Gherovici, Patricia. "Psychoanalysis needs a sex change." Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review, 7:1. 2011 (3-18).
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| Patricia Gherovici |
This article's got a seriously ass-kicking title I tremble and not having dreamt up myself… Psychoanalysis needs a sex change. Awesomeness. But, Patricia Gherovici is also the author of Please Select Your Gender; From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge, 2010), a book that I read back in January but never wrote anything about. Essentially I recognized that I had many points of agreement and that I also had a ton of uncertainties and whether due to my having only just begun to think about trans issues and thus being somewhat inhibited in fully engaging Gherovici's book or if the text's central arguments might lack a bit of incisive force,.. whatever the case, I didn't feel up to writing through it as a whole at that time. That said, I am going to go back to it soon and give it the patient reading that it deserves. What I do recall about it is that it is all over territory that I want to know much better, has copious sources that I'll want to look into and references many things I have already read, and that in broad stroke it appears to be the only sustained lacanian work on the topic of trans that doesn't assume in advance of trans people that pathology is unquestionably present.
Bolds are my emphases throughout, otherwise QBQ--quoteblatherquote.
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Gherovici's abstract promises that the "paper discusses the crucial part played by psychoanalysis in the history of transsexualism and assesses the controversial yet central role of sex-change theory for psychoanalysis" and that it "argues for the depathologisation of transgenderism." and that "Lacan's theory of the sinthome offers an innovative framework for rethinking sexual difference. With the help of this theory, one can challenge the pathological approach too often adopted by psychoanalysis. This calls for a more fruitful dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the clinic of transsexualism."(3)
The point about depathologization is crucial and I've made the argument here in a variety of ways already. But to say it once again, I see no justification analytically speaking for assuming that non-normative gender expression, cross-gender identification, or any of the behaviors that one associates with transgender most broadly conceived can signify, in advance, that the (trans)subject in question is of any particular structure of desire. To assume such a thing would seem to be strictly comparable to assuming that dreaming of walking up stairs always relates to coitus - & yes, I picked one of Freud's weaker, more problematic and arguably Jungian moments (gasp!) to make the point that Freud (and Lacan and everyone) is quite prone to failing to live up to the radical consequences of her own insights (or his) and here is a moment when Freud fails, slipping into a sort of 'dream dictionary' mode that elsewhere he warns against. As Fink's Clinical Introduction book is at pains to show, subjects can have psychotic or neurotic or perverse traits without having that as their fundamental structure of desire. While I would argue just as staunchly against understanding manifestations of trans identification as psychotic or obsessive traits just as much as I do against assuming that a trans person's desire is structured in any particular way because they are a trans person (and for the same reasons), the notion of traits that bear the mark of a structure's mode of desire is perhaps worth thinking about in connection with my idea about specific jouissances discussed here.
Would Gherovici agree with me that transgender cannot be equated with any one structure? I am not certain. It seems that she primarily associates it with hysteria and, at the same time, or so I am understanding her, with the sinthome and thus, perhaps, with psychosis to a degree as well. This is complicated though and I'll try to attend more carefully to this question below. Also, to the extent that she writes of "the clinic of transsexualism" I m moved to wonder how she is understanding the specificity involved - is being trans akin to being hysteric, or obsessional - is it a structure in that sense and thus another 'clinic' to comprehend? Or is she writing more loosely here, such that the clinic of transsexualism is simply a reference to any and all clinical interactions with trans persons? My insistent and motivated (mis)understanding of these issues and my argument against pathologization is found at the ding (hear it like an oven timer and imagine cookies are coming!).
