|
[35]
the first phases
of sexual development unfold in precisely the same way in boys and girls
alike. This view finds its justification in the fact that the erogenous
zones are the same and playa similar role: they are sources of excitement
and of satisfaction of the so-called "component instincts."
The mouth and the anus are the privileged erogenous zones, but the genital
organs also come into play, for although they have not yet subordinated
all the component instincts to the "sexual" or reproductive
function, they themselves intervene as erogenous zones particularly
in masturbation.
The primacy of the male organ
It does not seem to be a problem for Freud that the mouth and anus are
"neutral" from the standpoint of sexual difference. As for
the identity of the genital zones themselves, he draws upon biology
and upon his own analytical observations to state that for the little
girl the clitoris alone is involved at this period of her sexual development
and that the clitoris can be considered a truncated penis, a "smaller"
penis, an "embryological relic proving the bisexual nature of woman,"
"homologous to the masculine genital zone of the glans penis."
The little girl is then indeed a little man, and all her sexual drives
and pleasures, the masturbatory ones in particular, are in fact "masculine."
These assertions
among others are developed in the "Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, "2 in which it is asserted that the hypothesis of a
single identical genital apparatus-the male organ-is fundamental in
order to account for the infantile sexual organization of both sexes.
Freud thus maintains with consistency that the libido is always masculine,
whether it is manifested in males or females, whether the desired object
is woman or man. This idea, relative both to the primacy of the penis
and to the necessarily masculine character of the libido, presides,
as we
---------------------------
2"Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, " 7:125-243 (especially
the third of these essays, in the 1915 version and later).
[36]
shall see, over
the problematics of castration as developed by Freud. Before we reach
that point, we must stop to consider some implications of this "beginning"
of the process of be coming a woman.
Consequences for female infantile genitality
The little girl, according to Freud, does not lag behind the boy in
terms of the energy of her component instincts. For example, "her
aggressive impulses leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance
and violence" ("Femininity," p. 118); likewise, it has
been possible to observe the "incredible phallic activity of the
girl" (ibid., p. 130). Now in order for "femininity"
to arise, a much greater repression of the aforementioned instincts
will be required of the little girl, and, in particular, the transformation
of her sexual "activity" into its opposite: "passivity."
Thus the component instincts, in particular the sadoanal and also the
scoptophilic ones, the most insistent of all, will ultimately be distributed
in a harmonious complementarity: the tendency toward self-appropriation
will find its complement in the desire to be possessed, the pleasure
of causing suffering will be complemented by feminine masochism, the
desire to see by "masks" and modesty that evoke the desire
to exhibit oneself, and so on. The difference between the sexes ultimately
cuts back through early childhood, dividing up functions and sexual
roles: "maleness combines [the factors of] subject, activity, and
possession of the penis; femaleness takes over [those of] object and
passivity" and the castrated genital organ.3 But this distribution,
after the fact, of the component instincts is not inscribed in the sexual
activity of early childhood, and Freud has little to say about the effects
of the repression for /by women of this infantile sexual energy. He
stresses, however, that femininity is characterized, and must be characterized,
by an earlier and
------------------------
3"The Infantile Genital Organization: An Interpolation into the
Theory of Sexuality," 19:145.
[37]
more inflexible
repression of the sexual drives and a stronger tendency toward passivity.
In the final analysis, it is as a little man that the little girl loves
her mother. The specific relation of the girl-woman to the mother-woman
receives very little attention from Freud. And he turns back only belatedly
to the girl's pre-Oedipal stage as a largely neglected field of investigation.
But for a long time, and even at the last, he considers the girl's desire
for her mother to be a "masculine," "phallic" desire.
This accounts for the girl's necessary renunciation of the tie to her
mother, and, moreover, for her "hatred" of her mother, when
she discovers that in relation to the valued genital organ she herself
is castrated, and that the same is true of every woman, her mother included.
The Pathology
of the Component Instincts
Freud's analysis of the component instincts is elaborated in terms of
the desires for anatomical transgression whose traumatizing repression
he observes in neurosis, and whose realization he notes in cases of
perversion: the oral and anal mucus zones are overcathected with respect
to the genital zones; and by the same token, fantasies and sexual behavior
of the sadomasochistic, voyeurist, and exhibitionist types are predominant.
If Freud makes inferences as to the infantile sexuality of neurotics
and perverts on the basis of their symptomatology, he indicates at the
same time that these symptoms result either from a congenital disposition
(here again we see the anatomical basis of his theory) or from arrested
sexual development. Thus female sexuality could be disturbed either
through an anatomical "error" ("hermaphroditic ovaries"
determining a case of homosexuality, for example)4 or else by arrested
development at a particular moment in the process of becoming a woman:
-------------------------
4"The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,"
18:172.
[38]
thus the prevalence
of the oral mucus areas that are found, also, in homosexuality. As for
the scoptophilic and sadomasochistic instincts, they appear so significant
that Freud does not exclude them from genital organization; he reexamines
them in that context while differentiating them sexually-here we should
recall the opposition between seeing and being seen, causing to suffer
and suffering. It does not follow however that a sexual relationship
resolved at this level would fail to be, in Freud's eyes, pathological.
Feminine sexual pathology thus has to be interpreted, in pre-Oedipal
terms, as a fixation on the cathexis of the oral mucus region, but also
on exhibitionism and masochism. To be sure, other events may produce
various forms of "regression," qualified as morbid, to the
pregenital phases. In order to envisage such regressions, we shall have
to retrace Freud's story of the "development of a normal woman,"
and more specifically the little girl's relation to the castration complex.
The Specificity
of the Feminine Castration Complex
If the castration complex marks the decline of the Oedipus complex for
the boy, the same is not true-the reverse is more or less true-for the
girl. What does this mean? The boy's castration complex arises in the
period when he observes that the penis or male member that he values
so highly is not necessarily a part of the body, that certain people-his
sister, his little playmates-do not have one. A chance glimpse of a
girl's genital organs provides the occasion for such a discovery. If
the boy's first reaction is to deny what he has seen, to attribute a
penis, in spite of everything, to his sister, to every woman, and especially
to his mother, if he wants to see, believes he sees the male organ in
everyone no matter what the evidence suggests, this does not protect
him from castration anxiety. For if the penis is lacking in certain
individuals, it is because someone has cut it off. The penis was there
in the beginning, and then it was taken away.
