Chapter 5: Uncanny (Wo)Man: The Home/Secrets of Psychoanalysis

             In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud argues that psychoanalysis finds “no fundamental, but only quantitative, distinctions between normal and neurotic life” (V 373).  The hysteric, according to the Freud of around 1895 and 1896, suffered from the pathogenic repression of traumatic memories of incestuous violence.  Freud would later argue that he mistook these memories and their traumas for what were actually the child’s oedipal fantasies.  Since he argued that these fantasies are aspects of the universal Oedipus complex, they could no longer be the source of any structural differentiation between “normal and neurotic life”—hence my previous question asked with respect to the Wolf Man case: whence the neurosis?  I argued before that the orthodox view of the supposed schism between the “seduction” theory and psychoanalysis proper—Freud’s supposed abandonment of the “seduction” theory—is often over emphasized because, as Rand and Torok argue, Freud never is able to turn completely toward fantasy as the basis of his theory, and, as we see in the Wolf Man case and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the significance of the contingency of “external reality” haunts Freud’s movement toward a totalizing theory based on the determinism of his psychical reality.  I quote the passage from The Interpretation of Dreams above to note that this movement had begun for his theorizing as early as the late 1890s.  Given that there had been a structural difference between his earlier, “seduction” etiology of hysteria and normality, his position in The Interpretation of Dreams does represent a movement toward a paradigm shift, a movement toward a theory which attempts to reduce, if not negate, the effects of chance.

              Though Freud’s etiologies of the neuroses of his male patients, such as the Wolf Man, were muddled by his generalization of “seduction” fantasies and the “reality” of primal scenes, he would theorize a very distinct and female-specific etiology for hysteria about thirty years after he all but dropped his inquiry into the source of hysteria in 1897.  Predictably this later etiology grew out of his increasing emphasis on the importance and centrality of the castration complex.  Besides contradicting his earlier, Charcotian position on the reality of male hysteria, this female-specific etiology would also draw a clear line of division between the sexes with respect to bisexuality and the Oedipus complex.  The Freudian female of the Freud of the late twenties and the thirties is more clearly bisexual than the Freudian male, and, unlike the male whose developmental telos is to transcend the Oedipus complex, the Freudian female’s telos is to become embedded in it.  Freud’s final etiology of hysteria can be found in his essays “Female Sexuality” (1931) and “Femininity” (1933), and is one of three possible “lines of development” (XXI 229) open to females:

The first [the hysteric’s line] leads to a general revulsion from sexuality.  The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys, grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields. (ibid.)

The hysteric would like to give up sexuality in general by repressing what Freud theorizes is her primary masculinity, the latter of which he clearly equates with sexuality, and also with a highly abstract, pre-Socratic conception of activity.  The hysteric represses her primary masculinity too much, whereas the other two lines of development—of homosexuality and “normal” femininity—would repress it too little or just enough respectively.  Freud unambiguously posits masculinity as primary, both in terms of sexuality and activity, and therefore in terms of his conception of “subjectivity,” and even of Life in the most abstract.  His position—which would suggest that females are more bisexual since male bisexuality seems to have no origin—is based on his theory that females start out as males: “We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man” (XXII 118).  Freud argues that the girl’s pre-oedipal phase is spent as a little man who takes her mother as “her” primary sexual object, just as the boy does.  Strangely, however, the girl identifies with her mother, while the boy somehow identifies with his father, which contradicts Freud’s own conception in The Ego and the Id that, at “the very beginning, in the individual’s primitive oral phase, object-cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other” (XIX 29).  The source of the male’s original identification with the father is simply assumed, leaving little room for Freud’s common claim for the universality of bisexuality.

              Other evidence of Freud’s theorizing sexuality proper as masculine can be found in “Female Sexuality” where, after positing the two phases of the female’s sexual life—the initial masculine, active phase Freud associates with what he conceptualizes as a phallic clitoris, and the latter feminine, passive phase Freud associates with his conception of the vagina as the passive receptor of the penis—Freud writes that we “do not, of course, know the biological basis of these peculiarities in women” (XXI 228).  How could what Freud has just described as the nature of female sexuality be a peculiarity unless male sexuality, with its single sex organ and its one masculine sexuality, is considered primordial?  The traditional conception of the “enigma” of female sexuality is based on the assumption that male sexuality is a known norm of sexuality.  Yet Freud’s closing words on the “dark continent” (XX 212) of female sexuality and the question “Was will das Weib?” (Jon55 2:421) have the uncanny effect of bringing up disturbing questions regarding his theory of male sexuality—that is, of psychoanalysis in general, insofar as it is a form of hom(m)osexual theory.  Male sexuality is assumed as the norm, but it becomes the enigma itself as Freud theorizes female sexuality late in his career, and seemingly once and for all.  For example, why does the Oedipus complex seem to be the beginning of male development, whereas it is the end of female development?  In other words, what would be the pre-oedipal phase in boys?  Why would the boy be bisexual if he begins and ends as a male?  Why would the boy not initially identify with his mother?  How important is identification?  Is it as important as object choice?  Wouldn’t a change of identification be as significant as the girl’s supposed change of object?  If not, what would be the source of neurosis and homosexuality for boys?  In other words, why is there not an equivalent, clearly mapped-out three paths—normality, neurosis, homosexuality—for male sexuality in Freudian theory?

              Through my reading of Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny,’” I attempt to address these questions, not as much by delving into the fragments of Freudian theory that might be made to cohere in order to provide some answers, but by showing how these questions mark a much more general attribute of psychoanalysis: its primary defense against what is totally other via the reduction of that other to the binary of male/female and the (op)positionality of “castration-truth.”  Psychoanalysis can be read as a positioning with respect to the Other, a positioning sustained by the Other’s reduction to a simple other of (op)position, and this simple other at times figuring as woman, femininity, or hysteric, while at other times as “the unconscious,” the id, or “external reality.”  The figure of woman becomes the missive of the hom(m)osexual self-posting of psychoanalysis: the other that must be reduced to the One and what reveals the divisions of the One.

              More specifically, I try to show in my reading of “The ‘Uncanny’” how the undecidability of “the” unconscious is related to chance and the significance of the mother.  I argue here that the home (Heim) of psychoanalysis is established through the repression of a variety of secrets (Geheimnises) related to what is actually the undecidability hidden behind Freud’s rigid male/female (op)position and his “castration-truth.”  These secrets are not like Freud’s unknown of the navel of the dream, full of sense, but the secret of something otherwise to sense, a hidden unknowable, the partiality of the discourse that represses the secrets.  Moreover, these secrets are also the division within the supposed totality.  Finally I try to show how psychoanalysis employs many of the major defenses it describes in its relation to the Other, and to the Other in its simple-other guises as hysteric, femininity, female, woman, or mother.  I attempt to group all of these defensive strategies together under what I have called “the actual phallic function.”  My general goal is to show how Freud’s generalization into universal fantasies of memories that were pathogenic and (despite his efforts to make these memories all the same) full of chance is related to the “bedrock” (XXIII 252) of his phallic Weltanschauung, where anatomy is certainly destiny, despite his feints to the contrary.  In other words, I want to link Freud’s logic of lack and his destinational theory with his theories of sexual “difference” in order to show how psychoanalysis functions defensively in its “face to face” with actual difference, or différance and chance—how sexual difference in the (op)positional form male/female provides the basis of his reduction of difference to more of the same via a destinational linguistics based on “castration-truth.” 

              In “The ‘Uncanny,’” I read Freud as being in a Levinasian “face to face” (Lev69 79) with the beyond of “the” unconscious in a different mode than in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  Whereas Beyond … dealt with trauma and the contingency and violence of “external reality,” this text deals with what would seem to be the contingency or conflict of “psychic reality”: the beyond of the outside of the inside.  In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud was clear where he stood on the question of psychic determinism and the nature of the simple inside in general: “nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined” (242).  What I see as being at stake in “The ‘Uncanny’” is whether Freud reduces what he called “the unconscious” to more of the same via the psychoanalytic trope of (op)positionality, castration—therefore securing the position of his “I.”  A simpler way to put it—in line with how I read Derrida’s essay “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies”—might be to say that what is at stake is whether there is any space (or time) for chance and difference in Freud’s conception of the psyche.  “The” unconscious that is tolerant of contradiction seems to be for Freud intolerant of the chance that the letter might not arrive at its destination.  “Freud” depends upon all possible “beyonds” to the PP—these potential radical alterities—being reduced to what is known, predictable, and calculable, in order to secure his totality-based position and his transmissibility-dependent legacy.  With the Wolf Man case and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, we see Freud extending his determinism-seeking logic from “psychical reality” to “external reality” by a reduction of the latter to the “trauma”-structure of the former and therefore attempting to extend his determinism of the inside to the outside in order to achieve a totality of calculable terrain.

              I conclude that Freud’s ultimate system, and the positioning of totality it attempts to secure, requires a split along the lines of the existence of woman and therefore along the lines of the (male, phallic) self as being One.  The positioning of psychoanalysis is much like the positioning of man I derive from Freudian theory: a split ego that must at the same time believe in woman’s absence and presence, the product of a fort/da game (with a slash, where there is equivalence, repetition, and interminability).  We might call this a fetishist’s position of disavowal if not for the fact that Freud’s conception of the fetishist is centered on the presence/absence of the maternal phallus, and not the presence/absence of woman: the concept of the (male) fetishist is part of “the actual phallic function” in that it displaces the role of woman with the identity-difference term of castration.  What I am arguing here is that this disavowal is first of all the dissimulation of the Other behind man/woman, and then of the simple, or small-“o” other behind the One of man via the magical identity-difference term of castration.  What the concept of the fetish hides behind its phallocentrism, its “castration-truth,” is difference.  Here I attempt to map out the (op)positioning of Freudian theory with respect to the dissimulation of difference via the (op)positioning sexual “difference” as man/woman, Masculinity/Femininity, or Male/Female.  I argue that this dualistic sexual “difference” is part of the “actual phallic function”—that is, part of that which hides difference behind the “difference” of (op)positional and ideal binaries.

