The Queer Experience and the Uncanny

Recherches en Psychanalyse, no. 10, 2010/2, p. 242-250.

Abstract:

The queer insult designates one whose sexual identity is experienced as strange by another. The encountered strangeness fosters the emergence of the uncanny and its associated anxiety. Thus, the “queer experience” can be read through the concept of the uncanny developed by Sigmund Freud as a sign of the return of a previously processed psychic conflict, the renewal of which in the present causes the solutions, treatments, and infantile theories established to defend the ego against a historical conflict—such as that related to sexual difference—to falter.

 

 

Abstract:

The call someone a “queer” means to designate a person whose sexual or gender identity is experienced as strange by an other. This encounter with strangeness often leads to the feelings of the uncanny, of anxiety linked to the repressed. In this way, the “queer experience” can be read through Freud’s notion of “the uncanny”, as a sign of the return of previous psychic conflict, the reactualization of which may lead to a faltering of the solutions, handlings and infantile theories which had been instituted in order to defend the ego against a historical conflict, for example one connected to sexual difference.

The English word queer refers to that which is bizarre, sexually strange. This meaning is historically linked to the insult “Queer,” which in French we can compare to insults such as “Pédé” or “Gouine.” What is designated by this term today covers a broad field of meanings stretching from feminisms to Gender Theory, including Lesbian & Gay studies.¹ In a movement of reclaiming the insult, queer now designates individuals who claim to have adopted it as an identity, in a similarity to reappropriations such as “Black” or “Négro.” What we call the “queer experience” in the extension of these versions reflects the encounter with the strangeness of the sexual, as the sexual identity of some individuals presents itself, sometimes difficult to designate or name by another, giving way to a feeling of strangeness, and then of the uncanny. The sexual figures summoned by this signifier

queer challenge psychoanalysis and invite us to question the psychic processes at work. According to our hypothesis, the queer, insofar as it substantially actualizes the sexual, pertains to human psychosexuality, to the sexual in the psychoanalytic sense. In its original use as an insult, it covers an impossible identification of the other with the signifiers man or woman, like a filler or substitute for an unbearable disturbance, a plug manufactured by the “queer experience” itself. This encounter with strangeness in the other causes the subject to falter to the point that all sorts of symptoms are produced, ranging from fear to nervous amusement, through the regurgitation of hatred, to blood crimes. These visible effects, with sometimes violent consequences, are not merely the manifestation of a social or political misunderstanding of the lives encountered. They are, strictly speaking, symptoms insofar as these phenomena reflect the internal and overflowing tension resulting from an intrapsychic conflict that deserves our attention for what it reveals about an actualization of the clinical study of the uncanny, from the question of the double to castration anxiety. We wish to conduct this study through a commentary on Sigmund Freud’s text regarding the Unheimliche. This allows us to identify a commonality of psychic processes accounting for the movements of investment and defense at work in the encounter with the strangeness of the sexual in the other and in oneself. The aims of coherence and stability of sexual identities are then questioned in light of the content of the experience of sexual difference, whose enlightened return of the uncanny encourages us to follow its trace in queer theoretical developments when they summon the abject and psychoanalysis, and to appreciate its use.

Das Unheimliche² is the title of an article that Sigmund Freud dedicated to the uncanny in 1919. This notion presents itself as complex and polysemic. Its modulations are explored under the shadow of ambivalence and contradiction, when the latter operates from proximity, at the limit of confusion between a meaning and its opposite. So much so that the difficulty in approaching what cannot be summarized or function entirely as a concept mimics the psychic processes that clinical practice and theoretical elaboration attempt to write or describe about it. First, the title. The French translation inaugurated by Marie Bonaparte,

“l’inquiétante étrangeté” (the uncanny strangeness), continues to serve as the best-known reference in the Freudian bibliography, but the 1919 article is now titled “l’inquiétant” (the uncanny) in the Œuvres complètes. According to the translators, the removal of the term “étrangeté” aims to restore the notion to its proper place relative to the uncanny; that is, if strangeness is suggested or latent within the uncanny, the extension of the qualifier proposed by Marie Bonaparte anticipates its mechanisms and, according to our reading, precedes the consistency of the uncanny, which is thereafter sufficient unto itself to be approached. The uncanny, before being an article published in 1919 after several years of elaboration, is already present in the text on the Rat Man³ in 1909. Regarding sexual desire and fantasy, the patient evokes the following:

There were people, maids, who pleased me very much and whom I violently desired to see naked. However, in experiencing these desires, I had a feeling of [Unheimliche], as if something were to happen if I thought that and as if I had to do everything to prevent it.

