The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

p.231

PSYCHOANALYSIS, SUBJECTIVITY, AND FEMINISM

Kelly Oliver

Introduction

In this chapter I will argue that traditional psychoanalytic theory has been instructive in formulating a developmental theory of subjectivity—that is, of our senses of ourselves as selves with agency—but it has neglected the social context of subjects and their subject positions—that is their historical and social positions in their culture—which is sometimes off-putting to feminist theorists. Nonetheless, there are various reasons why psychoanalysis can be extremely useful to feminists who are interested in subjectivity and in the relationships of social, historical, and political forces to subject formation. For at least the last twenty years feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Teresa Brennan, Jane Gallop, Nancy Chodorow, Judith Butler, and Cynthia Willett—among others—have grappled with Freudian psychoanalysis in an attempt to bring its central insights into contemporary feminist contexts.

Certainly subjects, subjectivity, and agency only ever exist in political and social contexts that affect them in their constitution. One’s social position and history profoundly influence one’s very sense of oneself as an active agent in the world. Yet the contradictions and inconsistencies in historical and social circumstances guarantee that we are never completely determined by our subject position or our social context. It is possible to develop a sense of agency in spite of or in resistance to an oppressive social situation. When the social context provides positive images—figurative and otherwise—with which one can identify, then one’s sense of agency and of oneself as a subject are supported within the social sphere. But when the only available images are demeaning, then it can be difficult to sustain a sense of one’s active agency and self-worth. Ultimately, our experience of ourselves as subjects is maintained in the tension between our subject positions and our subjectivity.

Subjectivity and Subject Positions

Although Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, acknowledges the effect of social conditions on the psyche, he and his followers rarely consider how those social conditions become the conditions of possibility for psychic life and subject formation outside of the family drama. Like Freud, some contemporary psychoanalytic theorists, including object relations theorists, consider the social to be founded on the relationship between the infant and its caregiver; the social, then, is defined as a relation between two people. But there is another social dimension to consider—the larger socio-historical context and political economy within which that relationship between two develops. Although “object relations” theorists, especially feminists, do consider the ways in which patriarchal culture affects the development of gendered subjects, too often they reduce the psychic dimension to sociological facts about the gender of care-takers and simple imitation of gender roles. For example, this is true of Nancy Chodorow’s early work in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) in which, ultimately, she proposes that patriarchal gender roles are perpetuated through women mothering and men being breadwinners. Likewise Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking early work began what is called “care ethics,” now so prominent in feminist debates over ethics. Gilligan’s thesis that men and women are socialized differently, and therefore develop different moral attitudes, is heavily reliant—like Chodorow’s theory—on the fact that most caregivers are women (Gilligan 1982). While these theorists consider subject position, then, they give simplified accounts of subjectivity. It is important to give a more rich and nuanced account of both subject position and subjectivity. Psychoanalysis combined with social theory can help us to do that.

p.232

The distinction between subjectivity and subject position is, as I mentioned above, the difference between one’s sense of oneself as a self with agency and one’s historical and social position in one’s culture. Subject positions, although mobile, are constituted in our social interactions, and our positions within cultures and contexts; history and circumstance govern them. Subject positions are our relations to the finite world of human history and relations—the realm of politics. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is experienced as our sense of agency and responsiveness, which is constituted in the encounter with otherness. And although subjectivity is logically prior to any possible subject position, in our experience they are always profoundly interconnected. This is why our experience of our own subjectivity is the result of the productive tension between finite subject position and the infinite response-ability of the structure of subjectivity itself.

By subjectivity, then, I mean one’s sense of oneself as an “I,” as an agent. By subject position I mean one’s position in society and history as developed through various social relationships. The structure of subjectivity is the structure that makes taking oneself to be an agent (or a self) possible. This structure is a witnessing structure because it is founded on the possibility of address and response; it is a fundamentally dialogic structure (in the broadest sense of the term “dialogic”). Subject position, on the other hand, is the particular sense of one’s kind of agency, so to speak, that comes through one’s social position and historical context. While distinct, subject position and subjectivity are also intimately related. For example, if you are a black woman within a racist and sexist culture, then your subject position as oppressed could undermine your subjectivity, your sense of yourself as an agent. If you are a white man within a racist and sexist culture, then your subject position as privileged could shore up your subjectivity and promote your sense of yourself as an agent. Of course, usually social situations are not so black and white, but rather gray. And, among other things, psychoanalysis teaches us that identity, whatever the situation, is always ambiguous and often ambivalent.

