If Freud invented psychoanalysis as basically psychosexuality in response to the hypocrisy of the morals around sex at the turn of the 20th century, how does contemporary psychoanalysis respond to the hypocrisy of the morals of our times and to the power structures around sex and sexuality today? That is, if it does at all? My sense is that it does not. Psychoanalysis fails to listen attentively and critically from the margins. Moreover, it recoils from questioning and troubling dominant ideologies. Resistance always lies on the side of the analyst or a discipline.
Freud was radical after all, as he claimed that babies have sexuality, heterosexuality is not natural, and that fathers have been sexually seducing/abusing their daughters – not to mention his rather sensuous writing on the erotic, tactile relationship between a mother and an infant. Who would dare to write like this today? Freud disturbed; today's psychoanalysis does not. It does not disturb and more importantly it does not wish to disturb. Questions on sex and the erotic have become rare in the clinic. When they do occur, they are either approached through rigid analytical frameworks of early psychoanalysis that try to explain sexual desire, or they are overshadowed by the dominant discourses on sex and sexual identities that characterise the biopolitics of sex today. In this latter instance, psychoanalysis wants to think of itself as being progressive.
The repressed does not care about how progressive or conservative we are. The repressed, the marginalised, the excluded other disturbs just by being. It is the anomalous par excellence that does not fit neatly into any modern classification/diagnosis, or identity, but comes to question the clear taxonomic distinctions and the notion of identity/sameness itself.
The anomalous does not fit into social or sexual identities. Psychoanalysis is not an anomalous thinking any more and does not disturb any more. I will call it a tamed/domesticated psychoanalysis – a
psychoanalysis that is complicit to the dominant regulative and political discourses that tend to ossify sex and sexuality into identity thinking.
Our human attraction to domestication and identity thinking has clearly much to do with security. Domestication is simpler than wildness, consciousness is simpler than the unconscious: ‘we have to settle for very limited consciousness’ (Bateson, 1973, p. 408). A domesticated analysis that does not speak the strange language of the unconscious but the familiar normative language of society. An analysis that fails to and wants to be a ‘safe space’.
But the unconscious refuses to lie on the familial couch, stay still, immobilised, interpellated, interpreted … instead it longs to roam free, run wild, seek its own lines of flight.
The unconscious speaks in foreign tongues. It provokes, challenges, disturbs. It does not fit into the canonisation of grammar and syntax, it refutes the patriarchal symbolic and the neoliberal cultural images of normality. The unconscious is a-social, a-human, generative and symptomatic, and its sickness denotes a superior health (in a Nietzschean way). It sounds more like the laugh of the Medusa refuting civilising processes of colonial humanisation. The unconscious is multiple and rhizomatic, it is expansive not reductive, it produces conflict, not consent nor submission.
Processes of normalising and normativising conscious life led to the disappearance of the Other, essentially the disappearance of the unconscious, as the latter introduces otherness, radical difference, and heterogeneity. Instead of the face of the ‘civilised’ analyst that reproduces sameness through mirroring and doubling – what we call empathy today or empathic mirroring – I propose the image of the wild analyst who speaks in foreign tongues and practises a psychoanalysis that moves towards the mystery of life, of death, and essentially the mystery of love.
Oscar Wilde writes: ‘The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death’ (Mann, 2002, p. 8).
Note that I started with sex and am now moving towards love, as sex has become an exhausted modern category. Sex and sexuality have been investigated, interrogated, studied, scrutinised, defined, classified,
reclassified, analysed, policed, repressed, liberated constantly for the past 200 years. We need to get out of the discursive field of sex, find an escape route, shift the framework. I am taking the path of love as my escape route.
So what about the mystery of love? How much of a mystery is love?