[39]
Why? It must have
been to punish the child for some fault. This crime for which the penalty
is the amputation of one's sex organ must be masturbation, a topic on
which the boy has already received ample warnings and threats. We must
not forget that masturbation is governed by a need for release of affects
connected with the parents, and more especially the mother, whom the
little boy would like to possess as the father does we might say, "in
the father's place." The fear of losing his penis, an organ with
a very heavy narcissistic cathexis, is thus what brings the boy to abandon
his Oedipal position: the desire to possess the mother and to supplant
his rival, the father. Following upon this comes the formation of the
superego, the legacy of the Oedipus complex and guardian of social,
moral, cultural, and religious values. Freud insists on the fact that
"the
signijicance of the castration complex can only be rightly appreciated
if its origin in the phase of phallic primacy is also taken into account"
("The Infantile Genital Organization," p. 144). For the phallus,
as we have seen, is responsible for the regrouping and the hierarchization
of the component instincts in infantile genitality. A single sex organ,
the penis, is then recognized as valuable by girls as well as boys.
From this point
on, one can imagine what the castration complex must be for the girl.
She thought she had, in her clitoris, a significant phallic organ. And,
like her brother, she got voluptuous sensations from it through masturbation.
But the sight of the penis-and this is the inverse of what happens to
the little boy discovering his sister's genitals-shows the girl to what
extent her clitoris is unworthy of comparison to the boy's sex organ.
She understands, finally, the prejudice-the anatomical prejudice-that
is her fate, and forces herself to accept castration, not as the threat
of a loss, the fear of a not yet accomplished act, but as a fait accompli:
an amputation already performed. She recognizes, or ought to recognize,
that compared to the boy she has no sex, or at least that what she thought
was a valuable sex organ is only a truncated penis.
[40]
Penis Envy and
the Onset of the Oedipus Complex
The girl child does not readily resign herself to this effective castration,
which represents an irreducible narcissistic wound. This is the source
of the "penis envy" which to a great extent determines her
future development. Indeed, the girl child continues for a long time
to hope that one day she will find herself endowed with a "true"
penis, that her own tiny organ will yet develop and will be able to
hold its own in a comparison with the one her brother has, or her playmates.
While waiting for such hopes to be confirmed, she turns her desires
toward her father, wanting to obtain from him what she lacks: the very
precious male organ. This "penis envy" leads her to turn away
from her mother, whom she blames for having so badly endowed her, sexually
speaking, and whose fate, as she comes to realize, she herself shares:
like her mother, she herself is castrated. Doubly deceived by her mother,
her first "sexual" object, she abandons her to enter into
the Oedipus complex, or the desire for her father. Thus the girl's Oedipus
complex follows the castration complex, inverting the sequence observed
for the boy.
But, for the girl,
this Oedipus complex may last a very long time. For she need not fear
the loss of a sex organ she does not have. And only repeated frustrations
vis-à-vis her father will lead her, quite belatedly and often
incompletely, to deflect her desire away from him. We may infer that,
under such conditions, the formation of the superego will be compromised,
and that this will leave the girl, the woman, in a state of infantile
dependency with respect to the father, to the father-man (serving as
superego), and making her unfit to share in the most highly valued social
and cultural interests. Endowed with very little autonomy, the girl
child will be even less capable of making the "ob
jective" cathexes that are at stake in society, her behavior being
motivated either by jealousy, spite, "penis envy," or by the
fear of losing the love of her parents or their substitutes.
But even after
she has transferred to her father her former
[41]
attachment to her mother, after completing this change in sexual "object"
that her feminine condition requires, the girl child still has a long
way to go. And, as Freud stresses, "the development of a little
girl into a normal woman" requires transformations that are much
more complicated and difficult than those required in the more linear
development of male sexuality ("Femininity," p. 117). Indeed,
if "penis envy" determines the girl's desire for her father,
desired as the man who will perhaps give her one, that "desire,"
which is overly "active," still has to give way to the "passive"
receptivity that is expected of woman's sexuality, and of her genitalia.
The "penile" clitoral erogenous zone has to relinquish its
importance in favor of the vagina, which "is now valued as the
place of shelter for the penis; it enters into the heritage of the womb"
("The Infantile Genital Organization," p. 145). The girl has
to change not only her sexual object but also her erogenous zone. This
entails a "move toward passivity" that is absolutely indispensable
to the advent of femininity.
The Desire to
"Have" a Child
Nor is that all. The "sexual function," for Freud, is above
all the reproductive function. It is as such that it brings all the
instincts together and subjects them to the primacy of procreation.
The woman has to be induced to privilege this "sexual function";
the capstone of her libidinal evolution must be the desire to give birth.
In "penis envy" we find, once again, the motive force behind
this progression.
The desire to obtain
the penis from the father is replaced by the desire to have a child,
this latter becoming, in an equivalence that Freud analyzes, the penis
substitute. We must add here that the woman's happiness is complete
only if the newborn child is a boy, bearer of the longed-for penis.
In this way the woman is compensated, through the child she brings into
the world, for the narcissistic
[42]
humiliation inevitably associated with the feminine condition. To be
sure, it is not by her father that the little girl will in reality have
a child. She will have to wait until much later for this infantile desire
to be achieved. And it is this refusal that the father opposes to all
her desires that underlies the motif of the transfer of her drives onto
another man, who will finally be a paternal substitute.
Becoming the mother
of a son, the woman will be able to "transfer to her son all the
ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself," and,
as the lack of a penis loses none of its motivating power, "a mother
is brought only unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this
is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all
human relationships" ("Femininity," p. 133). This perfect
model of human love can henceforth be transferred to the husband: "a
marriage is not made secure untiJ the wife has succeeded in making her
husband her child as well" (ibid., pp. 133-34). The difficult course
that the girl, the woman, must navigate to achieve her "femininity"
thus finds its culmination in the birth and nurturing of a son. And,
as a logical consequence, of the husband.
Post-Oedipal
Pathological Formations
Of course this evolution is subject to interruptions, to periods of
stasis, and even to regressions, at certain points. Such instances bring
to light the pathological formations specific to female sexuality.
The masculinity
complex and homosexuality
Thus the discovery of castration may lead, in the woman, to the development
of "a powerful masculinity complex." "By this we mean
that the girl refuses, as it were, to recognize the unwelcome fact and,
defiantly rebellious, even exaggerates her
[42]
previous masculinity,
clings to her clitoridean activity, and takes refuge in an identification
with her phallic mother or her father" (ibid., pp. 129-30). The
extreme consequence of this masculinity complex can be found in the
sexual economy and in the object choice of the female homosexual, who,
having in most cases taken her father as "object," in conformity
with the female Oedipus complex, then regresses to infantile masculinity
owing to the inevitable disappointments that she has encountered in
her dealings with her father. The desired object for her is from then
on chosen according to the masculine mode, and "in her behavior
towards her love-object" she consistently assumes "the masculine
part." Not only does she choose "a feminine love-object,"
but she also adopts "a masculine attitude" toward that object.
