray, London: Routledge. Weed, E. (1993) 'The Question of Style', in Margaret Whitford (ed.), Engaging With Irigaray, London: Routledge. Whitford, M. (1991) 'Rationality and the Imaginary' and 'Maternal genealogy and the symbolic', in Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London: Routledge.
Queering the Phallus
A theory and practice of homophobia
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If there is one debate today which explosively threatens the closely locked gates of psychoanalytic institution(s) it is the debate on homosexuality. Psychoanalysis has continued to be homophobic, whilst its sexism has been under continual challenge within the movement from its earliest days. A preponderance of women psychoanalysts has always infused an awareness of gender debates within the analytic institution, and acceptance, however paternalistic, of feminist criticism has led to a high count of leading feminist theorists who also double up as psychoanalytical therapists. Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are perhaps the best known - although, as I have already mentioned, Kristeva's status as a feminist thinker is highly dubious. Juliet Mitchell, whose profile as an academic promoting political views on psychoanalysis was so central in the 1970s, has subsequently trained as a psychoanalyst with the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. The conservative nature of the British Institution of Psychoanalysis explains, perhaps, the lack of explicit political theorisation by its members. The implicit consensus by leading training institutions of psychoanalysis in Britain not to take on training members who are gay or homosexual, is part of an institutionalised homophobia that has instructed both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis from the beginning. In France, psychoanalytic thinking and practice via Lacan have been more radical in tearing psychoanalysis away from a positivist medical model and positing in its place the desire-ridden, decentred ego. But, as we have seen, Lacanian psychoanalysis has failed to escape dominant Oedipal constructions of knowledge and power that shore up not just paternal family values but a white, Western and heterosexual masculine identity as the universal discourse of the subject. However deconstructive Lacanianism is in terms of a humanist, 131
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transcendental ego, it fails to dislodge the mastery of that ego because it privileges on a totalising level the symbolic, linguistic phallus. The homophobia of psychoanalytic theory and practice covers a wide range - from the more predictable, but nonetheless serious pathologisation of homosexuality as a perversion within more conservative institutions, to the more sup rising but just as virulent homophobia espoused by critical difference theorists such as Julia Kristeva. Kristeva, as I have already discussed, pathologises lesbianism as psychotic. Subsequent reaction by gay theorists and radicals alike, who reject outright the discourses of psychoanalysis because of its institutionalised homophobia, is perhaps understandable. But psychoanalysis, or analytical psychotherapy, can be understood as a political and ethical practice, by which I mean that all analysts, whether they acknowledge it or not, occupy a political and potentially ethical position. If such practice is recognised and the unconscious is also acknowledged as being the situated history of both the client and the analyst, then there is no reason why psychoanalytic discourse has to be confined to narratives such as the Oedipal, the pre-Oedipal, the phallus or the mother. If the Freudian Oedipal complex can be seen (I argue that it can) as a highly elitist discourse that privileges white middle-class and masculine sexuality, pathologising to the pre-Oedipal arena female sexuality, homosexuality, racial and working-class difference, then in this scenario it is the pre-Oedipal that represents the social norm and the Oedipal which represents a minority (however dominant) of difference. Before elaborating on more contemporary queer debates in relation to psychoanalysis, I want to discuss some of the more conventional and widespread pathologisation within the psychoanalytic community of homosexuality as a pre-Oedipal perversion. I then intend to compare this pathologisation with a radical defence of gay sexuality, a defence which actively criticises and rewrites the normative capitalist and family values of the Oedipal complex. Freud's views on homosexuality were contradictory. On the one hand he viewed it in relatively unbiased terms, seeing it as part of everyone's bisexuality. He suggested that 'all human beings are capable of making an homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious' (Freud: 1905: 56). Homosexuality is, for Freud, an inversion of normal sexuality, but it is also a part of the naturally occurring polymorphous perversity of infantile life. A perversity, then, that had to be given up in order to accede to the heterosexual difference and sublimation of the Oedipal complex. It is the Oedipal complex in Freud's work that designates the 'pathology' of the homosexual. The Oedipal complex states that the necessary path to a civilised society is the repression of infantile sexual instincts and the unilateral sexual choice of heterosexual difference. Prohibition of the incest taboo, an integral part of Oedipal law, means giving up same sex desire. In this scenario, identification
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with the same sex becomes separated from desire. You can only desire what you are not, and you can only identify with the sex that you do not desire. The normative injunction of Oedipal sexual difference is, as Juliet Mitchell points out, at odds with much of the rest of Freud's work that repeatedly stresses bisexuality (Mitchell: 1982: 12). But if Freud managed to keep this sexual ambivalence alive by arguing that neurosis was a negative perversion - that all neurotics were at heart also perverts - his followers were less sophisticated in using the Oedipal map to divide normal £«?#//#/heterosexuality from the abnormalities of homosexuality. Such abnormalities were described in terms of degeneracy, infantile arrested development, and at their extreme, as dangerous and psychotic, Michael Balint, a leading member of the object relations school, thus explains why homosexuality is a perversion because like other perversions 'it attempts to escape from the two main demands of mature genitality' (Balint, 1956: 26). These two major claims of 'mature' genitality are regression in heterosexual coitus and a more cooperative (less destructive) relationship with the other person or object. Indeed, Balint suggests that it is only through genital love that the other person can really be understood as a human being rather than an object. Perverts and homosexuals are unable to accede to these mature forms of genital love because their egos are too weak and unintegrated; they are unable to master anxiety, especially castration anxiety. Sandor S. Felman, an American psychoanalyst writing in the 1950s, describes homosexuality as a defence against 'the biologically determined natural foundation' (Felman, 1956: 93). Felman's discovery as a therapist is that 'essentially, homosexuals want to mate with the opposite sex'. Unsurprisingly the real goal of therapy, Felman concludes, is 'to bring the patient to the biologically given heterosexual relationship which is not created by therapy but liberated for use' (Felman, 1956: 93). The work of the American psychoanalyst C. W. Socarides reveals the contemporary face of homophobia within the psychoanalytic institution. His belief that homosexuality is an immature, arrested stage of development, implicitly tied to perverse character structures, should provoke deep anxiety for anyone involved in an active relationship with psychoanalysis. In an age where equal rights and opportunities for gay people are now widely accepted and discrimination against homosexuality is seen increasingly as unacceptable, Socarides writes: The sexual deviant has been unable to pass successfully through the symbiotic and separation-individuating phase of early childhood, and this failure creates the original anxiety from which sexual perversions arise. This developmental failure results in severe ego deficits and faulty gender identity. (Socarides, 1979: 165) The Kleinian view on homosexuality is equally extreme. Klein believed
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homosexuality to be an idealised defence against early paranoia and feelings of persecution. Excessive narcissistic cathexis of the ego was, therefore, a common characteristic attributed to both homosexuals and schizophrenics. Indeed, in a recent interview with Jacqueline Rose, the leading Kleinian analyst Hannah Segal clearly states her belief that adult homosexuality is pathological because of its in-built narcissistic structure which can only desire the same (Rose, 1990: 198-214). This understanding of homosexuality as structurally or inherently narcissistic goes back to Freud's problematic theorisation of homosexuality in terms of the Oedipal complex. In his paper 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood', Freud analyses Leonardo's homosexuality in terms of his castration anxiety vis a vis his mother (Freud: 'Leonardo'). This passive castration anxiety around the phallus is informed by a recognition of the mother's castration. The homosexual is filled with his fear of the absence of the penis (girl's complex) or the fear of losing it (boy's complex) and is prevented from separating from the mother. He becomes fixated on her. Freud links this passive homosexuality to narcissism and to femininity. Women and homosexuals both lack the phallus, therefore their later external object relations (anaclitic choices) are based not in relation to the mother object but in relation to themselves. Narcissistic desire in women and homosexuals is consequently object-less, self-relating and closer to more primitive forms of libido. Both women and homosexuals are driven by their passive narcissistic desire to be loved, a desire of the same which cannot accede difference. As we saw in the last chapter, Freud adds that it is phallic masculinity that represents the most active and sublimated recognition of (heterosexual) difference.
Radical and queer psychoanalysis Maybe it is only through reading some of the pathological accounts of gay sexuality by contemporary analysts that one can sense the grave limitations of an Oedipal account that universally posits an exclusive phallic and heterosexist framework, as well as being simultaneously classist and racist. As a master discourse of the family romance, the Oedipal constructs the pathological category of the normal heterosexual and the abnormal homosexual, as it simultaneously privileges masculine phallic sexuality and excludes female sexuality from society as the abject. The radical French poststructuralist thinker, Guy Hocquenghem, spells this out quite plainly in his political tract Homosexual Desire. Writing in the wake of the French revolution in May 1968 and influenced by thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Hocquenghem criticises psychoanalysis, including Lacanian psychoanalysis, for its universal reliance on the phallic principle. Hocquenghem argues that the Oedipal is a dominant social family romance that constructs homosexuality as pathological. He writes,
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we only find in the Oedipalised homosexual libido what we have put there in the first place. In this sense, the analysis of homosexuality is at the same time the construction of the whole family romance, where it will go on living whether it likes it or not. (Hocquenghem, 1993: 81) Hocquenghem's critique of the Oedipal was greatly influenced by Deleuze and Guattari's seminal work Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze is renowned as a literary philosopher; Guattari is a Marxist and a trained Lacanian psychoanalyst. Both believed, contrary to Lacan's assertion that the Oedipal complex was a necessary stage in the development of the individual, that Freud's Oedipal complex was a key structure of capitalism, which repressed libido and desire, internalising a patriarchal family institution at an unconscious level. Psychoanalysis colludes with capitalism and its repression of sexuality by accepting the familial constellation. Deleuze and Guattari thus rejuvenated the debate between Freud and Marx and, like the anti-psychiatrists Laing and Cooper, challenged the existing medical and psychiatric orthodoxies. For Deleuze and Guattari, the unconscious cannot be defined by the Oedipal and is infinitely more open. The unconscious is likened by them to 'bodies without organs' or desiring machines which can plug into and out of the corresponding desire machines in other people. There is no constituent self as such, just these desiring and productive parts or machines, which Deleuze and Guattari link to the poymorphous perversity of pre-Oedipal sexuality. The pre-Oedipal fragmentation of the schizophrenic is not just limited to mad people but manifests itself as the reality of all unconscious psyches. 'Schizoanalysis' is the term Deleuze and Guattari coin to deconstruct the social field of desire and to undo Oedipal family neurosis through a revolutionary liberation of society's repressed desiring machines. Hocquenghem was also much influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault discusses how it is only comparatively recently that society has sought to define everything within a social classification, for instance, the growth in the eighteenth century of the understanding of madness as a distinct individual quality. Similarly, it is only from the nineteenth century onwards that homosexuality became classifiable as a specific attribute or disease of the individual. Before that it was generally accepted that homosexuality was a potential in all people or sinners. Hocquenghem argues that the artificial separation of homosexuality as a separate category enables it to be both repressed and pathologised by legal, medical and other discourses in society. Agreeing with Deleuze and Guattari, Hocquenghem suggests that if the phallus has been raised to despotic social significance, being made to account for all social identity, then the anus has been totally privatised and individualised. He therefore proposes a social reclamation of the anus. The desiring machine of homosexual desire plugged into the anus can displace the heterosexual kingship of
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the phallus. Hocquenghem has been criticised for his exclusion of female sexuality and lesbianism, although it is only fair to say that he makes a clear connection between the social use of the anus and hysteria. Homosexuals, like women, are hysterical because they are confused as to their sexual identity; their desire confounds the distinct (heterosexual) identity conferred by the phallus: Only the phallus dispenses identity; any social use of the anus, apart from its sublimated use, creates the risk of a loss of identity. Seen from behind we are all women; the anus does not practise discrimination. (Hocquenghem, 1993: 101) For all its exclusive focus on male homosexuality, there are some very interesting links between Hocquenghem's work on socially reclaiming the privatised anus and Irigaray's determination to reclaim the abject status of female sexuality within language. For Hocquenghem, the oppressive nature of Freud's theories is the division of sexuality into masculine or feminine, subject or object. Sandor Ferenczi, a close follower of Freud's, thus divided homosexuality into a passive 'feminine' sexuality and an active 'male' homosexuality. Such an understanding of gender inversion was reflected in Freud's own writings when he suggested a distinction between complete inversion where the 'subject homo-erotic' is like a woman and an 'amphigenic' inversion where the homosexual retains some masculine functions and attributes (Freud, 1905: 46-7). Hocquenghem objects to this division into masculine or feminine, subject or object, because of its Oedipal frame, which subordinates femininity and passive homosexuality under the active auspices of a dominant male heterosexual subjectivity. This Oedipal family configuration, encoding an opposition between the individual and society, can finally be transcended, according to Hocquenghem, by grouped homosexual desire and the recognition of transexual desire: It is the slope towards transexuality through the disappearance of objects and subjects, a slide towards the discovery that in matters of sex everything is simply communication. (Hocquenghem, 1993: 150) But this raises a question in relation to gay political identity. Many marginal groups politically need an embodied narrative of identity or self around which to activate and form community. This is true for gay people and feminists, for people of different ethnic backgrounds and with different class solidarities. So what does it mean to claim to dissolve these differences under a more fluid communication which ultimately deconstructs these binaries as artificial? And how can we, once we have taken on board the principal tenets of Derridean deconstruction, move beyond the binary or the phallic terms without collapsing into essential notions of the desiring body? For instance, in
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Hocquenghem's work, how can a privileging of fluid transexuality avoid dissolving into the same figurations of the feminine and unconscious deathly desire (which I discussed in the last chapter)? What does it mean to champion polymorphous perversity over the phallic term when it is understood within a model of the'return of the repressed'? Hocquenghem's work can be seen as part of a history of radical psychoanalysts who use the model of the return of the repressed to pit the revolutionary nature of instinctual desire against civilised, bourgeois society. I have already discussed the problematic way in which Wilhelm Reich's privileging of the sexual instincts ends shoring up a conservative genital heterosexuality. Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse were both radical post-war psychoanalysts who argued for a liberation of polymorphous perverse desire. In Marcuse's famous tract Eros and Civilisation he speaks of the myriad ways in which perverse desire and the pleasure principle can topple the rational ego of our repressive capitalist institutions. Implicitly critiquing Reich, Marcuse stressed how a true liberation of the polymorphous perverse instincts can lead to a transformation of sexuality into erotic desire. Marcuse believed that reducing the polymorphous, pleasure-seeking body to either genital sex, or sexuality was a mistake. In fact sexuality 'constrained under genital supremacy' could never achieve the full eroticisation of all the bodily zones that a pregenital polymorphous sexuality offered (Marcuse, 1966: 203). Eroticisation of perverse instincts resexualised the body and integrated it with society; mere sexuality was thus transformed to a larger order. Although Marcuse was not advocating a specific homosexual politics, his writing, which critiques Reich and anticipates Hocquenghem, is an important landmark. Mario Mieli was an important contemporary of Hocquenghem's who similarly advocated a radical psychoanalytic politics of sexuality. Like Hocquenghem, Mieli tries to rescue Freudian Eros from its heterosexist chains. As Jonathon Dollimore has pointed out, Hocquenghem's project can be seen as an anti-humanist one, where normative identity is shattered by deviant desire (Dollimore, 1991: 209). Mieli's work, on the other hand, has been deemed as more 'humanist' because it focuses on the wider intersubjective relations of the 'whole' personality in relation to society. Although it might be helpful in some ways to distinguish between Hocquenghem's anti-humanist stance and Mieli's humanist one, in other ways this distinction is not useful and belies the important connections between these two writers. Mieli, like Hocquenghem, believed in the underlying transexuality of the individual, but unlike Hocquenghem he did not reject the Oedipal complex. Mieli sketched an Oedipal scenario, including a positive Oedipal complex referring to the opposite sex and a negative Oedipal complex referring to the same sex parent. For Mieli, the strength of the incest taboo in society accounted for the positive heterosexual Oedipal complex. He explained how in this scenario the boy's
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identification with the father forced him to sacrifice both his father as an object choice or love, and a 'feminine' identification with the mother associated with qualities such as nurturance and giving. Heterosexual masculinity was therefore based on a denied homosexual bond. Mieli argued that heterosexual men subordinated women by forcing on them a relational bond with this exaggerated and repressed masculinity, and an identification with 'femininity' that they as men were forced to give up. Male homosexuals, on the other hand, did not give up their feminine identification with their mothers and this access to a negative Oedipal complex ensured a fuller and more plural personality. In this way Mieli suggests that it is only gay men that can truly love women, for heterosexual men cannot love woman for what she is, since he would then have to recognise the existence of female sexuality, finding in it a reflection of the 'femininity' within himself. He comes to love women above all as objectifications and holes, and hence does not really love them at all. (Mieli: 1980: 222) As an active participant in the British and Italian gay movements, Mieli in his autobiographical and political writing espoused a universal communism, a communism that could liberate transexuality. His Utopian vision of society entails the revolutionary overturning of the heterosexist, masculine norm through the combined efforts of women and gays, particularly gay women. So whereas Hocquenghem focused on the specific abject status of male homosexuality in relation to a phallic heterosexual norm, Mieli's analysis showed how the structuring of gay oppression was intimately linked with the women's movement and the cultural exclusion of female sexuality. Instead of dividing up these writers into anti-humanist and humanist camps it might be advantageous to see how one can situate and elaborate the other. For instance, Hocquenghem's rather specific focus on culturally transforming the abject anus is elaborated by Mieli's emphasis on the necessary connection between male homosexuality and the abject status of female sexuality. Meanwhile, Hocquenghem's detailed analysis of the relation between power, sexuality and society tempers the rather totalising utopianism of Mieli's project.
Between Foucault and Freud Dollimore has charted the writing of both Hocquenghem and Mieli within a tradition of liberationary radicals (heterosexist and homosexual) that is from today's perspective on the decentered self, determinedly essentialist. This criticism of radical liberationary politics as essentialist, whether directed at Reich or Hocquenghem, is based on an unease with positing pre-Oedipal, perverse sexuality as a sort of idealistic alternative to phallic or Oedipal models of society. The championing of the polymorphous perverse is seen as
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dangerously returning a sort of instinctual truth. Society's repressive chains can be liberated and thrown over to reveal some essential essence of natural or true sexuality and identity. If we look closely at Hocquenghem's work and at Midi's, however, we see how consistently they argue for the cultural structuring and mediation of perverse desire. They do not invoke, as Reich does, some natural and biological, true sexuality. Jonathon Dollimore's recent book, Sexual Dissidence, confronts the essentialist problematic of trying to locate or attribute some kind of pure, revolutionary source to polymorphous perverse sexuality. Whilst heeding the historical importance of the radical homosexual writers, Dollimore reflects on how their sexual transgression and vision of Utopian identities transcend the dominant repressive focus of power only to occupy in its place a different romanticised truth and authentic identity. He writes, 'even so, be it reluctantly, with relief, or maybe even anger at the delusion it fostered many would now agree that the polymorphous perverse has finally exhausted itself as a pure source of the revolutionary' (Dollimore, 1991: 217). In place of the integral essentialism of the polymorphous perverse, Dollimore suggests the historical exigencies of the perverse dynamic, bringing together Michel Foucault and Freud in a historicisation of homosexual desire. Using Foucault's own critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, Dollimore thus connects what have hitherto been antithetical explanations of the construction and repression of sexuality. But before I go on to elaborate Dollimore's ideas further, I must first outline Foucault's position. Foucault was critical of Freud's repressive hypothesis: that sexuality was a natural drive or force which society and civilisation sought to repress, control and sublimate. For Foucault, sexuality is an historical construction enabling power relations to operate in society. Far from being repressed or silenced, sexuality is a discourse produced through power. Unorthodox sexualities have not been repressed but produced and multiplied. Sexuality becomes the new religion or truth of our inner selves and psychoanalysis is the discourse of power that perpetuates it. These discourses of sexuality and power are not always obvious and operate in insidious ways. Foucault not only suggested that perversion, like sexuality, was a construction; he also pointed out the way in which homosexuality has come into being, since the nineteenth century, as a specific construction or identity. Whereas Freud sees sexuality and perversion as an instinctual force repressed by society, Foucault sees them as produced: part of the discourses of power and truth that create us and at the same time subject us to control and surveillance. As Dollimore acknowledges, this account is rather 'functionalist' and leaves little in the way of understanding how resistances might operate. Foucault does, however, talk about resistance as inscribed within the very workings of power. Resistance cannot be external to power because there is no outside position of alternative resistance we can take up. But where there is
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power there are always points of resistance that are oppositional. For instance, the social construction and control of homosexuality through discourses of power also provide an identity gay people can adopt and argue for in terms of its own legitimacy, using the same language, 'the same categories by which it was medically disqualified' (Foucault, 1978: 101). Foucault calls this resistant use of language and power, a 'reverse' discourse, not an alternative discourse, there is 'not on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite another discourse that runs counter to it'. Instead, discourses are 'blocks operating in the field of force relations'; these blocks of language contain contradictory discourses that compete within similar and opposing strategies (Foucault, 1978: 101-2). Dollimore takes Foucault's explanation of 'reverse' discourse to plot his perverse dynamic between history and psychoanalysis. The relation between the centre of power and its margins is both oppositional and interrelated. The outsider is, Dollimore suggests, created and defined in opposition to the centre. He/she may be outside, but they are also already inside. Transgressive acts from the outside that challenge and appropriate the inside is then part of the perverse dynamic that Dollimore traces through twentieth century homosexual writers such as Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide back to the early modern, religious and metaphysical writing of St. Augustine. The power of perversion to threaten and shatter more orthodox narratives is because such perversion is always integral to that more central power. Dollimore then links this perverse dynamic to Freud and to the radical psychoanalytic writers who propose a revolutionary polymorphous, perverse sexuality. Dollimore describes how homosexuality is always both central and peripheral in Freud's writing. He remarks on how Freud can relegate homosexuality as the deviant outsider to Oedipal repression, but can also observe how 'practising homosexuals may be especially civilised' (Dollimore, 1991: 193). Perversion in Freud and psychoanalysis always returns to trouble and subvert the normative dominance of the Oedipal, because that perversion has always been inscribed not just peripherally but at its heart. Dollimore's illustration of the homosexual encounter at the heart of the Oedipal myth proves his point: That Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother is well known. Less so is the fact that the tragic sequence is intiated because Oedipus' father, Laius, loved a beautiful youth, Chrysippus. (Dollimore: 1991: 204) In this way Dollimore explains how the essentialist writings that construct a homosexual identity out of the polymorphous perverse are also anti-essentialist because they displace the normative identity of the dominant. But they displace or challenge the dominant, not by being external to power, but by being right inside it. Freud and Foucault, as essentialist and anti-essentialist discourses, are thus understood through the perverse dynamic as intrinsically and oppositionally related:
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homosexuality returns in and as a reverse discourse, moving from the margins to the centre, from construction to presence but a presence still in terms of, or working in terms of, the initial construction; incipient, halting, yet finally challenging precisely because 'power' has created, become dependent upon, incorporated it. The perverse dynamic suggests a connection between theories otherwise fundamentally opposed. (Dollimore, 1991: 227) The perverse dynamic thus displaces the polymorphous perverse in Dollimore's work. Instead of a polymorphous perversity situated in a pre-social libido, the perverse dynamic is a dynamic intrinsically connected to a paradoxical social dialectic and process. The perverse dynamic operates between margins and centre. Dollimore provides the historical examples of the 'sodomite' and the more recent figures of the writer Oscar Wilde and the politician Peter Tatchell to explain how the success of demonising such significant others as deviant is because of 'the paranoid instabilities at the heart of dominant cultural identities' (Dollimore, 1991: 237). Projection of deviance onto a marginal other can only occur because that hated and feared 'otherness' is part of the normative centre. Subsequent threats of subversion by such 'deviant' others, whether perceived or real, are effective because what is marginal is already central and vice versa. In terms of a psychoanalytic account, this means that the perverse comes to challenge Oedipal law and theory. For Dollimore it goes as far as challenging the very integrity of the psychoanalytic project. Although Dollimore's perverse dynamic challenges the Oedipal script it nevertheless returns it as the repressive norm of social institutions, thereby confirming Freud's theory of perversion. Dollimore is aware of the dangers of this all-encompassing narrative of repressed desire, however, and openly admits he is not persuaded by Freud's theorisation of the complex. The problem is that Freudian psychoanalysis understands homosexuality as a psychic return from within and this provides only one narrative — namely the Oedipal, positioned on one hand as normative and dominant, or deconstructed on the other, to reveal perversity at its core. Dollimore acknowledges this and reminds the reader of Foucault's more materialist narrative. The materialist narrative understands homosexuality not as repressed desire but as a (deviant) construction placed outside or at the margins and used to police or regulate the heterosexual norm. Dollimore compares the psychoanalytic model with the materialist one, suggesting that whereas the Freudian account understands the securing of identity through the repression and sublimation of homosexual desire, the materialist model focuses much more on homophobia (part of the construction of homosexuality) as an external agent in policing identity. So, whereas psychoanalytic discourses on homosexuality seem to point to the instability of heterosexual identity, the materialist ones reveal how narratives
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of homosexuality/homophobia actually secure that normative heterosexual difference. These differences are important because the notion that homophobia is always rooted in the repressed desire of individuals does not give enough credence to the structural homophobia that is part and parcel of the language of our institutions, whether they be legal, educational or medical. Such structural homophobia can only be accounted for adequately by materialist explanations such as Foucault's, demonstrating the wide economic and sociopolitical forms such homophobia takes. But Dollimore does suggest, using his perverse dynamic, how materialist and psychoanalytic arguments converge, even though they cannot be completely identified with each other. Linking his ideas to Stallybrass and White's study of the Politics and Poetics of Transgression and the repression of the bourgeois subject, Dollimore brings together a psychoanalytic and materialist narrative of homosexuality. Stallybrass and White, as I have discussed, politicise Freud's return of the repressed by elaborating bodily disgust and abject desire into a dialogic narrative of the carnivalesque. In a similar move Dollimore explains how repressed desire gets projected onto a deviant other who is already a structurally independent construction of abjection and disgust. For example, homophobia sometimes arises from repressed desire, but it is also a separate material construction. When repressed homosexual desire becomes unleashed as homophobia it can easily be projected onto the structural forms of abject homosexuality that abound in society. One way of further illustrating this might be to look at the violent homophobia and racism exhibited by the extreme masculine narratives of football hooligans. It is easy to see how the repressed homosexual desire in such macho behaviour might overspill into unleashed panic and violence. But the legitimisation of such violence against men who are seen as too feminine, too different and too other, shows us that repressed desire can be projected so easily because those abjected sites of feminine homosexuality are already in place, subtending and securing that very violent macho difference and behaviour. Dollimore's work convincingly shows how a Freudian narrative of the return of the repressed can work transitionally together with more materialist constructions of dominant and marginal identities. The crucial relation of the repressed or excluded marginal position to a symbolically dominant and central subjectivity can be seen to operate in paradoxically perverse ways both with psychoanalytic and materialist narratives. But - and this is both the strength and weakness of Dollimore's position - if materialist and psychoanalytic narratives can converge but still remain independent of each other (as in the perverse dynamic that connects opposing theories of Freud and Foucault), then what about the peverse dynamic as a deconstruction which (Dollimore promises) will displace the integrity of the Oedipal psychoanalytic
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project? Although Dollimore suggests a dislodgement of the Oedipal, his arguments fall short of taking the perverse path to their suggested conclusion, a conclusion that could rewrite psychoanalysis politically from a more materialist perspective. In tracing the perverse dynamic in Freud's writing, Dollimore does historicise this model of the return of the repressed by rereading it through a Foucauldian model. But instead of moving to a materialist analysis of the unconscious as an undoing or displacement of the Oedipal, he upholds the frameworks of psychoanalysis and materialism as in dialogue, but ultimately intact. Perhaps the main difficulty in conceptualising a materialist narrative of psychoanalysis is that the psychic model of the return of the repressed is fundamentally based on a phallic and dominant subjectivity. As the Oedipal represents social representation and culture, perversity can find no cultural representation outside of this phallic form and norm. Similarly, in Foucault's analysis the power and construction of perversion is always determined by and returned to the dominant. Even when 'constructed' perverts take that identity and make a resistance out of it, that resistance is always ultimately appropriated by the law. There is no integrity or narrative of the pervert that is not ultimately subsumed under the violent and dominant term of a hierarchical binary. Both Freud and Foucault offer universalising renditions of desire and power. Interestingly, both provide adequate accounts of a deconstruction of dominant institutions and identities, but neither adequately provides a narrative mode of production for more marginal groups. The return of the repressed remains problematic as a universal model of desire because it is so predicated on a white heterosexual and bourgeois subject. What is missing from this model of the return of the repressed is an account of a productive and narrative unconscious that can represent abject sexuality and desire in terms of the social. Although Foucault's writing might seem the obvious answer to this problem, his theory of the material construction of marginal identity subjugates it to a diffuse and functionalist account of power that makes resistance eternally recuperable into a violent hierarchy initiated by the dominant. In other words, the law constructs marginal identity, for instance homosexuality, but resistance through that identity is severely limited because it is part and parcel of that dominant term. So although power can be radically deconstructed there are no revolutionary alternatives. Stallybrass and White's model of transgression is a useful example not just in understanding the circularity of desire and power that operates in Freud's and Foucault's work, but also in conceiving how materialist and psychoanalytic texts can be usefully negotiated. In Stallybrass and White's study, Freud's return of the repressed becomes a materialist narrative with repressed abject desire also being the socially excluded bottom or marginal body that can be dialogically returned, not just to
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destabilise the dominant, but also to transform it into something new. But the dialogic negotiation of desire and power that Stallbrass and White excavate remains dependent on a dialogic and poetic narrative of the unconscious: a bodily narrative of abject desire that is not repressed outside of society, but is productive of culture. Although Stallybrass and White do not actually confront the absence of such a productive unconscious within Freud's model of the return of the repressed, their own theorisation of a dialogic relation between the abject body and the bourgeois subject implies such forms of creative as well as repressive sublimation.
x\ Queer perverse desire Leo Bersani and Teresa de Lauretis are two critics who have recently taken up the debate, rewriting Freud's account of perverse desire. Leo Bersani starts out with the more conservative agenda of deconstructing Freud through examining the theoretical collapse in Freud's own texts, but ends up with a radical and ambitious disassembling of the psychoanalytic framework. Teresa De Lauretis designs a more overtly ambitious project, rewriting Freud's account of perverse desire as a model of homosexuality, but her account returns the Oedipal text albeit in fetishistic form. Bersani's analysis of perversion focuses on an analysis of sadism and masochism. Arguing for a collapse in Freud's text of any distinction between the life and the death instincts, Bersani follows Laplanche in announcing that the whole of sexual life can be understood in terms of the so-called perversions such as masochism and fetishism. Instead of masochism just representing a diverse/perverse path away from the main road to normal sexuality, it represents the whole of sexuality: sexuality as perversion. Bersani then reads perversion, particularly masochism, as a destabilising of Freud's narrative of the return of the repressed and the sublimation between sexuality and culture in 'Civilisation and its Discontents'. Masochism, for Bersani, is an unrepresentable desire which shatters the repressive forms of narrative and culture, thus exposing the failure of Oedipal and phallic metaphors. But masochism can also be modulated through what Bersani calls 'ironic reflection' and a 'process of culture'; as the production through the work of replication of cultural symbolisation (Bersani, 1986: 115). Bersani's work is interesting because it acknowledges Freud's Oedipal narrative of return of the repressed, as precisely those narratives of history where sexuality has been released 'as murderous aggression', but then points to another project of sexual production in art (Bersani, 1986: 115). Now this might signify, as Dollimore suggests, a challenge to 'the psychoanalytic project itself but it also gestures to another more productive narrative of desire that has been present in psychoanalytic discourse but more violently subsumed under the weight of the Oedipal injunction (Dollimore, 1991: 201).
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But if Bersani returns to a pre-Oedipal or, to be more accurate, an-Oedipal notion of productive desire, then Teresa de Lauretis's recent project The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire refuses what she sees as the rather idealistic and nostalgic pre-Oedipal mother/daughter ties in recent writings on lesbian loves and desire (De Lauretis, 1994:). For her, Freud's text can explain the workings of lesbian desire, but this desire must be mediated and coded in Oedipal ways. By making her account of lesbian desire 'OedipaT and therefore genital, de Lauretis criticises the lesbian continuum proposed by Adrienne Rich, which rooted lesbian desire along with heterosexual female desire in terms of the early relation to the maternal body. De Lauretis also refuses the psychoanalytic accounts of lesbian desire that pathologise it as part of Freud's masculinity complex: an arrested stage on the development to 'normal' passive femininity. In such accounts all lesbian sexuality is automatically seen as masculine, but such an emphasis on the 'butch' lesbian leaves no explanation of the femme lesbian and very problematically understands woman-to-woman desire as structured through heterosexual gendered positions. Instead of inscribing lesbianism into pre-Oedipal feminine or masculine positions, de Lauretis rereads Freudian theory to argue for a kind of Oedipal and fetishistic lesbian desire. Rather than following Freud's normative and neurotic accounts of repressed desire, de Lauretis turns to Freud's account of perversion and, cultivating Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, argues for a lesbian fetishistic structure of desire. This fetishistic desire is not based on a theory of repression but on the understanding of disavowal. In Freud's normative Oedipal complex the castration threat separates the child from the mother, repressing the maternal body and valorising masculinity. Fetishism is when that castration threat is denied and disavowed'and a substitute phallus is attributed to the mother's body. But in de Lauretis's fetishistic scenario, the fetish is a sign or fantasy phallus, not a substitute for the real penis/phallus. This means that the phallus is mobile. It does not have to symbolise either masculinity or the penis, and serves only as a sign of castration and separation from the primary libidinal object or mother. Her argument remains dependent on dividing castration into literal and symbolic castration. But can castration really be divided between the body and language in this way? Irigaray's whole critique of Lacan is based on uncovering the impossibility of such an endeavour. Because the body and language are intricately connected, trying to loosen the Oedipal grip by elevating the phallus to a symbolic level just doesn't work. In fact, it does the opposite by essentialising bodily masculinity within language. Of course the fetish as a disavowal of castration is a challenge to the Oedipal structure, but de Lauretis wants her fetish to be Oedipal as well. By Oedipal she does not mean masculine, just separate from the mother's body. Can the Oedipal simply be divorced from all the hegemonic signifiers of
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paternal, masculine heterosexuality and power that circulate in society? De Lauretis is right in acknowledging the importance of the Oedipal as a crucial stage in negotiating culture. Her dismissal of accounts that romanticise and pre-Oedipalise lesbian desire reflects an awareness of how pathologising it can be to celebrate lesbian love as a symbiotic fusion with the mother. As we have seen, the most homophobic tracts to date in psychoanalytic literature demonise gay desire, particularly lesbian desire, as the perverse, even psychotic symptom of a failure to grow up, separate from the mother or acknowledge castration. Understanding of the sublimations of lesbian desire is therefore very important, but the Oedipal configuration cannot easily be reworked to provide that necessary stage of cultural representation, because as an historical discourse it has been invested culturally in pronouncing lesbian desire to be negative, immature and ultimately psychotic. Elizabeth Grosz gives what may be the most lucid critique of de Lauretis's work, probably because she herself has made a similar journey aimed at reclaiming a lesbian psychoanalysis. But Grosz has abandoned psychoanalysis as a useful framework for feminists, and in her critique of de Lauretis's work she explains why. Grosz maintains, and I agree with her, that the castration complex cannot be disassociated from the frameworks of normative masculinity. Neither can it be resituated at an imaginary fetishistic level. She writes, I t remains unclear to me how one can claim to accept the framework of Oedipalisation, the notion of the paternal phallus, the concept of castration and yet locate "castration" as a mirror-stage or imaginary bodily dispossession' (Grosz, 1994: 298). Fetishism is also implicitly tied to masculinity and, as Grosz points out, 'does not necessarily leave lesbianism any better off' (Grosz, 1994:290). Queer theory, it seems, follows a similar route to that of feminism in trying to reclaim a more radical Oedipal theory, by taking Freud's theory of the phallus and reinventing it in a more positive understanding of female or lesbian desire. My argument in this book is that an Oedipal account based on castration must inevitably fail to represent women's and lesbians' difference in a positive way. Grosz comes right to the point when she boldly states: At stake here is more than the value — provisional or long term - of psychoanalytic theory, that is, the question of whether feminists should or should not abandon a discourse that paints so bleak a picture of women's containment within the psychical norms of masculinity. (Grosz, 1994: 275) But here Grosz equates Oedipal psychoanalysis with the whole of psychoanalysis. In other words, she throws the psychoanalytic baby out with the phallic or Oedipal bathwater. Why do so many contemporary theorists see the Oedipal as inevitable? Lacan was correct in suggesting that the significance of the Oedipal is its nature as a psychic stage which negotiates with the social. But
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are there no other alternatives to this theorisation of a rather desperate will to power? The Oedipal complex, the name of the father, the phallus or the castration complex are all categories that explain the rule, albeit a failed one, of the white, masculine and colonial containment of other subjects. Perhaps one motive or reason behind the success of such conservative psychic scripts is that historically the politically inspired psychoanalytic narratives have been seen to fail so badly. The demise of a more political psychoanalysis has been an historically fraught affair, beginning with the disbanding of political and Marxist psychoanalysis under Nazi Germany and then the Cold War of postwar America. It is in post-war America that the repressive mantle of the Oedipal complex can be seen to go hand in hand with the repressive strategies of the psychoanalytic institution in making psychoanalysis a strictly medical, non-political practice (Campbell and Harbord, 1998). Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus> do indeed point the way to another psychoanalytic theory of desire, as Hocquenghem realised. The difficulty of putting Foucault together with Freud is, as Dollimore admits, their incompatibility. But Foucault did not explore other more productive psychoanalytic accounts, although his introduction to Anti-Oedipus clearly states his admiration and support for such endeavours. Before I move on to this more productive account of a cultural unconscious, I want to discuss Judith Butler's work. Butler's writing is perhaps the most sophisticated account to date to utilise Foucault and psychoanalysis together within a performative agenda. Butler, however, does not leave the phallocentric discourse of psychoanalysis behind; instead she performs it differently. Through this performance, perhaps, we can see not just how the phallus performs in a different or more progressive way, but how other abject bodies can represent themselves performatively within a more positive and productive psychoanalytic discourse.