p.233

The subject is thus a dynamic yet stable structure, which results from the interaction between two sets of forces: finitude, being, and history (subject position) at the one pole and infinity, meaning, and historicity (subjectivity) at the other. Architects and engineers have worked with the principle of tension-loaded structures that use the tension as support. A classic example is the Brooklyn Bridge. We could say that the subject is a tension-loaded structure, but its flexibility makes it more like what architects call a tensile structure. The stability of tensile structures is the result of opposing forces pulling in two directions, through which a membrane’s double curvature receives its structure and resistance. Subjectivity is analogous to the structure and resistance that result from a membrane or skin being stretched in two directions and held together by tension. The two axes of force whose tension supports the subject are subject position and subjectivity.

One’s sense of oneself as a subject with agency is profoundly affected by one’s social position. Indeed, we cannot separate subjectivity from subject position; any theory of subjectivity—whether it is psychoanalytic, phenomenological, the result of critical theory, or post-structuralist, etc.—must consider subject position. While Freudian psychoanalytic theory has addressed itself to questions of subjectivity and subject formation, traditionally it has done so without considering subject position, or more significantly the impact of subject position on subject formation. Even some recent applications of psychoanalysis to the social context of subject formation have not reformulated the very concepts of psychoanalysis such that they account for, or explain, how subjects form within particular kinds of social contexts. Instead they apply psychoanalytic concepts in order to diagnose certain kinds of psychic or social formations (see, e.g., Lane 1998). We need more than an application of psychoanalytic concepts to social institutions or psychic formations in order to explain the effects of oppression on the psyche. To explain why so many people suffer at the core of their subjectivity and in their concomitant sense of agency when they are “abjected,” excluded, or oppressed by mainstream culture, we need a psychoanalytic social theory that reformulates psychoanalytic concepts as social concepts. We need a psychoanalytic social theory that is based on social concepts of subject formation, and that considers how subjectivity is formed and deformed within particular types of social contexts.

Theories that do not consider subject position and the role of social conditions in subjectivity and subject formation not only cover over differential power, but also cover over the differential subjectivities that are produced within those power relations. Without considering subject position, we assume that all subjects are alike, we level differences, or—like traditional psychoanalysis—we develop a normative notion of subject-formation based on a particular group—traditionally, white European men. Instead, a psychoanalytic theory of oppression must consider the role of subject position in subject formation, which is to say the relationships between subject position and subjectivity.

Most psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and subject formation, including both ego psychology and object relations theories, suppose that there is a primary struggle between the individual and the social or others that is constitutive of subjectivity. For example, in The Bonds of Love (1988), Jessica Benjamin suggests that the infant develops its individuality and autonomy in a Hegelian master–slave type dialectic with its mother; Axel Honneth (1996), following Benjamin, also imagines relations with others as a constant struggle for recognition; and Judith Butler (1997) describes all subject formation as subjugation. These theorists propose that subjectivity develops through alienation from and/or subjection to the social realm. Likewise most nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy (including existentialism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and critical theory) are based on, or presuppose, an antagonistic relationship between self and other, between subject and object, between individual and society. Contemporary French philosophy (Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray) has been an attempt to decenter the subject and move away from a subject-centered philosophy toward a relational or other-centered philosophy. These Post-Hegelian theorists—Freudians and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theorists (including object relations theorists), phenomenologists, and critical theorists—recognize the intersubjectivity of subjectivity, but they have not taken the relationality of subjectivity to its limit. To do so would mean going beyond intersubjectivity and admitting that there is no subject or individual to engage in a relationship with another subject—to engage in an intersubjective relationship—prior to relationality itself. (For an excellent analysis of how and why primary relationships are not intersubjective, see Willett 1995.)

p.234

Relationality is primary. This means that subjectivity is not the result of one autonomous subject in relation with another, or two self-consciousnesses encountering each other and looking for mutual recognition—this can only come later, after the foundation of subjectivity has been established, if only provisionally. Representation, language, and other non-linguistic visceral and more bodily forms of communication and meaning always mediate this relationality—it is always mediated by our attempts to respond. Responsivity is thus both the prerequisite for subjectivity and one of its definitive features. Subjectivity is constituted through response, responsiveness or response-ability and not the other way around (see Oliver 2001). We do not respond because we are subjects; rather, responsiveness and relationality make subjectivity and psychic life possible in the first place. In this sense, response-ability precedes and constitutes subjectivity, which is why the structure of subjectivity is fundamentally ethical. We are by virtue of our ability to respond to others, and therefore we have a primary obligation to our founding possibility, response-ability itself. We have a responsibility to open up rather than close off the possibility of response, both from others and ourselves.

