Current relevance of the Freudian “bedrock”: the first pregnant man (2014)

Current relevance of the Freudian “bedrock”: the “first pregnant man”

Vincent Bourseul, Laurie Laufer

Ágora, 2016, p. 9-20.

FRENCH

Based on the public and media reception of Thomas Beatie’s journey as the “first pregnant man1,” we are invited to revisit several Freudian inquiries regarding the “factor2” of sexual difference, and the difficulties encountered by analysis at the stumbling block of the “bedrock” identified by Freud. In the way Thomas Beatie’s case is received, we detect a possible echo of the “repudiation of femininity,” particularly in the construction of the expression “pregnant man,” spelled in the masculine form. Concurrently, the “bedrock” reveals its function as a hinge between the reactivation of past psychic conflicts and their treatment, and the ethical opening promoted by Freud regarding the subject’s positioning in the face of this experience of sexual difference, made accessible by analysis at the very site of this impasse-shaped opening.

PORTUGUESE

From the reception, by the public and the media, of Thomas Beatie’s adventure as the “first pregnant man,” we are urged to revisit some Freudian questioning on the “factor” of sexual difference and the difficulties encountered by analysis at the stumbling point of the “bedrock” identified by Freud. The originality of Thomas Beatie’s situation prompts an interrogation into the possibilities of psychic arrangements of sexual difference and the way the analytical process tests them as resistances. We reveal in the way Thomas Beatie’s case is welcomed a possible echo with the “repudiation of femininity,” in particular the fabrication of the expression “the pregnant man,” spelled without the feminine ending. Together, the “bedrock” shows itself in its function as a hinge between the updating of past psychic conflicts and their treatments and the ethical opening promoted by Freud of a positioning of the subject in front of this experience of sexual difference, made accessible by analysis at the place of this dead end in the form of an opening. The “first pregnant man” shows current events of the potentialities of the Freudian “bedrock” that we can, with it, still reread as a limit of analysis and as a fulcrum of analysis.

The “pregnant man” of yesterday and today

In 2008, the American newspaper The Advocate1, like many media outlets around the world, informed us in its March 14 edition of the upcoming birth of a child whose mother was a man. The “first pregnant man,” it was said of Thomas Beatie, this American transsexual then aged 34. Yet, he was not the first man to have given birth, to have sired or brought forth a child as a man; others had been there before him. Other transsexual men who give body to what until then existed only as myth. The most famous myth among them is, undoubtedly, that of Adam, from whom God begins by removing a rib to transform it into Eve; at least it remained so until the 16th century, when Eve was made to emerge from Adam’s body without the extraction of a rib. But Adam is not alone in this case; Roberto Zaperri, a writer and historian who in 1979 dedicated a very interesting study to this question, notes the presence of the myth of The Pregnant Man (Zaperri, 1979) in the Christian tradition, in the Arabian Nights, and in Antiquity, also lingering on the two marriages of Emperor Nero, who was said to have been made pregnant by one of his lovers. His analysis is especially instructive when he highlights the political nature of these variations around the “pregnant man,” which from his point of view fall into two major categories of opposition: the first being the superiority of man over woman, the second corresponding to the authority of the lord or the clergyman over his peasant or faithful follower. One of the things to be mastered appears under the opposition between horizontality and verticality. Indeed, in most of these legends, the threat of a man’s pregnancy was intended to enforce the necessary superiority of man over woman, particularly during coitus.

This verticality resonates, moreover, with what Thomas Laqueur teaches us in Making Sex (Laqueur, 1992) regarding that not-so-distant era when there was only one sex, a sex that was not even designated as male since it was the only one and had no need for such a distinction. This was also organized within a vertical relationship where the organs observed in women—a diminished or complementary version of the male sex depending on the era—were therefore situated below. It was not until the 18th century that the female sex appeared, an appearance that Laqueur enjoins us to understand as an operation of masculine reassurance. For by giving a specific existence to women’s organs, it is indeed those of men that continue from then on to ensure their superiority, at a time when it was feared that sexual knowledge might be capable of questioning masculine hegemony. Since then, it is said there are two sexes, but for how much longer?