I find myself interrupting the client's talk which is usually about their relationships or dating experiences and I ask: what about love, or being in love, or falling in love? Often the client will look back at me surprised and when love is confirmed it is almost always associated with security, familiarity, familialism; more the passive need ‘to be loved’ than the active longing ‘to love’. As a lesbian feminist scholar, I recall with some nostalgia the radical queer politics of the 1960s and 1970s that invested in the radicality of desire and passion as the catalyst for social change and a resistance against oppressive institutions of conjugality and governmentality – a desire that did not wish only for its liberation but its transmutation into ‘practices of freedom’ that could determine ‘what is sexual pleasure and what are our erotic, loving, passionate relationships with others’ (Bernauer & Rasmussen, 1988, p. 3).
Psychoanalysis listens to what is spoken, while at the same time encouraging another way of speaking; it introduces a different language. How else can one reach the unconscious or at least come closer to it? What we bring as worthy to talk about in the session is indicative of how we are shaped discursively, socially and culturally. How come we never hear about the kiss, the embrace, affection, the ecstasy of the fall, the small death in orgasm, the more secret experiences of the soul? Instead we hear about love as contract or transaction; control and dominance; boundaries and sex; the fear of rejection and the need for safety; about monogamy and polyamory. All in all, life and love have turned into an administrative task and there is no space in our clinic for the most intimate, most personal, most secretive passions of the soul. Do we encourage it? Do we direct the treatment towards unsettling questions of passion, of longing, of love? Or do we promote a notion of life as a neoliberal project of achieving goals and managing them efficiently? What is our lexicon? After all, psychoanalysis is an art more than a science, and,
much like a song, a film, a novel or a poem, it is more concerned with deep human affairs than with the rules of intimacy and discourses on sex. Psychoanalysis turns its eyes to the small hours of the dawn, when love, loneliness, eroticism and insomnia strike.
But what's love got to do with it? With psychoanalysis? I cannot and do not wish to address fully such a broad question, but I will suggest in this first part of the paper that love is the route for re-wilding psychoanalysis, while in the second part I will argue for a specifically female Eros beyond the Phallus, which wishes to disrupt the necrophiliac sexual imaginary of patriarchy.
What is Love? As Tennessee Williams remarked, it is ‘another four-letter word’ (Williams, , p. 128).
As Lothane argues, in his article titled ‘The Feud between Freud and Ferenczi over love’, love is one of the most misunderstood words in life and in psychoanalysis, in health and disease, for a long time an unmentionable taboo among psychoanalysts.
Thus the Vocabulaire of Laplanche and Pontalis contains only the entry ‘Libido,‘ as does the original Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts published by the American Psychoanalytic Association . That lack was corrected in the enlarged 1990 edition of the Glossary but, surprisingly, it refers to no words on love by Freud; quite expectedly, it is silent about the contribution of another unsung analyst that devoted his attention to the subject of love, Theodor Reik (, ).
In Freud's writings we can find several shifts in his conception of love. While love as transference in the analytic process was initially perceived as hindrance and resistance in the beginning but the promise of cure later, it then came to hold the key for cure. Love for Freud was linked to pleasure and the pleasure principle (1915) – a love that came to be defined predominantly as genital love associated with sexual drives and desires. I will come back to this point in the second part of the essay.
Freud also remarks on a rather inevitable narcissistic aspect of love if we want to protect the ego from being drained. Love as the ‘ “overvaluation” and idealisation of the loved object: the object we love has qualities to which we aspire. The ego enriches itself with the properties of the object’ (Mann, 2002, p. 9).
Similarly, Lacan takes a linguistic turn on Freud and thus shifts his focus from drive to desire. For Lacan, desire is the desire of the other – the other as an object of desire, the other as language and the plane of meaning-making, as well as the other within oneself that decentres the subject, that is, the unconscious. Central to the idea of desire is the objet petit a as the notion of lack/absence (of the breast). In his Seminars (1972–73), Lacan reminded his students of his belief that the essence of love is narcissistic (echoing Freud), and nurtures itself on its dissatisfied nature, not unlike the unsatisfactory limitation for reaching the climax of sexual excitation.