The Unconscious, Sublimation, and Meaning

If Freud normalizes a white male European subject, and we risk perpetuating this normalization by using his concepts without transforming them, then why turn to psychoanalytic theory at all to discuss gender and the effects of sexism on the psyche? Even if we could do away with the prejudice of Freud’s nineteenth-century theories and their twentieth-century versions, psychoanalysis still deals with individuals at odds with the social, so what can feminism gain from turning to psychoanalysis? There are at least two primary facets of psychoanalysis that make it crucial for social theory in general, and feminist theory in particular: the centrality of the notion of the unconscious and the importance of sublimation as an alternative to repression. Both of these facets come to bear in important ways on the fact that all of our relationships are mediated by meaning—that we are beings who mean. As beings that mean, our experiences are both bodily and mental. Unconscious drive force or energy operates between soma (body) and psyche. We could say that our being is brought into the realm of meaning through unconscious drive energies and their affective representations.

p.235

The psychoanalytic concept most appropriate to a discussion of unconscious drive energy making its way into the realm of meaning is sublimation. Although this notion remains underdeveloped in Freud’s writings (Freud supposedly burned his only paper on sublimation thus subjecting it to literal sublimation by fire), and it has been used without much further development since, it is central to social theory, especially to a social theory of oppression and sexism. We need a theory that explains how we articulate or otherwise express our bodies, experiences, and affects, all of which are fluid and energetic, in some form of meaningful signification so that we can communicate with others. Oppression and sexism undermine the ability to sublimate by withholding or foreclosing the possibility of articulating and thereby discharging bodily drives and affects. The bodies and affects of those marginalized have already been excluded as “abject” from the realm of proper society.

The colonization of psychic space operates by undermining the ability to sublimate. This is why Freud concludes that women are less able to sublimate than men. But if women are less able to sublimate than men it is not because of their anatomy, psychology, or individual pathologies, but rather because of social repression and the lack of social support required for sublimation. Sublimation is the hallmark of subjectivity, such that an impaired ability to sublimate undermines agency and ultimately leads to depression and melancholy—which, it could be argued, is why within patriarchal cultures women are more likely to be diagnosed as depressed or melancholy than men. The pathologization of women’s depression covers over the social and institutional causes for that symptomology. Patriarchal culture continues to devalue and debase women and girls in ways that colonize psychic space by undermining the possibility of sublimation and meaning-making.

Sublimation is necessary for beings to enter the realm of meaning. The first acts of meaning become available through the sublimation of bodily impulses into forms of communication. Moreover, sublimation allows us to connect and communicate with others by making our bodies and experiences meaningful; we become beings who mean by sublimating our bodily drives and affects. Sublimation, then, is necessary for both subjectivity (or individuality) and community (or sociality). Sublimation is the lynchpin of a psychoanalytic social theory, for sublimation makes idealization possible. And without idealization we can neither conceptualize our experience nor set goals or ideals for ourselves. Without the ability to idealize, we cannot imagine our situation otherwise, which is to say, without idealization we cannot resist domination. Sublimation and idealization are necessary not only for psychic life but also for transformative and restorative resistance to racist oppression. Sublimation and idealization are the cornerstones of our mental life, yet they have their source in bodies, bodies interacting with each other. Sublimation is possible through the social relationality of bodies. But in an oppressive culture that abjects, excludes, or marginalizes certain groups, or types, of people by demeaning them, sublimation and idealization can become the privilege of dominant groups. Psychoanalytic notions of sublimation and idealization thus need to be transformed into social concepts.

Subjectivity develops through a process of sublimation, of elevating bodily drives and their affective representations to a new level of meaning and signification. Sublimation is the ongoing process of subjectivity and signification; it is the basis for psychic life insofar as we are beings who mean. In addition, sublimation always and only takes place in relation to others and the Other, which is the meaning into which each individual is born. Sublimation in the constitution of subjectivity is analogous to sublimation in chemistry, which is defined as a chemical action or process of subliming or converting a solid substance by means of heat into a vapor, which resolidifies upon cooling. The process of sublimation transforms bodily drives and affects that seem solid and intractable into a dynamic vapor, which liberates the drives and affects from repression (specifically the repression inherent in oppression) and discharges them into signifying systems, which re-solidify them. This process continues from birth to death without end. Because we can never fully “speak our bodies” or our experiences, we continue to try. We continue to speak and attempt communication precisely because we never succeed, which is not to say that we completely fail. On the contrary, we not only fill our own lives with meaning through sublimation but also make communication with others possible, if always tenuous. The process must continue because the bodily drives and affects are fluid and like vapors dynamic and volatile; therefore they cannot be fixed or re-solidified in signification without a remainder or excess. But this excess is not an alienating lack but is precisely what motivates us to continue to commune. This excess is the unconscious itself, which can never be fully brought to consciousness—that is to say, the singularity of each individual.