The patient’s use of the term differs from what Sigmund Freud would subsequently deploy. However, we can note its articulation with the manifestation of a perceptible disturbance of the ego’s boundaries regarding the rest of the world, the effects of which may be feared.

Das Unheimliche is a common word, referring to everything that is contrary to the familiar, designated by heimlich. In the course of his study of terms, Sigmund Freud explains:

What emerges as most interesting for us from this long quotation is that, among the multiple nuances of its meaning, the little word heimlich also presents one where it coincides with its opposite unheimlich. What is heimlich then becomes unheimlich, […]. Das Unheimliche would only be used as the opposite of the first meaning, but not the second.⁴

Then, he concludes this first movement of the article:

Heimlich is therefore a word that develops its meaning toward an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite unheimlich. Unheimlich is, in a way, a species of heimlich.⁵

The double, the reflection, and the reversal into the opposite are present here in what holds his attention before developing various considerations on psychic processes; we shall return to this. The Larousse French-German dictionary gives the following definition for unheimlich: “strange and uncanny, causing a shiver.” Aside from the return of the association between the root “strange” and the word “uncanny,” this proposition brings us closer to that of Sigmund Freud when he selects the following terms for the French translation: uncanny, sinister, gloomy, uneasy. He also relies on the Arabic and Hebrew versions for which unheimlich “coincides with demonic: causing a shudder.”⁶

Exploring the different manifestations of the uncanny to grasp its contexts, motifs, and nuances, Sigmund Freud articulates his argument by traversing various themes step by step. We first find the phenomenon of attributing life to an inanimate thing; the dolls of little girls and the Tales of Hoffmann are utilized in this regard, reinforced by the dimension of magic that Sigmund Freud attributes to the poet’s approach. Thus, the figure of the double, understood as a narcissistic necessity in reference to the work of Otto Rank, is also linked to the possibility of its return and the dread it then arouses. For Sigmund Freud, this supports the idea that the uncanny, when it arises, is related to the return—on the occasion of a repetition—of an element or even an ancient phase of narcissistic development indispensable for the delimitation of the ego from the rest of the world. He then continues and specifies this narcissistic phase by associating it with animism, in reference to the time when the ego differentiates and structures itself through the wit or qualities it offers to the outside, to protect and define the inside.

The double was originally an insurance against the disappearance of the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death” (O. Rank), and the “immortal” soul was likely the body’s first double.⁷

In this vein, Sigmund Freud considers that the impression of the uncanny is to be related to:

[…] the return to this or that phase of the history of the development of the sense of self, of a regression to times when the ego had not yet been rigorously delimited […].

He then introduces another element:

The factor of the repetition of what is of the same nature will perhaps not be recognized by everyone as a source of the feeling of the uncanny.⁸

We can clearly read here the encounter with the “same” which can, although not automatically, be “recognized” as

“a source of the feeling of the uncanny.” This suggests the encounter with an element capable of suggesting the double in a moment that makes this encounter experience a repetition, a reactualization of an element previously metabolized or processed for the benefit of the constitution of the ego. The repetitive character is then specified as unintentional, which thus “makes uncanny what would otherwise be harmless and imposes on us the idea of the nefarious, the inevitable, […].”⁹ This carries the encounter of the same, the similar, beyond a mere reflection.

In reference to animism, Sigmund Freud then evokes:

[…] the unlimited narcissism of this period of evolution against the irrefutable

objection of reality. It seems that in the course of our individual development we have all passed through a phase corresponding to this animism of primitives, that it has not occurred in any of us without leaving remains and traces still capable of expression, and that everything that seems “uncanny” to us today fulfills the condition of touching these remains of an animistic soul activity and inciting them to express themselves.¹⁰

Gradually, the plasticity of the uncanny takes shape, from its origin to its manifestations; some conclusions appear.

