Identification Papers

Readings on Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Culture

Diana Fuss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135209179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

The notion of identification, especially in the discourse of feminist theory, has come sharply and dramatically into focus with the recent interest in such topics as queer performativity, cross-dressing, and racial passing. Identification Papers is the first book to track the evolution of identification's emergence in psychoanalytic theory. Diana Fuss seeks to understand where this notion of identification has come from, and why it has emerged as one of the most difficult problems in contemporary theory and politics.

Identification Papers situates the recent critical interest in identification in the intellectual tradition that first gave the idea its theoretical relevance: psychoanalysis. Fuss begins from the assumption that identification has a history, and that the term carries with it a host of theoretical problems, conceptual difficulties, and ideological complications. By tracking the evolution of identification in Freud's work over a forty year period, Fuss demonstrates how the concept of identification is neither a theoretically neutral notion nor a politically innocent one.

Identification Papers closely examines the three principal figures -- gravity, ingestion, and infection -- that psychoanalysis invokes to theorize identification. Fuss then deconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of identification in order to open up the possibility of more innovative rethinkings of the political.

Drawing on literature, film, and Freud's own case histories, and engaging with a wide range of disciplines -- including critical theory, philosophy, film theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism -- Identification Papers will be a necessary starting point in any future theoretical project that seeks to mobilize the concept of identification for a feminist politics.

I

IDENTIFICATION PAPERS

FREUD’S PAPERS ON IDENTIFICATION begin as early as the correspondence to Wilhelm Fliess in the late 1890s and conclude forty years later with a posthumously published journal note. In a professional career comprised of several hundred published pieces, ranging from letters, reviews, and prefaces to scientific abstracts, case histories, and analytical papers, Freud never allocated to identification a book or monograph of its own (Lacan was later to devote a whole seminar to the problem). Its most sustained treatment comes in Chapter Seven of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, but, even in this focussed investigation of group ties, what may be psychoanalysis’s most original idea commands far less rigorous attention than a host of other familiar Freudian concepts fundamentally dependent upon it, concepts including oedipality, fantasy, repression, castration, and ambivalence. The theory of identification, one of Freud’s most important contributions to twentieth-century thought, is also one of the most imperfectly understood— not least of all by Freud himself.

Of Sponges and Condoms

Two of Freud’s earliest references to identification [Identifizierung] appear in some fragmentary case notes on hysterical neurosis, contained in a letter, dated May 2, 1897, to the ear, nose, and throat doctor, Wilhelm Fliess. Freud entitles the first fragment “The Part Played by Servant-Girls”:

An immense load of guilt, with self-reproaches (for theft, abortion, etc.), is made possible [for a woman] by identification with these people of low morals, who are so often remembered by her as worthless women connected sexually with her father or brother. And, as a result of the sublimation of these girls in phantasies, most improbable charges against other people are made in these phantasies. Fear of prostitution [i.e. of becoming a prostitute] (fear of being in the street alone), fear of a man hidden under the bed, etc., also point in the direction of servant-girls. There is tragic justice in the fact that the action of the head of the family in stooping to a servant-girl is atoned for by his daughter’s self-abasement.

The second note, which immediately follows this class narrative of guilt, shame, and atonement, is called, simply, “Mushrooms”:

There was a girl last summer who was afraid to pick a flower or even to pull up a mushroom, because it was against the command of God, who did not wish living seeds to be destroyed.—This arose from a memory of religious maxims of her mother’s directed against precautions during coitus, because they mean that living seeds are destroyed. “Sponges” (Paris sponges) were explicitly mentioned among these precautions. The main content of her neurosis was identification with her mother.¹

Both are stories of feminine identification; both focus upon women’s sexual fears; both allude to the possible consequences of heterosexual intercourse for women. But more importantly, both fragments revolve around the question of pregnancy—in one case its termination, in the other its prevention. But what does pregnancy have to do with identification? How do the material practices of abortion and contraception help Freud to pose the question of psychical incorporation? Why does a German story of identification begin with a Paris sponge?

The story of identification properly begins with Freud’s trip to Paris in 1885 and his encounter with the Parisian neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot. The seed of Freud’s earliest speculations on the sexual etiology of hysteria is planted by Charcot, whose use of hypnosis to treat hysteria among charity patients in a large teaching hospital first alerts Freud to the possibility of a repressed sexual trauma behind the hysterical symptom. This “seed” of intellectual discovery comes to Freud through the penetrating intellect of a man whom he considered a surrogate father. The figure of the living seed, alluded to in Freud’s letter to Fliess, actually appears first in a letter to Freud’s fiancée, Martha Bernays, on the subject of Charcot’s professional seduction: “Whether the seed will one day bring forth fruit, I do not know; but that no other human being has ever acted on me in this way I know for certain.”² That Freud experienced his discipleship under the famous Parisian physician as a metaphorical impregnation is made clearer still by the birth of Freud’s first son whom he named Jean Martin, after Charcot. Equally influential for Freud’s early thinking on the problem of hysteria and its possible links to sexual reproduction was Josef Breuer, another successful physician and substitute father figure for Freud. The details of Breuer’s treatment of Anna O. (the founding case of psychoanalysis) convinced Freud that hysteria was fundamentally a question of unconscious imitation. Declaring that she was pregnant with Dr. B’s child, Bertha Pappenheim’s hysterical spasms and convulsions reproduced in fantasy the act of reproduction itself. Historically and theoretically, psychoanalysis begins with a performance of an imaginary birth.