She changes, as it were, "into a man, and [takes] her mother in
place of her father as the object of her love" ("The Psychogenesis
of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," p. 154). We need not go
to these extremes to find in the repeated alternation of masculinity
and femininity as predominating forces a possible explanation for the
enigma that woman represents for man, an enigma that is to be interpreted
through the importance of bisexuality in the life of the woman.
Furthermore, the
woman's masculine claims would never be entirely resolved, according
to Freud, and "penis envy," seeking to temper her sexual inferiority,
would account for many of the peculiarities of an otherwise "normal"
femininity. For example: "a larger amount of narcissism" than
the man has ("which also affects woman's choice of object"),
"physical vanity," "little sense of justice," and
even "shame," whose function would be primarily the "concealment
of genital deficiency." As for "having less capacity for sublimating
their instincts," and the corresponding lack of participation in
social and cultural interests, we have seen that these deficiencies
stemmed from the specific nature of the woman's relation to the Oedipus
complex, and from the resultant effects on the formation of her superego.
These characteristics of femininity, while not very heartening,
[44]
to be sure, are
nevertheless not pathological. They appear to belong, for Freud, to
the "normal" evolution of femininity ("Femininity,"
pp. 133-34).
Frigidity
We might well be more disquieted by Freud's observation of the frequency
of sexual frigidity in women. But, though he recognizes that he is dealing
here with a phenomenon that is not yet well understood, Freud seems
to want to see it as confirming the natural sexual disadvantage that
he attributes to women. Indeed, "it is our impression that more
constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the
service of the feminine function, and that ...Nature takes less careful
account of its [that function's] demands than in the case of masculinity.
And the reason for this may lie--thinking once again teleologically--in
the fact that the accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted
to the aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent
of women's consent" (ibid., p. 131). The idea that frigidity might
be the effect of such a conception-violent, violating-of sexual relations
does not appear in Freud's analyses; there he attributes frigidity either
to the sexual inferiority of all women, or else to some constitutional
or even anatomical factor that disturbs the sexuality of certain women,
except when he is admitting his own ignorance of what might account
for it.
Masochism
As for masochism, is it to be considered a factor in "normal"
femininity? Some of Freud's assertions tend in this direction. For example,
the following: "the suppression of women's aggressiveness which
is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially
favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed,
as we know, in binding
[45]
erotically the destructive trends which have been diverted inwards.
Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine" (ibid., p. 116).
Or does masochism constitute a sexual deviation, a morbid process, that
is particularly frequent in women? Freud would no doubt respond that
even if masochism is a component of "normal" femininity, this
latter cannot be simply reduced to masochism. The analysis of the fantasy"
A child is being beaten"5 gives a fairly complete description of
women's genital organization and indicates at the same time how masochism
is implied in that organization: the daughter's incestuous desire for
her father, her longing to have his child, and the correlative wish
to see the rival brother beaten, the brother who is detested as much
because he is seen as the child that the daughter has not had with her
father as because he is endowed with a penis, all these desires, longings,
wishes of the little girl are subject to repression because of the taboo
against incestuous relations as well as the one against sadistic, and
more generally against "active," impulses. The result is a
transformation of the desire that her brother be beaten into the fantasy
of being herself beaten by her father, a fantasy in which the little
girl's incestuous desires would find both regressive masochistic satisfaction
and punishment. This fantasy might also be interpreted as follows: my
father is beating me in the guise of the boy I wish I were; or else:
I am being beaten because I am a girl, that is, inferior, sexually speaking;
or, in other words: what is being beaten is my clitoris, that very small,
too small male organ, that little boy who refuses to grow up.
Hysteria
Although hysteria gives rise to the inaugural scene of analysis and
indeed to its discourse (see, in this connection, the Studies on
---------------------------
5" 'A Child is Being Beaten': A Contribution to the Study of the
Origin of Sexual Perversions," 17:177-204.
|
|
.[46]
Hysteria Freud published with J. Breuer), and although Freud's earliest
patients are hysterics, an exhaustive analysis of the symptoms involved
in hysteria and the establishment of their relation to the development
of female sexuality would extend beyond the framework of this summary
of Freudian positions; as it happens, moreover, no systematic regrouping
of the various phases of the investigation of hysteria is to be found
in Freud's work. Let us then simply recall that, for Freud, hysteria
does not constitute an exclusively feminine pathology. In another context,
the "Dora" analysis,6 the modalities of the female Oedipus
complex are defined in both positive and negative form, namely, the
desire for the father and hatred of the mother on the one hand, the
desire for the mother and hatred of the father on the other. This inversion
of the Oedipus complex might be categorized within the symptomatology
of hysteria.
Returning, belatedly,
to the girl's pre-Oedipal phase, Freud states that in any event "this
phase of attachment to the mother is especially intimately related to
the aetiology of hysteria. "7 Even though hysteria exhibits Oedipal
fantasies more than anything else-fantasies which, moreover, are often
presented as traumatizing-it is necessary to return to the pre-Oedipal
phase in order to achieve some understanding of what is hidden behind
this upping of the Oedipal ante.
Return to the
Girl's Pre-Oedipal Phase
Freud's reexamination of the issue of the girl's pre-Oedipal phase-which
he was encouraged to undertake, and in which he was assisted, by the
work of women psychoanalysts (Ruth Mack Brunswick, Jeanne Lampl de Groot,
Helene Deutsch), who could serve better than he as maternal substitutes
in the transference situation--led him to look more closely at this
-----------------------------
6"Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," 7:3-122.
7"Female Sexuality," 21:227.
[47]
phase of the girl
child's fixation on her mother.8 He ends up asserting that the pre-Oedipal
phase is more important for the girl than for the boy. But in this first
phase of female libidinal organization, he focuses particularly on certain
aspects that might be qualified as negative, or at least as problematic.
