Reflections on Flat Mountain

Anthony Bass, Ph.D. , Margaret Black, M.S.W. and Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

NADIA GHENT PAINTED A STUNNINGLY VIVID PORTRAIT OF HER FATHER

Emmanuel when, at his funeral service last April, she told the story of their day together
on Flat Mountain. The story captured a moment in Nadia's life with her father that
distilled into a single enduring image much of what those of us who knew Mannie
recognized as essential to his nature.

It is a story of what began as an ordinary summer outing, likely one of countless similar
excursions that blend together in memory, comprising the endless summers of childhood.
But along the way, this particular journey veered off the familiar route toward a different
destination, bypassing the standard landmarks. The experience retains, even so many
decades later, a dreamlike sense of wonder, mystery, and poignancy generated, I suspect,
in that realm of experience that is a complex blend of objective reality and private,
subjective experience. It is that personal dimension that Winnicott, one of Emmanuel's
most significant psychoanalytic forebears, discovered and constructed, referring to it as
“transitional experience.” It was a day in which a certain sort of illusion, a loving and
playful sleight of hand made possible by Mannie's gentle, creative, unobtrusive
responsiveness to Nadia's need, became the point of departure for an experience that,
paradoxically perhaps, contained lasting truths that would sponsor solace and wisdom to
his daughter and the rest of us so many years later.

If there were indeed a paradox to be found in the riddle of how the illusion of Flat
Mountain conjured such enchantment, bringing the little girl on the cusp of a fever to
surrender so perfectly to the delights of the late-day sun and the loving care of her
parents, that paradox

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would not have troubled Mannie in the least. No stranger to the wondrous potentials that
riddles hold, Mannie was a connoisseur of paradox and illusion. His Flat Mountain was a
perfect oxymoron, rooted in a deep personal grasp of and intimate familiarity with the
potential for creative living. His own extraordinary creative gifts were prodigious and
found ample if astonishing expression in his roles as a psychoanalytic practitioner,
teacher, and theoretician; physician; writer; composer; inventor; computer scientist;
pioneer of computer-synthesized music; student and teacher of Buddhist meditation; and
parent.

In his inspiring and groundbreaking psychoanalytic papers “Credo”(1989), “Masochism,

Submission, Surrender” (1990), and ‘“Paradox and Process” (1992), Mannie sought to
explore realms of experience enriched by paradox and illusion as sources of creative
living as well as emotional growth, both acknowledging and extending Winnicott's
radical contributions to fostering a creative, vital psychoanalysis. In “Paradox and
Process,” Mannie observed that by “introducing paradox into the dry sobriety of
psychoanalysis, Winnicott made room for spontaneity, ambiguity, illusion and creativity
as features that are essential to real living” (p. 136). Mannie further reflected on
something of the lesson that we take from Flat Mountain when he observed how “often it
happens that the route to truth is through the intensity of illusion” (p. 136). And, relating
the observation to the psychoanalytic process itself, he asked, rhetorically, “Is not
analysis a veritable playpen for transference and countertransference, and what are these
if not vehicles for finding truth by knocking on the walls of illusion?”(p. 139).

We see in Nadia's tale that what began as a little girl's day trip to the country in search of
a strange, exciting (maybe even a little scary) place called Bear Mountain turned—with
the help of a late start, the discomfort of an incipient fever, and the dysphoria of early-
stage chicken pox—into an experience that had all the earmarks of something far less
propitious. We probably all know something about days like these, retain some residue in
our bones of those impossibly long car rides when we were small, doing our best to
control our despair about the discomforts of such journeys without end. And if we have
survived these travails to bear and raise children of our own, we may suffer even more
distinct recollections of that sinking sense of helplessness and frustration as things seem
to be going from bad to worse on an adventure with our children that was conceived with

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good, loving, and hopeful intentions, but which in the harsh light of day falls far short of
the mark, to everyone's chagrin.

Nadia's recollection of Flat Mountain is not a story about a day marred by frustration or
the vagaries of ordinary childhood misery and disappointment. Rather, like many of the
Zen stories with which Mannie spiced his teaching and his papers, integrating two of his
passions, Nadia's story is in part about personal transformation, and the central role
played by paradox and illusion. It is about the contribution of spontaneity, ambiguity, and
responsiveness to need in the transformation of potentially disruptive experience toward
healthy development and growth. In a sense, it is a kind of touchstone of Mannie's spirit.

Nadia noted that it took many years to figure out that Flat Mountain “wasn't a real place
at all, that it was only a stop made necessary by a hot, tired, cranky and whining four-
year-old.” The stop had indeed been necessary, and it was just Mannie's recognition of
that necessity, and his lovingly playful and attuned response to Nadia's need, that made
the day one that she would carry with her forever. And now we can all hold it as a perfect
reflection of something that we knew about Mannie, but perhaps had not thought in so
many words. Flat Mountain was, after all (at least in one sense), “just a small patch of
grass” along the parkway. But Mannie and Nadia had found in it a route to an alternate
and sustaining reality.
The story of Flat Mountain is a remarkable testament to the creative way Mannie lived
his life from moment to moment, whether on a day trip with his family or in a
psychoanalytic session with a patient, reflecting the values and understandings consistent
with the creative leaps that enlivened his musical compositions and fueled his computer
inventions. Had Nadia discovered this place along the highway with Mannie's help, or did
she create it? Winnicott understood, in his landmark concept of transitional experience,
that such creative leaps are marked by their ability to sustain a quality of both creation
and discovery at once. A crucial ingredient in making this kind of leap possible is that the
question never be called. A good-enough parent, Winnicott (1953) noted, knows not to
ask the child whether the transitional object is something he or she found or something
imaginatively created. “Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of
agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: ‘Did you
conceive of this or was it presented to you from without? … The question is not to be
formulated’” (p. 95).

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It took Nadia until she was well into adulthood to figure out that Flat Mountain wasn't a
real place at all, because Mannie would never question her childhood experience as she
told the story over and over again. Nadia needed a perfect place to stop right then and
there. Bear Mountain many miles later, as much as it was the real destination, would not
have done at all. Mannie understood the reality of Flat Mountain implicitly, and in that
sense, their day's sojourn on its nonexistent summit was both illusory and as real as real
can be.

Margaret Black, C.S.W.

AUTUMN CAN BE A SOMBER TIME OF YEAR FOR ME DESPITE THE
GLORIOUS colors of foliage and the crisp freshness in the air, the shortening days and
predicable damp chill in the mornings portend endings, an insidious darkening that at
times feels unrelenting in its impact on my soul. This autumn feels particularly
challenging; the political uncertainty in my country seems to hold the fate of the world in
the balance. My patients arrive for their sessions expressing deeply felt anxieties that
extend far beyond the circumstances of their individual lives. Increasingly, they are
speaking not about their own emotional well-being but about the future of the world, the
survival of goodness in our human community. How much strife can we absorb, how
much loss can we tolerate, how many beheadings can we witness before we lose all
confidence in our capacity to find meaning, to find some sense of calm and safety in our
experience?

Images of Mannie on Sunday trips in an open convertible are precious and delightful in
this context. Thinking of him at that point in his life, with a young wife and daughter and
the wind blowing in their hair, brings a lightness and sense of unconstrained possibilities
that are so very welcome. But nagging cynicism creeps into my

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thoughts. Although whining four year-olds can indeed dampen one's high spirits, isn't it
much easier to be creative and generative, to push against such a threat, when one has
youth and health and an open road ahead?

What about the world we are living in now? It is perhaps somewhat pretentious, or an
indication of just how little our generation has been exposed to pain, that we are finding
this period so extremely difficult. Others have lived through world wars, concentration
camps, economic depressions. And yet the particular qualities of this period in our history
—the divisive impact of unpredictable terrorism on the world community, the horrifying
content and distressing impersonality of the news coverage, the apparent imperviousness
of international political leaders to the potentially destructive impact of self-interest—
leave many feeling overwhelmed and out of control of forces experienced as so
fundamentally destructive.

The everydayness of our lives is affected. One of my supervisees was unable to discuss
the clinical work she had brought to our meeting, because on her way to the session she
had encountered an unexpected convergence of emergency vehicles and heard rumors
that a bomb had been discovered nearby. Not thinking of herself as an anxious person,
she was astonished to find herself fully overcome with anxiety. Later that day, an
intelligent young father arrived for his analytic session agitated and upset. He had spent
the previous evening with an old friend, an experience he has come to count on as
emotionally generative, in his satisfying but too busy New York life. He was stunned to
learn, during the course of the evening, that his friend was planning to vote in our
upcoming election for the presidential candidate my patient views as the harbinger of
evil. He had counted on his friend's sharing his perspective, a perspective he has come to
via painful grappling with what he experiences as terrifying potential dangers in the
world. He found himself angrily confronting his friend. What was he thinking—what
kind of world was he planning to leave for their children? There is a marked vulnerability
that we all share to feeling undone, endangered, alone with our fear.

I find myself thinking often of Mannie as I work to establish a perspective in the midst of
these challenges. In fact, Mannie did not ride, optimistic, in convertibles during the years
that he was my friend. He had more than his share of personal struggles, and he was
plagued by disability, periodically blind, often in pain. For several of those years, guided
by the informed opinion of his physicians, he believed he was

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living his last days—or maybe weeks or months. Mannie knew pain; he did not deny it in
his life. And yet the personal presence he shared with the world was not one of defeat or
pain or even worry. Drawing on his training as a physician, he researched and processed
information about his numerous medical conditions. He was extremely clear about what
was involved and did not mince words with those he took into his confidence. Once he
had given the problem its due—learned all he felt he could learn in responsibly
addressing it—however, he just didn't seem to give it priority in his mind. It was as
though he approached his experience with a firm intention and allocation of focus. What
do I want to attend to here? How do I want to spend my time? In what state of mind? And
then he went about doing his best to realize his conclusions.

On closer examination, finding meaning in our lives is not exactly what we are doing: we
do not discover meaning “out there” but generate meaning from within ourselves.
Fundamentally, we are all artists, creating the tapestry that we will then regard as
representing the experience of our lives. This is all we really have to work with. The
events of life will come and go; our only negotiating point is how we will experience
them, what we will make of them. When we initially read Nadia's story, it may seem
remarkable that over the years Mannie never corrected her oft-told account of the
wonderful visit to Flat Mountain. He apparently didn't explain the trying circumstances
that developed during the trip or tell Nadia how he had saved the day for an upset and
gullible little girl by inventing a more palitable version of what was actually happening. I
suspect this is because, for Mannie, Flat Mountain was no less a personal creation than
any place in which we spend our time. In that sense, there is no other story than the one
that Nadia was told.

The account of Flat Mountain becomes for us, then, a story within a story. Initially, it
offers us an account of a day in a little girl's life with the kind of father we can all wish
we had a bit more of. But intrinsic to the telling is another account, one spelling out in
some detail the moment-by-moment creation of experience that eventually comprises the
fabric of our lives, a narrative describing how powerfully we shape our own experience,
how involved we each are in writing what will eventually become our own histories. Not
all of this creating will be fanciful and fun, but all of it will share a quality of
dimensionality of experience that is fundamental to feeling alive as a human being.

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In some sense, Mannie's ability to help his daughter find a way to continue to feel
engaged, to open up what looked like a flat, disappointing space and find within it a
magical mountain, draws on similar processes as my patient's being able, despite the
shock of difference that caused a full emotional retreat, to look more deeply into his
experience of his friend and find the threads of connection still intact which allowed him
to reconnect with the meaningfulness of their experience together and rendered alienating
difference upsetting but tolerable.
We are a community of healers. We are living at a time when our services are solely
needed both by our patients and by one another. Though we each bring to our work our
own specific ideas about theory and technique, our broader sensibility needs to draw us
together to become a source of strength and generativity for the world in which we find
ourselves. In this effort we are blessed with the possibility of finding the strength and
wisdom of people such as Mannie Ghent still available to us if we but look for it.

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

IT HAS BEEN MY HABIT FOR 25 YEARS TO WRITE IN NOTES OR JOTTINGS. I
can still write a straight paper but, for memorializing Mannie, I don't want to. After all,
this revered teacher, colleague, analyst, mentor, and friend was the person who helped me
intensify and live with my own paradoxes (or, if you will, contradictions). On one hand,
he advised me on strategic conformity, something I knew about already but hadn't quite
articulated for myself. On the other, authorizing me to hear the words I'd been waiting for
all my life, he recounted Elliot Carter's look back: “I didn't make it until I did what I
wanted and stopped doing what everyone else expected me to do.”

A conference was held in honor of Mannie on May 13, 2000. I organized it and, chaired
the committee that had gathered to celebrate this man, who was called by the New York
University publicity director (from whom I'd requested press coverage) “the shrink who
expands consciousness.” His ideas, musical creations and inventions, clinical gifts,
humor, seriousness, spirituality, psychoanalytic vision and leadership—these are familiar.
Would that he were still around, being what he was, doing what he wanted and needed
and felt he must do. Would that he were not gone—so that all we can do is remember
him, a true Renaissance man, a jack-of-all-trades and master of most, a man for all
seasons, which was one of the titles we'd inevitably thought of for the conference.

But, recalling that we had timed the conference to coincide with his 75th birthday, I heard
an insistent rhythm: “Mannie Who Will Be 75 in the Year 2000!” Alain Tanner's (1976)
touching film tribute to the contradictions of the 1960s, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the
Year 2000, suits the theme. Think of its Decameron cast of characters: the typographer,
the factory worker, the organic farmer, the mad artist, the history teacher, the
revolutionary, the Tantric adept, the working-class hero. (There is no feminist or
homosexual, you will notice, but then again, this was Geneva, and Geneva in 1976, at
that.) Mannie Ghent contained worlds within him, from Marxism to medicine to music to
meditation.

The film's poignancy, its fusion of melancholy and hope, fits Mannie. As it ends,
Tanner's (1976) protagonist, Matthieu, calling himself “labor,” names his erstwhile
companions “the lover, the hermit, the philosopher, the former prophet, the fool, the
thief”—a range of possibilities that I like to think Mannie would not have been displeased
to find in himself: wise and foolish, female and male, good and bad, visionary and blind,
revolutionary and conventional, exploiter and exploited, teacher and student, caring and
forgetful, 75 and 25, and just born. Thinking of his child Jonah, born in 1975, Matthieu
trails off (saying as much to his comrades as to his son), “I'm trying to keep your hopes
together so they don't disappear. I'm returning to work; I'll be exploited; I'll try to use
your hopes as levers.”

Hope as a lever: talk about process and paradox. Using the found objects of life, Mannie
created for another child, for Nadia, hope and joy and pleasure out of a flat mountain of
sadness and despair and frustration and oncoming illness.

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I liked, during and after treatment, to refer to the fact that Mannie knew what he was
doing. This quality in Mannie was a bit of a revelation, in comparison with my
experience with my first analyst, who seemed to follow his bliss. Mannie was after
something, and he was persistent. I don't mean that he had an agenda for me. Rather, he
had something about me in mind. He would tack with the wind and the current, but he
kept us moving forward. He had an idea of what was wrong, what needed to be worked
on, and he pursued it with a steely determination. Here his aggression, if you want to put
it in those terms, showed up in a most helpful and welcome way, not in the damaging
fashion that I believe he feared would always be aggression's effect and fate. His will,
coupled with his kindness, was reassuring and containing, and put me back on a much
better course.

Who else was I going to have a second analysis with, after all? At least, who else among
those I knew, because 20 years ago, my knowledge of the psychoanalytic world was not
as broad as it is now. Mannie's demeanor and bearing, his abundant energy and creativity
and adventurousness and eros, his willingness to go to the edge of the known—these
qualities spoke to me of shared values. I sneaked into analysis with him (another story)
and got what I unknowingly wanted—to work with an intellectual who had lived his
share of la vie bohème. I was lucky.

Later on, after the analysis had joyfully terminated through turbulence, conflict, and
anguish, I found that hope had come to me. I have no idea how. These days, should I
wake depressed or lonely or sick at heart, I can find myself thinking—to my surprise, I
assure you— “But at least it's not raining!” Or, if it is raining, I will, without willing it,
feel what a beautiful rain it is. Oh, not always. I mean, it's hard to feel joy when you have
to go to work in that most disgusting and slushy and freezing of New York City winter
rains. But, even then, you can always go home at night, and oh, how lovely and warm it
is.

Mannie knew his rough diamonds. In part through his example, I became interested in
matters meditative. At one point I received, as a present from a teacher of shamanic
journeying, a small length of crystal. Good for healing, she said. Although I soon lost that
crystal, it came back in a dream: I woke up and in my hand were two crystals, the short,
jagged-edged one given to me by my body teacher and a second
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one, two or three times the size of the first, shaped like a beautiful (and yes, erect)
phallus.

Go ahead. Think castration and penis envy, think transference and countertransference;
quite right. But all that Mannie Ghent said was, “Praise the Lord and pass the
ammunition!”

References
Ghent, E. (1989), Credo: The dialectics of one-person and two-person psychologies.
Contemp. Psychoanal., 25: 169-211. [→]

Ghent, E. (1990), Masochism, submission, surrender: Masochism as a perversion of

surrender. Contemp. Psychoanal. 26: 108-136. [→]

Ghent, E. (1992), Paradox and process. Psychoanal. Dial., 2: 135-159. [→]

Tanner, A. dir. (1976), Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (motion picture). Written
by J. Berger & A. Tanner (trans. M. Palmer). New York: New Yorker Films.

Winnicott, D. W. (1953), Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. Int. J. Psycho-

Anal., 34: 89-97. [→]

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Deconstructing Difference: Gender, Splitting, and Transitional Space

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Apparently a straightforward elaboration of anatomical difference, “gender” is

symbolically tied to many kinds of cultural representations, which, in turn, set the terms
not only for understanding the relations between women and men but for organizing self-
experience. Consequently, problems of self may come to be coded in terms of gender,
and those of gender, in terms of the self. Using a clinical example, I speak of gender less
as a determinate category than as something resembling a force field, that is, as a set of
complex and shifting relations among multiple contrasts or differences. This multiplicity,
in turn, generates some technical recommendations about gender and splitting.
Recapturing split-off parts of the self therefore requires inhabiting its transitional spaces,
including that in which gender is not a given but is in question. Moreover, I suggest,
counterintuitively, that gender identity both seals the package of self and preserves all the
self must lose and thus bridges undifferentiated archaic depths and selfhood. In
transference and countertransference, both patient and analyst must also enter this
paradoxical space, where they alternate between being gendered and being gender-free.

In an early session, Elizabeth, then 43 years old, held back her tears because, she said, “I
don't want to cry on your shoulder.” When I questioned her reluctance, she replied that
the danger lay in the shoulder, not in the crying: she would cry only on a man's shoulder;
she was not interested in women.

I want to understand Elizabeth's reply by thinking about gender not as an essence but as a
set of relations (May, 1986) and to propose that at the heart of gender is not
“masculinity” or “femininity” but the difference

—————————————

Dr. Dimen is a Fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York
University.

© 1991 The Analytic Press

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between them. My thinking is located in two intersecting contexts, feminist and

psychoanalytic. The first may be described as “the critique of gender,” a phrase whose
ambiguity is deliberate. I mean to suggest, simultaneously, gender as critiqued and
gender as critique, gender as a concept that not only requires scrutiny but can itself
illuminate other matters. Reciprocally, understanding gender depends on the second,
psychoanalytic context of this paper, framed here in terms of splitting and transitional
space, concepts themselves capable of furthering the clinical relevance of the critique of
gender. I am using the concept of “splitting” loosely, signifying in its psychoanalytic
sense both splitting of the ego and splitting of the object (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973,
pp. 427, 430) and in its cultural sense the many dichotomies and dualisms paradigmatic
in Western thinking since Descartes and of critical relevance to feminist discourse. The
doubled critique of gender I am proposing can, by defamiliarizing the emotion- and
value-laden notions of “femininity” and “masculinity,” help to peel away what we think
gender is (and believe it ought to be) from what it might be. When I speak thus of
gender's possibility, I refer to the present, not the future. Deconstructing gender in our
minds can help us stretch our clinical imagination about what our patients' inner worlds
are like and, indeed, could be like.

Gender and Self

Because the category of sex seems plain enough, the concept of gender likewise appears
unproblematic, even though, in fact, it requires clarification or, better, deconstruction.
Conventionally, “gender” denotes the psychological and social dimensions of the
biological category of sex. This characterization sounds like a clear enough division of
epistemological labor. But it is not. What gender seems to denote is one thing; what it
actually connotes is another. Indeed, the connotations of gender are so complex as to
generate an enormous indeterminancy, which Scott (1988), a feminist historian, phrases
thus:

[O]ften in patriarchal discourse, sexual difference (the contrast masculine/feminine)

serves to encode or establish meanings that are literally unrelated to gender or the body.
In that way, the meanings of

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gender become tied to many kinds of cultural representations, and these in turn establish
terms by which relations between women and men are organized and understood [p. 37].

In other words, the category of “sex” is not transparent but is itself a dense weave of
cultural significance, and “the contrast masculine/feminine,” as the representation of what
psychoanalysts commonly refer to as “the anatomical difference,” addresses a variety of
matters, not all of which are germane to sex, gender, or the genitals. This slippage from
sex to culture not only provides us with our understandings of gender as personally
experienced but informs gender as a social institution.

Another elision, equivalent in power to that from sex to culture, informs what we might
term the mutual definition of selfhood and gender identity, such that problems of self
may come to be coded in terms of gender, and those of gender, in terms of the self. Self
and gender identity inhabit one another so intimately that questions such as these become
familiar: If I feel “womanly,” am I at my most “feminine”? Or am I feeling most fully
“myself”? When I do feel “like myself,” does that feeling have anything to do with my
female identity? If I feel, by contrast and perhaps more pertinently, “unwomanly,” am I
feeling somehow “not myself”? If I am “not myself,” is gender identity somehow also,
and more secretly, involved? And so on.

The overriding question is, Would these puzzles even arise if selfhood and gender
identity were not already in problematic relation? In other words, though selfhood and
gender identity are structurally different, their contemporaneous crystallization in
development makes them seem, indeed feel, joined at the heart and leaves their
relationship simultaneously unquestioned and questionable. The intrapsychic proximity
of sense of self to sense of gender identity often obscures, not to say deepens, the
complexities of gender representation generated. At the same time, the contrast
masculine/feminine, by collapsing many representations of selfhood that are unrelated to
gender, can disguise, and even create, dilemmas of self as well.

Sometimes the mutual coding of gender and self is directly translatable. For example, the
conventional split between masculine and feminine in psychology and culture, that is, the
contrast masculine/feminine, speaks also to pleasure, activity, and passivity. Pleasure in
activity is wont to carry the valence of masculinity, while pleasure in passivity is charged
with femininity, a split aligned with the traditional dichotomy in sex

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roles. As this splitting has been challenged socially, it is more often questioned in the
clinical situation, where one may suspect, for example, that women's sense of activity
may be gender-dystonic and therefore anxiety-inducing, just as men's fantasies of
passivity may express a fear of being homosexual, itself often code for the fear of being
feminine.

This example seems straightforward enough. But the plot thickens. For example, gender
identity, normatively defined as watertight, may normally be porous. We do not always
feel in gender, and when we do not, we feel anxiety, which makes us less likely to
remember that sometimes one's gender resembles an ill-fitting garment. When I asked a
friend who had lost a tennis match how he felt during the game, he replied, “Like a girl”;
he had had trouble wielding the racket. Clearly, “feeling like a girl” was not a pleasant
experience for him. Still, was he anxious because he felt out of gender? Or out of gender
because anxious about something else? Or both? Why was losing incompatible with
masculinity? Is losing the same as castration? Does not losing also make us feel small?
Could this man have been feeling like a child as well as like a girl? Does “feeling like a
girl” represent a narcissistic wound (Shapiro, personal communication)? By way of
comparison and contrast, another friend, who has always seen herself as nonathletic,
represents her successful attempt to play squash by drawing a yapping, rushing
Pekingese, which she reluctantly identifies as male. We might say that in her activity, she
first and consciously experiences herself as not herself, as Other and, only second,
unconsciously, and more painfully, as out-of-gender, as a junior, ridiculous male. If my
woman friend experienced the narcissistic wound ultimately as gender loss, could my
man friend have represented it finally by loss of self, by an encounter with the second-sex
Otherness that femininity represents?

Gender as a Set of Relations

Let me review what has happened here, so as to make my main conceptual point. I began
by critiquing the alignment of femininity with passivity and of masculinity with activity.
In so doing, I came upon a whirl of dualisms orbiting in relation to the contrast
masculine/feminine and to each other as well — self/other, preoedipal/oedipal,
infancy/adulthood, autonomy/dependency, superiority/inferiority,
heterosexuality/homosexuality. In

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this process, “gender” appears to be less a determinate category than something

resembling a force field. Much like the atom, once thought of as substance but now
construed as a set of interacting forces, so gender looks to consist not of essences but of
complex and shifting relations among multiple contrasts or differences. Sometimes these
contrasts remain distinct, at other times they intersect, and at still other times they fuse
and exchange identities.

As a way of turning to how problems of self and gender may encode one another, let us
focus for a moment more on activity and passivity and their relation to sexual difference.
Recognizing the force field that marries the inherently unrelated contrasts
masculine/feminine, self/other, and active/passive to one another permits us to
understand, for example, that women's anxiety in activity may be a problem equally of
gender as of self. On the other hand, this recognition also lets us understand that gender-
neutral qualities of self, such as activity and passivity, can reciprocally organize and
thereby evoke sexual and gendered splits. I have alluded, for example, to the fact that, for
men, passivity may represent both homosexuality and femininity.

An analogous, although not identical, slippage among activity state, object choice, and
gender identity shows up in the experience of Elizabeth, whose refusal to cry on a
woman's shoulder now emerges as a negotiation among dangerous polarities. Her
response to my inquiry implied that she was neither a dependent child nor a lesbian but
an autonomous, heterosexual woman, and as such, her need for comfort was not a danger.
To have admitted being a woman who wanted a woman's shoulder to cry on would have
revealed what crying on a man's shoulder concealed, that sometimes she still felt like a
child. The idea of leaning on a man defended against dependency longings because, in
culture and psyche alike, heterosexuality lines up with, and symbolizes, adulthood and
autonomy.

Sex, Gender, and Splitting

Heterosexuality, even though it is classically (though not always in Freud) the object
choice of choice, can and does serve to conceal and express splits in the self. Nominally
heterosexual, Elizabeth had not been sexually active in 15 years, with the exception of
masturbation (which

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she acknowledged but refused to discuss). Having had one homosexual encounter in
junior college, she later married a mainly impotent man 20 years her senior with whom
she had intercourse perhaps half a dozen times before a heart attack killed him three
months after the wedding. Later, she had three major but short-lived love affairs; the last
breakup so bereaved her that she resolved never to let anyone get close again.

These facts of her life, and those to be recounted, emerged slowly and painfully over the
course of our work together. Contemplating our shared history now, I feel as I did then —
dismayed, conscious of both reluctance and helplessness to grasp the full damage. Not
untouched, I still was sensible of her wish that I not touch her uninvited, that I respect the
cocoon of privacy protecting her most secret self. Shielding her was her obesity, which,
she believed, distanced men in particular. In her fat, she was like a great big baby,
reminding me of no one so much as Ralph Kramden. The gender ambiguity in my
association reflects Elizabeth's sexual ambiguity. Elizabeth's attachment to a suspended
heterosexuality masking childhood longings was a powerful means to disremember the
sexual abuse that, from ages three to five, she experienced with her adored brother, nine
years older than she. Almost daily, Johnnie would masturbate before her in the parlor at
quarter to five in the afternoon, while they listened to a favorite radio program and their
mother prepared dinner in the kitchen, which happened to be the next room. Torn
between feelings of specialness and betrayal, Elizabeth never revealed these encounters;
she always believed that if she told her mother, she, not Johnnie, would be punished;
when she was older and thought about taking the story to confession (the family was
Catholic), she would somehow forget.

Not only her flesh but her words protected her. I was both moved and often made to feel
helpless by the verbal fence Elizabeth planted around her private self. When, one time,
she said, by way of explanation, “Johnnie set me up too early,” she sounded like a forlorn
child prostitute turned out by her lover-turned-pimp, a child now homeless but denying
the despair of her psychic bondage to him. Yet, even as Elizabeth's speech (she often
used clichés, for example) deftly dispatched emotion to some unreachable part of the
galaxy, it served to consolidate her personal universe. Shattered, she wrapped the wounds
of her amputated feeling in tried-and-true language that normalized her tragedy. At the
same time, Johnnie's betrayal of her trust disrupted not only the consolidation of her
selfhood but the emergence of her sexuality and gender identity and left

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her caught between identification with and desire for men. Was she female or male?
While watching his performance, was she watching and desiring her idol or identifying
with him? It was not clear. The only way she found relief was not to choose, not to be
either gender (a dilemma identified by Harris, 1991).

Here, in summary fashion, is the sequence as it appears, in retrospect, to me, for it was
not one she could have constructed herself. The cessation of the incest coincided with the
birth of her younger sister (the last of five children) and the start of school, a traumatic
concatenation of events that resulted in the tantrums for which she was punished after she
started school. At the age of 5, she wanted to drown her newborn younger sister “because
she wasn't a boy.” She remembered masturbating her clitoris when she was 8. Between
the ages of 9 and 10, she frequently wore one of her father's cast-off ties, which she
hoped would transform her into a boy. During her 11th year (when, after Johnnie's return
from the army, the incest recurred briefly until she put a stop to it), she began her avid
consumption of novels and was at the time equally drawn to stories of swashbuckling
pirates and tales of lascivious sultans.

She was disappointed that menstruation was not a one-time-only event yet was
humiliated that her first brassiere was her oldest sister's yellowed cast-off (delivered, to
her embarrassment, by Johnnie as a present at a holiday dinner). By adolescence, she had
come to feel that boys were dangerous. As an adult, she had come to hold what she
regarded as the prejudiced opinion that boys should not be allowed to babysit. Finally,
she feared sexually assertive men and preferred those who were shy and a bit unsure.

Frozen between femininity and masculinity, on guard against painful affect, and just out
of others' reach, she came, in her adult life, to be cleft between body and mind, a cleavage
that was apparently odd but, down deep, a source and sign of shame. Trained in physical
therapy (by which she was supporting herself), she was finishing a scholarly doctorate,
was already becoming known in her field, and had friends who were liberal, intellectual,
and sophisticated. Yet she resided alone in her suburban family home next door to her
oldest sister's household; the culture of her family and hometown friends might be
expressed in her late father's view of the New York Times as “a commie rag.” Her work
life was also polarized. Her specialty within her field relied more on concrete data than
on speculation, while the theoretical abstraction found in other sectors of her discipline
made her very anxious. She preferred gothic and
- 341 -

horror genres for extracurricular reading but generally found the news media too
distressing to witness.

Her major symptoms were consistent with splitting—not only obesity but myriad
physical ailments and a dependence on an oral hypnotic; dissociation in sessions and
amnesia between them; a sometimes dogged, sometimes mischievous balking at
interpretations of her unconscious. Although she always remembered the facts of the
incest and the sense of privilege she derived from it, she was, until a year and a half
before we terminated, unconscious of her anger about it. At that time, Elizabeth began to
follow the increasing media coverage of the sexual abuse of children, because she had
just learned that there had been more sexual abuse in her own family. Johnnie, who had
died in a freak accident at the age of 26, had left behind a wife and two children. His
widow later remarried a man who, it turned out, molested both his stepdaughter and his
stepson's daughter, that is, Johnnie's own daughter and granddaughter. Elizabeth's
subsequent outrage on behalf of her niece and her grandniece allowed us to probe her
rage about what had happened to her.

As Elizabeth recovered her anger and sense of betrayal about the incest, her splitting
generally lessened, and her drug and nicotine dependencies disappeared. Nevertheless,
the obesity, about which she was unhappy, and her resistance to unconscious
interpretation, which did not interest her, held fast all the way to the end. As I write this, I
can now link this tenacity to a splitting in the transference/countertransference
configuration, in which Elizabeth embraced the manifest, the literal, the body, and I
embraced the latent, the symbolic, the mind. Nor is it surprising that this split intersected
gender as well. During one session, when she was in deep distress about her family's
inability or refusal to appreciate her work, she spoke of her “inquiring mind.” Together,
we then discovered that, of her parents, brother, and three sisters, the only other person in
her family who could also be so described was her father. If, therefore, her mind inquired,
then it followed that she could not be female. For reasons to which I will return, we were
unable to explore the paradox that women, too, could have inquiring minds.

Desire in the Space of Difference

Let me sum up what I have said so far. Taking a deconstructionist tack, I have said that
the core of gender is difference, not essence, the relation

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between masculinity and femininity as culturally conceived, interpersonally negotiated,
and intrapsychically experienced. To put this view in developmental terms, one becomes
gendered not by learning “a one-dimensional message that [one is] either male or
female”; rather, one “absorb[s] the contrast between male and female” (Dimen, 1986, p.
8). In theoretical terms, looking at either masculinity or femininity without looking at the
contrast between them encourages us to imagine fixed essences, hard-and-fast polarities.
If, however, we enter the space occupied by their difference, we can see more clearly
other differences that, though not necessarily related to sex, in fact secretly construct
gender (Scott, 1988, p. 38). What I have done in that space is examine the gender dualism
as it shittingly intersects other dualisms, any pole of which, rigidly clung to, may also
signal splits in the self. I have also suggested, via a clinical example, that gender identity
as we know it can organize and disguise such splitting. and I have implied that a focus on
the space between the poles can reveal and help to dismantle these splits.

So far, then, the axis of my discussion has been splitting and its interface with the gender
polarity. Other, crosscutting axes introduce other considerations. Take, for example,
desire. It, too, is dualistically organized, such that desire is gender-syntonic for men,
dystonic for women. Let me quote myself (1986) again (but cf. Benjamin, 1989, pp. 85-
133): “Our culture has two patterns for desire, one for males and another for females. The
first pattern honors, masculinizes, and makes adult the felt experience of ‘I want.’ The
second demeans, feminizes, and infantilizes the state of being wanted, the felt experience
of ‘I want to be wanted’” (p. 7). This dualism between wanting and wanting-to-be-
wanted intersects not only the contrast masculine/feminine but that between subject and
object and results in a primary contradiction that I (1986) have termed the “Subject-as-
Object” (p. 3). Subjects, in our cultural and intrapsychic representations, are men. The
subject says, “I want.” The subject, “Man,” desires. Since men represent authorship,
agency, and adulthood, women as adults are expected to be subjects too. At the same time
through splitting that occurs equally on cultural and psychological levels, women are also
expected to be objects (“object” here meaning not the intrapsychic representation of
persons, as psychoanalysis uses the term, but “thing,” as the vernacular has it). As
inanimate things, women are represented to be without desire, to be the targets of the
subject's desire. If subjects want, objects are there to be wanted.

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Women, then, are expected to be both, the subject and the object. The development of
femininity is, therefore, a compromise, almost, you might say, a compromise formation.
It is the process of learning to be both, to take yourself as an object and to expect others
to do so too, and all the while you know that you are a subject. Elizabeth's case is an
extreme version of this common dilemma, an embodiment of a primary sexual
contradiction. On the one hand, as a woman, you would want to be a woman, not a child
or a man; unwilling to weep on my shoulder, Elizabeth pronounces herself a woman. On
the other hand, if being a woman means being both the subject of your own desires and
the object of others' and therefore torn or suspended between these two positions—like
Elizabeth, who, as a little girl, feared she would have been held responsible for her
brother's sexual incursions—then perhaps you would not want to be feminine after all. So
Elizabeth stopped time when the incest ceased; often feeling like a five-year old girl, she
walks with the rolling gait of a sailor, identifies as a heterosexual woman, and generally
keeps clear of sexual intimacy.

Hierarchy and Aggression Between

Women
Examining the gendering of desire and the contrast subject/object or, better,
subjectivity/objectification returns us to gender as critiqued, because it introduces the
particularly critical notion of hierarchy. The contrast power/weakness intersects all the
others considered so far. As literary critic Armstrong (1988) describes the ambiguities of
the gender hierarchy, “gender refers not only to a polarity within a field of cultural
information but also to the asymmetry between the two poles of that opposition” (p. 2).
Or, to put it less formally and more whimsically, all genders are created equal, but some
are more equal than others.

The contrast masculine/feminine, then, interfaces not only with inherently gender-neutral
and a-hierarchical polarities but also, via the gender hierarchy characterized variously as
“male dominance,” “patriarchy,” and “sexism,” with the duality of domination and
subordination as well, as indeed do all polarities, since, according to postmodernism,
“binary oppositions are inseparable from implicit or explicit hierarchies” (Flax, 1990, p.
10). Without, however, recapitulating what the last quarter-century of gender politics has
had to say about the effects of gender hierarchy on women, I would like to consider how
this new contrast, power/weakness, can illuminate masculinity as well.

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That femininity is not essentially, but only contingently, a compromise between

subjectivity and objectification is revealed when we understand that men, too, can be the
subject-as-object. In fact, this contradiction is what they, like women in the workplace,
enter every Monday morning. On the job, most men have to follow someone else's orders
with the same alarcity as though they had thought of them themselves. There, they, too,
must be subject-as-object. They escape this contradiction only when they leave; even
then, if they are Third World or in some other way stigmatized, they are not safely free of
this sort of domination until they return to their own communities or homes. The
difference for women is that hierarchy follows them everywhere they go; most men are
“feminized” at work, but most women are stigmatized not only at home but in the
community and on the street, because they wear the contradiction of subject-as-object on
their bodies. It may be, indeed, that the only time they are safe is when they are with
other women. Even then, not only the social hierarchies women inhabit but the relational
structures of domination and subordination govern them almost as surely.

Indeed, hierarchy between women may have kept Elizabeth's treatment from going
further than it did. I had hoped that, before she terminated, we would have been able to
negotiate the paradox that she, a woman of an active intellectuality, was in a room with
me, a woman of like mind, a woman on whose shoulder she could finally permit herself
to cry without any threat to her gender, sexual identity, and sense of maturity. There were
barriers, however, to the mutual recognition of our common engagement with the
dilemma of being the subject-as-object. Although all women are created equal, some,
particularly “archaic” mothers (Dinnerstein, 1976; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1986), are more
equal than others. As Shapiro and I (Dimen and Shapiro, n.d.) have argued elsewhere,
trouble arises between women in the analytic situation because

the juncture of caring and authority in one member of the dyad, that is, the analyst,
painfully juxtaposes the most primitive dimensions of the mother/daughter relationship to
the complications of femininity's social construction. The profound longing for maternal
nurturance conflicts with an equally deep repudiation of women's subjectivity and
authority, itself rooted in, simultaneously, infantile love and hate, gender-identity
formation, and conventional sexual stereotyping [p. 15].

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Sometimes, in consequence, “a collusive pretense to a sisterly, mutually nurturant

relationship” emerges to deny “competition, contempt, envy, and devaluation” (p. 15). In
particular, the anxiety that comes with aggression between women evokes the dangers of
preoedipal maternal destructiveness, dangers that, in turn, incline women to excise
aggression from their intimacy and replace it with pseudomutuality. This excision not
only prevents them from understanding the creative potential of aggression in politics and
in analysis (Harris, 1989) but can also threaten them with merging, a common solution to
which is splitting (Lindenbaum, 1985).

Interestingly, countertransference anxiety was less of a problem when my superiority to

Elizabeth depended on my not being a woman. When I was the actively probing,
thinking, and sometimes bullying father to Elizabeth's passively resisting, vegetating, and
sometimes helpless daughter, my interpretations permitted her to engage her rage and
therefore her ambivalent identification with her father. When I was superior as a woman,
however, I became far more dangerous. Neither I nor Elizabeth could give words to the
fact that, so often, I seemed to be the better woman: not only could I think, but I was thin.
As winner of both contests, of minds and of bodies, I became the omnipotent preoedipal
mother with a monopoly on power and desire. I therefore remained, in Elizabeth's belief,
incapable of understanding the shame, despair, and neediness she felt inside her fat.
Instead, I was the mother who heaped her children's plates and insisted they eat
everything, even when, as an adolescent, Elizabeth begged to be allowed to diet.
To some extent, Elizabeth was right. Like so many women who think of themselves as fat
even though they are not, I could, indeed, imagine Elizabeth's anguish, but I could not
cathect my empathy with her despair and self-hate. Unable to own my ruthless triumph in
being the thin, thinking winner, I could neither enter into her feeling of humiliation nor
use my aggression in the service of recognizing her own desires to be the woman warrior.
Unreleased, my competitiveness, instead, became contempt, which only now finds
expression in my likening of Elizabeth to Jackie Gleason's brilliant television creation,
that gentle blowhard, the lower middle-class bus driver, Ralph Kramden. It is, in
retrospect, no wonder that Elizabeth presented as a split her plan to terminate her eight-
year, once-a-week treatment; now that she no longer had to commute to Manhattan for
therapy, she would have time to work on her obesity with a self-help group in the
suburbs.

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Difference and Transitional Space

I would like to end with some remarks about the transitional, paradoxical space between
apparent opposites, the space in which I have been playing throughout this paper.
Although the idea of a creative and pleasurable tension within dualisms is an increasingly
familiar one in feminist theory, its most useful psychoanalytic expression is, I believe,
Benjamin's (1989). The answer to splitting is never simply the recall of the forgotten pole
of any split but, in her phrase, the tension of holding “the paradox of simultaneity.” This
paradox is essential to both development and treatment and is a paradox that is potentially
pleasurable, as it represents the Winnicottian transitional space where play occurs.
Indeed, this pleasurable play was rare for Elizabeth and me, play being laborious when
splitting dominates (Winnicott, 1971), when the “inability to ‘play with reality’ …
result[s] in using reality as a defense against fantasy” (Bassin, n.d., p. 13).

The pleasure of the tension is, then, intrapsychic as well as intersubjective. Consider what
Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) say about Jacobson's redefinition of the constancy
principle: “Rather than operating in the service of keeping the level of tension as low as
possible, it is the function of the constancy principle as redefined [by Jacobson], to
establish and maintain a constant axis of tension and a certain margin for the biological
vacillations around it” (p. 321). As Greenberg and Mitchell suggest, pleasure
paradoxically inheres in the cycle of tension, its oscillating reduction and increase, not in
its reduction alone. Cyclicity, in turn, implies the oscillation between two positions, not
an unvarying habitation of one. The pleasure of play, for example, lies in the repeated
oscillation between reality and fantasy; indeed, play loses its piquancy when it settles into
either reality or fantasy, when, for example, “the nip becomes a bite,” to quote Bateson's
(1972) famous insight. To my mind, one way to describe Elizabeth's sexuality is in terms
of a frightened and pleasureless holding to one position, an asexual attachment to a
heterosexual identity that is never played out, with or against, because it serves to defend
against an inner world in which nips are bites and, as such, too terrifying to enter.

Within desire, this pleasurable oscillation takes place between want and need. Desire is
conventionally defined as wish, emergent in the psyche, and is thereby absolutely
distinguished from need, rooted in the drives (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, pp. 481-
483). I regard this definition

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however, as a false dichotomy that intensifies polarization instead of illuminating

experience. In contrast, I see the longing that characterizes desire as engaged with both
want and need. As I (1989) have written elsewhere:

Merged in infancy as different aspects of desire, need and want separate out as
development proceeds. Although they continue unconsciously to be kin to one another,
they appear culturally as unequal strangers. Wanting, associated with adulthood, active
will, and masculinity, is better than need, linked to infancy, passive dependency, and
femininity. [Need is, furthermore, frightening, recalling as it does unconscious memories
of helpless, total dependence on others for love and care.] Adults therefore try to distance
their dependency needs by regarding their longings for love, tenderness, and care as
weak, childish, “womanish” [pp. 41-42].

In other words, adults split. Via the intersection of the contrast want/need with
adulthood/infancy, activity/passivity, and masculinity/femininity, they effect what I have
termed “the gendered divorce of want from need,” with undeniable, serious consequences
for their own well-being. As they try to want and not to need, they inevitably diminish
what they try to preserve, any appetite for living. Although, then, mental health is
normally defined by the triumph of desire—defined as want—over need, I would propose
a necessary, creative tension in the space between want and need. How else, for example,
might we negotiate Fairbairn's (1952) paradox of “mature dependence” than to feel both
want and need for the other?

“Difference,” as I have been speaking of it here, is a paradoxical space that selfhood itself
inhabits. Autonomy and dependence, activity and passivity, heterosexuality and
homosexuality, body and mind, selfness and otherness, subjectivity and objectification,
superiority and inferiority, want and need, and I could go on: these apparent polarities are
but different moments of the self, the passage between which might be regarded as
pleasurable, even though when we leave the preferred polarity—when, for example, we
transit from want to need—we are, as things now stand, extraodinarily uncomfortable. To
repeat, the solution to the problem of splitting is not merely remembering the other pole
but being able to inhabit the space between them, to tolerate and even enjoy the paradox
of simultaneity.
- 348 -

What, then, of masculinity and femininity, which do not appear on this increasingly long
list of contrasts? I might have said that they, too, are but different moments of the self.
But I am not sure that they are because, in fact, I am not sure what they are. I am not
arguing, as I once did, that, since masculinity and femininity are less determinate than
conventionally thought, gender need not exist (Dimen, 1982). On the other hand, even
though the ethnographic evidence for the predominance of dual-gender systems is very
persuasive (Cucchiari, 1981), the content of gender or the number of genders in any given
system remains cross-culturally variable (Gailey, 1988), suggesting the desirability of
further investigation. I would still make the same case for the possibility and pleasures of
gender multiplicity (Dimen, 1982; see also Goldner, this issue).

Perhaps, then, it would be better to restate this position as a question: If masculinity and
femininity were to be regarded as different moments of the self, what would each
moment mean to a particular self? What is masculinity? What is femininity? In other
words, I question these terms because, although we can name everything we think they
are, on examination their meanings become uncertain. Therefore, I have used this
uncertainty epistemologically; if, this paper is asking, we assume nothing about gender
other than that it is a socially and psychologically meaningful term, what meanings can
we find for it?

At the same time, I do not take the deconstructionist train all the way to its nihilist last
stop of saying that things are only what texts say they are, that there is no ontology. I
believe in the reality of gender-identity experience and of gender as an organizer in the
psyche; as such, gender is variably meaningful, a variability that generates uncertainty,
invites inquiry, and offers richness. This “diagnosis” of uncertainty should not, however,
be regarded as a failure of method or theory. Instead, it is a sign of what gender is.
Gender, as an internally varied experience, is sometimes central and definitive,
sometimes marginal and contingent. Consequently, it is fundamentally and inalterably
paradoxical (Goldner, this issue). Harris's (1991) phrasing expresses well a
conceptualization of gender's ambiguity and complexity, with which I agree:

gender is neither reified nor simply liminal and evanescent. Rather, in any one person's
experience, gender may occupy both positions. Gender may in some contexts be thick
and reified, as plausibly real as anything in our character. At other moments, gender may
seem

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porous and insubstantial. Furthermore, there may be multiple genders or embodied

selves. For some individuals these gendered experiences may feel integrated, ego-
syntonic. For others, the gender contradictions and alternatives seem dangerous and
frightening and so are maintained as splits in the self, dissociated part-objects [p. 212].

To put it more figuratively, if life is a sea, then gender is an island. Sometimes people
drown in the sea, sometimes they are stranded on land. I am arguing that we need the sea
as much as we need the land, and, to push this Winnicottian metaphor further, we also
need the seashore, where land and water merge (Winnicott, 1971).

In other words, I am suggesting that the notion of transitional space can help us
comprehend what our theory has heretofore been able to handle only by splitting. Gender
identity, born in the space of difference between masculinity and femininity, always
retains the marks of its birth. Therefore, although gender identity has come to be seen in
developmental theory as finalizing differentiation, I would suggest, counterintuitively,
that it does more: at one and the same time gender identity seals the package of self and
preserves all the self must lose. It serves to bridge the archaic depths, the Impossible that
underlies human creativity (McDougall, 1985, p. 8), and the self, the psychic agency that
authors creation. Not only, as Fast has it (1984), does gender identity incline us to look
for what we are not in the opposite-sexed other. Alternatingly definitive and liminal,
gender identity also permits us to find in ourselves the overinclusiveness we have had to
renounce so that we can also recognize it in the other, of whatever gender. This view of
gender tracks the progress Fast charts from “gender differentiation” from
“overinclusiveness” to gender identity, conceptualizes how access to the overinclusive
depths of the self might be conserved even as renunciation entails their loss, and
addresses “the capacity to identify with the opposite sex as a fundamental element in the
mobilization of sexual desire” (McDougall, 1980, pp. 149-150).

I am ending, then, where I began, on a moment of ambiguity, because the space of

paradox is where psychoanalysis works (Boris, 1986). There are many instances of
paradox in the clinical situation. At any given moment, for instance, countertransference
may be complementary and/or concordant (Racker, 1985, pp. 135-137). Gender's
habitation of transitional space is another instance. The analyst may be a good mother
and/or a bad one; a preoedipal and an oedipal father; sometimes a sister,

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a transference Elizabeth and I explored, and sometimes a brother, a transference that,

unfortunately, we did not examine and that did not occur to me at the time. Imprisoned
not only within my own gender but within a sense of femininity that splits aggression
from nurturing, I could not imagine then what seems likely now, that my inquiry may
have represented to Elizabeth the early violation she suffered at her brother's hands.

There is, as well, a final instance of ambiguity: we are not always gendered; sometimes,
as the orthodox position traditionally has it, the analyst's gender is irrelevant. Analysts
dwell not only in the paradox of being sometimes female, sometimes male, but also in
that of feeling and being construed as variably gendered and gender-free. Thus we enter
the countertransferential counterpart of our patients' experience, a paradox captured by
Boris's (1986) exemplification of Bion's approach: “If the 10:00 [a.m.] patient is one we
know to be a married man in his thirties, we know too much, for how are we to attend the
four-year-old girl who has just walked in?” (p. 177).

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179-194.

Racker, H. (1985), Transference and Countertransference. London: Maresfield Library.

[→]

Scott, J.W. (1988), Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the uses of post-

structuralist theory for feminism. Fem. Studies, 14: 33-50.

Winnicott, D.W. (1971), Playing and Reality. New York: Penguin. [→]
Reply to Mitchell

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Repetition? I think not. Or, at least, it's not I who repeat, but gender. Let me explain.

What Mitchell's Freud deemed conclusive is not final; whether sexuality necessarily seals
the distinction between self and other is an open question, not a quasi-fact. As far as I can
tell, Mitchell construes sexual difference thus because of its procreative function, not its
unconscious or cultural meaning. Her argument—that sexuality's ultimate purpose is to
facilitate the conjugation of two engendered beings so that they may “engender”—not
only effaces desire, it also reprises the least creative, dialectical, and psychoanalytic part
of Freud, that is, his scientific wish to ground psychology in biology, a project that
Mitchell elsewhere disavows.

I do not believe that repeated appeal to Freud (one of Mitchell's rhetorical strategies)
adjudicates any given argument. However, I want to point out that my project of
understanding sexual difference as in tension with selfhood, not as the guardian either of
the psyche or of the species, is one that Freud himself also inaugurated but could not
carry out because he lacked the notion of “gender” as a simultaneously psychological and
cultural category. With sexuality reframed by gender, however, a feminist-informed
psychoanalysis is positioned to complete that very project. Instead, then, of arguing that
our ancestors said it all before us, I suggest we steal the Promethean fire and forge ahead.
That you were once a gleam in someone's eye doesn't mean there can't be anything new
under the sun.

Pun in hand, let us return to gender. Mitchell's reading of Freud proposes a

developmental line in which (sexual) difference emerges from sameness. I am countering
this argument for linearity with a more dialectical interpretation of gender identity
(whether ontologically or

—————————————

© 1991 The Analytic Press

- 359 -

phenomenologically conceived, and I don't believe that, in psychoanalysis, you can

systematically split ontology and phenomenology as Mitchell tries to do): I am
suggesting that the self-other distinction, not sexual difference, registers (among other
things) the figure of absolute difference against a ground of seamless sameness. If gender
seals this distinction, it does so by juxtaposing difference and sameness, giving them
equal weight and thereby generating a paradox that makes sex, and creativity, possible.
Indeed, could this juxtaposing of difference and sameness not account for that miracle of
desire, the strange familiarity of recognition one finds in love, the wonder that “even
though you are a stranger to me, even though I didn't know you when I was a little child,
it's as if I've known you all my life”?

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Money, Love, and Hate: Contradiction and Paradox in Psychoanalysis

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

The way analysts talk, behave, and feel in relation to money is replete with an uneasiness
that is the surface manifestation of a deep, psychocultural contradiction between money
and love that cannot be thought, willed, or wished away. For the clinical project to
succeed, this contradiction can and must find a temporary, reparative resolution in the
paradox between love and hate. This essay takes up the question of money in the spirit of
the Marx-Freud tradition, in postmodern perspective, and through several languages, not
only psychoanalysis, but social theory, anthropology, and less centrally, feminist theory
as well. It addresses money's unconscious and emotional resonance, and its cultural
meanings; money's clinical and theoretical vicissitudes in the context of cultural
symbolism and economic change, as well as the class position of psychoanalysis and the
psychology of class itself; and money's relational meaning in transference and
countertransference.

Since most psychoanalytic discourse about money takes place informally, it seems
appropriate to begin in anecdotal style. When I first mentioned to colleagues my intention
to write about this topic, I was greeted with what you might call a less than enthusiastic
response. “Why are you talking about money?” asked one, quite startled. Another found
the proposed title a bit inappropriate and wondered if it oughtn't be changed to something
like “Between Commerce and Trust.” It's almost as though money were in fact not quite a
suitable topic for our distinguished community. Something we don't talk about, at least in
public? A little unsavory, perhaps? Or vulgar?

—————————————

Dr. Dimen is Clinical Professor of Psychology, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy

and Psychoanalysis, New York University, and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the
Humanities at New York University. She is also Faculty, Adelphi University, Derner
Institute Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

© 1994 The Analytic Press, Inc.

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This was not the first time I'd met with psychoanalytic unease about money. Consider Dr.
French, as I am calling him, a colleague to whom, many years ago, I referred a patient's
husband. The man had a cash business (no, he wasn't dealing drugs) and, like his wife,
paid his analyst in cash, just as anyone in his subculture did whenever buying anything.
Shocked, Dr. French shook his hands as if to rid them of dirt and said to me with an
embarrassed smile, “It's, well, money just doesn't belong in the consulting room.”

It begins to look as though Freud was right, doesn't it? Recall his (1913) ubiquitously
quoted observation: “Money matters are treated by civilized people in the same way as
sexual matters—with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy” (p. 131).

Freud and his contemporaries might not have shared Dr. French's feelings about cold,
hard cash. If they had, they probably would have written about it; to my knowledge, the
only classical reference to the matter is Abraham's (1921) certainly accurate diagnosis of
severe anality in people who insist on paying not only analysts' bills but even the smallest
sums by check (p. 378). Nevertheless, our forebears, themselves uneasy about money,
recognized the deep desire that its dilemmas simply vanish. They thought hard about
money's relation to development, character, and pathology. Abraham's (1921) and Jones's
(1918) attention to its place in anal characterology develops Freud's (1908) original
insights about its psychosexuality, “the sexual and especially the anal erotic significance
of money” (Aron and Hirsch, 1992, pp. 39-40), ideas that are certainly familiar enough
and to which I return later. Ferenczi (1914) augments this line of reasoning by assigning
money a role in development; he argues that the adult attachment to money represents a
socially useful reaction formation to repressed anal eroticism. Fenichel (1938) suggests
that anal-erogeneity is made use of, and strengthened, by a social system based on the
accumulation of wealth and competitiveness.

The approach to money taken by Ferenczi and Fenichel was political as well as
psychoanalytic. Ferenczi (1914), for example, concludes that the “capitalistic instinct …
contains … [both] an egoistic and an analerotic component”; standing at the disposal of
the reality principle, “the delight in gold and the possession of money … also satisfies the
pleasure-principle” (p. 88). Fenichel (1938) points out that what he identifies as the drive
to amass wealth is born with capitalism, adding that in precapitalist, tribal society it did
not exist, while, in a future classless

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society, it would have disappeared (p. 108). They were not the only classically trained
psychoanalysts who wanted to unite two of the three great and diverging arteries of 19th-
century European thought, Marxism and psychoanalysis (to put them in their
chronological order; the third and temporally intermediate one is Darwinian evolutionary
theory). While it is unlikely and probably not desirable that these two grand theories will
meld into a single perspective encompassing nothing short of human life itself,
nevertheless the dialogue between them has been fruitful and remains compelling. Not
only Ferenczi and Fenichel but such luminaries as Edith Jacobson, George Gero, and
Annie Reich received their intellectual formation during a time heady with progressive
politics and psychoanalytic discovery. While some, like Wilhelm Reich and Erich
Fromm, kept striving for synthesis, others abandoned their politics, a yielding impelled
more by their Holocaust-driven escape to an anticommunist United States (with its
medicalized and anti-intellectual psychoanalysis) than by the inherent incompatibility of
two cherished and imaginative comprehensions of human possibility (Jacoby, 1983).

Taking up the question of money in the spirit of the Marx-Freud tradition (a project
already called for by Rendon, 1991) but adding a postmodern perspective, I consider
money's vicissitudes in the psychoanalytic relationship a topic that is theoretically
immediate as well. Freud's discussions about money as a practical matter (1913) and
money as a psychological matter (e.g., 1908) may appear in separate essays (see Whitson,
N.D., p. 3). But their distance in print represents only the map of his thought, not their
lived geography. In the light of recent psychoanalytic and social thought, money's clinical
and theoretical locations turn out to be more proximate than might at first appear.
Developments in psychoanalytic theory—such as the Kleinian understanding of love and
hate, the Winnicottian notion of paradox, the interpersonal assessment of
countertransference, and contemporary relational arguments about the simultaneity of
one-person and two-person psychologies—and developments in social theory—such as
social constructionism, critical theory, and postmodernism—permit a synthetic and
evolving interpretation of money in the psychoanalytic relationship that is both clinically
relevant and theoretically responsible.

On reflection it becomes clear that a theory of money cannot derive from psychoanalysis
alone. Consider Freud's only partially theorized perspective. His ideas on the
psychosexuality of money, which predate his instructions about its handling in the
clinical setting, in essence constitute

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the sole intellectual frame for his practical considerations. Money is, Freud (1913) says,
to be approached in the consulting room with the same matter-of-factness as sex, for
while money has a narcissistic dimension, being “in the first instance … a medium for
self-preservation and for obtaining power, … powerful sexual factors are [also] involved
in the value set on it” (p. 131). The way analysts address it ought then to serve
psychotherapy. By speaking with frankness, Freud says, he furthers the educative project
of psychoanalysis; he shows patients that “he himself has cast off false shame on these
topics, by voluntarily telling them the price at which he values his time” (p. 131).

As for the rest, for the principles on which Freud bases his policy of leasing his time and
setting his fee, he speaks from “ordinary good sense” (p. 131). He speaks as a practical
man of the world who must consider his material existence by charging for all time
leased and regularly collecting his debts (pp. 131-132). The arrangement of leasing one's
time, he observes, is “taken as a matter of course for teachers of music or languages in
good society” (p. 126). He is faithful to his beliefs, not only his own theory of treatment
but what is closely related, his ethics. In elaborating his ethical position, he reviews the
behavior of other professionals, concurring in, or distinguishing his own practice from,
theirs. He has, he tells us, desisted from taking patients without charge or extending
courtesy to colleagues' kin for three reasons. For one thing, free treatment stirs up
resistances to, say, the erotic transference in young women and to the paternal
transference in young men, who rebel against any “obligation to feel grateful” (p. 132).
For another, charging a fee preempts countertransferential resentment of patients'
selfishness and exploitativeness (pp. 131-132). Finally, he finds it “more respectable and
ethically less objectionable” to avoid the pretense to philanthropy customary in the
medical profession and to acknowledge straightforwardly his interests and needs (p. 131).

The common sense from which Freud reasons is, however, like any informal system of
“folk” or cultural knowledge, embedded in unexamined presuppositions. It combines, in
effect, the expectations and prejudices customary for his class with his personal needs
and predilections, and thus contains unarticulated ideas about issues that are only now
being theorized in psychoanalysis—such as the patient's experience of the analyst's
subjectivity (Aron, 1991) or the relation between one-person and two-person
psychologies (Ghent, 1989; Aron and Hirsch, 1992)—or have, only since Freud's time,
been anatomized by social

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thought, like the economic and political place of the helping professions, the social class
of analysts and patients, and the psychology of class (Sennett and Cobb; 1972,
Ehrenreich, 1989). Such vantage points being absent either from classical theory or from
psychoanalytic thought altogether, it is not surprising that, until recently, so few analysts
have considered the matter of money systematically. Whatever the other resistances to
this topic (and I get back to them shortly), the intellectual tools to study it have been
missing.

I want here to refurbish the intellectual tool kit by conversing in several languages, not
only psychoanalysis but social theory, anthropology, and, less centrally, feminist theory
as well. I decode money's unconscious and emotional resonance, as well as its cultural
meanings. I track its clinical and theoretical vicissitudes in terms of cultural symbolism
and economic change, as well as the class position of psychoanalysts and the psychology
of class itself. Through both an examination of Freud's dicta and feelings about money
and a clinical example, I render its relational meaning in transference and
countertransference.

Money in Psychoanalytic Question

If Freud and his contemporaries were laconic on this matter, his followers have become
exponentially voluble as the psychoanalytic century has worn on. The bibliographical
entries in the anthology The Last Taboo: Psychoanalysis and Money (Krueger, 1986) are
few and far between until the 1960s, when they begin to cluster; and then in the 1970s
and 1980s they positively blizzard. Here we are in the 1990s, trying to climb out of what
has been termed a “recession” but has really been a depression, which has nipped at, if
not bitten into, the practices and pocketbooks and psyches of most psychoanalysts in
private practice. Just in the last three years, there have appeared two more books on the
question, one a general anthology (Klebanow and Lowenkopf, 1991) and the other about
the fee (Herron and Welt, 1992). All cover quite a range of topics, from fee setting,
personal philosophies about fee policies, and the relation between gender and money to
managed health care and the effects of free treatment.

The snowballing discussion of money has a history, part of which is cultural.

Psychoanalysis's “last taboo” fell during a period when a lot of other icons were being
broken too, as, simultaneously, the class position of professionals was subtly but
permanently shifting. If the 1960s (the

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“we decade”) saw the blossoming of sexual expression and the 1970s of narcissism (the
“me decade”), then the 1980s (the “greed decade”) made the admission of the desire for
money and the accumulation of wealth at least more common if not more socially
acceptable. But, we might ask, acceptable to whom? Surely not stockbrokers and
corporate raiders. Wall Street's expression of greed may well have had to do with the
wildest financial party since the roaring twenties, a party perhaps even more avaricious
than the age of the robber barons. But people who trade in money are supposed to be on
good terms with selfishness; helping professionals are not. Instead, they are supposed to
value money only for its ability to serve a modest standard of living. What was surprising
in the 1980s, then, was the seemingly sudden acquaintance with covetousness on the part
of professionals.

Psychoanalysts' heightened interest in money, not to mention their greed, had, however,
more than a decade behind it. It was, in fact, a response to, and expression of, a long,
slow slide in their socioeconomic fortunes. The 1960s were a watershed in a century-long
trend; until then, the gap between rich and poor in the United States had been steadily
decreasing. After that, the gap began to yawn. The middle class, from which traditionally
have come most analysts and analysands, began to shrink, indeed, to decline; presently,
middle-class people can no longer count on owning their homes or sending their children
to college without impoverishing themselves (Newman, 1988; Ehrenreich, 1989). By the
same token, the insurance reimbursements that subsidized their psychoanalytic treatment
have dwindled, bruising both those in need of therapeutic help and those who make their
living by providing it.

This decline in middle-class fortunes coincided with a boom in the helping professions,
which in turn further reduced professionals' share of the pie. The extension of parity to
psychologists and social workers by insurance companies, the increasing participation of
social workers in the psychoanalytic profession, the proliferation of “media shrinks,” and
the flood of self-help books—these belong to the expansion of psychotherapy to all levels
of the middle class, even to the working class. Part of the democratizing trend in
psychoanalysis (Havens, 1989, p. 142; Zaphiropoulos, 1991, p. 242), this growth also
belonged to a cultural change that might be called the “therapization of America.” The
evolution of a therapy-sensitive culture in which people are knowledgeable about, and
receptive to, psychotherapy, in which consumers assume the right to question and choose
among all medical authorities, and in

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which psychotherapy is packaged by managed health care has, ironically, also reduced
analysts' incomes. The more competition there is among providers of mental health care,
the fewer the patients and the lower the fees for each privately practicing analyst
(Chodoff, 1991, pp. 254-256; Drellich, 1991, pp. 159-161; Aron and Hirsch, 1992); the
more knowledge consumers have, the more they question analysts' authority and resist
the imposition of what have sometimes seemed to be arbitrarily high fees (see also
Herron and Welt, 1992, p. 171).

As psychoanalytic pockets slowly emptied, psychoanalytic journals began to fill up with

articles on money. Comparisons would be interesting. In other countries, say, Sweden,
where the middle class remains or has become economically secure, as it was in Freud's
time, are these issues handled differently? Are they addressed systematically? Or are they
ignored, as, in fact, they were in Europe and the United States until, for all intents and
purposes, 30 years ago? Or take the obverse: will psychoanalysts in Eastern Europe begin
formally to consider the clinical and theoretical problems money presents as their
practices leave the public domain of (medical) hospital care and enter the private market?

