Sexual Norms, Psychoanalysis and “Marriage for All” (2015)

Sexual Norms, Psychoanalysis and “Marriage for All”

Cahiers de psychologie clinique, no. 45, 2015, p. 97-109.

Abstract During the winter of 2012-2013, French political and social life was largely occupied, and even overwhelmed, by debates concerning the bill known as “marriage for all.” Placed directly in the media spotlight, the sexual question—homosexual—was the subject of the most vigorous expert and popular debates that France has experienced regarding morals and sexual and social norms. The upheaval was violent. Homophobic acts increased dramatically (insults, physical assaults). All sectors of society were challenged on this bill and invited to take a position. Psychoanalysts were widely questioned, and many of them expressed themselves regarding norms and sexuality as if psychoanalysis were the expert on these matters. Psychoanalysis became an unavoidable argument in these debates, particularly during the first reading of the bill in the National Assembly. This article aims to study the recourse to psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in the chamber. Furthermore, it seeks to assess the social and political function of psychoanalysis, and its relationship with the production of sexual norms, according to the political uses that can be made of it. Keywords: marriage for all, psychoanalysis, homophobia, perversion, social function of psychoanalysis.

SEXUAL NORMS, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND “MARRIAGE FOR ALL”

Abstract During the winter of 2012-2013, French political and social life was largely occupied and even overwhelmed by the debates on the bill known as “marriage for all.” Placed directly in front of the media scene, the sexual question—gay—was the subject of expert and popular discussions as vigorous as France has experienced regarding morals and sexual and social norms. The turmoil was violent. Homophobic incidents experienced a very large increase (insults, physical aggression). All sectors of society were challenged on this bill and invited to comment. Psychoanalysts were widely questioned, and many of them expressed themselves regarding standards of sexuality as if psychoanalysis were the expert. Psychoanalysis became a key argument in those debates, especially during the first reading of the draft in the National Assembly. This article aims to study the use of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts in the Chamber. Furthermore, it seeks to assess the social and political function of psychoanalysis, and its relationship with the production of sexual norms, according to the political uses that can be made of it.

Keywords: gay marriage, psychoanalysis, homophobia, perversion, social function of psychoanalysis.

While it is acknowledged that perversion does not truly constitute a model, as its conception and clinical presentation always appear shifting and divergent depending on the approach, its use nevertheless persists. Outside of scientific literature, we find examples of its use particularly in the social field, where it still represents today the common representation of social and sexual abnormality, without needing to take on the meaning of an attested psychic abnormality. In the aftermath of the recourse to psychoanalysis in the parliamentary debates on the Taubira law known as “marriage for all,” we can explore the manner in which the figures of the pervert or perversion were invoked in support of political arguments. Psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis distinguished themselves or were called upon as witnesses by society and its representatives, providing the necessary theoretical, clinical, or ideological elements. While this is not psychoanalysis as an experience, these social, cultural, and political debates nevertheless retrospectively question psychoanalysis and its practitioners on theoretical aspects, and especially ethical ones. It is then the stakes of the social function of psychoanalysis that we take seriously in the context of recent debates that have provided opportunities to assess new recourse, by some, to perversion as an argument regarding the sexuality of others, or to psychoanalysis as an editor of social and sexual norms. In other words, how certain social and political uses of knowledge derived from psychoanalytic experience wage the public battle over intimate sexual norms in collective debate, to the detriment of respect for the social individual and the subject of the unconscious.

When Jean-Pierre Winter, a psychoanalyst, states that “legalizing homoparentality means killing the father and the mother” in the magazine Psychologies⁵, his arguments are taken up by Deputy Marc Le Fur during the debates in the Assembly: “I would also like to mention a mode of thought that has had a great impact, perhaps more on the left than on the right: psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has marked generations—the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. (Exclamations from the SRC group benches.) I would like you to consider what a psychoanalyst, Dr. Winter, says: […] ‘From a psychoanalytic point of view, I argue that making such signifiers disappear is the equivalent of the symbolic murder of the father and the mother.’ The words of ‘a’ psychoanalyst become, on the political stage, an argument of ‘the’ entire psychoanalysis, even related to its historical, moral, and collective value. This extension of psychoanalysis is not rare, and can be observed according to the opinions defended in the ‘for’ camp and the ‘against’ camp. Deputy Le Fur is not mistaken in specifying, as if to accentuate its force, ‘a mode of thought that has had a great impact, perhaps more on the left than on the right […].’ Psychoanalysis here is a ‘mode of thought,’ opinion and conviction, both moral and political, but is this still ‘the’ psychoanalysis, or ‘some’ psychoanalysis that is being discussed here?

