On the Continuing Necessity of Psychoanalysis for Feminist Philosophy

We live in an era in which “gender” has become a political football, in which the broadening legitimacy of same-sex marriage, as well as the rise of trans and nonbinary visibility and rights, has sparked a reactionary entrenchment and defense of traditional, naturalized identities and family arrangements stemming primarily from the Catholic establishment and the Christian Right. In Brazil, in the wake of Pope Francis’s 2016 warning that “children!—are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex… And this [sic] terrible!” an effigy of Judith Butler was burned in 2017. Mass shootings in gay clubs in the USA, most recently at Club Q in Colorado Springs in November 2022, have been explicitly motivated by a similar Christian right agenda in defense of the traditional family. LGBTQ+ rights have become a huge ideological factor in the Russian war against Ukraine. In the UK, a deeply unfortunate situation has arisen, perhaps in the absence of this religious defense of traditional gender roles and identities so prevalent elsewhere, in which a feminist strand (the now-famous TERF or “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” position) counters political moves to ensure and expand basic human rights and dignity to trans people. The wide acceptance of this view in the UK has resulted in an internecine and depressingly entrenched split between queer politics and a certain naturalizing feminist politics in which women’s biology, and in particular their reproductive capacities and practices, are invoked as the primary ground of sexist oppression.

The psychoanalytic establishment has often found itself in lockstep with such defenses of traditional gender roles and the Oedipal family. Camille Robcis shows how the psychoanalytic establishment in France regularly argued, in complicity with traditional religious forces, that single-parent or same-sex parent families were directly causative of psychosis in children. In 2019, Paul Preciado, a transgender man, delivered a speech before 3500 psychoanalysts at the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne in Paris in which he was subjected to heckling and booing, resulting in the book Can the Monster Speak? With psychoanalysis’s evident pathologizing of LGBTQ+ lives and complicity with anti-LGBTQ+ political positions, and its promotion of the traditional heterosexual family, how can it possibly be useful for contemporary feminist and queer positions?

In this blog post, I argue that psychoanalysis, understood from a radical, counter-institutional and counterhegemonic, queer feminist perspective, is necessary for feminist thought because of what it affords. While I recognize the native suspicion among mainstream or analytically inclined feminist philosophy of psychoanalytic theory insofar as it is considered a theory that cannot be falsified, and therefore something respectable philosophers ought not touch with a bargepole, I remind readers of a long tradition of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science which throws male-dominated scientistic paradigms, particularly with regard to understanding the human phenomena of sex and gender, into question. Here, I offer some positive arguments in defense of its enduring value.

Firstly, psychoanalysis provides an unprecedently powerful account and diagnosis of the reasons for and the profound persistence of misogyny. Secondly, it opens up a space for thinking about the formation of sexual and gender identities which neither succumbs to a biological naturalism or determinism (the “only biological women are real women” battle cry of the TERFS) on the one hand, nor to a facile voluntarism rooted in a bastardized popular understanding of Butlerian performativity, or “free will” on the other (the specter of “children choosing their sex”). Thirdly, the complex understanding of psychical and bodily being it affords opens onto a political vision in which all formations of lived bodily experience may be honored, respected, and treated with dignity.