              I attempt to relate here themes of chance (the possibility of difference) with themes of sexual “difference” in Freudian theory.  In “The ‘Uncanny,’” this relationship can be found with respect to the themes of superstition and the mother-infant monad/dyad.  The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, besides being one of the primary texts where Freud makes his position on psychic determinism clear, is also the text where Freud treats superstition as a projection of repressed or unconscious wishes into “external reality.”  Given this position, one might assume that Freud is simply a committed materialist waging war on such beliefs.  Yet Freud is radically split on issues such as the relationship of psychoanalysis to what he considered to be two primary sub-categories of superstition: occultism and telepathy.  Whereas he rarely if ever took a definitive stance on the various beliefs he classified as occultism, Freud’s belief in telepathy was clearly stated later in his career  (see Gay88 443-45). 

              I read “The ‘Uncanny’” as evidence of Freud’s profound conflict regarding his superstitious beliefs, the lure these beliefs held out for him, and his desire to be a paragon of the materialist scientist—this despite his understanding of these two belief systems as mutually-exclusive.  I attribute this conflict, this splitting of Freud, to his desire to master “external reality” as a determinism, as he believed he had done with psychical reality.  I show how Freud associated superstition with “animistic beliefs,” and therefore with the primitive of man and ontogenetic infancy when the relationship to the mother is dominant.  Superstition thus is one theme that illustrates the splitting of the “castration-truth” positioning of the One in terms of the significance of the mother, or in terms of her presence/absence.  Castration, like animistic beliefs, is first theorized by Freud as a childhood sexual theory, a childhood belief—but it later becomes for Freud a grand truth.  Freud seems quite tempted to have animistic beliefs follow the same path from an aspect of infantile or childish psychology to a grand truth.  A determinism of “external reality” might be called Fate or Destiny, and, for the materialist scientist Freud, such superstitious beliefs assume a God-like or demonic Other who has framed the determinism as such.  The determinism of these beliefs held out the lure of Freud’s mastery over “external reality,” though the God-like Other they assumed conflicted with his identity as a materialist scientist.

              What is primitive, irrational, uneducated, and childlike Freud often associates with femininity, in contrast to what he associates with masculinity: what is civilized, rational, enlightened, and adult.  What I will show as Freud’s severe ambivalence with respect to “animistic beliefs” might be understood in terms of two mutually exclusive methods of achieving a certain mastery over “external reality,” chance, difference, and the figure of the mother or woman, which all should be associated with each other in this context: (1) by assuming the (phallic) position of materialist scientist and reducing the chance and difference of “external reality” to the absence of this position, that is, to lack or castration; and (2) by accepting the beliefs of occultism, superstitions, and possibly religions as partially true, or true if reformulated in a way more amenable to Freud’s psychoanalytic logic of determinism as applied to “psychic reality.”  Freud is split by maintaining both methods, both positions, simultaneously, which I argue is similar to what Freud describes as disavowal, where two mutually exclusive positions are held together: the fetishist boy “has retained that belief [in castration], but he has also given it up” (XXI 154).

              I argue below that “The ‘Uncanny’” is a position(ing) paper of “Freud’s,” much as Beyond … is one, where the positioning becomes abyssal because “the related is related to the relating,” and where the self-posting suggests something totally other beyond what the text admits: something that might be called das Unheimlich if Freud’s essay didn’t reduce this category to a logic of lack.  I show that Freud’s positioning in “The ‘Uncanny’” is primarily one made against difference and chance, which are first figured as the (op)positional other, the other against which the self-same is defined, the figure of woman, who is then (dis)figured as non-existent or absence in terms of castration: it is a positioning that employs the aforementioned triple (self-)deception of the actual phallic function.  Since the other of the positioning of “The ‘Uncanny’” remains repressed, the text becomes, again, an example of self-posting, an attempt at establishment of the One via the One.  This essay, which was written shortly before Beyond …, is, like Beyond …, a text where its self-posting ends up revealing an insecure positioning, and in this case with respect to chance, difference, and woman.  The feeling that this positional insecurity would produce could be called “uncanny,” though it might also simply be called anxiety.  The difference between the two here is that the uncanny marks the feeling of the return of something repressed, something that had once been familiar.  Yet, since Freud reduces all anxiety to castration anxiety, anxiety would also be the return of something familiar.  What differentiates the uncanny from anxiety is one question to keep in mind here.  Another would be whether Freud’s conception of the feeling of the uncanny would be specific to the (op)positionings determined by “castration-truth.”  Would it be, like fetishism, male-specific since females in this context are already castrated?[1] 

              “The ‘Uncanny’” is another example of a self-posting text of logocentric repression that reveals the uncanny remains of a ghostly inheritance due to the necessity of dispatching the self to the self in this postal relay and the necessary impropriety of this relay’s proper.  These are the remains of the original repetition, the essential division, and the logic of dissemination of what Derrida calls iterability.  This self-posting is based on a “castration-truth,” castration as identity-difference, a material-ideal phallus/letter that always arrives at its destination.  I argue here that the feeling of the uncanny, as Freud theorizes it, cannot be differentiated from Freud’s later, castration-based theory of anxiety, and is male-specific like Freud’s theory of fetishism.  In addition, I attempt to reveal how this self-posting of the “actual phallic function” goes beyond (op)positionality to a position where the self must be split—an impropriety of the proper à la Derrida, a “splitting of the ego” à la Freud—in order to simultaneously “believe” in the presence and absence of woman: not the presence or absence of woman’s phallus, the fetishist’s position, but the presence and absence of woman, the psychoanalytic position.  Psychoanalysis theorizes the fetishist position in order to center the phallus in defense against the opposition of woman, but ultimately against what is totally other that this opposition represses.  This present/absent woman, and the totally other her presence/absence hides, is the secret and the home, the familiar that returns with what we might call an uncanny feeling, if Freud had not theorized das Unheimlich in terms of what reduces the totally other to more of the phallic same via castration.  Heidegger writes the following in Being and Time: “Not-being-at-home [Ex-propriation] must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon” (Hei96 177).  This primordialness of “Not-being-at-home,” the familiarity of the impropriety of the proper, could be said to be the secret of Freudian theory, hidden by the (op)positionality of “castration-truth” and the (non)origin before the origin of phylo-“genetics,” and requiring this disavowal logic with respect to woman.  Therefore this psychoanalytic secret (Geheimnis) would constitute the psychoanalytic home (Heim), which is another way of theorizing that these psychoanalytic concepts “belong to the history of metaphysics, that is, to the system of logocentric repression” (Der78 197), where this logocentric repression is carried out via a “castration-truth” and its destinational linguistics: phallogocentrism.

The Lack of “The ‘Uncanny’” I: Primary Femininity

              “The ‘Uncanny’” is another candidate for an athetic text, just as Beyond… is, according to Derrida.  Freud’s hypotheses in “The ‘Uncanny’” are fragmentary, and his explication of them incomplete.  Freud asks more questions here than he answers, and many of the enigmas he introduces remain as such at the end: they are left to haunt the text.  For example, the uncanny is an affect for Freud—Freud “feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics” (XVII 219)—and he initially associates this affect with fear.  Later, however, he will wonder if there is also something about it that is at the same time pleasurable.  In his discussion of Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sand-Man,” and of automatons in general, he notes that a “living doll” (XVII 233), while often associated with the uncanny, would also suggest the realization of a basic desire of children to have their dolls come alive.  Freud could simply be refuting here the typical reading of Olympia as the primary uncanny aspect of Hoffman’s tale in order to make space for his own reading focusing on the eyes and castration.  Freud’s later discussion of what is required for any literary author’s “success” at evoking the feeling of the uncanny, however, suggests that he conceives of this feeling as being analogous to the feeling of pleasure a tragic play might provide its audience.  Regardless, Freud acknowledges a “contradiction” between the association of the uncanny with unpleasure and pleasure at the same time (ibid.).  This possible mixture of pleasure and unpleasure suggests the uncanny at least paradoxically combines opposites with regard to pleasure and defies any simple definition in terms of the pleasure principle, if not pointing towards something beyond it. 

              Yet, paradox seems to be right at home with the uncanny.  That the meaning of “das Heimlich” contains both the sense of what is familiar and unfamiliar makes the English translation of its opposite, “the uncanny,” lose the sense of uncertainty and undecidability of the German word.  Freud’s 1910 essay “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” reveals his fascination with words with two antithetical meanings, and his association of these words with the primitive, which for Freud always points to early infancy, the inner layers of the unconscious, and the pre-history of human kind at the same time.  Freud associates such a conflicted unity with the system Ucs., which remains a unity even when it “holds” contradictory ideas simultaneously.  Such a “holding” splits the ego, but not the unconscious.  Freud sees these words as being common in the primitive form of Egyptian, yet not in modern languages.  The system Ucs. is more archaic for Freud, whereas the ego would be associated with what is more contemporary, such as civilization.  Linguistically and psychologically, Freud might have seen “Unheimlichkeit” as something remaining in the present from the past, a ghostly inheritance.  I would argue that Freud’s fascination with these words is in a significant way related to the recurring trauma-structure tropes of psychoanalysis, his fascination with the primitive, and his consistent connection of these metaphors with the primitive and all it entails for him, especially the ontological primitive of the mother-infant monad/dyad.

