Feminine Law

Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire

Jill Gentile, Michael Macrone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913686
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Psychology

Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire explores the conjunction between psychoanalysis and democracy, in particular their shared commitments to free speech. In the process, it demonstrates how lawful constraints enable an embodied space or "gap" for the potentially disruptive but also liberating and novel flow of desire and its symbols. This space, intuited by the First Amendment as it is by Freud's free association, enables personal and collective sovereignty. By naming a "feminine law," we mark the primacy a space between the conceivable and the inconceivable, between knowledge and mystery. What do political free speech and psychoanalytic free association have in common, besides the word "free"? And what do Sigmund Freud and Justice Louis Brandeis share besides a world between two great wars? How is the female body a neglected key to understanding the conditions and contradictions of free discourse? Drs. Jill Gentile and Michael Macrone take up these questions, and more, in their wide-ranging, often passionate exploration of the hidden legacy of Freud and the Founding Fathers.

CHAPTER ONE

The Space Between

In one of his earliest defenses of what would evolve into the talking cure, Sigmund Freud confronted doubts about the value, and especially the healing power, of mere talk. At this point, Freud had yet to propose that free association is the “fundamental rule” of psychotherapy, that it is a privileged path to freedom of thought and thus to psychic release and healing. Nor had he yet considered the value of free speech in the consulting room. But he was already captivated by the mysterious power of speech and its potent, incantatory prehistory.

According to Freud, words are more than just sounds, more even than signs; in the form of speech, they inhabit a psychologically charged realm between science and magic.

A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by “mere” words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power. (Freud, 1890a, p. 283)

Freud, who began his career as a hypnotist in a spiritualistic age, believed in the power of language to not only alter perception but also to effectively reshape the world. That’s the very definition of magic: the ability to bridge the gap between wish and fulfillment, idea and reality, mental and physical. If not magic exactly, an indisputable mystery and majesty abound in the ineffable space between language and the world. This mystery and majesty is, for one primal example, woven into the biblical tale of creation, wherein God shapes the world through his word: he speaks, and the void surrenders to the material. Nothing becomes something, as speech bridges the widest possible gap. Freud sees in the Bible’s “‘Let there be light!’ and there was light” a transference of magical power from words to religion, part of a growing expectation that words could be more powerful than mere wish (1933a, p. 165).

How language works its magic is a question that has arisen time and again in philosophy and theology since at least the founding of the Symposium. In Plato’s Phaedrus (N.B.: a written text), Socrates considers the demerits of writing (a kind of absence and forgetting) in relation to the presence of speech, which has the power, in the words of communication theorist John Durham Peters, to directly bridge the gap between “person and person, soul and soul, body and body” (Peters, 1999, p. 37). But these dualities didn’t mean exactly the same thing to Plato as they do to us. Even while Plato appears, at least in some texts, to privilege the immaterial and the pure ideal, he also understood (as Freud later came to) that our only access to such things is through the material. However, Plato, like his fellow Greeks and by contrast with Freud, lacked any concept of an “unconscious” or of anything like “psychology.” To them, psyche was simultaneously “mind,” “spirit,” and, most literally, “breath”: there was no real distinction between consciousness and embodiment. There might have been a transcendent realm of ideals, the exclusive realm of truth; but there was no duality of mind and matter, of spiritual and spatial.

By Freud’s time, as documented in Carl Schorske’s seminal study of that period, the notion of an unconscious was already widespread. Freud’s innovation, according to Eli Zaretsky, was the idea of an “internal, idiosyncratic source of motivations peculiar to the individual” (2004, p. 16)—the idea of a personal unconscious. But this idea took some time to develop. Early in his career, Freud (quite unexceptionably) adhered to the currently accepted doctrines and treatments, which (as we shall see in Chapter Two) attempted to heal directly, without mediation. There was no concept of a gap between mind and body, no concept of a third space between psyche and soma, and so these early efforts attempted to bypass what Freud would come to discover as the most essential (and ultimately the signal) feature of psychoanalysis.