This rhetoric multiplied during the debates. Psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts were invoked nearly sixteen times, during seven discussion sessions, out of twenty-one in total. Psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts are mainly cited in the “against” camp. In the “for” camp, it is not psychoanalysis or psychoanalysts that are invoked, but the fact that a particular psychoanalyst has taken a favorable position on the bill. These references are largely confined to non-conceptual arguments in the “for” camp, while the “against” camp clearly relies on analytical theoretical knowledge. Thus, the “for” camp says “Élisabeth Roudinesco is in favor,” while the “against” camp says “Father, Symbolic Order, Perversion, Generation, Prohibition of Incest, etc.”

Judging by these debates, would psychoanalysis, or rather what is used of it in politics, be more readily the preserve of conservatism rather than liberalism? Would it be especially effective in supporting the production of norms or their maintenance rather than their questioning and challenge? Deputies seized upon Freud to speak of the necessity of the Father with a capital “F,” for example. Supporting here arguments in favor of maintaining the existing order and the fear to have regarding novelty. None seized upon Freud to speak of psychic bisexuality and its consequences on the psychological consequences of the difference between the sexes on the anatomical level, for example, which is nevertheless not uninteresting for addressing the question of parental functions and roles. But it must be admitted, in all cases, that pieces of theories dispatched in this way cannot do much except engage psychoanalysis, in one direction or another, in this delicate path that condemns it to occupy a position of superiority, or of superego, very far removed from the cure and from all ethical considerations.

At other times, psychoanalysis is cited to speak of the necessity of the distinction between feminine and masculine, which certain arguments seem to associate with father and mother, implying man and woman, without this ever being fully established and as if it were self-evident. There is in this sense an underlying thread, a sort of equivalence, correspondence, or relationship between binaries such as man/woman, father/mother, masculine/feminine, active/passive, male/female, which could be aligned in two columns, and to which we would be tempted to add, in order to question it, the binary sex/gender to know whether what is being said here does not amount to placing sex on the side of man and gender on the side of woman?

But psychoanalysis is not only theoretical; it is first and foremost an experience, that of the psychoanalytic cure, that of practice. As a theoretical ensemble, psychoanalytic formulations produce normative effects, like any theory. We have just seen through these references that these normative effects can sometimes point in one direction, then in another. Truths clash. For example, readings of the Oedipus complex diverge, between structural necessity or cultural identification, as if the two had to be separated. Let us return for a moment to the debates in the National Assembly: “Mr. Marc Le Fur: The sexual alterity of parents is a necessity for children; this is what we reaffirm through these amendments. We are not the only ones to say this; psychoanalysts also affirm it. Once again, I am surprised that the left, so marked by the psychoanalytic movement, completely forgets the elementary rules it helped to establish. I would like to quote a woman who devoted her life to childhood by working for Child Welfare Services. She mentions ‘the little boy who, around three years old, falls madly in love with his mother and who aspires to keep his father at a good distance. He must acknowledge that he cannot evict this rival. He will then attempt to resemble this man, to appropriate his knowledge, his tastes, his skills, his behavior. In doing so, he will develop his knowledge, the most diverse, appropriate his gendered and sexual identity: to be like daddy to approach mommy. Thus, through the Oedipal libidinal epic, the foundations of the child’s being and the future adult are laid.’ (Exclamations from the SRC group benches.) Return therefore to these theories that were your fundamentals just a few years ago; do not forget them. This text should allow you to remember them. Mr. Bernard Roman: Lie down then!”

