by Mario Mieli
The mother, for her part, ‘regards [the child] with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object’.32 And yet the mother is forbidden any overtly sexual love for her child, so that her erotic relationship with her son is expressed in an indirect and alienated form, and the boy really does serve her as a mere substitute. This first suppressed sexual relationship leaves a harmful trace in the erotic life of us all. To quote Myriam Cristallo:
The mother-child relationship in bourgeois society thus exhibits a double set of contradictions. The first is that education in sexual love is given by the mother, in the privacy of the family milieu . . . thus excluding a wider dialectical relationship with other people. The second, which is closely interwoven with the first, is that this education is vitiated as soon as it is transmitted, since it derives from the concrete experiences of the parents, formed on the alienated terrain of the love market.33
In general, it is through his relationship with his mother that the boy forms his first idea of woman. The formation of this idea involves, besides direct contact with the mother, the gradual projection onto her and other women of the boy’s own ‘feminine’ mental component, and the inherited collective image of woman that every man carries within him, the real repository of all the experiences that previous humanity has undergone in regard to woman and in particular to her oppression.
Jung gave the name of ‘anima’ to the image of woman formed in the accumulated male unconscious from the repressed ‘feminine’ traits and tendencies, and from the presence in the unconscious of an inherited collective image of woman. The anima, then, comes to define the ‘feminine’ element present in the man, while the ‘animus’ is the corresponding ‘masculine’ element in the woman. Though as Jung himself admits: ‘If it was no easy task to describe what is meant by the anima, the difficulties become almost insuperable when we set out to describe the psychology of the animus.’34
In any event, according to Jung, it is precisely the projection of the anima or animus that respectively orients the boy’s sexuality towards the mother, and the girl’s towards the father, stimulating the man, in adult life, to seek the woman emotionally and sexually, and vice versa. Heterosexuality dissolves into an interchange of projections: ‘A man, in his love-choice, is strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his own unconscious femininity – a woman, in short, who can unhesitatingly receive the projection of his soul.’35
Heterosexuality involves the projection of the other sex that is latent within us onto persons of the ‘opposite’ sex. It is determined by the repression of both transsexuality, or the original mental hermaphrodism, and of the so-called ‘perverse’ tendencies, in particular homosexuality.
The young boy desires without differentiation, but he is forced to identify with the father, repressing – as we have already seen – his homoerotic impulses and adapting himself to a heterosexual model. Male heterosexuality, therefore, as it presents itself today, is based on the repression by the man of his ‘femininity’ and the renunciation of the gay desire, and as such it represents a form of alienated sensuality, founded on the estrangement of the human being from himself. Male heterosexuality involves a misconception of self, and hence also a misconception of the other. By projecting his ‘femininity’ onto the woman, the man ‘no longer recognises’ either the woman or his own ‘femininity’. His exclusive heterosexual desire is an aspiration to totality through the misconception both of the woman within himself and of woman as she really is.
