The Immediate is not Unmediated: Commentary on Paper by Annie Sweetnam

Many Psychoanalytic Thinkers, Among Them Annie Sweetnam, are currently developing ways to integrate the critique of gender with contemporary clinical theory. Various approaches are taken. Jessica Benjamin (1988), for example, works with gender and intersubjectivity; Adrienne Harris (n.d.) works with gender and psycholinguistics. In focusing on the postmodernist wing of this critique, Sweetnam (1996) has followed Thomas Ogden's theory of psychological experience. Key to psychic structure and clinical process, the three psychological positions he proposes function, in Sweetnam's interpretation, as a screen through which gender passes to assume shape, substance, and meaning. Having argued that gender is constructed and fluid, she now adds sexuality to the discursive stew and posits a stopping point, a point of reference: “the gendered body.” The substantial, material body, she quite rightly contends, must make us stop and think, especially when it comes to the ways corporeality is sensed, for psychic reality is after all the meat and potatoes, not to mention the bread and butter, of our daily clinical lives. In the matter of sexuality, she is saying, we need to think about felt experience as contoured by the body and as it lives through gender. To that end, she models a new concept on Ogden's analytic third: the erotic third. In the course of considering this contribution to psychoanalytic gender theory, I will have occasion to glance at the other, wide-ranging clinical and theoretical issues on which this protean topic inevitably touches.

On both theoretical and clinical counts, this interest in recovering the subjectivized body is timely. Theoreticians have come to recognize a glaring aporia on the deconstructionist page. I shall quote Roger