When you stare long enough at the text...

...the text stares back. — This is not yet n/a that will come later. Now it's just tease, no application, no answer.

I just found something, a gestation period and a parallel. & this is all put here because of a little bell ringing in the meat of my head. 

Salome, Ree & Nietzsche

As one of her admirers put it, 'Lou would form a passionate attachment to a man and nine months later the man gave birth to a book!' The first of these literary births was Nietzsche's; exactly nine months after meeting Lou Salomé, he produced part I of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.*

In mid-January of this year, I found something — someone fascinating — and an idea appeared, mine — an idea spawning many connected ideas in all directions —  and at a tangent, and to begin, they were liquid, barely yet approaching any solidity. Nine months later (14 Sept, 2012) I had this "vision" (not to be shared here) that rebounded upon that idea, since much grown and now kicking.

Pace Nietzsche's thoughts about artists as mothers, creativity as feminine, etc & this found passage's positing of Lou Andreas-Salomé as the father of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I'm taken with the thought that I've discovered the paternity of Rock Paper Scissor.

*Neitzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman by Frances Nesbitt Oppel, p.121. 

Arnold I. Davidson's "How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" from _The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts_

Arnold I. Davidson

The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter Three:

How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Early on Davidson quotes Foucault saying that "'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements" (qtd 67). If one has read my previous two posts about David's book, this shouldn't surprise. A bit further on, discussing the status of the rules and formal exclusions that typify a discourse he writes "These rules are, however, never formulated by the participants in the discursive practice; they are not available to their consciousness but constitute what Foucault once called the 'positive unconscious of knowledge'"(67).

Foucalt's "positive unconscious of knowledge" sounds a lot like Lacan's Symbolic order to me (just as, elsewhere, while Foucault famously abjured 'desire' as a concept, when he speaks about pleasure it sounds a lot less like the vernacular sense of the term and a lot more like jouissance, as such. Whether this suggests any way to bring Foucault and Lacan together in a useful way, I am not sure - I cannot be the first to have noted these things).

Davidson refers back to an earlier chapter (which I covered here) drawing out the ways that this earlier chapter adapts Foucault's archeological method to describe the psychiatric style of reasoning. "An epistemologically central constituent of a style of reasoning, as I interpret it, is a set of concepts linked together by specifiable rules that // determine what statements can and cannot be made with the concepts. (…) Thus I have urged that we need a conceptual history of sexuality, without which we cannot know what was being talked about when the domain of psychiatric discourse became fixated on sexuality" (68-9).

He acknowledges that some may find an approach such as his counter-intuitive for the study of psychoanalysis, "a thoroughgoing skepticism about its usefulness for writing the history of psychoanalysis might well persist. Since psychoanalysis is so completely intertwined withe the name of Sigmund Freud, it is natural to object that writing its history without his name would not be to write its history at all. (…) …no matter what one takes to be the last word in psychoanalysis, its first and second words are always the words of Freud"(69).

Davidson nonetheless wants to "operate at a level distinct from individual biography and psychology. In writing the history of psychoanalysis, I want to preserve this level, one whose articulation requires a history of a structurally related system of concepts, a conceptual space, that lies below, or behind, the work of any particular author, even great works of great authors"(70).

He sketches out a pair of "competing myths" that are common in discussions of Freud. "The first myth, that of official psychoanalysis, depicts Freud as a lonely genius, isolated and ostracized by his colleagues, fashioning psychoanalysis single-handedly and in perpetual struggle with the world at large" this is then "the story of Freud as triumphant revolutionary"(70). Davidson dispels this myth with "ex nihilo nihil fit" [nothing comes from nothing] (70). 

"The second, opposing myth pictures Freud as getting all of his ideas from someone else (…) This is the myth of the career discontents", one which issues in "the story of Freud as demagogue, usurper, and megalomaniac"(70). "When applied to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, this myth proceeds by showing that, for example, Richard von Krafft-Ebing employed the idea of libido and Ellis the idea of autoeroticism, that Fleiss made central use of the notion of bisexuality, that Moll discovered infantile sexuality years before Freud, that Iwan Bloch talked about erotogenic zones, and so on, ad infinitum. Since Freud was fully aware of these writ-//ings, the story continues, how could he by anything other than a usurper, with a kingdom made of stolen materials?"(70-1).

Davidson finds this approach misguided, in that it depends "on an inappropriate invocation of his name"(71). Instead, what is needed per Davidson, is "a history of the concepts used in psychoanalysis, and account of their historical origins and transformations, their rules of combination, and their employment in a mode of reasoning. This task presumes, first, that we can isolate the distinctive concepts of nineteenth-century psychiatry, articulate their rules of combination, and thereby determine the limits of the possible. We must then undertake the very same enterprise for Freud's work, which, with sufficient detail, should enable us to see more clearly whether Freud's conceptual space continues or breaks with that of his predecessors"(71).

