What Lacan Said About Women by Colette Soler

Author:Colette Soler [Soler, Colette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

TODAY AND TOMORROW

What is happening, then, specifically for the hysterical subject? As I have said, hysteria and femininity are distinguished and even opposed. If they are sometimes confused, it is because both of them are mediated by the Other. Yet where woman exercises this mediation in order to realize herself as a symptom, the hysteric uses the desire of the Other and identifies with its lack.

It happens that, in its current state, our civilization has become the accomplice of every possible identification with masculine possession. Thanks to the resources of metonymy, a career is open to everyone, to our modern hysterics as well as to others; they don’t lack talent for it, and we can expect that they will make a lot of noise about it, since discretion is not their strong point. Nevertheless, this offer leads in a direction that is the contrary of her desire, as analysis in all of its forms attests: unlike what is sometimes imagined, the more the hysterical woman succeeds in her phallic conquest, the less she can get off on it and the greater grows her feeling of disappropriation. Karen Horney saw this very well. An hysteric can certainly take part in the various competitions that are offered to her, but as soon as she succeeds in proving herself, her profit disappears. It is not jouissance that is a necessary part of her true question. This question is at play elsewhere, in the closed field, as Lacan says, of the sexual relation [relation]. It is only here, indeed, that sexual difference, repressed everywhere by the regime of unisex, remains impossible to eliminate.

The hysteric’s strategy is remarkable at this level, for she is very far from seeking her jouissance as woman in the way that Charcot imagined. She exalts femininity in the form of the other woman, not in order to be feminine but rather to bring into existence the Woman whom man lacks. The hysteric is an activist for what does not exist! The result of this is clear: in her sexual relation with a man, the man whom she loves—for she loves men, that is, she is hommosexual with two m’s, as Lacan writes the word—what is most precious to her is the Other’s castration. Without this castration, the agalma of her partner, femininity, would be nothing. I could almost say that in this field, she makes the unisex of castration reign—but this is because she is only interested in the object that is its correlate and that she exalts.

To the hysteric, who is a being composed of a lack in being (manque à être), contemporary discourse offers conquests based on possession. We can see how great the misunderstanding is! In this respect, psychoanalysis is really what was necessary for the hysteric, since its mechanism is willing to recognize the enigma of sex and to take responsibility for it. The difference between psychoanalysis and Charcot is enormous. The latter imagined, a bit stupidly, that what the hysteric needed was an artisan of sex.

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