Displacing psychoanalytic law: Butler's I ^ M I I performing phallus Judith Butler's famous lesbian phallus is, like that of de Lauretis, a mobile one. Nevertheless, Butler refuses a psychoanalytic position as such, and reiterates or recites psychoanalytic discourse through her notion of performative language. Butler's notion of the citation of the body has reconfigured and moved forward debates on sexuality and gender, debates which by the end of the 1980s had become embedded in two mires: either the sociological separation of sex from gender, which polarised sexuality as the potentially radical force and gender as the socially prescribed role; or the critical impasse of the sexual difference debates. In Gender Trouble Butler's theory of gender as performative was elaborated using Austin's linguistic account of how effects are produced through their announcement and naming (Buder, 1991). Tracing this effect
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into the arena of sex/gender identity, Butler argues that gender is produced or brought into being as it is 'announced' in and through the stylised rituals and repetitions of everyday life. These practices, over time, create a (gender) identity effect. What is most challenging about Butler's account is that the theatricality of the the performative process applies not only to the scenarios of drag, the most 'obvious' sites of cross-gender identifications. But the theatrical acts of imitation or mimesis circle back to the centre, to insist that all gender identification is produced through an imitative or mimetic process. Femininity and masculinity are imitations of imitations: there is no original essence lying beneath them. Butler uses this argument to push heterosexuality from its pedestal of providing the origin of sexual roles. Butler pursues her argument of performativity in terms of psychoanalytic notions of melancholia, attempting to rewrite the resolution to the Oedipal complex (Campbell and Harbord, 1999). Reconfiguring Freud's text on 'Mourning and Melancholia', Butler refuses Freud's understanding of identification as a singular Oedipal process that delimits desire and defines the boundaries of the ego. Turning to Klein's notion of depressive mourning and loss, associated with recognition of separation and difference, Butler then rewrites Freud's work on melancholia to argue for a disavowed homosexual identity. Freud describes melancholic identity as an identification that is disavowed and therefore incorporated lastingly as an unresolved other of the self. For Butler, a taboo against homosexuality precedes Freud's incest taboo. It is not Oedipal prohibition of the mother that is primary, but an identificatory love of the same-sex parent that is forbidden: the homosexual cathexis. Because of this prohibition the lost object of love, which is the mother for the girl and the father for the boy, becomes incorporated as a melancholic other. The girl takes on identificatory aspects of her mother in her melancholic denial that she has lost her. Similarly for the boy with the father - the more extreme the heterosexual identification, the greater the degree of melancholia. The resolution of the Oedipal complex thus leads to an identification with the same-sexed parent, where the child in effect becomes the lost loved one (the mother or father) by incorporating and preserving the loss within the self. This is a compelling argument for the construction of gender identity, where gender identification and the effects of 'identity' are a result of the prohibition and internalisation of the homosexual aim and object. Butler's account is close to a Kleinian exposition of ambivalence within the object relation, although within Butler's analysis it would be overt heterosexuality rather than homosexuality that would constitute the more defensive, split position. Homosexuality in Butler's account expresses a much more acknowledged gender ambivalence than heterosexuality. This is because the homosexual disposition, rather than a heterosexual one, displays all the maturity, separation and loss associated with the mourning of the depressive position.
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Heterosexuality, rather than homosexuality, is placed within the more unmediated melancholic space where loss remains unacknowledged and therefore incorporated. For the homosexual, because the love object is acknowledged as lost, it can be found and located again in relation to the external world. Within this rereading, rigid heterosexuality is then a more defensive position than homosexuality, ruled not by melancholia, but also by paranoia and hate. The importance of this account, if it is pushed to its extremity, is the reversal of a normative psychoanalytical account of sex/gender 'development', represented most explicitly by the object relations model, where homosexuality, and in particular female homosexuality, is viewed as vunerable to the psychosis of a merging maternal body. Butler in this sense can be seen to reverse Kristeva's conceptualisation of the female homosexual relation as abject and outside the paternal symbolic. In a sense Butler makes Oedipal heterosexuality not a sublimation of desires but a defensive blocking associated with a melancholic disavowal of homosexual love. Butler's work suggests in many ways a more performative and productive structure of the unconscious and it is ultimately Foucault's ideas, rather than psychoanalysis, that are offered as the basis of her work. For this reason, one might expect that Butler would move to overthrow the phallic texts of psychoanalysis and perhaps engage with more Marxist notions of the unconscious, but she does not. Butler uses Foucault to reiterate Freudian and Lacanian texts, so that prohibitive phallic laws become productive. It is important to examine her argument between Foucault and psychoanalysis, because although Butler herself does not move outside of the phallocentric text, her recitation and performative reiteration of both Freud and Lacan points the way to a more materialist account of psychoanalysis. Butler uses Foucault's notion of the productive possibilities of power to challenge the Oedipal prohibitive law, especially in relation to Lacan's notion of a repressive symbolic law. According to Foucault, the prohibitive law on sexuality marked out by Freud has in fact been the most productive in that a so-called taboo on sexuality has given rise to a proliferation of discourses on sex. As I have already discussed, Foucault's critique of Freud's repressive hypothesis showed how sexuality is an historical construction enabling power relations to operate within society. There is no outside to these laws and discourses of power, merely points of opposition and resistance where that discourse or law can be reversed to resist the dominant. Butler makes the argument that in order to be intelligible the law compels certain repetitions, the remaking of (gender) identity as an ongoing series of repetitious acts that become sedimented as the linear effects of identity. Yet at the same time, in being dependent on repetitious acts of renewal, the law produces possibilities of alternative or even transgressive practices and performances. To give an example of this, homosexual transgression would be just as much a product of
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the law as its more repressive counterpart: normative heterosexuality. Thus, the law is not just juridicial but also generative. This effectively historicises the Lacanian symbolic by subjecting it to the forces of change. It adds a contingency that allows for both the sexual difference that the law repressively institutes, as well as the more generative transgressive desires it produces. Desires produced by the law also threaten its singularity and immutability. The extent to which juridical law actually becomes displaced through Butler's more performative reading is questionable. In Gender Trouble, gender identity is described as a 'stylised repetition of acts'. But this does not mean that the performativity of gender can be understood as a somewhat simple and willed act of cross dressing, if we don't like or want to be one identity we can perform and act another. As Butler makes increasingly clear in her next book, Bodies That Matter, performativity is not a singular 'act', with some free agency of choice or subjectivity lying behind it (Butler, 1993). In fact, 'agency' is only to be located in the circumstance of activities, caught up in different historical forms of repetition. Reflecting Foucault's notion that power constructs that which it then sanctions, Butler makes us understand that performativity is a material activity constructing us. It cannot be seen in terms of willed resistance or transgression of the law For Butler performativity is a citation of power effects that makes the subject's opposition to power (and the law) completely complicit with it. This does not mean that there is no agency, simply that it cannot occupy an external position: Although this constitutive constraint does not foreclose the possibility of agency, it does locate agency as a reiterative or rearticulatory practice, immanent to power, and not a relation of external opposition to power. (Butler, 1993:15) In 'The Lesbian Phallus' and 'Phantasmatic Identification', in Bodies That Matter, Butler follows Lacan's argument and turns it round by suggesting that if the phallus as symbol can be detached from the imaginary and the bodily part (the penis), then it is infinitely transferable (this argument as I have stated is very similar to de Lauretis's theory of the phallus as fetish) (Butler, 1993). By implication it can symbolise other bodily parts. The lesbian phallus, therefore, works by displacing the privileged phallus, and symbolising other body parts: instead of the penis/phallus the lesbian phallus can represent, for example, the breast or the clitoris, Butler rescues lesbian sexuality from its abject position by transporting the lesbian body into a realm of patriarchal language and signifiers. This is then a question of naming. Butler doesn't change language; she changes its referent. Crossing over between having and being the phallus, and between castration anxiety and penis envy, the lesbian phallus can signify both masculine and feminine sex, and in effect remove the distinction between
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them. Such an imaginary calls into question heterosexual difference based on distinct 'masculine' and 'feminine' morphologies. What is needed, according to Butler is not so much a new body part as alternative imaginary schemas. But Butler's notion of a mobile lesbian phallus remains problematic. If the sign of the phallus is so mobile that it can symbolise lesbian bodily parts, then why still call it the phallus? Surely the associations of the masculine phallus both in body and language will inevitably be privileged in this imaginary and the 'feminine' lesbian body and imaginary will remain unsymbolised and abject. Following Irigaray, I have suggested explicitly that the bodily imaginary and the language of the symbolic are inextricable. Butler's analysis of the lesbian phallus also seems to suggest a similar fluidity between the registers of the imaginary and the symbolic, but if this is so, then how can the feminine body and imaginary be represented in Butler's text? A main difficulty with Butler's argument lies in her insistence on reiterating phallic psychoanalytic texts. But are these phallic discourses of power really so monolithic? Just because their effects are institutionally recognised as dominant in our society, does this necessarily mean that there are no other narratives? That the Oedipal text is ineluctably and historically linked with dominant and hegemonic discourses of power is not in dispute, but what about all the other dissonant voices associated with Freud's own circle, who quite early on disagreed with Freud's Oedipal trajectory? Karl Jung and Wilhelm Reich developed quite different discourses of the unconscious that did not make Oedipal sexuality central to their ideas. How are these differences accounted for in terms of the implicit but seemingly rather totalising claim made by critics such as Butler, Grosz and de Lauretis that psychoanalysis means the singular Oedipal theory of its founding father Freud? So a question to Butler would be, why limit the notion of performativity to a reiteration of an imaginary or 'fantasy' that is predicated in the work of Freud and Lacan, on a male body? Irigaray's work has stated clearly that without acknowledgement of a feminine imaginary that connects the real with the imaginary rather than repressing it, there can be no exit from the kingdom of the phallus. Butler's work does not acknowledge this argument for a feminine bodily imaginary, partly because she sees it reinstituting heterosexual primacy, but also because of the danger of setting up a rival feminine ontology, leading back to the essentialist propositions of an alternative maternal origin. Again, Butler is following the Lacanian premise that the feminine occupies an unconscious negative position outside language - unlike Irigaray, who, as we have seen, is arguing for a positive feminine imaginary that exists within language, not just as a Utopian concept but as a representable historical actuality.1 1
See Chapter 4, where I disagree with Margaret Whitford's understanding of the female imaginary as Utopian.
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However much Butler insists on reiterating phallocentric texts, her performative theories lead away from psychoanalytic accounts of repressed desire to focus on the social dimensions of desire and its productive nature. In deconstructing the Lacanian opposition of being/having the phallus, Butler also reconfigures yet another cornerstone of the Freudian Oedipal scenario whereby the distinction between wanting to be and wanting to have is seen to structure the formation of desire. In her essay 'Phantasmatic Identification', Butler explains that identifications are imaginary, but not opposed to desire. Recalling her thinking on melancholia, identifications are melancholic disavowed desires. There is, then, no actual distinction between identification and desire (which is a fundamental division within the Oedipal account) or, therefore, between the imaginary and the symbolic. Her mimetic notion of desire, so close to Borch-Jakobsen's, and her fluid conception of the relationship between imaginary and symbolic, so reminiscent of Irigaray, interestingly situate Butler in a more radical position with its implications for what is in effect a social imaginary.
i^xtfcrv Multiple identifications Drawing on the work of Laplanche and Pontalis, Butler rewrites identification in terms of a phantasmatic staging of the subject. Fantasy is not understood as the activity of an already formed subject but as a staging of the person into a number of identificatory positions.2 As I have noted, Laplanche and Pontalis argue that fantasy arises only after the original object is lost. The emergence of this fantasy as auto-eroticism is a management by the individual of original loss, where fantasy is the recovery, dissimulation and representation of such loss. Fantasy is by this account already social and - as Butler emphasises - the taking up of positions as either desiring to have (the phallus) or to be (the phallus) is far more precarious than the Freudian and Lacanian accounts would suggest. The notion of the phantasmatic is important here, for it is a staging of a number of fantasies that converge at one site which refuses the coherence of the law of prohibition. If the symbolic is the normative dimension of the constitution of the sexed subject within language, then the subject only attains this coherence as the result of excluding and abjecting the possibilities of the phantasmatic. Although Butler displaces the monolithic dimensions of the prohibitive Oedipal law, she does not envisage how other imaginary possibilities of the phantasmatic might evolve different notions of symbolism and the symbolic(s). Again, this is in line with her Foucauldian reading that agency is reiterative and immanent to power rather than external and oppositonal. Such allegiance to a deconstructive, rather than a dialogical, 2
For an introduction to Laplanche and Pontalis, see Chapter 2.
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account of subjectivity and power perhaps highlights the weakness in Butler's otherwise illuminating project. Butler's point here is the need to recognise that which is excluded in the process of forming coherent (if unstable) identifications. Her suggestion that more multiple sites of fantasy and identification confound the normative symbolic law and her deconstruction of the (Oedipal) polarisation between identity and desire interestingly undo oppositions between intrapsychic and object relations models of psychoanalysis. Whilst Butler does not make this deconstruction explicit, the analyst and writer Jessica Benjamin foregrounds a necessary tension operating between intrapyschic and intersubjective strands in psychoanalytic thinking. Benjamin's recognition that object love and identificatory love are always intermingled critiques the Oedipal constellation of prohibition, where having and being the same object is forbidden. Like Butler, Benjamin underlines how 'identification is foreclosed' when having the object and being the object become 'mutually exclusive' (Benjamin, 1995: 99). This results in extreme loss and melancholia but, as Benjamin points out, it also has the effect of positioning the maternal sexual object as dangerous and engulfing. Such melancholic loss, therefore, exacerbates a maternal omnipotence and it is only by working through identification with the mother within the intersubjective relation that this deathly representation of the mother can be modified. It should also be added that the loss of identificatory same-sex love, whether it is in terms of the mother or the father, sets up omnipotent differences where the parents appear in idealised or deathly guises. Benjamin explores how it is only through a symbolic working through of identification within an intersubjective space that death and violence can be mediated. Her reasoning follows Winnicott's understanding of how the self relates to the object, both as a part of the self and as an equivalent but different centre of consciousness that is external to the self (see Chapter 3). But this intersubjective and outside other can only be recognised if the 'mother' survives her child's fantasised aggression. Working through these different levels of identification between the internal and external mother means that it is necessary that she remains as an object of desire and identification. A similar scenario is also relevant with the father, the difference being that as the present Oedipal constellation attributes all symbolic functioning to the father, he remains idealised, whilst the mother occupies a more abject position. Judith Butler's lesbian phallus can perhaps be construed as the daughter's more positive identification with a bodily father, breaking up the idealised and symbolic norm - but in order to mediate identifications with the mother an earlier, more intersubjective understanding of symbolism and the symbolic needs to be addressed. One way of explaining this would be to see the death drive as the other side to an omnipotent Oedipal prohibition. Melancholic loss of same-sex loves
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(and the foreclosure of opposite-sex identifications) becomes translated into a death drive where no other survives fantasised aggression. As Benjamin explains, you cannot dispose of dangerous fantasies; instead you have to 'contain and transform them through symbolisation in the intersubjective space' (Benjamin, 1995: 204). Sexual eroticism is dependent on 'the survival of the other throughout the exercise of power, which in turn makes the expression of power part of symbolic play'. If the real other retaliates or collapses, the transitional space of symbolisation is destroyed. Symbolisation of the intersubjective relation entails a recognition of the duality of object and identificatory loves, and such symbolic capacity has to be recognised in terms of homosexual loves for both the mother and the father. Benjamin's work interestingly makes homosexuality a positive alternative to the death drive, without idealising it into a transcendental relation. As so much psychoanalytic literature equates homosexuality with deathly identifications and an inability to move beyond the concrete creatively, Benjamin's work, like Butler's, exposes the lack of intersubjective symbolism within the Oedipal constellation in all its literal and idealised guises. Jessica Benjamin's vision of symbolic intersubjectivity is rooted in the early play of identification of sameness and difference between mother and child. Her notion of symbolism does not correspond simply to Lacan's symbolic order, 'but to an integration of the Imaginary with the Symbolic, which recognises the origins of the latter in the former and allows the transition from one to the other to be a "useful space"' (Benjamin, 1995: 207). The symbolic is understood, then, not as the repressive ruler, but as the social counterpart to a more bodily imaginary.
^;v Is The Anti-Oedipus a bodily imaginary? One of the most persistent questions for me about Judith Butler's work is: why Freud, and why Lacan? The Oedipal texts of Freud and Lacan are precisely the juridical texts on sexuality that Foucault was so critical of, and Butler's reiteration of them superbly deconstructs, historicises and displaces their 'repressive hypothesis'. But Foucault wasn't critical of all psychoanalytic texts. His preface to TheAnti-Oedipusby Deleuze and Guattari cites it as 'the first book on ethics to be written in France in quite a long time' (Foucault: 1984: xiii). Foucault's ecstatic tribute praises the book for its art and humour in rooting out the fascism in our bodies and in our behaviours. Recommending Anti-Oedipus as a guide book to everyday life on the art of living, Foucault sums up a few of its major strengths. Two points stand out: • Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the negative (law, limit, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple,
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difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. • Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force. (Foucault, 1984: xiii) Foucault's admiration for the text Anti-Oedipus focuses on its productive account of desire, its notion of the productive and materialist flows of an unconscious that topples the Oedipal law and lack as the only access to reality. For if the repressive phallus always neurotically wards off desire through an aestheticisation of the political and a retreat into representation, then the schizoanalysis and desiring machines of Anti-Oedipus aim to connect it and plug it into political reality. Like Laing and Cooper, Deleuze and Guattari develop a materialist analysis of schizophrenic breakdown in our society. Seeing breakdown as a kind of revolutionary breakthrough, these analysts and philosophers argue that the psycho tic's ego loss can be seen as the breakthrough representing not madness but sanity. Like Foucault, Laing saw a distinction between madness and mental illness. Madness is seen as what is unbearable, strange, an intensely affectual experience. Mental illness is when this affect becomes blocked off, refused by society and autistically returned to the individual as a refusal of reality (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 132, note). So Deleuze and Guattari argue for a schizoid experience that can be represented by society. This would mean a collective ego loss that refuses the imperialist Oedipal repressions of state and family. Although Deleuze and Guattari follow the anti-psychiatry of Laing in believing that the family is the source of oppression and illness, they go much further in advocating the removal of all anthropomorphic and individual man-made defences, the imaginary, if you like, of Western myth and tragedy. The removal of this individualised imaginary would mean a disconnection and deterritorialisation of fascist power and a reconnection with collective forms of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari give no example of what such a society would be, but clearly they envisage a kind of socialism that communism and social democracy have so far not delivered. Many analysts have criticised Laing and Deleuze and Guattari for a glorification of the schizophrenic experience. Stephen Frosh and Joel Kovel warn against the dangers of seeing the schizophrenic and psychotic experience as in any way a positive or revolutionary experience. Kovel portrays the world of the psychotic as isolating and terrifying: a world in which disassociation from others leads to the painful dissolution of both self and reality: The schizophrenic reveals not emancipation but the negative of emancipation: not unfree but antifree. The critical negativity within being - the
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capacity to refuse the given world while remaining one's self- is demolished and transposed to the zone of nonbeing, where self as well as world are refused, broken down, then commingled into the autistic configuration. (Kovel, 1988: 243) Deleuze and Guattari would answer this by saying that Kovel confuses the schizophrenic patient whose flows have been autistically cut from reality with the schizophrenic process where desiring flows can be reconnected with the world. But Stephen Frosh in turn questions whether in actuality 'one can be envisaged without the other'. Emphasising the pathological nature of the psychotic condition, Frosh warns against confusing it with some liberatory postmodern state. He suggests, 'that it is not the dissolution of self embodied by psychosis that is the state towards which liberational struggles should aspire, but the construction of new selves which are not so alienated, not so conformist or pained' (Frosh, 1991: 181). But can Deleuze and Guattari's radical theorisations in Anti-Oedipus be so hastily written off? Maybe the construction of new selves is dependent, as Frosh suggests, on the kind of productive relationship to the body and to experience that Deleuze and Guattari advocate. What Deleuze and Guattari, and Laing before them, illustrate is not that the end state of a psychotic patient is revolutionary, but that the ego loss and the encounter with the bodily unconscious that accompanies ego loss can be reconnected productively as a more collective form of identity. The problem with Deleuze and Guattari's thesis is that instead of rearticulating forms of representation and myth, they do away with the need to represent a more bodily imaginary. The issue for them is to destroy and deterritorialise myth, not rearticulate it within a more social and situated imaginary. As both Luce Irigaray and Jessica Benjamin have suggested, without imaginative and symbolic representation of the bodily imaginary, the imaginary will simply go to war with the real and the result will be the kind of destructive psychosis that Lacan envisages, in which the psychotic forecloses the symbolic. But we do not have to accept such a simple alternative between Oedipal signifier or psychosis. The Oedipal model of the unconscious represses the body and presents us with a purely masculine and mental imaginary that does not really move us much beyond the Cartesian mind/body split. I suggest that a more imaginative and bodily imaginary accessed through the image can represent the relation to the body rather than repressing it. Such an imaginary would transitionally connect with the symbolic, and that transition, to quote Benjamin, would be a 'useful space'. Representation of a bodily imaginary is key to understanding how a productive unconscious can be symbolised in alternative ways to the Oedipal. Moreover, such a creative imaginary is vital in rearticulating myth and providing a reconnection for the psychotic to her or
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his body and history. As Butler reminds us, homosexual loves don't have to be left as some kind of paralysed, internal objects of melancholic death, they can be creatively remembered and performed as bodily imaginaries that productively bring abject and so called deathly identifications back into social discourses of culture. As I intend to argue, if the concept of a bodily imaginary can be based on the notion of a more productive and social unconscious, then there is no reason why there cannot be, as in Butler's multiple sites of phantasmatic identification, multiple accounts of the bodily imaginary. The heterosexual primacy of Irigaray's feminine, bodily imaginary could perhaps be mediated by envisaging Hocquenghem's social and anal imaginary. Butler's alternative imaginary schemas, divested of a solely 'phallic' language, would also translate into the maternal symbolism of Benjamin's intersubjective space. The next chapter will explore further the mediations of identification and desire within a gay bodily imaginary.
rvtsic r e l i c t s 9
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Balint, M. (1956) 'Perversions and Genitality', in Sandor Lorand (ed.), Perversions: Psychodynamics and Therapy, New York: Random House. Benjamin, J. (1995) 'The Omnipotent Mother', in Like Subjects, Love Objects, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bersani, L. (1986) The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (1991) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge. — (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of'Sex', New York and London: Routledge. Campbell, J. and Harbord, J. (1998) 'Introduction', in Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord (eds), Psychopolitics and Cultural Desires, London: UCL Press. — (1999) 'Playing It Again: Citation, Reiteration or Circularity' in Vikki Bell (ed.), Theory, Culture and Society, special issue on Performativity and Belonging, Vol. 16, No. 2, April 1999, London: Sage Publications. De Lauretis, T. (1994) The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, preface by Michel Foucault, London: Athlone Press. Dollimore, J. (1991) SexualDissidence, Oxford: Clarenden Press. Feldman, S. (1956) 'On Homosexuality', in S. Lorand and M. Balint (eds), Perversions: Pychodynamics and Therapy, New York: Random House. Foucault, M. (1978) 'The Deployment of Sexuality', in The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, trans Robert Hurley, London: Penguin Books. — (1984) 'Preface' in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press. Freud, S. (1905) (1983) 'The Sexual Aberrations', On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, Vol. 7, The Pelican Freud Library, general editor Angela
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Richardson, London: Penguin. — 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood'. — Frosh, S. (1991) Identity Crisis: Modernity Psychoanalysis and the Self, London: Macmillan. Grosz, E. (1994) 'The Labors of Love. Analysing Perverse Desire: an Interrogation of Teresa de Lauretis's The Practice of Love', in More Gender Trouble: Feminism meets Queer Theory, issue ofdifferences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6, 2-3. Hocquenghem, G. (1993) Homosexual Desire, trans, by Daniella Dangoor, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kovel, J. (1988) 'Preface to the Morningside Edition', in White Racism: a Psychohistory, London: Free Associations. Marcuse, H. (1955) (1966) Eros and Civilisation: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, Boston: Beacon Press. Mieli, M. (1980) 'Towards a Gay Communism', in Homosexuality & Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, trans, by David Fernbach, London: Gay Men's Press. Mitchell, J. (1982) 'Introduction - F, in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and The Ecole Freudienne, trans, by Jacqueline Rose, London: Macmilian. Rose, J. (1990) 'Hannah Segal Interviewed by Jacqueline Rose', Woman: A Cultural Review, 1. Socarides, C.W. (1979) 'A Unitary Theory of Perversions', in T.B. Karasu and C.W. Socarides (eds), On Sexuality, New York: International Universities Press.
Gay Desire and the Bodily Imaginary
Historically queer theory has distinguished itself from feminist debates through a focus on sexuality rather than gender. We have seen how Judith Butler, following Foucault, questioned notions of fixed female identity and 'woman'-identified lesbianism that had been associated with the political feminist movement. Eve Kososfsky Sedgwick has been heralded as the 'queen of gay studies'; her work can be seen as initiating the field of queer theory. This chapter begins by examining the sex/gender debate through Eve Sedgwick's work. Sedgwick proposes a radical distinction between sex and gender, arguing that whereas gender illustrates the normative and Oedipal structures of power in our society, sexuality figures a more radical and fluid performativity, through which historically silenced and abjected identities can speak (Sedgwick, 1990). Critical of psychoanalysis and sexual difference theory, Sedgwick perceives these theories as symptom and support of the heterosexual status quo. This chapter takes her analysis as a starting point, but then departs from it by exploring the connections, rather than the divisions, between the more fluid sexualities that Sedgwick advocates and sexual difference theory. In linking concepts of sexuality and sexual difference, I want to deconstruct Oedipal hierarchies of sexual difference, and conceptualise or rememorise more situated accounts of a gay bodily imaginary. The unfolding debate thus proposes a dissolution of the sex/gender divide, not as a return to hierarchical notions of sexual difference, but as a way of moving beyond the sex/gender debate to a consideration of corporeal identities and ethics. Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990) explores the modern homoheterosexual definition of identity, an identity which Sedgwick argues has become an 'exacerbated cultural site' because of a longstanding confusion as to whether it should be thought of as a minority issue for lesbians and gay people,
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or as a universal issue that 'cuts across every locus of agency and subjectivity in the culture' (Sedgwick, 1990: xii). The contradiction of the second view is between seeing same-sex object choice as a matter of transivity or fluidity between genders and seeing it as a separatist agenda within each gender. This contradiction structures, for Sedgwick, both the meaning and knowledge of twentieth-century Western culture. From the beginning of this century, identity in the Western world has been divided into a binary of male or female gender, and heterosexual or homosexual identity. Discourses of law, medicine, literature and psychology have exacerbated this definition of hetero-homosexual identity and the incoherence such a definition produces. Following Foucault, Sedgwick argues that the regulation of same-sex bonds has intersected with 'every issue of power and gender' and that sexuality has been placed in an increasingly privileged position. Foucault's criticism of psychoanalysis, and the prohibitive Oedipal law, is that the law does not just repress or prohibit sexuality, but actually produces and constructs it. So although sexuality is what we are not supposed to talk about, what is silent and unspoken in our society, in fact sexuality is the most privileged vehicle for talking about truth identity, knowledge and so on. Sedgwick suggests that this discourse of sexuality not only transforms all other languages and social relations, but also creates a silent performativity of the closet. The relations of the closet, what is spoken and unspoken, what is implicit and explicit, structure what we understand as heterosexual and homosexual identity. These relations are, therefore, revealing - with the silence of the closet presenting as both performative and discursive. Sexuality is repressed and silent on one level, but on another, as Foucault points out, it never ceases to speak. If silence can speak through texts and there is no binary division between the spoken and the unsaid, then a plurality of ways to produce discursively and read silence materialise; it is not just sexuality that is silently discursive in this way, but also other cultural differences. Sedgwick illustrates this important point by giving several examples of how ignorance can speak as loudly and powerfully as knowledge. If Mitterrand knows English, but Reagan lacks French, then it is Mitterrand who must negotiate in a second language, whilst Reagan uses his native one. In this interactive language model, the lowest common denominator or the most ignorant wins. This can often be the case when those in power are less knowledgable about more marginal identities or cultures. A white, male heterosexual discourse is less likely to have the broader knowledgeable understanding of cultural difference, than say a black, female, lesbian one. But it is subsequently the former discourse that determines the ground for debate. This is because the white, male heterosexual discourse has access to linguistic privilege and power, but it is also because this more privileged discourse is far less likely to acknowledge other discourse positions that are different from its own. Sedgwick gives legal examples of how a man can defend himself against
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the charge of raping a woman by claiming ignorance of her perception and wishes. An employer can claim an equal ignorance by legally firing an employee with Aids, as long as he/she states that they were unaware of the medical fact. For Sedgwick the heterosexual/homosexual definition has affected our Western culture as a 'master term' during the last century (Sedgwick, 1990: 11). How does this analysis translate into the theory and practice of the psychoanalytic institution? Whether the focus is on the Lacanian phallus in the academic institution, or the object relations mother of mainstream practice in Britain, the privileging of a white heterosexual script has legislated discussion on cultural difference, where the experience of, say, a lesbian black woman becomes either immediately pathologised or relegated to categories of unknowable otherness. Sedgwick maps other binaries between knowledge/ignorance, public/ private, masculine/feminine, health/illness in terms of relations of sexuality rather than gender. Her overall project is to arrive at an understanding of sexuality that does not get reduced to 'the terms and relations of gender' (Sedgwick, 1990: 16). This brings to the fore both the distinction and alliance between feminist and gay studies. How can lesbian identity be understood in a way that doesn't immediately code it as either masculine or feminine? Is it indeed desirable, or possible, to move beyond such gender distinctions? Do the terms butch and femme assert an insistence on these very gender relations? The argument in this book is that it is indeed very important to move beyond the categories of gender division. The butch/femme lesbian classifications parody and perform their heterosexual counterparts. But for lesbian relationships sexuality and power move fluidly in excess of these positions, and it is the homophobia of heterosexual culture that positions lesbians as butch and therefore male, or as femme and therefore conveniently invisible. Eve Sedgwick's book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire deconstructs the homophobia of modern constructions of male heterosexuality by showing how men's identification with men in the nineteenth century was structurally distinguished from men's desire for women. Luce Irigaray makes a rather similar argument when she talks about how Western knowledge is constructed upon a male imaginary. Although Sedgwick criticises Irigaray for collapsing male homosexuality as the practice of Oedipal, male supremacy theories, her reading fails to recognise how Irigaray is challenging an implicit homosocial narrative (Sedgwick, 1990: 36). For Irigaray's criticism of a male same-sex imaginary signifies not specifically the homosexual practice of men, but the homosocial bonding between heterosexual men which is Sedgwick's own area of study. Although Sedgwick follows Butler in arguing for a disavowed mourning that forecloses specific homosexual possibilities, she remains fiercely critical of psychoanalysis, especially Lacanianism, for its refusal to provide any ontological weight or history to identities that fall outside of an Oedipal homosexual matrix.