He notes that he is really only attending to the 1st essay (which is everyone's favorite, no?) and that "In order to do even that, I will have to start before Freud, with the prevailing concept of sexual perversion in the literature of nineteenth-century psychiatry"(72). Davidson replays here the discussion of the idea of the functional disease, and how for that notion to apply to sexuality that the notion of the sexual instinct is required (all discussed in "Closing Up The Corpses"). He points to the thoughts of Moreau, Krafft-Ebing and Charcot (who preferred the term "sens genital") and writes, "The genital sense is just the sexual instinct, masquerading in different words. Its characterization as a sixth sense was a useful analogy. Just as one could become blind, or have acute vision, or be able to discriminate only a part of the color spectrum, and just as one might go deaf, or have abnormally sensitive hearing, or be able to hear only certain pitches, so too this sixth sense might be diminished, augmented, or perverted"(73). Davidson also repeats the earliest use of "perversion" as found in the OED (1842). "The notions of perversion and function are inextricably connected. Once one offers a functional characterization of the sexual instinct, perversions become a natural class of diseases; without this characterization there is really no conceptual room for this kind of disease"(73).

Of this whole mode of thought Davidson remarks "one must first believe that there is a natural function of the sexual instinct and then believe that this function is quite determinate. We might think that questions as momentous as these would have received extensive discussion during the heyday of perversion in the nineteenth century. But, remarkably enough, no such discussion appears. There is virtually unargued unanimity both on the fact that this instinct does have a natural function and on what that function is"(74). [He then quotes Krafft-Ebing for a representative view (74) and shows how a superficially different account by Moll is at this level of analysis "quite literally interchangeable" (75).]

"Nineteenth-century psychiatry silently adopted this conception of the function of the sexual instinct. It was often taken as so natural as not to // need explicit statement since it was the only conception that made sense of psychiatric practice. It is not at all obvious why sadism, masochism, fetishism, and homosexuality should be treated as species of the same disease, for they appear to have no essential features in common"(76).

Moll goes so far as to state that "we ought to consider the absence of heterosexual desires morbid even when the possibility of practicing normal coition exists"(qtd 76). To which I can add only YIKES!

"Had anyone denied either that the sexual instinct has a natural function or that this function is procreation, diseases of perversion, as they were actually understood, would not have entered psychiatric nosology"(76).

With a picture of this milieu and its assumptions in place - assumptions shared by Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld (though he is not discussed at this moment) and common amongst the emerging movement for greater justice for homosexuals - Davidson then turns at last to the first of Freud's Three Essays, called "The Sexual Aberrations".  He quotes Freud's first two paragraphs;

The fact of the existence of sexual needs in human beings and animals is expressed in biology by the assumption of a "sexual instinct," on the analogy of the instinct of nutrition, that is of hunger. Everyday language possesses no counterpart to the word "hunger," but science makes use of the word "libido" for that purpose.

Popular opinion has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of this sexual instinct. It is generally understood to be absent in childhood, to set in at the time of puberty in connection with the process of coming to maturity and to be revealed in the manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; while its aim is supposed to be sexual union, or at all events actions leading in that direction. We have every reason to believe, however, that these views give a // very false picture of the true situation. If we look into them more closely we shall find that they contain a number of errors, inaccuracies and hasty conclusions.(qtd. 76-7) 

Davidson: "If the argument of Freud's first essay is that these views 'give a very false picture of the true situation,' then we can expect Freud's conclusions to place him in opposition to both popular and, more important, medical opinion. The problem is how precisely to characterize this opposition"(77).

Davidson goes on to discuss Freud's positing of two terms, sexual object and sexual aim, the former being the sorts that one desires sexually and the latter term referring to the sorts of acts that one is hoping to get going with that desired other. Davidson notes that "these are precisely the two conceptually basic kinds of deviations we should expect of those writers who subscribed to the popular conception of the sexual instinct. Deviations with respect to sexual object are deviations from the natural attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; deviations with respect to sexual aim are deviations from the natural goal of sexual union"(77). & then, surprisingly to many superficial readers or those who come in thinking that they know already what Freud thought about everything (and that it must be wrong), Davidson continues, "The remainder of the first essay is structured around this distinction between sexual object and sexual aim, and the central role of this distinction is itself firmly dependent on the view of the sexual instinct that Freud will argue is false. I emphasize this point because one must recognize that Freud's opposition to the shared opinion concerning the sexual instinct is an opposition from within (…) Freud's opposition, let me say in anticipation, participates in the mentality that it criticizes"(77). Davidson characterizes Freud's procedure as "immanent criticism"(78).

We then look at the 1st sections where Freud, after a few other topics turns to inversion/homosexuality - Davidson, "the deviation to which nineteenth-century psychiatrists had themselves devoted the most attention"(78) - dropping in… "Freud argues that inversion should not be regarded as an innate indication of nervous degeneracy - an assessment which was widespread, even if not universal, in the nineteenth century. (…) Freud insisted that choice between claiming inversion to be innate and claiming it to be acquired is a false one, since neither explanation by itself gives an adequate explanation of the nature of inversion"(78) 

Davidson sums on Freud RE bisexuality "his remarks in this section become more and more puzzling the more carefully they are studied"(78). [I'll be getting to that soon enough - though not in this post.]

But we're back to the action when Freud turns to "the characteristics of the sexual object and sexual aims of inverts" and comes to a conclusion that Davidson sees as "more innovative, even revolutionary, than I suspect he was able to recognize"(78).