The Disturbance of Money

In responding, if only unconsciously, to this recent (and perhaps permanent) downturn in
the American economy, however, analysts are noticing merely what has been there all
along. In saying this, I am revising Durkheim's (1930) classic sociological position,
codified in his paradigmatic study of suicide. Durkheim (1938) drew a parallel between
medical and social science: if studying illness reveals the nature of health (as, indeed,
Freud himself, 1905, argued), then, he said, studies of social pathology should reveal the
basis for social order and hence the true nature of social life. That social life is normally
orderly, however, can no longer go unquestioned. A deconstructive, postmodern
approach, which, perhaps not strangely, finds a harbinger in Freud, suggests otherwise.
Taking a Foucauldian tack (Flax, 1990, p. 36), I argue that studying social disorder
reveals instead the normal lines of discontinuity and conflict that are the fault lines along
which cultural evolution and changes in inner life occur.
So with money and psychoanalysis: just as we learn from “hysterical misery” about
“common unhappiness” (Freud, 1895), so if we look into disrupted economics, we come
upon money's ever-present, complicated

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meaning in psychoanalysis and, thence the normal difficulties of the work. Several recent
papers teach us a lot about the underrecognized countertransferential effects of analysts'
economic dependence on their patients that these parlous times make visible. While their
work allows us to see that you and your patients want you to be as invulnerable as a
tenured full professor, you actually feel about as secure as a part-time adjunct. Yet,
analysts have been so uncomfortable with their own feelings of need and greed (Aron and
Hirsch, 1992, p. 255) that they have tended to treat money as a psychological problem for
patients and merely a practical one for analysts (Whitson, N.D., p. 3). Indeed, analysts'
dystonic relation to their own dependence may constitute the biggest single
counterresistance in regard to money (Aron and Hirsch, 1992, p. 243; Whitson, N.D., p.
3). Herron and Welt (1992) concur and develop the theme: “The issue … isn't that greed
exists [among psychoanalysts]; rather, it is how that greed is responded to; how it is
aroused, frustrated, or met” (p. 48; see also Shainess, 1991).

Analysts' pecuniary need of their patients, however, is not only a discreate

countertransference problem. As we can see from Freud's by now well-known financial
preoccupations, it is an inevitable thorn in their sides that demands as much inspection as
their other basic needs vis-à-vis patients, their needs for, for example, love and respect,
power and gratitude. Throughout his 17-year correspondence with Fliess (Masson, 1985),
Freud writes periodically about his money-related worries, as well as about the times
when his income feels to him adequate. It's quite clear not only that his cash flow is
uneven but that this unpredictability breeds cynicism. For example, he prefers American
patients for their hard currency (Gay, 1988) and writes, on January 24, 1895, “Mrs. M.
will be welcome; if she brings money and patience with her, we shall do a nice analysis.
If in the process there are some therapeutic gains for her, she too can be pleased”
(Masson, 1985, p. 107). Notice also his reference to his wellborn, well-to-do patients as
“goldfish,” once on September 21, 1899 (p. 374) and another time on September 27,
1899: “The goldfish (L. von E., and S. by birth and as such a distant relative of my wife)
has been caught, but will still enjoy half her freedom until the end of October because she
is remaining in the country” (p. 375). Such mordant humor ought not gainsay Freud's
famous largess toward some of his patients, for example, the Wolf Man (1918). Still,
since he complains, on September 15, 1898, of sleeping during his “afternoon analyses”
(Masson, 1985, p. 303), can we not imagine that, sometimes, the most

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desirable capacity of a patient's purse may have detoxified her less alluring capacity to
make him nod off? In any event, Freud's pervasive, if intermittent, focus on money and
its ups and downs of anxiety, cynicism, optimism and the like suggests that the roller
coaster of comfort and fear about income so familiar to contemporary analysts is doubly
determined: the product of hard times, this anxiety may also be an aggravated variant of a
pattern actually inherent to the work not only of psychoanalysts but, as we see in a
moment, of most helping professionals.

In the last generation or two, analysts have had a far smoother economic ride than Freud,
and those made anxious by money were more likely to be in the beginning stages of
practice. For example, at the beginning of the affluent 1980s, when my practice was
relatively new and supplemented by an academic position, I made my anxiety known to
my supervisor, a very senior and well-known analyst of interpersonal persuasion. His
reply was, “You can do your best work only when it's become a matter of indifference to
you whether you gain or lose an hour.” While he seemed to be saying that one can work
well only when money is out of the picture, I would now put it another way. It's not that
money is relevant to analytic work only when times are bad. When times are good, it's
relevant by its absence; then, we're like TAPS, which is what the disabled call the rest of
us, “temporarily abled persons.” From our present perspective of financial doubt, then,
we might wonder whether the mid-century lack of competition among analysts was
simply a constant or, instead, an active agent of countertransference. For example, if
financial uncertainty now unsettles analysts, can financial security make them smug?
Was it such smug sincerity, as well as, perhaps, character, that led another prominent
analyst, during the ironically but wistfully termed “golden years” of psychoanalysis (the
late 1950s/early 1960s to the stock market crash of 1987), to decline patients older than
40 because he thought them less able to change? Can complacency distort analysts'
respect for patients' neediness, transforming empathy into pity? Could such a
countertransference amplify the vexing popular mistrust of psychoanalysis itself?

These questions intersect another vital clinical issue, the countertransference symbolism
of money. Do psychoanalysts not face a dilemma of safety that money actually
symbolizes? If feeling unsafe threatens to impede the analyst's confidence and hence
competence, is it also possible to feel too safe (Greenberg, 1986)? There's a necessary
insecurity: psychoanalysts cannot guarantee their method will work, for success

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depends on a relationship being established and maintained, and the sustenance of

relatedness is a day-to-day affair (P. Bromberg, personal communication). More. Current
emphases on clinical process, on the importance of not knowing too precisely where you
are in a session suggest a need for analysts to tolerate a certain amount of danger (Bion,
1980; Eigen, 1986). Indeed, they develop Freud's insistence on not pressing the patient
for linear sense: In explicating the value of the fundamental rule, Freud (1913) cautions,
“A systematic narrative should never be expected and nothing should be done to
encourage it” (p. 136). Only in this atmosphere of unsafety can we expect to come upon
the new and/or the forgotten. Hence money's rollercoaster effect becomes a convenient,
rationalized, and inevitable container for the nonrationality and uncertainty of
psychoanalytic process.

While not arguing that the uncertainty of earning a living in capitalist society guarantees
the feeling of risk necessary to analytic process, I insist that the anxiety money generates
cannot be banished from the consulting room. On the contrary, it is endemic to the
particular sort of work analysts do (see, e.g., Chodoff, 1986). Analysts, it turns out, are
not alone in their unease about money matters. They share it with everyone else in their
class, a class called the “professional-managerial class” (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich,
1979; Ehrenreich, 1989) that came into being between 1870 and 1920 (the birth period,
note, of psychoanalysis, as well as the robber barons). Professional-managerial work
ranges from law and medicine to middle management, from social work and
psychotherapy to education, from academe to journalism. It entails what is crudely called
mental labor but is better characterized as labor that combines intellect and drive with
considerable, although not total, autonomy and self-direction (Ehrenreich, 1989, pp. 38,
78).

Professional-managerial work is not only a livelihood. It is also a means of power and

prestige, and a shaper of personal identity. Because it involves conceptualizing other
people's work and lives (Ehrenreich, 1989, p. 13), it confers authority and influence.
Indeed, it was arguably the chisel that the then-emerging middle class used “to carve out”
its own socioeconomic place, its own “occupational niche that would be closed both to
the poor and to those who were merely rich” (p. 78). Finally, by providing the
opportunity for creativity and discovery in regard not only to one's work but also to one
of its chief instruments, one's self, it enters—indeed, expresses, reflects, and generates—
one's identity.

This kind of work renders the professional-managerial class an elite.

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But, and this is Barbara Ehrenreich's main point in Fear of Falling, it is a highly anxious
elite. For one thing, members of this class know that their power, privilege and authority
can make their clients envy, resent, and hate them (and, analysts would add, idealize
them). For another, they, like their clients, also sometimes suspect, even if secretly, that
because they do not produce anything visible or tangible, they do not actually do
anything real; as such, not only does their work seem worthless, it also cannot match their
own or their clients' idealization. Because their only “capital,” so to speak, is, as
Ehrenreich writes, “knowledge and skill, or at least the credentials imputing skill and
knowledge” (p. 15), their high status is insecurely founded. She continues, unlike real,
material capital, skill and knowledge cannot be used to hedge inflation, nor can they be
bequeathed. They must be renewed by and in each person through hard work, diligence,
and self-discipline. Consequently, members of the professional-managerial class, like
anyone in any class but the highest, fear the misfortunes that have overnight sent even
middle-income people sliding into homelessness and indignity, a fear that Melanie Klein
and Joan Riviere (1964), to whom I shall return, liken to that of children who imagine
being orphaned or beggared as punishment for their unconscious aggression (p. 109, n1).
They fear falling through the economic and moral safety net, hence Ehrenreich's aptly
titled Fear of Falling. They fear “falling from grace,” the title of another book by Kathy
Newman (1988) on a similar topic; they fear losing their financial status, their elite
position of authority, the work they love and their identity as moral, beneficent persons.
Rooted in the very work of professionals, then, this anxiety about felt fraudulence and
looming loss is actually built into the role of analyst in a class-structured society.

Class, Countertransference, and

Alienation
Like all social institutions, class has powerful unconscious resonance. In the most general
sense, class refers to the material aspect of society and the way it divides and joins people
along a ladder of economic and political power. By definition, class is hierarchical; the
relation between classes is determined by their economic and political superiority or
inferiority to one another. To put it more crudely, class distinctions are about money and
its unequal distribution in society. Conversely, money represents the veritable or potential
differences in power among individuals and among groups. It indicates not only
differences of class but those

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constituting other hierarchies, like race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, and so on.
Money, in other words, is symbolic of the fault lines webbing and cracking a
psychological and social reality in which difference is the nucleus of hierarchy (Dimen-
Schein, 1977, pp. 88-92). The hierarchy of privilege organized by class, status
distinctions, the unequal amounts of money people have—these trigger not only greed
but envy, excite questions of self-esteem, invite oedipal competitions.

The fault lines of class and other hierarchies show up systematically in transference and
countertransference. To return to our exemplar: if, in his most despondent moments,
Freud felt greed and cynicism toward his “goldfish,” he was unreflectively contemptuous
of the middle class and benevolently condescending toward those poorer than he.
Addressing the petit bourgeois reluctance to pay for psychoanalysis, Freud (1913) argued
that the restored health and increased “efficiency and earning capacity” afforded by
treatment made therapy less expensive than it appeared. Therefore, he concluded; “We
are entitled to say that the patients have made a good bargain. Nothing in life is so
expensive as illness—and stupidity” (p. 133).
As for the poor, he opined that the best psychoanalysis could supply was “a practical
therapy of … the kind which … used to be dispensed by the Emperor Joseph II” (p. 133).
Known as the “emperor of the beggars” (1780-1790), Joseph, in good Enlightenment
fashion, used on occasion to live among the poor so he could come to know at firsthand
what they needed (C. Fink, personal communication). It would not, of course, have
occurred to either the emperor or the physician what we take for granted today, that poor
people might actually have been able to articulate at least some of their own needs. Still,
while Freud (1913) regrets the inaccessibility of psychoanalysis to the impecunious, he
acknowledges that “one does occasionally come across deserving people who are
helpless from no fault of their own, in whom unpaid treatment does not meet with any of
the obstacles [including secondary gain] that I have mentioned and in whom it leads to
excellent results” (p. 133). Nevertheless, in his relation to such poor patients as he might
have taken on, his paternalism would have had to be analyzed. That it would not have
been is a foregone conclusion. As we have known from his unconscious sexism, the
emotional structure of socioeconomic hierarchy does not appear on his map or on that of
classical psychoanalysis.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, one might see in Freud's intermittent dyspepsia about
his patients a symptom of what has been called the

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“money neurosis” suffered by the bourgeoisie in Vienna and other European cities in the
late 19th century (Warner, 1991). From a political perspective, one could label it
“classism,” or class prejudice. If we put psychoanalysis and politics together, however,
what we discern in Freud's heart is the social malaise called “alienation.” What I mean by
alienation is not so much estrangement or disaffection but the cause of these feelings.
Hear, for example, the dysphoria of a supervisee who reported thinking, during a difficult
session, “I wouldn't be sitting here if I weren't doing it for the money.” His guilt,
bewilderment, loss, hate, and self-hate proceed from the way money, which permitted
him to do his work, nevertheless stole from him its pleasures and meaning. When money
is exchanged in a capitalist economy, both buyer and seller—patient and analyst—come
to be like commodities, or things, to one another because they enter into relation with
each other through the mediation of a third thing (money) that, simultaneously, separates
them. As money wedges them apart, so it estranges them from themselves, a distancing
that creates anxiety in both (Amar, 1956, p. 286; Marx, 1964, p. 113; Mészáros, 1975, pp.
178, 186). This theft of the personal satisfaction you take in work and in your relationship
to those with whom you work is alienation, the process by which your labor and its fruit
become alien to you because of the very socioeconomic structure that lets them be (a
defining point that deserves particular emphasis here because it tends to be omitted from
psychoanalytic discussions [e.g., Fromm, 1966; see Struik, 1964, pp. 50-52; Mészáros,
1975, p. 36]).
Alienation, in short, is the estrangement of people from their activity, their products,
other people, and themselves (Ollman, 1976, p. 135). An occupational hazard of modern
life, it is core to psychoanalysis. As Masud Khan (1979) writes in the preface to
Alienation in Perversions: “In the nineteenth century two persons dictated the destiny of
the twentieth century, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Each … diagnosed the sickness of
the western Judaeo-Christian cultures: Marx in terms of the alienated person in society;
Freud, the person alienated from himself” (p. 9). And, of course, we would add today,
“herself.” Elsewhere, Khan (1972) calls psychoanalysis the “inevitable result of a long
sociological process of the evolution and alienation of the individual” in the West.
Freud's genius, he declares, was “to evaluate the situation and give it a new frame in
which [the alienated] could find [their] symbolic, therapeutic speech and expression” (p.
131). Extending Khan's point, I think of psychoanalysis

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as the perfect therapy for a culture of alienation, for in it you pay a stranger to recover
yourself. Paradoxically, psychotherapy that is bought and sold under conditions of
alienation generates a “dis-ease” in both the person who pays the stranger and the
stranger who is paid, and that needs treatment too. In a way, then, my goal is to explicate
how alienation filters into transference and countertransference and how clinical process,
by exploiting it, transcends it in a momentary, utopian, and reparative fashion.

Commerce and Psychoanalysis

This explication requires a further and ethnographic inquiry into money's cultural and
psychological significance. As the agent of alienation, money has acquired many kinds of
meaning. One psychoanalyst observes that it “is esteemed, yet … condemned” and traces
this familiar ambivalence to twin polarities—one, the dichotomy between the “altruistic,
selfless, humanistic sacrificing ethic” of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the
acquisitional, individualist values of capitalism; and two, Puritanism's conflict, in which
hard work and thrift are valued, but their material rewards may not be enjoyed (Krueger,
1986, p. 4). Another notes the contradiction between the philanthropic inclinations of
psychoanalysis and the custom of fee for service (Gutheil, 1986, p. 182); he thus echoes
Freud's admonition that the analyst be immune to demands for charity routinely placed on
the medical profession lest they obstruct one's ability to make a living.

But what is money? Money is so deeply embedded in our culture, daily life and history
that it tends to stay just out of definition's reach. Indeed as many years of teaching
anthropology showed me, one's own culture is often intangible until it is compared with
another. Like any institution, psychoanalysis has its own subculture. Let me, then, switch
the conversational perspective once again and look at money anthropologically. A most
important conclusion from the lengthy anthropological debate about money is that money
objects are not present in all cultures (Dimen-Schein, 1977, pp. 197-199). Money, in
other words, is not cultural bedrock. Instead, it comes into being under particular
political, economic, and/or ecological conditions. For example, under some
circumstances, the circulation of goods and services does not require money but instead is
carried out by barter or by conventionalized equivalences. In other situations, different
kinds of money have evolved, varying

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not only in substance (rock, shell, bead, metal, paper) but in their use and function.

After much cross-cultural comparison, then, anthropologists have come up with a

universal definition of money, that, spelled out, helps us see, as if anew, money's
meaning in psychoanalytic context: Money is any material object that performs one or
more of the following five functions—a medium of exchange, a standard of value, a unit
of account, a store of value, and a standard of deferred payments. While there may be
different objects serving each different function in any one society, the first function
tends to be controlling; whatever is the medium of exchange likely serves the other
functions too. Finally, money itself may be a commodity, as it is in capitalism, where you
buy it with what we call interest, that is, with more of the same (LeClair and Schneider,
1968, p. 468).

According to this less than exciting definition then, there's nothing mystical about money;
it is, among other things, a matter of commerce. As Freud saw, however, this plain fact
notoriously renders clinicians uneasy. After all these years, psychotherapists still “want to
nurture their image as beneficent purveyors of good rather than as individuals who are at
least partially involved in commerce” (Tulipan, 1986, p. 79), suffering its alienating
effects as much as their customers. Even the notion of fee for service goes gently by the
rough implications of trade, civilly suggesting the fair-and-squareness of being paid for
the work you do so that you, like your patients, may use what you earn by your labor to
buy what you need to live. But commerce? No. That we find tawdry and petty, the very
opposite of the trust and professionalism on which psychoanalysis depends (Herron and
Welt, 1992, p. 4).

Still, commerce is a cornerstone of the psychoanalytic edifice. It is not the only

cornerstone, but it is a primary one. We sell our services to make our living. Oh, yes,
sometimes analysts see patients for free. Some even argue that it may be necessary not to
charge certain kinds of patients in order to treat them at all (Jacobs, 1986). But even to
say “for free” suggests the norm, that analysts engage in trade (see also Horner, 1991, p.
177).

Without money, then, there's no psychoanalysis at all. But with it comes an unavoidable
anxiety, an anxiety to which I attribute my colleagues' initial disgruntlement, as well as
Dr. French's shock. Indeed, I would be quite surprised were anyone able to think through
this topic without a moment or two of anxiety. Just in case that anxiety has in the
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present instance proved elusive, perhaps I may offer some assistance. Think, for instance,
of that moment when you learn that your analytic patient who comes four times a week
has been fired and will have to discontinue treatment. That first dip on the Cyclone at
Coney Island has nothing on it. Or turn it around: You have taken on a new patient at
your very highest fee for a long-term analysis. To take a milder example, you find out
that a colleague's practice has doubled while yours has only maintained, or even dropped
an hour or two. Suppose it's even the reverse, and you feel merely the queasiness of
dismayed triumph: You have got more hours, income, or both than a friend who badly
needs the money.

Are these suggestions extreme? Perhaps there are clinicians to whom the loss (or gain) of,
let us say $600 a week or about $25,000 a year has no emotional resonance. If so, then
the extremity of these examples may have something to do with the history recounted
earlier: analysts who came of age before and just after the middle class began its recent,
but silent, descent in the 1960s are likely to be very differently positioned and to have
been initially less worried than those whose practices began in the last 15 or 20 years.
The original work experience of the last generation may well have created a basic sense
of ease, financial optimism, and professional security no matter what the current
economy.

Nevertheless, psychoanalytic anxiety in relation to money has always sufficed to create

the tacit prohibition on asking people how many hours they carry or what fees they
charge unless you know them very well. Of course, it's never in the best of taste for
professionals to inquire about each other's income. The traditional ideology of the
professional-managerial class is that they work for love, not money or power—although,
as we have seen, the 1980s saw some segments of this class reverse their priorities. Still, I
do not suppose it would surprise anyone to find that in order to protect themselves from
their anxiety about money and the alienation contextualizing it, psychoanalysts depict
their pecuniary practices in ways that are, at best, confusing. Let me illustrate with an
anecdote. I remember an informal and anonymous survey about fees taken at a retreat
sponsored by the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis. One of the obstacles to evaluating the results of this most unscientific
investigation is the difference between what people say they do and what they actually
do, and sometimes this difference is further complicated by gender. While I can't here
anatomize the question of gender difference in presentation of professional

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self, it's absolutely true that in answering the questionnaire, all the women said they had a
sliding scale, while each man declared one bold fee. Yet, we all know male analysts, both
senior and junior, who “reduce” their fees, to use that rather cool and complacent
euphemism for bargaining. The alleged tendency of women to charge lower fees (Herron
and Welt, 1992, p. 174; see Liss-Levenson, 1990) may be at times a fact, and at others, an
artifact of the same asymmetrical self-presentation: although men may charge the same
fees as women, offer sliding scales, and the like, saying so publicly is probably
inconsistent with their gender identity, in contrast to women, whose self-sacrifice accords
more with cultural and intrapsychic expectations of women. To let the men off the hook I
also have a female colleague who, in order to conquer her own anxiety about her recently
increased expenses (as well as, perhaps, to make me anxious), rather loftily announced
that she was now “taking” patients at higher fees. (And I always think, “How nice of
her!”)

The Contradiction Between Money and

Love
The point is critical: the way analysts talk, behave, and feel in relation to money is replete
with uneasiness, an uneasiness that is the surface manifestation of a deep, psychocultural
contradiction that cannot be thought, willed, or wished away. In the marrow of our
culture, this contradiction is embedded in the matrix of our work. It inhabits our souls.
And it will not disappear until the very bones of our society change, for like all social
contradictions, it is a relation between contraries that are historical and therefore mutable
but only by a political change that resolves their opposition. All we can do in our work is
to find a temporary and utopian resolution to it, and I return to that later.

For now, let us proceed with the contradiction between money and love, for that is what I
am talking about. Money and love, the twin engines that make the world go round, at
least the world as we know it, do not go together at all. Worse. They negate, undo one
another, and their contradiction funds alienation. While money may be a matter of
commerce, it is, like any material object, social practice, or cultural symbol,
simultaneously a matter of primitive passion. Freud knew this. He called money the
“Devil's gold,” an image he found in European folklore. The Devil, say the tales, gives
his lovers a parting gift of gold, which, upon his going, turns to excrement (Freud, 1908,
p. 174). (By the way,

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witches were said to have made a similar present to their lovers; neither gender has a
monopoly on love's cruelties.) Freud's psychosexual interpretation of this extravagant and
primal metaphor addressed what it means to consort with what he called “the repressed
instinctual life.” For example, he noted how the image contrasts the most precious and
the most worthless of substances, money and feces, and considered how this contrast
sublimates anal eroticism (whence Ferenczi's discussion). This interpretation is, of
course, right, brightly illuminating, for example, Dr. French's distress about the mess that
base and dirty money made in his office, the scene of noble motives and high-minded
encounters.

The aspect of Freud's interpretation that awaits elaboration, however, is the relation
between the gift and the act; what needs unraveling is the relation between the Devil and
his lovers so that we may, in turn, decipher the relation between money and love, as well
as the relation between those who exchange both, and therefore the place of money in
psychoanalysis. Freud and the European folktales had something very subtle in mind, and
if you have ever been loved by the Devil, you will know what I mean. Shakespeare did.
Recall sonnet #129, which begins:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action,

and ends with this couplet,

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to
this hell.

Follow me, if you would, through a brief exegesis of this poetry, which takes us where
we must go, along the nonlinear road from love to hate. When the Devil has left you, you
know not that you have been fooled, but that you have fooled yourself. Your feelings,
yearnings, longings have betrayed you. You now see you knew all along that what you
thought was pure gold was false, that what you thought would uplift you only degrades
you. You have searched to be better than you are, in fact, to be the best you can be. The
Devil's betrayal crumbles your dreams, destroys the ideal self into which you have
breathed life by imagining it in the other's form. In the end, you become less, not more,
than you hoped to be. This degradation, then, is the Devil's gold: the Devil's gold is a gift,
not a payment. It is a gift given after passion is spent. But, instead of

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honoring an encounter that, we must assume, was glorious, as glorious as love, this gift
degrades it. Gold given to mark love becomes worse than nothing, degraded desire and
lost illusions. Hopelessness.

That capacity to make everything less than it is and so to make us doubt what it was we
had in mind when we worked so hard to get it—that capacity, says Freud, is what money
has. That's why it's the Devil's gold. Money is a pact with the Devil. That's what Marx
(1964) said expounding on Goethe (and having also just quoted Shakespeare):

That which is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e. which
money can buy)—that am I, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of
money is the extent of my power. … Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means
determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of
women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness—its deterrent power—is
nullified by money. I, as an individual, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-
four feet. Therefore I am not lame…. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor
is good [p. 167].

If, as Marx goes on to tell us, money can “transform all [your] incapacities into their
contrary,” why would you not sell your soul to get it? If money can get you whatever you
need, then it “is the bond binding [you] to human life, … the bond of all bonds” (p. 167),
But then what can you get yourself? Money can create all that we are and desire and, by
the same token, destroy it. Marx therefore asks, “Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it
not therefore the universal agent of separation? It is the true agent of separation as well as
the true binding agent … of society” (p. 167). The agent of alienation, it absorbs all
creative power into itself, robs people of their own potential; just as money transforms
imperfections into powers, so it “transforms the real essential powers of [human beings]
and nature into what are merely abstract conceits” (p. 168-169). In a way, money
occupies the place in modern society that kinship has in premodern culture; it is the
cultural nerve center, the institution that organizes economic life, structures social
relations, underlies political power, and informs symbol, ritual, and systems of meaning.
Kinship, however, unlike money, can't be taken away from you; as the aphorism has it,
“Home is, when you go there, they gotta take you in.” In contrast, “money … is the
alienated ability of [hu]mankind” (p. 167). That's why it's the Devil's gold.

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In our culture, money has the same unconscious effect no matter in what trade it is used.
By reducing everything to a common denominator, it robs everything and every person of
individuality and thereby debases what it touches. That is one reason we like to separate
it from love and distinguish the profane, public sphere of work, trade, and politics from
the sacred, private space of intimacy, love, and relationship. Perhaps that is also one
reason that, in the families with which we are familiar and in which men have
conventionally been the breadwinners in the public sphere that has traditionally been their
province, men, more than women, have tended to think of the money they bring home as
their nurturing gifts; decontextualizing money, they can thereby deny the alienation that
otherwise robs them of their integrity (Rapp, 1978; Dimen, 1986). As feminism has
taught us, of course, these domains mix in a way that makes the personal political, so that
men, too, feel about money and love the way a blue-collar worker, described by Richard
Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972) in The Hidden Injuries of Class, felt about having to
put in overtime to send his son to college: aghast to find himself hating his kid, he said,
“Things were touching that shouldn't touch” (p. 200).

Money degrades because it makes everything the same. Some kinds of money are called
by anthropologists “special-purpose” money, because they can be used in exchange only
for particular objects or services; they are contrasted with the “general-purpose” money
to which we are more accustomed, money that can buy anything that can be bought. One
of the most famous ethnographic examples of special-purpose money is the jewelry used
in the system of ceremonial exchange known as the Kula Ring and practiced in the
Trobriand Islands of New Guinea; it was studied by Malinowski (1922), who had quite a
lot to say to psychoanalysts. Through ritualized ceremonies of bargaining, chiefs of
different villages or islands would exchange with regular trading partners bracelets and
necklaces made of shells. With any given partner, a chief would give necklaces and
receive bracelets, or vice versa; necklaces would go clockwise from island to island and
bracelets counterclockwise. The individual's aim in this exchange was to acquire prestige,
of which each shell ornament carried a different amount created by, and registered in, the
history of the exchanges it had undergone.

This special-purpose money could not be used in any other direct exchange. For example,
the chiefs' trading expeditions also occasioned

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market trade in utilitarian goods in which the ornaments played no role. Commoners
would accompany the chief on his voyages, in return for the chance not only to bask in
his glory but also to haggle for food, tools, and the raw materials that they could not
produce or forage at home. On the trading voyages, the jewelry and the utilitarian goods
circulated in completely separate spheres; voyagers could not buy oars with necklaces,
for example. Commoners were not, however, excluded from prestige circulation. On
certain ceremonial occasions, to demonstrate political loyalty, they would transfer some
of their own goods to the chief, in return for which he, on still later and formally
unrelated occasions, would give back ornaments that could then become the basis for a
commoner's climb up the prestige and political ladder (Dimen-Schein, 1977, pp. 215-217;
Malinowski, 1922).

There is a crucial distinction between special-purpose and general-purpose money:

whatever is transacted with special-purpose money tends to retain its individuality,
indeed, is embedded in the relationship governing the transaction; general-purpose
money, in contrast, is a “universal equivalent; since everything becomes translatable into
it,” it makes everything symbolically the same (Dimen-Schein, 1977, p. 197). For
example, in Manhattan (as of this writing), $1.25 can buy, and thus means, both a subway
token (itself a sort of special-purpose money) and, let us say, a frozen yogurt. While
special-purpose money is linked only in particulars, general-purpose money measures
everything by the same standard; we may think, for example, that a frozen yogurt has the
same price as a token, say, $1.25, but we won't think that $1.25 and the yogurt cost the
same, that is, that each can be exchanged for a token. While tokens will always represent
one's relationship only to the subway or a subway clerk (or, perhaps, the taxi driver who
will occasionally accept a token as a tip in lieu of the change a passenger cannot find),
that $1.25 will indiscriminately represent one's relationship to everyone and everything,
from the subway and yogurt clerks one gives the money to, to the bank and the
(automated) tellers one gets it from; from the Sunday paper for which one pays the
newsdealer $1.25, to that most appealing pair of shoes of whose less than appealing $250
price it is a mere half of 1 percent.

General-purpose money, or a universal medium of exchange, nullifies the particular

meaning of any object or transaction, destroying its individuality:

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As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing or for
any particular human essential power but for the entire objective world … from the
standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other,
even contradictory, property and object; it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes
contradictions embrace [Marx, 1964, p. 169].

In capitalism, money is a universal medium of exchange. Although everything is not in

fact for sale, in principle it is. Since the same standard, whether the dollar, ruble, or yen,
quantifies everything, then money erases all differences between things, levels all
qualities, eliminates all particularity. Money reduces everything to its abstract capacity to
be exchanged. The car assembled in Detroit, the hamburger flipped at the Moscow
McDonald's, the ad created for a candidate or dish detergent in Tokyo—what these things
signify is not anyone's desire for, or consumption of, them but what they have in
common, their cash value.

The Paradox Between Love and Hate

We come to what happens when that most general of things, money, pays for that most
personal of experiences, the psychoanalytic journey. The psychoanalytic relation, like
love, is highly particular. So particular is it that, at its most intense, in the heat of an
analytic encounter, no generality seems to apply to it at all. For example, one has to work
very hard to think about what is happening, to recall or develop the theory or construct
suited to clarify the complex relation that is transpiring. In fact, this doubled tension, the
struggle to engage and the struggle to conceptualize, is one mark of the curative power of
psychoanalysis, making it quite distinct from ordinary intercourse.

This particularity, however, is regularly undercut by the money that permits it. As
analysts, we all know how rapidly our narcissism or, as Freud would have called it, our
self-preservative instinct leads us to equate the loss of an hour with a bill we'll have to
find some other way to pay; how disjunctive, that is, contradictory, this thought is to the
personal relation that we are also about to lose, with the feeling of loss that looms; and
how dysphoric the hunch that our patients perceive these feelings (Aron and Hirsch,
1992; Whitson, n. d.). As patients, who of us has not wondered just which of our analysts'
bills our own treatment services? Or thought that we are replaceable by some other
patient with

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enough money to pay the fare for their own personal journey? What's so personal and
particular then? In fact, it's so painfully bizarre to go from the feelings of special love,
meant only for one's analyst or one's patient, to the money that allows those emotions to
flower but could also be used to buy many other things or could disappear in a flash, that
one represses the connection and asks, as did my colleague, Why are we talking about
money? That monthly bill rasps against the poignant longings for love that bloom in the
psychoanalytic contact. It threatens to destroy them, turn them to shit. Like the man said,
things touch that shouldn't.

When love turns to hate, it seems wise to move from Freud to Klein. In the
psychoanalytic contact, as in the psyche, as, indeed, in our culture, the contradiction
between money and love threatens to transform love into its seeming opposite; hate in
turn threatens to annihilate relatedness altogether; and analysts, not unlike infants, feel
the paralysis of terror. Money incites hate, if only because there is never enough of it to
go around. But, according to Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere (1964) in Love, Hate and
Reparation, this twist of social fate resembles the vicissitudes of dependency that they see
as the understructure of society, relatedness, and love. Riviere stresses

the degree of dependence of the human organism on its surroundings. In a stable political
and economic system there is a great deal of apparent liberty and opportunity to fulfill
our own needs, and we do not as a rule feel our dependence on the organization in which
we live—unless, for instance, there is an earthquake or a strike! Then we may realize
with reluctance and often with deep resentment that we are dependent on the forces of
nature or on other people to a terrifying extent [p. 5].

While this emergency recognition of dependence may typify only our own culture and
even only certain groups within it, what Riviere goes on to say is probably universal. Not
only, she says, does dependence become awful when external events deprive us of what
we need. Such terror also inheres in love. The “possibility of privation” tends “to rouse
resistance and aggressive emotions,” a murderousness that forebodes doom (p. 7). What
such loss feels like to the infant is what it unconsciously feels like to the adult: Your
world “is out of control; a strike and an earthquake have happened … and this is because”
you love and desire. Your “love may bring pain and devastation” to you and to those

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you love, but you “cannot control or eradicate” either your desire or your hate (p. 9). Hate
is a condition of love, as love is a condition of life. You must love in order to live, but
loving also means hating.

This, then, is the paradox of my title, the paradox of love and hate to which Klein, and
later Winnicott and Guntrip, introduced us. I do not hold, with Klein and Riviere, that
these primal passions of love and hate are constitutional. Nor do I hold with Guntrip
(1969, p. 24) that only one of them, love, is what we begin with. I prefer what I call the
big bang theory, in which love and hate are co-born. Their mutual birthing is what makes
their relation paradoxical, for paradox denotes the indissoluble tension between contraries
that themselves never change, are transhistorical, atemporal, universal. The paradox of
love and hate comes into being through the primal relationship; these passions take their
shape and meaning from their passage through the emotional and structural net of that
intimacy in which they likewise participate. Love and hate, emerging together, become
mutually meaningful in the context of failure, when babies and mothering persons
disappoint each other, when, as the earlier Klein seemed to argue, babies, in hating the
primary caretaker, also first sense their love, and when, as Winnicott (1945) taught us,
parents, to their often denying dismay, feel for their babies what they long ago learned to
disavow, the dreaded hate that portends the death of their newborn and miraculous and
reparative love.

That we must absorb, indeed, relish this paradox so as to do our best work, we have
learned from Winnicott (1945) and from Searles (1965), as well as from Khan (1970),
who says: “One could argue that what is unique about the clinical situation is that the
analyst survives both the loving and the hating of the patient as a person, and the patient
as a person at the resolution of the relationship survives it, too, and is the richer for it” (p.
111).

The Landlady of Time

That paradox is an acquired taste we've all learned from our clinical work. For example,
last year, I moved my office to a new and, I would say, upscaled location; while my
furnishings are substantially the same, the setting itself is far more elegant and
professional than the old one. Most of my patients, including Ms. Rose, as I will call her,
were pleased with their new environment. They read it as a sign of surging hope for their
therapeutic progress and, not coincidentally, a sign of hardiness in me, an ability to
survive their aggression.

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About six weeks after this move, Ms. Rose, whose low fee is nevertheless a struggle for
her to pay, took the opportunity to push on with her analytic work. She missed an
appointment, one she had rescheduled because of an upcoming conference. The next time
she came, she sat up on the couch and looked me in the eyes. With icy fury, she
challenged me: “Suppose someone has an accident?” she asked. Suppose they were in the
hospital? Would I charge them? I should note here that Ms. Rose had been in treatment
with me for slightly over five years. She then explained that she had missed her session
because her alarm clock had failed to work. Rageful that she would have to pay anyway,
she declined to call to tell me what had happened; I should say that I tried to telephone
her but never reached her. Her diatribe intensified. Must she, she wanted to know, be
responsible for everything? Could we not share the responsibility? Somewhere in here, I
said that the basis for my charging her was my commitment of time. “Of course,” she
said, “I understand this is a business; you have to guarantee yourself an income. But what
about my interests?” The schedule was for my convenience, not hers. It's often
inconvenient for her. Oh, she knew the answers: she had to conform to my schedule
because I wanted her to face the reality principle. I would not change it, so she had two
choices, to pay or not to pay. Anyway, why should she rely on my judgment that she
needed more than one session a week? Then, like an archer at last loosing her bow, she
let fly her final question: “What are you, the Landlady of Time?”

Ms. Rose is a poet as well as a graduate student in political studies, and if her rage made
my heart beat in anger, her metaphor hit me right in the solar plexus. I felt all the
emotions of the rainbow—guilt, recognition, anxiety, excitement, hate. After all, Freud
said that analysts lease their time. And one of the dilemmas with which I am trying to
deal here is what happens when money turns our work into a commodity just like any
other. Indeed, it did not escape my notice that Ms. Rose had granted me a perfect
illustration of my present argument, which I had already begun to think about. Her
knowledge of my inner life was, in certain respects, as unerring as her poetic aim.

At this, for us, unprecedented point of mutual hate, we continued. I said that while she
appeared to be asking about my policies, she in fact often seemed to assume my reply.
She agreed. She also concurred with my view that she was treating this clash like a
pitched battle and added that her anger meant not that she would not continue to analyze
this situation

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with me but that she was no longer letting her relationships go unquestioned. She then
observed that it was odd to feel the same way about our relationship, since, of all the
people she had been questioning, I was the one who had been kindest to her. I asked, by
way of interpretation, Where else should she bring her anger? Where hate but where she
loves? She nodded in agreement. I added, correctly but in a fit of bad timing that spewed
straight from my anger, that it was about time she was doing this, to which she coldly
replied that she knew I would say that. She then began to list my unfairnesses in regard to
money, some of which I acknowledged, others of which I contested. At session's end, I
wished her a good trip. Her scornful smile said, “Who needs your good wishes?” Two
weeks later, when she returned, she gave me a cartoon, in which a therapist is saying to a
naked turtle, “I see you're coming out of your shell.”

Every clinical moment is overdetermined, and many elements had fused to make Ms.
Rose's rage combust. What I would like this vignette to illustrate is my contention that in
the psychoanalytic contact, the contradiction between money and love can be resolved
only if we transform it into the paradox between love and hate. The Devil's gold turns
love to shit only when you cannot live out the hate with the one you love. What Ms. Rose
and I did was to live the contradiction together, risking the hate that seemed to be killing
us, tolerating imminent annihilation until she found a way to survive it, until the paradox
of love and hate presented itself to her in what Ghent (1992) has characterized as the
“somewhat altered consciousness that prevails in a spontaneous moment of creativity” (p.
9).

While the disparity in our financial, social, and ethnic status (I am white, Jewish, and a
full-fledged member of the professional-managerial class, to which Ms. Rose, fair-
skinned, Afro-American, and from a lower-middle-class family, aspires) had always been
apparent and sometimes attended to, the envy, greed, fear, and hate stimulated by these
economic and cultural differences had become far more accessible in my new
surroundings. Until now, Ms. Rose had denied the contradictory dimension of our strange
intimacy and could feel only fragments of her love and hate. My new office, which
flagged not only my standing and authority but her own aspirations for the best for
herself, now permitted her to move the contradiction between money and love into the
center of the relationship, where it produced the hate that it always does. There were
precursors. For example, shortly after I opened the new office, we

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began to discuss her ways of skirting shame. One day, she noticed a most offensive but,
in this context, strangely appropriate odor emanating from the lovely garden onto which
my casement windows open. Sniffing carefully, she said, “Why, it smells like cats.” Then
she giggled. I asked her about the giggle. She tentatively answered, “Well I just thought,
you smell like a cat.”

Once the river of hate began to rage, once she finally woke up, opened her eyes, and, in
shock, saw me for who I am, that is, the Landlady of Time, not only the money-hate but
all the others, all hate itself, could fill the space between us. Her rage was the sound of
her shell cracking, heralding the emergence of the self we had previously called the waif
in the cave. Naked, that waif emerged, angry yet/and still loving. Her discovery of the
paradox, that it was strange to doubt me, even though I was the one she had felt to have
been most caring during her years of personal and professional difficulty and struggle,
created this utopian moment in which there began to grow another kind of love, the kind
of bond you have with someone only when you have shed blood together. Since then, Ms.
Rose has let me in on her thought that perhaps analysis is not always the most important
thing in her life. She has owned more of the analytic work and, in return for permitting
me to write about this encounter between us in a way that disguises her identity, has
asked to see this paper; she has, in fact, read this version. Finally, she is no longer my
tenant in the cave of psychoanalysis; she has also made us into an interracial and
otherwise nontraditional family: in her last dream, she wondered what I saw in the little
black girl I had adopted when there were so many white ones around. Hate having been
accepted along with differences and inequities between us, she could begin imagining her
own, still untenanted loveliness.

Conclusion: From Contradiction to

Paradox, and Back
Money, along with its coordinates, space and time, belongs conventionally to what has
been labeled the analytic “frame.” I would like, in concluding, to argue that the frame,
which Langs (1973) calls “ground rules,” ought to be treated as part of the picture too
(see also Horner, 1991; Herron and Welt, 1992, p. 11). While analysts and patients often
find the ground rules irritating, not only their outlining of, but their presence inside, the
consulting room in fact potentiates the utopian moment that makes treatment work. They
enter the symbolic play the

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frame permits: “When there is a frame it surely serves to indicate that what's inside the
frame has to be interpreted in a different way from what's outside it…. Thus the frame
marks off an area within which what is perceived has to be taken symbolically, while
what is outside the frame is taken literally” (Milner, 1957, p. 158). Because money while
a constituent of the frame is also in the picture, it can be played with as symbol as well as
literally exchanged. Thus, in bourgeois culture, as I have argued, a money relation is
thought not to be a love relation. Money appears to negate love, producing the hate that
signs their contradiction.1 But the psychoanalytic situation is a case where money
permits love, where, for a moment, the culture can be upended, where you can love even
where you would most expect to hate, where you would not get to love unless money
were exchanged, where money in fact guarantees the possibility of love, and where,
therefore, the contradiction between money and love, and the hate it generates become
safe.

We know this from Freud, even though, in this instance, he did not appear to know what
he knew. His own case histories reveal that the money relation and, hence, alienation
entered his patients' lives through their families. Gallop (1982), a Lacanian feminist
literary critic, points out that “the closed, cellular model of the family used in …
psychoanalytic thinking is an idealization…. The family never was, in any of Freud's
texts, completely closed off from questions of economic class. And the most insistent
locus of that intrusion into the family circle … is the maid/governess/nurse” (p. 144).

The governess, an omnipresent and essential member of most bourgeois European

families, was always from the lower class. She symbolizes, in the unconscious and text
alike, the very “financial distinction” that also comes to characterize the relation of Freud
and all analysts to their patients. Gallop reminds us, in this context, of Dora's dismissal of
Freud, the two weeks' notice she gave him with the same courtesy she would have used
upon firing a servant (or a servant, on quitting, would have given her). Gallop argues that
for psychoanalysis to provide the radical encounter of self with self it promises and to
contend, I would add, with alienation, “Freud must assume his identification with the
governess” (p. 146), because, rather “than having the power of life and death like the

—————————————

1 That the dichotomy between money and love may also define love as we know it is a
consideration that is important but not possible to take up here.

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mother has over the infant, the analyst is financially dependent on the patient” (p. 143).

To put it more concretely, unless money may leave the frame and enter the picture,
psychoanalysis must renege on its promise. The very economic transaction that
distinguishes the psychoanalytic relationship from ordinary intimacies renders the
transference sensible; money mediates one-person and two-person psychologies, their
ambiguous, paradoxical, and contingent interface made possible and manifest by money's
unavoidable but necessary and definitive arbitrariness, by what, in a way, Freud would
have called the reality principle (Ms. Rose, it turns out, was right). “The fact that the
analyst is paid … proves that the analyst is … a stand-in” (p. 143). Payment, in other
words, grounds the possibility of genuinely new experience in the analysis, as well as that
of remembering, repeating, and working through the past: the old happens with a
newcomer who would never, without money, have been known and whose job it is to
interpret both the old and the new. Reciprocally, the money relation also unveils the
countertransference, in the service of whose understanding analysts must be willing to
confront, internally and, when indicated, interpretively, both the discomforts and the
pleasures of money's powerful place in psychoanalysis.

In a respectful view of psychoanalysis as seduction, Forrester (1990), another Lacanian

literary critic, argues:

Psychoanalysis treats money as if it truly were the universal means of exchange, and
patients do behave as if they could buy love…. The analyst … plays on the fact that
patients do not know what they mean, nor do they know what money will buy. It is
insofar as they do not know these things that seduction begins. And with seduction, the
questioning of the contract and the calling into question of authority … begins…. The
original seduction is thus that offered by the contract—namely that it is just a contract….
Its means of accomplishment is the free speech whereby one of the parties will contract
the disease of love that the other will cure by treating the proffered seductive words as if
they were simply the universal means of exchange [p. 47].

At the heart of psychoanalysis, this most private of encounters, lies society, just as at the
heart of public life lies the alienation psychoanalysis tries to cure. Psychoanalysis is not
revolution, and it doesn't make the contradiction between money and love go away. But
for a brief, utopian

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moment, it permits transcendence. In the psychoanalytic contact, the contradiction

between money and love, a relation between contraries that can be transformed, finds a
temporary, reparative resolution in the paradox between love and hate, a relation between
contraries that never changes. The possibility of transformation distinguishes
contradiction from paradox: contradiction bears resolution; paradox does not. Or, rather,
as Ghent (1992) has recently said, the only resolution of paradox is paradox itself, here to
inhabit, without rushing to relieve, the tension between love and hate, a tension that also
preserves the memory of the contradiction between money and love it resolves.

The lesson of contradiction is perhaps easier to remember than that of paradox, which is,
in turn, one of the easiest to forget. That money negates love, this we know
preconsciously and needs, I think, only to be surfaced to stay in consciousness. But
paradox is different; it is relearned each time it is lived. This is perhaps what Freud
(1923) was trying to capture when he said that “love is with unexpected regularity
accompanied by hate (ambivalence)” (p. 43). That love and hate go together, this is an
analytic commonplace. But that, in the hot moment of loving or hating, we never
remember that they do, this, perhaps, is wisdom.

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Introduction

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

This symposium reconsiders sexuality from a relational perspective. It follows up on the

Psychoanalytic Dialogues “Symposium on Gender” (Vol. 1, #3, 1991), which crystalized
a fresh, deconstructive mode for thinking about gender that had emerged from nearly two
decades of relational and feminist theorizing. This compilation initiates a new discussion.
It is prompted by the critical, postclassical paradigm shift in which sexuality, once read as
the driving force of desire, development, and pathology, has become that which is
organized. To put it colloquially, if, with Freud, we thought that your sex is what makes
you who you are, now we think that who you are shapes what sex you are and what sex
you like. Not sexual drive and its conflicts, but the relational meaning of sexual desire,
informs character and pathology, transference and countertransference. Clinical attention
is less often on how the anatomical distinction between the sexes influences the psyche
and more commonly on sexuality's relational complexity (see, e.g., Goldner, 1989;
Mitchell, 1988), on how the psychological and cultural meaning of biology inscribes
desire. Postclassical psychoanalysis thus implicitly destabilizes the nature and specificity
of desire, treating them as emergents, not determinants.

This shift is manifest in the psychoanalytic reversal on sex and gender: in the classical
version, sexuality organized gender; postclassical thinking, however, has it the other way
around—gender organizes sexuality (Person, 1980). Although, then, the theory of
psychosexuality preceded gender theory, the enormous recent interest in gender, gender
identity, and gender development has obscured sexuality per se.

—————————————

This symposium has benefited immeasurably from the advice of Lewis Aron and Sue A.
Shapiro.

Dr. Dimen is Clinical Professor of Psychology, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy

and Psychoanalysis, New York University, and a Fellow at the New York Institute for the
Humanities at New York University. She is also Faculty, Adelphi University, Derner
Institute Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

© 1995 The Analytic Press

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At the same time, relational theories are criticized because, having removed drive from
psychoanalytic theory, they offer no comprehensive perspective on lust and passion.
They no longer assign sexuality a special role in the relational constitution of individual
experience or in the psychoanalytic relationship. Furthermore, innovative ways of
reflecting on sexuality, born in a variety of other disciplines, are still only marginally
present in psychoanalytic thought.

There is a theoretical gap, a vacuum into which the orthodox view of psychosexuality
naturally flows, becoming by default the basis for interpreting and understanding desire.
It is not so much that the classical theory is wrong; the papers in this symposium, in fact,
work hard not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Indeed, insofar as Freud's
Oedipus has become a master cultural narrative (to extend Harold Bloom's, 1986, remark
that Freud's thought forms the sole mythology shared by contemporary Western
intellectuals), classical theory may never have left our thinking at all, which makes
critical attention to relational theories of sexuality all the more important.

This symposium proceeds with that critique. It addresses the implications of the
postclassical paradigm shift for thinking about sexuality, sexualities, and desire. Framing
that shift is the entire sea change informing intellectual life since Freud—the uncertainty
principle, relativity theory, social constructionism, postmodernism. In this context, three
main and overlapping currents have surfaced. First, mainstream psychoanalysis,
influenced by relational theory, has moved its focus away from infantile sexuality and
toward early relational experience, particularly with the mother (see, e.g., Klein, 1932,
and Winnicott, 1960; Benjamin, 1988, and Mitchell, 1988, discuss this change). Second,
feminist reformulations of the psychology of women have inspired new interpretations of
gender—its place in the psyche, in relationships, in psychoanalytic thought (Dinnerstein,
1976; Chodorow, 1978; Benjamin, 1988). Third, postmodernism puts the very categories
of sexuality and gender in question, a recognition of indeterminacy that, by
problematizing the nature of embodiment, suggests the necessity of revising the
evolutionary model of reproductive sexuality on which Freud relied (Dimen, 1991, 1993;
Goldner, 1991; Harris, 1991).

The importance of this radical reframing should not be underestimated. Indeed, it calls
for an explicit dialogue about the place of sexuality in relational theories of development
and of clinical practice.

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Relational theory provides one key to deciphering the variations, oscillations, and
ambiguities of sexual desire, which Freud and his early critics noted (May, 1993) and
which Lacanian theorists continue to emphasize (e.g., Mitchell and Rose, 1982, p. 49).
Proposing no independent account of sexuality, however, relational theory needs to
incorporate not only the feminist critique but postmodern discourse for its useful
challenge to familiar ways of thinking about sex, sexuality, desire, and gender. At the
same time, postmodernism needs relational theory. Its intellectual advances, hinged on
classical psychoanalysis, suffer the limitations of a one-person psychology and stand to
benefit from familiarity with, and indeed may even find kinship in, the paradoxical
thinking made possible by sustaining the tension between one-person and two-person
psychologies.

This compilation of essays, commentaries, and responses engages current intellectual

debate about desire now being carried on not only in relational theory but in semiotics,
feminist theory, literary and aesthetic theory, gender studies, and gay and lesbian studies.
The three central essays, employing a variety of theoretical strategies, render the debate
multivocal from the start. Butler's philosophical, feminist, and queer-theorist engagement
with Freud and Lacan; Aron's interpersonal, object-relational, and feminist adumbration
of Freud and Klein; Stein's clinical deployment of multiple and multiply resonant
psychoanalytic theories of sex and gender—these essays permit us to compare the way
diverse theories decipher the tangled codings of sexual desire as they appear in
transference and countertransference. As a group, these essays variously critique dualistic
thinking, moving interpretations of sexuality through several binaries common to
Western thought—biology and psychology (Aron and Stein), psychology and culture
(Butler and Aron), the normal/normative and the pathological (Butler, Aron, and Stein),
choice and compulsion (Butler and Stein).

In particular, these essays articulate and value the complexity of the sex-gender
connection. In the postmodernist view, the scientific reductionism of the Enlightenment
has made for oversimplification; we may have sacrificed too much in exchange for
conceptual clarity (Flax, 1990). Accordingly, this symposium offers not the familiar
linear determinism—sex sets gender's agenda, or gender renders sex—but, more
challengingly, decipherable indeterminancies. In the lead essay, Judith Butler investigates
Freud's thought on mourning so as to question

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the opposition between desire and identification usually deemed developmentally

standard. Her move clarifies how normatively complex, unstable, hard won, and
impassioned is the union of gender identity and sexual orientation, how mutually
dependent, in both cultural and psychological instantiations, are homosexual and
heterosexual desire for their formation, their satisfactions, their unhappiness.

Lewis Aron's essay puts new ideas about gender to work on thinking about sex. Here,
gender is a critical category, as well as a phenomenon to be studied: it is not only
something to think about; it is a concept to think with. For Aron, gender is informed by
the motif of difference that creates it: the distinction masculine-feminine. He employs
gender thus conceived to rethink both a sexual act—Freud's primal scene—and a sexual
figure—Klein's combined parent figure—into multiplicity, into transformers of
subjectivity and objectivity, preoedipality and oedipality, masculinity and femininity,
sexualities.
Ruth Stein's use of gender theory sets in play a network of problematics and themes that
inform her transexual patient's desire. Her construal finds not only domination and
submission, guilt and shame, erotized and gendered transference and countertransference.
It pinpoints also “the vertiginously multiple meanings and emotional elaborations of
masculinity and femininity.” Stein's rich and evocative tracing of a complicated treatment
unveils the interface of multiple sexual identities obscured by an apparently normal
oedipal resolution, allowing us to think further about the newly articulated complexity of
heterosexuality (Lewes, 1989; Chodorow, 1994).

The essays' commentaries center on two matters, the body and the clinic. Adam Phillips's
request that Butler remember the body has double resonance. On one hand, he challenges
her destabilization of the sexual body, reminding her that there is no “third sex”.1 On the
other, thinking of the clinical moment as lived, and hence embodied, he wonders whether
analysts can, or should, ask patients to search for the melancholy in sexualities in which
they feel at home. In David Schwartz's view, Aron fails in his well-meant attempt to turn
the concepts of the primal scene and the combined parent figure into metaphors stripped
of sex and gender. Instead, Schwartz says, they can

—————————————

1 Some contemporary theorists and researchers who study the lively lives lived by
anatomical hermaphrodites, think, however, that there may be more than three. (See
Fausto-Sterling, 1993, and S. Kessler, 1994, personal communication).

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not escape their bodily roots; as images, they will always evoke the reproductive (hence,
heterosexual) biology in which they originate, thus re-creating the discursive construction
of binary genders and sexualities. Nancy Chodorow's sympathetic critique of Stein's
paper ponders the theoretical and clinical difficulties we face in reconceiving gender
(which, she observes, has become impossible to define) while still speaking a language
that, every time it is used—every time we say “masculine” and “feminine”—reinvents
the conventional gender narrative that constitutes it.

As this symposium shows, the postclassical discussion of sexuality will proceed in the
tension of the two primary and complementary aspects of psychoanalytic work: the
making of theory and the delivery of care. The discussion will concern, at base, how to
reposition sexuality in postclassical thought. Perhaps we may wonder whether, if
relationship governs sexuality, there may still exist a parallel and paradoxical structure in
which sexuality governs relationship. We may ask, as have other disciplines before us,
whether we should even think of “sexuality” at all. As classic psychoanalytic thought was
the first to point out and as the vagaries of the consulting room continue to reveal, the
idea of “sexuality” connotes a singleness or uniformity of desire that is incongruent with
the multiplicity of sexual experience not only between individuals but within individual
experience. We might like to consider whether we would be better off reconstruing our
data with the postmodern notion of “sexualities.”

At the same time, the new psychoanalytic debate on sexuality will issue from the
conflicting claims of the clinic. Stein's response to Chodorow voices a concern already
evinced by Stephen Mitchell (1994) and poses the problem, How do we negotiate the
complicated and confusing juxtaposition of the brave new world of epistemological
uncertainty with the clinical mandate to fashion strategies of care, make narratives
cohere, provide answers? Patients, and their analysts, often seek relief from both
suffering and uncertainty in those seamless pronouncements about health and disease so
mistrusted by postmodern philosophy. As Adrienne Harris (1994) has observed, we may
think in postmodernism, but we practice in the Enlightenment (see also Shapiro, 1993).
Or, at least, the wish for ease of mind disposes analyst and patient alike to long for solid
ground, canons of knowable truths. Yet the search for comfort beckons at the cost of the
elemental post-modernism

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of psychoanalysis and its practice, its endless opening of doors within doors (Levenson,
1972; Barratt, 1993). Appropriately, sexual matters, with which psychoanalytic thought
originates, circle back to a perennial, necessary, and perhaps even fruitful quandary of
psychoanalytic practice: what sort of comfort can we, do we, give if the best answer is
only another question?

References
Barratt, B. (1993), Psychoanalysis and the Postmodern Impulse. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.

Benjamin, J. (1988), The Bonds of Love. New York: Pantheon.

Bloom, H. (1986), Freud, the greatest modern writer. The New York Times Book Review,
March 23.

Chodorow, N. (1978), The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Chodorow, N. (1994), Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities/Freud and Beyond.

Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

Dimen, M. (1991), Deconstructing difference: Gender, splitting and transitional space,

Psychoanal. Dial., 1: 335-352. [→]
Dimen, M. (1993), On “our nature”: Prolegomenon to a relational theory of sexuality,
Part I. Presented at conference on Homosexuality in Perspective: An Open Dialogue,
Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University,
December.

Dinnerstein, D. (1976), The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York: Harper & Row.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (1993), The five sexes: Why male and female are not enough. The
Sciences, March/April: 20-24.

Flax, J. (1990), Thinking Fragments. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Goldner, V. (1989), Sex, power, and gender: The politics of passion. In: Intimate
Environments, ed. D. Kantor & B. F. Okun. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 28-53.

Goldner, V. (1991), Toward a critical relational theory of gender, Psychoanal. Dial., 1:

249-272. [→]

Harris, A. (1991), Gender as contradiction, Psychoanal. Dial., 1: 197-224. [→]

Harris, A. (1994), Gender practices, speech practices. Presented at meeting of Division

39, American Psychological Association. Washington, DC, April.

Klein, M. (1932), The Psycho-Analysis of Children. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour

Lawrence, 1975. [→]

Levenson, E. (1972), The Fallacy of Understanding. New York: Basic Books.

Lewes, K. (1989), The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality. New York:

Simon & Schuster, pp. 69-94.

May, R. (1993), Gender and hierarchy (reading Freud). Presented at meeeting of Division
39, American Psychological Association, New York, April.

Mitchell, J. & Rose, J., ed. ( 1982), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École
Freudienne, tr. J. Rose. New York: Pantheon.

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Mitchell, S. A. (1988), Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.
Mitchell, S. A. (1994), Sexuality and gender in the age of postmodernism: What's a
perplexed clinician to do? Keynote address at meeting of Division 39, American
Psychological Association, Washington DC, April.

Person, E. (1988), Sexuality as the mainstay of identity, Signs, 5: 605-630.

Shapiro, S. A. (1993), Gender-role stereotypes and clinical process: Commentary on

papers by Gruenthal and Hirsch. Psychoanal. Dial., 3: 371-89. [→]

Winnicott, D. W. (1960), Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New

York: International Universities Press. [→]
Bodytalk

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

The psychoanalytic body, examined at the juncture of psychoanalysis, feminism, and

postmodernism, is ripe for rethinking. Its classic theoretical services, as the raw material
of desire and the fount of epistemic certainty, being no longer required, it has, with
postmodernism's linguistic turn, morphed into text, process, construction. How
convenient for the clinician's traffic in the Symbolic, a practice that nevertheless can
uniquely assess if not yet remedy two linked problems central to the postmodern solution:
the consignment of the body to the Real and of the self to the Imaginary.

The psychoanalytic body is going through changes. Once upon a time, it was real,
substantial, finite, mapped by excitable but containable erogenous zones. Recently,
however, it seems hardly corporeal or sensate at all. Thanks to Jacques Lacan and Michel
Foucault, what was for Sigmund Freud a biological entity has become, in postmodern
thought,

—————————————

Muriel Dimen, an Associate Editor of this Journal, is Professor of Clinical Psychology in

the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis,
and on the faculty of the Adelphi University Derner Institute in Psychotherapy and
Psychoanalysis. Her most recent book is Surviving Sexual Contradictions. She is in
private practice in New York.

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a linguistic–cultural coproduction, always unstable and contingent, deeply theorized in

literary, feminist, queer, and culture studies. The instability of the psychoanalytic body is
most prominent in the feminist critique of gender, where the body's classic theoretical
services, as the raw material of desire and the fount of epistemic certainty, seem no
longer to be required. A dilemma ensues: Absent biology, what becomes of the body?
Postmodern thinking resolves: See it as language, as construction, as process, as
representation. How convenient for a practice that traffics so heavily in the Symbolic, a
practice that, as we shall see, can uniquely assess if not yet remedy two linked problems
central to the postmodern solution: the consignment of the body to the Real and of the
self to the Imaginary.

The essays in this symposium on the relational construction of the body take critical
advantage of this exciting juncture of psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism.
Notice the dizzying array of languages they use: classical, relational, deconstructionist,
feminist, Lacanian, even Marxist and new age. The profusion of language not only shows
the proliferation of the body, the body as discourse. It expresses the excess of meaning
the body stands for, contains, generates. The papers are stirring, their ideas and
implications nearly overwhelming. One is reminded of the haunting excitement of erotic
countertransference. Too much, really. The excess of body. The body as excess in
session. The body Freud dispatched from the room into Dora's absent, cowlike mother,
the “housewife” whose “psychosis” cleaned it up for him (1905).

Not only the excess of the body, but its depth is this symposium's concern. In regard to
eating disorders and women's preoccupation with beauty, body matters are profound, not
superficial; in Susan Bordo's term, unbearable weight (1993). Body matters are so
weighty, so deeply important, they often cannot be spoken; untellable, they can only be
shown. “Show, don't tell,” this is the instruction given to aspiring writers. “Write what
you know,” goes another. Or, as Grace Paley advised once in a speech, “write what you
don't know about what you do know” (1985). This, I think, is what analytic bodytalk is
all about, it's what the analytic session is about. We try to say what we do not yet, or any
longer, know about what we do know. If we know where the session will end up, if we're
never surprised or confused or at a loss, we might as well change jobs or go back to
school: we're not doing it right. If there is no

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excess of meaning, nothing either remembered, invented, or discovered in speech,

feeling, or relatedness, what are we doing there?

In an essay on Mesmer called “Going Unconscious,” in The New York Review of Books
(1995), Jonathan Miller expatiates on what he calls “the distinctively enabling view of the
unconscious” developed by British psychologists in the midnineteenth century, and soon
overshadowed by the psychoanalytic unconscious. Without debating his distinction
between the former as productive and the latter as withholding, I would like to note the
role of the body in this other unconscious, or, perhaps, the location of this unconscious in
the body. Analogizing from Noam Chomsky's notion of a linguistic unconscious (which
Adrienne Harris has remarked is long overdue for deconstruction [personal
communication]), Miller tells us about “mental activity,” indexed on/in the body, “of
which the individual has no explicit awareness.” A critical example is “blindsight,” a
phenomenon in which “patients blinded by injury to the visual cortex” nevertheless
“registered the occurrence of a visual stimulus without being subjectively aware of it.”
Similarly, “patients whom brain damage has robbed of the ability to put names to familiar
faces,” but whose language and vision remain intact, still reveal a bodily recognition of
those forces:

[W]hen such patients are subjected to a variant of the forensic lie detector test, i.e., when
their sweating is monitored by changes in skin conductivity, their reactions surpass
chance whenever the photo of a well-loved face is thrown onto the screen. Although they
are unable to consciously identify the familiar features, their emotional response proves
that they have registered its familiarity, albeit unconsciously [1995, p. 65].

I don't suppose we need experimental psychology to verify our thought that body
memory exists. Still, the contemporary recuperation of Freud's cast-offs, of, for example,
early theories of dissociation, renders data and arguments like Miller's all the more
appealing, even if he intends them as an argument against the psychoanalytic
unconscious. His examples are suggestive, too, of the relation between trauma and body
memory, of experiences that, preceding or exceeding symbolization, remain outside
speech or were foreclosed from it, in what Lacan calls the order of the Real.

How is it possible to speak about the body? As Adrienne Harris says at the end of her
essay: “In the clinical examples the problem in the

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discourse is that we cannot find a throughline, the bodies' incoherences and volatility …
reveal the limits and inadequacy of speech in framing enactment and embodiment” (see
pp. 381-382). Here Harris voices a complexity I have long sensed but not known how to
put: that enactment and embodiment have in common their habitation of the inarticulate.
We enact, in other words, through the body; bodies are enactments, not only locally, in
psychoanalytic matters (e.g., McDougall 1989), but, as Sue Shapiro's argument would
seem to imply, everywhere and always, for better or worse, in illness and in health.
Embodiment and enactment confront each other as positive and negative, the singlebody,
one-person psychology speaking multitudes, the two-person enactment mumming two
psychic spaces in and of one. One body and two bodies see each other in the mirror of
themselves. Thus a definition of relational theory as operating in the tension of one-
person and two-person psychologies: If you look deeply enough into either, you come
upon the other.

If, hence, the difficulty of psychoanalytic bodytalk, how is it possible to think about the
body? Or is it because we can/may not think the body that we cannot speak it? These
double-sided questions address both theoretical and clinical matters, indeed, they put that
familiar psychoanalytic binary into question. Does the body's location in the
Real/nonverbal/preverbal always qualify somatic experience? If so, does the Real always
inform experiences of sexuality and gender insofar as they encode the body? Does it
thereby produce an anguished if also excited muteness that impels the body to speak as
we sit, pleasurably or painfully, on the analytic hot seat?