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y ^ n - The sex/gender distinction Sedgwick distinguishes between sexuality and gender although she also sees them as indivisibly linked. By sexuality Sedgwick means gay sexuality, as she classifies sexual difference under the rubric of'gender'. I will come back to the debate on sexual difference shortly as it has an important bearing on the distinctions Sedgwick makes between sex and gender. Sedgwick maintains such a division between sex and gender because she wants to challenge the privilege accorded to feminist analysis over say class, race and sexuality. Following Gayle Rubins's insight that the question of gender is not the same as the question of sexuality, Sedgwick argues that gender and sexuality are as different from each other as 'say gender and class, or class and race'. Of course this begs the question that none of these categories are really separable, but to collapse sexuality and gender is to occlude the specificity of gay identity and to make gay issues and rights subordinate to feminist ones. Another way of understanding this is to show the complexities of power that discursively structure such relations. It is perfectly possible, for instance, to be workingclass and racist, even more likely if that class/race relation is run through tropes of masculinity and nation. White feminism's historical complicity with racism is now widely accepted. The homophobia of feminists to gay men and women as well as the sexism of gay men to both heterosexual and gay women is probably not so openly acknowledged, partly because of the difficulty in differentiating gender issues from those of sexuality. But this debate between feminism and queer theory is not just whether to value gender or sexuality; the debate on sexual difference further complicates the equation. The sexual difference debate states not just that men and women are divided (historically) according to their sex, but also that the gender debate is too superficial because it only deals with sociology or ideology, but not with bodies. Sexual difference theorists argue that there is no easy way to simply remove gender inequality - through, say, political practice or the destruction of ideology, because the inequality of gender is ultimately marked through the body. In other words, gender cannot be separated from sexuality, and the cultural and symbolic markers of identity cannot be divided from the literal body. I want to discuss how Luce Irigaray's theorisation of feminine sexual difference and Jessica Benjamin's argument on the fluidity of gender identification can be linked to Eve Sedgwick's distinction between sex and gender. On the face of it these three critics seem to occupy very different positions, with Irigaray theorising sexual difference, Benjamin focusing on gender and Sedgwick placing both Irigaray's and Benjamin's work under what she would call the rubric of 'gender', as prioritising a heterosexual relationship over the question of sexuality and homosexuality. Combining the literal and the metaphoric is a necessary part of conceptual-
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ising Irigaray's threshold (her imaginary and symbolic). As we have seen, the Lacanian feminists privilege the phallus because of the accompanying theory of sexual difference and the symbolic. For them, it is the radical notion of an unconscious sexuality which undermines any coherent or fixed notion of gender identity. The problem with Irigaray's figuration of a feminine specificity is that essentially it seems to map femininity onto the female body, in a retrograde fashion. Recently Tina Chanter has displaced these essentialist objections with an explanation of how Irigaray's symbolic specification of the feminine deconstructs a rigid if cultural adherence to gender sameness (Chanter, 1995). Feminist reliance on the cultural construction of gender (men and women are really the same and therefore equal) has been, according to Chanter, little more than 'another inflection of patriarchal dogma masquerading under the guise of liberalism' (Chanter, 1995: 44). Irigaray's focus on feminine sexual difference deconstructs this gender sameness, making it much more difficult to maintain such a rigid distinction between sex and gender. Chanter traces back Irigaray's loosening of the split between sex and gender to the writing of Robert J. Stoller, a contemporary psychoanalyst whose text-Sex and Gender has been particularly influential in the object relations feminist adherence to a core gender identity. Chanter shows, however, that Stoller's text cannot actually distinguish between the two terms sex and gender which 'are contiguous and at times inextricably intermingled' (Chanter, 1995: 40). Jessica Benjamin also cites Stoller as a source of her work on gender identification (Benjamin: 1995b). Like Chanter, Benjamin points out that Stoller's 'core gender identity' actually describes a much more mobile sequence and conflict of gender identifications which cannot be tied to either sex. If the imaginary can be seen to include mobility between sexuality and gender, then Irigaray's figuration of an embodied feminine difference can also be seen in terms of the social construction of gender and fluidity of identification in Benjamin's work. Once feminine sexual difference is acknowledged we need to situate it within the differing cultural and historical contexts where gender is mobilised. In this way, the unconscious, and the female imaginary, can be understood as relating to a) symbolic structures of power and language, and b) the social and situated narratives of women's experience. Sexual difference is deployed by Irigaray to reveal the sameness of gender in phallic psychoanalysis and metaphysics, but Benjamin's mobility of gender identification shows 'the polymorphism of the psyche' and the impossibility of mapping femininity onto femaleness in any primary complementarity of biological, sexual difference. As we have seen, Sedgwick is hostile to the Oedipal configuration because historically it has abjected all identities that fall outside its normative bias. But maybe an anti-Oedipal psychoanalysis that connects with the kind of bodily imaginary that Irigaray proposes can deliver the social and historical
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situatedness to homosexual identities that Sedgwick's writing demands. Sedgwick, perhaps even more than Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler, is uneasy with the utilisation of psychoanalysis by sexual difference theorists such as Irigaray, because of the heterosexual primacy that seems to become implicit in these projects. De Lauretis, as we have seen, has tried to reverse this normative primacy by advocating Freud's theory of perversion and fetishism as a viable structure with which to understand lesbian desire. The last chapter discussed the problems and difficulties associated with trying to validate Freud's theory of perversions by distinguishing it from the more normative 'neurotic' model. Following Foucault, Sedgwick emphasises the need to produce performative theories of sexual desire which confound gender differences and mobilise sexuality and power in ways that are not contained within the dominant Oedipal matrix. I want to suggest that an elaboration of a bodily imaginary that connects the symbolic with the material, can provide an anti-Oedipal and social account of the unconscious that will represent lesbian and gay desire in terms of more transitive, fluid and positive identities. This might seem a contradiction in terms if we believe, as Sedgwick does, that there is a distinction between gender and sexuality. But if, as Chanter argues, sex and gender are much more indeterminate and fluid, then maybe an exploration of the bodily imaginary can help bridge the gap between psychoanalytic and historical explanations of gay desire and identity.
4^;
Imaginary bodies
Moira Gatens's collection of cssoys Imaginary Bodies can perhaps aid in this endeavour as she explores the social, political and ethical understandings of sexed bodies, analysing the unacknowledged philosophical premises of sexual difference. The categorisation of woman as lack from Aristotle to Lacan highlights a problem for metaphysics, but it also implicates structural consequences for all discourses of knowledge in the West, whether they be political, social or ethical. Gatens focuses on embodied subjectivity in relation to sexuality, politics and ethics. Historically representation of the human body in Western discourse has been a white, male figuration and Gatens gives the example of anatomy books where the masculine body stands as a prototype of the human, and the female body is merely wheeled on to announce reproductive or hormonal difference. So the woman is often characterised as a non-man and therefore not fully human, and this distinction is premised in terms of her corporeality and emotions. Gatens, however, is not concerned with real, physical bodies but with imaginary ones: imaginary in the sense that these bodies refer to images, symbols, metaphors and representations. Such imaginary and discursive bodies therefore help construct various forms of subjectivity. Gatens acknowledges
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her debt to Luce Irigaray's concept of the imaginary, although that in turn is influenced by such figures as Lacan and Merleau-Ponty. But Gatens can perhaps be seen to follow Irigaray most directly in positing an embodied imaginary which has been ignored within a history of metaphysics, where a masculine morphology has been universal, subtending an historical framework of philosophical knowledge that has excluded the woman. Yet Gatens states her departure from Irigaray by positing social imaginaries rather than one unitary social imaginary. Proposing a singular imaginary simply replaces old notions of ideology with the 1960s and 1970s new left debates, so that sexual difference becomes a kind of class struggle with the imaginary on one side and women's true reality on the other. Gatens writes I do not hold a notion of a social imaginary but rather social imaginaries. It is for this reason that I do not think that the concept of the imaginary is analogous to that of ideology. That is, perhaps, the point I part company with aspects of Irigaray's project (Gatens, 1996: ix). Gatens takes her reading of Irigaray's universal social imaginary from Margaret Whitford, but other readings of Irigaray have discussed how the more bodily imaginary critiques the universal 'mental' status of a Lacanian imaginary and symbolic. I have argued that Irigaray's bodily imaginary suggests a fluid relation between real and imaginary and because of the imaginary's connection with the real has a more situated historical specificity (Campbell, 1999). This reading of Irigaray, then, makes Gaten's project more akin to Irigaray's than she herself suggests. But Gatens follows up the emphasis on a more situated historical imaginary by linking it to Bourdieu's notion of habitus. According to Bourdieu, habitus is a more embodied history, or material experience which has been internalised as the unconscious and forgotten. Gatens's project then uses this notion of an embodied, situated imaginary to theorise and explore the sexual, political and ethical nature of human embodiment. Drawing on Spinoza's idea of the imagination and his notion of an ethics of power, where power is conceived as determined capacity for action', Gatens seeks to situate sexual difference historically and to connect it to other differences such as the political body (Gatens, 1996: 149). Deconstructing historical divisions in feminist theory between sex and gender, Gatens emphasises the historical specificity of human embodiment, thus tracking a crucial interrelationship between imaginative bodies and social, political identities, Gatens's essays are grouped into three sections. Thefirstsection analyses the power of certain images within both philosophy and psychoanalysis to disenfranchise women sexually, socially and politically. Critiquing the sex/gender distinction, Gatens reflects on how the psychoanalytic research of Robert J. Stoller has influenced feminist analysis on varying fronts: Marxism, ideology,
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social construction theory. Stoller argued for a distinction between sex and gender on the grounds that gender is determined by post-natal psychological influences and is therefore socially produced. Feminists used Stoller's work, utilising the category of gender to propose equality between the sexes: change society and change your gender. Sexual difference feminists, in contrast, have been branded as essentialist, Luce Irigaray perhaps being the most famous case in point. As I have noted above, Tina Chanter links Irigaray and Stoller in a skilful deconstruction of the binary distinction between a social construction emphasis on gender and the so called essentialist emphasis on the sexed body. Gatens also carefully deconstructs this polarisation between social construction and so called essentialist positions by her explication of the imaginary body and body image. As she points out, masculinity and femininity are not universal experiences for men and women; they differ qualitatively. The way a man lives his masculinity or his femininity and the way a woman lives her femininity or masculinity is different and it is affected by the imaginative, affectual relation to the body. For example, a women's femininity is qualified by an imaginary which has been inflected by different bodily events such as menstruation or loss of virginity and this is qualitatively different from a man's experience of femininity. Gatens is not making an essentialist statement based on biological difference, but she is arguing that we have an imaginary relation to our biology and it is the imaginary, often unconscious body that determines how we live out our masculinity and femininity. What is more, this imaginary body is not individual but social, so for instance modern hysterical conditions such as eating disorders signify the social nature or form of the imaginary body. Although Gatens cites Lacan's example of the intricate connection between unconscious body image and the imaginary, she ultimately discards psychoanalysis for its individual emphasis which cannot help understand 'corporate bodies' (Gatens, 1996: xii). In moving on to examine corporeal representation in terms of the body politic, Gatens turns to Thomas Hobbes's text the Leviathan. Gatens's exploration of the Leviathan, together with her interest in Deleuze and the early philosophical writings of Spinoza, raises important issues for thinking through a more bodily imaginary. This is because Gatens work historicises the way in which sexual difference has operated to exclude the female body from texts of the social imaginary. Her analysis also opens up an alternative way of thinking through a fluidity between mind and body; a connection between body and language, and between sex and gender, that undoes the rational Cartesian binary; and the Oedipal split between imaginary and symbolic. Leviathan is an imaginary artificial man based on the body and constructed to protect men from other men and nature. The Leviathan is thus a pact between men which protects them from nature and elevates reason. Woman is excluded from this
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Leviathan, and seen as closer to nature. Without her own Leviathan or artificial woman to protect her, the woman is swallowed up and subsumed by the allpowerful, artificial text of man - the public and universal, masculine Leviathan. We can see then how this modern body politic, or masculine symbolic, has lived through the consumption of women's bodies. The woman's body becomes consumed as an object of exchange, precisely because she is denied access to to a social and imaginary narrative which will represent her and thus separate her from her essential nature. Women are thus perceived in an imaginary sense, within this narrative, to be incomplete and lacking. Nevertheless, this imaginary understanding of the woman as incomplete has real effects on a political level. Reviewing psychoanalytic literature, Gatens critiques the phallocentric and phalloscopic nature of Freudian and Lacanian scripts: phallic accounts of Oedipal bodily integrity that continue to inscribe the woman' as lacking. She gestures to other corporeal multiplicities and non-Oedipalised bodies that might create a more polyvalent ethics - Irigaray's work, for example. But although she cites Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Gatens does not explore in depth Irigaray's alternative theory of a more bodily imaginary where the integrity of the woman's body can be recreated through a more imaginal figuration and painting, rather than through the mental and linguistic functioning of the phallus. In Irigaray's thinking, the relation to the bodily real can be represented through a more creative and imaginative imaginary. Implications here for a more materialist and historically situated psychoanalysis are beckoning, but the second two parts of Gatens's book move away from psychoanalysis as a mode of theorising the imaginary body and turn to more philosophical readings, particularly those of Spinoza. Drawing on Deleuze, Gatens revisits this seventeenth-century philosopher to produce an alternative to the discourses of Descartes and Hobbes, which privilege a Cartesian duality or mind/body split. Spinoza's writings refuse the oppositions of culture versus nature, or the mind versus the body, and argue that the mind and bodywork 'in concert'. Gatens writes: 'For Spinoza the body is not part of passive nature ruled over by an active mind but rather the body is the ground of human action' (Gatens, 1996: 57). The body cannot be seen as somefixedtruth or essence, but has a specific historical existence constituting, embodying and activating the mind and reason. The body, then, and its affects cannot be taken as a given across time, and its meanings will depend on cultural and historical contexts, Gatens demonstrates this by Spinoza's example of our apprehension of the sun. Looking at the sun we imagine it is. about 200 feet away. When the actual distance becomes known, 'the error is removed, not the imagination i.e., the idea of the sun, which explains its nature only so far as the body is affected by it. And so it is with other imaginations by which the mind is deceived' (Gatens, 1996: xiv). Gatens thus uses Spinoza's writings to
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envisage alternative landscapes of contemporary political and social possibilities, developing a feminist philosophy of the body and a more historically embodied postmodernism (Gatens, 1996: xii). The second part of Gatens's book analyses the implications of Spinoza's notion of the imagination for a feminist theory and philosophy that can use the notion of embodiment to challenge dominant social imaginaries. In the last part of the book Gatens develops her reading of the embodied imaginary in direct relation to the arena of ethics, law and responsibility. She asks the Deleuzian question, 'What forms of sociability are open to us at present' (Gatens, 1996: xii). In using Spinoza's understanding of knowledge as being, Gatens proposes that our frameworks of politics, law and justice are rooted in embodied imaginings. Rationality is constructed not as the transcendence of nature but as a kind of immanent transformation or active power of nature, developed from within our collective and material situations. Tracking this back to the sex/gender distinction in feminist theory, sexuality and gender can no longer be defined in terms of the mind/body divide but can only be understood relationally in terms of each other. In this more fluid scenario, sex becomes an imagined organisation of the body, and gender the affective powers of that body. Sex and gender run as 'parallel descriptions of modified nature', but because they are so interrelated the sexuality of a body cannot be seen as causal to its gender (Gatens, 1996: 149). Gatens brilliantly brings Spinoza's notion of the imagination to bear on contemporary debates about feminism, philosophy and postmodernism. The one arena which remains relatively unchallenged, however, is that of psychoanalysis. Her explanation of this is that as a discourse of individualism, psychoanalysis does not embrace more corporate or political bodies. And yet Gatens's whole argument for a more embodied imaginary links so closely with Luce Irigaray's work that its failure to explore the implications for a more collective, embodied and political psychoanalysis is striking. I have suggested, following Irigaray, that the power of the imagination can reconnect the imaginary with the real within a more bodily imaginary (Campbell, 1999). Another way of looking at this would be to understand the Lacanian real and the death drive not in terms of some essentialist, walled-off body, but as lacking a (creative) imagination.
iii«iiiii Unconscious immanence and communication, not repression Of course Deleuze and Guattarri's seminal text Anti-Oedipus uses Spinoza's philosophy to oppose the familial, psychoanalytic model (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). Arguing for the material and immanent nature of the unconscious as creative production rather than repression, Deleuze and Guattari follow Spinoza in stating that the problem lies not with hereditary trans-
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mission but with how individual unconsciouses are communicated. This communication of the unconscious takes as its basis the social community, not the primeval murder of the father. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the first thing the son has to repress, but fails to repress, is the unconscious of the father or the mother. Ethics and morality do not stem primarily from repression associated with the guilt and murder of the father but from a material and embodied social field. Moira Gatens suggests that Freud, far from refusing the notion that morality is situated by society, actually 'prefers an immanent and historical account of how social bodies produce ethical relations'. According to Gatens, Freud's more overtly political tracts on society, religion and morality — such as Totem and Taboo', 'Civilisation and Its Discontents', 'Moses and Monotheism' and 'The Future of an Illusion' - acknowledge that religion and the all-powerful father are but illusions that compensate for the 'sacrifices and suffering that communal living necessarily brings in its train' (Gatens, 1996; 103). But even if we accept this more materialist and embodied reading of Freud, we are still left with his explanation of the social constructed through sexual repression, ultimately caused by man's jealousy of the primeval father. Maybe it is important to recall here Wilhelm Reich's early criticism of Freud, with regard to the Oedipal complex, because it was Reich who first realised how the Oedipal complex and the so-called 'normal family' represented a social repression of bodily desire. In Reich's view, Freud's discovery of the Oedipal was his explanation of the social contingencies that interacted with the psyche. But as Reich continuously asserted, it was not just the psyche but also the sexual libido that was in conflict with the social. In an interview with Dr Eissler, Reich says, 'the Freud of the Victorian era contradicted the Freud who had discovered infantile sexuality' (Reich, 1975: 61). Freud's psychoanalytic research came into conflict with his bourgeois cultural assumptions about the family. The natural family based on love had to be distinguished from the compulsory family in Reich's opinion. His views on a sexual revolution in the family predated the second wave of feminism, but, as I have recounted above, Reich's views on sexuality became progressively more extreme and homophobic in his explication of orgone therapy. What is important in Reich's work, and indeed informs the basis of Deleuze and Guattari's AntiOedipus, is that bodily desire has to be connected with social institutions, allowed free expression of its flows. More troubling in Reich's work and AntiOedipus is the absence of this theorisation of bodily desire in terms of the imaginary. As I will suggest, the dismantling of the Oedipal myth must be accompanied by a rearticulation of alternative individual and social imaginaries, rather than some unmediated celebration of anarchic desire or libido. The central point of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is that desire is rooted firmly within a social context. The unconscious is not what you fail to repress about your own unconscious sexuality; it is your inability to repress
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your parent's unconscious and the sexualities that are transmitted or passed onto you. The unconscious, then, is something that is communicated to you through other people, rather than repressed through a familial history of parricide and murder of the primal father. This is not a denial of the unconscious as reproduced historically, but only an assertion that its reproduction is a social as well as individual passage that cannot be confined to the politics of the family. But if the situated and sexual bodily imaginary is socially as well as individually reproduced, and the psyche according to this reasoning would always be pre-written as social, then what model of psychoanalysis are we to draw on? The account that seems immediately obvious, and that I have been deliberately focusing on in this chapter, is the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari. But there are certain problems with their model that mirror in essence the problems in Wilhelm's Reich's work. In some ways the Freud versus Reich controversy of whether you privilege mental ideas or the body can be seen as reflected in the opposition or difference between Lacan's privilege of language and mental representation and Deleuze and Guattari's focus on the creative materialist notion of the unconscious: the unconscious as desiring production. Freudian and Lacanian accounts repress the body. However, the difficulty with Reich's work and Anti-Oedipus, as I have stressed, is that they both lack an adequate emphasis on imaginary representation and social sublimation. Anti-Oedipus is a radical and anarchistic deconstruction of Oedipal psychoanalysis. But as the history of anti-psychiatry has already shown, you can't mobilise the schizophrenic process as a radical force without the imaginary and representational forms to rearticulate cultural myth. Moreover, it is only through the rememory of cultural myth that the psychic and bodily imaginary can connect with the social. In Imaginary Bodies, Gatens actually traces how the body politic based on Hobbes's Leviathan or artificial man has acted historically to protect man from his jealous brother and to exclude the woman. So Freud's narrative of repression is historically specific and there must be other more productive psychoanalytic accounts that can better serve the social and embodied imaginaries that Gatens envisages. Rosi Braidotti is another feminist philosopher who recently, like Gatens, has postulated the importance of an embodied return to debates on sexual difference. Braidotti uses Irigaray to problematise the lack of attention to sexual difference in Deleuze's materialist account of desiring bodies or machines. But as both Deleuze and Irigaray propose a positive unconscious, perhaps their work can be fruitfully harnessed precisely through a notion of the embodied imaginary thereby bringing together philosophical and psychoanalytical discourses. I suggest that in addition to the embodied philosophical works, so adequately deployed by Gatens and Braidotti, we also start to explore more embodied accounts of an imaginative unconscious that already exist in psychoanalytic, and more overtly political psychoanalytic, writings.
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Gatens's theorisation of a bodily imaginary is a social one based on Spinoza's notion of the imagination. Gatens states her departure from Irigaray in that she envisages not one but multiple social imaginaries. But Irigaray's theory of a bodily imaginary, as I have already proposed, is not singular. Irigaray's challenge to Lacan's Oedipal structuring of the imaginary and symbolic has argued for a more bodily imaginary which will provide a more fluid relationship between imaginary and real and between real and symbolic. This imaginary is then a more historical one because it situates and attempts to represent the real in relation to cultural forms. Irigarays postulation of a feminine imaginary and symbolic is, therefore, the articulation of a narrative representation of a female imaginary which will represent what has hitherto been unconscious in Western discourses of ethics, power and knowledge. Chapter 4 tracked Irigarays work in relation to the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, showing how an unconscious and experiential relation to the real of the body and history can be recreated through the image to find representation within the imaginary and symbolic. Representation of the relation to the real through a more bodily imaginary, Irigaray suggests, can sublimate culturally the hysteric's unconscious relationship to the mother and other women. However, the hysteric's dilemma is not just the dilemma for the communication and representation of a feminine unconscious relationship, but also poses the problem of a social imaginary and unconscious.
Problems in thinking through N N H H I sexual difference The project Gatens outlines, for a more embodied imaginary based on thinking through sexual difference, can be seen to connect Irigaray's argument for a more radical explication of sexual difference with a social imaginary based on Spinoza's notion of the imagination. As I have noted, Deleuze and Guattari use Spinoza's philosophy to argue for a more collective, social and antiOedipal unconscious. The problem with their anti-Oedipal creative unconscious, made up of productive desiring machines, is that it proposes an unconscious beyond sexual difference. This is a polymorphous desire, then, of pure production which destroys and 'deterritorialises' all imaginary structures of myth to connect with reality. This deterritorialisation is a process of letting go of the ego and all its normative associated repressions and structures of power. But surely the kind of sexually neutral unconscious that Deleuze and Guattari suggest risks a collapse into masculine and hegemonic structures of desire because the kind of revolutionary 'schizoanalysis' that they propose cannot work through and rearticulate sexual difference? Irigaray sums up this discrepancy when she writes:
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But isn't a multiplicity that does not entail a rearticulation of the difference between the sexes bound to block or take away something of women's pleasure? In other words, is the feminine capable, at present, of attaining this desire, which is neutral precisely from the viewpoint of sexual difference? Except by miming masculine desire once again. And doesn't the 'desiring machine' still partly take the place of woman or the feminine? Isn't it a sort of metaphor for her/it, that men can use? Especially in terms of their relation to the techno-cratic? (Irigaray, 1985: 140) Irigaray's critique of anti-Oedipal desiring machines is concerned with the neutral organless bodies that Deleuze and Guattari see as the radical and schizophrenic alternative to the Oedipal unconscious. For Irigaray, the organless body has been an 'historical condition' for women (Irigaray, 1985: 141). To deterritorialise and do away with our historical cultural imaginary, which is based on sexual difference, is to run the risk of 'taking back from woman those as yet unterritorialized spaces where her desire might come into being' (Irigaray, 1985: 141). One example of this is the gradual collapse of Wilhelm Reich's thinking into a reactionary celebration of the id as an essential genital drive. Much of Anti-Oedipus is based on Reich's notion of liberating a productive desire that can connect with culture, rather than being repressed by it. But the violence of Reich's ultimately extreme heterosexist position perhaps points to the dangers of desire that overturns all imaginary forms and representation. Irigaray emphatically states that the need to go back to the question of sexual difference is not a call for a return to 'genitality' (Irigaray, 1985: 142). In order for 'woman's desire to come into being' women need 'a relation to language and to sex', a relation to the organs that they have never had (Irigaray, 1985: 142). What Irigaray is suggesting is a rearticulation of sexual difference and of myth which will provide an ethical relation between women and between the woman and her mother. This amounts, if you like, to the destruction of history as only one singular and masculine, imaginary and symbolic, but the rearticulation and recreation of myth through more bodily imaginaries which will represent women's desires to their mothers and to each other. Irigaray has been criticised for privileging a primacy of sexual difference; her book An Ethics of Sexual Difference is certainly focused on thinking through a radical heterosexuality for women, but also on the thinking through of ethical desire between women. For Irigaray, an ethics of the passions means that no love of the heterosexual other is possible without first attaining a homosexual love of the same, 'no love of the other without love of the same' (Irigaray, 1993: 104). Irigaray states that 'the love of self among women, in the feminine, is very hard to establish. Traditionally it is left in the undifferentiation of the mother-daughter relationship' (Irigaray, 1993: 101). Although Irigaray's focus on sexual difference has been viewed by many queer theorists as privileging a
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primacy of heterosexuality, there is an implicit agenda within Irigaray's work of thinking through same-sex desire. Irigaray does prioritise the historical importance of a sexual difference in terms of our cultural imaginary, but her thinking through of sexual difference does not leave heterosexuality as some kind of primordial origin; rather, it acknowledges a more primary bond of same-sex love which has to be acknowledged and established between women. This love of the feminine between women entails a love of the 'nourishing envelope' or mother and a 'love of the body: both of that body we give and of that body we give each other back in return' (Irigaray, 1993: 105). Now of course many would object to this as a reading of lesbian sexuality because of its containment within a notion of the gendered and heterosexually bound term the 'feminine'. But the feminine in Irigaray's text operates very much as the other, that which is negative, unconscious and outside representation. Until the feminine is brought into Western representation through a cultural imaginary, only masculine representations of desire are available. I would add that this means heterosexual masculinity. A positive male homosexual desire, just like a positive lesbian one, depends on the thinking through of the unconscious feminine of sexual difference. Of course this raises the problem of using the feminine as an umbrella term colonising other differences, but if the feminine is not coopted as a masquerade in terms of the phallus, but can mime other unconsciously available positions, then heterosexual primacy becomes displaced. This unconscious mime of the feminine is hysteria, and although Irigaray acknowledges that the hysteric is pathologised within patriarchal culture without a language, she also reminds us that hysteria harbours the possibility of another linguistic and 'cultural reserve yet to come' (Irigaray, 1985: 138).
Between desire and identification B « ^ « The idea that hysteria marks either neurotic illness or a kind of political resistance to the Oedipal complex has been a familiar one in the debates between psychoanalysis and feminism, originating from Freud's famous case of 'Dora'. In Freud's reading of Dora, the adolescent woman's refusal of her heterosexual love for the father is manifested by her underlying unconscious identification with him and desire for the mother, resulting in a neurotic Oedipal illness. Feminists, on the other hand, have read Dora's refusal of Freud's interpretation as either a political resistance to patriarchy, where anger and frustration are somatised through the body, or as evidence of the neurotic illness that results when women's bodies are silenced by the passive constraints of society.1 Even though Dora walks out on Freud, she does not proceed to 1
See the essays in Bernheimer and Kahane (1985), Cixous and Clement (1986), and Gallop (1982).
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have erotic relationships with women, but remains firmly within the circuit of 'normal' femininity. Feminists have disagreed with the reference to lesbian sexuality in Dora's case. De Lauretis in particular takes issue with earlier feminists whose readings proclaim Dora's homosexual desires. She remarks that to call Dora a lesbian blurs not just the distinction between waking and unconscious fantasy, but also the distinction between 'homosexual object-choice and same-sex identification' (De Lauretis, 1994: 47-8). Perhaps Dora's case can exemplify the problematic that seems to exist between feminism and gay theory, as to whether or not issues of gender and sexuality should be viewed as distinct or interrelated. Following Chanter and Gatens, I argue for the need to break down the sex/gender distinction. Within psychoanalysis it is this very distinction between normative gender relations and perverted sexual ones that has served to pathologise gay desire. Although De Lauretis suggests a demarcation between same-sex identification and homosexual object choice this is a dangerous separation, because it so closely resembles the normative Oedipal injunction that 'normal' heterosexuals identify with, whereas homosexuals or 'perverts' desire their own sex. To get beyond such a 'master term' of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and to represent within theory the more transitive sexualities that Sedgwick advocates, means the dissolution of distinctions between identification and desire and between the categories of sex and gender. As we have seen, Oedipal readings of sexuality separate desire from identification: you identify with the same-sex parent and automatically desire the other one. But why does the daughter necessarily end up desiring the father rather than the mother in Freud's account? The problem, for lesbian sexuality, of situating the daughter's desire for the mother in a pre-Oedipal scenario, is that this pathologises the daughter's relationship to the mother within an infantile and unsublimated arena of primary object choice. From orthodox psychoanalysts to contemporary thinkers such as Kristeva, lesbian relationships are characterised as infantile, without boundaries, pre-cultural and psychotic. In contrast, Diana Fuss's recent book, Identification Papers, refuses the Oedipal distinction between desire and identification, arguing that the female homosexual's turn to the mother 'suggests that the daughter must become her mother in order to have her' (Fuss, 1995: 67). Fuss's reading of Freud shows that desire and identification are not distinct but hopelessly entwined. Sexual identity consists of identifying with the person you desire and desiring the person with whom you identify. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's work (see Chapter 2) argued for a primary identification that brings the subject into being. Identification comes first and mimetically brings the subject into being, not the other way round:
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What comes first is a tendency towards identification, a primordial tendency which then gives rise to a desire; and this desire is, from the outset, a (mimetic, rivalrous) desire to oust the incommodious other from the place the pseudo-subject already occupies in fantasy. (Borch-Jacobsen, 1988: 47) Borch-Jacobsen's proposal that psychoanalysis is simply the latest epoch or chapter in the history of hypnosis presents his case by showing how the transference is in fact based on suggestion. The mimetic transference in the analytic session mimics the unconscious processes of the subject's identification with the other. Borch-Jacobsen cites this identification as an hysterical one that seeks to possess that which it also identifies with. The curative transference works by substituting this possessive hysterical trance and then by demystifying it. But how exactly is this trance-like hypnosis demystified within the analytic session? Traditionally Freud read sublimation through Oedipal structures and Lacan more radically posited the importance of language. Borch-Jacobsen is optimistic that society no longer believes in possession, but Diana Fuss demonstrates forcibly that such hysterical forms of possession are reproduced in the mass homophobic campaigns against gay school teachers. Such teachers becomes demonised as possessively inducting children into homosexuality. Other examples of such hysteria can be seen in the group phobic mechanisms operative within racist movements and fascism. Ironically so many of the group hysterias are symbolically grouped under national identities such as the 'name of the father'. Of course, for fascist leaders such as Hitler, the symbolic function becomes subsumed under an aggressive imaginary. Diana Fuss wonders if this means that the symbolic law itself can be seen as hysterical, 'the law itself as hysterical symptom' (Fuss, 1995: 130). Irigaray's criticism of Lacanian analysis also makes the point that a language that only recognises one sex - the phallus as a 'cheap imitation' - is really only operating within one system: the Oedipal or phallic imaginary. But if hysteria can be seen to characterise extreme points of paternal symbolic law, then what about the symbolic nature of women's desire for each other? Borch-Jacobsen's work is extremely useful because it enables us to see how identification and desire operate together. But if identification brings desire into being, and this returns us in my view not so much to Freud as to the Kleinian text of narcissistic envy, then what can sublimate the abject or deathly identification with the mother? In a sense, without a narrative of how women's imaginary desire can be sublimated in relation to each other, it remains vulnerable to either a pathologised collapse into psychosis or a paternal rescue through Oedipal heterosexuality. If, as Fuss suggests, the daughter must become her mother and identify with her in order to desire her, then what is needed is a language of mimesis with which the daughter can play at being her mother and also move away again to
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a position of otherness and desire. Luce Irigaray and Jessica Benjamin both suggest in different ways such a narrative of mimesis between mother and daughter. We have noted earlier Irigaray's description of how girl children play with their dolls miming at being and not being their mothers. This mimesis that speaks with the mother rather than against her can be seen as an alternative to Freud's theorisation of the little boy's entry to language through the throwing away of the cotton reel and pulling it back (the Fort Da game) (Irigaray, 1993b: 91-104) . Freud's idea of the Fort Da game, as we saw in Chapter 2, was the explanation of entry into language, but also an exegesis of the death drive. Irigaray's refusal of this description, because it obliterates the woman's sexual and symbolic relation to the mother, can be seen to put lesbian or woman-towoman desire in place of the death drive. Although this might seem too Utopian, Jessica Benjamin's work has been useful to us in imagining an intersubjective identification between mother and daughter that mediates death and aggression. Jessica Benjamin's depiction of the imaginary identifications between mother and daughter has described how the movement between states of fantasised oneness and a more intersubjective recognition with the early mother can articulate an early symbolic narrative of sameness and difference. But Benjamin's writing also includes the sophistication of detailing how the little girl also identifies pre-Oedipally with her father. The little girl's early ideal loves for the mother and father are not so much bisexual as transitive in terms of sexuality and gender: Benjamin calls them 'overinclusive' as they are made up of identification and desire (Benjamin, 1995a: 56). But if, for the little girl and the little boy, object love and identificatory love exist together as bodily imaginaries that subvert both heterosexual gender differences and any strict demarcation between gender and sex - then what is the Oedipal phase but a myth of heterosexual complementarity that is imposed by the social? Benjamin states forcefully that we can never get rid of the 'omnipotent aspect of the Oedipal position' because the Oedipal phase is a rigid defence against loss, envy and difference. Instead, she suggests a later post-conventional Oedipal phase, where we can return to lost early identifications and rework them. If the Oedipal is viewed as a defence against more polymorphic forms of identity, why does it have to be privileged as the only access to the symbolic? If the Oedipal phase is just a rather immature and one-sided form of secondary identification, surely we need to envisage other symbolics that fully represent all our multiple, bodily imaginaries? Now Kristeva, as we have seen, pathologises lesbianism as psychotic and sees single parent families and lesbianism as enemies or dangerous terrorists in relation to a paternal symbolic. Maybe we need to start imagining another psychoanalysis that does not kill off lesbian desire. We need an understanding
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of how the free acknowledgement and cultural institution of both lesbian desire and the lesbian family are necessary symbolic articulations of women's desire to (and with) the mother. In Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities, Noreen O'Connor and Joanna Ryan point out the varied and complex nature of lesbian identities and identifications that are inadequately catered for in psychoanalytic thinking. Proposing the need for a more open approach to lesbian identifications and a 'rethinking of the status of the Oedipal complex', O'Connor and Ryan stress that although 'symbiotic desexualised relationships might be one form of difficulty to which lesbianism is vulnerable', this is no different to the various pathologies of heterosexual relationships (O'Connor and Ryan, 1995: 268). O'Connor and Ryan are practising analysts and psychotherapists whose clinical and written work emphasises the urgent need for a positive approach to homosexual identity within the practice and the theory of psychoanalysis. Although Irigaray is constantly seen as a feminist theorist of radical heterosexuality, rather than of lesbian desire, her work as a theorist and a clinical practitioner is seen by O'Connor and Ryan to represent a dual project: Like Irigaray, we are challenging the premise that the relationship with the mother is always and inevitably something to be avoided and only grown away from, rather than explored and changed in various adult forms. (O'Connor and Ryan, 1995: 271) Irigaray returns again and again to the question of hysteria in her writing. Hysteria was first thought by Freud to be the symptom or effect of previous sexual trauma and seduction. Later he saw it as the refusal of an Oedipal transference: the neurotic illness of Dora. Irigaray might see hysteria as an unconscious protest against, or refusal of the patriarchal regime, but she also sees it as the loss or inability of the woman to achieve auto-eroticism (Irigaray, 1993b: 100). Hysteria is not just an unconscious refusal of the paternal law, then, it is also an unconscious refusal to give up the desire for the mother. Another way of looking at this would be to describe hysteria as the heterosexual woman's dilemma in not being able to fulfil her desire to possess her mother. Therapy can be seen as a place that can give the woman back her relationship to her desire in terms of herself and in relation to her mother. A more imaginal and bodily imaginary entails the representation of the sensual relationship to the mother. I want to suggest that such an imaginary morphology can represent woman-to-woman desire and lesbian relationships in a way that an Oedipal imaginary cannot. Hysteria, then, can be seen as the key to what the Oedipal complex and psychoanalysis repress, opening up questions of lesbian desire, but also other socially situated identities. Hysteria is also important for understanding the unconscious in its more collective aspects. In short, hysteria can help us to understand how subjectivity and sexual desire are
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not based on repression and prohibition of the unconscious, but on the transferability and communicability of the unconscious, on its origins in the social field. Diana Fuss notes how Dora was herself 'a symptom for the larger group neurosis'and how hysteria reveals the libidinous and sexual economics at work in the family or group organisation (Fuss, 1995: 147).
mmmm Mimesis and the gay bodily imaginary Diana Fuss draws together the topics of lesbianism, group hysteria and psychoanalysis in her chapter on 'Sexual Contagions'. Fuss outlines Freud's example of group hysteria in Group Psychology, where he relates a hypothetical case of infectious hysteria within a girl's boarding school. One girl receives a letter from someone she is in love with that sends her into a fit of jealous hysterics. The other girls in the school catch the hysteria through an imitating identification. Fuss then turns to a lesbian love novel by Dorothy Strachey written at the same time as Freud, a story framing the same kind of contagious identification that he outlines. The difference, however, between Freud's ideas and Strachey's story is that her 'boarding school narrative shows how desire circulates and moves along the very channels of group identification' (Fuss, 1995: 123). Strachey's novel, entitled Olivia, narrates the adolescent's girl's love for her schoolteacher and Fuss demonstrates how the mimetic identification between teacher and pupil instigates a desire which powerfully contravenes the distinction between identification and desire in the Oedipal family romance. She writes: 'Seduction is after all a question of transport ... and the bonds of identification provide the critical channels of this transport' (Fuss, 1995: 12). As Fuss emphasises, contemporary panics of the infectious spread of homosexuality in schools, through the presence of gay teachers, reveal the hysterical symptoms residing not in the homosexuals but in the homophobic crowds who fuel their hate campaigns by recourse to the letter of the law - the same law that still does not acknowledge equal gay rights and, in the case of orthodox psychoanalysis, actively pathologises gays as perverted or deviant. Fuss illustrates, however, how hysteria is not just opposed to the paternal law, but also allied with it. Hysteria also affirms the multiple positions of identification that are taken up unconsciously; the hysteric confounds what it means to be a woman or a man because mimetically she/he can identify with and desire either sex. Judith Butler remains critical of Irigaray's concept of mimesis because of its unconscious feminine nature. For Butler, only a miming and reiteration within the phallic law of language can produce performatively different imaginaries. Irigaray's position is that without a mimetic or performative language of the feminine we are indeed left within a trajectory of purely masculine desire. Maybe Irigaray's feminine bodily imaginary can be seen as a strategic stepping
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stone to envisaging other bodily imaginaries that are coded as neither feminine nor masculine, but can be seen to represent more transitive or ambivalent genders. In other words, Butler's performative lesbian phallus reiterating the phallic text is a viable alternative bodily imaginary once feminine sexual difference or the feminine body is connected to imaginary and symbolic representation. This chapter has argued for a dialogue between the sexual difference debates of feminist thinking and the sexuality debates of queer theory. A recent debate between Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler highlights both the difficulties and the radical possibilities between queer theory and the feminist emphasis on sexual difference. Butler here, like Eve Sedgwick, is arguing to keep the distinction between sex and gender. Braidotti, advocating the sexual difference line, votes to get rid of it. Butler follows the historical debates against sexual difference theory. Monique Plaza and the lesbian theorist Monique Wittig historically opposed the Vecriture feminine movement because of its development of compulsory heterosexuality. This fixed heterosexuality referred to the structural Oedipal complex, operative linguistically in Lacan's work and derived before that from Levi Strauss's notion of structural myth and symbolic exchange. Butler emphasises what she sees as the essentialism of sexual difference debates because of their affirmation of heterosexuality as the 'basis of linguistic intelligibility' (Braidotti, 1994b: 49). Furthermore, she points out how a feminine specificity cannot suffice because lesbian sexuality reappropriates masculinity and femininity in ways which destabilise the terms masculine and feminine. For her, 'an exclusive or primary focus on sexual difference obfuscates or denies the asymmetry of the hetero/homo divide* (Braidotti, 1994b: 49). Braidotti counters Butler by suggesting that sexual difference theory places heterosexuality as central when diagnosing or analysing the historical location of power, but at a 'programmatic level', sexual difference theory also 'challenges the idea of heterosexuality as the center and lesbianism as the periphery' (Braidotti, 1994b: 52). Braidotti gives as an example Irigaray's positioning of female homosexuality as primary and heterosexuality as secondary. However, Butler also takes issue with the separation between the symbolic and the material within psychoanalytical thinking. Braidotti answers this by explaining how sexual difference theory interrogates the separation between symbolic and material which has occurred as a violent and historical effect of power. But, as Butler reminds us, we do have to move beyond the violent split between the real and the symbolic within psychoanalytic thinking. Such a move is, I suggest, implicit in the notion of a bodily imaginary which will connect symbolic representation with the material body or history. What is more, this imaginary is not represented through linguistics but through a more figurative idea of representation via the image. I suggest that such a bodily imaginary
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illustrates the ultimately false distinction between sex and gender but it also critiques the primacy of sexual difference debates. One of the problems returned to again and again in this book is how we can use psychoanalysis to understand the relation and the transition between psyche and social if we bypass or go beyond the Oedipal injunction of sexual difference. Rosi Braidotti's recent book, Nomadic Subjects, argues for a refiguring of the subject that establishes links with the work of both Deleuze and Irigaray. Braidotti takes up Deleuze's 'effort to "image" the activity of thinking differently' (Braidotti, 1994: 101). Deleuze's aim, as we have seen, is to affirm the multiple and positive difference of desire. Following Reich, Deleuze stresses that the unconscious is a creative field that has its roots in the body. He uses the notion of the rhizome which captures the meaning of this rootedness in an unconscious body. Deleuze thus rejects the metaphysical divide between mind and body and, drawing on Spinoza, proposes an imaginative, postmetaphysical figuration of the subject. Taking up Irigaray's critique of Deleuze for abolishing sexual difference, Braidotti suggests a 'rhizomatic' figuration of the subject that will situate sexual difference as a positivity. Such a rhizomatic and nomadic figuration of the subject is provided for us, according to Braidotti, by Donna Haraway's epistemological, postmodern model of the cyborg. The cyborg connects between culture and the body in ways that mirror Deleuze's post-metaphysical rhizome. Futhermore, Haraway's model provides an account of the operation of power within society that is more contemporary than Foucault's. Braidotti writes: Supporting Jameson's idea that a postmodern politics is made necessary by the historical collapse of the traditional left, and that it represents the left's chance to reinvent itself from within, Harraway notes that contemporary power does not work by normalized heterogeneity anymore but rather by networking, communication, and multiple interconnections. She concludes that Foucault 'names a form of power at its moment of implosion. The discourse of biopolitics gives way to technobabble'. (Braidotti, 1994: 103) I will return to a fuller debate on postmodernism in the last chapter, but I want to draw attention here to how the above theorisation of power in postmodern society gives rise to a very different psychoanalysis, which has far more in common with rhizomatic figurations of the subject and bodily imaginaries, then it does with more Oedipal models of repressed desire, or phallic notions of a linguistically split subject. I want, therefore, to end this chapter by emphasising the need for a more creative theory of the psyche in thinking through positive gay forms of desire.
