7. “I am thus my body, at least inasmuch as I have experience, and reciprocally, my body is like a natural subject, like a tentative draft of my total being” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception).
8. I am taking here an exclusively physiological point of view. It is evident that maternity can be very advantageous psychologically for a woman, just as it can also be a disaster.
9. Cf. H. Vignes in Traité de physiologie normale et pathologique (Treatise on Normal and Pathological Physiology), Volume 11, edited by Roger and Binet.
| CHAPTER 2 |
The Psychoanalytical Point of View
The enormous advance psychoanalysis made over psychophysiology is in its consideration that no factor intervenes in psychic life without having taken on human meaning; it is not the body-object described by scientists that exists concretely but the body lived by the subject. The female is a woman, insofar as she feels herself as such. Some essential biological givens are not part of her lived situation: for example, the structure of the ovum is not reflected in it; by contrast, an organ of slight biological importance like the clitoris plays a primary role in it. Nature does not define woman: it is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.
An entire system has been erected based on this outlook: we do not intend here to criticize it as a whole, but only to examine its contribution to the study of woman. Discussing psychoanalysis as such is not an easy undertaking. Like all religions—Christianity or Marxism—it displays an unsettling flexibility against a background of rigid concepts. Sometimes words are taken in their narrowest meanings, the term “phallus,” for example, designating very precisely the fleshy growth that is the male sex organ; at other times, infinitely broadened, they take on a symbolic value: the phallus would express all of the virile character and situation as a whole. If one criticizes the doctrine to the letter, the psychoanalyst maintains that its spirit has been misunderstood; if one approves of the spirit, he immediately wants to limit you to the letter. The doctrine is unimportant, he says: psychoanalysis is a method; but the success of the method strengthens the doctrinaire in his faith. After all, where would the true features of psychoanalysis be found if not with psychoanalysts themselves? But among them, as among Christians and Marxists, there are heretics: more than one psychoanalyst has declared that “the worst enemies of psychoanalysis are psychoanalysts themselves.” Many ambiguities remain to be dissolved, in spite of an often-pedantic scholastic precision. As Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have observed, the proposition “sexuality is coextensive with existence” can be understood in two very different ways; it could mean that every avatar of the existent has a sexual signification, or that every sexual phenomenon has an existential meaning: these two affirmations can be reconciled; but often one tends to slip from one to the other. Besides, as soon as “sexual” and “genital” are distinguished, the notion of sexuality becomes blurred. “The sexual for Freud is the intrinsic aptitude to trigger the genital,” says Dalbiez.* But nothing is murkier than the notion of “aptitude,” or of possibility: only reality can indubitably prove possibility. Not being a philosopher, Freud refused to justify his system philosophically; his disciples maintain that he thus eludes any attacks of a metaphysical sort. There are, however, metaphysical postulates behind all of his affirmations: to use his language is to adopt a philosophy. It is this very confusion that, while making criticism awkward, demands it.
Freud was not very concerned with woman’s destiny; it is clear that he modeled his description of it on that of masculine destiny, merely modifying some of the traits. Before him, the sexologist Marañón had declared: “As differentiated energy, the libido is, one might say, a force of virile significance. We can say as much for the orgasm.” According to him, women who attain orgasm are “viriloid” women; sexual fulfillment is a “one-way street” and woman is only at the halfway point.1 Freud does not go that far; he accepts that woman’s sexuality is as developed as man’s; but he barely studies it in itself. He writes: “The libido is constantly and regularly male in essence, whether in man or in woman.” He refuses to posit the feminine libido in its originality: he will thus necessarily see it as a complex deviation from the human libido in general. And this, he thinks, develops first identically in both sexes: all children go through an oral phase that fixes them upon their mother’s breast, then an anal phase, and finally the genital phase; it is then that they become differentiated. Freud brought out a fact whose importance had not previously been recognized: male eroticism is definitively centered on the penis, while the woman has two distinct erotic systems, one that is clitoral and develops in infancy and another that is vaginal and develops only after puberty; when the boy gets to the genital phase, he completes his development; he has to move from the autoerotic attitude, where subjective pleasure is sought, to a hetero-erotic attitude that will link pleasure to an object, usually a woman; this passage will occur at puberty through a narcissistic phase: but the penis will remain, as in infancy, the favored erotic organ. Woman, also passing through a narcissistic phase, must make man the object of her libido; but the process will be far more complex as she must pass from clitoral to vaginal pleasure. There is but one genital step for man, while there are two for woman; she runs a greater risk of not completing her sexual development, and of remaining at the infantile stage, and consequently of developing neuroses.