Misogyny

If one does an internet search for “the most hated words in the English language” a great proportion of those that pop up have some association with women’s bodies: “moist,” “crevice,” “flaps,” “seepage,” “gushing,” “slime,” “foetus,” “yeast,” and so on. Surprisingly, perhaps, it’s not typically disgusting things such as excrement that take precedence here, but words that remind us that bodies, and especially women’s bodies, are not hermetically sealed, clean, non-porous, bounded entities. One recent video attempts a “scientific” explanation of the common aversion to the word “moist.” The “scientific” conclusion is that it “conjures up thoughts of wet bodily functions…” that disgust us. But why are such functions so disgusting? Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic account of “abjection” gives us a full account of this kind of disgust, a disgust that she associates with thin, porous membranes such as the famous “skin on the surface of milk,” (2) which provokes in me a gagging reflex, a reaction to what she calls “the abject.” Psychoanalysis teaches that our sense of individuation, independence, of wholeness, of integrity, of personhood, is in a formal sense a fantasized overlay over a much more porous, dependent, flimsy, vulnerable bodily situation. Our bodies leak and flow and seep and spurt, and, according to Kristeva, they always carry a visceral, unconscious memory of our original dependence and merging with the body of the mother, haunting our experience of the abject. Horror movies depicting dripping aliens and gory innards also play on this terror, which is a fundamental terror of losing our individuality and identity, the bodily boundary dissolving, portending a return to “la concha de tu madre” as the vivid Latin American insult has it. Words like “moist” cause disgust precisely because they irrupt with an unbearable reminder of our visceral, dependent origins. Simone de Beauvoir, whose 1949 The Second Sex depends heavily on the discourses of psychoanalysis, writes of the female sexual response: “If the flesh oozes—like an old wall or a dead body—it does not seem to be emitting liquid but deliquescing: a decomposition process that horrifies.” She is like “a carnivorous plant [that] waits for and watches the swamp… She is sucking, suction, sniffer, she is pitch and glue, immobile appeal, insinuating and viscous: at least this is the way she indefinably feels” (398). Psychoanalysis teaches us that women under patriarchy are forced to bear this bodily shame, their bodily “imperfections” inspiring the feminine impulse to beautify, slim, primp, and generally control and deny the body in its fleshly excesses. While mothers may be revered, they are just as often also despised—it doesn’t matter how badly one treats one’s mother after all, maternal care for the most part means that she will still care for us despite our tantrums. The contempt we carry for our own weakness and venality we carry over to our mothers who love us despite our weakness and venality. This set of misogynous affects—that circulate with particular virulence under patriarchy—redounds upon all women, mothers and childless women, young and old women, cis and trans women. Such affects will particularly manifest in those who are male or male-identified, since sexuation under patriarchy encourages these subjects to see themselves by contrast as relatively bounded, sealed, leakage free, and active, possessed of that magical outward organ, the penis, which is fantasized as “the phallus”—a primary sign of power, the ability to penetrate and conquer. De Beauvoir describes the “pissing contest” as a staging of power over bodily emissions and active freedom, where the girl child by contrast cannot participate; but must simply squat in shame (288).

This discourse risks making misogyny look inevitable and universal, the unmediated result of the natural facticity of women’s role as childbearers and their bodily endowments. Psychoanalysis, however, is not simply a diagnostic tool. It certainly forces us to look hard at deeply entrenched affects, practices, and styles of thought that cannot be solved by a simple act of fiat or will (those of us who find “moist” disgusting cannot simply choose to find it not so), but it also guides the way to a practice of “working through” that may take place at the levels of both the psychical and the socio-political or what Irigaray, in the Lacanian tradition, would call the Symbolic order. Alison Stone draws object-relations theorist Nancy Chodorow into conversation with Irigaray. Chodorow calls for greater participation of men in childrearing, which she believes will lead, as a positive effect, to the reduction of differences between men and women. Irigaray, by contrast, believes the Symbolic order (the realm of both language and law) is more recalcitrant than this, but is also more concerned with bringing a more open, porous, feminine subjectivity into being as a livable sexuate position than with doing away with sexual difference entirely. Women’s greater role in childrearing means that any child identifying with the female position (typically the daughter) will generally be more comfortable with, and thus less horrified by, the specter of bodily intimacy and porousness. For Stone, the task becomes one of shifting practices and remapping and transvaluing the inherent interconnectedness of the mother-daughter relationship, showing that it can lead to a more livable conception of identity-in-relation for anyone who is woman-identified rather than the total separation sought by fantasized masculine subjectivity and represented in our current familial arrangements largely by the father. By contrast with US-based “ego psychology” which encourages the consolidation of the separate, individuated ego, French psychoanalytic thinkers such as Lacan, Irigaray, Laplanche, Kristeva, and so on, push us toward an embrace of psychical porousness, in which we may always risk being undone by one another.

Sex / Gender Beyond Naturalism

The value of psychoanalysis here for thinking trans subjectivity is that it insists on a non-identity between the factical body and the lived body, the body that we feel and experience, which is itself not a given, but rather the result of a complex series of developmental processes. Gayle Salamon examines these processes by drawing critically on the resources offered both by phenomenology and psychoanalysis—indeed one way we might understand psychoanalysis is as something like a phenomenology of early life.  Salamon draws on a phenomenological approach informed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to understand phenomena, including phantom limbs and gender dysphoria, where we feel the limits of our bodies internally (proprioceptively) to be at odds with their empirical, physical being, as well as the psychoanalytic processes that trace the always uneven developments of desire and identification that contribute to our lived sense of bodily boundaries and sexual desire. In this way she shows how the “factical” or “given” body and the body as lived and experienced are in no case identical with one another, even if in many cases they seem to line up clearly and neatly; this normatively conferred appearance of “lining up” is precisely what Butler threw into question in Gender Trouble. Psychoanalysis, and this is my second point, teaches us that there is a whole realm of human experience, namely that of the psyche, that operates between determinism and free will, between the “given” and the freely chosen. Psychical development, according to psychoanalysis, entails the development of complex knots of desire and identification which animate us all, and involves a largely unconscious, yet dimly traceable (in analysis) series of commitments we make in relation to both the factical endowments of our own bodies and the social and political regime of gender identities available to us in our particular culture.