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Mourning lost imaginaries and creating m a u l new ones In her most recent book, The Psychic Life of Power, Butler returns to the question of melancholia, considering it not just as a psychic economy, but as 'the production of the circuitry of melancholia as part of the operation of regulatory power' (Butler, 1997:143). Butler develops her reversal of a Kleinian argument that heterosexuality, not homosexuality, refuses the depressive position and is thus characterised by the idealisation, aggression and incorporation so reminiscent of paranoid splitting. It is the performative 'acting out* by certain forms of queer activism that can undo such bounded straight melancholia. In this reversal, queer identity represents the more healthy and negotiated performance and mourning of a depressive position that can acknowledge sameness and difference. But if a certain rigid masculinity and femininity are seen as constructed, defensive positions - 'I will be the gender that I cannot desire or grieve the loss of' - then is homosexuality a similar denial of heterosexual difference and loss? Butler suggests that there might be other 'equally compelling accounts' of the unconscious that do not necessitate the repudiation of heterosexuality. Such plural, unconscious accounts of bisexuality do indeed suggest a beyond to the Oedipal injunction of sexual difference. Butler's question, 'But why is primary sexual difference the guarantor of loss in our psychic lives?' is a crucial one (Butler, 1997: 165). For Buder the sexual difference debates support an aporia around primary heterosexuality. Her theorisation of melancholia as founding the subject challenges the assumption that the subject is brought into being through the 'straight' injunction of Oedipal symbolic law. Following Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's argument that the subject is formed through a mimetic identification between ego and object, Butler stresses that it is the primary and social loss of the object that undoes the ego and creates the subject. This melancholic undoing of the ego is an internal disavowal of loss, coupled with rage which becomes deflected away from the social world and internalised, directed back against the ego (as a death wish). In this same way, regulatory power and language become psychically internalised and 'turned' back onto the ego, as a lost object that paradoxically and melancholically constructs the subject. However positively this melancholia is worked through, whether by mourning or an externalisation and acknowledgement of rage, at the heart of psychic life exists not identity, but ambivalence and loss. Can the possibilities that extend from Butler's latest analysis manage to displace the circularity of the phallogocentric text? Certainly her emphasis on 'working through' the mourning and rage of a melancholic subjectivity seems to suggest that the violent, incorporated relation to the other can make way for a more ethical recognition of alterity and difference. Grief undoes the ego, but does
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not destroy it; and survival is not the finding of an identity, but an acknowledgement of what she calls the 'historicity of loss' (Butler, 1997: 195). For Adam Phillips, Judith Butler's recent emphasis on mourning and melancholia provides a balance to notions of performative identity: If the idea of performance frees identity into states of (sometimes willed) possibility, mourning refers those same identities back to their unconscious histories, with their repetitions and their waste; those parameters that seemingly thwart our options. (Butler, 1997: 156) The mourning of Klein's depressive position, as Phillips remarks, provides a way out of the 'magic circle of the family', but also out of the magic omnipotent circle of primary and symbiotic desires. What is often lost in readings of Klein, however, is her stress on reparation and creativity. Successful movement from apprehending the mother as a fantasy part-object to a separate and 'real' or whole object is performed in Klein's thinking through the mourning and creative reparation of the depressive position. Now Klein's ideas on reparation have never gained the high profile that her portrayal of envy and rage seems to elicit. But if we understand the formation of the subject to take place through identificatory mimesis and the death drive to be, as Butler suggests, the melancholic rage deflected from the social and internalised within the self, then we are left with an unconscious that is governed, not by distinct life and death drives, but by the pleasure principle. I have discussed the kind of problems that are associated with theories of the unconscious that define it in terms of pure production and desire. Without a theory of representation or sublimation of desire we are in danger of collapsing into the kind of envious mimesis and destruction that make up what Freud called the death drive. I have suggested that the concept of a bodily and social imaginary can sublimate and represent more positive configurations of gay desire. But if the unconscious is to be understood as fundamentally bodily and creative, what theory of sublimation can substitute for the Oedipal? Cornelius Castoriadis answers this question and the problematic of how we can begin to think through more social imaginaries and symbolically represent a variety of bodily imaginaries, by his proposition that the unconscious is both affectual and representative. Rejecting Lacan's claim that the unconscious is structured like a linguistic language or that there is some overarching phallic symbolic that constructs the subject, Castoriadis presents a persuasive explanation of the unconscious situated historically in terms of different, embodied, sexual identities. For Castoriadis the unconscious is creative and representative from the beginning. He writes: 'The unconscious exists only as an indissociably representative/affective/intentional flux' (Castoriadis, 1987: 274). There is no separation between representation and affectual desire, no developmental point at which language and representation intrude to construct the subject
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and socialise desire. As a 'mode of being that is radically imaginative, the unconscious is made up of sexualised drives and representative fantasies, but these fantasies do not originate from outside the psyche but from deep within it. Castoriadis gives the example of dreaming, pointing out that Freud's rich interpretation of dreams becomes flattened out once we see them in terms of secondary modes of language and representation. Castoriadis's idea of a figural unconscious is close to Lyotard's, and he cites Freud's view that 'in the Unconscious there are only representations of things not representations of words' (Castoriadis, 1997: 376). Dreams cannot be interpreted as one thing meaning another; images can mean multiple things simultaneously, and interpretation is limitless and always incomplete. The psyche is then in meaning from the beginning: it does not renounce desire, but neither is there a real before representation; the origin of the psyche is phantasmatic in nature. Castoriadis describes the origin of the psyche as resting with the psychical monad. The earliest mode of being is a state of total symbiotic fusion, no separation and displeasure. Subjectivity is formed through the break-up of this monad. In Kleinian terms, Castoriadis relates how the infant initially identifies with the breast as a part-object. Displeasure caused by the too-often-absent breast means that the infant creates an external space and puts the breast outside: 'the psyche invents-figures an outside in order to place the breast of unpleasure there' (Castoriadis, 1987: 303). The other side of the bad or absent breast is the gratifying one. This good breast is introjected and incorporated, but it cannot remain unaware of the otherness of the projected object. The object is not really experienced as real until it is really lost, usually when the good and the bad breast are seen coinciding in a separate person. But the other has been constituted through extreme ambivalence, being the container of both the good and the bad breast, and it is the reintrojection of the projected rage against the object that accounts for the death wish. The projected other is seen as all-powerful. It is the giving up of this omnipotent other as an extension of the self that involves socialisation of the subject. The other might not obey the imaginary fantasy of the ego and it is in the ego's survival of the failure or break-up of this omipotent relation, this loss of the other, that the subject becomes socially instituted. This loss of the object entails a new or secondary identification. The first identification is omipotent and autistic or self-related, whereas the secondary identification involves a transitive identification with the other. The pleasure principle then becomes divided into primary pleasure-seeking autistic identification and a secondary identification where the object is perceived as other and desiring. This is then the meaning of the Oedipal complex. In order for the child to give up the primary and private imaginary world, the other has to strip herself or himself from the role of omnipotent master and constantly hand on ultimate power and signification to someone else. In the Oedipal
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family this means the mother handing on authority to the father, the 'wait till your father gets home' syndrome. The child must be referred to a social signification, in other words the father must make the child aware that he is one of many. But this passing on of social signification can equally refer to mothers. What better way to make the child aware he is one of many mothers than by the social institution of lesbian parents! The Oedipal in this is just one historical social institution, which many would argue is already outdated. Sublimation, for Castoriadis, is the psyche's replacement of its own private cathexis to itself and to the object with a socially instituted one. This identification with the social imaginary entails entry into language, but Castoriadis does not mean language per se, but symbolic or public language. He gives instances of the private language between two psychotic children, or even the private language that starts between mother and child, as referring to a world which is not social. What matters, then, is not the giving up or the repression of the sexual drive or aim, but the change in the identification or appropriation of the object. The mother who is simply sexually cathected must also be socially connected. She must be a socially instituted mother with relations that signify beyond her. Women must be allowed to cathect their private and imaginary relation with the mother up to social institutions which signify and refer beyond her to society. It is not that the sexual drive or aim towards the object of the mother has to be given up, but that she be seen and identified with as a social object. This last social identification with the object entails the subject being caught up in a network of significations that go beyond her/him. This social identification is the example of a social imaginary articulating the individual in question. But it is at the same time always, in Castoriadis's view, an 'image' of the individual for himself, a mediated bodily imaginary rooted in an unconscious of radical imagination. Sublimation, then, is not simply a matter of the social repressing bodily pleasure or drives, it is a question of the psychic imaginary cathecting the social as a pleasurable object in differing ways. Desires to be an artist or a doctor connotate a social pleasure in those roles, they are not merely a creative manifestation of repressed sexual drives. For Castoriadis, then, 'society and psyche are inseparable and irreducible one to the other' (Castoriadis, 1987: 320). The individual must be able to find herself or himself within a meaningful societal network of relations, but the social institution can never eradicate the individual's radical imagination. It must allow a private autonomous space for the creative psyche whose representative flux leads to 'the continous emergence of other representations' (Castoriadis, 1987: 321).The psyche as radical imagination and representation brings itself into being through imaging and figuring the other emerges. Subjectivity is actualised through this representative and creative imagination, the final identification being the social imaginary. But what is seen retro-
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spectively as the conditions of subjectivity, temporality, differentiation are actually part of the mimetic immanent and creative flux of the psyche that brings itself into being through self-alteration. The construction of the social individual cannot be explained by psychogenesis: understanding the origins of the mind. Construction of the individual and the socialisation of the psyche remain dependent on the social imaginary and the creative bodily imaginary of the psyche. The world and things in the world are the creation of the social imaginary. But social institutions cannot completely account for the individual; the psyche cannot be completely defined by the social as it is also a private bodily and representational unconscious, an imaginary of radical imagination. This is why Castoriadis can state that 'the imaginary - as the social imaginary and as the imagination of the psyche - is the logical and ontological condition of the "real"' (Castoriadis, 1987: 336). This reading of the creative unconscious makes sense of my argument for a bodily imaginary, the way the imaginary is connected with the real and the imaginary with the symbolic. Castoriadis can also be seen to add a muchneeded theory of representation and sublimation to Deleuze and Guattarfs Anti-Oedipusand 'schizoanalysis'. For Castoriadis the capitalist or the Oedipal father would be a psychotic fantasy if he were not reproduced as a social system of significations. So the schizophrenic who refuses the Oedipal familisation is only psychotic as long as his or her phantasies remain unidentified with or by social institutions. The problem with Freud's Oedipal complex, then, is that it identifies the father socially but not the mother; it therefore represses the maternal bodily imaginary into a violent and private identification with itself. The relation to the mother in Oedipal terms is not socially instituted, but referred to the social via the father. A social imaginary is needed that will symbolically endorse the mother as a social subject, referring her, the mother, to other public mothers, not through the privatised realm of the nuclear family but through a society that recognises and institutes the maternal bodily imaginary as a social one. We also need the social institution of gay desire. Guattari's statement that heterosexuality gets rid of all desire, and that desire can only really exist along a homosexual axis, can be understood as meaning that the Oedipal phallus represses not only the feminine relation to the body, but is also responsible for cutting off all desire by castrating the imaginary relation to the body and the imaginary relation to the social. This violent Oedipal separation between the socio-symbolic and the materialist relation to the psychic, imaginative body, is a reification of only one masculine imaginary as a universal, immutable symbolic. But, as Castoriadis reminds us, it is not language per se that forms the subject, but a secondary identification with the sexual object as a social one that provides access to socially instituted discourse. The dilemma for lesbian desire, then, is not the relation to the sexual object, but the need for that sexual
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desire to be institutionalised by society. Hence the importance of gay subcultures that socially legitimise gay sexuality and of other forms of public legitimation, whether through the media or the increase in 'coming out' in professional walks of life. Full achievement of this is of course a long way off, but the increasing pressure on public institutions to recognise gay civil rights can help in socially and symbolically articulating differing forms of the gay imaginary, whether that signifies Hocquenghem's socialisation of the privatised anus or Sedgwick's legitimation of more sexually transitive desires. The importance of theorising lesbian desire as a social imaginary is evident in de Lauretis's aim to Oedipalise the perversions. And Judith Butler has shown us how the dominance of Oedipal heterosexuality as a melancholic social imaginary makes it doubly important to work through, mourn and repair our homosexual loves. The irony, here, for psychoanalytic practice is that the hypothetical Oedipal analyst who refuses to legitimate socially 'his' patient's homosexuality, or indeed recognise his own bisexuality, thus reinforces a melancholic rage and envy which may become projected onto the gay client, but also serves to perpetuate the severance of the heterosexual (analyst or client) from his or her imaginative and bodily desires. The difficulty for a lesbian client with a heterosexual analyst might then be: how far is that analyst going to go in legitimising her desire socially, by acknowledging his or her own homosexuality and referring the client's desires on to other signifiers within the social imaginary? The hurdle for the heterosexual client however may be different: how neurotic say, is the division between a repressive socially instituted identity and the radical representative flux of his or her bodily imaginary? These dilemmas are not separate and the need to dissolve the sex/gender distinction through reference to a bodily and social imaginary arises precisely because of what this distinction obscures: the connection between the sexual difference argument for a social and bodily feminine imaginary, and the queer demand for the discursive acknowledgement of more transitive sexualities. Connection of the 'feminine' to a social imaginary is necessary to repair the historical dislocation between the sociosymbolic and the materialist body that has been so heavily inscribed by the Oedipal phallus. More transitive forms of gay desire are also dependent on the connection between the bodily imaginative psyche and the social imaginary. These forms of gay desire can be seen as running parallel to the configuration of'feminine' sexual difference, and can even be seen as interdependent without collapsing the specific situatedness of gay desire under a primacy of heterosexual femininity. Judith Butler's unease with sexual difference debates stems from the way that sexual difference always seems set up as the primary guarantor of loss. Butler chooses instead the Freudian explanation of mourning and melancholia (which is also Klein's) to explain the loss of the object and construction of the
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subject. Refusal of primary loss in relation to the original symbiotic monad, whether that is figured as the ego ideal (Freud) or the ambivalent splitting between good and bad breast (Klein), leads to a melancholic identification and incorporation of the object inside the ego. The rage of the ego against the lost object is internalised and the ego is literally haunted as the internalised object is turned into a deathly and destructive castigatibn of the ego. This, then, is the meaning of the superego and the death drive, although Klein's maternal superego is more primitive and therefore more violent than Freud's paternal one. The way out of this violent incorporation in Freud's and Klein's writing is through internalisation and mourning, where the object is really accepted as lost and acknowledged as separate and external. But, as Castoriadis points out, it is not necessarily the mother's relation to the father that breaks up the omipotent relation to the ideal, primal monad. The mother breaks it up by herself, through failing. If she doesn't fail, she is in danger of suffocating her child and overfeeding it, thus running the risk of making it psychotic. As I have noted, mediation of the infant's idealisation and rage entails secondary identication with the object in terms of a social imaginary which will provide a social formation of the subject without obliterating the private imaginative and representative psyche. When Winnicott stresses the importance for the child of being able to discover reality, but also hold on to the idea that she or he created it, he is saying much the same thing. Irigaray's objection to the Oedipal is that as a social institution it represents only one male imaginary, the elevation of which to the level of symbolic insists that all other imaginaries remain private or non-existent - as when Lacan refers the female imaginary to the status of the 'real'. Irigaray suggests that the masculine imaginary masquerading as the symbolic projects the death drive onto women. Without representation of the mother as a socio-symbolic subject, the Oedipal imaginary cannot be properly social either; it remains inside a privatised locus of power, whether operating within the nuclear family, as a cabinet-run government, or behind the closed doors of the psychoanalytic institution. But if the Oedipal imaginary illustrates inadequate separation from the mother, thus projecting death in place of her bodily imaginary, the Oedipal also cuts off and castrates the bodily imaginaries of gay desire, eclipsing their propensities for representing different social imaginaries.
Conclusion u^^ii^ Homosexual desires are at present too often refused their place within a social imaginary, having death projected onto them in the guises of Aids carriers, perverts or psychotics. Although, as Butler admits, there is no one without ambivalence, she also realises that there 'is no ambivalence without loss' (Butler, 1997: 198). Acknowledging the historical loss of our gay desires - the
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more heterosexual we are, the more lost they are - involves the working through of ambivalence, the acknowledgement of rage and mourning. Acceding to a social imaginary of gay desires means recognising the bodily imaginative psyche in all the representative dimensions that can creatively build different social institutions. One crucial move in legitimating a social imaginary of gay desires would be to institute gay parenting socially. Re-evaluation of the politics of the family would have to be enacted alongside this, so that the social legitimisation and insitutionalisation of, say, single parent families and communal childcare arrangements would all be seen as part of building a social imaginary that really is social. By social I mean that it is representative of the variety of situated bodily desires and imaginative individual psyches that people it. So often, in the political world, power is privatised and what seems to be a public decision, made in the interests of society, in actuality is made by a very few, behind closed doors. Take, for example, the recent legislation by Blair's government on cuts in single parent benefit, a massively unpopular decision made by a few ministers. Where is the public debate over this issue? The Blairite rhetoric on family values, not distant enough from the traditional Conservative 'back to basics' hype, remains a privatised Oedipal imaginary, socialised by governmental institutions, but also highly unrepresentative of present-day family arrangements. Social institutions and the linguistic symbolic, as part of the social imaginary, are not inevitably separate from materialist social relations, or the imaginative representative flux of the psyche. The idea that society and the discourses of power are always universally wrapped up within one phallic symbolic is a fantasy. This is a fantasy that admittedly has been made law, but the imaginary identifications that create our linguistic socio-symbolic mean that other possible discourses arising out of our imagination are potentially available as part of our social and our symbolic imaginary. To illustrate this I want to conclude this chapter by discussing the possibilities of imagining the bodily and the social imaginary of gay desires within the analytic session. Noreen O'Connor and Joanna Ryan discuss the fears and anxieties that arise for lesbian clients in relation to their sexuality. Problems around identity emerge not because they are inherent in lesbianism, but because of the marginal position lesbian sexuality occupies in society, and its continual measurement against a normative and given heterosexuality. The issue of the therapist's sexuality is also an issue for the patients, who often request a lesbian practitioner, but also for the lesbian therapist in relation to her professional colleagues. As O'Connor and Ryan point out Historically, lesbians have been able to be therapists only by completely concealing their sexuality, or by being, as one psychoanalyst at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis put it, Very discreet'. (O'Connor and Ryan, 1995: 262)
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The suspicion of the psychoanalytic institution towards homosexuality is very bound up with the pathologisation of homosexuality as a perverse character structure or pre-Oedipal stage of arrested development. New directions in theory are crucial in moving beyond the Oedipal discourses that silence gay desire. The analytic session is also potentially a place where, as this chapter has suggested, gay desires can be imagined, imaged and figured through a more bodily imaginary. Such representations of gay desire do not automatically categorise it as pre-Oedipal sexuality, but acknowledge the inseparable and irreducible links between the bodily imaginary and the social field.
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^ !i li ll ii iiiliiiliiili li s
Benjamin, J. (1995)/The Omnipotent Mother', in Like Subjects, Love Objects, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Benjamin, J. (1995b) 'Sameness and Difference: towards an "Over-inclusive" Theory of Gender Development' in Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (eds), Psychoanalysis in Contexts, London: Routledge. Bernheimer, C. and Kahane, C. (eds) (1985) In Dora's Case: Freud- Hysteria - Feminism, New York: Columbia University Press. Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1988) The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Braidotti, R. (1994) 'Re-figuring the Subject', in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. — (1994b) Rosi Braidotti with Judith Butler, 'Feminism by Any Other Name', More Gender Trouble: Feminism meets Queer Theory, issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 6, 2 - 3 . Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Campbell, J. (1999) 'Ethics and Sexual Difference: Imaging and Imagining a Different Imaginary', International Journal of Gender and Psychoanalysis. Castoriadis, C. (1987) 'Individuals and Things', in The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 274. — (1997) 'Done and to be Done', in David Ames Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Chanter, T. (1995) 'Tracking Essentialism with the Help of a Sex/Gender Map', in Ethics Of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers, New York: Routledge. Cixous, H. and Clement, C. (1986) The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Lauretis, T. (1994) 'Female Homosexuality Revisited', in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 47-8. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone. Fuss, D. (1995) 'Fallen Women', and 'Sexual Contagions', in Identification Papers, London and New York: Routledge.
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Gallop, J. (1982) The Daughters Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gatens, M. (1996) Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, London and New York: Routledge. Irigaray, L. (1985) 'Questions', in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. — (1993) 'Love of the Same, Love of the Other', in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, London: Athlone Press. — (1993b) 'Gesture in Psychoanalysis', in Sexes and Genealogies, New York: Columbia University Press. O'Connor, N. and Ryan, J. (1995) Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis, London: Virago, Reich, W. (1975) in M. Higgins and C M . Raphael (eds), Reich Speaks Of Freud, London: Penguin Books. Phillips, A. (1997) 'Keeping It Moving', in Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990) 'Axiomatic', in Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Colonial Desires and the Postcolonial 'Subject'
This chapter examines the relationship between psychoanalysis, race and postcolonial theory. In some ways the debate between psychoanalysis and race has not even begun. If feminism, originally represented by Karen Horney, has occupied a relatively privileged place inside the discourse and practice of psychoanalysis, and homosexuality has classically occupied the ill and degenerative side of normative Oedipal theory, then the questions of race and nonWestern identities have been most prominent in their absence from psychoanalytic frameworks. But, as I will argue, this absence has also been a discursive negative presence. Blackness and the image of a primitive, dark and uncivilised presence has occupied an unconscious but deeply structuring discursivity to the texts of psychoanalysis. If the Oedipal imaginary in Freud's and Lacan's texts constructs a white male subject through splitting and castrating the mother's body from language and subjectivity, and, as we have seen, that same Oedipal imaginary positions homosexuality as degenerative and excessive bodily perversion, then a similar abjection of the person of colour' or the black into a bodily, animal and non-human other is also at work within the psychoanalytic text. Freudian psychoanalysis has been perceived conventionally as an originary modernist discourse following on an Enlightenment tradition that privileges rational knowledge over the body. In this narrative black people are situated as a primitive and unknowable other to Western 'truths' of knowledge and reason. Slavery can be viewed as an origin of European modernity, but it can also be placed as a founding origin to Freudian thinking, a point that the French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon repeatedly made in arguing that the black man remains the unconscious 'other' to a white and colonial imaginary. In the colonial situation, according to Fanon, the 'real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man' (Fanon, 1986: 161). 191
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Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the French (West Indian) island of Martinique. Escaping from Nazi occupation in his youth led Fanon to join up and fight with the French Army. After the war, he studied in France to become a psychiatrist and subsequently worked in Algeria. Fanon's life in the 1950s as a colonial psychiatrist in French Algeria became increasingly involved in political dispute, leading finally to the resignation of his hospital job. Although Fanon died at a youthful age from leukaemia in 1961, his work had a worldwide impact on political and nationalist struggles in the 1960s. More recently his seminal texts, The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skins, White Masks have helped to inaugurate the 'postcolonial studies' that came to fruition in the 1980s, Black Skins, White Masks earned Fanon the title of'a black Freud', and it is Fanon's status as a canonical thinker in terms of postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis that places him as central to this chapter. His work can also be seen to agree significantly with the trajectory of this book, in its refusal to separate Oedipally the imaginary from the real. Fanon's fluid connection of the imaginary and the real fits aptly with the project in Arguing with the Phallus of exploring a bodily imaginary. His analysis of how the black man is situated as the white man's unconscious can also be seen to deconstruct the 'subject' of psychoanalysis and colonial discourse, as a white imaginary masquerading in place of a universal, cultural symbolic. The black critic Henry Louis Gates calls for a more situated reading of Fanon, suggesting that Fanon has been 'reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies' (Gates, 1991: 457-78). Steve Pile follows this realisation by his summary of the paradoxical way in which critics assume plurality in Fanon's work and then feel 'able to pick the Fanon they want to and, from there, elevate the chosen one Fanon into a Global theorist' (Pile, 2000: 1). This chapter will examine Fanon's writing in relation to psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and Marxist readings in an attempt to contextualise Fanon's psychoanalytic thinking geographically, by elucidating the situated nature of his bodily imaginary.1 This chapter will also explore this bodily imaginary in relation to more recent discussions of postcolonial theory. The field of postcolonial studies developed in dialogue with French postructuralist concerns. But it also crossed over with postmodernism, focusing on the understanding of power relations between the West and Third World cultures. If modernism can be caricatured as a crisis concerning epistemology (knowledge structures) and reason, then postmodernism, like postructuralism, attacks and decentres the unified white and humanist subject. Postcolonial theory, however, deconstructs the imperialist subject.
I'm indebted to Steve Pile's ideas on the geography of Fanon's work and the spatial determinants of psychoanalysis.
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Postcolonial theory in a postructuralist frame ^ ^ » « The founder of deconstruction theory, Jacques Derrida, has argued that Western discourse and metaphysics is a white mythology in which the white man takes his own knowledge or 'logos' as the universal form of rational truth (Derrida, 1971). The three best-known and central theorists of colonial discourse - Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak - are centrally attracted to the methodologies of deconstruction (Said, 1978; Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1987). Postmodernism dismantles Enlightenment narratives of rationality, but it also dismantles all narrative positions. This comes at a time when the postcolonial subject is just about to speak. It has been argued that the significance of this is that postmodernism seems to deny the 'native' a speaking position just as he/she is about to find one. The danger of a postcolonial theory based on such postmodern ideas is that it will simply reproduce the colonial subject as the repressed other to a likewise confirmed centrality of Western ideology. The postmodern theorist Linda Hutcheon deals with this difficulty by arguing that the postmodern deconstruction of the self must be delayed until postcolonial and feminist discourse can find their alienated and denied discourses (Hutcheon, 1989). But again the problem arises, where do these postcolonial and feminist voices arise from? What historical space and place do they occupy? If they are merely the repressed other of an Oedipal and colonial narrative, then they remain subjected and legitimated in terms of those controlling master discourses; there is no external position, or alternative narrative, outside this discourse of power from which they can speak.2 Denied a subject speaking position, the subaltern is relegated to an unknowable real outside Western language and representation, remaining, in Lacan's parlance, inaccessible and unrepresentable. The implicit refusal, by postcolonial theory, of any other language or imaginary that does not coincide with the dominant symbolic refuses the dialogic implications that are always present in the negotiation of power. We have seen that a dialogic understanding of the operation of power and ideology 2
This is a Foucauldian argument, extolled most forcibly as a postcolonial concern by Edward Said. Said's text Orientalism develops Foucault's ideas in terms of power, knowledge and discourse in relation to the social and political struggles between East and West. Orientalism, for Said, involves the history of cultural relations between Europe and Asia, and is revealed by Said as a Western fantasy projected onto the Eastern world in order to dominate it. Gayatri Spivak, indebted to Derrida's deconstruction, gives the example of the 'othered' subaltern woman who is written, argued for, but given no discursive position from which to speak. The oppressed subaltern cannot speak or achieve legitimation outside the discourse of power that subjects him/her. Ultimately for Said and Spivak the subaltern cannot articulate a subject position for her or himself. This seems to lead to the rather depressing conclusion that there can be no anti-colonial discourse. See Said (1978) and Spivak (1987).
