Psychoanalytic Feminism
In broad terms the influence of psychoanalysis has produced two major variants. The first of these is Freudian feminism which has attended to the significance of psychology and the formation of sexually specific personalities (subjectivities) in the framing of male dominance by analysing the impact of women's responsibility for mothering. Freudian feminism is associated with certain English speaking, particularly North American writers. The second grouping draws upon the work of Jaques Lacan, an interpreter of Freud's analytic method, who stresses the fraught fragility of sexual identity and its links to language acquisition. Lacanian feminist approaches are usually linked with French and to a lesser extent some British and Australian writers. Two sub-groups within Lacanian feminism may be distinguished--that is, those who more or less follow Lacan's interpretation of psychoanalysis and those who may described as post-Lacanians (otherwise known as French feminists or ecriture feminine school or, broadly speaking, poststructuralist feminists). (Beasley 66)
Freud and the Women's Movement
Freud and Femininity
(Freud announces, "The girl has turned into a little woman" at the stage of the feminine Oedipus Complex.)
Freud sees masculinity and femininity as largely cultural categories or social constructs. Freud's whole theory is a rejection of biological determinism. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud sees the unconscious the place of repressed, painful knowledge and forbidden desire. Freud's ideas about the unconscious would become more structured in The Ego and the Id (1923). Freud linked the unconscious with sexuality. Infantile sexuality was inseparable from a subject's identity and their development into sexual adulthood. Subversively for feminists, this meant that adult sexuality was not the result of biology, but was constructed through the repression of infantile polymorphous drives. Thus the sexes may be born biologically different (as males or females), but their identities (masculine or feminine) are molded as they emerge from different developmental stages particular to their cultural environment. (Gamble 170)
Freud's ideas about sexuality are developed in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) and his later papers, "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes" (1925), "Female Sexuality" (1931), "Femininity" (1933). Freud discerned three phases of infantile sexuality according to the three erotogenic zones: oral, anal, phallic. The oral phase is where pleasure is gained through sucking the mother's breast. The baby feels sexual pleasure in its mouth. Because the act of sucking is pleasurable, the baby forms a bond with its mother that goes beyond the satisfaction of the baby's hunger. That bond Freud calls libidinal, since it involves the baby's libido, the drive for sexual pleasure. The anal stage (which Freud says has a lot to do with toilet training) is where the child gains pleasure from control over its faeces. The phallic stage--Freud argues that "phallic" refers to both penis and clitoris, and is common to both boys and girls--leads a child toward genital masturbation, and hence to the gateway of adult sexuality. Psychoanalysts argue that the oral stage begins soon after birth with the first experience of nursing and that the phallic stage ends somewhere between ages 3 and 5. It is important to note that the child is "polymorphously perverse," a term Freud uses to describe a being whose sexual or libidinal drives are relatively unorganized and are directed at any and every object that might provide sexual pleasure. The polymorphously perverse child is pleasure-seeking. It is not yet under the sway of the reality principle, and because it does not have to repress any of its desires, it has no unconscious. Without an unconscious or the reality that demands repression, the child has no gender. The child experiences an erotic pleasure any time one of these erotogenic zones--oral, anal, and phallic--is stimulated; these pleasures persist into adult life.
The child enters the latency period when the libidinal exploration of the polymorphous perversity is put on hold; the child does not think about or go after sexual pleasure any more (at least not so directly and constantly). The search for sexual pleasure is revived at puberty, the final stage in sexual development. At puberty, the instinctual urges from infancy take on adult characteristics, and get directed toward normal aims. At puberty, sexual drives turn from being autoerotic (that is, masturbatory or directed at one's own body as a source of pleasure) to being directed at an object, another person. These sexual desires also acquire a new aim, which is not just pleasurable stimulation but orgasm. If all works well, at puberty all of the polymorphously perverse drives of infancy get channeled into reproductive heterosexual intercourse, and all the erotic feelings generated in the erotogenic zones get subordinated to the genital zone alone. The old erotogenic zones becomes places to provide forepleasure, which Freud defines as the only normal adult form of sexual pleasure.