Then there is Ferenczi's love within the therapeutic alliance perceived as the cure for traumatised patients – a paternal love as he called it to dismiss the sexual element. For Klein, love is reparation and derives from guilt. Love is never pure but always in co-existence with hate. Moreover, love in psychoanalysis is seen as the opposite of mourning or as the wish to control or master the object as a possession; love as possession through projective identification, etc. The list could go on but I will pause. Not because I have managed to map in any meaningful or detailed way love in psychoanalysis but because reading or searching for love in psychoanalysis leaves me deeply dissatisfied.
Is all love a neurotic repetition of infantile love? Is the narcissistic type of love the cure? Once again, does psychoanalysis describe or prescribe?
In his book Love and its Vicissitudes, André Green raises the questions: ‘Can infantile love be usefully taken as a model in understanding adult love? Should we understand love by referring to its earliest and most primitive roots, or should we accept to take our starting point from the experience of the adult?’ (Green & Kohon, 2005, p. 6). He continues to remark: ‘As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, there are very few
books interested in trying to explore the difference between love during childhood and the love of the mature individual' (Green & Kohon, 2005, p. 12).
Love, for British psychoanalysis – dominated by the object relations school – is tied to dependency and aggression expressed in cannibalistic impulses; a guilty love which inevitably vacillates between anxiety–responsibility–protectiveness, sadness and aggression, a love that throws the goodness of the lover and that of the beloved in doubt in the name of preservation of the ego. An egological love then, where the other is the object. It may not be accidental that psychoanalysis calls the other an ‘object’ and relations with others ‘object relations’. The word ‘object’ connotes a thing and predisposes one to adopt a depersonalised view of, and a narcissistic relation to others; a relation that centres on ‘my’ needs and how the other meets them or not. The narcissistic view of relationships emerges in the psychoanalytic vocabulary of ‘bad objects’, ‘part-objects’, ‘need-satisfying objects’ and ‘self-objects’. It is not surprising that psychoanalysis lacks a nuanced and compelling account of emotional intimacy among egalitarian subjects (Rubin, 1996).
How could there be an adequate account of intimacy when the other is seen mostly in terms of what it does for the self, Rubin asks in Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Toward an Integration. Similarly, the decentred Lacanian subject who desires as a response to lack perfectly into the hyperreal, consumerist, individualist culture of (post-) capitalism; a vacuous, dissatisfied self; a simulacra that is caught in a chain of signifiers.
Therefore, psychoanalysis describes but also prescribes and reproduces a culture of love that is infantilised and infantilising narcissistic – a love, essentially an egological love that refuses to leave the parental bedroom of Oedipus. A love that refuses to grow up. Or in its assumed adult form, a love devoid of passion, a puritanical love as André Green suggests. He writes:
Even in adult love, the choice of the reference model is rarely predicated on passion but more on stability, constancy and psychic equilibrium. In other words, once again tradition and puritanism
Page 18have won the battle against Freud's conception, too hard to accept with its final postulation opposing love to destructiveness.
What are then psychoanalysis's wild thoughts? Where are they to be found? It is in the early notion of love transference (not as childhood regression and reparation which is the prevalent understanding) but as movement towards the fire of the soul, or towards the aliveness of the patient and the analyst alike. A love transference that points to something beyond the sexual, what Lothane calls a love writ large: ‘to that fire within, the ardent and passionate emotions, that make life worth living. For these also animated the first psychoanalysts, in their quest of truth and their labors of love, on behalf of their patients and pupils, and themselves‘ (Lothane, 1988, p. 27).
Does our clinical practice today point to that fire within the analyst and the patient alike? Are we motivated by the passionate emotions that make life worth living in our quest for truth? Is the analytic journey a rediscovering of this fire within or does it just aim at turning neurotic misery into ‘common unhappiness’ as Freud proclaimed?
Does love lead to the deepest insights encouraging the mind to grow and understand the language of the soul, or is love totally blind with mystifying myopia?
Etymologically, the word mystery is derived from the Greek verb myein, ‘to close’ the lips and eyes, to keep the eyes and the mouth shut; in other words to keep something as a secret. Mysteries in ancient Greece were rituals of initiations whose content had to remain a secret, unspoken under penalty of death. The mystic experience of the initiated was the experience of ‘seeing the unseen’ and ‘speaking the unspoken’, and had to be kept private, a secret. It could not be put into words.
