Psychoanalysis and Gender

An Introductory Reader

Rosalind Minsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134680337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

What is object-relations theory and what does it have to do with literary studies? How can Freud's phallocentric theories be applied by feminist critics? In Psychoanalysis and Gender: An Introductory Reader Rosalind Minsky answers these questions and more, offering students a clear, straightforward overview without ever losing them in jargon.
In the first section Minsky outlines the fundamentals of the theory, introducing the key thinkers and providing clear commentary. In the second section, the theory is demonstrated by an anthology of seminal essays which includes:
* Feminity by Sigmund Freud
* Envy and Gratitude by Melanie Klein
* An extract from Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena by Donald Winnicot
* The Meaning of the Phallus by Jacques Lacan
* An extract from Women's Time by Julia Kristeva
* An extract from Speculum of the Other Woman by Luce Irigaray

PART I

Introduction: psychoanalysis and the unconscious

The idea that we could think out a theory of the structure and functioning of the personality without it having any relation to the structure and functioning of our own personality, should be a self evident impossibility.

(Harry Guntrip, 1975)

Overview

Psychoanalytic theory is radically different from other theories because it makes the unconscious its central organising concept. The unconscious, however, is something which, by definition is largely inaccessible to us. In the modern age it was Freud who first called this hidden, wordless dimension of identity the unconscious or psychical reality. What is most distinctive about the unconscious, as Freud defined it, is that, although it is constructed in early childhood out of our earliest desires and losses, its system of frozen meanings influences everything we do, whether we are five or eighty-five, without our being aware of it. Freud thought that we can only catch glimpses of its meanings in dreams, or random slips of the tongue or pen, in jokes, in what he described as neurotic symptoms in the form of anxiety, guilt, depression, obsessions, phobias, psychosomatic illness or in sudden eruptions of emotion which we find impossible to explain. We sometimes say in bewilderment ‘I don’t know what came over me’. We seem to have slipped out of what we normally think of as our identity. We may say ‘It’s not like me. I’m not myself’. Although psychoanalytic theory provides the basis for the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis out of which it emerged, it also provides a structural theory of the construction of identity and has increasingly been used, especially by feminists, to expose and explore the unconscious dimensions of both history and contemporary culture. It makes possible the exploration of a territory of meaning beyond the boundaries of other theories such as conventional psychology and sociology which have been primarily concerned with the analysis of consciousness and the processes of socialisation. By focusing on unconscious processes and states of mind conceived as a psychical domain which may not be entirely determined by culture, psychoanalytic theory has made it possible to analyse the unconscious, as well as conscious, meanings which contribute to the complexity of ourselves and the world in which we live and, ultimately, in the work of Lacan, to question the very meaning and status of consciousness and language. It is in Lacan’s post-structuralist development of Freud, that the unconscious, now conceptualised as the driving force of language, begins to have an integral role in the construction of consciousness and culture. An unconscious sense of lack of being is transformed into desire, a want to be.

In particular, in this book, we shall use psychoanalytic theory to examine one of the most important issues in contemporary life: the construction of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ identity. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, hovering between natural and human science, sees identity in terms of the unconscious negotiation of painful feelings of loss and desire in relation to a complicated web of social or cultural constraints but never solely determined by them. In his theory the silent world of hidden meanings never displaces the ordinary human suffering which gives rise to them. However, in Lacan’s development of Freud’s work, the stuff of psychoanalysis – difference, desire and identity – is transformed into language. Difference orders the meanings within language and desire energises the movement from one meaning to the next. In describing the unconscious construction of patriarchal ideology, he makes a dramatic link between sexuality on the one hand, and culture on the other. Gendered desiring identity becomes gendered eroticised language and knowledge out of which our gendered subjectivity is constructed. Language can no longer be seen as neutral and objective.

