Hatred and Forgiveness

To present these figures of feminine fatigue, I will say that psychosomatic fatigue in women—when not the tip of the iceberg of depression, and even if easily confused with it—is a fatigue of sexuation. The tired woman is exhausted by sexual difference; her complaint is rooted in her inability to choose the sex of her object of desire, because she has failed to work through her bisexuality. This would be a specific variant of feminine fatigue as I understand it in my clinical experience, but I would say that, ultimately, this fatigue of sexuation underlies all fatigue in women.

Indeed, the tired woman is not the eternally frustrated conversion hysteric who “makes us” her somatic symptom in order to assert her womanly body, even at the price of physical suffering, an irrefutable reproach: to avenge herself for an unsatisfied desire, to make up for an amorous separation, or to manifest a narcissistic humiliation. No, the chronically tired woman is not sure of her sexual identity, because she does not know whom she loves: “A man or a woman, papa or mama, I don’t know,” she says, in short; and this uncertainty of the sexual choice of her object of desire or love object leads to constant indecision in her existential and professional choices. This conscious or unconscious uncertainty as to the choice of the partner’s sex seems to be more tiring for women than for men due to psychical bisexuality, which Freud already noted came to the fore “much more clearly” in women.² Indeed, the chronically tired woman I listen to on the couch complains constantly about the people around her who are “pains in the neck,” as if by chance, tedious people who “sap her energy”: her mother, her sister, her boss, not to mention her partners, men or women she “tries out” tirelessly but who never fail to “get on her nerves,” she says (for lack of satisfying her undecided sexual desire?). All the impossible objects that cause her to experience as fatigue what I understand to be her lack of passion for a defined object, cut and uncoupled from the parental duo, combined father-mothers whose conflicting sexuality is at once overinvested by the patient and unacceptable to her.

The woman with fatigue I am talking about is a homosexual woman who is unaware of it or is at least hesitating: her unconscious takes pleasure in the arcane realms of psychical bisexuality, but she feels such fascination and repulsion toward the united parents that she is exhausted pursuing this mirage of a total object whose toxic hold is supposed to spare her from choosing an object of desire of one sex and therefore from choosing one sex for herself. Everything that is not part of this toxicity of the fusion with what is revealed to be a mirage of combined parents is perceived by my exhausted woman as boring—it annoys her, gets on her nerves, is a pain in the neck, saps her energy, is tedious; she doesn’t like anything, she’s tired.

If it is true that this two-sided oedipal gives the feminine subject an exceptional plasticity (which Colette diagnosed in her own way as endurance not made of steel but “of woman”), it is no less true that many women do not manage to accomplish the multiple subjective positions required by this polyphonic structure. As a consequence of these failures, whose specific causes I cannot analyze today (trauma inflicted by disagreement or parental separation, a depressive mother, the mother’s operational functioning, the father’s hysterical seducer behavior, etc.), the female subject is fixed defensively at one or several possible postures of this oedipal trajectory, which I will retrace here. And this veritable psychosomatic mutilation is perceived as a lack of being and as lassitude—indeed, as an inability to survive.

I situate this complaint therefore in the context of female psychosexuality, which goes through two versions of the oedipal.