Freud himself noted that while most children will identify with their same-sex parent and enter into rivalry with him or her for the attentions of the opposite-sex parent as a matter of desire (the classic structure of the Oedipus complex), it’s also possible, even usual, to enter into what he calls the “negative Oedipus complex” in which one may identify with the opposite sex parent and desire the same sex parent:

Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children: that is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother (23).

This situation opens up the possibility that one might experience any admixture of desire and identification for either the mother or the father leading to a myriad of potential positions within what we would call the (culturally ordained) sex/gender system. We will, as a matter of fact, all negotiate the cultural regime of sex/gender into which we’re born in our own way, our own style, according to our own unconscious cathexes and dimly discerned outline of the sort of sexuate being we would like to become. The many human cultures which offer a legible and legitimate option beyond the binary have incorporated the fact that the psyche has its own adventurous logic exceeding the physical body into its cultural norms; those that don’t such as those cultures, including our own, that have developed in the shadow of the great patriarchal monotheisms. And indeed, if we are to begin to treat one another ethically and with dignity, it is of the first political importance to resist the restrictive edicts of these monotheisms (and of the hegemonic institutions of psychoanalysis) when it comes to the legislation of sexual and gender identity.

Political Possibilities

Psychoanalytic thinking presents feminist and queer political possibilities that emerge specifically in the realm of what my mentor Drucilla Cornell, who died in December 2022, dubbed the “imaginary domain.” Cornell proposes what she calls “minimum conditions of individuation” that she argues ought to be protected under the law. These are: 1) bodily integrity, 2) access to symbolic forms sufficient to achieve linguistic skills permitting the differentiation of oneself from others, and 3) the protection of the imaginary domain itself. The “imaginary domain” here draws on Lacan to carve out a temporal notion of individuated and embodied personhood that is always in a sense “ahead of” one, but that contributes to one’s present sense of personhood in a very real and concrete way. It’s a necessary and relevant notion for women, including those who understand themselves as potential mothers, or not, as well as for LGBTQ+ subjects of all stripes, for the reason that it signifies one’s ability (in the face of all kinds of more or less violent physical and symbolic incursions) to project oneself into the future as an integrated and flourishing subject, one who is afforded dignity and the potential for relative comfort in their own skin as a matter of legal right. So for a woman who becomes pregnant and wishes to have a child, protection of her imaginary domain would involve protecting that vision of herself as a pregnant woman and future mother, and would guarantee her the provision of appropriate healthcare, while for a woman who becomes pregnant and does not wish to be a mother, protection of her imaginary domain would ensure her access to safe and free abortion, as she recently wrote with Carolina Alonso Bejarano in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. Equally, protection of the imaginary domain for a trans person would ensure access to appropriate health care, equal treatment under the law, and the right to dignity necessary for potential comfort in their own skin.

Protection of the psychoanalytically informed “imaginary domain” protects the right of all beings to project themselves into the future as beings individuated at least minimally (to the extent that it enables them to be full political participants in their social milieu). Calling our sexed and gendered existences “imaginary” may not finally be satisfactory to either TERFs or those defending trans rights on the basis of a naturalized view of gender (for a nonpsychoanalytic philosophical take on this see this interview with Tamsin Kimoto), since what is at stake on each side seems to be a claim on “reality” (namely who or what is a “real woman”). But what is missed by such claims is that coming into sexual or gender identity is, like (political) life itself, never not a kind of working through, a becoming whatever or whoever we are in the process of becoming at the necessarily opaque level of the psyche, neither simply natural nor fully cultural, and never a fait accompli.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.

Emanuela Bianchi

Emanuela Bianchi is a philosopher by training and is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University with affiliations in Classics and Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (Fordham University Press, 2014) and La Naturaleza in Disputa: Physis y Eros en el pensamiento antigua (in Spanish), trans. Valeria Campos, Mariana Wadsworth, and Franchesca Rotger, (Editorial Hueders, 2022). She is also editor of Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy? (Northwestern UP, 1999) and the co-editor (with Brooke Holmes and Sara Brill) of Antiquities Beyond Humanism (OUP, 2019).