On Passivity

‘… to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity.’ (Freud, 1933, p. 115)

‘All sexuality begins with the experience of passivity.’ (Laplanche, 1988, p. 160).

In an article published in 1961, the American psychoanalyst Henry Harper Hart argued that the term passivity is in constant use in psychoanalysis, but it has not been adequately studied (Hart 1961). Have we come any further in understanding this commonly used term? The word certainly permeates the psychoanalytic literature, but it’s deployed in such a variety of ways its precise meanings can become clouded. At one moment, “passivity” might denote the infant’s dependency, another moment, the aim of the drive. It is used loosely to describe observable behaviour (he is a passive, accommodating man) without theoretical meaning, and precisely with respect to psychical structures, such as the impact of castration. It can denote ways of relating, as well as cultural disempowerment – the subjugation, the ‘passivation’ of women or minority people. These are all different levels of reality – albeit ones that may intersect. One of the great controversies around the term is Freud’s famous elision of passivity with femininity, giving rise to enduring feminist, psychoanalytic debates. Freud also wrote that the term readily slips into its opposite: that passivity and activity intertwine. If, as Roy Schafer once wrote, the conceptual confusion in the term passivity makes defining it “formidable if not insuperable” (Schafer 1968, p.173), is it worth having a go?

The IJP Education Section has taken up this challenge, as Ursula Orstendorf, Heinz Weiss, and Lisa Baraitser look at passivity from a range of psychoanalytic angles – from a focus on masochism, to a phenomenological reading, to a contemporary reading and reframing of passivity with respect to gender. Before turning to these papers, this introduction will briefly trace some of the historical accounts of passivity in psychoanalytic thought, touching on (th