But there is a third sense in which psychoanalysis might be said to be the progeny of a hysterical pregnancy. At the time Freud writes his letter to Fliess on the subject of Paris sponges, he was beginning a three-year analysis of his own hysteria triggered by the death of his father. Freud was later to speculate that his hysterical symptoms, which included a nose infection, headache, and fits of melancholia, may have also issued from a repressed homosexual desire for his friend Fliess, the nose doctor.³ But initially Freud is content to attribute his professional anxieties to a feminine identification, the very precondition, in his later writings, for a male homosexual object-choice. A letter to Fliess dated November 14, 1897, opens with a “birth announcement”: “It was on November 12, a day dominated by a left-sided migraine, … that, after the frightful labour-pains of the last few weeks, I gave birth to a new piece of knowledge.”⁴ For Freud, pregnancy is apparently only a state of mind, and femininity a position any sexed subject can inhabit.

The pregnant woman is in many ways the perfect figure for a psychoanalytic model of identification based upon incorporation. As Otto Fenichel comments, pregnancy represents the “full realization of identificatory strivings to incorporate an external object bodily into the ego and to enable that object to carry on an independent existence there.”⁵ But it is another follower of Freud’s, Helene Deutsch, who brings this idea to term. Deutsch elaborates an entire psychology of women on the theoretical ground of what we might call in utero identification, the idea that the fetus occupies the interiorized position of a “second ego” or “ego in miniature” in relation to the pregnant woman who is “both mother and child at the same time.” The biological processes of pregnancy and parturition offer ready-made models for the psychical work of identification, defined by Deutsch, Fenichel, and Freud as the ego’s introjection and eventual expulsion of the object.⁶

And yet the two working papers in the May 1897 Fliess correspondence are less about pregnancy per se than its termination or prevention. Abortion and contraception are the occasional subtexts for the two feminine identifications Freud describes: a bourgeois daughter’s identification with a servant-girl, and a young girl’s identification with her god-fearing mother. In this second case, the girl’s neurotic fear of picking flowers or mushrooms is related to a specific maternal instruction prohibiting the use of contraceptives. The linguistic clue that unlocks the case for Freud is the German word for mushroom, Schwämme, which also means sponge—a popular form of birth control for European women. Identifying herself with her mother, the girl’s irrational fear of Schwämme is based upon an anxious concern for her own conception and survival. But the story does not terminate here. In Freud’s reading of the neurosis, the girl’s phobic reaction to the mushroom/sponge operates as a diplaced terror and fascination with what it implicitly assumes: sexual intercourse and pregnancy. In a later fragment on the same case entitled “Wrapping-Up,” Freud notes that “the girl insisted that any objects handed to her must be wrapped up. (Condom).” Discontented with his initial reading which discovers the source of the girl’s neurotic behavior in the repudiation of birth control, Freud locates it instead in her unconscious obsession with contraception. It will come as no surprise that Freud’s personal and professional views on birth control were staunchly conservative. Throughout his life Freud considered the practice of birth control as one of the prime etiological factors in the production of anxiety neurosis. To the degree that contraceptives interfered with the full gratification of sexual pleasure, Freud believed that the use of a sponge or a condom during heterosexual intercourse predisposed the subject to hysteria.⁷

Through a similar logic, termination of a pregnancy was also identified by Freud as one of the causes of hysterical identification and neurotic symptom formations, this time through the “intense load of guilt” he assumed the woman must carry in place of the aborted child. Heavy with remorse, the woman identifies with the servant-girls of her childhood whom she remembers as “worthless women connected sexually with her father or brother.” In unconsciously identifying herself with the household servants who have been sexually exploited by the male members of her family, the woman enacts in fantasy her own incestuous, oedipal desires, while at the same time atoning for her father’s sins through her “self-reproaches” and “self-abasement.” Both in “The Part Played by Servant-Girls” and in “Mushrooms,” identification is fundamentally a question of lowness: “people of low morals,” “fear of a man hidden under the bed,” a father “stooping to a servant-girl,” a “daughter’s self-abasement,” a “flower,” a “mushroom,” a “seed.” From the very beginning, identification is understood as a problem of the ground, rather vaguely associated, in “The Part Played By Servant-Girls,” with the gravitational pull of sublimation. Although a fairly pervasive figure in the papers on identification, the trope of gravity is nonetheless almost entirely buried. Unlike Freud’s other two central metaphors for identification (ingestion and infection), which each receives extended analysis, the metaphor of gravity remains submerged in Freud’s work, undertheorized and largely unnoticed. It is as if the conceptualization of identification as what is below consciousness obeys its own figurative logic and stays just beneath the surface of Freud’s prose, readable only through its symptomatic materializations.