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Gherovici's Introduction starts with a bang,
"Psychoanalysis has a sex problem in more than one sense. Transgender activists and scholars have been wary of psychoanalysis, with good reasons. In both subtle and brutal ways, psychoanalysis has a history of coercive hetero-normatization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities and genders. Such a homophobic and transphobic history, however, is based on a selective reinterpretation of the Freudian texts."(3)
To underpin the selective, if not coercive nature of this use of Freud, we turn next to struggle against popular misunderstandings of Freud which all who care to understand him better must struggle with (far more than seems just at times). Gherovici approaches this task, not surprisingly, through homosexuality,
"Freud never condemned homosexuality and has a very tolerant attitude facing it. Furthermore, (…) the founder of psychoanalysis never considered same sex desire pathological. Freud was not voicing liberal tolerance but rather making a radical move, because for [him] homosexuality was a sexual orientation as any other, and as contingent as heterosexuality. (…) For Freud, human sexuality was essentially polymorphous and perverse because the erotic drive does not follow any 'natural' course" (…) "Freud 'perverted' sexuality when he separated the drive from any instinctual function and described its object as 'indifferent', that is, not determined by gender."(3)
…but, as Dean and others have argued, this is Freud being very queer about sexuality. Something that unsettled his contemporaries and which many of his followers denied, disavowed or foreclosed…
"What irritated people most in Freud’s early sexual theories was not the scandalous claim that children were sexual beings, but rather his non-essentialism in the definition of sexuality. Freud’s later notion of the drive is also non-gender specific; this was the real scandal that would clash with Victorian sensibility and it was thereafter repressed by post-Freudians."(3-4)
It is this collapse of analysts post-Freud back into heteronormative-ideological understandings of the psyche that troubles so many of us that are committed (queerly or not) to analytic thought. Gherovici asks,
"How then could psychoanalysts after Freud talk about 'normal' sexuality assuming it means heterosexual genital function when Freud acknowledged that the mutual interest of men and women is 'a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact'."(4) [Her quote is from Three Essays, though not the SE version.]
Sadly it is not that hard to imagine how this was done. Take some heavily cathected beliefs and watch them find themselves projected anywhere they search long enough.
"As Dean & Lane (2001) note, one of the greatest paradoxes of the history of psychoanalysis is that its institutions have developed normalizing moralistic and discriminatory practices that are antithetical to psychoanalytic concepts."(4)
Anyone who has read me much here on this blog can probably guess at my thoughts about some of this. On the one hand, I am profoundly suspicious of the Ego Psychology version of "psychoanalytic" thought that held sway in North America for so long, and am inclined to see lacanian thought as a corrective to this. At the same time (the other hand) I am wary as well of lacanians' tendency to orthodoxies. This perhaps colors me as a psychoanalytic "utopian" for some of you, in that I want a psychoanalysis that is not connected to the State, irrelevant to the institutionalization of people or any cure derived from or constituted through the State's demand, I want a psychoanalysis that is radically non-normative and anti-pathologizing. I do not think that this is of necessity utopian, but your mileage may vary.
It occurs to me that Gherovici, though she cites many folks in the U.S. does not address herself to the 'doctrinal' adherences of the players involved (are they 'object relations' thinkers? 'ego psychologists'? would they best be described as relational or perhaps humanistic, or - who knows, Adlerian? — any and all of which might be classed as "psychoanalytic" depending on who is speaking). That might well be a huge task, but it would seem to be a potentially useful one to a degree and it is not as if Lacan doesn't have things to say about psychoanalysis American style. Though, perhaps as a practicioner in the States, this might feel impolitic for the rhetorical situation as Gherovici feels it, that is, as an analyst assuming she will be read by other therapists and analysts?
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Gherovici then surveys some terminological history relevant to the topic which she is pursuing to highlight certain connections to psychoanalytic thought, a job that is sort of does, though I think that on whole, a bit less history and more discussion of her cases studies and more explication of her use and understanding of the sinthome would have suited me better.
