The Emptiness of the Image

Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences

Parveen Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135081119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Cultura popular en el arte

There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge?
The Emptiness of the Image offers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. She goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects. Throughout she discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace.
The Emptiness of the Image shows how the very space of representation can change to provide a new way of thinking the relation between the text and the spectator. It shows how psychoanalytic theory is supple enough to slide into and transform the most unexpected situations.

1
Symptoms and hysteria

Some years ago, in preparing a course in a department of psychology, I decided that I would question some of the assumptions of the medical model as used within psychiatry by introducing Freud's concept of hysteria. In fact, I was able to use only one short paper dating from 1893, 'Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses'. It is an excellent paper and one that served my purpose well. While ostensibly a tribute to Charcot, this paper actually undermines his notion of the 'functional lesion' as an explanation of hysteria. Freud's achievement here is that he establishes the hysterical symptom in the domain of the psyche. This symptom is the conversion symptom, taken as paradigmatic of hysterical disorder. But it became clear to me in reading Freud on hysteria that I didn't understand what hysteria was for Freud. The conversion paradigm did not seem to work. How was I to relate hysterical identification or the analysis of Dora to it? Furthermore, reading a more general literature raised the question 'does hysteria exist today?' This question is not unrelated to the relative rarity of the conversion symptom today. And one explanation of this fact appears to be that Freud's own discoveries caused the disappearance of hysteria. But then, by the same token, is Freud's work now out of date? And if I was to understand all this, what would I find concerning the relation of women to hysteria?

After thinking about these questions I have come to a provisional conclusion — that there are two concepts of hysteria in Freud to which correspond two concepts of the symptom. Of the two concepts of hysteria, one is developed and elaborated around conversion symptoms while the other is present in fragmentary form in the use of the concepts of identification and bisexuality. What is at stake in making this distinction is the very identity of hysteria, a point to which I will return. So, the first theory of hysteria: Freud's work on conversion symptoms leads, of course, to the important discoveries of psychoanalysis, the unconscious, repression, resistance, transference. We will see that these in turn leave their mark on the hysterical symptom. Freud signals what he has learned about the mechanism of hysteria by using the term 'defence hysteria'. This term is mainly aimed against the view that an idea becomes pathogenic because it has been experienced in a special psychic state dissociated from the ego, a view held by both Janet and Breuer. For Freud, the unconscious idea is pathogenic because the ego expelled and repressed it. Freud starts from the existence of two incompatible ideas, one of which is then repressed and may lead to pathological reactions. The unconscious pathogenic idea is prevented from becoming conscious by a psychical force and this is the defence of the ego against the distressing thought which is usually sexual in nature. The idea is weakened by divorcing it from its affect and in hysteria this affect is transformed into something somatic — the conversion symptom is formed. Conversion is the characteristic factor in hysteria. This is, of course, a familiar account.

Let us look a little more closely at the formation of the hysterical symptom, for hysteria is explained by a mechanism that explains its symptoms. The hysteric and the obsessional neurotic both have an unconscious, repression, defence and resistance. But Freud needs to distinguish the two and he suggests that the mechanism of repression works differently in the two cases. There is, of course, a general schema for the neuroses laid out by Freud. An instinctual representative is subjected to a first repression which leads to the formation of a substitute which is the primary symptom; there follows a stage of successful defence, but finally there is the return of the repressed and the formation of new symptoms which are the illness proper. Now in hysteria many substitutes are formed, all of which are part of the repressed instinctual representation itself. But in this case, contrary to the schema, these substitutes are the symptoms.

It is quite different in obsessional neurosis, where the substitutive formation produces an alteration in the ego in the form of increased conscientiousness which in itself is not a symptom marking the obsession. Here repression has been brought about by reaction-formation. It is only after the failure of this initial repression that the affect returns as social and moral anxiety and self-reproach. And it is only at this point that the symptoms of the neurosis are formed.

Both in hysteria and in obsessional neurosis then, the symptom remains an essential part of the pathological conditions, crucial to their definition. But there is an asymmetry — hysterical symptoms are defined not so much by their relation to other pathological symptoms but by their proximity to the effects of the unconscious as such, as in the phenomena of dreams, slips of the tongue, etc. To see this we must note the close connection between hysteria and dreams which is laid out in The Interpretation of Dreams (SE IV, V).¹ Freud's summing up:

In view of the complete identity between the characteristics of the dream work and those of the psychical activity which issues in psychoneurotic symptoms, we feel justified in carrying over to dreams the conclusions we have been led to by hysteria.

