Division Review Issue #21

REVIEW DIVISION DIVISION A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

NO.4 SUMMER 2012

NO.21 SPRING 2020

A QUARTERLY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORUM

DOES THE (FANTASTIC) TRANSWOMAN EXIST? | GOZLAN

T H E

A N A L Y T I C

F I E L D

WOMEN & PSYCHOSIS: MULTIDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES | BROWN AND CHARLES

REMINISCENCE FINDING THE SPACES IN BETWEEN | NOBUS

ROADS TAKEN | STEVEN ELLMAN

CONVERSION DISORDER | WEBSTER

ON FEMININITY: COMMENTARIES TURNING THE PERIODIC TABLES | GHEROVICI

JANE BOWN

WRITING MENSTRUATION | HATCH

P H O T O G R A P H Y

Heir Apparent

Loren DENT

For the past decade, David Lichtenstein has cultivated a remarkable forum for psychoanalytic discourse in his role as editor of DIVISION/Review. Most notable has been his curation of a space where varied contributions, including empirical research, meditations on poetry, debates on technique, book reviews, political engagements, photography, and personal reminiscences on psychoanalytic masters have interlaced while maintaining a rigorous quality of scholarship. David, with the support of senior

and contributing editors, has set an exacting standard for DIVISION/Review, to the great benefit of not only Division 39 members, but an entire international readership.

To inherit carries both burden and promise. Freud twice quoted—twenty-five years apart—Goethe’s Faust: “What thou hast inherited from thy fathers, acquire it to make it thine” (Freud, 1913/1955, 1938/1964). In these texts, Freud was struggling with the enigma of inheritance and transmission across generations. Through

various idioms—such as oral tradition, phylogenesis, the superego, and identification—Freud highlighted the burden of inheritance, its imposition of individual and collective debt, that nevertheless is appropriated in singular ways. Therefore, in assuming the role of editor, I am faced with an inevitable disquiet. My responsibility is to find a unique voice within this tradition memorialized on the pages of past issues of DIVISION/Review. To this aim, I seek to sustain the publication as space for

Official publication of Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association

EDITOR

Loren Dent SENIOR EDITORS

Steven David Axelrod, J. Todd Dean, William Fried, William MacGillivray, Marian Margulies, Bettina Mathes, Manya Steinkoler

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

THE ANALYTIC FIELD 4

Does the (Fantastic) Transwoman Exist?

A Commentary on the Film A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean Drama Directed by Sebastian Lelio, and the Question of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy

Oren Gozlan

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Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, Ricardo Ainslie, Christina Biedermann, Chris Bonovitz, Steven Botticelli, Ghislaine Boulanger, Patricia Gherovici, Peter Goldberg, Adrienne Harris, Elliott Jurist, Jane Kupersmidt, Paola Mieli, Donald Moss, Ronald Naso, Donna Orange, Robert Prince, Allan Schore, Robert Stolorow, Nina Thomas, Usha Tummala, Jamieson Webster, Lynne Zeavin BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Anna Fishzon FOUNDING EDITOR

Marie Brown and Marilyn Charles

Women & Psychosis: Multidisciplinary Perspectives An interview with editors Marie Brown and Marilyn Charles

David Lichtenstein PHOTOGRAPHY BY

Jane Bown IMAGES EDITOR

Tim Maul

REMINISCENCE 10

DESIGN BY

Hannah Alderfer, HHA design, NYC

The Roads Taken, as in the Grand Tradition

Steven Ellman

DIVISION | REVIEW a quarterly psychoanalytic forum published by the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association, 2615 Amesbury Road, Winston-Salem, NC 27103.

ON FEMININITY: COMMENTARIES 17

Dany Nobus

Finding the Spaces in Between, or How to Tackle the Persistence of Patriarchy

Subscription rates: $25.00 per year (four issues). Individual Copies: $7.50. Email requests: divisionreview@optonline. com or mail requests: Editor, Division/Review 80 University Place #5, New York, NY 10003

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Jamieson Webster

Conversion Disorder

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Patricia Gherovici

Turning the Periodic Tables on Freud: Lacan’s Colon

32

Loryn Hatch

Writing Menstruation

Letters to the Editor and all Submission Inquiries email the Editor: lorendentphd@gmail.com, Division/Review 80 University Place #5, New York, NY 10003 Advertising: Please direct all inquiries regarding advertising, professional notices, and announcements to divisionreview.editor@gmail.com © Division Of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.

Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher.

DIVISION | REVIEW accepts unsolicited manuscripts. They should be submitted by email to the editor: lorendentphd@gmail.com, prepared according to the APA publication manual, and no longer than 2500 words DIVISION | REVIEW can be read online at divisionreview.com

ISSN 2166-3653

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Heir Apparent (from page 1) sophisticated dialogue to address clinical, cultural, political, and aesthetic questions and controversies that are pertinent to psychoanalytic clinicians and other communities engaged in our field.

In this inaugural issue of my editorship, I am grateful for the assistance of Jamieson Webster, who generously served as guest issue editor. This issue was inspired by the 51st Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, which addressed the topic of femininity. To address femininity is to evoke the question of difference, which is intrinsic

to the psychoanalytic field and its practice. Psychoanalytic thinking, arguably, has always been a way of thinking of the maladies of the discontent with difference, whether through repression, disavowal, expulsion. Feminism, critical theory, and postcolonial studies have revealed the psychic and material coupling of the repudiation of femininity and other marks of difference, whether they be race, class, or other representatives of the social abject.

As a practice of speaking the unthinkable, psychoanalysis is one antidote among others to the erasure of the other, though it has not been exempted from the ailments of group psychology. Despite longstanding

attempts to define the commonality of psychoanalysis as theory and technique, the field remains unyieldingly multifarious. The sustaining of a space for such differences to be exchanged and contested without leaning on diluted appeals to standardization and sameness has been the bedrock of DIVISION/Review, and perhaps of psychoanalytic ethics itself. z REFERENCES Freud, S. (1955). Totem and taboo. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 13, pp.1-164). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1913) Freud, S. (1964). An outline of psycho-analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 23, pp.139208). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1938)

Photography of Jane Bown A review by Tim Maul Jane Bown: A Lifetime of Looking

By Jane Bown (edited by Luke Dodd) London, England: Guardian Faber, 2015 Exposures

By Jane Bown (edited by Luke Dodd) London, England: Guardian Books, 2009 The light administrative duties (downloading files, having welcome exchanges with my London-based curator/editor friend Luke Dodd) required to curate this issue of DIVISION/Review cannot detract from the gravity and honor of introducing Jane Bown’s (1925-2014) images to a highly specific audience such as ours. Although little known on this side of the Atlantic, Bown is familiar to older readers of London’s The Observer with her portraiture and reportage growing in reputation as the specialized role of photojournalist becomes redundant in the continued democratization of the imaging device or camera. A “Wren” (Women’s Royal Naval Service) during World War II, Bown’s life path was radically diverted by wedding photography and she was soon contributing to the The Observer in that black and white postwar decade of deprivation, enforced austerity, and delayed PTSD on a national level. There is a brief scene in the 2017 film Phantom Thread where the neurotic fashion designer played

by Daniel Day Lewis is photographed gazing upon his most recent muse in a bustling Cecil Beaton-esque studio of the same period. Bown operated in an opposite world.

Her portraiture had a job to do and a deadline to meet, necessitating immediate productive encounters with limited access to her subjects, a “who’s who” of politics, entertainment, literature, and other cultural personages. Bown acknowledged that her conventional appearance and mild manner allowed her subjects to drop their reserve

and to give her what she needed, unlike our Diane Arbus, who disliked commercial assignments and psychically exhausted her sitters into submission. Bown was beloved by many. Andy Warhol’s assistant in the 1960s and the Factory doorman poet/photographer Gerard Malanga (while not quite in Bown’s league) stated that rather than taking an image, one is given it by the subject, an exchange continually recognized in reviewing Bown’s extensive corpus. I am personally intrigued by the mythic characters that populated Londons debauched 1950s bohemia, which Bown, both the insider, and the outsider documented. The Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon was the only assignment that frightened her unlike queer icon Quentin Crisp (I met him once, we talked about Boy George, another Bown sitter), the libertine grandson of you-know-who, painter Lucien Freud; and Britain’s forgotten “answer” to the Hollywood bombshell, Diana Dors. The momentum picks up in the 1960s with the young nicotine addicted Beatles, goggle-eyed artist David Hockney, and the elfin Rita Tushingham star of the kitchen-sink drama A Taste Of Honey (1962) and soon after Richard Lester’s kooky The Knack and How To Get It (1965), both films in gritty black and white. Bown continually reminds us that prior to social media and the iPhone, the liminal intimate physical encounter required an agreement, like being vaccinated, brief and mostly painless, opening a fleeting window of trust, which Bown could summon on a daily basis. Everyone looks their age. We are provided a good hard look at someone that either confirms or contributes knowledge to our formed opinion of them. In public life, it helps when an individual knows how they appear and can send whichever signal needs to be transmitted or 3

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performed through what critic Max Kozloff called “‘the theatre of the face’.” Models, actors, and public figures have it while the rest us can acquire it over time or learn it via a media consultant.

Moving someone closer to a window in light-deprived London may have had a sedating effect upon Bown’s subjects. One cannot imagine improvising a studio shoot and ordering around a Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien, Rudolf Nureyev, or a wary Bernadette Devlin the activist and former Mid Ulster MP, here in a skirt she knitted in prison. Bown’s London has passed, but with Brexit done, the exportation of a one-dimensional Britishness feels more urgent than ever, and PBS watcher that I am, I remain struck by the plethora of bonnet romances, cozy murder mysteries (exceptions: Prime Suspect, Shetland) and monarchy-centered docudramas coming our way.

Perhaps they are simply cheaper to license.

Jane Bown’s achievement offers an antidote to much of this, consider her image of the elderly former Blackshirt pinup girl Lady Diana Mosley smiling tolerantly like Norman Bates in the final scene of Psycho (1960). She wouldn’t hurt a fly but Bown, unusually so, maintains her distance. z REFERENCES Aird, C., Collins, E., & Bartlett, K. (Executive producers). (2013-present). Shetland [TV series]. ITV Studios.

Anderson, P. T. (Director). (2017). Phantom thread [Film]. Annapurna Pictures; Ghoulardi Film Company; Perfect World Pictures.

Bown, J. (2009). Exposures (Luke Dodd, Ed.). London, England: Guardian Books.

Bown, J. (2015). Jane Bown: A lifetime of looking (Luke Dodd, Ed.). London, England: Guardian Faber.

Head, S. (Executive producer). (1991-2006). Prime suspect [TV series]. Granada Television/ITV Productions; WGBH Boston/Masterpiece Mystery.

Hitchcock, A. (Director). (1960). Psycho [Film]. Shamley Productions.

Lester, R. (Director). (1965). The knack...and how to get it [Film]. Woodfall Film Productions.

Richardson, T. (Director). (1961). A taste of honey [Film].

Woodfall Film Productions.

THE ANALYTIC FIELD

Does the (Fantastic) Transwoman Exist?

Oren GOZLAN

A Commentary on the Film A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean Drama directed by Sebastian Lelio, and the Question of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy We now live in a time when there are different ways of thinking and representing gender, and in this regard, the transsexual subject represents a new kind of subjectivity, that along with other individuals subjected to exclusion, such as autistic or indigenous groups, is oriented by a desire for social change. There are multiple realities that are at stake, and there is a question of how far we can go when we think about what is possible or the human’s determination, and this comes to a boiling point on the matter of gender. The attempt to change the nature of how to make meaning also involves the capacity to face difficult questions and to have the courage to tolerate anxiety and frustration without falling back to compliance or destruction. There are new demands being made from LGBTQ groups for a different way of approaching discourse on gender, including demands for recognition, inclusion, and, recently, an apology for a history of willful disregard.

The slow-moving creep of discourses about gender now involves a move from looking at transsexuality towards examining the cisgender reception of trans subjectivities and demands for recognition. In turn, trans communities are making demands from within for education about their own subject position in relation to transsexuality. There is an intensity that belongs to the topic of education, because it is a site to which we bring our own desires, our hatred of dependency and development, and our tacit fantasies of what it takes to change minds. This paper engages with the question of film as one site of education, in which the central question is the viewers’ reception. The question of reception is crucial, because clinicians are now beginning to think more deeply about their own work in relation to gender demands, and about their own education in matters of gender. In this paper, I offer a brief reviewing of the film A Fantastic Woman (2017), a passionate melodrama by Sebastian Leilo, a Chilean director, with the question of reception in mind. The use of the melodrama, I suggest, animates a particular kind of passion, and if as analytic viewers, we also study passion when we study this film, what sense can we make of melodrama in relation to the film’s reception? What do we think about the film’s effect of addressing mentalities towards gender? The larger question I attempt to address in this paper is this: what do we think about the film as a pedagogical tool in affecting people’s minds?

A Fantastic Woman is a film about inexplicability. It presents us with a geometry of what would be the stakes for the aftermath

of a transgender love affair. Yet it is a fiction taken at its tragic dimensions. The movie begins with Marina and Orlando celebrating Marina’s birthday. Orlando presents Marina with an envelope containing a missing object. In a piece of paper, there is a promise of a trip to Iguazu Falls. The “would-be” tickets themselves are lost. Soon after returning from the restaurant, Orlando collapses. Marina rushes him to the hospital, where he dies. It is at this point that the movie leaves the transgender scene and moves into the trauma of the society: there is no time for grief for Marina, who is confronted with an onslaught of humiliations and attacks. She is misgendered, believed to be a prostitute, suspected of committing murder or of having engaged in bizarre and deadly sex. She is asked by her lover’s wife and son to leave the apartment she shared with her lover and is violently attacked for attending her lover’s funeral. In a normative rule-governed reality, there is no freedom even when you die.

The film opens up the clichés of the mistress’ story. The new narrative, involving a love affair between a young transwoman and an older man, challenges the fault line of the old story because it opens up the repressed qualities of an affair, its enigmatic desires for escape and entrapment, the enigmatic qualities of attraction and its persecutory anxieties.

It presents a different, non-normative narrative of old conflicts, burdened by new additions like questions around identity and escape from heterosexuality. Yet as I was watching the film, I wondered, does the transwoman exist in the fantasy of the society? Judging by the film, the trans body is imagined as having no interiority: how does Marina make sense of her lover’s family? Of her lover? Of her situation? It is the family who takes the center stage, while the audience watches a transsexual being beaten. The family cannot believe that a husband and a father would fall in love with someone they could not anticipate.

They are the persecutory face of the society that disavows the capacity of someone to decide what they want to do or be.

The story of transitioning, one could argue, is one of taking ownership. One of making meaning of an intricate story, whose traces one is unable to capture or undo. It is a story that is never-ending, whose consequences are unknown. The advent of transsexuality has opened for us a new position of gender as it raises the question of whether femininity and masculinity, as they are conceptualized, are the extremes of gender, and yet are not the whole of gender’s capabilities.

A broad story of transsexuality, where the 4

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center of a question is not physical violation, aggression, or rape, however, is hard to come by. It is precisely this difficulty that brings the film A Fantastic Woman so close to the trauma of gender, and in this way, it is traumatic and hard to watch. In essence, the film is not so much about the transsexual, of whom we know very little, or their affair, of which we know even less, or about Marina’s relationship to life, of which we know nothing at all.

A Fantastic Woman is a film about the experience of the scorned woman, who is betrayed.

And so, we may wonder, why are we seeing it as emblematic of the trans experience? After all, how well does anyone do with an affair?

Would it be different if we placed any other disclaimed person in Marina’s place (e.g., a young boy, a gay man)?

The space of the disclaimed subject, I suggest, is interchangeable. Yet, the radical moment in the film, I believe, is sexuality, not trans. It is about two people who surprised each other and had sex. That disrupted the normative marriage, the age relation, and gender. The normative is disrupted not so much because of who Marina and Orlando are, but because of what they did in bed. Yet, what did they do in bed?

The big question of the sexual act is not asked. The voyeuristic fixation about the genitals is an extremely veiled curiosity in the film. And yet, like Poe’s purloined letter, it becomes evident through the question of how unbelievable the relationship is felt to be. It is the relationship between Marina and Orlando whose impossibility is at the heart of the movie and that remains alienated in the film. Why is Marina and Orlando’s relationship so unimaginable to the heteronormative family? Partly because they thought they knew. So, the fantasy of mastery is the defense against the anxiety of not knowing the other. The viewer may experience a torn loyalty, see an impossible paradise, or feel anger towards the couple.

The film, I suggest, is made from the point of view of the society that cannot make sense of the transsexual, at the same time that it does not make sense. The central question of the film becomes the ways in which the body is addressed by normalcy, and so we are witness to the brutality of the society and what it does to the transsexual.

