Читать книгу Sexuality in the Field of Vision - Jacqueline Rose - Страница 14

In this final section I want to look at the two ‘vanishing points’ of the case of Dora — the theory of feminine sexuality and the concept of transference. For if the case failed it was because Freud failed to recognize the specificity of either of these two factors, and where he saw their pertinence (addenda, postscript, footnote) they were left in a type of offstage of the case, as the thing that was missing (the ‘secret’) or the element that he had failed to ‘master’, as if both were a content, an object to be identified, placed, and resolved (transference as the recovery of an actual event). What I want to do here, therefore, is to show how in both of these concepts something of the subject’s relation to discourse as we saw it emerging above — in Dora’s second dream, and then in the schizophrenic relation to the word — can be discerned and to suggest the pertinence of that theory for discussion of the feminine not as discourse but, within discourse, as a relationship to it.

First, the transference, as it was elaborated by Freud in his papers on technique (‘The Dynamics of Transference’, ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’, ‘Observations on Transference-Love’),³⁶ where he starts again with a definition of neurosis as a libidinal turning away from reality, is first seen as a resistance in the chain of associations that would lead logically to the repairing or completing of the patient’s memory. Dora’s case also started, in Freud’s discussion of the fragment, with this insistence that cure of the symptom and completion of memory were synonymous — psychoanalysis being defined here as the creation of a full history to which the subject would be restored. It is a concept also present at the beginning of Lacan’s work on the idea of full speech,³⁷ retranscription of the history of the patient through language, before the development of the concept of the unconscious precisely as the effect of language, and hence behind it a moment of failing that can never be restored, that is nothing other than that of the subject itself (primary repression). Thus Freud starts by stressing transference as the obstacle to the reality of the patient’s history, in a simple sense corresponding to the notion that behind neurosis is an event (seduction theory) and in front of it, if all goes well, another event (neurosis vanquished by reality), transference appearing here as something that ‘flings’ the patient ‘out of his real relation to the doctor’.³⁸

Yet, taken together, these three texts inscribe an opposite movement. In the discussion of recollection (‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’), Freud interpolates a discussion of amnesia that starts with the concept of total recall as the objective of analysis but ends up with a discussion of primary or primal fantasy, indicating that concept of Freud’s which was most completely to undermine the concept of the cure as the retrieval of a real occurrence. In fact, in his article on the two principles of mental functioning,³⁹ Freud assigned to fantasy the whole domain of sexuality, whereby it escapes the reality principle altogether (pleasure in sexuality revealing itself as pleasure in the act of representation itself).⁴⁰

Through this a different concept of the transference emerges, one seen most clearly in ‘Observations on Transference-Love’, where what is objected to in transference is its status as a demand (the demand for love) and, more important, one that insists on being recognized as real (which it is, Freud has to concede), so that what now ‘irrupts’ into the analytic situation is reality itself, a reality that is totally out of place: ‘There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality’.⁴¹ The patient insists therefore on repeating ‘in real life’ what should only have been reproduced as ‘psychical material’ — thus the relationship to the real has been reversed. What this indicates for this discussion is that Freud himself was forced to correct or to revise the concept of transference to which he ascribed the failure of the case of Dora, and this in a way that is not satisfactorily or exhaustively defined by reference to the countertransference (Freud’s implication in the case). For what is at stake is transference as an impossible demand for recognition (a return of love in ‘Observations on the Transference-Love’), a demand that has to be displaced onto another register, indicated here by the corresponding emphasis on the concepts of fantasy (‘make-believe’), representation, psychical material (the only meaning of material that has any value here). Note the proximity of these terms to the query, image, Bild, of Dora’s second dream, sexuality precisely not as demand (the demand for love) but as question.

In the discussion of the case itself, I suggested that Freud’s concept of the transference as the retrieval of an event corresponded to the concept of a pregiven normal feminine sexuality, neurosis being defined as the failure to meet a ‘real erotic demand’. Thus if the concept of reality has to go in relation to the notion of transference, we can reasonably assume that it also goes in relation to that of sexuality itself. I have already suggested briefly that it does, in what Freud says about the pleasure principle. What is important to grasp is that, while it is undoubtedly correct to state that Freud’s analysis of Dora failed because of the theory of feminine sexuality to which he then held, this concept cannot be corrected by a simple reference to his later theses on feminine sexuality (preoedipality, etc.), crucial as these may be, since that is simply to.replace one content with another, whereas what must be seen in Freud’s work on femininity is exactly the same movement we have just seen in the concept of transference, which is nothing less than the collapse of the category of sexuality as content altogether.

Freud starts both his papers on femininity (‘Female Sexuality’ and ‘Femininity’) with recognition of the girl’s preoedipal attachment to the mother, its strength and duration, as it had been overlooked within psychoanalytic theory, thus feminine sexuality as an earlier stage, a more repressed content, something archaic. Yet although the two papers in one sense say the same thing, their logic or sequence is different, and the difference has important effects on the level of theory.