              For Freud in general, “the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed” (XVII 247), but he also relies heavily on Schelling's related definition: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light” (qtd. in XVII 224).  Freud’s definition relies on both the root meanings of heim as home (familiar) and secret (private).  So the uncanny for Freud, at least as his essay sets out, seems to be a feeling associated with something that was once familiar, that something having since been repressed or made secret from oneself, and then the return of that something.  Not only does Freud not fully explicate any of his examples of what evokes uncanny feelings according to this definition, he will also contradict this definition with other definitions.  The closest he comes to explicating one of his examples fully—fully meaning accounting for issues of familiarity, repression, and return—occurs when he describes the feeling of “neurotic men” who “declare they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs”:

This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.  There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: “this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before”, we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body.  In this case too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix “un” is the token of repression. (XVII 245)

Why would this heim be a secret or repressed?  Why just neurotic men if it is everyone’s former home?  What about healthy men?  Or women in general?  Obviously, Freud is alluding to castration as the source of the uncanny here, as he does repeatedly throughout the essay (e.g., XVII 227, 231, 232n1, 233, 235, 243, 244, 248, 248-49, 252, 252n1).  But why does he keep it vague?  Is it a secret for him in some way?  We might read Freud’s vagueness regarding the Unheimlichkeit of castration as a manifestation of the threat it represents of bringing woman to the fore, and, therefore, of revealing the secret of the repression of her significance. 

              Just before his explication of the uncanny with respect to viewing female genitalia above, Freud gives what he claims to be a thorough list of examples of what constitutes the uncanny:

We have now only a few remarks to add—for animism, magic and sorcery, the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn something frightening into something uncanny. (XVII 243)

Towards the end of the essay Freud divides the uncanny into two categories: those having to do with “infantile complexes” and those having to do with “animistic beliefs.”  Freud argues that the uncanny feeling associated with infantile complexes concerns the repression of “a particular ideational content” (XVII 249) and its return, whereas the uncanny feeling associated with animistic beliefs concerns the truth or reality of such beliefs: superstitions, the occult, magic, the omnipotence of thought, telepathy, etc.  Freud argues that animistic beliefs are not repressed but “surmounted,” therefore we are left with a choice: either one of the primary categories of the uncanny does not fit the general definition provided above, or the “secret and hidden” of Schelling’s definition should be understood not simply in terms of repression.  Though something simply surmounted would not necessarily be secret in terms of repression (secret from oneself), and therefore its return would not necessarily be disturbing, Freud’s concluding definition takes into account the difference between repression and surmounting, which he recognizes would extend “the term ‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning” (ibid.):

Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. (ibid.)

We might ask why Freud feels it is necessary to differentiate between repression and surmounting with respect to animistic beliefs, especially when it comes to his self-positioning and his own beliefs?  I return to this question below.

              Freud refers to both sources of the uncanny as the primitive, archaic, primal, and primeval—and to “the distinction between the two” categories of uncanny as both “theoretically very important” and yet “hazy” (ibid.).  Freud argues, “[w]hen we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we shall not be greatly astonished to find that the distinction is a hazy one” (ibid.).  How might superstition be based on the castration or Oedipus complexes?  Magical thinking?  The omnipotence of thought?  Any answer to these questions must come to terms with how much Freud conflates the two infancies of “man” and “Man.”  My general thesis here is that Freud’s thesis, his positioning in terms of his formulation of the uncanny, cannot be understood, does not make sense, unless it is understood in terms of, not just the archetypal scenes of both infancies, but with respect to both plays in their entirety, and to how these plays relate to each other.  For Freud, they are remarkably similar since the scenes of the ontogenetic play of infancy is a repetition of the phylogenetic one.  Therefore, I argue here that Freud does not simply reduce das Unheimlich to castration and (op)positionality—though many of his examples are simply reducible in this way—but that he does so with reference to what might be called his primal play, which is made up of specific primal scenes and primal phantasies.  Moreover, I see this primal play as the manifestation of the “actual phallic function” and the “three (self-) deceptions” of what I am arguing is the “mainstyle” of Freudian theory. 

              If we compare the plays of primitive “Man” and “man” as treated by Freud, a possible differentiation would be the role of woman in each: in the former “she” is largely absent except as an exchange commodity, whereas in the latter “her” role as mother seems central.  This main role in the ontogenetic play, however, is ultimately effaced in the proper resolution of the Oedipus complex: as in the phylogenetic play, she becomes a place holder for the phallus.  In both plays the protagonists are sons (or a son) and a father, and the mother and females are not players as much as commodities of exchange and conduits of desire for the phallus: the girl is even “a little man.”  On one level, the importance of woman in these plays—even as conduit, place holder, and commodity—seems to be the secret of the phallocentric home of psychoanalysis: the familiar that has been repressed and yet keeps returning.  On another level, the figuring of woman hides the secret of difference (différance) beyond binaries, which I would argue constitutes the primal repressed of psychoanalysis, as with any phallogocentric discourse.  The former level attempts to achieve hom(m)osexuality, a phallic One (phallocentrism), while the latter attempts to dissimulate the Other behind the binary of man/woman (dualisms as an aspect of logocentrism).  The staging and casting of the phylogenetic play, which is ultimately privileged by Freud, can be read as a denial of the importance of woman, specifically of the mother.  The “origin of origins” is constructed with the primal father and his sons already in place at the beginning of the play; the women are not as much mothers as wives and daughters.  The players are outside of time: phylo-“genetics.”

              It may be useful to turn to Lacan’s treatment of these two plays in his  return to Freud since Lacan’s reading of Freud, as an example of such a reading according to a strict logic of lack, assumes the effacement of woman’s role in terms of presence: “woman doesn’t ex-sist” (Lac90 38).  “Her” absence, as we might suspect, is ultimately God for Lacan (see Lac98, chapter VI).  For Lacan the two plays are One, and the One is the Symbolic of “le ‘non’ du père”/“le nom du père.”  In Lacan’s Kojèvian reading of Freudian desire, desire is essentially about recognition: “Man’s desire is desire of the Other’s desire” (Lac77b 235; see Bor92).  Via Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Lacan’s mother is reduced to her lack and subsequent desire for the phallus.  Woman is simultaneously other and absent in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and as other she is reduced to the absence-presence of the phallus: woman as phallus is the commodity of exchange between father and son; woman as lack is the conduit of phallic desire.  Her mutually exclusive dual roles require a logic of disavowal.  This phallic economy, one in which difference is reduced to identity and position is thus secured, is the Freudian heim to which Lacan returns.  Derrida points out the common Greek root of “home” and “economy,” oikos and oikonomia (Der97 359): home and economy based on the repression and disavowal (a secret).

              With the primitive of “Man” one can assume, as Freud does, a mythical patriarchal society where females are insignificant outside their role in the commodity exchange.  With the primitive of “man”—that is, with ontogenetic infancy—it is harder to efface the significance of the role of the mother, but both Freud and Lacan manage to a large extent to do just this.  One way of conceptualizing the secret Freud seems to be hiding in “The ‘Uncanny’” is what he would later call in his essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” the “bedrock” of psychoanalysis: “the repudiation of femininity” (XXIII 252).  In “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud repudiates the importance of femininity.  The secret is the importance of femininity, and the home is its repudiation.  Given that this so-called bedrock of psychoanalysis had formerly been conceptualized as repression—Freud wrote in 1914 that the “theory of repression is the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests” (XIV 16)—it is not hard to imagine that, for Freud, these two themes of femininity and repression are intimately related, though never fully spelled out.  For primeval “man,” exogamy becomes the result of the taboo of incest, and the privation of the mother (secret, private, Geheimnis) and the threat of the son’s castration (trauma, Unheimlichkeit) become two sides of the same coin (“trauma”-structure) in the law of the totemic or Symbolic father.  The desire for the mother—that is, for her desire—becomes a secret that is repressed, as is the father’s threat of castration.  Resolution of the race’s Oedipus complex translates into the establishment of the transcendental law of the symbolic father, or “civilization.” 

              Yet this is not the whole story.  The differentiation between the two plays becomes clear when we consider that, in the ontogenetic play, identity, positioning, or subjectification is part of the process, whereas phylogenesis privileges the race or group above the individual.  In Freud’s phylo-“genetic” play, the establishment of the law, the relationship of individual to the group, is more the issue: the identity of the group.  The Freudian ontogenetic split of Freud’s later work should be conceived as one between selfish or individualist instincts and the requirements of the group or law (see Civilization and Its Discontents).  This split, however, would be preprogrammed in the “trauma”-structure of the primal phantasies the individual inherits (instincts of law? drive of proper?).  Regardless, the plays differ when it comes to the mother’s central role in the establishment of the primary institution in question: the mother would seem to play a leading role in the ontogenetic play where there seems to be a conflation of desire for the mother and identification with the mother—or, as cited before, Freud’s conception in The Ego and the Id that, at “the very beginning, in the individual’s primitive oral phase, object-cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other” (XIX 29, my emphasis).

              And this may point us toward another way of conceptualizing the secret which Freud keeps repressed in “The ‘Uncanny.’”  This conflation of “desire for” and “identification with” is an especially pertinent theme for 1919 and the war years when Freud was struggling with a concept that ultimately could threaten the primacy of the unconscious: primary narcissism.  In the abyme of the mother-infant “dyad,” a two which is one, “love of the mother” and “love of self” would be supposedly indistinguishable.  When we consider how separation from the mother is theorized by Freud as a form of castration in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, we can now begin to piece together the connections between the mother, positioning-identity, and castration.  If the loss of the loved object conflates the mother and the penis, and the primary love object may be a conflation of the ego (primary narcissism) and the mother, then a loss of identity or sense of place or position or self, would also be a form of castration for Freud, and would associate castration with death.  Within the phallic economy, it is important that the mother’s role not be too significant or else it might eclipse the (male) infant’s identity/position/existence.  Again the mother is merely a conduit for a phallic economy.  Regardless of her significance being displaced by castration (of not-being as castration), what is important here is the connection of identity, castration, death, and the mother’s effacement/role.  With respect to these themes, the male infant’s identity would be analogous to the positioning of “Freud” and psychoanalysis: castration as both an “infantile sexual theory” and the truth that is found.