Freud ~ "It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together—a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thought be//tween instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its object likely to be due to its objects attractions." (78-9)

Davidson writes, "By claiming, in effect, that there is no natural object of the sexual instinct, that the sexual object and sexual instinct are merely soldered together, Freud dealt a conceptually devastating blow to the entire structure of nineteenth-century theories of sexual psychopathy. (…) If the object in not internal to the instinct, then there can be no intrinsic clinico-pathological meaning to the fact that the instinct can become attached to an inverted object. The distinction between normal and inverted object will not then coincide with the division between the natural and the unnatural, itself a devision between the normal and the pathological. Since the nature of the instinct, according to Freud, has no special bond with any particular kind of object, we seemed forced to conclude that the supposed deviation of inversion is no more than a mere difference. (…) cases of inversion can no longer be considered pathologically abnormal"(79).

Now I want to work over that passage from Freud a bit more…

"It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is." 

There are hints already of his position—the suddenness of 'brought to our notice' suggestive of an error or mistake realized—the evocation of 'habit' and thus a non-reflective or routinized relation to the issue—I'm uncertain how much to make of "intimate" here—should consult the German.

"Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together—a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct."

& again, I'm curious about the German ("soldered together" is what auf Deutsch?)—but the basic thrust is that aim and object are contingently connected regardless of what sort of object does the trick (I choose this phrase in hopes of avoiding the word "choice" as it seems to reflect so poorly how many people feel what is also called sexual "orientation", and to simultaneously avoid making the person in question powerless in the face of their desire, while recognizing that some people do choose and others feel powerless—what does the trick is intended to try to refer, open-endedly, across the board, but of course it fails with asexuality immediately, oops). Davidson will place stress on the "considered abnormal"(79) in this sentence to show that Freud is disputing the common assumption—true enough, and he might also have stressed "where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct" so as to balance the qualifications. Not only is the object chosen by the 'invert' merely 'soldered' to their sexual aim, but the relation of aim to object for the 'normal picture' (i.e., that of heterosexuals as tritely & reproductively conceived) is no less contingent. & because of these lazy habits and assumptions…

"We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thought between instinct and object."

One might ask we are asked to loosen and not simply to break any such 'bond' found in our thought? Perhaps this is because Freud feels that those with a sexual aim will also direct this toward an object, so that it is not the assumption that there will be an object that is problematic, what is problematic is assuming that this object is somehow 'hardwired' to the aim and predictable in advance. Freud continues

"(i) It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; (ii) nor is its object likely to be due to its object's attractions."

In the i. section of this, we have the clearest expression of what is most radical about Freud's thinking here - and what distinguishes him from all of those that he surveys in Three Essays (and who Davidson has been talking about in this article)… that the sexual instinct (or, let us upgrade to a lacanian reading of the terms perhaps?)… that the drive toward jouissance, while it has a conceptual object (objet a), that any object actually found will be a semblance of that one, a thoroughly contingent object that comes to seem to embody the a-object. So then, in ii. where Freud cautions us against thinking that it is something inherent in the object chosen by some sexual being which determines their desire for it, though he does not spell out where from - if not from the object - though it would have to fall on the side of the subject / the desiring person with a sexual aim. This final clause sort of bugs me tho and I tend more to think that whatever will do the trick for a subject, whatever will be able to occupy the place of the a-object, will have been formed through interaction with the desire of the Other, and thus it becomes difficult to say either that what objects do the trick for this subject is determined by their own intrinsic qualities OR that they derive from something about the subject's drive as such, the distinction itself doesn't seem to hold (after "desire is the desire of the Other")—though, Lacan never suggests that 'drive is the drive of the Other' and the drive does embody something of what might be called the subjects singularity, that aspect of the real which marks them.

From the foregoing discussion Davidson concludes that though many point to Freud's use of trieb and not instinkt and the sloppy translation of Strachey and co., Davidson notes that Krafft-Ebing also used the word 'trieb' and as such this alone is rather insignificant, what is extremely significant is that Freud's notion of the "Sexualtrieb" is fundamentally unlike the notions of sexual instinct found in Moll, Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Hirschfeld, etc. All of those thinkers, even the homosexuals among them, accepted the link between aim and object on the heterosexual model and sought to argue for the inverts not being degenerates or in need of prosecution etc in spite of their deviation from the 'natural' object of the instinct. Freud agreed with the political aspirations of this movement (as is well-documented by Robert May and discussed here) but he refused to mark off homosexuals off as a separate type of human being unlike the rest of the population.

Davidson discusses Iwan Bloch - who Freud also mentions - as providing an instance of a certain attitude that Freud would adopt and further. Bloch had written about sexuality from an "anthropologic-ethnologic" point of view (qtd 81). Basically, Bloch saw the charge of pathology as misplaced and recognized a great deal of variability in sexual activity and was loath to designate this or that practice as a perversion (80-2). Davidson discusses a milder way that Freud might have grafted Bloch's attitude to a less challenging (more socially palatable) position but notes that "rather than drawing this limited, though significant, conclusion, Freud when to the core of the matter and decisively replaced the concept of sexual instinct with that of sexual drive 'in the first instance independent of its object'"(82).