Freud initially believed that the mind operated mechanistically and that neuroses could be understood somatically. The inefficacy of hypnotic suggestion and physical stimulation led him to admit that unmediated communication is the stuff of myth. From there, he would gradually develop a greater, and ultimately revolutionary, recognition of his patients as speaking subjects, and of the key value of that speaking to subjectivity. Psychoanalysis would then become a science—and an art—of translation, interpretation, and mediation. His patients’ symptoms compelled translation, and as Freud enlisted them as active participants in that translation, they (and their speech) compelled his attention. Human beings’ capacity for language, that which situates them in a symbolic realm—beyond both stimulus-response physical prompting and also beyond suggestion—became a means of cure. In that sense, psychoanalysis “restor[ed] to words a part at least of their former magical power.”

Freud certainly didn’t see himself as a magician or a dealer in magical cures; nor did he believe in supernatural beings whose utterance of “Light!” could produce light. But one needn’t believe in magic to recognize words’ magical quality—that is, their instrumentality in making the spiritual, the mental, and the interior manifest in physical reality. Disenchanted with “therapeutic potions … the use of magical formulas or purificatory baths, or the elicitation of oracular dreams,” Freud discovers “the magic of words”:

Words are the most important media by which one man seeks to bring his influence to bear on another; words are a good method of producing mental changes in the person to whom they are addressed. So that there is no longer anything puzzling in the assertion that the magic of words can remove the symptoms of illness, and especially such as are themselves founded on mental states. (Freud, 1890a, p. 292)

It is here that Freud’s evolving theory intersects with that of the science of signs—semiotics.

Semiotics has two distinct founders and two distinct strains, one cultivated by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the other by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Despite their differences (which we shall consider later), both are concerned not only with signs (prototypically words) in and of themselves, but also with how meanings are made and how reality is represented through such signs. Freud’s similar concerns made him a virtual semiotician. His focus on decoding the patterns of his patients’ speech, and his use of that speech in making meaning of other signs, such as the hysteric’s symptoms, long anticipated semiotician Roman Jakobson’s declaration that “language is the central and most important among all human semiotic systems” (1971, p. 658) and Émile Benveniste’s observation that “language is the interpreting system of all other systems, linguistic and non-linguistic” (1969, p. 239). Both Freud and semioticians of either stripe place their emphasis on the mechanisms by which reality is mediated for the mind through symbols. All deny that reality can in any respect speak for itself, whether the reality is perceived or not, objective or subjective, and mediating signs in turn require interpretation and translation, be they words, symbols, hieroglyphics, or the dream content that so fascinated Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams.

The disjunction between sign and reality, word and thing, may become obscured as signifiers become familiar over time, “naturalized,” creating a “spurious identity between reference and referents, between the text and the world” (Tagg, 1988, p. 99). Naturalized signifiers may even acquire what Daniel Chandler refers to as “almost magical power” as the “medium of language comes to acquire the illusion of transparency” (Chandler, 2002, pp. 76–77). In the face of these temptations, we must keep asking, as Judith Butler reminds us, “What does transparency keep obscure?” (Butler, 1999, p. xix). In the wash of signifiers that seem wedded to their signifieds, we might slip into an atavistic, naïve pursuit for unmediated experience—if we don’t fall prey to what Freud lamented as our “herd instinct” (Freud, 1921c, pp. 117ff.).

The power of psychoanalysis lies, in large part, in its semiotic mission: to defamiliarize us with what we take for granted; to challenge us to interpret our symptoms, dreams, and the like as meaningful signs; to question the power dynamics embedded in the codes that we adopt without reflection; and so forth. In short, one might argue that the power of psychoanalysis lies in its status between—between the word and the thing; between the quest for unmediated spiritual knowing and its corollary: direct, unmediated physical knowing; between hypnosis and physical manipulation. These are merely a few of the dialectics that sustain psychoanalytic inquiry.

Freud’s thought would grow to encompass the ancient intuition (implicit even in Plato’s idealism) that spirit and expression, discourse and intercourse, emerge in a space that is neither pure place nor pure idea. As it happens, hysteria played a large role in driving Freud to this conclusion, and in Freud’s day (as in ours), hysteria was a gendered disease. As Eli Zaretsky argues, “In its association with overexcitement and theatricality on the one hand, and with passivity on the other, hysteria converged with ‘femininity,’ which the Victorian age opposed to autonomy” (2004, p. 24). Hysterics, it was thought, tended to be suggestible, responsive to unconscious currents, and therefore also responsive to the practice of hypnosis. Jean-Martin Charcot—the director of the leading clinic dedicated to the treatment of hysteria (the Salpêtrière), and an early major influence on Freud—believed that through hypnosis, “the ‘lower’ or ‘feminine’ parts of the mind” could be released and brought into connection with consciousness (ibid., p. 25).

