The Anatomy of the Clitoris

Reflections on the Theory of Female Sexuality

Anne Zachary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429840791
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the long and passionate debate within psychoanalysis over the theory of female sexuality, which has spanned more than a century and reached no definitive conclusion, a pattern of non-acceptance of ideas, their disappearance and then re-emergence later is a continually repeating one. The Anatomy of the Clitoris shows how this happens, using a comprehensive guide to the literature. The time is right culturally to explore this further usingclinical material as illustration. The central aim of this book is to introduce recent innovative redrawing of female anatomy appearing in the scientific literature to psychoanalysis.

Part I

CHAPTER ONE

Womankind through history

How to begin this book? I simply want to lay out the position women have found themselves in down the centuries and to create a template on which to explore the new attempt by anatomists, fin de siècle, to reconsider the biological interpretation of our make-up. Of course, here this concerns only the anatomy of the clitoris and a woman is made up of much more than this. But this aspect of woman may be extremely relevant not only socially but specifically in drawing together and developing psychoanalytic theory, my main aim of the book. What has happened is that the history of the development of knowledge of the female in other disciplines over history, and including psychoanalysis, has been governed by social and cultural mores and then suppressed.

The classical view of the history of the psychoanalytic theory of female sexuality is that it developed in the hands of one man, Sigmund Freud, and then passed into the hands of another man, Ernest Jones. Of course, it is more than implicit that Jones was the spokesman for a group of women, Horney, Deutsch, Benedek … but even so, the Freud–Jones debate was a sign of those patriarchal times.

What is also important to recognise is that the development of the theory of psychoanalysis as a whole passed from Freud to two women, Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. This important history is acknowledged and described in terms very relevant to my approach now by Margot Waddell. She chooses to focus on Klein. Having stated that Freud concentrated on reconstructing the detail of past trauma and its effect on present difficulties, she highlights Klein’s work with children and their interest “about inside matters—about what is going on inside their own bodies and in those of their mothers” (Waddell, 1998, p. 2). Taken up by Donald Winnicott also, the emphasis in theory had shifted from biological drives to relationships. Later in this book, I will show how that interest in the inside, the internal life of a person, in relationships, comes naturally to women when much of their sexual biology is, in effect, inside.

There have always been powerful women who are remembered down the ages: the Virgin Mary, Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc, according to Angier, thought to have possibly had androgen insufficiency syndrome (AIS) (see Chapter Five), Queen Elizabeth I … But none of these are remembered for their sexual pursuits. Queen Victoria was a little different, her nine children with the love of her life Albert, and then later her apparently very close friendships with one or two of her male servants, her own private life to remain private. But ironically, she was of an age when repression of sexuality for all was at a height, and her name has since been given to mean just that, “the Victorian era”. None of these figureheads was representative, in the wider sense, of all women by any means. Repression together with lack of education led to hysteria, psychosomatic complaints, pregnancies that were dissociated from and denied. As far as the masses were concerned, the women were the property of the men, they belonged to their fathers and then to their husbands. In some cultures, there are still references to the business side of marriage in the ritual of the ceremony. The dowry, arranged between future husband and the bride’s father, is a thing of the not so distant past in Western culture.

Women were under the control of men throughout history—their desire, their passion—their capacity for a limitless amount of these inducing fear and restriction. There tended to be few pictures of their beauty; they covered themselves to indicate modesty but also to minimise temptation. In some cultures, this still happens. Women were second class, uneducated, seen as dirty, hidden in the home.

But there were renaissances. In medieval times, anatomical drawings existed and the larger, more natural dimensions of the clitoris as an organ involving more of its surrounding structures were recognized. The drawings were banned. At the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Helen O’Connell, another series of diagrams of the female genitalia showing the clitoris was deleted from Gray’s Anatomy, seen as unnecessary, unsuitable, or both. O’Connell tries at the end of the century to re-instate them. I will show, as the book goes on, how this same pattern of insightful ideas followed by their disappearance is repeated throughout the theory of psychoanalysis on female sexuality, coursing through the whole twentieth century.

