Shadow of the Other

Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis

Jessica Benjamin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415912365
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135225032
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Shadow of the Other is a discussion of how the individual has two sorts of relationships with an "other"--other beings, other individuals. The first regards the other as an entirely different being from oneself, but one which is still recognizable. The second understands and recognizes this other by its function as a repository of characteristics cast from oneself.

In recognizing how this dual relationship is reconciled within the self, and its implications in male/female relations, Jessica Benjamin continues her exploration of intersubjectivity and gender, taking up questions of contemporary debates in feminist theory and psychoanalysis.

1

The Primal Leap* of Psychoanalysis, From Body to Speech

Freud, Feminism, and the Vicissitudes of the Transference

I

In reflecting on the one-hundredth anniversary of Studies on Hysteria‚ I felt impelled to remember an earlier point, the seventy-fifth anniversary, in which the rebirth of the feminist movement occurred—a movement that had at least equal importance for the inventor of the “talking cure,” Anna Ο., a movement that has been shadowing psychoanalysis since its inception and has, in our time, called for and led to a massive revision in how we view ourselves and the subjects of those original Studies. Without the additional surge of the feminist movement, I would not be here as a psychoanalyst today, nor would I be able to say what I have to say. So it seemed worth noting the coincidence that, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of psychoanalysis, I was, without realizing it, living just around the corner from the Leerbachstrasse in Frankfurt, where Anna O., known to her world as Bertha Pappenheim, settled after her recovery from hysterical illness in the 1890’s.

Anna O. was the patient of Freud’s older colleague Breuer, coauthor of Studies on Hysteria‚ and it was her treatment on which Freud based the connection between hysterical symptoms and specific ideas or feelings that could not be otherwise expressed. It was also her intense attachment to Breuer that led to a precipitous end to the treatment by the frightened physician and so inspired the founding myth of transference love as Freud conveyed it to us.¹

Frankfurt was not an accidental choice, in the 1890s or the 1960s. As an historically independent, liberal city and center of finance, the site of the 1848 democratic parliament, Frankfurt was home to an important Jewish bourgeoisie before the Third Reich and was the center of “Red Hessen”‘s social democratic movement. Therefore it had been and in the 1960s was now again host to the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, famous for its neo-Marxist, psychoanalytically informed social theory. Having given up on what my only supportive professor at the time called “the antifeminist profession” of history, I had escaped to Frankfurt to study philosophy and social theory with the remaining professors of the Frankfurt institute. Once there, I had become deeply involved in the student movement’s project to create new forms of early childhood education, an effort which sought a viable alternative to the authoritarian traditions of German fascism by renewing the psychoanalytic pedagogy of the 1920s (best known here in the work of Bernfeld and Reich) establishing “antiauthoritarian” early childhood centers. Yet at the same time, my commitment to the new wave of feminism was leading to an inexorable break with my first psychoanalyst, a man whose antifascist history still did not prepare him for the idea of angry women writing attacks on the idea of penis envy and the myth of the vaginal orgasm.

The inception of the women’s movement brought the dialectical poles of psychoanalysis and feminism into violent contradiction, seemingly the contradiction between the acknowledgement of social oppression and the awareness of internal repression. The notion of rebellion opposed the notion of illness, making heroines, or at least protesters, out of patients. Not surprisingly, hysteria was among the first issues explored by feminist criticism, and the idea of the hysteric as an antecedent form of woman’s protest against the constraints of the patriarchal family (Cixous & Clement, 1975; see also Bernheimer & Kahane, 1985; Showalter, 1985;) was among the earliest revisions proposed by feminist scholarship.

Significant for our inquiry, however, is the fact that her illness is not the only thing for which Bertha Pappenheim is remembered in Frankfurt today. Pappenheim, founder of the first feminist Jewish women’s organization, is not as well-known as her alter ego Anna O. But her history, with pictures, is to be found in the Woman’s Guide to Frankfurt (Hillman, 1992), packed in alongside reminiscences of our contemporary women’s movement as well as articles on women in health, banking and the performing arts. Pappenheim’s address to the German women’s congress in Berlin, 1912, can be found in the volumes on the history of Jewish women in Germany recently published by the state of Hessen (Wagner, Mehrwald, Maierhof, Jansen 1994). Here Pappenheim analyzes the difficult position of Jewish women, deprived of access to their own religious tradition, denied instruction in the Hebrew language and texts, prevented from managing even those institutions most relevant to them.

