PASSAGES: To begin at the beginning, so to speak, what is your personal contribution to psychoanalysis?
ANTOINETTE FOUQUE: My contribution may lie in my insistence on asking analytic theory a few questions; naturally enough, these questions contain the outline of some answers. Why, for example, does the only scientific discourse on sexuality, psychoanalytic discourse, assert, from Freud to Lacan, that there is only one libido, and that it is “essentially male” or “phallic,” when there are obviously, in reality, two sexes? Might not this phallic monism, which is more contaminated by the vir than analysts themselves might like to admit—as the phallus is very often confused, even in analytic theory, with the penis—obey the pleasure principle rather than the reality principle? So what is conventionally termed the symbolic order would appear to be based upon a denial of reality, in the claim that there is a single, male, libido for both men and women. This monophallicism cannot fail to evoke the various monotheisms. Might psychoanalytic theory thus derive from a religious rather than a scientific way of thinking?
This theory has all sorts of implications, not to say perverse effects. It is, for example, impossible to describe women’s sexuality except in terms of castration—negative phallicity—or to designate it “feminine”; yet “feminine” characterizes a gender that can also be applied to a man. For a long time I have been saying that femininity is a form of transvestism. In any case, because Freud often gives it connotations of passivity, it refers back to the anal register of sexuality; it is therefore pregenital.
Because it is encapsulated in pregenitality in this way (for men too; I shall come back to this point), psychoanalytic theory is caught up in a regressive attraction from the phallic toward the anal, in a perverse phallic fixation that powerfully inhibits it from elaborating a theory of genitality, since genitality is, of necessity, heterosexed.
This has a further perverse implication: hysterical neurosis is seen as the obverse of the phallic perversion. But if the discourse of the master is illuminated by that of the hysteric—hysteria being the lease that is taken out on the uterus by the phallus—why shouldn’t it be illuminated, in a progressive sense, by the discourse of women? Its subordination to the reality principle would then allow psychoanalytic theory to make progress by allowing it to elaborate a theory of genitality, which can only be heterosexed, as we know. Strangely enough, women analysts who work with, or through, their female analysands on their common sexuality continue to assert this “only” in theoretical terms (“there is only one libido”; “jouissance can only come from the phallus”). Do they do this so as to avoid the risk of losing the father’s love, or a place in one or another of his institutional mansions?
Women’s right to the symbolic, and therefore the right of both men and women to a “dialogic order,” might allow a better understanding of how things stand, or do not stand, with sexual relationships. But women’s right to the symbolic requires us to take the view that, given that there are two sexes, there are two libidos: every woman bears within her a libido of her own. Twenty years ago I called this libido 2, but since, after all, we are talking about a uterine libido, about a matricial economy, it could also be called “libido 1,” as it is primary, principial, and primal for both sexes.
PASSAGES: Are you saying that psychoanalysis is a male science?
AF: The theory, or rather psychoanalytic discourse, was elaborated de facto by Freud the man—who was both
vir and
homo sapiens—and based on the words of young women he described as hysterics; however, Freud the writer partially repressed the women subjects of these words because, starting with the
Studies in Hysteria and later with
Dora, where he conjugated dream and hysteria, he finally described “the interpretation of dreams” as the royal road to the unconscious, usually with himself as his object of study; his own male obsessional neurosis was the basis for psychoanalytic knowledge.
The repression of hysteria, which is itself a trace of the foreclosure of the uterus, can be read in more than one place in Freud’s works. Freud himself admits that he did not know how to take Dora’s homosexuality into account and that his interpretation of the countertransference was mistaken; elsewhere, during his analysis of the poet Hilda Doolittle, he refuses to assume the maternal position in the countertransference. We now know that he did little work on his relationship with his mother during his self-analysis and that, when he wrote up the final version of his notes on his sessions with the Rat Man, he repressed almost all references to the maternal. We also know, finally, that, while it appears in one of the key dreams in the Interpretation—the so-called dream of “dissecting my own pelvis,” it does not give rise to any discussion of his own uterine drive, his female being, except through the use of an encrypted metaphor. Now, while repression is one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, its cornerstone, perhaps, the foreclosure of the body of the mother, like the foreclosure of the name of the father conceptualized by Lacan, can generate psychoses: what is foreclosed from the symbolic returns in the real.