A Fantastic Woman is also a film about adolescent fantasies and is steeped in ideality: Marina and Orlando’s ideality of the affair and the viewer’s ideality, that if we could only explain the brutal reality, there will be tolerance. These idealities present a dilemma that also belongs to psychoanalysis: can there be an address to the normative

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Mick Jagger, 1977 5

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that isn’t normative? That does not repeat the trauma? The question can also be framed along the lines of Butler (1993) and Britzman’s address to pedagogy: can psychoanalysis admit the unthinkability of normalcy and how it is constituted again and again? (Britzman, 1998, p.85). What are the stakes of addressing the aggressor? The problem with an affective plea for tolerance and inclusion is that it is saturated in the belief that “one discourse can make room for those it must exclude” (Britzman, 1998, p.86). The commitment to tolerance, they seem to suggest, is already addressing the large society that is rendering the transsexual invisible. The commitment to tolerance is close to the death drive: its movement towards reduction of tension creates de-differentiation, which erases subjectivity by presuming to know self and other. What would it be to consider transsexuality as a human condition, not a social event?

In singling out the ways in which transphobia works, pedagogy’s preoccupation with inclusion is engaged in what Eve Sedgwick (2008) terms “minoritizing.”

The discursive tendency to “minoritize” or particularize identities situates heteronormative/trans or homo distinction as “an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed...minority” (Sedgwick, 2008, p.1). Eve Sedgwick’s problematization of the discursive tendency of “minoritizing” or particularizing identities, which addresses the other as known, intervenes in a particular way to disrupt the pedagogical idea that only certain people that have certain positions are allowed to understand certain things and everyone else, who does not occupy that position, will never know. Minoritizing discourses attempt to stabilize something that is fleeting and momentary. From the vantage point of a minoritizing discourse, transsexuality is in a constant state of emergency—it is a call to act: rescuing, recognition, rights.

Particularities are static, timeless, and unconscious, in that what is desired is always presumed known and where the structure of identity and gender lies becomes a fixation point. As soon as we place the unconscious as the center of life, however, we have in the markers of gender something very fantasied and idealized and disparaged and aggressive, whatever side we are on (masculine or feminine).

What is at stake for the analyst in limiting analysis to the brute “reality” of experience?

We run the risk of repeating the conflation of the real of the body—forever and universally inaccessible—with its signifiers, whose multiple psychic meanings exceed socio-cultural significations. What is left behind is the question of desire and the conundrum of self-difference that is both a human condition and a

subjective situation. In a story where victim and perpetrator are clearly defined, desire takes a second stage. What are the anxieties that move us away from the transsexual story? What would it be to offer an analysis of anxieties over the body, the idea of transitioning and its disorienting effect on the fragility of identity? And so, is there such a thing as a therapeutic pedagogy that can open our discourse to uncertainty? There is something being cancelled out, I believe, in current discourses that focus on the transsexual as victim of discrimination and intolerance, because we are reproducing a binary in such a way that our pedagogy is at stake. And what gets cancelled is the subjectivity of the transsexual person themselves. And while we must insist on the right to have rights, which also brings us to essentialism and stability, these, I suggest, like the clothes we wear, are a fleeting cover up for the incommensurability between becoming and being read. From the vantage point of the transsexual, how would the film be considered? I think that here, we move away from the question of equality, to the question of difference. This question does not center on the way the body is addressed by normativity, but on the capacity to move from the problem of identity to the particularity of an emotional situation.

All transformations are described by Bion (1965) as a catastrophic emotional situation. As a transformative process, transsexuality is not simply a triumphant story, but also a site of a catastrophe, in a Bionian sense.

The wish to belong and to create something for the self is not only a freeing experience, but also very painful, and there has to be a sadness that is part of any situation of major change, as one’s fantasy is bound to fail. And indeed, I do not think that as analysts, we can give up the idea of suffering. To make meaning of the idea of transsexual suffering, however, the pain of transitioning must be tied to the complexity of a subject’s own experience, beyond the question of how the other makes them suffer. In other words, the victim position forecloses the idea of difference by becoming preoccupied solely by the claustrum of rights. For the analyst to understand the mental configurations in different terms than the repetition of what the society already does to the transsexual, the analyst too must enter the relational imaginary, which may also include sadomasochistic wishes on both parts. I think this involves a turn to the question of adolescent ideality on the part of both theory and its object.

The adolescent, as Kristeva (2007) reminds us, is also a passionate creature who believes in absolute satisfaction and refuses ambivalence as a way to simultaneously keep an infallible Other and evade the irremediably disappointing real other. The analyst’s wish for total understanding of 6

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the transsexual situation is a kind of ideality that wards off the anxiety of not knowing.

Can the analyst hear the ideality in their own viewpoint and those of the patient?

Can they maintain an opening, grounded on the acceptance of trying to understand something without having to act? Here are the tensions we face when we are caught in the question of opening minds to something that the mind obstructs: the dilemma of psychoanalysis is always the notion that the very capacity to open our ideas is also the very thing that closes them. And so, we have to study the obstacles for thinking, one of which is the mastery of knowledge. And we may wonder if the only place where open-mindedness is possible is in dreamlife. Resistance in psychoanalytic treatment is to be expected, and so why would not the same resistance also play out in other modes of ideas that challenge the normativity of thought or the freedom to think something unknown? In the clinic, analyst and patients struggle through the lure of the imaginary that promises full recognition and mimetic symmetry. Yet the body has a very difficult time becoming abstract.

There is a narcissistic blow that plays out on both sides of the analytic couch, where we often think that our ego is in charge of our house. This fantasy maps nicely into the society that promises a normative life, even though normativity is already a fantasy. An emotional relationship to an object that I don’t know, however, requires for me to be interested in one’s obstacles, to knowing this Other: to countertransference, anxieties, and projections. If from the transsexual situation, we learn what it is like to question our intelligibility, the anxiety about transsexual discourse affects the cis-gender’s understanding of their sexuality, because there, the familiar is rendered strange. I think the psychoanalytic clinic is oriented by this impasse. It is a scene of pedagogy because it engages the question of how to communicate the ethical dilemmas of transsexuality beyond its concrete procedures. Is there a way to speak of self-other processes in ways that do not condemn individuals into the prison house of identity, even though they may be residing there temporarily?

There are a number of idealities I have discussed in this paper: those of the film, the relationship, the analyst, and of the viewer.

And one of the difficulties is that these idealities animate a constellation of anxieties that I am trying to understand through film.

Films are often used as points of discussion.

Clinical writing draws on a cultural viewpoint, and this film presents such a viewpoint.

A Fantastic Woman presents us with multiple viewpoints, some more dominant than others.

But it assumes that there is a crisis of misunderstanding that occurs after a significant loss.

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Diana Mosley, 1981

People bring to their relationships a history of loss. This becomes much more complicated when the subject of the loss is a disparaged object. That is the case with the fantastic woman, and everyone would agree she has to fight for her right to love. But in fighting for her right to love, she has to come in contact with significant ignorance.

As we witness Marina being repeatedly humiliated by the society, we may wonder, can we tell the story of how normativity produces unintelligibility? The film’s doer and done-to structure, I suggest, is oriented towards the naysayers who are dedicated to the normative view and who cannot imagine transsexuality. Portraying the transsexual as a victim of the society repeats the history of homophobia and transphobia through the magnetizing pull towards sameness, where certitude (about gender, victim, and perpetrator) replaces questions of difference; where the body is as often mystified as known. Freud’s elaborations on the structure of fantasy through the beating scene illustrate the defining feature of fantasy, where none of the positions actualized in the scene can be understood separately, but only in terms of their complementary function in the fantasy’s configuration; therefore, the logic that structures these positions is relational. If the logic of relationality orients our approach to sexuality, this logic is fantasy. The difficulty is that the capacity to enter fantasy is linked to the relational puzzlement our fantasies invite.

Can we bear the aesthetics of unintelligibility? What would it be to think of a transsexual story as entrance into something much more human, enigmatic, and unfinished: a relationship and a loss? An everydayness?

As a fantasy about the libidinal world and its disillusionment? These questions move us towards the analyst’s capacity to enter into fantasy and for psychoanalysis to be a pedagogy oriented by interest in sexuality and movement beyond the binary.

Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (1991) astutely observes a link between theorization and sexual fantasies. One’s identifications with one’s gender or another, she argues, “sustains” if not produces theories in which male-female difference are either emphasized, eradicated, desexualized, or shifted.

That is one of the dilemmas in the film that belongs to the clinic: no one can say what something means, only fantasize what has happened. Young-Bruehl’s observation helps us understand the craziness of the binary not as a reality of gender, but as an effect of the pressures that manifest with gender. There is something about our narrative of gender that not only refuses its infantile history, but will use infantile theory as a sadistic weapon against mental pain and thinking. Indeed, the fingerprints of gender are tied to primal communications that later take the form of disavowal. If sexuality gives us the possibility of gender, our gender will be marked by the libidinal qualities of identifications. Along with the brute facts of bodily 7

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difference, the space between pleasure and pain, there is a gooey layer of social meaning saturated with infantile theories of sexuality, which covers it over. Perhaps, by revisiting our theories of gender through their erotic and binding infantile sexuality, we may find a crack through which a different story of how we become gendered may materialize and pierce the normative fantasy. For the psyche, “transitioning occurs on the plain of fantasy because it engages the history of our object relations which are always partial, transient, and unconscious” (Gozlan, 2015).

Regaining our history requires reinventing our origins, and in this way, the transwoman, is indeed, fantastic. z REFERENCES Bion, W. R. (1965). Transformations: Change from learning to growth. London, England: Tavistock.

Britzman, P. D. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York, NY: Routledge.

Gozlan, O. (2008). The accident of gender. Psychoanalytic Review, 95, 541-570.

Gozlan, O. (2015). Transsexuality and the art of transitioning; A Lacanian approach. New York, NY: Routledge.

Gozlan, O. (2018). Critical debates in the field of transsexual studies: In transition. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kristeva, J. (2007). Adolescence: A syndrome of ideality (M. Marder & P. Vieira, Trans.). Psychoanalytic Review, 94(5), 716-725.

Lelio, S. (2017). Una mujer fantástica [A fantastic woman] [Film]. Fabula; Komplizen Film.

Sedgewick, E. K. (2008). Epistemology of the closet.

Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Young-Bruehl, E. (1991). Rereading Freud on female development. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 11(4):427-440.

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Women & Psychosis: Multidisciplinary Perspectives An interview with editors Marie Brown and Marilyn Charles D/R: Please share a bit of background as to how this collection came to be.

MB: I was interested in the way that psychosis affects women, and how it traditionally has been tied to biology, in particular the female reproductive body, for example with postpartum psychosis. There’s also the fact that psychosis is more prevalent in women after the age of 45, which is often attributed to menopause. I was struck by the over-emphasis of biomedical discourse regarding women’s “madness” and was wondering what else could be happening? Is this narrative another iteration of the unstable body or “unruly” hormonal story? I was also really inspired by dialogic practice, and the idea that some semblance of “truth” can be found in between people. So, I was thinking that what would make an interesting collection would be one where everyone’s voice is honored, across a multitude of disciplines, in keeping with the idea of polyphony. I knew of Marilyn’s work, of course, and also knew that she was interested in feminism and with understanding femininity and psychosis from a psychoanalytic perspective. I approached her, and luckily, she said yes and was interested in working on this together.

MC: I think the perspective that I’m bringing as someone a few decades older is a sense of what it has meant to be a woman and to not necessarily be seen as legitimate in one’s own life as a speaking subject. I was a young adult in an era where a husband could speak for a wife, and one could not necessarily speak for oneself, where a woman could very easily be labeled as mentally ill and lose one’s rights. I’m also someone who is very interested in literature as a chronicling of human experience. Those were the two contexts I was bringing, both historical and cultural.

How do we make sense of what women have been trying to say for themselves, and what has been said about women? There is Freud’s enigma: how do you know a woman? The man can know her from the outside, but not the inside. How do we speak for ourselves and about ourselves from different angles? Because part of what matters for women in the feminist movement is that it has taken a stand for the whole person, the things that have been associated with women in terms of passion, being in the body, but were devalued at everyone’s expense. These are human qualities that get devalued and loaded in pejorative kinds of ways. How do we all be people, and if we can’t be people, then how do we raise children who are people. That’s my agenda here.

D/R: The volume is notable for its inclusion of first-person accounts, which are becoming increasingly visible, yet still often absent in literature on psychosis. Please say a bit about the inescapable challenge of selecting what was included and not included in the volume.

MB: The perspective of how someone understands their experience from a psychiatric or biomedical lens is pervasive. It is such a large, dominant story. I was really interested in people who understood their experience from other perspectives. Sometimes trauma is presented as the only alternative to the biomedical model. I felt that was important, but that there are other narratives as well, so we have for example Gogo Ekhaya Esima’s piece in there about shamanism. I think it’s very important, historically, to talk about this other side of women’s experiences of alternate states of consciousness. Writers such as Rachel Liebert have been focusing on this idea more, that patriarchy is in some sense bound up with a “de-supernaturalization” of experience.

MC: It’s also important in terms of what we know about the embeddedness of psychosis, as a phenomenon, within a certain socio-political discourse. When you look at extreme experiences, if they occur within a context where meaning can be made of them, then there’s a way of making sense that doesn’t devalue, marginalize or frighten the individual. Within Christianity, you have a tradition of extreme experiences that are virtually identical with psychotic experiences. Across the globe, early interventions are effective when meaning is made, which stabilizes the person and allows them to get their bearings.

D/R: This brings to mind the debates within psychoanalysis as to whether psychosis is a structure, personality, or some kind of continuum of experience.

MC: Lacan spoke about a psychotic position, which I have found to be true and helpful conceptually. This is a place where somebody is put, which is my experience with individuals and families. When you work with a family, you can see the determination to mark someone as the crazy person, which leaves that person in an untenable position.

MB: There’s something interesting that happens in psychoanalytic discourse, both in terms of psychosis and in terms [of ] “women” or femininity. For example, Kristeva’s ideas on women and the abject, Lacanian ideas about 8

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psychosis and femininity. This idea of psychosis as a blurring of the boundary between self and other, which can equally be applied to women. There is, for example, Winnicott’s thoughts on maternal preoccupation. Both of these concepts, women and psychosis, are elusive and unable to be fully grasped. Both feminist and mad pride movements have emphasized the role of language, by problematizing words like “psychosis” or “women”— moving things away from categories. They have tackled this question of language as a political stance.

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MC: I also just want to say that the issue of psychosis versus madness is an important one for me, because I think people are driven mad, whereas psychosis pretends to be a phenomenon in itself as opposed to something that marks meanings. I prefer to talk about psychotic symptoms as opposed to psychosis. One of the problems that happened in psychoanalysis—particularly in the Lacanian tradition—is talk about “the psychotic” as though there is a particular kind of crazy person who manifests in the universe. Those kinds of language structures are poetic and have resonance, but if you don’t think about them and how you’re using them, you can be very destructive. I think one of the problems in psychoanalysis, which is very metaphorical in its language structures, has been to lose sight of the person who is

being spoken about. So, part of what is ethically important about this volume and is also true of ISPS (International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis) is that we condition our tendency to wander off by insisting on staying in dialogue and speaking to people who are suffering from the problems that we’re talking about, whether it’s families or people with lived experience. We can’t just talk about people without having to engage with the actual person. Everybody knows something and nobody knows it all. We’re living in this time of binaries, where the conversations we’re needing to have are almost impossible because it’s active warfare.

MB: Another kind of commonality in both feminist activism and the mad pride

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movement is this idea “the personal is the political.” This isn’t all that different within psychoanalysis—because you need to be an analysand first in order to be an analyst. So, in some ways psychoanalysis is the perfect place from which to have this conversation.

MC: Which also points to the real space of psychoanalysis as opposed to the overly intellectualized discourse, which has also been part of its tradition. In order to really engage across differences, which this book is about, it’s really important to recognize the common experiences of being human and being frightened and trying to deal with impossible things. And really being respectful of one another, which allows for the potential growth that we all need. z

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The Roads Taken, as in the Grand Tradition First, I want to thank Dr. William Fried for inviting me to write this recollective essay. I recently wrote a review of the Rapaport-Holt letters, and reading these letters stimulated my readiness to write about my early training and my past and present relationships with other psychologists and analysts.

When I graduated from college, I wanted to be the poster boy for what was then called the Boulder Model. This model stipulated that a clinical psychologist should be involved both in clinical work and research. I decided that before I would begin clinical training, I would do some type of research. At the very end of my undergraduate studies, I took a course with Solomon Steiner and became interested in some of the questions that learning theorists were exploring. Steiner got me a job doing neurophysiological research with Edward Taub, now a famous neuropsychologist. We did research on deafferentation, a procedure in which the afferent fibers of the spinal cord are excised to demonstrate that animals do not need afferent feedback in order to learn. This research focused on the conditions necessary for learning, primarily in an avoidance paradigm. Animals had to learn to make a response to avoid a negative stimulus (a shock). We were trying to show that the behaviorists were wrong and that learning is a cognitive process.

