Sexuality, Excess, and Representation

A Psychoanalytic Clinical and Theoretical Perspective

Rosine Jozef Perelberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367253547
• eBook ISBN: 9781000448870
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Sexuality, Excess, and Representation develops a psychoanalytic understanding of psychic bisexuality and how it can be understood theoretically and in clinical practice.

Rosine Jozef Perelberg articulates a Freudian metapsychology with modern preoccupations with questions of sexual difference and differences. She expands on the ideas presented in her previous book edited work, Psychic Bisexuality: a British-French Dialogue. The author's approach brings back into focus Freud's idea that "one is not born already made as a man or woman, but one is constituted as such in the process of development". Freud's theoretical writing on bisexuality is examined, returning us firmly to infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex and the "repudiation of femininity".

Perelberg draws on her past training as a social anthropologist to propose and explore the differentiation between sex, gender, and sexuality. She considers post-war academic work in gender and women's studies and queer theory, arguing that the object of psychoanalysis is not gender but sexuality, which establishes a link between the sexual and the unconscious. She suggests that the unconscious permanently challenges our apparent unity as subjects.

Sexuality, Excess and Representation will be of great interest to all practicing psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Part I

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK TOWARDS THE UNDERSTANDING OF PSYCHOSEXUALITY

1

PSYCHOANALYTIC UNDERSTANDING OF BISEXUALITY

A framework

Although, for psychoanalysis, difference is sexual, the question of bisexuality is related to psychoanalytic theory as a whole.

(A. Green, 2001, p. 158)

A King of shreds and patches.

(Shakespeare, Hamlet, III: iv, l. 103)

Initial considerations

I wish to offer a few lines of thought at the outset:

• The second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries have been marked by the emergence of the cyborg—a hybrid creature, made up of both organism and machine. This is the inauguration of a world in which, because of the penetration of technology into the very construction of the human body, the traditional philosophical and anthropological dichotomies between nature and culture, humans and objects, men and women no longer appear to offer a framework for understanding the world. If these considerations indicate a need to take into account the technological, social, and political forms that inform the practices existing within contemporary societies, how do these categorizations impact our psychoanalytic thinking on sexuality?—Or do they?
• A psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality refers to the unconscious, repressed aspects of sexuality, which have their origins in infantile sexuality and can only be derived après-coup in the analytic process.
• Psychoanalysis has, since Freud, viewed sexuality in itself as traumatic to the individual. This traumatic dimension is linked to the force of the drives in that there is always something in excess that cannot be reduced to the level of representation (Perelberg, 2015). This excessive aspect of sexuality has been highlighted in different ways by Bataille (1957), Kohon (1999), and Laplanche (1987).
• The traumatic dimension of sexuality also relates to the recognition of the difference between the sexes, the result of a long process of development and elaboration. In its homosexual and heterosexual dimensions, the oedipal configuration confronts the child with the impossibility of belonging to both sexes, as well as the impossibility of possessing their parents. This establishes a link between sexuality, castration, renunciation, taboo, and prohibition (Perelberg, 2009b).
• The revolutionary contribution made by Freud is the idea that one is not born already formed as a man or woman, but one is constituted as such in the process of development.
• There is a fundamental difference between a psychoanalytic perspective on sexuality and a sociological definition of gender.
• In the psychoanalytic movement, there has been a process of de-sexualization of the theory (Green, 1986c; Kohon, 1999).

Psychic bisexuality

In a letter to Fliess in 1896, Freud used the word “bisexuality” for the first time:

In order to account for why the outcome [of premature sexual experience] … is sometimes perversion and sometimes neurosis, I avail myself of the bisexuality of all human beings.

(Freud, 1950 [1892–1899], p. 238)

Freud was to use the term “bisexuality” 44 times throughout his work. In the initial phase, he was still concerned with matching his ideas on bisexuality to the anatomical–biological substratum proposed by Fliess, to whom he attributed the discovery of bisexuality. It is only progressively that bisexuality acquired a more fundamental psychological meaning in his work. In time Freud came to regard bisexuality as an inherent characteristic of all human beings.

In his Studies on Hysteria (1895d), Freud established an essential link between hysteria and bisexuality. He suggested that hysterical attacks express an experience of rape in which the hysteric plays both roles.¹ “In one case I observed, for instance, the patient pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as a woman), while she tried to tear it off with the other (as a man)” (Freud, 1908a, p. 166).