Is this sufficient to consider that psychoanalysis is normative? If the existence of “elementary rules” that the “analytical movement […] helped to establish” is mentioned, what is being discussed? We do not know, if only to consider the interest in norms and their constructions that the cure expresses when it aims to illuminate them, deconstruct them, for the account of the subject, for the analysand. Psychoanalysis is normative to the extent of subjective normativity, in the experience of the cure. Psychoanalytic theories, when they model by conceptual or rhetorical necessity, address concepts, not subjects. Psychoanalytic theory(ies), like any theory, produce normative effects, but this is not psychoanalysis as a cure. The history of the psychoanalytic movement is strewn with rich critiques addressed to its most famous and normative concepts. Ultimately, have these deputies of the “for” and the

“against” provided proof that psychoanalysis produces norms? We may wonder whether what was brandished there does not relate more to individual sexual norms, in the sense of each person’s family norms? What appears here as sexual norms linked to psychoanalysis can also be considered as “singular norms” developed by each person in response to the disturbance of the sexual. Psychoanalysis, insofar as each person maintains a certain relationship with it, whatever it may be, comes to present this production of normativity. These so-called norms could just as well be thought of as norms reflecting the creation of infantile sexual theories, for example.

Thus conceived, these norms would be entirely a figure of what gender, in particular, seems able to offer that is most interesting in the analytical field, namely a formalization of an unthought and unthinkable aspect of sex, of the real of sex, which unfolds before our eyes through the supposed reality, of which we do not forget that it proceeds from the imaginary, even though it is partially supported by the symbolic to border the real.

Stéphane Nadaud, a child psychiatrist heard by the Senate during the second stage of discussion of the text, begins his intervention thus: “When addressing a political assembly, one must first situate at what level of discourse one is situated; one must situate from where one speaks. […] It is one of the most complicated things to consider, knowing at what level of discourse what one is going to say refers […] I consider myself invited here as a philosopher, psychiatrist, and expert […] I will try to reject this third title, that of expert, by showing that in my opinion I cannot hold a discourse that can be useful to you with that status […].” This taking of the floor and position echoes Freud’s words, who on two occasions declared that psychoanalysis, politics, and pedagogy are impossible professions.

Freud favors this perpetual renewal of the teaching experience, the welcoming of the unknown, at the risk of upheavals, desubjectivations, just as he himself made methodical, scientific use of it to discover some obstacles in the exploration of the unconscious. So when politics meets psychoanalysis in the chamber of the National Assembly and deputies attempt to engage in pedagogy, or when psychoanalysts are invited as experts before the deputies of the law commission, what are we witnessing if not a congress of assembled impossibilities? Yet, we must consider that the experience of some and others, in their impossibilities, can work to extract some knowledge useful for common reflection. But already we are crossing the impossible frontier again, the line of incommunicability between experience and knowledge, where not all of experience constitutes knowledge, where the impossible to know, the nonsense, insist.

Gender is not a psychoanalytic concept. And yet, gender does not cease to question psychoanalysis in its experience and its theory. It is undoubtedly today the best tool for psychoanalysis when it questions itself about norms, indispensable at least to the scrupulous initiation that psychoanalysis as knowledge can engage upon itself. It questions, in a return movement, psychoanalysis in place of the knowledge about the sexual that it itself inaugurated. This echo crosses various disciplinary fields and has notably been illustrated in the return to Europe of French Theory, to which we owe cultural studies, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, all illustrations promoting what gender has occasioned as trouble for more than thirty years. In doing so, the knowledge about the sexual in circulation, which we observe in the social or political disciplines, inflicts in the direction of psychoanalytic theoretical knowledge all sorts of invectives and invitations to reconsider here positions, there ways of doing. But the debates are difficult to sustain; the tensions are great. How to appreciate and welcome these movements without omitting that the knowledge that interests psychoanalysis, unconscious knowledge, is still of another order than the aforementioned knowledge? One must undoubtedly appreciate the social function of psychoanalysis, because with it we can carefully consider the manner in which theoretical repercussions inflict on the social patent effects that, in turn, illuminate theoretical postulates on their shortcomings and impasses. Let us see in this way the question of perversion, which is partially illuminated in doing so.