Being at once on the far side and the near side of the anal-phallic problematic, which takes up virtually the entire field of analytic theory, women’s sexuality might be elaborated around an oral-genital articulation. The writer who preyed on the talking cure discovered by Anna O. died of a cancer of the mouth that reduced him to silence toward the end of his life; he had planned to theorize orality, but that project was aborted because work on the prenatal, on pregnancy, on the sexed body, on the thinking flesh of women as the space of the
production of living-speaking beings , was foreclosed from the science of the unconscious. If I dared, I would say that, even before it could be written, the epistemophilic drive degenerated into an epistemophallic drive, to the detriment of an analytic and conceptual advance that could have geni(t)ally freed the son from a mother who is seen, in fantasy, as omnipotent. For sons pay a high price for wanting to be loved with a nonambivalent love, for wanting to see themselves as God and wanting to remain tethered to Her, to the mother, both as fathers and sons, rather than admitting that they were born of mere women and that, like those women, they are human beings, nothing more and nothing less, even though they are sometimes geniuses.
Mono-phallo-theism may have led to spiritual progress, but it cost us a misogyny which increasingly seems to be a factor in humanity’s sclerosis, its perverse fixation, and its impoverishment. Because it has been foreclosed from the symbolic, the vital link with the matricial returns in the real in the form of dependency on the archaic mother, while the misogyny, fear, and hatred men feel towards women make the human contract obsolete.
PASSAGES: So what work has to be done within psychoanalysis, in your view, to get out of this impasse?
AF: Secularizing and democratizing psychoanalytic theory is a matter of urgency; that is, we must not only make room for the mother in the father’s house, but we must also free ourselves from pregenitality and infantile dependency. Far from wishing to destroy the body of Freud’s construction, whose foundations and roof are admirable, from cellar to loft, we have to repair parts of it and extend it by adding a few more indispensable rooms. When it comes to genealogies, birth certificates, proper names, and family ties, it is time to reconsider the matricial function, maternal responsibilities, and the woman subject’s place in the house; in a word, we have to think through postpatriarchy in order to invent ourselves as men and women, but we must do so together.
The work that has to be done therefore means recalling this unknown relationship, elaborating this vital link with the matricial. Going beyond envy and recognizing, as Wilfred Bion did, the mother’s ability to daydream or, to be more accurate, the drive to know, woman’s capacity to welcome the other: this would be a way of arriving at a form of gratitude that would in itself bring us closer to what we might call thinking. Perhaps it might be a way of getting away from a religious mode of thought, which is all too often obscurantist, and of coming closer to a scientific and ethical mode of thought.
The symbolizable experience, virtual or real, of pregnancy is, for every woman, an intimate way of working on the self and the nonself. It is the model for all successful grafts, for “thinking of the other,” a heterogeneous “between-us,” a tolerance of the other’s jouissance, a hospitality shown to a foreign body, a gift that creates no debts, a fleshly hope that is disavowed by all absolute narcissism, all totalitarian undividualism, and all racism. These specific capacities can be transmitted, can be shared in the man-woman cocreation that is human procreation.
It is time to do away with misogyny; it is time for knowledge, gratitude, and thought to triumph over the relation with the unknown, over the envy of women and over obscurantism towards women. It is time to do away with the fantasy of the “dark continent.” A women’s ethics would converge with the woman-inspired ethics of the poet-philosophers Rimbaud and Rilke and others … In his Bremen speech Paul Celan recalls that, in German,
denken and
danken, to think and to thank, have the same root.
1 This is an echo of Heidegger, for whom the word
thinking directs us to the essential sphere of memory, devotion, and thanks.
2