Femininity and Psychoanalysis

Cinema, Culture, Theory

Agnieszka Piotrowska, Ben Tyrer, Agnieszka Piotrowska, Ben Tyrer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138500938
• eBook ISBN: 9781000008593
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man's relationship to the question of 'woman' but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes.

This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger.

Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensable tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.

1

THE CERTAINTIES OF DIFFERENCE AND THEIR DIFFICULTY

Desire and the symptom

Elizabeth Cowie

For Freud, woman’s desire was an enigma; writing to the French psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte he famously declared that, “the great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” (cited by Jones 1953: 421).¹ Lacan, taking up Freud’s question in Encore, poses it in relation to woman’s enjoyment, her jouissance that he argues is other than phallic jouissance, which she also enjoys. Asking women about this other jouissance, “to try to tell us”, he declares: “We’ve never been able to get anything out of them. So we call this jouissance by whatever name we can come up with” (Lacan 1999: 75). What is addressed in this chapter is this questioning by both Freud and Lacan of woman as other and thus the enigma of her desire. Asking women questions, however, cannot advance knowledge of the unconscious of feminine desire, just as the child cannot fathom the m/Other’s desire. For the question “What does a woman want?” is also the question “What does she want of me, that is, what am I for her?” Thus, Lacan suggests, the problem expressed in the question is the problem of the Other, “woman being, in this case, equivalent to truth” (ibid.: 127). For Lacan, however, the central truth that he insisted upon throughout his later work is that “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel”, “there is no sexual relationship”; instead there is the possibility of love (2006: 147).² In The Sinthome, Seminar XXIII, the consequences for the subject that the sexual relation does not exist are explored in relation to the psychoanalytic concept of the symptom (Lacan 2016: 68). It is here that Lacan introduces his new syllogism of the “sinthome” in his discussion of the writings of James Joyce, and through which he addresses the limitations of “going through the fantasy” as an ending of analysis. Instead Lacan formulates the symptom-as-sinthome as a knotting of the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. In this Seminar Lacan not only develops his conceptualisation of the Real but also addresses how art – the artifices of art – might be engaged through the symptom in relation to Joyce’s writing, while at the same time Lacan complicates the role of the phallus and the Name-of-the-Father. As a result, Lacanian analyst Geneviève Morel suggests that Lacan’s theory of the symptom “allows us to think the relations between the sexes and the generations without necessarily referring to the Name-of-the-Father nor to the phallus, as transcendent norms of a symbolic order” (Morel 2005: xvi). While Paul Verhaeghe and Frédéric Declercq write, “the Lacanian conclusion of the treatment (. . .) is a particular process that is situated entirely in the line of femininity” (2002: 76).³

This chapter seeks to trace the complications for his account of sexual difference that Morel and Verhaeghe suggest that Lacan introduces here, and relate them to the story of femininity. For “femininity” is a “story”, a construction, that all those who become placed as “feminine” find themselves within, and part of that story is the assumed interchangeability or equivalence of woman and femininity in the writing of both Freud and Lacan. It is a story, however, that remains incomplete, creating a gap that is the Real of knowledge. Lacan repeatedly returns to the question of femininity and the woman but he does so not to close the gaps, instead a certain “gapping”, or incommensurability, appears as constitutive. Freud himself suggested that “if you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own experiences of life or turn to the poets” (1933/1964: 135). I will be turning not to poets but to two film directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Jane Campion, to examine ways in which woman’s desire finds articulation in cinema’s stories, drawing on Lacan’s re-thinking of the symptom in relation to femininity. I am drawing here on the discussions that I was part of in the 1970s and 1980s on feminine sexuality in the turn to psychoanalysis and Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, which were central for my book, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (1997). In my analysis of the representation of women in film I drew upon a psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy in its role in desire, identification and sexuality for male and female characters. I argued that for both men and women their sexual identification is neither singular nor a choice, rather it arises as a concatenation, a palimpsest, realised in the context of the contingency of the Other who responds to our demand for love. For one enacts the emplacements – both unconscious and conscious – of one’s psychical history in relation to one’s parental figures and one’s encounter with the demands and desires – enjoined or prohibited – that they convey, consciously or unconsciously. This chapter returns to the question of desire and sexual difference in film’s representations through Lacan’s concept of the sinthome.