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means that there is a complex and hegemonic struggle between the dominant and the subordinate, where the dominant is always changed into something new. But this dialogic interaction depends on an acknowledgement of narratives that are not automatically included by the dominant symbolic. How does this difference - between, on one hand, poststructuralist, postcolonial theory, and, on the other, a more dialogic interaction between imaginary and symbolic - relate to Frantz Fanon and psychoanalysis? This chapter will examine various readings of Fanon - poststructuralist, phenomenological, and Marxist - to develop an analysis of the white and black imaginary with respect to Fanon's work. Whereas a Lacanian reading of Fanon tries to incorporate his writing within an Oedipal framework, and Marxist narratives reject psychoanalysis in favour of more historical theories, this chapter will bring history and psychoanalysis together by reading Fanon in relation to a situated bodily imaginary. Fanon's work is an important tool in in remembering the Oedipal heritage of psychoanalysis differently, because it reveals the racism implicit in psychoanalysis as white ethnography, and yet also shows the transformative potential of a more historical unconscious.
iiiiiiiiii Bhabha's Fanon, or the black Lacan Homi Bhabha has criticised Said's rather universalistic argument in Orientalism, suggesting that its implicit claim that Orientalist discourse was uniformly hegemonic and effective ignored the unconscious aspects of this colonial knowledge. According to Bhabha, colonial discourse operates in terms of conscious mechanisms of knowlege and power, but also in relation to the ambivalent flux of unconscious fantasy and desire (Bhabha, 1994). As with the Freudian dream, there is a manifest or overt colonial discourse of instrumental power and a more hidden, unconscious or latent phantasmatic desire. These two arenas are inseparable, and Bhabha uses the Freudian conception of desire - to want and not want the object - in his analysis of how ambivalent desire resides at the heart of colonial discourse. So although Said asserts that colonial discourse is maintained through the external controlling dominance of the coloniser over the subjected subaltern, Bhabha points out that this reductive binary obfuscates a core ambivalence. This ambivalence points to the anxiety and instability of the dominant discourse but also to the possibility of resistance from the marginal subject. Bhabha explains this ambivalence more fully through his analysis of the colonial stereotype in terms of psychoanalytic notions of sexual fetishism. Bhabha objects to simplistic ideas of colonial stereotypes that offer only one unitary point of identification; for him the stereotype is always fundamentally a 'complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive' (Bhabha, 1994: 70). The stereotype is fetishistic because it simul-
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taneously recognises and disavows the other's difference. Fetishism, psychoanalytically speaking, is a reactivation of the scene of anxiety over castration and difference where castration is disavowed and a penis is ascribed to the mother's body. This disavowal is normalised through the fetish object which substitutes for the maternal penis. Bhabha then rearticulates this Freudian discourse of sexual difference in terms of race. Tying Freudian fetishism to the reproduction of power and colonial discourse in society, Bhabha explains how the sexual and racial fetishisms are inextricably linked. Recognition of sexual difference is a prerequisite of the Lacanian cultural symbolic, where castration and the phallus inaugurate the necessary linguistic chain of signifiers and cultural meaning. But with fetishism there is a disavowal of castration and sexual difference, where the fixation on the object masks difference and returns original wholeness, before lack and separation. As colonial stereotype, then, the fetish works by its ambivalent play between: the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity - Freud's terms: 'All men have penises'; in ours 'All men have the same skin/race/culture - and the anxiety associated with lack and difference - again, for Freud 'some do not have penises'; or for us 'Some do not have the same skin/race/culture'. (Bhabha, 1994: 74) Bhabha seems to link fetishism and colonial discourse with a disavowal of the symbolic, as if we have access, elsewhere, to an acknowledged sexually differentiated symbolic, but colonial discourse somehow forecloses on it. But if we are to take Irigaray's critique of the Lacanian imaginary and symbolic seriously as being solely a white male one, then the Lacanian symbolic is primarily a phallic fetishistic one, that denies difference from the beginning whether that be the feminine, homosexuality or black skin. Bhabha argues that the colonial stereotype provides access to an ' "identity" which is predicated as much on master and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is the form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it' (Bhabha, 1994: 75). Fetishism reactivates the primal scene where the mastery and originary pleasure of narcissistic plenitude and wholeness is constantly threatened with unpleasure, castration and lack. The colonial stereotype is the substitution and the desire for some kind of original wholeness, ambivalently dealing with the threat of division through difference, race and culture. Homi Bhabha returns to the writings of Frantz Fanon, reading his texts through a Lacanian definition of the imaginary. As I discussed in Chapter 3, Lacan's mirror stage is an ambivalent identification where the infant has the narcissistic illusion of mastery and presence, immediately deflected by the mother's desire which goes beyond the child towards the other or the phallus. This deflection of the mother's desire in relation to the symbolic wrenches the
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child from his imaginary plenitude into language, and the signifiers of lack and desire that represent identity as forever divided. Bhabha argues that it is the two forms of identification associated with the imaginary, aggressivity and narcissism, that construct dominant colonial stereotypes of the other. Working through fetishistic tropes of metaphor and metonymy, the colonial stereotype symbolically and narcissistically disavows the other's difference through metaphor, at the same time aggressively recognising the unconscious or metonymic lack that the other represents. In this way the stereotype is both fixed and a fantasy, becoming part of an institutionalised discourse of racism, inherited colonialism, but at the same time reactivating a more immediate desire and aggressivity. The racist stereotype becomes fixed as 'the same old stories', for instance the negro's animality. But at the same time compulsive repetition of these tired and familiar caricatures brings the fantasy: these stories are always 'differently gratifying and terrifying each time' (Bhabha, 1994: 77). Homi Bhabha adds psychoanalysis to postcolonial studies. Whereas Edward Said focused on more conscious constructions of colonial discourse and power, Bhabha has shown through a variety of readings how colonial power is always shot through and suffused by ambivalent desire. And it is unconscious ambivalence that not only resides at the heart of colonial desire and power but also threatens to collapse and destabilise it from the inside. Colonial discourse is inherently unstable, then, its own historicity of dominant tradition being constantly undone by the return of the repressed, or by a core unconscious ambivalence. To summarise, Bhabha's utilisation of a Lacanian unconscious destabilises a fixed and unitary view of colonial discourse, how through the fetishistic stereotype conscious knowledge and power are constantly undermined by the ambivalent unconscious. In his reading of Frantz Fanon, Bhabha stresses that Fanon's liberatory and existential humanism is an overcompensation for the darker narcissistic imaginary of the colonial psyche. For Bhabha, Fanon exposes how colonial desire is split between the image of post-Enlightenment man and the abject dark shadow of the colonised man that constantly disturbs and splits the very being of colonial identity. As, in Lacan's account, the real becomes lost as an unconscious relation that is split off from the symbolic, so in Bhabha's account the real is not addressed in Fanon's text except as a 'banal' overcompensatory humanism. The core of Fanon's address resides in an ambivalence, according to Bhabha, that cannot be tied down in reified historical experience: It is one of the original and disturbing qualities of Black Skin, White Masks that it rarely historicizes the colonial experience: There is no master narrative or realist perspective that provide a background of social and historical facts against which emerge the problems of the individual or collective psyche. (Bhabha, 1986: 104)
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But if Bhabha is wary of losing Fanon's unconscious ambivalence to a vision of reified and transcendental subjectivity, he is equally in danger of returning Fanon as a black Lacan who can proclaim the universal theory of a colonial psyche. To be sure, there is a persuasive line to the notion that Lacan's narcissistic imaginary typifies a racist psyche, but to extend this analysis to the whole of the colonial condition is to ignore the ways in which Fanon actively disagrees with Lacan and does indeed historicise colonial experience. In Black Skiriy White Masks, Fanon reminds us that the psychoanalytic dream must be returned to 'its proper time' and 'its proper place' (Fanon, 1986: 104). Arguing against Freud's universal prescription of Oedipal neurosis, where the psyche and the social are in conflict, Fanon's view simply states: I t is too often forgotten that neurosis is not a basic element of human reality. Like it, or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among Negroes'. Fanon references the disagreement that this establishes between him and Lacan: 'On this point psychoanalysts will be reluctant to share my view. Dr Lacan, for instance, talks of the 'abundance' of the Oedipal complex' (Fanon, 1986: 152). Fanon's criticism of Lacan reflects Irigaray's understanding of the exclusionary politics of the phallic metaphor, which refuses the affectual place of the mother's body and thus discards women's experience as abject and unspeakable. Irigaray's and Fanon's critiques of Lacan arise from their refusal to separate psychoanalytic theory and practice, a refusal to separate thinking with the mind, from thinking the body. Fanon explicitly spells this out, referring to Lacan's mirror stage, when he says, 'the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man'. No impossible real here, but the real bodily castration of the negro; a colonial and phallic castration, not simply located at the level of language, but also at the level of his experiential, corporeal self: 'But it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked. It is as a concrete personality that he is lynched. It is as an actual being that he is a threat' (Fanon, 1986: 163). This connection between symbolic and literal castration, so reminiscent of Irigaray, opens up an interesting debate on the relationship between theory and practice. Fanon, like Irigaray, refuses to make absolute distinctions between the real and the imaginary, and both make it clear that this more fluid relation between the imaginary and the real is linked to the clinical transference. Attempts to read Irigaray and Fanon from within a poststructuralist tradition have missed the phenomenological understanding that informs their work. Traced back to such figures as Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Husserl, phenomenology insists that the subject is always an embodied subject. Such notions of embodied subjectivity seriously question the divisory, linguistic phallus that splits and abjects the mother's body outside language. It is perhaps particularly ironic that Irigaray and Fanon have been so misread, in relation to
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Lacanian psychoanalysis.3 Irigaray refuses, on phenomenological grounds, the Lacanian split between language and the female body. Similarly Fanon (who is influenced far more by Sartre's existentialism than by Lacan) critiques the Lacanian phallus as part of a white male imaginary which relegates the black man to an abject bodily other.
iiiiiiiiii Truth against power: a Marxist analysis Recently Lewis R. Gordon has emphasised the need to read Fanon in relation to a history of phenomenological thinking that bears more debt to thinkers such as Merleau Ponty and Sartre than to Lacan and deconstruction. For Gordon, this tradition refers to 'embodied consciousness' and 'embodied meaning' and cannot be translated into the repression of the body and history under a Lacanian linguistic metaphor (Gordon, 1995: 19). If a Lacanian reading of Fanon obscures and mystifies the historicity of Fanon's emphasis on agency and praxis, then is a Marxist reading more accurate? E. San Juan Jr's recent book, Beyond Postcolonial Theory, takes issue with postcolonial theory, particularly the holy trinity of thinkers, Said, Spivak and Bhabha. Critical of reducing the whole of postcolonial theory to a deconstructive project, San Juan Jr objects to the title 'postcolonial', insisting that what is meant by postcolonial is in fact a continuing neo-colonial situation where power operates in a hegemonic Marxist sense as a struggle between centre and periphery. San Juan Jr then replaces poststructuralist theories of the indeterminacy of the linguistic sign with the concrete and situational histories of real experience and struggle. Locating oppositional narratives of 'subalterns', whose agency actively confronts the silent subaltern of postcolonial theory, San Juan Jr returns Marxism as a progressive alternative to the deconstructive delights of contemporary postmodern thinking. Delivering a particularly blistering attack on Homi Bhabha, whom San Juan Jr labels postcolonial theory's most 'doctrinaire instigator', he writes: 'For Bhabha, the poststructuralist paradigm of linguistic or textual difference legitimises a new master-narrative of indeterminism and contingency' (San Juan Jr, 1998: 25). In respect to Fanon: 'I would like to show how Bhabha's subordination of everything to the language metaphor and its exorbitant implications compels him to distort and thus render inutile the praxis-orientated voice of 3
Some of the most impressive and scholarly poststructuralist readings of Lacanian psychoanalysis have ignored the phenomenological critique implicit in Irigaray's and Fanon's work. Consequently, Jacqueline Rose argues that Irigaray's challenge to the Lacanian phallus is essentialist and Homi Bhabha aligns Fanon with a Lacanian reading, thereby subsuming Fanon's roots in existential phenomenology and his criticism of Lacan with regard to the Oedipal complex. See Jacqueline Rose (1986) and Homi K. Bhabha (1994).
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Frantz Fanon' (San Juan Jr, 1998: 27). San Juan Jr is also indignant at how Bhabha depoliticises the materialist thinker Bakhtin in his 'attempts to impute a deconstructive motive' to him (San Juan Jr, 1998: 27). Whereas Bhabha reads Bakhtin in terms of the contingent arbitary status of the linguistic sign, San Juan Jr stresses the 'multiaccentuality' of Bakhtin's sign. Speech and language are always rooted in material, experiential relations and class warfare and struggle. The problem for San Juan Jr is how Bhabha's emphasis on deconstruction disposes of the dialogic and dialectical politics in Bakhtin's work. As we have seen, without another marginal narrative that can dialogically interact with the dominant we are left with pure deconstruction of the dominant, or a pure death drive that cannot configure positive identities outside of the Oedipal. Leaving aside the obvious problems of returning to the rather unreconstituted aspects of the Marxist framework that San Juan Jr suggests, his work is nevertheless important. Its vitality and significance reside in the dialogic nature of narrative that San Juan underpins with his explicit, traumatic and courageous accounts of the experiential narratives of subalterns who do resist in the face of repressive colonial outrage. He cites the case of Rigoberta Menchu, a Quiche Indian and political activist from Guatemala, who was given the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in support of the rights of indigenous people. Menchu's account of the violent suppression and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans under a military coup instigated by the American CIA to impose a regime then given massive financial backing by successive American governments, is horrifying. The slaughter of rural Guatemalans and Indians, including Menchu's parents and brothers, is graphically summed up by Menchu's description of her brother's torture (he was subsequently burnt alive). My brother was tortured for more than sixteen days. They cut off his finger nails, they cut off his fingers, they cut off his skin, they burned parts of his skin. Many of the wounds, the first ones, swelled and were infected. He stayed alive. They shaved his head, left just the skin, and also they cut off the fleshy part of his face. My brother suffered tortures on every part of his body, but they took care not to damage the arteries or veins so that he would survive the torment and not die. (San Juan Jr, 1998: 34) San Juan Jr cites Menchu's narrative as a 'return of the truth-claims in a time when the real has supposedly evaporated into a pastiche of kaleidoscope images' (San Juan Jr, 1998: 35). Juxtaposing popular narratives of struggle and resistance, such as Menchu's, alongside the postmodern rhetoric of the unrepresentability of the real, San Juan Jr. points to the slain Indians and Guatemalans, asking 'could these figures be interpreted as mere signs in a self-contained logic of difference' (San Juan Jr, 1998: 35). Postmodernism is dealt with in more
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detail in the next chapter, but for now it is crucial to acknowledge San Juan Jr's stress on the validity and authenticity of subaltern speech, its witness to real events and Menchu's truth against power, her revolutionary performance. In contrast, then, to the silent subaltern of postcolonial deconstruction theory, is a Marxist emphasis on the popular resistant narratives that do indeed represent a dialogic alternative to the dominant. But a Marxism that simply divides postcolonial or neocolonial society into a world capitalist market of the dominant and the oppressed, placing orientalism in one camp and the speaking subaltern in another, cannot explain or represent the dialogic negotiation of different identities and identifications. Class metaphor, expanded to encompass a global capitalist economy, fails to address difference in terms of race, sexuality and gender and falls back into an essentialist rendering of dominant and surbordinate in terms of equality. For example, we might want to make a straight equation between the oppressed blacks of South Africa and the Catholics of Northern Ireland. But these are very different societies where class is intertwined with differing identifications of race, religion, gender and sexuality. These societies are hybrid in their structure and dissemination of power. So whereas religion might seem a dominant identification in Ireland, and race in South Africa, other identifications will be more unconscious and popular resistant narratives will intersect with power in hybrid ways. This is why Homi Bhabha, referring to a Foucauldian analysis, can say that T h e force of colonial and postcolonial discourse as a theoretical and cultural intervention in our contemporary moment represents the urgent need to contest singularities of difference and to articulate diverse "subjects" of differentiation5 (Bhabha, 1994: 74). This is also why the concept of the unconscious is such an important addition to a Marxist or a Foucauldian analysis, because identifications are always politicised and never fully conscious, although some are more unconscious than others.
Mimicry: a white or black imaginary? The strength of Homi Bhabha's productive analysis of the unconscious nature of colonial discourse lies in its exposition of hidden ambivalence and desire. Bhabha's analysis of mimicry is a good example of this ambivalence, showing how what is deemed peripheral, marginal and other, is really only a projection of the (unconscious) centre. For example, the colonial classification of 'natives' as primitive, aggressive and unsublimated is merely the denied ambivalence at the heart of the dominant discourse itself. Bhabha describes mimicry in terms of the Lacanian concept of masquerade. Lacan likens mimicry to 'the technique of camouflage practised in warfare', a sexual aim 'produced by all kinds of effects that are essentially disguise, masquerade' (Lacan, 1977: 100). For
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Bhabha, mimicry is an important strategy and support for colonial power. Operative in stereotyping, mimicry enables the colonised subject to be identified as recognisably the same, but different: 'not quite/not white' (Bhabha, 1994: 92). Bhabha gives as an example of mimicry the Indian civil servant, educated in English, who reflects the coloniser but at the same time disturbs him through a representation that seems uncannily familiar and yet not the same. The coloniser perceives a distorted image of himself, mimicry as 'resemblance and menace' (Bhabha, 1994: 86). His mastery is then undone, as the returning gaze of the other dismantles narcissistic illusions of sameness. Through a series of important readings of Fanon, Bhabha shows how this strategy of mimicry, 'almost the same but not white' subjugates the colonial subject but at the same time irrevocably slips into a parody and mockery of the coloniser that displaces his authority and arouses his paranoia (Bhabha, 1994: 89). Bhabha, as I have shown, uses a Lacanian concept of the imaginary, where identification is always split between imaginary demand and symbolic desire. For Bhabha this means that the native is split between his fantasy 'to occupy the master's place while keeping his place in the slave's avenging anger' (Bhabha, 1986: xvi). The problem with Bhabha's analysis is that he does not make a distinction between the white man's imaginary and the black man's; they can both be read in terms of a Lacanian interpretation of the split identification and desire that constitutes subjectivity. But if we read Fanon's work, we find not an alignment of his ideas with Lacan but a sharp objection to the relevance of the Oedipal complex (see above) and to the Eurocentric application of psychoanalytic ideas. These concepts interpret the black man or woman's psychological dependence to colonial authority without reference to the historical and political realities of the situation. For example, Fanon criticises Mannoni's psychoanalytic analysis of the Malagasy people. Fanon points out that Mannoni 'leaves the Malagasy no choice save between inferiority and dependence' because he insists on relating issues of dependency and inferiority to infantile complexes that antedate colonisation (Fanon, 1986: 93). When Fanon states that 'one should not lose sight of the real' he is insisting that there is no psychic complex that precedes the colonial situation. Putting the dream back in its proper time and place means accepting that the colonial situation is causal and the imaginary is differently determined by historical situations. His anger with Mannoni is that he insists on analysing the Malagasy people and their dreams in terms of the Oedipal father and phallus, thus encouraging an acceptance and naturalisation of the Oedipal complex rather than urging resistance to political reality. Psychoanalysis is at its most dangerous when it universalises and dehistoricises. Bhabha critiques Fanon's continual insistence that the 'real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man' (Bhabha, 1986: xix). He worries that Fanon turns 'too hastily' from the ambivalence of identification to
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a personalisation of the other in terms of colonial racism: 'Fanon's words, to restore the dream to its proper political time and cultural space, can, at times, blunt the edge of Fanon's brilliant illustrations of the complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial relation' (Bhabha, 1986: xx). But to make this argument, Bhabha has to separate the imaginary from the real, suggesting a disjunction between the psyche and the social, an assertion of separation which Fanon never explicitly makes. If we look again at Fanon's analysis of the black man as the white man's other, we can see that he distinguishes it on an imaginary level. Whereas Bhabha seems to theorise the colonial relation between coloniser and subject in terms of a universal and split Lacanian imaginary, Fanon rereads and investigates the Lacanian imaginary ascribing different notions of the imaginary, to the white and the black psyche: It would indeed be interesting, on the basis of Lacan's theory of the mirror period, to investigate the extent to which the imago of his fellow built up in the young white at the usual age would undergo an imaginary aggression with the appearance of the Negro. When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan, one can have no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man the Other is perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable. For the black man, as we have shown, historical and economic realities come into the picture. (Fanon, 1986: 161) What Fanon means here, is that the Lacanian imaginary explains the split colonial psyche which divides the imaginary from the real and projects all its unconscious and unwanted bodily desire and infantile needs onto the black man. The white colonial imaginary perceives the black man simply as an abject body. Without cultural representation or identity, this abject body is located at the level of the biological: an animal 'unidentifiable', a non-self. As we can see, this critique of the Lacanian imaginary as a colonial one is similar to Irigaray's critique of a Lacanian hegemonic masculine imaginary that splits language from the female body, abjecting the feminine (as other) to a place beyond culture and representation. The bodily imaginary readdresses the Lacanian divide between language and the body, by reconnecting the real with the imaginary and the symbolic. When Fanon insists on the historical and economic realities of the black man he agrees that the real should not remain split from the imaginary. Fanon argues that the 'white family is the workshop in which one is shaped and trained for life in society' (Fanon, 1986: 149). This family structure is internalised by the individual imaginary and then projected onto society as a universal. The point Fanon is making is that this imaginary is a myth that the black man has to confront when he encounters the white man.
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In the colonial relation the coloniser's racist split imaginary remains unconscious through guilt. But the negro's inferiority or superiority complex or his feeling of equality is conscious (Fanon, 1986: 150). Identifications at an imaginary level are politically influenced. The black man is made aware of the imaginary's connection with the real and this connection between real and imaginary does not split the body off in one direction and society in another. Fanon's urgent insistence on returning the dream to its proper time and place is an awareness of the political nature of unconscious identifications. In order for the black man to resist the colonial situation, there has to be an awareness of the possibility of different imaginaries and different myths. Fanon's demand for 'a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black man's experience' and of 'the Negro myth' is also a demand for the understanding of a more culturally situated unconscious, a more bodily imaginary (Fanon, 1986: 151). In this more bodily imaginary the body is not projected, abjected or scapegoated to represent the black man as a non-human thing: evil, genital or animal. Instead it is reconnected with the situated sociosymbolic and with the cultural language of given communities. Bhabha's reading of mimicry reveals it as a strategy of colonial subjugation that admittedly backfires to become deconstructive of its own authority. Irigaray's reading of mimesis is quite different. Whereas Bhabha's notion of mimicry is undistinguished from Lacan's concept of masquerade, depicting an unconscious identification that is unwittingly performed, Irigaray's notion of mimesis is a much more conscious and subversive parody of the dominant, less an identification than an ironic, playful imitation and performance - the difference if you like between a 'femininity' that is forced to masquerade within an Oedipal exchange, and the social institution of a 'feminine' bodily imaginary.4 Fanon certainly seems to be saying that colonial mimesis can change from unconscious identification to a refusal of that identification; indeed, much of his ironic language provides precisely that refusal of a Lacanian Oedipal psychoanalysis.
Diana Fuss distinguishes between masquerade and mimicry. Masquerade is unconscious identification, whereas mimicry is a a parody that ironises dominant systems of representation, Fuss perceives Bhabha's definition of mimicry as a strategy of the dominant, rather than a strategy of subversion, but ultimately for her mimicry oscillates between the two, encapsulating both dominant identification and subversion. My reading makes a simpler division, linking Lacan's masquerade and Bhabha's mimicry and comparing them with Irigaray's concept of mimesis. Although at face value this seems to refuse the irony and mockery that Bhabha extends to his concept of mimicry, my reading is dependent on the status of the imaginary. Bhabha, like Lacan, is analysing a dominant imaginary, whereas Irigaray's notion of mimesis is linked to a more bodily and subversive imaginary. See Diana Fuss (1995).
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Mimicry, and the body as a limit to identifications
Bhabha is emphatic when he states that his depiction of mimicry 'is not the familiar exercise of dependent colonial relations through narcissistic identification', an identification that in Fanon's view disables the black man because only the white man can represent a valued self (Bhabha, 1994: 88). For, continues Bhabha, there is no identity lurking behind the veil of mimicry: 'Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask' (Bhabha, 1994: 88). Maybe not, but mimicry does conceal the white man's body, so allowing the white imaginary to masquerade as the symbolic universal or whole. As Fanon continually reminds us, it is in his body that the black man is attacked. It is as a literal and corporeal being that he is killed and lynched. The body acts as a limit to the political identifications of the imaginary. Recently Janet Harbord has discussed how the mobility of our identificatory practices is controlled and circumscribed by our embodiment through race, gender or age. For those black and female subjectivities, where the body is more emphasised, identification and fantasy life become to some extent more grounded by the emphasis on the corporeal and the material as 'reality': So, for example, for the black subject to pass as white, the corporeal gets in the way, pronounces theatrically the distance between the identification and the identity. Where as for the white man, 'passing' is possible precisely because of the invisibility of the white body; the fantasy is achieved because the materiality of the corporeal is not pronounced socio-culturally. Thus, fantasy dissimulates materiality for certain subject categories, whilst foregrounding it for others. (Harbord, 1998: 176-7) Psychoanalysis teaches us that identifications are incorporations or introjections, in which the other person is cannibalistically taken into the self. And because who can identify with whom is about power, if as a mother or a black man you are perceived only as a body, then as a body you provide the object to be identified with, but are deprived of those imaginary identifications that give you access to a symbolic self. The success of mimicry as a colonial identification and strategy of subjugation is that the literal presence of the black body and the invisibility of the white provides access for the white man to an imaginary world of identifications that are fairly limitless. The black man remains locked in the abject world of the real, between the two non-alternatives of either masquerading in the colonial master's symbolic, or suffering psychosis and psychic collapse. Fanon envisions another positive alternative, but this remains dependent on being able to return the dream to its proper time and place, refusing the identification with a colonial imaginary, and situating the black man's
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unconscious in terms of a cultural imaginary. Diana Fuss, in an important article entitled Interior Colonies; Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification, points out how Fanon uses the terms other and Other in his work, following the psychoanalytic understanding where 'Other' connotates the symbolic order of desire and 'other' refers to the imaginary world of demand characterised by narcissism and aggression (Fuss, 1995: 142-3). The black man's exclusion from the symbolic place of Other crushes him into an object world outside of alterity and intersubjectivity. Foreclosure from the symbolic place of the Other, in Lacan's thinking, means a fall into the imaginary world of the mother and psychosis. Irigaray accuses the Lacanian symbolic of being a masculine imaginary that masquerades in the place of the symbolic, pretending to acknowledge sexual difference. Fuss's argument, and Fanon's, is that colonialism polices which imaginaries and which identifications can be culturally legislated. Fanon's demand that the black man resist mimicry and the colonial imaginary is also a recognition that other imaginaries can exist as cultural. There are alternatives to imperialist colonialism, other imaginaries and Other symbolics. Fuss acknowledges the radical resistance in Fanon's work to colonial mimicry, but also explores Fanon's rather 'disquieting discussions of not only femininity but homosexuality' (Fuss, 1995: 154). Fanon's exploration of white women's 'negrophobia', their phobic fear of black men, is illustrated by the example of a fantasy: 'A Negro is Raping Me' (Fanon, 1986: 179). Fanon interprets this fantasy as a hidden desire deriving from the white woman's early and unmanaged desire and aggression towards the father. Projection of her own violent desire onto the black man results in the fantasy and the fear of rape. Fuss notes this interpretation as 'troubling' but also reminds us that it has to be set in the context of 'the myth of the black rapist', a myth actively responsible for lynching hundreds/thousands of black men. Fanon can then be seen as constructing a counter-narrative to 'the myth of the black rapist'.5 More worrying for Fuss, 'is not what Fanon says about white women and black men but what he does not say about black women and white men'(Fuss, 1995: 156) Fanon's refusal to explore the colonial violence and rape of black women by white men obscures how such rape institutionalised and maintained 'a slave economy' (Fuss, 1995: 156). His famous quote about the woman of colour, 'I know nothing about her', obliterates the black woman's historical experience and identity (Fanon, 1986: 179-80). Diana Fuss describes how Fanon roots white people's negrophobia, their fear and hatred of black men, in perversion. For the white woman, it is her repressed heterosexual desire, and for the white man it is his repressed homosexuality. Fuss notes that 'in both instances, perversion is represented specifically as a white pathology' (Fuss, 1995: 157). In other words, Fanon does not 5
For an analysis of the myth of the black rapist see Davis (1981).
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associate the Oedipal complex with black people. In fact, Fanon's work comes very close to a Reichian analysis here, both in his understanding of the Oedipal complex as a psychic mechanism which is socially instigated through the bourgeois family and imperial state, but also as a repression of genital sexuality. This repressed genital sexuality is then projected onto the black man, who is in turn envied and put down: Still on a genital level, when a white man hates black men, is he not yielding to a feeling of impotence or of sexual inferiority? Since his ideal is an infinite virility, is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis symbol? Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge? (Fanon, 1986: 159) Fuss sees Fanon's homophobic ideas, and the way he roots racism in homosexuality, as the most worrying part of his theory of sexual perversion. This is undoubtedly true. For Fanon's work shows, just as Reich's does, how sexuality is always mythologised. Finding a political alternative to the Oedipal complex entails rememorising other cultural myths. It is no good reifying some kind of genital, non-perverse or even polymorphous perverse sexuality as a revolutionary substitute for the Oedipal. Such an alternative necessitates thinking through other imaginaries. Fanon, who is so radically explicit in deconstructing the genital myth of the black man and revealing of how sexuality is racialised under colonialism, ignores the pathology and the Oedipal myth at stake in his own classification of perversion. Both Reich and Fanon critique Freud and Lacan respectively for the universalisation of their Oedipal myths. But their privileging of a 'natural' heterosexual masculinity, that somehow transcends myth, can be seen to mirror the very master discourses they are seeking to displace. Reich's genital heterosexuality cannot dethrone the hegemony of the bourgeois family, and neither can Fanon's equally heterosexual black masculinity displace the colonial white imaginary, as long as their narratives of masculinity remain intact and undeconstructed. By rooting racism in perverse homosexuality, Fanon reveals the vunerability of an account that does not analyse differences or think them through in relation to each other. This is also Bhabha's worry about Fanon's humanism, that it falls too easily into a self-other dichotomy. Irigaray's feminine, Reich's class consciousness and Fanon's emphasis on race all risk a reinstatement of the hegemonic binary self-other, if the primacy they allot to femininity, class, and race cannot be thought through in relation to other differences. The same applies to gay sexualities, and I have already discussed the relevance of thinking through the relationships between sex and gender, rather than celebrating them as separate identity politics. Maybe, as Diana Fuss states, strategic essentialism is necessary as a stage in overcoming oppression, whether the other is race, class, sexuality or gender. But the importance of moving on to de-
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essentialise those differences, once they have been acknowledged symbolically, cannot be underestimated. Irigaray's feminine imaginary is an essentialist trap if it continues to assert a primacy of sexual difference. The Oedipal imaginary, as Fanon has pointed out, is not just hegemonic in its masculinity, but also in its heterosexuality and whiteness. It is not enough to simply celebrate different identities simply because those different identities are structured in terms of power, consciously and unconsciously in relation to each other. Finding an alternative to the Oedipal entails rememorising and recreating different bodily imaginaries and myths at an individual and a social level. Kobena Mercer's recent discussion of the 'identity crisis of the left' is illuminating (Mercer, 1992: 260). Noting how the classical Marxist view of the industrial working class as the revolutionary agent of change has been subverted by feminism, black struggles and the gay movement, Mercer then worries that this new emphasis on postmodern and plural differences fragments the left because there is no common language with which to unite these individual struggles: 'The absence of a common language in which to conceive contemporary alliances among potentially counter-hegemonic forces is a fundamental problem that needs to be acknowledged' (Mercer, 1992: 263). Mercer argues for a new emphasis on citizenship and civil democracy, and the finding of a common language to unite differences through the notion of 'imagined community'. His concept of imagined community returns to Bakhtin and the dialogic 'multiaccented' nature of the sign. Mercer's work can be situated along with other postcolonial critics in the arena of cultural studies. The most famous of these is Stuart Hall, although significant others are Paul Gilroy and bell hooks. These writers are all concerned with the diasporic experience of being, for instance, Black and British, or Asian and British, and they highlight the double voice or consciousness of these experiences. Stuart Hall has used the understanding of a class struggle within language, 'the multiaccented sign', to show how the term 'immigrant' has been replaced by a derogatory meaning of the term 'black'. But, he also demonstrates how the struggle in language works the other way, differently accenting the sign so that 'the derogatory colour "black" became the enhanced value "black"' (Hall, 1988).
Reimagining myth, situating the imaginary mmmm Taking his cue from Hall, Kobena Mercer understands black identity not as something to be found, but as something that is imagined or made. Linking this Bakhtinian notion of the struggle in language with identity, Mercer argues that 'social identities are structured like a language'. Mercer also develops Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (1985) position that at different historical conjunctures diverse identities can be hegemonically constructed into 'imagined communities' (Mercer, 1992: 273). What is so interesting about Mercer's
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analysis is how he realises that an effective left alliance, one which would collectively organise and combat ideologies such as Thatcherism, relies on this need to imagine alternative myths and communities. Mercer, therefore, documents how Enoch Powell's effective racist ideology operated on 'the cultural construction of Little England as a domain of ethnic homogeneity, a unified and monocultural imagined community' (Mercer, 1992: 436). Powell's racist rhetoric was effective, not because of its recourse to notions of racist biology, but because of its textual strategy in deconstructing old myths of ethnicity and reconstructing modern ones: It may be difficult for cultural studies to grasp, but Enoch Powell's political practice in the de-mythification and re-mythification of English ethnicity in the 1960s was fully theorized in a relational logic that is not incompatible with that which underpins the concept of 'myth' in Antonio Gramsci or Claude Levi-Strauss. (Mercer, 1992: 436) Reich's understanding of the authoritarian ideology behind mass fascism makes a similar point. Hitler's fascism was based in national socialism. Reich notes that Hitler had studied the success of Marxism and went on to appeal to the masses through a similar rhetoric of being anti-capitalist: banishing the classes and getting rid of big business. But because Hitler's fascism appealed through the masses to nationalism and an authoritarian 'imagined community' he was able to develop a movement that ended up championing capitalist imperialism. In other words, Hitler's rhetoric deconstructed the old bourgeois myths of democracy, but managed to transform a Marxist agenda into a fascist one by providing new myths of an authoritarian 'imagined community'. Reich's challenge to this authoritarian community was so inadequate precisely because he saw the destruction of myth as the end result. For him, the liberation of repressed genital sexuality would smash right-wing ideologies of the state and family and revolutionise society. In much the same way, Deleuze and Guattari envisage the anarchic schizoid desiring machines which will destroy modernism's Oedipal myths and liberate a plurality of postmodern selves. Without the recreation of more bodily and social imaginaries, however, it is hard to see how individual postmodern differences will be able to situate themselves within communities or develop 'a common language'. Historically psychoanalysis has been implicated in the right-wing construction of dominative myths and in their more radical left-wing deconstruction. It has been less active in recreating new imaginaries that will acknowledge people's bodily differences within a social community. Joel Kovel's recent introduction to his book White Racism discusses this. He sees racism as a splitting mechanism where the black person becomes located as the bodily underside of the white imaginary. Whereas the ego is white, the black man or woman embodies the place of the other: the abject, instinct-ridden unconscious place
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of the id. Kovel demonstrates how the violence of racism is the violation of the black person as he or she is excluded and negated in order to construct a white European self. Racism does not reveal an accurate portrait of the black person, just a reflection of the violent unconscious imaginary of the coloniser. However, Kovel also recognises his own 'psychologising' in his writing. White Racism was written during Kovel's training as a Freudian analyst in America and he reflects on how much the book was hooked up to an ego psychology that was in itself already whitened. Comparing Freud's original decentered ego, where the ego is but 'a point of consciousness, the differentiated portion of the id' with the technocratic ego psychology of twentieth-century America, Kovel argues that the latter is a reified bourgeois construction of a meta-racist world, cut off from the exigencies of history. Kovel rather ruefully admits his feelings that * White Racism could have done better in its use of psychoanalysis' (Kovel, 1988: xciii). Reich criticised Freudian psychoanalysis for its bourgeois positioning. Following Fanon, Kovel explicitly lays out the case that he more implicitly made, namely, that psychoanalysis historically has been a racist discourse, institutionalised within Western society. Writing on 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego', Freud describes the group mentality as intellectually weak, lacking emotional restraint, incapable of moderation, showing 'an unmistakeable picture of a regression of mental activity to an earlier stage such as we are not suprised to find among savages and children' (Freud, 1921: 117). As Kovel sarcastically remarks, Freud's racism portrayed people of colour as walking ids' (Kovel, 1995: 218). A psychoanalysis that is not self-conscious of the historical racism of its language will inevitably perpetuate those myths of a racist imaginary which ascribe all the symbolic attributes of mental control, knowledge and subjectivity to the white person, abjecting people of colour to a bodily position outside of culture and representation. The Lacanian imaginary is thus susceptible to the charge that it is perpetuating a similarly white, hegemonic imaginary, because of the way it masquerades as a universal, occupying a purely mental space split off from the body and from any situated space. The argument that Lacan lifts the Oedipal out of its empirical roots, and de-essentialises it by locating it in language, is therefore erroneous. A deessentialisation of the Oedipal imaginary can only occur through a struggle and reappropriation of language and myth: a rearticulation of the imaginary. This cannot be done if the imaginary is envisaged, as it is in Lacan's work, as a purely mental and unconscious phenomenon. Arguing with the Phallus has suggested a more historicised bodily imaginary read in relation to feminism, queer theory and race. This postmodern, but not poststructuralist, notion of the bodily imaginary as experiential, imaginal and imaginative constructs a more fluid transitional space that connects between fantasy and the real and between language and the body. In this way we move
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beyond deconstructing the imaginary to actively creating it! Furthermore, such an experiential reading of the imaginary grounds the imaginary and its symbolic representation in a connection with the real of the body and history. Fanon's work suggests such a bodily imaginary, when he argues for a return to the real and for a more cultural unconscious. Unsatisfied with the Western legitimised discourses of psychoanalysis and philosophy, he sets out to construct his own psychoanalytic account based on his experience and praxis. Fanon's deconstruction of the colonial imaginary and the oppressive masquerade or mimicry which is enforced on colonial subjects uses his own historical work as a black 'colonial' practitioner. But Fanon's work cannot be seen as simply a deconstructive exercise; he moves beyond existing psychoanalytic discourse to demand a creative and cultural imaginary that does not forget the real. Kobena Mercer's more recent reading of 'Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary', can be seen as a contemporary example of Fanon's cultural and creative unconscious (Mercer, 1987). However, Mercer's reading also deconstructs the narrative of heterosexual masculinity that so collapses the most radical aspects of Fanon's writing. Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of black male nudes is the subject of Mercer's alternative script of a homoerotic imaginary. Robert Mapplethorpe, a gay photographer who died in 1989 from Aids, has been the subject of a fierce right-wing cultural offensive in the United States. Mercer's reading of Mapplethorpe's work utilises a classic textual Freudian/Lacanian interpretation of fetishism, and then subverts it by arguing that, as a white gay artist, Mapplethorpe cannot simply be bracketed with the controlling position - that of the white male gaze. Neither can the circulation of Mapplethorpe's work within the male gay community be seen as commensurate with its transport within a more normative milieu. Different readers of Mapplethorpe's photography will access different imaginaries. As a black, gay male critic, Mercer offers his own experiential reading of the photographs as an oppositional narrative to a classical, ethnically white, Oedipal meaning. Mercer's reading of a more situated experiential imaginary rewrites the Oedipal fetish in a way that prevents the normative othering and abjection of the black man within psychoanalytic and colonialist discourse. The importance of recognising the situated embodied nature of the imaginary cannot be overestimated. The imaginary is not some transcendental mental function, but is rooted and connected to the real of material processes and practice.