[…] an uncanny effect often occurs easily when the boundary between fantasy and effective reality is erased, when something we had previously held to be fantastic is offered to us in a real way, […].¹¹

It is a matter of the effective repression of a content and the return of the repressed, not the suppression of the belief in the reality of that content.

[…] the uncanny in life experience occurs when repressed infantile complexes are brought back to life by an impression, or when overcome primitive convictions appear confirmed once again.¹²

Reality, through the possibilities it offers to the Imaginary, advances as the surface for the renewed triggering of an old encounter, an experience whose efforts at avoidance, repression, and substitution are brought back into play without warning.

The experience we qualify as queer, in the scene of the interpellation by the original insult whose reclamation by the insulted party conceptually founds the queer theoretical and identity movement, must be observed from the two poles present, for both speaking beings concerned. Our reading of the uncanny allows us to think of the effect of strangeness provoked by the encounter in reality with an other who is non-definable in terms of socially normed or gendered sexual identity, and the possibility of a return of the infantile conflict of sexual difference and its past theoretical creations. Psychoanalytic experience tends to observe and explore the extent to which everything from sexual difference to castration anxiety, including the difference between the sexes, maintains tension and apprehension for the subject in having to be situated and situating themselves, and therefore others, within the sexual landscape. It is easy to interpret the act of insulting the queer so named as the mark of a defense against the uncanny experienced through the accompanying anxiety of having been released from a previously established repression—a precarious suture that has become ineffective during a chance encounter with the appearance of repetition.

One of the “convictions” thus brought back into play by

the “queer experience” is possibly that of the difference between the sexes; it is that the difference between the sexes does not pre-exist the sexes for which it establishes a relationship, unlike sexual difference. The variability of the sexes requires that what is presented—the anatomical difference between the sexes—can harmonize with perceived reality and the subject’s singular experience. Clinical experience teaches us that the difference between the sexes is established to circumscribe an impossible by covering the uncanny motifs of experience. If we do not lose sight of the fact that this creation tends to be preserved for its virtues in stabilizing the psyche, it is easy to grasp both the faltering that the experience conducive to the feeling of the uncanny can produce, and the necessity of reducing it.

The original insult, reclaimed and elevated to the rank of identity, is constituted by being first the return of a conflictual, fantastic, and threatening content. The return precedes the reclamation. The latter is part of a ricochet of conflictual and anxious content, ignored by the first person besieged by its return in the uncanny. The insulted person voluntarily takes back what they receive and appropriates it. In other words, the operation of burial and forgetting through repression is almost diametrically reversed at the moment of the encounter experience, then illustrated in its opposite in the operations of adherence to the signifier and its selection as an identity. This radically questions the structure of the foundations of identity as a subjective unity, of which we now encounter substrates in terms of subjectivity, as David Halperin proposes with “gay subjectivity.” It remains to question the future of the repressed conflictual content, of the signified, to know if the reclamation of the insult, through the use of the signifier, indicates anything to us about its fate.

If the content of one activates the naming of the other, we may ask whether both ultimately have to do with the same content: what is put outside by the insult or the identity inscription suffers the same fate in both cases: being maintained beyond the limits of the ego thus defended. Although diametrically opposed in a linear and chronological reading—from the return of the repressed under the guise of the uncanny to the claim of identity—these two subjective options proceed from movements of identification, introjection, and projection that seem parallel, where in terms of identity the first rejects what the other adopts.¹³ In the scene of the insult, the first recognizes in themselves this renewed queer, rejects it outward through their speech act, while the second also recognizes it and attributes it to themselves as a representative of self: both serving the defense of the ego.

Let us see what may be of interest to note regarding two theorists of identity questions who are authoritative in queer studies and gender studies, in whose work we find the question of the return of a rejected content in two distinct versions inspired by psychoanalytic conceptions. In her introduction to Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler refers to the notion of the abject, which she links to foreclosure:

Abjection literally means to throw out, to cast away. […] This rejection echoes the psychoanalytic notion of Verwerfung, which implies a foreclosure that founds the subject and consequently defines this foundation as fragile. […] Thus what is foreclosed or repudiated […] is precisely

 

that which cannot enter again […] without producing a risk of psychosis, that is, of the dissolution of the subject itself.¹⁴

The author here proposes a parallel between the phenomenon of rejection outside the psyche—with the major risk of its return from the place of its rejection and the possible crisis this can provoke—and social exclusion at the margins of sexual minorities, then understood by analogy as the rejected content, as the abject, of which she mentions Julia Kristeva’s conception while specifying that she has not yet taken that path.