What anguish, you might ask. Surely, you may reasonably be thinking, we have at least
one good, solid way to address the body, the oldfashioned way that Freud used: we are
animals, after all, biological organisms about which much scientific knowledge has been
accumulated (to wit, Miller). Right off the bat, however, Shapiro contests the
psychoanalytic use of biology: “while traditional psychoanalytic theory turned to
biological explanations as a last resort to support the truth of its statements, it does not
rely clinically on an experiential body” (see p. 298). The body on which psychoanalysis
has so confidently relied is not necessarily the body people experience: it is the scientific
body known objectively, the object and creation of much research. As the postmodern
mood of these essays suggests, however, the scientific

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body's correspondence with the subjective body should not any longer be taken for
granted. Rather, subjective and objective bodies, or, better, scientific, linguistic, and
experienced bodies are a crazy quilt of overlaps, mismatches, and novelty, the stuff of
excitement, anguish, sanity, and madness.

Traditionally, the scientific body is caught in a binary created by the problem of

determinism, of nature versus nurture, or biology versus psychology, or biology versus
culture, or psychology versus anything. In a period of neodeterminism (think of The Bell
Curve by Herrnstein and Murray [1994]), it is worth emphasizing what is probably
tediously familiar to readers of this journal—we need to get beyond determinism, whose
power as cultural trope and master regulatory practice is stupendous. Here in these essays
are theoretical and clinical moves that actually if not intentionally challenge determinism,
at the same time as they do not always avoid its regulation—and note also their common
concern with psychoanalysis as regulatory practice, overtly in the case of Gerson and
Harris, more indirectly in the case of Knoblauch and Shapiro.

Harris, in hearing echoes of Winnicott, puts the objectified, one-person body immediately
into question: “there is no baby without the mother, but at the beginning only the mother-
baby ego. There is no meaningful individual body ego without the interface—the holding,
looking, touching encounter of the social other” (see p. 371). The baby-body comes to be
only as it is semiotically and linguistically appropriated, processes whose object-
relational situation endow infant embodiment with meaning. Here, she draws on
Elizabeth Grosz's understanding of the constitution of difference, the way a psychical and
social inscription of flesh, blood, and bone as “the surface and raw materials of an
integrated and cohesive totality” gives this bag of guts unity, cohesiveness, and
organization.

And yet I wonder about the ease with which the maternal metaphor surfaces when
considering the body. Developmentalism as regulatory practice—that linear sequence of
stages in which health and normality cohere—may be a culprit here, inclining us to fill in
the blanks of the Enlightenment metanarrative with ontology: compelled by the question,
“Where did it all begin, and why?” we answer “the family.” What about other initial
vantage points, other epistemologies, on the mutual infolding of body and object relation?
Shapiro recalls Ernst
- 389 -

Schachtel's sense categories, the immediacy of touch and smell, and their simultaneous
signification of self and other, emotion and body (pp. 313-314). With gender critique as
ground, I myself am more likely to turn first to the sexual psyche-soma, as did Freud, for
a figurative account of the interimplications of body and object relation. Or think of the
body in pain, not only, as Harris later notes, Judith Butler's account of Freud's view of
pain (see p. 379) but Elaine Scarry's account of society's inscription of its power via the
infliction of carnal suffering (see p. 378).

One way of breaking down determinism, these essays show, is to deconstruct it. Harris,
for example, examines that familiar catch-all “constitution,” helping us to think about
bodies not as biology but as embodiment. She argues that, for kids with gender identity
disorder, and perhaps marginally for the rest of us, gender performativity is relationally
constituted. The child's problem of sustaining the parent, which the child cannot speak
and the parent cannot comprehend, finds a solution in being lived “excruciatingly in splits
and fragments in the child's body ego and in the meaning of that body for the child” (see
p. 368). There it can be put into a disguising language, that of gender, which adults can
interpret even as they misunderstand. This attempted solution to the inarticulate and
seemingly irreducibly biologic body creates, of course, another problem: the boy wants to
be a lady, an angry and violent lady. Possibly, however, it's only when the disorder
becomes somatic that it begets, for boys, the healing, regulatory practice of
psychomedical intervention; in girls, GID, may be, at least in its milder form, the normal
pathology of normative femininity. A boy's unruly body is not biology, it is unruliness
embodied as a failed masculinity, the order which depends on all the other disorders—
femininity, homosexuality, otherness in culture—against which it measures itself.

Breakdowns in determinism help us to see how speaking and acting are not always
different. Samuel Gerson's essay is eloquent on this project. Like gender talk, he argues,
our speech about transference, our interpretations, are performatives. They are the way
psychoanalytic authority employs language to generate, by repetition, the content it
states. Psychoanalytic performativity emerges in the way both analyst and patient
“employ language as a praxis … to expand their subjectivity into the realm of the other”
(see p. 358); it is in this effort to establish the

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domains of knowing,” he has also said (in the oral version of his essay), “that discourse
creates what it comes to represent” (Gerson, 1995).

In this context, though, a surprisingly nondialectical and determinist moment in Gerson's

argument eclipses a central clinical concern. He relies on Butler's Lacanian understanding
of language and cites her, for example, when he says “that language itself, when
reiterated through the voices of the powerful, is the medium through which human
possibility is born and dies” (see p. 357). As an old-fashioned (new) leftist, however, one
would wonder where, in this characterization, resistance lies. As a clinician, one asks
where agency lies. The Lacanian understanding of language has powerfully criticized
reification. However, the erasure of self it presumes strangely suits all too well the
earlier, determinist social theories which Foucauldian thought means to answer. Once it
was economic forces that constructed society and psyche; now it is language.

We begin to see here how the clinical perspective may shed light on a postmodernist
paradox: Language may speak the person, but clinically we know also that persons speak
language. Under conditions of domination, Gerson earlier argues, naming creates prisons:
“the naming of bodies, sex, gender, and desire effects the embodiment of oppressive
social forces as they invade and diminish the privacy of the individual. Names mark the
body and are as resistant to erasure as are tattoos. And like tattooing, naming exhibits the
ruthless attempt of culture-as-mind to gain control over the body” (see p. 348). Yet, as he
goes on to show, we can expect psychoanalysis to contest, respeak, reclaim names so as
to undermine authority. How, then, one wants to know, should we formulate the
dialectical dimension of naming, the way naming also releases? For, like an artist's choice
of medium, language both constrains and frees. Indeed, Gerson later urges us to think of
the gay reappropriation of “queer.” He proposes that “when spoken with new meaning
and intent, names may be reclaimed in a manner which undermines their power to create
zones of exclusion and of abjection” (see p. 348). Postmodernism would question this
novelty of meaning and intent, pointing to the discursive context in and of which we are
woven, to the impossibility of finding a language of the body that does not recreate its
inscription in biopower.

Yet, as clinicians, and I begin here to indicate another fly in the postmodern ointment, we
know that genuinely new experiences, or at least

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those that feel absolutely and liberatingly novel, do occur to our patients in the course of
treatment. Gerson points to a dimension of experience that Margo Rivera (1989) has
begun to theorize for us: “The enclosures created by naming permit escape only through
the fragmentation of bodily and sexual experience; fragments which can then be fluidly
shaped by wish and fantasy and thereby avoid the fate of the named and constrained
body” (see p. 348). Fragmentation suggests dissociation, the land of the foreclosed or
never-known, indeed, the land of the body, where lives what cannot be thought. Recall
Rivera's (1989) dictum: “It is not the multiplicity which the individual with multiple
personality experiences that is problematic but the defensive dissociation and the
consequent limited awareness and ability to act on that awareness” (p. 29). By the same
token, one aspect of psychoanalytic encounter and change is the capacity to represent not
only the other's multiplicity, but a multiplicity of others: this person, this analyst, is
different from, as well as like, that other Other with whom your troubles began.

How, once again, to speak this novelty without losing sight of the constitution, the
construction of novelty in context? Perhaps we can find help in a different theory of
speech, one that works language as process, not structure, and thereby may return us to
body as experienced. In the view of Russian (psycho) linguists Mikhail Bakhtin, V. N.
Volosinov, and Lev Vygotsky, meaning is “not first inside or outside, but in constant flux
between” (Massey, 1996b, p. 127). Formulated in contemporaneous disagreement with
Fernand de Saussure (Volosinov, 1929-1930, pp. 58-63), their view departs from the
structural linguistics that inspired Lacan, in which language is la langue, a structure or
code that is in effect “a static, impermeable, inanimate object.” In contrast, Bakhtin
thinks in terms of la parole, of voice and speech, “an alive phenomenon of a living
person” (Massey, 1996b, p. 126). If language is a set of relations, it also lives, breathes,
and changes; it “is a dialogic activity, a mode of being, and a means of transformation, as
much as it is also a means of sustaining constancy and defense” (Massey, 1996b, p. 125).
If Lacan's langue is cerebral, Bakhtin's parole is “sensorial, affective.…
pragmatic”(Massey, 1996b, p. 125); “bodies and language are inseparable” (Massey,
1996a, p. 75). To put it in more psychoanalytically immediate terms, la parole is
simultaneously intrapsychic and interpersonal, always multiply voiced, an interweaving
of voice, gesture, and selves that constitutes meaning.

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Drawing on Carla Massey's explication of Bakhtin's dialogics, Steven Knoblauch's essay

places the body in its psychoanalytically familiar sexual home and, perhaps not
coincidentally, also problematizes affect, which, as Shapiro reminds us, arguably borders
mind, body, and language. In Knoblauch's view, neither affect in general nor desire in
particular is given. Instead, they are comade in dialogue, an approach yielding a new
narrative of psychoanalytic desire. Thus, when he recounts his adventures with Leslie, he
nearly apologizes for disappointing us, his audience, in not telling a conventionally
climactic narrative whose apex is surrender to corporeal enactment. But I felt no
disappointment. Rather, as I breathlessly roller-coastered with the (literal as well as
figurative) rise and fall of his arousal with Leslie, I cheered when he won, that is,
achieved a narrative climax that is not a climax but a state of sustained sexual tension
which, only later, he dared put into words—or, more appropriately to this symposium's
concern, performative speech-acts.

Knoblauch's success suggests that one principal way of breaking the regulatory hold of
discourse is to speak words that are not only words but acts. We return here to Gerson's
concern, the relation of performativity to regulatory practice. Not only judicial speech—
Austin's “I pronounce you man and wife”—not only hate speech (about which Butler is
now writing), but sexual speech is performative: to speak your desire is to enact desire.
To talk sex is to do sex too. This is what makes erotic countertransference so disturbing,
dangerous, exciting, potent, transgressive. Performatives constitute a paradoxical
experience in which a word is not a word, an act not an act, in which this ambiguity can
be experienced and, eventually but not immediately, named. Speaking desire is a
performative, a speech act that constitutes the situation it declares, but is at the same time
not an action. Its very ambiguity is what makes it erotically, affectively, cognitively,
therapeutically powerful. Analyst and patient must, therefore, always feel both
disappointment and relief when they find a way out of erotic transference and
countertransference by speaking their desire.

Here, inspired by Jody Davies' recent work on self-disclosure (1994), we can carefully
unpack what in the clinic is classically a sexual tinderbox. In her commentary on Davies,
Jessica Benjamin worries whether we would be so pleased with sexual self-disclosure
were the analytic configuration to be reversed (1994, pp. 199-200) and the male analyst's

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revelation of his desire for his female patient to enact, however, unintentionally, the
patriarchal subordination of women. Knoblauch's account of the clinical management of
heterosexual desire between male analyst and female patient is instructive. He addresses
the problem of clinical politics via generational difference and power: “I am struck by my
initially organizing this relationship, on one dimesion as parent/ child, a template recently
critiqued … for its implicit power practices and defensive uses” (p. 336). To this we
might add the more explicitly historicizing feminist and progressive critiques embedding
Gerson's essay, who shows in a different way how speaking desire, always transgressive,
refuses alienation, but instead insists on reclaiming subjectivity from the deadness of
naming.

Why, we might wonder in recognition of the Foucauldian critique of the repressive

hypothesis, does sexuality have this enlivening place in the clinic? Think of Knoblauch's
patients with their talk of penises, anuses, and panties, Gerson's patient's naughty T-shirt,
the dead lesbian mice, and the nexus of pain, disgust, and excitement in Harris' account.
Why, to ask it differently, is sex the cultural site of the body? Why is the body the site of
dissociation? Knoblauch's patients, we learn:

[T]hrust their bodies into the dialogue between us, desperately needing not just as a one-
person model would explain, the animation of their self experience, but rather an
experience of vitalization contextualized with the vitalization of another emerging within
the dialogue between us, and particularly by the impact of body sensations. For their self
states mediated through body experience to be understood, it was crucial for me … to be
penetrated at the level of my body experience [see p. 341].

Yes. But why, one wonders, thrusting? If the body as experienced had a more central
clinical place, would, Shapiro's essay makes us want to ask, thrusting be the
communicative mode? Why penetration? Is this a stereotypically (heterosexual?)
masculine or, as Harriet Wrye argues (see p. 290), oedipal (ized) experience of the
climax-seeking body? One would not wish to contest Knoblauch's therapeutic
achievement: his somatic experience countered his patients' felt need for their “Body
thoughts and feelings … to be anesthetized or [to become] the source of anxiety, conflict,
guilt, and shame” (see p. 41). Still do we have here what was called in Cool Hand Luke“a
failure to communicate”? Do patients thrust their bodies at analysts because analysts, like
the other (parental)

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authorities who precede them, don't yet know how to understand bodytalk? Do they
thrust their bodies at their analysts because that is how their analysts think of intimate
intercourse, as thrusting? Does, furthermore, the incomprehension of bodytalk have
anything to do with the scientific body spawned by what Evelyn Fox Keller has identified
as the heterosexualized mode of knowing in which a cognizing scientist probes a world of
mute female objects (Keller, 1985)?

Suppose our common understanding of bodytalk were informed, instead, by a Bakhtinian

account of parole. Consider V.N. Volosinov's characterization of verbal interaction: “No
sharp dividing line can be drawn between understanding and response. Any act of
understanding is a response, i.e., it translates what is being understood into a new context
from which a response can be made” (1929-1930, p. 69, n. 2). Perhaps, in other words,
our bodies are always already penetrated by and responsive to the other's experience;
body states never exactly the “unconstructed” tabulae rasae suggested by Wrye (see p.
293). We are, Shapiro would argue, simply not aware of this paradoxical dimension of
our bodily states of mind because the construction of psychoanalysis—and, one would
have to add, the discursive constitution of selfhood as unitary—forecloses it. Nearly
claiming that clinical psychoanalysis lacks a body altogether, Shapiro convincingly
argues that the scientific body of classical theory is, in fact, defensive: the “highly
theorized ‘body’ of psychoanalysis reflects the kind of defensive stance described by
Mitrani in which patients use words to surround themselves and to substitute for bodily
containment in the face of loss” (see p. 298). The loss that psychoanalysis has classically
sustained is, she contends, of the analyst's body and then by extension the patient's.
Shapiro boldly puts it baldly: “I think it accurate to describe conventional psychoanalysis
as taking place between two minds that happened to inhabit bodies—bodies which should
be counted on to stay under control” (see p. 309).

The resulting paradox, which she sets herself to find a way out of, will be familiar to
most psychoanalytic practitioners and patients: “The analytic consulting room is now one
of the more formal and physically constricting environments that analyst and patient
inhabit” (see p. 316). She finds one escape route by critiquing binary models of health
and maturity. She distills a usually unarticulated, clinically central, developmental tenet:
“The mark of maturity is stillness” (see p. 317). Acknowledging the contributions of
Anzieu, Ogden, and Mitrani to our understanding
- 395 -

of the body in clinical practice, she points out that they “tend to view these [somatic]
experiences as more primitive and pathological than verbally symbolized experience”
(see p. 299). She, instead, invites us, in a series of fun questions, to inhabit our bodies as
we read, as a way of illustrating how we might catch the body's awarenesses as we
practice. She breaks the somatic down into several dimensions that clinicians might begin
to observe and register: “visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, gustatory and visceral
experience” (see p. 299). She asks you to think about what your body has been doing;
what about, she wants to know, the effects of “alcohol or coffee”?

That regulatory practice strikes once again, however, should alert us to the never-ending
story in which we are engaged: It's hard to be asked to think about one's caffeine and
liquor consumption without feeling at least a little bit scrutinized and wondering whether
one may have been doing something, well, “unhealthy,” a signifier that, always in this
culture, but particularly in these neopuritan times, betokens immorality. I suppose that,
even in what some of us on the left used to call “the good society” regulatory practice
will require and generate monitoring (or is my dystopian supposition the product of
disillusionment?). In any event, the discourse of the body presently and inevitably
invokes pathologizing and moralizing, to which even (therefore?) dedicated hedonists
may be vulnerable. In other words, why did Shapiro not also ask us to consider the effects
on our current somatic state of protein or leafy greens (these are still thought to be good
for you, I believe), not to mention eight hours' sleep, designer water, or, for that matter,
sexual gratification?

At the same time, focusing on one's self-report of bodily experience marks a limit to the
postmodern critique, which has itself so quickly become rule-bound and regulatory.
Roger Lancaster, an anthropologist, argues that currently popular (Lacanian) linguistic
and semiotic models emerge out of “a deferral of the question of sense-perception”
(1995, p. 2). While his suggestion of a return to Maurice Merleau-Ponty requires more
extended discussion than can be afforded here, it does signal the relation between the
sensuous and the semiotic. Mindful of the kinship between embodiment and enactment,
Shapiro herself draws on a variety of other models to consider the fate of the senses in
psychoanalysis. Referring to Wilhelm Reich and Sandor Ferenczi, she reminds us clinical
readers that we sense our bodies, and so do our

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patients, and that these senses constitute various knowledges of self, other, and
relationship.
That one knows through the senses constitutes a primary challenge to the postmodern
constitution of the subject through la langue. Clinicians, speaking to people rather than to
texts, must contend with the postmodern erasure of the “I” Several psychoanalysts, some
of them the very feminists who are introducing postmodernist thought (Flax, 1990, pp.
218-219; Rivera,1989, p. 29), have noticed a critical difficulty in deploying
deconstruction in clinical practice; they argue variously that, the multiplicity and
instability of subjectivity to the contrary notwithstanding, a central consciousness and a
sense of subjective coherence are psychically vital (see also Benjamin, 1994b). In a
similar move, Lancaster too emphasizes the radical place of feeling, its challenge to
alienation and fragmentation: “Feeling is precisely what is denied in an alienated
performance. Feeling, as a mode of sensorimotor perception, is not the Truth. But it is, in
Merleau-Ponty's sense, the possibility of truth, and our access to it. It is not necessarily
singular, for its somatic modes facilitate many possibilities of embodiment. Its plural
truths are luxuriant and splendid” (p. 16). Lancaster, operating still within what
psychoanalysts would call a one-person psychology, does not consider what clinicians
will want to take up, that shared sensing between beings can be equally constitutive of
truthful moments, and can help crack equally the prison of naming and the deconstructive
hall of mirrors.

Can psychoanalysts think then of the body, sensation, feeling, affect, and emotion in a
Bakhtinian dialogic process as a route to subjectivity or agency or the sense of central
consciousness that can name all dissociated states “I”? It is not far from feeling to affect.
Referring to Bromberg's ideas on shared self states, Knoblauch writes: “This excitement
constituted by a liberating eroticism, then, exploded the illusion of father and daughter
and the constricting effect of thinking of depression as some kind of defective
disease/process in my patient rather than a potential affective contour, a self state with
significant meanings to be understood and expressed” (see p. 334). Perhaps affect, a
body-mind state whose intersubjectivity puts into question the body's location in the Real,
leads back to the subject whose location in the Imaginary belies its own moments of
sensed reality, of its own realness (lower-case “r” intended).

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The postmodernist suspension of the body parallels the banishment of affect from
scientific writing and of the analyst's body from the clinic. Holding my breath (and
heeding Shapiro's injunction to note my body tension as I write), I quote Lancaster's
critique of Butler: “Butler's work makes explicit what was implicit all along: a body
amputated of the body; a world where language is real and the body is not. The Cartesian
dilemmas of mind and body are resolved—by abolishing the body” (1995, p. 4). Not
quite the Empress' new clothes, but close (indeed, when anthropologist Gayle Rubin, who
first introduced Butler to Foucauldian thought, is interviewed by Butler, she fondly dubs
her interviewer “the reigning ‘Queen’ of Gender!” [Rubin, 1994, p. 97]). Judy, Judy,
Judy, one wants to ask, is this a case of new wine in old regulatory bottles? What happens
if, instead, the body's senses are always already problematized, if the experienced body
joins the scientific and psychoanalytic bodies?

“Holding my breath,” I have said, experiencing my body as I think and write. How
should we theorize the experienced body? How do we begin to articulate those mute
domains of body and enactment that exceed la langue? is the articulated body as much a
fiction as, in Lacanian view, is the self? Or does the semiotic both proceed from and
create the body in the same terms as it potentiates the self? Would a different view of the
body alter the alignment of the Imaginary with the maternal?

Probably it's true that we cannot answer such questions undialogically. Let me then bring
forward a dialogue implicit in Shapiro's essay: that between “West” and “East.” While I
think it false generalizing to suggest, as Shapiro does, that all or most non-Western
constructions of the body differ in the same way from our own (see p. 315), still it is
possible to challenge the corporeal canon passed on to us from judeo Christianity and the
Enlightenment by borrowing bodies from elsewhere, even if we necessarily alter them in
translation.

In Buddhism, for example, the body is not a hungry body, as it is in Freud. It is a

breathing body. This different conceptualization has consequences for our understandings
of suffering and its surcease. As Mark Epstein, an American Buddhist psychotherapist,
argues: “The usual psychodynamic foundation for self experience is that of hunger, not
breath. When this is the case, the body is experienced as an alien entity that has to be kept
satisfied …” (1995, p. 145). In Winnicott's account

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of the not good-enough mother, he reminds us, there is either insufficient food/mother or
there is excess, and the child becomes, respectively, either deprived and entitled or
engulfed and obliterated. Epstein contrasts the Buddhist view: “When awareness is
shifted from appetite to breath, the anxieties about not being enough are automatically
attenuated” (1995, p. 145). The body is a site not of demand or need but, simply, of being
in the timelessness of the present which is, indeed, the site of psychoanalytic space.
Epstein then quotes psychoanalyst Michael Eigen: “The self structured by an awareness
of breathing … does not run after or get ahead of time but, instead, seems simply to move
with it” (1995, p. 146). A self located in its moment, connected to its past and sensible of
its flow into the future, produces echoes not only of “going with the flow” but also of free
association. Epstein has earlier said: “it is impossible to turn the river around. Once
[Buddhist] mindfulness is developed, there is no avoiding the relentless and teeming rush
that underlies our experience” (1995, p. 126). Mindfully inhabiting the breath is, in other
words, also to inhabit the body, relatedness, desire, the unconscious.

It will not do, of course, to think of this one suggestion taken from the West's Other as a
final, oppositional answer to the scientific or linguistic body. Many questions remain:
Would such a body be, any longer, the site, cause, structure, origin of relationship, of
sex? How would we want to reconceptualize attachment, desire, intimacy? Reciprocally,
if we start with the body as merely breathing, not as endlessly longing, is the body still
the site of excess? Or is the body's unspeakability produced by a certain sort of speech? Is
it this sort of speech that characterizes the Real? If so, is it really the case that the Real
can never be known or spoken? Or is mindful breathing a different sort of knowledge?

The point is to destabilize: As Shapiro observes, psychoanalytic conventions of the body

iron out contradictory wrinkles in the name of scientific legitimacy. These essays on the
relational construction of the body show us the wrinkles once more. They help us to
appreciate, as we age into psychoanalysis (itself a discipline of maturity), the complexity
and paradox that, face-lifted by science and linguistics from the experienced body,
characterize what feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman has identified as the core modern
epistemological problem of identifying and then bridging gaps, such as those between
masculine and feminine, psyche and society, and, of course, mind and body (1993, p. 3).

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One mind–body bridge is pain, another is pleasure, affects also bridging the two bodies
posed here, the one that hungers, the other that breathes. Two concluding anecdotes on
affects as carriers of paradox: I recall a neighbor girl when I was a child, she was about 5
and I was 10, and when she was unhappy, she didn't cry or scream, she would instead
squat down and hold her breath until, blue in the face, she would faint. Laughingly, her
father would call her “Sarah Heartburn,” much as my father did me if for different
reasons; as we now all know, the female body is not hysterical for no reason. My point is
that, whatever unbearable states of relational affairs would lead her to terrorize her family
with her tantrums, still, something was intolerable as long as she continued to breathe.
Not breathing, she no longer had to feel.

By the same token, if you breathe, you feel, and not only pain. A meditation-minded
psychiatric resident, wanting to integrate her two practices, began during our work
together to bring her meditative awareness into the consulting room. This interface of
psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, in helping her to keep thinking despite the anxious
tension of uncertainty and inarticulate affect, enabled her to open up rather than foreclose
the multiple interpretive possibilities her patients' dilemmas suggested. Neither of us,
however, had anticipated the personal spin-off from this professional progress. In our
penultimate supervisory session she rather generously and unexpectedly revealed to me
that, during the previous evening's sex making with her boyfriend, she found herself
focusing not on her desire, her hungry body's need for what Lacanians see as illusory
satisfaction, but instead on her breath, on each inhalation and exhalation, until she found
herself, in the end, taken by surprise by the most extraordinary orgasm of her life.

References
Benjamin, J. (1994a), Commentary on papers by Tansey, Hirsch, and Davies.
Psychoanal. Dial. 4:193-202. [→]

Benjamin, J. (1994b), The shadow of the other (subject): Intersubjectivity and feminist
theory, Constellations, 1:231-254.

Bordo, S. (1993), Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Davies, J. M. (1994), Love in the afternoon: A relational reconsideration of desire and

dread in the counter-transference. Psychoanal. Dial., 4:153-170. [→]

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Epstein, M. (1995), Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist

Perspective. New York: Basic Books.

Flax, J. (1990), Thinking Fragments. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Freud, S. (1905), Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. Standard Edition, 7:1-122.

London: Hogarth Press, 1953. [→]

Gerson, S. (1995), A shared body of language. Division 39, American Psychological

Association Spring Meeting, Santa Monica, CA.

Herrnstein, R., & Murray, C. (1994), The Bell Curve. New York: Free Press.

Keller, E. F. (1985), Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lancaster, R. (1995), The queer body: Notes on masculinity, desire, and sexuality, or
movies, magazines and bodies that trade places: A phenomenological triptych. Paper
presented at the New York Academy of Sciences, January 22.

Massey, C. (1996a), Body-smarts: An adolescent girl thinking, talking, mattering.

Gender and Psychoanal., 1:75-102. [→]

Massey, C. (1996b), Cultural and conceptual dissonance in theoretical practice:

Commentary on RoseMarie Pérez Foster's “The bilingual self: Duet in two voices”.
Psychoanal. Dial., 6:123-140. [→]

McDougall, J. (1989), Theaters of the Body. New York: W. W. Norton.

Miller, J. (1995), Going unconscious, NY Rev. Books, April 2:29-32.

Paley, G. (1985), Talk given to Columbia University Seminar on Women and Society.

Rivera, M. (1989), Linking the psychological and the social: Feminism,

poststructuralism, and multiple personality. Dissociation, 2:24-31.

Rubin, G., with Butler, J., (1994), Interview: Sexual traffic. Differences, 6:62-99.

Scheman, N. (1993), Engenderings. New York: Routledge.

Vologinov, V. N. (1929-1930), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. L. Matejka

& I. R. Titunik. New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973.
The Engagement Between Psychoanalysis And Feminism

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

A REPORT FROM THE FRONT

Now, in a line of associations ambiguous words (or, as we may call them, “switch-
words”) act like points at a junction. If the points are switched across from the position in
which they appear to lie in the dream, then we find ourselves on another set of rails; and
along this second track run the thoughts which we are in search of but which still lie
concealed behind the dream.
—Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria

Psychoanalysis Makes a Map

Toward the end of his hilarious Small World, which spoofs the international academic
conference circuit, David Lodge (1984) constructs an antic scene that could not have
been written had not both psychoanalysis and feminism pervaded academia in particular,
and intellectual life in general. Angelica, a rising literary critic, is presenting a paper on
the genre of romance (the novel in which she appears is, after all, subtitled An Academic
Romance) at the Modern Language Association. Rife with sexual reference, her essay
reveals the woman who, at once central and marginal to psychoanalytic thought, has
uneasily entered the psychoanalytic stage, glad to have joined the nervously welcoming
company of players, but not wholly sure that it's a good idea.

Angelica's theory unfolds in terms whose debt to Sigmund Freud states itself.

If epic is a phallic genre, which can hardly be denied, and tragedy the genre of castration
(we are none of us, I suppose, deceived by the selfblinding of Oedipus as to the true
nature of the wound he is impelled to inflict upon himself, or likely to overlook the
symbolic equivalence between eyeballs and testicles) then surely there is no doubt that
romance is a supremely invaginated mode of narrative. (p. 366)

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0010-7530/97 $2.00 + .05

Copyright © 1997 W. A. W. Institute
20 W. 74th Street, New York, NY 10023
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Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Vol. 33, No. 4 (1997)

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Phallic. Castration. Oedipus. Need I say more?

No, but also yes. That I don't have to detail these terms appertains to the first point I am
making: the parodic extreme of Angelica's theory dramatizes how necessary Freud's
theory of sex is for contemporary literary criticism, to name but one of many fields of
thought. Who can think about sex without thinking of psychoanalysis? Whence the
language to discuss in public the erstwhile private parts of the body? Where did we get
what literary theorist Harold Bloom (1986) has called the nearest thing to a cultural
mythology that Western intellectuals share, the story of how you grow up, become a
sexed creature? In teaching us how to speak about it, psychoanalysis may be said to have
invented sex as we in the twentieth century imagine we know it. Freud's theory of desire,
his scheme of psychosexual stages (elaborated by Karl Abraham, 1927, into a well-
known but terminally boring theory of normal sexual development), and his narrative of
sexual conflict that, drawn from the origin myths of Western culture, claims to account
fully for what we might call the normal neuroses of modern civilization—these
constitutive ideas make up a culturally central story of erotic passion, which, by the same
token, they also engender.

The cultural salience of the Freudian psychosexual narrative means, however, that it is
not always correct. Cultural myths regularly accent some truths at the expense of others.
One truth Freud omitted or, better, mistook was women's. Since his time, many have
risen up to correct him. Take the erogenous zones in psychoanalytic theory. “Oral,”
“anal,” “phallic,” and so on, designate bodily sites of arousal and chart stages of growth.
At the same time, they map ideas and allegiances. Body parts operate in psychoanalytic
theory much as they do in the unconscious, as “switch-words,” to use the versatile
metaphor of dream process that Freud comes up with in recounting his treatment of Dora.
Freud's anatomical map of a brave new sexual world plots a passage that begins as
though generic to Homo sapiens but ends in masculinity: in a failure of nerve, it inscribes
things female on a “dark continent” (Gay, 1988, p. 501), a metaphor burying in
femininity the underproblematized racism of psychoanalysis (but see Abel, 1990; Doane,
1991; Gilman, 1993; Tate, 1996; Walton, 1995).

The psychoanalytic map of sex is currently being redrawn. Angelica, following such
thinkers as philosopher Jacques Derrida, uses, for example, the metaphor of
“invagination,” once a medical and now a literary term that describes

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the complex relationship between inside and outside in discursive practices. What we
think of as the meaning or “inside” of a text is in fact nothing more than its externality
folded in to create a pocket which is both secret and therefore desired and at the same
time empty and therefore impossible to possess. (Lodge, 1984, pp. 365-366)
Does invagination, as a concept, bear a slightly sexist charge? If so, Angelica deploys
sexism against itself in order to redress the gender balance tipped, in theory as in life,
toward men: “I want to appropriate this term and apply it, in a very specific sense of my
own, to romance.” She begins with a feminist critique:

Epic and tragedy move inexorably to what we call, and by no accident, a “climax” and it
is, in terms of sexual metaphor, an essentially male climax—a single, explosive discharge
of accumulated tension. (p. 366)

In literary view, Angelica is saying, reading is like sex. But, she wants us to ask, Whose
sex? She knows that, for all the feminist revolution, for all the social critiques of sexual
prejudice, still, when we think sex, we think Freud: we use his ideas to think with, if only
to correct them.

Angelica corrects. This classical psychoanalytic thinking about sex that so informs
literary criticism usually has, she says, only one sort of sex in mind: male (and
heterosexual male at that, though Angelica, or rather Lodge, isn't concerned with what is
for far too many still too fine a point). Literary theorist and poet Roland Barthes (yes,
there are a lot of French people in the story of psychoanalysis and feminism) also
succumbs. He

has taught us the close connection between narrative and sexuality, between the pleasure
of the body and the “pleasure of the text,” but in spite of his own sexual ambivalence, he
developed this analogy in an overly masculine fashion. The pleasure of the classic text, in
Barthes’ system, is all foreplay. It consists in the constant titillation and deferred
satisfaction of the reader's curiosity and desire—desire for the solution of enigma, the
completion of an action, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice. (p. 366)

Foreplay. That which Freud told us you shouldn't spend too much time doing, lest you
sicken. To reach adult health, you should relinquish the infantile, polymorphously
perverse pleasures of non-genital zones,

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focus on penis and vagina, and achieve the correct and healthy aim of sex, discharge from
penis into vagina. Oh, yes, health and normality have their tragic consequences:
“neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversion” (Freud, 1905). Instead of practicing
perversities, we become normal, that is, neurotic (a psychoanalytic paradox perhaps
better known in Europe than in the United States). In sexual terms, you must complete
the action, climax the sexual story, survive le petit mort. Orgasm quenches the flames of
foreplay, but also, sadly, douses desire. Ordinary unhappiness is the price of civilization,
and accepting it is the way one accedes to authority.
Angelica suggests, however, that at least one literary genre escapes the polarity between
fore-pleasure and end-pleasure. Not surprisingly, this genre's sexual style is, in her view,
female.

Romance, in contrast, . . . has not one climax but many, the pleasure of this text comes
and comes and comes again. No sooner is one crisis in the fortunes of the hero averted
than a new one presents itself; no sooner has one mystery been solved than another is
raised; no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative
questions open and close, open and close, like the contractions of the vaginal muscles in
intercourse, and this process is in principle endless. The greatest and most characteristic
romances are often unfinished—they end only with the author's exhaustion, as woman's
capacity for orgasm is limited only by her physical stamina. Romance is a multiple
orgasm. (p. 366)

“Romance is a multiple orgasm.” It is funny, isn't it? What a clever parody. Too clever,
however, by half. Angelica's critique, you see, slips up a bit. She, or rather her creator,
David Lodge, who I think must begin to take his share of blame as well as credit here,
forgets one tiny (although not always literally so) detail, a detail Freud didn't forget,
though many other psychoanalytic theorists of sexuality do. Read on.

One of the young men [in the audience] said, if the organ of epic was the phallus, of
tragedy the testicles, and of romance the vagina, what was the organ of comedy? Oh, the
anus, Angelica replied instantly, with a bright smile. Think of Rabelais. . . . (p. 367)

We should all be so quick on our feet! But not quick enough. Angelica does not
remember the one organ whose sole function is erotic, the one that we might call, in these
computer-wise days, the dedicated sex organ.

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You know which one I’m talking about, don't you? (This is the teasing portion of the
essay; the foreplay, if you would; it gets more serious, to the point, very soon. Just wait.)
Yes. That's right. The clitoris. In literary theory as parodied in Small World, the clitoris,
the organ of pleasure, has no genre of its own. Strange, isn't it?

Or perhaps not. The psychoanalysis on which Lodge, like other literary critics, relies is,
you see, a psychoanalysis of the book. In the Book of Freud, which is what literary critics
know best (even, perhaps, better than the clinicians who practice psychoanalysis, and for
whom, as is well known and to which I will later allude, whole new sets of books have
emerged), the clitoris occupies quite a secondary and immature place. There, the female
sexual organ of most, if not first, importance is the vagina. And thereby hangs a very
well-known tale (or, rather, no tail at all, which is, after all, the tale's point). In Freud's
vision, vaginal orgasm tops the scale of maturity and mental health; the clitoris is but an
instrument to be manipulated (literally) so as to get the vagina to work. The task of the
clitoris, “male” in its biological homology with the penis, resembles that of a switch-
point: to transmit “excitation to the adjacent female sexual parts, just as—to use a simile
—pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on fire” (Freud, 1905,
p. 221).1

Feminists Make Waves

In 1968, sixty-three years and three generations later, those were fighting words. The
magnitude of the recent feminist revolt against Freudian tyranny over the female body
can be measured by the fact that, in 1990, this “strangely inappropriate identification of
the cavity of the vagina with a burning log” could be called, in the cool, urbane sarcasm
of the high road, “less than illuminating” (Laqueur, 1990, p. 235). In and around 1970,
however, when women were very, very angry (of course, we’re still angry, but now some
of us get to say so in professional publications like this one), the vaginal orgasm was
officially declared a myth (Koedt, 1968).

The feminism of that time saw in the psychoanalytic construction of the female body the
pernicious machinery of patriarchal power. Freud's

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1 And, by the way, lest you think everything has changed, just take a look at Kernberg's
recent Love Relations (1995), in which the clitoris makes an appearance only as a rather
dubious absence from the list of erogenous zones attributed to girls. Feminist critics, of
course, give the clitoris its erotic due (e.g., Schor, 1981), although, oddly enough, they
occasionally forget the vagina (e.g., Wright, 1992).

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definition of the clitoris as male organized women's sexuality for men's pleasure: the
penis wants the female vagina, after all. The myth of the vaginal orgasm also served
men's power: as medical and political switch-point, it “emerged out of the long historical
repression of female sexuality in the interests of men's control over women's reproductive
capacities” (Segal, 1994, p. 36). Freudian psychoanalysis made women adapt to the
repressive, oppressive, bourgeois role of accepting, compliantly smiling housewife and
mother. Not only that. In a dialectical move of the sort that Michel Foucault (1976)
would theorize only in 1976, psychoanalysis secured a power base for itself: by debasing
the clitoral orgasm, it aggravated the problem of frigidity that it then called upon itself to
cure (not bad for business, as Kate Millett, 1970, pointed out six years earlier). Buoyed
by Masters and Johnson's empirical research (1966) that claimed to demonstrate a unitary
orgasm, the second wave of feminism deposed Freud and (re)captured the clitoris.

How different from the first feminist response to Freud. Karen Horney, who began her
campaign in the 1920s, was angry too. Her sarcasm was equally urbane and no less biting
(e.g., 1926). Her arguments, however, were professional, not political. While she
followed the sociologist Georg Simmel in noticing that psychoanalysis was part of a
masculinist culture, she worked then from within the clinical psychoanalytic fold. Not
chiefly interested in the clitoris, Horney wanted, instead, to rescue the vagina from its
developmentally secondary place; unlike the secondwave feminists, she did not question
its orgasmic primacy. She wanted to show that penis-envy is not bedrock, that femininity
is as primary as masculinity.

Horney, and, in other voices, Ernest Jones (1927) and Melanie Klein (1928), took on
Freud's theory of phallic monism: all children believe there is only one sex—male—until
that catastrophic recognition of lack, differently traumatic for each sex, that only men
have penises, women do not. Surviving the cataclysm of castration fears and anxiety is, in
Freud's view, prerequisite to healthy, mature femininity and masculinity; on it,
furthermore, rests his theory of desire, neurosis, and human nature. Horney (1933)
contradicted: if boys are born boys, girls are born girls. The vagina's sensuality, at least
equal to that of the clitoris, is demonstrably present from infancy onward. She concluded
by arguing that “behind the ‘failure to discover’ the vagina is a [culturally motivated]
denial of its existence” (p. 160). Freud's response to this strong argument is tendentious,
categorically stipulating the nonexistence of infantile vaginal sensations

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(Freud, 1933, p. 118). This preemptive strike not only foreclosed argument but hinged
psychoanalytic legitimacy on belief in the dogma of phallic monism (Fliegel, 1986).

Although Horney's intervention was evidently not the final answer—nor, as we shall see,
is there one yet—it was the first sign that the center of Freud's theory of sex, a red-hot
manifesto for sexual liberation bound up by a blue-blooded scientific pedigree, doesn't
quite hold. Psychoanalytic subversion contends, tout court, that humans desire.
Psychoanalytic conformity insists that they procreate. The classic psychoanalytic theory
of sexuality is torn between two masters, sex and reproduction, a conflict of loyalties
whose contradictory effects are visited upon women. In the classic psychoanalytic story,
libido is always masculine; women, insofar as they lust—and indeed they do in Freud's
account—are male. Female desire is defined, hence nullified, by procreation or, more
precisely, by Freud's desire. Sex as reproduction was Freud's royal road to legitimacy: if
the psychoanalytic theory of desire could be linked to the great chain of cause and effect
running all the way back from biology and Darwin to physics and Newton, it would be
shown to be true and could take its place in the noble roster of modern sciences.

Anatomy, or rather biology, was destiny—for Freud. There were two prizes in the battle
between Freud and the feminists: one, overt, was female sexual subjectivity, the other,
covert, was Freud's scientific legitimacy. He sacrificed the first in order to win the
second, a sacrifice symbolized by the instrumentalization of the clitoris on the
psychoanalytic map (that this strategy failed is the story, as I have indicated, of
contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism). Hence his perhaps guilty exasperation in
asking Princess Marie Bonaparte, “What does a woman want?” (quoted in Jones, 1953, p.
421). What his question disavowed, his affect acknowledged: Women do desire. They
want sex. They need it. He knew it, and he dissociated what he knew.

Surely this dissociation of women's sexual desire registers the shock of feminism. Freud's
theories of women, as well as his asides on feminists, are littered with splitting and
contempt, the defensive strategies characterizing the divided mind variously termed
hysterical, borderline, or dissociated. Think, for example, of Freud's (1931) famously
weird reference to “the fact” of female castration that, if faithful to fantasy, nonetheless
splits off the factuality of female anatomy (p. 229). Recall his manipulative and
condescending exemption of women analysts from femininity: the negative features of
femininity did not, he said, apply to them, they

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were exceptions, “more masculine than feminine” (Freud, 1932, pp. 116-117). Remember
his rage at the nameless lesbian, for whose unnecessary “treatment” he tries to account
(she was “in no way neurotic”; Freud, 1920, p. 158, n. 2) and whose ire he explains by
jibing, “In fact, she was a feminist.” It is she whose gender he changes, in a mid-
paragraph pronominal slip of the pen, from female to male (pp. 150-151; see Harris,
1991, who was the first to note this slip).

Three's Company

One might say that Freud's dissociation of women's desire renders feminism a ghost come
back to haunt psychoanalysis (and it is to tell you about this that I have sketched the fight
between Freud and Horney, who serve here less as actual historic intellectuals than as
switch-points to intellectual history). Get rid of women as active desiring subjects, solve
the “enigma of womanhood” (Freud, 1933) by equating femininity with passivity, and
you get rid of feminism. It's that simple—and that complicated. Women's desire, and
feminism, are not forgotten, they are disavowed; they are dissociated, not repressed.
When we dissociate, or more precisely, projectively identify, we attempt to eliminate
something that belongs to us by projecting it into some other being or thing, we next feel
it was never part of us in the first place, and then we have it return to us as the other
whom we hate with a debilitating passion.

All of this suggests that there was something for psychoanalysis to get rid of. And there
was. The early psychoanalytic world was, equally, a feminist one; the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were the temporal home of first-wave feminism. Horney may
have been Freud's specific target (Freud, 1925a, 1933), but she was only one of many
advocates of women's desire in the psychoanalytic orbit. The pseudonymous Anna O,
Josef Breuer's patient who is said to have invented “the talking cure,” was Bertha
Pappenheim, a founder of German Jewish feminism (Jackowitz, 1984). Other feminist
contemporaries adopted and revised varied portions of the psychoanalytic understanding
of women's desire (Anderson, 1992). Later luminaries in the arts, like H.D., sought out
Freud and others for surcease of psychic suffering.

I am proposing a dialectical view: psychoanalysis and feminism come in a package.

Psychoanalysis and feminism are causes (as both labeled themselves; see Alexander,
1992) with much in common, like their “questioning of the moral status quo,” and much
to fight about, like their

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conceptions of femininity (Anderson, p. 73). Their paradoxical engagement consists in

their interimplicated evolutions. Each, of course, has its Enlightenment pioneers, for
example, the Marquis de Puységur for psychoanalysis (Ellenberger, 1970, 70ff.) and
Mary Wollstonecraft for feminists. As full-blown movements, however, psychoanalysis
and feminism are creatures of the fin de siècle. Embroiled, they not only constitute one
another, they have never lived apart; to wit, the timing and context of Freud's antifeminist
remarks “make it unclear whether it was he himself or feminists who first chose to make
psychoanalysis a center of ideological struggle” (Chodorow, 1989, p. 175). Just as
psychoanalysis synthesizes and articulates in one convenient place the ruling ideas of
patriarchy, thereby constituting both an attack on women and a means for feminism to
deconstruct sexist ideology, so feminism exists as a pressure on psychoanalytic thought
(Rubin, 1975). Conversely, the predominance of female patients suggests a diagnosis of
psychoanalysis as “itself a symptom of women” (Forrester, 1992). Indeed, as I am about
to suggest, together psychoanalysis and feminism triangulate with social theory.

If psychoanalysis plots desire, it also records a changed and changing sexual landscape,
whose alterity alters it. The “dark continent” had already begun to explore herself by the
time Freud declared her Man's terra incognita. Exploration continued after him, now
enhanced by a scientific imprimatur of desire that, nevertheless, required women's
masquerade as good wife, dutiful daughter, or token woman (Rivière, 1929). What went
’round came ’round: Two generations later, feminists addressed a different sexuality than
Freud and Horney. Indeed, the secondwave's focus on women's sexuality, departing from
earlier bourgeois feminisms, is likely a psychoanalytic legacy (see also Delmar, 1986, p.
27). As Freud's first feminist critics pushed him to articulate his misrepresentation of
women's sexuality, his assumption that women want and need sex reciprocally
reconfigured erotic experience altogether, if only by speaking the hitherto taboo truth.
Sex having become speakable, women then had a public language in which to say that
they knew something about their own pleasure that Freud had denied (Laqueur, 1990, pp.
233-243). If Horney gave them back the vagina, they could then reappropriate the clitoris.
As I will suggest later on, maybe it's not too late to have both.
In principle, however, psychoanalysis and feminism were at a standoff until, in the late
1960s, a third term broke the polarized tension between them. Social theory, to put it
broadly, or Marxism, to put it more

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evocatively, gave feminism what it needed to counter psychoanalytic misogyny: the idea
that the Woman Question had a history and a future. Woman's place, her desire, even her
erotic anatomy were contingent. So were Man's. Historically constructed and socially
contextualized, the battle between the sexes was a cultural, not a natural phenomenon.
More. It was a matter of power. Sex was political. Desire, and all the theories analyzing
and regulating it, could be understood In political terms. As women and men were not
equal, so women were of different classes and races, differences that correlated variously
with family structure, gender role, and sexual possibility. All that psychoanalysis took for
granted about the human sexual question became, suddenly, destabilized. The governing
narrative of psychosexual development, the familial frame for subjectivity, the culturally
central arrangements for the heterosexualization of desire, these could now be put into
question.

Fortified with social theory, feminists could turn to psychoanalysis for what they needed.
And need it they did. Although social theory illumines the political dimension of their
sex, it only flirts with the personal. Yet, as feminists soon saw, “the personal is political”
holds especially for them, insofar as women's lives are defined by the personal in a way
that men's are not. Social theory unveils women's social role. It does not, however,
unravel those interpersonal, personal, and intimate matters with which it is women's
cultural business to traffic. Psychoanalysis takes up where social theory leaves off.
Marxism, for example, leads right up to the bedroom door, to the hearth of family and
psyche. Then it stops. And thereupon psychoanalysis enters, bearing interpretations of
women and desire, a theory and course of action in respect of the inner life, a construal of
early object relations, and a way into the representational processes composing the
symbolic systems of both psyche and society.

In a now triangular space, feminist theory mediates social theory and psychoanalysis,
challenging both to exceed their premises. This triangulation completes a historical
process. As Jacqueline Rose (1986) also argues, it continues a project, the “Marx-Freud
synthesis,” begun and then suspended in the 1920s and 1930s. The project uses
psychoanalytic insights into interior life to understand, in order to alter, “the
internalisation, effectivity and persistence of some of the most oppressive social norms”
(pp. 6, 8). The debate over psychoanalysis and politics (for which Freud's quarrel with the
Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich may perhaps here stand as symbol) coincided with
that over women, but the two controversies were not to engage until a half-century later:
- 536 -

it is rather as if the theoretical/clinical debate about female sexuality and the more
explicitly Marxist debate about ideology and its forms were historically severed from
each other—at least until [second-wave] feminism itself forged, or rather, demonstrated,
the links.2 (Rose, 1986, p. 8)

With the exception of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949), all important
contemporary feminist accounts of psychoanalysis emerge from this one historical and
political moment: the Women's Liberation Movement, where the personal is political also
meant that the personal is theoretical, and that the theoretical requires validation by the
personal (Chodorow, 1989, p. 213).3 Works by hostile critics like Shulamith Firestone
(1970) and Kate Millett, as well as by admiring critics and revisionists, like Gayle Rubin
and Juliet Mitchell respectively, these, in the early 1970s, primed the psychoanalytic
feminist effort to explain how “ideological processes are transformed, via individual
subjects, into human actions and beliefs” (Rose, 1986, p. 7). Between Rubin's work,
which launches contemporary gender studies, and Mitchell's, which facilitates the
anglophone-feminist appropriation of Jacques Lacan's theory of sexed subjectivity, lies a
field of tension that holds the encounter between feminism and psychoanalysis.

Enter Foucault, Laughing

Which feminism, however? one might ask. Which psychoanalysis, for that matter?
Psychoanalysis and feminism each may have begun as one

—————————————

2 This coincidence is not surprising in a time of cultural and political ferment when, in
fact, many second-generation analysts were receiving their intellectual formation. Not
only Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Fenichel, but such figures as Edith Jacobson, George
Gero, and Annie Reich were steeped in left-wing politics. While some, like Wilhelm
Reich and Erich Fromm, kept striving for synthesis, others abandoned their politics, a
yielding impelled more by their Holocaust-driven escape to an anticommunist United
States (with its medicalized and antiintellectual psychoanalysis) than by the inherent
incompatibility of two cherished and imaginative comprehensions of human possibility
(see Jacoby, 1983).

3 If a single work could be said to represent this moment, it is Gayle Rubin's “The Traffic
in Women” (1975), in which Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss, and
Jacques Lacan are all hoisted on their own petards in the service of both illuminating and
calling for a new theory of what she then called the “sex/gender” system. Situating
sexuality between psyche and politics requires, on the other hand, a theory, a
psychoanalytic way to explain, as Rose puts it, how “ideological processes are
transformed, via individual subjects, into human actions and beliefs.” Juliet Mitchell
(1974) argued at the same time as Rubin that this theory was at hand: Jacques Lacan
would provide the means to route Marx through Freud, so that women's subordination
might be explained. Later, Rubin (1984) redivided sex from gender, arguing for distinct if
mutually implicated theories of each.

- 537 -

thing: psychoanalysis saw to the psyche, feminism to women. As they traversed the
twentieth century, however, the tides of change swept through them, and their internal
uniformity dissolved into a montage of interests, theories, practices, and constituencies.
The meeting of practices, say, of feminism, psychoanalysis, and social theory, produces
new ideas, new allegiances and alliances, new enemies. Now there are many feminisms
—white, black, heterosexual, lesbian, socialist, psychoanalytic, academic, grass-roots,
and so on. Likewise, as the psychoanalytic century has worn on, many psychoanalyses
have materialized: (neo)Freudian, object-relational, interpersonal, self-psychological,
ego-psychological, Lacanian, Kleinian, and one could go on, as each splinter group
schisms yet again.

So many voices, so little time. The noisy frontiers of psychosexual theory are a
deconstructionist's delight but a rapporteur's nightmare. The report from the front must,
then, be brief, a headline or two. For one thing, body parts no longer have quite the same
place on the psychoanatomical map. In fact, they’re hardly corporeal or sensate at all.
Take, for example, penis-envy (not, of course, that anyone would want to). In
psychoanalytic thought, the penis was once a biological organ that little boys had and
little girls wanted. Many objects, especially cigars, symbolized it. Not anymore. Now,
Freud's penis has become Jacques Lacan's (1982) phallus, which stands for (a pun that is
always intended) what all want and none can have: to be the object of mother's desire, an
impossible state of grace and power accorded not even to father—it's your mother, not his
own, who desires him, after all. That Lacan claims this law of desire as the true account
of human culture is, as I will shortly suggest, a misleading bit of politics.

For now, the next headline: Never fear, mother is here. A near-absence in the Freudian
corpus and still a wordless void in Lacan's cosmology—from which Julia Kristeva
(1983), and, in other registers, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1986) and Joyce McDougall
(1995) are trying to rescue her—mother elsewhere receives the mark of psychoanalytic
distinction, a symbol of her own. Thanks to Melanie Klein, who answered Freud's (1931)
wish by excavating the “Minoan-Mycenean” stratum beneath the oedipal floor and
finding there even more primal origins for civilization's discontents than Freud had
thought (Klein, 1928), the breast now rivals the phallus. Klein and, perhaps more
dramatically and certainly more accessibly, D. W. Winnicott (1975), both synonymous
with object-relations theory, have created a new primal scene: one's first
- 538 -

trauma is not the sight of father screwing mother but the feeling that the good breast has
turned sour—a mother absent or too present, actively bad or just so plain wonderful that
all you can do is hate her for the unbearably intense love she inspires.

Phallus and breast, however, are incommensurate. Even if mother has joined father at the
head of the psychoanalytic table—or, rather, at separate tables, since Lacanian and
object-relational do not really translate—different is not the same as equal. This
inequality is not quite a matter of paternal power. Men's unconscious awe of maternal
power may indeed underlie, as Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976) contends, the near-universal
degradation of the feminine, perhaps undergirding their grip on public power. Femininity,
moreover, is not passive (as Freud recognized in a famous footnote; 1930, p. 105, n. 3)
but active, even, as Adrienne Harris (1989) writes, aggressive, sometimes similarly to
men but also, as Carol Gilligan (1982) and Jean Baker Miller (1976) propound,
differently.

Still, femininity remains, here as everywhere, the marked category. That psychoanalytic
gender (explicated by Irene Fast, 1984, and Ethel Person, 1980) corresponds to gender
injustice remains a knotty theoretical and, among clinicians, professional problem. Male
and female belong to a “system of difference” (Benjamin, 1992) whose hierarchical
privileging of masculinity has unconscious correlates that, Virginia Goldner (1991)
explains, require not only decoding (a task furthered by academic psychoanalytic
feminism), but healing. By promising to lead to sexual health, developmental accounts of
how girls grow up to become what boys are not, and vice versa, serve also as moral
recommendations. Analysts, educators, and parents need Jessica Benjamin's (1988)
object-relational reworking of penis envy: the sense of inadequacy girls feel in the
absence of paternal recognition has its partner in the repudiation of femininity that, as
Nancy Chodorow (1978) shows us, engenders both masculinity as conventionally
constructed and the “oedipal asymmetries and heterosexual knots” of marital intimacy.

Description, however, is often also prescription. Psychoanalytic and feminist theory slip
between registers, between what is and what ought to be. In each, you can find yourself
talking about one when you meant to be talking about the other. Many have noted this
swivel-hipped action of theory, not least Foucault in his answer to Karl Marx.
Domination, he explains, hinges only in part on brawn, capital, and other material
advantages. People also imprison themselves, with a little help from their friends, in
Freud's three “impossible professions”—education, government,

- 539 -
and psychoanalysis (Freud, 1925b, p. 273; Foucault, 1976; Ehrenreich, 1989). If
oppression consists in the force of law backed up by the force of arms, domination
depends on what people tell themselves, both consciously and unconsciously. What we
tell ourselves, however, draws on a matrix of assorted claims to truth. These claims are
established and reproduced by disciplinary institutions, whose participants produce the
knowledge systems underlying modern power regimes, work in which they take
enormous pleasure (think of the intellectual enjoyment in the practices, both clinical and
theoretical, of psychoanalysis).

Domination derives from constructed cultural practices—what Foucault terms

“regulatory” practices—that, willy-nilly, people believe reveal the truth about
themselves, their lives, their value, and therefore about the systems that produce those
truths. Domination practices achieve this effect, suggests Pierre Bourdieu, French social
theorist, by impressing the psyche at the level of the body, by what he terms “symbolic
domination.” Hence, the centrality of sex, identified by Foucault as the modern
preoccupation. Indeed, the more nonverbal the symbolic, the greater its power. In contrast
to, say, military discipline, in which the enemy is clear, symbolic domination “is
something you absorb like air, something you don't feel pressured by; it is everywhere
and nowhere,” and therefore nearly impossible to get away from (Bourdieu & Eagleton,
1992, p. 115). Entering silently through such significant psychosocial arteries as posture
and gait, or through the prelinguistic semiosis of tone, rhythm, and prosody, linked by
Kristeva with the Lacanian imaginary and the maternal (1983), domination is what one
may fairly call a sadomasochistic fusion of power, knowledge, and pleasure that forges
the very hearts and minds it engages, thereby securing body and soul so as to make the
modern state run. As psychoanalytic feminism has begun arguing with regard to social
conventions of female desire (Benjamin, 1988; Dimen, 1986, 1989), escaping one's own
need of, loyalty to, and pleasure in domination practices, like any revolution, requires a
very special effort analogous to the dilemma, familiar to any clinician, of relinquishing a
bad object.

The challenge is to remember the political while retaining the psychical. With one not-so-
small quibble, one could agree with Rose's (1986) elegant phrasing of the problem.

The difficulty is to pull psychoanalysis in the direction of both these insights—towards a

recognition of the fully social constitution of identity

- 540 -

and norms, and then back again to that point of tension between ego and unconscious
where they are endlessly remodeled and endlessly break. (p. 7)

The quibble is power: the social construction of desire is also political, a nuance that
psychoanalysis resolutely denies in aid of its own institutional strength. In psychoanalytic
colloquy, “politics” is a signifier sure to evoke the response, “But that's not
psychoanalysis.” It's like the old song: I say “tomay-to,” you say “tomah-to.” I say
“political,” you say “not psychoanalytical.” Psychoanalysis entertains only two legitimate
bases for speech, the biological and the psychical. It excludes, in other words, the social,
which nevertheless sneaks back into discourse in the service of the normative or, what is
effectually the same thing, the universal.

In suggesting a relation between power structures and the unconscious, Lacanian thought
seems to meet this challenge. For Lacan (1977, 1982), building on structural linguistics as
developed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1966) and Roman Jakobson (1971), whose work
together led to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ mid-century structuralism, 1969, sex is a place in
and a matter of language, but language is itself a matter of law and culture. To be
(psychically) sexed is to speak, to become a person, and to enter culture, all in the same
terms. Judith Butler (1992) puts it this way: “Whereas [in object-relations theory] gender
appears to be a cultural determination that a pre-existing subject acquires, sexual
difference [in Lacanian theory] appears to constitute the matrix that gives rise to the
subject itself” (p. 140; see also Mitchell, 1991, who, like other Lacanian feminists,
refuses the term gender, which Freud never used at all). Subjectivity is primally and
multiply split, its coherence founded in a linguistic fiction, a single sex: one is either male
or female. Alternative sexual inclinations endure, unforgotten and unremembered,
perceptible only in “the gaps, silences, absences in speech” (Alexander, 1992, p. 109) to
which therapists attend so closely for clues to pain, or in the abject spaces of culture,
where cultural critics like Butler (1995) locate a marginalized and dissociated
homosexuality that haunts mainstream heterosexuality with the melancholy of its loss.

Yet, Lacanian theory defaults on its promise. It indicates the necessary discontinuities,
prohibitions, and losses of sex. Its pointer, however, remains the phallus, an obdurately
male symbol that eclipses female desire. True, the theory of the phallus as the
(appropriately named) master signifier of desire, sanity, meaning, and culture, describes
awfully well

- 541 -

how patriarchy works,4 or, at least, how it represents itself as working (Bowie, 1991, p.
130). No one has yet adequately explained, however, why the phallus has to be the
human key-symbol.5 We must agree with Elizabeth Grosz: “the relation between the
penis and the phallus is not arbitrary but is clearly socially and politically motivated”
(1992, p. 322). Grosz precedes this remark by insisting that “feminists cannot afford to
ignore the a priori privileging of the masculine within [Lacan's] account, nor can they too
readily accept Lacan's claim that the phallus is a signifier like any other.” Jane Flax
(1990) makes a similar argument using a slightly bizarre metaphor that is, however,
appropriate to her subject.

Lacan's claims that the phallus exists purely upon a symbolic plane, that it does not
signify penis, and that any relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary[,] are
disingenuous. Would we be persuaded by Lacan if he claims that the mother lacks, say,
“mouse” or that her desire for the child is to be the “waxpaper”? (p. 104)

The phallus is not a universal, but rather the ideology, the theory and practice, of
patriarchy.6

The final headline from the front then is this: If mother is here, can women's desire be far
behind? The breast is a switch-point to mother's desire, not yet women's. And the phallus,
I suppose, switches us to infinity. Lacanian theory, so subtle about desire's fluidity,
uncertainty, and intractability, is remarkably positivist about women's subjectivity.
Female desire's unspeakability may describe its own social erasure: “Only the concept of
a subjectivity at odds with itself gives back to women the right to an impasse at the point
of sexual identity, with no nostalgia whatsoever for its possible or future integration into
a norm” (Rose, 1986, p. 15). To represent that effacement by a falsely universal symbol
is, however, to prescribe the practice of misogyny as timeless, fixed. Nor is object-
relational gender theory free of prescriptivity; narratives of gender

—————————————

4 Rose (1982) claims this putative veridicality as the principal reason that feminists
should adhere to Lacan.

5 A “key” symbol is an element of meaning (which would include what Lacanians call
signifiers) that, in ethnographic perspective, simultaneously expresses and creates a
culture's central ideas, describes and prescribes its values and behavior (see Ortner,
1973).

6 Not only does Lacan shore up Freud's patriarchy, he strengthens it by eliminating the
biological determinism clouding Freud's account. The phallus is not the penis, or so he
insists: “The importance of the phallus is that its status in the development of human
sexuality is something which nature cannot account for” (Rose, 1982, p. 40; but see Flax,
1990).

- 542 -

identity and development cannot help but (re)present the normative structures they mean
to deconstruct. At the same time, however, theories of gender as social construction index
its historical multiplicity, revealing women's desire as the contradictory thing it is—
present here and absent there, flaring here, doused there, flickering still elsewhere, its
ambiguity, difficulty, and elusiveness the alternate truth of all, of anyone's desire.7
Encountering Paradox: Strange Hearts

And so we return, in closing, to sex. Or, more precisely, to sexual parts, to the erogenous
zones with which our heroine, Angelica, was so delightedly, if virtually, playing when we
last saw her. Nor, now that we’re talking about structures of domination, is this a very
surprising place to end up. Considering that one of the best ways to control people is to
reduce them by taking the part for the whole, this resurrection of body parts is mandated.
If erogenous body parts were Angelica's switch-words for her theory of genre, they are
society's switch-points for its theories and, therefore, its control of mind and heart. We
might say that this strategy is tantamount to turning people into part-objects. And yet so
often the erogenous body parts are switch-points to desire, excitement, sexual pleasure,
and orgasm. You know this, I know this, even Kernberg (1995) tells us about the routine
centrality to sexual excitement and satisfaction of eroticized body parts (safely
boundaried, of course, by what he calls “mature object-love”). It's old news to say that
sex is a site of contradictions. What would be new would be a strategy for dealing with
them.

I want to suggest the trope and habit of paradox. Consider philosopher Teresa Brennan's
(1989) paradoxical resolution of the false choice between object-relations and Lacanian
feminisms: “sexual difference is not only the result of socialization but its condition” (p.
9). To put this another way, psychoanalysis and feminism share what philosopher Naomi
Scheman (1993) terms the core modern epistemological problem of identifying and then
bridging gaps, such as those between mind and body, masculine and feminine, psyche
and society, and so on (p. 3). Resolving dualism means not splitting. Instead it means
maintaining possibility:

—————————————

7 The inconstancy of desire might well be symbolized by what Bowie, an eagle-eyed but
sympathetic interpreter of Lacan, calls “the everyday uncertainties that beset the male
member.” He wonders why Lacan does not see that the penis's unpredictability “make[s]
it into a dialectician par excellence, a nexus of signifying opportunities, a fine example,
in all of its modes, of the Freudian fort/da” (Bowie, 1991, p. 125).

- 543 -

the mobile, dynamic space between binaries yields resolutions that in turn give on to new
complexity.

It's like having to choose between vagina and clitoris. Why bother when we can have
both? The psychoanatomical map redrawn, our train of thought shifts tracks. Like bodies
of thought and intellectual-political movements, sexual bodies are neither singular nor
dual, neither whole nor part. They are multiple, and require paradoxical thinking. We can
agree with literary critic Valerie Traub's (1995) appraisal without giving up the body:
“the elevation of the clitoris (or labia) as the sine qua non of ‘lesbian’ sexuality
overvalues not only the genitals as a source of pleasure but the power of bodily
metonymy to represent that pleasure” (p. 100). The problem, and solution, is that no
single organ represents Woman's desire (much less anyone's). There really is no Queen to
partner King Phallus, whose sovereignty produces the resistance inevitably triggered by
domination. The refusal of feminists, of women, to be either same or Other, which is the
spirit inspiring Luce Irigaray (1985), transforms sexual splitting into paradox. Dissension
in the feminist ranks matches the multiplicity of women's desire, a cacophony exceeding
the body's symbolic capacity.