But at the same time Lacan’s work raises yet more questions about the nature of the baby’s earliest experiences of sexuality and meaning in relation to the mother which have been pursued in the work of the French feminists, in particular, in the writings of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. In focusing on an unconscious domain which exists, it is argued, at some level beyond the reach of theories of socialisation or symbolic practices, psychoanalytic theory poses questions about the origins of the unconscious meanings of the body, desire, pleasure, phantasy and identification. These unconscious meanings always potentially challenge the status of cultural meanings and identities based on the apparently safe, rational categories of language. In particular, Freud’s concept of mastery as control of painful loss and desire through language pre-figures Lacan’s view of language as a system of control as well as subjectivity.

Evidence of the unconscious

Before we look further into the different psychoanalytic theories let us begin by considering the question of what constitutes ‘evidence’ of the unconscious at the level of our everyday experience. We can take as examples the powerful experiences of feeling an irrational dislike or hostility towards an individual or a group of people and the experience of falling in love.

The following kind of behaviour is probably recognisable to many of us. We feel rather anxious, guilty or vulnerable, so we hit out at other people, often the people closest to us, and act as if they were attacking us. This mechanism is known in psychoanalytic theory as ‘projection’. We find a part of ourselves unacceptable and painful (the thing we feel guilty about – our anxiety, insecurity or vulnerability) and instead of allowing ourself consciously to feel and own the emotions we don’t like, we project them onto other people and then feel attacked by them. These same people then represent to us the alienated part of ourselves that we’ve thrown out into the external world. Feeling under attack, we attack them – usually much to their surprise! The concept of projection is important because it describes one of the many unconscious defensive behaviours by means of which which we protect ourselves from knowing about the contents of our inner world. Unacceptable feelings which, if we allow ourselves to feel them consciously, are potentially very painful may be projected into the world and onto other people where we mistakenly imagine ourselves rid of them. Unfortunately we are not, and we subsequently experience paranoia to a greater or lesser extent. We feel under attack from these alienated parts of ourself over which we no longer have any control. Racism, forms of ethnocentric or nationalist hatred, class antagonism, sexism and homophobia may be generalised examples of this kind of unconscious behaviour. Feelings of anxiety or inferiority are projected or externalised onto others so that these hated parts of the self are experienced as hostile elements contained in the external rather than internal world, which therefore have to be controlled.

Within the conceptual framework of psychoanalytic theory, sometimes whole relationships are perceived to be based on what is known as ‘projective identification’. Individuals often marry or live together in a symbiotic relationship of mutual dependency where one person seems to express all the anger for both partners and the other all the vulnerability. Together they seem to inhabit one identity with complementary roles which are wholly unconscious. The amazing sensation of being in love – the feeling of oneness and completion accompanied by a feeling of exhilaration or euphoria – can be seen from a psychoanalytic perspective to be about meeting someone through whom we can express, using the mechanism of projection, that part of ourself that we do not want consciously to acknowledge. Both parties unconsciously recognise that they can complete each other and increase each other’s sense of identity and self-worth. Often, this seems to become clear only when one partner suddenly starts expressing emotions which were not part of the original unconscious ‘deal’ – which belonged to the terrain of the other. The fragile equilibrium may be disturbed, for example, when a woman stops being the person in the relationship ‘in charge’ of the vulnerability and starts to break out of this role by becoming strong and active. Very often the husband/lover may feel a sense of betrayal and doesn’t understand why. (Of course this may happen just as easily the other way round.) When a relationship of very powerful mutual dependency, based on projective identification, breaks up, it often feels as if the leaver has literally gone off with a part of the self of the person who has been left. This is because the leaver has actually made him/herself absent, still carrying a substantial part of the projected self of the other partner, who is left feeling, not surprisingly, fragile, empty and incomplete.

