Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis by Benjamin Jessica

Author:Benjamin, Jessica [Benjamin, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-10-30T23:00:00+00:00

1 These remarks were organized for a comment on a paper by Leon Hoffman (1996) contending that Freud’s inability to recognize woman’s subjectivity was at the heart of his problematic assumptions about femininity. Hoffman defined subjectivity as the capacity to posit the self as the independent agent who determines or controls thoughts and actions. To integrate woman’s subjectivity would, Hoffman contended, extend to women aspects of psychic life that received short shrift in Freud’s thinking about femininity, e.g. aggression and sexual desire and above all entitlement to the active position.

2 Notice that this manner in which the girl’s passivity evolves in the “Femininity” essay follows the same movement as in Freud’s (1915a) elucidation of sadomasochism in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” though in reverse—there, a primary sadism, aggression actually, is turned inward to masochism, and then back outward to intentional sadism. Here a primary passivity at the hands of the mother is turned around to an active position to do to self or other what was done to her, and then once again reverts to passivity in rela-tion to the father.

3 Chodorow (1994) rightly cites this passage to illustrate the difference be-tween gender and sexual object choice, a difference Mitchell (1991) disputes. Precisely this conflation of object choice with masculine or feminine identifications is what Chodorow overturned, by showing that preoedipal differences precede oedipal, heterosexual object choice. But, of course, the point is that Freud cannot hold to this position; when he seeks his explanation for the girl’s femininity he lapses into a conflation of it with her heterosexual orientation. Again, we must ask, is it because of his strenuous refusal to see her identification with mother as feminine?

4 In my earlier work, I also stressed this disidentification, although I later came to note that it is an oedipal phenomenon and, as Fast (1984) emphasized, preceded by a very strong identification with the mother and her reproductive capacities. Chodorow, I think, assumes too readily that this identification with mother is usually completely suppressed by paternal, masculine orientation rather than anchoring the boy’s ability to mother in his over-inclusive identification with mother that can persist alongside the oedipal and often does.

5 Brennan (1992) develops an idea of energy exchange in which the subject gains energy by fixing the other in the “feminine” position. The daughter, or occupant of that position receives the father’s “imprint,” the unwanted anx-iety, being used to provide the “living attention” that sustains the self. While this fixing of identity suppresses multiplicity, in Brennan’s view either sex can assume the masculine position.

6 Fast stresses a certain asymmetry, that boys mainly envy reproductive capacities, but I have been struck by clinical and childhood evidence that some males also have fantasies of having a vagina or uterus; in response to lectures on this subject I have been told of men whose unwanted sexual compulsions dissolved as they recovered the fantasy of having a vagina.

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