13 Beyond the phallus: Lacan and feminism
Above all, spare us any father educators, rather let them be in retreat on any position as master.1
In 1970s America, at the crest of second-wave feminism, Sigmund Freud was the man women loved to hate. They were not without reason. The medical specialty practiced in Freud’s name by American analysts (mostly men) devoted itself not to helping patients (mostly women) discover their desire, but to enforcing ideas about “normal” femininity.2 To those beginning to question the conventions of domesticity and heterosexuality, psychoanalysis, with its talk of “female masochism” and “penis envy,” seemed the enemy of women’s liberation. Freud’s words were plucked out of context to prove it.
But in 1974, the British feminist Juliet Mitchell published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which would have enormous impact on a generation of women, both academic and activist. Mitchell wrote: “[a] rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud’s works is fatal for feminism. However it may have been used, psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one. If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we cannot afford to neglect it.”3
Mitchell’s work permitted those on the political left to go beyond the materialism of the “nature vs nurture debates” in social science. Neither biology nor culture could exhaust the meaning of individual fantasy, of subjectivity. Freud took the desiring subject as his main topic of investigation, and the reading of Freud that was most compatible with feminist politics, according to Mitchell, was that of Jacques Lacan. She even defended Lacan’s recondite style by referring to the unfortunate consequences of Freud’s accessible, easily bowdlerized style.
Mitchell continued such pathbreaking work with the publication in 1982 of Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, co-edited with Jacqueline Rose – a book that marked a turning point in the encounter of English-speaking feminists with Lacan. Readers’ reactions to their translated excerpts from the Ecrits and Seminar XX tended to divide sharply along discipline lines. Lacan developed a feminist following in the academy – mostly in the humanities – where his notions of “the gaze” and of the contested, troubled nature of gender inspired brilliant commentary. By 1992, just eighteen years after psychoanalysis had made its entrée into feminist theory, there was material enough to compile a five-hundred-page Dictionary of Psychoanalytic Feminism.4
Unlike their academic counterparts, most Anglophone feminist clinicians found in their encounter with Lacan’s writing no reason to go further. Less accustomed to dealing with difficult philosophical texts, they viewed Lacan’s style as obscurantist and elitist, and complained with some justification that his ideas could not be evaluated without access to the lengthy clinical illustrations offered by Freud, Klein, and Winnicott. Rumors had spread that Lacan was abusive with patients, and that he used the short analytic session to see huge numbers of people, charging astronomical fees.5 Finally, most practitioners felt that Lacan’s reliance on the concept of the phallus and the “paternal metaphor” returned them to all the wrong aspects of Freud. Freud, by his own admission, had underestimated the role of the mother in children’s development. And unlike Melanie Klein and the object relations analysts in England, Lacan seemed to be carrying on the Freudian tradition of ignoring mothers and the pre-Oedipal. Most English-speaking feminist practitioners thus gravitated towards either Klein or object relations theory. Mitchell herself left Lacan behind and became a Kleinian psychoanalyst; her later work ignores him almost completely.
That Lacan would be rejected by practitioners, and keenly promoted in the academy is rather ironic. More than any other analyst, Lacan insisted that psychoanalysis was defined exclusively through a discursive exchange between analyst and analysand. Indeed, the psychoanalytic scene in France differed radically from that in North America: clinicians as well as academics – feminists and non-feminists alike – became “Lacanian.” Even Simone de Beauvoir, ever wary of psychoanalysis, incorporated Lacan’s mirror stage into her account of female development.6
Some Anglophone writers relying mainly on the Ecrits still appear to believe that Lacanian theory can be reduced to a few concepts, all glorifying the phallus. Thus it may be necessary to take the phallus off center stage to understand what else Lacan offers feminists, particularly those committed to psychoanalytic practice, whether as analysts or analysands.