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| Magnus & friends (that's MH in the lower right, seated, wearing glasses, behind the masked person) |
& there is some other interesting stuff about Freud's and Hirschfeld's connection…
Freud published in Hirschfeld's journal devoted to sexology, his "Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality" appeared in its inaugural issue. & that journal published other folks from Freud's circle in its subsequent issues.(4)
& then comes some dirt on Jung (who, it seems to me, routinely has his dirt denied or swept under a rug)…
"Hirschfeld co-founded with Karl Abraham the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in August, 1908 (Gay, 1998). In 1911, at the third international Weimar congress of psychoanalysts, Freud greeted Hirschfeld as an honored guest and a 'Berlin authority on homosexuality' (Bullough, 1994, p.64). Yet even with this recognition, Hirschfeld left the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society shortly after the Weimar meeting, despite Abraham's 'attempts at persuasion' to stay (Falzeder, 2002, p.139). Hirschfeld's departure had been precipitated by 'an external cause' (p.139) also described by Abraham as 'a question of resistances' (p.140). It seemed that Jung had objected to his homosexuality (p.141). Unlike Jung, Freud did not seem to mind Hirschfeld's advocacy of homosexual rights as a positive development and from the beginning he had encouraged Abraham to work with him (Gay, 1998, p.181)."(5)
"But Sigmund, we can't have analysts sucking cock!"
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| Magnus Hirschfeld |
But since we're dishing, how about another helping of Jung?
"But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. None the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman." ("Women in Europe" from 1927, collected here)
With the echo of John Cage in my head I wonder about the should here and the claims of nature and the overt biologism peeking out from every turn in this thinker who is, it seems to me, unjustly praised for positing anima and animus as if this implied a more open-ended sense of gender identifications (and it is often mentioned as somehow a corrective to the presumed rigidity of Freud of Lacan vis-a-vis sexual difference) when it masks a rigidity of end points and a quite harsh endorsement of what hindsight would allow us to call cissexualism (though there is surely some homo- and trans-phobia in there too I'd reckon). & as certain meanings of the phallus will come up for discussion below I'll risk noting that in Jung's text above that to "achieve something important for the love of a thing" is rare for women but is "a man's prerogative" seems to require not simply a phallic attitude with respect to the fixing of meaning in an Imaginary stasis, but slips so easily into being phallic in the sense of masculinist-misogynist. Phallus schmallus. This will recur below with more nuance (I hope).
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There is little about Stekel or Gutheil's work on fetishism or transvestism that seems to rise above a rigidified and imaginarized version of whatever aspects of Freud might serve the desire to go on a safari amongst the more exotic of sexual pathologies and Gherovici doesn't add much to the mix, sufficing to point to the conceptual differences between these rather conventional thinkers and Freud.
Next she talks about David Cauldwell, a rather bizarre figure, who I again will mostly ignore save to note that in Gherovici's view he "just added the biological component to the old psychoanalytic formula of childhood trauma: when a generic predisposition was combined with a dysfunctional childhood, the result was the immaturity that produced a 'pathologic-morbid desire to be a full member of the opposite sex'"(6).
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| Harry Benjamin looking friendly |
"For transsexuals, Benjamin (1954) reiterated that therapy was of no use. He was also not naive, admitting that for a male-to-female transsexual surgery 'may not always solve [the transsexual's] problem'. His feminization craving may never end' (p.228-229). He also warned against performing sex reassignment on patients with psychosis or who were in danger of suicide or self-mutilation."(7)
Gherovici points to the curious contradictions in the conclusion to Benjamin's paper wherein he wrote "Transsexualism is inaccessible by any curative methods at present at our disposal. Nevertheless the condition requires psychiatric help, reinforced by hormone treatment and, in some cases, by surgery. In this way a reasonably contented existence may be worked out for these patients"(qtd 7)
She also observes that "Benjamin maintained a very negative bias against psychotherapy and psychoanalysis but created a protocol for sex change therapy in which psychiatrists were given the power to determine who the potential candidates for surgery were; psychiatrists had the final word on the treatment decision but no say on the diagnosis."(7)
There are a couple of threads in this that I find instructive. First of all, Benjamin's impressions of what psychoanalysis is offering or insisting upon is that non-normative gender expression be cured, in the sense of being eradicated, those who had suffered from 'it' would then presumably comport themselves and desire and desire to be desired as men or women as understood by society, and thus ultimately via anatomical-genital reference? & of course it doesn't take much looking around in the writings of people like Socarides, Stoller, etc to begin to see something called "psychoanalysis" being used, as Gherovici put it earlier "In both subtle and brutal ways" to effect the "coercive hetero-normatization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities and genders" and so, I'm inclined to grant Benjamin's refusal a critical insight into the problems with American psychoanalysis and what I've called elsewhere the Psychiatric-I.S.A. Hetero-normatization and pathologization of the non-normative would be exhibit one in my critique of the american Psy-ISA.