Michel Tort rightly notes: “What makes the originality of the war declared against psychoanalysis since the 1990s and its stakes? One can consider that the main aspect lies in the questioning of the social function of psychoanalysis […].” Reading mainstream magazines or specialist debates provides us with a thousand proofs of this regularly. Whether it concerns theoretical critiques from gender or queer studies^, the use of psychoanalysis by French parliamentarians during the debates on the “Taubira Law,” or even the partial and unscrupulous use of Freudian theories by certain duly titled psychoanalysts, the social function of psychoanalysis—to be understood as experience and not as a sum of knowledge—is questioned, undermined as strongly as possible, without any kind of stammering being made known in response. So we must question the future of the limits that analytical subversion encounters within itself currently, and consequently raise what becomes within it of the understanding of perversion in the social field—paradigm of limits and subversion.

We say that psychoanalysis is an experience before anything else, well before constituting a body of theoretical knowledge, of which we know—through the experience of psychoanalysis—that it is nothing compared to the unconscious knowledge that each subject undertakes to elucidate for their own account. On one side, theoretical knowledge provides reference. On the other, unconscious knowledge is determinant. Which to favor? Which to trust in matters of sexual norms, what the clinic informs or what commonly recognized knowledge asserts? It is at this point that Lacan’s remark to France Culture in 1973 is appreciated: “There are social norms for lack of any sexual norm; that is what Freud says. The way of grasping the ambiguity, the slippage of any approach to sexuality favors that there, to fill in, one rushes with all sorts of notations that claim to be scientific and one believes that this illuminates the question; it is very remarkable this double game of analytical publication between what biologists can detect in animals and on the other hand, this, which is quite tangible in everyone’s life, namely that everyone manages very poorly their sexual life.”

Would sexual abnormality or the impossible sexual normativity therefore be in friction, to the point of referring each person to their personal sexual muddle, nowadays as in Freud’s time? What does Lacan suggest, if not that no scholarly discourse is able to reduce the sexual imbroglio of the speaking being, found wanting in comparison to animals, unable to content itself with either biology or medicine to address the embarrassment that their sexual life creates for them? Choosing to believe in sexual abnormality or relying on the impossible sexual normativity remain the two options tracing the boundary of the normal and the pathological while defining the possibilities of the subject’s movement on either side of this boundary or even through it.

The “polymorphous perverse” with which Freud designates the child in his exploration of sexual life—at the time when, step by step, he develops and arranges the conditions for a future adequation, more or less well regulated, between what the drive demands and what he finds to present to it as objects in fantasy—is no longer the exclusive preserve of the child of the last century. The general disruption of ordinary and historical sexual uses has liberated the possible to open us to pharmacopornography, land of expression of the sexual perversions of this 21st century between economic and chemical liberalism. The modes of satisfaction, whether material, physiological, or imaginary, have never been so well regulated to the drive necessities, reducing the perimeter of usual contingencies, relegated to banal criteria without consequences. Man has lost even his gravity according to Charles Melman’s analysis, expressing here an opinion shared by others. Would medical progress, in concert with technical advances, and the effective increase in the field of possibilities, maintain in a new way the polymorphism of today’s subjects, thereby allowing perversion to maintain and extend itself rather than being regulated as could be observed in the past? This is the fear also shared by conservative political tendencies, joined also by psychoanalysts, expressing themselves anxiously about the uncertain and unstable future to which society would expose itself in this direction. Here the unconscious views of psychoanalysis cross in the social the expression and social representation of Freudian sexuality. The mixture and confusion operate in favor of a consideration of evident appearance, between what the psychic processes detected by Freudian experience and the social and cultural and political movements activate during the march of progress, which the fear of the worst—always to come—alone would justify waving as a red flag. But what do we really know about what perversions have become—privileged figures in the study of sexual norms?