As I re-read this last sentence, I realize how distant from this research I have become. Despite this divergence, the early experience left me with both a desire to integrate positions and a strong interest in evolution. The research was not only interesting but provided me with grounding in a number of physiological techniques. With Taub, I started to look at how lack of afferent feedback influenced the central nervous system and sleep cycles. This work also brought me to the realization that while proprioceptive feedback could be important, it was not necessary for learning, as various relational analysts have stipulated.

When I began graduate school at the NYU Clinical Program, I continued to do sleep research and focused on rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which I thought and still think is appropriately considered dreaming sleep. (More about this later.) I fortunately landed at the Research Center for Mental Health that was co-directed by George Klein and Bob (Robert) Holt. It is hard to imagine two more unlikely partners. Although both were dedicated to a deep understanding of the human condition and to some version of psychoanalysis, they could easily have been characterized

as the odd couple. George commanded center stage and was often dramatic and charismatic, while Bob was quieter and more reserved. I met George when George was setting up a sleep lab at NYU. I already knew how to read EEGs and had done some sleep research. George recruited me to his lab and quickly asked if I was interested in psychoanalysis. I told him that I was fascinated by Freud and was trying to read his views on dreams.

George then told me that there would be someone coming to NYU for a semester, perhaps a year, who was going to teach a course on “The Interpretation of Dreams” (Freud, 1900/1953a). He said he could get me into the course and was sure that I would find it “incredible.” David Rapaport (if you don’t know who Rapaport was, go immediately to your version of a library) was a brilliant and, for most of us in the class, terrifying presence. He sent out a notice of what we should read in advance of the first class, and for the first and last time in that class, I read the assignment casually. It was a large class, about 60 to 80 students, held in a type of amphitheater. I took a seat in the back. Speaking from a small stage, Rapaport turned to the class without saying hello and remarked, “I have always been puzzled by the different usages (or perhaps he said ‘meanings’) that Freud had for regression.” He turned to page 536 in “The Interpretation of Dreams” (Freud, 1900/1953a), read a paragraph, and then asked some poor student in the second row, “How do you untangle his usage here?” As the semester went on, I sat as far back as I could, and I tried to crouch behind the person in front of me. I was annoyed that the person wasn’t taller so I could be totally out of Rapaport’s sight line.

With each passing meeting, the class got smaller, and by mid-semester, we were a beleaguered group united in our efforts to avoid being called on by Rapaport. I don’t remember any of us answering a question correctly (according to Rapaport), but we developed a comradeship that, for some of us, lasted a long time. Rapaport was fascinating, interested in every aspect of psychology, and believed that psychoanalysis could provide insight into topics that seemed far away from the couch (read Schwartz and Schilder for a sample). He read everything from Piaget through Skinner, a good deal of the neurophysiological (or physiological psychology) literature, and, of course, the psychoanalytic literature from all over the globe. I found out later, I think from Leo Goldberger, that Rapaport slept only three to four hours and read through the night. (Unfortunately, he died a few years 10

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Steven ELLMAN after his stay at NYU, when he went back to Austin Riggs.)

When I entered the NYU Clinical Program, George Klein was my general mentor and Harry Fiss was a faculty member who guided the sleep lab. Various wellknown analysts would venture through the Research Center, among them Bob Langs and Merton Gill; there were others whose names at the moment I do not recall. Fred Pine had either graduated or taken another job, and I. H. Paul had moved to the City College of New York (CCNY) PhD Program in Clinical Psychology. I was fortunate to have weekly meetings with George and particularly privileged to have an individual reading course with Leo Goldberger. During this time, Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895/1950) was published, and there was a weekly reading group in which its meaning and importance were debated. As I remember it, the people in the group were Hartvig Dahl, Merton Gill, Bob Holt, George Klein, Leo Goldberger, I, and two other students. I recall trying to impress the group with the neuroscience at my command. I was doing research at the Research Center with human subjects, but I also was doing animal research with Sol Steiner, and I believed, and still believe, that we had found the secret of REM sleep and the dream. Others in the group were less convinced, and Bob Holt helped me understand, then and later, that I did not quite have the unified theory that I thought I had, though I have tried, subsequently, to answer some of his criticisms. I could describe some of the positions that various members of the group took, but most of all, I was again impressed by the several intellectual virtuosos who were its members. It was unfortunate that George died so young and that Mert Gill left for Chicago. I am sure, however, that various analysts in Chicago were pleased that Gill came to there and helped to begin the relational position in psychoanalysis.

During my years at the Research Center, the most important event of my life occurred: I met the woman whom I later married. Carolyn (Feinberg) Ellman was also a graduate student at the Research Center working with Don Spence. She was the strong influence in my life, and in many ways, I have never properly cited her importance in developing some of my concepts.

We edited and wrote one book together, but she did almost all of the work involved in creating this volume, The Modern Freudians (Ellman, Grand, Silvan, & Ellman, 1998).

The book was, in my view, quite good, but the title tended to misidentify us with other

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groups. In my view, two of Carolyn’s other books (including Ellman & Reppen, 1997) are examples of work that truly begins to bring together clinical perspectives from divergent theoretical viewpoints in a meaningful way.

When I wrote the review of the Rapaport-Holt letters, I neglected to mention that Morris Eagle was an important member of the Research Center staff during this period. Already an established psychologist when I entered the program, Morris at times would pop in and either tell us the latest joke or provide an interesting critique of a recent book or article that he had read. Morris was one of the analysts

who made the Research Center a meeting ground and an intellectually and emotionally exciting community. At that time, many of the senior people were research candidates at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (NYPI). Research candidates (not medically trained, usually psychologists, 1960s through early 1970s) were required to sign an agreement saying that they would not conduct psychoanalysis as private practitioners. The research candidates that I knew of were George Klein, Leo Goldberger, Fred Pine, I. H. Paul, and Dave Wolitzky. There were also probably other psychologists that I did not know. At that time, some members of NYPI argued

Bob Hope and Anita Ekberg, 1950 11

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that psychologists who were doing psychotherapy could easily perform analysis and it would be impossible to discern the difference. They maintained that psychologists should sign an agreement that they would not privately practice either psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. The psychologists protested that psychotherapy had been part of their training in graduate school and had nothing to do with their training at NYPI. Other members of NYPI argued that if there was such difficulty in ascertaining what the research candidates did, perhaps there should be no restrictions placed on psychologists. That position won the day, and I was the first psychologist at NYPI

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who did not have to sign such an agreement, which was called a waiver.

Before I began analytic training, I did my internship at Montefiore Medical Center.

At that time, Mort Reiser was the Chair of Psychiatry there, and Montefiore was still a place that was primarily psychoanalytic.

I met Edith Jacobson there when she gave a long continuous case seminar. Jacobson’s supervision and teaching were perhaps the highlights of my time at Montefiore; she is, in my view, a greatly undervalued analyst.

She is certainly someone who strongly influenced my understanding of Freud. I continued to study with her at NYPI. Howie Roffwarg was doing sleep research at Montefiore, and Myron Hofer was beginning animal work that studied early development in ingenious ways. I did a post-doc at Montefiore and again learned new techniques (single unit recording, etc.) while meeting such researchers as William Dement and Eric Kandel, who later won a Nobel Prize. But whatever basic neurophysiological or biological research I did (cortisol research, etc.), I maintained that most of these studies were consistent with psychoanalytic concepts. I still get requests for our paper demonstrating that cortisol is secreted episodically. Much to my shame and Roffwarg’s annoyance, I never published our study on the effects of REM deprivation on cortisol secretion. As I write this, I think of the possibility of publishing it now.

After my post-doc, I began my 30-year career at CCNY in the Doctoral Program of Clinical Psychology. At the same time, I was also involved in the Experimental Cognition program, where we had both animal and human laboratories. In our studies with humans, John Antrobus, Arthur Arkin, and I collaborated on several long projects that helped produce a book called The Mind in Sleep (Ellman & Antrobus, 1991). I collaborated in animal research with Solomon (Sol) Steiner, and we received various grants to study the function of REM sleep. It was, and still is, our view that REM sleep is a system that activates the positive reward network discovered by Olds, and that the activation of this network physiologically contributes to the wish in dreaming sleep. Lissa Weinstein and I have somewhat changed the theory and have done a variety of studies since the Steiner and Ellman publication in Science in 1972. Whatever our theory, we were excited to conduct a number of studies in our animal lab investigating the meaning of REM and trying to understand why mammals have positive reward networks that are tied to basic motivational areas (eating, sex, aggression, etc.). I am tempted to spell out our theory, but I will restrain myself and simply provide a few references. I will mention that our lab included a variety of researchers such

as Arthur Spielman, Bob Ackerman, Richard Bodnar, Jeff and Ronnie Halperin (brother and sister), and Lissa Weinstein, all of whom went on to have distinguished careers.

Returning to psychoanalysis, as I mentioned, during this same time, I undertook training at NYPI. My analyst was Dora Hartmann, Heinz’s wife; she was a sensitive warm analyst, who unfortunately died after I had seen her for only three years. Her death derailed me, and I wondered about completing training. I had finished one analytic case supervised by Jacob Arlow, and I was also being supervised

by Leo Stone. Owing, in part, to this supervision, I began to realize that American Classical Analysis did not coincide with my version of Freud or psychoanalysis. I had taught classes on Freud for five years, had studied Freud with Klein and Gill and actually, most interestingly, with Leo Goldberger, who might be surprised at my saying this, although he gave me two long individual reading courses. Klein had already moved away from aspects of the Classical position, as had Gill.

Arlow’s supervision was actually very useful and clinically sensitive, although his approach to some issues were at odds with what I believed. As I wrote (Ellman, 2010a), he told me after a five-year analysis that we had reached the point with the patient where the work should be terminated. He said that we had cleared up the patient’s symptoms (she had gotten married after breaking up two previous engagements), she had finished her PhD thesis, and she was no longer engaged in certain masochistic behaviors that before seemed to upend her life. I said that I hadn’t seen any signs of termination or evidence of what had been called the termination phase of treatment. Arlow scoffed at this. He said that we had understood her unconscious dynamics, worked them through, and her symptoms were cleared up; ergo, we had reached the end of the treatment. I wondered why I was arguing with Arlow since every candidate wanted an analysis that finished, given that some could last for many, many years. So, in the following session with my patient I suggested that perhaps we had reached a point where the analysis might be ending. She said that she didn’t think we had reached that point and when I reported this to Arlow he said, in effect, “What does she know?” He told me that if you are the doctor, you declare when the analysis is over. I couldn’t do that, and so we were stalemated, but the patient had the last word, since her husband, a doctor, had found a post-doc position in Miami, and several months later, she had to move.

Leo Stone, my other supervisor, was much closer to my developing view, but he cautioned me to be more circumspect in my critiques of the Classical position.

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At that point, Arlow and Brenner seemed to be the leading analysts in the United States. I had been supervised by various psychologists, and Sheldon (Shelly) Bach was the supervisor who had influenced me the most. In addition to this supervision, I started teaching courses featuring such analysts as Kohut, Winnicott, Klein, and eventually Bion. Reading this material, and meeting with some of the British analysts as well as self-psychologists, altered my views of psychoanalysis. I also continued to teach courses in Freud. Early on, I held the view that Freud used a much wider theoretical lens than the one through which Arlow and Brenner focused in the United States.

I was particularly interested in Freud’s writings from 1905-1917. In trying to understand Freud’s developing theory, I followed LaPlanche’s advice to readers of Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905/1953b). He suggested leaving out the footnotes on first reading. In this way, one can make sense of where Freud was when he wrote “Three Essays.” In my most recent book (not including the one I am currently writing), When Theories Touch (Ellman, 2010b), I try to look at Freud’s different theories and gently limn how American Classical Theory somewhat distorts Freud.

Perhaps the most significant part of my career was becoming Director of The City University of New York (CUNY)’s Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology. For a period of time, Larry Gould, I. H. Paul, Mae Lord, and others created a fine psychoanalytic clinical program. My experience of the program was that Larry Gould and I were partners in running it. At some point, both of us got involved in psychoanalytic institutes, and others took the helm at CUNY. We wisely hired Steve Tuber in the 1980s, and Paul Wachtel and Steve hired two clinicians who did their theses with me: Lissa Weinstein and Elliot Jurist. I am sure that this was not the reason they were hired, but they did help Tuber create a new clinical program.

I must also mention such significant faculty members as Diana Diamond, who made the program richer.

That said, it must be added that the crucial part of being a faculty member at CUNY was coming into contact with the extraordinary group of students in our program. To mention only a few is probably unfair, and unintentionally discriminatory, but I will venture forth and say that it has been my privilege to be the sponsor of Mike Moskowitz, Neal Vorus, Lissa Weinstein, Elliot Jurist, Katherine Monk, and several other students whose forgiveness of my inability to retrieve their names from my aging memory I beg. I have already mentioned Art Spielman, who was in both our animal laboratory

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and the clinical program. Art died two years ago and many of us from that laboratory—Bodnar, Ackerman, Ronnie Halperin, Jeff Halperin, and Paul Glovinsky, to name a few—came together to celebrate his life and the fact that in the same year, he had been named sleep researcher of the year.

When I left NYPI, I finished my training at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). I graduated from IPTAR in 1982 and in 1992 became a training analyst there. In 2000, I left CUNY, entered full-time private practice, and focused on my roles at IPTAR. During that time, I served as President twice. This era was particularly

LAISPS, PCC, IPTAR, and the NY Freudian Society (the only one without an acronym, thank goodness) formed a national organization called the Independent Psychoanalytic Societies (IPS) of IPA. I was one of the founders of the IPS, now called the CIPS as a result of adding ‘C’ for confederation to the original three letters.

Bert Freedman, James Gooch, Albert Mason, Jean Sanville, Mark Silvan, Abbie Adams, and I were members of the first board of the IPS. Bert and Jeanne were the first CoChairs. Albert Mason and I were the second Co-Chairs. When the by-laws changed, I was the first President of CIPS. There are now

I have focused on the positions that I have held in order to give what I am aware is a subjective and personal history of the last 40 to 50 years of psychoanalytic politics. I have ignored perhaps the most significant movement in the USA, that of the Relational group, but I will leave that history to others. During the time that I have spoken about here, I published a number of articles (about 125) and authored or co-authored seven books. There are three books that I will mention in particular. The first is Freud’s Technique Papers: A Contemporary Perspective (1991). In that volume, I tried to show how quite differ-

seven societies in CIPS, and I have undoubtedly forgotten some of the main early people who started or helped start IPS (CIPS). Once we got into the IPA, we became part of the structure of that organization, and I was on the IPA Board when Otto Kernberg was President of the IPA, though I was not his favorite board member. When Charles Hanly was elected President of the IPA, I was appointed Program Chair of the IPA meeting (called the congress) in 2010 in Mexico City.

In my opinion, there are still tensions between CIPS and the American Psychoanalytic Association, but they are minor compared to those of the period when we were excluded from the IPA.

ent versions of clinical psychoanalysis have their roots in Freud’s papers. I discussed many analytic theorists, but I continuously compared Gill, Brenner, and Kohut, as their ideas reflect Freud’s various technique papers. I also tried to show that Freud was equivocal at best in stating his views and they were certainly not the last word. The Mind in Sleep, written with John Antrobus (1991), is a book on sleep and dream research, and all of the chapters in the book are based on empirical studies. It included a long REM deprivation study and the effect of REM deprivation on the mind in sleep.

My most recent (2010) book is When Theories Touch: A Historical and Theoretical

Francis Bacon, 1980

exciting since psychologists had sued the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and American Psychoanalytic Association for restraint of trade. In less formal terms, the suit charged medical analysts with trying to restrict psychoanalysis to the medical profession. After the lawsuit challenging the IPA and the American Psychoanalytic Association was settled, IPTAR and three other Societies that were unaffiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association joined the IPA. The three other societies were the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS) and the Psychoanalytic Center of California (PCC), both in Los Angeles, and the New York Freudian Society.

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Richard Ashcroft, 2011

Integration of Psychoanalytic Thought. In this book, I covered some of the most significant analysts of the last century. I tried to take the opposite view of Greenberg and Mitchell, who stated, “There is a basic incompatibility between what they term the drive/structural and the relational/structural models.” They have stated that much of the complexity of psychoanalytic thought is clarified if one chooses between these alternatives. They have not, in my opinion, provided any logical or empirical evidence for this necessary incompatibility. I have argued that the complexity generated by the tension between these two models (and others) is at the heart of psychoanalytic understanding. I go on to opine that a complete psychoanalytic theory has to blend aspects of both these positions as well as others. I believe that only an integration of the models that have been created will lead to a truly rich psychoanalytic theory. I hope this type of integration will be carried out by a diversity of analysts.

In When Theories Touch (Ellman, 2010), I try to integrate a miscellany of positions.