& with that in mind it seems that Benjamin and Hamburger are both being better analysts than those who take the term analysts upon themselves as both Hamburger and Benjamin speak about the desire of these people and are not seeking to deny them their desires, Gherovici's gloss on Benjamin is that in his perspective, the intentions of the Psy-ISA (for him simply "psychoanalysis") "did not lessen the wish to change sex but rather forced patients to hide this desire and therefore live miserable lives." Certainly no lacanian would seem to be able to reasonably sustain such a goal, of requiring the analysand to hide, deny or repress their desire (which is not to suggest that some lacanians might not effectively do so nonetheless). & the same recognition is present it seems in Hamburger's own words "it is impossible to make a genuine transvestite [transsexual] wish to have his mentality altered by means of psychotherapy". Both of these men seem to have taken the desires of their patients to be central, meaningful and not amenable to the imposition of norms, both seem to find in the desire of their patients the grounds of an ethical relation to them. Notably, Benjamin's comment that surgery "may not always solve [the transsexual's] problem" also seems to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of desire as something which desires to keep on desiring - a recognition that does not stop him from being the advocate of his patient's desires.
But there is still a but, and a curious one as well. While we are given to understand Benjamin as against psychoanalysis he nonetheless relies on certain psychoanalytic notions at key moments, as when he cautions against granting the desire for surgery to any patient that is psychotic. & more importantly in that his protocols give the decision about who is granted surgery and who not, to psychiatrists! What is not clear to me is how much of this is Benjamin's recognition that these are the powers that be and thus this is the audience he must address himself to, and how much this can be understood as his faith in these arbiters. I am inclined to read this as real politik more than deep-seated ideological confusion.
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Gherovici then turns to the work of Robert Stoller. I'll quote at length,
"Stoller further refined the notion of a separation of sex and gender with the idea of 'core gender identity', which corresponded to the internalised idea of the individual's belonging to a particular sex. Stoller initially supported the idea of a biological force, a drive determining gender. 'Gender identity' stressed more the subjective experience of gender and separated gender from sexuality. Based on the conviction of a distinct identity and the importance of the penis, Stoller systematised a distinction between the transsexual, the transvestite (cross-dresser), and the effeminate homosexual. He noted that in contrast with transsexuals, transvestites and male homosexuals identify as men; transexuals abhor the penis, which for transvestites and homosexuals is an insignia of maleness and a source of pleasure"(8).
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| I can't find a picture of Stoller, but here is one of his books. |
"By 1968, Stoller, always a believer in bisexuality, had completely moved away from a biological model to a psychological one and emphasised the psychological forces that resulted in transsexualism. Stoller was mainly interested in male transsexualism, which he considered a 'natural experiment' (Stoller, 1975, p.281) to measure variables in the development of masculinity and femininity, but also a pathology of psychosexual development caused in early childhood by 'excess merging with the mother' (p.296). He recommended ''sex change' surgery' for patients properly diagnosed as transsexual, requesting from his colleagues that 'everything should be done to assist them in passing' (p.279) and was quite humble about the goals of his treatment. Stoller opposed any attempt as 'converting' male transsexuals into masculine, heterosexual or even less feminine people, because 'the treatment of the adult transsexual is palliative; we must bear this and not, in our frustration, impatience, or commitment to theoretical positions, fail even to provide that much comfort to our patients' (p.280)."(8)