Let us dare a question, then another. Nowadays, are “homo-

sexuals” still perverts or is it not rather that perversion has abandoned them? Does not the social and symbolic scope of “Just Married,” permitted by the recent law opening marriage to all couples, answer this question? Without a doubt, the normalization related to equal rights radically levels what, until recently, seemed to step out of line in a damaging way. Families are recomposing and developing their alliances. Marriage is no longer the guarantee of the supposed stability of the family and thereby becomes an expanded right: paradox. Even a mayor opposed to marriage for all ended up agreeing to officiate the marriage of his own son with his partner, another paradox. What does the acquired respectability of some generate for others? If yesterday’s abnormals are today’s normalized, what new arrangement of abnormality is being realized? Who are the new pariahs or the new perverts? We perceive here how perversion maintains itself well beyond an always fluctuating nosographic coherence, as a socially effective figure, including when psychological arguments come to support its foundations. Which among them

• among the abnormals of the moment—can now bear this heavy diagnostic burden, of being those who use diversion and dissimulation for purposes of forced ignorance of the evidence, anxiety-provoking, of castration? Who are those to whom, a fortiori, this social complaint of reproached disorder, of the impropriety of remarks, of inappropriate behaviors, must be addressed? The newlyweds of a new kind kissing greedily on the steps of town halls or the anti-equality demonstrators inciting hatred? Who diverts, today, the social norm to make others bear the weight of their narcissistic wounds erected as arguments for reform against all possibilities of social dialogue? Who abnormalizes themselves today, and what can today’s psychoanalysis say about it or not?

If we say “today‘s psychoanalysis” and not only that which could speak in the present time, it is to emphasize that for lack of being the one that can say, psychoanalysis nonetheless remains one that speaks like all the others, because there is no other psychoanalysis than that of one who does it, or who has done it. In 1905 or in 2014, the matter is identical: those who profess in its name

• with or without knowledge, with or without experience—speak only of their own psychoanalysis—the one to come, the one that failed, the one feared or hoped for. Of today is therefore, at all times, the only possibility of speaking, about psychoanalysis, a word of analysand—lying down or not—so much has it been imposed for these last fifty years, that the Freudian experience has generated a whole series of transference effects outside the cure that we have not finished appreciating.

Psychoanalysis belongs to everyone and anyone, at all times and to no one. The parliamentarians were wrong to want to monopolize it, because anyone can easily know that any current speech about sexuality is a speech traversed by psychoanalysis, whether one is Michel Onfray or Élisabeth Roudinesco, this condition is common and without glory. From this point of view, psychoanalysis imposes itself as being timeless although not opposed to history. Thus, to speak of perversion and question it about its actuality, we discuss under the same conditions as those of Freud in 1905. There is no history of perversion—except perhaps for psychiatry or nosography—only its actuality. As regression in the cure offers us access in the present to the present past, the theoretical knowledge of symptoms and structures is only valid at the place of their updating in the cure of those they concern: the analysand and their analyst. What did they say, these parliamentarians and those heard in the preliminary inquiry to the debate on the Taubira law known as “marriage for all”? They said, in substance first of all, that the law is not the norm, and even a law opening marriage to persons said to be of “the same sex” will not reduce the symptomatic insistence of the symbolic law. They denounced the symbolic order, while reifying it, as if it were an instance prior to any subjective psychic operation, thereby avoiding considering the symbolic order as a primary psychic operation, that by which the subject comes to the symbolic and to language, without need for the order to be established before them but in the necessity that another invite them to it, and that they finally propose it to themselves. Freud teaches us this easily: what is erected as necessary order is only the partial result of a partial adaptation of the human psyche in the face of the sexual experience that it cannot assume beyond its possibilities. Thus, the adopted psychic order—and symbolic by this sole fact, and not by the graces of Nature or Culture—is a permanent work in progress. We are not born with our psychic apparatus; it is constituted under the effect of experience. What is organized there of norms and instances—to cite only that—finds its place and function there only in the perspective of this adaptation, which we know to be minimal and monitored: the psyche does not like change and worse still, it fights against change even if this is harmful to the person. So much so, Freud deplores and denounces it at the same time, that the order so necessary to ensure and reassure finds expression only in resistance, that toward which Freud directs all his efforts to diminish it, interpret it, or displace it so that psychic treatment can be realized. In discussing the law, opposing it or defending it, the actors of this parliamentary debate staged in broad daylight the processes of edification of the psychic apparatus, those that we all live without knowing it. More than a rigorous denunciation from one point of view or another, we witnessed a forced lesson in the sociology of psychoanalysis by which we must appreciate the effects in the form of echoes that psychoanalysis arouses, and that psychoanalysts cannot ignore.

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