Lissa Weinstein and I are working on a clinical analytic volume that attempts to further the clinical integration begun in When Theories Touch.

At this point, I am no longer doing laboratory research, and I am mainly a psychoanalyst. I still follow the psychological, neuropsychological, and psychoanalytic literatures. I am still of the view, perhaps

instilled in me by Rapaport a long time ago, that there can be an overarching psychoanalytic theory that can integrate the findings of cognitive and neurophysiological research. It is possible that this type of mythology is useful as one grows older, but in my book When Theories Touch, chapter 18 provides an attempt at integration of some aspects of biology and various psychoanalytic positions. As I write this paragraph, I become aware that I have not mentioned a number of analysts such as Winnicott who have strongly influenced me. I imagine that I am saving this for the book on the psychoanalytic situation that I am writing with Weinstein. It is always comforting to think about the next book. z REFERENCES Ellman, C. S., & Reppen, J. (Eds.). (1997). Omnipotent fantasies and the vulnerable self. Northvale, NJ and London, England: Jason Aronson.

Ellman, C. S., Grand, S., Silvan, M., & Ellman, S. J. (Eds.). (1998). The modern Freudians: Contemporary psychoanalytic technique. Northvale, NJ and London, England: Jason Aronson.

Ellman, S. J. (1991). Freud’s technique papers: A contemporary perspective. Northvale, NJ and London, England: Jason Aronson.

Ellman, S. J. (2007). Analytic trust and transference: Love, healing ruptures and facilitating repairs. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 27, 246-263.

Ellman, S. J. (2010a). Termination and long term treatments. In William O. Donohue and Michael Cucciare, Eds., Terminating psychotherapy: A clinician’s guide (pp.205-228).

New York, NY and London, England: Routledge.

Ellman, S. J. (2010b). When theories touch: A historical and theoretical integration of psychoanalytic thought. London, England: Karnac.

Ellman, S. J. (2014). Traversing narcissistic pathways: From Freud to present times. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 34, 394-407.

Ellman, S. J., & Antrobus, J. S. (Eds.). (1991). The mind 14

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in sleep: Psychology and psychophysiology (2nd ed.). New York, NY and London, England: Wiley and Sons.

Ellman, S. J., Roffwarg, H., Sacher, E., Hellman, L., Curtis, H., Kream, J., & Gallagher, T. F. (1970). Night-time production of growth hormone in depressives. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 33, 212-216.

Ellman, S. J., & Steiner, S. S. (1971). Relation between REM sleep and intracranial self-stimulation: A reciprocal activating system. Brain Research, 2, 290-296.

Ellman, S. J., and Weinstein, L. (2012). When theories touch: An attempted integration and reformulation of dream theory. In Peter Fonagy, Horst Kächele, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, and David Taylor, Eds., The significance of dreams: Bridging clinical and extraclinical research in psychoanalysis (pp.109-126). New York, NY and London, England: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1950). Project for a scientific psychology. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 1, pp.281391). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1895) Freud, S. (1953a). The interpretation of dreams (second part). In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 5, pp.339-628). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900) Freud, S. (1953b). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 7, pp.123-246). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Hellman, L., Jujinori, N., Curti, J., Weitzman, E. D., Kream, J., Roffwarg, H., Ellman, S. J., Fukushima, D. K., & Gallagher, T. F. (1970). Cortisol is secreted episodically by a normal man. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 30, 401-412.

Schwartz, F., & Schiller, P. (1970). A psychoanalytic model of attention and learning. Psychological Issues, Monograph 23. New York, NY: International Universities Press.

Steiner, S. S., & Ellman, S. J. (1972). Relation between REM sleep and intracranial self-stimulation. Science, 172, 1122-1124.

Taub, E., Ellman, S. J., & Berman, A. (1966). Deafferentation in monkeys: Effect on conditioned grasp response.

Science, 151, 594-595.

Weinstein, L., & Ellman, S. J. (2012). “It’s only a dream”: Physiological and developmental contributions to the feeling of reality. In Peter Fonagy, Horst Kächele, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, and David Taylor, Eds., The significance of dreams: Bridging clinical and extraclinical research in psychoanalysis (pp.127-149). New York, NY and London, England: Routledge.

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ON FEMININITY: COMMENTARIES

Finding the Spaces In Between, or How to Tackle the Persistence of Patriarchy Dany NOBUS

Writing in the aftermath of the election of an orange-colored gammon to the White House, Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider (2018) recently dared to ask the impossible question. Why does patriarchy persist, in spite of decades-long, widespread campaigns for social equality and women’s rights? Although they occasionally conflate patriarchy with hierarchy, and power with authority, their answer is that—over and above the fact that a notable sub-section of the population, namely those men-in-power, evidently benefit from the advantages it bestows upon them—patriarchy effectively fulfils an important psychological function:

may very well be the most important one.

In addition, patriarchy is also crucially conditioned by its own structures of love—the unconditional love of the leader, ruler, or sovereign—which undoubtedly induces other experiences of vulnerability and pain. I do think that Gilligan and Snider hit the proverbial nail when they aver that patriarchy fulfils an important psychological function, and that precisely because of this, it is likely to persist. Yet instead of designating this psychological function as “therapeutic,” insofar as it would alleviate pain, I am more inclined to say it is “prophylactic,” inasmuch as it prevents human desire, which is

Patriarchy’s persistence is tied not only to a struggle for power and a contest between different frameworks for living or systems of belief, but also to the tension between our desire for love and our desire to avoid the pain of loss. With its gender binary and hierarchy creating impediments to relational presence and integrity, patriarchy becomes a bastion against the pain of loss. The catch is: it requires a sacrifice of love. (p.135) Deeply influenced by John Bowlby’s theory of attachment and loss (1969; 1973; 1980), Gilligan and Snider argue that the socio-political restoration and preservation of patriarchy provides relief from the psychological anguish that is associated with the intrinsic vulnerabilities of love.

In Freudian terms, allowing oneself to (be in) love requires a certain relinquishment of self-love, and thus, the acceptance that a quantum of narcissism will need to be given up in favor of the reorientation of the libido towards the external object of love (Freud, 1921/1955, pp.112-113). Being in love makes us more vulnerable; vulnerability is tantamount to a reduction of self-love, the resulting experience of loss is painful, and the foundation of patriarchy, which entails a gendering of social imbalances of power, attenuates the affective impact of loss, presumably because it exchanges the human experience of love, and all the emotional quandaries it generates, for a loveless system of domination and submission.

There is a lot to be said in favor of this perspective, yet I am not convinced that patriarchy, which is but another word for toxic masculinity here, potently dampens down the psychological pain of loss. For one, the “therapeutic” function of patriarchy may easily be undone by the new plethora of losses it generates in the oppressed, amongst which the loss of a voice

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also driven by loss, from becoming extinguished, and therefore lost in and of itself in the overwhelming plenitude of commodified objects, which may also include identity—as the final frontier of mass-market commodification. Echoing Todd McGowan’s compelling argument (2016) that capitalism continues to dominate—despite the numerous inequalities it creates and despite its vocal opponents—because it mimics the structure of human desire, which is mired in a ruthless dynamic of incomplete satisfaction and an equally tenacious anticipation of self-fulfillment, I would propose that patriarchy, phallicism, and toxic masculinity

ON FEMININITY: COMMENTARIES

continue to rule because their fundamental mechanism of domination (arrectness) and submission (decubitus) captures another feature of human desire—the fact that it cannot operate without alienation, i.e., without its having been forced into a state of compulsory dispossession. In other words, the relentless return of phallicism and toxic masculinity reinstates and confirms the structure of human desire as a force flowing from loss. By contrast with Gilligan and Snider, I would argue, then, that patriarchy persists not because it mitigates (the pain of ) loss, but because it renders (the pain of ) loss possible, which is in itself a necessary precondition for human desire to operate.

However, much more important than the question as to why patriarchy and phallicism persist is the complex issue of a feasible alternative. Here, I remain far less optimistic than Gilligan and Snider, who continue to believe in the revolutionary power of social protest: We see movements fueled by the anger of hope: the hope that things will in fact change, that the ruptures in democracy can be repaired, that relationship—however tenuous its hold, however beset by appeals to masculine honor and feminine goodness—does not give way to dominance and submission, violence and silence. These are movements inspired by the conviction that as humans we are capable of reconciliation, that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, and that in the end the anger of hope will win out over the anger of despair. (p.137) In not sharing these words, heartfelt and inspiring as they may be, I fully accept that someone out there will go on to expose me as just another man with a manly view, the more so as the authors of the cited volume are women and I, at least for the time being, remain just an average man.

However, Gilligan and Snider’s message of love and hope occurs to me as a flagrant contradiction of their own observational premises: patriarchy persists despite social protest, and the intrinsic vulnerabilities of love prompt the preservation of patriarchy. Why would the new waves of protest, which are purportedly animated by the anger of hope, be more effective in the abolition of patriarchy than all the ones that have gone before? Why would the new restorative relationships of justice and reconciliation no longer entail painful experiences of loss, and why would the latter be less intractable than those that gave rise to a renewed call for “therapeutic” patriarchy?

When it comes to thinking about effective ways of disposing of patriarchy, phallicism, and toxic masculinity, I am much

more on Lacan’s side when, in a chaotic exchange with students and agitators at the newly established experimental University of Vincennes in December 1969, he proclaimed: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one” (Lacan, 1991/2007, p.207). The discourse of the master, which is consistent with the discourse of domination and submission, and the distribution of libido in a phallic space, is inescapable, for the pure and simple reason that it is the discourse of the human unconscious, and as such, the fundamental discourse of human desire. This does not imply that other discourses are de facto excluded, and Lacan himself identified at least three alternative discursive structures (pp.11-24), yet these other discourses only ever operate with reference and in opposition to the discourse of the master, which reigns supreme. When, in 1974, the influential French sociologist Henri Lefebvre unfolded his theory of the production and reproduction of phallic space, he at one stage played with the idea of an alternative arrangement of spatial coordinates: “Is a final metamorphosis called for that will reverse all earlier ones, destroying phallic space and replacing it with a ‘uterine’ space? We can be sure, at any rate, that this in itself will not ensure the invention of a truly appropriated space, or that of an architecture of joy and enjoyment” (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, p.410). For Lefebvre, the mode of production of goods and services within space, of which the capitalist modality is but one example, is in fact easier to transform than the production of space itself, because the latter would require a modification of the controlling agencies and parameters of space, and thus a shift away from the (re-)production of things towards the (re-)production of the environment in which these things are produced, which is much more difficult to contemplate, at least in terms of socio-economic and political action. Because his intellectual agenda is firmly set on ideological matters, Lefebvre does not consider the extent to which the transformation of phallic space may only be achievable through psychological means, as a mental transformation of the structure of human desire, yet even then it remains to be seen what could be achieved at this level, and whether a permanent transformation of the discourse of the master, phallic space, and toxic masculinity is at all realistic. For all its ostensible duplication of arrectness and decubitus, the discourse of psychoanalysis, which Lacan conceived as the exact opposite of the master’s discourse (Lacan, 1991/2007, pp.35-36), initiates an alternative, generative space for speech and a potential re-restructuring of desire, yet this does not necessarily imply that 18

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the discourse of the master will completely disintegrate. Maybe the best we can hope for is that with or without psychoanalysis, authority and hierarchy no longer by definition lead to (an abuse of ) power, because domination and submission are incorporated into a more flexible distribution of libido, as a result of which phallicism and masculinity would also lose their obstinate odium of toxicity.

Unlike Gilligan and Snider, and much like Lacan and Lefebvre, I therefore do not believe that the question as to why patriarchy persists will one day become obsolete, because (as I have endeavored to argue) it constitutes the most basic, necessary, and sufficient condition for human desire to emerge and sustain itself. At the same time, however, I can envisage a psycho-social constellation in which the conventional forms of patriarchy are balanced against other, alternative configurations of power and less rigid spatial arrangements. I am not advocating, here, a serious reconsideration of the fundamentally dissonant and incongruous spaces in which we live, because these spaces cannot be disjointed from patriarchy, much less so as they proliferate in their appropriation of the object-world as a series of transient, inchoate commodities. Following Edward W. Soja’s (1996) meticulous dissection of post-modern geographies, I would indeed claim that people in the Western world now live in a radically incongruous Thirdspace.

According to Soja, Thirdspace is where everything comes together: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. (pp.56-57) Almost twenty-five years after these words were first written, some additional confluences of conventional dichotomies could probably be added to the list: left and right, East and West, selfhood and otherness, meaning and nonsense, analog and digital, high art and popular culture, masculinity and femininity. Yet I would consider 21st century Thirdspace to be radically incongruous, because the complete hybridity of our life-world—internal as well as external—also coincides, as Homi Bhabha argued in his seminal work on the location of culture and in other texts (Bhabha, 1994; Rutherford, 1990, p.211), with new structures of authority, much less visible than those of yore, which would have been embodied

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by priests, teachers, medical doctors, and law enforcers, but all the more controlling for that. Insofar as contemporary reason is fundamentally disturbed on account of the intrinsic hybridity of the Thirdspace, the disturbance is counter-balanced and confounded by a socio-political sphere of continuous surveillance, which is materialized in omnipresent CCTV cameras (no one knows whether they really work, because functionality has long since been abandoned as a key deterrent, and defective cameras are much more cost-effective than fully operational ones), and so-called “low emission zones” (a clever ecological euphemism for the presence of punitive speed control cameras in densely populated areas), but which is much more insidiously enforced through anonymous policies, ranging from “quality and standards” to “health and safety” and “equality and diversity,” to “prevent” and “dignity at work.” What I have in mind is the invention of new, more open, and more accessible spaces for human speech, where (much like in psychoanalysis) the lack and the losses

that preside over desire can be re-configured into what Jill Gentile has called a “feminine law” (2016), i.e., a generative, emancipatory structure that activates the crucial “space between” positions of power, divisions of labor, mechanisms of (in)equality, gender dichotomies, etc. In its most radical sense, it would involve the creation of psycho-social spaces, in which priority is given to the voice of desire. In its most radical sense, it would involve us finding and reinvigorating the discursive “spaces in between,” which Judith Butler once designated as the discursive spaces of resistance for the subversion of identity and the disruption of hetero-normative dichotomies (1990, p.145), but which could equally well be captured under the heading of the feminine. . . In this sense, orange may not be the new black at all, but just another shade on the multi-colored spectrum of human diversity. z REFERENCES Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. London, England and New York, NY: Routledge.

Boys, Dublin, 1960 19

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Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment. London, England: Hogarth Press.

Bowlby, J. (1973). Separation: Anxiety and anger. London, England: Hogarth Press.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Loss: Sadness and depression. London, England: Hogarth Press.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY and London, England: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1955). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 18, pp.65-143). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1921) Gentile, J. (2016). Feminine law: Freud, free speech, and the voice of desire (with M. Macrone). London, England: Karnac Books.

Gilligan, C., & Snider, N. (2018). Why does patriarchy persist? Cambridge, England and Medford, MA: Polity.

Lacan, J. (2007). The seminar. Book XVII: The other side of psychoanalysis (1969-’70) (J.-A. Miller, Ed., and R. Grigg, Trans.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

(Original work published 1991) Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Malden, MA and Oxford, England: Blackwell. (Original work published 1974) McGowan, T. (2016). Capitalism and desire: The psychic cost of free markets. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Rutherford, J. (1990). The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha. In (J. Rutherford, Ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (pp.207-221). London, England: Lawrence & Wishart.

Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Malden, MA and Oxford, England: Blackwell.

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Rita Tushingham, 1965 20

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Conversion Disorder 199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat in your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting ‘the fundamental impermanence of all things’. This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness). –Maggie Nelson, Bluets Conversion in Freud “I have a sounding board in my abdomen…if anything happens, it starts up my old pain,” said a woman to Breuer in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893/1955, p.204). While hysterical conversion was mostly a feminine problem (the book consists of five cases, all women), in the section on “Hysterical Conversion,” Breuer is quick to evoke the figure of a man: All degrees of affective excitability are to be found between, on the one hand, the ideal (which is rarely met with today) of a man who is absolutely free from ‘nerves’… and, on the other hand, a ‘nervous’ man who has palpitations and diarrhoea on the smallest provocation. (p.203) The scarce, masculine ideal, absolutely free, without “nerves,” is opposed to the nervous woman with the sounding board in her abdomen that can revive any old pain. It is the electrified, nerve-ridden body of the hysterical woman that gives the ideal—the unprovoked—and at the same time undermines it. He is rarely met with today. But yesterday?

Only thirty some odd pages later, Freud takes over, as he would do, this hysteric’s imagery as his own, laying down the foundation for the existence of “unconscious ideas” and the “splitting” of the mind on the basis of her words. It is not the masculine that proves universal, but his failed other half, woman, who gives to Breuer and Freud a new model of the relationship between mind and body. Freud writes: The impressionability of hysterical patients is indeed to a large extent determined simply by their innate excitability; but the lively affects into which they are thrown by relatively trivial causes become more intelligible if we reflect that the ‘split-off ’ mind acts like a sounding-board to the note of a tuning fork. (pp.237-238) 1. This paper is edited excerpts from my recent publication Conversion Disorder (2018; New York, NY: Columbia University Press).