"Yet despite his efforts at contributing to psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, and perhaps because of the fact that he believed that transsexualism was a petri-dish for human sexuality - a 'key test, in fact the paradigm for Freud's theories of sexual development in both males and females' (Stoller, 1975, p.297) - Stoller developed a simplistic explanation with psychological overtones that he summed up in the formula: 'dominant mother, father pushed to one side, infant cuddly and lovable, mother-son too close' (p.193). In cases of male-to-female transsexualism, the key was the essential femininity passed from mother to son: 'What his mother feels is femininity; what he feels is femininity' (p.204). The model was one of mimetic imitation: The son copied the mother; the mother's excessive closeness to the son was considered to be a negative influence. Stoller also talked about a bisexual mother, who might have has a period of extreme tomboyishness, and of a distant // father. These factors contributing to the creation of transsexuality, especially male to female. For female-to-male transsexuals, Stoller's speculations can be rendered as 'too much father and too little mother masculinizes girls' (p.223-244). Importantly, Stoller stated explicitly that female transsexualism is not the same condition as male transsexualism, stressing that female and male transsexualism are clinically, dynamically, and etiologically different(p.223-244)".(8-9)
& then, in the wake of Stoller's work…
"…many psychoanalytic theories of gender identity development blamed gender trouble on identifications with the 'wrong' parent'"(9)
"And most psychoanalysts proceeded to view transgender expressions as an indicator or underlying pathology - be it a precursor of transvestism or homosexuality (Limentani, 1979), borderline disorders (Green, 1986), narcisistic disorders (Oppenheimer, 1991, Chiland, 2003) or psychosis (Socarides, 1970, 1978-79). Understandably, feeling relegated to the realm of pathology and abjection, transpeople rejected psychoanalysis."(9)
Obviously I'm going to need to read Stoller. Lacan mentions him in Seminar XVIII, so I at least need to figure out which text he is obliquely referring to. & simply given his centrality in American psychoanalysis and his influence on the thinking about these issues, witnessed, if by nothing else, by the ubiquity of his coinage of the phrase "core gender identity." But, that said - all the mother blaming and father blaming and just this immediate reduction of all issues to a highly routinized notion of the family romance read through a similarly rigid conception of developmental stages and the obsessive foregrounding of the penis all looks to me to be indefensible if named as psychoanalysis (assuming you share my S1s and not Stoller's I suppose). But here again it seems that Stoller's thought has to be read with and against the history of psychiatry's POV on homosexuality in the States. I discuss this to a degree here. & it is not as if Stoller is without empathy even if it is framed by pathologizing which makes him a complex character in this history.
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The discussion of Millot via Sheperdson and with Kate Bornstein's dubbing of Millot as a Gender Terrorist is interesting but ends too quickly for my taste. That is, it repeats something that Gherovici is wont to do in this text and in her book - she will often pose a question that I, as reader, very much want to see her then answer in some relatively clear fashion,… and then, she does not answer it to my satisfaction. For instance, with regard to Bornstein's critique of Millot, Gherovici asks "Is Bornstein's accusation of gender terrorism justified?"(10) The next sentence is not an obvious answer "Millot's interpretation of transsexuality is classic…"(10) unless we understand "classic" status as an answer (hopefully not). Gherovici's subsequent gloss on Millot may be accurate, but does not present itself as an answer to the question she posed. A bit later when she agrees with Pat Califia's critique of Millot (11) and then after a somewhat odd detour through the film Transamerica (which Gherovici seems to read positively, where to me it seems like mild trans-exploitation wrapped up in a 'feel-good' road movie) which then leads to some reflections on the phallus before returning to Millot, she writes,
"To return to Millot, then, it is in the inevitability yet variety of symptoms that I mainly disagree with Millot's generalised assumption that most transsexuals are psychotic…"(12).
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| So am I a gender terrorist or what? [Catherine Millot] |
I guess what I would have appreciated in this text is some way to distinguish between pathologizing and psychodiagnostics.