The project of psychoanalytic theory is to describe how the gendered (masculine and feminine) and sexual (non-incestuous reproductive heterosexual) self is formed. The project of Freud's psychoanalytic practice was to cure those who had gone astray in the process, those who had not correctly developed this firm sense of gender, sexuality, and repression of libidinal drives. The main vehicle for the construction of properly gendered and sexual selves is the Oedipus Complex. The Oedipus Complex is what ends the phallic phase and the polymorphous perverse phase in general, and forces the child into the latency phase. Up to the phallic phase, both children are active in their sexuality, in gaining bodily pleasure from their clitoris or penis. Interestingly, Freud does concern himself with the difficulty of such terms as "masculinity" and "femininity," since at this stage girl and boy are responsive both actively and passively towards their object (the mother). It is during this stage that the children discover sexual difference and believe the mother to be in possession of a penis.
At some point of the phallic phase, the boy discovers phallic masturbation and wants to direct this phallic activity toward his mother with libidinal cathexis. Because of this sexual love for his mother, the boy wants to get rid of this father as his rival for his mother's love--more specifically, he wants to kill his father so he can have sole sexual possession of his mother. This is the Oedipal Complex in boys; the desire to kill the father so that he can fulfill his libidinal desire for his mother. Having developed these feelings for sexual desire for his mother and aggression towards his father, the boy perceives the fact of the girl's castration and develops castration anxiety--the fear that his father, angry at the boy's desire to kill him and have sex with the father's woman, will cut off his penis in revenge. The boy then enters into the castration complex, which forces him to choose between wanting his mother and losing his penis. Fearing the anger of the father, and the loss of his penis, the boy gives up his desire for his mother, thus ending the Oedipus Complex and creating the unconscious, which is the place where all his unfillable and inexpressible desires--starting with his desire for his mother--will go.
The desire for the mother goes into and creates the unconscious. The fear of the father creates the superego, which will be the place where the voices of authority and conscience reside. All subsequent prohibitions on behavior, whether from parents, teachers, laws, police, religious authorities, or whatever, will join this initial prohibition in the superego, and will shape the boy's sense of morality, of right or wrong. Hence the abandonment of incestuous desire, under the threat of castration, forms the basis of instilling and enforcing the reality principle and subduing the pleasure principle. At the instigation of the superego, inexpressible and impermissible desire and pleasures will be repressed into the unconscious, and emerge in other forms--as sublimations, neuroses, reaction formations, and in dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes. Freud thus charts the human mind as a result of the resolution of the Oedipus Complex by the castration complex: the unconscious, the superego, and the consciousness, or sense of self. After this, the path is pretty clear for the boy. He identifies with his father, and with his father's authority to prohibit incestuous desire. He understands that, if he is good, he will get a woman of his own someday, and, with his own children, wield the authority his father has. Thus all he has to do is to wait to fulfill his libidinal urges in the proper non-incestuous reproductive heterosexual way.
The Oedipal stage is more complicated for the girls who do not perceive any difference between themselves and their mothers. For Freud, girls, like boys, are active in regard to infantile sexuality, seeking pleasure especially through masturbation. The active part of sexuality in girls is the clitoris, a miniature penis. At some point, the girl notices that boys have penises and girls do not. Freud says that the girl instantly recognizes the penis as the superior counterpart to the clitoris and falls victim of penis envy. The girl decides her lack of a penis is the punishment for some wrongdoing (probably masturbation). She also feels the clitoris to be so inferior and feels a great disgust at the idea of masturbation. With puberty, girls experience a great wave of repression of clitoridal sexuality (masturbation), accompanied by feelings of disgust and shame at the idea of masturbation. This repression of what Freud calls a "masculine/active" sexuality is necessary for girls to become "feminine/passive." Thus the girl at puberty has the task of switching primary erotogenic zones, from clitoris which was the focus of her pleasure in the phallic stage to the vagina, which is to become the focus of her pleasure in adult reproductive heterosexual intercourse in order to become a normal adult.