The family complexes
An often neglected work is “The family complexes,” which Lacan wrote in 1938 as an encyclopedia article.7 According to Jacques-Alain Miller, it was excluded from the Ecrits only because of its length. Despite certain condescending references to “primitive peoples,” “The family complexes” is in some ways ahead of its time, as it argues how little of what is considered “natural” about families, and about human development in general, can be ascribed to nature. This marks a significant motif in Lacanian theory. Later references to the “paternal metaphor” and the “name of the father” do not reflect a belief that families must consist of a male and female parent, joined in marriage. The “third term” needed to signal a limit to the child’s jouissance with the mother can be provided by a flesh-and-blood father, by another adult who cares for the child, or simply through the mother’s own speech.8 Lacan argues further that the term “complex” should replace “instinct” in theorizing human beings, as human instincts are so much weaker than those of other species, and, moreover, are voiced as a demand through speech. A “complex” is neither organic nor learned, but situated “in between” the two. Freud, of course, had already formulated the Oedipus complex, and to this Lacan added two more: the “weaning” (sèvrage) and “intrusion” complexes.
In Lacan’s discussion of the weaning complex, what is striking is the absence of a sentimental bond between mother and baby. He is even clearer than Freud on the point that having to separate from the breast – rather than being at the breast – creates the enduring desire for connection. Lacan acknowledges that weaning can become “traumatic,” in ways associated with various neurotic symptoms. But nowhere does he suggest that it is the mother’s behavior per se – her failure to adapt almost perfectly like the Winnicottian mother – that causes problems.9 According to Lacan, it is the image of the maternal sein (in French both “breast” and “womb”) that dominates human life. Our having to leave it, he asserts, is a reality inseparable from all human nostalgia, religion, and the belief in political utopias.
If the mother is not the dominant figure she is in object relations theory, then neither is she absent from Lacan’s theory. Feminist Shuli Barzilai, in Lacan and the Matter of Origins, compares her to a “Cheshire cat” appearing and disappearing at crucial moments in his work.10 Lacan does not offer helpful advice on mothering techniques, nor does he indulge in the facile mother-blaming for which British object relations and American ego-psychology are notorious. In those more conventional views of development, the mother becomes a precious commodity: we develop a True Self if we get ourselves a good one or, rather, one who is “good enough.”
In Lacan’s view, the most important thing a mother can do is to be not in a state of “primary maternal preoccupation” with her infant, but instead a subject in her own right, who does not look to the child to complete her. Who or what else she desires – husband, lover, or work – is not as important as the fact of her desiring something beyond the child. One might expect this notion of motherhood to appeal to feminists, who have struggled against the charge that “working mothers” are responsible for all human ills, and that it is “natural” for woman to be locked into a love affair with her offspring.
The ambiguity of the French word sein underscores a fundamental point: even the baby’s separation from the breast, which some might consider the “original” separation, harks back to a prior event – the infant’s leaving the womb. Lacan will always complicate our efforts to build a linear theory by making it difficult to think of a first stage. For him, there are only “firsts.”
Some twenty years after “The family complexes,” Lacan returns to the weaning complex in his seventh seminar, when he introduces the term das
Ding (“the thing”) (S VII, pp. 43–71). While an older child may relate to the mother as a subject in her own right, and the infant relates to her as an object or part-object, there is, according to Lacan, an anterior moment in which the child experiences the mother without any capacity for representation whatsoever. At this point, the mother exists not in the imaginary register, but only in the domain of the Real. It is to das Ding that we refer in our nostalgias. When, as adults, we long for what has been lost, we refer psychically to something unknown and prior to symbolization, though what eludes representation also has an abominable aspect. Thus, as much as we have unidentifiable longings for “what was,” so are we also terrified by images of das Ding. (Slavoj 
i
ek has used this Lacanian concept to reflect on the placental images in horror movies such as Alien.)11
The slightly bizarre concept of das Ding has important clinical relevance. It is no accident that Lacan devotes two chapters to it in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis. There he explains why analysis must have nothing to do with helping the patient “adjust” better to society. For Lacan, the domain of analysis is desire; psychoanalysis can do nothing more than enable the subject to come to grips with his or her relationship to it. Desire, as we know, does not really have an object; it cannot be said to be for something. Or rather, to the extent that it is for something, it is also necessarily for something else. Needs and demands can be satisfied, but desire cannot, and substitution is its most reliable rule. Thus, if the analysand is in the process of discovering what we might call “the truth” of her or his own desire, this process will involve investigating the substitutions as they exist in that subject’s history. The chain of displacements will always move in the direction of childhood and certainly to encounters with the mother – encounters that can never exclude das Ding. It is in analysis that we may come to realize that our first desires were inexpressible, our first object unknowable, and that every “refinding” of the object of our desire throughout life will never be entirely separable from illusion.