But then, why did we say he was the first, regarding Thomas Beatie? And why did we use the masculine form of “pregnant”? What can this formulation teach us about what Thomas Beatie’s story produces or reveals in terms of sexual knowledge and its effects? Does the trans-body bear the mark of the “repudiation of femininity,” or is it rather in the effects of the trans-body, as it is received and experienced by other bodies, that this “repudiation” manifests? It may be that Thomas Beatie’s story resonates within each of us, stirring buried memories of the experience of sexual difference, for which the “repudiation of femininity” bears witness to a form of resolution, and for which Thomas Beatie would question in each of us the possibility of another “solution,” another possible path to the experience of the “bedrock.”

Thomas Beatie, “pregnant” in the masculine

Thomas Beatie is an American man (FtM) born in 1974 in Hawaii, under the name Tracy (Beatie, 2008). He became a man following hormonal treatment and a mastectomy. However, he did not undergo “gender reassignment surgery,” such as phalloplasty or metoidioplasty; he consequently retained his reproductive organs: his uterus and ovaries. Married to his wife Nancy, Thomas engaged in a medically assisted procreation procedure. The couple had desired children since the beginning of their relationship, but Nancy is sterile. Thomas Beatie gave birth by “natural means” to a first child on June 29, 2008, followed by two other children on June 9, 2009, and the last born on July 25, 2010. His story and that of his family were widely publicized throughout the world, notably at the initiative of Thomas, who wished to share his journey. A book was published in which he recounts his path (Beatie 2008), and dozens of reports and documentaries have portrayed this family, which at first glance seems atypical but gradually reveals itself to be quite ordinary. Indeed, it is interesting to note in these audiovisual archives the extent to which the imagery proposed by Thomas and his family is that of an ordinary American family. All observers agree that the desire to project an image of normality is, during the media coverage of his story, at the heart of Thomas’s concerns.

“The first pregnant man,” it was said of Mr. Thomas Beatie and others who were so before him, and since, forgetting all too quickly that Thomas Beatie proposed another formulation that was neither heard nor retained, presenting himself as

“pregnant husband.” And this is something we must keep in mind for what follows. Let us note this: “man” is written with a lowercase “m,” and “pregnant” is matched to the masculine grammatical gender of the noun “man” it qualifies. Upon reading and saying it, this statement seems to give body and meaning to an unusual reality, even deemed impossible.

By formulating perhaps too quickly “the first pregnant man,” the statement crushes and camouflages what was coming to light in a brutal unveiling, an unveiling of the sexual; it is a makeshift but nonetheless effective rescue. It treats through symbolic formalization that which, from the Real, the real of sex, finds itself simultaneously covered over, or perhaps disavowed. For after all, why would we not say

“the first pregnant man” using the feminine form of the adjective? Why this grammatical agreement, in the masculine gender, so quickly, so easily granted? Does the statement celebrate a point of truth in Thomas Beatie’s story, respecting what would be considered his sexual identity—namely, that he is a man, and that it is therefore appropriate to masculinize or defeminize the pregnancy of the body from which he speaks? Is the removal of the feminine ending linked to the proper way of speaking according to conventions, to align with his personal journey? Or does this operation of agreement achieve something else entirely?

We hypothesize that this rewriting of pregnancy in the masculine—relative to its common usage—is a defeminization of the term that tends to maintain the man (lowercase “m”) in his proper place in discourse, and what appears to survive of a

“symbolic order.” By renewing the spelling, it is the man preceding in the statement that we think of; it is to him that we adjust by matching the qualifier with the noun to which it refers. It is not at all certain that this formulation accounts for the truth that Thomas Beatie embodies, which deserves to be pinned down by a less normative grammar and more flourished spellings. A truth that comes to us, returns to us, and teaches us, returning to us in a form, in a new figure of kinship, something previously lost or abandoned. An offshoot-truth that is not just a repression, but perhaps signs the exclusion from the outside of a knowledge that is unbearable within, disturbing or mad. Would one not say that a “pregnant man is mind-blowing!”?