It was in his discussion of the case of Katharina in 1896 that Freud himself first related hysteria to the primal scene (Letter 52, in Freud, 1950 [1892–1899]). Freud mentioned at least three further cases linking anxiety to the primal scene—in a letter to Fliess, in his paper on anxiety neurosis (1895b), and in his analysis of Dora (1905e). Later, in a letter to Jung on 21 November 1909, Freud wrote about Anna O’s term “chimney sweeping”:

The reason why a chimney sweep is supposed to bring good luck is that sweeping a chimney is an unconscious symbol of coitus, which is something of which Breuer certainly never dreamed.

(in McGuire, 1974, p. 267)

The hysteric is the feminine in the neurotic representation (Schaeffer, 1986); it is also the very repudiation of the feminine. Kohon has suggested a divalent stage for the hysteric: “In fact, stuck in her divalent stage, the hysteric … cannot define herself as a man or as a woman because she cannot finally choose between her father and her mother” (Kohon, 1999, p. 19).

Schaeffer—using an expression coined by Michel Cachoux (see Schaeffer, 1997)—suggests that the hysteric, like a ruby, displays what it is in fact rejecting: “The ruby is a stone that has a horror of red. It absorbs and retains all the other colours, but rejects and expels red” (Schaeffer, 1986, p. 925). Thus, the hysteric has a horror of the colour red, of sexuality, while at the same time displaying it. In her hysterical pregnancy Anna O was, paradoxically, rejecting a feminine identification—the woman who would produce babies as a result of intercourse.

Some aspects of Bertha Pappenheim’s later life represent transformations of Anna O’s question, “Am I a man or a woman?” (see Kohon, 1984; Lacan, 1993; Leclaire, 1980), albeit in a sublimated way. In her social work, she designated the social workers she trained as her daughters—products of an imaginary intercourse without a father or mother. The orphanage she built was known as “Papahome”—the house of the father—in which she would fulfil the two parental roles.

Hysteria becomes, fundamentally, a mode of thinking about sexuality and the sexual object (Schaeffer, 1986).² Hysteria works by imitation; the difference between identification and imitation is that between “being like the object” and “being the object”. Through her symptoms, Anna O seems to be imitating the sexual act. Her symptoms become like a theatre of the sexual act in an attempt to both deny and represent the primal scene and deny the mourning of her incestuous sexual desires. It is also displaying a body that cannot be experienced as sexual and feminine, but only as bits and pieces that ache. The fracture of the mind (the Humpty Dumpty song she recited at her father’s bedside) is mirrored in the fragmentation of the body through her symptoms.

Freud’s revolutionary vision on sexuality was to maintain the inherent, unconscious, infantile, perverse psychic bisexuality in both men and women. Each child is confronted with questions about the enigma of the differences between the sexes of the parents and the nature of their sexuality (Freud, 1905d, pp. 194–197).

Masculine and feminine are structural positions in relation to the difference between the sexes. The interplay of identifications in relation to the primal scene is implicit or explicit in each of Freud’s case studies, from Dora (1905e), to Little Hans (1909b), the Rat Man (1909d), Schreber (1911c), the Wolf Man (1918b), to “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920a). I give summarized indications below for some of Freud’s clinical cases.

Dora (Freud, 1905e)

The theme of hysteria and its relationship with sexuality continues in the discussion of Dora’s analysis, which expresses Freud’s interest in the sexual origins of hysterical symptoms, as well as in the role of dreams as expressing unconscious conflicts. The hysterical symptom “enacts a fantasy with a sexual content” (Cournut-Janin, 2005), even if a single unconscious phantasy is generally not sufficient to engender a symptom.

In this analysis Freud is still interested in the reconstruction of the trauma that had led to the appearance of the symptom, through the analysis of dreams and free associations. This clinical emphasis would change in later years, when Freud started to see the analytic process more in terms of a process of construction. At the time of the analysis itself, Freud emphasized the paternal transference and the role of the father’s impotence in the structuring of the symptom. Dora’s aphonia and cough are understood as manifestations of the unconscious phantasy of having oral sex with a woman, Mrs K, in identification with her impotent father. In Freud’s formulations, a symptom establishes a link between unconscious phantasy and sexuality: “a symptom signifies the representation—the realization of a phantasy with a sexual content, that is to say, it signifies a sexual situation” (1905e, p. 47).

There is a link between the current phantasy and a childhood memory, as Dora tells Freud that as a child she had been a thumb-sucker. She remembers an occasion when she would be thumb-sucking at the same time as she would be tugging at her brother’s earlobe (p. 51). Freud believes that these are new versions of a “pre-historic impression of sucking at the mother’s or nurse’s breast” (p. 52).

It is only retrospectively, after Dora had broken off the analysis, that Freud identified the relevance of the maternal transference.

