Castration and Intolerance1

Anatomy is destiny, said Freud; but does it have to be so? It is in the nature of social interaction that difference so easily becomes opposition and invites the urge to oppress. People become trapped in those social and gender roles, and entrapping of each other. In this panel, the speakers looked at the internal processes and mechanisms that complement the social attitudes, and which in turn respond to them. Psychoanalysis can nuance these life problems of reality and point to hidden aspects not touched by the more rational and perhaps simplistic political processes.

The first speaker, Marilyn Charles (North America), considered how gendered knowledge inhibits thought and the hegemony of the voice of authority. Reiterating Freud's question ‘what does a woman want?’ she uses her own experiences of marginalization as a way of considering how prejudice, intolerance, and stigma serve the regressive forces in groups that can literally cause us to ‘lose our minds’ - to not know what we thought we knew. This type of opposition to thinking exacerbates what LaCapra (1999) refers to as a ‘structural trauma’ that marks a deficit within the social fabric. LaCapra suggests that confusion between structural and individual trauma invites projection of badness onto the other and inhibits the type of mindful action that might invite more constructive social practice.

Charles (in press) discussed ways in which the gendering of knowledge and power invites ongoing structural trauma, noting Felman's (1993) argument regarding the difference between men and women such that the woman as subject inevitably adds something to the conversation in a way that cannot be superseded by the male voice. Without the voice of an Other, potentially useful information can be trivialized and discarded without reflection or consideration, and the voice of authority easily becomes a conjectured projection that cannot be located or disconfirmed or elaborated upon in actual discourse. She then discussed a cas