Freud had acknowledged that there is an “uninterpretable navel” to dreams and the unconscious,⁴ while Lacan called for a training in antiphilosophy for analysts,⁵ and in Encore he declared that “The Discordance between knowledge and being is my subject” (1999: 120), but nevertheless acknowledges that “We are still (encore) caught up in the insufficiency of knowledge” (ibid.). It is the “insufficiency of knowledge” in relation to sexuality and to the categories of sexual difference that this chapter explores, for we might see in Lacan’s re-thinking of Freud’s ideas – with his graphs, mathemes and concepts – an attempt to wrestle with the uninterpretability Freud writes of, and the insufficiency of knowledge he laments. Charles Shepherdson has suggested that,

These attempts at a logical formalization of Freud are not merely descriptive, however, but are used as a means of discovery. It is almost as if Lacan believes that the conceptual impasses which his logical formulations produce are themselves capable of revealing something about the real.

(2003: 141)

Taking up again the question of our psychical relation to sexual difference, to “sexuation” as Lacan poses it, and the different relation of men and women to jouissance – as Lacan continued to do in his late Seminars – I suggest that femininity is as much an enigma for women as for men, inasmuch as “being feminine” is something other than anatomical difference, or biology in the sense of hormones. Indeed Lacan himself comments, in The Psychoses, in relation to Freud’s case study, “What is Dora saying through her neurosis? (. . .) Her question is this – What is it to be a woman?” (1993: 175). Femininity is what is added to the biological difference of “being a woman” in a performance, through gestures of movement and speech, in forms of response and through appearance: a masquerade.⁶ This is no less true for men, of course, and that it is equally an enigma – and a problem – is attested by the regular appearance of claims that masculinity is in crisis. At the same time the categories “woman” and “man” are not singular but involve further categories, not only in terms of age – for “girls” are not-yet-fully “women” – but also categories that are social, that is, relational: women as mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and workers. Being a mother or father to a son, or daughter, or being daughter or a son to a mother or father are each different kinds of being a woman, or a man, and each centres a relationship. Indeed, for Lacan what is central is that our subjectivity arises in relation to an Other and others through discourse: that is, in a social relation, which is the focus of his discussion of the “Four Discourses” in Seminar XVII. For language is trans-individual and speech, discourse, always implies – anticipates – another subject as addressee, and interlocutor.

How then, as Juliet Mitchell asked in a recent interview, “does the construction of sexual difference become so embedded that we experience it as who we are?” (2015: 115). Her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) presented Freud in a new and vital way for feminists in 1974, while in the collection of essays that she co-edited with Jacqueline Rose, she writes that for Lacan,

the analysand’s unconscious reveals a fragmented subject of shifting and uncertain sexual identity. To be human is to be subjected to a law which decentres and divides: sexuality is created in a division, the subject is split; but an ideological world conceals this from the conscious subject who is supposed to feel whole and certain of a sexual identity.

(Mitchell and Rose 1982: 26)

The account of femininity in both Freud and Lacan is of a construction, not as an essence or as simply biological. This also means that for Lacan there is no feminine outside language because, as Jacqueline Rose notes, first “the unconscious severs the subject from any unmediated relation to the body as such (. . .) and secondly because the ‘feminine’ is constituted in a division in language” (ibid.: 55).

