‘Introduction I’ by Juliet Mitchell situates Lacan’s work in relation to his overall project within psychoanalytic theory, and then gives an account of the earlier psychoanalytic debate on femininity in the 1920s and 1930s of which these texts are in many ways the direct sequel.
Juliet Mitchell, the author of ‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism’, is (in 1982) a practising psychoanalyst in London. She has lectured widely and written articles and books on literature, women and psychoanalysis
Published in ‘Jacques Lacan & the École Freudienne: Feminine Sexuality’, Edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, Macmillan, 1982 : See Commentaries & Information from ‘Jacques Lacan & the École Freudienne: Feminine Sexuality’ : 1982 : Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Mitchell or Rose or Index of Authors’ texts)
Availability :
Introduction – I : Juliet Mitchell : Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Authors A-Z or authors by date (1982)
Chapter heading, Editor’s Preface and availability given : See Commentaries & Information from ‘Jacques Lacan & the École Freudienne: Feminine Sexuality’ : 1982 : Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Mitchell or Rose or Index of Authors’ texts)
Quote from the ‘Editors’ Preface’ p vii
See www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Other Authors A-Z (Mitchell or Rose)
The articles translated here are a selection put together by us in 1975 from the works of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, and the école freudienne, the school of psychoanalysis which he directed in Paris between 1964 and 1980. They have never appeared together before, and only one has been translated previously into English. In making this selection our objective has been to show the relevance of Lacan’s ideas for the continuing debate on femininity within both psychoanalysis and feminism.
Lacan’s relationship to the psychoanalytic institution has always been controversial; his work became controversial for feminism when, in the 1970s, he focused more intensively on the question of feminine sexuality. In the years prior to his death in September 1981 both these controversies intensified.
The basic premise of Lacan’s work is a questioning of any certainty or authority in notions of psychic and sexual life. There is a connection between this premise and his repeated breaks with psychoanalytic institutions. In January 1980 Lacan unilaterally dissolved the école freudienne in order to stop what he saw as the degradation of his ideas under the weight of his own institution. But this act, like Lacan’s presentation of his work, was a challenge to authority yet at the same time authoritarian and patriarchal. It will be clear to the reader in the texts which follow that Lacan was trapped in the circles of this paradox.
The texts are preceded by an Introduction. In the first part, Juliet Mitchell situates Lacan’s work in relation to his overall project within psychoanalytic theory, and then gives an account of the earlier psychoanalytic debate on femininity in the 1920s and 1930s of which these texts are in many ways the direct sequel. In the second part, Jacqueline Rose describes the conceptual movement of the texts themselves, and the implications of the debate on femininity in and around the work of Lacan. Although each part can be read separately, the Introduction as a whole represents a double engagement expressing our shared sense of the importance of Lacan for psychoanalysis, and of psychoanalysis for feminism. January 1982
References
p3 Outside France his targets were the theories of American dominated ego-psychology, of Melanie Klein and of object-relations analysts, most notably, Balint, Fairburn and Winnicott.
p4-5 “In conformity with its peculiar nature, psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman is – that would be a task it could scarcely perform – but sets about enquiring how she comes into being” (Freud SE XXII p116) See -Lecture XXXIII: ‘Femininity’: 1932 (published 1933), SE XXII p112-135 Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (Femininity (Lecture XXXIII))
p6 It is this process that, to Lacan, lies behind Freud’s statement that ‘We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction’ (Freud SE XI p188-9) See On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (Contributions to the Psychology of Love II) : 1912 : Sigmund Freud, SE XI p177-190 See this site /4 Sigmund Freud (19120101)
P7 At no other point in one’s analytic work does one suffer more from an oppressive feeling that all one’s repeated efforts have been in vain, and from a suspicion that one has been ‘preaching to the winds’, than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis on the ground of its being unrealizable. (Freud, SE XXIII p252) Analysis Terminable & Interminable : 1937c : Sigmund Freud, SE XXIII p209-54. Published, bilingual, at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Homepage (Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Die endliche und die unendliche Analyse))
p8 The arguments on female sexuality are usually referred to as the ‘Freud-Jones debate’. In the presentation that follows I have not adhered to the privileging of Jones’s work. This is partly because it is the subject of a detailed examination in one of the texts translated here, (See The Meaning (or Signification) of the Phallus : 9th May 1958 (Munich) : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580509 or index of Jacques Lacan’s texts));
p8 but more importantly because the purpose of my selection is to draw attention to the general nature of the problem and present Freud’s work from the perspective to which Lacan returns.