Thus the girl's numerous grievances against her mother: premature weaning,
the failure to satisfy a limitless need for love, the obligation to
share maternal love with brothers and sisters, the forbidding of masturbation
subsequent to the excitation of the erogenous zones by the mother herself,
and especially the fact of having been born a girl, that is, deprived
of the phallic sexual organ. These grievances result in a considerable
ambivalence in the girl's attachment to her mother; were the repression
of this ambivalence to be removed, the conjugal relation would be disrupted
by more or less insoluble conflicts. The woman's tendency toward activity
is also understood, in large measure, as an attempt on the girl's part
to rid herself of her need for her mother by doing what her mother does-aside
from the fact that the little girl, as a phallic being, has already
desired to seduce her mother and have a child by her. Overly "active"
tendencies in the woman's libidinal organization thus often have to
be explored as resurgences, insufficient repressions, of the relation
to the mother, and the "instincts with a passive aim" are
thought to develop in proportion to the girl's abandonment of her relation
to her mother. Nor must we neglect the fact that the little girl's ambivalence
toward her mother brings about aggressive and sadistic impulses; the
inadequate repression of these drives, or their conversion into their
opposites, may constitute the seeds of a later paranoia to be investigated
both as stemming from the inevitable frustrations imposed by the mother
on the daughter-at the time of weaning, or at the time of the discovery
of woman's "castration," for example-and also from the little
girl's aggressive reactions. This would account for the girl's fear
of
------------------------------
8See "Female Sexuality" and "Femininity."
[47]
being killed by her mother, her mistrust, and her continuing preoccupation
with threats emanating from the mother or mother-substitutes.
The "Dark
Continent" of Psychoanalysis
Whatever may have been established in this area, Freud continues to
qualify feminine sexuality as the "dark continent" of psychoanalysis.
He insists that he has not gotten beyond the "prehistory of women"
("Femininity," p. 130), allowing in another connection that
the pre-Oedipal period itself "comes to us as a surprise, like
the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization
behind the civilization of Greece" ("Female Sexuality,"
p. 226). Whatever he may have said or written on the sexual development
of women, that development remains quite enigmatic to him, and he makes
no claim to have gotten to the bottom of it. In approaching it he advises
caution, especially as regards the determining social factors that partially
conceal what feminine sexuality might be. Indeed, these factors often
place women in passive situations, requiring them to repress their aggressive
instincts, thwarting them in the choice of objects of desire, and so
on. In this field of investigation, prejudices threaten to impede the
objectivity of research, and, seeking to demonstrate impartiality in
debates that are so subject to controversy, Freud falls back on the
affirmation that the libido is necessarily male, and maintains that
there is in fact only one libido, but that in the case of femininity
it may put itself in the service of "passive aims" (ibid.,
p. 240). So in no way does his account question the fact that this libido
has to be more repressed in the sexual organization of the woman. This
would explain the persistence, the permanence of "penis envy,"
even where femininity is most firmly established.
These appeals for
caution, these modifications of earlier state-
[48]
ments, do not keep Freud from neglecting the analysis of the determining
socioeconomic and cultural factors that also govern the sexual development
of women; nor do they prevent him from once again reacting-or continuing
to react-negatively to the research of analysts who rebel against the
exclusively masculine viewpoint that informs his own theory and that
of certain of his disciples, male and female, where "the development
of women" is concerned. Thus although he bestows his approval on
the work of Jeanne Lampl de Groot, Ruth Mack Brunswick, Helene Deutsch,
and even, with some reservations, Karl Abraham, and though he includes
the results of their work in his latest writings on the problem, he
still remains opposed to the efforts being made by Karen Horney, Melanie
Klein, and Ernest Jones to construct hypotheses about female sexuality
that are somewhat less predetermined by masculine parameters, somewhat
less dominated by "penis envy. "9 No doubt in his eyes these
efforts present not only the disagreeable situation in which he finds
himself criticized by his students, but also the risk of calling into
question the female castration complex as he has defined
WOMEN ANALYSTS
AGAINST THE FREUDIAN POINT OF VIEW
Karen Horney
It was a woman, Karen Horney, who first refused to subscribe to Freud's
point of view on female sexuality, and who maintained that the complex
sequence of castration and the Oedipus complex, as Freud had set it
forth in order to explain the sexual evolution of the girl child, had
to be "reversed." This state-
---------------------
9See "Female Sexuality" and "Femininity."
[50]
reversal significantly modifies the interpretation of woman's relation
to her sex.
Indeed, it is no
longer "penis envy" which turns the girl away from her mother,
who does not have one, and leads her to her father, who might give her
one; rather it is because the girl child is frustrated in her specifically
feminine desire for incestuous relations with the father that she reaches
the point, secondarily, of coveting the penis as a substitute for the
father. Thus the girl, the woman, no longer desires to be a man and
to have the penis in order to be (like) a man. If she reaches the point
of post-Oedipal longing to appropriate the penis for herself, it is
to compensate for her disappointment at having been deprived of the
penis-object and/ or to defend herself both against the guilt accruing
to incestuous desires and against a future sadistic penetration by the
father, which she fears as much as she desires it.10 All this presupposes
that the girl has already discovered her vagina, contrary to Freud's
claims that the vagina remains unknown to both sexes for a long time.
For Horney it would
not be appropriate to speak of the relation of the girl child to her
vagina in terms of ignorance, but rather in terms of "denegation."
This would account for the fact that the girl may appear not to know,
consciously, what she knows. This "denegation" of the vagina
by the little girl would be justified by the fact that knowledge of
that part of her sex has not been sanctioned at this stage, and also
by the fact that this knowledge is dreaded. The comparison of an adult
male's penis with the child's diminutive vagina, the sight of menstrual
blood, or perhaps the experience of a painful tearing
------------------------
10Karen Horney, "On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women,"
in Feminine Psychology: Papers, ed. Harold Kelman (New York,
1967).
[51]
of the hymen during
manual explorations may in fact have led the girl child to be afraid
of having a vagina, and to deny what she already knows about its existence.11
The cultural
neurosis of women
From this point on, Karen Horney set herself even further apart from
the Freudian theses, in that she appealed almost exclusively to determining
sociocultural factors in order to account for the specijic characteristics
of the sexuality known as female. The influence of American sociologists
and anthropologists such as Abram Kardiner, Margaret Mead, and Ruth
Benedict led Horney to distance herself more and more decisively from
the classical psychoanalytic viewpoints, for which she substituted-or
to which she joined while criticizing them-the analysis of social and
cultural factors in the development of' 'normal" sexuality as well
as in the etiology of neurosis. In this perspective, "penis envy"
is no longer prescribed, nor inscribed, by/in some feminine "nature,"
a correlative of some "anatomical defect," and the like. Rather,
it is to be interpreted as a defensive symptom, protecting the woman
from the political, economic, social, aud cultural condition that is
hers at the same time that it prevents her from contributing effectively
to the transformation of her allotted fate. "Penis envy" translates
woman's resentment and jealousy at being deprived of the advantages,
especially the sexual advantages, reserved for men alone: "autonomy,"
"freedom," "power," and so on; but it also expresses
her resentment at having been largely excluded, as she has been for
centuries, from political, social, and cultural responsibilities. "Love"
has been her only recourse, and for that reason she has elevated it
to the rank of sole and absolute value.