The “intrusion complex” refers to the young child’s encounters with siblings and other rivals for parental attention, and it includes what Lacan calls “the mirror stage.” The latter occurs when the baby is around 18 months of age, and recognizes its image in the mirror for the first time. The child at this point is relatively uncoordinated, and if ambulatory, is still striving to improve its sense of balance and muscular control. Having never seen itself from the outside, the infant has not had the opportunity to know that its body has a certain consistent form and size, easily locatable in space. Endlessly curious, the infant leans away from the mother or guardian, looks into the mirror and begins “the jubilant assumption of his specular image” (E/S, p. 2). This euphoric developmental moment has its melancholic side. Having recognized ourselves in the mirror, we are bound to go through life looking outward for evidence of who we are. We will seek out ordinary mirrors (which deceive if only by reversing left and right) and we will look into the mirroring gaze of others which will just as surely distort, diminish, aggrandize. Identity, for Lacan, is necessarily an alienated state – something crucial for functioning in the world, but also radically unstable. The analysand will look to the analyst as the ultimate mirror, believing that there might finally be an answer to the question, “Who am I?” The work of analysis prepares the patient to realize that there is no “thou art that” – no truth that can be given by an agency outside the subject.
On the question of the Oedipus complex, there are important differences between Freud and Lacan. Freud’s boy and girl pass through their oral and anal stages in parallel fashion; in the “genital phase,” they compare bodies, and conclude that since only the boy has a penis, the girl must have lost hers, or be awaiting one. This knowledge ends the boy’s Oedipus complex and begins the girl’s. What Lacan emphasizes is that these observations, fears, and fantasies about the body cannot be understood except in terms of antecedent moments – to the weaning complex, for example, in which the loss of a body part (the nipple) was already at stake. Toilet training presents another moment in which the child is forced to come to grips with something falling off or out of the body; the feces are lost or “given up.” Lacan also reminds us that long after the mirror phase, we remain subject to the effects of the “fragmented body” with which it begins. Thus, he asserts in “The family complexes”:
This fantasy [of castration] is preceded by a whole series of dismemberment fantasies which go back in a regressive sequence beginning with dislocation and dismemberment, through deprivation of sexual organs to disemboweling and even to the fantasy of being swallowed up or entombed.12
Castration fear is thus an imaginary localization of a more pervasive, unnamable fear. When we return to the Freudian boy and girl in the sandbox comparing bodies, we see not a sudden fall from security to the terror of Adam and Eve in the garden, but instead children whose lives are coextensive with worries about the body. Somewhat later, children use their theories about sexual difference as a way of answering a question that they have lacked the ability to formulate in language until this important moment: “What is missing from this body of mine?” Something has always been experienced as lost, but the development of speech at this age means that it is the Oedipal body that is offered up as a means of addressing it. Lacan observed that many human beings use the penis to cover their pervasive sense of bodily lack, and so he chose the term “phallus” to refer to our wish for completeness. The phallus therefore signifies, paradoxically, the opposite of completion – that is, lack. Whereas the penis is an organ that some individuals possess and some don’t, the phallus is what no one can have but everyone wants: a belief in bodily unity, wholeness, perfect autonomy. The phallus, as Lacan explains in his 1958 “The meaning of the phallus,” is not an object like the breast, penis or clitoris. It is a signifier, eventually designating all binary difference.