p9 The essence of the Oedipus complex is first mentioned in his published writings in a passing reference to Oedipus Rex in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (1900) [See The Interpretation of Dreams : 6th November 1899 (published as 1900) : Sigmund Freud SE IV & V, See this site /3 Sigmund Freud (November 1899) & see SE IV & V, bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage ( The complete bilingual of THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS and ON DREAMS, Chapters I-V, Chapter V, Chapter VI, Chapter VII, ON DREAMS; Bibliographies, Indices)]
p9 in 1910 it is named [Maybe in Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis : 1909 [1910] : Sigmund Freud, SE XI p3-59]
p9 as the Oedipus Complex and by 1919, [Possibly ‘A child is being beaten’ a contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions : 1919 : Sigmund Freud, Trans. J. Strachey, SE XVII p175-204, PFL Vol 10. Published bilingual at http://www.freud2lacan.com /Homepage /‘A Child is Being Beaten’ (‘Ein Kind wird geschlagen’)]
p9 without much theoretical but with a great deal of clinical expansion (most notably in the case of Little Hans), [Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy – ‘Little Hans’: 1909 : Sigmund Freud, SE X p5-149 Available bilingual www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy (Little Hans))],
p9 it has become the foundation stone of psychoanalysis.
p9 But the Oedipus complex of this early period is a simple set of relationships in which the child desires the parent of the opposite sex and feels hostile rivalry for the one of the same sex as itself. There is a symmetrical correspondence I the history of the boy and the girl. Thus in “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905) Freud writes : ‘Distinct traces are probably to be found in most people of an early partiality of this kind – on the part of a daughter for her father, or on the part of a son for his mother’ (Freud SE VII p56) [Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (‘Dora’) : 1901 [1905] : Sigmund Freud, SE VII p7-114. Available, bilingual, from www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (FRAGMENTS OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA, 1905 (Bruchstűck einer Hysterie-Analyse) (Dora))]
p9-10 Or, in ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva : it is the general rule for a normally constituted girl to turn her affection towards her father in the first instance (Freud, SE IX p33 1906/7) [reference not found]
p10-11 In his Paper ‘The Unconscious”, he (Freud) wrote: An instinct [drive] can never become an object of consciousness – only the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea … . When we nevertheless speak of an unconscious instinctual impulse or of a repressed instinctual impulse … we can only mean an instinctual impulse the ideational representative of which is unconscious. (Freud, SE SIV p177 1915) [See ‘Das Unbewusste’ – The unconscious : 1915e : Sigmund Freud, SE XIV p159-215. The final section of Freud’s paper on the The Unconscious seems to have roots in his early monograph ’On Aphasia’ (1891). Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com / Freud: The Metapsychological Papers, Papers on Technique and others (8. The Unconscious : Parts 1-2, Parts 3-5, Parts 6-7, Appendices A-B)]
P11 The structure and content of the Three Essays [Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality : 1905d : Sigmund Freud, SE VII p123-245. Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (THREE ESSAYS ON SEXUALITY (Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie))] erodes any idea of normative sexuality.
p11 By deduction, if no heterosexual attraction is ordained in nature, there can be no genderised sex – there cannot at the outset be a male or female person in a psychological sense.