------------------------------------
l1Karen Horney, "The Denial of the Vagina," in Feminine Psychology.
On this point, Horney reexamines and expands upon Josine Muller's position
in "A Contribution to the Problem of Libidinal Development of the
Genital Phase in Girls," in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
13:361-368.
[52]
Her "envy"
would thus be the index of an "inferiority" that women share,
in practical terms, with the other oppressed groups of Western culture-children,
the insane, and so on. And her acceptance of a biological "destiny,"
of an "injustice" done her as regards the constitution of
her genital organs, is tantamount to a refusal to take into consideration
the factors that actually explain that so-called "inferiority."
In other words, woman's neurosis, according to Karen Horney, would very
closely resemble an indispensable component in the "development
of a normal woman" according to Freud: she resigns herself to the
role-which is among other things a sexual role that Western civilization
assigns her .12
Melanie Klein
The second woman who objected to Freud's theories on female sexuality
was Melanie Klein. Like Karen Horney, she inverted, or "turned
around," certain sequences of consecutive events that Freud had
established. And, again like Horney, she argued that "penis envy"
is a secondary reaction formation compensating for the difficulty that
the girl, the woman, experiences in sustaining her own desire. But it
was through the exploration, the reconstruction, of the fantasy world
of early childhood that Melanie Klein challenged the Freudian system.
Precocious forms
of the Oedipus complex
.
Her divergences from Freud are evident right away, as it were: from
the "beginning." For Melanie Klein refuses to assimilate clitoral
masturbation to masculine activity. The clitoris is a feminine genital
organ; it is thus inappropriate to see it as
---------------------
12Karen Horney, "The Overvaluation of Love," in Feminine
Psychology. See also "The Problem of Feminine Masochism,"
"The Neurotic Need for Love," etc.
[53]
but a "little"
penis and to want the girl to find pleasure in caressing it on that
basis alone. Moreover, the privileged eroticization of the clitoris
is already a process of defense against vaginal eroticization, which
is more dangerous, more problematic, at this stage of sexual development.
Vaginal excitement occurs earlier, but the fantasies of incorporation
of the father's penis and the destruction of the mother-rival that accompany
it lead the girl to be anxious about countermeasures on her mother's
part, for there is the risk that her mother, in seeking revenge, might
deprive her of her internal sexual organs. Since no means of verification,
no "reality" test allows the girl to determine whether these
organs are intact, and thus to eliminate the anxiety resulting from
such fantasies, she is led to a provisional renunciation of vaginal
eroticization. 13
In any event, the
little girl does not wait for the "castration complex" before
she turns toward her father. In Klein's view, the "Oedipus complex"
is at work in the economy ofpregenital drives, and especially the oral
drives.14 Thus not only does weaning from the "good breast"
lead to hostility toward her mother on the girl's part-hostility that
is projected onto the mother, in a first phase, causing her to be dreaded
as a "bad mother"-but in addition this conflictual relation
with the mother is aggravated by the fact that she represents the forbidding
of the oral satisfaction of Oedipal desires, of that satisfaction which
is opposed to the incorporation of the paternal penis. For Melanie Klein,
the first form of the girl's desire for a penis is the desire to introject
the father's. Thus it is not a matter of "penis envy" in the
Freudian sense, not a tendency to appropriate to oneself the attribute
of masculine power in order to be (like) a man, but rather the expression,
as early as the oral phase, of feminine
------------------------
13Melanie Klein, "Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict," in
Contributions to
Psycho-analysis, 1921-1945 (London, 1948).
14Melanie Klein, "Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict and of Super-Ego
Formation," in The Psycho-analysis of Children, trans. Alix Strachey
(London, 1937).
[53]
desires for the intromission of the penis. The girl's Oedipus complex
is thus not the counterpart of a "castration complex" that
would induce her to hope to get from her father the sex organ she lacks;
rather it is active from the time of the girl's earliest sexual appetites.
is This Oedipal precocity would be accentuated owing to the fact that
woman's genital drives, like the oral ones, privilege receptivity.
Defensive masculine
identifications
Such Oedipal precocity no doubt has its dangers. The father's penis
is capable of satisfying the little girl's desires, but it can also,
and at the same time, destroy. It is "good" and "bad,"
life-giving and death-dealing, itself caught up in the implacable ambivalence
between love and hate, in the duality of the life and death instincts.
In addition, the first attraction for the father's penis has the father
as its aim insofar as his organ has already been introjected by the
mother. Thus the girl would take possession of the paternal penis, and
potentially of the children, that are contained in the mother's body.
This entails a certain aggressiveness toward the mother, who may then
respond by destroying the "inside" of her daughter's body
and the "good objects" already incorporated there. The little
girl's anxiety about both the father's penis and the mother's revenge
usually obliges her to abandon this first, feminine structuration of
her libido and to identify herself, in a defensive maneuver, with the
father's penis or with the
father himself She thus adopts a "masculine" position in reaction
to the frustration, and the dangers, of her Oedipal desires. This masculinity
is thus quite secondary and has the function of concealing-indeed of
decisively repressing-incestuous fantasies: the desire to take the mother's
place with respect to the father, and to have the father's child.16
-----------------
l5 Melanie Klein, "The Effects of Early Anxiety-Situations on the
Sexual Development of the Girl," in The Psycho-analysis of Children.
16Melanie Klein, "The Oedipus Complex in the Light of Early Anxieties,"
in Contributions to Psycho-analysis,
[55]
AN ATTEMPT AT RECONCILIATION: ERNEST JONES
Unlike Freud, Ernest Jones greeted with considerable interest the modifications
that certain women such as Karen Horney and Melanie Klein brought to
the earliest psychoanalytic theorizing about female sexuality. This
was undoubtedly because Jones undertook a much more thoroughgoing investigation
of the "feminine" desires of men and the castration anxiety
that accompanies the boy's identification with women's genitals, especially
in his relation with his father. Somewhat more cognizant of men's longing
for and fear of such an identification, Ernest Jones was able to venture
further in the exploration of the "dark continent" of femininity,
and to hear in a less reticent fashion what certain women were trying
to articulate as to their own sexual economy. It is also true he was
less obliged than Freud to defend the foundations of a new theoretical
edifice. Still, the fact is that, without acquiescing to the positions
maintained by Karen Horney in the second part of her work, without breaking
with Freud as some of his students, male and female, had done, Jones
nevertheless attempted to reconcile the Freudian viewpoint and new psychoanalytic
contributions concerning the sexual development of women, adding his
own in the process.