But Freud (along with his collaborator Breuer, with whom he published five case studies as Studies on Hysteria) eventually recognized that hysterics, in place of speech, relied on the body to communicate. He came to hypothesize that hysterical symptoms represented a “resistance” against awareness of traumatic memory of “a presexual sexual shock” (Freud, cited in Makari, 2008, p. 90).¹ At first he believed that such shocks must have originated in events, and that the number of women suffering from hysteria must mean that early sexual abuse was widespread. But he could not long sustain belief in this “seduction theory.” He still recognized that real experiences have psychological effects, and he never denied that sometimes his patients had actually been abused, and thereby psychologically damaged. But his theoretical focus shifted from the external to the internal: to children’s native impulses and fantasies.

Simultaneously, Freud abandoned his practice of hypnosis (a form of seduction) in favor of close listening to the hysteric’s speech and challenging her to find words that could take the place of actions (i.e., her bodily symptoms). Now “[m]ind would be linked to body, and the psychic would be rooted in the physical” (Makari, 2008, p. 103). And very specifically, the most private regions of the body, the genitals, would be implicated and exposed in a private but now also public discourse about very private (sexual and erotic) practices.

It has been commonly noted that the early analytic literature is replete with many explicit references to the genitals, but that as psychoanalysis evolved, it lost its foothold in the physical, let alone in the most personal and private aspects of our physicality. Study of psyche became the study of words and mind alone; we forgot that consciousness (let alone the unconscious) is not synonymous with the mental. We lost track of the way fantasy was (for Freud) and truly remains (for all of us) rooted as much in the body as in the mind. The resulting focus on interiority made it difficult for psychoanalysis to comprehend or cope with verbal impasses. And every analyst faces such impasses, as when after we urge patients (as Freud taught us) to speak freely, to share in unedited form whatever comes to mind, many insist they cannot do so.

The history of free association, like the history of free speech, has unfolded against a backdrop of longing for frictionless communication. Hidden within the concepts is a fantasy of the direct transference of thoughts, of a kind of telepathy, of a magical discourse in which freedom of speech means that it’s unnecessary to speak, for even speech (like writing) is plagued with the impasses and misunderstandings. This longing is nothing new, of course. In The Symposium, Plato depicts the ideal of love as selves merging into one being, whose unity obviously does away with any need for discourse.

A similar mingling of selves, if selves they properly be, is presumed in the branch of classical and medieval theology called angelology. Among other conundrums, angelologists pondered the possibility and consequences of speech between beings who are pure spirit. The conclusion advanced by divines from Augustine to Aquinas is that angels are free from the need to use words; they communicate by sheer spiritual interpenetration, using a kind of telepathy. Freud, himself, never ruled out the possibility of telepathy;² even as he celebrated and harnessed the magic of speech, he harbored some doubts of its necessity. I suspect Freud knew that this was a mistake. Even if telepathy, by means of metaphor, helps us to capture subjective experience that we may attribute to what physicists describe as the nonlocality or quantum entanglement of an implicate universe, it is misguided to presume we can do without speech.

John Durham Peters hints at this mistake in his enlightening examination of Aquinas. He takes up the interesting suggestion by Stuart Schneiderman that

angelology can be read as semiotics by other means. The bodies of angels and their couplings are allegories of signs and their syntax. But in the dominant Thomistic tradition, angels stand for communication as if bodies did not matter. …

… Since [Aquinas’s] angels have no fleshly bodies, nothing to hide, and no reason to conceal anything, the external speech of the voice “does not befit an angel, but only interior speech belongs to him.” Since the purpose of mortal speech is to manifest what is hidden, what use would speech be among such lucidly intelligible beings? … The speech of angels “is interior, but perceived, nevertheless, by another.” … Angels commune through a noiseless rustle of intelligence without the ministry of language or matter. (Peters, 1999, pp. 76–77)

In sum, angels “are unhindered by distance, are exempt from the supposed limitations of embodiment, and effortlessly couple the psychical and the physical, the signified and the signifier, the divine and the human” (ibid., p. 75).