              “The ‘Uncanny’” is a position(ing) paper which, at the same time, attempts to establish phallocentrism and base itself on phallocentrism: self-posting.  The secret of “The ‘Uncanny,’” behind which lies the secret of non-binary difference and chance, is the importance of the mother’s role to establishing identity, the importance of the primary identification with the mother for any individual, and the intensity of this bedrock of identity.[2]  It is as if, with psychoanalysis, Freud is acting out the male infant’s anxiety with respect to the secret of the power and significance of the mother and his primary identification with her, the latter being theoretically repressed with the assumption of “primary masculinity.”  We might call the secret “primary femininity,” where the little boy and the little girl start out as “little women” with respect to identification—that is, according to the explicit logic of The Ego and Id.  Of course, there would be a “more primordial” (Heidegger) Otherness behind this “primary femininity” as primary small “o” other.  This femininity, however, would be primary for any such identitarian ego within such a system, a system that would establish an origin, where there was a feminine mother and the mother was the first object of identification and desire.  In this vein—one which suffers from being essentialist with respect to the male/female and father/mother binaries—primary femininity in terms of identification could have been coupled with primary masculinity in terms of object-cathexes, which would

make the primary state of being a bisexual one, and therefore give masculinity a source for bisexuality (again, it lacks such a source with Freud’s primary masculinity). 

              In The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, Sarah Kofman writes,

[Freud’s] affirmation of bisexuality thus amounts to affirming the original predominance of masculinity (in both sexes); what becomes enigmatic, then—and this is the riddle of femininity—is the development into womanhood of a little girl who has first been a little boy. (111-12)

Freud’s “affirmation” of “primary masculinity” (the predominance of masculinity) is a negation of his earlier numerous affirmations of bisexuality.  What becomes enigmatic if we accept both the predominance of masculinity and bisexuality is, first, how these conflicting conceptions can both be primary, and, second, how male sexuality could ever be bisexual: the bisexuality of femininity could be, and is, explained with respect to this logic.  Male sexuality becomes the riddle of primary-masculinity psychoanalysis.  The “development into womanhood of a little girl who has first been a little boy” is not enigmatic here.  Both Freudian “affirmations” or assumptions—of bisexuality and primary masculinity—work for females, but not for males.  Freud’s unexplained assumption that the boy’s primary identification is to his father—an aspect of his primary masculinity—can also be found in The Ego and the Id (XIX 31; see also XIII 115 ff, 259; XVIII 105 ff), directly contradicting his other  position in The Ego and the Id quoted above conflating early object cathexes and identification.  The little girl as solely a “little man” and the boy’s identification with the father appear magically despite Freud’s general assumption of bisexuality and his concept of object and identity being initially conflated.  Freud’s assumptions allow for femininity to be theorized in Freudian terms and with respect to bisexuality, neurosis, homosexuality, and normality, but not masculinity.  Bisexuality is required for Freud’s theoretical mastery of woman, but he never systematically applies it to man.  Primary masculinity is at once assumed as a known and stable thing, while also making masculinity in general into an enigma.  Freud’s later theorization of female sexuality makes male sexuality the enigma, and this theorization requires the ideal of masculinity as an unquestionable ideal category and origin of full presence and identity.  Moreover, Freud’s assumption of a primary “masculinity” would not be limited to human subjects.  It would also include the nature of libido and the most abstract of philosophical categories: activity.  Freud’s extension of his primary-masculinity assumption beyond human subjects and into Nature makes inescapable, contrary to Kofman’s claims, Freud’s multiple appeals to ideal categories of masculinity and femininity. 

              Primary femininity—as we might extrapolate it from Freud’s position in The Ego and the Id where object-cathexes and identification are the same with respect to the supposed female mother of early infancy—would solve many of the enigmas of his conception of male sexuality, which I find his work on female sexuality complicates and uncovers.  A concept of primary femininity would account for Freud’s position in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” that the male’s “passive or feminine attitude to another male” (XXIII 250), like penis envy for the female, is one of the “themes” that “give the analyst an unusual amount of trouble” (ibid.).  Without such a concept, whence this attitude of the typical male analysand?  It would be an especially inexplicable attitude given the awesome fear associated with the castration complex.  Primary femininity in this respect could also constitute one aspect of a primary bisexuality.  It would also account for a pre-oedipal phase for the boy: one whose negative Oedipus complex would be based on identification, unlike the girl’s, whose pre-oedipal phase is theorized as a negative Oedipus complex based on object-choice.  From this primary femininity, Freud might have also developed an analogous three lines of masculine development: a normal one with the proper repression of primary femininity, a neurotic one with too much repression, and a homosexual one with not enough. 

              It should be understood that I am not arguing for primary femininity as a gap-filling measure for Freudian theory; I am not advocating for the acceptance of primary femininity in terms of identification.  To do so would be to accept the very ideal categories I am trying to deconstruct.  I am trying to draw attention to a lacuna in Freud’s theorization in order to put into relief what I feel are primary secrets of psychoanalysis, secrets that establish its home: the significance of the mother, male identification with the mother, the obvious necessity of male bisexuality if bisexuality is theorized as primary and universal, and the absence of an equivalent three-path theorization of masculinity in Freud’s later work.  My goal has been to suggest a connection between these secrets and the logic of lack of psychoanalysis, its “castration-truth,” its “actual phallic function”—that is, its mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same.  Freud’s theorization of the development of female sexuality destabilizes the basis of psychoanalysis itself: his theorization of the development of male sexuality in terms of the Oedipus and castration complexes.  We might see the three-path theory as a move to theorize woman once and for all, a mastery of the other.  But this move destabilizes the basis of the original position, and this destabilization goes unacknowledged.

The Lack of “The ‘Uncanny’” II: Freud and Lac(k)an

              Part of the very early relation to the mother is a “pleasure” or affective intensity that would go beyond the pleasure principle.  Lacan would call this intense affective intensity “jouissance.”  He would call “jouissance” any such intensity beyond pain or pleasure, anything beyond the “(un)pleasure” principle and contrary to the edict of the ego’s principle of constancy to feel as little pain and pleasure as possible.  Lacan associates the jouissance of this supposed early dyadic oneness with das Ding and objet a, the hub and cause of desire respectively.  Lacan argues that to go “beyond the pleasure principle” in order to experience jouissance would be closer to the experience of pain, since one’s desire can only circle around das Ding: to actually achieve it would mean one would no longer be one, separated from the mother: one would no longer exist, as with “woman”; one would not be supported by the “bedrock” of “the repudiation of femininity.”  Much as with Freud, the secret behind Lacan’s abstractions here is the significance of the mother’s role in phallic identity-positioning.  The paradoxical pleasure-unpleasure of Freud’s uncanny, which is weighted toward horror and the fear of extreme unpleasure, could be read as being related to Lacan’s conception of jouissance, and therefore with the objet a, das Ding, and the intensity of the mother-infant oneness.  If the uncanny is the return of this primitive time of “identification” with the mother—the quotes are intended to note that identification requires a simple subject-object split—then many of Freud’s examples of the uncanny begin to take on new significance in relation to the mother: telepathy, magical thinking, the omnipotence of thoughts, primitive beliefs, “phantasies of intra-uterine experiences,” the fulfillment of every wish, the effacement of reality and the imaginary (the oneness being imaginary), and even reminders of death.  The pleasure-unpleasure for all of them could all be associated with the jouissance of this oneness, its intensity that goes beyond the pleasure principle and the oneness of this “dyad.”

              When we consider the process of subjectification in the mirror stage of Lacanian psychoanalysis with respect to the importance of this earlier “identification,” Freud’s examples of the uncanny as related to doubling, automatons, ghosts, mutilated bodies (fragmentation versus wholeness), positioning, the effacement of reality and the imaginary (the ego ideal of the whole body being an effacement of the infant’s actual experience of the body), and “secret injurious powers” (the mirror stage, according to Lacan, gives rise to aggression towards the image), among others, also take on a new significance.  Inasmuch as the nascent ego can experience this process of individuation, it would be terrifying and painful at the same time it might also be pleasurable: the ontogenetic origin.  Whatever terror and pain there might be, from whatever “memory” might exist from a “before” of the origin of the individuated ego, would be caused by having the jouissance of oneness with the mother taken away—which Lacan, faithfully following Freud, reduces to castration.  But Lacan also associates this original oneness with castration.  The pleasure of individuation, according to Lacan, would be caused by leaving behind what Lacan refers to as a state of fragmentation and utter dependence, and which he associates with castration: fragmented body ego.  Individuation here would be a making-whole of the (always male) bodily ego.  Once again denying the importance of the mother and privileging the pleasure of phallic individuation, Lacan privileges the pleasure here and calls this moment when the infant is able to recognize itself as a subject and the mother as an object a “jubilant” moment (Lac77a 2)—that is, when the (always male) infant recognizes the image as “himself,” when “he” identifies with it, with its phallic completeness, he feels joy.  What happens to the castration of the infant being separated from the mother of which Freud so often writes? 

              Lacan argues that this identification, this moment of self-positioning, leads to a sense of mastery, including self-mastery, and eventually mastery over the mother, a prefiguring of her repudiation in the resolution of the Oedipus complex.  This could be read as the origin of the phallic pleasure principle and its self-posting of letters that always arrive at their destination.  Paradoxically, this origin would be one of castration, as Freud formulates it: separation from the mother as castration.  It seems both sides of the individuation process are castration: “trauma”-structure.  Lacan’s notion of the “jubilant” moment represses the necessary ambivalence of this origin, and privileges phallic individuation.  The early identification of the “infant” (subjectivity being especially problematic at a pre-individuation point) would be with an ego ideal, a prefiguring of the super-ego, which, according to what I would call a secret logic of Freudian theory, would be a bodily Gestalt ultimately grounded in the mother-infant oneness.  Given that the nascent identification of the mirror stage is based on the repudiation of the mother-infant oneness, the phallic Gestalt of the Oedipus complex would to a large degree depend on keeping this original Gestalt and its intensities secret.  The mother-infant Gestalt would be based on a repudiation of difference and chance, which Lacan calls fragmentation and ultimately reduces to castration.  The oedipal Gestalt would also be based on the repudiation of the (identification with the) mother as a female, and therefore the absence to the presence of this phallic Gestalt, the other against which the One is established.