Love under psychoanalytic investigation ceases to be a mystery: it is interpreted, explained, analysed, demystified, dissected – it regresses to infantile love. But most philosophers, artists, and poets argue that love just won't be pinned down in words. '[W]ords are insufficient to describe the experience. In fact, most of the time words do the opposite: they
obscure it, dissect it, and kill it,’ Erich Fromm writes. ‘Poetry, music, and other forms of art are by far the best suited media for describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins that are taken for adequate representations of human experience’ ([1970], 2010, p. 12).
Those who try to explain love have never been in love.
But ‘love is missing in the hypersexualised universe of the West’, writes Horvart (2016, p. 1), and that is reflected in our sessions: no mention of love and passion in our clinical encounters (with few exceptions). Badiou, in his book In Praise for Love, begins by commenting on posters found all over Paris for an internet dating site that promotes a safety-first concept of love devoid of risk – no raptures nor any casualties – with slogans like ‘Be in love without falling in love!’ ‘Get perfect love without suffering!’
Badiou writes:
It is love comprehensively insured against all risks: you will have love, but will have assessed the prospective relationship so thoroughly, will have selected your partner so carefully by searching online – by obtaining, of course, a photo, details of his or her tastes, date of birth, horoscope sign, etc. – and putting it all in the mix you can tell yourself: ‘This is a risk-free option!‘
This is a neoliberal love that promises safety and mutual benefits.
The second threat love faces, according to Badiou, is to deny that love is at all important. The counterpoint to the safety threat, he argues, ‘is the idea that love is only a variant of rampant hedonism and the wide range of possible enjoyment’ (Badiou, 2012, p. 8). I might add, love is seen as being conspicuously naïve in our times, if not mad and pathological.
In a similar spirit, in The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han bears witness to how love – in the strong sense that a long historical tradition has granted it – is threatened. He states the end of love has been announced many times, and traces it back to expanding technologies of choice (an
overabundance of choice) as well as the rationalisation of love. However, he claims what really corrodes love is the erosion of the Other and the narcissification of the Self:
This erosion is occurring in all spheres of life; its corollary is the mounting narcissification of the Self […] Eros concerns the Other in the strong sense, namely, what cannot be encompassed by the regime of the ego. Therefore, in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist. Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other. It is not by chance that Socrates the lover is called atopos. The Other, whom I desire and who fascinates me, is placeless.
How different that sounds to the psychoanalytic confinement of love into the parental bedroom.
Philosophers and mystics since antiquity have discussed love a great deal and always aligned it to a quest for truth, with philosophy par excellence being the love for truth. What kind of truth do we reach in love, if we take the risk of falling into love with all the vertigo a fall entails:
This truth is quite simply the truth about Two: the truth that derives from difference as such. And I think that love – what I call the ‘Two scene’ – is this experience. Love contains an initial element that separates, dislocates and differentiates. You have Two. Love involves Two.
What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one?
Further, Badiou argues that the declaration of love marks the transition from chance – two strangers meet randomly – to destiny; that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright. This
feeling that it was preordained – that they were destined to be together – that only the lovers can experience.
Rollo May (1981) states that destiny means ‘to ordain, to devote, to consecrate’ and is connected to the word destination, suggesting that destiny includes both a direction and a plan, and also the life command to arrive/to reach the destination. A ‘Here I am at last!‘ And the journey was neither easy nor risk free. That's what life is after all. A soul journey during which we must try to figure something out for ourselves – Freud called it psychosexual development.
In 1913, Jung renounced his prior conceptual framework as ‘a dead system’. He understood that to know the soul, he had to open a direct dialogue with its mystery, itself in itself. It was in the midst of love that he confronted his inner world and met his soul and his demons (Owens, 2015).