At the autoerotic stage, the child is already more or less strongly attached to an object: a boy is fixated on his mother and wants to identify with his father; he is afraid of this ambition and fears that his father will punish him for it by mutilating him; the castration complex emanates from the Oedipus complex; so he develops aggressive feelings toward his father, while at the same time interiorizing his father’s authority: thus develops the superego that censures incestuous tendencies; these tendencies are repressed, the complex is liquidated, and the son is freed from the father, whom he in fact has installed in himself in the form of moral precepts. The more defined and strongly fought the Oedipus complex is, the stronger the superego. Freud first described the history of the girl in a completely symmetrical way; later he named the feminine form of the infant complex the Electra complex; but clearly he defined it less in itself than based on a masculine model; yet he accepts a very important difference between the two: the little girl first has a maternal fixation, while the boy is at no time sexually attracted by the father; this fixation is a carryover from the oral phase; the infant then identifies with the father; but around the age of five, she discovers the anatomical difference between the sexes, and she reacts to the absence of a penis by a castration complex: she imagines having been mutilated, and suffers from it; she must therefore renounce her virile pretensions; she identifies with her mother and tries to seduce her father. The castration complex and the Electra complex reinforce each other; the feeling of frustration for girls is all the more painful as, loving her father, the girl would like to resemble him; and inversely regret strengthens her love: through the tenderness she inspires in her father, she can compensate for her inferiority. The girl experiences feelings of rivalry and hostility toward her mother. Then her superego is constituted as well, repressing her incestuous tendencies; but her superego is more fragile: the Electra complex is less clear than the Oedipus complex, because her first fixation was maternal; and since the father was himself the object of this love that he condemned, his prohibitions had less force than in the case of the rival son. It can be seen that, as with her genital development, the little girl’s overall sexual drama is more complex than her brother’s: she might be tempted to react to the castration complex by rejecting her femininity, obstinately coveting a penis, and identifying with her father; this attitude will lead her to remain at the clitoral stage, to become frigid, or to turn to homosexuality.