Women don't want just the genitals. They, we, want whatever is erotic, you name it.
Perhaps Lacan's mysterious and mystifying jouissance is nothing more than this mundane
multiformity of sex, its “excess over . . . the bare choreographies of procreation”
(Sedgewick, 1990, p. 29) symbolized by not only the distinction of clitoris from vagina,
but their concrete possibilities: Women can, want, and do have both clitoral and vaginal
orgasms, maybe not the same woman, maybe not at the same time, maybe not each time,
and maybe alternately or simultaneously with other climaxes, like those of “G-spot”
(Whipple & Komisaruk, 1991) or anus or . . . who knows?

Like orgasm, psychoanalysis and feminism are open questions, uncertainties waiting to
cohere, only to fall apart and then begin again. Their relationship neither does nor should
resemble a harmonious marriage nor any kind of primal scene whatsoever. No, family
therapy is not indicated. Rather, nonmonogamy is the treatment of choice; think of their
ménage à trois with Marxian, Saussurean, and Foucauldian social theory. Their relations
should always be tense, the radicalism of each, given by their promiscuity (feminist
intercourse with social reality, psychoanalytic congress with psychic reality), answering
the other's conformist and dominating tendencies.

- 544 -

The uncertainty at feminism's heart is the tension between its two main goals, one
ameliorative, the other revolutionary. On the one hand, feminism aims to better the lives
women lead, hence, the Women's Liberation Movement. On the other, feminism aims to
radically reconfigure what we mean by Woman, hence, feminist postmodernism. On the
face of it, these goals would surprise no one. However, if you look into them, you find
that they contradict one another. Feminism tries to empower women so that they can
create the lives they want, but it also, and simultaneously, puts their very desires into
question, for it asks whether there are wants women have not yet begun, or dared, to
imagine. Like any progressive social movement, feminism tries to improve what already
exists, while at the same time it undermines the status quo. In so doing, it generates a
tension, a paradox between the desire and need to better women's lives and the wish and
necessity to redefine them.
The heart of psychoanalysis is equally strange. Indeed, it is this strangeness, the initial,
revolutionary shock of psychoanalytic theory, that Lacan's impossible language is meant
to memorialize. Lacan wants to combat the ameliorating pull of clinical practice toward
rationalizing the weirdness, “undecidability,” and difficulty of the psychic interior
(Bowie, 1991, p. 196; Rose, 1986, p. 15). The theory of the unconscious, so at odds with
daily life and ordinary speech, remains the most radical of Freud's contributions (even
though the idea of it had long preceded him; Ellenberger, 1970, passim). For it's here, in
the once-known and then repressed, or as some analysts are thinking these days, in the
neverknown and dissociated (Bromberg, 1994; Davies & Frawley, 1992), that lives what
cannot be thought. In the tension of conscious and unconscious lies the potential for
psychic integration, which is to say, paradoxically, for personal change and meaning. The
psychoanalytic session is a chance to say the unspeakable and think the unthinkable, to
imagine what does not yet exist. It's not much fun: psychoanalysis offers individuals what
feminism and other varieties of political action offer collectivities, the subversive
opportunity of digging up the ground beneath your feet. But, like feminism, it's got
possibilities.

REFERENCES
Abel, E. (1990). Race, class, and psychoanalysis? Opening questions. In: Conflicts in
feminism, ed. M. Hirsch. & E. F. Keller. New York: Routledge, pp. 184-204.

Abraham, K. (1924). A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light
of mental disorders. In: Selected papers on psycho-analysis, ed. E. Jones. New York:
Brunner/Mazel.

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Between Lust and Libido: Sex, Psychoanalysis, and the Moment Before

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Recent contributions to the psychoanalytic literature suggest that the classical focus on
psychosexuality has been lost. This charge is both wrong and right. After briefly
surveying the evolution of psychoanalytic thinking on sexuality and reviewing the
concept of libido, this essay retrieves the word Lust from the footnotes to which Freud
consigned it and remodels it into a new idea. The proposition is put forth that a
postclassical theory of sex compatible with contemporary clinical and theoretical practice
can emerge once sexuality is rethought in the ambiguous, potential space between Lust
and libido.

The only appropriate word in the German language, Lust, is unfortunately ambiguous and
is used to denote the experience of a need and of its gratification.

[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud, 1905b, p. 135, fn. 2, added 1910]

Sexuality Is Alive And Well And Living In Psychoanalysis. You just have to know where
to look for it—conduct a treasure hunt in which the prize is hiding in plain sight. At the
same time, the reports of sexuality's death are not exactly wrong either. This apparent
contradiction, really a paradox, deserves some unpacking. After reexamining the idea of
libido, I will unearth the idea of Lust which

—————————————

This paper was originally delivered at the Colloquium on Sexuality in Psychoanalysis,

Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University,
March 1998. I thank Ken Corbett, Jack Drescher, Samuel Gerson, Karol Marshall, and
Sue Shapiro for many useful suggestions regarding the present version of this paper.

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Freud did not articulate but which, in the metaphor Masud Khan (1979) uses to
characterize Freud's genius, is an answer “in relation to which we are learning to ask the
right questions” (p. 18). There are three main themes: the psychoanalytic paradigm shift
from sex to object relation; the problem of discharge and the solution of Lust; and the
anxiety of erotic countertransference. These themes wind through a series of arguments:
the history of desexualization in psychosexual theory; libido and the changing idea of
nature in psychoanalysis; and desire and interpretation in clinical practice.

Rethinking Sex
Desexualization, Andre Green argues, is rife. Nor is he alone in thinking so. When his
provocative “Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis?” appeared in January
1996, I consumed it not with admiring hunger but, for all its polemic against the post-
Kleinian paradigm shift, with voracious envy: he beat me to the punch, got it into print
before me. Actually, though, someone else said it before him. Thomas Domenici, then a
candidate at the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York
University, had critiqued the psychoanalytic flip on sexuality in April 1993 (at the
meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association
[APA] in New York). Drive theory, he contended in print (1995), sees affective and
interpersonal needs as “an overlay upon a more basic template of sexuality and
aggression” (p. 34). In contrast, object-relations theory (to name but the most influential
and general of the new psychoanalytic schools) reverses the matter— making sexuality
the secondary precipitate of a desire for connection and intimacy.

Curiously, there was a flurry of psychoanalytic writing on sex even as Green was firing
his initial salvo. In 1995 (when Green delivered his paper as the Freud birthday lecture at
the Anna Freud Centre), four new books were published. Sheldon Bach (1995), in The
Language of Perversion and the Language of Love, freshly sets a Winnicottian platform
under the traditional binary of sex and aggression. In The Many Faces of Eros, Joyce
McDougall (1995) finds dilemmas of psychic life and death embedded in sexual desire
and practice. Otto Kernberg (1995) couples classic psychosexuality with postclassic
object relations in Love Relations. Last, the authors in Disorienting Sexuality, an
anthology edited by Lesser and Domenici (1995), deploy social

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constructionist, feminist, and queer theory to interrogate the way sexual identity is
construed in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. Now in the space of 12 months have
come two major conferences on the topic—conferences of the International
Psychoanalytic Association (Barcelona, 1997) and the Division of Psychoanalysis of the
APA (Boston, 1998)—as well as many local symposia and seminars.

There seems to be something in the air.

Of course, when an authority, a veritable tribal elder like Green, anathematizes our
unconscious omission, we notice it and hop to. But our psychosexual closets need even
more of an airing than Green gives them; there exists, to use a more classical metaphor, a
psychoanalytic bedrock that Green has overlooked. Yes, Freud invented psychosexuality,
and Green like Lacan, is right to want to go back to him. I want to suggest, however, that
we return to a different Freud, the prescient Freud of the footnotes, whose answer to
questions that only now may be asked can put an entirely unexpected spin on this
rethinking of sex. Yet before we can return to our point of embarkation, some
reconnaissance is necessary—some assessment of the journey so far as well as some
inventory of what we need to recover.
Where Libido Was, There Shall Objects
Be?
Psychoanalysis has blown hot and cold about sex from the beginning, as a speedy review
will indicate. Even Freud (1905b) desexualizes when, in his epochal Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality, he carves heterosexual order out of the polymorphously perverse
jungle, and he continues domesticating as he proceeds (e.g., 1911, p. 222; 1920). Ferenczi
(1933), for his part, names an often transgressed divide between the language of adult
passion and the language of childhood tenderness but nearly writes sexuality out of
infancy in his attempt to write sexual exploitation out of parenting and therapy.1 In the
next generation, object relations, ego psychology, and self psychology all

—————————————

1 Lewis Aron (personal communication) argues that Ferenczi “did not abandon the idea
of childhood sexuality but rather downplayed it as the origin of pathology unless it was
made traumatic by parental abuse, misunderstanding, and deceit.” Nevertheless, it seems
to me that calling infantile sexuality “tenderness” and adult sexuality “passion”
constitutes a desexualizing move. The danger is that, once the damage done by incest and
sexual abuse is given its due, there is a tendency to deny infantile sexuality. The
challenge is to hold both children's sexuality and adults' abuse in mind simultaneously
(Harris, 1996a, b).

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contribute to the unsexing Green deplores. Fairbairn's (1952) pithy pronouncement that
libido is object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking, brings objects into the circuit of desire but
sends sex to Coventry. Sexual pleasure may seem to acquire a scientifically indisputable
place in human necessity when Lichtenstein (1961) gives “nonprocreative sexuality” an
evolutionary function; thus rationalized, however, it promptly and predictably becomes
distinctly unsexy, sinking under the weight of its Darwinian burden as “the mainstay of
identity” (Person, 1980) for the malleable psyche of Homo sapiens. Kohut's (1977, p.
226) substitution of Odysseus and Telemachus for Laius and Oedipus fashions a new
father but startlingly omits sex altogether—unless you include homoerotics, which his
image of a successful oedipal outcome specifically rules out. Even Lacan's (1977; see
also J. Mitchell and Rose, 1982) return to Freud is oddly disembodied—the phallus
signing an excitement that seems more cerebral than psychical.

Still, Green (and, for that matter, Lacan) is wrong to argue that, when it comes to
sexuality, the contemporary critical shift in ideas is valueless. Our postclassical lens helps
us to see our classical subject more, not less, clearly. The new thinking takes off from
Melanie Klein's relocation of genitality in the preoedipal period, which “places sexuality
squarely in the middle of the emergence and structuralization of the self in its relation to
others” (S. A. Mitchell, 1988, p. 95). The developmental story changes: As individuals,
we are no longer thought to go straight from birth to Oedipus. On the way, we pass
through, even tarry a while in and definitely take our sexual shapes from, a maternal
landscape (Laplanche, 1976) in which Narcissus can be seen looking into pools of desire.
It is even regularly noticed that not everyone traveling this road is male or heterosexual.

Key to this new thinking has been the contemporaneous insight of Fairbairn (1952) and
Sullivan (1953) that psychosexual stages are not just corporeal but also interpersonal
moments; to take the most famous example, the mouth is erotic because it channels not
drive but relatedness. In this mode, S. A. Mitchell (1988) mines the sexual for such
relational themes as search, surrender, and escape. Clinically, then, sexuality is
reinterpreted. Technical questions now focus on how sexuality serves the need for, say,
attachment or recognition or selfobjects. Furthermore, clinicians newly engage and
theorize the preoedipal erotization of transference and countertransference (Welles and
Wrye, 1996).

Sexuality has become a relation, not a force. If, with Freud, we thought that your sex is
what makes you who you are, now we think

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that who you are shapes what sex you are and what sex you like. Clinical attention is less
often on how the anatomical distinction between the sexes influences the psyche. More
commonly, we think about meaning, not biology. We wonder how the intrapsychic,
interpersonal, and cultural significance of the anatomical distinction inscribes desire. The
self, we now think, is born in relationship, not in the continuously flowing impersonal
excitement—libido—that Freud said underlies psychic process and structure.

Yet as is so often the dialectical case, the solution is a problem—or, in other words, plus
ca change. Although it may look like our views of sexuality have been completely turned
upside down, Freud's theory of sex reigns, if only unconsciously. The “sexuality”
produced by the intersubjective world, to put it differently, is exactly the one that Freud
had in mind. Look at George Klein's (1961) appealing argument about Freud's two
theories of sexuality. In ego-psychological voice, he pits what he calls Freud's explicit
structural-libido theory, which he claims lacks clinical relevance, against his (implicit)
clinical theory. But what, in the end, does Klein really mean by the clinical theory of sex?
Sensuality, not sexuality—“a capacity for a primary, distinctively poignant, enveloping
experience of pleasure that manifests itself from early infancy on” and endures
throughout life (p. 19). Like the other efforts to generate viable theses of sex and
selfhood, sex and object-relation, sex and clinical process, sex and corporeality, Klein's is
good and sensible and useful. However, his clinical theory is manifestly not about sex, or,
rather, it redefines sex as sensuality. In other words, we find here as everywhere else the
desexualization that Green complains about. There remains only one theory of sex, and,
yes, Klein is right about it. Libido theory is cold. But what does he offer instead?
Something nice and warm. What happened to the heat?

On the Anxiety of Erotic

Countertransference
Now before I turn up the flame, let me say why I think our reconsideration matters. After
all, you might be thinking that clinically we address sex the way we do anything else.
Too true. Yet technique, try as it might, does not prevent countertransference anxiety,
which is what, clinically, the eclipsing of sexuality shows up as. I have in mind the
student who worried, two thirds of the way through my course on sexuality, whether it
was unethical to ask patients about their sexuality. We have come full circle in 100 years,
no?

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Consider Freud's uneasy countertransference with Dora, Jane Gallop's sophisticated

account of which illustrates an anxious approach—avoidance to sex that is time honored
in consulting room, classroom, and text. In “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of
Hysteria” (1905a), Freud, Gallop (1982, p. 140) reminds us, frets “that the reader might
be scandalized that a psychoanalyst should discuss sexual practices… with an
inexperienced girl.” He instructs clinicians to be direct, frank, fearless, medically dry;
don't gynecologists unhesitatingly make their patients “submit” to the uncovering of their
most intimate anatomy? Yet at the very moment Freud claims to speak most
straightforwardly, his patriarchal attitude—and, I would add, his own anxiety—compels
him to take what Gallop slyly terms a “French detour”: “I call bodily organs and
processes by their technical names, and I tell these to the patient if they—the names, I
mean—happen to be unknown to her. J'appelle un chat un chat.'” (Freud, 1905a, quoted
in Gallop, 1982, p. 140) The proper doctor becomes, Gallop cleverly suggests, flirtatious,
even titillating, simultaneously prurient and puritan: Freud, unconsciously using the
French vulgarity for female genitalia (chat or chatte),” calls a pussy a pussy” (Gallop,
1982, p. 140). A slip of this order, even if it occurred only with his readers and not with
his patient, suggests an underlying anxiety that we ourselves can recognize to this day.

Our slips are not dark corners to rush past. Contemporary clinical theory argues instead
that we can and should put them to work. I am right, therefore, to make the anxiety of
erotic countertransference my principal pedagogical concern. Anxiety prevents analysts
from addressing sex where it is and makes them see it where it isn't. The solution, I have
found, is to talk about sex not dryly, as Freud counseled with a prudence necessary to his
daring venture, but with humor and pleasure. Read Three Essays with your genitals, I tell
my students (some of whom have suggested we read with our other erogenous zones as
well). Let the laughter bubble, let the puns come, let the eroticism permeate the room.
Sex talk is, as I have argued elsewhere (1998), sexy talk because it is a performative:

To talk sex is to do sex too.… Performatives constitute a paradoxical experience in which

a word is not a word, an act not an act. They permit ambiguity to be experienced and,
eventually but not immediately, named. Speaking desire is a performative, a speech act
that constitutes the situation it declares, but at the same time is not an action. Its very
ambiguity is what makes

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it erotically, affectively, cognitively, therapeutically powerful [p. 83].

When we engage sex in clinic or classroom, we need to enjoy it, if only because sex talk
is also anxious talk. When I teach, I want the class to think together about this anxiety as
well as about the (possibly) anxiety-related sexual prejudices they share with patients and
other analysts. If students can be at ease talking about sex with one another, they are
more likely to be comfortable with patients and thereby let this particular taboo lift.

Why does anxiety so commonly accompany erotic countertrans-ference? The problem is

general. No topic, with the possible exception of money, so renders analysts and others
unable to think; no topic but sex is so filled with doubt, fear, shame, excitement. Witness
the common popular agreement relative to Zippergate: If people will lie about nothing
else, they'll lie about sex. Many rivulets feed the anxious flow. The return of the
repressed, to be sure; we are haunted by what we forget. The culture matters too. I agree
with Green that psychoanalysis sports a fearsome puritanical streak. “Excitement,” says
Adam Phillips (1988) when writing of Winnicott, “tends to turn up in object-relations
theory as a defense against something reputedly more valuable.… The implication … is
that freedom is freedom from bodily excitement. As though in states of desire the self
was, as it were, complying with the tyranny of the body” (p. 71). And now in these
relational days at the millennium, we are uneasy with the ruthlessness Freud (1908)
perceived that, disciplined by what he ironically called “civilized” sexual morality,
accounts for “modern nervous illness.” Today, too, we fear the law or, specifically,
accusations of sexual harassment or the public sequelae of recovered memories; the threat
of legal action and media exposure makes us edgy and cautious (Harris, 1996a, b). We
are, finally, intellectually anxious: We require a theory of sexuality that fits the sea
change in psychoanalytic thought and practice.

Parsing Libido: The Idea of Nature in

Psychoanalysis
Sex, if it is a fact, is also an idea. Like most ideas, it has weight, a body, you might say,
of its own. Ideas are commonly thought to be

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accurate recastings of the facts they represent, molds giving the true outlines of the reality
they encase. We tend to assume a one-to-one ratio between an idea and the thing that the
idea is about. Through ideas we can see, as through transparent glass, the “real” truth. Or
so goes the model of thought with which we have been operating for 200 years or so
(Harvey, 1989; Flax, 1990). At the end of the 1900s, though, it makes sense to take
account of an alternative way of thinking that has cohered of late—the postmodernist
paradigm that, if the attacks now leveled at it by the academia who once adored it are any
indication, has now joined the 20th-century philosophical canon. What we, along with
Freud and his critics, are unused to entertaining is that ideas have substance; they color
and shape.

When we write, talk, or think about “sex,” we are engaging a reality even before we
begin to study it. It is not so much that ideas distort a previously existing, true, and
knowable reality. It is more that ideas possess a reality of their own. They constitute a
sort of parallel universe that must be parsed so as to set in sharp relief the world it is
meant to illuminate. Here I want to parse the idea of libido, core to which is the idea of
Nature. Libido, we learn right at the beginning of Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905b), is to sex as hunger is to food. “The fact of the existence of sexual
needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a
‘sexual instinct’ [termed libido], on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition, that is of
hunger” (p. 135). Sexual desire, this analogy suggests, is as natural as hunger.

The idea that sex is natural, not cultural, belongs to a wide, pervasive, and largely
successful intellectual gambit on Freud's part. Freud was trying to construct the
psychoanalytic equivalent of evolutionary theory: He wanted to make his account a
master narrative (Flax, 1990) that, by explaining everything about how the mind works,
would sway medical minds in particular and intellectuals in general. To do that, he
needed the legitimation Darwinian theory could provide (Schafer, 1977; Fliegel, 1986). If
the psychoanalytic theory of desire could be linked to the great chain of cause and effect
running all the way back from biology and Darwin to physics and Newton, it would be
shown to be true and could take its place in the noble roster of modern sciences.

Today, after a century in which all certainties are shattered (Harvey, 1989), the rallying
cry is that sex is cultural, not natural. Human nature, we now think, is a possibility, not a
determinate. As I have

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contended elsewhere (1995), the psychoanalytic reliance on Darwinian thought amounts
to little more than an appeal to authority. To deem something natural is to suggest it is
originary: You need look no further than sexual needs or instincts for cause or
explanation. The familiar and by now largely accepted multiculturalist argument, that
desire is socially constructed, has traditionally found support in anthropological
observation. The manifest diversity in forms of sexual desire indicates that sexuality (like
hunger) is a cultural, not a natural, product and process. The nature of human nature is, as
anthropologists like to say, cultural as well as biological and therefore inherently various
(Levi-Strauss, 1949, pp. 3-25); “the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that
it is ‘in’ that nature to construct its own history” (Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin, 1984, p.
14). If you want to appeal to Darwin, you could do worse than follow Steven Jay Gould
(1977), who concludes, “Flexibility may well be the most important determinant of
human consciousness; the direct programming of behavior has probably become
maladaptive” (p. 257).

As far as the psychoanalytic idea of Nature goes, however, it's a case of new wine in old
bottles. If, in 1900, sex was natural, now, in 1999, objects are. “Attachment is the new
Nature,” observes Ken Corbett (personal communication), “but its social construction is
regularly overlooked.” Over the course of the psychoanalytic century, psychoanalysis has
remained faithful to Freud: It uses the selfsame strategy to achieve the elusive goal of
scientific legitimacy but deploys it on different territory. “Where libido was, there shall
objects be” may be said, as we have seen, to be the common metapsychological thread
running through the diverse midcentury rereadings of psycho-sexual theory as described
in the brief literature review offered earlier. Nature retains an honored place in
psychoanalytic thought, but its contents have, amazingly, changed altogether.

Nature is not bedrock; it is shifting sand. For psychoanalytic purposes, the idea of the
Natural as solid ground and reliable guide to causality is not so much wrong as
incoherent. Just as the appealing simplicity and parsimony of libido elide the rich
complications of object relations, so the naturalizing of attachment denies the protean
ambiguity of sexuality. Indeed, the binary opposition between Nature and Culture begins
to make less and less sense in psychoanalytic perspective. Even in Freud's thought,
sexuality is always both natural and cultural. Libido is a bedrock energy, but it must be
shaped, and the consequences of this construction are inevitably tragic: “Neurosis

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is the negative of perversion,” he taught us in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”

(1905b, p. 165). The repression of sexual desire, he said in 1908, was necessary for
civilization, but it also produces illness, which in turn reduces the appetite, the passion,
for life. Hence the irony of sublimation: What civilization gives with one hand, it takes
away with the other. This classic ambiguity is, I believe, more important in rethinking
sexuality than the either—or that Freud buys into when he turns to Darwin (Young-
Bruehl, cited in de Lauretis, 1994).
Sex and Technique: Libido, Discharge,
and Catharsis
I propose then that, in probing the psychoanalytic idea of sexuality, we skip the 19th-
century debate between Nature and Culture and engage the more contemporary one
between modernism and postmodernism. My strategy is, however, quite old-fashioned: I
read the footnotes. As many analysts (e.g., Robert May, 1995), literary critics (especially
Steven-Marcus, 1984; Leo Bersani, 1986), and other readers have found, to read Freud's
footnotes is to discover a sub-oceanic world that puts in question the self-evidence and
stability of the textual terra firma. Containing Freud's doubts, second thoughts, and
contradictions, they are the seams in an otherwise seamless story (to switch to a rather
domestic metaphor whose appropriateness will soon be apparent). One customary
function of footnotes (Grafton, 1997), of which Freud takes great advantage, is to manage
theory's overflow, its inevitable inconsistencies. Freud's notes serve as a reservoir for
competing ideas that, although they did not fit what he intended to say, may turn out to be
relevant to what we want to say.

The first substantive footnote in Three Essays (1905b) betrays Freud's inkling that libido
was not an altogether satisfactory idea. “Science,” his second sentence reads, “makes use
of the word ‘libido”’ to designate sexual needs because the only available word in
ordinary language is inadequate. Which word is that? In the note tacked onto this
sentence, we learn: “The only appropriate word in the German language, Lust, is
unfortunately ambiguous and is used to denote the experience of a need and of its
gratification” (p. 135, fn. 2, added 1910). Science wants precision, not ambiguity. Lust
does not meet this standard. It is contradictory, denoting, Strachey adds, either desire or
pleasure. The meaning of Lust is, in other words, doubled—both

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the longing for pleasure and pleasure itself—a meaning unavailable in the English
homonym, lust.

What Freud gains in clarity, he loses in complexity. That his explanation emphasizes
semantics should not obscure the footnote's semiotic and discursive significance. Freud's
discourse on sexuality contains, I want to argue, a slippage we must explore in order to
rescue sexuality from the obscurity into which it has lately been cast. Following
Laplanche's (1976) use of Foucault's theory of the “derivation of psychoanalytic entities,”
I suggest that the slippage between text and footnote corresponds to a doubled movement
in sex that Freud senses but, committed to science and simplicity, cannot quite
articulate.2 In making biology the ground for libido by likening libido to hunger, Freud
trims his terms, obeying science's demand for parsimony and consistency. In rejecting the
doubleness of Lust, though, he strips sexuality of something vital. Perhaps there is a
straight shoot from biological need to biological satisfaction; he has indicated, remember,
that hunger is simple (although the convolutions of anorexia and bulimia qualify this
suggestion considerably, as I am not the first to point out). The sexual way is, however—
and it is Freud who teaches this—anything but straight.

I propose to rehabilitate this rejected word, Lust, and remodel it as a new idea that can
revivify sexuality for postclassical psychoanalysis. Between libido and Lust lies a century
of controversy, contest, and clinical change. If libido marks the ultimately straight and
narrow of biology, Lust marks the contradictions, the twinned joy and suffering of the
psyche. Libido and Lust render two competing psychoanalytic accounts of sex, one
articulated, the other buried. Libido is the account we know, but Lust, a piece of sexuality
hiding in plain sight beneath the text, is the account we intuit. Postclassical fluency with
the practices of paradox and uncertainty authorizes questions about sexuality which
would have lacked legitimacy within classical thought, but answers to which are
potentiated by the idea of Lust.

The cardinal feature of libido, its drive toward discharge, is rich with presupposition and
implication, with models of body and mind, illness and cure, desire and action, social
values and moral dicta. As a

—————————————

2 For Bersani (1986) too, this doubling is simultaneously theoretical and experiential.
Freud's “telelogical view of sexuality in the Three Essays [represses] the
counterargument of sexuality as a kind of historically non-viable phenomenon of a
pleasurable-nonpleasurable tension” (p. 89).

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concept, it does much theoretical work. Let me review, condensing here Person's (1986)
admirable summary. Not only an appetite demanding satisfaction, libido has
psychological power: It is a force that registers sexual instincts in the mind and thereby
partners the emotion of sexual longing. Alternatively conceived, libido is an energy that
accumulates to produce “unpleasure.” It mounts, surges, seeks release. Existing outside
awareness, libido nevertheless serves to excite consciousness, there to be transformed
into something the psyche wishes to get rid of.

Discharge is the bridge between sex and sanity. Classically, sex requires release, without
which illness ensues. There is a psychic economy, and sex is central to it. It is not far
from sex as safety valve to catharsis as psychic cure. I am referring, of course, to the
“talking cure.” Today, Anna O (Breuer and Freud, 1893-1895) might have said she “just
needed to talk.”3 Then she called it “chimney sweeping”—a domestic metaphor
appropriate to much of her life at the time and also true to the root meaning of catharsis,
“to clean.” Although this account of psychoanalytic cure is controversial (whether in fact
Bertha Pappenheim got symptomatic relief but not cure), and although the therapeutic
mechanisms are under debate (whether it was the mere act of talking or, rather, talking to
someone that helped her), still Anna O's strong image of chimney sweeping accorded
well with classical psychic economy.

Nowadays, we do not measure our work by catharsis; indeed, much of psychoanalysis

may be regarded as a dialectical development in response to this early formulation. So
too should we overhaul the discharge model of and for sex.4 Discharge and sex do make
a suspiciously perfect couple: sexual discharge and psychic discharge, the economics of
body and mind, cure and sex. Freud, it is said, derived the sexual discharge model from
the economic theory (which he drew from Newton and Darwin). But what if the
economic theory draws on the sexual model? Why did discharge become the
psychoanalytically defining moment of sex? Did its physicality have something to do
with

—————————————

3 I am familiar with Mikkel Borch-Jakobson's (1997) recent indictment of Breuer's

account as a fabrication; this is not, however, the place to address his argument.

4 Although the approach I am suggesting agrees with the focus of George Klein's (1961)
critique, it provides a different sort of answer than the one he had in mind. He too
observed that, in drive—discharge, sexuality is something to be gotten rid of, whereas in
clinical theory, “sexuality is a pleasure experience to be elicited or pursued, with
variations of aim” (p. 49).

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the psychic centrality accorded it by theory? To put it a little differently: Were its origins
more literal, at least as personal as they were professional? If, in the beginning of Three
Essays, of sex, and of psychological development, all sexual pleasures are equal, in the
end only one is said to count: “end pleasure,” or orgasm. The desired and psychically
necessary completion of the sex act, end-pleasure is defined as discharge. Discharge of
what? Two things, we are told—force and, in Freud's (1905b, p. 207) phrase, “sexual
substances.” We have already seen what the force is: energy, libido. But what are the
substances that are discharged?

My question is rhetorical (and a bit arch) and the answer obvious. Discharge as substance
can refer only, in Freud's time, to seminal emission. Contemporary research on female
ejaculate notwithstanding (Ladas, Whipple, and Perry, 1983), only the orgasms of men
routinely entail physical discharge—at least in the Euro-American view of these matters,
for Tantric Buddhism, by way of contrast, teaches a sexual practice in which orgasm
occurs without ejaculation (Odier, 1997).5 In argument with, especially, Krafft-Ebing,
Freud (1905b) recognizes the bias of this formulation: “Having been designed to account
for the sexual activity of adult males, it takes too little account of three sets of conditions
which it should also be able to explain. These are the conditions in children, in females
and in castrated males” (p. 214). However, that he goes on to warn us against laying
“more weight on the factor of the accumulation of the sexual products than it is able to
bear” does not impel him to rethink further the implications of the discharge model. This
is a task that confronts us now.

Maybe, as Robert Holt (1989, p. 184, fn. 7) quite sensibly and perhaps humorously
proposes, there was another substance at stake. He suggests that the original model for
drive was not hunger but urination—a model that enables us to capture the drift but also
the insufficiency of discharge theory. Although the implicitly invidious comparison
between seminal discharge and micturition may ill serve the erotics of urination, it does
bring out a certain grimness in the classic theory of psychosexuality. Revealed is the
astonishing chain implicated by the figure of discharge: urine, semen, symptom, cure. At
work here is the hydraulics of sex and psyche: the relief upon

—————————————

5 I am indebted to Sue Shapiro for alerting me to the significance of Indian sexual

practice for my argument.

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excreting urine, the release of ejaculating semen, the cathartic passing of the symptom,
the calm after the storm of illness.

Can cleanliness and godliness be far behind? This often unquestioned imbrication of
hygiene, sex, illness, and treatment is worth noting. If semen is a waste product, what
does that make of sex? With Foucault (1975), we can observe here a sort of policing
function, a moralizing tone that stands out when discharge becomes the exclusive
metaphor for sexuality or, for that matter, for sanity. As hygiene, sexuality becomes a
moral and medical matter subjected to the authority of doctors, clergy, therapists, and
other guardians of the contemporary soul (Shapiro, 1996). The economic theory of sex, or
at least the aim it bestows on sex, embeds sexuality in a model of health and illness,
engineering and efficiency.

We can wonder as well about the moral force exercised by the discharge model on our
clinical practice. Classically, what mattered was the interpretive climax: once the patient
had vented (to use today's slang), the doctor would know what was wrong and could then
tell the patient what caused the illness—an authoritative (if also sometimes authoritarian)
telling that was curative. Did things ever work out like that? Today we doubt not only the
efficacy of this model of cure, but its veridicality. We work very differently now. We
notice and value mutuality and enactments and the indeterminacy they sow (Ogden,
1994; Chused, 1996; Price, 1996); we employ a multiplicity of theoretical and clinical
practices. We doubt. Is it the destination that matters, we have begun to ask, or the
journey? What is the relative importance of interpretation, the process of arriving at it,
and the relationship between analyst and patient?

The Mess in the Consulting Room: Lust,

Chimney Sweeping, and the Moment
Before
Additional interpretations of Anna O's humble but spectacularly layered metaphor of
chimney sweeping are possible, and I begin here to show how Lust might serve to answer
the postclassical questions raised in this essay. I do not dismiss the power of catharsis in
either the clinic or the bedroom. The parallel between ejaculation and catharsis is, for one
thing, too compelling to set aside: Slighting female orgasm though it may, it salutes the
gratifying conclusiveness of orgasm. And, in therapy, it does help to get things off your
chest, even if analysis

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is interminable. But, although libido and catharsis befit a oneperson model of mind, they
don't do much for the two-person variety.

You need someone to sweep your chimney. Anna O did. She didn't say so in as many
words, but she did. Think about it this way. Anna O didn't clean her own chimneys. In
her socioeconomic class, you got someone in to do the work (usually young boys who
were small enough to climb inside the tall, sooty towers). Breuer too was hired help,
employed by Anna O's father to help her get well. Is it stretching the matter to suppose
that, when Anna O spoke of chimney sweeping, she was addressing not only Breuer's
need for her father's money (Borch-Jakobson, 1997) but her need for Breuer? What Anna
O meant, I should like to interpret, is that she needed her analyst. In keeping with
contemporary theoretical and clinical practice, the focus of which is equally in the inner
world of psychic reality and in the external world of interpersonal and social reality, I
want to argue that Anna O was trying to tell Breuer, in language that both admitted and
denied her desire, that she depended on him.

Certainly we do not wish to avoid the metaphor's sexual implications, but we do not want
to overlook its ambiguities either. Without a doubt, the image of the chimney, a
passageway for heat and smoke, evokes the desirous vaginal interior, the phallic entry of
the cleaner and his brush. “Chimney-sweeping is an action symbolic of coitus, something
Breuer never dreamed of,” writes Freud to Jung in 1909 (McGuire, 1988, p. 267).6 Anna
O wanted Breuer, so the account goes, to enter her chimney. She desired him sexually
and is even said to have had a hysterical pregnancy as a sign of what she desired and
could not have. Look again at the metaphor, however. Is the chimney, would you say, a
phallic column or a vaginal cavity? Is it female? Male? Is entering the chimney to sweep
it an act of female domesticity or an act of male labor? Is it a one-person or a two-person
psychology? How can we choose? Like the ambiguous container in Henry Moore's
“Internal and Extrenal Forms,” the chimney has both an outside and an inside, is both
male and female, is an erect enclosure that is also an embrace.

I would like us to think of chimney sweeping not through the economics but through the
semiotics of desire and therapy. Borrowing Foucault's (1966, p. xii) characterization of
his own effort in The Order

—————————————

6 I thank Steven Reisner for alerting me to this letter; it is always reassuring to have
Freud confirm one's independent assessments.

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of Things, I am proposing a set of “corresponding transformations” in how we think

about sex, how we think about the mind, and how we think about psychotherapy. Anna
O's imagery is not only sexed and gendered. It also evokes the space of dependency and
need that we associate with domestic life. Chimney sweeping smacks of a creatureliness,
a bodily feel, a plenitude and messiness that are surely properties of both sex and therapy
but drop out of Freud's elegant scientific reduction of desire to libido and his clinical
understanding,7 You think chimneys, you think hearths, you think homes. The domestic
interior, surrounded by the public world to which psychoanalytic theory and practice
belong, situates intimacy, relatedness, and warmth as well as complexity, confusion, and
the half-lights of bodies and minds growing into and out of each other— a viny,
complicated mess, the same sort of mess that we find, according to Philip Bromberg's
theory of psychoanalytic technique, in the consulting room (personal communication),
the same sort of mess that we find in sex.

What about this mess? Certainly it has something to do with development, with the
“relational excess of early human life” (Corbett, 1997, p. 501); with the ambiguities of
intersubjectivity; with the complications of gender; with sex as, paradoxically, both ruth
and ruthless-ness. But before we can get to such matters, we need to mess with the idea
of libido just a little bit more. There is, hovering mutely on the margins of classical
psychoanalytic thinking, an alternative theory of sex. I am referring to that word, Lust,
tucked away down there in that profligate footnote. If libido describes why you want to
have sex, Lust says what it's like while you are having it.

I would like here to let one of my students speak for me. One day, after class, he said to
me privately, “I don't know why Freud emphasized discharge as the be-all and end-all of
sex, why he thought the moment of orgasm is the greatest pleasure. As far as I'm
concerned, it's the moment before, when you're just hanging on, and you want it to go on
and on and you don't want to stop.” It would not then be exact to say that Lust is to libido
as polymorphous perversity is to sexual intercourse or as need is to desire. I am trying
here to suspend dualistic thinking. Hence I do not suggest, either, that libido is to Lust as
male

—————————————

7 An absence that, we have wondered, can itself induce a little iatrogenic sickness. Was
Anna O's hysterical pregnancy an answer to Breuer's unacknowledged sexual
countertransference?

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is to female, even though, of course, the androcentrism of discharge theory is old feminist
news, if perhaps newer psychoanalytic news. Neither feminism nor psychoanalysis,
however, has noticed the other sexuality dormant at the bottom of the page and in the
clinic. A different axis of tension is at work here.

Way down deep, Lust means not the conclusion of discharge but the penultimate moment
of peak excitement when being excited is, both enough and not enough, when each rise in
excitement is, paradoxically, satisfying. Orgiastic. I would not want to do without orgasm
—catharsis—myself. But isn't the pleasure of Lust equally central? A need calling for
satisfaction, a satisfaction becoming a thrilling need? An excitement whose gratification
is simultaneously exciting? Both “lost to the world” and in the world at once (Bach,
1998)? A doubling of feeling, a doubled and potently contradictory state whose end one
craves and fears? If the closure of climax is devoutly to be wished, do we, or at least
some of us, not savor it all the more because, in achieving it, we must let go of the
extraordinary poignancy of sustained excitement in the moment before?

Two states ordinarily thought of as mutually exclusive—desire and satisfaction, or

tension and release—in fact coexist in Lust. Whereas libido puts a distance between need
and gratification, Lust posits their simultaneity. The line between Lust and libido is
therefore always on the verge of disappearing. Even though Freud (1905b) announces on
the first page that he prefers the Latinate and scientific-sounding libido because it seems
so straightforward, clear-cut (clean-cut?), and economical, libido never entirely satisfies
him. Look at how, 65 pages later, it turns out that arousal and gratification are not always
distinct in ordinary experience. “The concepts of ‘sexual excitation’ and ‘satisfaction’
can,” Freud notes, “to a great extent be used without distinction” (p. 210). Two pages
after that comes yet another footnote written not later on but in the very first edition of
the work: “Lust' has two meanings, and is used to describe the sensation of sexual tension
(‘Ich habe Lust’ = ‘I should like to,) ‘I feel an impulse to’) as well as the feeling of
satisfaction” (p. 212, fn. 1).
Vicissitudes of Lust in the Clinic: Three
Vignettes
Might we call this the pleasure of desiring? Madame X, a patient who, four years ago,
would leave her body when her lovers responded to

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her desire, was recently recounting her struggle with the shame, pleasure, and
embarrassment of telling her husband just which squeeze or caress she likes him to give
her. She associated to the lunch she would eat after the session: She always thinks she
wants an empanada even though it always disappoints her. She recalled a short story
about a woman who gives up smoking and discovers all the longings and cravings
smoking had hidden. At the end of the story, the woman decides to go to a bad,
overpriced restaurant so she can have the tomato soup that is always too salty, because
that's what she wants. “Wanting the empanada,” I said, “is almost an experiment, sort of
holding something constant, sort of pure desire.” “Yes,” replied Madame X, who has
been struggling with matters of desire and aggression, “it's not tied up with satisfaction, I
don't know how to say this, it's the satisfaction of the desire, no …” She trailed off. The
next session, she said, “It's enough just having the desire. No, that's not right…“She ran
out of words. There is no English word for Lust.

Clinical examples whet our analytic appetites. Certainly we want to know what an
empanada means to Madame X, and we can easily begin to associate to its symbolic
possibilities. I chose not to pursue an interpretive line, however, because I felt that, at that
particular moment, expanding her experience of Lust was more congruent with the
psychoanalytic goal of the examined life. Another patient, Mr. Y, has suffered from his
lust for me because it cannot receive satisfaction. Not only is he, like Odysseus, bound to
the mast, but he has done this voluntarily, and it frustrates and angers him. Mr. Y knew
something about Lust already, however. As I was going off for summer vacation during
our first year of work together, he gave me a letter in a sealed envelope. On the flap of
the envelope, he had written, “Don't open this right now. Open it later. Later still. Later.
Not now. Later. La—”As Madame X ran out of words, so the rest of Mr. Y's words ran
over the edge, disappearing into the flap's foldover.

The unease of Lust's ambiguity shows up here. As relatedness, we now think, may
nurture desire (e.g., S. A. Mitchell, 1988), so the suspended state of unconsummated
desire might reciprocally hold relatedness. Perhaps, indeed, this state of suspended
animation— feeling without acting—is a gift of the incest prohibition: the creation of
intimacy in which, as Freud might have put it, undischarged libido generates the
connective power of love. Think here of Jody Davies's (1998) recent argument: “We all
have sexual desires on which we do not act—places in which such actions would be
inappropriate and

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wrong. As adults, we can desire without the promise of satisfaction; we can want without
having to possess. Perhaps this is the true legacy of Oedipus—the capacity to sustain
desire for what we can never have” (p. 76). I feel obligated to acknowledge that one
might find aggression hiding in Mr. Y's playful, teasing note. Such was not, however, my
first response, and I did not offer such an interpretation. Indeed, I made no interpretation
at all. I waited because, as I now understand my decision, I thought there was more than
hostility offered to me. You might call his gift seductive. I would call it Lust.

Indeed, Lust, as an atmosphere, may yield more understanding than—one might put it—
premature interpretation. Having emerged for a time from a long, dark regression, Mr. Y
had a new feeling. One day, after telling me about his yearning for another unattainable
woman—a public figure—he fell into a brief silence. Then, “Oh, this lust for you, it won't
go away.” Another silence. “But the lust does something good, it makes me feel close,
hopeful about our relationship. It's not all good. It hurts. There is also a melancholy that
is pleasurable too.” The poignancy of desire slips away when we focus only on discharge.
Even so, it is not easy to hold. Here is Davies (1998) again: “Perhaps it is only the gentle
survival of such a harsh reality that allows us to risk the potential humiliations and
rejections of … adult mutuality and sexual intimacy” (p. 765). Mr. Y and I go back and
forth between being able to inhabit this ambiguous space with any degree of comfort,
unsettled in the unsettling, inconclusive space of the examined life.

Lust thus reconceived has technical implications. Was Mr. Y's feeling for me sexual
transference? Dependency sexualized? Just plain sexual? All of the above? Perhaps
equally vital is the emotional climate of the consulting room. How do we sustain the state
of desiring so critical to the analytic relationship—the shared states of feeling in which
clinical discovery and creation take place? There is an excess of hypothesis, many
potential routes that patient and analyst might take to achieve a state of intimacy through
which one may “court surprise” (Stern, 1997).

The same fruitful indeterminacy holds for sexual countertrans-ference, which we are
thereby enabled to enter in a mutative way. Another patient had been describing
significant problems that one would have called marital had marriage been the
relationship in question. Suspecting that my erotic countertransference, unvoiced, had
once before unconsciously communicated itself to Dr. Z and

- 433 -
coalesced in a nearly home-wrecking affair, I decided to disclose my erotic feelings.
Aware of the possible risks attendant upon disclosure (Maroda, 1994, pp. 94-96, 135-
138) but also aware of the potential rewards (Davies, 1994), I said that I would not act on
my desires in any way other than verbal, and I did not reveal anything about my own
sexual preference or domestic state. I suggested that this erotic countertransference might
have a variety of sources that we could discuss; I had in mind projective identification,
erotization of attachment, my own unresolved personal issues, and mundane sexual
attraction.

This disclosure permitted us to enter and maintain a state of intimacy that, remarkably,
yielded not only symptom relief but fundamental change. “No one has ever said anything
like that to me before,” said Dr. Z, who had been through a range of treatments over the
preceding 25 years. What was new for this patient was not the revelation of another's
sexual desire—a form of relatedness uncomfortably familiar from childhood on. What
was novel and even shocking was my interest in noting and maintaining a state of mutual
desiring that itself became an object of shared experience and knowledge rather than an
occasion for discharge. If one wished to put what happened next in classical language,
one could say that libido and Lust together made Eros, the life force in its binding aspect,
which has, at least for now, triumphed over Thanatos (Freud, 1920). Dr. Z's “hysterical
misery,” I hesitate to say (because it seems too good to be true) began turning into
“ordinary unhappiness.” The route taken by this transformation has been, however,
postclassical—the one-way street of catharsis meeting the two-way street of connection.
For the first time, Dr. Z felt me as a presence in the room, a person, and things began,
slowly, to change. The symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome have been gone for some
time now, their place taken by the psychological distress kept at bay for so many years.
Now we contend with anger, fear, anxiety, terror, sadness, and loss. “I am no longer the
‘walking dead,”’ Dr. Z puts it, “I have come alive.”

This final vignette has been meant to illustrate the intermediate space of Lust, the
unconsummated, pleasurable, ambiguous, difficult, and clinically potent space my
patients and I inhabit, and I have tried to recount it so that the medium is the message.
Did you notice I haven't mentioned the gender of Dr. Z? Do you care? Why? My silence
is, I know, a bit teasing and mischievous, but there is a point. There are many
ambiguities, and I will mention two. One is the relation between technique and turnout:
We are not, I would maintain,

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scientists, and we cannot therefore predict (for a recent discussion of psychoanalysis as

science and the Grunbaum debate, see Curtis, 1996; Fourcher, 1996; Jacobson, 1996;
Protter, 1996; Schwartz, 1996). Dr. Z's analysis is not over, and, to be sure, we do not
know what will happen between now and termination. Like any clinical act, my self-
disclosure grew in a matrix made equally of technical and metapsy-chological
generalities and the particularities of the individual case; Dr. Z is a person able and more
than willing to inhabit potential space, and we have shared similar thunderous moments
in regard to dilemmas of attachment as well as desire. (Final disclosure: Dr. Z is a woman
who lives with a woman.)

The second ambiguity is gender. When we meet sex in the clinic nowadays, we are
tempted to think gender, and so we should. The entrance of gender theory into
psychoanalysis—or, as Benjamin (1984) has put it, “the convergence of psychoanalysis
and feminism” in the object-relational model—is something of a phenomenon. A fringe
element only 15 years ago, the discourse on gender has become abso-lutely central to
psychoanalytic colloquy. Gender theory has so convincingly responded to the classical
conundrum of female desire that not only does Green (1997) himself agree it needs
attention, but much of psychosexual theory falls these days under its rubric, as Benjamin
(1997) notes. Still, now that we remember gender, we have to be able to forget it too. As I
(1991) have elsewhere suggested, the psychoanalytic situation has both gendered and
gender-free moments— creating a tension that we inhabit all the time. If, to put it
differently, we subtract gender, then what's left of sex? A lot, I suspect, and it is that to
which I have been attending in this essay. There is sex as well as gender, and it is time to
retheorize sex.

Conclusion: Between Lust and Libido

When we read below as well as above the line, Freud's distinctions blur. Not only do
excitement and satisfaction fade into each other. Not only do the two acts into which the
play of sex is said to be clearly divided also lose their identities. A new account of sexual
experience takes shape—one that disturbs the smooth surface of theory, one as messy as
sex ordinarily is. What happens in the experiential and conceptual—one might say
intermediate—space between what Freud taught us to think about as “fore-pleasure” and
“end-pleasure”?

- 435 -

Something sexy, I think. And something, of course, complicated and difficult. (Hence the
urgent question occupying pundits and politicians alike: Is oral sex sex?) On reflection,
“sex” in Three Essays and, therefore, I would argue, in the back of our minds is always
confused. Sometimes, sexuality means heterosexual intercourse; other times,
polysexuality; still other times, reproduction. On one page, sexuality denotes specifically
and originally genital excitement that tends to flood into other body parts; on the next
page, the entire body is an erogenous zone. Sometimes it signifies arousal, and sometimes
it signifies climax. It may connote a driving force or a psychic structure or a relationship.
I do not reject this confusion. On the contrary, I find it appropriately recursive.

Psychoanalysis has lost its innocence, swept through by the sea change in 20th-century
thought. Marshall Berman's (1982) remarkable appreciation of the modern spirit sums up
the spirit of the new psychoanalysis: “a desire to live openly with the split and
unreconciled character of our lives, and to draw energy from our inner struggles, where
ever they may lead us in the end” (p. 171). If libido fits the classical model of cure, then
Lust—the unconsummated moment before—is a signifier more suited to the clinical
stance taken today. Think about current metaphors for the space of psychoanalytic work
— transitional, potential, intermediate (Winnicott, Ogden, Bromberg). Think about a
personal relation mediated by the impersonalities of time and money in which belief is
willingly suspended and analyst and patients proceed like Odysseus bound to the mast—
an Odysseus more suited to the psychoanalytic task than the one invoked by Kohut—
“exercising restraint while yielding to desire” (Wilner, 1998).

I want to situate sex in the space between libido and Lust. We might begin our thinking
about this ambiguous location through both the dialectics and the grammar of space. I
juxtapose two unlikely bedfellows. We can say, with Thomas Ogden (1994), that, like
consciousness and unconsciousness, neither libido nor Lust “holds a privileged position
in relation to the other; rather they stand in a relation of relative difference, each
constituting the other through negation” (p. 60). And we can listen to Daniel Odier
(1997), a Tantric master who writes of the power of the comma, the space in the text
standing for the space in life: “Between two breaths, there is a comma. Between two
feelings or two ideas, there is a comma. Between one gesture and another, there is a
comma.… All life experiences are followed by a comma.… Our life is too often like a
text without punctuation [but] all of a sudden, there is a rupture, a silence, a void,

- 436 -

a comma, and true life”—what Freud later called Eros—“begins” (p. 151).

One more riff on Bromberg (1996): Standing in the space between libido and Lust, a
space giving on to the potent debates animating psychoanalytic thought today, we can
look back at our origins. Recall Freud's (1905b) preface to Three Essays: “For it is some
time since Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher, showed mankind the extent to which
their activities are determined by sexual impulses—in the ordinary sense of the word” (p.
134). In the ordinary, quotidian sense of the word. For all the peregrinations of his theory,
all the impossibilities and confusions as well as illuminating truths, all the many
questions to be put even to this one remark, this is what Freud was trying to explain:
sexual experience as it was and is commonly supposed—concrete, graphic, exciting, hot.
Contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism, each for different reasons, contest the idea
that sexual impulses determine our activities; they follow the Freud of the footnotes who
knew that there was no such thing as ordinary sex. But classic psychosexual theory won't
let go of our imagination for a good reason: it remembers the sheer materiality of sex, the
body, the mute excitement (Bowie, 1990, pp. 49, 141; Stein, 1998) to which our theories
of desire attempt to give meaning.
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The Immediate is not Unmediated: Commentary on Paper by Annie Sweetnam

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Many Psychoanalytic Thinkers, Among Them Annie Sweetnam, are currently developing
ways to integrate the critique of gender with contemporary clinical theory. Various
approaches are taken. Jessica Benjamin (1988), for example, works with gender and
intersubjectivity; Adrienne Harris (n.d.) works with gender and psycholinguistics. In
focusing on the postmodernist wing of this critique, Sweetnam (1996) has followed
Thomas Ogden's theory of psychological experience. Key to psychic structure and
clinical process, the three psychological positions he proposes function, in Sweetnam's
interpretation, as a screen through which gender passes to assume shape, substance, and
meaning. Having argued that gender is constructed and fluid, she now adds sexuality to
the discursive stew and posits a stopping point, a point of reference: “the gendered body.”
The substantial, material body, she quite rightly contends, must make us stop and think,
especially when it comes to the ways corporeality is sensed, for psychic reality is after all
the meat and potatoes, not to mention the bread and butter, of our daily clinical lives. In
the matter of sexuality, she is saying, we need to think about felt experience as contoured
by the body and as it lives through gender. To that end, she models a new concept on
Ogden's analytic third: the erotic third. In the course of considering this contribution to
psychoanalytic gender theory, I will have occasion to glance at the other, wide-ranging
clinical and theoretical issues on which this protean topic inevitably touches.

On both theoretical and clinical counts, this interest in recovering the subjectivized body
is timely. Theoreticians have come to recognize a glaring aporia on the deconstructionist
page. I shall quote Roger

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Lancaster, an anthropologist critical of Judith Butler, the philosopher whose

deconstruction of the body, relied on by nearly all contemporary theorists of sex and
gender, can stand in this particular context as signifier for what I have called “the fly in
the postmodern ointment” (Dimen, 1998, p. 80). Butler's work, says Lancaster (1995),
“makes explicit what was implicit all along: a body amputated of the body; a world
where language is real and the body is not” (p. 4). To be sure, bodies are culturally
produced, shaped, and signified. But, Lancaster argues, the cost of an entirely
constructivist view is high: “Cartesian dilemmas of mind and body are resolved—by
abolishing the body” (p. 4).1 Butler's and Lee Edelman's rhetorical accounts, Tim Dean
(1994) charges from a Lacanian perspective, leave us high and dry with naught but
“undersubjectivized bodies” to explain to ourselves how and what and why we desire.
Their mistake, Dean avers, is to assimilate “the category of sexuality” to the Imaginary
and the Symbolic rather than to the Real, producing “subjects of the signifier, not subjects
of desire” (p. 90). From a literary critical standpoint, Michael Levenson (1998) laments
the “impalpable, disembodied character” of Butler's (1998b) The Psychic Life of Power:
“Subjects have no names, no particularity, no histories. There are no people here” (p. 64).
All seem to agree that, although Butler is a profound critic of theories of psychic
structure, she does not adequately grasp the puissance and significance of psychic
process, of “psychical reality”: “whatever in the subject's psyche presents a consistency
and resistance comparable to those displayed by material reality; fundamentally, what is
involved here is unconscious desire and its associated phantasies” (Laplanche and
Pontalis, 1963, p. 363).

Criticizing Butler—well, it's not quite the Empress's new clothes, but close. Do clinicans,
who deal with subjects in all their particularity and history, also dare to play the child and
speak the truth that the deconstructionist adults agree to hide from themselves? There's a
naked body there, says Sweetnam, and it has a mind of its own (others have recently
made the same or related points, e.g., Elise, 1998; McCarroll, 1998; A. Schwartz,
personal communication). As clinicians, we contend daily with our patients' and our own
lived

—————————————

1 “What sort of body,” asks Susan Bordo (1990) of deconstructionist theorists in general
but not of Butler in particular, “is it that is free to change its shape and location at will,
that can become anyone and travel anywhere?” Philosophically speaking, Bordo avows
the value of denying “the unity and stability of identity” but doubts the “epistemological
fantasy of becoming multiplicity” (p. 145).

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realities, the immediate, corporeal persuasiveness of which seems to make postmodern

skepticism about the reality of the body seem a little silly, if not downright loony. We
engage daily with subjective experiences of sexual passion and visceral senses of gender.
Sweetnam's delicious detail testifies to the liveliness of the clinical body. It is not often
that the sexual nitty-gritty graces the pages of a psychoanalytic journal. Were the reader
to be aroused by the several vignettes Sweetnam limns, it would not be surprising. Sexual
pleasure, pain, disgust, and ecstacy all find a home in her lyrical rendering. One has
confidence that Sweetnam, unafraid of the disturbing erotic countertransference risked in
this intimate therapy, knows just what she is doing when she treats individuals and
couples whose sexuality comes into her clinical sights.

When she starts theorizing what she senses in session, the ride, so far so smooth, begins
to get a little bumpy. Using writerly gesture as her initial device, Sweetnam tries to get
under the skin of post-modernism. Notice her performative typography. Almost as though
to convince us of the reality and, perhaps, theoretical validity of the body, she frequently
italicizes: for example, sensed, felt truths, saw. She is trying to show as well as tell, to
elbow us with the ink on the page; the italics are a nearly embodied means to make the
text do what it says. The idea, it would seem, is that this sort of mute persuasion is
necessary in order to pierce the slick surface of postmodernist language:2 You may
deconstruct the body all you want, but don't you agree, Sweetnam seems to be asking
without doing so explicitly, that there are things you sense in your body that feel like
bedrock? And if you do, well, then, they must be so, mustn't they? These things you feel
must be as bedrock, indeed of the same bedrock, as the body through which you feel
them.

Sweetnam's friendly persuasion does not convince. The immediate is not unmediated. Of
course, she is right that corporeal sensations intimate primal truths. But is the meaning we
bestow on these sensations their definitive bottom line? In particular, Sweetnam wants to
argue that the body has not only a mind but a gender of its own. Of

—————————————

2 Sweetnam is not alone in using emphasis to get her point across. Butler (1993) reports,
in the Preface to her Bodies That Matter, that the question of the body's materiality,
which she had deconstructed in Gender Trouble (1990), “was repeatedly formulated to
me this way: ‘What about the materiality of the body, Judy? I took it that the addition of
‘Judy’ was an effort to dislodge me from the more formal ‘Judith’ and to recall me to a
bodily life that could not be theorized away” (p. ix).

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this, however, she has developed no convincing argument, which is one reason, I think,
that she relies so much on language as gesture. Sometimes she simply asserts, without
arguing, the truth she holds: “A gendered person,” she states in her abstract, “lives in and
creates a gendered body.” But what is the epistemological or ontological status of this
gendered body? We do not find out how we know it when we meet it, how it comes to be,
or why we should think it resembles or differs from a sexed body; it would have been
helpful had she positioned her use of “gender” in relation to the now classic (North
American) feminist distinction between “gender” as psychocultural and “sex” as
biological.

Sweetnam's assertion prompts a question: Does the body support only one gender?
Certainly her patients' diverse senses of gender fuel the deconstructionist fire. There are
at least three different female bodies represented here. For Jeanette, living “as a woman”
meant being in “a place, bounded and continuous in her own body,” a location generated
by autistic-contiguous contacts. In a different register, Marilyn's sense of femaleness,
nurtured in “the touching of her breasts,” was to be “a gentle woman … with substance
and weightiness.” Another woman found “the simultaneous feeling of softness and
firmness” just right, making her feel like the “‘all-rounded’ woman” she liked to be. If
the female anatomical body can support three different subjective and, it should be noted,
nongenital “sense meanings” of gender—place, weight, balance—why could it not
support the sense of being male? One heterosexual patient felt, when she humped her first
female lover, like “a man pushing his penis in.”

To recapitulate Freud, the realities of anatomy need not limit those of the psyche. At
stake here is the significance of psychic reality, which, taking everything into
consideration, is the province of, indeed the creature of, psychoanalysis. Often enough, of
course, Freud throws in his lot with anatomy; think of the constituting role of the penis in
his ideas about the travels and travails of masculinity and femininity (e.g., 1925).3 Yet, if
it is true that, in “the unconscious, … ‘No’ does not exist” (1918, p. 81, fn2), then we are
entitled to infer that in psychic

—————————————

3 It should be remarked, however, that even in this notorious essay, Freud's uncertainty
about both the psychic power of the penis and the validity of Freud's ideas shows through
the prevailing absoluteness of his tone: “The majority of men are also far behind the
masculine ideal and … all human individuals … combine in themselves both masculine
and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical
constructions of uncertain content” (p. 258).

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reality one may be female, male, or both, in whole or in part, and variously so at different
times. Unconsciously and in diverse ways, the body—its psychic registry varying with
personal and intersubjective history, experience, and meaning—shifts shape
independently of anatomy. Through the use of cocaine, a quadriplegic man, 20 years after
his injury, recovered for a period of 10 years a sense of genital excitement and
gratification. With deep irony and gratitude, he writes of his “astral ejaculations”: He
knows that his penis, clasped by his “clawed left hand's index finger and thumb,” does
not spurt semen but he feels as if it does (Caldwell, n.d., p. 2). One then might wonder
that, in Sweetnam's view, the gendered body, however fluid its sensations, remains fixed
to the sexed body. Also, as we have just seen, gender does not reside only in the genitals
and in (what are commonly called) the secondary sex characteristics. A heterosexual
patient wished he could be a girl so he would feel less physically constrained. When I
asked him what he meant, he said, “Oh, you know,” at the same time he flapped his wrist
toward me in what would be, according to homophobia, the limp-wristed fashion favored
by homosexual men in general but sometimes found also in teenage girls practicing the
femininity to which they aspire.4 Did he want masculine genitals and feminine wrists?

As she sets forth her ideas, Sweetnam engages a range of theorists: psychoanalysts from
Freud to Winnicott, Anzieu, and McDougall and philosophers, particularly the feminist
Elizabeth Grosz and, through her, the anthropologist Mary Douglas and the
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Following Sweetnam's review of the
theoretical literature, we come upon a rather intriguing image of bodies that, as sites of
sociability and of Merleau-Ponty's “double sensation,” inhabit intersubjective space.
Sweetnam introduces us to the “body of the couple,” a conceit of intersubjectivity that
might make us question the idea of “the” body. Perhaps the body is not always singular,
the foundation and container of the individual psyche. Extending Winnicott's
“psychesoma,” Harris (1996) writes: “There is no baby without the mother, but at the
beginning only the mother-baby ego. There is no meaningful individual body ego without
the interface—the holding, looking, touching encounter of the social other” (p. 371).

—————————————

4 For a camp version of this vision of femininity, look at any drag queen or, for that
matter, at Bette Midler in the Down and Out in Beverly Hills scene in which, prancing
around in leggings and stilettoes, she allows her hands to dangle from her wrists so that
her red salon nails can dry.

- 353 -

Maybe one body is always already two—another theoretical basis on which to debate the
possibility of a multiply gendered body.

The most problematic foundation for Sweetnam's argument in favor of the primal
genderedness of the body lies in what she draws from her clinical work. Here I think we
come upon an occupational hazard of psychoanalytic theory. What sort of data are
clinical data? Are they evidence? Are they theory? Both? It is as if Sweetnam turns to us
and says, “Look, my patients feel that their bodies are gendered, so therefore bodies are
gendered.” That these particular patients of Sweetnam's inhabit bodies they experience as
gendered and that her (counter-transferential) sensations resonate with theirs might well
be so. Such engrossing phenomena indeed merit the careful attention being paid them by
Grosz, Sweetnam, and others. Whether these gendered bodies exist as such is, however,
another matter. To put it differently, if you tell me that a patient experiences certain
sensations as signs of gender, that is not my theoretical business but the patient's personal
affair. It is when analysts use their patients' (and their own) subjective senses of gender as
evidence for the existence of objective, bodily grounded “sensations of femaleness” or
“sensations of maleness” that I think there is reason for debate. Butler (1998a) makes a
related point when, in her recent commentary on two psychoanalytic essays on gender
and sexuality, she asks: “Do we learn about the nature of bisexuality when we register in
writing what a client says, as if the phenomenology of the utterance furnished the proof
of its truth?” (p. 377). A patient's subjectivity is a patient's subjectivity. But the
subjectivity of one's patients does not constitute evidence that can prove or disprove one's
assertions about reality. Rather it and its intersubjective matrix constitute the reality one
is trying to explain.

Sweetnam, it would seem, takes pains not to base universal and definitive claims about
body and gender on her patients' experience. Rather, she acknowledges contingency by
regularly using the auxiliary “may” to qualify the link between corporeal and gendered
experience—a strategy that, absent explicit rationale, leaves us wanting. Relying on
Grosz's notion of how “sensory experiences come to have a gendered significance,” she
suggests in a theoretical section “that in sexual experience a variety of bodily experiences
might take on gendered meanings.” Perhaps they might. When would that be? We are not
told. In a clinical section, she says, “With the help of Marilyn's and Jeanette's material, I
hope to show how these are all examples of the kinds of erotic contact that may serve to
form, affirm, and create visceral senses of what it feels like to be not just a sexual being
but a sexual man or

- 354 -

woman.” I do not doubt that erotic intimacy may generate and ratify visceral senses of
gender when gender is salient to a particular person. Again, however, some specification
about the conditions under which eroticism might and might not come to serve these
functions of gender would be welcome.

So circumspect is this untheorized qualification that it makes me wonder whether the

postmodernist debate between essentialism and constructivism is this essay's
unarticulated subtext.5 Sweetnam is, after all, attempting to create a theory of the
production of subjectively perceived, gender-related sensations through psychic
structures and processes, the existence of which does not, as I understand them, depend
on anyone's subjectivity at all: Ogden's three psychological positions and his notion of the
analytic third, here transmuted into the erotic third, are presumably meant to denote
universally occurring organizations of psychic experience. Does Sweetnam imply, then,
that the experiences of body that are sieved through these positions have some claim to
transindividual, essential truth? Are they constructed? Or, like Stein (1992; see also
Bordo, 1990, p. 149), who makes a strong case for constructed essentialism, does she
think they are both? If so, how? “It is,” Sweetnam writes, “the dialectical movement
among all three contexts of sexual experience that contributes to the sensations of shape,
texture, life, and distinctiveness that come with feeling male or female.” It would be
interesting to know what Sweetnam would think about Eve Sedgwick's (1995) now
famous aphorism, “Some people are just plain more gender-y than others” (p. 16). To feel
male or female, to feel that maleness and femaleness have special attributes, to feel
gender distinctness—these feelings of gender vary not only among individuals but within
them over time and place and circumstance and psychic vicissitude.

