Sexuality in the Field of Vision - Jacqueline Rose

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the emphasis from the subjectivity of the infant in the throes of unmanageable queries, envies and demands, onto the social institution of the family within which they are played out. Which is not to argue for a reversal of this dogma and grant primacy to the psychic, which would leave social misery or inequality as its simple effect, but to notice the strain on and of psychoanalytic theory in its attempt to describe in a non-reductive way the vicissitudes of psychic and sexual life.

      In relation to psychoanalysis, feminism therefore finds itself with a dual inheritance: the quarrel over femininity in the thirties, but equally important, the terms of what was already then the more explicitly political debate. Read ‘ideology’ as ‘femininity’, ‘cultural norms’ as ‘the family’ and you produce the position of Shulamith Firestone, for whom psychic conflict — the problem of female identity — is the direct reflection of institutionally regulated forms of control (the link runs historically as well as theoretically from both the culturalists and the radical Freud).15 Add the question of femininity to Fenichel’s concern to insist, against this reduction, on the importance of the unconscious and sexuality to any political psychoanalysis, and you have the precise intervention for feminism made by Juliet Mitchell in 1974. The dialogue between psychoanalysis and feminism is prefigured in this earlier, and still unresolved, debate. When someone like Elizabeth Wilson objects to any consideration of sexuality which cannot be mapped directly onto the immediately observable forms of gender inequality and oppression, her argument merely unwittingly repeats a historical and theoretical tension one half of which it blithely presents as a contemporary political fact.16

      The same tension might explain the constant side-stepping of psychoanalysis and feminism in their mutual relation within recent Marxist debate. Thus Perry Anderson dismisses the feminist turn to Freud as a ‘precarious resort to less scientific bodies of thought [than socialism]’; Fredric Jameson overlooks the links between psychoanalysis and feminism in a book devoted to the place of the unconscious in cultural form (although radical feminism is recognised, it is later re-absorbed into a priority of class division and the category of the subject is dismissed as ‘anarchic’); Terry Eagleton about turns at the end of Literary Theory, and posits socialism and feminism over and above the forms of analysis, including psychoanalysis, he has covered in the book.17 In Jameson’s case, psychoanalysis returns in a footnote via Reich as a possible path to the analysis of the collective fantasies of religion, nationalism and fascism. In Anderson’s case, the moral-aesthetic utopias of the Frankfurt school, and in particular Habermas, appear — once psychoanalysis has been divested of its feminist interest — as the political end-point of the book. As indeed they do for Eagleton at the close of his chapter on psychoanalysis and the literary text.18 What is at issue here is not the political impetus of these books, but something which looks like a conspicuous omission or marginalisation of a crucial political link. And it seems to come in direct response to that moment when feminism brings the most fundamental problems of the psychic back onto the political agenda. It is as if feminism can be acknowledged as part of a critique of Marxism, and psychoanalysis can be incorporated into an account of collective fantasy, but they cannot be taken together. For then the concept of psychic life which accompanies the feminist challenge to sexual division presents itself too starkly against the terms of a traditional political critique. The unconscious as ideology (its present oppressiveness), or as pleasure (its future emancipation), but not something which hovers uncomfortably in between. This was the problem in the thirties as it re-presents itself to Marxism, and also feminism, today.

      The most recent form taken by the polarity between inside and outside is the dispute which has broken out over Jeffrey Masson’s assault on Freud for relinquishing the seduction theory of neurosis in favour of the analysis of fantasy life.19 Seen in these terms, it might lose something of the originality and drama which it claims for itself. A radical feminist issue (not just because Masson now chooses to describe himself as such), this polemic states more clearly than any other that the concept of an internal psychic dynamic is detrimental to politics — in this case explicitly feminism — since it denies to women an unequivocal accusation of the real. There must be no internal conflict, no desire and no dialogue; conflict must be external, the event must be wholly outside, if women are to have a legitimate voice. The psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious becomes a male conspiracy which takes from women the truth value of their speech. Kate Millett puts the argument better than Masson in the Barnard anthology on sexual politics:

      Reich was the first to address the sexuality of the young in an age when Freud was analysing and curing young persons with sexual disorders on order and payment from their parents. Freud often dealt with children, especially females, who had been sexually abused; he resolved the entire problem by deciding that it was an Oedipal fantasy on their part. So female children were not only sexually abused, they had to assent that they imagined it. This process undermines sanity, since if what takes place isn’t real but imaginary, then you are at fault: you are illogical, as well as naughty, to have imagined an unimaginable act: incest. You ascribed guilt to your father, and you are also a very guilty, sexy little creature yourself. So much for you.20

      Freud in fact never treated children, and the only child he had access to analytically — even indirectly — was male. But more important is the way that the idea of a conflictual, divided subjectivity, caught up in the register of fantasy, is directly opposed to the idea of legitimate protest as it is politically understood. The debate about political causality and the real event resolves itself into the issue of language. Political truth relies, therefore, on the concept of full speech. This throws slips and symptoms alike back into the outer darkness of aberration from which the Freudian attention to fantasy and the unconscious had originally served to rescue them.

      The psychoanalytic attention to fantasy does not, however, discredit the utterance of the patient. To argue that Freud dismissed the traumas of his patients as ‘the fantasies of hysterical women who invented stories and told lies’ is a total misconstrual of the status psychoanalysis accords to fantasy, which was never assigned by Freud to the category of wilful untruth.21 In fact Freud’s move was the reverse — towards a dimension of reality all the more important for the subject because it goes way beyond anything that can, or needs to be, attested as fact. By seeing fantasy as a degradation of speech, by turning reality into nothing more than what can be empirically established as the case, it is Masson himself who places human subjects in the dock.

      What can this discarding of the concept of fantasy make, for instance, of one of Masson’s own examples — the case of a twenty-nine-year-old woman who has sexual fantasies to the point of hallucination about her three-year-old nephew and who compulsively seeks reassurance from those around her that the event has not taken place? This example — in which desire belongs to the woman in relation to a male child and where what does not happen is hallucinated as if it had—is offered by Masson, without a trace of irony, as evidence that sexual impulses ‘which often lead to sexual acts’ on the part of adults towards children were ‘real’.22 Doesn’t this very example illustrate the vexed relation between actuality, memory, and fantasy which is the domain of the Freudian unconscious? And if we use this example to insist on the reality of seduction, where does that leave the woman if not simply accused, when her far more painful reality leaves her suspended between fantasy and the reality of the event? And again what should we make of the tension between Masson’s unequivocal appeal to ‘an actual world of sadness, misery and cruelty’ and his own recognition of a ‘need to repeat early sorrows’ which he recognises in his conclusion as one of the most genuine discoveries of Freud?23

      Fantasy and the compulsion to repeat — these appear as the concepts against which the idea of a more fully political objection to injustice constantly stalls. It seems to me that this is the ground on to which the feminist debate about psychoanalysis has now moved; but in doing so it has merely underlined a more general problem for political analysis which has always been present in the radical readings of Freud. Which is how to reconcile the problem of subjectivity which assigns activity (but not guilt), fantasy (but not error), conflict (but not stupidity) to individual subjects — in this case women — with a form of analysis which can also recognise the force of structures in urgent need of social change?

      I would argue that the importance of psychoanalysis

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