p.236

Without accounting for the unconscious processes inherent in sublimation and thereby necessary to become beings that mean, we risk falling into the all too popular discourse of autonomous self-governed individuals, which covers over the way in which autonomy, self-governance, and individuality were formed. This discourse erases the unconscious processes by virtue of which we become subjects with a sense of agency. We are not born with feelings of autonomy and self-governance. Rather, these are the effects of unconscious processes of sublimation and idealization. Autonomy, sovereignty and individuality are effects—by-products if you will—and not causes of becoming a being who means, of becoming subjectivity.

If we analyze the social merely in terms of bodies and behaviors without accounting for the unconscious, we cannot fully explain the contradictory effects of oppression. Indeed, in order to explain the bodies and the behaviors of those oppressed, not to mention their oppressors, we need to account for the unconscious effects of oppression. We need to understand how oppression causes depression, shame, and anger. But only a theory that incorporates an account of the unconscious can explain the dynamic operations of the affects of oppression. In order to understand the relationship between oppression or social context and affect, we need to postulate the existence of the unconscious. Without this postulation, we become complicit with those who would blame the victim, so to speak, for her own negative affects. Even if sociological or psychological studies demonstrate a higher incidence of depression, shame, or anger in particular groups, this information cannot be interpreted outside of social context and without consideration of subject position and subject formation. Certainly, affective life is caught up in one’s sense of oneself as a subject and an agent. And oppression and the affects of oppression undermine subjectivity and agency such that even those very affects become signs of inferiority or weakness rather than symptoms of oppression.

In other words, it is only by postulating the unconscious that we can explain why many people who are in some way excluded, oppressed, or marginalized at some level blame themselves for their condition. In general, our culture blames individuals rather than social institutions for negative “personality traits” and “flaws.” The psychoanalytic notion of the super-ego is useful in diagnosing how and why those who are marginalized internalize the very values that abject and oppress them. Without the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, we could not adequately explain the conflicting, and especially the self-destructive, desires of those marginalized. Even the Marxist notion of “false consciousness” implies not only that we are not transparent to ourselves, but also that there are parts of our mental lives that we repress or cannot access without intervention.

p.237

There is a complicated relationship between cultural values and an individual’s sense of herself as an agent; this relationship goes beyond the internalization of abject images. The internalization of abject images in turn results in ambivalence towards one’s own personal and group identity. It also results in ambivalence at the level of one’s desires. This is to say, oppression and sexism can lead women and girls to embrace patriarchal traditions and values even as those very values demean them. For example, even some feminists have embraced the notion that women are more caring than men, and that women’s nurturing is definitive of women’s value. While there is no denying that caring and nurturing are essential values for human existence, it is also true that caring and nurturing are not essential to, or necessarily biologically determined in, women and girls.

Some feminists have argued that women bear the affective or emotional burdens for men in an unequal affective division of labor. As Sandra Bartky (1990) puts it, women feed egos and tend emotional wounds. Like Bartky, Teresa Brennan (1992) describes this emotional labor as feeding the masculine ego and self-esteem by directing attention toward it and away from oneself. And, Gayatri Spivak (1999) claims, the civilizing mission rests on the foreclosure of affects, which are then projected onto the oppressed, who are expected to carry the affective burden for dominant culture. This denial of unwanted affects is not so much a projection as a transfer onto, or injection of, affects into those who are marginalized within dominant society. Philosophers have long associated lack of control over emotions with a lack of reason, and lack of reason with a lack of humanity. Affects are associated with the irrational and barbaric, in a complicated movement through which they are transferred onto the abjected other and at once become signs or symptoms of that abjection. They are further disavowed by the foreclosure of their articulation by those who are forced to carry them. Even mainstream culture’s rage over difference—which should be met with anger by those whose difference is abjected—is transferred to those who are marginalized, who are forced to carry it. Their resistance, then, is seen as a symptom of their irrational monstrous rage, while the domination, oppression, and abuse against which that resistance was directed (perhaps misdirected) are normalized and naturalized as rational self-defenses against monstrous evil or disease in order to maintain proper order.