The question, to revise Freud, is not what femaleness is but, as I have elsewhere advised
(Dimen, 1991, 1995), what being female means to this patient. Take, for example, the
way analyst and patient use gender binaries such as hairlessness (female) versus hairiness
(male). Jeanette “enjoyed the feel of his hirsute body touching her smooth body.” Now, I
think I know what Jeanette means: She took pleasure and a sense of being female in
feeling her hairless chest, abdomen, arms and legs against her lover's furry limbs and
torso—a sensation
—————————————

5 At least Grosz's argument, so key to Sweetnam's, winds up, in its final chapter, in an
essentialist place.

- 355 -

that, for her, read male. Still, without wanting to doubt her experience and desires, one
can ask the analyst to wonder about the patient's construction of her embodied
experience. Is there not only a body but a fantasy of femaleness at work here? Is there not
cultural ideology? I bet Jeanette has hair on her body somewhere. I bet that, in order to
approximate cultural ideals of femininity (themselves part of a well-or ill-fitting second
skin if not “skin ego”), she has removed at least some of it. Sweetnam's language of sense
perception portrays Jeanette's body, pure and simple, against her partner's, pure and
simple, as what, when processed through the psychological positions, turns her on and
off. I would wonder, however, about the erotic power of the couple's shared
representations—the amalgam of unconscious phantasies and norms of gender, of
femininity, hairless and pure, coupled with masculinity, hairy and impure. Given that
sexual difference is a symbolic divide across which projective identifications so often and
easily leap, could it be that, on the occasions when Jeanette's partner's hair irritates and
disgusts her, it is her own dissociated, symbolically masculine, impure hair(iness)
returning to haunt her? I will return again to the problem of body, culture, and desire.

When all is said and done, Sweetnam's essay seems to hold that body precedes culture,
and this, I think, is an error. Illustrating her point that the paranoid-schizoid position
contextualizes visceral experiences of maleness and femaleness, she misses a great
opportunity to consider the complex mix of body, culture, and desire presented by sex
and symptom. She writes: “It may be the sight of genitalia that gives the sensory feel of
idealization of gendered self or other. It was when Jeanette saw her partner's erect penis
and felt her own muscles tighten like armor that she felt like a powerful woman.” Well,
yes. Maybe what Jeanette saw stirred her to this feeling. But what did that sight mean to
her? What was its unconscious significance? Here is a moment when one might think of a
body-culture-psyche mosaic. Indeed, an apposite theory is at hand—Lacan's construction
of the phallus as the unconscious symbol of power and desire, of his version of the third
term or the paternal law (i.e., language and culture).6

—————————————

6 In this context, it is startling to note that Sweetnam and Lacan have a shared goal: Each
wants to find a corporeal anchor for the continuous flow of signification (Bowie, 1990, p.
108). Lacan, in sexist fashion, chooses the erect penis, whereas Sweetnam, more
democratically and perhaps out of her own gendered experience, opts for the whole body.
- 356 -

Perhaps, on seeing the phallus—and, intriguingly, Lacan privileges the role of sight in the
Symbolic (Borch-Jakobsen, 1991, pp. 49-56)—Jeanette identified with it, made an
unconscious reversal that, consistent with not all cultures but certainly with our own,
transforms her partner's erection into a sign of his weakness, for, in patriarchy, the one
with the phallus (in this identificatory case, Jeanette) is strong, whereas everyone else, by
definition lacking it, is weak. You do not have to agree with the falsely claimed
universality of Lacan's story to believe that it accurately describes the psychology,
culture, and ideology of patriarchy.

Before ending, I want to note certain important differences and similarities between the
erotic third and its prototype. In Sweetnam's hands, the erotic third proves to be a
productive idea, offering up compelling, layered, and exciting portrayals of erotic
pleasure and displeasure. Whenever a working clinical term is transformed into a
taxonomic label, however, I worry about the operation of what Michel Foucault (1978)
called regulatory practice. To speak of transference in civilian life, for example, seems to
take the signifier for the signified, the map for the territory: “Transference” denotes the
specialized use, in a specific circumstance, of processes that flow through ordinary life all
of the time. Likewise, the “analytic third” and its analogs are technical terms for the
therapeutic version of, to put it simply, relationship itself. To extrapolate from the
“analytic third” to the “erotic third” seems to me to compound the problem: The sexual
relationship of the couple is now codified and, in a way, appropriated by specialized
nomenclature that implicitly directs how people are to relate to what it denotes.

Do we prescribe or profess? Psychoanalysis occupies such an odd place between

medicine and academe. In regard to the psychological positions, for example, Sweetnam
cautions the laity: “It is almost impossible, and not generally recommended outside of the
therapeutic situation, to try to untangle all these different types of sensations from overall
sexual experience.” I wonder how necessary this warning is. Suppose a patient or couple
were to read her essay and try to think about her/his/their own psychological positions or
erotic third? What would be the harm? Why would the positions or the erotic third—or
the analytic third, for that matter—be dangerous rather than authorizing? When the
professional begins to govern the personal, we arrive at the nexus of power and
knowledge and are presented with the opportunity to ponder the fine line between
authority and authoritarianism.

- 357 -

The analytic and erotic thirds also have different pasts, presents, and futures. The analytic
third, as I have just indicated, serves as part of a technical apparatus designed to do a
particular job of work, the potential healing of one of the parties. Located in analyst-
patient intersubjectivity, it is generated in and, indeed, defines a particular situation that
has a particular goal and a finite lifetime. The erotic third, in contrast, is an ongoing
relationship in which sex takes place and denotes “the process by which intersubjective
and subjective interchange is lived between the couple.” Meant, if not always built to last,
it would appear to be one of the many strands of which the fabric of intimacy is woven.
Unlike the analytic third, however, it does not uniquely specify the relationship. There are
couples for whom sex is absent, rare, or at least not salient. Even in a couple in which the
erotic third exists, it may have equal partners in other regions of the body and other
activities of the couple. Could there be, in any ongoing couple, a gustatory third, for
example, or a reproductive/parental third?

Still, an important resemblance obtains: The erotic third, like the analytic third, is about
relationship. Indeed, it is at least as much about that as it is about sex. Let me put this by
posing a few questions: Does the erotic third materialize whenever sex happens? Is it
there in a one-night stand? During anonymous sex? Does the erotic third crystallize in the
fusion of power, sex, and violence that is rape? Like the analytic third and other
conceptions of psychoanalytic coupledom, the erotic third draws much on a matrimonial
model of intimacy and as such traffics less in sexual activity than in object relation—and
an extraordinarily balmy object relation at that. Missing is the heavy weather of hierarchy
and struggle that climatizes both sex and intimacy.

No theory of sex and gender can get along without a recognition of the inevitable
combustion of power and sex in the genesis, social presence, and psychodynamics of
gender.7 To put it differently, power, an active ingredient in the hierarchy in whose
matrix gender difference crystallizes, surely inflects the corporeal sensations of
genderedness about which we have just learned (Goldner, 1989). In intimacy, on

—————————————

7 Indeed, it would be interesting to consider the relationship of the analytic third to power
matters. Does the effectiveness of the analytic third also depend on its dissonance with
the dual and contradictory hierarchy that I have described (Dimen, 1994) in which the
patient employs the analyst who embodies the authority to inform the patient's life?

- 358 -

the one hand, mutuality and equality of pleasure are quite regularly desired and, at least
currently, ideologically mandated. They are not, however, so often realized. On the other
hand, the predictable asymmetries, chagrins, and longueurs of intimacy come most often
as a disappointing surprise. How does this quotidian contradiction between these two
dissonant, coexisting states of coupledness, which counterbalance, mask, and coproduce
each other, manifest itself in the erotic third? How does the erotic third negotiate it?
Whatever, finally, the erotic third may now and in the future tell us about couples of
whatever sex or gender, it ultimately presumes a heterosexual pairing, at least as it has so
far been theorized. Much of the erotic third's appeal is its engagement of difference. The
difference Sweetnam engages is, however, the usual suspect: The erotic third, defined in
terms of gendered people inhabiting gendered bodies, is heterosexual space. Try
imagining what would happen if the two parties to the erotic third were blessed with the
same genital anatomy. Were the couple homosexual, how would “gender configurations
[open into] new possibilities”? The only way this could work, as far as I can make out, is
for the erotic third to encompass differences other than those represented by, as
Sweetnam's essay has it, gendered people in gendered bodies. Many sorts of erotically
relevant differences could be transacted in an intersubjective space such as the erotic
third. We tend, however, to overlook this possibility because, as Sue Shapiro (personal
communication) reminds us, gender, as a product of heterosexuality, is often a signifier
for difference, so that difference reciprocally albeit tacitly signifies heterosexuality
(Butler, 1990). Yet, as Mark Blechner (1995) observes, erotic(ized) “distinctions of
object-choice” can and do exceed gender, possibly including “age, social class,
intelligence, race, religion, profession, sex behavior preference, and others” (p. 279). If
such distinctions (e.g., the sex behavior preference and practices signified by the terms
butch and femme in lesbian desire) were to enter the picture, you would then have a new
scene animated not only by bodily sensation and psychological positions but also by
meaning and culture. In other words, the theory would really have to move off the couch,
out of the bedroom, and into the world, at which point we could then take up the difficult,
fascinating, and ever-present problem of how psychoanalysis can put body, psyche, and
culture together in a way that reduces none to the others but sustains the complexity of
their dynamics.

- 359 -

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Borch-Jakobsen, M. (1991), Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Bordo, S. (1990), Feminism, postmodernism, and gender-skepticism. In: Feminism and

Postmodernism, ed. L. Nichoson. New York: Routledge, pp. 133-156.

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Lancaster, R. (1995), The queer body: Notes on masculinity, desire, and sexuality, or
movies, magazines, and bodies that trade places: A phenomenological triptych. Presented
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Introduction

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

This symposium addresses a psychoanalytic lacuna: race. The papers it comprises, drawn
from both clinical and academic precincts, pick up the thread of social commentary that
runs through the psychoanalytic fabric. Here Psychoanalytic Dialogues joins other like-
minded efforts to position the psychic and the social, the clinical and the cultural, in the
same discourse, and to consider the painfulness of political inequity amid therapeutic
intimacy. These essays demonstrate the clinical and intellectual benefits of the
engagement with the disciplines characteristic of psychoanalysis in the previous
generation. They also reveal how the evolution of psychoanalytic practice itself
potentiates recognition of psychoanalytically marginalized dimensions of society and
culture that constitute subjectivity and inform everyday clinical life.

This symposium, a contribution to the ongoing historical dialogue between

psychoanalysis and social theory, should also be read as a call for papers. Too little
psychoanalytic space has been devoted to race, surely as pressing a matter as gender. As
indeed might have been said when, in 1991, Psychoanalytic Dialogues (Vol. 1, No. 3)
published its “Symposium on Gender” and when, in 1995, Psychoanalytic Dialogues
(Vol. 5, No. 2) published its “Symposium on Sexuality/Sexualities,” if gender and sex are
here, can race be far behind? We are pleased to be able to offer this set of papers, drawn
from both clinical and academic precincts, that once again picks up the thread of social
commentary that runs through the psychoanalytic fabric. Here we join other like-minded
efforts (e.g., Bracher, 1997, cited in Gump's essay) to position the psychic and the social,
the

- 569 -

clinical and the cultural, in the same discourse, and to consider the painfulness of political
inequity amid therapeutic intimacy.

These essays, occupying a range of literatures and practices, embody old interests and
new capacities of psychoanalysis. Although the social has been no stranger to the halls of
psychoanalytic dialogue, it has not been a favored guest either. If Civilization and Its
Discontents (Freud, 1930), among other essays, indicated the potential of psychoanalysis
to illuminate complicated questions of culture and politics, nevertheless the field has
opened itself only with difficulty to the insights and ideas of other disciplines in order to
dig more deeply into the complex problems of social hierarchy, inequality, and power in
contemporary life as well as human history. These essays demonstrate the clinical and
intellectual benefits of the engagement with the disciplines characteristic of
psychoanalysis in the previous generation. They also reveal how the evolution of
psychoanalytic practice itself potentiates the previously unthought, the taboo, the
recognition of psychoanalytically marginalized dimensions of society and culture that
constitute subjectivity and inform everyday clinical life.

The symposium is itself diverse. The contributors are both clinicians and academics. The
disciplines to which they belong and refer include not only psychoanalysis and
psychology, but social and political theory, philosophy and culture studies, feminism and
critical race theory. The practices from which their ideas proceed are those of the clinic
(psychotherapy and psychoanalysis) and the academy (textual critique and cross-
disciplinary study). Psychoanalysis appears in shifting guises, sometimes in its familiar
clinical application (Kovel; Altman, Cushman, Gump; Harris, Leary; Eng and Han),
sometimes as a device for political and cultural critique (Kovel, Cushman, Gump, Harris,
Eng and Han, Pellegrini), sometimes as a tool for textual analysis (Eng and Han,
Pellegrini). The varied racial and ethnic identities of the authors and of their patients and
subjects—white, African American, Jewish, Asian American—originate research, focus
argument, and illustrate difference and sameness across gaps of culture and history.

As observed elsewhere (Dimen, 1999), when clinical and social theory worlds converse,
they in fact have a lot to say to each other. These essays on race and psychoanalysis,
made on different looms, are yet woven of common themes. Certainly the clinical
presentations, the commentaries on them, and the clinicians' replies (Altman, Cushman,
Gump, Altman; Leary, Harris, Leary) locate themselves in current psychoanalytic debate.
Altman's use of countertransference

- 570 -

theory to limn his difficulties with Mr. A and Leary's understanding of her enactment
with Gloria announce that psychoanalysis, paradigm shifted in a relational turn, has come
of social-commentary age. Concepts recruiting, if not privileging the person of the
analyst, make it possible to address concrete differences of race, along with gender and
sexual identity, not to mention class, as they appear in and animate the clinical encounter.

Likewise, the academic writers are animated by topics of intense concern within the
world of cultural studies and progressive political critique. Eng and Han's essay focuses
dually on the cultural politics of Asian American ethnicity and the clinical handling of
psychic distress among Asian American students. In her review of Flax's (1998) The
American Dream in Black and White, Pellegrini considers the dilemma of identity
politics—how to claim social justice for marginalized groups or subject positions while
recognizing the incoherence and contradiction within what Eng and Han call minoritarian
subjectivities.

By the same token, each of the two worlds contains worlds of difference. In the clinical
world, Altman, for example, sees himself “preoccupied with racism” (Altman's reply). He
wants himself and psychoanalysis to stretch. He articulates for us the personal, technical,
professional, and political dilemmas that race and racial difference and racial inequalities
generate for him. Gump, in response, suggests that, although such attentiveness is
laudable, it might be in its own way racist; she therefore advises us to remember the
sameness beneath the skin. Cushman notes the black and white thinking of American
racial experience and suggests we include the ambiguous, middle portions of the
spectrum—where Jews, for instance, may be perceived by themselves and others as
sometimes white, sometimes black, sometimes in between or nowhere.

In the social theory world, an interesting generation gap shows up. Kovel, in looking
back at his seminal White Racism, published in 1970, recounts his journey from the
insulated world of psychiatry and classical psychoanalysis to the passionately engaged
world of progressive politics. Where he despairs of any contribution psychoanalysis can
make to an amelioration of racial injustice, Eng and Han, young scholars writing 30 years
later, embrace not only Freud but Klein, as well as, more predictably, Lacan. In keeping
with the scope of cultural studies, and in contrast to the historical materialism elemental
to Kovel's progressivism, they see inequality as multiply sited, not only in economics but
in cultural politics too. Although they share

- 571 -

Kovel's concern for racial inequality and its rectification, and agree that ameliorating the
cultural side of the equation is necessary but not sufficient to address the power side, they
hold that systems of representation have equal political impact and therefore require
attention. For example, the concept of melancholia, as formulated by Freud and
reinterpreted by Klein, can serve very nicely, Eng and Han argue, to articulate the
dilemma of assimilation in which assimilation is impossible, and as such help to map out
a terrain if not a campaign of intergenerational cultural politics.

One can think of all these essays as coalescing in a common field of thoughts and values,
a conjoint history of the past 30 years. Because of this shared tradition, they evince
coincidences of thought and argument. None is without reference to history, all hold that
race relations in American life must be seen in the context of slavery as economically and
politically structured and as represented both psychically and culturally. Kovel, for
example, recounts his effort in White Racism to explore the psychic correlate of
commodity fetishism, the representation of African Americans as feces. Gump, in turn,
uses Helen Block Lewis's account of the shame—rage cycle, as presently operative and
historically central to slavery, to suggest how the treatment conducted by Altman with
Mr. A became intractably tangled. Cushman thinks that a little historically situated guilt
would go a long way in the psychoanalytic understanding of race and racism. Eng and
Han, for their part, locate the marginalization of Asian American subjectivity in the
history and experience of immigration and internment camps.

Similar interpretations of this history pop up in these varied contributions. Most striking,
perhaps, are the ideas of trauma and haunting. The psychoanalytic engagement with
trauma in cases of sexual abuse broadents here to trauma in cases of political abuse, and
lets us think in terms of losses that can never be grieved but instead hang around like
ghosts. Gump, using clinical literature and data, as well as personal experience, argues
forcefully for the traumatic effect of slavery and its intergenerational replication, to
which Leary also makes reference. Similarly focused on intergenerational engagements
and transformations around racism, Eng and Han find hauntings both in Han's
psychotherapeutic work with Asian American students and in the work of contemporary
American novelists (e.g., Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison) in which ghost
imagery figures prominently. Harris, commenting on Leary, also thinks about slavery as a
trauma

- 572 -

and correspondingly sees a national haunting as the heritage contextualizing

contemporary American racial experience.

Not far removed from trauma are shame and its cousin, guilt. These affects are potentially
present wherever racial experience is found, whether the parties to the clinical encounter
are differently raced, as are Altman and Mr. A, or similarly raced, as are Leary and
Gloria. As Gump argues, shame and guilt, inevitable products of racism, contributed
signally to the problems in Altman's work with Mr. A. The anxiety they generated made
the buildup of trust between analyst and patient all but impossible. Narcissistic pride and
injury are also quite alive in both transference and countertransference in Leary's work
with Gloria. Leary writes:

That Gloria drew from the powerful arsenal of race for her counterattack is evidence, I
think, of the narcissistic injury I wrought. When I questioned an aspect of her identity
(changing the spelling of her name), she promptly cast doubt on my identity as black.
Thus, the racial enactment was coincident with an experience of narcissistic disruption on
the part of both patient and therapist.

Narcissism feeds anger, idealization, devaluation, and competitiveness, as Leary sees it,
as well as envy and victimization, as Harris, in discussing Leary, sees it. The
psychosocial split between white and black circulates through Leary and Gloria's shared
symbolism, associations, attacks, and counterattacks.

The connection between shame and another social problem, that of class, also receives
note here. Both Gump and Harris remind us of Sennett and Cobb's (1973) prescient The
Hidden Injuries of Class, the thesis of which is precisely the capacity of socioeconomic
hierarchy to inflict narcissistic wounds. That more can and should be done on
psychoanalysis and class is implicit.

A different affect occupies the attention of Eng and Han, and Harris—melancholia. Here
the academic reinterpretation of psychoanalytic commonplace might make for new
clinical understanding. Drawing on Butler's (1995) idea of melancholy gender-refused
identification, these authors think of losses that cannot be grieved. Whereas Butler's
argument refers to the impossibility of mourning a gender when identification with it is
refused, Harris speaks of some losses as “impermanently metabolizable”: The horror and

- 573 -

trauma of slavery are alternatingly recognized and refused, dissociated and understood
with overwhelming, paralyzing, infuriating clarity. Eng and Han, for their part, suggest
that some identifications can and should never be entirely relinquished. The attainment of
whiteness is a double-binding goal: The Asian American “model minority” must give up
Japaneseness or Chineseness or Koreanness but at the same time will never be white. Eng
and Han's solution is not either/or but both/and—mourning and melancholia.
Melancholia, they argue, is inevitable and on that account should be depathologized; the
attempt to retain the lost good object of Asian American identity is a means of preserving
intergenerational social cohesion even as a once (seemingly) coherent identity must be
mourned.

How racial identity feeds the solidities and injuries, successes and failures of narcissistic
development should be the topic for more work and writing in both the clinical and
theoretical practices of psychoanalysis. Note the important perspectival shift in these
essays. Whiteness is as much a subject as blackness or coloredness. Racism, as Kovel
argued in his book, is a problem of whiteness, not of blackness. Cushman's point that
most whites are trying to pass for white is echoed by arguments made by Pellegrini, and
Eng and Han. White people, Cushman contends, are trained to be “white,” and this
training involves instilling the hatred that accompanies the projective identification that
hands despised aspects of self over to marginalized groups in society. This structure of
abjection, echoing the infrastructure of gender pathology as theorized by Goldner (1991),
manifests as a deep shame that is not recognized as such by the white population or by
those who study them. This shame might be said, as suggested in self psychology, to be
the affective counterpart to the incoherent, split subjectivity identified by Lacan as the
prime human condition.

From another angle, this “training to be white” is part and parcel of what Pellegrini calls
the regulatory process of equality—a nomination with which I think Eng and Han would
agree. To be equal, you have to be something you may or may not be able to be but will
want to try to ape in order to attain it, thereby abandoning elements of your self that feel
essential, even if they are socially constructed. I quote Pellegrini's important point at
length:

The putatively abstract individual at the heart of the nation is, in fact, one subject in
particular—a white man—and, I would
- 574 -

add, historically a propertied, heterosexually reproductive, Protestant white man. The

category American citizen is thus both normalizing and regulatory. The norms is
represents are officially open to all; in fact, equality is among its ideals. However, to the
extent that some bodies come to stand in for the one, and some others come to represent
unruly difference, it is necessary to ask …: Equal to whom? The ideal of equality is
regulatory, compelling some would-be subjects of equality to set aside their differences
so that they might enter into the commonweal as one.

E pluribus unum: erasure in the name of unity…. [M]ust complexity and diversity really
be set aside as the entry price for citizenship and meaningful agency?

Such perhaps is the dilemma of Jews as theorized by Cushman: The attainment of

whiteness (i.e., equality) requires the loss of particularity, diversity, and communal
identity and results in a simplification of a complex social fabric.

Eng and Han make a related point, one that brings us to the force of gender in racial
arrangements and in psychoanalytic debate. The (attempted) achievement of equality may
entail loss, albeit one not always recognized as such. Some losses may “not, perhaps,
even [be] seen as losses but as social gains.” Eng and Han use the example of the oedipal
boy as cognate with the achievement of “access to political, economic, and cultural
privilege; alignment with whiteness and the nation; and ‘full’ subjectivity and a sense of
belonging.” The son's loss of the father as an object of desire in the smashing of the
oedipal complex may be a “forfeiture' … not seen as an abandonment but as a culturally
rewarded transaction.” The result is, for example, that “the normative heterosexual white
male” does not experience himself as troubled by “his melancholic disavowals.” Here
Eng and Han draw on and echo a debate, in the pages of Psychoanalytic Dialogues,
between Butler (1995) and Phillips (1995).

Race and gender are elsewhere counterpositioned in these essays. Leary's data, Harris
points out, are about both race and gender at once, triggering and obscuring the envy and
shame circulating in the consulting room around these identity categories or subject
positions, as well as around that of class. Although Altman, for his part, does not take up
the question of his and Mr. A's shared masculinity, certainly Gump in her critique does,
by drawing on personal experience to imagine herself into Mr. A's mother and Mr. A's
experience of having

- 575 -

been a young black man on the ghetto streets. Finally, Pellegrini discusses the typography
—the slash—so commonly used these days to represent the relation between identity
categories (e.g., race/gender). The slash suggests “itself as the space of identity in
difference—in other words, as the split [Lacanian] subject of psychoanalysis.” That that
identity is “intersectional” (Pellegrini) intimates the quandary of what Harris calls
identity politics and identity psychodynamics: “Persons and groups act within categories
of identity even as they exceed those categories. Not only can they not be all the category
requires, the category cannot name all that they are” (Pellegrini).

Considering the specificity of race/gender inside the consulting room ineluctably brings
us to race/gender in the world beyond. “Racist behavior,” Kovel says he predicted in
1970, “might change, and even to some degree go away, but … white racism would”
endure. Like migrating pains, the racial/racist symptom travels around the social body:
Blacks may be more accepted as individuals, but black males now take the hit. “One third
or so of young black men,” writes Kovel, “are caught up in the so-called criminal justice
system…. [B]lack men comprise seven percent of the population but virtually half of all
prisoners [and] three fourths of the inmates in New York state come from seven
neighborhoods in New York City.” Gump's data coordinate with Kovel's shocking
statistics. As she imagines Mr. A's history, for example, she considers the social
conditions contextualizing it. She reports that, in 1991, black men in Columbus, Ohio,
comprised 11 percent of the population but 90 percent of those arrested.

How is psychoanalysis to think about racism? In the New York Times (Eakin, January
15, 2000), Alvin Poussaint, M.D., is quoted as saying he would like racism to be a
category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. None of the
clinical authors here takes such a position. Kovel argues that making racism a mental
illness whitewashes its condition as a social evil. Others could be said to follow Leary,
who, though cognizant of the politics of race, also finds clinical power in deconstructing
race as a category, mode of being, and sociopsychological process. Even as race is
situated in racist history, social institutions, and practices, still, Leary argues, “race does
not in any meaningful sense speak for itself. It is instead a complex negotiation within
persons as well as a complex negotiation between persons.” She shifts our perspective by
modeling a delicate dialectics of race, racism, and psychoanalysis. To the signifiers race
and racism, Leary adds that of racial experience, racial thoughts, and racial enactment,
which move the focus from racism as behavior and race as

- 576 -

appearance to race and racism as intersubjective processes. Like Gump on dissociated

racial trauma, or Davies (n. d.) on the developmental dissociation of sexuality, Leary sees
“racial experience [as having] something in common with what Stern (1997) called
unformulated experience—that is, experience that is not yet reflected upon or
linguistically encoded but that nevertheless remains a part of our everyday psychic
grammar.”
If, as already noted, the essays in this symposium dialogue on common theoretical
themes and social issues, they also, fortuitously, offer supervision to one another. Leary's
clinical stance, for example, illuminates Altman's predicament:

Although it is always possible that the therapist may unwittingly retraumatize a patient in
his or her care, the analyst can usually be assured that he or she played no role in the
patient's original trauma. [At the same time] the institutional nature of racism and the
differential privilege conferred on some members of a racial community mean that the
analyst, by virtue of her participation in the social world of which the treatment is a part,
may in fact be complicit in some forms of oppression.

If, Leary's thesis suggests, therapists can get a handle on the narcissistic anxieties
generated by their “unintended racial thoughts, feelings, and actions,” they can
contemplate “racial enactments [as] occasions—at least potentially—of clinical
productivity [as well as] moments of clinical exposure for” themselves and their patients.

This symposium is comprehensive but incomplete. Its collective voices are a preliminary
draft, a working model for how psychoanalysis might begin to think about race—
personal, political, theoretical, professional. When Neil Altman asked me to join him in
gathering a set of papers on race and psychoanalysis for this special contribution to
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, the enormity of the project intimidated me. But I was also
inspired by his courageous exposure of his own racial dilemmas—an act that made the
symposium possible. These essays are intended not only to inform but to provoke, to
invite debate around the matters of race and racism that bind and fracture us as a nation.
Maybe, on a smaller scale, they will aid clinicians in contending with the “narcissistic
vulnerability [that] is perhaps an inevitable consequence of analysis in which socially
constructed but unconsciously maintained forms of identity arise” (Harris). It is, as I have
said, an intimidating project, but a necessary one.

- 577 -

References
Bracher, M. (1997), Psychoanalysis and racism. J. Psychoanal. Cult. Soc., 2:1-11.

Butler, J. (1995). Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification Psychoanal. Dial. 5:165-

180 [→]

Davies, J. (n. d.), Too hot to handle: Containing and symbolizing erotic overstimulation
in the realms of the traumatic and the transgressive. Unpublished manuscript.
Dimen, M. (1999), Unfinished business. In: That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud's
Female Homosexual Revisited, ed. R. Lesser & E. Schoenberg. New York: Routledge,
pp. 233-256.

Eakin, E. (2000, January 15), Bigotry as mental illness or just another norm? New York
Times, p. B9.

Flax, J. (1998), The American Dream in Black and White: The Clarence Thomas
Hearings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Freud, S. (1930), Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition, 21:64-146. London:
Hogarth Press, 1961. [→]

Goldner, V. (1991). Toward a Critical Relational Theory of Gender Psychoanal. Dial.

1:249-272 [→]

Kovel, J. (1970), White Racism: A Psychohistory. New York: Pantheon Books.

Phillips, A. (1995). Keeping It Moving: Commentary on Judith Butler's “Melancholy

Gender—Refused Identification” Psychoanal. Dial. 5:181-188 [→]

Sennett, R. & Cobb, J. (1973), The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage.
The Body as Rorschach

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Reinterpreted from one end of the century to the other, the psychoanalytic body situates
theoretical debate, dispute, and change. Originally and starkly biological and sexual, it
has all along carried other, often discordant meanings. Now, in the postclassical era, we
are equipped to redraft the classical body. Three perspectives intercut in this
interdisciplinary essay—the bodymind in culture, embodiment in psychoanalytic space,
and bodies in patriarchy. This splicing of psychic reality, interpersonal relatedness, and
systems of power produces bodies of many kinds. The many-drafted body funds the
fecund diversity of the individuality that psychoanalysis explores and cultivates, as well
as imagined and imaginable possibilities of freedom necessary to protest domination.

All neurotics, and many others besides, take exception to the fact that “inter urinas et
faeces nascimur” [we are born between urine and faeces]. The genitals, too, give rise to
strong sensations of smell which many people cannot tolerate and which spoil sexual
intercourse for them. … there exist even in Europe peoples among whom the strong
genital odours which are so repellant to us are highly prized as sexual stimulants and who
refuse to give them up

[Freud, 1930, p. 106, n 3].

—————————————

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University

Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Fellow, New York Institute
for the Humanities, New York University; Faculty and Supervisor, Derner Institute
Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Adelphi University.

For critical readings of this essay I wish to thank Ken Corbett, Adrienne Harris, Natalie
Kampen, Katherine King, Tom Lewis, Robert Roth, Sue Shapiro, and, especially,
Virginia Goldner.

-9-

Consider the body a Rorschach. In its doubleness of form, its bilateral symmetry, it even
resembles the inkblots routinely administered by psychologists to assess character and
sanity: two arms and hands, legs and feet, two eyes, ears, and nostrils, vaginal lips and
testicles, and a spine along which to fold the single units into mirror images—mouth and
face, head and torso, clitoris, penis, anus, urethra, mouth, and umbilicus. Imagine! You
can say anything you want about this body. You can project your fantasies onto it. See
someone whose form stirs your delight, and you fantasize the fulfilment of your passion.
Stare at a body like your own, and your lust flames or dies. Perhaps you glimpse a person
whose skin color makes you think of danger, and you swerve or freeze in fear or defiantly
keep right on going. The body might not be a blank slate, but it is surely treated like one.

A surface, yes, but also a cavity, the body is both external and internal, more than skin
deep. A three-dimensional trellis of bones with a carapace of skin housing the organs of
life, it is animated not only by the pulsating blood and guts nestled in the corporeal
interior but by something less tangible—a mind, some would put it, or a soul, or,
metaphorically, a heart. Psychoanalysis names this interiority “psychic reality”:
“whatever in the subject's psyche presents a consistency and resistance comparable to
those displayed by material reality; fundamentally, what is involved here is unconscious
desire and its associated phantasies” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1963, p. 363).

That psychic reality is as real as physical reality was Freud's earliest point. Conversion
hysteria, in which objectionable thoughts and emotions turn into bodily suffering, is a
cornerstone of classical psychoanalysis: it was the diagnosis that permitted Freud (Breuer
and Freud, 1893-95) to begin thinking that the mind, you might put it, has a body of its
own. By using the body to express itself, he was arguing, the mind transforms the body;
conversely, when psychic survival is at stake and the mind can do no more, the body
takes over. Reasoning from Newtonian dynamics, Freud posited psychic energy, which
could assume either physical or mental form (Brennan, 1990). In conversion, unbearable
thoughts, feelings, images and memories—signally, sexual ones—take not symbolic but
corporeal shape. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy feed on this convertibility.

The body, if it is a fact, is also an idea. Reinterpreted from one end of the century to the
other, it situates theoretical debate, dispute, and change. Originally and starkly biological
and sexual, the psychoanalytic body has all along carried other, often discordant
meanings: a surface to be inscribed and a register of the psyche; “both an object for
others and a subject for myself” (Merleau-Ponty, 1961, p. 167); a fount and target of
power. Blessed with postclassical uncertainty, we can envision the classical body as but
one of many representations of material reality,

- 10 -

and redraft it. On top of it we can layer new versions, just as, through the ages,
Paleolithic painters superimposed on cave walls image upon image of the fauna they
needed and revered.

For this deconstruction project, well advanced in the academy but overdue in
pyschoanalysis, I propose a conversion of my own: deploying the jiu-jitsu of clinical
psychoanalysis, in which we grant the symptom its truth, let us give the body its head.
Three perspectives intercut here-the bodymind in culture, embodiment in the consulting
room, and bodies in patriarchy. This splicing of psychic reality, interpersonal relatedness,
and systems of power, which is my response to our common Rorschach, produces bodies
of many kinds. The many-drafted body funds the fecund diversity of the individuality that
psychoanalysis explores and cultivates (Shapiro, 1979), as well as the imagined and
imaginable possibilities of freedom necessary to protest domination brute and subtle.

Embedded in both theoretical and clinical practice, this interdisciplinary essay employs
the Rorschach, that name-brand projective test, as metaphor for the endless projections
and constructions to which the body has been subject. Here bodies parade through an
array of perspectives: embodied patients and analysts; disembodied theorists; gendered,
raced, and aged bodies; hungry bodies and breathing bodies. The potent space between
binaries is mined: the elusive borderland between exteriority and interiority; ambiguities
of surface and cavity; reversals between perception and projection; the interconvertibility
of psychic and material reality; the contradiction of Mind-Body refitted as the paradox of
bodymind. As the intersubjective body emerges from the dichotomy between the object-
body of science and the subject-body of experience, clinical case material and
psychoanalytic concepts like the Skin-Ego and projective identification come into play. A
feminist and deconstructive reading of anality, domination, and splitting links
psychoanalysis and politics. As an effect of power, the abject body's sexuality is
anatomized; the dichotomized female orgasm produced by the domination of women can,
at century's close, yield to a nuanced multiplicity of desire and pleasure. I use a
concluding contrast between Freudian and Buddhist bodies to hint at corporealities not
yet dreamed of in our philosophy.

The body is what it is and what we make of it. Different practices make for different
bodies. It may be, for example, that Jacques Lacan, living much in his head, found his
physical body rather more ineffable than, say, a dancer might. For him, the body, as all
biology, incarnates “the Real,” that which, mutely resisting symbolization, cannot with
any certainty be known (Žižek, 1996; but see Butler, 1993). Impervious to our ideas of it,
this cipher body is a brick wall into which all systems of meanings run. For others, the
body is quite vocal, both transparent and substantial. Listen to Irene Dowd (personal
communication), a dancer and neuromuscular educator whose sensibility might in fact
define

- 11 -

embodiment: “You speak of ‘the body,’” she laughs. “I am my body. I am aware of

myself as a physical being all the time, of how I change according to what I am doing and
how I am moving.” The dancer knows her body as the theorist knows his words.

Still, even in the dance world, the body and its activity exceed representation. Consider
the fate of Labanotation, one of many sorts of transcription that are to dance what the
score is to music. Created in 1940 by Ann Hutchinson Guest, Helen Priest Rogers, Eve
Gentry, and Janey Price, it has largely yielded to video (Zina Steinberg, personal
communication) and video's ability to capture the body's signature mobility. Yet, finally,
dancing must be taught hands on, in three-dimensional flesh, kinesthetically activating
multiple sensory mnemonics (Schachtel, 1959)—not just sight and sound, but touch and,
possibly, even smell and taste.

Psychic Reality, or the History of the

Bodymind
Certainly physical bodies exist, but, for psychoanalysts, it is their psychic meaning that
counts. Marie Cardinal (1983) tells of intolerable vaginal hemorrhaging that eluded
medical healing. Psychoanalysis was her last resort. Her analyst forbade all talk of her
physical suffering; for that, he said, she might consult her physician. His interest was her
body's representation in her mind. Much pain and many years later, when Cardinal could
fathom her mother's madness and thereby own a hatred that, disavowed, had maddened
and sickened her in turn, she found serenity at last, while losing her psychosomatic
bleeding forever.

The body's psychic reality is an effect of history, of the fourth dimension, time, inhabited
by the body in all its immediacy. Psychic reality forms a palimpsest through time, across
time, in layers of time, each layer surviving into the present and stretching toward the
future. Unlike linear, one-damnthing-after-another historical time, psychic history is as
layered as a Napoleon, as curvy as Einsteinian space.

Recall Freud's (1930) brilliant but flawed use of spatial absurdity to figure the temporal
impossibility of mind. The mind, said he, is like Rome, only more so. In this “jumble of a
great metropolis” the present neighbors immediately on the past. Hard on one building,
dating from, say, the city's birth, is another from, perhaps, the Renaissance. Except that in
the mind's montage, these two structures hold the very same spot at the very same time:

In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli [1580] would once more stand—without
the Palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus [of the sixth
century B.C.E.]; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it
[between

- 12 -

the first and 6th centuries C.E.], but also in its earliest one, when [in the 6th century
B.C.E.] it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes [p.
70].

Notice, however, that Freud did not speak to what you might call architectural
embodiment, an omission perhaps telling of the psychoanalytic tendency toward
objectification under critique here. Had he factored in the use of these buildings, another
palimpsest or two would have surfaced: the Palazzo, says Natalie Kampen (personal
communication), a historian of Roman art who has kindly supplied both the foregoing
dates and data, served as the German Embassy until 1918 and, for a moment after 1925,
as the Museo Mussolini.

Embodiment may be conceptualized as bodymind (Wrye, 1998), a notion we can employ

in working through the Cartesian split between subjective mind and objective body
governing Freud's thought. An interleaving of psyche and soma, private epochs,
interpersonal history, and public convention, bodymind situates extreme individuality.
Opening that “frontier between the mental and the physical,” where Freud (1905, p. 168)
presciently but dualistically located instinct, bodymind denotes not two separate
functions but a third area: the body as “the subject of perception [in] a dialogue with the
world,” as Merleau-Ponty saw it (Reis, 1999, p. 384).

Bodymind is a perfect fount of mystery for the endless probing of the “unique
individuality” (Wolstein, 1975) that constitutes clinical psychoanalysis. Think of the
Skin-Ego, conceived by Didier Anzieu (1989) as “the original parchment which
preserves, like a palimpsest, the erased, scratched-out, written-over first outlines of an
‘original’ pre-verbal writing made up of traces upon the skin” (p. 105). Perhaps the self is
written plurally on the body. For Adrienne Harris (1996), memory is a series of drafts,
not a single snapshot. At any given moment, any given body may inscribe an orderly
developmental sequence, but it may also speak in tongues, with memories registered and
superimposed in flesh and sensation like paintings on a cave wall. On and in the body,
past, present, and future jumble higgledy-piggledy as in the mind.

Bodymind moments record a life. HC puts together, during his treatment with me, a
series of accidents that lead him to recall the central trauma of his childhood. At age five
and then again at age seven, he had a broken collar bone. He fell off the roof, he knows.
Here and there he details the bloody fights with his father that pockmarked his
adolescence. Somewhat later on, he mentions that, at age two, he was wearing an arm and
shoulder cast (dead white plaster strangely bright against young white skin, as I saw in a
black and white snapshot that he sent to me after the therapy ended). He fell off a chair,
he thinks.

We work these memories until, one night at 2 A.M., he awakens in panic. His cat,
hunched at the foot of the bed, is hissing and growling,

- 13 -

her ears flat in terror and hostility. HC has been visited by a memory of evil: he
remembers going to the dentist, at age seven, in a foreign country where his father was
working for an international company. He remembers sitting, frightened, in the chair, he
remembers crying out, he remembers his father entering the office, chiding HC for being
a baby, climbing on to HC's lap, and then forcibly holding HC's jaws open so that the
dentist could do his work. At the procedure's end, HC recalls in horror and humiliation,
his father smiled and then spat in his mouth. Or, he muses a few sessions later, did his
father only drool? Whatever.

Humiliation, having entered HC's mouth and soul, became systemic. The week after HC
entrusts me with this flashback, he force-marches himself through his shame over rotting
teeth. After the fact, he confides that he has visited the dentist for the first time in 30
years. Only slowly and with extreme terror, getting the shakes every now and then, does
he impart all these details, revealing to me his lonely courage when, at 13, he siphoned
off, into a large juice glass, a little bit of liquor from every bottle in the living room
cabinet, took a pair of pliers, and went into the woods where, drunk, he healed a months'
old toothache by yanking the backmost molar out of the lower right side of his jaw.

As HC and I cautiously weave between the concerns of his present life and the tangles of
his past, he fashions out of these superimposed layers three images, three little boys—
aged two, five, and seven—who become imaginary companions. Shards of his
fragmented psychic self, each imagined little boy begins to have his own memories, each
slowly and in pieces tells the story of his own injury, none accidental and all having
something to do with a very angry and alcoholic and abusive and adored father and a
mother who stood by and did nothing. After a while, the boys grow older and merge into
one: by the time HC left treatment, he had as his imaginary companion his own 18-year-
old self, a psychic construction that, he told me with remarkable insight, signaled his self-
acceptance, a sign that he had taken himself to his bosom. Later came a final, color
photograph of him standing in front of his new store with his new boyfriend.

The Mind-Body Problem in

Psychoanalytic Theory: Anatomy is
Destiny?
If, for Freud, the body was first and foremost sexual, it now seems protean, versatile
rather than sexual. This plethora of meaning and practice, which might be rephrased as
the mind-body problem, constructs a polarization ripe for undoing. Primally and
profoundly, classical psychoanalytic metaphor plumps for biology: as hunger rules the
body (Freud, 1905, p. 135), so libido steers desire. At the same time, psychoanalysis
renders the body the mind's creature: the hysteric's body(Breuer and Freud, 1893-95)

- 14 -

obeys the laws of psychology, not biology. Instead of a contradiction to be resolved, then,
perhaps the mind-body problem is a paradox to be explored. “A dialectical theory …
nowadays means not a theory that resolves the tension of paradox, but that which sustains
it, which allows the contradiction to stand and milks it for all it's worth” (Benjamin,
1994, p. 93).

Instead of a dialectic, however, indecision and contradiction govern psychoanalytic

thinking about the bodymind across the century. Examine, for example, that classic
soundbite, “Anatomy is destiny.” Now, as you probably know, this immortal claim has
nothing to do with the “psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the
sexes” (Freud, 1925). Rather it denotes the condition of human birth and its effect on
sexual desire: inter urinas et faeces nascimur—we are born between urine and faeces.
Most people, Freud (1930) contended—not only “neurotics,” but “many others besides”
(p. 106n. 3)-do not like to think that they enter the world, head first, through the region of
the body dedicated to waste disposal. One's downy little head, with its still unclosed
fontanelle, passing through a corridor situated between the twin sewer-pipes of urethra
and anus?

At this point subsists an illogic emanating from an unarticulated contradiction. Freud

(1930) had been plumbing a “primary repelling attitude … toward sexuality” (pp. 105-
106, n. 3), which he links to the atrophied sense of smell in Homo sapiens,
understandably for an epoch in which the genitals were thought to be hardwired into the
nose (Gay, 1988, pp. 56-57). Leaning on Darwin, Freud (1930) deemed diminished
olfaction biologically adaptive, an “organic defence … against animal existence” (pp.
105-106, n. 3). Homo sapiens having gained bipedal locomotion, the highly corporeal
sense of smell, so intense for other mammals, became a shadow of its former self; the
rather less visceral sense of sight took over as prime erotic stimulus. As the capacity for
olfaction wasted away, so too did sexual desire and with equal evolutionary advantage.1

Freud seems to have been unaware of the puzzle: if you can't smell, why would the odor
of sex bother you at all? In one place, we learn that disgust is as innate as the upright
posture it accompanies, while elsewhere we learn that it sets in only after birth. Freud's
footnoted argument has the poor, innocent baby, born between urine and feces, receiving
from the world's Welcome Wagon the gift of a nigh-traumatizing stench, but lacking the
physiological or emotional tolerance for it. And yet, as Freud (1930) explained in an
earlier footnote. “The excreta arouse no disgust in children.” Disgust is learned, not
inborn, acquired not inherited.

—————————————

1 “The diminution of the olfactory stimuli seems itself to be a consequence of man's

raising himself from the ground …” (Freud, 1930, p. 99n1). Freud made a similar
argument, Gay (1988) tells us, in a letter of 1897 to Wilhelm Fliess.

- 15 -
Indeed, it is taught: “Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course
of development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless,
disgusting, abhorrent and abominable” (pp. 99-100n. 1).

The contradiction between mind and body in psychoanalytic thought constitutes a

productive tension. If we step into that tension and construe the relation between mind
and body as paradoxical rather than oppositional, then we find a third term: Both mind
and body, it turns out, inhabit culture, a triangulation that Freud recognized but for which
his system could not account. “Accident,” as Freud repeatedly terms it throughout his
studies on masculinity and femininity, not “constitution,” causes the feeling of disgust
that “seems to be one of the forces which have led to a restriction of the sexual aim”
(Freud, 1905, p. 152).

Freud's illogical but culturally sensible argument predicted what the 20th-century was to
bring: those smooth, deodorized, but nevertheless (or therefore) very sexy bodies, posing
on the page and prancing on the screen, their minimalism signaling the erotics of
corporeal excess, and of its control. His thought anticipated Norbert Elias's (1939)
documentation of its cultural context: Nineteenth-century Europe's “incitement to
cleanliness,” which was potentiated, Shapiro (1996, p. 306) suggests, by that new
technology, indoor plumbing, which, initially available only to the rich, eventually
radiated a civility aspired to by all. As down there became “down there,” toilet training in
particular and socialization in general fell into line. Dirt in the new regime was for
animals, not human beings. And all things anal—from the products and process of human
excretion to olfactory pleasure—became de trop, a fastidiousness about bodily functions
that children were, through upbringing, to acquire. Meanwhile, of course, repression,
both psychical and theoretical, left urinas et faeces sparkling with desire.

Freud and the Nitty-Gritty Body

The immediate is not unmediated. Take another look at the epigraph to this essay and
imagine it in its original form, as a footnote on a page of Civilization and Its Discontents.
Like heat, the distinctive odors of the groin practically rise from the bottom of the page.
Freud stowed below the line that which had, in his view, sadly but fatefully to be put
“down there” in order that civilization might rise up. In the text, he listed civilization's
sexual limits: the incest taboo, the prohibition on childhood sexuality, and heterosexuality
mandated solely for monogamously married reproduction. That many consequently lose
sexual enjoyment regrettably follows on the necessary binding of human beings, with
their anarchic instincts, into the protective social order.

Here as elsewhere, footnotes memorialize the contradiction of the good ship Freud: a red-
hot manifesto for sexual liberation in the hold,

- 16 -
a blue-blooded, scientific pedigree on deck. Perhaps the power of this epochal opus owes
something to the notes' recursive action, a little performance of show-and-tell with a
sophisticated twist. Subtle engines of domination, the notes show you how to control
yourself. Not only do they show what the text tells, they also do what the text cannot say.
The mind above, the body below. Performed for us on Freud's page is the selfsame
sickening process that Freud identified in civilization: down boy and, especially, girl.

The result is Freud's legacy: paradox. In the red-light districts of Civilization and Its
Discontents (Freud, 1930), the pungent body lives on. Just as culture, Freud says, cannot
disavow childhood's corporeal excess, so, we see, he cannot disavow the dirty pleasure of
adult sex. But he does try to get rid of it, palming it off first on animals, then on children,
next on the Other. Here is sex the innocent. For animals and, implicitly, for the animal in
us, Freud points out, sex and its carnal pleasures know no shame. Think, he scolds, of
how we betray our “most faithful friend,” the dog, whose shameless bliss in putting head
to crotch so as to smell, lick, and clean incites our shameful contempt and whose name is
one of “our strongest and commonest terms of abuse.” All men are dogs, say some.
Hence too the insulting “son of a bitch,” even the damning “a bitch in heat.”

When it comes to the animal in the human, however, Freud gets on his high horse and
gallops away. A strange thing to say, I know, given that the sexual body may rightly be
judged a psychoanalytic creation (Foucault, 1976). But the only way Freud could
memorialize the erotic appeal of the nitty-gritty body was to project it outward and
downward. Projection (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1963) “is always a matter of throwing out
what one refuses either to recognise in oneself or to be oneself (p. 354).” Freud knew that
not all human beings so disdain the scent of sex, that some have a different erotic
sensibility. Typically, he tells us about it. Having taken some pains to argue that human
sexual malaise is universal, he turns right around and says the opposite: “in spite of the
undeniable depreciation of olfactory stimuli, there exist even in Europe peoples among
whom the strong genital odours which are so repellant to us are highly prized as sexual
stimulants and who refuse to give them up” (p. 107 n. 3).

Faced with a contradiction—the robust appetite of some unidentified European peoples

versus the squeamishness known to him from his patients, his acquaintances, and,
possibly, himself2—he articulated his confusion in a way that permits one to infer at least
an ambivalence on his part about the relationship between anatomy and destiny. On one
hand, the “result of [Darwinian] research coincides in a remarkable way

—————————————

2 We know from his letters (Gay, 1988), that Freud virtually stopped having sexual
intercourse around the age of 40.

- 17 -
with commonplace prejudices that have often made themselves heard” (Freud, 1930, pp.
105-106n. 3). To be concrete, most people, according to popular belief as well as his own
clinical data, recoil from fellatio or cunnilingus, consistent with evolutionary exigency.
Their oral erotism thus restricted to mouth-to-mouth contact, their sexual pleasure
likewise contracts. “Nevertheless,” the universally adaptive advantages of these
prejudices “are at present no more than unconfirmed possibilities which have not been
substantiated by science” (pp. 105-106 n. 3). Carnality is not lethal: nose to groin, some
“peoples” relish the intoxicating mix of urine, feces, and sexual fluids and rather defy you
to take their pleasure away.

In the miasma of Freud's unease, all the inferiorized, all the abjected Others—the body,
sex, peasants, Jews, the racially and sexually stigmatized, women—begin to look pretty
much alike. They are made to identify with what he dislikes, and therefore disidentifies
from, in himself. If in identification one “ssimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the
other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides”
(Laplanche and Pontalis, 1963, p. 205), in disidentification one disassociates oneself from
it. Freud's disidentifications create a strange and potent stew of country, class, race, and
gender. His sense of his ethnicity, and hence his class pride were, in Sander Gilman's
(1993) argument, equally a dilemma about racial and gender identity. In fin de siècle
Austria, Jews were docketed as a mentally and physically defective race, an anti-
Semitism with which, Gilman contends, Freud colluded by scotomizing his roots and
identifying with his nation. (We might then wonder whether, if only figuratively, his
reviled Eastern European Jewish forebears were those very “peoples” who defiantly
prized “strong genital odours … as sexual stimulants.”) In the same breath, according to
Gilman, Freud's unconscious effort to expel from his own bodymind the dregs of his
abject Jewishness fed his denigration of women like an underground river.

A Body that Stinks and a Body that

Thinks
The Body Relieved of Embodiment

As soon as Freud brings the body out of the closet, he shoves it back in. The case of
women is paradigmatic. Ponder the joke that Freud (1930) used to illustrate his claim that
a “quota of plain aggression” invariably accompanies Eros: “The love-object will not
always view these complications with the degree of understanding and tolerance shown
by the peasant woman who complained that her husband did not love her any more, since
he had not beaten her for a week” (pp. 105-106 n. 3). Ho ho. The efficiency with which
this pleasantry fuses sexism, classism, and racism sure hits that funny bone.

The conditions are ripe for projective identification: “a mechanism revealed in phantasies
in which the subject inserts his self—in whole or
- 18 -

in part—into the object in order to harm, possess or control it” (Laplanche and Pontalis,
1963, p. 356). Here is a self-that-can-insert-into an other-that-can-receive the fear, hatred,
and contempt that so often mark the intimacy of enemies. Why couldn't Freud tell that
joke about one of his bourgeois patients instead of a stereotypical woman from an
Austro-Hungarian village? That she lacks an ethnicity is probably part of the humor: she
is an “other,” not a “self.” Subordinate and rural, one of “them” as opposed to “us,” she is
also a woman, the butt of both her man's aggression and Freud's.

We seem to be dealing with a misogyny as old as Aristotle, whose phrase, translated

probably by St. Augustine3 Freud used (albeit without citation): “inter urinas et faeces
nascimur.” Why did Freud not notice that those smells that he presumed vaporize sexual
desire belong exclusively to those in whom the birth canal is found? To put it differently:
The people who love that region of female anatomy inter urinas et faeces are, literally and
figuratively, peasants. In Freud's thinking, maleness may serve not only as “a critique of
femininity,” in John Toews's (1998, p. 78) canny phrase, but also as an assessment of any
abject category whatsoever—peasants, Jews, bodies, excreta, reprogenital aromas, and so
on. Admire Jonathan Swift's (1732) satiric vision in “The Lady's Dressing Room” (pp.
448-52):

Thus finishing his grand survey,

The swain disgusted slunk away,

Repeating in his amorous fits,

“Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” [p. 451].

Now Strephon, the poem's protagonist, meets what Freud considered to be Man's fate:

But Vengeance, goddess never sleeping,

Soon punished Strephon for his peeping.

His foul imagination links

Each dame he sees with all her stinks:

And, if unsavoury odours fly,

Conceives a lady standing by [p. 451].

Strephon sees a woman who reminds him of sex. He smells something noxious and
imagines a woman. What a mess!4

—————————————

3 I have attempted to discover who actually translated Aristotle. Norman O. Brown

(1959) names St. Augustine, although Seth L. Schein, a classicist, understands that it
might have been St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

4 Brown (1959) chides scholars for ignoring what both Freud and Swift had to say about
anality (p. 180) but does not notice the gendered aspect of either the omission or his
correction.

- 19 -

The mistaken equation that causes Strephon's particular malady—foulness = femininity =

foulness—becomes, in Freud's thought, a disease common to humanity. We can read the
associative chain: men = Man = human, while women = ? or, in Lacan's version, woman.
Once again, the unconscious equation of humanity with men inflects Freud's view of the
sexual world. Doubtless there are women who have no taste for the aromatics of their
own repro-excreto-genital region nor, for that matter, of men's. However, the nauseated
people for whom the association between the condition of their birth and the smell of sex
is so intolerably close that it snuffs out their sexual desire are, without a doubt, men.
Stench, thy name is Woman. Bye-bye, Sex.

Or, better, good-bye, Body, hello, Mind. Have you wondered why Rodin's The Thinker
took a male form? Feminism has chastised Western culture for reducing Woman to her
Body. I want, with feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young (1990), to note another drift:
the classic Western body, for psychoanalysts as for everyone, is male. It is, however, a
body relieved of embodiment. A body that neither feels nor knows itself, an objectbody,
if you will, it is free of the stresses and strains, the stinks and smells, the weaknesses and
wetnesses and mortality and, most important, the senses of the ordinary body that are in
European history made the property of women (Grosz, 1994). It is a body suited to
Descartes' cogito, which subordinates the boundary-losing, emoting body to the
separatingindividuating, cognizing mind.5 As Young (1990) argues, the ordinary absence
from philosophical considerations of women's socially ordained and highly embodied
concerns—housework, child rearing, the negotiation of interpersonal life—bares the
secret Western premise that “the body” is male. A body that thinks, not a body that
stinks.

The female body may be the West's own private Rorschach, the artist's often headless
muse. But a body with a head, a body that thinks? Rodin's sculpture concretizes the body
latently conjured by that third-person neutral, “he,” which, officially but a literary
convention, actively and repeatedly constructs a particular type of body for all to see—
the “abstract individual” of capitalism with a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, upper-
middle-class, heterosexual, male body that is, you might say, cleansed of embodiment, a
body whose main feature is its head borne on a hefty fist.

Recovering Embodiment

Embodiment has lived a sort of secret life, hidden away by gender hierarchy (Jaggar and
Bordo, 1989). Abjected on the margins of adult corporeality,

—————————————

5 Jane Flax (1983) has linked this body precisely to the two-year old, and, Ken Corbett
(personal communication) adds, a male one at that, as can be seen in the move from the
emoting to the separating-individuating, cognizing mind in the case of Little Hans.

- 20 -

preserved in the private domain ruled by women, both venerated and abominated in
Western culture, the female body also and equally memorializes embodiment, body as
source of experience, knowledge, meaning. Woman is the prime, although not the only,
vehicle, selected by Freud, as well as by Western culture at large, to transport the abject
aspects of human experience away from the civilized center of daily life. Perhaps the
conundrum in Sherry Ortner's (1974) classic question, “Is male to female as culture is to
nature?” is a body that stinks as much as it thinks.6

As quickly as Freud tears off the fig leaf, he slaps it back on. On one hand, he is trying to
liberate his readers: Look, you may think that all this carnality belongs only to lower
types like peasants, but the truth is, you the civilized want it too. We know that far from
our cosmopolitan capitals exist many strange orders of folk who relish the aromatic stew
of ejaculate, vaginal fluids, urine, feces, sweat, and hair. But this dangerous, exciting
preference, which we sophisticates regard with fascinated and horrified disgust that “the
sexual instinct in its strength enjoys overriding” (Freud, 1905, p. 152), really resides
close by, so near as to be almost one of us. Like the adjacent genital, excretory, and
reproductive zones, these crotchlovers are intimate neighbors, living “even in Europe.” If
they won't relinquish their olfactory delight, well, then, maybe we don't want to either.

On the other hand, Freud has been engaging in a little anality of his own, splitting the
body into two, keeping one part and expelling the other. The body he knew is the body as
the object of scientific knowledge, “the body known as a third-person observer knows
any object in the world” (Sampson, 1996, p. 604). Studied, interpreted, and governed by
mind, to which it is inferior, this object-body reproduces gender hierarchy, a part of the
unknowing, but knowable world called “she” by the probing scientist (Keller, 1985).
The body that has disappeared from psychoanalysis is the body of experience, the body
known from the inside out, not outside in. Embodiment renders the body a site of
experience and source of knowledge differently available to the person living in that body
than to the person watching that body. This ostracized subject-body is certainly the sexual
body, but it is equally the sensed body, the body of pleasure and pain, the body made of
emotion as well as of thought, unconscious as well as conscious signification, the body of
psychic reality, the paraplegic's “body silent,” which loudly compels our attention
(Murphy, 1987).

Like as not, the embodied body involves other bodies. As Elsa Beatriz Cardalda (personal
communication), a Newyorican poet and psychologist, puts it: “our boundaries are made
of people.” Encrypted by culture, the

—————————————

6 Even Claude Lévi-Strauss (1949) agreed that while women may be treated like
objects-“signs”-they are also fully sentient human beings who use signs themselves.

- 21 -

subject-body inhabits a liminal world of other subject-bodies. Such multiplicity is

marginal to Eurowestern representation, contend anthropologists Beth A. Conklin and
Lynn M. Morgan (1996). In prevailing North American imagery, the body is a material
entity, subject to natural, not social, processes and incarnating cultural ideals of
individuated personhood: “it is disciplined, controlled, restrained, and autonomous—a
kind of private property” (p. 664). In contrast, among the Wari' of the Brazilian
rainforest, bodies are construed as thoroughly social, “constituted through interpersonal
exchanges of body fluids and foods.” Puberty, for instance, is brought on by social,
interpersonal, and psychological events: heterosexual intercourse triggers menstruation,
while killing an enemy begets puberty in men.7 Fatherhood in this nonmonogamous
society is plural: “any man who has sex with a pregnant woman contributes semen to
form the fetus' body and has a claim to biological paternity” (p. 671). Even prenatally
one's boundaries are made of many Wari', unlike the Eurowestern embryo, always
already “interpellated” (Althusser, 1971, pp. 173-183) as an unambiguously boundaried
and singular subject.

Working the Tension by Multiplying the

Body
Instead of splitting the body up, let's multiply it. Consider Maurice MerleauPonty's
(1962) phenomenological solution to the mind-body dualism: the body is neither subject
nor object; it is both. He speaks of “the metaphysical structure of my body, which is both
“an object for others and a subject for myself” (p. 167). An object for others and a subject
for myself. In MerleauPonty's paradox, the body always involves other minds, existing
simultaneously for self and for other. The body can be both subject and object, rather
than one or the other, because (at least) two people are involved in it, each from a
necessarily different relation to it. No one can know my own body from the inside as I
do, nor can I perceive it as you can from the perspective of your own embodiment, which
exists outside of mine. The body's psychic location, in this new response to the universal
Rorschach, is invariably doubled.

How helpful Merleau-Ponty's stance can be in our reflecting on psychotherapeutic

embodiment, which, we are now understanding, is always doubled and intersubjective.
An object for others but not yet a subject for herself, AB's body was her medium; on it,
she performed the psychical and social inscription of flesh, blood, and bone, which
everywhere endows the mortal bag of guts with structure, identity,

—————————————

7 Conception, in turn, is said to occur when enough semen accumulates following many,
closely sequential acts of sexual intercourse. Pregnancy, in other words, “is evidence of a
sustained relationship between a man and a woman.”

- 22 -

and reality (Scarry, 1985; Santner, 1996). At first, AB's life was “desolate.” Unfocused,
she could not cohere work life, career, nor did any of her love affairs, whether gay or
straight, furnish that “sense of aliveness” which Winnicott (1971, p. 158) called “the
self.” Her psychic life was lived externally, on her body. For 15 years, since her late
teens, her body measures had worked overtime both to create a sense of meaning and
thereby to keep her sense of realness intact.

Anzieu's (1989) idea of the Skin-Ego illuminates both AB's dilemma and her solution.
Her body was a bad thing: it was, she thought, fat, as well as, or because, female (and she
dreamt once about a flabby older woman somewhere behind her-me, of course, also
repellingly female, in the chair behind the couch). Trying to redraft her body, AB would
starve, or gorge and vomit, and drink. She would mark her skin by the “delicate self-
cutting” that relives and masters the threat to psychic existence posed by childhood
traumas (Kaplan, 1991, p. 369). Pain is a way to feel and so to know one is alive
(McDougall, 1989). If to cut oneself and not die is to mark one's aliveness by reminding
oneself that the skin-envelope (Anzieu, 1989) works, AB's cutting gave her life.

AB had been trying to make a psychic skin all by herself, an effort curiously incarnating
the century-long contradiction between theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis. If
psychoanalytic theory has trafficked in a “one-body psychology” (Rickman, cited in
Laplanche and Pontalis, 1963, p. 278), clinical psychoanalysis has in effect functioned as
a two-person field, a disjuncture we may now be set to evaluate and remedy. Construing
the body, paradoxically, as simultaneously subject and object may be one way to navigate
this tension between the theory of an individual mind and a therapy of two (see Shapiro,
1996).

Much as several buildings can occupy the same site in the Rome of the mind, maybe one
body is always also two or more. At the beginning of treatment, AB was dwelling in a
one-body, one-person psychology. What helped was the recognition and experience that
two of us in two bodies were working together in the same space and time. Extending
Winnicott's immortal soundbite, “There is no such thing as an infant,” but only a baby in
an environment mediated by the maternal object (Khan 1958, p. xxxvii), Harris (1996a)
writes, “There is no meaningful individual body ego without the interface-the holding,
looking, touching encounter of the social other” (p. 371). AB needed to let her one
become two until her one could take its own place in the world.

Anzieu (1989) called it the Skin-Ego, but Touch-Ego might be a better appellation. The
Skin-Ego surprisingly echoes Merleau-Ponty's (1962) subject/object body, even though it
adumbrates a one-body psychology. In fact, it is intersubjective—“the mental image of
which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to
represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience

- 23 -

of the surface of the body” (p. 40, italics added). Arising in tactility, in the primal
sensuality of being held by a caretaking (m)other, the Skin-Ego in fact exists somewhere
in the space between embodied persons, a twoperson psychology in a one-person
bodymind.

AB needed me to touch her, to be both the family who did not hold and the therapist who
did. I was to contain images of her health and illness both, to see the creative side of her
self-destruction. Certainly there were times when I incarnated the parents who held
neither physically nor psychically. How many sessions would begin with my silent prayer
that she stop yelling at me as though I were the cause of her persisting anguish. My
holding failed her quite concretely too: although I noticed her anorexia very quickly, I
was long blind to her alcoholism.

AB needed me both to hold her in mind and to let her go to the mindless edge of mad
embodiment. This allowance communicated what she unconsciously wanted me to
imagine and what in fact I did: an image of her as separate, intact, integrated, and alive.
For much of the analysis, I was the Skin-Ego she needed to develop for herself through
the analytic Touch-Ego. I was the other for whom her body was an object, she the self for
whom it was a subject. That she could survive my failure, and I her disappointment in
me, testified to our mutual psychic sturdiness. Looking back, at the close of her analysis,
AB said she had not only needed to fall apart, she needed me to let her do so. She had
needed me, like the neighbors who heard her nightly screaming, to notice the pale scars
cut into her olive skin. But she did not need me to try to stop her. Like the patients
described by Masud Khan (1979) and Michael Eigen (1993) who seclude themselves for
long periods, failing either to work or to carry out their social lives, she had to risk all in
order to (re)gain a sense of her own wish to live.

Even Analysts Have Bodies: Projective

Identification, Anality, and Relationality
The nearly simultaneous entrance of women, embodiment, and the person of the analyst
on the psychoanalytic stage is no accident. Women as analysts incarnate the clinical
commonplace that analysts use their bodies when treating psyches; countertransference,
like transference, registers somatically (e.g., Davies, 1994; Harris, 1996a). Patients
employ the bodied analyst as both dumping ground and sounding board, eliminating what
they cannot abide by making their analysts both concretize and experience it. Analysts,
probing their embodiment (Shapiro, 1996), deepen the surface they provide for patients to
inscribe their interiority. Ogden (1994) describes how analysts use “reverie” to reflect not
only on fantasies but also on corporeal sensations and imagery in order to intuit a
patient's unconscious process (Reis, 1999, p. 389).