In recalling Pappenheim’s history it is not my intention to create a countermyth of the feminist heroine or to take an uncritical feminist revisionist version of hysteria at face value. For reading Pappenheim’s words is not an unmixed experience. Both as she appears to us in Breuer’s recorded recollection and in the later histories that see her as the founder of the German Jewish women’s movement and a forerunner of modern social work, Pappenheim is surely a difficult figure with whom to identify. A woman who saw the straight lines of needlepoint as a metaphor for the well-lived, socially useful life (Hillman, 1992), who renounced sexual freedom in favor of social agency, she was a woman guided by an incredibly powerful super ego. Nonetheless it was she who became a rebel against the role of women prescribed by her religion and family, who did not finally remain paralyzed by unexpressed anger and desire, who strove valiantly to express them through her body and her speech. One could say that she overcame her incapacity by developing a position of active mastery in the world—a reversal which, in Freud’s thought, would count as the characteristic masculine strategy for overcoming hysteria (Freud, 1896).

The reversal of passivity and the overcoming of the feminine position will turn out to be quite important, indeed fateful, to psychoanalysis. Pappenheim herself promulgated a feminism that founded women’s active position in the virtues of maternal care as well as in economic independence and self-expression, the right to which she defended eloquently along with the right to freedom from sexual exploitation. Appignanesi and Forrester (1992) call the transformation from the illness of Anna O. to the healthy activity of Pappenheim “an inexplicable discontinuity.” In fact, one could easily see her effort to forget her past, to repudiate her identity as patient and assume that of an activist social worker as a kind of defensive reaction. Then again, one could say that it reflects an identification with the other side of the analytic couple, the position of healer and helper, an identification Freud himself would later propose as a means of cure.

As historical figures, Pappenheim and Freud inhabit the same discursive world, the tradition of German Enlightenment and humanism that secularized Judaism had made its own. In one respect their assessment of women’s condition matched: Even as Pappenheim saw the one possibility for equal self-expression and agency in the maternal, Freud too defined the maternal position as the one in which women are active rather than passive. However, the gap between their positions becomes evident when we consider Pappenheim’s declaration (1912) that the only commandment that gives women a position equal to that of men in the Jewish community is the one that constitutes the main tenet of the Jewish religion, “Love thy Neighbor as thyself,” the very commandment that Freud (1930) uses to illustrate the naivete of religion and the nature of reaction formation. The disjunction between Pappenheim and Freud marks the site of a tension between psychoanalysis and feminism regarding love and femininity: For Freud, love is to be deconstructed, revealing the terms of sexuality or libido—yet this endeavor will be fraught with the contradiction between the effort to identify woman’s hidden desire and his relegation of her desire to passivity; for Pappenheim, altruistic love is to be liberated from a desire associated with sexual passivity and exploitation into a protective identification (or identifying protection) with the vulnerable Other. If you like, the tension between these positions may be seen as constituting an unfortunate kind of choice, one that has pulled feminist writers on hysteria in opposing directions (Bernheimer & Kahane, 1985; Gallop, 1982; Rose, 1985): On the one hand, reliance on Freud’s attempt to liberate us from ideal forms of love; on the other, an effort to reinhabit and so revalue the position of the cast-off other.

Observing these pulls and counterpulls in the history of feminist thought, one might well ask, What does it mean, in light of Pappenheim’s trajectory, to found feminism in a flight from the primary leap into the arms of the male healer, from the unanalyzed, un-worked-through erotic transference? But my focus will be on psychoanalysis, its founding in a particular constellation in which femininity becomes imbricated with passivity. Does not this, too, reflect a flight from the erotic, from the confrontation with female sexuality? This essay, therefore, will query psychoanalysis, concentrating on the ambivalent legacy Freud bequeathed us, a kind of liberation, freedom from religious and moral strictures, from grand ideals, from the temptation to save and redeem—but offered at a price: denial of the analyst’s subjectivity and desire which might mirror that of the patient; distance from the helpless, the passive, and for that matter, the feminine Other, identification with whom did not always come easily to Freud, did not fit with his notion of objectivity and science. (Although it will follow from his own thinking that such identification is ineluctable and can only be prevented by acting against it in some intrapsychic way.) Thus I shall ask, How has the history of psychoanalysis been marked by the move from passivity to activity, and how is this move fundamental to the problems of the transference, especially the transference between unequal persons—doctor and patient, male authority and woman rebel? How did Freud’s way of formulating that move reflect his ambivalence about attributing activity to women (see Hoffman, 1996), especially sexual activity, and incorporate defensive aspects that the psychoanalytic project must continually bring to consciousness?