In spite of this qualm of mine with regard to her stance on Millot, Gherovici does have some things to say which distinguish her rather radically from Millot and the pathologizing analysts' club, such as this;
"I argue for a depathologisation of transgenderism and thus differ from the position taken by nearly all analysts. What I propose is an alternative to the usual psychoanalytic treatment of transgenderism. That is to say, transgenderism should not be systematically defined as pathology. If transgenderism is not pathological, then a sex change should not be considered either a treatment or a cure. My perspective follows Lacan's later theory of the sinthome to rethink sexual difference. This theory is a departure from the classical Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex and even from Lacan's first formulations that insisted on the symbolic and the father. It departs as well from a second period on Lacan's work when he would put the emphasis on the theory of fantasy and the object cause of desire. Lacan modified his whole position a last time in the mid-1970s when he elaborated a new conception of sexuality, just before discussing Joyce's writings.(12)
Of the Sinthome she writes,
"Lacan gave a new twist to Freud's Oedipus complex when he reformulated it as evincing the domination of the Name-of-the-Father. Later, Lacan (2005) went beyond the Oedipus complex and finally proposed the sinthome as a way of reknotting in the psychic structure what had been left unknotted because of the father's failure. (…) Since the sinthome is not a complement but a supplement, it is a vehicle for creative unbalance, capable of disrupting the symmetry. The sinthome is what helps one tolerate the absence of the sexual relation/proportion (Lacan, 1975, p.45). Instead of grief and reproaches for broken promises addressed to the Other as demands, the sinthome employs the Name-of-the-Father as a way of naming, as a path in the invention of new signifiers (Lacan, 1977). Lacan's notions of the sinthome thus connected fantasy, demand, the system of the symbolic, and the place of the real with the infinite possibilities that it allows for jouissance."(12)
This passage chimes suddenly with a book blurb I spotted on amazon today: Self-Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space, Jay Sennett Ed. - the blurb for which includes the following; "…Noble, who discusses female-to-male transition as a racialized experience with very different ramifications of power and status for transmen of color, offers a new theoretical paradigm, which encapsulates the strengths of Self-Organizing Men: trans in-coherence, a positive, productive disharmony, a collective state of paradox and flux."
. . . can one not hear in this an echo of Gherovici's gloss on the sinthome above as "a vehicle for creative unbalance, capable of disrupting the symmetry." Perhaps the echoes are incidental, but surely it warrants consideration.
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Gherovici next turns to the phallus and I so wish that she was a bit more explicit about the distinctions within that word between the imaginary phallus and the symbolic phallus, as it is there that so much trouble starts. Here though is what she writes,
"It is true that the phallus, often confused with the limp little prick, is not much more than a signified of jouissance that sexual discourse transforms into a signifier. Lacan's dictum that 'there is no sexual relation' is another way of saying that for the unconscious there is no representation of the female sex, that the unconscious is monosexual or homosexual; there is only one signifier for both sexes, the phallus. The phallus refers only to phallic jouissance; other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification."(13)
She continues this line of thought…
"Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference. The error is to take the phallus as a signifier of sexual difference."(13)
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| The phrasing here has a bit more punch! |
It is in reference to this 'common error' that Gherovici's slight twist on Dean's now well know quote makes sense. Dean had written of the phallus as "red herring", on which Gherovici puns,
"I would like to suggest that the phallus is less a red herring than a 'read' herring - in fact, like gender, it is subject to interpretation, and it will always be read like a text"(14).
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| "the flying phallus" |
Where things become muddled (it seems to me) is that when she writes that "Sexual positioning is predicated on an 'error' that consists of taking the real organ for a signifier of sexual difference" we are able to see this as beginning at birth (if not before) when a delivering doctor might announce "It's a boy" or "It's a girl" - and in this instance it is hard to credit this as a common error (which makes it sound sort of bland and easily avoidable) so much as an instituted protocol of misrecognition fully backed by a naturalized ideology which makes its avoidance structurally difficult. This error is not one that the infans has made, it is imposed on the body of the infans. But, when she writes that "Sexual positioning is not based on organ attribution. The transgender phenomenon proves that there is nothing natural that would direct us to the opposite sex. Sexual identity is a secondary nature. Since the unconscious has no representation of masculinity or femininity, we cannot speak with certainty in terms of sexual identity of being a man or a woman, but only of an assurance, a happy uncertainty"…here it seems that she does have something like sexuation in mind, a model of sexed being which allows for identification as the ground of positionality which trumps anatomy. This instability in the text as to what "sexual positioning" is, is vexing. Consider me vexed. In the first instance she seems to mean by it "assigned sex" and in the second instance to mean something not radically unlike what Stoller means by "core gender identity" even if, as a good Lacanian, she recognizes that "Sexual identity is a secondary nature" she surely understands how primarily it is experienced by subjects, as something which simply is, rather than it being a choice the subject makes.