The two essential objections to this description stem from the fact that Freud copied it from a masculine model. He assumes that a woman feels like a mutilated man; but the notion of
mutilation implies comparison and valorization; many psychoanalysts accept today that girls miss having a penis without assuming they were ever stripped of one; this regret is not even generalized among all girls; and it could not arise from a simple anatomical encounter; many little girls discover the masculine constitution very late; and if they do discover it, it is only by seeing it; the boy has a living experience from his penis that allows him to take pride in it, but this pride has no immediate correlation with the humiliation of his sisters since they only know the masculine organ in its exteriority; this growth, this delicate stalk of skin, can only inspire their indifference and even disgust; the girl’s envy, when it appears, is the result of a prior valorization of virility: Freud takes this for granted when instead he should account for it.2 Besides, because there is no original description of the feminine libido, the notion of the Electra complex is very vague. Even the presence of a specifically genital Oedipus complex in boys is by no means general; but, apart from very rare exceptions, it cannot be stated that the father is a source of genital excitation for his daughter; one of the great problems of female eroticism is that clitoral pleasure is localized: it is only in puberty, in connection with vaginal eroticism, that many erogenous zones develop in the woman’s body; to say that in a child of ten a father’s kisses and caresses have an “intrinsic aptitude” to arouse clitoral pleasure is an assertion that in most cases makes no sense. If it is accepted that the “Electra complex” has only a very diffuse and affective nature, then the whole question of affectivity is raised, a question that Freudianism does not provide the means to define, once it is distinguished from sexuality. In any case, it is not the feminine libido that deifies the father: the mother is not deified by the desire she arouses in her son; the fact that feminine desire is focused on a sovereign being gives it a unique character; but the girl is not constitutive of her object, she submits to it. The father’s sovereignty is a fact of social order: Freud fails to account for this; he himself admits that it is impossible to know what authority decided at what moment in history that the father would prevail over the mother: according to him, this decision represents progress, but its causes are unknown. “[In this case] it cannot be the father himself, since it is only this progress that raises him to the rank of an authority,” he writes in his last work.3
Adler departed from Freud because he understood the inadequacies of a system that bases the development of human life on sexuality alone: he means to reintegrate sexuality into the total personality; while for Freud all behavior is driven by desire, that is, by seeking pleasure, Adler sees man as aiming at certain goals; he replaces drives with motives, finality, and plans; he raises intelligence to such heights that for him sexuality often has only symbolic value. According to his theories, the human drama is divided into three steps: each individual has a will to power but along with it an inferiority complex; this conflict leads him to use countless ruses rather than confront real-life obstacles that he fears may be insurmountable; the subject establishes a distance between himself and the society he fears: thus develop neuroses that are disturbances of the social sense. As for woman, her inferiority complex manifests itself in a rejection out of shame of her femininity: it is not the absence of a penis that unleashes this complex but the total situation; the girl envies the phallus only as a symbol of the privileges granted to boys; the father’s place in the family, the universal predominance of males, and upbringing all confirm her idea of masculine superiority. Later, in the course of sexual relations, even the coital posture that places the woman underneath the man is an added humiliation. She reacts by a “masculine protest”; she either tries to masculinize herself or uses her feminine wiles to go into battle against man. Through motherhood she can find in her child the equivalent of the penis. But this supposes that she must first accept herself completely as woman, and thus accept her inferiority. She is far more deeply divided against herself than is man.
It is unnecessary to underline here the theoretical differences between Adler and Freud or the possibilities of reconciliation: neither the explanation based on drive nor the one based on motive is ever sufficient: all drives posit a motive, but motive is never grasped except through drives; a synthesis of Adlerism and Freudianism thus seems possible. In fact, while bringing in notions of aim and finality, Adler retains in full the idea of psychic causality; his relation to Freud resembles somewhat the relation of energeticism to mechanism: whether it is a question of impact or force of attraction, the physicist always recognizes determinism. This is the postulate common to all psychoanalysts: for them, human history is explained by an interplay of determined elements. They all allot the same destiny to woman. Her drama is summed up in a conflict between her “viriloid” and her “feminine” tendencies; the former are expressed in the clitoral system, the latter in vaginal eroticism; as a very young girl, she identifies with her father; she then experiences feelings of inferiority relative to man and is faced with the alternative of either maintaining her autonomy, becoming virilized—which, with an underlying inferiority complex, provokes a tension that risks bringing on neuroses—or else finding happy self-fulfillment in amorous submission, a solution facilitated by the love she felt for her sovereign father; it is he whom she is looking for in her lover or husband, and her sexual love is mingled with her desire to be dominated. Maternity will be her reward, restoring to her a new kind of autonomy. This drama seems to be endowed with its own dynamism; it continues to work itself out through all the mishaps that distort it, and every woman passively endures it.