In addition to having to shift erotogenic zones, girls also have to shift objects. Like the boy, the girl takes the mother as her first love object because her experience of the mother's body is associated with the first experiences of pleasure. On discovering that her mother does not have a penis and did not give her one, the girl takes the libidinal desire she felt for the mother and turns it into anger and hatred for not giving her a penis. This moves her toward the necessary shift to taking her father as libidinal object. The girl then decides that, if she cannot have a penis, she will have a baby instead, and takes her father as her erotic object. The girl fantasizes that she will be able to get a penis from him in order to satisfy the mother. This wish for a penis can be gratified through the father giving the girl a baby (a symbolic penis). This is Freud's controversial theory of penis envy, which might be defined as the expression of the castration complex in the girl. Yet this fantasy is shattered when she has to acknowledge that the father will not give her a penis because it is the mother who is the father's love object. To achieve the culturally accepted status of femininity she must accept that one day she will get her penis/baby from a man like her father. Unlike the boy, who identifies solely with the father, the girl must now turn from the father back to re-identify with the mother so she will succeed in becoming a feminine woman. For Freud, the girls' penis envy marks the Oedipus Complex, which Freud first called the "Electra Complex" but in later works called the feminine or negative Oedipus Complex.
If the boy's castration complex ends the Oedipus Complex, creates the unconscious and the superego, and pushes him into heterosexuality, what happens with the girl? Freud is at best fuzzy on this. In girls there is nothing to lose since they realize they are castrated (castration has already been carried out). The result is that women never really do form a strong superego. Women are not as moral or just as men; women go by their feelings and not their sense of reason and justice. (Klages 65-68)
Jacques Lacan
(Lacan rewrites Descartes's "I think therefore I am," as "I am not where I think, and I think where I am not.")
Feminists have taken issue with Freudian theory, but even more than the writings of Freud himself they have engaged with the work of Jacques Lacan who offers a revision of Freudian psychoanalysis. Lacan rereads Freud's concept of the Oedipal crisis in terms of the acquisition of language. Lacan calls the pre-Oedipal stage the Imaginary, where the child sees itself as part of the mother and sees no separation between itself and the world, where there is no difference and no language. The Oedipal crisis, when the father breaks the blissful dyadic relationship between mother and child, is for Lacan the moment of the child's entry into the post-Oedipal or the Symbolic Order, which entails the child perceiving difference of self and other, entering into the differential system of language, and taking up a subject-position there. In other words, the child learns to speak "I am, you are, they are" and to have repressed its desire for the maternal body and the unity felt in the Imaginary. This unconscious surrender is the moment of primary repression, the birth of the unconscious and the birth of a desire that can never be fulfilled, for the desire for the mother is forbidden by what Lacan calls "the Law of the Father." This is the Freudian threat of castration and is represented by the Phallus (used in a symbolic sense to stand for male privilege and authority).
Like Freud's, Lacan's infant starts out as something inseparable from its mother; there is no distinction between self and mother/other/objects. In fact, the baby, for both Freud and Lacan, is a kind of blob, with no sense of self or individual identity. Lacan calls this stage the realm of the Real. This is the state of nature that has to be broken up in order for culture to be formed. This is true in both Freud and Lacan: the infant must separate from its mother, form a separate identity, in order to enter into civilization. That separation entails some kind of loss. When the child knows the difference between itself and its mother and starts to become an individuated being, it loses that primal sense of unity it originally had.
