Politicized Passions: A Discussion of Dianne Elise's Essay

There are many things to appreciate in this strong, engaging, and groundbreaking essay. There is a clarity and fresh immediacy to the writing. There is Elise's comfort with politicized and passionate cultural critique applied to psychoanalytic concepts and clinical experiences. As Elise outlines an interrelationship between the constructed representations of female bodily life and the forms and constraints of adult heterosexual sexuality, she interweaves with a light but careful hand the political, the social, and the intrapsychic. Within this two—way traffic of influence and construction, Elise notes that psychoanalytic theory plays a complex role, reflecting cultural misogyny but perhaps, she seems to suggest, psychoanalytic theory also contributes to cultural misogyny; and to the particularly acute constrictions in women's lives. I hope that is what she is suggesting. I would certainly read the evidence she marshals from studies in sexual behavior as well as psychoanalytic theory in just such a specifically political way. Psychoanalysis, in concert with other theories of human activity, is one site that exerts subtle but powerful normalizing pressures on cultures and on individuals. And psychoanalysis is itself a practical activity stained and fired with the preoccupations and passions of the culture(s) in which it has emerged. Elise's work reminds me that we can trace many complex lines of mutual, interactive influence on theory, on theory makers, on women in their sexual relationships and experiences and in the deepest conscious and unconscious fantasies about the female body.