Judith Butler explains that the symbol rejected “out of” to found the real must have been first recognized as such beforehand. A confusion seems to be introduced here that Jacques Lacan’s text in response to Jean Hyppolite’s commentary illustrates. Jacques Lacan returns to Sigmund Freud’s use of Verwerfung regarding a defense mechanism that the latter notes is not repression:

It is not, he tells us, a matter of repression (Verdrängung), for repression cannot be distinguished from the return of the repressed whereby that which the subject cannot speak, he screams through every pore of his being. This subject, Freud tells us, wanted to know nothing of castration in the sense of repression, er von nichts wissen wolte im Sinne der Verdrängung. And to designate this process, he uses the term Verwerfung, for which we will propose, all things considered, the term “retranchement” (severance).¹⁵

In the case of Verwerfung, there is no return in the sense of the return of the repressed which makes a “return from within,” as being part of the subject’s unconscious. The “rejected” does not reach the Symbolic and remains in the Real, as a constituent, not as a product of rejection. What is not symbolized in the sense of primordial symbolization (Bejahung) does not reach the symbolic. The subject can know nothing of this rejected element in the sense of repression because for that “it would have had to come in some way to the light of primordial symbolization.” He continues:

But once again, what becomes of it? What becomes of it, you can see: what has not come to the light of the symbolic appears in the real […] constitutes the real insofar as it is the domain of what subsists outside of symbolization.

Thus, when Judith Butler evokes foreclosure as producing the real of the unlivable and the abject, one may wonder if it is not more a matter of repression as a process of rejection rather than foreclosure.

What interests us here is the movement of return, in the mode of repression, which we can juxtapose with the return previously illustrated with the uncanny. On the other hand, the application to the social question seems more delicate to us, as it amounts to questioning the psychic structure of the collective based on individual considerations. This highlighting of identifiable, structurally locatable, or readable elements is obviously part of Judith Butler’s work when she studies the possibilities of rethinking identity in light of the processes of construction and deconstruction that condition it, whether they are visible or invisible. In this vein, this excerpt highlights the concern given to what serves as a sign of identity character; we question: at the limit of what serves as a sign of a symptom.

We also find a psychoanalytic reference to the abject in David Halperin, in his essay titled What do Gay men want?¹⁶, where he clearly relies on the conceptions of Julia Kristeva. This time the abject is evoked to specify the in-between of the object and the subject from which, for the author, the quasi-perverse diversion of desire is founded in the marginal sexual identification of what he defines as “gay subjectivity,” from desire to its social and political constructions. This time, the dimension of return is also present in support of the abject, but it is more a matter of the so-called perverse return, which is not to be understood as a psychic structure but rather in its common sense of being devious. The recourse to the abject by David

Halperin tends to designate the intimate matter upon which desire is founded between revelation and reprobation. A point of extension emerges from this, opening a surface where the author bases his development of a “gay subjectivity.” This seems to extend the possibility of the identity sign to an additional consistency, revealed from the shadow where it is struck by abjection. This proposition does not fail to highlight a certain consideration of an unconscious dimension against which the author nurtures a severe critique, particularly regarding psychoanalytic theories. The fact remains that “gay subjectivity” would have to maintain for the subject this enlightened but radical confrontation with his recognition of being none other than abject. Identity would here partially cover the subject’s articulation with what animates them at the deepest level. This cannot be thought better than with the propositions of Julia Kristeva, a psychoanalyst who writes this in the introduction to her work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection:

There is, in abjection, one of those violent and obscure revolts of being against what threatens it and which seems to come from an exorbitant outside or inside, cast alongside the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.¹⁷

When the subject is seized by it, abjection has no “truly definable object,” setting in motion “the improper to the point of self-abjection.”