The Real lasts from birth till somewhere between 6 and 18 months, when the baby-blob starts to be able to distinguish between its body and everything else in the world. At this point, the baby starts to become aware that it is separate from the mother, that there are times when the mother is gone; it also begins to become aware that there exist things that are not part of it. This is how the idea of "other" is created. Note, however, that the concept of self/other does not yet exist because the baby does not know what self is and thus does not have any coherent sense of self. The awareness of separation creates an anxiety, a sense of loss, and leads the baby to the demand of a reunion, a return to the original state of fullness and non-separation that it had in the Real. But once the baby knows (all this knowing happens unconsciously) that the concept of other exists, that is impossible because the lack or absence, the sense of otherness, is the condition for the baby becoming a self, a subject in language, a functioning cultural being.
This is where Lacan's mirror stage happens. At some point during this period, the child will see itself in a mirror. It will look at its reflection, then look back at a real person (its mother or some other person), then look again at the mirror image. The child begins to understand that what it sees in the mirror looks like what it sees when it looks at other real people. The verbal reinforcement "It's you!" helps the baby learn that the entity in the mirror, which the child sees as a whole, is the signified designated by the words "you" or "I"--the child begins to see that the entity in the mirror is its self. What is really happening, however, is an identification that is a misrecognition. The child sees an image in the mirror and thinks, "That's me." But it is only an image the child sees. The other person is there to reinforce the misrecognition with that shifting pronoun "you" by saying "Yes, it's you." The other person gives the linguistic name, the signifier, that will go with the image the baby sees, and guarantees the reality of the connection between the child and its image, between the signifier "I" (or "You") and the image, and between the picture of the whole body in the mirror and the child's sense of itself as a whole integrated being.
The child mistakes the mirror image as a perfect whole self who has no insufficiency. The child imagines a self that has no lack, no notion of absence or incompleteness. The fiction of the stable, whole unified self that the child sees in the mirror becomes a compensation for having lost the original oneness with its mother's body. The idea of a self is created through an imaginary identification with the image in the mirror. For Lacan, the realm of the Imaginary is where the alienated relation of self to its own image is created and maintained. In short, according to Lacan, we lose our identity with the mother's body, the state of nature, but we internalize a perfect whole self and protect ourselves from the knowledge of that loss by misperceiving ourselves as not lacking anything. However, the image in the mirror is always other than the child--something outside it. The child, for the rest of its life, will misrecognize its self as other, as the image in the mirror that provides an illusion of self and of mastery. For Lacan, the child's misrecognition is the gateway to language, to the Symbolic Order. For language, in providing the signifier "I" which solidifies the mirror image as the signified (the self), compensates for lack by creating an illusion of full presence for the speaking subject who believes language comes from his/her self.
In explaining further the child's entry into language, Lacan borrows from Freud's Oedipus theory. As in Freud's world, the most important other in a child's life is its mother, so the child wants to merge with its mother. In Lacan's terms, this is the child's demand that the self/other split be erased as in the realm of the Real where the baby makes no distinction between itself and its mother, where there is no absence, no lack, no language (and thus beyond language, unrepresentable in language). The child decides that it can merge with the mother if it becomes what the mother wants it to be--in Lacan's terms, the child tries to fulfill the mother's desire. The mother's desire, formed by her own entry into the Symbolic, because she is already a language-using adult self, is not to have lack or Lack. This fits with the Freudian version of the Oedipus Complex, where the child wants to merge with its mother by having sexual intercourse with her. For Freud, the idea of lack is represented by the lack of a penis. The boy who wants to sleep with his mother wants to complete her lack by filling her up with his penis. The father breaks up this Oedipal desire, threatening the boy with the idea of castration. The father threatens to make the boy experience lack, the absence of the penis, if he tries to use his penis to make up for his mother's lack of a penis. For Lacan, it is not the real father who threatens castration but the Name of the Father or the Law of the Father; the threat of castration is a metaphor for lack, a metaphor for Lack as a structural concept. To become a language-using subject, you have to be subjected to the laws and rules of language. Lacan designates the structure of language and its rules as specifically paternal. From this perspective, Lacan's father, rather than being a person, becomes a structuring principle of the Symbolic. Lacan thus calls the rules of language the Law of the Father. Lacan's use of Freud's Oedipus theory is simple: Lacan links the entry into the Symbolic to Freud's notion of the castration anxiety and to the creation of the superego.