But do we hear it, this feminine ending that returns, or that appears to us, when

“the pregnant one” matches the man as if it had always been his business, as if it suddenly went without saying that the man carries the child and gives birth to it, as if it were nothing? It is astonishing, and there is indeed a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by agreeing too quickly with the man of grammar and its rules. This man capable of pregnancy looks strikingly like an infantile theoretical construction capable of guaranteeing a state of sexual indistinction, which the experience of sexual difference demolishes, allowing the effects of psychic bisexuality to appear. And looking closely, being “pregnant” is not so simple etymologically speaking. It comes from the verb “enceindre,” which means “to surround,” “to encircle.” To be “pregnant” would therefore mean to be surrounded by something. It is therefore rather the fetus that deserves to be called “pregnant,” for it is surrounded by the placenta, the mother’s womb, etc. But we also say “falling pregnant”—like falling in love or falling ill—which is closer to the fact of having become “an enclosure” through pregnancy, an enclosure that welcomes the fetus.

Common expression has literally rejected the definite article “an” to give

“being pregnant” on its own. This may be the offshoot of the truth we mentioned above. “Being pregnant” or “being an enclosure” due to the physiological state of pregnancy seems to relate to the possibility of pregnancy in the first place, and less directly to what common expression and its grammatical agreement suggest: namely, that it would be a woman’s affair, whereas it is an affair of pregnancy. If common usage has established this agreement, it is not without foundations or stakes. It was likely necessary to make pregnancy hold together with the woman, to make the woman hold to the possibility of pregnancy, to make the woman hold in opposition to the man even if it meant deceiving grammar, which itself became an accomplice to a subtle sleight of hand for unconscious ends. It is because an order must hold, one might say, a symbolic order, even if it may be imaginary. Agreeing with the man too quickly can make us miss that the enclosure is first a place, a place of the body, long before and long after being a qualifier or a state.

Language thus allows us to reduce the thing, the place of the enclosure, to a state, a quality, attempting at the same time to silence the unthinkable nature of pregnancy to make it pass for something that passes, that does not last—like love or illness, for that matter. With a pregnant man, we extend the structural, linguistic arrangement of the woman in discourse, and it is the hollowed-out body, the impossible and unthinkable of the woman, the real of sex that continues to be rejected without it being possible to get rid of it entirely, since it returns to us or persists even in the small letters. Pregnancy is an opportunity to make an unthinkable place hold together with an enigma that is no less so, and to provide, no doubt, a small comfort through the illusion of mastery, of organization.

The linguistic subterfuge of the “enclosure” that we have just explored presents itself in this light as a vestige, a place of celebration parallel to the sanctuary of the woman’s body. The statement “the first pregnant man” then bears the mark of this unconscious operation of setting aside, of concealing an embarrassing truth, a “repudiation of femininity.” It bears witness in its heart to this suture left by the rejected truth. But what is it? Let us make another hypothesis. The undone feminine ending carries within it the trace of a thwarted desire that can be envisioned in the following translation: “To be a mother like a Man,” with a capital “M,” as a possible illustration of a fantasy linked to the “repudiation of femininity.” This corresponds well to Thomas Beatie’s child project, which is a project of a father, man, and husband. His goal seems indeed to build a family entirely different from his own. No doubt it could not have known this development had he not met Nancy, with whom he fell in love, and to whom he made a “gift of gestation,” to her and to his family.

“To be a mother like a Man” is, among other things, to be a mother as a “good father of the family” according to the established expression.

In the media coverage of this story, the question of gender reveals itself as socially embodied; it is the traditional parental roles that are ultimately highlighted, far from sex, which remains devolved to the body or to what is envisioned of anatomy and its natural functions; a certain trouble is avoided. And the wish for normality in Thomas and Nancy’s project perfectly encouraged this reading of events, for fundamentally, if the media as a whole1 covered their situation with great benevolence, it is undoubtedly because family values and the setting, as we have said, of an America serene with itself were preserved, and through these elements, a relative peace on the fundamental sexual questions that may have remained unspoken and unconscious. Nancy breastfed the children, Thomas “gave birth as a

husband” and not as a man, but as a man responsible for a family. Is this not, moreover, what Thomas says of himself when he expresses himself by saying: “pregnant husband,” “My name is Thomas Beatie and I have a family,” “Giving birth as a husband,”

“my own surrogate”… This normalizes the family, the parents, and the children. Thomas Beatie as a transsexual represents a trouble in gender, but as a pregnant man in the masculine, he seems much less troubling with the help of language, our grammatical agreements, and the aid of the law and the Law. Without that feminine ending, the problematic “feminine” is mastered to ensure the calm necessary for the psychic apparatus.

