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Jill Gentile's ambitious and expansive work engages the two central questions of our time in the field of psychoanalysis. What is the relationship between clinical psychoanalysis and the political realm? – in this case, between psychoanalysis and democracy in the US. And how do we understand and undo the exclusion of the Other, here, the feminine Other, at the heart of both?
If some contemporary psychoanalytic discussions of gender risk abstraction, the loss of the material, the physical, as Rosemary Balsam warns, others risk conflating the material, the body, the morphology of the body, with gender and gender-inflected psychic experience. Gentile's call to explicitly name the vagina and the conflation of terms in her discussion begs the question of whether “woman” and “the feminine” begin to accrue meanings that are limiting or even dangerous. And whether democratic relations as she draws them out simply reify heterosexual complementarity and heterosexual union as the ultimate aim.
For Gentile, US democracy and psychoanalysis as discovered by Freud are intimately bound. And hope for ethical democratic relations, both interpersonally and in the polis, require the naming of the feminine, the vagina, which she argues is the founding exclusion in both. Gentile artfully connects the fundamental rule of free association in the practice of psychoanalysis and the foundational condition of free speech in a democracy, adding that democracy in the US and Freud's psychoanalysis were both conceived as a means of liberating people from repressive forces. Freedom in both exists in a “space between”, a metaphoric territory for open encounter. This third space is marked by limit on one side and absolute freedom on the other, conditions that make this space for encounter possible. The key to opening and ensuring this potential space is the naming of the vagina and what Gentile calls feminine law.
Gentile parallels the exclusion of “the woman” in Freud's psychoanalysis and US democracy,