Unconscious defences: projection and projective identification

Although Freud first used the concept of projection, the joint concepts of projection and projective identification are particularly associated with the work of Melanie Klein who, on the basis of her analysis of very young children, took the view radically different from that of Freud, that the unconscious is structured not between the age of three and five during the Oedipal crisis (a fuller explanation of this idea will be given below), but in the pre-Oedipal baby’s developing relationship with its mother. In a relationship of projective identification in which the baby projects itself onto the mother and then re-identifies with her, the baby’s self is characterised by Klein as being initially undifferentiated from that of the mother. Because of this total dependence, the baby, according to Klein, experiences alternating states of love and hate. When it is full and satisfied by the mother, it experiences itself as ‘good’; psychically ‘full’ it loves and idealises the mother. When it feels frustrated and empty it experiences itself as ‘bad’ and in danger of psychical disintegration. To overcome this danger to its fragile sense of self the baby splits off its bad feelings and projects them onto the mother who is then experienced as attacking rather than loving. The baby, like the adult who projects in later life, is actually suffering from a paranoid fantasy: it feels itself under attack from its own externalised, split-off, feelings of hatred and envy now embodied by the mother, its psychical ‘other half’. Being in love in the way I have described seems to hark back unconsciously to the young baby’s feelings of fullness and love when it experienced the mother as totally satisfying and fulfilling.

The psychoanalytic concepts of projection and projective identification allow us to begin to see the evidence for feelings or phantasies which are unconscious. (Phantasy is the usual way of indicating a powerful form of primitive thinking which pre-dates reason or emotional insight, and which originates in the unconscious, as distinct from a fantasy or piece of conscious day-dreaming.) They represent what Klein sees as defence mechanisms against the emergence of these feelings into consciousness which enable us to ignore and disown them. Psychoanalysis suggests that these may be seen at work, not just during crises, but in the smallest details of our day-to-day existence. Some of us will be able to remember the times when we have compulsively cleared out our cupboards, turned our houses or rooms upside down, wiped the last fragment of a tea leaf from the work surface, got up from our seat to straighten the edge of a curtain or felt a sudden need to go on a diet or take violent exercise. These are all ways in which we attempt to control our inner reality by trying to control the external world. Usually this is only of limited value. If this behaviour goes on for too long we may feel a sense of inner emptiness and impoverishment because so much of who we are has been disowned and split off somewhere outside ourselves; in short we feel lacking in substance and self-esteem and we feel depressed.

The origins of the unconscious

If we can accept that there is evidence for a dimension of identity which is outside our conscious knowledge, we have to ask how it came into being. Psychoanalytic theory is the discourse which attempts to provide the answer to this question because, alone among discourses, it deals with the human subject’s unconscious coming into being and the kind of events which constitute an individual’s hidden, unrecorded history. It charts not what we normally call history – the history of consciousness, of social power and domination, the social construction of reality – but another kind of story. This is the important history of the individual’s unconscious construction, which takes place inside the wider social or cultural context, but maps how an individual has reacted to the powerful currents of emotion in his or her own family and the presences and absences, both physical and emotional, within this family. In Freud’s version of this historical psychoanalytic reality, the crucial experiences seem to be the powerful desire of the male or female child for total possession of the mother, the loss of whom provides the origin for the formation of the unconscious and the split subject. (‘Mummy, I’m going to marry you when I grow up.’ ‘But I’m already married to Daddy.’) The fear of retribution from the spouse of the desired parent, feelings of loss and rejection by the parents we can’t ‘marry’ and have to give up, feelings of rivalry and intense jealousy at the birth of new babies – in fact, all the feelings we would expect in a passionate love affair brought to an end by the existence of a rival, seem to be felt by many children, however sensitive individual parents might be, and even when stereotyped gender roles have been changed. Psychoanalytic case histories suggest that these Oedipal feelings (named after the Greek myth in which Oedipus unknowingly – unconsciously – killed his father and married his mother) which were first identified and described by Freud, seem to be experienced by most people, including those brought up in single-parent families. However, in order to cope in the outside world, such feelings have to be repressed for the individual to become a viable, coping human subject. Unfortunately, this viability seems to be at the cost of our sense of personal coherence; in order to function we have alienated or split-off some important part of ourselves.