Castration and
Aphanisis
Casting himself more or less as an arbiter of the debate, and seeking
to find potential agreement between divergent positions, Jones maintained
the Freudian view of the female Oedipus complex but demonstrated that
some discoveries about the girl's pre-Oedipal phase made by analysts
working with children encouraged a modification of the way the relation
between the girl and the Oedipus complex was formulated. To begin with,
Jones distinguishes castration-or the threat of losing the capacity
for genital sexual pleasure-from aphanisis, which would
[56]
represent the complete and permanent disappearance of all sexual pleasure.
Thinking along these lines makes it clear that the fear of "aphanisis,"
following upon the radical frustration of her Oedipal desires, is what
induces the girl to renounce her femininity in order to identify herself
with the sex that eludes her pleasure.17 Thus she wards off, imaginarily,
the anxiety of being deprived of all pleasure forever. This solution
also has the advantage of appeasing the guilt connected with incestuous
desires. If this option is carried to its logical conclusion, it leads
to homosexuality, but it occurs in an attenuated form in the normal
development of femininity. In the latter case, it represents a secondary
and defensive reaction against the aphanisis anxiety that follows the
father's nonresponse to the girl's desires.
Various Interpretations
of "Penis Envy"
The little girl is already a "woman," then, before she passes
through this reactional masculinity. And we find evidence of her precocious
femininity in the so-called "pregenital" stages. Is penis
envy is first of all the desire to incorporate the penis within oneselj;
that is, an allo-erotic desire already discernible in the oral stage.
The centripetal zone of attraction of the penis is subsequently displaced
owing to the operation of the equivalence among mouth, anus, and vagina.
Taking this precocious desire for the father's sex into consideration,
Jones is led to refine the notion of "penis envy." For him,
what is at issue may be the girl's desire to incorporate or introject
the penis in order to keep it "inside" the body and transform
it into a child; or it may be the desire to enjoy the penis during intercourse
(oral, anal, or genital); or, finally, it may be the desire to possess
a male organ in (the) place of the clitoris.
--------------------------------
17Ernest Jones, "The Early Development of Female Sexuality,"
in Papers on Psycho-analysis, 5th ed. (Boston, 1961).
18Ernest Jones, "Early Female Sexuality," in Papers on Psycho-analysis.
[57]
This latter interpretation is the one Freud prefers, thus accentuating
the girl-woman's desires for masculinity and denying the specificity
of her libidinal organization and her sex. Now the desire to possess
a penis in the clitoral region would correspond above all to autoerotic
desires, since the penis is more accessible, more visible, a better
source of narcissistic gratification during masturbatory activity. The
penis would be similarly favored in fantasies of urethral omnipotence,
or in scopophilic and exhibitionist drives. The pregenital activity
of the girl child cannot be reduced to these activities or fantasies,
and one might even argue that they develop only subsequent to her allo-erotic
desires for the father's penis. It follows that, both in the so-called
pre-Oedipal structuration and in the post-Oedipal phase, "penis
envy" in the girl is secondary, and often defensive, with respect
to a specifically feminine desire to enjoy the penis. The little girl
has not, therefore, been from time immemorial a little boy, any more
than the development of her sexuality is subtended by a longing to be
a man. To wish that it were so would amount to an inappropriate suspension
of the girl's sexual evolution-and the boy's as well-at a particularly
critical stage of its development, the stage that Jones calls "deuterophallic,"19
in which each of the two sexes is led to identify with the object of
its desire, that is, with the opposite sex, in order to escape both
from the threat of mutilation of the genital organ that emanates from
the same-sex parent, the rival in the Oedipal economy, and also from
the anxiety or "aphanisis" resulting from the suspension of
incestuous desires.
COMPLEMENTS
TO FREUDIAN THEORY
We have already
noted that such alterations of the theory are opposed by other women
analysts, who support and develop
---------------------
19Ernest Jones, "The Phallic Phase," in Papers on Psycho-analysis.
[58]
Freud's original views, and that in his later writings Freud himself
draws upon their contributions to the study of the first stages of woman's
sexual development.
Let us recall that
Jeanne Lampl de Groot insists on the question of the girl's negative
Oedipus. Before arriving at a "positive" desire for the father,
which implies the advent of receptive "passivity," the girl
wishes to possess the mother and supplant the father, and this wish
operates in the "active" and/ or "phallic" mode.
The impossibility of satisfying such desires brings about a devaluation
of the clitoris, which cannot stand up to comparison with the penis.
The passage from the negative (active) phase to the positive (passive)
phase of the Oedipus complex is thus achieved through the intervention
of the castration complex. 20
One of the characteristic
features of Helene Deutsch's work is the accent she places on masochism
in the structuring of woman's genital sexuality. In all phases of pregenital
development, the clitoris is cathected to the same extent as a penis.
The vagina is ignored, and will only be discovered in puberty. But although
the clitoris (penis) may be assimilated to the breast or to the fecal
column, its inferiority becomes obvious in the phallic stage, since
the clitoris is much less capable than the penis of satisfying the active
drives that have come into play. What becomes of the libidinal energy
with which the devalued clitoris was once cathected? Helene Deutsch
maintains that to a large extent this energy regresses and is reorganized
along masochistic lines. The fantasy "I want to be castrated"
takes over from unrealizable phallic desires. Such masochism, of course,
must not be confused with the later "moral" masochism. It
represents a primary, erogenous, and biologically determined form of
-----------------
20 Jeanne Lampl de Groot, "The Evolution of the Oedipus Complex
in Women," in The Psycho-analytical Reader, ed. Robert Fliess (New
York, 1948).