(SE V: 597)

Freud explicitly compares the over-determination of the hysterical symptom and the over-determination of the dream. Yet this is hardly a comparison; it is a question, rather, of the same process.² The hysterical symptom and the dream element are alike; the symptom is the part which, by a process of condensation, draws the whole cathexis onto itself.

I have already pointed out that the hysterical symptom is riot elaborated further. Given that it is so very much like the dream, it remains somewhat of a mystery as to what differentiates it, apart, of course, from the element of conversion. I stress the proximity of the hysterical symptom to the effects of the unconscious because I will argue later that whatever it is that is called a symptom in hysteria retains only the mark of unconscious processes and that it is by virtue of that alone that it is a symptom.³ For the moment, however, conversion remains defining of hysteria.

In the first theory, then, hysteria equals an ungendered bodily symptom proximate in its mechanism to unconscious processes in general. There is no need to consider sexual difference. Freud has, of course, introduced sexuality, but he has done so in a way that does not bear on the question of why hysterics are women, which empirically, on the whole, they are. There are some remarks to the effect that they might be more vulnerable to sexual thoughts and feelings but this would seem to be a contingent matter, suggesting no intrinsic relation between women and hysteria. Certainly Freud does not make the link which one would expect him to make through the concept of femininity.

Let us jump to 1926 when there is no doubt according to Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety 'that hysteria has a strong affinity with femininity, just as obsessional neurosis has with masculinity' (SE XX: 143). He says no more about the former. But Freud now has a clearer idea of the Oedipus complex and its function in the differentiation of masculinity and femininity. Hysteria, the affliction of women, could then reasonably be regarded in relation to the problem of femininity. However, it is important to note that this invocation of sexual difference marks a shift in Freud's conception of hysteria, a shift that has been prefigured in his work on identification and bisexuality. I want to say that this shift is made possible by jettisoning the conversion theory. Hysteria has to become something else.

This is where Freud's new view of the symptom comes in. The question of the formation of symptoms is now handled through mechanisms of identification and it is this mechanism of identification in relation to symptom formation that is crucial to my argument. Freud presented this relation in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (SE XVIII). There he distinguishes three kinds of symptom formation, all illustrated by reference to the girl. The first kind supposes a girl who develops the same painful cough as her mother and it may be that this has come about through an identification with the mother within the Oedipus complex. The girl had a hostile desire to take her mother's place; the symptom expresses object-love towards the father. The cough signals that she now is the mother, at least in so far as her sufferings are concerned. Notice that while this still remains a bodily symptom, it is not ordered by the structure of the conversion mechanism. We are concerned here with a single trait, certainly, but it does not signify the expression of a portion of the material of the instinctual representation; that is, it is not a symptom produced through the condensation which is such a characteristic feature of over-determination. The symptom now expresses hostile and loving impulses towards others. Of course Freud had already interpreted symptoms as resulting from repressed desires — as in the case of Elisabeth von R. and her brother-in-law (Studies on Hysteria, SE II: 155—8). What is different in the girl's cough is that she puts herself in the place of someone else within the structure of the Oedipal triangle.

These remarks also hold for Freud's second type of relation between identification and the symptom. He instances Dora's cough, a symptom deriving from her father's cough. Here there is identification with the object choice. Object choice has regressed to identification. This makes sense when you remember that identification is the earliest and original form of emotional tie.

There is a third particularly frequent and important case of symptom formation', writes Freud, and here the identification leaves entirely out of account any object-relation to the person (SE XVIII: 106—7). There follows the famous example of the girls in the boarding school. One of them receives a letter from someone with whom she is secretly in love, the letter arouses her jealousy and she has a fit of hysterics. The other girls catch the fit. This identification is based on the desire of putting oneself in the same situation — they too would like a secret love affair. The desire shared in common is here the basis of the identification. The symptom marks the coincidence between two egos which has to be kept repressed.

There are two important points to note about this third particularly frequent and important case of symptom formation. First, it is a case of symptom formation that is not peculiar to hysteria. It is true Freud had already noted this type of identification in The Interpretation of Dreams in relation to the smoked salmon dream and had called it hysterical identification. But in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego twenty-one years later, he reserves this term for the first type of identification. Second, the frequent and important case of symptom formation does not necessarily yield somatic effects. Undoubtedly the example given of such a symptom is the hysterical fit. But let us turn to the smoked salmon dream, the dream of a hysteric patient described in The Interpretation of Dreams (SE IV: 146—51). She wanted to give a supper-party but only had a little smoked salmon. It was a Sunday and the shops were shut. So she had to abandon her wish to give a supper-party. Without going into the details uncovered by the interpretation of the dream, we can say that what Freud makes clear is that the wish is the desire for an unfulfilled desire. On the way to this conclusion he identifies and explains a symptom of a quite different kind from the hysterical fit. The symptom in this case is the production of an unfulfilled wish both in the dream and in reality — in the dream she cannot give her supper-party; in real life she would like a caviare sandwich every morning but has expressly asked her husband, the butcher, not to give it to her. This does not look anything like a conversion symptom to me.