■ i i i i i i Transcendental myths and the white imaginary Perhaps one of the most extreme examples of psychoanalysis as theory of the white imaginary is the work of Carl Jung. I don't want to try and mitigate the racism in Jung's work, although I do, following Andrew Samuels, want to
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reread his theories in a more pluralistic, post-Jungian fashion. Before I do this, however, it is perhaps important to note, quite clearly, the pathologisation of black and Asian identity as an unconscious other in Jung's work. In an recent article entitled Jung: a Racist, Farhad Dalai systematically sets out Jungs racism, which is presented as overt scientific typology. As Dalai observes, Jung's work aligns the contemporary black person with the prehistoric human, the contemporary black conscious with the white unconscious and the 'modern black adult with the white child'. Jung divides his topology of the psyche into three layers: the collective unconscious, the personal unconscious and the self. These layers are biologically determined and racially specific. For example, the collective unconscious is the undeveloped, primitive and biological state that remains non-evolved and undifferentiated. As Dalai shows, the collective unconscious is ascribed by Jung to personify African and Asian peoples who are not culturally differentiated. Whereas the European has managed to repress his unconscious and attain self-realisation and individuation, the primitive or African remains submerged in a symbiotic, concrete and unconscious morass. And whilst the European is able to own and contain his unconscious world, the primitive is ruled by it, relating to others by way of projecting - for example, projecting split-off parts of the psyche into the world and then relating to them as if they were real. As we can see, the primitive's close association with the collective unconscious in Jung's work is very similar to the pre-Oedipal association with women's sexuality in Freud's account. Both the pre-Oedipal and the collective unconscious signify an infantile stage of relating to the world which is less ethical, less developed, and outside both language and culture. The European psyche in Jung's thinking is therefore deemed racially superior and more evolved. Dalai quotes Jung in summing this up: somewhere you are the same as the negro or the Chinese or whoever you live with, you are all just human beings. In the collective unconscious you are the same as a man of another race, you have the same archetypes, just as you have like him, eyes, a heart, a liver, and so on. It does not matter that his skin is black. It matters to a certain extent, sure enough - he probably has a whole historical layer less than you. The different strata of the mind correspond to the history of the races. Qung, 1952, Vol. 18: 46) 6 At the end of his article on Jung, Dalai concludes that ' J u n g thought that blacks were inferior and not just different'. Dalai asks whether it is possible to rescue Jungian 'concepts of individuation and the collective unconscious from their racist antecedents' (Dalai, 1988: 271). A recent novel by the African-American writer Alice Walker, Possessing the 6
Karl Jung (1952), quoted in Farhad Dalai (1988), p. 271.
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Secret of Joy, has attempted to appropriate Jungian concepts of the archetype and the collective unconscious into a healing narrative for Afro-American women. However, Walker certainly doesn't seem to escape the institutionalised racism that Dalai speaks of. In Possessing the Secret ofJoy> Walker follows the story of an African girl, Tashi, who has undergone female circumcision to prove her cultural independence from British colonialism. Tashi's narrative journey is described in terms of a collective female experience. Her healing through the wise old analyst Carl Jung, who is just like an 'African grandmother', cements African and European culture into one transcendental self. As the Jungian analyst in Walker's novel states, 'I am finding myself in them.... A truly universal self (Walker, 1983: 81). One wonders whether Alice Walker has read Jung's writings on African people. The African girl Tashi in this story is psychologically healed by her analyst Jung, so bringing African and European cultures together. But as Kadiatu Kanneh notes, this healing Jungian analyst - with all his tribal trappings, interchangeable with an African grandmother - is nothing but a denial of cultural specificity and difference (Kanneh, 1998: 111). Walker's celebration of a universal feminine unconscious in her novel is perhaps one of the clearest examples of how the unchallenged ethnocentric status of pychoanalytic discourse colonialises and appropriates racial difference, recalling Fanon's words by refusing to ascribe the unconscious to its proper time and place. Fanon's demand for 'a psychoanalytic interpretation of the black man's experience' and 'the Negro myth', can I think be used to reread the Jungian concept of the archetype. The essentialism of Jung's thinking arises from the biological fixity and determinism that he attributes to the archetype, dehistoricising it and making it a biological entity that conditions his universal theories of a white and colonial subjectivity. But although Jung does implicitly state that archetypes are impersonal, a priori images, elsewhere he talks about them simply as myths that have been passed on historically in the form of stories. Jung can then state that the psychotherapist and the folklorist 'proceed no differently in regard to the psychic figures which appear in dreams , fantasies, visions, and manic ideas, as in legends, fairytales, myth and religion' (Jung> 1954: 124). To substantiate this notion of the unconscious as archetypal and symbolic stories, we can compare the difference between Jung's thinking and Freud's in terms of the dream. Whereas Freud's dream is hierarchically divided into a manifest and hidden or latent unconscious that can only be deciphered by the all-knowing analyst, Jung saw the dream as simply being symbolically what it says: a mythical reflection, if you like, of everyday living. He therefore totally disagreed with Freud, that the dream is a facade hiding true meaning: The 'manifest' dream-picture is the dream itself and contains the whole meaning of the dream. When I find sugar in urine, it is sugar and not just a
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facade for albumen. What Freud calls the 'dream-facade' is the dream's obscurity, and this is really only a projection of our own lack of understanding. Qung, 1954: 149) The dream, then, is a symbolic reflection of our hidden, secret world, or in other words a mythic story of our everyday life, that is perhaps consciously not fully knowable, but unconsciously told through the dream image. For Jung the unconscious works through projection, not repression, and it is through the reading of these dream images in analysis that patients can repossess their archetypal projections and myths, and thereby create new stories with which to move into the future. I suggest that Jungian analysis is not just about understanding unconscious stories and myths but actively rereading them. If dream images are perceived as archetypal images that are revisited and actively reread through the bodily imaginary, then they cease to be biologically determined structures of our unconscious, and become the dynamic tales of lived history. The charge against Jung of racism and anti-semitism is not a light one, as Andrew Samuels sensitively documents in The Political Psyche. But part of the racist typology of Jung's collective unconscious is due to the fixed and archaic position that Jung allots to the archetype. Andrew Samuels reconceptualises the archetype as cultural and historically mutable, making it personal as well as collective. Whereas, for Jung, the archetypal complex is something which envelops the individual, whose personality is contained within it, for Samuels the archetype can also be viewed as a state of mind, something which exists within the 'eye and heart of the beholder' (Samuels, 1989: 25). The archetype is then a kind of cultural filter of experience, existing as an interaction between the individual eye or heart and images. Archetypal states, in Samuels's account, mediate between literal and metaphorical, between the experiential and the symbolic. Samuels uses the example of the image of the father to explain this. Rather than perceiving the archetypal father as simply an innate archetypal structure, he posits a cultural image of the father residing in the child. This paternal image (which is confronted by the child) is an internalisation of a cultural image of the father which will interact with more literal experiences of fathering (Samuels, 1995). For Samuels, Lacan only recognises a repressive father, synonymous with language and the cultural status quo, but does not take into account either the powerlessness of individual fathers within society or a more 'positive, direct, affirming father-infant relationship' (Samuels, 1995). Samuels's critique of the Lacanian symbolic father for its universalism and ahistoricism is balanced by an exploration of the father relation in a more historically accountable way, so that the all-powerful phallus, synonymous with language, moves to include other explanations of the father relating in a pre-Oedipal, experiential and bodily way. Such accounts of a more bodily
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father, who does not simply represent law, make the simple equation of paternal phallus with language and culture inadequate. As Samuels points out, Jungian archetypes are psychosomatic entities 'occupying a midway position between instinct and image'(Samuels, 1985: 27). As I have said, Jung's rooting of the archetype in innate and universal structures leads to an essentialism that dehistoricises his work. But Samuels's reconceptualisation of the archetype as an interaction between cultural perceptions of 'father' and literal experiences of fathering dynamically historicises Jung's archetypal image. Whether it is Samuels's archetypal father or Bollas's generative maternal object, myths of parenting can be returned to and rememorised in the analytic session, through the work of the imaginal and bodily imaginary, so connecting past and present and creating a bridge into the future. Samuels's historicisation of the Jungian archetype is progressive in terms of gender relations, but how far does it go in rescuing Jungian psychology from its racist heritage? Indeed, Samuels's does not attempt to resolve the issue. Instead he tracks the relationship between Jung's racism and antisemitism, and shows how Jung's ideas find a reflection in Nazi ideology in terms of ideologies of nationhood and racial typology (Samuels, 1993: 287-336). Fanon sarcastically highlights the inherent racism in Jung's collective unconscious and then analyses it in terms of the very concepts of projection and transference that are key to classical psychoanalysis: Jung consistently identifies the foreign with the obscure, with the tendency to evil. He is perfectly right. This mechanism of projection - or, if one prefers, transference - has been described by classic psychoanalysis. In the degree to which I find in myself something unheard-of, something reprehensible, only one solution remains for me: to get rid of it, to ascribe its origin to someone else. (Fanon, 1986: 190) Maybe, instead of trying to rescue the Jungian concept of a collective unconscious, from its 'racist antecendents' we need to explore how other writers and philosophers, such as Frantz Fanon, have actively reread and remembered the archetype in more culturally situated ways. Frantz Fanon takes issue with Jung's collective unconscious, showing how Jung's archetype is nothing more or less than 'the expression of the bad instincts, of the darkness inherent in every ego, of the uncivilised savage, the negro who slumbers in every white man' (Fanon, 1986: 187). But although Jung clearly tried to transpose his archetypal theory onto African and Asian cultures, Fanon challenges him saying, 'Personally I think Jung has deceived himself (Fanon, 1986: 187). For Fanon, the collective unconscious, is not made up, as Jung would have it, of inherited genes or cerebral matter, but 'is purely and simply the sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group' (Fanon, 1986:188). By confusing 'instinct and habit' Jung has mistakenly
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claimed a collective unconscious, instead of a cultural unconscious. When Fanon asserts, that 'the collective unconscious is cultural' he historicises the imaginary, demonstrating how Jung's collective unconscious is the 'unreflected imposition' of white society (Fanon, 1986:188-90). Fanon accepted Jung's radical ideas that the unconscious is creative and that regression to childhood, through rememory, can activate consciousness of certain psychic realities. Having conceded Jung's innovative ideas, however, Fanon warns that c J u n g wanted to go back to the childhood of the world, but he made a remarkable mistake: he went back only to the childhood of Europe' (Fanon, 1986: 190).
Conclusion ^ ^ ^ H Fanon's demand to return the dream to its proper time and place can then be answered by the active and cultural remembering of myth through an imaginal and bodily imaginary. In Fanon's writing this is the work of history and psychoanalysis: the unconscious as situated history. If, as I have argued, the imaginary conceptualised within the writings of Freud, Lacan and Jung is a white, ethnocentric imaginary, then psychoanalytic discourse as it stands is part of a Western colonising discourse that imposes itself as a universal cultural narrative. This universality has been buttressed by the academy, whose interest - whether in feminism, literary criticism or cultural/film studies - has embraced psychoanalysis (particularly Lacan) as part of a deconstructive analysis of the socially constructed subject. Although feminism has used psychoanalysis historically to deconstruct the cultural hegemony, of a masculine Marxist narrative for instance, it has attempted but largely failed to deconstruct the dominant tenets of psychoanalysis. As Elizabeth Grosz's work shows, psychoanalysis remains an Oedipal discourse that is either accommodated or thrown out according to its phallic linguistic, or maternally essentialist determinants. A large part of the problem is the question of practice. As Luce Irigaray asserts, without recourse to practice the language of psychoanalysis remains ossified in some essentialist and dominant universalism. This has been demonstrated most obviously in the way that Lacanianism has circulated free of all its empirical roots within the university disciplines of literary or film studies. But the split between theory and practice has also been due to the conservative practice of psychoanalysis and its medical institutionalisation that historically has undermined more leftwing radical agendas. The marginalisation of figures such as Wilhelm Reich and R. D. Laing discloses how the psychoanalytical establishment, as a trenchantly political but private animal, refuses the more overt political interventions that undermine its universal myths. A recent anthology of essays entitled Female Subjects in Black and White:
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Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen, uses Toni Morrison's text Beloved as a seminal text in envisaging 'a series of dialogues, rather than reconciliations, between Feminist psychoanalysis and African-American representations of female subjectivity' (Abel, Christian and Moglen, 1997: 1). Many of the essays in this volume use African American texts, particularly Beloved, to reconceptualise psychoanalytic terms. One of the most forceful realisations that comes out of this anthology is not just how feminist psychoanalysis cannot be reconciled with black representations of subjectivity, but also how African American texts construct alternative stories of unconscious processes, psychic landscapes and practices of healing. If Western history has mapped the psychic and social conjunction of time and memory in terms of Oedipal laws and discourses, then Morrison's novel Beloved czn be seen to translate time and history into a geography of space and place that is both physically and poetically manifested as an anti-Oedipal narrative. Although many readings of Beloved have tried to analyse the text through psychoanalytic methodologies, this book intends to use Morrison's novel as a representative text which both challenges the ethnocentrism of psychoanalytic discourse and rewrites a politicised and spatially located unconscious from an Afro-American perspective. The final chapter focuses, then, on Toni Morrison's text Beloved as a key narrative in relation to debates between postcolonialism, postmodernism and psychoanalysis. But the conclusion also focuses on how the narrative of rememory at work in Beloved can also be located differently in other cultural texts, such as the writings of Walter Benjamin, or even the more conventional psychoanalytic work of Christopher Bollas. The importance of linking these differently located texts and practices of cultural history and psychoanalysis is precisely to dissolve the boundaries between them. In Benjamin's work history is reread through the dialectical image and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, by contrast to Possessing the Secret of joy, can be seen to rearticulate and rememorise a cultural imaginary that restores black subjects to a history and community located in space and place. Fanon's vision of returning the dream to its proper time and place becomes realised in Toni Morrison's Beloved', a central text in envisaging a cultural unconscious. But Morrison's work does not stand as some a priori or exceptional example. The cultural unconscious as the work of rememory and the bodily imaginary is a practice of active reading, where old traditions of the phallic and colonial white imaginary can be reimaged and reimagined: no privileging, then, of a purely textual unconscious, but the movement in literature, film, psychoanalysis or cultural history of the bodily imaginary. This imaginary in motion connects theory to history and practice; it therefore negotiates the space between language and experience, allowing the bodily inscription of new, culturally embedded, narrative identities.
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References ^ M i » Abel, E., Christian, B. and Moglen, H. (1997) Introduction' to Female Subjects in Black and White, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Bhabha, H. (1986) 'Foreword' to Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press. — (1994) The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Dalai, F. (1988) 'Jung: a Racist', British Journal of Psychotherapy, 4, 3 (Spring). Davis, A. (1981) Women Race and Class, New York: Random House. Derrida, J. (1982) 'White Mythology' (1971), in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Ball, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Fanon, F. (1986) Black Skins, White Masks, London: Pluto Press. Freud, S. (1921) 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego', Standard Edition, Vol. 18. Fuss, D. (1995) Identification Papers, London and New York: Routledge. Gates , H. L. (1991) 'Critical Fanonism' Critical Inquiry, 17. Gordon, L. R. (1995) Existential Phenomenology and History: Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, London and New York: Routledge. Hall, S. (1988) 'Popular Democratic vs Authoritarian Populism (1980), in A. Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Harbord, J. (1998) 'Identification's Edge' in J. Campbell and J. Harbord (eds), Psychopolitics and Cultural Desires, London: UCL Press. Hutcheon, L. (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London: Roudedge. Jung, C. (1952) The Collected Works, Vol. 18, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. — (1954) 'The Practice of Psychotherapy', The Collected Works, Vol. 16, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Kanneh, K. (1998) 'Remembered Landscapes', in African Identities, Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures, London and New York: Roudedge. Kovel, J. (1988) 'Preface to the Morningside Edition', in White Racism: a Psychohistory, London: Free Association Books. — (1995) 'On Racism and Psychoanalysis' in Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh (eds), Psychoanalysis in Context: Paths between Theory and Modern Culture, London: Routledge. Lacan, J. (1977) 'The Line and the Light' in The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoAnalysis, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Laclau, E. and Chantal Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Mercer, K. (1987) 'Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary', in Welcome to The Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics. — (1992) '"1968" Periodizing Politics and Identity', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge. Morrison, Toni (1987), Beloved, London: Chatto and Windus. Pile, S. (2000) 'The Troubled Spaces of Frantz Fanon', in Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (eds), Thinking Space, forthcoming 2000, London: Routledge, p. 1. Rose, J. (1986) Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso. Said, Edward (1987) Orientalism London: Routledge. Samuels, A. (1985) Jung and the Post Jungians, London and New York: Routledge. — (1989) The Plural Psyche, London: Routledge. — (1993) The Political Psyche, London: Routledge. — (1995) Feminism and Psychology, London: Routledge. San Juan, Jr, E. (1998) Beyond Postcolonial Theory, Basingstoke and London: Spivak, G. C. (1987) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, London: Routledge. Walker, Alice (1983) Possessing the Secret of Joy, London: The Women's Press.
Situating the Cultural Unconscious: Reading and Recreating Myths and Memory
This book has argued that there is no unmythologised truth, sexuality or essence that lies outside the imaginary, and that the imaginary is always embodied within culture. Black women's writing is, therefore, one of the most pertinent places to start exploring alternative cultural imaginaries. Lacking an institutionalised other, black and Asian women have had to confront the quadruple oppression structured through race, gender, sexuality and class. Black and Asian women's writing has contributed key texts to postcolonial thinking, and this contribution has been due in part to the fact that their situated histories abject them into an invisible position, outside of all dominant mythologies or symbolic places of speech. Black feminist scholars such as Barbara Smith (1977), Hazel Carby (1987), Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991) have all pointed in varying ways to the differences that historically have been effaced for women of colour by an emphasis on black male or white feminist criticism. The black women novelists Toni Morrison and Alice Walker both articulate cultural imaginaries that rememorise myth, and both writers in different ways can be seen to inscribe a cultural imaginary within their writing. But whereas Walker collapses her imaginary within the universalising myth of a feminine unconscious, Morrison deconstructs the colonial and Oedipal master narrative of the family, rearticulating a black embodied imaginary in terms of a situated historical community. This concluding chapter reads Morrison's work in terms of an imaginal, bodily imaginary which rereads and remembers myth to articulate a cultural unconscious. Active rereading of historical images and myths, through the bodily imaginary, historicises psychoanalysis and the unconscious, revealing them as situated ethnographies. This cultural rememory as a practice of the postmodern bodily imaginary, can be tracked through the psychoanalytic work of thinkers as diverse as Luce Irigaray, Christopher Bollas M>M;
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and Frantz Fanon. It can also, through a more radical post-Jungian interpretation of the Jungian heritage, reread the archetype as a more historicised and mobile cultural form. As I have argued throughout Arguing with the Phallus, the practice of a more bodily imaginary is activated via the image, and this final chapter reads that practice as the work of cultural rememory with particular reference to the historical work of Toni Morrison, but also to that of Paul Gilroy and Walter Benjamin. The importance of rereading and reworking the psychoanalytic heritage through these writers is the significance of being able to situate a cultural rereading of the bodily imaginary precisely within an interdisciplinary framework of psychoanalysis, cultural history and literature not to privilege one above the other, but to designate their storytelling practice as an act of popular memory. Paul Gilroy's recent book The Black Atlantic also challenges the universal concept of a white imaginary and the notion that the real other for the white man remains the black man. He argues, for instance, that the history of slavery can be seen as distinct from that of Western modernity. History as a double consciousness can be seen to write its way back into modernity, not as confirmation of black people simply as other, but in restating the sublimated and complex subjectivities of black peoples. Toni Morrison also rewrites the postmodern. Morrison's work deals with narratives of memory and history and the centrality of slave experience, not just for African-American culture but for the historic understanding of modernity. Morrison has argued that the intensity of slave experience marks out blacks as the first truly modern people. For her, modern life begins with slavery and 'from a woman's point of view, in terms of confronting the problems of where the world is now, black women had to deal with "postmodern" problems in the nineteenth century or earlier' (Morrison, 1994: 178).
Madness or history as double consciousness mmmm The First World War, according to Morrison, and the holocaust of the Second World War, are not intelligible unless slavery is placed as a primary and unacknowledged holocaust. Remembering this traumatically unspeakable space becomes a part of Morrison's narrative archaeology in recreating a cultural representation of the lost real event. Fiction hovers in a space between the real event and fantasy; Morrison's narrative strategy in her novel Beloved becomes a political reinscription of a more bodily imaginary or unconscious. But what is more, the ghosts of the text press the question of the status of truth, knowledge and belief, questions that psychoanalysis sets out to interrogate but not resolve. Morrison, then, historicises Oedipal psychoanalysis. The real in her text is not some immovable psychotic hole in the fabric of the symbolic, but is made up of lost, traumatic experience. This experience has been collectively
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forgotten, but can be creatively remembered through the bodily imaginary as performative storytelling: a telling of tales that is figured through the image. Morrison's radical subversion of the classical form of the novel uses a much more sensual and lyrical form of storytelling that is also a more active and imaginative rereading of history. Like Morrison, Paul Gilroy uses the notion of rememory to analyse how 'Black Atlantic' culture, in terms of musical vernaculars, can figure better 'theories of racism and of black political culture' that move beyond essentialist notions of racial traditions (Gilroy, 1993: 223) Gilroy analyses modernity in terms of black political culture. His notion of the double consciousness of black subjectivity highlights the diasporic experience of people who are situated between two or more cultural traditions. He addresses the syncretic identities and 'mongrel forms' that lie between Black Africa and the West (Gilroy, 1993: 3). Like Hall and Gilroy, Cornel West argues for a more plural discourse of identities and difference that will militate against fixed notions of ethnic identity. Similarly, bell hooks in her essay 'Postmodern Blackness' asserts the need for blacks to critique essentialism and discover more multiple experiences that lead to 'diverse cultural productions' (hooks, 1991: 29). But there are problems with celebrating postmodern differences, if local and situated histories are not acknowledged. This becomes Kadiatu Kanneh's critique of Paul Gilroy: Kanneh suggests that Gilroy's celebration of diaspora, located within the metropolis, ignores and evades specific and local African spaces, colluding in 'the prevalent non-engagement with African reality' (Kanneh, 1988: 64). Gilroy's notion of double consciousness derives from the historian W. E. B du Bois: the split between being black and being American is also Gilroy's sense of a consciousness in alienation with its body, an identity in struggle and perpetual ambivalence emerging as a counter-narrative of European modernity. Acknowledging the evacuation of African cultural specificity from Gilroy's work does not detract from the important connection he makes between the Black Atlantic and the origins of modernity. Citing Toni Morrison, Gilroy reveals how the slave experience was postmodern in the nineteenth century and before that. Morrison explains how slavery faced black people with a kind of dissolution and loss, and the need to build ontological security which is so reminiscent today of the fragmented, postmodern angst. She writes of the strategies necessary to 'reconstruct certain kinds of stability. Certain kinds of madness, deliberately going mad in order, as one of the characters says in the book, "not to lose your mind"' (Morrison, 1994). Traditionally a psychoanalytic understanding of madness has perceived madness and psychosis rooted in more developmental narratives of infancy, a result of the inability to separate from the imaginary world of the mother's body. Locked into a pre-Oedipal world, without access to the liberating phallus and the symbolic, the sick adult cannot move into a world of separate
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identity, representation and culture. Lacan sees psychosis as a structural problem. The individual carries a structural deficit or weakness in her or his symbolic. Through certain triggers such as adolescence, marriage or childbirth, the person will fall through the weak spot in the fabric of the symbolic into the real. Psychosis is caused by a foreclosure of the paternal function. Either the paternal function is operative by a certain age, or it never comes into being. A person might appear neurotic, but because they have foreclosed the symbolic function of the paternal and language, they will have an underlying psychotic structure. As Bruce Fink points out, 'Lacanian psychoanalysis though it purports to help the psychotic cannot change the psychotic's structure: once a psychotic, always a psychotic' (Fink, 1997). The difficulty with this is that psychosis is traced back to childhood origins. Madness in the adult cannot be attributed to cultural phenomena. Society does not make the person psychotically sick, or, if it does, its effects are only significant in the nursery. Fanon makes a similar point when he objects to psychoanalytic interpretations that situate the psychotic or neurotic complex as an infantile one that antecedes colonization. For Fanon, racist society causes the complex or madness; it does not merely exacerbate an underlying trend that has been seeded in infancy.
Abjection, racism and psychoanalysis &&rf»&&g Fanon conceptualises a cultural unconscious that fluidly connects the real with the imaginary. Historically, psychoanalysis has abjected the body as feminine, gay and black to a castrated, perverse or psychotic position outside language, sanity and culture. Institutionally the black person has been equated with the primitive in psychoanalytic thinking and with the bodily, instinctual, unconscious id. What constitutes subjectivity in this discourse is a colonial white imaginary that masquerades in the universal place of the symbolic. Exploring a dialogue between psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, as Homi Bhabha does, becomes problematic because the psychoanalytic terms at stake are historically and discursively inscribed within a racist framework where the colonial subject is continually projected as the affectual site of the unconscious, body, or death instinct that shores up the civilised but repressed Oedipal coloniser. The imaginary in Freudian, Lacanian and Jungian discourse is not neutral but culturally specific, and only an imaginary that is situated within the localised space of a black culture and community can embody and represent the black or coloured subject. Whether that is, for example, the diasporic experience of being Black/Asian and British or affiliated to a more traditional African/Asian culture, the imaginary at stake, and the cultural unconscious it is linked to, can only be remembered or recreated through a rememorisation and reappropriation of myth.
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? Toni Morrison's cultural rememory: from image to text
In my introduction to a postmodern bodily imaginary, I discussed Christopher Bollas's theorisation of the remembered past or nachtraglichkeit, conceptualised in terms of traumatic amnesia. In distinction to a Freudian and phallic account of the repressed unconscious (where a lost 'maternal' history is only ever recovered as the unspeakable other to paternal, mental representation and language), in Bollas's account the generative unconscious is a vehicle for the elaboration of an image of the internalised object, which mediates between the experiential real event and language. In an interview about beloved, Toni Morrison talks about the collective amnesia the book is addressing in terms of the unbearable pain of slavery: I thought this has got to be the least read of all the books I'd written because it is about something that the characters don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia. (Morrison, 1989) We can link the collective amnesia described by Morrison to the model of traumatic forgetting in Bollas's account. As I have said, Bollas describes the expression of a generative unconscious and the internalised object in terms of the image and imagist theory. Toni Morrison describes her narrative strategy as 'a kind of literary archaeology', in which the act of the imagination together with what remains of memory/history can symbolise a move from 'image to text': on the basis of some information and a little guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains - in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of truth. (Morrison, 1987b: 113) Morrison's archaeology is crucial in distinguishing, not fact from fiction, but 'fact from truth'. Morrison's fiction acts as a cultural memory, excavating and reimagining the lives and histories of the slaves and the truth behind the historical blanks that the slave narratives left. Morrison uses the image of the 'veil' drawn over the events of slavery, 'too terrible to relate'. This image masks and renders unspeakable the narrative of race. For Morrison, it is 'only the act of the imagination' which can rip or draw aside this historical 'veil' (Morrison, 1987b: 113). Postmodern and poststructuralist critics have used Beloved as a key text in drawing together contemporary theories on narrativity, historiography and psychoanalysis. Mae G. Henderson writes of how Toni Morrison 'aims to restore a dimension of the repressed personal in a manifestly political
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discourse'. For Henderson, 'the texts of the slave narratives can be regarded as classic examples of the 'return of the repressed', primarily because the events relating to violence and violation (which are self-censored or edited out) return again and again in "veiled allusions'". Henderson links the rememory of narrative history represented in Morrison's text to the rememory of psychic history in the analytic session: To the degree that her work is intended to resurrect stories buried and stories repressed, Morrison's relationship to the slave narrators, as well as the relationship of her text to its precursor narratives, can be profitably compared not only to the relationship of the historian to his or her informant, but also the analyst to the analysand. (Henderson, 1991: 63) The relationship and the difference between psychic history and narrative history focuses on a notion of the unspeakable. Morrison's task in Beloved is to represent the interior psychic lives and the communal history 'of a people who didn't write it'. But are the unspeakable and buried stories that evolve in Morrison's novel best described in terms of Freud's Oedipal model? Pete Nicholls argues that Henderson's use of Freud's 'return of the repressed' remains problematical because of the difficulty of simply retrieving the lost event or story in a return to a dominant and linear account of history: The danger, here, though is that we begin to think of the 'repressed' as simply a lost fact or datum, a link which once restored will return us to a form of historical continuity. (Nicholls, 1994: 15-16) History conceived as the return of the repressed is analogous to the cultural repression of the maternal body. The repressed is repeated within language because that early relationship with the mother is impossible to mediate or psychically process within language. To give voice to the repressed returns us to an Oedipal account of history which is in a sense dependent on veiling the relationship to the mother's body and the unspeakable narratives of slavery. It cannot, in Morrison's words, 'part the veil' or 'fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left', because the spatial relationship of those slave narratives to history, like the pre-linguistic relationship to the mother's body, remains ultimately unspeakable. But if we link Morrison's narrative text of rememory to Bollas's notion of traumatic amnesia, we avoid the pitfalls of a metaphysical or dominant account of history. As I have mentioned (see Chapter 4) Bollas distinguishes between trauma associated with a return of the repressed and the amnesia resulting from an intra-psychic destruction of self-experience. His explanation of a destroyed and a generative unconscious provides a temporal explanation which does not merely return us to past traditional myths and dominant histories. Instead the past is destroyed and recreated in a generative transformation of the real from
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experience to language, mobilising the relation to the body by connecting and representing it within the registers of the imaginary and symbolic. This describes a narrative strategy of unspeakable bodies and histories not locked in the past but capable of projection into the future. How is this transformation of the 'real5 of embodied history, from selfexperience to language, traced in Morrison's novel Beloved! Morrison, as I have discussed, argues for a narrative strategy of writing that retrieves the fragments and remains of history and then yields them to an imaginative rememory of history that is performed in terms of the image. For Morrison the image conjures up a pictorial and sensual landscape, not language. She writes, by '"image", of course, I don't mean "symbol"; I simply mean "picture" and the feelings that accompany the picture' (Morrison, 1987b: 112). An Oedipal reading of Morrison's novel would represent the character Beloved as a traumatic and abject relation to the real, outside culture and representation. But Morrison's text historicises the Oedipal text, putting it back in its 'proper place' as the colonial, white slave owners' discourse: the 'master' discourse of both family and culture. The rememory that elaborates narrative identity for the slave mother Sethe and indeed for the other slaves, is not an Oedipal text but a journey from traumatic experiential event to an imaginative elaboration of that past in terms of the future. The character Beloved certainly represents the traumatic horror and brutality of slavery, as the traumatic real event, but she also represents a generative experiential space of rememory that does not rest solely with the individual but connects her or him to the community. Whereas in an Oedipal account the abject real remains severed from the symbolic, preserving the difference between traumatic event and sign, and the necessary incommensurability between the psyche and the social, in Beloved the real is transformed and connected with the symbolic community. This elaboration of the real is imagined and remembered through storytelling and the aesthetic image. One such image in the novel is of the precious 'diamond earrings' which Sethe the mother dangles for her baby daughter. '"Tell me", said Beloved, smiling a wide happy smile. "Tell me your diamonds"' (Morrison, 1987: 58). The diamonds are attractive to Beloved, whose hunger to be fed stories by her mother enables Sethe to remember. Sethe's memory of the past, and her narrative to tell it, has been stolen by the slave-owner's sons who took her milk, and by their Oedipal book-reading teacher who watched nearby and wrote it up. Beloved's desire for storytelling makes Sethe remember another image her mother's mark, the cross and circle that has been burnt into her breast. This image yields a further rememory for Sethe of her mother's words: 'If something happens to me and you can't tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark' (Morrison, 1987: 211). This mark is also part of an Oedipal and colonial narrative that stamps Sethe's mother as 'property that reproduced
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without cost'. But is also becomes a generative bodily story of how Sethe has been loved and known by her mother, thus elaborating a historical relation to the real of the maternal body within narrative. Another generative image in Morrison's text is the image of the orange squares of colour on the grandmother Baby Suggs's quilt. Baby Suggs's 'holy' represents the relation to the community and the ancestor. Baby Suggs's word or call to her people to love themselves and their bodies is situated in a spiritual and imaginary 'sunlit dance' in the woods. Her call to the community's imagination fails when Baby Suggs is confronted with Sethe's act of killing her daughter rather than seeing her taken back into slavery. Unable to condemn Sethe's 'rough choice', Baby Suggs retires to bed only interested in the orange colours on her quilt. Sethe's act proves to Baby Suggs the limits of the imagination in transforming the real traumatic events of slavery into a symbolic narrative of self. But it is precisely at this point in the novel, when Baby Suggs's heart of love collapses, that the forgotten relation to the real returns manifested in Beloved. Baby Suggs's final contemplation of this colour paints the forgotten relation to the real which is personified by Beloved's return from the other side, when the first thing she notices are the 'orange patches in the darkness of the quilt' (Morrison, 1987: 54). Beloved is also an ancestor, albeit a forgotten one. When she arrives, her sister Denver trembles with gratitude because, 'Whatever her power and however she used it, Beloved was hers' (Morrison, 1987: 104). Beloved embodies and promises her, the self and stories she has never had. The 'orange patches' lie between them on the quilt as Denver tells her story, beginning to see and feel it through Beloved, 'Feeling how it must have felt to be her mother' (Morrison, 1987: 78). Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it. (Morrison, 1987: 78) The orange squares symbolise the passage between unspeakable history and the transformative narrative act, between Beloved and Denver. But if the orange squares (like the earrings and the maternal mark) are images which mediate and elaborate the traumatic real of the body and history, then it is Beloved herself who actually represents the internalised object or unconscious self-experience as both a psychic act and a function of history. The symbolic generative movement from real to text depends on this dual function of psychic memory and history, linking Sethe's inner pain with the community. The 'spiritual coming' and singing voices of the women who finally come to connect Sethe with her community are a key that 'breaks the back of words', joining the experiential real of the slave-mother's body to a situated cultural symbolic.