‘Female Sexuality’ (1931) starts with the preoedipal factor and its necessary relinquishment, which is then discussed in terms of the castration complex and penis envy. But this does not exhaust the question of the girl’s renunciation of her mother, a question that then persists in a series of references to ‘premature’ weaning, the advent of a rival, the necessary frustration and final ambivalence of the child’s demand for love. None of these factors, however, constitute a sufficient explanation: ‘All these motives seem nevertheless insufficient to justify the girl’s final hostility’,⁴² which cannot be attributed to the ambivalence of the infantile relation to the object, since this would be true of the boy child too. Thus a question persists that reveals itself as the question, hanging over from that of a demand that has been frustrated and a renunciation that still has not been explained: ‘A further question arises: “What does the little girl require of her mother?”’.⁴³

Freud can only answer this question by reference to the nature of the infantile sexual aim — its activity (rejection of a male/female biological chemistry, a single libido with both active and passive aims), an activity that is not only a corrective to the idea of a naturally passive femininity but functions as repetition (the child repeats a distressing experience through play). Correlating this with the definition of infantile sexuality given earlier in the paper (‘It has, in point of fact, no aim, and is incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction; and principally for that reason is doomed to end in disappointment’.⁴⁴) it emerges that what specifies the little girl’s aim, and her demand, is that she does not have one. The question persists, or is repeated, therefore, as the impossibility of satisfaction.

In ‘Femininity’ (1933), the sequence is in a sense reversed. The paper starts with the caution against the biological definition of sexual difference and then reposes the question of the girl’s relinquishment of the preoedipal attachment to the mother. The motives for renunciation are listed again — oral frustration, jealousy, prohibition, ambivalence — but in this case the question of how these can explain such renunciation when they apply equally to the boy is answered with the concept of penis envy, with which the question is in a sense closed (the discussion moves on to a consideration of adult modes of feminine sexuality). Thus the question is answered here, and it is as answer that the concept of penis envy has produced, rightly, the anger against Freud. For looking at the paper again, it is clear that nothing has been answered at all, since Freud characterizes each of the earlier motives specifically in terms of its impossibility (see above): oral demand as ‘insatiable’, ‘a child’s demands for love are immoderate’ (rivalry), ‘multifarious sexual wishes … which cannot for the most part be satisfied’, ‘the immoderate charater of the demand for love and the impossibility of fulfilling their sexual wishes’.⁴⁵ Now, if what characterizes all these demands is the impossibility of their satisfaction, then the fact that there is another impossible demand (‘the wish to get the longed-for penis’)⁴⁶ cannot strictly explain anything at all, other than the persistence of the demand itself — the question, therefore, of the earlier paper, ‘What does the little girl require of her mother?’⁴⁷

The question persists, therefore, only insofar as it cannot be answered, and what I want to suggest here is that what we see opening up in the gap between the demand and its impossibility is desire itself, what Lacan calls the effect of the articulation of need as demand, ‘desire endlessly impossible to speak as such’. This is why the demand for love in the transference blocks the passage of the treatment insofar as it insists precisely on its own reality (the possibility of satisfaction). What Freud’s papers on femininity reveal, therefore, is nothing less than the emergence of this concept of desire as the question of sexual difference: how does the little girl become a woman, or does she?

To return to dreams and hysteria, isn’t this exactly the question that reveals itself in the dream of the hysteric analyzed in The Interpretation of Dreams⁴⁸ who dreamt that her own wish was not fulfilled, through an identification with the woman she posited as her sexual rival? Her desire, therefore, is the desire for an unsatisfied desire: ‘She likes caviar,’ writes Lacan, ‘but she doesn’t want any. It is in that that she desires it.’⁴⁹ And behind that wish (and that identification) can be seen the question of the woman as object of desire, of how her husband could desire a woman who was incapable of giving him satisfaction (she knows he does not want her), the identification being, therefore, with the question itself: ‘This being the question put forward, which is very generally that of hysterical identification … whereby the woman identifies herself with the man.’⁵⁰ This can be referred directly back to the case of Dora, woman as object and subject of desire — the impossibility of either position, for if object of desire then whose desire, and if subject of desire then its own impossibility, the impossibility of subject and desire (the one implying the fading of the other). Thus Dora rejects Herr K. at the exact moment when he states that he does not desire his own wife, the very woman through whom the whole question for Dora was posed (the scene at the lake).

Thus what feminine sexuality reveals in these examples is the persistence of the question of desire as a question (exactly the opposite of the feminine as sexual content, substance, or whatever). Finally, to return to the hysterical symptom itself:

It is to the extent that a need gets caught up in the function of desire that the psychosomatic can be conceived of as something more than the idle commonplace which consists in saying that there is a psychic backing to everything somatic. That much we have known for a long time. If we speak of the psychosomatic it is insofar as what must intervene is desire.⁵¹

I want to conclude with this, not because I think it answers anything but because I believe it to be a necessary caution to certain current developments within feminist theory. What seems to me to need attention is precisely this movement of psychoanalysis away from sexuality as content (preoedipal or otherwise) to a concept of sexuality as caught up in the register of demand and desire. What does emerge from the above is that it was on the failings in the concept of the feminine (the case of Dora) that this problem emerged in Freud’s own work. To relinquish the idea of a specific feminine discourse may be less discouraging if what it leads to is work on the place of the feminine as somehow revealing more urgently the impossibility of the position of the woman within a discourse that would prefer to suppress the question of desire as such (the question of its splitting). I would suggest that the case of Dora reveals no more, and no less, than this.

Bernini: ‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’ with Cardinal Comero, one of the cardinals and doges of the city in accompanying gallery, Santa Maria della Vittoria. Rome.