Lacan would always speak of the phallus not as a thing but as a position through which different objects circulate. Adults can use wealth, accomplishments, or their own children as phallic objects. In this way, the “objects” are desired for their representative value, their capacity to make the subject feel complete. The “phallic function,” in other words, is not gender-specific; it relates to being and having, to lack and the denial of lack – for all subjects. If biology does enter this crucial set of issues, it is mainly at the level of describing the “original” state of incompleteness. That is, according to Lacan, the experience of something lacking or lost may be conditioned by the “specific prematurity of birth” in our species, in contrast to others whose offspring are born much readier to fend for themselves (E/S, p. 4). In The Project, Freud had claimed that “the initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives” (SE 1, p. 318; emphasis in original). Diana Rabinovich maintains that this Freudian idea of helplessness is one that Lacan is constantly reworking.13
Castration
Given Lacan’s unique formulation of the phallus, it is not surprising that his concept of “castration” is quite different from Freud’s. Put most simply, castration is the ability of the subject to recognize, “I am lacking.” Far from being something to avoid, castration is a necessity, and an absolute precondition for the ability to love. With respect to the two sexes, Lacan specifies that “[the] woman must undergo no more or less castration than the man.”14
Lacan is by no means doing away with the difference between women and men; on the contrary he insists on it. Perhaps only psychotics such as Dr. Schreber (in Freud’s famous case study) can live as man and woman at once – refusing the sacrifice that the rest of us (neurotics) make in giving up either an ongoing masculine or feminine identity. When Freud described the little girl’s “discovery” of the inferiority of her genitals, many feminists asked if he was describing children’s fantasies or his own. For Lacan, there can be nothing missing from the real of the female body. Lack is something that exists in the imaginary register; it is operative (although in different ways) for everyone. And so the phallus is not what men have and women lack; we might say that it is what men believe they have and what women are considered to lack.
A frequently asked question is: If Lacan wants us not to confuse the penis with the phallus, then why didn’t he call the phallus something less penile – perhaps the “all” or the “omega”? Lacan, aiming to present his theory as a rereading of Freud, cites the overwhelming importance of the image of the phallus to the ancients. In a different context however, in a section on Aristotle and Freud, he wrote: “. . . we must use things like that, old words, as stupid as anything, but really use them, work them to the bone” (S XX, p. 60). In The Daughter’s Seduction, Jane Gallop suggests that this passage describes what Lacan is doing with the words “phallus” and “castration.” She writes: “Maybe he’s using them up, running the risk of essence, running dangerously close to patriarchal positions, so as to wear ‘phallus’ and ‘castration’ out, until they’re thoroughly hackneyed.” And: “What a way of ruining exchange value by use!”15
Feminine jouissance
Freud had maintained that there was but one kind of libido, and that it was masculine. Throughout the 1950s, Lacan seemed to agree with him. In subsequent decades, however, the questions that Lacan’s feminist interlocutors raised seemed to have an impact. Many observers believe that he was responding directly to them when he chose to devote his seminar of 1971–2 to questions of feminine sexuality. Indeed, that seminar is sprinkled with comments about the “MLF” – the mouvement de libération des femmes – comments that seem at turns playful and patronizing.
In one of his rare departures from Freud, Lacan asserts: “Freud claims that there is only masculine libido. What does that mean if not that a field that certainly is not negligible is thus ignored? That field is the one of all beings that take on the status of woman – assuming that being takes on anything whatsoever of her destiny” (S XX, p. 80).
Lacan proceeded to elaborate a theory of feminine sexuality in terms of a jouissance that was “beyond” phallic jouissance. The latter is a jouissance of the organ (women, of course, also have access to it). About this feminine or “supplementary” jouissance, Lacan was perhaps more than characteristically oblique. He compared it to the experience of the mystic, explaining:
Mysticism isn’t everything that isn’t politics. It is something serious, about which several people inform us – most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when one is male, to situate oneself on the side of [the phallic function]. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women. It happens. And who also feel just fine about it.
(S XX, p. 76)
Lacan held that feminine jouissance was, however, difficult for ordinary men to comprehend, despite their fascination: “. . . in all the time people have been begging them, begging them on their hands and knees – I spoke last time of women psychoanalysts – to try to tell us, not a word! We’ve never been able to get anything out of them” (S XX, p. 75). Was Lacan admitting to ignorance of women’s experience in order to clear a space for their own accounts? Or was he actually spinning an old yarn about woman as the “dark continent?” Considering the “women psychoanalysts” and the other writers he chose to ignore, we may well ask if Lacan truly desired the knowledge for which he was apparently so willing to grovel.16
He was disingenuous, in any case, to maintain that he got nothing “out of them.” In fact, there is reason to believe that Lacan, an inveterate borrower, drew primary inspiration for his model of feminine jouissance from “The mystic” – the penultimate chapter of The Second Sex.17 De Beauvoir writes, for example, “St. Theresa’s writings hardly leave room for doubt, and they justify Bernini’s statue which shows us the saint swooning in an excess of voluptuousness.”18 Here is Lacan, writing twenty years later: “. . . it’s like for Saint Teresa – you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it” (S XX, p. 76).