& here we begin to see one of Davidson's strokes of brilliance - and one that Tim Dean will pick up and capitalize on (applying it to Lacan). That is, Davidson is alert to the ways that Freud himself is unable to fully integrate the radical consequences of his idea in a thorough-going way. Davidson discusses his use of 'perversion' later in the text when, as a concept, it had already been undermined earlier (82-3). He also draws attention to Freud's notion (also in Three Essays) of the 'component [drive(s)]' - basically the idea that the sexual drive is not a unitary and singular thing but that it has component parts, contingently soldered together. As Freud puts it "the sexual [drive] itself must be something put together from various factors, and that in the perversions it falls apart, into its components" (qtd 84). [I'm bringing the 'drive' substitution from here on out]. Davidson dos not remark upon this assumption of Freud's that the perversions show the component drives as disaggregated, or more negatively as 'fallen apart'—it would seem to me that this description again poses perversions as outcomes that are somehow F'd up.

"Freud's argument, his structure of concepts, leads to the claim that neither the erotogenic zone of the genitals nor the aim of copulation bears any privileged connection to the sexual [drive]. The 'normal' aim of the sexual instinct [as discussed before Freud, etc], is not part of the content of the [drive]…"(85)

"We ought to conclude from what Freud says here that there are no true perversions. The conceptual space within which the concept if perversion functions and has a stable role has been thoroughly displaced—and displaced in a way that requires a new set of concepts for understanding sexuality and a new mode of reasoning about it"(85).

As Freud does mention both disgust and shame in connection with the perversions, Davidson recognizes that some might be inclined to use those affects as indexes of perversion, but he points out that Freud clearly was not saying this. Rather Freud says such responses as "often purely conventional" and compares them to the disgust one might feel at "the idea of using someone else's toothbrush" (qtd 86). 

Davidson then writes that "Even if Freud's conclusions in effect overturn the conceptual apparatus of perversion, it is well known that he did not embrace these conclusions unambiguously or unhesitatingly. The language of Freud's discussion sometimes reads as if he is unaware of the conceptual innovations he has wrought, as if nineteenth-century theories of sexual psychopathology can remain secure in their conceptual underpinnings"(86).

He highlights a contradictory moment in Freud's writings where, later in Three Essays, Freud suggests that something is deemed pathological when a perverse object takes the place of all others and the subject is fixated wholly upon it. But of course, in the so-called 'normal picture' of heterosexual psychosexuality that Freud has effectively undermined, this fixation (of men on women with the goal of penis-in-vagina sex) would be just such a fixation, and thus, perverse (87).

Davidson also underscores the way that more frequently early on but less so as the book progresses, Freud places words like normal, pathological and perversion in scare quotes, distancing himself from the common and medical understandings of them.

"But once Freud recon//ceived the sexual instinct as having no natural operation, once any specific aim and object of the drive were thought to be merely soldered to it, the genital zone lost the conceptual primacy that was a precondition of its principled identification with the instinct itself"(88-9). 

… or Goodbye "Sexual Instinct" and Hello Drive(s)

"Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality provided the resources to overturn this conceptual space [that is nineteenth-century psychiatry] by fundamentally altering the rules of combination for concepts such as sexual instinct, sexual object, sexual aim—with the consequence that these shared concepts, among others, were destroyed. The conclusion forced upon us is that perversion is no longer a legitimate concept, that the conceptual preconditions for its employment no longer exist in Freud's text. So that if Freud, despite himself, said that such and such phenomena were perversions, he could not have meant what Krafft-Ebing, or Moll, or Charcot had meant. We will not be able to arrive at this conclusion if we focus simply on whom Freud read, on who before him used what words in which contexts"(90). …I have a few uncertainties here. Given that Davidson shows that Freud himself, a victim of his own mentality, was unable to completely wipe the older way of thinking out of his own work—even just in Three Essays—what sense does it make to say that the older concepts and all their problematic baggage "were destroyed"? & while I agree that, when Freud persists in using the term 'perversion' that he cannot by that term mean to revert to what Moll or Krafft-Ebing had meant by the term, it is also not quite clear what he does mean either. Are we to assume that somewhere in any use he puts these words to there is an aspect of this revolutionary idea of the drives and their contingent objects, and echo of this demotion of the "normal picture" and all the rest? That might be useful, in terms of furthering Freud's project (by which I mean one's own) but it would seem that every instance would have to be examined in detail.

Bringing up Bloch's attitude once again, Davidson writes, "This notion of attitude (…) is one component of the concept of mentalité, a concept that has been put to extraor//dinarily fertile use by recent historians, especially in France. A mentality includes, among other constituents, a set of mental habits or automatisms that characterize the collective understandings and representations of a population. (…) But this displacement [of the old by the new] could only be partial, and one was always in danger of falling back into the old mentality, precisely because there was no conceptual backing for this change of attitude"(91).

Then comes the long passage that Dean is fond of and which I'll undoubtedly be using in my dissertation somehow;