I call the most archaic period oedipal prime, which goes from birth to the so-called phallic stage (between the ages of three and six). I should remind you that while emphasizing what is commonly called “phallic monism” (namely, the idea that “a single genital organ, the male organ, plays a role” in the infantile genital organization of both sexes), Freud notes, in his later writings, a particular relationship between a little girl and her mother: adhesive and intense, almost inaccessible to analysis, because embedded in preverbal sensorial experience, which the founder of psychoanalysis compares to “the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the civilization of the Greeks.”³ This foundation of a more marked psychic bisexuality in women is nevertheless far from the idyll of “being” before the drive-related “doing,” as Winnicott would have it. Immediately eroticized, oral-anal-and-genital, the primal mother-baby girl coexcitation points to what I call the woman’s endogenous homosexuality, which I consider to underlie Melanie Klein’s “projective identification” and remains the repressed center of feminine psychosexuality throughout the life of the subject, just as inaccessible to analysis as the “rock of castration,” if not more so. It is marked by this intrusion of the adult, and more particularly of the mother, in the life of the neotenous infans, which many analysts have found to be at the origins of infantile sexuality. The infant is seduced and seduces through the skin and five senses, offering himself or herself through the orifices: the mouth, anus, and vagina for the girl. Seduced, orificial, broken into: Minoan-Mycenaean sexuality—or oedipal prime, as I call it—is that of a sexual being, the “polymorphous pervert,” anticipating … the woman’s penetrated being. Yet, in spite of this break-in, oedipal prime is no less active and reactive: the emission of excrement, vocalizations, and gestures punctuate it aggressively. But while penile excitation in the boy (later reinforced by the phallic phase) is superimposed on the break-in specific to this “feminine position” (which continues in the male subject with the desire to possess the father’s penis orally and anally), oedipal prime in the girl involves a more complex ambiguity.

On the one hand, the little girl’s “ego-skin” (D. Anzieu) and the “orificial ego” (J. André) are offered to the seduction-passivation that engages the narcissism of the two women (mother and daughter), united in reciprocal projective identifications (more or less unconscious for the mother), as well as masochism and its sadistic abreactions: on the part of the girl, devouring the breast along with the penis, an outpouring of excrement, and so on; on the part of the mother, taking pleasure in the powerlessness of the newborn baby girl, in her orificial offering, when not ignoring them to defend herself, or, indeed, violating them to avenge herself.

On the other hand, this orificial break-in, this breaking and entering in the little girl’s oedipal prime, is compensated not only by clitoral excitation but also by the precocious elaboration of a link of introjection-and-identification with the seductive and intrusive object that is the mother. I believe Melanie Klein was the first to suggest that under optimal circumstances the libidinal investment of the mother’s hollow body as well as her own body is metabolized in the child into “depth.”⁴ As for me, I would note that, through introjection, the girl installs the seductress mother within: the excited cavity of the interior body is transformed into an internal representation. This starts the slow and long-lasting work of psychization that will be accentuated by oedipal two, in which we recognize the female tendency to favor psychic [stet] or amorous representation-idealization in counterpoint to drive-related erotic excitation. This precocious psychization also seems to be an early mechanism of the absorption of somatic fatigue: we find it again in the experience of the female mystic, the female writer, and the female psychoanalyst (and, of course, in the male psychoanalyst, insofar as his unconscious remains open to the “Minoan-Mycenaean” oedipal prime).

This real need for a link is like the recto of the cloacal verso, the daughter claiming an insatiable, imaginary premium for oral, anal, and vaginal pleasures submitted to (rather than acted upon). It is doubled by the attachment of the mother to her infant daughter: not a phallic prosthesis, as the boy is, but a chasm of masochistic or depressive latencies. The implacable need for a real presence, a protective link, is manifested in the tireless, necessarily extenuating request the woman addresses to her male erotic partner: the one who will rarely be a “partner” but more exclusively a “lover,” whom the woman asks to understand her and to always be there, as if he were … a real/impossible mother.

Following neurobiological maturation and satisfying experiences of separation with the object, the phallic stage becomes the central organizer of the thought-sexuality copresence in both sexes: the subject may move on to oedipal two. The child who has already developed language and thought is no longer content to invest his organs and their excitability but associates the cognitive operations he applies to the external world with the internal movements of his drive-related excitability. From now on, he sees that papa is not only the one he wants to kill in order to appropriate the mother, but the one who possesses what must be called a separability: he is a third figure regulating the mother-child sensorial dyad, a symbolic father, authority of law and the forbidden. The bearer of a penis, the little boy invests this organ of pleasure all the more since it is first and foremost that of the father, whose organizing role in the familial and psychical world the child is now in a position to recognize.