Unlike Lacan, de Beauvoir described at least two types of mystics: “the narcissistic” (e.g. Mme Guyon), who simply craves the personal attention of all heaven, and “the virile” (e.g. Saints Theresa and John of the Cross), whose ecstatic visions form part of a theological project and a life of action. Intriguing is the fact that both Lacan and de Beauvoir privileged the sexed position of the other: he favored feminine over phallic jouissance, while she valued virile over non-virile mysticism. In neither case did these positions correspond literally to biological sex.
No sexual relation
One of Lacan’s most important formulations concerns the “nonexistence” of the sexual relation. First mentioned in Seminar XIV and expanded in Seminar XX, this claim amplifies Freud’s famous remark: “We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realisation of complete satisfaction.” (SE 11, pp. 188–9).
Lacan did not mean that love doesn’t exist or that people don’t revel in sexual pleasure. What does not exist is a romantic love that allows individuals to complete each other, making one of two, like the fabled creatures in Plato’s Symposium. It would seem that Lacan shared with feminist social critics a sense of the overvaluation of “true love” in the contemporary West. But whereas feminists have seen the problem as socially constructed, Lacan saw the impossibility of the sexual relation as largely structural – our fate as subjects divided by the unconscious.
French feminisms
In the years following Lacan’s Seminar XX, a number of “French feminists” were using his reading of Freud to move on in their own theoretical directions. And somewhat ironically, many feminists working in English began enthusiastically promoting the ideas of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and others, although it is not clear that they would call themselves “feminist” without significant qualification.
Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born philosopher of language and contributor to the avant-garde journal Tel Quel, is known for her interest in the limits of language – particularly in what she calls the “semiotic.” This is the realm in which children, not yet able to speak, experience the “raw material” of speech – its sounds and gestures as they permeate the relationship of child and mother. Kristeva added to the pre-Oedipal mother-baby paradigm the concept of the “imaginary father,” also called the “father of personal pre-history.”
On the question of feminism, she said famously, “A feminist practice can only be . . . at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it.’ By ‘woman’ I mean that which cannot be represented, what is not said, what remains above and beyond nomenclature and ideologies. There are certain ‘men’ who are familiar with this phenomenon.”19 Some readers appreciate Kristeva’s refusal of a liberal, co-optable feminism. Others see her as a “dutiful daughter” of Lacan, because she seems to adopt his somewhat ethereal vision of femininity.
Irigaray is perhaps best known for appropriating Lacan’s structural reading of Freud, while refusing everything she sees as masculinist in psychoanalysis. In 1974, she published Speculum of the Other Woman, in which she repudiates the Freudian view of woman as defective man, tying his misogyny to that of Western philosophy. Her target is Freud, not Lacan, but clearly some of her fulminations against phallocentrism and the mystification of woman apply to him as well. Three weeks after the publication of Speculum, Irigaray was fired from her teaching position at the University of Paris at Vincennes.20
Irigaray does not settle for a feminist practice that simply insists “that’s not it”; on the contrary, she argues for the formulation of new theories and practices – even a new language – that is not phallocentric but based on women’s bodies and pleasures. She writes: “If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history . . . If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries . . . we’ll miss each other, fail ourselves.”21
Against a feminism that would promote androgyny, or the erasure of gender, Irigaray advocates “an ethics of sexual difference.” In describing the difference, she has written: “But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere . . . The geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle than is imagined.”22 Moreover, she argues that psychoanalysis has failed to represent lesbians except according to pre-existing models of male homosexuality. And she insists also on the importance of finding ways to represent the mother-daughter relationship in psychoanalysis.