Beginning with the Studies‚ the issues of passive versus active—along with other complementarities such as identification or distance, empathy or objectivity—can be seen as gender underlines of the themes that recurrently trouble the evolution of psychoanalysis. The effort to clarify those themes, to overcome an old and shallow opposition between feminism and psychoanalysis, might be seen as the work of producing a more creative tension between the seemingly disparate personas, Anna and Bertha. So if psychoanalysis asks of femininism that it interrogate a founding gesture of liberation that denies the truth of dependency and desire, feminism asks of psychoanalysis that it reconsider its historical positioning of its Other, the one who is not yet able to speak for herself. Let us remind ourselves that in front of Salpetriere, where Charcot paraded his hysterics as a spectacle for popular audiences, stands a statue of Pinel freeing the mad from their chains; indeed, Freud noted at the time that this scene was painted on the wall of that very lecture theater (Showalter, 1985). Doesn’t that irony enjoin such a reconsideration?

In our time, this reconsideration has led to a concern with the radical effects of perspective, the necessity of struggling to grasp the viewpoint of another as well as to strain our own view through the critical filter of analysis. Easily said, but not easily done. Seeking to grasp the real process involved in attaining an approximation of another’s viewpoint (or even glimpses of it) as well as awareness of our own subjective view is central to our current efforts to elaborate an intersubjective psychoanalysis. Hopefully, we shall reach some clarification of what this means by the end of this essay. Provisionally, I will say that grasping the other’s viewpoint means striving to dissolve the complementary opposition of the subject and object that inevitably appeared and reappears in the practice and theory of psychoanalysis. As I shall try to show, Freud’s work, beginning with the Studies‚ aspired to move beyond the evident constraints of this complementarity, but was nevertheless continually drawn back into that opposition because of the confluence of scientific rationalism and gender hierarchy.

If we, in hindsight, are more aware of what pulls us back into that complementarity, we are also more inclined to identify with Bertha’s position in the story. This is not only because our theory of the unconscious teaches us that we cannot prevent such identification, that we can only split it off, repudiate it, in effect dislocate it and thus create a dangerous form of complementarity (one which, indeed, allows only a choice between immediate, unthinking, “hysterical” identification or repudiation). It is also the contribution of both contemporary feminism and psychoanalysis to our understanding of the necessity of taking in the position of the other. As a result, we recognize that the only choice is to develop this identification, that the (re)admission of what was rejected is central to evolving the analyst’s position as well as the patient’s. The dialectic by which we undo repudiation is as important to psychoanalysis as it has been to the project of women’s liberation, as it has been to each of the successive demands for recognition articulated in this century by the silenced or excluded.

The process by which demands are raised against those who already claim to be empowered as rational, speaking subjects is not identical with psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, the movement of psychoanalysis has a certain parallel with this project, which requires the self-conscious consideration of how to develop its forms of identification. As we see in social movements that found new identities, demands for recognition have their problematic side—a kind of entitlement or moral absolutism, which is always inextricable from and fueled by the power it opposes (see Chapter 3). It therefore always draws the other into the relationship of reversible complementarity. In many ways, as I shall try to show, Freud’s journey through the transference is an allegory of learning to traverse the unmapped and surprising (though oddly familiar) paths of such complementary relationships.