Psychoanalysts have no trouble finding empirical confirmations of their theories: it is known that if Ptolemy’s system is subtly complicated, his version of the position of the planets could be upheld for a long time; if an inverse Oedipus complex is superimposed onto the Oedipus complex and by showing a desire in every anxiety, the very facts that contradicted Freudianism will be successfully integrated into it. For a figure to be perceived, it must stand out from its background, and how the figure is perceived brings out the ground behind it in positive delineation; thus if one is determined to describe a particular case from a Freudian perspective, one will find the Freudian schema as the background behind it; but when a doctrine demands the multiplication of secondary explanations in an indefinite and arbitrary way, when observation uncovers as many anomalies as normal cases, it is better to give up the old frameworks. Today as well, every psychoanalyst works at adapting Freudian concepts to suit himself; he attempts compromises; for example, a contemporary psychoanalyst writes: “Whenever there is a complex, there are by definition several components … The complex consists in grouping these disparate elements and not in representing one of them by the others.”4 But the idea of a simple grouping of elements is unacceptable: psychic life is not a mosaic; it is altogether complete in every one of its moments, and this unity must be respected. This is possible only by recovering the original intentionality of existence through the disparate facts. Without going back to this source, man appears a battlefield of drives and prohibitions equally devoid of meaning and contingent. All psychoanalysts systematically refuse the idea of choice and its corollary, the notion of value; and herein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system. Cutting out drives and prohibitions from existential choice, Freud fails to explain their origin: he takes them as givens. He tried to replace the notion of value with that of authority; but he admits in Moses and Monotheism that he has no way to account for this authority. Incest, for example, is forbidden because the father forbade it: But why did he forbid it? It is a mystery. The superego interiorizes orders and prohibitions emanating from an arbitrary tyranny; instinctive tendencies exist, but we do not know why; these two realities are heterogeneous because morality is posited as foreign to sexuality; human unity appears as shattered, there is no passage from the individual to the society: Freud is forced to invent strange fictions to reunite them.5 Adler saw clearly that the castration complex could be explained only in a social context; he approached the
problem of valorization, but he did not go back to the ontological source of values recognized by society, and he did not understand that values were involved in sexuality itself, which led him to misunderstand their importance.
Sexuality certainly plays a considerable role in human life: it could be said to penetrate it completely; physiology has already demonstrated how the activity of testes and ovaries is intermixed with that of the soma. The existent is a sexed body; in its relations with other existents that are also sexed bodies, sexuality is thus always involved; but as the body and sexuality are concrete expressions of existence, it is also from here that their significance can be ascertained: without this perspective, psychoanalysis takes unexplained facts for granted. For example, a young girl is said to be “ashamed” of urinating in a squatting position, with her bottom exposed; but what is shame? Likewise, before asking if the male is proud because he has a penis or if his penis is the expression of his pride, we need to know what pride is and how the subject’s aspirations can be embodied in an object. Sexuality must not be taken as an irreducible given; the existent possesses a more primary “quest for being”; sexuality is only one of these aspects. Sartre demonstrates this in Being and Nothingness; Bachelard also says it in his works on Earth, Air, and Water: psychoanalysts believe that man’s quintessential truth lies in his relation to his own body and that of others like him within society; but man has a primordial interest in the substance of the natural world surrounding him that he attempts to discover in work, play, and all experiences of the “dynamic imagination”; man seeks to connect concretely with existence through the whole world, grasped in all possible ways. Working the soil and digging a hole are activities as primal as an embrace or coitus: it is an error to see them only as sexual symbols; a hole, slime, a gash, hardness, and wholeness are primary realities; man’s interest in them is not dictated by libido; instead, the libido will be influenced by the way these realities were revealed to him. Man is not fascinated by wholeness because it symbolizes feminine virginity: rather, his love for wholeness makes virginity precious. Work, war, play, and art define ways of being in the world that cannot be reduced to any others; they bring to light features that impinge on those that sexuality reveals; it is both through them and through these erotic experiences that the individual chooses himself. But only an ontological point of view can restore the unity of this choice.
The Second Sex Page 9