While appreciating the boldness and vitality of Irigaray’s writing, feminist Ann Rosalind Jones notes that Irigaray has little, if anything, to say about class, race, or women’s history in particular, and is thus vulnerable to the charge of essentializing women’s experience.23 Margaret Whitford, in contrast, claims that such charges underestimate Irigaray’s project, which she sees as nothing less than an attempt “to dismantle from within the foundations of Western metaphysics.”24
Sexuation
The challenge to both feminism and psychoanalysis is to create theory and practice that neither deny sexual difference nor generate new, coercive antinomies. How can we describe difference without inscribing essential difference? Some believe that this is exactly what Lacan attempted to do with his diagram of sexuation, presented most fully in Seminar XX. The symbols and syntax of formal logic might seem the least likely idiom for something as alogical as sex, but it is precisely the diagram’s minimalism that limits a proclivity towards misleading content.
On the “masculine” side of the diagram, Lacan wrote a formula generally read as “All men are subjected to the phallic function.” On the “feminine” side, he wrote a formula generally read as: “Not all of a woman is subject to the phallic function.” The difference is that whereas men can be discussed as a class, there is no set of “all women.” Lacan believed that while women were a part of the phallic or symbolic order, they were not in it “all together.” Thus, he would describe woman as pas tout [not all]. We know that women historically have been kept out of the symbolic order. We could also say that there is something about woman that resists it.
The lower half of the sexuation diagram shows the “feminine” side having access to two libidinal positions, while the “masculine” side has access to one only. Thus any given “woman” can choose to associate with the phallic function, or with the “signifier of the barred Other” – a way of describing the jouissance that is beyond the phallus.25
Again, if these distinctions appear outrageously subtle and abstract, they at least have the virtue of not trapping us into neo-Confucian paradigms according to which man is rational; woman, emotional – paradigms that surface endlessly in popular psychology.26 Lacan also made it clear in explicating the diagram of sexuation that he was not simply placing biological males on one side and biological females on the other. As he explained, referring to the “feminine” side: “Any speaking being whatsoever, as is expressly formulated in Freudian theory, whether provided with the attributes of masculinity – attributes that remain to be determined – or not, is allowed to inscribe itself in this part” (S XX, p. 80).
How do the two sides relate to each other? How does desire move within and across the divide of sexuation? Ellie Ragland has suggested beautifully: “Heterosexual or homosexual, we are drawn to each other sexually because we are not whole and because we are not the same.”27
Lacan and the talking cure
Lacan always maintained that the only purpose of his teaching was to train analysts. As mentioned earlier, his clinical practice was non-normative in its aims. Whereas analysts of other schools want patients to identify with the analyst’s ego, Lacan felt that analysis had failed if this occurred. Feminists might be interested in this and other aspects of Lacanian practice as well – aspects which have scarcely been mentioned in the literature.
Toward the goal of sketching foundations for a feminist articulation of Lacan’s work that would go beyond theory to clinical practice, I offer the following questions: (1) What is the position of the analyst? (2) Where does neurotic suffering come from? (3) How can we understand the Oedipus complex? (4) Who may analyze?
(1) What is the position of the analyst?
In the Anglophone world, it has been common since Freud to speak of the “maternalization of the analyst.” Rejecting Freud’s metaphors of the analyst as picklock or surgeon, clinicians such as Winnicott represent the analytic relationship in terms of mother and infant. The analytic mother’s job is not necessarily to love, but to recognize the patient and thus to make up for bad mirroring in childhood. A feminist critique of object relations might ask if the maternalization of the analyst and the corresponding infantilization of the patient make sense in an encounter meant to help women discover their desires as women.
The good enough mother is not Lacan’s model of the analyst. Rather, he placed the analyst in the role of the Other, a position he also identified with death. The goal of analysis for Lacan is not to provide reparation for bad mothering, nor even to improve communication with the living, but to change the subject’s relationship to the dead, and to help him or her examine the meaning of mortality.
(2) Where does neurotic suffering come from?
Freud stated after his analysis of Dora that he had never completely given up his “seduction theory,” according to which actual sexual abuse causes neurosis. He came to believe, however, that unresolved Oedipal fantasies, even in the absence of trauma, could create the same kinds of symptoms. Since Freud, much controversy has focused on the question of which aspect of his theory (seduction or Oedipus) is “truer.”