p11 In the case of ‘Dora’, Freud assumed that had Dora not been an hysteric she would have been naturally attracted to her suitor, Herr K, just as she had been attracted to her father when she was a small child. In other words, she would have had a natural female Oedipus complex. But the footnotes, written subsequently, tell another story: … See Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (‘Dora’) : 1901 [1905] : Sigmund Freud. SE VII p7-114. Available, bilingual, from www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (FRAGMENTS OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA, 1905 (Bruchstűck einer Hysterie-Analyse) (Dora))
p12 By about 1915 it seems that Freud was aware that his theory of the Oedipus complex and of the nature of sexuality could not. satisfactorily explain the difference between the sexes. Freud never explicitly stated his difficulties (as he did in other areas of work), but in 1915, he added a series of footnotes to the Three Essays [See above] which are almost all about the problem of defining masculinity and femininity. Other writers – notably Jung – had taken Freud’s ideas on the Oedipus complex as they were expressed at the time, to their logical conclusion, …
P13 During the first phase of Freud’s work we can see the idea of the castration complex gradually gain momentum. It was discussed in ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908)*, crucially important in the analysis of Little Hans (1909)**,
p13 yet when he wrote ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ in 1914*** Freud was still uncertain as to whether or not it was a universal occurrence.
p13 But in 1915 it starts to assume a larger and larger part.
p13 By 1924, in the paper on ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’**** the castration complex has emerged as a central concept.
p13 In his autobiography of 1925, Freud wrote: ‘The castration complex is of the profoundest importance in the formation alike of character and of neurosis’ (Freud, XX, 1925, p. 37)*****.
p13 He made it the focal point of the acquisition of culture; it operates as a law whereby men and women assume their humanity and, inextricably bound up with this, it gives the human meaning of the distinction between the sexes.
* On the Sexual Theories of Children : 1908c : Sigmund Freud, SE IX p206. Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com / Home Page ( On the Sexual Theories of Children (Über infantile Sexualtheorien))
** Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy – ‘Little Hans’: 1909 : Sigmund Freud, SE X p5-149 Available bilingual www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy (Little Hans))
*** On Narcissism – an Introduction : 1914 : Sigmund Freud, SE XIV p69-102 Notes & Information See www.LacanianWorks.org /On Narcissism – an Introduction : March 1914 : Sigmund Freud. Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (On Narcissism: An Introduction prefaced with critical notes about Strachey’s translation)
**** The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex : 1924d : Sigmund Freud, SE XIX p173-179 : Published bilingual at www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (Der Untergang des Ödipuskomplexes))
***** An Autobiographical Study : 1924 [1925d] : Sigmund Freud, SE XX p3-24, See www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Freud (1924)
P14 : That the castration complex operates as an external event, a law, can be seen too from a related preoccupation of Freud’s. Some time around 1916, Freud became interested in the ideas of Lamarck. This interest is most often regarded, with condescension, as an instance of Freud’s nineteenth-century scientific anachronism. But in fact by 1916 Lamarck was already outmoded and it is clear that Freud’s interest arose not from ignorance but from the need to account for something that he observed but could not theorise. The question at stake was : how does the individual acquire the whole essential history of being human within the first few short years of its life? Lamarkian notions of cultural inheritance offered Freud a possible solution to the problem. In rejecting the idea of cultural inheritance, Freud’s opponents may have been refusing a false solution but in doing so they missed the urgency of the question and thereby failed to confront the problem of how the child acquires so early and so rapidly its knowledge of human law.
p14 Karen Horney’s ‘ culturalist’ stress – her emphasis on the influence of society – was an attempt to put things right, but it failed because it necessitated an implicit assumption that the human subject could be set apart from society and was not constructed solely within it: the child and society were separate entities mutually affecting each other. For Horney there are men and women (boys and girls) already there; in this she takes for granted exactly that which she intends to explain. Probably On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women : September 1922 (Berlin) : Karen Horney, see this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Horney or Index of Authors’ texts)
p14 Freud’s concept of the castration complex completely shifted the implications of the Oedipus complex and altered the meaning of bisexuality.