              The transition of the mother from the blissful mother of oneness to the imaginary-symbolic-lacking mother that incites aggression (she threatens castration) is figured from an oedipal position as the transition from the phallic mother (the repressed basis of the oedipal Gestalt identity) to the castrated (castrating) mother: thus the subject of the Symbolic is born of the Law of the Father.  This figuration of the mother reduces “her” to the central absence of phallic economy or heim.  Every definition and every example Freud gives of the uncanny is in harmony with a definition of the uncanny according to this economy and their phallic figurations of the mother as secret (phallic mother) and opposite (abject castrated-castrating mother).   The mother and the Other are simultaneously reduced to more of the phallic Same via Freud’s treatment of the uncanny in these terms.  Again, one secret of “The ‘Uncanny,’” and of psychoanalysis in general, is the great importance of what Freud referred to as “Minoan-Mycean” (XXI 226) layer of the bedrock of infancy; and this “bedrock” of the mother-infant monad/dyad, hidden behind the oedipal construction of the phallic mother (which must be repudiated in order for phallic individuation to occur), itself hides something totally other behind it: the mise en abyme of something like jouissance, of “experience” prior to an ego, prior to any kind of individuation, any kind of subject-object experience.  The “archeologist of the mind” tended to see the deepest layers in terms of his androcentric and patriarchal themes of Totem and Taboo, and not in terms of an all-powerful figure of the mother, and especially not an all-powerful “(dis)figure(ing)” of différance.

              Lacanian psychoanalysis is very much the legitimate legatee of “The ‘Uncanny’” with respect to three profound and related themes: the effacement of the importance of woman, the reduction of (sexual) difference to identity via castration (really the same as the first theme), and the reduction of literature to psychoanalytic truth.  For example, with respect to all of these themes, “The ‘Uncanny’” prefigures Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’”  Derrida shows that Lacan reduces Poe’s text to his destinational linguistics where the proper destination of the phallic and mysteriously material-ideal letter is with the Queen (woman as phallus), her secret (the loss of her penis-phallus-letter; her wandering desire or womb) is kept, and her position in relation to the king maintained (proper arrival).  It is interesting to note that the secret of the letter is “hidden” in a most heimlich place: in the Minister’s home, and Dupin immediately looks to the loins of the woman-shaped mantle.  The hiding place is so heimlich it becomes unheimlich; it also recalls female genitals, and the letter a phallic lost object.  The letter’s eventual arrival sets everything right, and, according to Lacan, it must happen this way: it is destiny, the nature of language.  Lack has its proper place.

              Literature—which is traditionally figured as the female other to phallic psychoanalysis, science, and philosophy—is reduced to “castration-truth” by both Lacan and Freud.  Psychoanalysis, philosophy, and science attempt to erect a firm position, whereas with literature and its numerous vehicles for effecting “uncanny” displacements, one never knows where one stands.  As Lacan effaces the narration of Poe’s tale, and treats Dupin as the (Lacanian) analyst, Freud reduces the function of the author to that of the analyst in “The ‘Uncanny.’”  Like a proper analyst, the “success” of Freud’s literary author depends on divining methods of getting beyond the resistances of the reader-analysand in order to produce a catharsis of the repressed in the form of an uncanny feeling (XVII 250).  Freud even uses the term “recalcitrance” with respect to the literary reader at this point in “The ‘Uncanny,’” much as he had in his description of a patient in the dream of Irma’s injection in The Interpretation of Dreams.  That which displaces (literature) is reduced to the terms of what seeks a fixed place (Freud’s science or “analysis”).

“The ‘Uncanny’” and Superstition

              Early in “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud praises Jentsch, a predecessor on the subject of das Unheimlich, for laying “stress on the obstacle [to writing about the uncanny] presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feeling” (XVII 220).  Then Freud makes the following statement and disingenuously frames it as a confession: 

The writer of the present contribution, indeed, must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place.  It is long since he has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny impression, and he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling, by awakening in himself the possibility of experiencing it. (ibid.)

I find it intriguing that Freud would argue that he could actively make himself open to feeling the uncanny.  More evidence of his sense of mastery over this feeling—to which by definition one would be passive—lies in his later claim that the type of uncanny feeling associated with animistic beliefs does not concern repression—a process to which one is passive—but a process of “surmounting,” where one would be a more active participant.  Freud puts himself in the category of someone who has gotten beyond sensitivity to this feeling because he has actively rid himself of those remnants, the ghostly remains, of animistic beliefs that cause the uncanny: “anyone who has completely and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the uncanny” (XVII 248).  Perhaps Freud felt he had also “surmounted” the other type of the uncanny, which involves infantile complexes, by way of his self analysis, where Freud, via a certain activity, is able to subvert his own theory of one’s passive relation to the unconscious.

              Of course, Freud’s own works, and those of his biographers, are filled with clues that, far from being insensitive to this type of feeling, Freud was acutely sensitive to them, and to the conflicts such beliefs would cause for the leader of a movement that is trying to establish itself as a science and that often must do so by fending off accusations that psychoanalysis is akin to, if not an example of, occultism.  According to Jones, Freud’s “wish to believe [in occultism] fought hard with the warning to disbelieve” (Gay88 444).  Jones writes the following in his most orthodox biography of Freud:

The extent to which a given superstitious belief is accepted by the mind is usually one of degree, and it is often very hard to ascertain to what extent the person “really” gives credence to it.  It is a common experience to get the reply when someone is questioned on the point: “No, I don’t really believe it, but all the same it is very odd.”  Acceptance and rejection are both operative….  Freud was no exception in this respect, and he would himself have not found it easy at times to say whether he accepted a given belief of this order or not. (3: 379)

This simultaneous “acceptance and rejection” would be a form of Freudian disavowal and a similar alogic as in Freud’s conception of the fetish.  Given the definitive statements he makes, such as the one above about his insensitivity to uncanny feelings, it seems that Freud actually found it quite easy to disavow his superstitious beliefs, even though he would argue at other times they were either partially true (aspects of occultism) or wholly true (telepathy).  At times he would even vehemently attack superstitions, occultism, and religion as if they were the enemy in a war.  According to Peter Gay, Freud’s “view of religion as the enemy was wholly shared by the first generation of psychoanalysts” (Gay88 533n), and this view was extended to superstitions and occultism.  Those beliefs of Freud’s that other psychoanalysts would classify as superstitious in other people, as Freud would also do in his more secular materialist moments, might be compared with his Lamarckian mythology of phylo-“genetics”: both were somewhat suppressed by Freud and the psychoanalytic orthodoxy, and both have a similar relation to science and to the issue of determinacy versus contingency—that is, both superstition and Freud’s phylo-“genetics” are ultimately deterministic beliefs.

              An example of Freud’s superstitious beliefs is given in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, where Freud finds a hidden meaning regarding the number 2,467, which he had written to Fliess regarding his guess at how many mistakes The Interpretation of Dreams contained.  After relating the number to the retirement of a general he knew, and then the manipulation of the number of years he had until his own retirement, subtracting, then dividing … he came up with the number sixty seven, and interpreted this as a wish to have just a few more years of life—that is, not to die at age sixty two, the age his father had died, and the age he was sure he would die.  Seven or so years after writing this passage in Psychopathology, Freud would begin writing “The ‘Uncanny.’”  He would write over a period from when he was about fifty eight to sixty three, including this passage:

If we take another class of things, it is easy to see that there, too, it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds what would otherwise be innocent enough with an uncanny atmosphere, and forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of “chance.”  For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number.  But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together—if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures.  We do feel this to be uncanny.  And unless a man is utterly hardened and proof against the lure of superstition, he will be tempted to ascribe a secret meaning to this obstinate recurrence of a number; he will take it, perhaps, as an indication of the span of life allotted to him. (XVII 237-8)

Did Freud see himself as such a hardened man, with “a special obtuseness in the matter”?  Or did he see himself as a less special man, one who would be tempted to “ascribe a secret meaning”?  The “lure of superstition” is not to have to speak of “chance.”  Freud’s quotes around “chance” suggest a certain disdain for what would be this more common sense conclusion.  Freud suggests that what is difficult is not the hardening of oneself, but the acceptance of a certain fate and the “involuntary repetition” it enforces—that is, ultimately giving up a certain bad faith of having choice and of there being chance. 

              Fate’s lure for Freud is its determinism.  For Freud, the evidence of the 2,467 example is, not necessarily the truth of Fate and related superstitious beliefs, but the proof that there is no chance in psychic reality, and that there is nothing beyond his theory of wish-fulfillment: nothing beyond the PP and its/his mastery.  But Freud’s point with the number sixty in “The ‘Uncanny’” goes beyond psychic determinism.  Freud wrote this essay right after the Wolf Man case where he struggled so with the contingencies of “external reality,” and the problems these contingencies created for the development of his masterplot.  This is not an example of unconscious fantasy filtering out other numbers (anticathexis of sorts) and investing in the one number (hypercathexis), which would be a typical psychoanalytic interpretation, if not simply a Freudian one.  For the number to indicate a destined “span of life allotted to him,” of course, there would have to be Fate: a cosmological determinism. 

              The imbrication of themes we find above—themes of a general determinism, a powerful Other that constitutes one’s fate, one’s passivity to this Other, chance, one’s connection to a parent (in this case, the father), and death—are repeated in Freud’s later essay, “Femininity,” with respect to the child’s relation to the mother.  Freud writes, after discussing one of the child’s early reproaches of the mother, “that it never gets over the pain of losing its mother’s breast” (XXII 122).[3]  He then claims a universality of the fantasy of being poisoned by the mother:

The fear of being poisoned is also probably connected with the withdrawal of the breast.  Poison is nourishment that makes one ill.  Perhaps children trace back their early illnesses too to this frustration.  A fair amount of intellectual education is a prerequisite for believing in chance; primitive people and uneducated ones, and no doubt children as well, are able to assign a ground for everything that happens.  Perhaps originally it was a reason on animistic lines.  Even to-day in some strata of our population no one can die without having been killed by someone else—preferably by the doctor.  And the regular reaction of a neurotic to the death of someone closely connected with him is to put the blame on himself for having caused the death. (ibid.)