In terms of psychoanalytic theory, those who are marginalized within culture are subject to and interiorize a cruel and punishing super-ego, which excludes them as abject. The super-ego of dominant culture judges them inferior and defective. This harsh super-ego maintains the good upon which dominant values rest by projecting its opposite onto those marginalized and excluded; they become evil. They are expected to carry the burden of evil, sickness, weakness, and dejection for the entire culture. They become the scapegoats of the dominant super-ego. But this super-ego and its good are not only self-contradictory but also self-destructive, and therefore necessarily leave open the possibility of resistance.

Ironically, those who are marginalized seek love and recognition from the very culture that rejects them as inferior. The dominant values with which someone is raised cannot but affect her; she cannot but internalize those values as valuable, even if they devalue her. The contradiction of valuing what devalues oneself can lead to feelings of inferiority, shame, and depression—or it can lead to reflection, resistance, and revolt. Anger and aggression redirected outward or sublimated into creative expression can renew agency and self-esteem. Indeed, feelings of shame and discrimination can become the basis for alternative communities and alternative modes of expression. Eve Sedgwick concludes that because shame is constitutive of identity and not just part of someone’s personality, and because shame is performative, it need not be toxic but rather can become transformative (2002: 21). Those who are excluded or abjected because of their race, sex, gender, sexuality, or class have to negotiate shame as an affect that is constitutive of their identities. This negotiation can lead to depression, but it can also lead to transformation, humor, solidarity, or political action.

p.238

Without social support and positive self-images available in culture girls, women, and those who are marginalized suffer from the colonization of psychic space, which can result in the inability to sublimate, and ultimately the inability to find or create meaning in their lives. Without this accepting social support, psychic space can become atrophied and impassable. Drives and affects, one’s bodily experience itself, devalued in culture, become locked in some unnamable crypt, which either makes of the psyche a prison that confines or immobilizes affects and experience, on the one hand, or flattens psychic space, on the other. In either case, drives and affects—the very passions that give meaning to life and love—become cut off from words and representations. One necessary antidote, if not the cure, for sexism, then, is to have, find, or create the social space within which to articulate women’s and girls’ drives and affects as positive, lovable, and loved, and thereby supporting of psychic space.

On the other hand, lack of social support can lead to feelings of emptiness, incompleteness, and worthlessness; at the extreme, the lack of social support can lead to the split between words and affects that psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1989) identifies with the depressive position. Within patriarchal cultures in which women’s affects are not valued, it is no surprise that we lack the social space in which these affects can be sublimated or discharged. Women’s experience generally, and women’s depression more specifically, remain subterranean within dominant discourses (for information on rates of depression in women, see, for example, Peden et al. 2000; Kessler 2003; and Noble 2005). Therefore the depressed woman has given up on finding the words to discharge or manifest her affects. The silence, especially women’s silence, which so often accompanies depression, is a socially proscribed silence and its cause. Some, if not all, of women’s depression should be diagnosed as social melancholy rather than individual pathology, or merely biological chemical imbalance. The structure of psychic space through which sublimation is possible depends upon the connection between words and affects. It depends upon a primary identification with the meaning of language, which is to say the operation of making meaning one’s own through a process of assimilation that allows nourishment for both the body and for the soul or psyche.

Indeed, making meaning for oneself is the seat of subjectivity and agency; and this is what oppression attempts to take away from those oppressed. Exclusion operates most effectively by preventing the assimilation of authority that legitimates the individual and authorizes her agency. This authorization is a prerequisite for the capacity to sublimate, through which an individual makes meaning her own and thereby gains a sense of belonging to the community. Yet in spite of oppression, empowered subjectivity and agency are possible for those marginalized within mainstream culture, by virtue of their own resistance and revolt against oppression. Resistance and revolt reauthorize agency and restore the capacity to sublimate and make meaning one’s own. This resistance not only brings people together to create meaning for themselves but also begins to provide the social space that is necessary for empowered psychic space. Creating the social space for resistance to sexism provides the social support that is necessary to reverse and counteract the process of internalization of oppressive values. As we create free and open social spaces, we begin to create free and open psychic spaces. Social revolt and psychic revolt go hand in hand; one is not possible without the other, which is why psychoanalysis is crucial for understanding subject formation within patriarchal cultures.

p.239