- 24 -

Projective identification, as a bodily state of mind that bleeds into intersubjectivity

(Schore, 1996; but see Reis's, 1999, critique), is immensely valuable in limning
countertransference embodiment. Initially a signature of Klein's (1950; Klein et al., 1952)
one-person psychology, it now emblematizes relational, two-person thought and practice
(Sands, 1997) because it signifies at once interpersonal process, individual psycho-
dynamics, and unconscious communication. The language used to describe it can evoke
the corporeality of intersubjectivity, that is, the Touch-Ego: recall AB who both
“touched” me and got “under my skin.”

It is early morning. I am alone in the office. I had a very rich meal the night before. I use
the toilet. A smell lingers. I use the bathroom spray. JG, my first patient, arrives. He has
noticed the spray, he says. In fact, he adds, he's noticed the odor behind the camouflage. I
freeze. Like an automaton, I follow the rules. I ask what this experience is like for him.
“Smelling your shit is comforting,” he replies with a private smile. “It makes me feel
close to you.” I am humiliated.

Excretory embarrassment perfumes the psychoanalytic air. Who is easy with shit in the
analytic office? “I won't talk to my therapist about shit,” Marcelle Clements (1985) wryly
confides. “As far as she's concerned, I haven't gone to the bathroom in the three years
she's known me, and I hope she has therefore deduced that I have in fact never gone to
the bathroom, and that excrement has nothing at all to do with my life on any level
whatsoever” (p. 69). Only recently (with the increase of women in the field) are analysts
studying how they use their physicality in psychotherapy (see, e.g., Shapiro, 1996; Aron
and Anderson, 1998). None, however, writes of personal odors. Fools rush in.

A female analyst and a male patient, middle-aged, white, face to face, the patient needing
relief not of body but of mind, the analyst embedded in her body and, for the moment,
bereft of her mind (Rosenfeld, 1987; Josephs, 1989). A horrifying and fascinating
moment. How hard it is to have an analyst with a body. For JG, my body (like his
mother's and wife's) contained both extraordinary hope and crushing disappointment, all
the goodness in the world and all the badness, a “great burden,” as he put it, for him, but
for me too, one that I carried with uneasy delight. Now the private body that excites
disgust and may not go out in public had been caught, naked, in the peculiar public
privacy of the analytic office. Cut off from the good body and saddled with the bad, JG
fell into anxiety, from which he could flee only by attacking me.

Shame aromatized the room that morning, mingling there with the love and hate that
marked our relationship. The intensity of this moment of therapeutic impasse suited
perfectly the primal quality of our intimacy, which had bloomed almost instantly when
we began working together nine years before. In an atmosphere thick with projections
and

- 25 -

counterprojections, we felt deeply connected and shared periods of profound anger and
difficulty. Reacting to JG's rageful and assaultive suffering, I would feel a combustible
and paralyzing mix of seemingly bottomless fury and empathy. It is fair to speculate that,
after all these years, I was fed up with his sense that nothing was ever good enough, as
well as with my own helplessness; but I had resisted probing my ambivalence until my
body took over, as bodies will do, and, overflowing, forced a countertransference
enactment (Davies, 1994).

That, in this clinical drama, I felt not only my own but JG's shame was part and parcel of
our relationship, my job, and our joint patriarchal heritage. The classical proposition that
shame is developmentally connected with matters of toilet training, power struggles, and
hence the anal stage, is sufficiently familiar (Erikson, 1950). A clinically more
enlightening move locates shaming in a relational matrix. According to current argument,
the erogenous zones are exciting not in themselves but in the unconscious context in
which they matter (Fairbairn, 1954); by the same token, psychosexual stages are not just
corporeal but also interpersonal moments (Sullivan, 1953). To take the example most
famous among clinicians, the mouth is erotic because it channels not libido but
relatedness: it's great to get together with mother and get fed, an excitement symbolized
by the breast (Klein, 1975).
This humiliating anal encounter between JG and me enacted the best and the worst about
our relationship. My experience of shame, and his shaming of me, complied with his
need that I temporarily hold all he hated in himself until he felt sufficiently
uncontaminated and undamaged and therefore resilient enough to take it back. As the
analyst whose job it is to bear the patient's projective identifications, I was, in the
transference, the parent whose job it is to contain and process the child's intolerable
affects (Bion, 1977). Our enactment epitomized our power struggle over shame: an
unconscious demand on his part and a conscious acquiescence coupled with an
unconscious refusal on mine, that I dispel, by embodying, the atmosphere of humiliation
that he has always inhabited, an anxietyridden, bodily state of mind to which a solution
had unexpectedly presented itself-my body's serendipitous betrayal of me, as bodies
betray everyone, lingering like footnotes at the bottom of the page to mark the cost of
civilization.

That my failure was his triumph depended, finally, on patriarchy and its gendered
splitting of emotional labor between mind and body, nurturance and aggression
(Benjamin, 1988; Dimen, 1991). With me, the woman, as the omnipotent (m)other,
processing and therefore identified with the abject (Grosz, 1994), JG could be the man
whose body could be counted on to stay in control. During those few minutes in which
my messy (female) embodiment became the center of our attention, JG could expel into
me the narcissistically wounded and castrated boy who had rectal surgery three times
before puberty, whose mother's rages terrorized

- 26 -

the family, whose father suffered bouts of depression, and whose twin sisters were born
shortly after his first surgery. Gone was the disappointed, bewildered, and shamed six-
year-old whose beautiful mother repulsed his amorous advances. Erased was the
humiliated 12-year-old who agreed with his father's dismissal of his pubertal anxiety as
girlish. For the moment, JG could be strong and I could be weak, he the mocking adult
and I the shamed child, he the male and I the female. But perhaps, I see now, there was
an additional exchange. Perhaps, if JG ever returns from the hiatus he took two years
later, we might analyze the possibility that on that dreadful morning we also enacted a
conventional heterosexual split: he as a man shouldered the aggression that I as a woman
could not sustain in my effort to nurture his narcissism and contain his abjection.

Clitoridectomies, Psychic and Otherwise

If “the ‘book’ from which the children learn their vision of the world is read with the
body” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 90), children's knowledge of their bodies also always passes
through the sieve of culture. Think of, say, facial scars, whether acquired in duels by
19th-century German noblemen or created in puberty rituals for Nuer boys and girls.
Consider the butt lifts and hair implants, pierced ears and noses and earlobes and lips, the
circumcisions and clitoridectomies found here and there in human history. Bodies are
inscribed with ideas and values that announce to self and other what a person is and is to
be.

Culture, however, is shot through with power. Silently, power enters psyche and intimacy
through diverse arteries that convey social meaning, for example, posture and gait
(Mauss, 1936). Power slinks in on semiosis, the tone, rhythm, and prosody animating the
primal experience of mothering (Kristeva, 1983). Most obviously, power becomes
internal through sex, through acts performed on the genitals to beautify, sanitize, and sex
the body. Even physicality, seemingly self-evident-the body as only biological and never
psychological, or only spiritual and never earthly, for example—is “an effect of power”
(Butler, 1993, p. 2).

Indeed, the more nonverbal the symbolic, the greater its effect, which is why, in the play
of power, the body is often a route to the mind. Domination, goes Bourdieu's (1977)
theory of power and ideology, impresses the psyche at the level of the body, which, as
both object for others and subject for oneself, has great symbolic, representational, and
communicative capability. In contrast to, say, military discipline, in which the enemy is
clear, symbolic domination “is something you absorb like air … it is every where and
nowhere” (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p. 115). It draws on a matrix of assorted claims
to truth that are established and reproduced by disciplinary institutions, not only the
family but also the “impossible professions”—education, government, and
psychoanalysis

- 27 -

(Freud, 1925; Foucault, 1976; Ehrenreich, 1989), each of which has a lot to say about the
body.

Not only practices of, but resistances to, symbolic domination take advantage of the
body's ambiguity, its doubled position as object for others and subject for oneself. The
clitoris, and its adventures both psychoanalytical and political, illustrates this décalage.
When Princess Marie Bonaparte, psychoanalyst, and student, patient and benefactress of
Freud, elected to cut her clitoris to fit theoretical fashion, it would have been hard to say
whether her act was a strike for or against freedom. Her sad and slightly bizarre story, so
different from Marie Cardinal's (1983), allows us to begin pulling together the many and
varied threads of which this essay is woven: psychic reality and embodiment, sexuality
and gender in psychoanalytic thought, psychic process and cultural politics. An
independent-minded sexual intellectual, Bonaparte was nevertheless, in her own view,
“frigid” (Bertin, 1982; Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992). More exactly, she enjoyed
clitoral sensation and orgasm but mourned simultaneous, penis-in-vagina orgasm.

Disposed perhaps by trauma (Bertin, 1982) to dissociate incompatible truths (Davies and
Frawley, 1994), Bonaparte risked a masochistic sexual odyssey that enacted
psychoanalysis' century-long ambivalence about the body. In, possibly, a paternal
transference to Freud (Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992, p. 340), she agreed on libido's
masculinity but firmly disagreed that vaginal life depended on clitoral death. Instead, she
held that women are innately bisexual; that the clitoris situates both masculinity and
female eroticism; and that vaginal orgasm in heterosexual intercourse is the most
desirable form of climax.

Bonaparte's theory of her sexual unhappiness foundered on psychoanalysis' unsolved

mind-body problem. In the matter of orgasm, psychic reality held sway for everyone but
her. If psychoneurosis caused sexual difficulty for some women, genital anatomy turned
out to be erotic destiny for others. In tall women like herself, she believed, and her
research seemed to confirm, “largish gaps” between clitoris and vaginal opening “were
not … favourable to normal transference of” sensation from clitoris to vagina,
representing “a real stigma of bisexuality” (1953, p. 150).

Oedipally rebelling—Freud had tried to dissuade her-Bonaparte turned to surgery.

Genital operations are no strangers to Western medicine (Freud, 1920, p. 171). As
Bonaparte (1953) knew, “Some turn-of-the-century European and American doctors used
clitoridectomy as a cure for masturbation and so-called nymphomania” (Walley, 1997, p.
407). When one Professor J. Halban claimed a surgical cure for anorgasmia, Bonaparte
hired him—twice—to move her clitoris nearer her vaginal aperture so that penile
thrusting might stimulate them simultaneously. To her despair, the

- 28 -

perfect orgasm never came (Bertin, 1982, pp. 170, 181; Appignanesi and Forrester, 1992,
p. 337).

That the clitoris is so often an article of dogma would be funny if it were not tragic.
Certainly the “fetishized” clitoris (Traub, 1995, p. 90), not to mention the penis, is a form
of symbolic domination. Far-fetched though it may seem, clitoral psychopolitics connects
psychoanalysis and international politics. Dramatizing this odd coupling are Bonaparte's
meetings with jomo Kenyatta, then anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski's student and
later Kenyan anticolonialist, prime minister, and president. In the 1930s, Bonaparte,
circulating by virtue of station and intelligence among political and cultural elites, sought
him out to discuss clitoral excision among his people, the Kikuyu (Bertin, 1982, pp. 191-
2), a fortuitous but not accidental historical conjuncture.

The sadism in Freud's dichotomy between the immature clitoral orgasm versus the
mature vaginal orgasm is, of course, old news (Koedt, 1968). More interesting is the way
the various excisions of this little bit of flesh fuse feminists with colonial iconography.
There is no need to rehearse the feminist critique, beyond emphasizing that this psychic
and cultural clitoridectomy (Bonaparte, 1953, pp. 153-165; et Saadawi, 1980, p. xiv)
inferiorizes the clitoris relative to both penis and vagina. But do recall that Freud's
anatomical map inscribes things female on that famous “dark continent,8 a European
colonialist epithet for Africa that buries in femininity another body matter—the
unconscious and institutional racism to which psychoanalysis, like all disciplines, is heir,
a legacy that, until practically yesterday, received hardly any attention at all.9

In classical psychoanalytic theory as well the culture in which it grew, (heterosexual)

male desire, as feminists have been pointing out since 1970, is the governor of sexuality,
and female desire is his servant, a colonialist model if ever there was one. Having
mapped women onto the terrain of the Other, Freud (1905) fantasized about that which,
bedarkened, is no longer visible. The clitoris' job is to “transmit” its excitement to the
vagina, “just as … pine shavings can be kindled in order to set a log of harder wood on
fire” (p. 221). While Laqueur (1990) coolly deems this metaphor “less than illuminating”
(p. 235), it is hardly a stretch to interpret that burning log as a penis: the real reason the
clitoris must yield its excitement is not to pleasure the vagina but to ensure a warm
welcome for the penis.

—————————————

8 Which, as he confessed in a 1928 letter to protégé and biographer Ernest Jones, is how
he regarded the adult woman's sexual life (Gay 1988).

9 There are several recent attempts to remedy this lacuna. See Abel (1990), Doane,
(1991), Gilman, (1993), Tate (1996), and Walton (1995).

- 29 -

Both mind and body are at stake here. The clitoris attracts patriarchal prurience because it
is a route to psychic reality, to hearts and minds as well as sex. Literally and
symbolically, Alice Walker (1992) insists, the clitoris embodies sovereignty; in
psychoanalytic terms, clitoral embodiment underwrites the self's place in psychic and
cultural representation. When, cries Nawal et Saadawi (1980), girls “in Egypt, the Sudan,
Yemen, and some of the Gulf states” (p. 33) are ritually cut at age seven, as she herself
was, the mortification of their sexual flesh not only violates their bodily integrity, but
hobbles them as citizens of country and world by deforming their capacity for
autonomous thought.

How do you draw the line between routine care of the body and domination? between
consent and submission? between violation and selfexpression? Female Genital
Mutilation (FGM'10—a label already drenched in moral outrage) raises these questions in
explosive terms. The controversy kindles anguished argument because it pits one central
tenet of Western enlightenment feminism, control over one's body, against another about
the need for multiplicity in understanding and setting feminism's agendas.
The politics are delicate. Western feminists have been advised to butt out (el Saadawi
1980, p. ix), but also asked to complexify (Spivak, cited in Apter, 1992, p. 51). So it
might further the international conversation to note the dilemma and splits created by the
paradoxical, ambiguous body, object for others and subject for oneself. Friends and foes
of clitoral excision range from mothers and daughters to politicians. For many Third
World women, this sacred ritual surgery makes their daughters both sexually pure and
marriageable (Walley, 1997). Publicly embarrassed by et Saadawi's polemic, Anwar
Sadat stripped her, a physician, of the post to which he had named her, Director of Public
Health. By the same token, those girls and mothers who do speak out report the horror of
the assault and the danger and punishment of protesting. And at the United Nations,
Hillary Clinton charged: “It is no longer acceptable to say that the abuse and
mistreatment of women is cultural. It should be called what it is: criminal” (New York
Times, March 5, 1999; see also Toubia, 1993, and Schroeder, 1994).

Negotiating the Scylla of relativism and the Charybdis of colonialism, First World
feminists are challenged to hold plural identifications while taking a stance on the
practice itself. At stake are crucial debates: competing ideas of bodily integrity; the rights
of children and who defines them; women's choice and voice, and their distribution.
Currently there is no way out of the contradictions of the ambiguous, intersubjective
bodymind caught in cultural and international hierarchies: alternatingly legal, cultural,
and moral, what is for some the routine care of the female body is for others symbolic
domination-and here let us not forget breast implants.

—————————————

10 See the website: www.hollyfeld.org/fgm/intro/mgmfgm.html

- 30 -

Freud's Body, Buddha'S Body, or the

Politics of Multiple Orgasm
Rebel with a Cause

The body, I have said, may be a fact, but it is also an idea. As an idea, the clitoris rebels
against the phallus, the symbol of the permanently erect penis, which for Lacanians
represents desire, the social order, and language. What a perfect example of symbolic
domination, of patriarchy using the body to sell itself as the only version of sanity. How
else to understand why Lacan attended so little to “the everyday uncertainties that beset
the male member?” (Bowie, 1990). Lacan, Bowie notes, missed an excellent opportunity
to see that the penis' unpredictability “make[s] it into a dialectician par excellence, a
nexus of signifying opportunities, a fine example, in all of its modes, of the Freudian
fort/da” (p. 125).

While the penis, in its prosaic vicissitudes, might well symbolize multiplicity,
uncertainty, and democracy, that representational job happily belongs to the clitoris. In
psychoanalytic iconography, the clitoris occupies the discursive place of multiplicity.
Talk about Rorschachs. Shoved to the margins of society, the female body, with its
savage little clitoris, becomes rather like a wild animal on the outskirts of civilization.
“On the one hand,” says Laqueur (1990), “the clitoris is the organ of sexual pleasure in
women. On the other, its easy responsiveness to touch makes it difficult to domesticate
for reproductive, heterosexual intercourse” (p. 240). In the reign of the penis, the clitoris
begins to seem like an unruly citizen and therefore has to be put in its place.

Perhaps it is the clitoris' excess that has had to be excised. Look at its fate in Otto
Kernberg's (1990), summation of his thoughts on sexuality: the clitoris appears only as a
rather dubious absence from the list of erogenous zones attributed to girls (pp. 23, 30).
Odd, isn't it? In the classically sexual body of psychoanalysis, the clitoris is the one
dedicated sex organ. Unlike vagina and penis, or urethra and anus, which combine,
variously, reproductive, excretory, and sexual capacities, it is the one whose sole function
is erotic. Yet when it comes to psychosexual anatomy as viewed by the American dean of
contemporary classical psychoanalysis, the clitoris comes in last.

In contrast, I think that the clitoris is as protean as the body itself. Recall its links,
whether in Freud's Vienna or Kenyatta's Kenya, el Saadawi's Egypt or 1970s feminism,
to autonomy and rebellion. The body, I have been arguing, is versatile, multiple in its
meanings, flexible in its capacities. In the décalage between object for others and subject
for oneself, bodily materialization is ongoing, “never quite complete;” bodies “never
quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled” (Butler, 1993, p.
2). Sex is variously sited not only on the body (Foucault, 1976) but between bodies and
minds.

- 31 -

In a manner approaching transcendence, genitally traumatized persons manifest this

erotic versatility. Through the use of cocaine, a quadriplegic man, 20 years after his
injury, recovered for a period of 10 years a sense of genital excitement and gratification.
With deep irony and gratitude, he writes in his autobiographical novel of his “astral
ejaculations”: he knows that his penis, clasped by his “clawed left hand's index finger and
thumb,” does not spurt semen, but he feels as if it does (Caldwell, n.d. p. 2). In email to
me, he explained further: “Tactile illusion is indeed odd. It took me very much by
surprise. … I would have liked to be hooked up to sensors to see if any of the changes I
felt were objectively measurable. The hot sperm … was extraordinary to feel, was very
realas was the sometime lifting of my hand by my erection even when my penis wasn't
tumescing. …” He was interested to know of the “phantom orgasms” experienced by
quadraplegics and paraplegics, even those with penile amputation (Money, 1961, p. 293).

Nor is he alone in his will to psychic transcendence. Regard the sexual pleasure that a
strong critic of FGM, Hanny Lightfoot-Klein (1989), found among Sudanese women
who, even though they had received the most extreme, pharaonic form of clitoridectomy,
in which not only the clitoris but the labia majora and minora are excised and the vaginal
orifice all but closed by sutures, found a way to realize their heterosexual subjectivity.
Without dismissing the trauma of genital mutilation, Lightfoot-Klein reports several
verbatim accounts of heterosexual intercourse (pp. 85-86; see also Hoodfar, 1997, p.
261): “It feels like electric shock going around my body,” said one. “I feel as if I have
had a shot of morphine,” revealed another. “My body vibrates all over. Then I feel
shocked and cannot move. At the end, I relax all over.” A third confided, “It gets very
tight in my vagina. I have a tremendous feeling of pleasure and I cannot move at all …
for about two minutes.” A fourth: “I tremble all over. My vagina contracts strongly, and I
have a feeling of great joy.” And, finally, a fifth reported, “I feel shivery … very happy.
… It is a very sweet feeling that spreads and it takes hold of my entire body.” In a chapter
praised by an otherwise critical Ruth Hubbard (1999), Natalie Angier (1999, pp. 77-78)
both imparts similar data and contrasts two clitoridectomized American women, one who
has orgasms and the other who does not.

Clitoral orgasm, move over. Vaginal orgasm, move over. Even penile orgasm, step aside.
There is more than one way for women, and, as a matter of fact, for men, to come. Alice
Ladas, John D. Perry, and Beverly Whipple (1982) identify an orgasmic continuum for
women, ranging from the classic clitoral or “vulval” orgasm to the uterine or “G-spot”
orgasm with many a “blended orgasm” in between. They propose, as well, a parallel
continuum for men: “orgasm without semen expulsion,” “typical ejaculatory orgasm,”
and “nonejaculatory emission.” Multiple orgasms, indeed.

- 32 -

How wonderful, as Harris (1999) points out, to recoup what psychoanalyst Josine Müller
(1932) believed: the site of female or any sexuality is never singular. For her, clitoris and
vagina were equally female or, as she put it, “feminine.” Oddly, even Freud, by arguing
that there were two orgasms for women, the psychoanalytically incorrect clitoral and the
proper vaginal, paved the way for the notion that there might be different strokes for
different folks.

Is splitting the orgasm, and thereby dominating women, a way that psychoanalysis (and
even a culture or two) handles the inability to tolerate multiplicity? One could argue that
the clitoris is not one but many.11 Remember its history: the seat of orgasm and fertility
until 1905 (Laqueur, 1990), the creature of the penis after that, and the insignia of the
liberated woman in the 70s, it narrates competing social forces. And even though vaginal
orgasm, for example, was officially declared a myth in 1970-a fabulously emancipatory
bit of feminist doctrine that may nevertheless require revision in the light of history and
experience-some vaginas keep right on going and going and …

One More Rorschach Response

If the clitoris rebels against the phallus, what is the discursive place of orgasm? Perhaps a
glance Eastward, at one more response to the Rorschach body, may yield a clue. That,
once upon a time, orgasm measured health and maturity makes sense for a body in which
sexual need and gratification are modeled on hunger and its satisfaction. Suppose,
however, the Buddhist body, one based not on appetite but on breath. Mark Epstein
(1995)

—————————————

11 Let us note half a dozen clitorides in Euro-American sexual history. There is, for
example, the oral clitoris: the uvula, said second-century A.D. physician Galen, “gives
the same sort of protection to the throat that the clitoris gives to the uterus” (Laqueur,
1990, p. 37). Then you have, of course, the penile clitoris. While Galen and everyone
following him thought of the uterus as a penis turned inside out-male and female being
greater and lesser variants, respectively, of the same body-Kaspar Bartholin, a 16th-
century Danish professor of medicine, pointed out their error: not the womb, but the
clitoris is “the female penis, …‘the female yard or prick’” (p. 92). Around the same time,
“Columbus—not Christopher but Renaldus” (p. 64) announced he had discovered what
Traub (1995, p. 84) dubs the “Renaissance clitoris,” the reproductive clitoris from which,
if rubbed “‘vigorously with a penis, or … even with a little finger, semen flies swifter
than air …’” (Laqueur 1990, p. 66). Then, in the 19th century, the demon clitoris rode
into town, tinged with masculinity, always suggestive of homoeroticism, and therefore set
up—by Freud—in gladiatorial combat for erotic dominion with the definitively female
vagina. Finally, we should register a couple of 20th-century clitorides: on one hand, the
liberated clitoris, which, distinguishing recreation from procreation, is Queen of female
pleasure, “a Pandora's box packed not with sorrow but with laughter” (Angier, 1999, p.
58); and, on the other hand, the lesbian clitoris, which, in Traub's (1995) view, has served
the politics of identity by metonymically associating “female bodily orgasms … with an
erotic identity …” (p. 101), i.e., female homosexuality.

- 33 -

lays out the clinical and theoretical consequences. When the body is a hungry body, it “is
experienced as an alien entity that has to be kept satisfied … (p. 145). Winnicott's
account of the not good-enough mother, Epstein reasons, yields either too little or too
much food/mother, so that the child becomes, respectively, either deprived and entitled or
engulfed and obliterated. He contrasts the Buddhist view: “When awareness is shifted
from appetite to breath, the anxieties about not being enough are automatically
attenuated” (p. 145). In mindful breathing, the body is a site not of demand or need but,
simply, of being in the timelessness of the present, which is, indeed, the site of
psychoanalytic space. A self located in its moment, connected to its past and sensible of
its flow into the future, produces echoes not only of “going with the flow” but also of free
association.

It will not do, of course, to think of this solitary suggestion taken from the West's Other
as a final, oppositional answer to the psychoanalytic body. Many questions remain:
Would such a body be, any longer, the site, structure, origin, or symbol of relationship?
of sex? How would we want to redraft attachment, desire, intimacy? What would
measure maturity? Reciprocally, if we start with the body as just breathing, not as
endlessly longing, is the body still the site of excess? Or is the body's unspeakability
produced by a particular discourse? Is it this sort of discursive construction, asks Butler
(1993), that characterizes the Real? If so, can the Real never be known or spoken? For
Lacan, the breath can be a cause of desire, which he sometimes defined as the demand for
love minus the appetite for satisfaction; he spoke of “respiratory erogeneity,” and
deplored the paucity of its study (cited by Dean, 1994). Is Buddhist breathing Lacan's
desire? Or is mindful breathing a different sort of knowledge?

The point is to destabilize. As Shapiro (1996) observes, psychoanalytic conventions of

the body iron out contradictory wrinkles in the name of scientific legitimacy. Resituating
the body in relational tension reveals the wrinkles once more. Good. They help us to
appreciate, as we age into psychoanalysis (itself a discipline of maturity), the complexity
and paradox that, face-lifted by science and linguistics from the experienced body,
characterize what feminist philosopher Naomi Scheman (1993, p. 3) has identified as the
core modern epistemological problem of identifying and then bridging gaps, such as
those between masculine and feminine, psyche and society, us and them, and, of course,
mind and body. Entering embodiment, we come upon affects, which may emblematize
the bridge between body and mind, self and other (Schore, 1996).12 Pain and pleasure
are two such bridges, affects also spanning the two bodies posed here, the one that
hungers, the other that breathes. Two concluding anecdotes on

—————————————

12 Sue Shapiro (personal communication) reminds me that William James was the first to
speak of affects as bridges between mind and body.

- 34 -

affects as carriers of paradox: I recall a neighbor girl when I was a child, she was about
five and I was ten. When she was unhappy, she didn't cry or scream, she would instead
squat down and hold her breath until, blue in the face, she would faint. (Laughingly, her
father would call her “Sarah Heartburn,” much as my father did me, if for different
reasons; as we now all know, the female body is not hysterical for no reason.) I don't
know what was wrong, but I am sure that something was intolerable as long as she
continued to breathe. Not breathing, she no longer had to feel.

By the same token, if you breathe, you feel, and not only pain. A meditation-minded
psychiatric resident, wanting to integrate her two practices, began during our work
together to bring her meditative awareness into the consulting room. As we worked on
splicing psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism, she found herself increasingly tolerant of
disturbing affects (which would flood her while she was treating very ill in-patients) and
therefore increasingly able to think in session. Neither of us, however, anticipated the
personal spin-off from this professional progress. In our penultimate supervisory session
she rather generously and unexpectedly revealed to me that, during the previous evening's
sex-making with her boyfriend, she found herself focusing not on her hungry body's need
for what Lacanians see as illusory satisfaction, but instead on her breath, on each
inhalation and exhalation, until she found herself, in the end, overtaken by the most
extraordinary orgasm of her life.

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Perversion Is Us?: Eight Notes

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Perversion challenges one's intellect, passion, clinical practice, and cultural and personal
values. As a topic, it also generates anxiety—a problem addressed in this paper by an
experimental literary format. Perversion is conventionally deemed a self-evident,
pathological entity. From the perspective on multiplicity and discontinuity taken here,
however, its familiar meanings fall apart at the seams, yielding new questions of theory
and technique. Criteria of mental health, standards of morality, and power structures are
shown to intertwine in the discourse on perversion. Recent theological and clinical work
on this topic by Bach, Chasseguet-Smirgel, Kernberg, and Khan, valuable in certain ways
and problematic in others, is assessed and historicized. A claim both classical and
iconoclastic is made: If perversion can coexist with health, if its status as illness varies
with cultural time and place, then, conversely, any sexuality may be symptomatic, or
healthy. Put another way, sexuality has nothing inherently to do with mental health or
mental illness.

Note 1. How to Talk About This: Anxiety

and Disgust
“Just signed the contract for Flesh and the World,” writes Michael Bronski, a culture
theorist. “We had talked about my writing about blood and cutting…. Am I ready for
this? Usually I have no trouble writing about anything in my sexual history—s/m, public

—————————————

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D. is Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University
Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and author or cocditor of
books and articles on psychoanalysis, anthropology, and feminism.

I thank Neil Altman, Ken Corbett, William F. Cornell, Tom Lewis, and Sue Shapiro for
critical readings of this paper.

- 825 -

sex, intimate moments with a lover, piercing, sex as a salve for death, jerking off on death
beds, piss, violence…. It's a great subject—and the essay is sure to be mentioned in the
reviews as, well, cutting edge,” Ten days later, he writes, “I have no idea what tone to
strike—lurid, medical, religious, psychological, confessional? … Assume an honest, open
tone and simply describe the experiences. Don't forget to mention that it was the most
potent sexual stimulation I have ever encountered. Leave out the fact that we were on
drugs (you wouldn't want to give cutting and blood sports a bad name)” [Bronski, in
press a].

What Tone to Strike Indeed? I was Glad to find in Bronski (in press b)—a man who
practices what (he agrees) would surely be named a perversion—the uneasiness that I,
whose perversities do not run in this particular direction, feel too. This essay was not easy
to write. In fact, it isn't an essay at all. It is a set of notes, excerpts from clinical reports of
my own, literary essays, psychoanalytic theory, notes accompanied by commentary, free
association, developed thoughts, fragments of theory—a form that will mirror and predict
my topic. Perversion in the context of multiplicity and discontinuity is a discursive
construct that, when examined, begins to fall apart so that we must wonder: why do we
still talk about it?

In a way, notes make an end run around anxiety. And anxiety shows up a lot around sex.
You may not agree with Bronski's (in press a) assertion that “everyone likes … slasher
films where sex and anxiety are bound together and released in the spattering of red
fluid,” but hundreds of millions of box-office dollars can't be all wrong. As Sallie
Tisdale, a Buddhist whose Talk Dirty to Me (1994) made Newsweek headlines several
years ago, wrote, “the merging of two into one in orgasm, this blending of identity,
combines bliss and anxiety in a strange stew” (p. 281). Anxiety, Harry Stack Sullivan is
said to have said, is like a blow on the head—it stops you from thinking. To write a
coherent essay, you have to think in a straight line. To write notes, you jig and jog, zig
along until you meet anxiety and then zag away in another direction, hoping to come
back to that anxious spot from another angle, sparking this thought here and that feeling
there and that idea way over there, hoping that this little bit of fireworks will end in a
pattern of power and significance. Anyway, it is more my mode to open questions up, not
to answer them. “Psychoanalysis,”

- 826 -

L. Jacobson (personal communication) said, “is not an answer, it's a question,”

Unanswered questions court anxiety. Anxiety, discovered a friend just embarked on the
psychoanalytic journey, is a tool for change.

Perversion is a topic rife with anxiety. Tisdale (1996) was probably right when she said,
“We all have an edge, a place where we are bothered.” We can see this anxiety in
Bronski's writing, which, itself note-like, combines excerpts from his journal with
excerpts from his essay-in-progress. Puzzled by anxiety's presence, Bronski (in press a)
reminded himself and us about his participation in other transgressions, “s/m, public sex,
intimate moments with a lover, piercing, sex as a salve for death, jerking off on death
beds, piss, violence.” This anxiety shows up in psychoanalytic writing too. I have in mind
here some of the most significant recent thought about perversion, the work of Bach,
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Kernberg, and Khan—thought that I want to use, historicize, and
critique. Sometimes this anxiety is handled by demonizing the pervert on behalf of
Western civilization, as in Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1985) Creativity and Perversion.
Sometimes it is stilled by bringing perversion into the safe precincts of matrimony, as in
Kernberg's (1995) Love Relations, or love, as in Bach's (1995) The Language of
Perversion and the Language of Love. And always, even in Khan's (1979) extraordinary
essay on foreskin fetishism, the anxiety is relieved by exclusion, so that however
empathically the pervert patient is comprehended, the pervert is still the other guy doing
alien and even disgusting albeit (or therefore) fascinating things. Perversion may be
defined, after all, as the sex that you like and I don't.

Cutting and bloodletting. Are these perversions perversions— transgressions to end all
transgressions, la crème? de la crème? Do sexual blood sports carry the anxiety and
shame, the stigma and danger, the horror and frissons formerly associated with your run-
of-the-mill perversion? Maybe stigma leaps from practice to practice just as genes in
certain species of corn jump from chromosome to chromosome (Keller, 1983).
Homosexuality, for example, came off the diagnostic books a long time ago, even if in
the minds of some people, including analysts, it remains a perversion. Maybe, as the
stigma lifts from one marginal sexual practice, it doesn't disappear but alights on another
— from homosexuality to b&d, from b&d to bloodletting, from bloodletting to … Do
visions of slippery slopes enter your minds?

Throughout these notes, I am noting anxious moments, and this is one: Stigma lurks.

- 827 -

Our collective cultural relationship to perversion is, we might put it, one of projcctive
identification. Perhaps perversion brews anxiety because, as Stoller (1975)
sympathetically suggested during the “sexual revolution,” we depend on it to hold what
we cannot bear to remember about ourselves. It fascinates endlessly because it serves
psychic and social functions. For the individual, Stoller opined, perverse practices redress
the ancient humiliations of childhood. For the family, perversion siphons off aggression,
serving as a scapegoat by containing the cruelty and hatred threatening family integrity
and security. By thus preserving the family, it conserves a cultural cornerstone and,
therefore, society itself. At the same time, Stoller contended, perversion, by soaking up
the anxiety and aggression brought on by oedipal rigors, safeguards heterosexuality and,
therefore, the species. Absent a sponge for the anger, resentment, and hostility generated
by oedipal competitiveness, these agonistic affects fester, contaminating the desire for the
opposite-sexed other required by reproductive sexuality. Does what Ferenczi (1933)
darkly dubbed “the hate-impregnated love of adult mating” (p. 206) require sanitizing?

What sex was to the 19th century, perversion is to us now. Once upon a time, sex situated
taboo, transgression, stigma, shame, excitement, dangerous pleasure, anxiety. A century
of revolutionary sexual thought and a generation of revolutionary sexual practice later,
sex is at least officially disarmed. If Barney Frank is in Congress, where can the frontier
lie? Now the kids pierce noses, tongues, and cycbrows (forget earlobes!) and tattoo
everything—an intimate erotics of body and rebellion, the dark side of which shows up in
the self-mutilations that some deem adolescent self-hatred.

A moment of anxiety. Don't mention children and perversion in the same breath.

Note 2. Pathology and Suffering, Shame

and Pain
When, three years ago, I asked Dr. MH whether I might use material from our work
together for this paper, he consented. Two days later, he said that, while he still felt
comfortable with my writing about him, he found himself in a bit of shock. That I had
included him as a pervert opened his eyes: “I had thought it

- 828 -

was OK, depathologized. But now …” He trailed off, and I filled in: “It says something is
wrong.”

How do shame and suffering become one? When Dr. MH, with whom I have worked
three times weekly for slightly more than five years (three years at the original time of
writing), said “I had thought it was OK, depathologized. But now …,” his anxiety
registered, in part, the ambiguous power of diagnosis. In the matter of mind—as opposed
to body—to pathologize is simultaneously to identify the illness that needs cure and to
stigmatize the badness that causes shame. From a Foucaultian perspective, this doubled
power inheres in all disciplinary institutions. Schools and the education system,
government and its manifold activities, prisons and the correctional system, hospitals and
the medical system, the mental health care system and what the French call les psy—all
these organized practices have a doubled power, the power to name and the power to
blame.

Think how often your patients express the anguished fear that “there is something wrong
with me.” Some of us had it too when we were patients—the fear that you are a
fundamentally and irreparably damaged human being, damaged goods, not even human
in fact, something unwholesome and decaying at your core. “There is something wrong
with me” is a cry of shame, the narcissistic injury for which there are no words—the
injury that, because it inhabits the Real and lacks representation, often turns concrete,
mutating into psychical or physical harm to self or others. Dr. MH complains of
frightening fantasies of violence, of occasional outbursts of rage in the dangerous
neighborhoods to which his clinical work takes him.
What is the “it” that Dr. MH (whose initials and sexual interests I have altered) thought
had been pathologized? This “it” is, at least on the face of it, not singular but plural.
Included are erotic fantasies and practices of beating; fetishes, including shiny belts,
especially those of patent leather, and photographs; the payment of money (itself possibly
a fetish) for beatings as well as for massages and handjobs; secrets and deceptions (the
enlistment of putatively unwilling partners into beating scenarios); exhibitionism and
voyeurism while cruising; the photographing of consenting and unsuspecting subjects
whose body type, rarely found, meets Dr. MH's needs; the secret touching of a shiny belt
worn by someone with just such a special body. When, upon first consulting me, Dr. MH
told me he was a pervert, he did not have

- 829 -

in mind his overeating and overdrinking, although he was nearly as ashamed of these
practices as he was of the others—and we might want to think of them as what Louse
Kaplan (1990), writing in the feminist tradition, called “female perversions.”

How can Dr. MH remember that something is wrong without feeling bad about himself?
He entered treatment having self-pathologized. A mental health professional, he knows a
sexual perversion when he sees one. He also knows full well what people in general but
also psychoanalysts in particular think about perversion—the uneasy mix of clinical and
moral evaluation, the cloud of shame in which perversities are practiced and studied, the
anxieties they provoke. He hasn't read Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1985) Creativity and
Perversion and probably never will—even my paper was, he complained, too dense for
him—but he would find right there a mirror for his self-hate. For Chasseguet-Smirgel,
“perversion is the equivalent of Devil religion” (p. 9). Dr. MH came of age in the 1970s,
during that decade's sexual free-for-all—an epoch against which Creativity and
Perversion must be read. Saving civilization by reinforcing traditional signs of purity and
danger (Douglas, 1970), this near jeremiad sounds a clarion call for a certain personal and
moral sanity-and, I would hazard, purity, if we recall that the Latin sanitas means
“cleanliness”—in the face of a presumed cultural degeneration.

In Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1985) view, perversion degrades psyche and culture alike. Out
of de Sade's texts, she distilled a definition: The pervert wishes to obliterate the
distinctions on which psychic structures and social orders depend. The pervert makes a
double erosion, of the difference between the sexes and of that between the generations.
Chasseguet-Smirgel pointed out that sex, in the Sadean texts, takes place not within the
heterosexual adult couple but all over the place—between males and females, between
males, between females, between adults and children. Disorder is created, and, as borders
are violated, pollution prevails. Things out of place soil, Douglas (1970, passim)
maintained in her ethnographic treatise on pollution, and Chasseguct-Smirgel in turn
deemed such soiling the goal of perversion, which, in its confusion of the sexes and
generations, lives defiantly in the anal phase. It chews everything up, reduces everything
to excrement, and thus embodies “a system of values [that] is only the first stage in an
operation whose end is the destruction of all values” (p. 10).

- 830 -

Ouch. I do not doubt the hatred that wants to obliterate, the despair that annihilates. As a
literary effort, Creativity and Perversion succeeds quite well: It riles you up and thereby
captures perversion's intensity. At the same time, however, its formulations do not do
much beyond demonizing perverts and amplifying self-disgust. There is a glitch, a
contradiction, at the book's core. The theory of perversion advocated by it departs boldly
from classical formulations, but the theory of the clinical subject by which it implicitly
abides lags behind. In its view, not oedipal but narcissistic dilemmas generate the
perverse solution. The inability to sustain loss, inadequacy, castration, and death; troubles
of identity, of the fusion of ego and non-ego, of the differentiation of self and other—
these issues, unresolved, may find expression in perverse sexual practices.

Although this argument sounds sympathetic to the narcissistic patient—we are all,
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985) announced early on (p. 26), open to the perverse solution
because it soothes wounded narcissism—Creativity and Perversion speaks as superego to
id. Distilling its definition of perversion from the Sadean corpus produces an odd clinical
picture: The crippled narcissist, whether hero or villain, is a mature adult who is and can
be held to account for his ignorance of shared values. The patient is deemed responsible
in a way that, Mitchell (2000) argued, contravenes the request that analysts, who agree to
hold up the side of reason, make of their patients—to surrender “to love and hate with
abandon” (p. 133). In Creativity and Perversion (e.g., p. 34), narcissistic perverts always
fall short when compared with neurotics. When perverts tell examination dreams, for
example, they hear interprctations of their wish to escape the law, never their wish for
unconditional acceptance (pp. 30-34). Here patients are not said to seek recognition or
selfhood or connection. Rather, they are driven by sex and aggression, especially the wish
to ruin the parental coupling.

In Creativity and Perversion, intcrsubjectivity begets no explicit clinical or theoretical

attention. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985) felt speechless, ground up—experiencing, one
might propose, a sort of annihilation anxiety in the countertransference (p. 112). With
pervert patients, who take the analyst's words as seduction or attack but never
interpretation, there lacks, she justifiably claimed, a space, a depth, a third dimension—
what Winnicott termed intermediate space. “In such a situation, “Chasseguet-Smirgel
wrote, “there are not three persons—the analyst and the ‘normal’ part of the analysand,
investigating, and

- 831 -
taking care together of the sick part of the analysand” (p. 111). Instead, there is an
excremental mess made of parts of both analyst and patient—a mess that can paralyze the
analyst's mind.

But consider Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1985) take on her counter-transference. It is as

though the unsettlement is induced, solely the patient's fault. Or at least Chasseguet-
Smirgel neither entertained the utility of a two-person psychology to illuminate this
impasse nor allowed that she had brought any feeling or idea or history of her own to it.
Yet, if the message of her book holds—that perversion shakes civilization to its core—
then the analyst herself must feel some uneasiness even before she meets the pervert
patient. Perverse sexual practices challenge just those fundamental cultural values that
orbit on the procreating couple and, in Chasseguet-Smirgel's view, anchor Western
civilization. And it is very clear that her clinical philosophy centers on these values:
Hating life, perverts do not accept the primal scene as likely to produce a child and
therefore cannot “form… a couple with the analyst so as to give birth to a child that
would be themselves, re-created” (p. 116).

Yet what of the analyst's hatred? Or love? What of the analyst's reflection on these
inevitable emotions? They do not show up in Creativity and Perversion. This absence
creates a knot of affect, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the meaning of perversion. In
Chasseguet-Smirgel's account, the bounded, cogitating, omniscient analyst stands front
and center. Nowhere to be found, however, is the analyst who reflects on the personal and
clinical (not to say cultural) meaning (Chodorow, 2000) of her feelings, who in the
chaotic clinical mix of part-selves might be able to identify with the patient. Absent these
dimensions of the analyst's subjectivity, the patient's subjectivity finds no purchase.
Subjectivity is a shared state of mind. Residing not only in each being, but also in the
space between, it is evoked in each person by the other. Benjamin's (1998) proposal that
recognition of that other subject is the point of the psychoanalytic process seems spot-on.

That this recognition takes place through affect (Stein, 1991; Spezzano, 1993)
complicates matters. Affects, to come at the problem from the other side, are by nature
intersubjective. As Mitchell (2000) and Morrison (1989) see it, they are highly
contagious. Lacking floors and ceilings, walls and doors and windows, they cannot but be
interpersonal. Constituting the atmosphere of early object-relational life, affects challenge
the separateness of “I” on which conventional

- 832 -

constructions of subjectivity, and the personal and cultural values associated with them,
depend. In, for example, “anxiety, sexual excitement, rage, depression, and euphoria,”
Mitchell (2000) wrote, it is often impossible to say which person started what. So when
the pervert patient is said to be hateful, might it be hard to tell in whom the hatred first
arose?
The analyst needs her theory of perversion (if this is a concept she requires in order to
think about sexuality), but she also needs to know both what she feels about perversion—
its affective meaning to her and the values embedded in that meaning—and what those
perverse practices mean to her patients. And then she needs to know how these two
subjectivities together produce and reproduce the transference neurosis through which the
analytic cure, such as it is, takes place.

Certainly Chasseguet-Smirgel's patient enjoyed grinding her up, but what, one might
have asked, is this enjoyment all about? If chewing can be destructive, it can also be
creative (Winnicott, 1969a, 1969b): If you want to grind someone up, you may want to
kill them, but you may also wish to take them in so as to metabolize their identity and
thereby grow an identity of your own. Not to concern yourself with what perversion
means to a particular patient is, in fact, to enact a perversion of your own—to reduce your
patient to a non-entity by annihilating his or her subjectivity, to confuse what the patient
means to you with what the patient means to himself or herself, and thereby to violate the
patient's (emergent) boundaries. This is an act of power and knowledge not without its
own pleasures (Foucault, 1978).

To think in the way I am proposing requires a therapeutic balancing act. Maybe you don't
like perverse sexual practices, but that's not your business. Assuming that no work gets
done when an inclination, practice, or pleasure is cloaked in shame and disgust—when
the superego shames the id, inciting further resistance—my initial clinical goal with Dr.
MH was to question the self-loathing that clings to his practices like a stink. Trying to
hold all my responses in mind, I negotiate between acceptance and rejection, attraction
and repulsion, curiosity, disgust, and boredom—a sort of guarded neutrality, if what we
mean these days by neutrality is some point of balance (see Greenberg, 1993 for a related
idea). Neutral in the I Ching sense of “no blame:” I try to stay the Zen course of
accepting what exists because it exists. Guarded in the sense of analytic caution:
ultimately this congeries of shame, disgust, and excitement, which no neutrality of

- 833 -

mine can ever excise from either a patient's or analyst's psyche or their culture, must itself
be explored.

But you can't do this condescendingly, as though one day your patient will scale the
heterosexual heights. You really have to believe that his solution—the body type, the
nongenital erotic practices, the sexual contact acquired on the sly and through commerce
—is, other things being equal, viable. Dr. MH needs to have his practices and preferences
and affects protected and guarded, kept safe and whole, until he can decide whether he
wants to keep them or change them or let them go. But he can't explore his shame until he
feels safe enough to find out what's wrong, until he feels sufficiently acceptable to look at
it without becoming it, to stand in the spaces (Bromberg, 1998), between his shamed and
shaming states of mind.
Note 3. What Is a Perversion?
Another difficulty arises from the circumstance that there is so often associated with the
erotic relationship, over and above its own sadistic components, a quota of plain
inclination to aggression. The love-object will not always view these complications with
the degree of understanding and tolerance shown by the peasant woman who complained
that her husband did not love her any more, since he had not beaten her for a week
[Freud, 1930, p. 105, no. 3].

Now I don't suppose that anyone has previously taken this footnote as relevant to
perversion. You would more likely use it as Freud meant you to—as an example of the
“quota of plain inclination to aggression” bedeviling us all. Aggression is not, however, a
found object, a plain natural phenomenon; it is as constructed as we now understand sex
to be. As Freud told the story, aggression has, to my mind, a rather perverse distribution.
A woman waits for a man to exercise aggression, which to her signifies love. To turn this
formulation around, the man agents aggression, and the woman receives it—he the
subject and she the object. For him to love is to give aggression; for her to be loved is to
get it. He is active, she is passive. He does, she is done to. Sound familiar? Why are we
not surprised?

I will hold off on the obvious gender implications of this construction of aggression and
power in Freud's thought. I want first to pull out

- 834 -

another thread. When I began work with a supervisee whose problem was a difficult
countertransference to a patient's sexual perversion, I asked what the perversion was. The
supervisee missed a beat, then replied as though the answer was self-evident:
“Sadomasochism.” Specifically, the patient engaged in practices of bondage and
domination and had as well elaborate fantasies of torture dramatized in photographs and
videos. As we know that versions of perversion exist, however, we need to ask why
perversion is often equated to sadomasochism as a matter of course.

A signifying chain links perversion, sadomasochism, gender, and power. Let me put this
differently. In keeping with the fin de dixneuvième siècle discovery that the abnormal
reveals the normal, Freud (1905) begins his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with
“The Sexual Aberrations.” What he did not see, and what the second wave of feminism,
especially psychoanalytic feminism, did, is that the sexual order to which the aberrations
and perversions were central is equally a gendered order. In psychoanalytic feminist
view, gender is “no longer a consequence” (Goldner, 1998) of mind or body or culture
but a principle informing all; it is “everywhere and nowhere” (Chodorow, cited in
Goldner, 1998). Produced by patriarchy and heteroscxuality, it is also always a matter of
power—an argument too long and complicated for me to make here (Firestone, 1970;
Millett, 1970)—but a fact that certain psychoanalytic applications of gender theory tend
to forget.

Returning to Freud's “joke” about the peasant woman and her complaint, we may wonder
whether sadomasochism and, next to it, aggression, as constructed in both psychoanalysis
and culture, are always and everywhere gendered. I am not the first to indicate the
paradox: All Freud's case examples of feminine masochism are men. As Kaplan (1990)
put it: “The sexual perversions … are pathologies of gender stereotyping” (p. 196). Look
at it this way: If gender as an elemental structure of dominance and subordination is so
critical to psyche, soma, and culture, is it any wonder that we think of perversion as
inevitably sadomasochistic?

Listen to the mix of sex, gender, and power in Dr. MH's fantasy: “I really am a ninny, a
squirmy little faggot…. I am having a fantasy of the heat pipe as a penis going into the
ceiling. I am thinking of men buttfucking each other. Then I think of Romans with
helmets on.” I say, “They wouldn't be ninnies, would they?” “I hadn't thought of that.”
“The wish to have those desires and not feel like a ninny, to feel like a warrior.”
“Wanting to be taken care of is to be a ninny.

- 835 -

That's part of men's attraction to women, cuddling up, being taken care of, but real men
take care of women.” So are real women ninnies? In a power structure, someone has to be
the ninny. In a power structure, weakness and longings for closeness—call them
ninniness and tenderness—tend to fuse. In his transferential longings for care, does Dr.
MH feel like a ninny with me? Does he think I think his need for me makes him a
squirmy little faggot? I shall return to Dr. MH's longing for tenderness, which is so
crucial to current thinking about perversion (Benjamin, 1988).

Is wife battering a perversion? Like Freud's peasant woman, Ms. K, a sculptor, described
the most satisfying sexual intercourse as what she's had after her lover has beaten her up.
Perhaps, she wonders, the combustion of sex and violence originates in the beating she
got as a six-year-old at her mother's hands—a punishment for making mud pies in her
room. Or possibly it stems from her father's denied lust for her—manifested in his
humiliating attack on her teenage sexuality (one day he tried to pull her tank top down in
front of her brothers). The influence of feminism on psychoanalysis, mused culture
theorist Apter (1992), “may be shifting … what qualifies as perverse. Whereas
traditionally attention has been devoted to determining the epistemological boundaries
between, for example, sadism and masochism …, rape, abuse, incest and other forms of
violence … may now increasingly come to be theorized psychoanalytically as forms of
perversion” (p. 313). If, as Goldner (n.d.), cofounder of the Intimate Violence Project at
the Ackerman Institute, told us, “one-third of all [heterosexual] women will, at some
point in their lives, be physically assaulted by an intimate male partner—slapped, kicked,
beaten, choked or attacked with a weapon” (p. 6), that makes physical abuse almost
normative for the culture in general and for heterosexuality, marriage, and (given that
abuse is no stranger to homosexual households either) even attachment in particular. If
aggressive sex and eroticized aggression are so at home in the nuclear family, can we say
that the abnormal is at home in the normal?

Freud's joke about wife battering is a joke about power that also performs power, and the
performance is patriarchal. Is it perverse of Freud to illuminate a shady sexual pleasure
by attributing it to his social inferiors? Why else would he think it funny to tell a joke
about a peasant woman waiting to be beaten? Yes, we all know that Freud was a man of
his time, but, you know, he is also a man of our time. And I do know that television host
Bill Maher would lampoon me—

- 836 -

that is, if these notes were of any interest to the Nielsen ratings—for political correctness.
Why couldn't Freud tell that joke about one of his bourgeois patients instead of a
stereotypical woman from an Austro-Hungarian village? That she lacks an ethnicity is
probably part of the humor. She is an “other,” one of “them” as opposed to “us,” which is
a binary we see frequently in the psychoanalytic discourse on perversion; recall
Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1985) distinction between the pervert and “ourselves” (p. 34). And
she is subordinate. And she is a woman, the butt of, and buttfucked by, not only her
husband's aggression but Freud's.

Caution: regulatory practice at work. That's how Foucault (1978, passim) would put it.
After the Catholic church, psychoanalysis is, in his thought, perhaps the exemplary
disciplinary power—its pronouncements routinely enforcing social injustice through the
apparent neutrality of objective science. Psychoanalysts are routinely caught in the
clinical dilemma that I indicated earlier: The power to name is also the power to blame
and to shame. It is not far-fetched to think that Freud, for example, was using this
anonymous couple as a rhetorical device to needle the sexually uptight Europeans who
constituted his audience. One job of psychoanalysis is, after all, to reveal to the suffering
the thing that, denied, sickens them. Doing it at the expense of those who can't talk back
is, however, the ultimate in bullying. How tenacious Freud's misogyny is, how on the
beaten track is his class pride, and how truly ambivalent is his attachment to sexuality.
When he says to his readers, “Look, you may think that this perverse desire is beneath
you, you may think only lower types like peasants engage in it, but the truth is that you,
the civilized, want it too,” he simultancously liberates and imprisons, frees by naming
and binds by shaming.

Note 4. Accepting/Disowning the Perverse

in the Normal
No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called
perverse to the normal sexual aim [Freud, 1905, p. 160].

It is difficult to comprehend the idea of perversion otherwise than by reference to a norm

[Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 306].

- 837 -

Well, you can't say it much more loudly or clearly than that. Perversion is culturally
constructed. By this, I do not mean the crude misapprehension that psyche is culture's
clone. Rather, perversion links with a set of meanings and practices that render each other
intelligible and habitable. To label something a perversion is simultaneously to identify
something else not perverse. The normal, what does not need to be said because it goes
without saying, serves in this discourse as a residual category. In Three Essays, for
example, Freud (1905) defined his somewhat coy but ubiquitous and textually crucial
locution, “the sex act,” only once and nearly by the by, about 10 pages into his first
chapter: We may think of the “normal sexual aim … as … the union of the genitals in the
act known as copulation” (p. 149). On the next page, after pointing out that kissing is not
a perversion even though it does not involve the sexual apparatus but rather mucus
membranes that constitute the portal to the digestive tract, Freud defined perversions as
“sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of
the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations
to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the
final sexual aim” (p. 150).

There's no way around it. Freud argued with but ended up joining Krafft-Ebing, who said,
“Every expression of [the sexual instinct] that does not correspond with the purpose of
nature—i.c., propagation—must be regarded as perverse” (cited in Davidson, 1987, p.
39). The normal is the heterosexual, the coital, the reproductive. Abelove (1991), a
European historian covering the topic of sexuality, called it “cross-sex genital
intercourse” or “intercourse so-called”: “penis in vagina, vagina around penis, with
seminal emission uninterrupted” (p. 337). I call it PIV—penis in vagina.

Perversion and that inadequately specific term normality construct each other. Perversion
is necessary in more ways than Stoller (1975) imagined. How do you know what's normal
unless you know what's not, unless you have a boundary? How do you know what's not
normal unless you know what is? In the discourse of psychosexuality, perversion and
heteronormality constitute each other's limits. Perversion marks the boundary across
which you become an outlaw. Normality marks off the territory that, if stayed inside,
keeps you safe from shame, disgust, and anxiety.

The binary thus formed is, however, only illusorily clear. Even people who engage in
normal sexuality, Freud said, tend to include a perverse
- 838 -

moment or two in their ordinary sexual practice—a position that, we shall see, Kernberg
shared, sort of. And they don't even find it a problem: “Everyday experience has shown
that most of these extensions, or at any rate, the less severe of them, are constituents
which are rarely absent from the sexual life of healthy people, and are judged by them no
differently from other intimate events” (Freud, 1905, p. 160). Do you recognize yourself
here? Routinely, Freud said, the sexual instinct enjoys overriding disgust. Perhaps,
suggested de Lauretis (1994, p. 24), Freud deemed the perversions positive; after all, the
perverts, like the woman in “A Case of Paranoia” (1915) or “Leonardo da Vinci” (1910)
or the unnamed homosexual woman whom Freud (1920) said was “in no way neurotic”
(p. 158), were not ill. Indeed, they lived functional if not happy lives (remember
“ordinary unhappiness”), in contrast to the neurotics and hysterics who came to him
because they could not live at all. “Neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversion”
(1905, p. 165).

Note 5. Fixity and Flexibility

If, in short, a perversion has the characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation—then we
shall usually be justified in regarding it as a pathological symptom [Freud, 1905, p. 161].

Not only civilizations, psychology, too, has great difficulty, where borderline cases are
concerned, in distinguishing with confidence what is still part of normal sexuality, what
is perverse and what is neurotic or psychotic…. For instance, is it normal or not to
demand that the love object must be tall or petite, fair or dark, very bright or rather
simple, domineering or submissive, and so on? Perhaps we may accept the conditions just
quoted as normal; when they exact that a woman limp or even have a false leg, or that the
man wear spectacles, or that the woman wear black underwear during coitus, the
difficulty of drawing the boundary becomes greater [Balint, 1956, p. 20].

Is it normal or abnormal to insist that the love-object be only one gender or another? I
remember during psychoanalytic training some two decades ago a discussion of a
homosexual woman being treated

- 839 -

by one of our male candidates. He was professing his liberalism: “I have no problem with
her being a lesbian. [You can already hear the excess of protest, of course.] It's just that
she's restricting her choices.” I don't think anyone mentioned what Balint (1956) had
noticed two decades earlier—that those who are exclusively heterosexual restrict their
choices too.
Now that psychoanalysis has welcomed into the fold of mental health the homosexual as
well as the heterosexual, how will we define illness in the sexual domain? Many have
fixed on the criterion of flexibility. Khan (1979) observed “the limited nature of the
fantasies of the fetishist” (p. 143). Kaplan (1990) and McDougall (1995) argued also for
flexibility as a criterion of mental health. This criterion makes sense. Kaplan remarked on
“the inherent flexibility” (p. 506) of our sexual nature—a flexibility that, according to
Lacan (1977), defines desire. Lacan would contrast desire with need: Need, like hunger,
must have one thing and one thing only, food. Desire thrives on substitutes. It may be
satisfied or deferred—turned into pleasure or babies or buildings or bombs. It may accept
a blowjob or PIV or a beating, a fantasy or a body, a belt or a breast or a picture, a male
or a female or a transvestite.

Truth to tell, though, human beings aren't the only flexible sexuals, and they are not all
that flexible either. The Bonobo chimpanzees' sexuality is far more versatile, serving not
only as a source of pleasure, a means to procreation, or a tension-release mechanism, but
a tool of social cohesion and an expression of dominance and subordination (de Waal and
Lanting, 1997). On the other hand, human sexual limits are notorious. In the 1960s, we
said, “If it moves, fuck it.” Most of us, of course, didn't do that at all, or, if we did, it was
for about five minutes. Balint (1956), among others, noticed that sexual preference is
really not catholic, hardly ecumenical at all. Person (1980) maintained that most adult
fantasies are rather fixed. Our “sex-prints” (Person, 1980, p. 618; see also Stoller's, 1979,
idea of sexual scripts) are not only individualized but quite unvarying and as such ground
identity in a fluid society.

Are we all a little bit perverse? Well, so some argue, though not always in the most
charitable way. Let's return to Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985) here, and put off an evaluation
of Kernberg's contribution just a little bit longer. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985) said,
“Perversions [are] a dimension of the human psyche in general, a temptation in the mind

- 840 -

common to us all” (p. 1). As we have seen, however, her “we” is not so ecumenical as it
sounds. Unlike “us,” for example, perverts hate the truth. “The perverse solution,” she
insisted, “tempts us to replace the love for truth with ‘a taste for sham’” (p. 26), a
temptation to which “they” yield. I would have her consider Bronski's (in press a)
struggle between his wish to represent the sexiness of cutting and … well, hear him out:

Journal entry of two days ago is complete shit. I know perfectly well what is missing
from the essay: honesty and truth…. What am I leaving out? That as much as I loved Jim,
I thought he was fucked up about sex and his own sexual desires? That his s/m practices,
including cutting, were mostly vain attempts to break through the crushing repression of
his southern boyhood and his horrible feelings about himself? That for the first year we
were together (out of five) he would have to leave the room after coming, so he could be
alone? That some of these times he cried?… The romanticism of our blood games—and
my presentation of it—is countered by the fact that there was often blood dripped all over
the floor and furniture from other men he brought home.

A moment of anxiety. “Blood, mother, blood,” cried Norman Bates in Psycho in 1960.
“Blood and AIDS!” we scream in 2001.

Well, but who doesn't lie about their sexual pleasure? Bill Clinton's not alone here, you
know. A patient once allowed that she liked being fucked from behind while in a forward
bend. I asked her what she liked about it. She didn't answer. “Sex is funny that way,” was
all she wanted to say. Is there nothing you are ashamed of? As Tisdale (1994) put it,
“Tongues loosen during orgasm, things get said that would never be said otherwise” (p.
280). Remember Gordon Lightfoot's verse about the room where you do what you don't
confess? Shame, excitement, pleasure, the overriding of disgust. And why should you
confess?

Still, viewed from another angle, Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1985) diagnosis may contain a
truth that her truth cannot encompass. Replying to a commentary on my discussion
(Dimen, in press) of “Dr. Fell,” Bronski (in press b) referred to my criticism of her
assertion, shared culturally, that “perverts hate the truth.” Surprisingly, however, Bronski
retorted, “this phrase to me is delicious for, ironically, as a

- 841 -

pervert, I believe it to be completely true.” Perverts do hate the truth, he insisted, but
what truth is that? Chasseguet-Smirgel's idea works, Bronski suggested, because the
pervert is always on the outside, always the other: “The ‘truth,’ as it is so carefully and
lovingly called, is almost always what is held as a cherished belief by those in the
dominant culture: those with power, those who have the power to name—and, as it
follows, to name-call.” Truth, in Foucauldian view, is an effect of power, a form of
domination that les psy embody in characterizing perversion. There is, you could say, a
bit of projection going on: The contempt and arrogance that Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985)
or, in fact, Kaplan (1990), who remarked that the pervert's self-regard is as “the one with
secrets of Great Sex” (p. 41), identified in the sexuality of perverts shows up also in the
psychoanalytic discourse about perversion. So often when “we” are all said to be
perverse, what is really meant is, “There but for the grace of God go I.” We may be
merely tempted, but they, poor wretches, give in. Dr. MH may use his hatred of his
sexual desires as a form of hate speech, as an expression of his self-loathing, but so does
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis prescribes sexual convention even as it subscribes to
sexual liberation, but, in the fashion of projective identification, it splits this contradiction
in two and then denies having done so—a disavowal that on occasion shows up as a bit of
hate speech itself.

Indeed, it may be the details of desire, the particularities of pleasure, that most incite
disgust, challenge sexual conventionality, set off the alarm. I could elaborate on Dr. MH's
beating fantasies and practices, his furtive touching of belts, his Peeping Tom
photography, his veiled invitations to a beating. But, I submit, these somewhat expectable
instances and aspects of perversion discomfit less than what actually turns him on. Dr.
MH has a very particular preference. The object of his desire is a man possessed of a
strong but severe face, twinkly eyes, and white hair; a belly that protrudes just a little bit
under the belt line; and thighs that spread out when he sits down, forming a lap. In a
culture of thinness and fitness, I wonder whether a taste for pooched-out bellies and full
thighs on elderly men is more transgressive than all the bondage and domination in the
world.

A moment of anxiety. Taboo, in Douglas's (1970) view, neighbors on pollution. Shame

isn't far away, either.

- 842 -

Perversion and normality construct each other. It is only relative to a desire like Dr. MH's
that heterosexuality and homosexuality look like models of normality. Dr. MH's desire
tests flexibility as a criterion for mental health, or, rather, his very specific tastes remind
psychoanalysis, and the culture that embeds it, of what is projectively identified away
from the norm into the marginal—the restriction of desire that, so necessary to
civilization, causes “modern nervousness,” as Freud (1908) put it. Dr. MH is anxious
when we discuss his taste and the photographs he takes of men who fit his fantasy. “But
you can't get what you need otherwise” is his plaint. Advertisements and, for that matter,
crotica and pornography are full of thin young people, not softly paunched seniors with
full thighs. You could, as Dr. MH does, make a case for the bellied woman in the body of
the man he desires. But can you also feature this? Maybe it's Dr. MH who is on the side
of health. The rest of us, who hate the signs of age in ourselves and others—the softening
flesh, spreading bellies, graying hair—defend against our certain death by fixating on the
billboarded thin young people whom we would be so happy to resemble. To rewrite
Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) as quoted at the beginning of note 4, “It is difficult to
comprehend the idea of the norm otherwise than by reference to a perversion.”

The discourse on perversion, I have been contending, seethes with moralism, my own
included. I want to ask for a moment of cultural relativism, that moralistic discourse par
excellence. Suppose Dr. MH had lived in 19th-century Euro-America, in which men's
portliness, a form of conspicuous consumption, signaled prosperity. As L. Jacobson
(personal communication, 1999) asked me, if Dr. MH had lived there and then, would he
have been turned on by emaciation? Consider the following. While conducting graduate
archival research, a patient, Elizabeth, lived in an inexpensive, immigrant quarter of
Paris. A white woman of some 250 pounds (which, we figured out, she unconsciously
hoped would keep her from being an object of desire), she was troubled by the evident
delight of North African men who gasped, in patriarchal pleasure, “Une grosse femme.”
Sexism is sexism, no? or No? In Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology is
Haubegger's (1997) essay, “I'm Not Fat, I'm Latina.” Or, as someone responding to this
paper said, is this comparison racist?