p15 Lou Andreas-Salomé, van Ophuijsen, then Karl Abraham and Auguste Starcke in 1921 initiate the response to the notion. Franz Alexander, Otto Rank, Carl Müller-Braunschweig, and Josine Müller continue it until the names that are more famous in this context – Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Lampl-de Groot, Helene Deutsch, Ernest Jones – are added in the mid-twenties and thirties. Others join in: Fenichel, Rado, Marjorie Brierley, Joan Rivière, Ruth Mack Brunswick, but by 1935 the positions have clarified and the terms of the discussion on sexual differences do not change importantly, though the content that goes to fill out the argument does so.
Karl Abraham’s work is crucial. …
Recommended texts
Jacques Lacan speaks on Karl Abraham’s work in Seminar IV : 21st November 1956, 9th January 1957, 30th January 1957, & 27th February 1957. See Seminar IV The Relation from Object (La relation d’objet) & Freudian Structures (1956-1957) : from 21st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19561121 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
Related texts to Stages & Karl Abraham
Tracing Stages linked to Libido in Freud : 24th October 2017, edited 23rd January 2023 : Julia Evans. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Evans)
Notes & References for Jacques Lacan’s Seminar IV 21st November 1956 : 28th February 2017 : Julia Evans. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Evans or Index of Julia Evans’ texts)
Footnote p15-16 One difference is that Freud argues that girls envy the phallus, Karl Abraham believes that both sexes in parallel fashion fear castration – which he describes as lack of sexual potency.[2] Footnote 2. This difference was to be taken further by other writers, most notably by Ernest Jones who in arguing against the specificity of phallic castration and for the general fear of an extinction of sexual desire, coined the term aphanisis to cover his idea. This notion is not developed in Abraham’s work but it did, however, set a future trend. Lacan returns to it, arguing that Jones so nearly hit the mark that his failure is the more grotesque for his near insight. To Lacan, aphanisis relates to the essential division of the subject whereas, he writes, Jones ‘mistook it for something rather absurd, the fear of seeing desire disappear. Now aphanisis is to be situated in a more radical way at the level at which the subject manifests himself in this movement I describe as lethal. In a quite different way, I have called this movement the fading of the subject.’ * ‘The subject appears on the one side as meaning and on the other as fading-disappearance ** (SXI, pp. 189, 199, pp. 207-8, 218).
* [27th May 1964, p207-208 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, see Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts (1963-1964) : from 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19640115)]
** [3rd June 1964, p218 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, ibid. quote from Sheridan’s translation, ‘We can locate this Vorstellungsrepräsentanz in our schema of the original mechanisms of alienation in that first signifying coupling that enables us to conceive that the subject appears first in the Other, in so far as the first signifier, the unary signifier, emerges in the field of the Other and represents the subject for another signifier, which other signifier has as its effect the aphanisis of the subject. Hence the division of the subject—when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading’, as disappearance. There is, then, one might say, a matter of life and death between the unary signifier and the subject, qua binary signifier, cause of his disappearance. The Vorstellungsrepräsentanz is the binary signifier.’]
See also The Early Development of Female Sexuality [aphanisis] : 1st September 1927 (Innsbruck) : Ernest Jones. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Jones or Index of Authors)
p17 Freud was aware of the discrepancy in his account; his published statements tend to be confusing, but in a letter he wrote: ‘the sight of the penis and its function of urination cannot be the motive, only the trigger of the child’s envy. However, no one has stated this’ (Freud, 1935, 1971, p. 329). ‘Letter to Carl Müller-Braunschweig’ (1935), published as ‘Freud and female sexuality: a previously unpublished letter’, Psychiatry, 1971, p328-9
p17 Freud referred to Abraham’s article on the female castration complex (1920) as ‘unsurpassed’ . But absolutely nothing in the theoretical framework of Freud’s writing confirmed Abraham’s perspective. [See Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex : 1920 : Karl Abrahams, at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Abrahams or Index of Authors’ texts]
p18 Thus Starcke found the prevalence of castration anxiety in the loss of the nipple from the baby’s mouth, so that daily weaning accounted for the universality of the complex. As a further instance he proposed the baby’s gradual ability to see itself as distinct from the external world: ‘The formation of the outer world is the original castration; the withdrawal of the nipple forms the root-conception of this’ (Starcke, 1921, p. 180)*. Franz Alexander and Otto Rank took castration back to the baby’s loss of the womb, which was once part of itself.