& then, while it is accepted almost as dogma that there is no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious, I think that this statement runs some risks as well. To begin, it cannot be understood to suggest that signifiers like clitoris, or vagina, or less clinical and more slangy sexual ones are somehow barred from the unconscious. So if it does not mean that signifiers of the genitals are unknown in the unconscious, what does it mean that there is no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious? That is, if we are all subjected to the common error at birth, that of being marked as male or female due to the presence or absence of the penis, such that the penis as bit of flesh and signifier signifies male to us in large part and if vagina as flesh and as signifier signifies female to a significant degree, then on what grounds can we argue that no signifiers of sexual difference are found in the unconscious? The predictable lacanian answer begins by pointing out that the penis is not the phallus - but if the penis is used, and it is, to ascribe sex to the new born - that is, if the penis is able to sustain that signifying function at the moment of childbirth and if that ascription "It's a boy" then serves as ground of the social identity that a child is raised to occupy - then it would seem difficult to maintain a straight face while arguing that the phallus is radically distinct from the penis. Certainly the doctor who delivers the baby is not relying on a lacanian understanding of the phallus in that moment, even if she or he might be treating the penis (or the vagina) as Imaginary phallus (if I am allowed to read their actions as a lacanian).
Also what can it mean to say that "there is only one signifier for both sexes, the phallus. The phallus refers only to phallic jouissance; other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification." That is, there is a slippage it seems between the penis understood as Imaginary phallus and phallus said to refer "only to phallic jouissance" (and, we might add, to phallus as Symbolic, that is, as master signifier or S1 - a relation that is involved with phallus as signifier of jouissance but not equivalent to it, or so it seems to me).
Does it seem like I am clarifying anything to anyone? I feel like I am just making more murk in any already murky scene.
In the back of my mind here is again Dean's idea of supplanting the phallus where possible with objet petit a, a suggestion I find very interesting and which I want to explore further, but which surely does not always work. To help further undermine the reach of this term (which, denotes quite a few distinct and non-equivalent concepts) I've been advocating for the use of S1s, master signifiers or quilting points as terms when and where possible to supplant those uses of the phallus where it acts to ground meaning. & explicit in this is my feeling that the varied overdeterminations of the term are too suasive and operate at too many levels to make hanging on to "phallus" more generative or useful than less. What I cannot say is whether it is possible, as Dany Nobus suggested at a seminar I was at some years ago, to articulate the whole of Lacan's theory without using the term phallus. But it's not a bad project now is it?
So to return again to fail again to make clear why there can be no signifier of sexual difference in the unconscious… It would seem to hinge on both jouissance and the requirements of signification itself and thus desire and… lots of stuff. Starting with desire, we might argue as Dean does that desire, as it has no fixed object and as there is no natural relationality of sexes, that unconscious desire has no signifier of the other sex in the sense that it is not constituted by any such relation and precedes whatever objects it takes up (even where its object is what is denoted by such a signifier). Or perhaps, we might observe that as the unconscious is symbolic, is structured like a language, etc, that it cannot ever adequately signify jouissance, not for the subject and even less for the Other or any other positioned as such. & finally, if the securing of an S1 is in a sense a "phallic" relation to meaning then the sexual difference that cannot be signified, cannot be signified because it operates differently, if it could be designated as a meaning then it would not be other to meaning as exemplified/established by master signifiers generally (i.e., it could be called "phallic"). It is this that Gherovici seems to be getting at when she writes "other forms of nonphallic jouissance exist and can be experienced, although they remain outside signification."
But, before I move on, this part again calls out for applause: "This common error can be what the rectification proposed by some transsexuals is all about 'If you think that because I have a penis I am a man, that is an error; I can be a woman who has a penis.' Or conversely. 'If you think that not having a penis makes me a woman, this is an error because I am a man without a penis. And, they are absolutely right, because for the unconscious somebody with a penis can be a woman or someone without a penis can be a man."