At stake is how we think the “ideological” – the social organisation of difference that is usually addressed in terms of gender assignment – in relation to the unconscious formations that arise in relation to the constitutive splitting of the subject in its relation to lack, prohibition and desire.⁷ What arises is both an attributed sexed identity, and a psychological relation to difference and to sexuality. It is this that Jean Laplanche’s discussion, in his essay, “Gender, Sex, and the Sexual” emphasises, and that I want to draw upon here. He argues that gender – the social and linguistic identification of a difference of sex – precedes sexuality, but, he says, “Yes, gender precedes sex. But far from organizing it, it is organized by it” (2007: 215). Gender is the social assignment of difference, and Laplanche emphasises the primacy of the other, the social, in the messages of gender assignment both at an official level – the level of Foucault’s discursive ordering – in the registering of the birth of a child who is always thereby sexed and, more importantly, by its carers. The baby’s being for others is not only as a boy or girl, but also as a son or daughter. But these messages assigning gender, Laplanche argues, are “also carriers of many ‘noises’, all those brought by the adults who are close to the child: parents, grandparents, brother and sisters. Their fantasies, their unconscious and preconscious expectations” (ibid.). Here Laplanche draws on a key element of his work in describing these messages from the other – mother or carer – as seductive but also enigmatic, as “preconscious-conscious” in which “the parental unconscious is like the ‘noise’ – in the sense of communications theory – that comes to disturb and compromise the preconscious-conscious message” (ibid.). It is a gendered child that the parent addresses, but “their unconscious wishes also come to infiltrate gender assignment”. And, Laplanche suggests, it is “above all what is le sexual in the parents that makes noise in the assignment” of gender and that “in the presence of the child, the adults ultimately come to reactivate their infantile sexuality above all” (ibid.).⁸ For the child, he says, “Gender is acquired, assigned, but enigmatic up to about fifteen months. Sex comes along to fix, to translate gender in the course of the second year (. . .) The castration complex is its center”. Laplanche also argues, however, that “The certainty of the castration complex is maintained on the basis of ideology and on the basis of illusion, namely, in the early genital phase” (ibid.: 216, emphasis in original).⁹

Mustapha Safouan, a member of the Lacanian school, points out that:

Not only does the essence of the Oedipus complex not lie in the rivalry for which it is the precondition, it is even that very rivalry that obscures its essence. The Oedipal complex is in the end no more than one cultural form among others, those others being equally possible providing they perform the same function of promoting the function of castration in the psyche.

(1990: 281, emphasis in original)

It is as signifier that the phallus comes to play its role as an ideal “precisely, of that whose insufficiency is discovered for the boy and its nonexistence for the girl, at an early age, in an attribute of the father” (ibid.: 280). Lacan (re)defines the phallus (which is not the penis) as the structural function of whatever “x” the child hypothesises the paternal figure possesses making him the focus of the maternal figure’s desire, that is, the possession enabling the father to domesticate and control the mother’s otherwise unpredictable desire. If the Name-of-the-Father, as the O/other of the mother, “forbids” by standing in the way of the child’s wish for unlimited access to the mother, it is because until this intervention the mother is for the child not a woman,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Certainties of Difference and Their Difficulty: Desire and the Symptom
• 2 Her Skin Against the Rocks, the Rocks Against the Sky: Revisiting Weir’S Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) After Morley’S The Falling (2014) and Freud’s Fable of Female Hysteria
• 3 Growing Up Girl in the ’Hood: Vulnerability, Violence and the Girl-Gang State of Mind in Bande De Filles/Girlhood
• 4 Revisiting Joan Riviere
• 5 Supplementary Jouissance and Feminine Sexual Rapport
• 6 Self-Recreation Through the Uncanny Encounter: Reading the Feminine Close-Up in Cinema
• 7 River’s Edge: The Ebb and Flow of Feminine Ex-Sistence
• 8 Under Her Skin: On Woman Without Body and Body Without Woman
• 9 Desire, Commitment and the Transformative Power of Touch: The Posthuman Femme Fatale in Under the Skin
• 10 Annamarilyn: Queer Tales of Femininity
• 11 Tiresias: Bracha L. Ettinger and the Transgression with-in-to the Feminine
• 12 A Specimen of a Commentary on Lacan’s ‘L’éTourdit’
• 13 A #Metoo Moment in Communist Poland: A Short Story
• 14 Vulnerabilities
• Index