Identification also operates along a certain class register in “The Part Played by Servant-Girls.” Unlike Freud’s later discussions of cross-class identifications between women, cases that tend to focus mainly on a servant’s erotic ambitions to kill off the mistress and to take her place with the master,⁸ this early narrative stages a different scenario: a middle-class daughter’s identification with rival servant-girls who in the past have assumed the mother’s place with the father, the very place that the daughter herself now unconsciously wishes to occupy. The bourgeois woman who identifies with “people of low morals” is one of the first in a long line of Freudian hysterics. The earliest reference to Identifizierung in Freud’s writings, preceding even the present fragmentary notes, helps to clarify the tenuous connections between class, identification, height, and falling that structure so many of Freud’s texts on femininity. In an earlier letter dated December 17, 1896, Freud attempts to explain to Fliess the root mechanism of agoraphobia in women: “No doubt you will guess it if you think of ‘public’ women. It is the repression of the intention to take the first man one meets in the street: envy of prostitution and identification.”⁹ Freud also cites envy of street-walkers as the basis of another common phobia, fear of “falling out of the window,” where the window is all that consciously remains of a sublimated identification with prostitutes. The phobia is based upon the repression of a particular image: “Going to the window to beckon a man to come up, as prostitutes do” (217). The two phobias in “The Part Played by Servant-Girls” become readable within the context of this earlier passage on cross-class identification. For Freud, the bourgeois woman’s “fear of prostitution” and “fear of being in the street alone” are symptoms of a powerful unconscious identification with “fallen women.”

When speaking of class identifications, we might recall that Freud personified psychoanalysis itself as a female domestic, objecting spiritedly when other analysts sought to elevate her to the status of a respectable lady. Writing to the American psychoanalyst James Jackson Putnam, Freud protests, “you make psychoanalysis seem so much nobler and more beautiful: in her Sunday clothes I scarcely recognize the servant who performs my household tasks.”¹⁰ For Freud, psychoanalysis is less a noble enterprise than a service profession based upon a crass money transaction. While it is tempting to suggest that Freud chose to open his medical practice on an Easter Sunday in 1886 to commemorate his boyhood affection for the Czech nanny who used to bring Freud to Catholic Church with her on Sundays, such an inference is immediately complicated by Freud’s adult dislike for the Church of Rome and its official sanctioning of racial anti-Semitism. It seems truer to say that the economics of psychoanalytic practice provide the material ground of Freud’s own anxious identification with his old Catholic nurse who routinely extorted money from Freud as a child. Several months after the servant-girl tale, Freud confesses in another letter to Fliess that “just as the old woman got money from me for her bad treatment of me, so to-day I get money for my bad treatment of my patients.”¹¹ Freud’s lifelong repudiation of the anti-Semitic caricature of Jewish professional men as unscrupulous, money-grubbing swindlers finds displaced inversion in the parallel Freud draws here between the practicing psychoanalyst and the larcenous Catholic servant woman of his childhood.

There is surely a whole book to be written on the matter of Freud’s feminine identifications, unconscious identifications that cover an astonishing range of subjects, from pregnant women to pubescent girls, from maids to mistresses, from prostitutes to colleagues.¹² Freud’s representation of the psychoanalyst as a working-class servant-woman signals an insecurity that appears to have plagued Freud throughout his career. In the demand for pecuniary reimbursement from the patient for a treatment that never promises a cure, how, Freud wonders, is the psychoanalyst any different from the dishonest Catholic nurse who demands recompense for her bad care of her charge or from the anti-Semite’s Jew who swindles for financial profit? Worse still, in its extraction of money for specifically sexual services rendered, how is the practice of psychoanalysis any different than the profession of prostitution? Might not the bourgeois woman’s “fear of prostitution” in “The Part Played By Servant-Girls” in some profound sense mirror Freud’s own? By following the path of Freud’s complicated cross-class, cross-gender, cross-ethnic identifications, we can perhaps begin to unravel the anxieties that imperfectly structure the “science” of psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a practice.

A Supper Party

Freud’s next major foray into the problem of identification comes wrapped up in a story of desire, or more accurat...