The liberation of Eros and the achievement of communism pass necessarily via the (re)conquest of transsexuality and the overcoming of heterosexuality as it presents itself today. The struggle to (re)conquer life is equally, and above all, a struggle for the liberation of the homoerotic desire. The gay movement is fighting to negate the negation of homosexuality, because the diffusion of homoeroticism will qualitatively change our existence and transform mere survival into life. With reference to the concluding essay in the Grande Encyclopedie des Homosexualites,36 Luciano Parinetto maintains:
If we accept the fundamental male-female bipolarity in human sex, and if at the same time we recognise the capitalist and Oedipal repression of the feminine in the male, then, because something is only repressed if it proves too attractive, we must say to ‘normal’ people: ‘You are the homosexuals’ […] The homosexual and feminist challenge, like the atheist challenge to God, does not just seek to put a positive valuation on something that has emerged under capitalism in a marginalised form. If it does not want to confirm sexual roles in the very act of negating those on which it is itself based, it must present itself as a step towards transsexuality, i.e. something totally different, both from so-called ‘normality’ and from the dialectical opposite of this.37
Parinetto is undoubtedly right. But I must add that the achievement of transsexuality can only follow from the work of the women’s movement and the complete liberation of homoeroticism, as well as the other components of human erotic polymorphism; nor must the utopian ideal of transsexuality, if it is to serve as a ‘concrete utopia’, be divorced from the concrete dialectic presently under way between the sexes and between different sexual tendencies (in particular heterosexuality and homosexuality). Only the struggle of those who are the historical subjects of the basic antithesis to the male heterosexual Norm can lead to overcoming the present opposition between the two sexes, and that between genital heterosexuality and homosexuality or other so-called ‘perversions’. If transsexuality is the real telos, it can only be achieved when women have defeated the male ‘power’ grounded in sexual polarity and homosexuals have abolished the Norm that universally prohibits homosexuality. Besides, given the very important functional role for the perpetuation of capitalism of the subordination of women and the sublimation of certain ‘perverse’ erotic tendencies in labour, the (re)conquest of transsexuality will coincide with the fall of capitalism and the rejection of alienated and alienating labour: the struggle of homosexuals and women is essential to the communist revolution.38
And if transsexuality is the telos of the struggle for the liberation of Eros, it is properly a telos in the sense that it is an internal goal, at once future, past, and present in the unconscious, a repressed potential that is today beginning to reassert itself against capital and its Norm. You can use your own anima (or animus) to understand this.
Critique of the Concept of Bisexuality. ‘Neurosis as the Negative of Perversion’
The original and far-reaching theory of bisexuality or ‘ambisexuality’ (Ferenczi) does not clarify the causes of so-called ‘sexual inversion’, but it does justify it. According to Otto Weininger, author of Sex and Character (1903) and a keen upholder of the theory of bisexuality, homosexuality is neither a vice nor unnatural, given that any man, being also female, can equally well desire another man (who is himself also a woman), just as any woman, being at the same time male, can equally well desire another woman (who is also a man).
But this justification of homosexuality is not good enough (and in fact falls fully within the essentially reactionary perspective of tolerance). Weininger simply tried to fit homoeroticism into the bipolar pattern of heterosexuality. Homosexuality is explained in terms of heterosexual categories. I believe, rather, that homosexuality contains, among its secrets, the possibility of understanding psycho-biological hermaphrodism not as something bi-sexual, but rather as erotic in a new (and also very old) sense, as polysexual, transsexual. The heterosexual categories are based on a rejection of the underlying hermaphrodism, on the submission of the body to the neurotic directives of the censored mind, on an ego-istic vision of the world-of-life as determined by the repression of woman and Eros, by compulsory sexual morality, by the negation of human community and by individualistic atomisation. It is no good trying to use the bisexual and therefore heterosexual categories of our alienated reason, superimposed on the latent and the r
epressed, to plumb the depths, for we shall only fail to appreciate the full scope of the repression that chains us to the status quo. We revolutionary gays want rather to raise ourselves to transsexuality, as a concrete process of liberation.
For the time being, I simply want to emphasise once again how even the heterosexual psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories of bisexuality reveal the historical contingency of the concept of erotic ‘normality’. But this notwithstanding, psychoanalysis has still studied homosexuality only as a form of ‘deviance’, and has never questioned those erotic manifestations that are considered ‘normal’ and their ideological absolutisation. Psychoanalysis, in other words, has not deeply investigated the causes of heterosexual inversion, since it is too attached to heterosexual primacy. In this case as in so many others, psychoanalysis proves only too loyal to capitalist ideology and doesn’t dare to push its own insights or draw ‘extreme’ theoretical conclusions (and when these inevitably surface from time to time, it avoids concentrating any real critical attention on them).