- 843 -

Anxiety. You will think me a moral relativist, someone for whom all bets are off, no law
applies, anything goes, from blood-letting to child abuse to …

Note 6. Fetishism and the Paradigm Shift

[The] meaning and purpose of the fetish … is [to] substitute for the woman's (the
mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does
not want to give up [Freud, 1927, pp. 152-153].

Fetishism is a state of omnipotently but precariously controlled mania. Hence it is at once

intensely pleasurable and frightfully vulnerable [Khan, 1979, p. 165].

Perhaps because we are all fetishists in one way or another, as Balint (1956) suggested,
fetishism occupies an ambiguous place in the psychoanalytic theory of perversions.
Sometimes it belongs, sometimes it is excluded. In the classical view, fetishism is not a
perversion, because the fetish is what enables a man to be heterosexual, not homosexual.
The fetish, symbolizing the mother's penis, demonstrates that castration does not happen:
Mother still has her penis. With his fetish close at hand, then, he need not flee women for
the imagined safety of another man and his penis. Rather, standing in for the destructive,
uncannily penisless vagina so feared by the boy is, say, a leather boot the man insists his
wife wear before they have sex, or a bit of fur he caresses, or the car about which he
fantasizes, or the dress he wears at the kitchen sink.

This definition of fetishism held, in principle, as long as homosexuality remained a

perversion. If sexual preference no longer separates the perverse from the normal,
however, what happens to our understanding of fetishism? Even Balint (1956), writing 17
years before the removal of homosexuality as a diagnosis from the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, argued that homosexuality is not a perversion.
Why is that? His explanation is illuminating. For Balint, what determines normality is not
sex but love—a stance that epitomizes the sea change that psychoanalytic thought
underwent over

- 844 -

the course of the 20th century. What drives human beings and binds them together is, to
use slightly different language, attachment—not the amoral, impersonal, imperious
libido. Because homosexuals, Balint argued, experience “practically the whole scale of
love and hatred that is exemplified in heterosexuality” (p. 17), because “all the beautiful,
all the hideous, all the altruistically loving and all the egotistically exploiting features of
heterosexual love can be found in homosexual love as well” (p. 17), we cannot argue for
the perversity of their desire. (I could riff on the way that, even in this prescience,
heterosexuality still measures mental health: Exactly what does “practically” mean? How
do homosexuals fail? But never mind.)

As what we may call the relational turn has taken place, a new psychoanalytic and
probably cultural normality has been erected and, along with it, a new clinical goal—not
the derepression of forbidden desire but the healing of the mutilated capacity to love. As
a one-person psychology has given way to, or at least moved over to accommodate, a
two-person psychology, fetishism, like perversion, becomes interpretable in
intersubjective space. Khan's (1979) remarkable essay, “Fetish as Negation of the Self:
Clinical Notes on Foreskin Fetishism in a Male Homosexual,” encapsulates the paradigm
shift in psychoanalytic thinking about fetishism in particular and perversion in general.
This exceptionally moving and theoretically interesting piece of writing comprises two
parts. The first, a 30-page section, is severely difficult and is based on the first, five-year
phase of an analysis. The second, which reads like a spare eight-page short story, arose
from the second phase, which took place a decade later.

The story behind the story told in this essay is that of the relational turn. The first part is a
Tower of Psychoanalytic Babel. It attempts to have it all—to retain the classical model of
fetishism and sexuality while incorporating the language and findings, most notably and
rather surprisingly, of ego-psychology, as well as those of object relations. The range of
concepts includes: “ego pathology,” “the (breast) mother,” “internal objects and early ego
development,” “transitional object phenomena,” “separation anxiety,” “pathological
body-ego development,” “disintegration,” “bisexual primary identifications,” “flight from
incest,” and “defence against archaic anxiety affects.”

In the second section, the struggle to integrate theories of attachment and narcissism with
drive theory has vanished. This herculean effort is no longer necessary because in the 15
years between

- 845 -

the two writings, from 1965 to 1979, the paradigm had shifted. By 1979, it was possible
to dispense with references to the classical one-person model of genitality and drive and
to focus on matters of narcissistic integration and damage and of broken and restored
interpersonal relatedness, and so it was possible to tell a simple, accessible story, a story
of the negation and recovery of self. As Khan (1979) wrote, “The title of this paper
reflects largely the understanding of the fetishistic reveries and practices as we began to
comprehend them in the second phase” (p. 139).
Fetishism, in Khan's (1979) view, is not about sex; it's about a state of mind. Things, or
body-parts, are used to regulate not sex but psychic equilibrium, which in turn is primally
dependent on the quality of object relations. “What the patient had sought from his
treatment was the assimilation of this manic sexual fetishistic excitement and affectivity
into an ego-capacity that could be related to the self, the object, and the environment” (p.
165). The manic defense against psychic deadness, an idea Khan drew from Winnicott,
defines fetishism. For this patient, it patched together the fragmentary psychic structure
constituted by an idealized attachment to a highly narcissistic mother whose marital
instability and depression pockmarked his early life with a series of losses. In arousing
uncircumcised working-class boys against their will and cjaculating into their foreskins,
Khan's patient was simultaneously repairing his mother, binding her to him, and
reintegrating himself. Classically, Khan wrote, the fetish is an auxiliary means serving
heterosexual gratification and defending against perversions, especially homosexuality.
Postclassically, however, we could do worse than cite McDougall (1995, p. 174), even
though she denied anything as disjunctive as a paradigm shift: Fetishism is a
“technique… of psychic survival … required to preserve the feeling of subjective identity
as well” (p. 237).

Note 7. Relatedness, Aggression, and

Social Control1.
I feel like I'm not getting into the meet [!] of anything [Dr. MH].

I have deliberately widened the issue of perversion from one of sexual identity to one of
identity in general in order to include

- 846 -

character perversions and also perverse relationships, where the other person is used as a
functional or part-object. Perversion in this larger sense is a lack of capacity for whole-
object love [Bach, 1995, p. 53].

What makes a good life? A good psyche? So often the answer to this question seems to
depend on what a person thinks comes first. Your idea of elemental human nature
determines your idea of mental health. With the early Freud, we postulated that sex
comes first, attachment second, and therefore the de-repression of sexuality became the
clinical telos, achieved by the authoritative if not authoritarian doctor pronouncing on the
patient patient. Now, with the relational turn, we have flip-flopped. As Domenici (1995)
argued, drive theory sees affective and interpersonal needs as “an overlay upon a more
basic template of sexuality and aggression” (p. 34). In contrast, object-relations theory (to
name but the most influential and general of the new psychoanalytic schools) reverses the
matter, making sexuality the secondary precipitate of a desire for connection and
intimacy—a desire entailing, presupposing, creating, and regulating a narcissistically
intact self. Now the relationship of analyst and patient, opened up for intersubjcctive
construction and deconstruction, becomes a key clinical tool, object of knowledge, a goal.

“Perversion,” wrote Bach (1995) “is a lack of capacity for whole-object love” (p. 53). A
moment of anxiety, at least for me. Perversion isn't about sex?

The new psychoanalytic vision of mental health, I have suggested, matches a new
cultural norm, which means really a new morality. Specifically, it needs to be
contextualized in the “family values” ideology that came to the Euro-American fore in
the late 1980s and early 1990s as a sort of backlash against the 1960s and 1970s. The
tangle of values and theory and therapy backgrounds everyday psychoanalysis. Sex
brings it out, but perversion inflames it. Perversion is so disturbing, so challenging of
received and ordinarily unquestioned norms. Its power to pollute the normal reveals the
sanctity with which the normal is endowed, provoking a defense of normality, sometimes
with a flare of outrage, as in Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1985) Creativity and Perversion, and
sometimes with a canny redefinition of it, as in Kernberg's (1995) Love Relations. Both
these major works have been influenced by the relational turn. Chasseguet-Smirgel, as we
have seen,

- 847 -

switched the etiology of perversion from Oedipus to Narcissus, even though clinically
she kept the classical faith. Kcrnbcrg made a somewhat different move. If Chasscguct-
Smirgel's account includes unnoticed inconsistencies between theoretical and clinical
stances issuing from the décalage of theory we have already seen in Khan's (1979) study
of foreskin fetishism, Kernberg intentionally tried to meld the relational turn with the
founding paradigm. Love Relations inscribes a developmental trajectory in which
psychosexuality evolves as a complicated weave of corporeality, psychodynamics, and
inter-subjectivity. In a tour de force, Kernberg whipped up a multiply twinned solution,
an integration of two capacities—for body pleasure and for “total object-relation.”
Kernberg (1976) wrote that, at maturity, genital pleasure organizes body-surface erotism
into the matrix of total object relation and complementary sexual identification (p. 185).

In this new, widely shared model, love and intimacy are the new signs and critieria of
health, if not health itself. If you don't have them, there's something wrong. Across the
entire analytic spectrum, attachment and its vicissitudes are what we look at and look for
as we sit with our patients. I am alert to it with Dr. MH. Perhaps in response to my being
away one August, Dr. MH said, “I feel like I'm not getting into the meat of anything.”
But what I wrote down in my notes was not meat, I wrote meet. As I was thinking both
about this essay and about a feeling of impasse in our work, I decided (inspired by
Gerson's, 1996, disclosure of his transcription errors) to tell Dr. MH of my slip of the pen
and to propose an interpretation. Consciously he may have wanted his flesh, his meat,
beat, so to speak, but unconsciously he wished to meet me, to encounter and engage me
—and, further, this was an idea that did not yet seem safe to him, and so he needed me to
hold it for him. To my surprise, Dr. MH agreed. He had (as of the first writing of this
essay three years ago) been complaining the preceding six months that therapy had
plateaued for him. He did not want to come to session. Nothing seemed to be happening.
His sexual appetite had fallen off. Following my interpretation, we began speaking of his
mistrust of me, of his doubt that I can hold him in mind. Now we approached the
possibility of tenderness. We entertained the possibility that his fear of my pathologizing
him is also a wish for me to be more critical of his sexual practices—somewhat, we
thought, the way he wants to be spanked—to show him not that he is wrong but that
something is wrong and needs fixing.

- 848 -

But I am trying to decipher what sense it makes to call Dr. MH's difficulty with love and
intimacy a perversion—for that is how Bach and, I think, Kernberg too would label it.
Interpreting sexuality in object-relational terms is now an indelible part of our view and
technique. Consider Ogden's (1989) choice to “use the term ‘perverse’ to refer to forms
of sexuality that are used in the service of denying the scparateness of external objects
and sexual difference, and thus interfere with the elaboration of the depressive position”
(p. 166, n. 11). Perversion here still denotes sexuality, but only the sexuality that defends
against object-relational dangers. What is really wrong in a perversion, then, is not sex
but relatedness and, by implication, development if not character itself.

Caution: regulatory practice still at work. When perversion relocates from sex to
relatedness, its moral baggage comes along. If psychoanalysis once carved heterosexual
order out of the poly-morphously perverse jungle, now it fashions a model of mature total
object relation as the critcrion of mental health. Yet who among us can claim to have
achieved that? Wholeness and totality in relatedness are as intimidating as a
heterosexuality untroubled by the homosexuality it has renounced (Butler, 1995). Bronski
(in press a), tricking with Jim, lived with Walta, “the love of my life,” whom he might
tell of sex on the side—as many gay men do—but not of the cutting. Do you, by the way,
tell your lover everything? Vital questions of cultural value pop up here. Does whole-
object love mean telling all? Some? Does the idea of whole-object love replace
heterosexuality as the unachievable ideal to which we must, in aspiring, submit?

Yikes. I feel like I'm criticizing motherhood. I respect the intent of Bach's (1995)
revisionism. The “capacity for whole-object love” is surely a good thing. But surely it's
also a case of new wine in old regulatory bottles. “There's something wrong” still turns
into “There's something wrong with me,” though the referent shifts from sex to love.
Sure, for most of us, it's awful not to be able to love and be loved. But why call this
absence, this suffering, this failure, a perversion? All that assigning this diagnosis
accomplishes is to preserve a traditional discourse, perpetuatc an oppression, and make
people feel bad.
Must there always be stigma? “It's my body” is the claim made regarding parent-
mortifying adolescent body practices like piercing or, in the 1970s, the long hair guys
sported or the bras women didn't. But adolescent rebellion may be equally cultural
critique or, if you

- 849 -

will, symptom. Perhaps kids mark themselves to remind their elders that, in our culture,
stigma never disappears. In the new family-values psychoanalysis, stigma hops from sex
to relatedness, from abjected forms of sexual desire to the impaired capacity to love. Sex
recedes, and relatedness steps forward—a relatedness that has its perverse and, implicitly,
normal forms, a clinical as well as theoretical happenstance not without its puritan
underpinnings (Green, 1996) and cultural contouring (Dimen, 1999).

We return to Stoller's (1975) argument about perversion and aggression. Does

psychoanalytic preoccupation, like stigma, jump from sex to love because of an
uncontainable aggression? Where, that is, does aggression lie in this model of mature
caring? Oh, yes, I know that you can get angry and repair and so on, but somehow the
family values version of intimate struggle doesn't quite capture the intensity and
ruthlessness of fear and anger and rage marking long-standing intimacy. Let me remind
you of a scene from Taxi, the old television sitcom. Latka, an immigrant from some
unnamed Balkan state, has married Simka, his fiancee recently arrived from their
homeland. In order to get a green card, Simka has to prove to the immigration officer that
she and Latka are married. Naturally, the day they are to appear, she has PMS and (what
else?) forgets the marriage license. Of course, when she arrives without it, Latka gets
angry at her. The officer helps them out by posing a series of questions designed to let
them show that they live together on a regular basis. Question after question, they fail.
Finally, he asks them to name the last movie they saw together. Latka answers one thing,
Simka another, they begin to disagree, they begin to fight, they lapse into Ruritanian, and
the next thing you know they have spiraled into a vindictive, hate-filled screaming match
that is, of course, hystcrically funny—at which point the officer interrupts them and says,
“Okay, okay, I believe it—you're married. Only married people fight like that.”

K. Leary (personal communication) has observed the short clinical shrift given
aggression in the literature during these relational days. Particularly in the context of the
two-person psychology that is so rapidly becoming the new psychoanalytic convention,
aggression might seem a bit incongruous (perhaps in part having to do with the maternal
dimensions of the two-person model and the psychocultural divorce of aggression and
femininity). Yet, as Freud's joke goes, aggression is ubiquitous, showing up not only
between analyst and patient but

- 850 -
between psychoanalysis and its customers. I am concerned, as I said earlier, with
psychoanalytic participation in domination—in naming, blaming, truth framing, and
shaming. You might think of this psychoanalytic re-creation of the cultural morality
producing it as a sort of aggression.

This participation tends to be quite invisible and therefore all the more powerful, as
revealed by an inspection of Kernberg's (1995) take on perversion in Love Relations. On
this view, a healthy sexual relationship in fact encompasses occasional sexual
engagements in which one uses the other “as a pure sexual object” (p. 58). This
permission for part-object exploitation in sexuality corrects the drift toward purity that, I
have been suggesting, infuses the new family-values psychoanalysis. In an act of
liberation, it admits aggression into the sanctum of sanity. Proposing the Kleinian
integration of love and hate as signaling mature object-love, it does us all a favor by
reintroducing Freud's recognition of perversion's ubiquity and giving it an object-
relational place.

At the same time, this redefinition of normality is an act of imperialism. Speaking from
the center of psychoanalytic power, of disciplinary authority, it colonizes the sexual
margins, allowing the conventional to own the unconventional without any of the risks of
unconventionality. In a royal co-optation of the sexual revolution, Love Relations renders
perverse erotics acceptable, but only under the condition that it be practiced by that
guardian of nonconformity, the heterosexual, married couple: “If a couple can
incorporate their polymorphous perverse fantasies and wishes into their sexual
relationship, discover and uncover the sadomasochistic core of sexual excitement in their
intimacy, their defiance of conventional cultural mores may become a conscious element
of their pleasure” (Kernberg, 1995, p. 96). That heterosexual couples might readmit
pregenitality to their bed, that they might acknowledge the erotics of pain, that, like
adolescents who pierce and tattoo, they might get off on sexual rebellion—what a daring
vision.

But then comes the stretch: “It is in the very nature of conventional culture to attempt to
control the basically rebellious and implicitly asocial nature of the couple as it is
perceived by the conventional social environment” (Kernberg, 1995, p. 96). Here I must
protest: the couple's “basically rebellious and implicitly asocial nature”? Unnoticed here
is the absolute legitimacy conferred by heterosexual matrimony

- 851 -

and the corresponding marginalization and denigration of other forms of intimacy, as told
by the absence of homosexual coupledom from the model of mental health in Love
Relations. Kernberg (2000) recently indicted psychoanalysis's neglect of ideas beyond its
perimeters—not only those of science but of history and sociology as well. If, however,
he himself had consulted the critique of psychoanalysis found in those disciplines in the
latest generation (e.g., Weisstein, 1970; Kovel, 1981), his own idcalization of the marital
unit would not have escaped his ordinarily critical eye. Maybe radical notions of all sorts
flit like fireflies in the matrimonial darkness. But, in Kernberg's own oeuvre, the
procreating couple still reigns as the navel of the psychoanalytic universe—a stable
center of sanity and social responsibility. I don't understand, then, how it can also situate
rebellion and asociality.

Talk about a moment of anxiety. This time, though, it's not the anxiety of stigma or
pollution or shame—it's the anxiety of domination.

These mystifying, double-binding pronouncements incarnate the Foucaultian nightmare.

They exemplify the worst tendencies toward domination; toward naming, blaming, truth
framing, and shaming; in effect toward stigmatizing and the participation of
psychoanalysis in the cultural morality governing it. Les psy, argued Foucault (1978),
belong to a new form of power, “a technology of health and pathology” (p. 45) that
constantly attends to and scrutinizes its subject, becoming itself a domain of pleasure.
The body is a principal route to the subject—hence, the centrality of stigma to this power
structure and its operation. This theory may be paranoid but is not on that account wrong;
at the same time that the maneuver proposed by Love Relations unlocks one ball-and-
chain by authorizing aggression on the sexual side of intimacy, it snaps another one on.
You read Love Relations, and you think you can't possibly get it right; Kernberg knows,
and you don't. Either you love the wrong way, or you can't love at all.

You enter the “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” that Foucault (1978) argued
inhere in the technology of desire in contemporary society (p. 44). This spiraling finds
itself in the knowledge that psychoanalysis creates and exercises, knowledge in which
power is sensualized and pleasure therefore enhanced. Power, knowledge, and pleasure
are, to use Butler's (1990, passim) neologism, interimplicated. Always suggesting,
engaging, triggering, or in fact constituting one another, they form a psychopolitical
gyroscope, in which “an impetus [is] given to power through its very exercise; an
emotion reward[s]

- 852 -

the overseeing control and carrie[s] it further” (Foucault, 1978, p. 45). As I read Foucault,
I begin to imagine his two paradigmatic models of social control, the confessional and the
couch, and think about the one I know. I think about pleasures and powers and
knowledges of the psychoanalytic encounter. “Pleasure spread[s] to the power that
harrie[s] it; power anchor[s] the pleasure it uncover[s]” (pp. 44-45). And now listen to the
darker side of the transference-counter-transference embrace, a psychoanalytic
sadomasochism that may glue the analytic couple, as well as the writer-reader couple:
“the pleasure … of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches
out, palpates, brings to light” (the analyst's pleasure at probing, asking, knowing, helping)
and, “on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power, flee from
it, fool it, or travesty it” (the patient's pleasure at resisting, the erotics of the repetition
compulsion). Following Foucault, we must conclude that sadomasochism is the principal
psychodynamic animating the desire and struggle for power fueling the infrastructures of
contemporary society, and it shows up everywhere authority and hierarchy are found
(Chancer, 1992), including, need I say, in psychoanalysis.

Anxiety.

Note 8. Shelter from the Storm?/Rabbit in

a Briar Patch
I like deep massage, I like being beaten, I like catharsis [Dr. MH].

He is just an alienated isolate in human society and lives from that stance [Khan, 1979, p.
170].

As if by will alone a single drop of crimson, scarlet, carmine blood forms and runs down
my chest. It stops, and I stare at it in the mirror. I don't feel like a saint, I don't feel
beautiful, I don't feel sexy. I just feel alive and begin to cry [Bronski, in press a, p. 14].

The label of perversion is as clinically superfluous as we now understand the label of

homosexuality to be. It is not a diagnostic category; it does not tell us what to do. Now
we take our clinical cue not from disorders of desire but from struggles of self and
relationship— splits in psyche, maladies of object love, infirmities of intimacy. My

- 853 -

strategy of detoxification has had some success with Dr. MH. Focusing on his discomfort
with his being, with his self and his obese body, we have checked, if not eliminated, the
depredations and degradations of his shaming self, and cleared space for the possibility
that he might after all be an acceptable person. We have opened a channel through which
might flow his longing just to be, to feel, to be a held baby. Glimmers of self-acceptance
come and go. Recently he was able to dance without embarrassment for the first time in
many years. His self-loathing is occasionally less virulent, at times quiescent. We explore
in a widening spiral the range of Dr. MH's sexual practices and fantasies, thereby
rendering them not much more toxic than the other dilemmas of his life—those of work
and family, for example. As we explore, however, we must survive the periods of
deadness that accompany the diminution of the manic defense.

Psychoanalysis offers shelter from the storm, but it is not without its dangers. We have to
be careful, E. Ghent (1986, personal communication) said to me once in supervision. He
recapped the end of Long Day's Journey into Night, when, following Hickey's false
promises of peace after sobriety, the punch leaches from the whiskey: “Bejees,” says
Hope, “what did you do to the booze, Hickey? There's no damned life left in it” (O'Neill
1940, p. 154). Evaluating his patient's and his own accomplishments, Khan (1979)
suggested that we be mindful of “the great hazard of the analytic cure of a pervert's self-
cure” (p. 176). Khan's foreskin fetishist emerged from biphasic analysis “a person real in
himself, creative in his intellectual pursuits, unharrowed by that ungraspable anxiety in
himself, and beginning to live a life which to him is meaningful, sentient and true, and
has a purpose as well as a direction in terms of its future” (p. 176). At the same time,
however, he “lives a life which, by ordinary standards, is extremely lacking in human
contact…. He is just an alienated isolate in human society and lives from that stance” (p.
170). Of another patient, Khan wrote that the glow was gone: When the manic defense
collapses, when the perversions cease, a certain liveliness, an “instinctual fervour and
dynamism” vanish too (p. 176).

I wonder, though. A great absence in Khan's clinical account is of his own concordant
countertransference to perversion. Had he been able to empathize, might he have found a
way to help his patients keep the glow or create it elsewhere? V. Bonfilio (1999, personal
communication) said that unless he thinks about how he lost his glow and found a new
one, he cannot be of much help to his patients who

- 854 -

are risking all with the throw of those analytic dice. There are good reasons, based on the
internal structure of Khan's arguments, to think that, theoretically speaking, the only
acceptable glow is that produced by conventional forms of intimacy. Certainly Khan
enjoyed his homophobia; Godley (2001), writing in the London Review of Books of his
disastrous treatment with Khan, recounted a telephone call from Winnicott that Khan
took in session, in which the two men shared “a giggly joke about homosexual fellatio”
(p. 6). The “spiral of degradation” (p. 5) that constituted the treatment, as well as his
posttreatment relationship with Godley, suggests, however, that Khan's own glow derived
as much from cruelty as from married intimacy.

With Stoller (1979), I wonder about the link between the glow and aggression, even the
imbrication of sex, death, and life. If Khan's countertransference problem was, you might
put it, love, then mine is perhaps hate or, at least, aggression, which I know is one reason
that anxiety has dogged this paper. And it is not clear whether fear of aggression is my
problem, Dr. MH's, or ours; we'll see. The effort of loving him, even as he wards me off
with gestures and sentiments soaked in hatred, echoes my struggle to negotiate between
the love speech of naming and the hate speech of blaming; the depressive position being
always in precarious balance, love and hate are never far apart, and intimacy is always
both challenged and made possible by aggression.

If you domesticate desire, take the hate away from love and the aggression from sex,
whence the glow? In “More Life,” an essay whose title is borrowed from a speech by
Prior in Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Corbett (2001) proposed a new
developmental theory of multiplicity: There are many routes to sanity, maturity,
sexuality. Probably this is another of our jobs, to midwife more life. “I like deep massage,
I like being beaten, I like catharsis,” said Dr. MH. Certainly his manic defense fuses
elements of both connection and sexuality. At the same time, his pleasure in the deathlike
shattering of self born in the crucible of catharsis (Bersani, 1988) sounds familiar to
many of us. Chodorow (1992) wisely connected perversion and liveliness: “If we retain
passion and intensity for heterosexuality, we are in the arena of symptom, neurosis, and
disorder; if we deperversionize hetero-sexuality, giving up its claim to intensity and
passion, we make it less interesting to us and to its practitioners” (p. 301). Of his final
self-cutting, Bronski (in press a) wrote in the last line of his penultimate paragraph, “I
just feel alive and begin to cry.” He wrote here in the

- 855 -

midst of death, the plague of AIDS that stole his lovers from him. Pain and blood are
signs of life. Perhaps he struggled with psychic death too. In any case, is life after
deadness not a decent goal? Certainly, Ogden (1997) would agree. Perversion, Ogden
argued, shows up in analysis as a defense against deadness, even if his prescription was
the family-values usual: “In a healthy development, a sense of oneself as alive is equated
with a generative loving parental intercourse” (p. 143). Are there no other ways to
represent life, exuberance, passion, and pleasure besides reproductive heterosexuality?

How can we prescribe health when we cannot know, going forward, what produces
illness? There needs to be a way to back off from the authoritarian and dominating
inclinations that psychoanalysis shares with other regulatory practices. Remembering
doubt is one route; writing disruptively is another. As Kaplan (1990) wrote, the anorexic
was once a smart and compliant child who surrendered all “for the safety and self-esteem
of becoming a narcissistic extension of Mother. Yet from a prospective view,… no
sensible clinical observer would predict from observations of a girl's relationship to her
mother during infancy and childhood an anorectic solution to the dilemmas of
adolescence” (p. 458). Freud (1920) said it earlier, in The Psychogenesis of a Case of
Homosexuality in a Woman: “The synthesis is thus not so satisfactory as the analysis; in
other words, from a knowledge of the premises we could not have foretold the nature of
the result” (p. 167). Notice the judicious contingency of his formulation, which Khan, for
all his grandiosity, in fact shares. How different from the certitude of marking Love
Relations, a seamless narrative that seems to wrap everything up in the service of truth
but also hides all the loose ends.

Notes pull on those threads, rupture the surface coherence, or at least I hope they do. In
this presentation both clinical and rhetorical. I have taken the liberty of leaving you with
many open questions alive in both clinic and culture about our diagnostic categories, our
standards of health and illness, of morality, and of truth—a strategy that I think is true to
the passion of psychoanalysis past and present, theoretical and clinical. Something has
gone wrong for Dr. MH, and he suffers because of it. In order to make it better, he and I
need to find out what that is. It may be that, once we find the answer, we will discover
that the books had been telling the truth and the answer was there all along. Then, again,
maybe we will create a new truth, one

- 856 -

that works for him, or for us, or maybe even for others. We just don't know right now. I
am reminded of what Pete Seeger said about his daddy's vision of truth: “It's like a rabbit
in a briar patch. You know it's in there somewhere, but you can't ever get at it.”

Perversion, even in Freud's understanding, let alone in light of the cultural revolution that
has taken place since the 1960s, challenges our intellect, our passion, our practice. My
study group read this paper and worried that Dr. MH might be recognizable in the
psychoanalytic community. They wanted me to disguise him more. I was surprised.
Although he is a mental health worker at a very high level, he is not a psychoanalyst,
does not run in psychoanalytic circles, does not read psychoanalysis. He and I thought it
important that he be identified by his title so as to say to the readers of this essay that he
is, if not of them, at least among them. This is, of course, a rhetorical strategy and, I hope,
a performative one. If Chasseguet-Smirgel and Kernberg are right, then let us
acknowledge their moral, perhaps even moralistic, but finally routine, familiar, and
ancient point: Perversion is us.

What, after all, is pathology? If perversion can coexist with health, if its status as illness
varies with cultural time and place, then, conversely, any sexuality may be symptomatic
—or healthy. If all sexualities may claim wholesomeness, if all have a valid psychic
place, then all are subject to the same psychic vicissitudes. Put yet another way, sexuality
has nothing inherently to do with mental health or mental illness. You may be ill if you
are heterosexual and healthy, if you are homosexual, bisexual, transvestite, or …
whatever. By the same token, you, like Khan's fetishist or like Barbara McClintock,
Nobel laureate in medicine and discoverer of jumping genes, may live alone, without the
trappings of conventional intimacy (Keller, 1983, p. 205). And who's to say that there's
something wrong … something wrong with that … something wrong with you?

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Day 2/Month 2: Wordless/The Words to Say It

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

I reflection the psychoanalytic and political and personal meaning—or meaninglessness

—of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11,2001.

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

I Spent one Session Today Talking Mostly about the Tragedy. That was unusual. Other
patients and I wound back and forth between the story of what had been going on in their
lives and minds since we last met or what was going on between us, and the story of the
day, our loss, the attack, the disaster, the catastrophe, the act of war, what shall we call it?

Yesterday, oddly, was my first day back after vacation. I thought I would be in shock
from seeing patients. Of course, that's not what happened.

Shock is wordless. That's principally what I gleaned yesterday by myself and with my
patients. This level of violence is, literally, unspeakable. At the level of the body, the
Real, it resists symbolization. A hole in meaning as big as the gap in the skyline, as large
as the new absences in so many families and workplaces. Meaninglessness, I found
myself discovering and explaining to patients, is what happens when, as did someone I
know, you see the second plane make the turn and you know why it's turning and you
know before you see it that it's going to smash into—and, as it happens, go through
(through!)—the second tower. You cannot make what you see signify. Only horror. Or
perhaps, better, the first time you see it, the first burning tower, it's

—————————————

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D. is Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University

Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

- 451 -

shock. When you see the second tower, Nachträglichkeit goes into action, and it's trauma.

And so we try to talk, to put words where wordlessness is. Perhaps we fail. But the effort
to find the words to say it, like Marie Cardinale's (1975) effort, make it worthwhile, even
if meaning eludes. Or perhaps the effort is the meaning.

I have been working, seeing patients. That is what I feel right doing. Others I know have
canceled their patients, gone home to mourn, or volunteered. Partly because I just came
back, I did not want to miss appointments this week. In fact, those patients who could
come in did; others had phone sessions. But, as I go on, I feel more and more drained. I
respond first with that surreal sense so many are talking about, which I feel as a kind of
instant numbness, with which I am not unfamiliar in the face of catastrophe. Then that
numb skin thins and melts as I see the images on the TV, talk to friends, and, especially,
talk with patients. Each responds differently, which is not, I suppose, a surprise. And the
responses evolve. Most patients feel that their lives are too trivial to get into. Yet, I keep
thinking, life goes on.

Yes, it stops. There has been a rupture. For Americans, nothing will be the same again. I
hope. We have been so insulated, perhaps those of us “haves” more so than the “have-
nots.” Now we have had a hole blown in our skin. Some people compare this catastrophe
to the Civil War. But that was between two parts of one entity. This is between us and,
well, who? Who is the us? The them? The answers evolve as we go on.

Yes, life does go on, I believe and tell my patients. One patient tells of a friend's baby
born yesterday. Is its life forever shadowed? Or is this the green shoot miraculously
growing in the rubble?

For the outside to be restructured, the inside needs to be attended to. The converse holds
true simultaneously. And here is the horror. You try to think, to transcend the inside-
outside binary. How? What? Who? Why? The outside battle is for justice. But what is
that? According to whom?

“Like, duh. Did the United States think it could wreak havoc and violence and nothing
would happen? What goes around, comes around.” The words of the eight-year-old
daughter of a supervisee. You assume the attack is from the Middle East; you assume it
has something to do with fundamentalism or Palestinians; you think Osama bin Laden.
You see the Palestinians on TV, laughing, sharing sweets, ululating. You know what they
feel: the hatred, as others have already

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noted, and the joy at the enemy's suffering a deep wound. But hatred with cause. The
talion principle. Which is not justification. But the arrogance of the United States is
beyond words itself: not sending a representative to the United Nations race conference at
Durban was unbearably stupid and contemptuous. Not to mention hateful.

Of course, this attack was in the planning long before September 11: flight plans found, a
terrorist who went to flight school. And why didn't the CIA know? Carelessness?
Complacency? Outsmarted? Knives, box cutters, Mace. We see that we are no longer
immune, that we have to live differently from now on. In 1917, peasants armed with
wooden rakes started the Russian Revolution by storming the Kremlin. David and
Goliath come to mind. Genius, too. Will and discipline. Desperation. Demonization.
Mutual demonization.
I can stand in both places. Perhaps that's a defense: outrage for us, sympathy for them.
(Oh, these weak words.) I don't know the way out.

I hear planes overhead. More than I heard earlier. It's Day 2: Wednesday, September 12,
2001, 6:45 p.m. I don't know why they're here. Oh, military aircraft on patrol. Yesterday I
heard the first plane. I remember thinking, “Oh, these planes. They sound like they're so
low, they always do. I hope it doesn't crash here. No, of course it won't.” Only when my
first patient arrived some 20 minutes later did I learn. She took me outside to show me
that it hadn't crashed accidentally—it had penetrated the tower with deliberation.

My supervisee's six-year-old son: “Why does this involve me? I just want to play pick-up
sticks. Where are my pick-up sticks?” (Of course, he knows what it means: just visualize
pick-up sticks.) He goes out of the room, returns. “Did you say the Twin Towers? My
twins? Dang!”

A T-shirt reads, “Nuclear war? There goes my career!” There will be some people who
feel like that, and some of it will find its way into most of us. Can our meaning
encompass this solipsistic regret too? We do not need this disruption. Each of us has our
own (and what must, after all, be) petty life to lead. So we do something to make sure this
catastrophe doesn't happen again to anyone.

What?

Monday, October 15, 2001

Out of the mouths of babes? It's not always sufficient. Even before we went to war, we
were learning the complications. A colleague said, “I

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was it were simple, the way it used to be. We hated the cops; they hated us.” Vietnam
was different. Now I appreciate what the firefighters do, their heroism, altruism; I didn't
before. I wrote as much at a shrine at the West Tenth Street firehouse.

Chalking all this up to the victimization of the Middle East does not work either. Splitting
always gets you devils and angels, never human beings. From the information that has
speedily raced around the Internet, we now all have a deeper understanding of terrorist
politics in general and bin Laden in particular. We have come to understand who the
Taliban are and who they are not, their relation as overlords to the ordinary Afghanis,
their similarity in other ways to the Northern Alliance. Who was it who said that no
matter who wins the war, the people get killed?

We have learned about the divisions in the Middle East regarding bin Laden's vision and
action. That he has wanted a global war between the West and Islam is not in doubt; it is
evident in his public statements and speeches. But to achieve this conflagration he would
have to create “Islam” as a unified political force. Although there are Muslims and there
are Muslim countries, no such political entity as Islam exists, as Edward Said (2001)
observed during Week 3. Bin Laden's hope was that, if he could start a war, he could
constitute and run this entity: create a “them” who are attacking and you have an “us.”
With such a war he could both beat the West and topple the Saudi government. And quite
a vision it is too. An attack by the West on Muslim lands, opines Tamin Ansary in an
email circulating on the Internet during Week 2, would yield a billion people with
nothing left to lose (Miller, 2001, p. 86).

And yet, despite the presence of Osama and all future Osamas, I still believe that
suffering and poverty are the medium in which terrorism grows. The poor's hatred and
envy match the haves' hatred and contempt. Put envy, hatred, and contempt together with
fundamentalism and racism and you get people dying everywhere. I still think that the
United States has to address this problem. It needs to recognize that most people in the
Middle East live under one or another form of despotism and that, as long as they do,
there will always be an Osama waiting in the wings. You can make as much as you want
of Osama's psychology, his rebellion against his family, the meaning of his differences
from his siblings (who are among the intelligentsia in Boston and London), and so on.
But you cannot forget the brute economic and political facts that make it possible for

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him to work his problems out on an international stage. For many Middle Easterners, the
attack on the World Trade Center was but another strike in a war that was already
ongoing.

Should we be at war? Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Certainly, the war benefits the ambitions of the Bush adninistration.

And yet. Online, a friend—a feminist and community activist— asked me if the Afghan
women would have been able to drop their burqas had there been a negotiated settlement
before the bombing started. I don't know. Do the Afghan women think the war was worth
this new freedom? Do you?

References
Cardinale, M. (1975), The Words to Say It. Cambridge MA: VanVactor & Goodheart,
1983.

Miller, L. (2001), One e-mail message can change the world. The New York Times
Sunday Magazine, December 9, p. 86.
Said, E. (2001), The clash of ignorance. The Nation, 273:11-14, October 22.
Keep On Keepin' On: Alienation and Trauma Commentary on Ruth Fallenbaum's Paper

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Ruth Fallenbaum's “The Injured Worker” focuses on something that not only the
quotidian routine but also the inward focus of psychoanalysis inclines us to lose sight of:
that in capitalism our search for empowerment ultimately disempowers us. Alienation is
the psychology of class. It shows up as demoralization, shame, and inflamed
psychesomas. It is a condition of institutionalized sadism that makes people “go postal.”
“The Injured Worker” shows what we analysts must do when faced with the permanent
trauma of alienation: patiently bear witness to our patients' tellings and retellings and,
sometimes, get our hands dirty.

Truly, Ruth Fallenbaum's report is extraordinary. The persecution propagated by the

Office of Workers' Compensation Programs is news to all or most of us, I am sure. More
critically, she focuses on something which not only the daily routine but also the inward
focus of psychoanalysis inclines

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us, or at least me, to lose sight of: “the disempowering effects of many, if not most, …
environments in which Americans … work.” It was to the solution of this quandary–
alienation— that, as left-wing analysts, many of us thought, 20 years ago, we could
contribute through that Holy Grail of synthesis, the Marx- Freud connection. As “The
Injured Worker” demonstrates, however, the Marx-Freud synthesis is a never-ending
journey, not a treasure hunt—what we used to call the permanent revolution. So it is not
entirely out of nostalgia that I characterize my commentary on Fallenbaum's work with
the title, “Keep On Keepin' On.”

Our search for empowerment disempowers us. Called alienation, this social double bind
is the ordinary estrangement of people from their activities, their products, other people,
and themselves (Ollman, 1976, p. 135). In the private sector, alienation entails the loss of
direct connection to the products of one's labor power—think finished cars on an
assembly line or medical services funneled through managed care. Or it can show up as
the loss of autonomy that characterizes work in an anonymous government bureaucracy,
as Fallenbaum shows. Whatever its source or form, alienation is core to the class system,
in which some people sell their labor to others, who, possessing the wherewithal, buy that
labor to produce and purvey goods and services at a profit. Class, then, is a relation
between people mediated by things, money in particular (Marx, 1844; Meszaros, 1975).

Alienation makes things of people, not only to each other but to themselves. In the course
of selling your labor and time to get the money you need, you lose something of—
become alien to—yourself. (Is it any wonder that psychiatrists, their work crystalizing
during capitalism at its Dickensian worst, were early on called “alienists”?) Freud, as
Masud Khan (1979) wrote, thought alienation central to contemporary life:

In the nineteenth century two persons dictated the destiny of the twentieth century, Karl
Marx and Sigmund Freud. Each … diagnosed the sickness of the western Judaeo-
Christian cultures: Marx in terms of the alienated person in society; Freud, the person
alienated from himself [p. 9].

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And, of course, we would add today, “herself.”

Alienation is the psychology of class. Why is it so difficult for us to keep this idea in
mind? One reason may be that the white- collar work done by analysts and many of their
patients allows for minor or perhaps major, albeit temporary, escapes from alienation.
Consider the empowerments we enjoy, like control over our time. Yet, as I (Dimen,
1994) pointed out in my discussion of money and countertransference, even that
appearance of autonomy is compromised by the constant need to increase one's income,
whether to support one's family or, like Janis Joplin, to make amends with a Mercedes
Benz, a need that saps one's sense of belonging to oneself. Only with great reluctance do
we recall that, finally, we are all in the same boat. At any moment, middle-class and
upper middle-class workers can fall through the safety net, as Barbara Ehrenreich (1989)
has written. Our anxiety, caused by this contradiction, dominates and governs much of
our personal and professional conduct and influences what we forget and what we
remember.

“The Injured Worker” shows the process of disempowerment at work. Alienation takes
the form of demoralization, shame, and inflamed psychesomas. Fallenbaum writes:

It was with great reluctance that these workers confronted the fact that their workplace
was so destructive to their physical and emotional well-being that they had to leave. The
depression caused by physical pain is obvious, but for all the workers the freefall of their
self-esteem—because they have not been able to hang in there, do the job, bring home the
bacon—was and is equally, if not more, devastating.

Here is the downward spiral: if you cannot solve the contradiction yourself, if you cannot
survive and triumph over alienation, your self-esteem crumbles like an osteoporotic
skeleton. Believing the philosophy of individualism that draws on and intensifies your
narcissistic omnipotence, you think you are the only cause of both your success and your
failure. If you experience yourself as law abiding and suddenly feel seen as a malingerer,
self-doubt begins to pervade your self-regard. Your difficulties on the job redouble,
further inciting “shame,
- 95 -

diminished self-esteem,” and narcissistic injury resulting from an inability to function.

A vicious cycle makes matters worse. In the working conditions familiar to Fallenbaum's
patients, these injuries are reflected and reinstituted by the OWCP, by the physicians, the
community, and even by the countertransference of so conscientious, empathic, and
worker-identified a clinician as Fallenbaum. She found herself often wondering, with
bewilderment and dismay and, possibly, impatience, “why on earth they had stayed as
long at their respective jobs as they did.” Of course, one answer is evident and
straightforward and rational: the job was a plum, a triumph, a needed, scarce resource.
Still, some projective identification was evident: the self-doubt I have just been
describing shows up as Fallenbaum's response to their tales of horror. We learn this as we
hear more about the dilemmas faced by her patients as they move more deeply into the
workers' compensation nightmare.

But this question, “Why did you stay so long?” is also quite familiar from other contexts
and leads us to the most critical clinical aspect of the problem, one that, strikingly, evokes
the most critical social problem. Don't we as analysts ask on other occasions, particularly
when we are working with a battered person, Why did you stay? Isn't this what feminists
wanted to ask Hedda Nussbaum?1 What does the question imply? That we ourselves
would have done something differently? That we cannot bear to imagine ourselves so at
the mercy of social life or of desire? That we project into our patients all our own need
and victimization and humiliation and alienation?

—————————————

1 Hedda Nussbaum was the battered and emotionally violated partner of Joel Steinberg,
convicted in November 1987 of bludgeoning to death their adopted daughter, Lisa, in
their Greenwich Village apartment. Nussbaum was arrested too but was found to have
been so psychologically and physically incapacitated that the Manhattan District Attorney
could not press charges against her. Her complicity in the murder of her daughter, as well
as in her own abuse, has been debated. This case had particular shock value because it
showed that domestic violence is no stranger to middle class families: Steinberg was a
successful lawyer and Nussbaum an editor for a major publishing house.

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We are not alone in projective identification. The police, women as well as men, used to
put this sort of question to rape victims: “Why were you dressed like that?” Even if they
do not ask, they probably still think it, just as straight officers may accuse the gay-bashed,
“Why were you walking in that neighborhood?” The problems of stigma, of blaming the
victim are glaring; the experience of going through the workers' comp bureaucracy is like
the retraumatization suffered at the hands of the disbelieving police by someone who has
been raped.

Here Fallenbaum moves into the critique of psychoanalysis and in so doing moves back
to psychoanalysis' origins and its core dilemma. She identifies her patients' experience as
one of trauma, a concept that then allows her to illuminate the clinical problem. Trauma,
she suggests, is the psychoanalytic portal to the outside world. It is the site where we
cannot deny that what happens outside affects what happens inside. “It is by looking at
what happens to a person's psyche when the outside world forcefully disrupts the person's
fundamental sense of safety that psychoanalysis is made to face straight on the power
exerted by environment on the person's inner world,” she writes. Here, of course,
Fallenbaum is reaching back to 1897, to the fork in the psychoanalytic road between
actuality and fantasy, between the recognition of sexual abuse and the construction of
psychic reality (Freud, 1897). We understand now that this bifurcation, when applied to
patients, retraumatizes; that one can recognize both the seduction and the fantasied desire
for it, both the damage experienced at the impersonal workplace and the reliving, through
it, of earlier abuse at the hands of family and friends and other loved, trusted, and needed
relations.

Fallenbaum shows us the fine line she walks between the psychic and the social, the
internal and the external, fantasy and actuality, in working with her traumatized patients.
She says that the less able or willing they are to remember or recount the preinjury life,
especially familial life, the more severe their work trauma and the less they can mourn,
release, and get past their grievances. At the same time, the trauma must be addressed. In
a typical case, Fallenbaum discovers that she must listen repeatedly, as if to the Ancient
Mariner, to retellings of the work trauma, so that the patient can be sure she is believed

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and then can risk remembering, or maybe even just telling, the earlier trauma: “While the
therapy and the patient's life had seemed to me stuck in a traumatic deep freeze, the
gradual establishment of trust revolving around my response to the complicated feelings
surrounding her injury was, in fact, underway.” Anna O is said to have told her story
once, linearly, each day of the therapy year for each day of the trauma year (Breuer and
Freud, 1893-1895). Are the retellings Fallenbaum hears a variety of chimney sweeping?
Or do we need to think of it differently, as a sort of ritual, perhaps like women's
consciousness raising, with each woman telling her own, but in a way different, version
of the same story?

When it comes to trauma, the clinician's job, Fallenbaum shows us, is first to bear
witness. Bearing witness, she says, means validating the patient's perception that the
world is mad and dangerous; indeed, a nonanalyst friend of mine, herself a patient, says
the analyst is there “to witness your ordeal.” Concretely, to bear witness may mean to
sort out the economic and psychological motivations of the various oppressors. It may
also require actively intervening, as Fallenbaum did in Glenda's case when she set up a
meeting for herself and Glenda with Glenda's union's vice president and her
congresswoman's representative. In the “real, nonclinical world,” as Steven Seligman
(personal communication, 2001) remarked about Fallenbaum's discussion, action is a
legitimate vehicle of communication. Not only Fallenbaum's empathy but also her actions
communicated her trustworthiness to her patient. Action is appropriate to trauma, which
is so often experienced wordlessly, corporeally.

One might say that Fallenbaum is working here at once in the Imaginary and in the Real,
but she is also working in the depressive position. Bearing witness constitutes a mourning
process that permits one to relinquish the belief that the world and its institutions are
predictable, that a “predisaster existence” really did exist. After the World Trade Center
catastrophe in September 2001, many thought that all citizens of the United States would
have lost their childlike illusion of immunity. As the regrouping proceeded and the Bush
administration began muttering about nuclear attacks on the Evil Axis, innocence might
have to regain its foothold. How, after all, can you think

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it safe to use nuclear weapons unless you believe you are really immune to “their”
Nachträglichkeit in mind and on earth? Perhaps what is innocence in childhood is, in
adulthood, at best foolhardy and at worst evil.

Three related questions come to mind. If there were already traumata in the lives of
Fallenbaum's patients, then is the idea of a predisaster state a defense, as in the case of the
African American patient Fallenbaum tells us about? Second, what is the relation
between mourning and protest? Does mourning mute protest or make it possible? I see a
comparison here to the focus of much of my political life—feminism. Did we as
feminists mourn the human birthright we had to fight for? Do we refuse to mourn? I
cannot quite tell. And, third, I wonder, when the world's fabric rips, does gender bias the
response? Fallenbaum raises the issue of her practice's gender skew. More women than
men are referred to her and her male colleagues by the Institute for Labor and Mental
Health. Whereas, she says, men's workplace difficulties show up as anger, women's
manifest as psychiatric injury, sometimes secondary to physical injury. Do we have here
gender-skewed responses to trauma and alienation, or gender-skewed diagnoses? Are
women given diagnoses, but men seen to be merely at the extreme end of normal?

Trauma thrives on moral ambiguity. It thereby conjures a conundrum that, Fallenbaum

observes, shows up in every case. It has two parts. The first is the dilemma of sorting out
“what is me and what is them.” That is, for the workers, the traumatic question is whether
it was they or their employers, and, later, the examiners and vocational rehabilitation
counselors, who were at fault. Once again, note the echoes: rape and abuse victims ask
themselves that question all the time. It is this moral ambiguity that in part makes the
retelling so traumatic: you, the injured party, imagine they are thinking that it's your fault
and that you are just trying to evade responsibility. And, you wonder if maybe it is, in
fact, your fault anyway. But such ambiguity also shows up in intimate moments. On the
one hand, in intersubjective moments of moments of intense affect, as in “anxiety, sexual
excitement, rage, depression, and euphoria,” you cannot say with certainty who started
what (Mitchell, 2000,

- 99 -

p. 31). On the other hand, your analyst's loyalty, for example, is not a given. Your
therapist is on your side but also one of “them.” Analysts belong to disciplinary authority
—the professional- managerial class (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, 1979)—whose power
may benefit you but also makes you feel victim and who must therefore gain your trust.
In the consulting room, alienation and intimacy lie side by side.

So often, the answer to, “Is it me or it is them?” is “It's me.” And this, the second part of
the conundrum, is precisely where alienation and trauma meet in Fallenbaum's paper.
Winnicott (1925) explained this poignant choice of the “bad me” over the “good them”:
Better to think you're bad and can therefore improve yourself, and thereby repair the
situation and make it safe again, than to go crazy because the world is crazy, that is, bad.
Note how well an unhappy child's brave creation matches the experience of alienation.
The child thinks: My own goodness and my own experience—that the world has gone
mad—have become alien to me, because, in order to believe I am strong and responsible
for myself, I must believe I have made it mad and am therefore bad. Armed with this
faith, I can then set out to try again, whether to transform the parent who let me down
into one who will shore me up, or to transform the world into one I can trust to let me
make my way in it. Keep on keepin'on.

Perhaps the alienated self and the false self, as R. D. Laing (1959) thought, are one and
the same. To them we should add the traumatized self. Fallenbaum's patients come to her
when the false and alienated selves fail under the weight of trauma. And then bodily
injury ensues, speaking the traumata of humiliation and exploitation that break
consciousness down: “When workers must cling desperately to their jobs, they are
extremely vulnerable to being bullied and exploited and consequently to being injured.”
But to accept the extent to which one is not at fault—to refuse humiliation—is to
recognize the world as untrustworthy and therefore unsafe. Here we might think of Jay
Greenberg's (1992) argument about the goal of psychic striving: that is the need for
safety. Not only does adult trauma stir up infantile trauma, but losing faith in the world's
predictability and in the protectiveness of the good objects reincites fears about the bad
objects' cruelty and power.

- 100 -
You could say that alienation is a condition of permanent trauma. Jessica Henderson
Daniel (1995), for one, has linked racism and trauma. I wonder if we can extend her
observation to class. Quoting David Taylor, Fallenbaum says that, in PTSD, the ego may
contend more easily with object loss than with the problems emerging from a damaged
world. In other words, you can deal with something that is over and done with. But
alienation repeats. You deal with it once; you think it's gone— and it comes back. Worst
of all, like Alien, it eventually finds its way into your heart and mind and soul. I am
reminded of the last scene of the movie Alien III, in which Sigourney Weaver, while
falling from a great height into the flames below, cradles to her breast the newborn alien
bursting out of her midriff.

People “go postal” because of the institutionalized sadism that is alienation. The
disillusionments of the United States' experiment in social welfare are endless. As it turns
out, however, it is not just the United States in the 21st century: it is also Czechoslovakia
at the turn of the last. Fallenbaum tells of a contemporary claims examiner's huge power
in the claimant's life; he “personally authorize[es] a pharmacy to fill the patient's
prescriptions” but remained available only by fax or phone. In an associative flash, I
wrote “Kafka” in the margin. And then, on the very next page, I read about Kafka himself
and his own experience as a claims manager in the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute
in the Kingdom of Bohemia, a job he took because he could not get a job in the Post
Office.2

Alienation is trauma, and everyone in the Western world suffers from it. It is a sort of
madness that inheres as a structure of persecution and sadism at the state's core. This
madness shows up in blue- and white- and pink- collar work alike, but I am especially
grateful that Fallenbaum includes white-collar trauma. I have never liked idealizing
working-class pain, and I hate Malvina Reynolds' “Little Boxes,” a song, often sung on
bus-rides to antiwar and other demonstrations, that sanctimoniously satirizes the middle
class and its suburban houses made out of “ticky-tacky,” the sort of house I may have

—————————————

2 Perhaps Foucault's (1980) persecutory and sadistic panopticon theorizes what we mean
by Kafka-esque.

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disliked but that my parents sweated blood to get. If alienation were not culture wide,
then the traumata of wife battering, child abuse, and even, it occurs to me, impotence and
other sexual unhappiness, would not show up in the middle, upper, and professional-
managerial, as well as lower, classes. In each stratum, we can find “the despair that
comes with feeling overwhelmed by the dangerous and unpredictable world.” We can
observe equally that the “wishful fantasy that the world be fair and rational … leaves
[people] all the more fragile and vulnerable.” An intimate of mine, who works for a large
corporation, was astonished to find mirrored in Fallenbaum's patients his own compulsive
need to tell his story repeatedly, to have his daily alienation validated by his analyst day
after boring, rageful, despairing day, his own need to have witness borne.

Keep on keepin' on.

References
Breuer, J. & Freud, S. (1893-1895), Studies on hysteria. Standard Edition, 2. London:
Hogarth Press, 1955. [→]

Daniel, J. H. (1995), Conference on The psychoanalytic century. New York University,

May 6.

Dimen, M. (1994), Money, love and hate: Contradiction and paradox in psychoanalysis.
Psychoanal. Dial., 4: 69-100. [→]

Ehrenreich, B. (1989), Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York:
Pantheon.

Ehrenreich, B. & Ehrenreich, J. (1979), The professional-managerial class. In: Between

Labor and Capital, ed. P. Walker. Boston: South End Press, pp. 5-45.

Foucault, M. (1976), The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. R. Hurley. New York:
Vintage, 1980.

Freud, S. (1897), Letter 69 to Wilhelm Fliess, September 21. Standard Edition, 1: 259-
260. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. [→]

Greenberg, J. (1992), Oedipus and Beyond: A Clinical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

Khan, M. M. R. (1979), Alienation in Perversions. New York: International Universities

Press.

Laing, R. D. (1959), The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. New
York: Pelican Books.

- 102 -

Marx, K. (1844), The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. Struik
(trans. J. M. Milligan). New York: International Publishers, 1980.
Meszaros, I. (1975), Marx's Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin Press.

Mitchell, S. A. (2001), Relationality. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Ollman, B. (1976), Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1975), Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis. New York: Basic

Books. [→]

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The Return of the Dissociated: Discussion

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

Psychoanalysis and politics intersect variously. Some psychoanalytic writings have

critiqued society, whereas others have applied socially critical insights about class and
race to illuminate transference-countertransference enactments and other clinical matters.
The hegemonic politics of psychoanalysis, less intentional but equally influential, define
maturity and mental health by idealizing of some psychological and behavioral traits and
some clinical stances (especially authoritarianism), and by demonizing of certain
categories of persons (notably nonheterosexuals and people of color), certain types of
practice (e.g., social work), and certain sorts of ideas (e.g., that clinical and theoretical
practices are political practices, too). One way to redress these problems is to reclaim the
marginal—homosexuality and queerness, affect's presence in politics, and the political in
the psychical (in which instance, the concept of multiple self-states may be useful). Any
such effort requires recognizing and articulating one's own subject-position, that is, one's
own class, race, gender, or sexual location.

That clinical and theoretical practices are also political practices may one day be a truism.
For now, let us ask how we have done politics in psychoanalysis. Certainly, we have used
our public and professional writings to critique society, culture, and the workings of
power. Recall, for starters, some works of Freud (1908, 1929) and Reich (1942). Fromm
(1941) used psychoanalytic and Marxist-flavored insight to reveal the roots of ordinary
life in malformed social institutions and shallow value systems. The work of

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Andrew Samuels (2000) continues this tradition, as do various feminist and queer
critiques.

We have also taken politics directly into the consulting room. We could start with the
sponsorship (from 1920 until the Holocaust put an end to all that) of clinics for poor and
impecunious people by Eitingin, Simmel, Aichorn, Hitschmann, Freud, A. Freud,
Deutsch, Reich, and others (Danto, 1998). In the later 20th century, we could think of the
followers of Saul Newton and Jane Pearce, even if their project went off the rails. More
recently, Neil Altman (1995, this issue) and Ronnie Lesser (1999) have used socially
critical insights about class and similar insights about race (along with Schachter and
Butts, 1968; Holmes, 1992; and Leary, 1995) to illuminate transference-
countertransference enactments and other clinical matters. Altman (this issue) does it in
his signature style, that is, a modest, courageously self-revealing presentation of
quotidian analytic pettiness that makes a very large point.
So far, I have cited the liberatory politics that I approve of. But there are also the
hegemonic politics of exclusion and silencing about which David Schwartz (1993, this
issue) writes. Russell Jacoby (1983) relates the awful U.S., post-Holocaust adventure of
progressive analysts—Otto Fenichel, Edith Jacobson, George Gero, Annie Reich,
Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm. Some of them kept striving for synthesis, but others—like
Fenichel—abandoned their politics under the pressure of U.S. anticommunism and a
medicalized and anti-intellectual U.S. psychoanalysis. Tacking a new tack, Altman (this
issue) puts the problem in terms of race: the psychoanalytic émigrés “sought (consciously
or unconsciously) to join the ranks of white Americans,” which meant adopting
Calvinism, aspiring to upward mobility, and ignoring their own racism, as well as (I
would add) their own sexism and homophobia.

In lived life, this abandonment took the form (at least for a while) of a kind of splitting, as
we hear in the earlier version of this story that Aiello (2002) tells. Her subject is the
experience of “American psychotherapists working in inner city mental health clinics
prior to World War I” (p. 3), who “were enormously influenced by the first English
translations of Freud” (p. 3). Caught between the demands of daily clinical life and the
demands of disciplinary authority, these workers came to practice in one mode—which
she argues led to contemporary relational theory—while thinking in another: classical
psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytically oriented case workers, she writes,

- 860 -

still struggle with this split. Certainly Altman (this issue) lets us know how hard it is for
him. Two desires conflict: the desire to recognize his patients' need for more sessions and
the desire to maintain himself and his family in the lifestyle to which he has become
accustomed. Consequently, like many of us, he finds himself not offering more sessions
at a price patients can afford but instead raising his prices and seeing individuals less
often than perhaps they might need or want.

Another way in which we have joined politics with psychoanalysis has been to do
political critiques of psychoanalysis itself. Schwartz (1993) has deconstructed
psychoanalytic heterophilia, a wonderful term he coined to designate homophobia's
enabling counterpart. Samuels (this issue), for example, targets psychoanalytic
authoritarianism: in his view, the world's lack of interest in what psychoanalysts have to
say isn't, properly speaking, an interpretable resistance—although I think it may be in fact
a political resistance to the cause he identifies: “Therapists so much want and need to be
right. (Me, too [he adds disarmingly]—this shadow issue is not one I've fully dealt
with.)”

As Samuels (this issue) points out, “Therapists want to reduce everything to the special
knowledge that they have.” We tend to see everything in individualistic terms. We treat
the world as though it were a patient, even if it has not requested therapy; after September
11, 2001, I even heard some analysts saying that politics were unimportant in the terrorist
attacks—that what was really wrong was the psychosis of the hijackers, bin Laden, and
everyone else in the Middle East. We analyze friends, acquaintances, and sales
associates. We teach classes as though they were therapy sessions. In a private
psychoanalytic madness, we conduct our intellectual and political debates as though
writing case reports for insurance companies.

We also serve as cultural police. Quite cleverly, Aiello (2002) characterizes how
psychoanalysis patrols its disciplinary borders: “Unfortunately, both clients and clinicians
in [social work] settings lacked representation in the symbolic register” (p. 4). In other
words, the everyday life problems that evoked advice, corrective emotional experiences,
and other active interventions never made it into the psychoanalytic symbolic. Nor did
the patients who suffered them or the therapists who ministered to them.

Talking about policing and borders brings us to the margins, a metaphor that I am
interested to find is used by all three essays. Schwartz (this issue) suggests that the view
from the sexual margins

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affords a special privilege. Samuels (this issue) in turn suggests that we utilize the
margins in a new sort of political-psychoanalytic theory. “There are … buried sources of
political wisdom in many people, particularly those who do not seem likely to function in
such a way.” Examples of such persons include “the rednecks and the racists, the
fundamentalists, and the number crunchers” (Samuels, 2002, personal communication).
For a new politics, let us reframe psychic marginalia—the secrets of ordinary life to
which psychoanalysis has special access—those of childhood (and here of course I think
of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization, 1955), of intimate relationships, of sexual and other
fantasies, of dreams, and of corporeality.

Altman (this issue), in turn, reminds us of the marginal, racialized origins of

psychoanalysis itself. The brainchild of Jews (who were, in fin de siècle Vienna, regarded
as black in an overwhelmingly white population), psychoanalysis saw from the margins
into the darkness of our hearts and favored (indeed, insisted) that the dark side had to be
inspected if we were to survive the civilization that necessitated it. “As a black thing in a
white society, psychoanalysis attained the power of the outsider to gain perspective on
critique, to see in the dark.” But, he goes on, “in becoming white in America,
psychoanalysis forfeited some of this night vision, most particularly with respect to our
own … (racial and class) position and the ways this process might be reflected in clinical
work.”

One marginal thing we are reclaiming is affect. Aiello (2002) is very concerned with the
problem of the negative therapeutic reaction that was seen so early on in clinical
encounters between workers and inner-city clients, and which baffled psychoanalysts.
Many approaches have been taken to this problem, then and now. But she suggests that
Antonio Gramsci's work on class might afford a political angle on the clinical problem.
Gramsci, Aiello says, held that “the poor could find solidarity in misery and the hatred
that misery breeds. This hatred is the first glimmer of consciousness, ‘the basic negative
polemical attitude’”(p. 12). She shows us how she used this insight in her work with an
abusive client.

As noted by Samuels (this issue), affect can be extraordinarily useful in bringing people
to their own political insights and in connecting persons whose politics might otherwise
seem at best unrelated and at worst antagonistic. Samuels cites how the huge bursts of
feeling over shared public events have had a role in democratizing the hitherto elitist
insight that the personal is political. Breaking a new path, he suggests that we situate
politics in personal, affectively tinged history.

- 862 -

Suppose we were to take an event like September 11 as an occasion to ask patients about
the first political event they recall, he suggests. What a good idea! What Samuels offers
us here is a way to locate politics in subjectivity, which I deem an enormous contribution.

Whoops; I hear the drumming of little hooves—watch out. The psychoanalytic police are
on the case. Would this be psychoanalytic? Why not? If we think that politics is as
routine a part of life as sex or money, why shouldn't we ask about it? Power is present in
the consulting room and in the psyche, isn't it? Um, we have theories of sadism and
masochism, and they're not only about sex. Some of us (Dimen, 1994) have written about
money and power in the clinical setting. So why shouldn't we ask about patients'
experiences of power? Who knows? Bringing the margin into the consulting room might
lead us right back to the heart of psychoanalysis, looking at, for example, the transference
in its power-drenched dimensions, not to mention the countertransference, not to mention
—to use Michelle Price's (1996) phrase—“the enactment of power and the power of
enactment.” Going through the experiences of personal and clinical hierarchies—that is,
of hegemony—might even in the end help someone, even the analyst, by opening
pathways to mutual transformation, as Samuels suggests.

Which could bring us to social transformation and our role in it. Again, I think that
Samuels opens our eyes here. Most particularly, I want to emphasize his approach to
diversity. I have been thinking lately, with some guilt, that perhaps there never is going to
be a single, universal solution to economic injustice, just as we may be thinking these
days that a single, universal solution to psychic suffering might cramp diversity. Using
Jungian theory, he characterizes varied political styles: extroversion, introversion,
thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition. So as we begin trying to work out “a
psychologically driven transformative politics,” Samuels (this issue) says, “let us not
make the mistake of insisting that everyone do it in precisely the same way.” His political
typology is amusing: “warrior, terrorist, exhibitionist, leader, activist, parent, follower,
child, martyr, victim, trickster, healer, analyst, negotiator, bridge builder, diplomat,
philosopher, mystic, ostrich.”

I wonder whether we could add to this list. When I first read it, I misread ostrich and
thought he'd written bitch, and then I thought, Why not? How about witch, as some early
feminists styled themselves, or bastard— not all political activists are personally lovely,
you know—or … well, you take it from there. But contextually speaking, each of us may
find many of these in ourselves. Your political style may depend on the political context
in which you find yourself. Bringing multiple

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self-states to politics had not really occurred to me before, which reminds me to point out
Altman's intimation that multiple self-states and dissociative process are concepts that
might well be used when thinking about patients' experiences of politics. His work with
Elena suggested, for example, that her experience of upward mobility entailed such a
multiplicity of states of mind.