[59]
the masochism that is a constitutive element of female sexuality, a
sexuality dominated by the triad castration, rape, and childbirth, to
which is added, secondarily and as a correlative, the masochistic nature
of women's sublimations, including those that enter into their maternal,
nurturing behavior toward the child. 21
After having recalled,
following Freud's lead, that sexual development is governed by the play
of three successive and yet not quite interchangeable oppositions-active
vs. passive, phallic vs. castrated, masculine vs. feminine-Ruth Mack
Brunswick focuses her analysis principally on the modalities and transformations
of the activity/passivity dyad in the preOedipal phase of female sexual
development.22
For Marie Bonaparte,
the singularity of woman's relation to libidinal life, her "disadvantaged"
position, results from the fact that female genitals can be compared
to male organs that have been inhibited in their growth owing to the
development of "annexed" organs serving the purpose of maternity.23
Beyond this, in her view, three laws govern the sexual evolution of
woman: so far as the object of desire is concerned, all passive and
active cathexes implied in the relation to the mother are transferred
to the relation to the father; as for instinct development, the girl's
sadistic fantasies will be transformed into masochistic ones during
the passage from the "active" to the "passive"
Oedipus; finally, the privileged erogenous zone is displaced from the
clitoris (penis) to the "cloaca," then to the vagina, when
clitoral masturbation is abandoned. For Marie Bonaparte,
-----------------------
21Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytical Interpreta
tion, 2 vols. (New York, 1945, 1944-1945; repro 1967).
22Ruth Mack Brunswick, "The Preoedipal Phase of the Libido Develop
ment," in The Psycho-analytical Reader.
23Marie Bonaparte, "Passivite, masochisme et feminite," in
Psychanalyse et
biologie (Paris, 1952).
[60]
"cloacal" eroticism constitutes an intermediate stage between
anal eroticism and the much later eroticization of the vagina. Thus
the vagina is only an annex of the anus, or to be more precise it is
not yet differentiated from it, and the cloacal opening as a whole is
the dominant prephallic and postphallic erogenous zone, right up to
the stage of postpubertal vaginal eroticization.24
THE SYMBOLIC
ORDER: JACQUES LACAN
Fifteen or twenty years after the controversies over female sexuality
had cooled down, after the issues had been forgotten (repressed anew?),
Jacques Lacan reopened the debate. He sought to stress, in particular,
the fact that the questions had often been badly put, and also to draw
up a balance sheet for those issues that, in his opinion, remained unresolved.
Among these latter, he evoked new developments in physiology concerning
the functional distinction between "chromosomic sex" and "hormonal
sex," as well as research on "the libidinal advantage of the
male hormone," which led him to reexamine the patterns according
to which the "break" between the organic and the subjective
occurs; he also brought back to our attention our continuing ignorance
as to "the nature of the vaginal orgasm" and the exact role
of the clitoris in the displacement of cathexes in erogenous zones and
in "objects" of desire.25
The Phallus
as Signifier of Desire
As for the divergent psychoanalytic opinions about female sexual development,
Lacan criticizes those points of view that dis-
---------------------------
24Marie Bonaparte, Female Sexuality, trans. John Rodker (New York,
1953).
25Jacques Lacan, "Propos directifs pour un congres sur la sexualite
femi
nine," in Ecrits (Paris, 1966).
[61]
tance themselves
from Freud's for neglecting the perspective of structural organization
that the castration complex implies. An inadequate differentiation of
the registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, and of their
respective impacts in deprivation, frustration, and castration, for
example, leads psychoanalysts to reduce the symbolic dimension-the real
issue in castration-to a frustration Qf the oral type ("Propos
directifs"). In order to delineate more sharply the symbolic articulation
that castration has to effect, Lacan specifies that what is at issue
as potentially lacking in castration is not so much the penis-a real
organ-as the phallus, or the signifier of desire. And it is in the mother
that castration must, first and foremost, be located by the child, ifhe
is to exit from the imaginary orbit of maternal desire and be returned
to the father, that is, to the possessor of the phallic emblem that
makes the mother desire him and prefer him to the child.
Thus the operation
of the symbolic order becomes possible, and the father's duty is to
act as its guarantee. Thus he prohibits both mother and child from satisfying
their desires, whether the mother identifies the child with the phallus
that she lacks, or whether the child is assured of being the bearer
of the phallus by satisfying, incestuously, the mother's desire. Depriving
them of the fulfillment of their desire, of the "fullness"
of pleasure, the father introduces them, or reintroduces them, to the
exigencies of the symbolization of desire through language, that is,
to the necessity that desire pass by way of a demand. The ceaselessly
recurring hiatus between demand and satisfaction of desire maintains
the function of the phallus as the signifier of a lack which assures
and regulates the economy of libidinal exchanges in their double dimension
of quest for love and of specifically sexual satisfaction.
To Be a Phallus
or to Have One
"But one may, by reckoning only with the function of the phallus,
set forth the structures that will govern the relations
[62]
between the sexes.
Let us say that these relations will turn around a 'to be' and a 'to
have'. ...Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, we shall say that
it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the
desire of the Other, that a woman will reject an essential part of her
femininity, namely, all her attributes in the masquerade. It is for
that which she is not--that is, the phallus--that she asks to be desired
and simultaneously to be loved. But she finds the signifier of her own
desire in the body of the one--who is supposed to have it--to whom she
addresses her demand for love. Perhaps it should not be forgotten that
the organ that assumes this signifying function takes on the value of
a fetish. "26
This formulation
of a dialectic of relations that are sexualized by the phallic function
does not in any way contradict Lacan's maintenance of the girl's castration
complex as defined by Freud (that is, her lack or nonpossession of a
phallus) and her subsequent entry into the Oedipus complex-or her desire
to obtain the phallus from the one who is supposed to have it, the father.
Likewise, the importance of "penis envy" in the woman is not
called into question but is further elaborated in its structural dimension.
Françoise Dolto's research on the sexual evolution of the little
girl should also be cited.27 She stresses the need for the mother to
be recognized as "woman" by the father in order for the little
girl to feel that her feminine sex has value; and she provides useful
descriptions of the structuration of the body image at each
----------------------------------
26Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus," in Ecrits: A
Selection, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 289-290; emphasis and interpolated
statements added. For an analysis of one of Lacan's more recent publications
on female sexuality, see below, "Cosi Fan Tutti," Chapter
5.
27Françoise Dolto, "La libido genitale et son destin feminin,"
in La psychanalyse, no. 7 (Presses Universitaires Françaises).
[64]
stage of a girl's
libidinal development, paying a great deal of attention to the plurality
of the erogenous zones that are specifically feminine and to the corresponding
differentiation of the sexual pleasure of the woman.
But, given the
richness of her analyses and the pointedness of the questions raised
in her study, we may regret that like most of the other protagonists
in this debate over female sexuality she has not adequately attended
to the historical determinants that prescribe the "development
of a woman" as psychoanalysis conceives of it.