In her first paper on the subject, O’Connell states that, “Since the studies of Masters and Johnson (1966) there has been surprisingly little investigation of basic female anatomy or physiology” (O’Connell, 1998, p. 1894). Her paper attempts to change the view that the clitoris is a “small knob” and to open up its larger three-dimensional structure incorporating the bulbs of the clitoris previously named the bulbs of the vestibule. She gives a detailed, anatomically accurate account of why this should be so (see Chapter Two).

There are many ways in which to indicate how the portrayal of women in different ages has fluctuated according to the culture of the times. Novels tend to be well researched and therefore informative. A novel set in Italy, The Anatomist (1998), by the Argentinian writer Federico Andahazi, recounts the true story of Mateo Renaldo Columbo’s discovery of the clitoris, which he calls the “Amor Veneris” and which he had written up in De re anatomica (1559). (Andahazi draws an extravagant yet understandable parallel with Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. He is comparing the navigational anatomy maps for surgery with the navigational maps of the oceans.) Columbo, a renowned anatomist and doctor in Renaissance Italy, was put on trial by the Inquisition for the inclusion of this discovery in his book. For a flavour of the times—and every psychoanalyst will think of the superego—here is a quote from the novel, spoken by the Dean of the University:

Are we to wait idly for these new painters, sculptors and anatomists to replace Our Lord Jesus Christ with marble statues of Lucifer above the pulpits?

(Andahazi, 1998, p. 166)

Columbo is treating a wealthy and beautiful widow, Ines de Torremolinos, who was living in “Franciscan austerity” in Florence and who seemed to be dying of depression and lassitude. She is revived by his manual manipulation of her engorged clitoris. He gains a reprieve in court because, incidentally, he is meanwhile asked to cure the Pope of an illness and is successful. He wants to take his newfound knowledge back to his own love, a beautiful prostitute, Mona Sofia in Venice, but on finding her again she is already ravaged by advanced syphilis and she dies.

When Andahazi’s novel was put up for the Forbat prize for literature, ironically it was denounced, setting up a scandal and charges of modern-day censorship. Irony indeed, here is another round of prohibition in another time, in tune with the theme of my book.

The novel begins as my book does, with the history. He recounts how before the sixteenth century not only were women’s genitals hidden but women themselves were hidden. He begins: “The sixteenth century was the century of women …. Until (then) history had been recounted in a deep masculine voice.” He quotes Natalie Zemon and Arlette Farge in their History of Women:

Wherever one looks there she is, always present: from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, always on the domestic, economic, intellectual and public stage, on the battlefront and in moments of private leisure, we find the Woman. Usually, she is busy at her daily tasks. But she is also present in the vents that build and tear apart society. From one end to the other of the social spectrum she occupies all places and those who watch her constantly speak of her presence, often with fear.

(in Andahazi, 1998, p. 12)

Andahazi then explains how Mateo Columbo’s discovery happened precisely at the moment when women who had always been indoors began to appear outside, “gradually and subtly … emerging from behind the walls of convents and retreats, from whorehouses or from the warm but no less monastic sweetness of home” (Andahazi, 1998, p. 13).

But the spiral continues. This was Renaissance Europe. I will digress here, and fast forward to the twenty-first century. Dubai is a very modern and rapidly expanded place that has little recorded history, since there was “nothing there” (some Bedouins and a few pearl fishers) until the discovery of oil in the middle of the twentieth century. In Dubai, there is a museum on the waterfront, a merchant’s house. It is filled with beautiful black-and-white photographs of the original ruling family and other Bedouins, at home, out sailing and fishing, hunting with hawks in the desert. When I first saw these pictures, I was struck that they were all of men and boys. Where were the women? Of course, they were hidden, as they are still in public, behind their unkind black robes (unkind in the heat when the men wear white), but also hidden from the camera entirely, presumably at home. A few years later, I took my sister to Dubai and went back to the merchant’s house, on the new visitors’ list of places to se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Charts and Illustrations
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes
• References
• Index