The Law of the Father is another term for the center of the Symbolic, the thing that governs the whole structure and determines how all the elements in the system can move and form relationships. This center is also called the Phallus to underline even more the patriarchal nature of the Symbolic Order. The Phallus, as center, limits the play of elements and gives stability to the whole structure. The Phallus anchors the chain of signifiers which, in the unconscious, are just floating and sliding and shifting. The Phallus stops play, so that signifiers can be connected firmly to signifieds. It is because the Phallus is the center of the Symbolic Order, the center of language, that the term "I" designates the idea of the self, and why any word has relatively stable meaning.
Lacan says that boys mistakenly think they have a chance to be the Phallus and occupy the position of center because they have penises. Girls have a harder time misperceiving themselves as eligible to be the Phallus because they are, as Freud says, constituted by and as lack. The binary oppositions that structure Western thought associate boys with penis, presence, and order, while girls are associated with lack of penis, absence, and disorder. The Phallus is the place where there is no lack. Lacan insists, however, that no one can be the Phallus; every subject in language, every person who enters the Symbolic order and becomes a speaking subject, is in fact constituted by and as lack. The only reason we have language at all is because of the loss, lack, or absence, of the union with the maternal body. The subject position in language creates and sustains a never-ending lack, which Lacan calls desire. But Western philosophy values presence so thoroughly that we go to almost any length to mask the awareness that our civilization itself depends upon lack.
In taking up a position in the Symbolic, you enter through a gender-marked doorway; the position girls occupy in the structure of language, in relation to the Phallus, is different than the position for boys. Boys are closer to the Phallus than girls, but no one is or has the Phallus, since it is the center. Your position in the Symbolic, like the position of all other signifying elements, is fixed by the Phallus, held in place by the center. Unlike in the unconscious, the chains of signifiers in the Symbolic do not circulate and slide endlessly because the Phallus limits play.
Paradoxically, the Phallus and the Real are pretty similar. Both are places where things are whole, complete, full, unified, where there is no lack and no Lack. Both are places that are inaccessible to the human subject-in-language. But they are also opposite: the Real is the maternal, the ground from which we spring, the nature we have to separate from in order to have culture; the Phallus is the idea of the Father, the patriarchal order of culture, the position which rules everything in the world. (Klages 83-86)
French Feminists (Ecriture Feminine School)
(Cixous argues that woman recover "her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal.")
Given the significance accorded language within Lacan's work, it is not surprising that one of the two subgroups of feminist writers influenced by that work are sometimes depicted in terms of their concern with language. A particular strand of French Lacanian feminists (including writers like Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva) are described as engaged in the project of ecriture feminine, as attempting embodied feminine writing, or writing from the position of woman (from the position of the female body) in a manner that challenges the way in which woman is construed in language/culture. While this subgrouping of Lacanian feminist are most commonly labeled simply French feminists in the English speaking world or broadly called poststructuralist feminists, ecriture feminine is a better indicator.
Whereas Lacan, in common with Freud, depicts femininity as a castrated state--as lacking or deficient by comparison with the masculine--these French feminists start from but provide a critique of this negative assessment. Their more critical engagement with Lacan marks their position as rather more post-Lacanian than the work of writers such as Juliet Mitchell. While they accept Lacan's account of language/culture as a masculine order, they, unlike Mitchell, do not accept his positive affirmation of that masculine order as equivalent to civilisation or sociality in releasing the child from the stagnant primitivism of its prior symbiotic link with the feminine (Mother). These post-Lacanians--in common with the approach of Freudian feminists who stress the prior (pre-Oedipal) importance of the Mother and view women as positively contributing positively contributing an alternative psychological order--rejects any endorsement of masculine dominance and are skeptical regarding Lacan's view that the basis of a viable self and of culture lies in refusing attachment, in disconnection from others, and in the rejection of the Mother (women). Relatedly, the school of ecriture feminine questions the assumption that femininity can only be seen from the point of view of phallic culture (culture as masculine dominance) and argues for other possibilities.