Jamieson WEBSTER1

The apparent spontaneity that defines conversion symptoms also defines the women in question. Their bodies and personalities are described in concert: lively, restless, craving sensations and mental stimulation, intolerant of monotony or boredom, sexually excitable, awakened, sometimes infantile (kicking and thrashing about), suggestible, volatile, and whose force of resistance could swing from excessive and rigidly defensive, to seemingly weak and utterly permeable. This unity of soma-psyche in conversion hysterics provides Freud, paradoxically, with a model of the dis-unity of the human mind. Or perhaps better, this logical ordering of their disorder provides Freud with a similar psychic model.

In hysteria, nothing is subject to the socalled natural processes of erosion, wearing away, draining, leveling, and emptying out.

The sounding board remains a sounding board, while the ideal is always just out of reach. The goal of psychotherapy is not a removal of the pathogenic—how could that even be, since it defines her body and soul?— but a new state altogether. In the greatest of tautologies in psychoanalysis, conversion must be subject to conversion.

The patient will, according to Freud, feel “freer in the intervals” (Breuer & Freud, 1893/1955, p.298) as their analysis gains traction, establishing “an order of the day which corresponds to the state of analysis.” The symptom joins the conversation, and seems to transform, extend even, into a space, a rhythmic way of being in the oscillations of thought, whose peaks dip “down into the unconscious—the reverse of what has been asserted of our normal psychical processes” (Breuer & Freud, 1893/1955, p.301). The “norm” is turned upside down, over-turned. Conversion shows us how we may be converted.

Conversion symptoms imply, in a strange way, their own search for an end.

The symptom will not quit. And at the same time, it has entirely quit, without delay. It leaves the psychical sphere, splitting the mind, and then makes a detour into the soma in order to better insist there, meanwhile leaving the psychic sphere separated off, but intact.

When Freud compares conversion hysteria with anxiety hysteria, or even obsessional ideas, what becomes clear is that the split soma-psyche in conversion creates a pure symptom, if not the true symptom. The other symptomatic structures fail in their transformational relation to the psychical dimension, especially in so far as their defensive structure is simply too permanent. Psyche seems undefined, a kind of medial zone of 21

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incessant defense and substitution, projection and hallucination, what he eventually calls an unending series of half-measures.

In a letter to Fliess, while working on his unfinished neurotica, Freud writes, “If the symptoms of anxiety neurosis are examined more closely, one finds in the neurosis disjointed pieces of a major anxiety attack….

This is once again a kind of conversion in anxiety, just as occurs in hysteria” (Freud, 1985). Hysterical conversion is the reverse face of anxiety conversion, the former moving from the psychic to the somatic, and the latter a failed movement from the somatic to the psychic. A few letters later, as Freud summarizes these findings graphically, hysteria appears as the only diagnosis with a satisfactory gain and with an unstable, rather than permanent, defense structure.

Hysteria assumes its strange place of prominence in Freud’s diagnostic schema, despite its impending disappearance from Freud’s investigative eye, precisely at the very moment when he reclassifies anxiety as prior to repression, not subsequent to it.

Why? Perhaps it is enough for the moment to remember that one of the strange characteristics of hysteria is often a lack of anxiety. We need repression, the repression of anxiety, through the symptom, in order to structure this divided psyche.

When Freud returns to conversion hysteria again in his later work, Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety (1926/1959), he portrays the most intimate connection between what he calls repression, hysteria, and external anti-cathexis or “scotomization.” What Freud means by the latter term is the special kind of “not wanting to see” that the hysteric enacts, a paradoxical vigilance against certain perceptions. This hysterical configuration, characterized by her relation to amnesia or “not knowing,” moves in the opposite direction to obsessionality and phobia, which use regression and internal anti-cathexis. Defense against the outside, defense against the inside.

Freud, at this late point, says that we must understand better how defense turned against the external world leaves the symptom and the personality of the hysteric intact, whereas the cost on the obsessional and phobic ego is much greater: the reaction formation of hysteria clings tenaciously to a particular object and never spreads over into a general disposition of the ego, whereas what is characteristic of obsessional neurosis is precisely a spreading-over of this kind—a loosening of relations to the object and a facilitation of displacement in the choice of object. (Freud, 1926/1959, p.158)

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The hysteric is the creation and preservation of the symptom. She scotomizes reality in order to keep wish alive. Freud wrote to Fliess concerning the attraction of others to Saints (as opposed to what is naturally repugnant and unsociable about obsessions and phobias): he says it is as if we were waiting for what has been stored up, what Freud names “the music of the future” (Freud, 1985, p.296). Of course, in this music, together with the hysteric’s sounding board in her abdomen, we find simply another name for Freud’s hysterical unconscious.

And if we fast forward from 18941895 to Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926/1959), we find Freud presaging the current scotomization of hysteria, which you can only find under the heading in the DSM as conversion disorder. Freud writes: “Why the formation of symptoms in conversion hysteria should be such a peculiarly obscure thing I cannot tell; but the fact affords us a good reason for quitting such an unproductive field of enquiry without delay.”

History of Conversion Disorder So, conversion disorder is a late nineteenth century term fastened to hysteria

by Freud that remains. Ambiguous. More gender-neutral. Less arduous of a term than conversion hysteria, and much more empty in appearance than its grand equivalent that evokes too many images— Les Hystériques.

Conversion is found lumped under the heading of the somatoform disorders, or, under a new heading, functional neurological symptom disorder.

I am happy to greet the word “form” in all of this, if not the funny conjoined terms psyche-soma, or even the word functional—there in order to convey dysfunction, the order hoped for in disorder. The irony here is that hysteria preceded Freud from the Greeks to Janet and Charcot, and conversion was a term deployed by Freud, which underlies much of his theoretical work throughout his life, more perhaps even than the esteemed hysteria. The turning of the tides from conversion to hysteria and back seems to speak to something that insists—certainly on the level of the body—but which is always more than just that: psyche-soma, soma-form, function-form, split-soma, divided-psyche.

This is close to the way Freud worked with his notion of the drive, something he always called a limit concept.

We might welcome this word “conversion” as pure psychoanalytic nomenclature evoking itself as a strange remainder. The spheres of the world want to retain this word in a time that has dispensed with psychoanalysis while rife with problems that circle around religious, economic, and political violence, each one tied to questions

of, if not longings for, conversion, transformation, total change. What conversion may be hoped for?

Conversion comes from the Latin convertere, which means to turn around, or altogether turn, seeming to speak to the minimal difference between repetition and change. Conversion disorder seems to carry with it the absolutely singular, my conversion, and the universal, our disorder, together. Everything, or nothing, it seems to insist, will be overturned.

For the analyst who was looking for answers from all the others as to why become a psychoanalyst, Lacan does, oddly enough, provide an answer to the question of all questions—what is psychoanalysis? In his 1971-1972 seminar “The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst,” he states, “it is the mapping out of what is understood as obscure, of what is obscured in understanding because of a signifier which marked a point of the body” (1971-1972, p.VI 4). A point of the body, not a point on the body—an important distinction because even while the point is marked as a clash between word and flesh, it is of the body, meaning it is already body. At other times, Lacan delineates this simply as the field of the sexual.

Everyone, Lacan says, oddly enough, agrees on this; in this reproduction, the analyst is in the same position as the parent who produced the trauma, the parent whose work is to organize the bodies of their children with their own, always calling upon their sexual life and sexual history.

The analyst, Lacan says, has to re-awaken this mark of the body that is the point of disorder, though not in order to adapt this disorder to the order of the day, nor to make reparations to the souls who we believe were the cause of its pain, the root of suffering, but rather in the name of spreading this disorder, converting a piece of reality into it. “The difference,” says Lacan, from the get-go, “is that the psychoanalyst, from his position reproduces the neurosis and the traumatic parent for his part produces it innocently” (1971-1972, p.VI 5).

We must evoke this body in its original formal brilliance, provoked and repeated in the relationship between patient and doctor. The conversion of the patient in analysis takes place through repeating in their body the mark of its disorder. The sick body is made into an analytic body through the analyst, who must hold open this space. “It must give you the shivers, what I am saying!” Lacan chides his audience.

“It is from the phantasy of the psychoanalyst, namely, from what is most opaque, most closed, most autistic in his word, that there comes the shock by which the word is unfrozen in the analysand” (Lacan, 1967-1968, 19.6.68, p.10). Later, Lacan will 22

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call this process a “corporeal deduction” from which something of the analyst is to be made, something the analyst must not mistake for anything metaphorical.

As Freud says to Fliess in a letter from 1899 (Freud, 1985), “What happened in earliest childhood?” The answer is, “Nothing, but the germ of a sexual impulse existed” (Freud, 1985, p.338). The ambiguity holds in German: nothing but the germ of a sexual impulse; nothing, but also the germ of a sexual impulse. This germ of a sexual impulse is brought to life through the analyst’s body.

If this is true, I’m surprised the analysts aren’t more resistant to psychoanalysis, or, to turn this around—perhaps this is why they are, why psychoanalysis is dying. Who would want to make themselves the vessel for so many others in this way?

Two Cases The patient walks in and you suddenly wonder if she’s pregnant, for seemingly no reason. Maybe it’s the way she’s dressed today? Then you pause, you realize this would really be out of the blue, and even stranger if it was a reality that you guessed.

Maybe it’s a wish? The soundness of imputing a wish, seemingly out of nowhere, is worse than imputing a reality. Bits and pieces of the last session flash through your mind, nothing that really paves the way for this strange thought. You query yourself as to whether you have lost your mind—this is your wish—and then, unresolved, you return to listening. Strangely enough she has had the most important dream of her analysis this year and it is centered on the figure of pregnancy, but not pregnancy as such, but pregnancy as what two people can put into one another’s bodies.

The word “suit” looms large, not only as the clothes one wears, or in her case, what she doesn’t wear (filing in are all her questions about her career), but also suit as what fits, what suits a person, when another knows how to buy you clothes (so rare!), and this nagging unresolved question of what she should be or do. On the other side of this emerges an ominous figure, suit as a legal case, with all the vicissitudes of blame and guilt, what is passed down from one generation to another. This is the question in her analysis and the hinge of her deep depression. To have had this dream, you realize, as you listen to her, is to already be moving away from this legalistic order that dispenses judgment—I never wanted to judge her, it was hard to be in this place for her for so long—to be finally somewhere new, somewhere that depression wouldn’t be so threatening. She has heard the difference between suit, suit, and suit. It is also a question of the difference here between parents and analysts, parents who put things into your body,

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Woman on bus, London, 1954

and analysts who let you reside in theirs in order to take some things back with them, and to perhaps leave others.

All the turn of the century interest in telepathy by psychoanalysts, the fascinating question of unconscious communication, the contemporary talk of what is called the “intersubjective third,” which means something about the space where ideas and affects take shape between analyst and patient, and even everything that can be classed under the heading of countertransference, is about what it means to have these two bodies in such intimate proximity in an act of listening. To listen in a way that takes on the body, the drives, the unconscious, and the vicissitudes of sexuality, rather than quiet them, which is what everyday chitchat does—glosses it, tames it, and, if it can, brings this body down to a whisper. I do not discount the huge backlog of literature on this topic, but I want to approach the question not on the basis of pathology, or technique, or even metapsychology, but

through the lived life of the analyst, perhaps my life lived as an analyst, with this body, these patients, in this impossible profession.

What did I know when I allowed this strange thought to emerge regarding pregnancy, a thought that foreshadowed my patient’s dream? There is nothing mystical here—probably she was dressed a little more maternally and held her body differently because she had the dream, which I picked up. I’ve been working with her for six years. I know her, and yet have no experience of her outside this room. I register something the minute I look at her face, or see how she puts her bag down, or whether she’s chosen to go to the bathroom before a session. This is the level on which we live with our patients, something much more difficult to do in everyday life without the frame of the office, the frame of free association, or the frame simply of psychoanalysis. That the frame can do this is its importance, not as a protection akin to the rule of abstinence or professional 23

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boundaries. It allows you to live with, and so read, your patients. It is a folly to think that this is easily done, in whatever circumstance—it requires discipline and repetition, it requires the momentum of work, so that a sequence, both temporal and spatial, can develop. Freud called this the hysterical architecture of an analysis where we play out this ridiculous tautology at the bottom of an impossible profession: that a conversion must be subject to conversion.

Juliette was never told what she could be, only what she couldn’t and shouldn’t.

The images of women in this Dominican family from the Bronx were harrowing, a fate that she was consigned to, and nonetheless was supposed to find a way to avoid, without being told how. “Do not become like your devastated mother,” was the superego command that sounded through the generations. To watch this little girl enter puberty, with this injunction on her shoulders, meant watching the narrow straits of conversion open up to her, the only ground

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Diana Dors and Victor Mature, 1955

with which to symbolize her obscure desires as a woman. So many sessions were spent on this agony in her body, the pain of being a woman that felt to her like a curse; the aesthetic care of a body is an act of suffering, a variation on maternal care, but one that is colored by household war, a prologue to the war between the sexes.

Juliette was my very first patient and, in a kind of cosmic joke, my first patient’s major symptom that erupted in the analysis was a hysterical pregnancy, a very special variety of conversion disorder. It’s not the hysterical pregnancy itself that is of importance, but how it was brought into the treatment.

Juliette got her period when she was eleven, and her mother said something to her like: now you can get pregnant. It is funny writing this sentence now, so many years

later; you can almost hear the command, the permission even—now you can. This peeking through of a feminine desire set against the prohibition—you will not—which was, at the very least, the conscious intention. This equivalence makes sense given the fact that women in this family only separated from their mothers by getting pregnant, by offering her a substitute in exchange for a longed-for separation.

This strange command, barely explained, had far-reaching effects on this child, who was at the school nurse on and off for weeks. Her mother finally called me, saying she did not know what was wrong with Juliette, could I please find out, she is complaining of stomachaches again. After a few sessions, I reconstructed the following story: there was much excitement in the 24

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home over Juliette’s menstruation and her little brother, age six, was following Juliette into the bathroom to see what all the fuss was about, no doubt a continuation of sexual games and sexual curiosity that they had engaged in for quite some time. The whole affair was rather harmless, and up until this point, their sexual engagement with one another was probably something rather continuous, un-thought about, disavowed, left in latency. The commandment introduced a break in this state of affairs: now you can.

Juliette’s mother had strange decrees at home. For example, women’s underwear was not allowed in the dirty laundry bin and had to be washed separately. Her mother often spoke of how shameful women’s bodies were, and their secretions were something that should never be seen.

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She reacted with panic to her daughter’s body, especially her underwear, as she did her own. Her disgust did not discriminate and was equal among her own sex.

So, Juliette was constantly having to rush around and hide the traces of herself, all the more pressing, one imagines, with the onset of menstruation. Again, the commandment rears its head: you cannot (leave your underwear with the rest of the family laundry) meets with a can (you can get pregnant), which seals this child’s fate.

Juliette’s childish theory of birth was one that involved touch. Things can’t touch or something bad happens. Clearly this is what pregnancy must mean, this thing that can now happen. So, because of these little bathroom scenes, and the two siblings playing games around the toilet, Juliette fell into the belief that she must be pregnant, which was announced surreptitiously by the presence of stomachaches. If things can’t touch, if her body is the site of revulsion, one thing that does touch her, as it does each of us, are words. Her body is rearranged, as it is through puberty, but here, also by these words; or, perhaps better, they are rearranged together, body and word, everything is turned. The declarative force of words that penetrate bodies, rearranging them—now you can—to which, somewhere between conversion and disorder, the body replies.

There are two conversion symptoms in this treatment, one follows after the other.

The first, the stomachaches, is unraveled little by little in her analysis through telling the story of the bathroom, her talking about feeling something moving in her stomach, a sense she had that she looked bloated, and so on. She finally described the moment in question: Juliette was in the bathroom with her brother. Her little brother used the bathroom, holding his penis while he urinated, and flushed the toilet. She then used the toilet, and it was touching the handle after him that was the imagined moment of conception.

I’m sure you can imagine the scene of this session: one that calls on me as her analyst to explain to her what pregnancy really is and how it happens. Touching as her story is, touching is not the reality of sex, and something about sexual difference is what is being held in abeyance. Juliette is taking up the desire of her mother, a woman who didn’t want to touch her daughter. For this little girl, she has to learn that sex is something else. Sex isn’t this intrusion of a mother-daughter relationship, a maternal phobia in a complicated matrix of desire.

This is something too blithely referred to in psychoanalysis as the pre-Oedipal. This was conversion symptom number one.