The “repudiation of femininity”?

Let us return to the questions raised by the Thomas Beatie case, and notably this very representative one: is the trans-body the mark of the “repudiation of femininity”? Or is it, as we suggested, the effect of the trans-body in its reception that can provoke a reaction related to this “repudiation of femininity,” resulting, for example, in the removal of the feminine ending as a form of protection?

What is the “repudiation of femininity”? Freud formulated the “repudiation of femininity” in 1937, at the end of his life, in the article Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Freud, 1937). Freud translates here what he also calls the “underlying bedrock” against which all therapeutic efforts come to grief. Note that this proposition constitutes a theoretical after-effect, as Jacqueline Schaeffer points out (Schaeffer, 1997), an after-effect where Freud positions the strength of the drive—in its quantitative dimension—as the “original” problem responsible for this struggle with the ego. In doing so, he then specifies and articulates his reflection to transport, in a sense, this combative duality onto the historical psychic bisexuality of beings, a bisexuality that is the seat of original internal tensions there as well. From this reflection, Freud translates the “repudiation of femininity” as exemplary of the reaction of sexed beings to a certain “factor,” and Schaeffer is right to note that it is not so much the “repudiation of femininity” that poses a problem, but the “feminine” itself. This article is therefore an opportunity for Freud to return to a renewed consideration of his approach, based on the psychic bisexuality of both sexes and the repudiation of femininity in both sexes, to advance on the obstacles encountered in the pursuit of analysis.

Let us examine the text in some detail. Freud brings us back, according to our reading, to a point linked to the effects of the drive on the construction of the body as a psychic production. When he writes: “The constitutional strength of the drive and the unfavorable modification of the ego acquired in the defensive struggle, in the sense of a dislocation and a restriction, are the factors that are unfavorable to the action of analysis and can prolong its duration to an impossible conclusion. […] the question to be asked should be: what obstacles lie in the path of analytical healing.” (Freud, 1937) He locates the possibility of a difficulty in the therapeutic process at the very site of the constitution of the psyche. It is therefore from the origin that the elements constituting obstacles are known, even if original repression dilutes their trace, even if they reappear as a “bedrock” encountered during the treatment, when it is fundamentally rediscovered. This encourages us to note in the Freudian text how this “bedrock,” which analysis reactivates in its own way, is built on the vestiges of a psychic construction without equivalent. This allows us to emphasize that while psychoanalysis does not pursue a predetermined goal to be reached, it nonetheless pursues certain ends.

Further on, he considers negative transference, the necessary taming of the drive’s demand… And in passing, he questions the end, not of the term but of the goal, of analysis: “Does our theory not precisely claim the establishment of a state that is never spontaneously present in the ego and whose original creation constitutes the essential difference between the analyzed man and the one who is not?” (Freud, 1937). It is because analysis in this path aims at the establishment of “new dams,” new repressions capable of reducing the drive’s influence by “after-the-fact correction of the original repression process, which puts an end to the excessive power of the quantitative factor […].” (Freud, 1937) Unfortunately, the results often appear partial to Freud, and gradually the idea emerges of other motives that would be responsible for these failures or these inaccessible therapeutic successes. He then develops the drive dualism where tension, struggle, and rivalry appear as qualities emerging from the quantitative factor. Freud postulates again, and in the image of the death drive coupled with the life drive, the possibility of a conflict of orientation of the drive force according to competing paths of liquidation. He then relies on the question of constitutive bisexuality and lived heterosexuality—as object choice—which cannot coexist in the same individual without creating internal tension. Encouraged by Ferenczi’s 1928 lecture on The Termination of Analyses (Ferenczi, 1928), Freud writes: “It is indisputable that analysts have not completely reached, in their own personality, the degree of psychic normality to which they want their patients to attain.” (Freud, 1937). By affirming this, Freud suggests that the obstacles to analysis are inherent to psychoanalysis and that psychoanalysts themselves are one of the sites of this resistance. Here, in our opinion, the premises of the future development on the bedrock are announced.