First of all, Freud would often claim the truth of what he had formerly posited as a children’s theory, as he did with castration.  Freud associates truth with what is archaic and primitive.  Another example would be the childhood belief in “the

omnipotence of thought” and Freud’s belief in telepathy (see Freud’s essay, “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (XVIII)).  What I want to draw attention to here, however, is the imbrication for Freud of animistic beliefs and the mother, and of science and the father: Freud’s gendering of belief systems.  As Freud argues, believing in Fate, in a Destiny where there is no chance, would be a primitive belief of “Man/man.”  Science, on the other hand, teaches chance; it is a mature belief system one hopefully grows into.  As one must do with one’s connection to the mother, one must “surmount” animistic beliefs.  Soon after the passage above, Freud argues that the “wish to get the longed-for penis” may be sublimated by a woman in the form of a capacity “to carry on an intellectual profession” (XXII 125).  Clearly the sciences and intellectualism, and therefore a belief in chance, are associated for Freud with masculinity and by extension with the father, whereas an animistic and primitive belief in determinism is associated with the primitive or archaic connection with the mother and by extension with femininity.

              Like Derrida’s reading of Plato’s undecidable use of “pharmakon” as poison/cure, determinism is the poison/nourishment of the mother’s milk—though we might wonder why Freud strangely claims that all poison is nourishment.  The poison of determinism for Freud is the separation it causes from the position of masculine science; the nourishment is the potential sense of mastery it provides.  Here, from a phallocentric perspective, the figures of both parents are simultaneously “phallic” and castrating.  As Plato wrote about the dangers of writing—needing writing itself, and its metaphors, to further his phonocentric and logocentric beliefs—Freud at times disparages the determinism of superstition as he works hard to create a masterplot of totalizing cause and effect.  Freud’s repeated return to the themes of the occult and telepathy can be read as Freud trying to have the “nourishment” of both animistic beliefs (determinism) and the “nourishment” of science (the legitimate, masculine authority), the nourishment of both the mother and the father, without the poison of either: femininity/primitiveness and chance, respectively.  Freud would associate death with both poisons.  He was like a man with two gods: one maternal and one paternal.  But both are viewed from a phallocentric position, and in fact the phallic mother might be a compromise figuration of such a conflicted belief.

                The connections between the uncanny, superstition, chance, difference, and the figure of woman are revealed in Freud’s treatment of disavowal as a simultaneous belief-disbelief, as the primary defense mechanism of the fetishist against “external reality.”  Freud’s relationship to superstition and the uncanny can be seen as an example of the “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence” (XXIII), according to his 1938 essay title, and concerns the disavowal of perception.  The phallic archetype of “perception” here is the perception of the “reality” of woman’s castration.  A secret of Freud’s 1938 essay is that splitting is the defense of (op)positionality in the “face to face” with an Other that is irreducible to a One via twos, threes, absences, presences, theses, antitheses, or the kind of Aufhebung Hegel defined as preserving both the thesis and antithesis, rather than negating either or both.  This is the type of Aufhebung the fetishist tries to realize: a preservation of both the phallic mother and the mother of castration (castrated and therefore potentially castrating).  The fetishist cannot decide between giving up the jouissance the oedipally individuated subject might associate with the former (being One with Fate or God) or the possibility of the position of scientific master the latter holds out as lure through the reduction of woman to castration-truth where lack has its place (the hom(m)osexual One).  We might say that there are three demons under the employ of psychoanalysis: “external reality,” ontogeny, and woman.  With the determinism of Fate associated with the phallic mother, the chance of “external reality” cannot disrupt the movement toward the totality of the masterplot.  The phallic mother, however, is a mother, and therefore does not allow for a simply masculine position of power.  With a masterplot based on primal narratives free of all-powerful mother figures, it can position a masculine One.  But this masterplot lacks the cosmological determinism of an “external reality” where ontogeny is determined by Fate: it contains the chance of what is figured from a phallocentric perspective as paternal science.  Freudian psychoanalysis attempts to reduce what is totally other and full of contingency to (op)positionality and determinism via the trope of castration.  Behind the “three demons” mentioned above is the Other, even though these three demons to the One are also employed as dissimulators: they all are the products of idealist binaries.  Chance is rarely if ever used by Freud, and yet it haunts psychoanalysis.

              Ironically, Freud’s work is full of the very animistic beliefs he claims to have surmounted: for example, the omnipotence of thought (privileging of psychical reality, the truth of telepathy) and what he calls the displacement of the symbol for the thing itself.  The latter is especially evident in Freud’s treatment of castration as a reality.  According to Laplanche and Pontalis, the splitting of the ego of disavowal concerns “the primary defense consisting of a radical repudiation and the notion that such a mechanism bears specifically upon the reality of castration” (Lap67 119). 

This last point is without doubt the one which gives us the best key to the Freudian idea of disavowal, but it also brings us to reopen and extend the questions which that idea raises.  If the disavowal of castration is the prototype—and perhaps even the origin—of the other kinds of disavowal of reality [such as superstition], we are forced to ask what Freud understands by the “reality” of castration or by the perception of this reality.  If it is the woman’s “lack of penis” that is disavowed, then it becomes difficult to talk in terms of perception of reality, for an absence is not perceived as such, and it only becomes real in so far as it is related to a conceivable presence.  If, on the other hand, it is castration itself which is repudiated, then the object of disavowal would not be a perception—castration never being perceived as such—but rather a theory designed to account for the facts—a “sexual theory of children”….  These considerations clear the way for the following question: does not disavowal—whose consequences in reality are so obvious—bear upon a factor which founds human reality rather than upon a hypothetical “fact of perception”? (See also “Foreclosure”.) (Lap67 120)

Or we might ask: what is Freud disavowing when he refuses to see the non-reality of castration?  For Lacan, psychosis is the product of foreclosure: a radical repudiation of the truth of castration and the reality it founds.  Laplanche and Pontalis begin to ask the questions that subvert this castration truth, but seem incapable of seeing the idea that “woman is castrated” as a projection of the “hom(m)osexuality” of psychoanalysis, and itself a disavowal of difference beyond (op)positionality.  Castration is the disavowal of sexual difference, and here I mean sexual difference beyond the traditional binary of male/female.  In other words, this binary of “sexual difference” is itself a disavowal of difference, a reduction of something totally other to an idealized binary.  Freud’s reduction of what is totally other to man/woman is then followed by a reduction of woman to castration, so we are left with two (op)positions (having/not having) of One sex: hom(m)osexuality.[4]

              Lacan’s introduction of foreclosure and his definition of the Real in terms of woman and God in Encore belies the rigidness of the “castration-truth” of his psychoanalysis: in many ways, he takes this logic of lack to its end.  Lacan’s psychotic lacks the “anchoring point” that stops the supposed sliding of signifiers in the Symbolic, but then reduces this sliding and its “chaos” to a specific absence “related to a conceivable presence”: “trauma”-structure.  Lacan’s position, however, is clearly one of disavowal trying to maintain an Aufhebung that preserves mutually exclusive opposites since the Symbolic is both fixed as the law of the father and in motion as the maternal other.  Freud’s position is also consistently one of disavowal with respect to sexual difference, superstition, and contingency—and, by extension, the uncanny.  His disavowal, and the subsequent splitting of the PP, concerns his own position in relation to these themes.  Castration logic is necessarily doubly split with relation to woman: “she” is both present (as (op)positional other) and absent (with respect to the

One of hom(m)osexuality).  She is “Woman” (Encore), but this should be read differently than Derrida’s use of erasure, where the term has a use within logocentrism and under erasure.  Derrida’s erasure attempts to acknowledge différance and the necessity of “logo-phonocentrism”:

Logo-phonocentrism is not a philosophical or historical error which the history of philosophy, of the West, that is, of the world, would have rushed into pathologically, but is rather a necessary, and necessarily finite, movement and structure: the history of the possibility of symbolism in general (before the distinction between man and animal, and even before the distinction between the living and the nonliving); the history of différance, history as différance which finds in philosophy as episteme, in the European form of the metaphysical or onto-theological project, the privileged manifestation, with worldwide dominance, of dissimulation, of general censorship of the text in general. (Der78 197)[5]

The line through the Lacanian “Woman,” on the contrary, is part of this dissimulation and censorship of the text and its différance.  What I am trying to argue here is that this line, as with Derrida’s erasure, requires a double reading, but the difference is that the double and aporetic reading of Derrida’s erasure is between the (op)positionalities of binaries and différance, rather than between the presence and absence of one pole of the assumed-natural binary: they are at different levels of the triple (self-)deception, and radically different with respect

to awareness of the irreducibility of division and its applicability to their own project.  In other words, Derrida’s erasures are intended to be done without dissimulation, or with as little as possible, whereas Lacan’s “Woman” requires a logic of disavowal with respect to the division of the Lacanian project.  Derrida’s erasures denote a double game, whereas Lacan’s erasure of “Woman” is the primary trope employed to establish a single game of “castration-truth”—and this supposedly singular game is actually divided, as any totalitarian game would be due to the irreducibility of division.  The “Woman” must be a “hysteric” in Lacanian psychoanalysis: she must be divided with respect to existence.

              The phallic mother is the fetishist’s compromise figure, the perverse ego ideal.  From an oedipal position, however, this figure is psychotic: it threatens the patrocentrism of oedipal positionality based on the male/female binary and is therefore still associated with castration with respect to the oedipal One this binary serves—that is, even though the phallic mother is intended to nullify the very issue of castration.  The phallic mother short-circuits the actual phallic function by mixing the two poles of the binary, which constitutes “her” form of castration for the oedipal One.  Though it attempts to deal with castration, the “problem” of the One, the phallic mother subverts the very binary foundation that castration “solves” by providing an identity-difference term.  The fetishist’s “solution” subverts the “solution” of the oedipal One by subverting the binary of male/female, which thus makes the fetishist seem psychotic to the oedipal subject.  The difference between the oedipal One and the fetishist is that the former relies on the logic of lack and the actual phallic function to achieve his position (or her (non)position), whereas the fetishist relies on a logic of disavowal with respect to castration.  The oedipal One and the actual phallic function, however, also rely on a logic of disavowal, but with respect to the presence and absence of woman, rather than the presence or absence of the maternal phallus.  Despite these differences, both positions suffer from a splitting of the ego since both rely on a logic of disavowal: “solutions.”  Whereas the phallic mother is a non-solution because it disrupts “castration-truth,” the “hysteric” and “Woman” are two similar, if not the same, “solutions” of “castration-truth” and the disavowal of the irreducibility of division.  When Lacan mourns the loss of traditional hysterics, he is mourning the version of this “solution” that exists.