After this session, a second conversion symptom emerges. Juliette is at the nurse over and over again at school, and her mother

calls me and says I need to speak to the girl again and brings her in for her session. What is happening this time? Juliette has a new symptom and a new fear. She said she got a splinter, and she heard that it can enter into your bloodstream and pierce your heart. A friend told this to her, and all day long, she can think of nothing else. The symptom was easily interpreted. The presence of blood was not the truth about touching but in fact revealed another truth, not only what comes out, but what can go in. Blood comes out, into one’s blood: the truth of her vaginal opening, and so of course also, the penis that may enter it. This was her symbolization of the knowledge that she had gained access to in the previous session, and truth be told, that I’m sure she always had, as all children do. What is fascinating is that conversion leads to a second conversion, to conversion to the second power. Conversion is not dissipated; it is intensified.

Something that only struck me many years later was the absolutely stunning character of the desire embedded in her symptom of the splinter. It is the desire that something may enter into her, pierce her heart, touch her. This, in a child whose mother treated her like a phobic object. This, in a child who was taught to fear sex. This, in a child whose model of family love was the unmitigated war between the sexes. Perhaps this

John Huston, 1954 25

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was her unconscious response to the equivalence in her mother’s command: now you can. This split off permission, and her split off desire. Now you can splinter. Now you can be broken in half. Now you can separate. The symptom anticipates the moment of freedom, the moment when you finally can. Later, she would tell me that if she were to choose a female religious figure it would be the Virgin Mary, not as some hysterical disgust with sexuality, but rather against that in her and in her heritage, since, as she told me, the Virgin Mother is the only one who is permitted to take her body with her, after death. z REFERENCES Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1955). Studies on hysteria. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 2, pp.1251). London, England: Hogarth Press (Original work published 1893) Freud, S. (1959). Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety.

In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard Edition (Vol. 20, pp.75-176). London, England: Hogarth Press (Original work published 1926) Freud, S. (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904 (J. Masson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lacan, J. (1967–1968). The psychoanalytic act. In C. Gallagher (Trans.), Jacques Lacan in Ireland Seminars.

Retrieved from http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/ wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-15-The-Psychoanalytical-Act.pdf Lacan, J. (1971–1972). The knowledge of the psychoanalyst. In C. Gallagher (Trans.), Jacques Lacan in Ireland Seminars. Retrieved from http://www.lacaninireland. com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-19a-TheKnowledge-of-the-Psychoanalyst-1971-1972.pdf Webster, J. (2018). Conversion disorder. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

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Turning the Periodic Tables on Freud: Lacan’s Colon Bloating. Headaches. Moodiness.

Cramps.

Always. Bella. Carefree. Kotex.

Libresse. Lil-lets. Lunapads. o.b.

Playtex. Poise. Rely. Silky Cup. Stayfree. Summer’s Eve. Tampax.

Thinx. Uline. U. Maxi thin. Barely there. Radiant.

Ultrathin with wings. Pro comfort applicator. Ultrathin teen pads. Pearl plastic. Security Maxi. All-nighter ultra. Fitness ultra-thin regular absorbency.

Sanitary napkins. Tampons.

Panty liners. Menstrual cups.

Menstrual sponges.

Contradicting the claim of Elaine and English Showalter (1970) that “unlike sexual activities … menstruation has not literary reflection, true or false,” James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922/1986) not only mentions the menstrual period as “a theatrical event for Molly” who, as Cheryl Herr (1989) observes, “remains remarkably free from cramps or discomfort; she is incommoded only by having to sit on the broken commode,” but Joyce’s text attributes to them epistemological value in speculations about what constitutes femininity. Here is a sample: How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she. Something in the air. That’s the moon. But then why don’t all women menstruate at the same time with the same moon, I mean? Depends on the time they were born, I suppose.

Or all start scratch then get out of step.

(1922/1986, p.301) Ulysses has several references and disparate speculations about menses: they release women’s bodies of excess blood; they are regulated by the moon; they cause headaches; they are the result of divinely ordained force of nature; they enhance desire; they are an illness. When Molly finds out that she is menstruating, she is worried that her period may spoil the sexual encounter with Boylan on Monday. For a moment, Molly reviles womanhood, lamenting “the usual monthly auction.” Menses appear as an impediment, a debility, something always wrong with women “5 days every 3 or 1. Sections of this text appeared in Gherovici, P. (2019).

Commentary on Gulati and Pauley. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 67(1):123-132 and in Gherovici, P. (2010). Please select your gender: From the invention of hysteria to the democratizing of transgenderism.

New York, NY: Routledge.

4 weeks” (1922/1986, p.632). Molly leaves the bed for the chamber pot. She discharges a mix of urine and blood and, perhaps hoping to escape the female curse, thinks that she would not mind being a man making love to a woman.

According to Katherine Mullin (2009), when discussing menstruation, Joyce also “introduces the most preposterous of all menstrual myths: the medieval anti-Semitic suspicion that Jewish men suffered a monthly bleeding from the penis.” Joyce, however, gives Molly the last word on menstruation; she is skeptical about the gynecological knowledge of “that dry old stick Dr. Collins for womens diseases” and his use of medical language, “your vagina he called it” (1922/1986, p.633). Molly is mistrustful of his questions: “had I frequent omissions, where do those old fellows get all the words, they have omissions. …I wouldnt trust him too far to give me chlorophorm” (1922/1986, p.634). Does menstruation speak the truth about women?

In attempting to uncover the truth of women, we can look to Freud, whose career began inauspiciously with a huge setback not unrelated to menstrual periods and other sorts of female trouble. Since the inception of psychoanalysis, Freud has been accused of being a “pansexualist,” of finding sex everywhere. In fact, the scandal caused by his sexual theories would be better explained by a more proper appellation: Freud was a “pan-bisexualist,” for bisexuality is a foundational psychoanalytic concept.

It has far-reaching implications and yet is still perceived as ambiguous, contradictory, and full of impasses.

Considering that he had made great strides in his understanding of the riddle of sexuality, in a letter dated August 7, 1901, Freud announced that he was planning to write a book with the title Human Bisexuality, and asked his close friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess to be his coauthor: “The idea is yours. You remember my telling you years ago, when you were still a nose specialist and surgeon, that the solution lay in sexuality.” Freud added: “Several years ago you corrected me, saying that it lay in bisexuality—and I see you were right” (Masson, 1985, p.448).

Indeed, Freud wanted to transform Fliess’s ideas of a material, corporeal bisexuality, based on a comparison of nose bleeds and menstruation, into a universal psychoanalytic notion, freed from the constraints of biology.

The joint writing project never took place. Nonetheless, Frank Sulloway (1979) notes that the book on bisexuality 26

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Patricia GHEROVICI1

that Freud wanted Fliess to join him in writing was actually published: “That seminal work eventually came out—minus Fliess’s cooperation—under the better known title Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (p.187).

For years, Freud and Fliess had talked and exchanged correspondence about the new concept of bisexuality (1887–1904).

In 1897, Fliess (1897/1977) published what he thought was going to be a revolutionary contribution to the current debate on sexuality, Die Beziehung zwischen Nase und weiblichen Geschlechstorganen, in ihrer biologischen Bedeutung dargestellt [The Relation Between the Nose and Female Genital Organs Presented According to Their Biological Significance]. Fliess, who was an ear, throat, and nose specialist in Berlin, believed that he had found the proof of universal bisexuality by observing links between genital organs and noses. Basing his observations on the morphological similarity of the erectile tissue found in the nasal cavity as well as in the clitoris, penis, and nipples, he identified two cycles in the body. These cycles would underpin the most dramatic changes in the patients he observed, like falling ill, being cured, or dying. One cycle was feminine and lasted 28 days; the other was masculine and lasted 23 days. Men and women would experience regular nose bleeding corresponding to women’s menstruation.

He even calculated that Goethe’s life could be calculated in terms of 28-day feminine cycles: “Goethe thus died when his 1,077th feminine menstruation had deconstructed the last particle of his admirable organism” (p.252). Fliess’s bloody thesis was well received, as it shared many assumptions accepted by his scientific contemporaries confirming the doxa of the time (Sulloway, 1979, pp.147–169).

Why is menstruation a curse? In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937/1964b), Freud refers to “the repudiation of femininity” as a “biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex” (p.252). The great riddle of sex is what all psychoanalysts struggle with, something that they cannot reach through the usual processes of analysis.

Although Freud’s description of the “wish for a penis” and the “masculine protest” as a biological bedrock relies on a language still close enough to that of Fliess (Pontalis, 1973, p.26), the idea of a sexual dissymmetry persists, but as mediated by the Oedipal structure. Both sexes have a negative reaction to castration, but the difference is that men experience it as an impending danger, whereas women discover

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it as something that has already happened.

Thus, Freud’s (1937/1964b) own concept of bisexuality can be understood as a precursor to Lacan’s formulae of sexuation: Even though men and women both experience castration anxiety (pp.252–253), there is no equivalence between men’s sexuality and women’s sexuality.

Fliess’ menstrual speculations took place during “a crisis of gender,” that is, at “a moment when the boundaries and norms of male and female shifted, disintegrated, and seemed to intertwine” (Sengoopta, 1996, p.466). His theories of bisexuality were popularized by Weininger’s notorious book Sex and Character (1903), and they provided a basis for Eugen Steinach’s sex change experiments, which he performed on animals and humans in Vienna

in the 1910s. The so-called Einstein of Sex, the famous sexologist and LGBT rights pioneer activist, Magnus Hirschfeld’s first reported incomplete sex reassignment surgeries in female-to-male patients took place in Berlin in 1912. The surgery involved a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy (Hirschfeld, 1918; see also Pfaeflin, 1997, and Meyerowitz [2002/2004, pp.18–21]).

The European scientists grounded their medical interventions in a new definition of sex that cast all humans as bisexual, or partly male and partly female.

Stated simply, the new definition challenged the more widely known nineteenth century vision of separate and opposite sexes. (Meyerowitz, 2002/2004, p.15).

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In the absence of a point in the body to anchor sexual difference, the counterintuitive model of opposite sexes, which Thomas Laqueur (1990) argued was invented just a few centuries ago, dissolves into bisexuality.

However contradictory Freud’s notion of bisexuality, the key question that runs through all his speculations concerns the essence of bisexuality, which means teasing out what the two parts of the “bi” actually are. Freud’s early difficulties with the notion of bisexuality reveal the impossibility of defining either masculinity or femininity.

Feminine and masculine characteristics do not constitute “bisexuality.” This was part of Freud’s own “erring” progression, an “errancy” that describes a trajectory. If

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we try to reconstruct such a trajectory, this will be a theoretical wandering that goes from bisexuality to the phallus and libido and leads to the Lacanian idea of mobile sexuation patterns.

Serge André (1999) proposed to treat bisexuality not as a concept but rather “as an original signifier” (p.13). A signifier creates meaning in opposition to other signifiers; it is a sign without any fixed referent.

This signifier formed and unformed the relationship of Freud and Fliess; bisexuality also became “the foundation on which the edifice of psychoanalysis was built” (p.13). For Freud, the concept of bisexuality introduced the problem of how to formulate a theory of sexuality in which there is only one libido (male) but two genders.

Freud (1905/1953) concluded that libido is always active and in that sense is “invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature” (p.219) in both men and women, irrespective of the gender of the subject. The dualism intimated by the term bisexuality, in fact, pointed to the aporia (the impasse) of sexual difference. As Freud writes, the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” whose meanings seems so unambiguous to ordinary people, are among the most confused

that occur in science: “…Pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense. Every individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character traits belonging to his own and the opposite sex” (1905/1953, p.219).

Freud (1919/1955a) emphasizes the limitations of the idea of bisexuality as bilaterality, which “can only have an intelligible meaning if we assume that a person’s sex is to be determined by his genitals” (p.201).

Bisexuality’s riddle seems inextricably related to the nonrepresentability of what he calls the “enigma of woman.” In a later lecture devoted to resolving “the riddle of the nature of femininity,” Freud (1933/1964a) avoided the trap of setting himself an impossible task, that of describing “what a woman is”—rather, he wondered “how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition” (p.116). The paradox, Freud wrote, is that “when you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male’ or ‘female’? and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty” (p.141). And yet, one “cannot give the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ any new connotation. This distinction is not a

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psychological one” (p.142). Freud deepened the paradox by pointing out that while there are admittedly two sexes, there is no conceptual unity to complementary halves of a whole, the “yin and yang of sexuality” (Kohon, 2018, p.268). Fundamentally, I do not view bisexuality as a “third kind” of sexual identity that would stand between or beyond homosexuality and heterosexuality and complete them. On the contrary, I see it as something that calls into question the very concept of a symmetrical (normal) notion of sexual identity.

Freud developed a theory of sexuality in collaboration with his close friend Wilhelm Fliess. Without developing the complex links between Freud and Fliess, let us just mention that Fliess played a major role in Freud’s self-analysis, the invention of psychoanalysis, the discovery of the unconscious, and the experience of transference love. The friendship between Freud and Fliess came to an end amid bitter accusations of plagiarism regarding the theory of bisexuality (Strachey, 1962, p.xi). In trying to solve the riddle of sexuality, Freud made use of this problematic and incomplete notion. His theory asserts that there is no complementarity between men and

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Jessye Norman, 1981

women: from one sex to the other, there is a logical jump; between genders, all we have is an incommensurable difference.

Rather than bridging this gap, this discontinuity, bisexuality exacerbates it. Lacan highlighted this gap with his dictum, “there is no sexual relation.”2 One can grasp how this claim has validity: if libido is masculine in nature, and for the unconscious there is no representation of the female sex, then the unconscious is mono- or homosexual.

There is only one signifier for both sexes, the phallus. The patriarchal-heterosexism implied in some readings of Lacan’s work can be avoided if we consider that, like bisexuality, the phallus functions as a signifier; it is in no way reducible to the anatomical penis. Further, Lacan’s notion of sexual difference (what he calls sexuation) offers a model that accounts for a subject assuming a gender identity as a man, woman, or something else altogether, without fully relying on the notion of phallus.

For Freud, bisexuality is, as Fliess had proposed, universal; bisexuality is not bilaterality or complementarity. As Lacan 2. Sometimes translated as, “There is no such thing as sexual rapport.”

observed, sexual difference opens up an insurmountable chasm. Thus, rather than functioning as a bridge, bisexuality points to this division and difference, which operates at the level of the unconscious. This is a difference determined neither by sex (anatomy) nor by gender (social construction): the assumption of any sexual positioning is a subjective, unconscious choice.

Lacan pushed Freud’s ideas further in positing that the assumption of human sexuality is a process in which each person makes a choice and adopts a sexual positioning that does not fully depend on anatomical differences (or even their psychic consequences) or on social conventions.

Building on the idea than there is a basic disharmony, Lacan (1975/1998) argued that the feminine side of the sexuation formulas is structured differently from the male side: femininity is a position in regard to sexual difference that is not fully determined by the phallus.

Freud’s biological bedrock for his theories—the “wish for a penis” in a “woman,” and the “masculine protest” in a “man”—relies on a language still close enough to that of Fliess. For Freud, however, the idea of 29

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a sexual dissymmetry appears mediated by the Oedipal structure. In both genders, castration is violently opposed, but the difference is that men experience castration as an impending danger, whereas women discover it as something that has already happened. Though both men and women experience castration anxiety (pp.252–253), there is no equivalence between men’s sexuality and women’s. Lacan’s formulas of sexuation (1975/1998) pick up where Freud left off and follow a trajectory that moves beyond the sexual binary and in no way indulges the idea of bisexuality as a “third kind” of sexual identity. Since bisexuality puts in question the very concept of a symmetrical notion of sexual identity, Freud could conclude his analysis of a case of homosexuality in a woman with a thorough critique of the notion of a “third sex.”

In the early days of the discussion on bisexuality, Freud referred to the work of the endocrinologist Eugen Steinach in several texts. Steinach, along with Hirschfeld, speculated that the so-called “third sex” of homosexuals could be accounted for by biological bisexuality, which would be understood as the presence of both male

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and female sex hormones. Freud advised against this move: “it would be premature, or a harmful exaggeration, if at this stage we were to indulge in hope of a ‘therapy’ of inversion that could be generally applied,” despite “the remarkable transformations that Steinach has effected in some cases by operations” (Freud, 1920/1955b, p.171).

As Freud summarizes, Steinach had been “carrying out experimental castration and subsequently grafting the sex glands of the opposite sex” and had successfully managed “to transform a male into a female and vice versa. The transformation affected more or less completely both the somatic sexual characters and the psychosexual attitude” (Freud 1905/1953, p.144). The claim was that Steinach had “cured” male “inversions” by transplanting an undescended testicle from the body of a “healthy” heterosexual into that of a homosexual man (Hern, 1995, p.45). Steinach’s highly debatable—and quickly abandoned—“cure” for masculine homosexuality was not revolutionary but fit the general tendencies present in medical science at the time.