"Freud's genius consisted not simply in appropriating this attitude but in seizing and exploiting it. He provided a conceptual foundation for the newly emerging mentality that made it possible, once and for all, for us to change decisively our old mental habits. So why, one wonders, did Freud himself not so change his own mental habits, why did he exhibit an attitude no less ambiguous and unstable than Bloch's. Any answer to this question is bound to be complicated, so in lieu of an answer let me provide the structure for what I take this answer to consist in. Automatisms of attitude have a durability, a slow temporality, which does not match the sometimes rapid change of conceptual mutation. Mental habits have a tendency to inertia, and these habits resist change that, in retrospect, seems conceptually required. Such resistance can take place not only in a scientific community but even in the individual who is most responsible for the conceptual innovation. Freud was a product of the old mentality that regarded perversions as pathological, a mentality whose first real signs of disintegration can be found at the beginning of the twentieth century. Freud's Three Essays ought to have stabilized the new mentality, speeding up its entrenchment by providing it with a conceptual authorization. But given the divergent temporality of the emergence of new concepts and the formation of new mentalities, it is no surprise that Freud's mental habits never quite caught up with his conceptual articulations. The attitudes that comprise a mentality are sufficiently impervious to recognition, so much like natural dispositions, that many decades may intervene before habit and concept are aligned. However, without some appropriate conceptual backdrop, it is very unlikely that a new scientific mentality can genuinely // displace an old one, since concepts, especially in science, are on fundamentally habit-forming force, one force which, even if over a long span of time, makes possible a stable set of firm mental habits. Although social. cultural, institutional, and psychological factors may all delay the definitive formation of these new habits, it is conceptual innovation of the kind Freud produced that marks one place of genius. But we must remember that genius too has its habits, its inert tendencies, that create a form of friction between what could be said and what is said, so that genius is always ahead of itself"(91-2).

Arnold I. Davidson's "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality" from _The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts_

Arnold I. Davidson

The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter Two: Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality

[n.b. this chapter is not on my comps list, but there is some useful information nonetheless and so I'll briefly poach from it here. It's a fascinating chapter, but I'll perforce, deal only with a few pieces of it.]

Davidson sees deep congruence between Krafft-Ebing's terms and those of our contemporary the DSM's discussion of "gender identity disorders" (36)

_____re "sex-change" and it's impossibility BEFORE

"So-called sex-change operations were not only technologically impossible in earlier centuries; they were conceptually impossible as well. Before the second half of the nineteenth century persons of a determinate anatomical sex could not be thought to be really, that is, psychologically, of the opposite sex. Anatomical sex exhausted one's sexual identity…" (36)  "Our current medical concept of sex reassignment would have been unintelligible or incoherent since it could not cohere with the style of reasoning about sexual identity."(36)

On one level this makes sense, right? If there was not yet a notion of the 'psychological self' current in the culture, then how could one be thinking of it, much less feeling that it was at odds with the body one has? But at the same time, I have to question whether it makes sense to assume that, until a term is defined, that what it refers to is impossible for thought. For example, Freud gives us the notion of The Uncanny, and part of the success of this idea - or so it seems to me - is that we have felt this, we have encountered this uncanny thing and now that Freud has described it so carefully, the word has taken off as a designation of this. Immediately below, Davidson will invoke 'dynamic nominalism' as a problematic of sorts, but if there is anything problematic about it, it would seem to be the suggestion that these 'types' of people exist only because of the effect of the nomination. But is that true of The Uncanny or is it not? Can we be sure?

So to bring this back to those who might feel mis-aligned when considering how they understand themselves and the body that they have. Whether or not the conceptual scaffolding was present to make sense of this in the way that Davidson is discussing, or not, can we truly feel that it is certain that no one felt this disjunction before such time as this particular way of speaking about it was coined? 

Gratuitous, but whatever - sue me.

___________the idea of "dynamic nominalism"

"This shift from the emergence of a concept ("perversion") to the emergence of a kind of person (the pervert), to return to an issue I have already mentioned, is underwritten by the doctrine that Ian Hacking has called 'dynamic nominalism.' Hacking argues that in many domains of the human sciences, 'categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interactions between these processes.' Dynamic nominalism shows how 'history plays an essential role in the constitution of the objects, where the objects are the people and the ways in which they behave,' sine the human sciences 'bring into being new categories which, in part, bring into being new kinds of people.'" (57)

"Connected with this new focus is the face that nineteenth-century psychiatry often took sexuality to be the way in which the mind is best represented. To know a person's sexuality is to know the person. Sexuality is the externalization of the hidden, inner essence of personalty. And to know sexuality, to the know the person, we must know its anomalies." (63)

"Sexuality individualizes, turns one into a specific kind of being - a sadist, // masochist, homosexual, fetishist. This link between sexuality and individuality explains some of the passion with which psychiatry constituted the pervert. The more details we have about the anomalies of perversion, the better we are able to penetrate the covert individuality of the self. Only a psychiatrist, after meticulous examination, could recognize a real pervert. Or, to be more accurate, it was also thought that there was one other kind of person who could recognize a true pervert, even without meticulous examination: as if by some kind of hypersensitive perception, a pervert could recognize one of his own kind." (63-4)

"It's not that medicine simply took over the study of what has once been a part of morality; moral deviation did not merely transform itself into disease. Instead, the moral phenomenon of the perversity of the will furnished a point of reference that both opened the way for and provided an obstacle to the medical constitution of perversion."(64)

still from a Lucio Fulci film
One on Top of the Other [1969]
Google Image -> "Perversion"

Arnold I. Davidson's "Closing Up The Corpses" from _The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts_

Davidson

Arnold I. Davidson

The Emergence of Sexuality; Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts

Harvard UP 2001

Chapter One: 

Closing Up The Corpses

Davidson begins with Foucault (and he'll be with us till the end) observing that in THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC that Foucault had traced the "conjunction of pathological anatomy and clinical medicine" and "emphasize[d] the significance of pathological anatomy as a foundation for the description and classification of diseases"(1). After a bit of clarification he cites Foucault's conclusion about these matters, that "the great break in the history of Western medicine dates precisely from the moment clinical experience became the anatomo-clinical gaze"(2).