              The phallic mother is a psychotic and destabilizing figure within an oedipal patriarchy, and therefore cannot be the ideal of Freud’s masterplot.  The lure of this figure, however, is the lure of an even more totalizing masterplot than that which can be had within the oedipal “solution.”  Freud associates this “solution” with science and its acceptance of chance, and this chance provides the limit of what the masterplot can master, the limit of the PP: chance as what is beyond the PP.  The animistic beliefs of superstition, associated with the primitive of Man/man, and therefore with the mother, and the Gestalt of the mother-infant monad/dyad, combine with the phallocentrism of Freud’s oedipal patriarchy to make the phallic mother a figure combining phallic totality and maternal totality.  Freud’s fantasy of combining occultism and psychoanalysis can be construed as a fantasy of absolute mastery with no loss: like a fetishist’s fantasy of total determinism, with no loss, but one that is ultimately split along the dividing line of a disavowal.  Another way of conceptualizing this dividing line is with respect to the subject-object split required in the logic of phallic mastery, and the mise en abyme of what appears as a fusion with the mother from an oedipal position—accepting the truth of “animistic beliefs” as regressing back into fusion with the mother.  Jouissance would be both the pleasure of the “oceanic feeling” of such a “(dis)solution” and the terror of falling into the void.  From a phallic position, such a fall would be a castration, a death.

Home Secrets

              I read “The ‘Uncanny’” as study of the roots of the word “heim,” or the treatment of the relationship of the home (oikos, proper, position, identity) to the secret (repressed).  The secret is the repressed version of the home, or what is repressed in order to achieve the home.  The home is repressed secrets: first a logocentric repression of différance that allows for the establishment of an idealistic binary of male/female, then the repression of the difference of the oppositional term, “woman,” via the identity-difference or “trauma"-structure term, castration.  This home is ultimately split due to the conflict between these two repressions: one requires woman’s presence, the other requires her absence.  In “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud supposedly reveals the secret of castration, but this supposed secret, as the home, the oikonomia, of psychoanalysis and its logic of lack, is based on the secrets, the dissimulations of the actual phallic function. 

              We find here the “interiority” to psychoanalysis of “hysteria,” the divided woman, woman as a “division” that secures phallic Oneness: psychoanalysis/hysteria.  The “hysteric,” after her figuration wanes, is replaced by “Woman.”  As I argued in chapter two, psychoanalysis supposedly begins with its mastery of hysteria, but it constructs hysteria in order to provide a specific absence—specific “gaps” in the masterplot—for it to fill.  Thus what is original, psychoanalysis or hysteria, is undecidable: psychoanalysis/hysteria again.  To sustain the orthodox origin myth, one must disregard the dizzying polysymptomatology of “hysteria,” its inability to sustain a proper disease status; disregard Freud’s diagnosis of his own hysteria, or what would have been the interiority of hysteria; disregard the impossibility of a self-analysis, and the psychoanalytic breakthrough that gives greater power to the system Ucs. than to the system Cs.  “Hysteria” was Freud’s specimen neurosis: it was, to a large extent, synonymous with “neurosis.”  The cure of hysteria, supposedly, is the birth of psychoanalysis and its authority regarding the unconscious in general.  It was supposedly the discovery of the truth of the unconscious as Oedipus.  Neurosis was a “female malady” (Showalter), a repression of (masculine) sexuality as a reaction to not accepting “castration-truth.”  With hysteria and this birth of psychoanalysis, woman is linked to the unconscious. 

              Freud would later say that the “bedrock” of psychoanalysis is “the repudiation of femininity”—and in his later theory of hysteria, posited around the same time he made the above claim, what made the female ill with hysteria was her repudiation of femininity.  Here femininity is synonymous with “castration-truth”: the hysteric can’t accept her (non)position as castrated.  Freud would also argue late in his career that the problem for women was invariably penis envy, a difficulty repudiating what he theorized as their primary masculinity: never giving up the desire to be masculine as the repudiation of femininity.  For men, on the other hand, the problem he argues is invariably their “struggle against his passive or feminine attitude to another male” (XXIII 250).  Whereas the female neurotic suffers from repudiating her femininity, the male neurotic suffers from not doing it enough.  The male, it seems, though Freud never theorizes it in any systematic way, suffers from his bisexuality.  Would this be his primary femininity he must repudiate?  That which he must repudiate to avoid … what?  The homosexual side of his bisexuality (always divided into two: male/female)?  Is homosexuality a problem?  If so, is it the only problem of male sexual development for Freud?  What about neurosis?  How is neurosis related to homosexuality and the repudiation of femininity?  If libido is male, and both the boy and the girl start out as “little men,” what would be the femininity or passivity the male would have to repudiate?  As I have argued above, despite Freud’s theory of the conflation of object-cathexes and identification in infancy, the boy somehow identifies with the father.  So whence the femininity the boy and man must repudiate, and which forms the bedrock of psychoanalysis?  Freud never elaborates beyond the claim that bisexuality is fundamental: he never theorizes the feminine aspect of being male.  Indeed, he contradicts his claim to the universality of bisexuality with his adamant and arbitrary theory of what I call primary masculinity.  If bisexuality is a crucial aspect to any sexuality, it seems that, with respect to Freudian theory, male sexuality is more the enigma for psychoanalysis.

              The answers to these questions are not as much absent or missing as they are impossible, if “possibility” means maintaining the disavowal of the importance of the woman (and therefore femininity) as one pole of the fundamental binary of man/woman, especially with respect to the mother in the primitive of ontogeny where object cathexis and identification are the same.  The bedrock of psychoanalysis itself is “the repudiation of femininity” insofar as this repudiation is analogous to the disavowal of woman required by the actual phallic function and its phallic position of the One: the pure presence that is necessarily split, necessarily impure.  Behind/within this secret that constitutes the home or the One of psychoanalysis and its split hom(m)osexual positioning, lies another, more basic secret, behind the idealist categories of man/woman.  Something totally other is dissimulated by this binary.  Behind/within the psychoanalytic sexual “difference” of man/woman is the radical difference of an adestinational postal relay: the différance of the trace.

              Questioning the foundation of psychoanalysis as a cure of neurosis and a theory of the unconscious—the discovery of how repression works with respect to this supposed cure—quickly becomes a questioning of psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference, and of the role of chance in the etiologies of neurosis and therefore in the unconscious.  With Freud’s early memory-based etiologies of hysteria, some room had to be made for chance.  Despite Freud’s efforts to narrow “seduction” to a scene that only concerned the patient’s father, the chance of this “seduction” still differentiated the normal from the neurotic.  I have attempted to problematize the orthodox myth of Freud’s switch from memory-based theories to fantasy-based theories above.  If there was a switch at this time, it was one made from an etiology of the traumatic and chance imposition of sexuality on an asexual child to a metapsychology of what constituted normal sexual development: the infant was no longer raped or molested, it was a sexual being with fantasies of seduction.  The chance was no longer in terms of a trauma etiology; it would become, after Dora, the chance of a deviation from normal sexuality: too much masturbation, “seduction” by a nurse or sister, inability to give up primary masculinity, etc.  Freud’s etiologies after the “seduction” theory are never so definitive, and what exactly is pathogenic is usually left untheorized, thus psychoanalytic claims to authority or to truth based on cure, including or especially those regarding sexual development, are highly dubious. 

              Freud’s later theory of hysteria is in harmony with his notion from The Interpretation of Dreams that psychoanalysis finds “no fundamental, but only quantitative, distinctions between normal and neurotic life” (V 373): the hysteric represses her primary masculinity too much.  Freud is less concerned at this point with the cause, with finding his caput Nili.  His primary goal seems to have been to establish a stable position of masculinity via his theory.  The metapsychological theory of sexual development, Freud’s phylo-“genetic” masterplot of the PP, achieved this better than any etiology of hysteria ever did.  Yet when he attempts to define woman and femininity according to this masterplot—when he tries to appropriate the other and the Other—he ends up destabilizing the very basis of his theory: the oedipal masterplot of masculine sexual development.  Disavowing this instability, Freud’s woman is still reduced to functionaries according to his “three lines of development” and within a phallic economy centered on “castration-truth.”  This economy (oikonomia) provides the home (oikos, Heim) for the phallic One.  The stability of the oikos is achieved through a stable and complete definition (reduction of) woman, and the repression (secret, Heim) of the instability this definition causes (the repression of male bisexuality).

              In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud would switch the dominance between the ego and the id back to the id, after switching his original stance in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.  When Freud argues in this essay that the way psychoanalysis has come to understand the nature of resistance means that cure is hard to come by, he is privileging psychoanalysis as a metapsychology over psychoanalysis as a technique.  Given that this technique is what originally grounded the metapsychology, we are left wondering what is it that grounds the psychoanalytic metapsychology that theorizes interminable analyses.  Whence the authority?  What in turn grounds Freud’s theories of sexual difference?  With respect to females, analyses are interminable because, Freud argues, females cannot give up their penis envy.  But how did Freud arrive at the “truth” of penis-envy but via cure?  The foundation of psychoanalysis is not so much Freud theorizing and curing neurosis, but attempting to master sexual difference by theorizing normal sexual development: not curing hysteria as much as defining hysteria in terms of normal female development.  In this vein, I have tried to show how the trajectory of psychoanalysis was fundamentally directed toward securing a position, via metapsychology and masterplots, of a masculine One with respect to the unconscious, woman, chance, and difference.  Without cure as the basis, Freud’s theories would be mere speculations.

