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Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire brings together an unlikely pair: the private and intimate domain of psychoanalysis; and the public and shared space of democracy. Jill Gentile, writing with the editorial assistance of Michael Macrone, shows what is common to both domains, namely speech, but also what both lack: a metaphor or imaginary of feminine space, “a space for curiosity, desire, creation” (p. 242). Drawing on the public pronouncements of the Supreme Court as well as private confessions in the clinic, this book helps outline how this space is vital in both our private and public lives.
An arresting moment in Feminine Law is Gentile’s account of what she calls her patients’ “baggage claim dreams,” dreams in which one finds oneself “having to wrest ‘mine’ from the onslaught of ‘theirs.’” One patient had a recurring dream
in which she was at a baggage claim, besieged by other people’s luggage, as she waited to reclaim her own. During the wait she experienced a quality of despair and mounting desperation, until she glimpsed or (in some versions of the dream) wrested her luggage free from the others toppled upon it. (p. 187)
Another dreamt that toxic waste had been dumped in her yard and she was riven with anxiety over how to contain and expunge it. Such dreams, Gentile explains, reflect “the colonizing weight of the signifying baggage of others (parents, teachers, peers, society) that deadens the individual’s own experience of aliveness and agential, singular expression” (pp. 187–8). The problems here are twofold: the first is that others’ desires or demands are running roughshod over ours and the second is that there is no space for the dreamer to cultivate or experience her own desire. The toxic waste dream culminated with the dreamer packaging it all up and delivering it back to the sender, but upon waking she was soon overcome with a sense of being in conflict with others.
The patient is damned either way: feeling toppled upon and smothere