But Davidson will be concerned not with Medicine per se, but with psychiatry. 

"One of the great breaks in the history of Western psychiatry comes precisely during the time when the anatomo-clinical gaze is in steady decline. The story of psychiatry's emergence, in the nineteenth century, as an autonomous medical discipline, and specifically its autonomy from neurology and cerebral pathology, is, in part, the history of this decline. Pathological anatomy could not serve psychiatry either as an explanatory theory for so-called mental diseases or disorders or as the foundation for the classification and description of these diseases. But the gradual and virtually anonymous disappearance of pathological anatomy in psychiatry is not merely the history of decline. For with this decline came the proliferation of whole new kinds of diseases and disease categories, a revitalization and reworking of nosologies the consequences of which stamp us even today. Foremost among these new disease categories was the class of functional diseases, of which sexual perversion and hysteria were the two most prominent examples. Although the hope that these functional diseases would yield to pathological anatomy was held out long after there was any evidence for this hope, in clinical practice, and later in theory as well, these diseases were fully describable simply as functional deviations of some kind; in the case of sexual perversion, for instance, one was faced with a functional deviation or abnormality of the sexual instinct. Admitting pure functional deviations as diseases was to create entire new species of diseased individuals, and to radically alter our conceptions of ourselves"(2).

Davidson gives us a three stage model of the emergence of "sexual perversion". First "sexual perversion was thought to be a disease of the reproductive or genital organs (…) whose basis was some anatomical abnormality of these organs"(3). The second stage comes when, failing to find anything "wrong" with the organs in cases of "sexual perversion" it is asserted that the answer is to be found in "the neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of the brain"(3). So the first two are both still engaged with the "anatomo-clinical gaze" but directly their gaze differently. "The third stage took perversions to be pure functional deviations of the sexual instinct, not reducible to cerebral pathology" instead "Perversions were to be viewed and treated at the level of psychology, not at the grander level of pathological anatomy. The psychiatric style of reasoning emerged clearly and definitely at this third stage"(3).

"In the years between 1870 and 1905 psychiatry was caught between two conceptual grids; in one of which it was aligned with neurology, in the other with psychology"(3).

"During this span of time, no one really knew what it would mean to conceive of diseases like perversion in purely functional terms. It would be like admitting functions without organs, which, as Bouillard reminds us, was a palpable absurdity"(4).

"The real break, the new style of reasoning, is to be located at that point when the sexual instinct and its functional diseases were introduced together. Functional diseases were diseases of something - not an organ, but an instinct"(4).

Davidson is discussing the work of one Dr. Michea (late 1800s) and his ruminations on the causes of deviations of the sexual instinct (i.e., perversion, or homosexuality more accurately still) and a certain anatomical cause within the male body which explains these. 

"Nothing could be more natural than to expect these feminine tendencies to have some anatomical basis; and nothing could constitute a more appropriate anatomical basis than a masculine uterus. The uterus, that almost always diseased female organ, was responsible for masculine deviations as well!"

"Since it was natural to suppose that all behavioral disorders had an organic basis, and since the behavioral manifestations in question were diseases of sexuality, it seemed inevitable that the sexual organs themselves must be the seat of the perversions"(6).

"…to the consternation of the pathological anatomists, the conclusion is virtually always the same - genital organs, normal; no physical malformations of the reproductive organs"(7). Anatomy had proven in this case to be "a useless explanatory space"(7).

. . .  "But if pathological anatomy was to survive this startling claim [that perversions were not correlated with deviations in sexual anatomy], it had to retreat. And it quickly found its site of retreat in the brain"(7).

"At this time in the history of psychiatry only certain kinds of statements about disease processes could count as either true or false; not every such statement was a possible candidate for the status of truth or falsehood. Specifically, explanations of disease states had to be referred to organs; any explanation not of this type was not so much false as not even in the domain of the true and false. An explanation that did not at least attempt to anatomically localize the disease was more a part of theology than of science. Since it was believed that there were distinct diseases of sexuality, and since these diseases could not be explained by defects of the reproductive organs, the only plausible organ that remained to provide an explanation was the brain. (…) Indeed for these early psychiatrists it does not seem as if anything could have counted as evidence against the proposition that sexual perversions are ultimately traceable to brain disease. Postmortem examinations that demonstrated no pathological lesions, and should have constituted such evidence, were always explained away; the necessary changes in brain structure were undoubtedly 'so fine that with ordinary instruments they are not demonstrable postmortem'. (…) To affirm explicitly that sexual perversions or other mental diseases were functionally autonomous from the brain would have been to pass from basic truth to palpable absurdity, something beyond falsity"(10).

"The epistemological stranglehold of pathological anatomy on psychiatry is perhaps best illustrated by Moriz Benedikt's Anatomical Studies upon Brains of Criminals" … this series of studies was hoping to lay the "foundations stones of a Natural History of Crime" (Benedikt qtd 10)… and here is Bnedikt's (shouted?) conclusion;

THE BRAINS OF CRIMINALS EXHIBIT A DEVIATION FROM THE NORMAL TYPE, AND CRIMINALS ARE TO BE VIEWED AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL VARIETY OF THEIR SPECIES, AT LEAST AMONG THE CULTURED RACES. (Benedikt qtd 11)

"The appropriate way to understand the sexual instinct is in functional terms, not anatomical ones"(13).