Questions about
the Premises of Psychoanalytic Theory
To put certain
questions to psychoanalysis, to challenge it in some way, is always
to risk being misunderstood, and thus to encourage a precritical attitude
toward analytic theory. And yet there are many areas in which this theory
merits questioning, in which self-examination would be in order. One
of these areas is female sexuality. If we reconsider the terms in which
the debate has taken place within the field of psychoanalysis itself,
we may ask the following questions, for example:
Why has the alternative
between clitoral and vaginal pleasure played such a significant role?
Why has the woman been expected to choose between the two, being labeled
"masculine" if she stays with the former, "feminine"
if she renounces the former and limits herself to the latter? Is this
problematics really adequate to account for the evolution and the "flowering"
of a woman's sexuality? Or is it informed by the standardization of
this sexuality according to masculine parameters and/ or by criteria
that are valid--perhaps?--for determining whether autoeroticism or heteroeroticism
prevails in man? In fact, a woman's erogenous zones are not the clitoris
or the vagina, but the clitoris and the vagina, and the lips, and the
vulva, and the
[64]
mouth of the uterus, and the uterus itself, and the breasts. .. What
might have been, ought to have been, astonishing is the multiplicity
of genital erogenous zones (assuming that the qualifier "genital"
is still required) in female sexuality.
Why would the libidinal
structuring of the woman be decided, for the most part, before puberty--since
at that stage, for Freud and many of his disciples, "the truly
feminine vagina is still undiscovered" ("Femininity,"
p. 118)--unless it is because those feminine characteristics that are
politically, economically, and culturally valorized are linked to maternity
and mothering? Such a claim implies that everything, or almost everything,
is settled as to woman's allotted sexual role, and especially as to
the representations of that role that are suggested, or attributed,
to her, even before the specific, socially sanctioned form of her intervention
in the sexual economy is feasible, and before she has access to a unique,
"properly feminine" pleasure. It is understandable that she
only appears from then on as "lacking in," "deprived
of," "covetous of," and so forth.' In a word: castrated.
Why must the maternal
Junction take precedence over the more specifically erotic Junction
in woman? Why, once again, is she subjected, why does she subject herself,
to a hierarchical choice even though the articulation of those two sexual
roles has never been sufficiently elaborated? To be sure, this prescription
has to be understood within an economy and an ideology of (re)production,
but it is also, or still, the mark of a subjection to man's desire,
for "even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded
in making her husband her child as well and in acting as mother to him"
(ibid., pp. 133-134). Which leads to the next question:
Why must woman's
sexual evolution be "more difficult and more complicated"
than man's? (Ibid., p. 117). And what is the end point of that evolution,
except for her to become in some way
[65]
her husband's mother? The vagina itself, "now valued [only] as
a place of shelter for the penis. ..enters into the heritage of the
womb" ("The Infantile Genital Organization," p. 145).
In other words, does it go without saying that the little girl renounces
her first object cathexes, the precociously cathected erogenous zones,
in order to complete the itinerary that will enable her to satisfy man's
lasting desire to make love with his mother, or an appropriate substitute?
Why should a woman have to leave-and "hate" ("Femininity,"
pp. 121ff)-her own mother, leave her own house, abandon her own family,
renounce the name of her own mother and father, in order to take man's
genealogical desires upon herself?
Why is the interpretation
of female homosexuality, now as always, modeled on that of male homosexuality?
The female homosexual is thought to act as a man in desiring a woman
who is equivalent to the phallic mother and/or who has certain attributes
that remind her of another man, for example her brother ("The Psychogenesis
of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman," p. 156). Why should the
desire for likeness, for a female likeness, be forbidden to, or impossible
for, the woman? Then again, why are mother-daughter relations necessarily
conceived in terms of "masculine" desire and homosexuality?
What is the purpose of this misreading, of this condemnation, of woman's
relation to her own original desires, this nonelaboration of her relation
to her own origins? To assure the predominance of a single libido, as
the little girl finds herself obliged to repress her drives and her
earliest cathexes. Her libido?
Which leads us
to wonder why the active/passive opposition remains so persistent in
the controversies surrounding woman's sexuality. Even though this opposition
may be defined as characteristic of a pregenital stage, the anal stage,
it continues to leave its mark on the masculine/feminine difference--which
would draw
[66]
from it its psychological tenor28--just as it determines the respective
roles of man and woman in procreation ("Femininity"). What
relation continues to maintain that passivity toward the analsadistic
drives which are permitted to man and forbidden to inhibited in-woman?
What relation guarantees man sole and simultaneous ownership of the
child (the product), the woman (the reproductive machine), and sex (the
reproductive agent)? Rape, if possible resulting in conception-rape
is depicted moreover by certain male and female psychoanalysts as the
height of feminine pleasure29-has become the model for the sexual relation.
Why is woman so
little suited for sublimation? Does she also remain dependent upon a
relationship with the paternal superego? Why is woman's social role
still largely "transcendent with respect to the order of the contract
that work propagates? And, in particular, is it through its effect that
the status of marriage is maintained in the decline of paternalism?"30
These two questions converge perhaps in the fact that women are tied
down to domestic tasks without being explicitly bound by any work contract:
the marriage contract takes its place.
We have not exhausted
the list of questions that psychoanalysis could raise as to the "destiny,"
in particular the sexual destiny, assigned to woman, a destiny too often
ascribed to anatomy and biology-which are supposed to explain, among
other things, the very high frequency of female frigidity.
But the historical
determinants of this destiny need to be investigated. This implies that
psychoanalysis needs to reconsider the very limits of its theoretical
and practical field, needs to detour through an "interpretation"
of the cultural background and the
-------------------------------
28Freud, "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," 14:111-140.
29See Freud, "Femininity"; Helene Deutsch, The Psychology
of Women; and
Marie Bonaparte, Female Sexuality.
30Lacan, "Propos directifs."
[67]
economy, especially the political economy, that have marked it, without
its knowledge. And psychoanalysis ought to wonder whether it is even
possible to pursue a limited discussion of female sexuality) so long
as the status of woman in the general economy of the West has never
been established. What role has been marked off for her in the organization
of property, the philosophical systems, the religious mythologies that
have dominated the West for centuries?
In this perspective,
we might suspect the phallus (Phallus) of being the contemporary figure
of a god jealous of his prerogatives; we might suspect it of claiming,
on this basis, to be the ultimate meaning of all discourse, the standard
of truth and propriety, in particular as regards sex, the signifier
and/ or the ultimate signified of all desire, in addition to continuing,
as emblem and agent of the patriarchal system, to shore up the name
of the father (Father).
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