Given the reduction of original ‘bisexuality’ to heterosexual monosexuality, Freud was evidently disinclined to classify heterosexuality as an ‘aberration’: this would have meant, in fact, eliminating the concept of ‘aberration’ altogether. On the contrary, he took homosexuality as the very prototype of a ‘perversion’, thereby prejudging his analysis from the very start. As I see it, however, the concept of ‘aberration’ should be replaced by that of mutilation, for all the presently existing forms of sexuality, each separate from one another, represent mutilations with respect to the potential polymorphous unfolding of Eros.
If it is true that Freud describes homosexuality as the prototype of perversion, he also holds that only genital heterosexuality is not ‘deviant’. Even oral sex between man and woman is classed as a ‘deviation in respect of the sexual aim’, i.e. a ‘perversion’; and this despite his assertion in the same essay that ‘no healthy person . . . can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim’.39
Sexual activity, in fact, is considered ‘normal’ or ‘perverse’ simply as a function of standards that are relative and specific to the historical epoch. As we shall see, at the root of the repression of Eros and the classification of sexual acts and tendencies as ‘aberrations’ there is also an economic cause. Marx endures Niebuhr’s hypothesis, according to whom all ancient law-givers ‘and Moses above all, founded their success in commanding virtue, integrity and proper custom on landed property, or at least on secured, hereditary possession of land, for the greatest possible number of citizens.’40
As Freud himself maintained in a more general reflection:
We must learn to speak without indignation of what we call the sexual perversions – instances in which the sexual function has extended its limits in respect either to the part of the body concerned or to the sexual object chosen. The uncertainty in regard to the boundaries of what is to be called normal sexual life, when we take different races and different epochs into account, should in itself be enough to cool the zealot’s ardour. We surely ought not to forget that the perversion which is the most repellent to us, the sensual love of a man for a man, was not only tolerated by a people so far our superiors in cultivation as were the Greeks, but was actually entrusted by them with important social functions.41
But despite this and other similar statements, Freud never asked what were the specific reasons that led Western civilisation over the centuries to transform so radically its attitude towards homosexuality. It was sufficient that, ‘the sensual love of a man for a man’ was deemed an abomination by his contemporaries for Freud to class it among the ‘perversions’.
And yet Freud still did not consider homosexuality as ‘pathological’ in and of itself. On the contrary, in his view:
It is by no means only at the cost of the so-called normal sexual instinct that [psychoneurotic] symptoms originate – at any rate such is not exclusively or mainly the case; they also give expression (by conversion) to instincts which would be described as perverse in the widest sense of the word if they could be expressed directly in phantasy and action without being diverted from consciousness. Thus symptoms are formed in part at the cost of abnormal sexuality; neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions.42
Freud refused, then, to view either manifest homosexuality or the other ‘perversions’ as necessarily pathological. On the contrary, psychoneurosis derives in part precisely from the conversion of so-called ‘abnormal’ sexuality into pathological symptoms. And the neurosis that afflicts present human society as a whole is caused above all by the repression of Eros, the mutilation of an Eros reduced to monosexuality (almost always heterosexual).
The neurosis of us gay men and women (and there is no reason not to speak of a specific neurosis of homosexuals, given that we are all, gay or straight, more or less neurotic under present conditions), is not a function of our homosexuality, but is rather due to the translation into pathological terms of the heterosexual component and the so-called ‘perverse’ tendencies – which, as against homosexuality, we have in general repressed or at least ‘quasi-repressed’, to a greater or lesser extent.
It is readily apparent, too, that the neurosis from which we homosexuals suffer depends also, and above all, on the social persecution inflicted upon us simply because we are gay. In other words, it is the psychoneurosis of ‘normal’ people (based largely on the pathological conversion of homosexuality and other repressed ‘perversions’) that condemns the manifest expressions of homoeroticism, this being the main factor involved in the neurosis of homosexuals. The psychoneurosis based on the oppression and repression of homosexual desire is the chief cause of the psychoneurosis of us manifest homosexuals. What is pathological and pathogenic is not homoeroticism, but rather its persecution.