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The real, the imaginary and the symbolic in Toni Morrison's novel are all interconnected; there is no Oedipal disjunction between the psyche and the social. The bodily imaginary, whether individual or social, needs a connection with the ancestral real of history in order to establish narrative and cultural identity. Interestingly, the cultural third term which replaces the Oedipal phallus or father in this text is the spiritual ancestor of the community. The Oedipal text, as Hortense Spillers suggests, cannot be translated and applied to the African-American subject (Spillers, 1989). African-Americans have a different history with different kinship laws. Under slavery, children did not lawfully belong to either mother or father, although historically families have been traced through the mother line. Substantial differences remain, however, between Bollas's psychoanalysis of unconscious experience and Morrison's historically situated text of communal and psychic healing. Perhaps the most important of these differences is that whereas Bollas foregrounds notions of individual psychic healing in terms of an analytic dyad, psychic healing in Morrison's text can only come about through the integration of the self and the intersubjective dyad within the community. It is the connection between individual and communal memory that ultimately makes Morrison's work an historical narrative, and Bollas's intervention in terms of the analytic session a more private matter. Nevertheless both these writers illustrate how psychoanalysis can be seen as a situated form of ethnography and also as a practice of reading.
r*su* Psychoanalysis as ethnography and everyday dreaming The academic tradition of postructuralism has read psychoanalysis, through Lacan, as a textual practice. My conceptualisation of the bodily imaginary reads psychoanalysis as an interdisciplinary activity in terms of an active reading and reception of literary texts, as everyday living/dreaming, as clinical practice, as cultural theory and finally as popular memory. Now these quite different ways of reading psychoanalysis span large debates, ranging between English, Cultural Studies and clinical psychoanalysis. Although I have not the space in this book to develop these debates in any depth, my argument that these different readings of psychoanalysis are all interchangeable is significant. If psychoanalysis can be used to examine the real reader or audience, then we can move from a rather closed postructuralist focus on the text, to a more Cultural Studies emphasis on everyday living and ethnography. Literature and film, for example, can no longer be situated as solely textual artefacts, but have to placed in terms of their circulation in relation to production and consumption. In a similar move, if we argue for psychoanalysis as both cultural theory and clinical practice, then oppositions can be dissolved which dehistoricise both,
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through fixed grand narratives or an equally closed empiricism. Bollas's attention to the reading and elaboration in the transference is an account of how stories evolve and are remembered through a practice of reading and listening within the transference, where the imaginative image can elaborate past traumatic histories, so forming a bridge into the future. Bollas does not oppose the Oedipal readings of Freud and Lacan; he merely states that his focus on the primary unconscious is a development of unconscious experience in the work of Freud and Winnicott. But if psychoanalysis is to recognise its own ethnographic status, then maybe the more fluid, experiential and bodily imaginaries explored through writers such as Irigaray, Bollas, Fanon, Castoriadis and Morrison are important, because these imaginaries are spaces where the psyche is imbricated both with the real of history and the cultural realm of the social. In Morrison's Beloved the imaginary is not simply an arena of the mental unconscious. It is a place of imagination and the senses, a bodily imaginary that, like Castoriadis's unconscious creative flux, does not rely on a dominant symbolic or myth to bring it within narrative or cultural representation. As Castoriadis argues, contra Lacan, the symbolic is not required to bring the imaginary within cultural representation, because the unconscious is always innately creative and representative. But how does this notion of a creative and representative unconscious square with all the accounts of traumatic reality that lie beyond memory and representation? As Morrison's work shows, the real is not beyond representation, but it is often beyond the language and cultural representation at our disposal. Just as trauma wipes out language and representation, killing the creative aspects of the unconscious, so does the dominant symbolic language of our particular society or community disallow the narratives that might remember and recreate new cultural myths. For Castoriadis the social imaginary is a further identification of the radical, individual imaginary that becomes reproduced and institutionalised at a symbolic level. This does not mean that the social and the individual are the same thing but that they are fluidly inscribed through the notion of a creative and representative unconscious. These socio-symbolic forms can solidify in ways that preclude the creative kernel of the social imaginary. Twentiethcentury forms of totalitarian communism would be a case in point. But the right-wing democracies of England and the United States also annihilate the productive core of the social imaginary by concretising one imaginary at a symbolic level, so that our cultural and political institutions become private affairs masquerading in the place of public community. Anthony Elliott's lucid and timely resurrection of Castoriadis's ideas for postmodern debate reveals their importance for a more radical understanding of psychoanalysis. Castoriadis views the postmodern condition pessimistically, pointing to societies that have become dislocated and separated from their
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creative and imaginary imaginations. But surely there are creative forms of the social imaginary as well as social forms where that creative imaginary has become paralysed or destroyed? Take for example the Lacanian and Freudian Oedipal narrative of the cultural phallus repressing the maternal body, which I have argued is an historically situated symbolic, not a universal one. Its clinical relevance for our Western postmodern world is undeniably present, as any working psychotherapist will acknowledge. But the Oedipal and phallic symbolic is not the only imaginary identification at stake. In Toni Morrison's writing, the colonial Oedipal phallus is contrasted with the spiritual ancestor. As part of a recent anthology of essays on race, psychoanalysis and feminism, Gloria Hull's chapter on 'Channeling the Ancestral Muse' discusses how African-American poets and writers have all transmitted 'female ancestral energy as a vital force in their lives and poetry' (Hull, 1997: 332). This legacy of spiritualism has been ignored by academic debate. In contrast, Carolyn Martin Shaw is less celebratory about the use of spiritualism for African-American writers. She suggests that spiritualism does not connect writers with an ancestral past but creates imaginary 'stories of connection' for the community. This groundedness and connection in the community proves the advantages of spiritualism over psychoanalysis. She writes: you can believe that a spirit speaks through you and that you are still trying to resolve your Oedipal complex. Freudian psychoanalysis is exlusive: it does not allow for the understanding of human behaviour by reference to spirit possession or mediumship. (Shaw, 1997: 352) But maybe psychoanalysis should recognise the symbolic validity of the spirit world as an accompaniment or even as an alternative to the phallus? This would not invalidate psychoanalytic terms, but merely open them up to a more complex cultural analysis by acknowledging their situated narrative and ethnographic status. If you believe that psychoanalysis is a discourse universally circumscribed by its traditional phallic determinants, then what is the point of using it in trying to understand the shifting cultural variants of identity or identity politics in our postmodern society? Analysts, if they are good at what they do, don't engage in an analytic session with a pile of accepted theories at the ready. They listen and wait for the story that emerges because it is a story that they don't know. Of course psychoanalytic theories inform clinicians and can be helpful in helping them to listen and read the transference. But other narratives can prove just as useful: literature, philosophy, or more popular cultural texts such as films are all relevant in the analyst's interpretation of the clinical session. Shaw argues that the postmodern demise of grand theory has opened the way for African-American feminists to map more marginal narratives and identities that celebrate local knowledge and reclaim cultural
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heritage and knowledge. Spirituality is part of this language of recovery and healing (Shaw, 1997: 352). Barbara Christian, writing in same anthology as Gloria Hull and Carolyn Shaw, harnesses both Hull's emphasis on spiritual ancestors and Shaw's focus on stories of connective spiritual healing by returning to Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Christian reminds white feminists to be respectful of the situated, historical contexts of African-American writers. In her essay 'Fixing Methodologies', Christian argues that the character Beloved represents both the actual and the symbolic meaning of the Middle Passage: that historical journey of the slave ships that divided African-Americans from their African ancestors (Christian, 1997). Beloved acts as a spiritual healing story reminiscent of African fixing ceremonies where the traumatic and forgotten past is returned to and rememorised so that movement into the future can be achieved. In Christian's reading the spiritual and the psychoanalytic come together, but at the cost (or gift) of revising the cultural parameters of psychoanalytic thinking. Toni Morrison's Beloved figures, therefore, as a cultural rememory of myth that is part of the function of both the bodily and the social imaginaries. As Kobena Mercer has pointed out, such cultural rememory was a crucial strategy under Thatcher's government. He cites Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech, where old myths of scientific racism were dissolved and reconstructed with the contemporary force and appeal to right-wing rhetoric of nationhood and family. But, as Mercer suggests and Morrison demonstrates in action, rememory of cultural myth can also come from a left-wing radical agenda. Deleuze and Guattari's revolutionary postmodern tactics in Anti-Oedipus are flawed because they envisage the total destruction of imaginary cultural myth and the resurrection of pure productive desire. But desire is never free from the imaginary; the real, as Castoriadis points out, is dependent on the imaginary for its existence. Capitalist Oedipal myths, or colonial ones for that matter, can only be reconstructed through alternative rememories of myth that are situated geographically and historically in terms of the community. The unconscious as ethnographic experiential and embodied stories does not come into being through the representative force of an Oedipal symbolic. Rather, cultural myth and symbolic difference are instituted through a radical creative and experiential imaginary. This unconscious can be understood in terms of dreams that are an embodied part of both sleeping and waking life. Bollas returns to Freud's writing on dreams and argues for a distinction between dream experience and the dream text. Whereas the dream text refers to the familiar Freudian ideas of the dream as a synthesis of symbolism and desire, Bollas suggests that the dream experience is an expression of object relating, in which the subject or the dreamer relates to himself or herself as the other who is dreamed. The dream text signifies the secondary unconscious linked to mental representation, and the dream experience is the more simple,
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bodily primary experience. BoUas suggest that our lives can be seen as a kind of narrative dreaming in which we oscillate between simple immersion in experiences and more complex states of meta-reflection. Now, although BoUas would divide these two structures of dream into an Oedipal and a more primary maternal unconscious, I propose that the more narrative representations evolve out of a core experiential unconscious that is always already potentially representative. Bollas describes how the experiential unconscious operates in our everyday lives as a kind of dreaming: We all walk about in a metaphysical concrescence of our private idioms, our culture, society, and language, and our era in history. Moving through our object world, whether by choice, obligation, or invitational suprise, evokes self states sponsored by the specific objects we encounter. In a very particular sense, we live our life in our own private dreaming. (Bollas, 1993: 19) For Bollas this everyday dreaming consists of reading a book, falling in love, listening to music. By projecting ourselves into significant objects in the world we can be transfromed by them.
Psychoanalysis as popular memory Bollas's description is strikingly similar to the cultural theorist Michel de Certeau's account of 'Walking In the City'. De Certeau depicts the city as a spatial imaginary, a place of everyday practices such as walking and eating. De Certeau states that 'to practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood: it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other'(de Certeau, 1988: 110). So how does this notion of the unconscious as everyday dreaming and walking in the city help us further with eliciting a postmodern cultural unconscious in terms of rememory and myth? Bollas's writing and de Certeau's can be read interchangeably to reveal the connections between everyday life, analytic practice and cultural theory. Walter Benjamin also fits into this interdisciplinary frame. Benjamin is one of the famous Marxists of the Frankfurt School, who has also argued for everyday dreaming in terms of the city and modernity. Like Bollas and de Certeau, Benjamin maintains the dream as a form of active reading, but Benjamin's work specifically locates this active reading of the dream in terms of rememory and rearticulation of myth. Benjamin's huge work, the Arcades Project, was rooted in a Surrealist acknowledgement of the metropolis as both a centre for myth and a culture of commodities. Benjamin explores the mythic nature of the city in terms of dreaming, sleeping and awakening. The object world of the metropolis remains full of frozen wish-images from previous generations: Utopian dreams that lay embedded and immobilised within the productive enterprises of modern capitalist society. Benjamin's vision is to
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overcome the mythic so that past Utopian dreams can be realised in the present. So the modern commodity-filled arcades of Benjamin's day were merely a contemporary form of ancient Arcadia. The dream-like artifacts and commodities of the city contained a hidden promise of liberation from past myths. Benjamin's friend and fellow Marxist, Adorno, was very critical of this version of a collective unconscious or dreaming community. He warned: the collective unconscious is invoked, but I fear that in its present form it cannot be distinguished from Jung's conception.... It should be a clear and sufficient warning that in a dreaming collective no differences remain between classes. (Adorno, 1980: 112-13) Influenced by such ideas mainly through the work of surrealists like Andre Breton, Benjamin was also at times fiercely critical of psychoanalysis and particularly of Jung's work. In a letter to Gerhard Scholem, Benjamin writes: It is my desire to safeguard certain foundations of Paris Arcades methodologically by waging an onslaught on the doctrines of Jung, especially those concerning archaic images and the collective unconscious. (Benjamin, 1994: 540) Promising to expose its 'Fascist armature' Benjamin writes that Jung's psychology is 'the devil's work through and through' (Benjamin, 1994: 542-4). Benjamin takes pains to distinguish his work from Jung's. Indeed, it is the transformation of the notion of the archaic image to a dialectical one that informs the basis of much of Benjamin's writing, particularly his Arcades Project. Jung understood archetypes to be unconscious primordial images and imaginal patterns found in myths, legends and fairytales that reflected universal experience and behaviour. Archetypes make up the collective unconscious and are structural to the individual. Unlike Freud's concept of the individual repressed unconscious, the collective unconscious has never been conscious. Whereas the Jungian archetype is a fixed historical image passed on in a universal and immutable way, Benjamin's dialectical image opens up a dialogical contest between past and present. In the dialectical image the forgotten past is remembered as a moment or flash in the present. Benjamin writes that the dialectical image is 'that in which the has-been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation' (Benjamin, 1980-9: 576). The city and the arcades as a dreamscape is Benjamin's notion of a spatial and collective unconscious. The arcades are the remnants of nineteenthcentury Parisian luxury: elegant shops, with glass-covered passageways through houses that brought the external street inside, simultaneously marking the normally lower-class external habitat of the street as an internal, bourgeois space. But if the arcade is a kind of internal map of the city, it is also home to the commodity and the dream objects of modernity. Benjamin, however, is
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interested in the arcades as the derelict remains of nineteenth-century society. It is only in the decaying and twilight days of the ebbing historical epoch that its mythic nature can be truly grasped. Benjamin envisages the collective unconscious or dream as being equivalent to the individual. So 'architectures, fashions, yesy even the weather are in the interior of the collective what organ sensations, the feeling of sickness or health are in the interior of the individual' (Benjamin, 1983: 492). By envisaging social processes as imaginary ones, Benjamin situates the unconscious culturally in terms of Marxist dialectical relations between base and superstructure. Adorno continually expresses his concern over Benjamin's psychoanalytic theories of the social collective, arguing that the psychologising of the dialectic image by the dream also means that 'it falls under the spell of bourgeois psychology' and its subject - the individual (Cohen, 1993: 25). But Benjamin's concept of the collective dream is situated historically and economically in terms of the bourgeois man and the proletariat. So the collective unconscious can represent the repressed wishes of the dominant order, but it can equally represent forces of economic production. For Benjamin the city is a place of dreaming and myth, representing the mythic nature of modernity and its false conception of the 'progress of history'. For Benjamin, history is traumatic and broken, full of human suffering. Notions of a progressive continuous history can only ever be associated with dominant and conquering orders or factions. Deconstructing the modernist myths of history means to destroy myth, reducing it to ruins or rubble. But out of these archaelogical ruins, a positive redemption or rearticulation of myth can be found. And it is dreaming which is the psychic and social activity that leads to dialectical awakening and the transformation of history.
Psychoanalysis and cultural memory as active reading This awakening is processed through the dialectical image as an activity of reading. Closely tied to this idea of the dialectical image is Benjamin's notion of the body image-space. As Siegfried Weigel points out, these two concepts of thought images are closely linked, 'as by communicating tubes' (Weigel, 1996: 21). Benjamin's notion of body image-space precedes his idea of the dialectical image, but both images are integral to Benjamin's understanding of historical remembering. The body image-space reflects the city as a dreaming body, and is indebted to a surrealist inflection of psychoanalytic historiography. In his essay on 'Surrealism', Benjamin transforms psychoanalysis into a materialist trajectory, where the body image-space is a literal materialisation of bodily innervations. This image, then, is an embodied expression of the real which Benjamin entitles 'profane illumination'. Margaret Cohen describes how Benjamin's 'profane illuminations' are images that contain revolutionary
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energy in which the collective body and the forces of technology cohere. Earlier writings by Benjamin such as 'One Way Street' focus on a more classical Marxist dialectic. Cohen notes how this dialectic has 'broken down' in "Surrealism", where Benjamin 'employs the somatic rhetoric of stimulis found in psychoanalytic accounts of trauma' (Cohen, 1993: 193). This body image-space goes on to have, as Cohen puts it, a 'celebrated career' as the dialectic image, in other words it is the latter that Benjamin becomes so famously associated with (Cohen, 1993: 194). However, the significance of the relation between the body image-space and the dialectical image lies in understanding the stakes of representation in Benjamin's work. Whereas critics have tended to focus on either linguistic or pictorial paradigms of representation in terms of Benjamin's image of dialectic praxis, the roots of this dialectical image lie in a surrealist notion of the image as an unconscious expression where no distinction between the visual and the verbal, or between the body and language exists. Benjamin goes on to develop the dialectic image as a read image existing in language, whether that language is a language of objects, dreams, bodies or architecture. But it is important to remember that this read image is not housed in a language of representation separate from the bodily real. As a social destruction and rearticulation of myth, the dialectial image figures as a social imaginary that is indissociable from the imaginative bodily one and therefore inseparable from the individual psyche. Although various critics have suggested that Walter Benjamin's work contains an unacknowledged psychoanalytic text, they tend to identify it or disidentify it with differing psychoanalysts. So Benjamin's work becomes a Freudian thesis raised to a collective level, or it is described as having 'nothing to do' with Jung's work, as being totally distinct (Weigel, 1996: 120). But it would be a disservice to Benjamin's work to define his ideas as simply utilising Freudian concepts or rejecting Jungian ones. Benjamin was fiercely critical of Freud and Jung; he used them both, but instead of overtly challenging them he rewrote their accounts of a mythical imaginary. The work of Benjamin, I suggest, has to be understood as a situated theory of a cultural unconscious that, like Fanon's or Morrison's writing, has its own ethnographic status as a psychoanalytic and a historical text. Walter Benjamin was a contemporary of Wilhelm Reich; both men were associated with the Frankfurt School and were inhabitants of Berlin in the 1930s, bearing witness to the rise of National Socialism and the Nazi party. Like Reich, Benjamin's work synthesises Marxist and psychoanalytic concerns; but whereas Reich's vision of a cultural unconscious involves an extermination of capitalist Oedipal myths, Benjamin's notion of a collective historical unconscious seeks to rearticulate history and cultural myth through an active practice of ethnography and reading. Although writing in different eras, Benjamin's reading of cultural history is remarkably similar to Toni Morrison's. Both Benjamin and Morrison institute
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an archaeology of the imaginary, returning to the dominant myths of history and the site of scattered remains. They both describe a bodily and social imaginary that connects present and past through the imaginative image, mobilising unconscious experience into the realms of narrative and representation. Their ethnographic reading of cultural history does not locate the unconscious in terms of a phallic linguistic metaphor, but as an unspeakable and narrative bodily experience of the real. And it is this notion of an unspeakable but situated unconscious that fully historicises psychoanalysis. This is why Luce Irigaray's account of the bodily imaginary and Christopher Bollas's description of unconscious experience are so full of potential in exploring a more politicised psychoanalysis, because their theories are informed by the same kind of active reading of experiential praxis that is operating in the more historicised texts of Morrison and Benjamin. The ethnography of these analysts is not all-seeing. Irigaray's prioritisation of sexual difference angers many feminists who see a concomitant abjection of categories of homosexuality and race, whereas Bollas's work might seem too established within mainstream psychoanalytic practice. After all, divorcing Bollas's work on unconscious experience from the Oedipal myth and rearticulating it in terms of the bodily imaginary and rememorised historical myth is my imaginative reading, not his! What, one might ask, has Walter Benjamin's thesis on cultural history got to do with an analytic session? But if you examine the way Bollas argues for the intersubjective dialogue between analyst and patient, and how this imaginary space is a connection between past and present where the traumatic and unconscious remains of childhood are liberated through the poetic image, then the equivalence between this description of an analytic session and the historical cultural theory of Morrison and Benjamin is there. You might call one psychoanalysis and the other cultural history, but the difference resides only as a question of time, space and place. Psychoanalysis as active reading and ethnography of a cultural unconscious might seem an exciting prospect to academics who can further elaborate it in terms of film, literary and cultural studies. But what use are these ideas to clinical practice? Of course this question suggests a whole other book, but in this concluding section on postmodernism, with the clinical (schizophrenic) illness so clearly marked as the other symptom of the cultural condition, I want to give two examples of the clinical implications to be found in the work of Toni Morrison and Walter Benjamin. The first example, already described, is the reading of African-American spiritualism as a substitute for the cultural phallus. Unless white therapists understand the cultural and community significance of spiritualism and the shaman for black African-Americans, how will they begin to realise its significance in the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of the analytic transference? Of course listening to the patient's language can help therapists, listening to what they don't know: the symbolic
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desire of the other. Unfortunately, universal Oedipal myths cut off hearing the other's desire. They prevent an active listening to historical difference. Texts such as Toni Morrison's Beloved are therefore valuable sources for clinicians to read, helping to hone clinical reading skills. What (my second example) is the significance of a postmodern psychoanalysis that rearticulates cultural myth through 'active reading'? As Christopher Bollas says, the analyst's role, like the historian's, is to destroy prejudices by 'the action of reading or listening'. Whatever the power of beliefs, the work of unconscious experience will be their undoing. Active reading means not the desire for mastery or being the analyst that knows, but 'another kind of desire, based on a separate sense, in which they [the analysts] take pleasure in the deconstruction of subjectivity, as they are resituated by encounter with their objects' (Bollas, 1995: 142). Paul Ricoeur, the hermeneutic philosopher, also describes an active reading of texts that is based on the analytic encounter. Ricoeur argues for a pre-narrative structure of experience where life 'constitutes a genuine demand for narrative'. Stories are not just recounted, they are also 'lived in the mode of the imaginary' (Ricoeur, 1991: 432). Ricoeur links the analytic encounter, which features a movement from pre-narrative experience to narrative, with an understanding of reading literature. In this account the analytic transference is similar to the encounter between 'the world of the reader' and 'the world of the text'; reading, like the analytic session, involves a process in which the potential unspoken stories of lived experience are mediated by a secondary process of narrative, reconfiguring the self: narrating is a secondary process grafted on our 'being entangled in stories'. Recounting, following, understanding stories is then simply the continuation of these unspoken stories. From this double analysis, it follows that fiction is an irreducible dimension of self-understanding. (Ricoeur, 1991: 435) For Ricoeur, then, the secondary process of narrative does not reflect life, but instead reconfigures and transforms pre-narrative experience; that experience, in the form of life stories, is for its part in 'quest' for narration. These primary, pre-narrative stories, are, in Ricoeur's view, a form of 'narrative intelligence which issues from creative imagination' (Ricoeur, 1991: 429). These unspoken stories are part of the creative imagination, but they are also part of the unconscious imaginary because they have not yet been reconfigured and represented within a second-order narrative thinking. Ricoeur describes this primary structure of pre-narrative stories as experiential, as lived in the imaginary, and as poetry. Poetry offers a very different landscape or representation of the unconscious from a linear linguistic structure. Whereas (linguistic) language implies an unconscious of thinking and mental representation, poetry foregrounds more painterly images, creating a more
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sensual narrative closer to bodily experience. Active reading then moves the real of history from an unconscious experiential space into language. The postmodern 'real' is not permanently outside of representation or language. As Luce Irigaray suggests, this bodily imaginary is known and felt before it enters secondary language and symbolic representation. The movement, as Castoriadis tells us, from individual to social imaginary is through a secondary identification of the object which can reproduce that identification in a social and symbolic way. This movement is achieved through a reading in the analytic transference that, as Peter Brooks demonstrates, is reserved not just for the analytical patient, but for all textual readers. Dynamic narrative, like storytelling, is 'the movement of reference back and forth between teller and listener: It is in this movement of reference that change is produced - that the textual reader, like the psychoanalytic patient, finds himself modified by the work of interpretation and construction, by the transferential dynamics to which he has submitted himself. (Brooks, 1994: 72) These transferential dynamics of reading, are according to Brooks, what makes the story tell 'a difference'. As Walter Benjamin observes, the illumination of history, recognised through an instant in the present, can only be obtained through an active reading. This moment of historical awakening is due to the shocked response from the reader, who is startled out of his or her dream-like experience and moved to a new place of reflected meaning. Benjamin's notion of active reading where the reader is disconcerted, is reflected by the writing strategies Toni Morrison implements in her novel Beloved to unsettle and disquiet the reader. Morrison intends the language of the text, which becomes the first shared experience between the reader and the novel's population, to snatch the reader just as the slaves were snatched, from one place to another, with no preparation and no defence (Morrison, 1989b: 33). Morrison's imaginative and archaelogical writing is interchangeable as active reading. For Morrison it is the act of writing and readingwhich constitutes an act of the imagination, transporting experience to representation within language. Imagining is not 'merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming' (Morrison, 1992: 4). This active reading is not concerned with a purely textual analysis of Beloved or, for that matter, with a purely linguistic theory of the imaginary. Morrison's words demonstrate that active reading of the bodily imaginary negotiates the space between language and experience: the historical rememory at stake between the text and the real reader or spectator. This act of transference is a projection of the image and of the imaginary in a rereading of myth that makes up the cultural unconscious.1
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Conclusion: I M M I towards a situated, cultural unconscious An ethnography of psychoanalysis and history can situate postmodern subjectivity in terms of an active reading and the reconfiguration of narrative identity. This reconfiguration of our narrative selves is achieved through a rememory and rearticulation of cultural myth: whether that recreation of cultural myth is the positive female ancestry that Irigaray envisions between mother and daughter, or the historical ancestor and dialectical archetypal spirit of Toni Morrisons's Beloved, Perhaps such cultural rearticulation of myth can be understood as performed gender and recited by Judith Butler as the 'Lesbian Phallus' or maybe even the masculinised femme. Whatever their differences, indeed especially because of their situated differences, these creative cultural myths cannot be seen as based in a linguistic phallic unconscious, or in some essential and biological maternal void. They exist as the bodily imaginary both individual and social. The politics of a cultural unconscious is the work of this experiential, creative and bodily imaginary as an active reading that moves the real of history from image to text. But if the relationship between psyche and social is not simply to be understood in terms of the Oedipal symbolic phallus, how do we understand the passage from the body to society in ways which are ethical? Castoriadis suggests that society is just another form of the body, a social reproduction of the individual's creative and bodily imaginary. But if the social is just another successive and ambivalent identification of the narcissistic ego, what is to prevent it falling into a deathly mimesis of the same? Borch-Jacobsen lucidly describes how a violent identificatory mimesis between self and other, so aptly deployed in Kleinian accounts of envy, can replace Oedipal explanations of the death drive. But as I argued in Chapter 1, without an adequate account of an ethical symbolic we are left with societal collapse into destructive identifications that are certainly familiar enough, but do not understand or herald change. Castoriadis understands the socio-historical as the social imaginary. Sublimation is when and where the individual replaces his/her own private objects of cathexis, including an image of himself/herself, by objects that are valued within social institutions. This, of course, means positing the psyche as imagination, but it also means that the social imaginary brings into being forms and representations that the individual psyche cannot achieve on its own. Modification of the sexualised mother to the tender one is a move from cathecting her narcissitically to an interaction with her in terms of social !
See my chapter 'Maternal Memoirs and Cultural Methodologies' in Campbell (1999) where I read Walter Benjamin's work in terms of the bodily imaginary and suggest its importance for film theory.
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and symbolic institutions. Hence the destructiveness of only privileging the father as part of a symbolic and social institution. This move from private to public spheres entails the ethical importance of maintaining a fluid dialogue and connection between the individual creative imaginary and the socio-symbolic. Kobena Mercer talks about the need to rearticulate myths of socialism through historiography. His own rememory of the events of May 1968 is an attempt to historicise and utilise forms of the imaginary and symbolic for leftist purposes. Hegemonic forms of the imaginary and symbolic can be used by left or right and, as Mercer so acutely reflects, when the protagonists of'Paris May '68' adopted the surrealist slogan 'Let the Imagination Seize Power', they forgot that their conservative opponents were capable of doing the same thing (Mercer, 1992). But as Thatcher has wrested the imaginary high ground of cultural myth away from socialism, so Tony Blair has taken back the cultural inventive, mobilising it in terms of a majority centre politics. The current danger of this is not simply that Labour can swim along on the back of conservative ideology and policy, but that the radical left will not recognise a gap that has opened up for their struggle and potential power over imaginary and symbolic forms. An ethical society is not just a battle where one imaginary wins out over the other, but a place where there is room for debate and the social or public sphere can still negotiate with more private forms of the bodily imaginary. Anthony Elliott suggests that although social orders reproduce common symbolic forms, these forms are open to change through a creative and primary intersubjectivity of 'rolling identifications and representational wrappings between self and other' (Elliott, 1995: 49). Such a creative intersubjectivity depends on our roles as social subjects, citizens, parents, teachers and therapists in facilitating spaces where the bodily imaginary can find cultural representation and institution. Luce Irigaray's theorisation of an ethical relation between women addresses the need between mother and daughter to find a kind of symbolic exchange in terms of objects and cultural myths of female ancestry. The significance for the mother lies in not relating to her daughter as some possessive identification of herself, but allowing her daughter to elaborate a desiring relation to her in terms of the social reproduction of society. As I have discussed in Chapter 6, the social institution of lesbian parenting would be one positive way in which the daughter could cathect a social maternal imaginary where one mother is not the locus of private power, but has meaning in terms of other social mothers. Irigaray talks about the significance of rituals and the exchange of language and objects between mother and daughter, A more basic intervention would be to produce alternative self-help books on mothering that did not endlessly list the child's developmental needs. Books that would urge, not the welfare of the baby in terms of the mother as primary caretaker or as a security guard against abandonment, but the importance for the mother in elaborating
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her life in social terms so that she does not smother or over-invest in her child. The impinging mother, as Winnicott testifies, is not so much the mother who sometimes fails by neglect or anger, but the mother who mirrors back to the child her own projected needs.2 Mothering, then, not as sacrifice but as sharing, is a political vision of opening up the privatised mother-child relationship to a more public sphere. Debates on communal child rearing are currently unfashionable , but the dangers of desociating children to a private space creates a pathological narcissism which, as Kovel suggests, is a 'pox of late capitalism'(Kovel, 1988: 199). Postmodern society has been associated with the fragmented deconstruction of the individual, illustrated at its most sick as the narcissistic illness and the de-sociated schizophrenic, locked in private madness outside of the symbolic. But postmodernism can also entertain a more positive dissemination of the self in terms of the other, where mastery and certitude make way for more elaborative ways of intersubjective sharing and rearticulating history. Keeping the imaginary and symbolic on the move leaves a way to re-encounter past traumas and dead histories. If the progression of 'dominant history' remains in thrall to the death drive, we don't have to accept it. An ethnographic praxis of psychoanalysis as active reading can connect past with present and mobilise the real within new and future narrative identities. Such a view of the unconscious does not locate it in textual terms; rather it is present in the everyday activities of life. Like de Certeau's and Benjamin's dreaming and walking in the city, the unconscious as an imaginative and imaginal imaginary can be seen as a kind of experiential dreaming of our daily lives. Our bodily interaction with objects, buildings, commodities, films and books constitutes an immersion or dreaming that oscillates with more reflective moments where active reading and narrative reconfiguration can take place. The 'original' psychoanalysis of Freud has evolved through so-called 'empirical' case histories, or rather the ethnographic, everyday stories of living and dreaming that make up the analytic session. With the advent of Lacanian psychoanalysis through feminist theory and poststructuralist critique, the experiential stories of analytic practice have been ignored in favour of a theory of linguistic representation that, as Borch-Jacobsen notes, leaves the subject 'in a position of exteriority (subjacence) with respect to representation' (Borch2
I'm not trying to assert, against all maternal attachment theory, that abandonment does not seriously damage the child. However, such abandonment is always read as bad mothering versus its opposite - good mothering - where the mother is always privately enclosed at home. Acknowledgement that it is healthy for the mother to be ambivalent, to want to leave her child and go and do other things, must go hand in hand with the realisation that other carers fill the breach. See Rozsika Parker's work on 'maternal ambivalence' {Torn in Two) and Andrew Samuels writing on 'fathering' (The Plural Psyche, The Political Psyche).
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Jacobsen, 1988: 28). But the dream is not just a textual representation or spectacle that is staged for the subject; it is also an experience of lived history located in sleeping and waking life. The dream text involves the synthesis of desire and thoughts into the construction of a dramatic setting or theatre such as, for example, the stages of Freud's dream work: condensation, displacement, symbolisation and secondary elaboration. But the dream experience is where the subject or dreamer performatively relates to himself or herself in a mimetic way as the other who is dreamed. Raphael Samuel's evocative writing in Theatres of Memory explores the notion of popular memory as the movement of an experiential imaginary and lived history. Samuel links the 'art of memory' rehearsed in psychoanalysis with a similar practice of memory in oral history and heritage. These performances of popular memory help us to understand history, not as textual exegesis - the postructuralist's penchant for 'the close reading of a limited number of well thumbed books' - but as a study of reading, likened by Samuel to reader reception theory in literary criticism (Samuel, 1994: 8). However, Samuel situates his practice of popular memory and active reading in the imaginative movement of the past in terms of present, where history is passed 'from one learning circuit to another'. Whether that recreation of the past is located in watching television rehearsals of the past with programmes like 'Blackadder' or 'Dad's Army', or whether those imaginative performances translate Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility into a popular film, these imaginary readings of the past in terms of everyday life are the very dynamics of history in the making. Heritage, for Samuel, cannot simply be appropriated for right-wing agendas of nationalism, such as the Little Englandism of Thatcher's Britain, but has to be seen as an imaginary retrieval and contestation of the past. So, for example, the fundamentalist movements of the New Right in the United States claim the naming of heritage. But this naming can just as easily be located with 'black power cultural initiatives in the field of museology' or since the 1960s with black consciousness movements and their use of the term 'Afro-American' in a reclamation that expresses a 'preoccupation with historical roots' (Samuel, 1994: 289). Psychoanalysis can help outline this art of popular memory as a bodily imaginary that reimagines and moves the past into culturally symbolic narratives of the future. Analytic sessions are, at best, the imaginative work and reading of an experiential unconscious that recreates the past in terms of current everyday life.This political notion of a postmodern psychoanalysis does not have to leave the 'real' outside culture and representation, whether that 'real' summons up images of an 'essential' maternal body, the schizophrenically ill patient, or the racist and brutal abjection of ethnic minority groups. The Oedipal phallus represents the split between experience and language, history
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and theory, the body and knowledge. It also divides the individual from society, elevating one universal imaginary to the status of the symbolic and projecting the cultural, sexual and gendered difference of other bodily imaginaries into the abject spaces of an unrepresentable real. Going to war with Oedipal myths and cultural institutions is an anarchic attempt by Deleuze and Guattari to dismantle a dominant cultural imaginary. But there is no realm of real production or desire that lies outside the imaginary. Hence the validity of a postmodern psychoanalysis that recognises the experiential work of a cultural unconscious. The bodily and social nature of the imaginary can mobilise images of the real within situated and located communities. These images are dialectical or elaborative in the sense that they move us. Re-encountering and rememorising cultural myths of the past through the present projects us towards the future. Psychoanalysis as a practice of the bodily imaginary enables us not by retrieving the past, but by reimagining and contesting history through its performance of popular and cultural memory.