There are people who spend years of their lives asking, “Was I sexually molested as a child or have I only imagined it?” The fact that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious does not mean that human beings are (or ought to be) indifferent to questions surrounding the occurrence of sexual abuse.
Lacan’s formulation of the three registers can be helpful in mitigating the binarism: real or imagined? Consider a patient with phobias and gynecological symptoms so disabling that she wonders if she was abused in childhood, despite having no memories of such an event or events. During analysis, she learns that her mother at age thirteen had been raped by a male relative. Her mother had kept the secret with the benign intention of “not burdening” her child. Nonetheless, the same mother could not help but communicate unconsciously to her growing daughter a representation of the female body as shameful and prone to violation. Because the story of the wounding of the mother’s body was repressed, it was bound to return somewhere in the next generation. The failure, thus, was not in the patient’s Imaginary (a missing memory of an event) but in the Symbolic (a story withheld) resulting in a return in the Real (of the patient’s bodily symptoms). It can also be said that every instance of sexual abuse needs to be considered in all three registers.
(3) How can we understand the Oedipus complex?
For decades, feminists have noted that the Oedipus complex takes its structure from a story whose protagonist is male. Moreover, the story has often been used to create a pat developmental narrative confined to: “Mommy, Daddy, and me.” Lacan believed that Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus – the story of Oedipus in exile – held more for psychoanalysis than Oedipus Rex for it is only in exile that Oedipus comes to ask the important questions, and to assume his castration. His tragedy, like ours, says Lacan, does not turn simply on the famous family triangle, but on a more fundamental case of mistaken identity.
Feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan who, like Luce Irigaray, has protested the absence of mother-daughter representations in psychoanalysis, recommends reviving the myth of Psyche and Eros. In this myth, which begins with a daughter’s resistance to conventional love, the struggle for truth leads not to exile and suicide, but to marriage and the birth of a daughter named “Pleasure.”28
In his Seminar on Transference, Lacan similarly introduced a trilogy of plays featuring female protagonists – the trilogy of the Coûfontaine family – by Paul Claudel. This work, which has yet to catch the attention of feminists, tells the story of three generations of women, beginning in the early nineteenth century, culminating in the figure of Pensée. Pensée may be a more subversive feminist figure than Psyche, whose story reinstates the nuclear family. Pensée refuses traditional marriage, loves her child, embraces the future. Moreover, unlike Antigone, Pensée – because she is able to ask questions about her mother and grandmother, and because she brings the family history to light – is not condemned to reproduce their tragedies. An eloquent spokesperson for desire, she asks: “Am I not mistress of myself and of my soul and of my body? And of this which I have made from myself?”29 The editor of Seminar VIII labeled the section on the Claudel trilogy, “The Myth of Oedipus Today.”
(4) Who may analyze?
Like Freud, Lacan believed strongly in the importance of training lay (nonphysician) analysts. Lacan is said to have resigned from the Société psychanalytique de Paris partly over this issue.30 Less well known is the story of Freud’s refusal to exclude candidates based on sexual preference. In 1920 the Dutch Psychoanalytic Association asked the advice of Ernest Jones about whether or not to accept a known homosexual for membership. Jones was opposed, and wrote to Freud, who replied:
Your query, dear Ernest, concerning the prospective membership of homosexuals has been considered by us and we disagree with you. In effect, we cannot exclude such persons without other sufficient reasons, as we cannot agree with their legal prosecution. We feel that a decision in such cases should depend upon a thorough examination of the other qualities of the candidate.31
While the British Psychoanalytic Society excluded gay and lesbian candidates until very recently, Lacanians apparently follow Freud in this matter.32
Lacan, who spent a career warning against “father educators” and other masters, continues to attract acolytes, including some feminists. Among the feminists who have engaged Lacan’s work, more than a few have turned their back on it. Jane Gallop, for example, who defended Lacan’s formulation of the phallus in her early work, changed her mind a few years later, declaring: “Phallus/penis: same difference.”33 Others have sustained a more balanced perspective.34
Today, at the crest of third-wave feminism, Lacan has ironically become the man many women hate to love. Residual resentment has not prevented their coming to understand that respect, if not love, is the wave of the present. For without psychoanalysis, feminism risks capitulating to a purely materialist understanding of women, or settling for a very reduced account of fantasy, sexuality, and subjectivity. Without feminism, psychoanalysis risks being used to enforce what Freud himself called “normal” misogyny. We have reason to hope that provocative contact between them will continue to enhance the powers of feminism and psychoanalysis both to liberate, and to question.
1. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar of 21 January 1975,” Ornicar? 3 (1975), pp. 104–10. In Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 167.
2. For a critical history of the Americanization of psychoanalysis, see Russell Jacoby, The Repression of Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1983). For an early feminist critique of Freud and psychiatry, see Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969). See also Deborah Luepnitz, “‘I want you to be a woman’: Reading desire in Stoller’s case of ‘Mrs. G.’” Clinical Studies: International Journal of Psychoanalysis 2 (1996), pp. 49–58.
3. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. xiii.
4. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Although the dictionary contains entries related to object relations theory, Klein, and Jung, the majority are related to Lacan. Several contributors are psychoanalysts, the majority academics.
5. See Pierre Rey, Une saison chez Lacan (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989). See also Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Paperback, 1952), p. 313.
7. The full text of Lacan’s Les Complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu (Paris: Navarin, 1984) has not been translated into English. But see the abridged form translated by Carolyn Asp under the title “The family complexes,” Critical Texts 5 (1988), pp. 12–29. Also in Autres écrits, pp. 23–84.
8. Charles Shepherdson has affirmed this point in his rigorous Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2000).
9. See D. W. Winnicott, Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
10. Shuli Barzilai, Lacan and the Matter of Origins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
11. Slavoj iek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).
12. Jacques Lacan, “The family complexes,” p. 20.
13. Diana Rabinovich, El concepto de objeto en la teoria psicoanalitica: Sus incidencias en la dirección de la cura (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 1988), p. 122.
14. Jacques Lacan, Seminar of 21 January, 1975, p. 168.
15. Jane Gallop, The Daughter’s Seduction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
16. Lacan never commented directly on the work of Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, or on writers such as Woolf, Colette, or H. D., whom many read for their insights on feminine sexuality. He turned down an invitation for a set of interviews with Simone de Beauvoir. Marguerite Duras, one of the few whom Lacan openly admired, found his praise to be both condescending and self-serving. See his “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein.” Duras’ interview with Suzanne Lamy is quoted in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., p. 522.
17. See Françoise Collin’s fascinating “La Liberté inhumaine: Ou le marriage mystique de Jacques Lacan et Simone de Beauvoir,” Les Temps modernes, no. 605, août–oct. 1999, 90–114.
18. De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 743.
19. Julia Kristeva, “La Femme, ce n’est jamais ça,” an interview in Tel Quel 59 (Fall 1974), translated in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 134–8.
20. See Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine,” Feminist Studies 7 (Summer 1981), pp. 247–63.
21. Luce Irigaray, “When our lips speak together,” This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 205.
22. Irigaray, “This sex which is not one,” This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 28.
23. Jones, “Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine,” p. 96.
24. Margaret Whitford, “Rereading Irigaray,” Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 108.
25. See Elizabeth Wright, Lacan and Post-Feminism (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2000), as well as Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), for helpful explanations of the sexuation graph. See also pp. 137–46 and pp. 219–20.
26. For an example of a popular work on sexual difference which avoids the usual traps, see Darian Leader, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post? (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), published in the United States as Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Send? A Meditation on the Loneliness of the Sexes (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
27. Ellie Ragland, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, p. 206.
28. Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure (New York: Knopf, 2002).
29. The trilogy consists of: L’Otage, Le Pain dur, and Le Père humilié. In Paul Claudel, Théâtre, II (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 567. See Lacan, Le Séminaire VIII (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
30. See Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.
31. Quoted in Kenneth Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 33.
32. Noreen O’Connor and Joanna Ryan, Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism & Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
33. Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 124.
34. For balanced feminist perspectives on Lacan, see, for example, Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990) and Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Guilford, 1992), as well as Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Claude-Noëlle Pickmann, “Féminisme et féminité: Vers une hystérie sans maître?” La Clinique lacanienne 2 (1997), pp. 65–84.