But the symptom is a hysterical one which has come about through two identifications, one with a friend with an insatiable appetite for smoked salmon, and the other with her husband who she imagines might desire this friend, thus showing that he was not satisfied with her. What she has registered is the lack in the Other, to use Lacanian terms, and she has identified with that lack, thus sustaining her own desire. In 'The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power', Lacan writes:

Far from imprisoning her, this impasse [wanting and not wanting a caviare sandwich] provides her with the key to the fields, the key to the field of the desires of all the witty hysterics, whether butchers' wives or not, in the world.

(Lacan 1977c: 261)

Though the impasse has to be interpreted, of course.

My point is that these three forms of identification are general mechanisms that do not produce conversion symptoms. It is not that the symptoms are not hysterical symptoms or necessarily lack bodily character; it is rather that the bodily symptom as such does not characterise a pathological condition, hysteria. Nor is the symptom distinguished as a hysterical symptom by any special mechanism. The bodily symptom comes about from unconscious processes as all symptoms always did, but the bodily element no longer distinguishes the hysterical symptom from others. The hysterical symptom was very like the dream element from the start but had to be distinguished initially by the phenomenon of conversion since the symptoms of other neuroses also relied on all the psychical mechanisms that the study of hysteria had uncovered. We now have symptoms that may well be of the body, symptoms that spring from unconscious mechanisms, but they can only be called hysterical to the extent that any subject of the unconscious is hysterical by virtue of being a speaking subject. This does not allow us to distinguish a category of hysteria based on a specific kind of symptom. It is not possible to retain the conversion theory.

However, we can retain the new concept of hysteria which is incipient in Freud's work, a concept which in Lacan's hands makes of hysteria the problem of sexual difference for the woman. And there is no contradiction in saying that the third form of identification may properly be called hysterical as Freud had called it in the first place, when it is the mechanism utilised in the problem of the feminine condition, the hysteric's working out of the relations of desire between men and women.

I would like to touch on the problem of bisexuality at this point. Lacan has suggested that the hysteric's question is 'Am I a man or a woman?' This problem involves bisexuality and bisexual identifications. Freud had always emphasised that hysterics had fantasies arising from both hetero- and homosexual sexual impulses. In the Dora case, he registers her many identifications with men; a few years later he gives a striking example of a hysterical attack in which the patient simultaneously plays both parts in the underlying bisexual fantasy — she presses her dress up against her body with one hand (as the woman), while she tries to tear it off with the other (as the man). But while linking hysteria and bisexuality on the one hand and, much later, bisexuality and femininity on the other, Freud left the links between all three unexplored. Freud never explicitly recognises the problem of hysteria as the problem of femininity; for him hysteria retains a separate identity with 'a strong affinity to femininity'. This is to say that he fails to recognise the two concepts of symptom in his own work.

It is time for a set of concluding points, I have said that conversion symptoms have lost their theoretical dominance. Symptoms in the new sense of the term, symptoms produced through identification, no longer necessarily signify an illness, a pathological condition of a definite kind as is suggested by common usage. There are a whole variety of bodily symptoms that remain as symptoms only in Freud's new sense; these are not any more specific to hysteria than are slips of the tongue or dreams. It is not that there are no conversion symptoms today, though it is undoubtedly true that the paralysed arm is a much rarer phenomenon. But this is interesting — hysteria's special relation to the body has been displaced not only in theory, but in reality.⁴ I am not sure that the virtual disappearance of conversion symptoms can be explained from within the framework of psychoanalysis. But what is certain is that the relations between the woman, the body and hysteria have shifted.

2
Per os(cillation)

It is in the register of the symbolic that femininity comes to acquire its meaning as only its difference from masculinity; and it is not something with a content.

(m/f 1983: 14-15)

This is Juliet Mitchell in an interview with the editors of m/f. While I think that the 'femininity' and 'masculinity' that Freud is concerned with, positions taken up through different relations to the phallus, are related to the Freudian symbolic, I will argue that another account of femininity also gets smuggled into Freud's texts. In this account something appears as content which is not derived from the terms of Freud's psychical system, I will show this by tracing some of the relations between identification, object choice and the taking up of a feminine position.

In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1...