References m u m
Adorno, T. (1980) Aesthetics and Politics: Debates between Bloch, Lukdcs, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno, trans, and ed. Ronald Taylor, London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1980-9) Gerammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 7 vols, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp. — (1983) Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. — (1994) The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, eds, Gersham Scholem and Theodor Adorno, trans. M. R. Jacobson and E. Jacobsen, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Bollas, C. (1993) 'Aspects of Self Experiencing' in Being In Character, London: Routledge. — (1995) The Functions of History' in Cracking Up, London: Routledge. Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1988) The Freudian Subject, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Brooks, P. (1994) 'Changes in the Margins' in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, Oxford: Blackwell. Campbell, J. (2000) 'Maternal Memoirs and Cultural Methodologies', in Jan Campbell and Janet Harbord (eds), Temporalities: Autobiography in a Postmodern Age, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Carby, H. V. (1987) Reconstructing Womanhood: the Emergence of the African American Woman Novelist, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christian, B. (1997) 'Fixing Methodologies', in Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen (eds), Female Subjects in Black and White, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Cohen, M. (1993) Profane Illumination, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. De Certeau, M. (1988) 'Walking in the City', in The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
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Elliott, A. (1995) 'Affirmation of Primary Repression Rethought', in Psychoanalysis in Contexts, London: Routledge. Fink, B. (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanlysis: Theory and Technique, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. hooks, b. (1991) 'Postmodern Blackness', in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, London: Turnaround. Kanneh, K. (1998) '"Coming Home": Pan-Africanisms and National Identities', in African Identities, London and New York: Routledge. Henderson, M. G. (1991) 'Morrison's Beloved: Remembering the Body as Historical Text', in Hortense J. Spillers (ed.), Comparative American Identities, London: Routledge. Hull, G. (1997) 'Channeling the Ancestral Muse', in Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen (eds), Female Subjects in Black and White, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London and New York: Verso. Kovel. J. (1988) 'Narcissism and the Family', in The Radical Spirit: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Society', London: Free Association Books. Mercer, K. (1992) '"1968": Periodizing Politics and Identity', in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, London, New York: Routledge. Mohanty, C. T. (1991) 'Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses', in C. T. Mohanty et al (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morrison, T. (1987) Beloved, London: Chatto and Windus. — (1987b) 'Site of Memory', in William Zinsser (ed.), Inventing the Truth; the Art and Craft of Memoir, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. — (1989) 'The Pain Of Being Black', in Time, 22 May. — (1989b) 'Unspeakable Things Unspoken: the Afro-American Presence in American Literature', Michigan Quarterly Review, 28, 1 (Winter), p. 33. — (1992) 'Black Matters', in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagintion, London: Harvard University Press. — (1994) 'Living Memory: Meeting Toni Morrison', in Paul Gilroy (ed.), Small Acts, London, Serpents Tail. Nicholls, P. (1994) 'The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison', in Borderlines: Studies in American Culture, 1, 3 (March). Parker, R (1995) Torn in Two: the Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, London: Virago, Ricoeur, P. (1991) 'Life: a Story in Search of a Narrator', in M J . Valdes (ed.), A Ricoeur Reader, London: Harvester Weatsheaf. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory, London, Verso. Samuels, A., (1993) 'Fathers', in The Political Psyche, London, Routledge. Smith, B. (1977) Towards a Black Feminist Criticism, New York: Out and Out Press. Spillers, H. J. (1989) '"The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llible Straight": in the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers', in Cheryl A. Wall (ed.), Changing Our Own Words, New Bruswick and London: Rutgers. Shaw, C M . (1997) 'The Poetics of Identity', in Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen (eds), Female Subjects in Black and White, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Trinh T. Minh-ha, (1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Weigei, S. (1996) Body and Image-Space: Rereading Walter Benjamin, London and New York: Routledge,
Index Abel, Elizabeth 89, 216 Adorno, Theodor 231-2 aggression 2,4, 29, 35, 44, 58, 62,72, 83, 90-1, 1756,196, 200, 202, 205 Aids 161, 187, 210 Algeria 192 alienation 1, 10, 51 Althusser, Louis 24-6, 65, 81 ambivalence 2, 4, 6, 29-37,44, 58, 64,70-2, 99,133, 148,181,183,187-8,194,196-7, 200-1,239n anxiety 29, 42, 58, 61, 133-4,195 Aristotle 118,164 Artaud, Antonin 103 Austen, Jane 240 Austin, J. L. 147 Austria 48 Bakhtin, Mikhail 44-5,199, 207 Balint, Michael 57, 133 Barrett, Michele 25-6 Baudrillard, Jean 6, 73 Benjamin, Jessica 89,92-9,153-4, 156-7,162-3,176 Benjamin, Walter 14, 216, 219, 230-6, 237n, 239 Berlin 21, 233 Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis 23, 39-41 Berlin School, see Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis Bersani, Leo 144-5 Bhabha, Homi 65, 73,193-206,198n, 221 bisexuality 21, 24, 55, 81, 85, 90,132-3,176,181, 186 Blair,Tony4,14, 188,238 body, affectual 53-4, 61,71-2, 74,103,120,123, 166, 197, 221; black 116,191,198, 202, 204, 208, 221; and carnival 44-6; and culture 14,45-6, 54, 56, 60, 66, 70-1, 73,107,167,180; and desire 10, 20,44,61, 65-6, 93,136,169-71,186,202; and fascism 154; and father 96, 99, 213-14; female 25, 27-8, 31-2,34-5, 37-9,42-4,66, 83,102,110-12, 114,116,118,122,127,151,163,173,179,185, 198, 221; grotesque 44-5; and history 28, 45, 167, 216, 224-5, 227, 234; homosexual 191; hysterical 45; imaginary 2, 4,12-14, 27, 38, 45, 64-71, 74, 77,104-8, 111, 122-4,127,151,154-7,191-241; and language 14, 54,60, 62, 65, 73, 80, 120, 121, 126,145,198, 202,209,216, 224,233,236; lesbian 150-1; mad 221; male 110; and marginality 22, 44; maternal 32, 38-9, 42-4, 54-5, 59-62, 64, 66,68,76-8,92-3, 97, 99,102-12,115-16,119, 122-3,126,145,185-6,191,195,197,204,220, 223, 225, 228, 240; mind/body dualism 20,27, 345,49, 53-6,156,166-8,170,180,191,197,241;
and narrative 2, 5, 14, 39,43 45, 51, 56, 68,45, 63, 67,73,144, 216, 225, 234, 236; phaliocentric 65; and pleasure 49, 108; politics of 45-6, 165, 170; and race 39; and the real 77, 121-3, 125-6, 151, 167,171,192,196-7, 203-4,209-10,224-5,227, 232-3; rebellion of 39; Reich on 40, 42; repression of 39,42-4,44-5,62,64-5,71,73,169,184,198; return to 61, 66; schizophrenic 10, 65; and sexuality 35, 40,44,162-3; and society 237; unconscious 3, 5,14, 52-4,61-2,65,71,156,180, 182-3, 185, 221,229, 234; writing the 115-20 Bollas, Christopher 4,11-13, 59-62, 66,71,124-7, 171, 214,216,218,222-3,226-7,229-30,234-5 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 68-72,152, 174-5,181, 237, 240 Bosnia 4, 30,66 Bourdieu, Pierre 165 Bowlby,John34, 57 Bowlby, Rachel 99 Braidotti, Rosi 118,121,170,179-80 Breton, Andre" 231 Britain 1, 21, 27,49, 51-2,72,99,120,138, 227, 240 British Institute of Psychoanalysis 131 British School 21,23,26,39 Brooks, Peter 5, 236 Brown, Norman O. 137 Buder, Judith 65,116,73, 99,117,120,147-54, 157,159,161,164,178-9,181-2,186-7,237 capitalism 1, 6, 9-11, 24, 38-40, 51, 85,132,135, 137,185, 200,208, 229-30, 233,239 Carby, Hazel 218 carnival 44-6, 142 Carter, Angela 116 castration 24, 29,43, 54-5, 61-2, 76, 81, 83, 85, 87, 93,104-6,108-9,112-13,116,118-19,122-3, 133-4,145-7,150-1,185,187,191,195,197, 221 Castoriadis, Cornelius 11, 127, 182-4, 187, 227, 229, 236-7 Chanter, Tina 163-4, 166,174 Charcot, Jean 71 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 88 child abuse 7, 12,66, 125 Chodorow, N. 26-7, 84-95, 99,120 Christian, Barbara 216, 229 citizenship 4, 20, 36, 91, 207 civilisation 1, 20, 38, 50, 54, 62, 66,132, 137, 139, 191,221 Cixous, Helene 98, 102 class 2,20, 22,24-6, 33,35,46, 52,61,14, 85, 91,
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98, 132, 134, 136-7,143-4,160, 162, 165, 200, 206-8,218 Clinton, Bill 4 Cohen, Margaret 232 Cold War 2 1 , 1 4 7 colonialism 1, 2, 4, 19, 147, 191-217, 221, 224, 229 commodification 6, 9, 38, 99, 230-2, 239 communism 2 1 , 40, 138, 155, 227 consumerism 1, 6, 51, 226 Cornell, Drusilla 115-18, 120 culture, and the body 14, 45-6, 54, 56, 60, 66, 70-1, 73, 107, 167, 180; culturalism 23, 27, 57; and politics 220, 237; popular 4, 45; and psychoanalysis 57, 68, 7 3 , 234; studies 22, 27, 4 1 , 207, 226, 234; unconscious 14, 62-3, 216, 218-41 cyborg 180 Da Vinci, Leonardo 134 Dalai, Farhad 211-12 De Beauvoir, Simone 23, 98, 106 De Certeau, Michel 230, 239 De Lauretis, Teresa 92, 94, 144-7, 150-1, 164, 174, 186 death drive 3, 28-31, 36-9, 42-6, 58, 61-3, 66-7, 6970, 72, 97, 109, 113, 117, 122-3, 126, 144, 153-4, 168, 176, 181-3, 187, 199, 221, 237, 239 Deleuze, G. 9-11, 65, 134-5, 147, 154-6, 166-72, 180,185,208,229,241 Derrida, Jacques 115-16, 136, 193 Descartes, Rene- 19, 51, 54, 156, 166, 167 dialogic process 11, 44-6, 60, 67-8, 70-2, 74, 142-4, 152-3,193-4,199-200, 207, 231, 234 Dinnerstein, Dorothy 26, 84-5, 87 Doane, Janice 32, 86 Doane, Mary Ann 5 Dollimore, Jonathan 137-8, 140, 142-4, 147 Dora (patient of Freud) 5, 173-4, 177-8 Du Bois, W . E. B. 220 Dutoit, Ulysse 145 Dworkin, Andrea 31 Ecole Freudienne 108 ego 2 0 , 4 0 , 4 4 , 4 6 , 52-3, 56-8, 63-4, 77, 80,131-4, 137,155-6, 171,181, 183,187, 209, 237; narcissistic 48-53, 59-61, 63, 66-8, 70-3, 95, 237; realist 48-53, 58-61, 6 3 , 67-8, 71-3, 95 Eissler, Dr K. R. 169 Elliott, Anthony 8, 127, 227, 238 Enlightenment 6, 20, 27, 49, 51, 54, 191, 193, 196 envy 27, 72, 175-6, 182, 186, 237; penis envy 23-4, 5 5 , 8 1 , 150; womb envy 23 Erikson, Erik 52, 56 Ernst, Sheila 86 Eros 44, 46; see also life drive, pleasure ethics 1-4, 6-7, 30, 32, 38, 4 3 , 66, 68, 70, 103, 106-7, 109,114, 118, 132,154, 159,164-5,167-9,171-2, 181,211,237-8 everyday life 2-3, 154, 212-13, 226-32, 239-40 Fairburn, W . R. D. 57-9 family 8-9, 19, 25, 30, 33-4, 38-41, 63, 94, 131-6, 1 5 5 , 1 6 8 - 7 0 , 1 7 7 - 8 , 1 8 2 , 185,187-8, 202,206,
PHALLUS
208, 218, 224; daughter/father relationship 55, 934, 96, 153, 173-4, 176; father/son relationship 1378, 148, 169; see also mother, patriarchy Fanon, Frantz 14, 65, 191-217, 198n, 219, 221, 227, 233 fascism 2 1 , 66, 154-5, 175, 208, 231 Felman, Sandor S. 133 feminism, and African-American texts 216; and the body 39, 168; and the bodily imaginary 14, 74, 209; de Beauvoir's legacy to 98; and the dialogic process 67; and Freud 19, 2 1 , 23-4, 4 1 , 108; French 98-9, 102, 111; and gender debates 26; and history 25, 27; and homosexuality 100, 146, 161-2, 174, 179; and identity 121; and imaginary self 72; Kristeva and 103, 105-7; and Lacan 2 1 , 3 9 , 4 1 , 74, 76, 98, 10227, 163, 195, 239-40; and Marx 21-2, 24-5, 207, 215; and the mother 33-6; and narcissism 39, 49; and object relations 2 1 , 26, 32, 541, 73-4, 76, 83100; and oedipal discourse 22, 35; and patriarchy 25; and phallocentrism 55-6, 65, 76; and politics 25, 74, 159; and postcolonialism 100; post-feminism 98; and postmodernism 193; and psychoanalysis 1923, 25-8, 34-5, 3 9 , 4 6 , 55-6,65, 7 3 - 4 , 7 6 - 1 0 1 , 1 2 1 , 127, 146, 191, 215, 228; and Reich 169; and sexual difference 5 1 , 168; and social roles of women 34; and socialism 24-5, 27; and therapy 33; and violence 31; white 218, 229 Fenichel, Otto 2 1 , 39-41 Ferenczi, Sandor 136 fetishism 144-6, 150, 164, 194-5, 210 Figes, Eva 24 film studies 3, 14, 72, 215-16, 226, 228, 234, 237n, 239 Fink, Bruce 221 Firestone, Shulamith 24 Flax, Jane 89-91 Foucault, Michel 134-5, 138-44, 147, 149-50, 152, 154, 155, 159-60, 164, 180, 193n, 200 France 154, 191-2 Frankfort School 6, 230, 233 Freud, Sigmund/and Benjamin (Walter) 233; biologism in 26; Borch-Jacobsen on 68, 7 1 ; in Britain 2 1 , 48; Butler on 148, 152, 154; case history approach of 5, 239; and castration 83; and catharsis 45; and civilisation 1, 66; and cotton reel (Fort Da) game 6 1 , 70, 176; culturalist critique of 57; de Beauvoir on 23; death drive in 3, 42, 44, 97, 109; and decentred ego 209; and Dora 5, 173-4, 177-8; dream interpretation in 183, 194, 212-13, 229, 240; and ethics 169; faith in science 49; Fanon on 192; feminism and 19, 2 1 , 23-4, 4 1 , 108; and fetishism 164, 194-5, 210; Foucault on 138-44, 147, 149; Fuss on 174; Green on 52-3; and group mentality 209; homophobia in 19, 52; and homosexuality 132-4, 136, 141; and hysteria 45, 177; and the imaginary 119, 151, 215, 221; Irigaray on 66; and Jung 8, 151, 212-13; Klein on 28; and Little Hans 5; and Marx 39, 4 1 , 57, 72, 135; and materialism 169; and the maternal body 120; melancholy in 186-7; Mitchell on 2 1 , 23-5, 3 5 , 4 1 ; on narcissism 37-8, 44, 50, 54, 56, 58, 7 1 , 7 6 , 95, 106; neoFreudians 89; Oedipal discourse in 2, 6-7, 9, 19, 2 1 ,
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80, 83, 90, 105, 113,152, 154, 175, 191, 227, 228; Hodges, Devon 32, 86 Oedipus complex in 51-2, 54-6,108,119, 169, 185; homophobia 19, 52,108,131-4,141-2,146,161-2, 169,175,178,206 and patriarchy 23, 25, 54; and perverse desire 141-5, 164; pessimism of 1, 62; phallocentrism in 23-4, 29, homosexuality, activism 181; and ambivalence 148; 32, 54-5, 58,76-7, 80-1,88, 94,167; and politics and bodily imaginary 14, 157, 159-90, 209; and the 41, 48, 51-2,169; post-Freudians 56-7; body 191; demonisation of 175; and desire 146, postmodernism and 6-7', 54; poststructuralism and 173, 180, 182, 185-9; and dialogic process 67; 52; and racism 209; realist and narcissistic ego in 49disavowal of 148-9, 161; Fanon on 205-6; feminism 52; Reich and 40,151,169-70,206, 209; on and 100,138,146,159,161-2,174,179; Freud and representation 72; on repression 7-9, 28,42,46, 56, 132-3,136,141; and identity 159,164,177,181; 67, 78,125,139,142-5,169-70,222-3; Rose on imaginary of 186, 210; and intersubjective relations 42; seduction theory of 7-8, 67, 69,71,177; and 137, 153-4; Irigaray on 108; Klein on 133-4; and sexism 24; and slavery 191; and subjectivity 44; Lacan 96,195; and language 140; and loss 148-9; unconscious in 9,11-12, 28,40,45, 55,60, 113-14, and love 157,172,174,186; love of father 154; love 124,182-3, 212, 222, 227, 231; and Wolfman 5, 7of heterosexual women by homosexual men 138; 8,54 love of mother 154; and Marx 207; and melancholia 148-9; and narcissism 39,49, 51, 133-4; and Freely, Maureen 34 narrative 141-2; and Oedipal symbolic 107, 146; as Freud, Anna 48, 56, 59 parents 188;pathologisationof 132, 134-5,145-6, Friedan, Betty 24 174,178,189; and performativity 181; and Fromm, Erich 21, 39, 57 perversion 132-47,174,178,186-7,189,191,206, Frosh, Stephen 4, 30, 38,155-6 221; and politics 74, 136, 138,181; and power 139Fuss, Diana 115,118,174-5,178, 203n, 205-6 41; and psychoanalysis 19, 23, 46, 65,73-4, 87, 99, 127,131-58,159-90, 191, 221; and repression 205; Gallop, Jane 115 rights 133, 178,186; subcultures 186; as teachers Gatens, Moira 164-71, 174 175, 178; and violence 142; see also lesbianism Gates, Henry Louis 192 gay sexuality see homosexuality, lesbianism genocide 4 German Communist Party 40 Germany 147 Gide, Andre" 140 Gilligan, Carol 89 Gilroy, Paul 20, 207, 219-20 Girard, Rene" 42 Gordon, Lewis R. 198 Gramsci, Antonio 208 Green, Andre" 52-3, 120 Gross, Otto 20-1, 39 Grosz, Elizabeth 73,146,151,164, 215 Guatemala 199 Guattari, F. 9-11,65,134-5,147,154-6,168-72,185, 208, 229, 241 guilt 30, 33, 35, 58,61-2,203 Gulf War 6, 30,66 Guntrip, Harry 57-8 Habermas, Jurgen 6 Hall, Gary 68 Hall, Stuart 22n, 207, 220 Haraway, Donna 180 Harbord, Janet 204 Hartmann, Heinz 52, 56 Heaney, Seamus 13 Heidegger, Martin 197 Henderson, Mae G. 222-3 heterosexuality 19,22, 25,40, 52, 55, 80, 85, 92-4, 98,104,131-8,142-3,145,148-51,157,159,161, 164,172-7,179,181,185-6,188,205-7,210 Hirsch, Marianne 89 Hider, Adolf 175, 208 Hobbes, Thomas 166,170 Hocquenghem, Guy 134-9, 147,157,186
hooks, bell 207, 220 Homey, Karen 21,23, 32, 55, 57, 80, 84, 88,119, 191 Hull, Gloria 228-9 Husserl, Edmund 197 Hutcheon, Linda 193 hypnotism 68-9, 71, 175 hysteria 7, 44-5, 66-7, 71,102-3,106,110,123,136, 171,173,175,177-8 id 3, 5,10,40,44,49-50,52-3, 56,77,172,209,221 ideology 9,21,24-7,31,34,41,65-6,90, 92,162, 165-6,193,208,214 imaginaries, archaeology of 234; black 194, 201,21819; bodily 2,4,12-14,27,38,45,64-71,74,77, 104-8, 111, 122-4,127,151,154-7,191-241; child's 77; colonial 191-216, 221, 224; cultural 24, 172-3, 205, 210,216, 218, 241; ethical 66, 70; experiential 12, 229, 240; female 12, 38, 103, 108, 110-22,126,151,163,171,175,178-9,186,203, 207; Freud and 7; historicised 215; homoerotic 210; homosexual 186; ideology 24, 65; individual 227, 236, 238; Kristeva's 107; Lacan and 7, 51; and language 236; lost 181-7; Lyotard and 11; male 37, 42,108,114,122,161,172,179,187,198,201-2, 205; maternal 77, 92,103-4,107,127, 205, 238; mental 123; mother-daughter 66; mythical 233; narcissistic 36-8,42, 51,63,77; and narrative 1214,127; new 181-7; oedipal 2,181-7,191, 207, 209; and psychoanalysis 73; phallic 175; political 121, 203; 'primitive' 2; psychic 184; racist 209; real 61,73,111; in Reich 3; rememory and 14; social 11, 110,152,165-71,185-8,208,227-9,233-8; spatial 230; symbolic 4,12-14,27,43,45,63-4,77,11314,121-3,125-7,151-2,154,156,163,171,182, 185,188,192,194, 202,205,210,224,226-7,
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234, 238-9, 241; and the unconscious 14, 63-4, 235, 239; white 191-216, 221, 224 imagined communities 207-8 incest 8, 132, 137, 148 India 201 Institute of Psychoanalysis 188 International Psychoanalytic Association 21 Iraq 4 Irigaray, Luce 12-13, 22, 27, 35-9, 42-4, 66, 69-72, 83, 97-9, 102-3,105,108-27, 131,136,145,1512, 156-7, 161-80, 187, 195, 197,198n, 202-3, 203n, 205-7, 215, 218, 227, 234, 236-8 Italy 138
PHALLUS
narcissistic imaginary 51; and object relations approach 26, 99, 119-21; and Oedipal discourse 13,13, 56,65-6, 77, 90,111,131,146,154,171, 179, 191, 203, 227-8; on Oedipus complex 5, 51, 106; phallocentrism of 32, 80, 83, 86, 91, 94-5, 98, 103, 105, 107,117-19, 122,126,134,161,167, 175; political pessimism of 115-16; postmodernism and 9, 61, 63-4; poststructuralism and 49, 63-4, 72, 76, 198n, 226, 239; on psychosis 221; and race 195; and the real 83, 126, 168, 196; on repression 14950, 170, 213; on representation 72, 193; Rose and 27-8; Sayers and 32; on sexual difference 22, 27, 64, 78, 92, 95, 98; on subjectivity 12, 22, 71, 77, 78; on the symbolic 11,30-1,45,66,77, 116, 123,126, 149-50,171, 195, 201, 205; textual emphasis in 67, Jacoby, Russell 20 73; on the unconscious 9, 53, 64, 67,76, 113-14, Jameson, Frederic 9-10, 180 114n, 182, 196, 209; Whitford and 114 Janet, Pierre 71 Jones, Ann Rosalind 107 lack 106,108-9,116,164,167,195-6 Jones, Ernest 21, 23, 48, 55, 80-1, 84, 119 Laclau, E. 207 puissance 109-10 Laing, R. D. 21, 41, 135, 155-6, 215 Joyce, James 103 Laplanche, Jean 8-9, 66-7, 69, 144, 152 Lasch, Christopher 38 Jung, Carl 3-4, 8, 14, 20, 36, 39, 82, 151, 210-15, Lautreamont, Comte de 103 219,221,231,233 law 1-2, 4, 14, 31-2, 37, 44-5, 54-6, 61,65-6, 69, 72, Kahn, Coppelia 89 92, 97, 99, 103, 105-6, 108, 112-13, 123, 132, 141, Kanneh, Kadiatu 212, 220 143, 147, 149-50, 152-5, 160,168,175,177-8, 181, 188,214,216 Kaplan, Cora 25 Kernberg, Otto 62 Lawrence, Stephen 4 Kestenberg, Judith S. 88 lesbianism, and the body 150-1; and the bodily imaginary 14; desire 145-6, 164, 173, 175, 177-8, Klein, Melanie 3, 21, 23, 28-33, 35, 37, 51, 55, 57-9, 185-6; and the family 94, \77',femme237; and 61-2,66, 69-70, 80, 84, 86, 88,104-5,119-20, fetishism 145-6; Hocquenghem and 136; and 133-4,148,175,181-3,186-7,237 identity 159, 161, 177, 188; Kristeva and 105-6, Kohut, Heinz 62 132, 176-7; love 178; marginality of 160, 188; and Kosovo 4 the mother 145; and the maternal body 149; and Kovel, Joel 38-9, 155-6, 208-9, 239 narcissism 37; and Oedipal discourse 145; and Kristeva, Julia 1, 28, 30-2, 36-8, 43-5, 66, 98-9, 102psychoanalysis 145, 177-8; and parental role 184, 5,107-9, 111, 116, 120, 123,126,131-2,149, 174 238; pathologisation of 132,145-6, 161, 176-7; phallus 65, 147-53, 179, 237; and psychosis 176-7; Lacan, Jacques, and Althusser 24-5, 65; and antiand sexuality 173-4, 179, 188; see also homosexuality empiricism 28; Bhabha and 194-8; and the binary Levi-Strauss, Claude 64, 179, 208 subject 60; Butler and 152, 154; on castration 83, libido 6,10-11, 40-1, 50-1, 65, 83,119,121,124, 111-12, 119; Cixous and 98; Cornell and 115-16; 134-5,141,145,169,178 on the death drive 3; and deconstruction 9, 54, 1312, 215; Deleuze and Guattari on 135; on desire 31, life drive 29, 40, 42-4, 69, 144 literature 2, 4,13-14, 24, 27, 45, 72, 88-9,102-4, 95; Fanon and 194, 197-8, 201-2, 206; on father figure 213; feminism and 21, 25-7, 41, 76, 80-3, 94, 106,127,135,159,215-16, 222-6, 228, 234-6, 239 Little Hans (patient of Freud) 5 98-9, 102-27, 163,195, 239-40; and the female body 121; and the female imaginary 111, 151, 187; London 33, 48, 86 and female sexuality 56; and fetishism 210; on Freud loss 10,13, 38, 51, 54-5,61, 83-4,148-9,152-3,176, 181-3,186-8 24-5, 76; and history 28; Hocquenghem on 134; Lyotard, Jean Francois 6, 10-11, 183 and homosexuality 96, 195; and identity 7, 19; and the imaginary 45, 72, 77, 119, 123, 126, 151, 166, madness 102-3, 126, 135, 155, 219-21, 239; see also 171, 195, 201-2, 205, 215, 221; Irigaray on 98, psychosis 108, 112,117, 119, 122,145, 197-8, 202, 205; Kristeva on 66, 98; on lack 83-4, 164; and language Maguire, Maggie 33, 86-7 62, 64, 74, 99, 121, 170, 175, 182, 198, 202, 213, Mallarme, Stephane 103 Mannoni, O. 201 239-40; on linguistic unconscious 11, 65; and masquerade 200, 203, 203n, 210; and the maternal Mapplethorpe, Robert 210 Marcuse, Herbert 39, 137 body 120; on the mirror stage 51, 63, 77, 78, 111, marginality 14,19, 22, 44, 52, 65, 74, 107, 140-3, 127, 195, 197, 202; Mitchell and 21, 24-7, 81; on 160, 188, 194, 199, 200, 228 mother's influence 41, 83, 91, 120; on narcissism Martinique 192 49, 54, 56, 63, 78; on narcissistic ego 63; on
S I T U A T I N G THE CULTURAL UNCONSCIOUS Marxism 2,6, 20-2, 24-5, 35, 39-41, 57, 68, 72-3, 81, 127,135,147,149,165-6,192,194,198-200,2078,215,230,232-3 masochism 31,42, 44, 92,113, 144 Masson, Jeffrey 67, 71 materialism 20, 22-3, 25-8, 33-4, 36, 38-43, 46,72-4, 77-8,121,127,141-3,149-50,155,164,167-8, 170,179,185,188,199,232 melancholy 148-9, 181-2,186-7 memory 2-3, 7,12-13, 125-6, 218-41; see also rememory Menchu, Rigoberta 199-200 Mercer, Kobena 207-8,210, 229, 238 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 165, 197 metonymy 121,115,196 Mieli, Mario 137-9 Millett, Kate 24-6 mimesis 69-72,116-18,148,172-3,175-6,178-82, 185,203,237,240 mimicry 200-7, 210 mirror stage 50,63,77-8,111,127,146,195,197, 202 misogyny 32, 39 Mitchell, Juliet 21-7, 35, 39-41, 65, 81-2, 84, 99,131, 133 Mitterand, President Francois 160 modernity 1, 6, 20, 30, 58, 65, 191, 219-20, 230-2 modernism 2, 5-6, 8, 20, 191-2, 208 Moglen, Helen 216 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 218 Morrison, Toni 14, 20,116, 216, 218-20, 222-9, 2337 mother, ambivalence 28, 34-7, 58, 70-1, 99, 183, 239n; body of 32, 38-9, 43-4, 54, 61-2, 64, 66, 68, 76-8, 83, 92-3, 97,99,102-5,107-8,110-12,11516,119,122-3,126,145,185,191,195,197,204, 220, 223, 225, 228, 240; breast 23, 29, 58, 183, 187; castration of 134; and child (dyad) 19, 23, 289, 57-9, 72, 81-2,84,87, 91, 97,102,114,124, 195-6, 239; and daughter 32-3, 36-7, 55,66,70-1, 76, 84-6, 89,91-3,96,106,109-10,112,145-6, 148,153,171-2,174, 176-7,184,237-8; desire of/for 33,35-7, 54-5,61,71,81,83,91,96-7,99, 111,173,177, 184,195, 238; 'good-enough' 32, 35, 59,70,78-9,83,86,91,124; ideal 32-3,35,76, 81, 83, 86-rS, 90-2, 94, 96,99,114; imaginary of 10, 77,103-4, 107, 127,185, 205; Klein and 23, 28; Lacan and 4l, 83, 91,120; lesbian 35, 145; murder of 36-8, 43-4, 97, 104-6; and narcissism 36,70-1, 238; object relations and 26, 214; omnipotence of 85, 92, 96-7,104,153,176,182-3,187; and race 33,35; and rememory 13; and repression 19-20, 223, 228; reproduction of mothering 84-5; sacrifice by 33,38,43,66,70,104,106^239; separation from 29, 31, 34-6, 44, 58-9, 61, 78, 81-2, 84, 87, 92,97,104,134,145-6,182-3,187,195-6,220; and son 36, 70, 84, 92,110,138,169; and subjectivity 30, 35-6, 44,71, 78; and the symbolic 32, 36-7, 43, 54, 66,157, 238; Thatcherism and 31; and the unconscious 58-60, 230; and violence 30-2, 34, 37-8, 44; in the West 33; and women's language
247
102-3; and working women 34 Mouffe, Chantal 207 myth 5, 9,14,24,39, 82,115-16,120,140,155-6, 170-2,176,179,203,205-15,218-41 narrative 5, 7-9,12-14,22, 60, 63,67,73, 89, 99, 105,107,124-7,141-4,151,163,167,171,175-6, 178,193,199-200,210,212-13,215-16,218,220, 222-8,230,234-7,239 Nazism 21,40,48, 147,192, 214, 233 neurosis 7, 56,178,186,197, 221 Nicholls, Pete 223 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6 Northern Ireland 200 object relations school 21, 26, 28, 32,37, 51-100, 105,107,119-21,133,149,153,161,163,229 O'Connor, Noreen 177,188 orientalism 194, 200 painting 123, 127, 236 Papoulias, Tina 7 paranoia 29-30, 58 Parker, Rozsika 35-6, 239n patriarchy, culture 76, 81, 83, 86, 91-2, 95,103-4, 107, 112, 173; family 38-9, 135; father/daughter relationship 55, 93-4, 96,153, 173-4,176; father/son relationship 137-8, 148,169; symbolic 27,31-2,38,76-7,102-5,107, 111, 120,149,175, 177,238 performativity 99, 116, 117, 147-9, 150, 151, 157, 159,160,161,164,178,179,181-2,200,203, 220, 237, 240,241 Philadelphia Association 52 Phillips, Adam 182 Pile, Steve 192 Plato 117 Plaza, Monique 179 pleasure 42,44,46,49-50, 52, 54, 56-7,61, 67,6970,137, 172,182-3 politics, aestheticisation of 155; and the body 45-6, 165, 170; and the bodily imaginary 27, 219; and culture 220, 237; and desire 51; of early psychoanalysts 20; and everyday life 3; of experience 72, 118; and family 170, 188; feminism and 159; and the female imaginary 111; Freud and48, 67', and history 20; homosexuality and 136, 138,181; hysteria and 173; imaginary of 121; and imaginaries 27, 121, 203, 219; Kristeva and 107; literature and 104, 106-7; and marginality 107; mother and 32, 36; psychoanalysis and 2-3, 20-2,39-40, 43,46, 678,72, 74,127,132,143,147,168,170,201,215, 234, 240; and the personal 25; postmodernism and 180; Reich and 3; and the unconscious 27, 31,45-6, 237 Pontalis, J.-B. 8, 152 postcolonialism, and the bodily imaginary 14; and deconstruction 200; and the dialogic process 67; Fanon's influence on 191-204; and feminism 100; and Marx 192, 198-200; and materialism 46; and the narcissistic ego 49, 51; and psychoanalysis 19, 23, 65, 73-4, 87,191-217, 221; and postmodernism
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192-3, 198-200, 216; and politics 74; and poststructuralism 192-4, 198; and race 30 postmodernism 1, 2, 5, 13, 20, 38, 43, 51, 54, 60-1, 63-5, 73-4, 78, 87-97, 99,124,156, 168,180, 193, 198, 207-9, 216, 219, 222, 227-30, 234-7, 239 poststructuralism 2, 3, 19, 21-2, 30, 46, 49, 51-3, 601, 63-8, 71-4, 76, 88, 95, 99,120,134, 146,192-4, 197-8, 209, 222, 226, 239 Powell, Enoch 208, 229 pregnancy 103, 107 psychosis 1, 10, 58, 77, 83, 106-7, 112, 116, 122, 126, 132,149, 155-6, 175-7, 184-5, 187, 204-5, 219-21 queer sexuality see homosexuality, lesbianism race 2, 4-5, 20, 22, 30, 33, 35, 39, 43, 52, 60-1, 67, 74, 91, 98-9,107, 132, 134, 142-3, 147, 160-2, 175, 191-217, 218, 220-2, 229, 240 Reagan, Ronald 160 reality principle 41,56 Reich, Wilhelm 3, 8, 10, 20-1, 39-44, 137-9, 151, 169-70, 172, 180, 206, 208-9, 215, 233 rememory 2, 8-9, 13-14, 170, 206-7, 214-16, 218-26, 223-4, 230, 234, 236-8, 241 Rich, Adrienne 34-5, 145 Ricoeur, Paul 235 Riley, Denise 34 Roosevelt, F. D. 48 Rose, Jacqueline 3, 8, 23, 27-8, 30-1, 36-7, 39-40, 42, 44, 46, 62-3, 65, 67, 73, 81-2, 84-5, 112, 134,198n Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 33 Rubin, Gayle 162 Rustin, Michael 29-30 Rwanda 4 Ryan, Joanna 177, 188 sadism 31, 144 Said, Edward 193-4, 196, 198 Samuels, Andrew 4, 36, 82, 99, 120, 210-11, 213, 239n Samuels, Raphael 240 San Juan, Jr, E. 198-200 Sartre, Jean-Paul 198 Sass, Louis A. 9-10 Saussure, Ferdinand de 64, 76 Sayers, Janet 32, 86 schizoanalysis 135, 155, 171, 185 schizophrenia 9-11,65, 135, 155-6, 170, 185,234, 239 Scholem, Gerhard 231 Schor, Naomi 117-18 Sedgwick, Eve Kososfsky 159-64, 174, 179, 186 seduction 7-8, 66-7, 69, 71, 109, 177-8 Segal, Hannah 134 Serbia 4 Shaw, Carolyn Martin 228-9 single parents 94, 106, 177, 188 slavery 20, 191, 201, 205, 219-20, 222-3, 225-6, 229, 236 Smith, Barbara 218 Socarides, C. W. 133 socialism 21, 24-5, 27-8, 34, 39, 155, 238
PHALLUS
South Africa 200 Spillers, Hortense 226 Spinoza, Baruch 165-8, 171, 180 Spivak, Gayatri 193, 198 Sprengnether, Madelon 91-2, 96 St Augustine 140 Stallybrass, Peter 44-5, 142-4 Stern, Daniel 82 Stoller, Robert J. 26, 89, 163, 165-6 Strachey, Dorothy 178 Sultan, Harry 57 superego 77, 187 symbolic, female 103, 113-17, 121-2, 171; and the imaginary 4, 12-14, 27, 43, 45,63-4, 77, 113-14, 121-3, 125-7, 151-2, 154, 156,163, 171,182,185, 188, 192, 194, 202, 205, 210, 224, 226-7, 234, 238-9, 241; patriarchal 27, 31-2, 38, 76-7, 102-5, 107,111,120,149, 175,177,238 Tatchell, Peter 141 textuality 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 28, 48, 54, 61, 67, 73, 89, 117, 125, 167, 181, 208, 216, 219-20, 222-6, 229 Thanatos 44; see also death drive Thatcher, Margaret 3, 31, 37, 63, 208, 229, 238, 240 Third World 192 transexuality 99, 136-7, 148, 150 transference 68, 105, 123-5, 175, 177-8, 197, 214, 227-8, 235-6 Trinh T. Minh-ha 218 United States 1, 21, 26, 49, 52, 57, 62, 89, 99, 147, 199, 209-10, 227, 240 Utopia 10-11,29, 43-4, 108, 111-12, 114-17, 120, 138-9,151,176,231 Vienna 21, 48 Vienna School 23, 39 Walker, Alice 211-12, 218 Weed, Elizabeth 117-18 Weigel, Siegfried 232-3 West, Cornel 220 Western world 1, 4-5, 14, 33, 42, 51, 99, 102, 108, 110, 122,131, 154-5, 160-1,164, 171,173, 191-3, 209-10,215-16,219,228 White, Alan 44-5, 142-4 Whitford, Margaret 112-15,117, 119-20, 165 Wilde, Oscar 140 Winnicott, D. 28, 32-3, 35, 37, 42, 51, 56-7, 59-63, 70-1, 78-80, 83-4, 86, 88, 91, 93,95, 97-8,105, 111, 120, 123-4, 153, 187,227,239 Wittig, Monique 179 Wolfman (patient of Freud) 5,7-8, 54 Wollstonecraft, Mary 33 Women's Therapy Centre 86 Woolf, Virginia 23 writing 115-20 Young, Robert 20, 22, 25 Zizek, Slavoj 65-6