Steinach’s experiments, however, opened the path for contemporary hormone therapy and gender confirmation. The ideology that supported Steinach’s interventions was based on the endorsement of heterosexuality as the anatomical, healthy destiny of human sexuality and on a belief in complementarity between men and women.

It is important to highlight that what Lacan calls in his grid of sexuation the “male side” and the “female side” are determined not by biology, but by the logic of unconscious investments, to the point that, for example, a cisgendered male can nevertheless inscribe himself on the female side.

Lacan (1975/1998, pp.5-7; see also Lacan, 1973) took a very important step forward in the debate around sexual difference when he proposed a division based on two forms of being, masculine and feminine, corresponding to two forms of enjoyment or jouissance: phallic and Other (i.e., feminine jouissance, not fully subjected to the phallus). Freed from the shackles of anatomy, this is a choice that has to do with self-authorization within speech.

This is a revolutionary concept: authorization as a sexual being (man, woman, or anything else) originates in oneself; in matters of sexual difference, one proceeds from one’s own authorization. To authorize oneself as a man, woman, or something else involves an ethical decision, as also happens when the analyst decides on which position to adopt. These are choices that should not be dependent on the big Other (moral duty, law, institutional or social customs, and the like). According to Adrian Johnston, the Other is understood as

trans-individual socio-linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions. Relatedly, the Symbolic big Other also can refer to (often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge (whether that of God, Nature, History, Society, State, Party, Science, or the analyst as the ‘subject supposed to know’ [sujet supposé savoir] as per Lacan’s distinctive account of analytic transference). (2018) The idea of one’s sexual self-authorization is a variation of Lacan’s better-known aphorism: “the analysts authorize themselves,” which can also be rendered as “One’s only authorization as a sexed being [male or female] comes from oneself ” (Fink, 1991, p.83). The fact that Lacan proposes a variation of the radical and simple principle of self-authorization when training psychoanalysts in matters of sexual identity reveals that what is at stake is a new ethics of sexual difference.

The ethics of sexual difference provided by Lacan’s formulas of sexuation should be considered in conjunction with his notion of “sinthome,” as I have argued elsewhere (Gherovici, 2010, 2017). The sinthome refers to a type of symptom that is more like a creative invention than something one should try to dispel. It is not trying to “make up for” the disharmony between genders, but instead makes do around the disjunction. For instance, what one often sees in gender transition is that the corporeal reconstruction will not suffice to “hold” the body. At times, the material interventions on the body (hormonal or surgical) are not enough to achieve a full transformation of the body. In other words, the change that takes place at the level of the flesh is not sufficient, and thus an artifice, a creation, a renaming, some sort of writing or inscription, will be necessary before a more livable embodiment is accomplished.

The sinthome—which is understood as a singular creation—is an invention that compensates for this lack and fulfills such a function. Through the sinthome, a final transition emerges as a type of (self-)creation. The sinthome is not, of course, limited to transgender or gender nonconforming people, because everyone has to grapple with sexual difference.

Since sexual difference resists symbolization, it creates a symptom, but this symptom is something that cannot be rectified or cured; it is nevertheless something with which every subject must come to terms, five days a month, every two or three weeks.

Psychoanalysis was created by the encounter of Freud with hysterical women whose bodily symptoms were more faithful to language than to anatomy. Following the 30

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subjective grammar of desire revealed by the unconscious, I will conclude by mentioning that Lacan’s use of the variable session is choosing a colon, rather than a period, because his use of variable sessions, rather than a full stop, introduces a colon into the flow of discourse. Today, for many critics of Jacques Lacan, in particular those working within the American context, his worst, most unforgivable, unacceptable mortal sin was not that he took an analysand as a lover or was a terrible father, but that he conducted sessions of variable length.

This is a very innovative practice, one that was not without risks if misused or abused. It is often wrongly described as a short session. However, limiting a session’s length is not the main concern: the rationale for the variation in duration is that the session ends unexpectedly and that this interruption is a scansion, one that works as a form of punctuation that reactivates transference. It may happen, for instance, when there is a slip of the tongue; the cut is performed in hopes that the analysand will become aware of something outside the intended speech—a contradiction, an impossibility, or unresolvable dilemma that will bring forth a question that will elicit the revelation of a truth. Ideally, the abrupt ending of the session will not just highlight this revelation, but will perhaps retroactively function as an interpretation. For example, one analysand, an academic, discusses a typical anxiety dream: He is at a lectern giving a talk for which he feels unprepared. He gets more and more nervous, and keeps dropping the lecture papers. The papers fall all over the ground and are mixed up. He is unable to continue delivering the lecture.

In session, he associates with the elements of the dream: anxiety about his tenure promotion, concerns about a book he is writing, feeling “dropped” by his colleagues who are not as supportive as he wishes. After exploring several thoughts connected to the dream material, he asks the analyst: “But what about the papers?” Asked what comes to mind, he answers that he can never keep the papers on his desk in order. He talks about how he wishes to have a more organized life, eat better, exercise, sleep more.

Then, he mentions in passing what seemed like an unconnected thought: “My girlfriend just moved into my apartment.” They have been dating casually and he had not mentioned her in a while. She lived in another city and had considered possibly relocating in the city where he lives. The analyst asks: “Is she now in your lease?” The analysand responds: “Oh yes. It was such an ordeal with the rental office. But yesterday we finally

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Cecil Beaton, 1950

signed the papers.” “Finally signed the papers,” repeats the analyst, and at that point they end the session. This punctuation highlighted the double meaning of papers and had the function of allowing the analysand to make better sense of the sense of the links between his anxieties about his professional life and his erotic life. As Lacan observed, by “cutting” in such a way, you prevent the analysand from losing himself in banal chatter. The punctuation cuts to the chase.

Perhaps, in an American context, it is hard to justify such a variable length session if one believes that “time is money.” In fact, we know that the analysand is not paying by the minute, but for a session that belongs to a process, which implies that an analysis also includes the time in between sessions. The result of the variable session is a speeding up of the interpretation patterns and in the end is conducive to a faster conclusion. Time is money, indeed, when you can speed up time.

Those critics, who voice their enraged indignation at what they consider a major transgression of a supposedly fair business

etiquette, forget that sessions do not need to end with a period, but rather with a colon. Despite the potential anal associations that may call up all sorts of infantile sexual theories of cloacal reproduction, let us note that the colon as a punctuation mark can introduce a logical consequence, or effect, of a fact stated before; it can bring in a description; it can separate the numbers in abbreviated measures of time; it is also used in the descriptive location of a book verse or to separate the subtitle of a work from its principal title. Similar to a dash or quotation mark, a colon can be employed to introduce speech in written dialogues, such as in a play. z Patient: I don’t like how the session is going.

Analyst: Like how the session is going! Let’s stop here for today.

REFERENCES André, S. (1999). What does a woman want? (S. Fairfield, Trans.). New York: Other Press.

Fink, B. (1991). There’s no such thing as a sexual 31

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relationship: Existence and the formulas of sexuation. Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 5(1-2), 59–85.

Fliess, W. (1977). Les relations entre les nez et les organes génitaux de la femme: Présentées selon leurs significations biologiques. Paris, France: Editions du Seuil. (Original work published 1897) Freud, S. (1953). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 7, pp.123–246). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1905) Freud, S. (1955a). “A child is being beaten” a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 17, pp.175–204). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1919) Freud, S. (1955b). The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 18, pp.145–172). London, England: Hogarth Press.

(Original work published 1920) Freud, S. (1964a). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis, lecture 33: Femininity. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 22, pp.112–135). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1933) Freud, S. (1964b). Analysis terminable and interminable. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 23, pp.209–254). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1937) Gherovici, P. (2010). Please select your gender: From the invention of hysteria to the democratizing of transgenderism. New York, NY: Routledge.

Gherovici, P. (2017). Transgender psychoanalysis: A Lacanian perspective on sexual difference.

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Hern, R. (1995). On the history of the biological theories of homosexuality. Journal of Homosexuality, 28(1/2), 31–56.

Herr, C. (1989). “Penelope” as period piece.

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Hirschfeld, M. (1918). Sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Sexualpathologie. Bonn, Germany: Marcus & Webers.

Johnston, A. (2018). Jacques Lacan. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2018/entries/lacan/ Joyce, J. (1986). Ulysses. New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1922) Kohon, G. (2018). Bye-bye, sexuality. In R. J. Perelberg (Ed.), Psychic bisexuality: A British-French dialogue (pp.258-276). New York, NY and London, England: Routledge.

Lacan, J. (1973). L’etourdit, Scilicet, 4, 5–52.

Lacan, J. (1998). The seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX. On the limits of love and knowledge, 1972–1973 (J. A. Miller, Ed. & B. Fink, Trans.). New York, NY: Norton. (Original work published 1975) Laqueur, T. (1990). Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Masson, J. (1985). The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Meyerowitz, J. (2004). How sex changed: A history of transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 2002) Mullin, K. (2009). Menstruation in “Ulysses”. James Joyce Quarterly, 46(3/4), 497-508.

Pfaeflin, F. (1997). Sex reassignment, Harry Benjamin, and some European roots. The International Journal of Transgenderism, 1(2).

Pontalis, J. B. (Ed.) (1973). Bisexualité et difference de sexes. Paris, France: Gallimard.

Sengoopta, C. (1996). The unknown Weininger: Science, philosophy, and cultural politics in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Central European History, 29, 453–493.

Showalter, E., & Showalter, E. (1970). Victorian women and menstruation. Victorian Studies, 14(1), 83-89.

Strachey, J. (1962). Editor’s note. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), Freud: Three essays on the theory of sexuality (pp.xi– xiii). New York, NY: Basic Books.

Sulloway, F. (1979). Freud: Biologist of the mind. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Weininger, O. (1903). Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung. Vienna, Austria: Leipzig.

Weininger, O. (2005). Sex and character: An investigation of fundamental principles (D. Steuer & L. Marcus, Eds., L. Löb, Trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

(Original work published 1903)

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Writing Menstruation Despite all that is known about menstruation, the biological phenomenon persists as a question repeatedly posed and answered anew. Throughout the history of Western thought and medical practice, the discourse and treatment of menstruation reflects not only the knowledge trends of the day, but also the vestiges of knowledge and fantasies of previous eras. For the individual who menstruates, the experience of and relationship to having a period changes in both dramatic and subtle ways with each cycle and each life phase, as it does within each family and culture, where different perceptions of menstruation are emphasized and denied. The variability inherent to this cyclical event further amplifies when questions like “what is a woman?” or “what makes a woman a woman?” are asked. The declaration “You’re now a woman,” often made at menarche, receives mixed reception for those who aren’t quite sure what that actually means. While menstruation stands as a marker of womanhood for many, singling out any one trait to determine sex or gender proves problematic, as nature and culture inevitably elide and elude attempts at categorization. A woman who has a mastectomy does not lose her womanhood without breasts. A person who menstruates may determine himself male. That the menstrual cycle is at times declared the defining feature of womanhood, but is just as often rendered insignificant, raises questions about its place and effects in the reciprocal relations between the body, the subject, and the social order— relationships that psychoanalysis addresses and transforms in theory and practice.

Mysterious, haunting, painful, destabilizing, hidden, present, irrepressible, fluid, blocked, heavy, light, forgotten, anticipated, simultaneously signaling both an ending and a beginning: this stream of words describes something of the characteristics, contours, and movement of menstruation as well as the psychoanalytic process of working through life’s many ambiguities and paradoxes, of enduring seemingly ceaseless repetitions, and of having the opportunity to turn them into something new before they assimilate into the familiar. The ever-shifting repetition of the menstrual cycle offers an interesting point from which to explore the intersection of the symbolic body of psychoanalytic knowledge of female sexuality and its relationship to the reality of the body.

Beginning with Freud’s struggles to cure hysteria and the condition of womanhood, on through the work of his contemporaries in trying to codify one psychic path

Loryn HATCH

for womanhood, and into Lacan’s theorizing of woman and the feminine standing as markers for limits of our symbolic systems, the historical and structural obstacles for women in finding an Other who would hear and permit their messages are apparent. When these messages pertain to menstruation, discourse has historically stayed fixed in the physical and in gender essentialist significations. Early analysts, following a literal reading of Freud’s developing ideas on female sexuality, treat menstruation as just another reminder of many of women’s inferiority, if they treat it at all. Kate Donmall notes in her 2013 article, “What It Means to Bleed,” how menstruation as a phenomenon is not so readily found in psychoanalytic theory. She observes that in Wright’s Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (1992), there is not even one indexed reference to menstruation. The long history of taboo (which I will merely evoke without cataloguing examples) can be inferred to play a part in this absence, but the question of how menstruation does appear in the theory remains.

In “Hysteria,” Freud (1888/1966) describes the onset of hysterical neurosis as most commonly beginning at the age of fifteen for women, where it follows either an unremitting course or comes in sporadic episodes. He writes, As is well known, an early age, from fifteen onwards, is the period at which the hysterical neurosis most usually shows itself actively in females. This can happen either by an unbroken succession of comparatively slight disturbances (chronic hysteria) or by several severe outbreaks (acute hysteria) separated by free intervals lasting for years. The first years of a happy marriage interrupt the illness as a rule; when marital relations become cooler and repeated births have brought exhaustion, the neurosis re-appears. After the age of forty in women the illness does not usually produce fresh phenomena; but the old symptoms may persist and strong provocations may intensify the illness even at an advanced age. (p.52) Nearly 40 years later, in “The Question of Lay Analysis” (1926/1959), Freud’s prognosis for women suffering through their reproductive life cycle takes on a wryly pessimistic tone, but otherwise remains unchanged. He writes, “Indeed, there is not much that can be done; nature must help, or time. With women there is first menstruation, then marriage, and later on the menopause. Finally death is a real help” 32

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(p.232). After decades treating patients, Freud concedes that psychoanalysis offers little relief for being a woman; the realities of the female’s biological and social conditions can only be assuaged by death.

This pessimistic prognosis for finding “something that can be done” to help the condition of womanhood begs the question of what the pathology of womanhood is. Menstruation is one part of the whole reproductive life that Freud describes, as much a symptom and source of suffering as the societal expectations and events of being a woman. The psychoanalytic confrontation with the questions of womanhood continues a long Western history of confounding the physical and social conditions that shape the female sex. Menstruation, virginity, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, menopause, and even death indicate potential designations of woman, but also can be the very sites of her undoing. Inherent to the word “menstruation” is a relationship to time, with the Latin menstruus meaning “month” or “monthly.” The word “period” became synonymous with “menstruation” in the 19th century, further merging this sense of time with a sense of departure and return, as “period” is born from the Greek word periodos with peri meaning “around” and hodos signifying “going, way, journey.”

Freud’s description of womanhood reflects a journey in time with departures from and returns to illness, the markers of womanhood as much chronological points as they are symptoms and cures for something that never quite goes away. Perhaps the very thing that cannot be escaped is this idea of death, which stands as the ultimate cure against suffering, its specter haunting the passage of time and the entire reproductive cycle with its many beginnings, endings, creations, losses, and the fears of the unknown they all engender.

The female body in its variable states provokes anxiety with the impossible paradoxes its powers of creation can provoke.

It blurs distinctions between interior and exterior and, as the locus of early analytic exploration, obscured the distinction between the biological origin and the hysterical creation. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious similarly upsets ideas on a notion of objective, scientific truth with the elusive truth of the individual subject, who uniquely interprets and often subverts that which seems fixed and absolute, and who emerges as something entirely other than her anatomy and what society expects of it. In a footnote to “Case Histories from Studies on Hysteria” (1893/1955), Freud demonstrates something of how his early analytic

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Rita Tushingham, 1965

work pulled at the tangle between the biological events of the body, synchronous social events, and the place of analysis in making meaning of it all after the fact, in his description of his work with an unnamed 38 year-old woman with whom he worked in “non-somnambulistic” states while still employing techniques of touch and suggestion. He is determined to find the nucleus of the woman’s disease and arrives at her first hysterical episode when she was 17 years old, at which point he continues to literally press her for details: The attack was now to some extent explained. But I still required to know of some precipitating factor which had provoked the memory at that particular time. I formed what happened to be a lucky conjecture. “Do you remember the exact street you were walking along just then?”— “Certainly. It was the principal street, with its old houses. I can see them now.”—“And where was it that your friend lived?”—“In a house in the same street. I had just passed it, and I had the attack a couple of houses further on.”—“So when you went by the house it reminded you of your dead friend, and you were once more overcome by the contrast which you did not want to think of.” I was still not satisfied.

There might, I thought, be something else at work as well that had aroused or reinforced the hysterical disposition of a girl who had till then been normal. My suspicions turned to her monthly periods as an appropriate factor, and I asked: “Do you know at what time in the month your period came on?” The question was not a welcome one. “Do you expect me to know that, too? I can only tell you that I had them very seldom then and very irregularly. When I was seventeen I only had one once.”—“Very well, then, we will find out when this once was by counting over.”