* Starke, A., ‘The Castration Complex’, IJPA, II, 1921, p179-204
Related texts
Notes from Seminar VII 3rd February 1960 (p133) – Interventions by Xavier Audouard & Jean Laplanche on René Spitz & the function of ‘rooting’: 28th September 2013 (Reading Group) : Julia Evans. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Evans)
Notes from Seminar VII 3rd February 1960 (p132 & top p133), Discussion with Victor Smirnov on René Spitz’s ‘Yes and No’ : Reading Group of 7th September 2013 : Julia Evans. See this site / m) Seminar VII, Jacques Lacan (1 A Lacanian Clinic/ C Cartel or group work )
Seminar VII 3rd February 1960 (p129) – Discussion of ‘function of sublimation with reference to the Thing.’ : 7th September 2013 (Reading Group) : Julia Evans. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Evans)
p18 Freud took up his colleague’s ideas on separation anxiety (as he termed it) most fully in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety [Angst] written in 1925 *, * Inhibitions, Symptoms & Angst [Angst mistranslated as Anxiety] : 1926d : Sigmund Freud, SE XX p75-175 : Download bilingual Part 1 www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (INHBITIONS (Part I), & Part 2 www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (SYMPTOMS AND ANXIETY (Part II))
p18 but two years earlier he had added this footnote to the case of Little Hans:
While recognizing all of these roots of the complex, I have nevertheless put forward the view that the term ‘castration complex’ ought to be confined to those excitations and con sequences which are bound up with the loss of the penis. Anyone who, in analysing adults, has become convinced of the invariable presence of the castration complex, will of course find difficulty in ascribing its origin to a chance threat – of a kind which is not, after all, of such universal occurrence; he will be driven to assume that children construct this danger for themselves out of the slightest hints . . . (Freud, X, 1909, p. 8, n2, 1923)**
** Texts on Little Hans this site /1 A Lacanian Clinic (A Case Studies / ii) From Freud & Lacan / d) Little Hans) or Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy – ‘Little Hans’: 1909 : Sigmund Freud, SE X p5-149 Available bilingual www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy (Little Hans))
P20 : In the mid-twenties the focus of the concept of the castration complex may well have contributed to a change of emphasis away from itself and towards a preoccupation with female sexuality. When the well-known names associated with the discussion – Horney, Deutsch, Lamp-d Groot, Klein, Jones – join in, their concern is less with the construction of sexual difference than it is with the nature of female sexuality. It is from this time that we can date what has become known as the ‘great debate’. The debate was to reach its peak when in 1935, … [ Also see Introduction to Female Sexuality – The early psychoanalytic controversies : 1999 : Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq & Craig Smith. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Grigg, Hecq or Smith or Index of Authors)
p21 There is now not only an original masculinity and femininity but a natural heterosexuality. In 1926, Karen Horney spoke of the ‘biological principle of hetero sexual attraction’ and argued from this that the girl’s so-called masculine phase is a defence against her primary feminine anxiety that her father will violate her. [The Flight from Womanhood – The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and by Women : Karen Horney. See this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Horney or Index of Authors’ texts)]
Citation
P8 & p15-16 & p20 & p23 quoted in Introduction to Female Sexuality – The early psychoanalytic controversies : 1999 : Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq & Craig Smith, see this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Grigg, Hecq or Smith or Index of Authors’ texts)