If it is true that the abject both solicits and pulverizes the subject, one understands that it is experienced in its maximum force when, weary of its vain attempts to recognize it outside of itself, the subject finds the impossible within itself: when it finds that the impossible is its very being, discovering that it is none other than abject.¹⁸

In both of these references to psychoanalytic conceptions, we note that both attempt to identify through structural processes (or construction, in relation to so-called identity construction) what the uncanny reveals more accurately in terms of dynamics: namely, that the content of what causes a problem to the point of being processed by ego defenses does not fail to benefit from a prior judgment of attribution, which founds its own character and determines the possibility of danger upon its return. This last point is found in the article titled The Compulsion to Look: Polémique avec le Réel by Judith Butler, in the collection already cited. There she deploys this division of the proper and the improper and detaches her argument from the application of the structural elements of foreclosure in psychosis, asserting, in our opinion, a double elaboration attached to identity stakes as much as to the elusive nature of underlying processes, when she concludes:

The fact that the term is contestable does not mean that we should not use it, but the necessity of using it does not mean either that we should not perpetually question the exclusions on which it rests, and do so precisely in order to learn how to live the contingency of the political signifier in a culture of democratic contestation.^19,20

These words are evocative of a possible path for the content likely to generate the uncanny of which we spoke earlier. Perhaps abjection is a variation or an illustration of it that we can conceive alongside dolls to which life is attributed, animism, the defense of the ego against the world, the persistence of the effects of the fear of death, which Sigmund Freud describes as situations he recognizes as carriers of the uncanny. Furthermore, these two uses of the abject, in the service of interpreting a movement of exclusion and rejection, lead us to consider the point of horror, the point of horror in itself around which these trajectories revolve without quite defining it, or else under the guise of a value added to the subject’s voluntary determination in their effort to capture their own identity. In this regard, the dimension of the abject broadens the perspective of exclusion, of putting outside, from projection to foreclosure, but taking care not to delimit a boundary too quickly, leaving diffuse the circumscription of a point of the Real that it identifies, and which no identity definition could translate or encompass its edges. The abject is summoned here to describe the mechanics of rejection in motion. But it cannot translate, in the use produced by Judith Butler and David Halperin, the return of the shattering experience of the past except by borrowing from psychosis its hallucinatory properties, or from perversion its transgressive properties. This return reveals itself otherwise with the uncanny, which is more prompt to make all the psychic elements encountered resonate beyond the terms and potentialities of the identity dialectic, which always risks excluding identifications and their unconscious underpinnings, which never fail to return.

At the end of this journey, we can draw some conclusions. We have highlighted the evidence of a relationship between identity and identification, notably by shedding light on some points of competition, overlap, and complementarity between identity and what underpins it, but which does not reside there in a container-content relationship. However, reading the identity signifier as a sign and product of the processes that found it offers us the possibility that identity illustrates or perhaps signals what constitutes it in the manner of a symptom, as a consensus of representation of the subject and a diffusion of what moves them. Sexual identity does not say so much about the sex of the one who speaks it, but rather informs us about what the experience of the sexual has generated as adjustments to the subject’s sexuation. But then what remains of the consistency of what presents itself precisely under the mark of identity, understood as a marker endowed with a foundation, a basis? It is that it is not solely a matter of queer in the identity sense, but much more a reclamation of the effect of subjective reversal initiated by queer discourse regarding the original insult, a reclamation that extends the rejection preceding it and informs us, as we have just seen, about the psychic processes of identification.

It is in this way that we conceive that the unconscious stakes of the crossings whose presence we evoked in clinical practice at the beginning can be accounted for, underlying semantic decompartmentalization and other political claims. We can say that

the “queer experience“, in connection with the identity construction emerging from it, renews the untenability of sexual identity (one could also say gender identity) when the latter claims to express the sexual truth of the subject it represents. Thus, the term used to say who one is, is never more than a signifier, as Jacques Lacan translated regarding man or woman.

However, the fact that it is no longer possible, or precisely made possible, not to be satisfied with those signifiers, undoubtedly tells of a substantial actualization, as we have said, of the sexual, which summons the psychoanalytic field to hear an unconscious truth revealed therein. Clinical encounter should, in the extension of what we have just traversed, be enlightened by the “queer experience” in that it is also founded on being an encounter with the other of the sexual, in its strangeness, at the risk of the uncanny, for the patient, for the clinician, for the analysand, for the analyst.