Passionate adult love is a terrible thing to waste or erase. A drying up of the soul, the extinguishing of the fire within. But also a failure to meet the Other, to relate in difference and to face our demons. Wild psychoanalysis invites us to become ‘interested in what lies at the origin of eroticism, desire. What you can't, and probably shouldn't, appease with sex’ (Duras, 1986).
Supposing truth is a woman – what then? […] Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons.
Male Eros is Thanatos in disguise.
Sex is Thanatos.
Male Eros is sex in disguise.
Eros is not Sex.
If deep down you really loved me, wouldn't you accept the truth?
Sex is death, Eros acts as a detour to death. Sexual pleasure is release: it strives to reach a state of non-tension, a state of complete repose … that is, death. Freud came to see later how the pleasure principle does not oppose death but comes to serve it. Sexual orgasm as the little death. Sex aims at gratification, relaxation. Sex is lazy, needy, narcissistic, morbid. Sex … a man's game that does not like uncertainty, it secures, fixes, ties, attaches. Sex wants its objects, its toys, it wants approval, it knows its repertoire, it is teleological, predictable, repetitive … so that it feels nothing.
Eros, on the other hand, feels everything. Eros is beyond gratification, beyond the pleasure principle. Eros is not pleasurable, it is unsettling. Eros is longing, it's restless, uncomfortable. Eros is forever reaching out, pushing forward, it seeks to expand, it is fascinated by the ‘outlander’, the Other. Eros flaps its wings, creates butterflies in the stomach, raises adrenaline, increases heart rate, produces e/motion: the opposite of stasis/death. Eros leaps through social barriers, does not know social categories or conventions. There is no game to play, only uncharted landscapes to explore. Eros is a ‘with’ and a ‘to’: participation with, in dialogue with, a commitment to. It is relational, directional and intentional, towards the Other. An ‘I love to You’. It seeks truth and crosses the distance. When in love everything comes alive, everything feels fresh and new with an almost virginal quality – it feels as if it is the first time.
Historically, it is men that have spoken about Eros, Sex and Love. But then again, historically it is only men that spoke … about everything: the self, the world, nature, the Other, God, Love, Desire, Being. You name it. Who were they speaking to? No one, other than themselves. A woman could be, at best, a muse, not an interlocutor. The whole tradition of philosophy and psychoanalysis is homosocial and develops around the law of sameness, where everything is defined through men. A monosexual or phallologocentric culture that eradicates the other, the feminine other par excellence, that is mutilated, castrated, lacking.
Phallocentrism is a term first used by the Freudian psychoanalyst Ernest Jones in 1927 to focus his disagreement with Freud's theory of female sexual identity as being marked by the lack of the penis, a sense, in other words, of their castration. This theory evidently deprives
females of any positive sense of their own sexual organs and was seen by Jones as an unconscious projection by male psychoanalysts of their own neurotic fears about the female body. Lacanian analysis repeats with variations Freud's obsession with the phallus and its lack, and was charged with phallocentrism by feminist critics, particularly Luce Irigaray in her Speculum of the Other Woman . Phallologocentrism, on the other hand, is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning or social relations. Phallologocentrism is thus the discursive and symbolic system of patriarchy. The Symbolic includes all of language as well as non-linguistic forms such as music, art and ritual, and in fact can be used to designate the broad conceptual patterns of civilisation. Moreover, the Symbolic is structured into socially important discourses such as those of law, science, economics and religion.
A lineage of philosophers, poets, writers, artists, theologians, psychoanalysts, anarchists have been telling us what love is, even though love has been traditionally seen as the domain of women and a specifically female task. We have been seduced by the phallic fantasies, male speculations, projections of men about Love, Sex and Eros. It has been their intellectual domain, their discourse, their fantasy, their wish, their game. A tool of domination and control. And it is through the ‘business of love and sex’ that women have served and sustained patriarchy; it is in the bedroom that feminism has failed.1 For what makes a woman is a specific social and sexual relation to man. ‘It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary […] as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men’ (Wittig, 1992, p. 2)
Within phallologocentrism the woman is othered, but she does not constitute the Other. Her sex is othered, subjugated, used, defined, and when it is perceived as mysterious or enigmatic, it means she is malleable, she can be moulded, or she is just a junkyard of male projections. Woman as the not-Man lacks her own definition.