In one of several footnotes added to the text of the analysis of Dora, Freud indicated his mistake in underestimating Dora’s love for Frau K: “I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life” (Freud, 1905e, p. 120).

Yet quite a few years were to pass before Freud discovered the pre-oedipal passion for the mother expressed by children of both sexes. The homosexual love for Frau K would then be seen as the “strongest unconscious current” in the mental life of all individuals. It is always the mother, in the words of Kristeva (2012). Bisexuality was at the core of Freud’s understanding of hysteria.

Cournut-Janin (2005) has suggested that

in the longing for Frau K it is her own femininity that Dora—still an adolescent—also loves the woman she herself will be in the person of the lovely Frau K., who is desirable, as her father has clearly indicated to her.

(2005, p. 58)

From this perspective, Frau K becomes the ideal of unattainable femininity.

More recently, Mitchell has suggested that the identification with the mother is also present in this analysis. Freud himself says that Dora

identified with her mother by means of slight symptoms and peculiarities of manner, which gave her an opportunity for some really remarkable achievements in the direction of intolerable behaviour. … The persistence with which she held to this identification with her mother almost forced me to ask whether she too was suffering from a venereal disease.

(Mitchell, 2000, pp. 75–76)

At the time, it was believed that syphilis could lead to madness. In her analysis of the case, Mitchell suggests that Freud is both the father and the mother in the transference. She also convincingly emphasizes the importance of Dora’s identification with her older brother, Otto Bauer, in the development of Dora’s symptoms. “She had wanted to be positioned as a child in the family like her brother, only to discover that she was not like him in gender and that (probably) he, first-born and male, had their mother’s love” (Mitchell, 2000, p. 104). Her hysteria emanated from childhood and a “breakdown of her identification with her brother” (p. 105).

Little Hans (Freud, 1909b)

This was an analysis carried out by Little Hans’s father, Max Graf, who sent Freud extensive notes about his son. When he was 4 years old, Herbert witnessed a cart horse that was pulling a heavy load collapse. The little boy became fearful of horses: Freud understood Hans’s phobia as being related to the anxiety caused by the arrival of his younger sister and the lies that the adults were offering him about the origin of babies.

Hans’s material offered Freud evidence about his theories on infantile sexuality, castration anxiety, and the Oedipus complex. Progressively, Freud understood Hans’s fear as being one of his father biting him (castrating him) for his desires towards the mother. As Hans’s father was acting as analyst, Freud conjectured that this fear was impeding the progress of the treatment, so he invited Hans to see him so that he could explain his symptoms to him.

Hans also showed jealousy towards his father and expressed a desire to give his mother babies, thus revealing himself as a “little Oedipus” (Freud, 1909b, p. 11). At the same time, however, his homosexual attachment to his father was recognized. His father described the boy’s loving feelings towards boy companions, as well his loving responses to girls. Freud referred to these “accesses of homosexuality” in Hans as one of the many polymorphous libidinal strands that flourished before the effects of repression became evident.

Hans was a homosexual (as all children may well be), quite consistently with the fact, which must always be kept in mind, that he was acquainted with one kind of genital organ—a genital organ like his own.

(Freud, 1909b, p. 110)

Little Hans is an example of the infantile theory of phallic monism that is impermeable to observation. He believed that girls and boys had “widdlers”, in spite of the evidence against this through his observation of his sister. This is again an expression of the force of phantasy life and the anxiety provoked by the threat of castration (see a fuller discussion of this later in this chapter).

The account of the case gives ample evidence of Hans’s identification with his mother and the wish to give birth to babies, although this is not explored by Freud in the paper and would only be discussed in 1926. As Temperley (2005) indicates, it is only in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Freud, 1926d) that Freud linked Hans with the Wolf Man, stating that in both cases the animal phobia derived from tender, passive homosexual desires towards the father, which had been distorted by regression to the oral phase, as well as by repression:

The process of repression had attacked almost all the components of his Oedipus complex—both his hostile and his tender impulses toward his father and his tender impulses toward his mother.

(Freud, 1926d, p. 107)

In the next paragraph, however, Freud writes:

A tender feeling for his father was undoubtedly there too and played a part in repressing the opposite feeling: but we can prove neither that it was strong enough to draw repression on itself nor that it disappeared afterwards. Hans seems in fact to have been a normal boy with what is called a “positive” Oedipus complex.

(1926d, p. 107)

The in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: A theoretical framework towards the understanding of psychosexuality
• PART II: Excess and representation: clinical configurations
• PART III: The uncanny and time
• References
• Index