The Psychonazis
Freud’s view, according to which homosexuality, while a ‘perversion’, was precisely not a pathological syndrome, is far from shared by all psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. This is shown by the comprehensive denial of the more threatening aspects of Freudian thought by the psychoanalytic schools – a denial taken up even by Wilhelm Reich, particularly on the question of homosexuality.
Sandor Ferenczi, for instance, took an explicitly contrary view to Freud as far as homoeroticism was concerned. In 1909, he defined homosexuality as a psychoneurosis, also maintaining that he did not believe in any universal and congenital homosexuality.43 In October 1911, at the third congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association held in Weimar, Ferenczi proposed a distinction between subject- and object-homoeroticism:
A man who in intercourse with men feels himself to be a woman is inverted in respect to his own ego (homoeroticism through subjectinversion, or, more shortly, ‘subject homoeroticism’); he feels himself to be a woman, and this not only in genital intercourse, but in all relations of life.44
This latter type of homosexuality, according to Ferenczi, forms ‘a true “sexual intermediate stage” (in the sense of Magnus Hirschfeld and his followers), thus a pure developmental anomaly’. (Note the facile simplicity of his definition.)
To the figure of the passive homosexual ‘suffering’ from this ‘subjecthomoeroticism’, Ferenczi counterposed the ‘true active homosexual’:
The true ‘active homosexual’ . . . feels himself a man in every respect, is as a rule very energetic, and there is nothing effeminate to be discovered in his bodily or mental organisation. The object of his inclination alone is exchanged, so that one might call him a homoerotic through exchange of the love-object, or, more shortly, an object-homoerotic.
It is this ‘object homoeroticism’, according to Ferenczi, that constitutes a neurosis – an obsessional neurosis, to be more precise. Describing ‘object-homoeroticism’ as a pathological syndrome, Ferenczi admitted that he found himself ‘in opposition with Freud, who in his “Sexualtheorie” describes homosexuality as a perversion’.45 It is clear that, while the label of
‘perversion’ that Freud applied to homosexuality shows up the reactionary basis of his position towards gay people (even if it is ‘inappropriate . . . to use the word perversion as a term of reproach’), other psychoanalysts, including many who were personally close to Freud, such as Ferenczi, could be more overtly reactionary in defining homosexuality as pathological in itself.
On the other hand, however, Ferenczi’s line of argument is full of contradictions. In some of his writings, where he deals with the question of homosexuality less directly, he cannot avoid tacitly accepting the existence of a congenital homosexuality, i.e. the universal presence of the gay desire. But if (as these texts suggest) any human being can be viewed as also homosexual, are we then all affected by obsessional neurosis or a ‘pure developmental anomaly’?
No: this could not be the case, because, we’ve noted, Doctor Ferenczi still distinguishes between ‘neurotic’ and ‘healthy’ people. Clearly, from his point of view, homosexuality shows itself to be a psychoneurosis or anomaly only when it is manifest, i.e. when it defeats the resistances and escapes repression.
I believe I speak for many homosexuals if I say that, on the contrary (and here we find ourselves closer to Freud’s own line of thought), the general neurosis that affects everyone in our society is largely a function of the social suppression of gay desire, its forced repression and its conversion into pathological symptoms.
Ferenczi, it would seem, was unwilling to draw this conclusion. His privileged condition as a heterosexual male, conforming to the Norm, prevented him from discovering the major role played by the repression of homosexuality in the aetiology of the neurosis that torments our society and Kultur.46 To discover this, he would have had first of all to recognise his own ‘obsessional neurosis’ and the anomalous character of his own development as opposed to a free pansexual ‘evolution’. He would then have had to consider how it is possible to be truly well and ‘healthy’ except by liberating one’s own desire for people of the same sex. Manifest homosexuality does not in itself guarantee happiness, but there is no genuine liberation without the liberation of gay desire. In order to heal, you need to gather les fleurs de mal.