"By acknowledging the subservience of the genital organs to the function of the sexual instinct, Legrain makes overt what by 1896 nobody should have doubted. And by claiming that the seat of the sexual instinct was everywhere and nowhere, he told us to look for diseases everywhere and nowhere. This 'everywhere and nowhere' sometimes had a more common name in psychiatric discussion - it went under the name of personality"(13).

The first modern usage of "perversion" per the OED "occurred in 1842 in Robley Dunglison's Medical Lexicon"(14).

OED: " 'Perversion,' one of four modifications of function in disease; the three others being augmentation, diminution, and abolition"(14).

"Once one offers a functional characterization of the sexual instinct, perversions become a natural class of diseases; and without this characterization there is really no conceptual room for this kind of disease"(14). 

Krafft-Ebing saw the sexual instinct in functional terms (14-5).

"In order to be able to determine precisely what phenomena are functional disturbances or diseases of the sexual instinct, one must also, of course, specify what the normal or natural function of this instinct consists in. Without knowing what the normal function of the instinct is, everything and nothing could count as a functional disturbance. There would be no principled criterion to include or exclude any behavior from the disease category of perversion. So one must first believe that there is a natural function of the sexual instinct and then believe that this function is quite determinate. One might have thought that questions as momentous as these would have received extensive discussion during the nineteenth-century heyday of perversion. But, remarkably enough, no such discussion appears. There is virtually unargued unanimity both on the fact that this instinct does have a natural function and on what that function is"(15).

"Krafft-Ebing further divides the perversions into sadism, masochism, fetishism, and contrary sexual instinct"(15).

"It is not at all obvious why sadism, masochism, fetishism, and homosexuality should be treated as species of the same disease, for they appear to have no essential features in common. Yet if one takes the natural function of the sexual instinct to be propagation, it becomes possible to see why they were all classified together as perversions"(15).

"Had anyone denied wither that the sexual instinct has a natural function or that this function is procreation, diseases of perversion, as we understand them, would not have entered psychiatric nosology"(16).

"We can conveniently place the origin of contrary sexual instinct, as a medicopsychological diagnostic category, in 1870, with the publication of Carl Westphal's 'Die conträre Sexualempfindung'"(16).

"He believed that contrary sexual instinct was a congenital perversion of the sexual instinct, and that in this perversion 'a woman is physically a woman and psychologically a man and, on the other hand, a man is physically a man and psychologically a woman.' I have called this the firth modern definition because it presents a purely psychological characterization of homosexuality, and detached from Westphal's meager explanatory speculations, it provides us with the clinical conception of this perversion operative in almost all of the subsequent medical literature"(16).

"Westphal's psychological characterization of homosexuality is, in effect, the psychiatric transformation of a previous, although nonmedical, understanding of this disorder"(17). ---> links this to Ulrichs and the "urnings" of his thinking

"…throughout the 1870s and 1880s there were the obligatory anatomical claims that these desires were the result of 'the brain of a woman in the body of a man and the brain of a man in the body of a woman'. These three ideas of same-sex behavior represent three central places where the phenomenon was thought to reside - the soul, the brain, and the psyche or personality. And, although not always in this historical sequence, theology, pathological anatomy, and psychiatry each took its own opportunity to lay claim to a complete explanation of perverse desires"(17).

"None of the writers I am familiar with ever suggest that these so-called functional diseases are not true diseases, are not part of the legitimate domain of medical science. Yet, at the same time, where was no already clearly formulated concept of disease under which they could readily fall. Clinical practice came first; explanatory theory lagged far behind. No doubt the circumstances are complicated by the fact that all of the early writers expressed allegiance to pathological anatomy. But even after pathological anatomy became an obvious explanatory failure, psychiatry did not regroup and address itself to the question to whether these perversions were really diseases. One unequivocal path to take would have been to claim that because no anatomical changes underlay the perversions, they could not be considered diseases, and physicians must leave there regulation to others more qualified. But clinical practice had already constituted the perversions as diseases, and by // the time the hold of pathological anatomy was loosened, they were already a recognized part of psychiatric nosology. This precedence of clinical practice to theory is officially endorsed by the American Psychiatric Association, whose Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is meant to be theoretically neutral. But such theoretical neutrality is as unprincipled as it is expansive; indeed, its expansiveness is partially a function of its lack of principle. On a straightforward interpretation, it sanctions the view that whatever psychiatrists do in fact treat as diseases are diseases"(19-20).

"To count something as a disease is to make a theoretical classification. The hope of reading diseases straight off of nature, independent of theory, is as philosophically naive as it is historically suspect"(20).

Theories of functional disease were proposed, but what Davidson sees as crucial is that they come along after the classificatory work has already been done. "These new diseases appeared almost full-blown in clinical practice, and silently, anonymously, became part of psychiatric nomenclature"(21).

Krafft-Ebing "These anomalies are very important elementary disturbances, since upon the nature of sexual sensibility the mental individuality in greater part depends"(21).

"Sexuality individualizes, turns one into a specific kind of human being - a sadist, masochist, homosexual, fetishist. This link between sexuality and // individuality explains some of the passion with which psychiatry investigated perversions"(22).