This decisive encounter between the mastery of signs and sexual excitation is also produced in the little girl to weld her being as speaking-and-desiring subject. It is no longer oral or anal excitation but clitoral excitation, above all, with or without the perception of the vagina, that dominates this period that I call oedipal two, where, unlike the boy, the little girl changes objects: the father replaces the mother as the target of desire. Let us examine in detail the ambiguity of this change.

On the one hand, like the boy, and every subject of speech and law, the girl identifies with the phallus and the father who is its representative. But at the heart of this phallic assumption, she is nevertheless at a disadvantage. Deprived of a penis and depreciated by this fact in all known cultures, she adheres to the phallic order by bearing the unconscious trace of oedipal prime, of her polymorphous sensoriality, devoted to the desire of the mother and for the mother. Thus the little girl gains access to the phallic order—which is erected on the foundation of the “dark continent” or the “Minoan-Mycenaean” continent—according to the “as if” modality, the “illusory,” the “I’m playing the game, but I know I’m not in it, because I don’t have It.” Consequently, if she is not stuck in the pose of the virago, the necessary phallic position of the woman constitutes the female subject in the register of radical extraneousness, constitutive exclusion, and irreparable solitude.

Moreover, while being a phallic subject of speech, thought, and law, the girl retreats not to the passive position, as is commonly said, but to the receptive position, in order to become the object of the father. A phallic subject of the symbolic order as a speaking being, as a woman she nevertheless wants to receive the penis and have the father’s child, taking the place of the mother whom she wishes to evict, now a genital rival with whom the daughter never stops settling scores that go back to the original coexcitation in oedipal prime.

Following the twists that access to oedipal two imprints in the female subject, we understand the irreducible extraneousness a woman feels in the phallic-symbolic order. At best, that foreignness takes on the aspect of an enigma: “What does a woman want?” Freud is not the only one to ask. It may be refined in revolt and insubordination: Hegel salutes woman as the “eternal irony of the community.” The constitutive exile of a woman in the phallic-symbolic order may prove unsuitable and then be deflected into chronic depressiveness and intractable melancholy. Or run aground in the suicidal aftermath of the “refusal of the feminine” that anorexia and bulimia are: morbid symptoms in which the gaping excitability of the hollow body persists, unable to defend itself against the intrusion of the maternal-paternal seduction except by stuffing up or blocking the erogenous zones.

Because it is two-sided, ambivalent, and tortuous, the oedipal phase of the woman might be thought of as incomplete or interminable: Freud says it clearly (through his phallic optic) by noting that, unlike the oedipal of the boy who “sinks” under the effect of the castration complex, the oedipal of the girl is only “introduced” with the castration complex (in what I call oedipal two) and only endures with the feminine demand for a penis or a child.⁵ In my interpretation the feminine oedipal does not “undergo catastrophe,” but completes eternal returns due to the pregnancy of oedipal prime under and in oedipal two and leads the female subject to an eternal psychosexual incompletion: tiring, exhausting hesitation between unstable, undecidable objects of desire (as “marked” psychic bisexuality requires).

On the other hand, when a woman manages to complete the complex tourniquet that oedipal prime and oedipal two impose, she may have a chance to acquire the solid maturity a man so often lacks, buffeted as he is between the phallic pose of the “macho” man and the infantile regression of the impossible Mr. Baby. For, having assumed and elucidated the multiple facets of her two-sided oedipal phase, the female subject, like a portrait by Picasso, obtains an astonishing psychosexual plasticity: I am tempted to see this as the key to the endurance that indeed has nothing to do with steel. Colette, again: “A woman can never die of grief. She is such a solid creature, so hard to kill!”⁶