Universal or social construction

One of the most common criticisms of the concept of the unconscious is that Freud considered that it was a universal phenomenon fixed in early childhood and therefore ahistorical, or outside the influence of society or culture. This issue is a very important one, particularly in relation to the unconscious construction of the socially unequal categories of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ and the possibility of change. But although the existence of phenomena which are universal and ahistorical is widely contested, it does look as if the phenomenon of the unconscious is not historical in the usual sense of the word. It is difficult to see how a child’s passionate feelings of desire and loss in relation to its mother around the age of three or four, or intense jealousy at the birth of a new sibling and its subsequent repression, can be totally dependent on historical contingencies and consciousness. Historical contingencies will obviously affect who is present or absent, how and what emotions can be expressed or repressed, what kind of defences are more socially acceptable at any one time. But they do not alter the possibility that the unconscious comes into being some time in early childhood, that desires seem to have to be repressed in favour of consciousness, in order for the subject to come into being and cope with the demands of life. Powerful emotions such as the ones that lie behind the statement ‘Mummy, I’m going to marry you’, that lie behind the recognition that someone, a rival, was there before us, or behind the statement ‘But you can’t have a baby like me, you’re a boy’, or behind the jealousy about a new sibling, look like experiences which might run through the heart of historical contingencies and consciousness which seem to determine the conceptual grid through which we interpret the world.

Even if we want to argue that the only universal experiences are birth and death, it could be argued, taking a more Lacanian view, that desire or the unconscious comes into being at birth, the moment of the baby’s first experience of loss. This is the time when the baby is cut off from its first total unity with the mother for ever although it may hanker to regain this original state of bliss for the rest of its life. Subsequent losses are loss of the mother’s breast after weaning, loss of acceptance of its own internal contents after toilet training and finally loss of the phantasy of the mother’s desire. If these are not universal experiences, then we have at least to recognise that they may be so widespread that we cannot ignore their symbolic significance for our psychical development.

However, this view of the unconscious construction of identity does not disclaim the vital significance of social or cultural factors. Both Freud and Lacan recognised that there must always be a complex and subtle interaction between the historical, social and psychical dimensions of existence. As culturalists argue, and psychoanalysis also suggests, it seems that in a variety of complex symbolic ways, the social world or culture both ‘picks up’ and is ‘picked up’ and structured by the unconscious which, to the extent that it is implicated in creating history, is, at the same time, also historicised and subsequently disposed of in relation to the wider forces within culture and history. In yet more complex ways, as we shall see in the work of Freud and Lacan, the body acts as a kind of mediator in this interplay between the unconscious and the cultural.

Theoretically, Freud’s unconscious seems to lie somewhere between biology and history while for Lacan, it lies exclusively within language in the spaces between the ordered categories of culture where many assume only reason and logic prevail. As we shall see, language is seen by Lacan as a cultural version of the child’s pleasing mirror-image of its still uncoordinated body. (Intriguingly, long before Lacan, we referred to the idea of a ‘body’ of knowledge.) To the extent that the unconscious is something which, although intrinsically linked to the body, always lies outside our idea of ourselves and the cultural categories of language and knowledge which sustain our sense of these selves, it does seem to exist in some sense beyond culture and history although, as we shall see, Lacan argues that the unconscious is language and culture. However, if we accept that the unconscious consists of bodily processes and the phantasies associated with them mediated by language, and if we are also concerned to bring about social and cultural change, we will need to give the concept of the unconscious some careful attention, and particularly in the area of gender and difference, where unconscious processes seem to play such a powerful role. This attention needs to include our insight that difference is crucial to the meaning of our sexual identities but also to the meanings of the selves we create in language, which is also based on difference. But it must also include at the ordinary everyday level, how we respond to all those whom we perceive as different from ourselves. The issue of gender difference and the domination of women, including all those who have been ‘feminised’ within patriarchal societies, has been and continues to be, one of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography
• Index