"One will not be able to understand the importance of these new diseases of sexuality if one conflates them with sodomy. Sodomy was a legal category, defined in terms of certain specifiable behavior; the sodomite was a judicial subject of the law. Homosexuality was a psychic disease of the instinct, of one's sensibility, not to be reduced to merely behavioral terms"(22).

"Homosexuality was a disease, a 'perversion' strictly speaking, whereas sodomy was a vice, a problem for morality and law, about which medicine has no special knowledge"(23).

"Every psychiatrist writing during this period acknowledged the difference between perversions and perversity, even if they also quickly admitted that it often proved difficult to distinguish the two. Only minutely detailed examination could help to determine that a given patient was a genuine pervert, and not merely evil or wicked"(23).

"The reassignment in regulating the perversions, from law/morality to medicine, was not simply a new institutional division of labor; it was to signal a fundamental transformation, and the inauguration of whole new ways of conceptualizing ourselves.

Perversion was not a disease that lurked about in nature, waiting for a psychiatrist with especially acute powers of observation to discover it hiding almost everywhere. It was a disease created by a new (functional) understanding of disease, a conceptual shift, a shift in reasoning, that made it possible to interpret various types of activity in medicopsychiatric terms. There was no natural morbid entity to be discovered until clinical psychiatric practice invented one. Perversion was not a disease candidate until it became possible to attribute diseases to the sexual instinct, and there were no possible diseases of the sexual instinct before the nineteenth century; when the notion of diseases of this instinct loses its last remaining grasp upon us, we will rid the world of all of its perverts."(24)

"The theory of degeneracy was used as a pseudoexplanatory framework for practically every  serious psychopathological state dealt with by nineteen-century psychiatry."(25)

Nature and nurture make plenty of appearances too - notably when the issue of treatment appears. Kraeplin thought these things were congenital, ergo there could not be eradicated. But this position would undermine any treatment and there was a lot of push behind the idea of treatment. Kraeplin; "There can be no thought of treatment of an anomaly like this, which has developed with the development of the personality and has its origin deep within it" (qtd 26)

"Schrenck-Notzing was perhaps the first to argue in detail that extraneous influences and education were actually the most significant etiological factors in the genesis of perversions"(26).

Morton Prince tackled the problem somewhat differently, but restating the conflicts between nature and nuture. Davidson writes "If it was not congenital, then therapeutic intervention would be required. This is exactly where Prince relied on his theory of habit neuroses and true functional diseases. He believed that in order to maintain that perversion, although acquired, was nevertheless a disease, one had to demonstrate that intensely cultivated habits could eventually become automatic, independent of volitional control. The pervert was then subject to 'real imperative sensations and ideas.'

[...embedding Prince] "analogy with what takes place in other fields of the nervous system would make it intelligible that sexual feelings and actions may by constant repetition (cultivation) become associated together and developed into the sort of quasi-independent neural activities, which may then become practically independent of the will - or, in other words, a psychosis." [back to Davidson...]

Google Image > "19th Century
Psychiatry"

Prince could then argue that, given this theory, it us up to 'counter-education to replace the morbid processes by healthy ones'. Under counter-education one could include almost anything one pleased, and so psychiatry was on its way to an unlimited disciplinary regulation of the sexual life. This theory of perversion as an acquired disease induced one to leave completely the domain of pathological anatomy and embed oneself firmly in psychology. Morton Prince, after all, founded both the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1906) and the American Psychological Association (1910). The sexual personality was created so much the better to control the body"(27).

"The categories and conceptualizations of the self determine not only how others view us, but also how each person conceives of him- or herself. And conceptions of ourselves greatly influence how we actually behave"(28).

"The concept of perversion, once exclusively a part of specialized nineteenth-century discussion, became, in the twentieth century, a dominant way of organizing our thought about own sexuality. People diagnosed as perverts came to think of themselves as diseased, morbid, an experience that was not possible before the heyday of the pervert that I have described"(28).

"Being classified as a pervert could alter everything from one's self-conception to one's behavior to one's social circumstances. And even those of us who are not full-fledged perverts have had to reconceive of ourselves; every little deviation may be a sign of our impending perversion. We are all possible perverts. It is perversion as a possible way of being, a possible category of self, that is the legacy of nineteenth-century psychiatry"(28).

"Moreover, we cannot think away the concept of perversion, even if we no longer claim to believe that there is any natural function of the sexual instinct. We are prisoners of the historical space of nineteenth-century // psychiatry"(28-9).

Without having an argument against this last observation, I do wonder at its stability. Admittedly the term has taken off, been taken up, and means variously to many people even now. But I wonder first whether as a term it might have been detourned one too many times to really function any longer - without qualification - as the bars of our 19th C psychiatric cage. Secondly, it seems to me that, often, when on encounters the word used spontaneously these days, that it isn't really employed in an othering or pathologizing way. Perhaps that is symptomatic of the people I talk to/read etc (?) but it often seems to be used as self-description or when applied to another's interests, used to denote the suspicion of a sexual motivation or of some manner of jouissance involved, but in a way that is nascently complimentary, as if, under it all, the comment also says "good on you for figuring out how to get off on that stuff!"

Hartwood Hospital, a 19th Century psychiatric Hospital
Cheery, ain't it?