This fantasy of instant communication, of a kind of quantum entanglement of understanding, was at least tempting to Freud. Perhaps he thought telepathy—angelic mental synchronicity—was the least implausible way to account for some clinical or hypnagogic phenomena. But the main course of his intellectual and professional development led to a different conclusion: any kind of communication, speech above all, presupposes a material gap. There can’t even theoretically be symbolization where there is complete transparency and “mental” interpenetration, if we allow for the notion of the mental without the physical.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin places an ironic spin on mediation, defining it in terms that allow for a kind of telepathy, a seeming immediacy of mental communication. And “if one chooses to call this immediacy magic, then the primary problem of language is its magic. At the same time, the notion of the magic of language points to something else: its infiniteness. … [A]ll language contains its own incommensurate, uniquely constituted infinity.” He goes on to argue that “Name steps outside itself in this knowledge … from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become expressly, as it were externally, magic. The word must communicate something (other than itself)” (Benjamin, 1916, pp. 65–71).

Just as a word must communicate something other than itself, so too must the symbolic in general attach itself to material objects. This necessity is implicit in French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s claim that the speaking subject comes into being where the “thing” was. And it is at least implied in pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s (1953) description of “transitional objects.” Winnicott was addressing the developmental process whereby the child comes to recognize that his mother (or his mother’s breast) is neither a part of him nor under his total control. That is, he has come to realize that he is not the same as mother, and perforce not the world, and (most woundingly) not omnipotent. The child seeks special objects (security blankets, teddy bears, etc.) that will comfort him and provide a sense of potency or magic—objects that will simultaneously refute this fall and soften his adjustment to the harsh reality of life in a world that is largely indifferent to his desires and even to his needs. This wounding realization is foreshadowed (at least faintly) in our first encounters with maternal fallibility, encounters that also puncture our omnipotence. The “transitional object,” like Benjamin’s word, communicates something other than itself. It occupies a space between unnamed and named, between the world of things-in-themselves and the named world. By definition, it occupies a space between material constraint and subjective omnipotence. Ultimately far more than a developmental phase, transitional or “potential space”—the “place where we live,” where all of cultural and creative life takes place—was sacred for Winnicott, and its metaphoric status has compelled psychoanalysts ever since.

Angelic communication is a fantasy akin to the infant’s fantasy of omnipotent control over his environment. If angels are all instantly accessible and transparent to one another, then there’s no need to communicate, no gap to fill, no unknown to know. The infant, in his original state, not only has no capacity for language; like an angel, he has no use for it, either. He may cry out in hunger, but crying is not language; it is language’s developmental (semiotic) analogue. Even animals cry out in hunger. As we shall see, such cries are not symbols, though one might call them “signs.” Indeed the mother will interpret such signs as the infant’s expression of hunger, and therefore she breast-feeds. But in Winnicott’s evocative theorizing, the infant “hallucinates” the breast into being (his fantasy is understood to be virtually coincident with reality), and in this way the breast is both a confirmation (to the infant) of an emergent omnipotence, but also a precursor to the transitional object, to what lies beyond his subjective control. But sooner or later every infant approaches the gap: he is not his environment, he is not the master of his mother, he is not the totality of physical experience. With his evolving “invention” of transitional objects (which are not yet recognized as found objects), the child enters the realm of symbolization—the transitional space where language becomes necessary to bridge the gap between self and other, inner desire and outer reality (Winnicott, 1953).

The blanket as transitional object is comforting because the child both makes it that way and believes it has the inherent power to comfort. It is both discovered and invented. And this duality is cloaked under a spell of silence. As Winnicott puts i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One The space between
• Chapter Two The fundamental rule: freedom in psychoanalysis
• Chapter Three The paradox of freedom and the first amendment
• Chapter Four What is special about speech?
• Chapter Five The polis, analysis, and excluded voices
• Chapter Six Repression
• Chapter Seven Free speech? For whom?
• Chapter Eight Facilitating speech
• Chapter Nine Hate speech, survival, love
• Chapter Ten Enshrined ambiguity: drawing lines between speech and action
• Chapter Eleven On having no thoughts: freedom in the context of feminine space
• Chapter Twelve Metaphors of space
• Chapter Thirteen Phallic fantasy and vaginal primacy
• Chapter Fourteen Laws of lack and feminine law
• Chapter Fifteen Naming the vagina: on the feminine dimension of truth
• Chapter Sixteen Clinical interlude: the body announces itself
• Chapter Seventeen Free speech on the playground of desire
• Chapter Eighteen Coda: homeland security and the secure home base
• Notes
• References
• Index