II

Lest the comparisons I have drawn between the movement of psychoanalysis and that of feminism seem forced, let me delay consideration of the history of the transference a moment and consider the background of psychoanalysis in relation to European thought. Our consciousness of who we are today should take into account the history of psychoanalysis as a practice indebted to the project of liberation rooted in the Enlightenment—and Freud, despite all his political skepticism, surely did see psychoanalysis as an activity only thinkable through and because of the Enlightenment project of personal freedom, rational autonomy, being for oneself. This project, as Kant described in “What is Enlightenment,” is that of freedom from tutelage, in German Unmundigkeit. Usually translated as “attaining majority, adulthood,” the term Mundig, derived from the word for mouth, refers to speaking for oneself (in fact, Pappenheim [12] uses it when she points out that every thirteen-year-old Jewish boy receives a Mundigsprechung, which girls are denied). To be mundig is to be entitled, empowered to speak, the opposite term to the one so often used today: silenced. It may thus fairly be understood as the antithesis of hysterical passivity, speechlessness. For the better part of the twentieth century this project of freedom from authority has been questioned precisely because—so the poststructural, postmodern critique goes—the subject of speech was never intended to be all-inclusive, was always predicated on the exclusion of an other, an abject, a disenfranchised, or an object of speech. And yet, precisely this critique of exclusion and objectification operates by referring back to a demand for inclusive recognition of subjectivity that the Enlightenment project formulated (Benjamin, 1994, Chapter 3).

Now this contradiction, between rejecting and calling upon the categories of Enlightenment, makes for a particular uneasiness regarding the place of psychoanalysis. For the twentieth-century theory that rejects the Enlightenment has invoked Freud himself in its efforts to show that the figure of the autonomous, coherent, rational subject is a deceptive appearance, which serves to deny the reality of a fragmented, chaotic, incoherent self, whose active efforts to articulate and make meaning are ultimately defensive. And yet the advocacy of meaning over chaos, thought over suffering, integration over splitting, symbolization over symptom, consciousness over unconsciousness remains essential to psychoanalysis. Finally, we can cite one more problem, one which arises regarding the psychoanalytic relationship: The achievement of autonomy is revealed to be the product of a discourse that situates the subject in the oppositional complementarities—subject and object, mind and body, active and passive, autonomously rational and “irrational”—that worked historically by splitting off the devalued side of the opposition from the subject. And, of course, by associating femininity with the devalued side. Psychoanalysis has thus continually reenacted these oppositions, which are in fact iterations of gender hierarchy, even as it offers the possibility of uncovering their meanings. As with Freud’s frequent rehearsals and disclaimers of the association between passivity and femininity, psychoanalysis reproduces the splits it aims to analyze.

Thus, to pick up where I left off, it is useful to explore the identification with Anna O./Bertha Pappenheim because she incarnates for the first time and in a most compelling way that dual identity which each psychoanalyst-patient pair, separately and together, must embody. The contradictions of Anna/Bertha—which appear through the split image of the helpless, fragmented patient versus the articulate, stalwart feminist who defends the helpless—reflect the split in every analyst, who is her/himself subject to as well as subject of the analytic process. In Freud’s own evolution as well as in psychoanalysis in general, we can see the problem of constructing the encounter as one between the Analyst-Subject who already speaks and the Patient-Other who does not yet speak for herself. This suffering Other requires recognition by the subject who does speak. But this recognition will be effective only if it incorporates a moment of identification, and so disrupts the enclosed identity of the Subject. Likewise, the Other’s attainment of speech may only proceed by her identification with the speaking subject, by which she is in danger of losing her own “identity” as Other. If the patient must “become” the analyst, the analyst must also “become” the patient.

Thus both analyst and patient have reason to resist the identifications that result from their encounter, for eventually the double- ness of identification leads to a breakdown of the rationalistic complementarities between knower and known, active and helpless, subject and object. And while this identification may in theory be laudably subversive of hierarchy, it is in practice a “most dangerous method” (Kerr, 1993), generating a muddle of boundaries, mystification, anxiety and old defenses against it. To this analytic heart of darkness we will turn shortly. For now, speaking of theory, let us say that psychoanalysis and feminism may join in the project of inspiring this inevitable breakdown to assume a creative rather than destructive form—to challenge the valorization of the autonomous, active, “masculine” side of the gender polarity without reactively elevating its opposite.

I am highlighting this paradoxical movement in psychoanalytic history: That even in the moment of breaking down those oppositions through which the masculine subject was constituted, the psychoanalytic project necessarily participated in the hierarchical opposition between activity and passiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. The Primal Leap of Psychoanalysis, From Body to Speech: Freud, Feminism, and the Vicissitudes of the Transference
• 2. Constructions of Uncertain Content: Gender and Subjectivity beyond the Oedipal Complementarities
• 3. The Shadow of the Other Subject: Intersubjectivity and Feminist Theory
• References
• Index