I did the counting over, and she decided definitely on one particular month and hesitated between two days immediately preceding the date of a fixed holiday.

“Does that fit in somehow with the date of the ball?” She answered sheepishly: “The ball was on the holiday. And now I remember, too, what an impression it made on me that my only period that year should have had to come on just before the ball. It was my first ball.” (p.112) As a clinician in this period, attempting to understand the relationship between the psychic and the physical, Freud identifies the body and the reproductive cycle as the site where the symbolic is written, 33

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but also as the trigger for what is symbolized, and helps the patient stumble onto the factors contributing to an over-determined hysterical event. The personal relationship between these core ideas of womanhood is forged (and forced to some degree) for Freud’s patient as if by chance, with the timing of first periods, a debutante debut and all that implies, and of course, the reminder of unexpected and inevitable death, converging to make a psychic fault line at the very point that the potential for new life came together with her first period.

Freud’s reconstruction of the events precipitating his patient’s case of hysteria creates a myth of origin to explain what had previously been disconnected and unknown. It is through language and systems of meaning, in the form of myths, religion, philosophy, and so forth that we are able to construct a passage between opposites, between life and death. Freud’s work, and the many iterations of psychoanalysis born from it, center on his choice of the myth of Oedipus to reflect something of the familial dynamics that structure our identifications and relationships. For a myth that captures something more distinct and unique of womanhood, the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter is the oft-cited and redolent story of the changing of the

ON FEMININITY: COMMENTARIES

seasons for Mother Earth and her daughters. As the myth is often told, the young virgin Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest, finds herself caught between life and death, between fertility and barrenness, and between girlhood and womanhood, when she is ripped from the earth and taken down into the underworld

by Hades to be his bride. In one rendition of the story, Persephone eats nothing while held captive except for six pomegranate seeds. After months of searching for her daughter, bereft Demeter lets life wither on earth. When the ordinary mortals begin to starve, Zeus and the other gods intervene to return Persephone to Demeter, but the pomegranate seeds she ate keep her beholden to the underworld for six months of the year, marking the change in seasons on earth. In the figure of Persephone, the cyclical patterns of womanhood are captured and resolved with a somewhat reassuring story of separation and reunion between the living and the dead. In the fertile kernels of the blood red seed of pomegranate, the life and death powers of women’s gendered blood are evoked and become the determining element for the passage between opposing worlds.

Persephone’s status as virgin is a crucial element to the structure of the myth and to many other myths and stories that feature women in this pivotal position. In her study of the virgin in Ancient Greece, classics scholar Helen King describes the transition from parthenos, virgin, to gyne, woman, as involving “a series of bleedings, each of which must take place at the proper time” (2002, p.88). King notes that the word gyne is the word for both wife and woman, and that it was only in becoming a wife that a woman was recognized as such and most fully integrated into the social structure.

With menarche, the newly menstruating girl becomes the virgin, whose mature but unbound sexuality threatens social bonds.

The virgin should be carefully protected by her family and should only shed the blood of defloration on her wedding night and the blood of childbirth as a wife. The time in between, when the girl is fertile but unwed, is most problematic, and, reflectively, menstrual blood is recognized both as an essential sign of fertility and also a source of pathology if not “remedied” quickly with marriage. Looking at the connection between the virgin of Ancient Greece and the virgin of 16th and 17th century England, King (2002) notes that English doctors of the early modern era translated the early Greek term peri-parthenion to “the disease of virgins,” (which she notes is best translated as “the disease of the unmarried”) and further maintained ancient practices for treating hysterical symptoms. King cites a

striking example in a 17th century English text on female reproductive health that references a description from Hippocrates stating that menstrual blood should move regularly and heavily, “like that of a sacrificial victim” (2004, p.9). The chorus in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis sings of such sacrifices and blood flow as they laud the virgin Iphigenia: O look at the girl who walks to the goddess’ altar …Her hair in garlands of honor and flung upon her body the lustral waters she will go to the goddess’ altar which she will stain and her lovely body’s neck with streams of flowing blood (2013, p.133) Iphigenia’s virgin blood is the catalyst for the Trojan War, which begins following her sacrifice. Ultimately this blood does not belong to her, but instead to her father and her country. That the virgin’s body is imbued with powers that transcend the physical is evident in her mythical status and the level of importance placed on transitioning her to either wedded womanhood or to sacrificial death. It is her blood that must be contained by a name, a cause, or a diagnosis. Through analytic work, the analysand takes on the names, explanations, and diagnoses that have long determined the meaning of her blood, and approaches the illusory boundaries between body and mind, past and present, external and internal, and masculine and feminine, reconstituting her relationship to these dichotomous ideas and her experience of them.

An account of the undoing of a knot, caught in registers of the reality of anatomy and the imaginary and symbolic meanings that menstruation and womanhood are tied to, can be found in Marie Cardinal’s work, The Words to Say It (1975/2003), an autobiographical novel of her seven-year psychoanalysis. Interpretation and the world of theory that attempts to explain the psychic processes that lead to change are not the focus of this narrative. While the work of analysis is vividly depicted (including the transference, the analyst as consistent presence attuned to hear “something else” in the patient’s speech, as well as the return of memories and feelings that are as vital as when they first happened), the account is singularly Cardinal’s construction of a personal and family history of existing at the nebulous borders of nationality, class, race, language, and sex. What can be witnessed at a broader theoretical level is Cardinal’s transformation from a passive victim ruled by the disinterested diagnoses of medical and psychiatric doctors to a subject who defines her own position in her relationships 34

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to her family history, her symptoms, and her work as a writer.

The conflicts and traumas of the personal and social conditions of Cardinal’s position between Algeria and France, between separated mother and father, between sick and well, and between life and death, manifest at the supposed site of her womanhood, her reproductive anatomy. Upon beginning analysis, she has experienced an incessant flow of blood for three years, been diagnosed with uterine fibroids, and undergone two curettages. Still the blood will not stop.

Droplets and puddles of blood trail her, her presence and absence marked by shameful stains. Her life is spent obsessively tracking the ebb and flow of blood, its darkening and lightening, its changing textures and smells.

She grows terrified of leaving her home, of doing anything but monitoring and controlling the blood flow. Cardinal’s physical symptoms become bound with a psychic presence she names “the Thing.” She writes, The Thing, which on the inside was made of a monstrous crawling of images, sounds, and odors, projected in every way by a devastating pulse making all reasoning incoherent, all explanation absurd, all efforts to order tentative and useless, was revealed on the outside by violent shaking and nauseating sweat. (1975/2003, p.10) The Thing overtakes her capacity to think and to put into words what ails her.

Because the blood is material reality, unlike the psychic pain no one can see, she observes, “I loved to make it the center of my illness” (1975/2003, p.4). Medical treatments focus solely on the blood as well, just as her psychiatric treatments treat the physical symptoms of her psychic distress.

Medications for managing the bleeding and the Thing allow her to do her duties as a wife and mother for periods of time, but Cardinal struggles as the drugs merely quiet the problems and only temporarily stave off anxiety attacks. At nearly 30 years old, a hysterectomy is recommended. She refuses the procedure without understanding her reasons for doing so. She is hospitalized at a psychiatric institute. She refuses her medication. Through analysis, she realizes, I had been subjected to dozens of tests and there had never been any evidence to indicate something abnormal in the various bodily functions...no gynecologist, psychiatrist or neurologist had ever acknowledged that the blood came from the Thing. On the contrary I was told the Thing came from the blood. “Women are often ‘nervous’ because their gynecological equilibrium is precarious, very delicate.”

(1975/2003, p.33-34)

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Edna O’Brien, 2002 35

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Cardinal discovers the bearing that words have on the Thing and the Thing on words, writing of the persecutory effect of words and phrases like “fibroid uterus” on her vulnerable state: For the mentally ill, words, like objects, are as much alive as people or animals. They palpitate, they vanish or expand. Passing through words is like walking in a crowd. Faces stay with you, as silhouettes which quickly fade from memory, or else as images that stick there, one doesn’t know why. For me at that time, a word isolated from the mass of other words started to live, becoming an important thing, becoming perhaps even the most important thing, inhabiting me, torturing me, never leaving me, reappearing in my dreams, waiting for me to wake up. (1975/2003, p.8) The words of the doctors, fixated on her physical symptoms, infect Cardinal just as strongly as the condition of her uterus.

Her analyst’s attention to her words, the flow of which had been blocked and prohibited, yields a different result.

Cardinal’s analytic work begins with her on the couch in the fetal position and brings an “opening up of the mind” that she likens to the process of being born. In telling her analyst of her condition in the first sessions, he asks simply how she feels apart from her illness. She tells him she is afraid. When returning for her next session she begins by saying she is “bled dry” and attempts to communicate her wretched state through descriptions of her bodily symptoms but receives the following reply: “Those are psychosomatic disorders. That doesn’t interest me. Speak about something else” (1975/2003, p.32). This interpretation comes along with strict rules to not medicate herself, even with aspirin—a rigid analytic stance that relies on the power of speech to cure. The analyst dismisses her fixation on the blood, and soon, she finds herself speaking, the words flowing just as profusely as the blood and just as powerfully as the Thing. Cardinal finds “the flow” of words “to construct the bridge which would join the intense to the calm, the clear to the obscure” (1975/2003, p.3) and begins to define a position for herself in the recounting of once chaotic events. She determines that The Thing emerged at the time of her marriage, in the passage from girlhood to womanhood, and is rooted in fears of death—in memories of loss, pain, illness, and the undeniable message that, in fact, her mother had never wanted her to be born. Her mother’s half-spoken messages and the ambiguous desire they conveyed made Cardinal’s passage to womanhood, into a new name and a

new position as wife and mother, physically impossible for a time.

“The hysteric writes nothing,” write Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement in The Newly Born Woman (1975/2008), “for the hysteric does not write, does not produce, does nothing—nothing other than make things circulate without inscribing them” (1975/2008, p.37). What are these “things” of the hysteric that circulate?

Repressed truths of the female anatomy that for one reason or another were impossible to speak? Throughout history, the experiences of female anatomy generally were not recognized and articulated by the subjects who experienced them firsthand.

Men described women, permitting and acknowledging only certain versions of experience, while denying the emergence of unexpected truths. The hysteric, with her particular relationship to truth, nonetheless found a way to transmit the paradoxes and ambiguities of her experience via the body.

With the discovery of the unconscious and psychoanalysis, the analyst and analytic space carved a path from this state of cryptic somatic expressions to the potential for acts of inscription and of creation.

Narrative is not the only way to take account of change. Transformation emerges word by repeated word, drop by drop, and may never be acknowledged as having a discernible effect by the speaker, as what comes to be may never quite meet the fantasy of what could or should be. Through a summarizing of Lacan’s work on the sinthome in her book, The Law of the Mother (2008/2019), Genevieve Morel articulates the effects of the signifier on the symptom, of the work of the symbolic on the real, not as a result of a narrative construction, per se, but as something more fragmented and inherently connected to the hole in the symbolic and that which cannot be known of death. The symptom, she explains, is reduced through “equivocations” or interpretations, whose ambiguous meanings touch on “fragments of the real” (2008/2019, p.69). Exposure over time to the multiplicity of meanings offered through analytic interpretation drains the signifiers of their charge and their hold on the symptom. This is a departure from the Freudian idea that it is the narrative interpretation that transforms the symptom (what earlier Lacan described as a symbolic registering and traversing of a fundamental fantasy) to the idea that change can occur in pieces. Morel writes, “It is not the ‘construction of the self,’ nor of one’s internal life, that can be glimpsed on the horizon of analysis, but rather the material reduction of the symptom by means of the equivocal signifier” (2008/2019, p.72). Through the sinthome, a subject “‘trapped’ in a particular knot” (2008/2019, p.72) creates a new 36

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solution for living with less suffering (and even with creativity) regardless of structural diagnosis. This does not eliminate the place or importance of narrative for some analysands. Cardinal’s written memoir demonstrates both the work of interpretation and that of narrative construction in addressing her pathological experience of womanhood.

Cardinal shows a gathering of fragments that foreground the act of writing, of work that redefines the signified in relation to the signifier, creating new possibilities for words to connect to other meanings and be bled dry of the torturous and persecutory qualities they once held.

Cixous and Clement contrast the hysteric, who cannot make use of her truths, with the sorceress, who draws on the power of the fragments, of abject items, and “makes partial objects useful, puts them back in circulation—properly” (1975/2008, p.36). For the sorceress, the refuse of the body, the “wastes: nail clippings, menstrual blood, excrement, a lock of hair; these scraps of the body are what will act as a charm” (1975/2008, p.35).

The sorceress transforms the partial objects categorized as waste into objects of desire.

Similarly, the analyst attends to what is dismissed and refused in the speech of the patient, not letting the fragments be discarded, but instead using them as a tool to open the path of desire. Both sorceress and analyst reconfigure the laws that define and govern what is most intimate of the body, the power of their processes hinging on that which is rejected and refused by the psyche. Loaded in this process of free association is the encounter with that which is most abhorrent, uncomfortable, and abject. Putting words to that which has thus far felt unspeakable is the individual work of the analysand but is also a phenomenon of artistic creations that have the potential to redefine social and cultural boundaries. Menstruation has long existed at the edge of nonexistence in social discourse, which has lent it significant power to the art, literature, and cinema that have drawn on it both intentionally and inadvertently. Over the course of the last century, these media have directly and indirectly done the work of stripping longstanding menstrual taboos of their power, draining ever more of the persecutory fragments that haunt the quotidian reality of menstruation in all its complexity. And yet, the work remains ongoing as something that will always remain repressed, untouchable, and at the point of abjection, and thus primed to return to prey on our ambivalent relationships to blood and woman.

Writing about menstruation is an attempt to mark what passes month after month, year after year—until it doesn’t. A mysterious but known relationship with a hidden yet visible force inside the body.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1957

Sometimes, there is a sense that it can be read on the face, if not red on the pants.

A desire to share something of it, to have it be known, all while knowing it can only be borne alone. At times it becomes the point of explanation, the understanding that illuminates everything and nothing at once. The intensity and frustration and volatility of daily domestic scenes rendered all the more vivid as the upheaval of the anatomy during menstruation drives truths to be spoken and just as easily renders them meaningless. And then, maybe, they return—perhaps what is seen and felt during that time of the month is real, something that has emerged from the depths to

disrupt the Other as much as it may be disrupted by the Other. This hidden yet visible force may come to be spoken, seen, and even written in analysis, where, through a mapping of its patterns and its effects, a new knowledge is forged. z REFERENCES Cardinal, M. (2003). The words to say it (P. Goodheart, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: VanVactor & Goodheart.

(Original work published 1975) Cixous, H., & Clement, C. (2008). The newly born woman (B. Wing, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1975) Donmall, K. (2013). What it means to bleed: An exploration of young women’s experiences of menarche and menstruation. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 29(2), 202-216.

Euripides. (2013). Euripides V (M. Griffith, G. Most, D. Grene, & R. Lattimore, Ed. and Trans.). Chicago, IL: 37

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University of Chicago Press.

Freud, S. (1955). Miss Lucy R, case histories from studies on hysteria. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 2, pp.106-124). London, England: Hogarth Press.

(Original work published 1893) Freud, S. (1959). The question of lay analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 20, pp. 177258). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1926) Freud, S. (1966). Hysteria. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 1, pp.37-59). London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1888) King, H. (2002). Bound to bleed: Artemis and Greek women. In L. McClure (Ed.), Sexuality and gender in the classical world (p.77-102). Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. King, H. (2004). The disease of virgins: Green sickness, chlorosis and the problems of puberty. London, England: Routledge.

Morel, G. (2019). The law of the mother: An essay on the sexual sinthome (L. Watson, Trans.). London, England: Routledge. (Original work published 2008)

Boy George, 1995

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Marie Brown is a clinical psychologist and Adjunct (Associate) Professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn.

Marilyn Charles is a practicing psychoanalyst and staff psychologist at the Austen Riggs Center. She has published over 90 articles and book chapters and five books.

Steven J. Ellman has published more than 70 papers in psychoanalysis, sleep and dreams, the neurophysiology of motivation, and several books. He is Clinical Professor at New York University’s Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and is a member of the IPA and was previously on the Executive Council of the IPA.

Patricia Gherovici is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. She is co-founder and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Group and Associate Faculty, Psychoanalytic Studies Minor, University of Pennsylvania (PSYS), Honorary Member at IPTAR the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City, and Founding Member of Das Unbehagen.

Oren Gozlan is a clinical psychologist and a psychoanalyst in private practice and professor and director of clinical training at the Adler Graduate School in Toronto.

Loryn Hatch is a clinician in private practice in New York City.

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SPRING 2020

Dany Nobus is a psychoanalyst in London on the faculty of Brunel University, chair of the Freud Museum, and author of Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology.

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She teaches at Eugene Lang College at The New School and supervises doctoral students at The City University of New York.