For our own permanent revolution, I think we have a few suggestions and a few examples
of what to avoid. I think we need always to be aware of where we are standing—of our
own subject-position, to use the postmodernist lingo; of our own class, race, gender, or
sexual location, to use the older language. So when Schwartz uses the term we to signify
queers, I wonder whether he means that queerness is essentially wed to homosexuality or
whether, on second thought, he might agree with Eve Sedgwick's (1993) complex and
quirky notion that queer isn't about sex but about shame: “Queer … might usefully be
thought of as [groups or individuals] whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned
most durably to the note of shame” (p. 13). When Altman (this issue) rightly tells us
about what whites projectively identify onto blacks, he would add, on self-reflection,
what blacks project onto whites, remembering that African-Americans, too, are subjects.
Or when Aiello (2002, p. 16) tells us about the indignity and insults and lack of freedom
experienced by social workers' clients, she would specify the context, looking back: is
trust ever lacking absolutely and altogether in the families of the poor? Or does it only
seem so to the white professional outsider? Likewise, in hindsight, Samuels would try to
reconcile a certain contradiction in his stance. On one hand, rednecks are a source of
political wisdom. On the other, the transformative politics that he sees currently
emerging, in which political action and personal growth are interimplicative, “is not only
progressive and left leaning, but it can also be spotted in many right-wing and reactionary
movements.”

And, looking back, I would do whatever I need to do to correct the blind spot inherent in
my own subject-position. But I can do this only by retrospection and by hearing from
someone on my own margins. I am sympathetic to Altman's exhortation that we
remember history in order not to repeat it. But I would also have us remember what
Freud said about viewing the unconscious: you can only see it as though riding
backwards in a train and seeing what you see through the window just after you have
passed it. We are always embedded. There is no stance outside our own context from
which to uncover our own

- 864 -

truth. That is why we need the margins—why we need diversity, multiple perspectives
from which to understand and create ourselves.

References
Aiello, T. (2002), From the margins: The origin of some relational concepts in
psychoanalytic work in the inner city. Presented at IARPP Conference, January 20, New
York City.

Altman, N. (1995), The Analyst in the Inner City. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Danto,E. A. (1998), The ambulatorium: Freud's free clinic in Vienna. Int. J. Psycho-
Anal., 79: 287-300. [→]

Dimen, M. (1994), Money, love, and hate: Contradiction and paradox in psychoanalysis.
Psychoanal. Dial., 4: 69-100. [→]

Freud, S. (1908), “Civilized” sexual morality and modern nervous illness. Standard
Edition, 9: 181-204. London: Hogarth Press, 1959. [→]

Freud, S. (1929), Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition, 21: 64-145. London:
Hogarth Press, 1961. [→]

Fromm, E. (1941), Escape from Freedom. New York: H. Holt, 1994.

Holmes, D. E. (1992), Race and transference in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Int. J.

Psycho-Anal., 73: 1-11. [→]

Jacoby, R. (1983), The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political
Freudians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leary, K. (1995), Interpeting in the dark: Race and ethnicity in psychoanalytic

psychotherapy. Psychoanal. Psychol., 12: 127-140. [→]

Lesser, R. (1999), Introduction: In the shadow of Freud. In: That Obscure Subject of
Desire, ed. R. Lesser & E. Schoenberg. New York: Routledge.
Marcuse, H. (1955), Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press.

Price, M. (1996), The power of enactment and the enactment of power. Presented at
meeting of Division 39, American Psychological Association, April, New York.

Reich, W. (1942), The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. V. R. Carfagno. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.

Samuels, A. (2000), Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life. New York:
Other Press.

Schachter, J. & Butts, H. (1968), Transference and countertransference in interracial

analyses. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 16: 792-808. [→]

Schwartz, D. (1993), Heterophilia—The love that dare not speak its aim. Psychoanal.
Dial., 3: 643-652. [→]

Sedgwick, E. (1993), Queer performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel. GLQ, 1:
1-16.

- 865 -
Dark continents: Psychoanalysis and colonialism by Ranjana Khanna Durham, NC: Duke
U Press. 2003. 310 pp.

Review by: Muriel Dimen

Even though this book bears traces of the obscure syntax and language often favored by
academic postmodernism, still it has a lot to teach. It documents a cultural conversation
of which psychoanalysis in general was, early on, a critical part. Through its pages parade
150 years of socially engaged intellectual thought: Marx, Freud, Ferenczi and Gramsci;
Sartre, Mannoni, Memmi, Fanon, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, and de Beauvoir; Baldwin,
Malraux and Malcolm X; Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Spivak. Viewing colonialism
psychoanalytically, the book also ‘reads’ psychoanalysis historically. Poignantly, for
example, it retells Freud's

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life and thought in terms of the epochal shift from colonialism to postcolonialism.
Consider this:

The age of colonial travel and exploration [and the self-contained self] was that of Freud's
youth. That of his old age [and of the melancholic self] was the moment of Nazi
suppression. The future, to which he referred when writing [in ‘A comment on anti-
Semitism’] of his threatened children, would be that of the split and defensive ego, when
a nation-state would be unable to exist without rupture and beyond betrayal (p. 64).

The subtitle efficiently states the book's topics: the complex engagement, at once causal
and recursive, between psychoanalysis and colonialism as both are lived and studied.
Dark continents addresses psychoanalysis in four ways. It mines psychoanalytic ideas to
elucidate colonialism as a state of being or experience. It locates psychoanalytic theory in
the history of colonialism, contending that certain significant alterations in Freud's
thought have at least an unconscious political history. It argues that psychoanalytic theory
has served as not only therapeutic practice, but political resistance for anti-colonialist and
post colonial writers. And it attempts to use a particular psychoanalytic theory—Abraham
and Torok's (1994) notions of introjection, incorporation and demetaphorization—to
identify and explain the ambivalence haunting postcolonialism.

In addition to psychoanalytic matters, the book also takes up social issues like gender and
race, and classic debates, especially that between Marxian and Freudian traditions. The
title refers, of course, to Freud's famous caricature of women. Choosing a “both/and” as
opposed to an “either/or” approach, the book does not stop with indictment. Rather, it
puts the bias it observes to intellectual work. ‘Dark continents’, a dismissive and
incendiary phrase, also evokes the book's problematic, the colonial context in whose
heyday psychoanalysis came to be. Denoting Africa, but connoting the entire colonized
world, the phrase subtly if unintentionally manifests a (white) racism so taken for granted
that to mention it is to risk discredit for political stridency. In this regard, the book
engages a number of subtexts: (1) a series of intellectual debates about mind and society,
thought and action, situated in, and indeed originating in, France and its colonies, and
giving rise to contemporary academic discourse around the world; (2) the Marx-Freud
problem, which entails (a) praxis, or the living of theory, and the intellectual's
responsibility to activist politics; and (b) the intellectual challenge posed by gender and
race to the primacy of class analysis; (3) the place of feminism and postcolonial theory;
(4) the role of affect in theory and history; and (5) the tension, in theory, in practice and,
for intellectuals personally and professionally, between universal/singular and
local/particular.

The book's basic intellectual context is the elusive ‘Marx-Freud synthesis’. In different
ways, says the author (p. xii), Marx and Freud opened new continents. ‘Founders of
discursivity’ (as Foucault called them (Rabinow, 1984)), their systems of thought and
action are founts to which we return repeatedly. Even though their maps have altered
because of creative encounters between theory and practice (and will continue to do so),
nevertheless their oeuvres revolutionized forever how we understand and how we live
society and mind. The comparable impact of Marxism and psychoanalysis has piqued
scholars and activists to try to use both at once,

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to ask how or whether we can understand mind and society, the mental and the material,
in the same terms.

Although the Holy Grail of synthesis might serve better as a vanishing point than a
realizable goal, still this knotty problem has occupied generations of activists and
theorists (e.g. Gramsci, 1929-37; Althusser, 1971; Bourdieu, 1977; Foucault, 1976;
Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Žižek, 1989). The dilemma faced by all is to juxtapose these
world-historical systems without reducing one to the other. Most importantly, the task, or
trick, is to keep in focus the genuine object of interest—human experience—without
concretizing or demetaphorizing it. Khanna (p. 134) describes Memmi's view: a
postcolonial thinker steeped in Freud and Marx, he cautioned that neither Marxism nor
psychoanalysis should preempt lived experience by reifying its complexity and pain to
either ‘profit motive or Oedipus complex’. Walking the line between theory and lived
experience, Khanna argues against the academy's nearly exclusive reliance on Lacanian
thought, which, although quite potent in linking mind and culture, goes limp when history
enters the picture. This insight is not new: Fanon, a Lacanian himself, insisted that
psychoanalysis include the historical, the economic, even the biological (skin color),
which are not generated by subjectivity but are instead its causes (p. 186).

Seen through a Heideggerian lens, psychoanalysis is, Khanna proposes, a form of

‘worlding’ (p. 3). Although worlding initially denotes the creation of art, and the violence
it entails, here it describes an intellectual system. As construed by Louis Althusser (a
structuralist Marxist analyzed by Lacan), psychoanalysis birthed a way of being: it is less
a way to generate new information than a new conceptual apparatus in the world. As
such, psychoanalysis not only can but, in fact, should be historicized, that is, understood
as a product of, ingredient in and shaper of the world into which it emerges and which it
both maintains and revolutionizes. Khanna historicizes psychoanalysis by
‘parochializing’: ‘provincialized’ as a colonial discipline, its specificity is, she convinces,
sharpened and its power to illuminate postcolonial dilemmas enhanced.

In Dark continents, then, psychoanalysis is both object of inquiry and mode of analysis.
This methodological move coheres with much academic postmodernist and postcolonial
theory, which, like feminist, queer and cultural studies, has drawn on psychoanalysis,
Lacanian style, to illuminate its objects of study. But Khanna gives the plot another turn.
It has become an intellectual and political commonplace to contrast psychoanalysis'
world role with that of Marxism. Historically, Marxism has guided anti-colonialist
struggles and independence. Psychoanalysis has served as its foil, merely a Western
luxury for the capitalist imperialism's epitome, the bourgeoisie, but irrelevant to the rest
of humanity's struggles and mentality.

Well, not exactly, says Khanna, pressing the bewilderment also infusing Freud's slur into
political and intellectual service. On the one hand, psychoanalysis (like other ‘master
narratives of European modernity’) did indeed inflict ‘colonial trauma’. Its weapon was
not physical force but ‘epistemic violence’, or the politics of colonial psychocultural
relations. Claiming universality, its concept of self, for example, ruptures and rearranges
dominant local, cultural self-representations (p. xi); the new continent Freud opened was
‘the science of the Western self in its relation to modern

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nation-statehood, even as a “dark continent” lay within its realms’ (p. 53). This self—de
facto, a specifically European self (for what else could it be?)—is defined against
colonial difference figured as primitive, sexual, feminine (‘dark continent’), a self at
home with the Oceanic feeling and polymorphousness (p. 53). Into that Other, the
colonized, are deposited by psychoanalysis all those differences that would challenge the
adult, sane self's intelligibility, all that (darkness) which Freud (1905, p. 229) said
countermanded the needs of the species, civilization and sanity. ‘The national self in
Europe is structured in psychoanalysis as a modern counterpart of the primitive
colonized’ (p. 6). Seen together, these seeming psychic polarities speak the unspeakable,
paradoxical product of this dissociative construction of the Western self: ‘the impossible
achievement of selfhood for the colonized’ and the precariousness of a self, founded on
psychopolitical rupture, revealed by decolonization (p. 6).

On the other hand, and this is a very important message sent by Dark continents to the
academy, psychoanalysis’ contributions to the understanding of certain postcolonialist
dilemmas are and remain significant. The first part of the book having contextualized
psychoanalysis in culture and history, the second part details how, after the First World
War, certain thinkers engaged colonial and anti-colonial politics by working their way
through and around Marxism, psychoanalysis and existentialism. Examining Sartre's
quarrel with psychoanalysis, Khanna also scrutinizes in particular Memmi (Tunisia), and
psychiatrists Mannoni (Madagascar) and Fanon (Martinique), as they draw on, debate
and ‘rescript’ psychoanalysis (and, by the way, each other). In their hands,
psychoanalysis serves to illuminate the mental life of colonizer as well as colonized, their
relationship as well as their history and their futures, their slavery and their freedom and
their ambivalence too.

At its most general, Dark continents is about affect in relation to the trauma of
colonialism and its interpretation. Traumatizing, colonialism necessarily entails
unmourned and unmournable losses. What the colonized must and cannot mourn is their
representation as first-class citizens, their intelligibility tout court. Colonists, and
colonizing entities like psychoanalysis, are likewise haunted by melancholy. Khanna
theorizes a recursiveness between the histories of colonialism and psychoanalysis,
between conceptions of the nation and the self. She proposes a ‘secret embedded in
nation-state formation:’ the idea of the nation-state is not an eternal, free-standing entity.
Rather, the nat
Power and Shame: Reply to Mark Blechner and to Ruth Stein

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

I touch briefly on my own experience of shame as triggered by what my discussants have

written. I look at how shame and power interact in psychoanalytic discourse, examine
their play in relation to questions of aggression and activity, and refer as well to what I
am calling “an ethics of relativism.” Cautioning against uncritical binary thinking, I
conclude that, if we forget the intimacy of good and bad, we are going to write
jouissance, that site of extremity and transcendence where pain and pleasure are
indistinguishable, right out of our sexual lives. And, if we do that, we are once again
going to write sexuality out of psychoanalysis.

By Eew! Factor, I want to indicate abjection's ordinary infusion of anxiety into sexual
life. I use it in a doubled project: to destigmatize sexual variety and to defamiliarize
sexual countertransference anxiety, which, habitual, routine, and taken for granted, often
eludes scrutiny. My project is party to the rescue of sexuality from its odd exile (Green,
1996; Stein, 1998; Dimen, 2003), a recuperation contextualized by the upheaval in
psychoanalysis: the relational turn. As the ground shifts, many other old issues turn up for
reexamination, several of which pertain here: shame, power, and psychoanalysis;
aggression; the analyst's activity; and clinical narrative.

- 47 -

Given that my own effort is clinical and political, not to mention personal, I was startled
to see how easily stigma and anxiety can be reinvigorated. In replying to my able
discussants, I touch briefly on my own experience of shame as triggered by what they
have written. I take a look how shame and power interact in psychoanalytic discourse,
examine their play in relation to questions of aggression and activity, and refer as well to
what I am calling “an ethics of relativism.”

Relativism carries both a particular importance and a particular charge, especially when it
comes to gender and sexuality. Its psychoanalytic sources are at least two. On one hand,
the interpersonal standpoint, construing analysts as persons whose character, history, and
style are as unique and present as patients', articulates a difference that must be taken into
account in clinical and theoretical practice. On the other, psychoanalysis' belated
welcome of social critique and intellectual currents, especially feminist, postmodernist,
and queer theory, has piqued interest in its own cultural circuitry. This recognition of
relative values has freed clinicians by providing a vantage from which to check their
biases. But, sailing in on the sexual tide, relativism has also disconcerted analysts. It has
brought an ambivalence that, difficult to narrate, needs more airing (see Mitchell's, 1996,
exploration and manifestation of it).
One site at which shame, power, and relativism meet is the ubiquitous and ambiguous
binary “good-bad.” This particular dualism merits a lot of attention. Even if one
consciously does not think or utter those words about what a patient says, does, thinks, or
feels—and one often does use them (a patient begins to develop an observing ego and we
say, encouragingly, “Good!”)—nevertheless they hang around the consulting room, their
preconscious, deeply cultural meaning never quite noticed, much less plumbed. Ruth
Stein writes, “viewed from my emphasis on the ‘otherness’ of sexuality, the ‘Eew’ Factor
is a kind of ‘bad’ otherness.” Stein does not name a “good” otherness as such. But, since
each term of a binary always evokes its opposite number, it is fair to infer that some not-
bad, good (better?) sort of otherness exists in her text.

- 48 -

Stein comes to bad otherness from her own theory of the sort of otherness (the good
otherness?) that entails the sustained and evolving mutual recognition of another's
subjectivity and creates embodiment out of bodies, arousal out of exploitation,
intersubjectivity out of objectification. She contrasts embodied sex with “obscene” sex:
“The obscene is the display of the sexual act in such a way as to threaten or ridicule its
unique, individualizing aspect.” In contrast to obscene (bad?) sex is that in which unique
individuality (note, by the way, the interesting evocation and echo of interpersonal
psychoanalysis; see Wolstein, 1975), is respected, the sort in which, as Stein put it, the
body is married to “its spirituality, … its interpersonal intentionality.” Good sex?

Perhaps “the Ick Factor”—as it has been dubbed in the media for a couple of years now
—derives from depersonalized, desubjectified sexuality (or fantasies of it). But invoking
the good-bad binary to characterize the Eew! Factor may create more problems than it
solves, a likelihood Stein seems to register by the scare quotes in which she encloses
“bad.” Typography, however, ought not obscure the discursive dilemma activated by the
good-bad binary, which belongs to a “vicious rhetorical cycle” (Ross, 1994, p. 19) in
which several binaries trigger each other as though in a hall of mirrors: good-bad willy-
nilly evokes and equates with right-wrong, natural-unnatural, well-ill, sane-insane,
success-failure, and so on.

The good-bad dualism is also implicated in psychoanalytic writing and clinical discourse.
It seems to promise a satisfying therapeutic story: through treatment one can move from
bad to good, as from “bad” to “good” otherness, which is to say, from illness to health.
Erased from such a linear narrative, however, are all the other binaries haunting it:
moving from bad to good and ill to well, one also moves from the stigmatized regions of
the unnatural, the wrong, and the mad, to the sacred precincts of the natural, the right, and
the sane. Absent awareness of this cycle, one drifts unreflectively across disciplinary
borders, particularly the moral and the clinical (whose constructedness and permeability
are demonstrated by this cycling).
- 49 -

There are other problems. Not only does this mélange camouflage clinical judgment's
inevitable cultural anatomy. It also affords no reflection on how the fungibility of
diagnostic and moral categories inescapably informs experience. Consider how
commonly “I feel bad” dissolves into “I am bad.” An aphorism attributed to Winnicott
addresses this problem in part: “Better bad than mad.”1 But, this saying does not attend
to the discursive underpinnings of badness/madness. How and at what point does pain
turn into misconduct, even evil, and vice versa? Especially when contemplating sexual
variation, it is easy to interimplicate the criminal and the pathological: often when I have
spoken about destigmatizing perversion (see Dimen, 2001b), the first response is a
question like, “What about pedophilia?” However important its topic, such a query's
knee-jerkiness suggests an anxiety born of untheorized participation in regulatory
practice.

Is “bad” otherness the kind of otherness where you feel bad or the kind of Otherness that
is wrong? My syntax—“you feel” versus “that is”—poses a problem: if feeling bad and
being wrong interpenetrate, then there is a relation between one's state of mind (not to
mention relatedness and intimacy) and ex cathedra edicts about what is good and right
and acceptable, bad and wrong and illicit. At this juncture, the experiential and the moral
meet, nosology encounters morality, and ethical questions pop. Clinicians work in this
juncture daily: in judging psychic suffering, they find themselves evaluating character. So
do analysts who write about their work: in dissecting sexuality, they somehow begin to
label some things—qualities, interventions, analytic techniques—good and others, bad;
the same holds even when the topic is not as hot as sexuality.

Mark Blechner writes of the shame, the feeling bad, attendant on being or doing the
bad/wrong kind of sex. On the basis of this familiar stigmatization, he argues, gay people,
especially therapists, [should] develop an ethic of tolerance for sexual idiosyncrasy: “Gay
therapists, then, may learn to mentalize their sexual disgust more readily than most
straight people do.” Or

—————————————

1 Having been unable to locate a reference for this aphorism of Winnicott's, I would be
grateful for any information about its source.

- 50 -

they may not. We need to be careful about idealizing oppression, that is, deploying the
good-bad binary on behalf of emancipatory politics. Is sexual, or any other, oppression
necessarily morally or psychically liberating? Much evidence, not to mention much
theory (see Reich, 1942; Adorno et al., 1950; Grier and Cobbs, 1968; Benjamin, 1988),
indicates that domination may lead not to psychic freedom or moral superiority, but to
psychic suffering and social difficulty. Whether we are talking about the psychic
dimensions of classism, racism, or sexism, domination deforms and depresses, as much
as it inspires revolt.

However, Blechner's advice, that one mentalize one's abjection, is a powerful clinical
suggestion that operationalizes a relativist ethics, for it provides some leverage on one's
affective response. Thus, one way to defamiliarize sexual-countertransference anxiety
might be to think about one's disgust, rather than simply reacting to the disturbing feeling
with the anxiety that is produced by repressing or dissociating an unwelcome affect or
thought. Relativism can, in other words, keep at bay the shaming power of sexual
normativity, that is, the power to name what is good and bad, healthy and ill, right and
wrong, (see Dimen, 1995, 2001b). “We can,” writes Blechner, “look at disgust reactions,
our own and other people's, and recognize how arbitrary, personal, and defensive those
reactions can be.” Recall here the concluding anecdote of my article, my friend's
indifference to the Eew! Factor as a site of abjection: relativism gives equal weight to all
versions of (sexual) desire, all responses to it, all preferences of person and practice.

The paradox, of course, is that relativist ethics possess their own power to shame. In
exemplifying this point, I draw on another of Stein's (2003) essays. Published online with
discussions and an interchange between author, discussants, and audience, her paper
takes up the topic of perversion; it recognizes but temporarily sets aside the term's
controversial status as culturally informed and politically active. Some of the discussions
responding to that paper, including mine (2003), suggest the inextricability of political
and cultural considerations from theoretical and clinical issues. At one point in the
general debate, Stein requests that political and clinical

- 51 -

discussions of her work be separated, and her language is telling of relativism's shaming
power:

I also hope (what ambition!) for us to go further into the political-ideological, but couldn't
we do it after we listen more to the clinical? Of course, this would make sense only if you
don't think my work was influenced to a disturbing degree (of course it was: how could it
not? We're all contaminated) by normative ideology [Stein, 2003, italics added].

Disturbing. Contaminated. When such affect-drenched language appears, one needs to sit
up and take notice.

Surely, if we speak of and feel contamination, we are in the realm of pollution (Douglas,
1970). Whence the need for purity in the clinical and the political, in cultural discourse?
The appearance of purity and pollution signals shame's disciplinary power, as well as
aggression's jab. Not only does sexuality inevitably bring us to shame's unconscious
vicissitudes. It situates us squarely in the center of its political deployment, its use in
regimes of power. Shame operates as a regulatory emotion, a containment of excitement
with defensive, constructive, and destructive manifestations, as Stein (1997) points out.
As such, shame is also ineluctably implicated in the political process. It facilitates
civilization in Freud's (1930) sense; for example, the disgust for feces and for the
genitalia (putatively attendant on Homo sapiens' upright posture) grounds the cleanliness
and orderliness necessary for a child's sublimatory process. Disgust surely has its
corollary in the shame that surfaces when feces and the sexual body (are about to) make
unanticipated, culturally inappropriate appearances in childhood and maturity alike.

Shame also seeds biopower in Foucault's (1976) sense. The “technology of health and
pathology” arising in the post-17th century West takes bodies, hearts, and minds as its
object of control and source of power. Biopower, which “is distinguished from other
forms of power by the concrete and precise character of its knowledge of human bodies”
(Flax, 1990, p. 208), both materializes and regulates sexuality by establishing a central,
single narrative of healthy sexuality. Diversity of thought and

- 52 -

desire, the uncontrollable slipping of signifier under signified theorized by Lacan's (1988)
notion of the Symbolic, is stigmatized and thereby erased by the regime of the phallus,
the political manipulation of unconscious shame. Thus homosexuality has been the
unequal if also the coconstructive partner of heterosexuality. Hence the Ick Factor, “the
revulsion some heterosexuals feel about homosexual acts” (Thomas, 2003, p. 40), and its
power to stand for the revulsion everyone feels at some time or other about sexuality
altogether (Bersani, 1988).

The imbrication of shame and power renders their deconstruction critical for
psychoanalysis. Since psychoanalysts cannot eliminate experiences of shame, can we at
least reflect on our own use of them? Shame circulates in the consulting room, as we all
know. “The Eew! Factor” tells some stories of it, and Stein's (1997) work on this matter
is a profound beginning; she writes of four varieties of shame and how they might be
used clinically. But shame also loiters in the seminar room. There is always the risk,
when presenting clinical material, of feeling bad about yourself and wondering if you are,
in fact, bad because you (may) have done something wrong. Reading my discussants'
remarks, I had unexpected experiences of shame. Let me recount two moments when a
feeling of doing wrong, being wrong, and feeling bad about this wrongness overtook me.

What was wrong with me? I found myself wondering as I read Blechner's critique. How
come I had not relativized Mitchell's notion of the intersubjectivity of affects? How could
I forget myself that way? “Well, yes,” Blechner agrees, you can't always “tell who started
it.” But sometimes, he demurs, you can, because “sometimes strong sexual attraction and
those other affects are not so mutual and intersubjective. Sometimes one person has a
strong reaction not shared by the other, and that is a situation that has led many clinical
treatments to go awry. The psychoanalytic history of so-called treatments of
homosexuality is filled with those horror stories.” How stupid can you be (especially
when you yourself—and who hasn't—have had similar experiences, whether in treatment
or personal life)? Or so I ask myself.

How can you forget, come to think of it, “The Confusion of Tongues” (Ferenczi, 1933),
which argues that, when it comes to

- 53 -

adults and children, there is, in fact, a way to tell who started it or, at least, who should
stop it? Here indeed is a meeting of the moral and the clinical: children and adults,
contends Ferenczi, speak different tongues. But, although these languages may seem
alike, adults can recognize their differences and children cannot. Healthy adults will act
on their responsibility; pathological adults, on their mistranslation. That there is a child in
every adult, especially when our affective and sexual self-states are at the forefront, calls
for more deconstruction of this query, “Who started it?” whether we are talking about
analyst and patient or lover and lover.

In the second instance of my feeling shame upon reading my colleagues' responses to my

thoughts, I wondered instantly about my cowardice as well as my clinical ineptitude.
Speaking of sexuality as inevitably entailing transgression of boundaries, Stein writes:
“Perhaps Dimen should have crossed them, too, but, then perhaps she did not go far
enough in pursuing that knowledge.” Although I am taking Stein to mean that I did
transgress and should have done so (even if her wording might suggest that I did not but
ought to have done), I worried, when I read her remarks, about not having gone “far
enough.” Falling short, once again? Failing to pursue knowledge because of my
inadequate skills or personal shortcomings?

Given that this treatment was over a long time ago, I struggle helplessly with (a) trying to
figure out if I did anything wrong; (b) if I did, trying to imagine how I might have
corrected it (the classic psychoanalytic “what-if” or “if only” scenario); (c) talking myself
out of my feeling of having done the wrong thing and therefore being a bad analyst
(noting, once again, the fungibility of wrong and bad here); and (d) reminding myself of
the treatment's good points. No doubt I am wrestling with a perhaps not unfamiliar need
to be the perfect analyst instead of the good-enough one. But pushing us away from the
latter and toward the former are the forces emergent in the intersection of shame and
power.

In these two moments, as well as others, I sensed myself to be, as Stein puts it, “that
object which the other [was] looking at and judging, … not free to be whoever I want[ed]
to be.”
- 54 -

Curiously, I did not have this feeling when Stein and I spoke in public, and, until writing
the final draft of this reply, did not know why. An important dimension of shame is the
disparity between your presentation of self (Goffman, 1964) in writing, or in life, and the
perception others have of you: you are not seen as you wish to be seen because,
inevitably, you reveal that which you did not intend to disclose (I draw here on
Levenson's, 1996, distinction between self-disclosure as volitional and self-revelation as
out of one's hands). At the moment when such shaming happens, you feel at risk,
vulnerable to harm, even attacked. Bad (in both or all senses of the term), you feel your
goodness, value, acceptability impugned, on the verge of exile from the professional and
moral communities, whose distinction has begun to fade. You feel policed. Defending
against this danger, you are tempted to hold back, smooth out, sanitize, lie about the
necessary messiness of the clinical encounter, especially when sexuality shows up.

When you are shamed, you are caught in a good-bad dyad in which your accusing other
is good and you are bad. Reading my discussants, I entered that oppositional space
without a Third to break the impasse of complementarity (Benjamin, 2001) between the
good them and the bad me. But when I spoke before an audience, that Third was there:
whatever my listeners actually thought about what I was saying, I could unconsciously
use it as a Third to neutralize the toxic opposition that otherwise emanates from binary
thinking. Alone in the privacy of my study, however, I felt caught as that naked object
evoked by Stein, petrified, deanimated, without thought. What enabled me to begin
writing myself out of abjection was, finally, a different Third: my editor's critique and
challenge of my first draft set the fires going that thawed my mind.

And so I could begin to wonder about feeling (a)shamed that, for example, I had not gone
“far enough.” How far is far enough? Far enough for what? What is the destination where
I am—where, clinicians are—meant to go? The answers to these questions depend on a
narrative of treatment, implicit in which is a narrative of mental health and illness and
therefore of goodness and badness, rightness and wrongness, and so on. Implicit too

- 55 -

is a technical narrative of good treatment, good and bad speech, good and bad analytic
activity. Narratives conventionally turn chaos into order; they have a beginning, a middle,
an end. Had I gone far enough, would I have ended with a neat narrative, a satisfactory
account—the patient got better, got a good job, stopped his addictions, got married, had
children, and so on and so forth?

Larger questions are at stake here. What happens when a treatment is over? If termination
is truly the end of your relationship with a patient, you cannot know how your patient's
life will turn out. What you deem a success may be a failure, or vice versa: the person I
treated in my very first control case returned many years later to tell me I had saved his
life. You could have fooled me; I thought I had done a terrible job. Now you can blame
my lack of clinical acuity or experience here. Or you can recognize that you may never
know the end of the clinical story. Can a life, let alone a treatment, be incorporated in a
satisfying narrative? Perhaps life and therapy, like desire, are rarely complete, as likely to
fall short as to reach the goal— whatever that might be, for it is part of our classical as
well as of contemporary canon that the goals of treatment will and must change in the
course of treatment. Otherwise Freud (1905a) would never have had to say to Dora that
what they were going to do was to replace her hysterical misery with ordinary
unhappiness.

In this period of upheaval, the wisest route is a radically cautious one: sustain paradox.
By presenting expired cases with uncertain outcomes, I want to activate that state of mind
—a transitional, both blissful and disturbing, space—that is a principal in sexual
experience. This self-state, where contraries hold, has proved fruitful in much
contemporary psychoanalytic endeavor. It can, I propose, be used for the problem of
psychoanalysis and paradox. Although you can discuss the clinical and the political
separately—they are not the same, psychoanalysis being of this earthly plane—you
cannot imagine them separately, just as you cannot imagine power structures without the
emotions they run on (Reich, 1942; see also Dimen, 1994).

- 56 -

You need to hold the analytical and the political in tension. Such containment might help
us with another crucial project: figuring out how self-reflection can proceed without
morphing into policing. A critical position on policing would be valuable, but its near-
identity with self-policing makes it difficult to achieve and maintain, and not only
because the panopticon (Foucault, 1976) is everywhere. If we become subjects in relation
(Harris, 2005), we also arguably become subjects of ourselves by becoming subject to
something else. One's subjectivity emerges out of one's subjection to the discursive
construction of people as subjects. This process, dubbed “interpellation” in Althusser's
(1971) Lacanian construction, precedes our arrival on this plane: what prospective parent
has not thought of the fetus as a person, a self, a subject-to-be? You are a subject (and an
intersubject), and all that is thereby implied, before you know it.

Can we sustain paradox when it comes to good and bad? Because psychoanalysis inhabits
and in a certain way exemplifies the regime of biopower, concepts like “bad” and “good”
must, as Katie Gentile (2003) says of “perversion,” “be vigilantly ‘troubled.’” Awareness
of our conscious and subtextual use of good and bad is vital so that we may explore them
as we would any other piece of countertransference. How do they resonate, synergize,
and snarl with our patients' experiences of them and their cycling through all the other
moral and psychological and political binaries? When are we participating in
normativity? Do we want to? If so, why? Why not? These questions begin to sound like
those we were always asked on essay tests. But we were asked them by the authorities
authorizing us for good reason: they helped us think. If we do not trouble these
ambiguities, we will, pulled by the power of each binary term to call up its opposite, wind
up saying the opposite of what we intended.

I think this snarl is in part what turns up in Stein's argument. In keeping with her earlier
work (e.g., 1998), Stein congratulates me on “turning to the ‘less nice,’ ‘less friendly,’
‘other,’ ‘dark’ sides of sexuality, … aspects … missing from American and particularly
relational psychoanalysis until recently.” How do we bring darkness into relationality?
By sustaining paradox,

- 57 -

by neither seeking nor expecting a coherent, linear narrative. How else might we
appreciate that the aggression of sexual attraction can, must, and does go haywire,
penetrating then withdrawing, flaming then icing, skittering from here to there, inciting
desire, love, then hate, taking then repudiating life (Corbett, 2004, personal
communication)

But, insofar as paradox dissipates and darkness is traded in for light, Stein's commentary
works against itself. As we have seen, what we might call relational sex, in which
interpersonality, spirituality, and mutual recognition hold sway, seems to triumph. These
assuredly nice, friendly qualities accord with cultural values prevalent since the middle of
the last century. At the beginning of the last century, sexuality was construed as amoral,
wild self-gratification that had to be repressed and sublimated in the service of
civilization. By the 20th century's end, sex had become a site of mutuality, mutual
gratification, mutual orgasm, mutual recognition of the other's needs and desires. If
sacrifice was required, it was in the service of relationship, of being a mensch.
Menschliche sexualität?

Now don't get me wrong. Mutuality is a good thing. But I can't help recalling that, in
Freud's (1905b, 1908, 1930) thinking, sex was dark and dirty, a necessary and deeply
pleasurable evil perhaps, but neither good nor bad; rather, it was a good that was bad.
Now there is good sex versus bad sex, even in psychoanalysis. I notice an odd conversion
of two-person psychology, mutuality, nice sex, and classic femininity. In her contribution
to an online discussion of perversion, Gentile (2003) identified a discourse in which a
hidden interpersonal version of mental health, conventionally if tacitly associated with
women, mothering, and care of the other, was being “held up as an opposite and healthier
form of relational subjectivity that is absent in … perverse forms of relating.” So here we
are, once again, presented with a sexual ideal. Instead of penis-in-vagina orgasm
eventuating in procreation, however, the new really good kind of sexuality is to ensure
that no one is objectified, everyone's subjectivity is recognized, and mutuality rules the
day that aggression never darkens.
I wonder, then, where the aggression is. Certainly it is present in the interpellative
process. Certainly it is active in the

- 58 -

experiences of being policed and of self-policing. My clinical anxiety—did I do the

wrong thing?—was as much about my fear of being found out for clinical errors as about
my concern that I had harmed my patients. But, in my anxiety that I damaged those
trusting in my tender and respectful care, I also began to feel like a criminal. I wonder if
this sequence of feelings—anxiety, fear, shame, guilt—is more general. Perhaps the
alacrity with which it springs to life when questions of sexual self-disclosure pop up is
symptomatic of a countertransferential and cultural problem. The disciplinary
deployment of these feelings of fear and blame, of shame and criminality, of badness,
may be one factor that terrorized the second and third generations of analysts and
rendered them so rigid as to be ludicrous. I think of one analyst who, when his patient
came back from maternity leave to announce proudly “I had my baby!” interpreted, “And
now you have your penis!” (Wisely recognizing the aggression, the patient left a few
months later.)

Perhaps it is time to reclaim not only sexuality but also Freudian messiness and mistakes,
the disorder of the ordinary clinical hour. As a two-person psychology has become more
familiar in the psychoanalytic world, this chaos has become increasingly tolerated. Yes,
we still treasure those deft interpretations that wrap everything up, but we also now value
enactment's destructive-creative capacity to open everything up (and thereby can make
hay out of psychoanalysis' most powerful contradiction, its two principles of mental
freedom (Benjamin, 1998). The clinical setting being a site of intersubjectivity, as well as
of mutual and self-policing, analysts' actions and self-disclosure are vital and powerful
but also ungovernable, not neat at all.

At the same time, it may be opportune to continue revisiting the problem of analytic
authority. As custom has democratized the consulting room, recent work (e.g., Renik,
1998) has interrogated the classical authoritarianism of the omniscient doctor treating his
supine patient (see also, e.g., Gallop, 1982). This necessary challenge to authoritarianism
also, however, requires a reconsideration of analytic authority. It might be useful to take
another look at Sullivan's (1954) notion of the analyst as expert (pp. 11-13, 28-36, 66-
67), if only to help us

- 59 -

address, as a community, the expert's doubled, ambiguous power to inflict terrible harm,
as well as to do good.
Subtlety and irony constitute psychoanalysis' strong suit: to wit, Blechner's insight that
Eew! lives right next to Wow!, and, I would add, to Ick! and Ooh! Excitement and
disgust, fascination and horror, pleasure and shame, pleasure and pain—these are
intimate strangers (and don't forget Kernberg's, 1995, recommendation, which admits
aggression into the sanctum of sanity, that good marital sex includes exploitative
moments when one uses the other “as a pure sexual object”). Let us remark here also on
the finesse of Stein's formulation that our entry into good sex/otherness renders us
vulnerable to bad sex/otherness: “When we admit our need, we abnegate our privacy by
overcoming our shame, and we expose ourselves to the possibility of being negated and
perceived as obscene.” What a beautiful formulation of the disturbance of sex (Dimen,
2001a), not to mention of collegial intercourse. But reliance on binary categories, like
good-bad, cuts the power of such delicate and ironic insight. If we forget the intimacy of
good and bad, we are going to write jouissance, that site of extremity and transcendence
where pain and pleasure are indistinguishable (Dean, 2001, p. 271), right out of our
sexual lives. And if we do that, we are once again going to write sexuality out of
psychoanalysis.

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Sexuality and Suffering, Or the Eew! Factor

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D.

The ubiquitous Eew! Factor—an excited disgust—is layered. Its tangled experiential and
constitutive dimensions unfold when the Eew! Factor is examined through the lens of
sexual countertransference; sexual countertransference through affect, abjection, and
intersubjectivity; and sex itself through all of them. Taking the perspective that sex is
neither psychic bedrock nor diagnostic sign, this essay examines three expired, not
entirely successful, cases in which this sexual disturbance, which all clinicians, like as not
have experienced at one time or another, appeared. Receiving particular attention are
matters of transference-countertransference lust and erotic unknowing; racism in the
clinical setting; and shame, embarrassment, and humiliation in relation to gender and
sexuality.

Writing about sex wobbles drunkenly among the celebratory, the didactic, and the
disciplinary. Here is a darker path: the “Eew! Factor,”1 that sexual moment when you go,
“Eew! that's disgusting!” The Eew! Factor is relative. Maybe yours has never

-1-

been about sex at all. But like as not each clinician has felt this sexual disturbance—an
excited disgust—at some time or another, which is this paper might be subtitled not “the
clinician's sexual unease,” but clinicians' sexual unease.

Sex and Affect

Although the disturbance of sex has many histories and manifestations, here I stress
affect's role. The affects around sex make it difficult to think about. So when examining
sex, it helps to weave theory and feeling together by splicing theoretical and
philosophical reflections with clinical retrospection. The interleaved experiential and
constitutive dimensions of the Eew! Factor's manifold and mingled aspects unfold when
examined through the lens of sexual countertransference; sexual countertransference
through affect, abjection, and intersubjectivity; and sex itself through all of them.

As I reexamine the three clinical moments I describe here, I ask your indulgence or,
rather, effort. Please don't supervise these expired, not exactly successful, cases.
Although I cannot control how you read, I hope that these cases do what I intend: spark
discussion so the unspeakable can enter public discourse. My perspective is relational:
neither psychic bedrock nor diagnostic sign, sex can be treated like any other clinical
matter. “Sexual countertransference” designates any given clinician's responses to
sexuality, including but not limited to, the desire marking erotic countertransference.

“Sex is a beautiful thing,” soberly taught my parents—or, at least, my mother. Except it

isn't—always. Donald Jones (1995) attributes to sex three different affects: excitement,
enjoyment, and contentment, usually in that order. Missing, however, are anxiety,
uneasiness, the Eew! Factor, dread—which is a little like anatomizing marriage without
dissecting divorce.

Remember The Joy of Sex, whose author, the oddly but aptly named Alex Comfort
(1972), might have penned instead The Discomforts of Sex, whose existence occasions,
after all, his book's long life, Dr. Ruth's fame, and the success of David Reuben's (1969)
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. The 60s-
70s sexual revolution contextualizing

-2-

these media events emerged from the prudish 50s' naughty underside, itself a response to
the sexual break-out of the 20s and 30s. But the Eew! Factor!1 lived on.

In countertransference, the affects accompanying sex tend to disturb. Charles Spezzano

(1993) criticized a clinician who wrote about having interpreted as sexual his patient's
experience of a haircut. But nothing that the patient said, complained Spezzano, allowed
that interpretation. Apart from theoretical premises, the clinician had to have had feeling:
his subjective experience, whatever its transference-countertransference sources, must
have led to his understanding. But the clinician did not mention any countertransference
affect.

Like all emotions, sexual feeling tends to be catching—I feel it, you feel it. Reporting on
sexual matters in clinical space, Davies (1994), de Peyer (2002), and Samuels (1985), for
example, record a profound if not surprising amount of personal discomfort. Among the
many reasons for this unease, I want to emphasize affective contagion, which de Peyer's
case shows especially well. Like all emotions, sexual feeling tends to be catching—I feel
it, you feel it. “On the deepest level,” wrote Steve Mitchell (2000), “affective states are
transpersonal” (p. 61). Recent theory, for example, Ruth Stein's (1991), situates affect in
the primal swirl of infant and caretaker. Feelings arrive at once corporeally and
psychically, but corporeality is as much a two-person as a one-body phenomenon,
standing, as we know, for both psychic and interpersonal reality (Fairbairn, 1954;
Shapiro, 1996; Aron and Anderson, 1998; Harris, 1998; Dimen, 2000). To quote Mitchell
(2000) again: “Questions like, ‘Who started it?’ and ‘Who did what to whom?’ tend to be
meaningless when intense affective connections are involved, as in strong sexual
attraction, terror, murderous rage, or joyous exhilaration” (p. 61).
What makes sexual affect special? “Sexual speech is inherently performative in that it
materializes what it aims to describe,” says Virginia Goldner (2003, p. 120), elucidating
Foucault's take on psychoanalytic and confessional speech as “inscribed in an

—————————————

1 A term coined by Stephen Hartman.

-3-

erotic circuit of scrutiny and disclosure.” Because words are as visceral as psychosocial,
and because, as Bakhtin's (1934-1935) theory of heteroglossia has it, my parole, or
speech, is always already permeated by yours, sex talk is also sexy talk (Gallop, 1992;
Dimen, 1999). Or at least it may be.

In the analytic situation, where sex comes to us in spoken words and body-language, even
conversations that attempt to contain its excess and analyze its action-driven character are
bathed in its heat, and [we] are thus always at risk of collapsing into a forced choice
between “talking dirty” or not talking at all [Goldner, 2002, p. 10].

Speaking sex, then, may threaten to violate ethics (Gabbard, 1989; Maroda, 1994) or
catalyze the treatment (Samuels, 1985; Davies, 1994). You just don't know. The
ambiguity is, currently, inherent.

Abjection
My effort to limn clinicians' sexual unease is part of a larger project, individual and
collective, of reconsidering sexuality post classically, beyond but not exclusive of the
oedipal, inclusive of narcissism but registering culture too. Take, for example, a
roundtable on developmental dialogues of sexuality held in 2002 at a New York City
meeting of the Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association (Slavin
et al., 2004). Ultimately the debate concerned whether sex was intersubjective (Seligman
and Davies) or Other (Stein). Davies voiced the pull toward synthesis: the two sides, she
insisted, were not so far apart. But, although I usually go for that third space too, this time
I wanted the two sides to disagree more.

It is necessary to maintain a tension between sex as emerging in object relation and sex as
Other. Although I cannot argue the point here, I want to explain why I take this stance.
One reason is political: I fear that, if we imagine we can locate everything sexual in
everything we know about intersubjectivity, it would not be too difficult to reduce sex to
familiar forms of object relation that are overtly blessed, or damned, by social
-4-

norms. The other, psychoanalytical, reason is cognate: there is more in heaven and earth
than is dreamt of in normativity. Preserving sexuality as Other “stretches the clinical
imagination about what patients' inner worlds are like and, given the chance, could be
like” (Dimen, 2003, p. 178). In sex as in psychoanalysis, shouldn't there be room for
discovery and invention, for surprise, if also disturbance?

In going for the sexual stretch, though, we are likely to come upon abjection. Before I
turn to Julia Kristeva's (1982) ideas about this iffy state, I want to survey how the OED
defines “abject” and its derivatives: to cast away, out, down; to reject, abase, lower; by
implication, to feel discarded, rejected, dejected. Go further and you get to the affects that
are, for Kristeva, abject central: humiliation, shame, and disgust. These affects arrive
with a feeling of horror infusing what Kristeva deems abjection's primordial form, food
loathing—or, as I call it, food alarm. One of my food alarms is seaweed. Seaweed in miso
soup or sushi rolls, not to mention in the sea or on the shore—that's fine. But when, every
year or so, I try a bite from a nice salad where that awful stuff, neither containing nor
contained, sits on its plate, a siren screams silently and hyperventilation nears. Kristeva's
evocation of “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness” (p. 2) is right on the
money. Eew!

Abjection appears to be a one-person, one-body experience of Otherness. Implicitly,

however, it is part of an intersubjective and developmental process. Kristeva's food
loathing in reaction to “skin on milk's surface” leads to the thought: “‘I’ want none of that
element, sign of [my parents'] desire” (pp. 2-3). Note her “I” in scare quotes, which alerts
us to the developmental matter. If, Kristeva goes on, we think in terms of “subjective
diachrony”—and what is that if not development?—abjection turns out to be “a
precondition of narcissism” (p. 13), precondition as both prerequisite and prior stage. On
one hand, says Kristeva, “Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, ab-
ject.” Separating through rejecting and abjecting—that is who one is. On the other, the
uncanniness, “familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome.” The abject state is “Not me. Not that. But not
nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a

-5-

thing” (p. 2). Might we recognize here Sullivan's (1953) “notme”?

Abjection's position on what Freud (1905) called “the frontier between the physical and
the mental” (p. 168) locates it close to narcissism, which thereby takes on a new look.
Narcissism as I am using it denotes “less a psychiatric character phenomenon and more a
developmental position” (Ken Corbett, 2003, personal communication). The oneness with
which it is usually endowed contains, as we know, the seeds of its own transformation.
Inevitably corporeal and psychically inevitable, abjection registers that moment when one
is not quite separate but no longer merged either. This uncertainty introduces to
narcissism the discomforts of borders in the between spaces. “Abjection,” says Kristeva
(1982), “preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the
immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order
to be” (p. 10). Violence. Ungrounded affect. Loss. “The abject is the violence of
mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost” (p. 15). Would you have
thought of transitional space as shot through with pain?

Abjection is desire before self and object have psychically cohered and, by so cohering,
constituted each other (p. 5). In Kristeva's view, it renders narcissism a condition of
torment and impossibility. No wonder abjection registers in liminal substances that evoke
fascinated disgust—feces, to take the prime example, but urine, semen, vaginal fluids,
menstrual blood, snot, pimples, pus, skin excrescences. These border materials, neither
fully alive nor fully dead, signify what must be rejected in order that life exist—death—
but that must exist in order that life exist (pp. 2-3). Abjection inhabits the space between
deprivation and signification, as the Lacanians might put it. Finally, abjection signifies
the breast, mother, and femininity, the disgust they inspire, and their consequent
repudiation (Grosz, 1994).

Humiliation, Narcissism, and Sexual Pain

Let me try some of these musings out clinically. L, considerably younger than I, found
me attractive. I responded in kind. At

-6-

one point, I shared my feelings with him, to make the sexuality into what Ogden (1994),
following Green, calls an object of knowledge or reflection. The disclosure relieved some
anxiety, but an unease lingered that I would now name abjection because of the hovering
shame and humiliation linked, for him, with maternal tantalization.

Sexual abjection is, to some extent, unspeakable, as de Peyer (2002), in a case study, has
shown. The sexual disturbance between us—our Eew! Factor—was never fully translated
into some other analytic pleasure, that is, analytic knowing. Rather, you might say that
for years every session took place against a background of erotic unknowing. Did our
muteness in fact help him to leave as he did, having regained his sexual potency? I want
to claim success, even as I suspect failure. It is true that he continued in a state of
abjection and gradually replaced me with another tantalizing object, the money he would
win or lose at the track. Yet something shifted later, for he returned for a couple of visits
to make sure I was still alive and to tell me that he wasn't gambling anymore.
You could say simply that L and I were frustrated: we couldn't do it, we could only sort
of speak it. But frustration is more interesting than that. Think of its relation to abjection.
Frustration marks sexual desire, as loss tinges attachment and pain, love. You may have a
steady partner, but that does not always mean you get to have sex when or how you want
it, or that you even want it now that it's available. When I spoke of these matters in
Stockbridge in February 2002, Paul Lippmann alluded wistfully to “our efforts to have
sexual lives.” Sexual desire, Freud (1941) thought, is inherently unsatisfiable: “‘En
attendant toujours quelque chose qui ne venait point [Always waiting for something that
never came]” (quoted by Green, 1996, p. 872). Concurring, Lancan (1977) saw
satisfaction as a necessarily alluring impossibility critical to the crystalization of
subjectivity, sanity, and culture. I don't know about this view of sexual satisfaction as an
endlessly receding mirage, but it's not a useless perspective either, especially in a culture
that means every sexual encounter to end atop Mt. Everest.

You could also locate the Eew! Factor between L and me in narcissism's unease—
unstable identity, elemental uncertainty,

-7-

fragility, spatial ambivalence, inability to distinguish inside from outside, pleasure from
pain. What happens when sexual feeling enters? Required reading here would be
Laplanche's (1976) account of the enigmatic message, sexuality as an unconscious
transmission to the infant from the mother's or, as we might now emend it, the parental
unconscious. Thus sexuality is always already an inarticulable mystery, an “alien internal
entity.”

Agreeing with but going beyond Laplanche, Stein (1998) limns the excess of sexuality,
its transcendence and loss of self that contrast with and even contradict the state of mind
required for ordinary life. Making a further distinction, Benjamin (1998) proposes to
regard excess as a result of “failures in affective containment [that] may produce sexual
tension rather than reflect some interpersonal transmission of unconscious sexual
content” (p. 7). Davies (2001), unearthing yet another effect of the unmetabolizable
spillover of parent-child intimacy, has suggested that parents' unavoidable silence about
their children's sexual feeling will inevitably imbue sexuality with a sense of trauma. As
she suggests, you may say to your child, “Oh you're so angry. I know what that's like,”
but you probably won't say, “Oh, you're turned on, aren't you?”

To return to the clinic, analysts may need to serve as containers for excess and trauma.
But we need also to accept pain and discomfort's permanence in sex, hence in sexual
transference-countertransference. Consider Kristeva's (1982) slant on “the edenic image
of primary narcissism”: “the archaic relation to the mother … is … of no solace.… For
the subject will always be marked by the uncertainty of his borders and of his affective
valency as well” (p. 62). Cognate with this rather undyllic maternal relation is jouissance,
which we generally read as orgasm in all its ineffability, but is sometimes pain or shame
to the nth degree. “Freud's expansion of the sexual beyond the genital,” explains Tim
Dean (2001), “is redescribed by Lacan in terms of jouissance, a form of enjoyment so
intense as to be barely distinguishable from suffering and pain” (p. 271).

Embarrassment, Racism, and Disgust

Think here of the French folk song: Plaisir d'amour, Ne dure qu'un moment, Chagrin
d'amour, Dure toute la vie. Chagrin d'amour [the

-8-

pleasure of love lasts but a moment. The sorrow of love lasts a lifetime.] or, at least, pain
or suffering. That's what we need to add to our thinking about sexual countertransference
and transference, even about sex itself, whatever that might be. With L, for instance,
there was a congeries of emotions, shared and unshared, ranging from excitement and
playfulness, to contemplative quietude, to fear, rage, disgust, and mortification. With A,
in contrast, embarrassment ruled the clinical day. Probably both of us were embarrassed,
but I was so locked in my discomfort that I never found hers. Once, for example, she
picked up a minor celebrity. The morning after, he threw 50 bucks on the night table. “I
took it,” she shrugged with what I now see as an embarrassed laugh.

What's a nice vanilla analyst to do? I am trying to puzzle out my countertransference

blind spot. A was a fledgling, temping for a living. I was a fledgling too, conducting a
once-weekly treatment early in my practice. Had we worked in the transference, I am
sure I could have caught my reenactment of her mother's emotional abandonment of her.
As it was, I failed to hear her plea that I see through her happy little mask to the
frightened girl armed with a sexuality that she didn't know how to use. “Perhaps,” I might
have said, “you are asking me for something but you don't know what it is. I sense this
encounter unsettled you, and you don't quite know how to think about it.”

But embarrassment? For enlightenment, let us turn to abjection's psychic and cultural
ramifications. Since sexuality happens not only within but between psyches, its focus is
not always clear. Sex may be for me, it may be for you; it may be for us, it may be for
someone else. A source of both pleasure and pain, it may lead to self-gratification or
other-gratification or both, and which goal governs any particular sexual encounter varies
unpredictably from time to time, and person to person, even within any one coupling. Not
only exploitation, but self-deception, is always possible. One person seems sexually
gratified but is not: think faked orgasms. Another appears to feel love, or at least like, but
actually feels indifference. Or disgust. You don't always know, even in a legitimated,
long-term relationship, whether you are exploiting or being exploited or sharing;
Kernberg (1995) almost prescribes part-object exploitation for conjugality.
-9-

A did not know how to negotiate this minefield. I didn't either. Who does? There is a
great deal of pressure not to notice sexual abjection. Enter culture, which I introduce to
pry open the closed-mindedness that exploits abjection. Sex is value laden, emotions are
saturated with values, and values are emotionally charged (Jaggar, 1983; Stein, 1991;
Spezzano, 1993; Tomkins, 1995). I have no doubt that A and I, even though we were
from different subcultures and classes, shared a prevailing morality wedding sex to love
and mutual respect, and in respect of which trading in sex, for example, is embarrassing.

At the same time, our subcultural differences worked on us, or at least me, insidiously,
because this treatment never went deep or long enough for me to walk another conscious
minefield of my own: racism. Looking back, I see that I believed that, in A's immiserated
black and Latino subculture, exchanging sex for money stood on a continuum of
acceptable behavior. Since this belief seemed to abject people of color and since I was
ashamed of it, I could never make my way through it to see how embarrassed she was, to
speculate on the transference implications, or to probe my countertransference by
imagining myself as a hooker or resurrecting a hooker fantasy of my own. Was she
embarrassed because I was the white middle-class lady doctor whom she paid for one-
week stands as her one-night stand lover paid her? Because she sensed my abjecting
racism? Because her need for care, so miserably unmet, left her begging for crumbs?

As I was drafting this article, however, I recalled Judith Walkowitz's (1980) feminist
research on working-class Jewish women in New York City at the turn of the last
century. Then and now, Walkowitz argues, dominant middle-class values have obscured
the freedom with which some women have historically mined their own sexuality on their
own behalf. In any given family of the group she studied, for example, there might have
been one sister who married and reproduced right away; another who lived alone and
worked in a factory or wrote books; one who did that and later married and had children;
one who hooked and used her job to find the right man; and one who just ran a
whorehouse (and, like Polly Adler, 1953, wrote a memoir). Indeed, I wonder if such a
narrative might befit the cocotte in Freud's (1920) contemporaneous case of the

- 10 -

psychogenesis of homosexuality in a woman. Could A's mores have been so described? I

don't know. Maybe even suggesting so is offensive. The point is that a gendered and
cultural, if not also personal, Eew! Factor prevented me from thinking about any of this
then.

That psychoanalysis contributes to that familiar construction which filled my

countertransference—sex belongs only in the region of intimacy—is a commonplace.
The structure of Three Essays, Ethel Person (1986) has pointed out, begins in the wild
sexual aberrations of adulthood. After having relished infancy's polymorphous perversity,
the book finally narrows its prescriptions to the reproductive heterosexuality of maturity
in which sexual health is defined as the release of semen into the vagina. But we know
that sex was and remains far more multifaceted than that, and we are embarrassed by our
own multiplicity, which, in cultural and psychoanalytic theory, turns out to consist of
deviations.

This affectively complicated knowledge circles back to the first half of Three Essays.
Sex, says Stein (Slavin et al., 2004), may be transgressive, transcendent, and
transformative, but it is also ridiculous. Think, she suggests, about all that embarrassing
licking and slobbering. Now let's add the visual to the oral: who is pretty at the height of
passion? Maya Angelou(1981) quipped about someone she didn't like: “She was utterly
unable to make me ugly up my face between the sheets”(p. 102). Way back in 1915,
Freud (1905) uneasily pondered the same problem. “There is in my mind,” he confided in
a footnote to Three Essays, “no doubt that the concept of ‘beautiful’ has its roots in
sexual excitation and that its original meaning was ‘sexually stimulating.’”
Universalizing his unease, he added, “This is related to the fact that we never regard the
genitals themselves, which produce the strongest sexual excitation, as really ‘beautiful’”
(p. 156 n. 2).

Note the word really. Genitals seem disgusting as well as beautiful. Stein (Slavin et al.,
2004) was addressing what Freud knew, that sexual disgust is unavoidable and
overcoming it is part of sexual experience. Sexual excitement transports you into bodily
and sensory realms of abjection foreclosed long ago in the necessities of maturation. For
one thing, you encounter the

- 11 -

groinal odors and sensations that you learned to associate with the toilet and its privacy.
To have sex, you have to climb psychic and symbolic, not to mention sensory, barriers
established to civilize you and to render you and your caretakers happy and proud.
“Libido,” said Freud (1912) “thrives on obstacles”(p. 187) and “in its strength enjoys
overriding … disgust” (1905, p. 152). Certainly disgust is one emotion you learn to
employ for toilet training. No wonder it is embarrassing to talk of the pleasure/pain of
sex. Think about the grunts, moans, and screams, the farts, the sound and feeling of sticky
membrane on sticky membrane. And I haven't even mentioned taste. Eew!

Shame, Hatred, and Sex

It is not far from embarrassment to shame. Embarrassment, writes Andrew Morrison
(1989), is a mild form of shame. In it, you feel exposed for some feeling or act that
transgresses interpersonal or social morality but keeps you within the pale.
Embarrassment may or may not snowball into shame, in which, in contrast, you feel that
your core is corroded and that you should be excommunicated. Shame, perhaps, is the
state of narcissistic injury. It is, Morrison suggests, the other side of self-regard (p. 42).

Shame spreads as easily as poison ivy. One patient calls it “wildfire”: you tell of one
moment of shame, then another comes back, and then another, and another, until all you
are is shame. Shame self-replicates; if you near the shame feelings of someone with
narcissistic injury, then that person feels, lo and behold, ashamed. Through its perform
ativity, shame also oozes into intersubjective space, which in psychotherapy makes
countertransference errors very easy. “The shame of patients is contagious,” Morrison
explains, “often resonating with the clinician's own shame experiences—the therapist's
own sense of failure, self-deficiency, and life disappointments” (p. 6). I don't doubt that
this contagion featured in my work with L and with A.

Shame, Kristeva (1982) holds, is core to abjection, but the reasons for this become clear
only if we consider abjection

- 12 -

relationally. You can see how this works in Fairbairn's (1954) take on frustration.
Characteristically turning a classical concept on its head, Fairbairn argued that, in an
object-relations as opposed to an impulse psychology, “frustration is always emotionally
equivalent to rejection” (p. 13). This equivalence between frustration, on one hand, and
exclusion and hurt, on the other, obtains because an object is always already present in
psychic reality: “If the child is essentially object-seeking, frustration is inevitably
experienced as rejection on the part of the object” (p. 13). If rejection comes, can
humiliation and its cognate affect, shame, be far behind? Frustration being usual—
whether in object seeking, in selfing, or in sex—shame partners pleasure from the getgo.

Talk about chagrin d'amour. When shame attends frustration, then disgust, hatred, and
other effects of aggression are not far behind. How often, for example, we say, “making
love” when we mean “having sex.” Are we in reaction formation? Recall that Sándor
Ferenczi (1933) concluded his amazing “The Confusion of Tongues” by referring to “the
hate-impregnated love of adult mating” (p. 206). I cannot here deconstruct this
fascinating, unsettling paradox of maturity, but will just note Stoller's (1975, 1979)
thoughts on the subject and indicate its roots in paranoid-schizoid splitting and in
abjection. Clearly, the achievement of ambivalence is necessary to negotiate it. But
ambivalence is, as we know, unstable. I quote Meltzer's (1973) intriguing thought that a
libidinal/object-relational “stage might be successfully traversed but … never truly
dismantled”(p. 27). Having sexual feeling as adults, we always risk the shifting of
positions—the return of abjection's unease and horror, of paranoid-schizoid suffering.

In my final clinical example, I track how excitement and revulsion attend the circulating
affects of shame, hate, and love in transference and countertransference. W, a slender
fellow with an ivory complexion, graceful black hair, green eyes, and a face I'd call
chiseled, was not physically to my taste at all, but I could see how a girl could fall for
him. And you can already see the war between my feelings for and against him. Tightly
focused on his lucrative work, he was, if not exactly a mama's boy, fused to her in an
underground sort of way.

- 13 -

As withholding from me as he was from his girlfriend (whose wishes for his commitment
I was unable to grant; he'd been referred by his girlfriend's therapist), W had a sexual
secret: he kept a lover on the side. Now, even though I do not escape the cultural belief
that sex is a subset of intimacy, still I think that, adultery being as ubiquitous as French
bistros, monogamy cannot really be a criterion for mental health and probity. But there
was an Eew! Factor, perhaps, a hateful thrill he may have felt at withholding from his
girlfriend and turning to a degraded lover. I wonder if, countertransferentially, I too felt
that thrill, in complementary or concordant (Racker, 1968) fashion.

What really angered me was the degradation he effected, the disgust he felt, and the
hatred he manifested—and the emergence of all those affects in me about him and about
myself. W's lover was a woman whose lower status and dark skin, explicitly exciting for
him, were also so embarrassing that he could not or would not reveal any of the
identifying details. Was she Latina? Black? Indian? His silence, coupled with his
eroticized racism and classism, offended me. Another hateful thrill: his treating all of us
as part-objects. Looking back, I see that I felt humiliation, excluded like his lover, not to
mention his girlfriend, who was, unlike him but like me, Jewish and as such may have
already participated in the abjection necessary to his sexuality. (And here, in the land of
part-objects, we might think back to A and to the Eew! of $ 50 tossed on the table and the
corresponding Eew! of picking it up.)

Of course, we must suspect here W's own self-disgust, signaled by the occasional bulimic
episode, as well as what, I speculate, may, in fact, have been his real sexual secret.
Looking back, I wonder whether he was disguising not class and race, but gender. You
see, as I was writing that monogamy could not be a criterion for mental health, I made a
slip of the pen or, rather, of the keyboard. I had first written, not “monogamy,” but
“heterosexuality.” If, then, heterosexuality could not be a criterion for mental health, then
perhaps W was masking his lover's gender. Had I reflected on my heterosexual
countertransference of humiliated, controlled, and hating female to his withholding,
domineering, and hateful male, might I have been able to speculate about homosexual
acts or wishes? Other

- 14 -
features, after all, would have supported that hypothesis. After reading, in his girlfriend's
diary, about her last boyfriend, he became so angry he would repeatedly grill her about
her sexual past. Who was he interested in, his girl or her lover?

Yet another speculation forms. At issue was perhaps not object choice but his own gender
or sexual identity. Recall his bulimia, more often than not what Louise Kaplan (1991)
calls a “female perversion.” When, for example, he would take his Maserati out of the
garage, he would circle it several times, dramatizing his search for dings, not because he
expected damage but to intimidate the garage attendants. “I don't like to do it,” he
explained, “but I have to.” How hypermasculine, how hard edged, in contrast to the little
boy whose mother found him so pretty that she would sit him on her lap in the bow
window of their suburban home to show him off to the neighbors. How great was his
struggle not to be her thing. Was his real secret a disgusting and shameful feminine
identification projected and abjected onto a debased female lover, mistress, or analyst?

Conclusion
The hate that accompanies frustration, rejection, humiliating and shame is a prime cause
of sexual suffering, whether at home or in the consulting room. Once inside the act,
however, this disturbance evaporates. Space precludes further explanation, but I can share
Goldner's (2003) observation of our reluctance to theorize good sex lest it fizzle. I do
want to mention a friend's response to this thesis of the Eew! Factor. He shrugged. “You
mean,” I replied, “for you, it's all part of it?” So this Eew! Factor requires deconstruction.
Do I—or, if you agree with me—we come to it because of a certain personal and
professional, not to say theoretical, idealization of sex? The Eew! Factor, and certainly
clinicians' sexual unease, may be multiply inflected by gender, sexual preference, time of
life, character, cohabitational status, and certainly other features.

Perhaps you know of Leo Bersani's (1988) one-liner: “There is a secret about sex: most
people don't like it.” Drawing on Bataille's notions of sex, death, and disgust, Bersani
speaks of the shattering of the ego that constitutes jouissance, and that

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terrifies us and makes us want to forget to have sex. A culture theorist, Bersani writes in a
one-person psychology. Add the two-person model and we would also have to think
about how, when passion runs high, the balance between love and hate swings
nauseatingly. Now hate is up, now love. You cannot predict. The depressive position,
maturity, even sanity, and, as the Lacanians would have it, membership in the symbolic,
human order, fail. We fall into dread and disgust. Journalist Amy Taubin (1994) writes
about hate-fucking, an idea suggested to her by her maverick analyst, the late Ernst Pavel,
which she sees registered in Mike Leigh's film Naked. But when hate pops out in sex,
what happens to self-regard? Perhaps it turns to disgust. Eew!
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