The problem of difference/otherness begins with the woman. What or who could she be? How do we become other than this other that
history has designated us to be? Without systematising otherness, without construing it in terms of the totalising male discourse? But then how can a woman speak, or indeed enter the symbolic at all? And what sort of cataclysm would occur if women did speak? ‘When she speaks as an “I” it is never clear that she speaks (of or as) herself. She speaks in a mode of masquerade, in imitation of the masculine, phallic subject. Her “I”, then, ambiguously signifies her position as a (pale reflection of the) masculine subject; or it refers to a “you”, the (linguistic) counterpart of the masculine’ (Grosz, 1992, p. 72).
There cannot be real change without the destruction of the existing categories and the myths that serve them – primarily, the foundational myth of heterosexuality that sustains patriarchy. We cannot experience love in a society based on domination. Sexual liberation has not been the answer; it just made more women available to men. Sex and sexuality have been commodified and/or weaponised by both parties and the erotic has dissipated. We cannot love when we have lost our souls, when we speak with severed tongues, muted voices, when we have been estranged from our own bodies, raped, abused, used, alienated from what is most raw, most essential in us: our wildness, our life force, our erotic power.
We should stop lying to ourselves. For the master's tools will never take down the master's house. If anyone has given Eros poison to drink, it has been us. From being a powerful daimonic, creative force, Eros has deteriorated. Since the Hellenistic era and throughout Christianity, Eros has been made to be increasingly younger, has deteriorated to a banal playboy, then to an angelic child (Cupid), then to an infant. Without passion Eros is banal, insipid, childish, or it is confused with the pornographic.
But Eros is a daimon, an old female daimon with a diabolic energy. Diabolos' etymology comes from the verb ‘diabollein’ which means to ‘tear apart’. The daimonic female Eros has appeared with many names: Aphrodite, Venus, Inana, Lilith, Hathor, Isis, Hedone, Aurora, the Amazons, Sappho, Artemis … she tears apart the patriarchal construct of womanhood, she refuses and demolishes the political, economic, ideological power of a wo/man; she delivers with her arrow a disruption,
a cut on phallologocentrism. The woman as a new category will emerge out of these cuts and cracks. The newly born woman is not born from the head of Zeus, neither from the rib of Adam, nor from the semen of Psychoanalysis. The newly born woman is an immaculate conception, an erotic conception beyond the phallus. She comes out of the two lips that will not be separated any more by phallic penetration. Male authority can no longer maintain its hold.
Truth is a woman, a female noun.
In Greek ‘Alethea’ means against lethe/oblivion. Truth is a call to re-member, re-call, bring back what is most hidden/repressed in us, a different kind of knowing, a profound intuition. ‘I wanted to return to those natural matters which constitute the origin of our bodies, of our life, of our environment, the flesh of our passions. I was obeying a profound intuition, necessary and obscure, even when it was shared with other thoughts’ (Irigaray & Marder, 2016, p. 7).
Time to leave the bedroom, time to stop feeling forced to repeat, to echo, to please. Time to speak with our own voices. Time to leave the familiar, leave the family. Time to wake up to our own erotic feeling as a vehicle by which we will discover our own set of authentic values; we will discover our bodies. It is time to stop ossifying our dreams and desires. And to stop being scared when we are attracted by something other than their laws, their rules.
Yes, there is Eros beyond the Phallus.Love is not a common noun,It is substantive,Of feminine gender,A singular number.Love is a ‘she’.She is beautiful. She is laughing.‘Let the best of herself be given to woman by another woman‘
‘In actuality, those of us who were sleeping with men, choosing them as primary partners, were losing the war in the bedroom. Men celebrated our sexual liberation—our willingness to freely give and enjoy blow jobs and group sex, our willingness to experiment with anal penetration—but ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will’ (hooks, 2016, p. 38).