In order to understand this approach some further comments on the work of Lacan may be helpful. For Lacan each person becomes a person, enters human culture, by internalising society's communicative rules or Symbolic Order. This occurs through the formation of a separate and sexually specific (unconscious) self in the process of learning language. Individuals can only speak in the tongue of the Symbolic Order but that order is viewed in psychoanalytic terms as the Law of the Father. In Lacanian thought, following Freud, culture is masculine, not just presently male dominated. Femininity is no more than the negative pole in relation to the symbolic rules which regulate individuals and hence society. Femininity is unspeakable except in the terms of masculinity: there is no feminine outside the phallic order of language. The project of ecriture feminine accepts the Lacanian account of femininity's outsider status but proposed developing an alternative language, a way of thinking, which might make use of that status. The feminine is therefore not merely construed as lack, from which nothing can be generated, but as offering a rebellious cultural creativity.
In this context French feminists perceive the invisibility/marginality associated with the feminine as representing an opportune positioning for critical assessment of what is valued and legitimated in the Symbolic Order. Hence they are distinguished by rejecting the cultural assumption that women can only be seen in the terms of men and by a form of writing which claims the possibilities of femininity. Though radical feminism may be seen as initiating this manoeuvre, unlike most radical feminist work French feminist approaches refuse to specify the content of femininity, viewing such specification as a repetition of patriarchal imperatives which continually tell us what women are and must be.
For ecriture feminine writers, the notion of Women exemplifies the cultural and linguistic principle of rendering inferior that which does not fit the (masculine) norm and refusing to acknowledge or value difference of any kind, not just sexual difference. Woman demonstrates the operation of hierarchical differentiation within phallic culture rather than bearing a set content. Thus femininity is celebrated as offering the potential for interrogation of the singular yardstick of the Symbolic Order (the Rule of the Father): in other words, femininity offers a possible procedure for subverting the marginalising mechanisms of power, thereby breaking it up. As far as this method is concerned, woman, as the exemplary embodiment of the repressed other, is not a fixed essence so much as a device to invert and hence destabilise the existing conceptual order (the Symbolic Order which is patriarchal). (Beasley 71-74)
Helene Cixous identifies ecriture feminine or feminine writing as a style of writing that seeks to recapture the pleasures of the Imaginary, which undermines the rationality of the Symbolic, fractures the closed state of binary oppositions, and seeks to construct an open-ended textuality. Ecriture feminine rejects masculine reason and the logical use of language in favour of the fantastic, the grotesque, the insane use of language. Cixous makes an emphatic distinction between the sex of the writing and the biological sex of the author--men can write ecriture feminine just as women can (James Joyce and Jean Genet are among examples she gives). Ecriture feminine then embraces the "feminine" side of the binary division and seeks to unsettle the entire binary system by upsetting the established hierarchy it expresses. It then opens the possibility of a new type of sexuality. For this, Cixous opposes Freud's old idea of bisexuality and advocates instead what she calls "the other bisexuality" which is the nonexclusion either of the difference of one sex--a refusal of self/other as a structuring dichotomy. In essence, rather than taping masculine and feminine together, Cixous' bisexuality would dissolve the distinctions, so that sexuality would be from any body, any body part, at any time; it would be more like the polymorphous perversity that Freud say all infants have, but which has to be organized and disciplined in order for (phallogocentric) civilization to happen. Through the ambiguities of the text that makes the meanings of words undecidable, ecriture feminine negates any specific meaning and invites the reader feel the bi-sexual, erotic drives of the feminine body and the relation to the repressed mother. This is of course "jouissance," the pleasure of the text, abolishing all repressions, reaches an intense crisis (the death of meaning). (Madsen)