‘Wildlife and the Wild Woman’, claims Clarissa Pinkola Estés (2002: 1), ‘are both endangered species’, but perhaps it depends on who is doing the defining. The Oxford English Dictionary (oed.com), says that to be wild is simply ‘living in a state of nature’. For Freud the fundamental nature of a woman involves ‘an envy for the penis – a positive striving to possess a male genital’ (Freud 1937: 253), but he strongly cautions against ‘wild psychoanalysis’ (1910), warning against dabblers and snake-oil merchants who apply a little knowledge in cavalier and thoughtless ways, taking half an idea and turning it into something concretely ineffectual, without proper training or technique. But misogyny is exactly that: confusing half an idea with a woman. Wild Thoughts: For a Feminist Psychoanalysis-to-Come, held at Birkbeck University in June 2024, was an invitation to allow thinking beyond ‘discourse’ that ‘hardens up and closes off’ (Irigaray 2002: 5). For two days papers and panel discussion encouraged thinking outside the orthodox in fluid and original ways, and the selection of papers reproduced here, a snapshot of the richness of the event, reflect that. We have deliberately chosen not to tame or shoehorn some of the freer presentations out of their more natural state into conventional journalese. In that spirit, this issue's editorial comes in three voices: we include an editorial note from Andie Newman, who headed up the conference's feminist organising collective, and the original position statement for Wild Thoughts.
In her paper ‘What's Love Got To Do With It?‘, Chrysanthi Nigianni, invites us to consider love – in more complex and mysterious senses than just sex and sexuality – in ways that are creative, original, attentive to the anomalous and marginal (in other words, psychoanalytic in the best sense) rather than simply in terms of well-thumbed analytical theories or biopolitically correct vocabulary. By unravelling some of the threads of analytic convention and patriarchy, she begins to explore the possibility that following ‘love‘, in the complexity of its meanings, might be the route to rewilding a tamed psychoanalysis. Can psychoanalysis, in its
individualist, potentially narcissistic interest in the discovery of the self, find a way to express the mysteries of love beyond the phallologocentrism of neoliberal patriarchy?
A certain phallologocentrism in the history of psychoanalysis is put into sharper focus in Michaela Chamberlain's ‘The Intrinsic Misogyny of Psychoanalysis’, in which the question of the centrality of the phallus (somatically, psychologically, linguistically and metaphorically) in the psychoanalytic articulation of women's experiences is acknowledged and considered. If psychoanalysis makes so little space for women in its theories, and in its organisational and political hierarchies, what does it mean to speak of a feminist psychoanalysis, and what does the existence of this question tell us about misogyny in the profession as a whole? Despite being founded on the idea that the ego is not master in its own house, psychoanalysis can be reluctant to analyse its own institutions.
From misogyny to ‘misogynies’. In her paper ‘Misogyny and Feminism’, Liz Guild points out that to speak of misogyny in the singular risks accepting the brutality of the binary categories it aims to deconstruct. Between the theoretical tendency to see an individual woman as generic ‘woman’, confused and conflated with a generic (idealised/denigrated) mother, there is little room to think creatively or in terms of sexuality. ‘When women, plural, in all their differences and diversity, are reduced to a fixed and generic woman, who in turn is tacitly reduced to mother, it remains more difficult to analyse hostilities towards women or the feminine.’ The cul-de-sacs of generic thinking are deftly explored through a discussion of Winnicott's complex analytic relationship with Marion Milner and the internalised misogyny reflected in responses to Rachel Cusk's memoir, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother.
The misogyny of Freud, specifically as expressed in Civilization and Its Discontents, is considered in Anouchka Grose's paper ‘I Love Freud but …’ There is much to butt against in Freud's declaration that ‘woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilisation and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it’, not least, she points out, in a dismantling of this assumptive theorisation, because there might be a
confusion of the symptom with the underlying sickness, requiring a myth or a patriarchal cover story to frame unexamined internalised misogyny and matricide.
A different frame is expressed by film-maker Ruth Novaczek in her paper ‘Hiding/Untitled’, where she considers questions around (her) history and identity expressed in intersectional threads of achronological associations, the inbetween, the hidden and unspoken, in an oblique narrative of layers and spaces and symbols – a narrative of dreaming or ‘freeing intrusive thoughts, repressed ideas from their subterranean spaces’.
Alongside these creative explorations Sitegeist 17 contains several reviews: Eric Harper offers an extended discussion of Ana Minozzo's Anxiety as Vibration: A Psychosocial Cartography . Madhu Nandi discusses Stephen Frosch's paper ‘(In)security’ , and Robert Weiss gives us his thoughts on Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter . Mark Argent considers Juliet Mitchell's Fratriarchy: The Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother , and Tali Artman Partock gives us her assessments of Early Women Psychoanalysts, edited by Klara Naszkowska, as well as Yael Pilowsky Bankirer's Psychoanalytic Explorations of the Masculine and the Maternal: Uncovering the Image of Circumcision in Freud's Works .
In an important event in the history of Sitegeist, since publication of the previous issue, the journal and all its back issues are now accessible on the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (PEP) database, and we would like to use this opportunity to thank and aknowledge all those who have contributed papers, time, as well as critical, editorial, and typesetting skills over the years.
Katia Houghton, with Penelope Allsobrook, Yael Pilowsky Bankirer, and Duncan Harris