Sexuality in the Field of Vision - Jacqueline Rose

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image of the patriarch whose insidious effects at the level of our psychic life they each attempted — with more or less success — to undo or defy.

      The question which this introduction will attempt to address, therefore, is what could be the purchase of psychoanalysis outside its own specific domain. More specifically, the argument is for psychoanalysis in relation to feminism, and the importance of these together for the larger terms of contemporary political debate. We are in fact witnessing a moment when psychoanalysis is being assimilated into literary method—as it has been before — at the same time as the critique of psychoanalysis outside the academy by feminists and others is being renewed or increased. Feminism inherits and inflects a set of political challenges to psychoanalysis with a long and complex history which this introduction will also attempt to trace. The point being not to serve the essays themselves, but rather to situate them within an ongoing history and set of problems which I see them as part of today.

      Two letters written by women at the time of Lacan’s dissolution of his school in 1980 confront each other on one page of the French radical newspaper Libération. Together they can give some sense of the struggles over institutions and power in which Lacanian psychoanalysis has been played out in France, and the place of the woman within it. The first, from Michèle Montrelay, states a refusal: to accept the dissolution of the école freudienne declared unilaterally by Lacan, to reaffiliate to his person. This refusal is a matter of love (‘what love is being demanded here?’) and its fantasies (‘in what Christlike position does Lacan thereby find himself placed?’), of the body and its powers (‘that massive body which becomes corpus and dogma, blindly putting itself at the service of a power which many would prefer to ignore’).4 The second, from Marie-Christine Hamon, sees, on the other hand, the dissolution of the school not as a ‘seizure of power’ or as a sign of ‘dogmatic intolerance’, but rather as the only way of reintroducing the ‘dimension of risk which is proper to discourse’5 against the transformation of Lacan’s theory into style (Lacanianism no less) and that view, which has been so influential outside of France under the brief of ‘New French Feminisms’, which sees theory itself as a masculine fantasy to which the only response for many women is the dissolution, not just of institutions, but of language itself.

      For both writers, however, and despite the different personal decisions to which they individually came, the issue of institutional power is one in which the question of language and its limits is centrally at stake. ‘On n’est fou que de sens’ (‘Only meaning drives you mad’ or ‘No madness without meaning’), writes Montrelay6 — the unconscious is the only defence against a language frozen into pure, fixed or institutionalised meaning, and what we call sexuality, in its capacity to unsettle the subject, is a break against the intolerable limits of common sense.

      François Roustang has described the way that this problem — how to create an institution in which the effects of the unconscious can be spoken without fossilizing into hereditary transmission and style — has marked the whole history of the psychoanalytic movement.7 In this case, however, it is clear that the question of the unconscious brings with it fantasies and images of sexual difference. Above all it leads to a question: how to situate oneself as a woman between the Christlike figure with its powerful and oppressive weight, and the too easy assimilation of the underside of language to an archaic femininity gone wild. That there is another scene to the language through which we most normatively identify and recognise ourselves is the basic tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis. But it is rarely demonstrated with such startling clarity how far the effects of the unconscious are tied into the key fantasies operating at the heart of institutions, and how these in turn are linked into the most fundamental images of sexual difference (adoration to the male, chaos or exclusion to the female) on which the wider culture so centrally turns.

      The crisis of the analytic institution therefore leads outside itself and also outside the figure of Lacan. Montrelay herself stresses that her critique is addressed neither to his ‘person’ nor his ‘teaching’, although we can notice the strange similarity-cum-difference between Freud’s plea to H.D. and Lacan’s to his members: the end of all defence and the demise of a school, both of which hold within them the ultimate and most impossible of commands. Yet more importantly, this moment suggests that the question of how an institution defines its limits, or even constitutes itself as an institution, is underpinned by a realm in which sexual fantasy is at play. The interface between these two factors — of institutions and their fantasies — shows the fully social import of the concept of the unconscious, but the disagreement between these two women writers also suggests that the ramifications are not adequately covered, or cannot easily be settled, by recourse to any one-sided concept of power. For if the power clearly goes first to Lacan, and through him to Freud, it is also the case that Lacan’s dissolution of his school has led to a proliferation of analytic schools in France, which endlessly divide the name and image of Lacan to which many of them also claim allegiance.

      The political import and difficulty of psychoanalysis can, I think, be read out of this moment. In terms of Lacan himself, the history begins with his critique of American ego-psychology, the assimilation, as he saw it, of the concept of the unconscious into a normative or adaptive psychology which took identity at its word and tried to strengthen it. But behind that lies the divisions of the analytic community in France and Lacan’s dissociation in 1953 from the Société psychanalytique de Paris because (amongst other reasons) of the autocratic way it was being governed. The critique of autocracy and the critique of the ego should be taken together, since an ego in place which has held off the challenge from the unconscious, or transformed it into something which can simply be known and controlled, will be autocratic above all else. For women especially, the supremest of autocrats is a father whose status goes without question and beyond which there is no appeal. Feminism describes this structure as patriarchal. It is no coincidence therefore that Lacan’s attempts to undo the effects of autocracy inside the analytic institution, and their hideous return, should have brought into such sharp relief his own symbolic status and the crisis for women of their relationship to it.

      For someone like Montrelay, however, the only way to deal with that crisis is to continue to be an analyst, that is, to continue to create a space in which the problem of identification and its laws, in all their force and impossibility, can repeatedly be experienced.

      The question of identity — how it is constituted and maintained — is, therefore, the central issue through which psychoanalysis enters the political field. This is one reason why Lacanian psychoanalysis came into English intellectual life, via Althusser’s concept of ideology, through the two paths of feminism and the analysis of film (a fact often used to discredit all three). Feminism because the issue of how individuals recognise themselves as male or female, the demand that they do so, seems to stand in such fundamental relation to the forms of inequality and subordination which it is feminism’s objective to change. Film because its power as an ideological apparatus rests on the mechanisms of identification and sexual fantasy which we all seem to participate in, but which — outside the cinema — are, for the most part, only ever admitted on the couch. If ideology is effective, it is because it works at the most rudimentary levels of psychic identity and the drives. As early as 1935, Otto Fenichel saw this as the chief contribution which psychoanalysis had to make to political analysis:

      The study of the modifications of instinct is in no way an unessential bagatelle, but is of the greatest importance theoretically as well as practically. The statement that the production and dissemination of the ideology of a society must be understood from the actual economic conditions of this society, the ‘superstructure’ of which is the ideology; that further they are to be understood from the fact that this ‘superstructure’ by means of the actions of human beings, reacts back again upon the ‘foundation’, the economic conditions modifying them — these statements are correct but general. They become more specific when we succeed in comprehending scientifically the details of the mechanisms of these transformations, and only psychoanalysis is able to help us in that.8

      Fenichel’s objective was a form of analysis which would understand the psychic force of ideological process while avoiding the twin pitfalls of sociological and psychological reductionism—the sociologists dismissing the psychic investments of social life

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