When the mother manages to go beyond her control over the child as a phallic prosthesis and to disimpassion the link to the genitor-father, beyond the time of desire which is that of death, a cyclical time opens for her, a time of new beginnings and rebirths and a certain serenity. In the real presence of this other that the child is for her, both phallus taken from the father and real body in a narcissistic doubling of her own infantile sensuality as constituted in oedipal prime, the woman finds the conjunction of her symbolic essence (phallic thinking subject) and her carnal essence (mother/daughter sensual duality, genetrix reduplication). Nothing is impossible for a mother who succeeds at her psychical bisexuality: a tireless “good fairy,” she does not notice that she is depleted in the small cares lavished on her loved ones. Like the mother coming for consultation who was worried (but was she really?) because, after getting divorced, taking care of a mother afflicted with Alzheimer’s and a son who was operated on for a brain tumor—no less!—she broke her ankle but felt no pain or fatigue: “My cousin told me that that wasn’t normal, that I should be seen, what do you think?” she smiled, almost naively.

As for the hysteric, her erotomania tries to resolve her interminable oedipal and the bisexuality it commands through amorous exaltation: the infinite quest for an object whose absence is filled by the God of monotheists. Isn’t the “successful hysteric” the one who does not succumb to conversion or depression, an indefatigable Diana, huntress of ideal objects, who narrowly misses paranoia by tirelessly persecuting more or less androgynous idols, whether men or women? The genius of Freud could not have been more inspired than when he tried to put an end to his patients’ ill-being by transforming their loves into transference love. “It’s useless to try to look for a two-sided Object that can’t be found,” he is basically saying, laying his patients down on the couch. “Let’s maintain this transferential link, which you can’t do without, but let’s deconstruct it constantly, in the hopes of arranging more tolerable familial, professional, and social connections for you.” Relying on this new found/created object, which is the object of transference, it is then, as we know, a matter of working through the time and space of the oedipal: reconstructing the psychical complexity, if need be, causing it to come about. In the best of cases there is a true modification of the psychical structure, so that its survival depends as much, if not more, on the capacity of psychical construction/deconstruction than on the quest for an improbable object of satisfaction. The psychization induced by the analytic process balances the race to the object, the inside defatigues the outside, the “interior castle” relieves exterior conflicts. Proust knew this already: the important thing is not the value of the beloved woman but the depth of the lover: not the object but the psychical working through. The writer compared himself to those strollers or readers who live “surrounded by our own soul.”⁸ We could say: their psychical space protects them from ills as well as from fatigue.

The tired woman, on the contrary, is a failed hysteric or a mother without conviction: she has such a hard time choosing between letting herself go, as the object of a sadomasochistic break-in in oedipal prime, or wearing herself out, trying to seduce in the solitude of the stranger proper to oedipal two, that she risks seeking refuge in the analytical cure. A last resort if there ever was one, where psychoanalytical speech causes to resonate, pell-mell, the echoes of the unspeakable intimacy with mama and those of elective symbolization through a father who understands her and makes her understood. While continuing to complain to the analyst about the analyst himself (or herself), who is tiring in turn: now a mother, now a father, never the two together, never the total object that the tired woman would so like to meet in someone—an absolute object that would fulfill her, without any loss, a nonobject, actually, nothing but a toxic exaltation to ward off the fatigue of sexuation; and refusing, with this very complaint, to choose the sex of her object—or to choose herself as a subject of a single sex. In regard to current social values, she is too modern to be content being “your basic” mother or hysteric and not modern enough to be content with perverse acting out.

Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) succeeds where Schreber fails: she manages to fortify her body, subject to frequent epileptic fits and grueling headaches, through faith in a God who is not a persecuting God but a loving spouse who stands by her—like a permanent mother doubled by paternal wisdom that does nothing less than speak through the mouth of Teresa herself. Teresa ends up sheltering this perfect object of her bisexuality, this loving Lord, in her own center, since what she calls the “interior castle” in her heart is inhabited by the Lord himself, whom the Carmelite admits to us she has managed to … “checkmate.”⁹ Might this mystic who is “checkmating God” be an atheist? The only possible atheist: not ignoring that God is love, because the human subject is constructed in his connections to the love object, without which he founders; but constructing oneself through and beyond the object of love: taking it into oneself through the intervention of “humility,” as she specifies; identifying oneself in him by absorbing Him in herself? If Teresa succeeds where Schreber fails, it is not only because the mother superior very lucidly asks her Carmelite daughters to be women as well as men, but because she avoids fatigue by loving herself in the object of love, which amounts to saying that she loves herself without an object of love: she loves nothing other than everything, the Everything that she is herself, through an incessant inspection, first, vocal (prayer), then essentially silent (meditation), and finally, above all, written, so as to be clarified and shared, an exercise in which one can easily see the ancestor of analysis. Starting here, Teresa is no longer sick or, at any rate, her maladies no longer matter. Between the ages of forty-seven and sixty-six, in fewer than twenty years, she managed to found sixteen convents: is this being tired? No, this is ecstasy. Or else a castle streaming with water, the exquisite fluidity of the soul, whose suppleness she compares to “liquid stone,” when not to the metamorphosis of a silkworm. The castle—a chrysalis becoming a butterfly: What better image of feminine psychical plasticity in the meanders of the two-sided oedipal, endlessly revisited!

We do not have to be mystics to arrive at this absorption of the object that is perhaps the only possible freedom vis-à-vis the object of desire, without succumbing to its control or resigning oneself to its melancholic loss: a joyful freedom. If freedom is the modern version of happiness, as Simone de Beauvoir says in The Second Sex, Colette—closer to us than Teresa of Avila and in a different way—conquered it by melding all possible loves into the “mental hermaphrodite” she claimed to be, so as to rid herself of it: “The open sea, but not the wilderness. The discovery that there is no wilderness! That in itself is enough to sustain me in triumphing over my afflictions.”¹⁰ Or again: “Love, one of the great commonplaces of existence, is slowly leaving mine… . Once we’ve left these behind, we find that all the rest is gay and varied, and that there is plenty of it.”¹¹

The Freudian path is entirely different. By implicitly inviting his disciples to participate in constant, endless transference-countertransference, oedipal prime and oedipal two, inside and outside, men and women, and several patients a day, an indefatigable psychical plasticity is demanded of us by the psychoanalytical experience. This amorous suppleness, this infidelity that we reenact from one analysand to another, is only tiring if we get caught in the trap of countertransferential identification, and if we allow the fluidity of the analytical process, required for a “good analysis,” to become petrified. On the contrary, if we manage to keep our attention “floating” and our unconscious always ready to travel through the meanders of the various oedipal stages, prime or two, feminine or masculine, drives and meanings, and vice versa, and in different ways with each analysand, I do not think it is a matter of an aptitude for regression, or the efficacy of a lightened (protective rather than tyrannical) superego, or even a mania to switch objects perversely, specific to psychoanalysts; but a back and forth between agencies of the psychical apparatus, so many stations in the history of the speaking subject, which, by virtue of being revisited in this paradoxical amorous link that we call transference-countertransference, is relieved of the passionate hold (or its lack) that is grueling for its protagonists. Continually at play in the plurality of the links with our patients, transferential-countertransferential love, accompanied by its elucidation, mobilizes and favors our psychosexual plasticity. Can we imagine a better antidote to our fatigues? Neither “checkmating” the object of love, as the mystic would have it, nor love as “one of the great commonplaces of existence,” as the writer given over to her sublimation would say; but a plurality of real-imaginary-symbolic transferential links, attentive to the two-sided oedipal phase of the woman, that accompany the feminine in man as well and give the most subtle among us this gracious maturity and fresh vitality we see radiate from certain women, at ease in their psychical bisexuality. Analysts of both sexes deal with it tirelessly in their listening and their interpretation: tireless guardians, because tireless builders of psychical space as open, incomplete, interminable structures. How? By not being made “of steel” but simply “of woman.”