              Freud’s movement away from etiologies and cures toward metapsychologies of sexual difference is continued by Lacan, who would de-differentiate normality and neurosis by doing away with the category of normal, and essentially collapsing it into the category of neurotic.  For Lacan, neurosis is a clinical structure not differentiated from normality, but from psychosis and perversion, perversion being the other possible structures of subjectivity.  Neurosis “is a question being poses for the subject” (Lac93 168).  Lacan divides the neurotic structure into two forms, and each form is centered on its own question.  The question (asked) of the obsessional neurotic is Hamlet’s basic existential question, “to be or not to be?”—or, “am I dead or alive?” and “why do I exist?” (Lac93 179-80).  The question (asked) of the hysteric concerns the subject’s sexual position: “Am I a man or a woman?” or “what is a woman?” (Lac93, 170-75).  With respect to this last form of the hysteric’s question, Dylan Evans argues that Lacan “reaffirms the ancient view that there is an intimate connection between hysteria and femininity” (Eva96 78-79).  I would first argue that the Lacanian hysteric is the Lacanian woman, since neurosis and normality are the same: two forms of the Lacanian “solution” of “castration-truth,” where the irreducibility of division is transformed into the center of identity (though this “solution” itself is divided, hence the quotation marks).  “Femininity” for Lacan is reduced to lack, and specifically a lack of being—“woman doesn’t ex-sist” (Lac90 38)—and therefore the hysteric’s question and the obsessional’s question are the same question, since being for Lacan is a question of one’s position within the Symbolic—i.e., one’s sexual identity.  Having a position, being, would then be obsessional and masculine.  To ask “am I a man or a woman?” would therefore be the same as asking “to be or not to be?”  To be is to be a man, and to be obsessional.  This would be the onto-theological positioning of the hom(m)osexual One: vigilant about the Other/other potentially within (bisexuality) and against which it had to define itself in its (op)positional stage, and whose non-existence must be assured to maintain its fantasy of Oneness.  Yet, since the two questions are the same question, and therefore the same “solution,” the One is also divided, which would also explain its vigilance, its obsession, with maintaining not only the repression of “woman” and her division, but the repression of all repression.

              The difference between the questions, the sexual difference, would be from whence the questions are asked.  According to Ellie Ragland-Sullivan,

Lacan placed knowledge of the something else on the side of woman or the feminine: the hysteric’s solution goes against the normative one of believing in cultural stereotypes, adapting to the Symbolic père-version, aiming, rather, at the Real father of the jouissance of the impossible.  In its very impossibility, her quest reveals a lack in desire, a flaw in culture, and in knowledge.  Not surprisingly, she has a certain subversive attitude towards norms.  Lacan hypothesized that the hysteric’s particular dignity comes from her ability to elevate a suffering life to a worthy position, despite the fact that her body is constantly invaded by anxiety and affect that others more successfully repress.  In a more general sense, Lacan saw the hysteric as embodying the quintessence of the human subject because she speaks, as agent, from the lack and gaps in knowledge, language and being.  In her “being” she reveals the incapacity of any human subject to satisfy the ideals of Symbolic identification. (Wri92 164)

Lacan would therefore continue the traditional imbrication of femininity and madness by associating femininity with the Real and masculinity with the Symbolic.  The quotes around “being” above exemplify the hysteric’s impossible question.  She cannot ask “what is not being?” without the “is” and “not being” creating an aporia.  How can the hysteric speak with agency from the gaps?  Doesn’t agency require existence?  Doesn’t speech?  The hysteric, according to Lacan, asks her question from the Real, but this Real is what sustains the Symbolic and its norms: the Real as the (op)position of the Symbolic (and the Symbolic as inseparable from the Imaginary as in “symbolic identification” (see Web92)), and the Real as the absent center of the Symbolic, “das Ding,” which desire circles.  Ragland-Sullivan reads Lacan’s hysteric as if she represented some radical positioning from beyond.  This hysteric, however, cannot be subversive.  She is the (op)position, the specific absence, the center, that allows for the unquestioned presence of man: the taming of the Other as other.  The hysteric here is the figure of woman that “ex-sists”—and she magically exists, but does not exist, in a manner akin to the magically material-ideal phallus:

The phallus, thanks to castration, always remains in its place, in the transcendental topology of which we were speaking above.  In castration, the phallus is indivisible, and therefore indestructible, like the letter which takes its place.  And this is why the motivated, never demonstrated presupposition of the materiality of the letter as indivisibility is indispensable for this restricted economy, this circulation of the proper. (Der87 441)

The reduction of woman to castration, to its magical presence/absence is also indispensable.

              Lacan’s hysteric is woman in his structural economy that collapses the categories of the neurotic and the normal into one.  The dignity Lacan gives to the hysteric is the dignity usually afforded to woman for providing this specific absence to presence, where lack (the Real) has its place (opposed to the Symbolic).  Lacan’s identification of Socrates, Hegel, and himself as hysterics is less an identification of hysteria with these thinkers who went beyond common knowledge than a manifestation of Lacan’s relationship of disavowal with respect to woman: Lacan, with his usual immodesty, associates himself with those whom he sees as having possessed some Knowledge that might be associated with the phallic mother, if woman were not constantly a threat.  “Castration-truth” provides a transcendental place for the specific lack, but the threat always remains, as does the instability due to the logic of disavowal required to sustain the One.  The hysteric must exist (Lacan’s mourning) and yet “be” woman who cannot exist.  All this must “be” in order to achieve the ideal “hom(m)osexuality” of Being.  Man exists (alone) in Lacan’s phallogocentrism, and Lacan presents himself as an example of His ability to transcend the limitations of normal knowledge, beyond the obsessional position, to possess the God-like knowledge of both Self and Other, both sides of the split in the RSI: he supposes himself to be a mystic, a subject of knowledge (“sujet supposé savoir”).  Lacan’s association of himself and his three great men with the god-like position of the man-hysteric, what he calls “the mystic” (Lac98 76), and the hysteric’s quintessential lack can be seen as a disavowal of the hysteric as woman: the man-hysteric is akin to the phallic mother, his-her absolute knowledge the product of a totality unbounded.  Lacanian psychoanalysis is Lacan’s superstition: a destinational linguistics.  With respect to one level of the actual phallic function—the level that hides the small “o” other behind the One of hom(m)osexuality—what remains is the existence and femininity of the hysteric and woman.  With respect to a “more primordial” level, the level of das Unheimlich, the “not-being-at-home,” what remains, as usual, is the trace of logocentric repression: the différance of a split One, the impropriety of the proper in a self-post.

              Lacan’s neurotic structures are thus ideal categories of sexual difference in ontological terms.  Lacan extends a trend in Freud’s theorizing that conflates neurosis and normality, and associates ideal categories of masculine and feminine with diagnostic categories, among many other types of categories.  In this sense psychoanalysis resembles the ego of the obsessional male.  Like the obsessional male, psychoanalysis can be read as a defensive discourse attempting to maintain the masculine position of existence against the threats of feminine uncertainty and undecidability.  Laplanche and Pontalis describe obsessional neurosis as follows:

the psychical conflict is expressed through symptoms which are described as compulsive-obsessive ideas, compulsions towards undesirable acts, struggles against these thoughts and tendencies, exorcistic rituals, etc.—and through a mode of thinking which is characterized in particular by rumination, doubt and scruples, and which leads to inhibitions of thought and action…. displacement of affect on to ideas removed to a varying degree from the original conflict; isolation; undoing what has been done … ambivalence … (Lap67 281)

Freud’s attempts to theorize “the unconscious” might be read as a compulsive undesirable act for the obsessional interested in certainty and mastery.  Analysis itself might be considered an exorcistic ritual: for men, exorcising the feminine or passive trends, enhancing the repudiation of femininity, whereas for women exorcising resistance to assuming the feminine position, to not being.  With regard to positioning, the Lacanian obsessional-hysterical question itself is one that dissimulates, represses something beyond Lacan’s RSI based on a logic of lack: the obsessional-hysterical question, the ontological question, is in the service of a totality of positioning, and a representative of castration-truth.  Lacan positions himself as master of this totality.  Without the Lacanian hysteric, without woman as magical presence/absence (division as identity), without the magical material-ideal phallus of Lacanian “castration-truth,” this totality cannot be maintained.  The magic is required to disavow the impropriety that these concepts and categories bring with them, to dissimulate the dissimulation of the irreducibility of division, to transform the otherwise spaces into “gaps” and “lack.”  Just as “lack does not have its place in dissemination” (Der87 441), there is no space for dissemination or différance within a logic of lack.

Anders  57

[1]   Feminists have criticized Freud’s notion of fetishism for being male-specific, and have attempted to theorize a female fetishism (see Apt91), which seems misguided to me since this concept attempts to secure phallocentrism.

[2]  I am referring here to the mother’s role within Freud’s own theories of development, and not to some natural or reified mother.  Moreover, assuming the mother to be female naturalizes the male/female binary I am trying to problematize, and especially trying to avoid reproducing.

[3]  Freud is discussing the little girl here, but will later argue that this applies to the little boy too.  He is trying to theorize what motivates the girl to reject her mother as love object, while the boy keeps her as such.  Therefore, any experiences common to both boy and girl, such as the one above, would not explain this cause.  Ultimately Freud will theorize the cause as the girl’s castration complex.

[4]   My critique of the “hom(m)osexuality” of psychoanalysis is in no way intended to be a criticism of what is commonly termed “male homosexuality,” a term which relies on, in addition to male/female, a simplistic binary of homo-/hetero-, another reduction of something totally other to an idealistic binary.  “Hom(m)osexuality” is the term I use for the reduction of what is totally other first to a binary, then to a phallic singularity.

[5] “Phallogocentrism is neither an accident nor a speculative error that can be imputed to any given theoretician.  It is an old and enormous root that must also be accounted for” (Der87 480-2n60).