In the final part of the article’s development, Freud advances on psychic bisexuality and the “repudiation of femininity” in both sexes, and concludes: “It cannot be otherwise, for for the psyche, the biological truly plays the role of the underlying bedrock. The repudiation of femininity can obviously be nothing other than a biological fact, a part of that great enigma of sexuality. To say if and when we have succeeded in an analytical cure in mastering this factor will be difficult. We console ourselves with the certainty that we have provided the analysand with every possible incentive to revise and modify his position toward this factor.” (Freud, 1937). This passage draws all our attention, and it is from its reading and interpretation that we attempt to propose a vision of this “repudiation of femininity” in light of the Thomas Beatie case, which perhaps represents a

“solution” to the “bedrock.” The conclusion of the article is astonishing, for it is both the recognition of an impossibility for analytical work to lead the analysand beyond a certain point, and at the same time the recommendation that analysis be able to offer the analysand the possibility of achieving it and situating themselves there in their own name. Does Thomas Beatie embody, through his singular arrangements, a transcendence in action of the “bedrock”? Or does he confirm, through the effects provoked in others, the stumbling point?

Can this “bedrock” then be considered a dead end giving analysis its infinitude? Must we not consider that the “bedrock” is, all at once, certainly insurmountable and yet surpassable. It is, indeed, the mark of an inaccessibility of the subject, whose coordinates of historical arrangement can be heard through analysis, to the point of allowing the patient himself to envision a possible change of position regarding this factor and to possess a new degree of relative freedom. by himself, and in a certain way to dispose of it relatively.

Is this not a possible definition of the ends of a psychoanalysis? The “bedrock” can just as well be perceived here as the ultimate offshoot of the subject’s unanalyzable—the final umbilicus—around which or from which their desire for truth, their desire, and the capacity for reopening the elaboration process are activated. Is it not, at the end of the analytical work as Freud thinks of it here, the return to the trace of the first support on that primary movement which, by establishing the original repression, allowed, from the body and through language, the emergence of the subject? Is the “bedrock” not in this way the outcropping of this impossible return, perceptible only through one or another of its concretions, or through one of its edges? Is this not what Thomas Beatie echoes in what he represents, as a kind of compilation of what was once distinguished and separated? Does the “trans-body” not come to give a “real” form and representation to these questions that are usually more obscure and bodiless? We believe that this “trans-body” is a new presence of questions usually kept at a distance, without forms and without figures, which our modernity makes visible.

But then why speak of the “feminine”? Why does this return take form here under the seal of sexual difference in particular, with the feminine as a banner? Which feminine is Freud speaking of here? Perhaps it is a matter of identifying the primary necessity for the subject in the making to rise from the hospitable body that welcomes its emergence (its own and merged with the mother in function), within through the drive and the organs, and on its surface through language and the body image?

Would the feminine not refer here to the fact that at the dawn of life, every being is marked by original psychic bisexuality, but that, moreover, it occupies this fundamentally feminine position that allows it to assume a passivity which is the condition for the constitution of the subject. The feminine of which we speak cannot, of course, be restricted to genital “femininity.” We can think here of the work carried out by the nascent ego, “of introjection of intense drive movements but made tolerable by the place they take in the primitive relationship.” (Roussillon, Schaeffer, 1997). It is a matrix feminine, that of the body of organs where the drive awakens, which would be refused by virtue of the original period it represents for every being, refused by the effects of analysis when analysis brings the analysand back to this point of their personal psychic history, and which can only provoke in them the rejection of not being able to be recognized by them, without inviting them to detach themselves from it, to look away and to refuse what has already been constituted in the past through negation: Verdrängung, Verneinung, Verleugnung… (Rabinovitch, 2000). Is this not, in its own way, what Thomas Beatie embodies in the form of a quasi-hallucinatory return, forcing a reaction to circumscribe the psychic conflict he arouses, to locate the possibility of pregnancy outside of man or to subject it to him “by force” and make it pass for a “current event of the past”? The “repudiation of femininity” provoked—and partially embodied—by Thomas Beatie would then be a repetition, or an echo of a founding rejection-negation movement. Thomas Beatie represents this “femininity” in the paradox of being a mother like a Man. It is here that the “repudiation” is activated, at the point of the “bedrock” sublimated, surpassed, and renewed by Thomas Beatie, as if knowing his story made one live an experience whose effects approach those of the “bedrock” as an effect of analysis.