Maybe one thing that I wish was more present in Gherovici's discourse was the recognition that the trans person is there in the audience listening, if not perhaps that the big Other is a big transOther (whether existent or not) but simply that while trans people may be a small group numerically, that signifiers like transsexual and transgender and many others are already at work in the symbolic, already heavily cathected in diverse ways and operant in their lives. That meaning is something we battle over is indicative of its status as Imaginary. We need new symbolizations, and not more imaginarizations. We need greater attention to language which is renewed, re-distanced, stepped-away-again from its mediated habits. The attention to language is somewhat impoverished in this paper, regardless of where one stands on trans issues, or the use of new pronouns or words to designate people or refuse their designation with older words, the signifiers are there now - are extant - they cannot readily be foreclosed from signification. But the literal words are quite pristine in Gherovici's use (man, woman etc), their ramification is symbolic even as her lack of space-making for any third or queered sexual position implies (to me at least) that her discourse cannot escape fully the gravitational pull of the Imaginary of the sex/gender regime as is. Is that a general problem with Lacan too? Maybe. Though I suspect I owe you all more about this for it to be granted as a problem at all.
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She then turns to briefly sketching what would be involved in understanding transitioning as a sinthomatic writing. I am very interested in this, even with the qualifications and so forth, but wish that here Gherovici had spent more time to explicate. She writes,
"Certainly in some cases, writing about one's transexual transformation is of the order of the sinthome; there are many cases where the transformation is reported as achieving a reknotting of the three registers of the real, symbolic and imaginary. Then the sinthome shapes the singularity of an 'art,' a techne that reknots a workable consistency for the subject; this movement can best be evoked by saying that it moves the subject from a certain contingency to absolute necessity."(14) …she then looks to Jan Morris' book to clarify what this might mean for a subject who is trans, writing that "One can see why her sinthome was necessary: It was necessity itself. In Morris' case the sinthome has produced less a 'woman' than a 'woman of letters'. Sex may have its reasons but they remain unknown since sexual difference obstinately resists symbolization. This impossibility can produce a sinthome. The sinthome is something that cannot be rectified or cured. The sinthome is a purified symptom, it remains beyond symbolic representation and exists outside the unconscious structured as language. In this sense, the sinthome is closer to the real. Lacan reached the final conclusion that there is no subject without a sinthome. Lacan's contention that there is no sexual relation, and therefore that the relationship between partners is a sinthomatic one."(14).
She notes on page 14 that Lacan was the 1st analyst in France to work with transsexuals. There is a bit of discussion of this in her book, and I recall not being thrilled by it.
Returning to Freud Gherovici draws attention to the moment in Three Essays when Freud writes "It is experimentally possible (E.Steinach) to transform a male into a female and conversely a male into a female"(14)(yes, it says the same thing twice here in Gherovici's text - but presumably that is a typo and Freud's second clause reversed things along the lines of an "& vice versa"). She also points to Freud's interest in sex hormones as dating back to 1896 and discussed in letters to Fleiss.
In her conclusion Gherovici writes,
"What makes a man a man and a woman a woman is a question that has come to psychoanalysis from hysteric patients. The position on bisexuality held by Steinach and Benjamin seems closer to a queer notion of sexuality in which genders are placed in a continuum beyond a strict binary. Paradoxically, the liberal discourses of gender identity support a sort of essentialism about gender identification. A collaboration between psychoanalysis and transgender discourse would thus open the way for an alternative."(15)
I've written elsewhere about my issues with a continuum model, so when Gherovici invokes an alternative to this, I'm on board immediately if standing near the life rafts. What does not come through for me in this article is a vantage from which I then might take a breath and say, ok, given this where now? Instead I am simply reeling amongst questions or my inability to use what is offered in such a way as to open things up more (where 'more' is obviously relative to wherever I might be said to 'be' and thus perhaps a measure of the 'dullardity' of my misunderstanding).
Superego says: Bingo!
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| A trans friend of mine found this cover offensive. You? |
& there is still so much in this paper that I didn't talk about at all!
I'm too lazy to type out the sources cited in the text of Gherovici's paper. You'll have to get it or ask me if you need that stuff.
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lay it on me/us