We therefore distinguish the biological “bedrock” and the “femininity” related to it in Freud’s writing. It is not the whole of the “feminine,” although it makes its psychic traces resonate in an actualization that interests the treatment, but which also manifests outside the treatment. Freud’s use of constitutive psychic bisexuality as an argument is accompanied by the observation that it cannot be otherwise. Thus, it can be thought that the repudiated “feminine” is fundamentally heard in the letter

“e” silenced, a symbol of the silence cast over this problematic and insistent psychic bisexuality.

More than a stumbling point that prevents moving further in analysis, the “bedrock” is here a kind of arrival point, or a decisive point of analysis, revealing in any case a certain progression of the work accomplished. When analysis is led that far, do we not enter those territories where words are sometimes lost because they can no longer emerge from a body before which they fail? Are we not then forced into a work of remembrance which, welcoming the return of movements dating from a time before language, pre-genital, would give them human figures? Does the psyche not then have the task of bringing to language, as much as possible, this inner sanctum where it touches the body from which it originates? Is the “repudiation of femininity” not the witness of a story without words, which, by being summoned in the analytical present, seizes the analysand and condemns them to refuse what, originally, was realized to make them exist, but whose possibility of return causes a shudder? It is because its “original” quality forces the subject to repeat its rejection without even being able to remember it, since from that (original) repression, no usual return is expected. Is this not what occurs in

the removal of the “e” from “pregnant,” an effective but neither definitive nor complete maneuver, as Thomas Beatie comes to remind us? Thomas Beatie finds himself realizing the

“bedrock,” by partially diverting it, by making it surpassable in its biological effectiveness, and by reactivating its unsurpassable character since it generates linguistic arrangements tending to circumscribe it once again. He proves in passing that none of the technical and bodily transformations exempts anyone from the unconscious psychic processes necessary for their psychic integration. If their laws do not transform as much as they are updated, this nonetheless offers us new therapeutic perspectives in the present of their psychic current events.

To conclude

Freud writes at the very end of his conclusion: “modify his position toward this factor.” There is certainly no hope of eliminating the factor, but the psychic productions that resulted from it can today, at the end of analysis, be reconsidered; a space opens up. This factor which reveals that sexual difference supports and allows the emergence of the subject itself through the recognition of sexual difference for one’s own account and that of others, has played an essential role for this necessary and divisive work. It can now, through analysis, be looked at differently by the analysand. We hear emerging here the possibility of a new ethical positioning of the subject toward this factor—understood as the original sexual difference where the subject differentiates themselves sexually to exist as one; there then arises the possibility of reintegrating it into an analytical elaboration capable of giving it a version different from the one whose trace was found in analysis as generating more division than union. Through analysis, the sexed being is given back the possibility of thinking their personal historical constitution from and within sexual difference and of nourishing their personal ethics through it. Can “gender,” which patients sometimes use, not be put to work in the clinic within this therapeutic and ethical psychoanalytic perspective? Thomas Beatie’s story makes us live the experience of a large-scale “repudiation of femininity” operation, which we locate particularly, in view of the elements we have just explored, in the reception of his story by the public, by the media. The orthographic correction of “pregnant” without the feminine ending is a kind of sexual rectification at the level of language. Thomas Beatie’s story brings us back to this “factor” identified by Freud and to the interest of the “bedrock” when it makes it possible for the subject to revise their position, which analysis allows to be questioned and renewed as Freud hoped. So that, from its “repudiation,” the “feminine” can be heard as the support for a modern creation of a new kind that is situated in the psychic continuity of that which experience made necessary for the subject.

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