Notes and speculations on clitoral envy and the deconfinement of the prostate in boys (2021)

Notes and speculations on clitoral envy and the deconfinement of the prostate in boys

Online publication, January 2021

“[…] it is quite clear that there is a need to find another name for what it is about man for a woman […]” J. Lacan, The Sinthome.

 

Can the Freudian gesture, which consisted in designating the sexual as opening up to the experience of psychoanalysis, be followed not only by effects but also by extensions, just as Lacan was able to return to Freud, and after whom it is up to us to continue exploring what continues to emerge – by actualizing itself – in the psychic and sexual life of human beings?

As Freud so often remarked, the most apparently abnormal manifestations of sexual life, sexual aberrations, continue to instruct us more surely than obvious facts. The most astonishing, most disturbing – or unsettling – sexual behaviors at first glance are merely ambassadors, emissaries that we must continue to welcome and follow before thanking them, for the clarity they provide and offer us in our exploration of the sexual fact and its relations to the unconscious.

What we learn from the study of some of these astonishing phenomena may well be covered by the elegant explanations already produced, or by the most authoritarian academic theoretical demonstrations. But by following these, we would miss encountering the unheard-of – which questions both the natural and the cultural or civilizational – with which we both create ourselves and struggle.

Since Freud, we have begun to distinguish anatomy from destinies, then anatomy itself beyond its genitality from which the Phallus rises to all winds, a slayer of the Oedipus Complex in its own way, with Lacan, and a representative of civilization to the unconscious.

Let us admit it – and regret it – we have not yet pushed very far the possibility of fully opening up the intimacies of our inner thoughts on gender, love, life. This reluctance – as we must qualify what is not a delay – insists and brings to light what we do not yet want to know, what we refuse to know, yet it must be revealed step by step.

What supports the psychoanalytic clinical experience, always irrefutable and undemonstrable, where, for nearly thirty years, these cases – which we occasionally qualify – have become ordinary, literally so illuminating of the continent less dark than it seemed of so-called feminine sexuality – or of the feminine, when the latter is confused with its supposed phantasmatic genealogy in those we call “women” – which no longer allow us to claim to continue identically, without taking into account the evidence encountered in clitoral envy in boys, an envy supported by the irresistible ascent of prostatic orgasm in men and its consequences on our theoretical elaborations?

It is appropriate to situate a proximity, which we will appreciate later, with this clinic – which we have called “gender clinic” to make the couch amenable – taught by the singularity of transition journeys, known as FtM, which challenge and surpass the better-known MtF ones in our experience. At the same time, without etiological connection, but linked by their contemporaneity, the explosion of Chemsex, over the last fifteen years, illustrates in its own way the implacable desire and its conditions aiming at the desperate circumvention of phallic jouissance for the sake of a reification, thwarted, of the ordinary incarnation of a relationship that still does not exist between the sexes, whatever they may be: to which genders outrageously respond with their capacity for agreement, where they make believe in the possibility of an agreement of particles. One phenomenon can hide another, without concealing it or modifying its trajectory, at least disturbing its observation.

 

From sex, healing love

To this end, we have proposed to identify what in love seems to be affected by sex to the point of suffering from it, which an imaginary healing can make resilient enough to render it harmless after having declared it fulfilled, liberated, or performant, as sexuality should have been for nearly fifty years, but whose liberalization, we bitterly note, has durably prevented its liberation, mistakenly conceived as such, despite undeniable adjustments that constitute progress.

From sex, healing love, as a project to free love from what makes it suffer, as we understand and decipher this common unconscious wish, of which we must state what composes it between fantasy, desire, drive, and the vectorization of being by the jouissance of the Other, where these challenges thrown towards the Absolute, which electrify and electrocute many all-too-human attempts, at the risk of culture, are currently combined.

 

From anatomy, we began to disengage sex over a century ago. Thanks to the experience of analysis, one can distinguish sex from the signifier and stop trying to heal love with sex: what psychoanalysts resist believing – despite Lacan’s writing of the formulas of sexuation – convinced that the law must be held responsible for the signifier, while it is at best guilty of leaving some of its representatives as masters on behalf of the subject: Man, Woman, as usage consecrates them as the most widely shared imbecility.

In boys, we could not have known, before our current knowledge of the incredible physiological and anatomical existence of the clitoris, the non-link between the fantasy of pregnancy – the body as a container or the body made pregnant by pregnancy – and the occupation/transcendence of the body by limitless jouissance established as the stake of fist-fucking, which takes over in the reality of an unconscious desire to possess the supposedly invisible organ of feminine pleasure – at the heart of a sensory form where, at the same time, the phallic object of the fist/arm, which first becomes an anal filling – a phallic object that makes the jouissance of the same name adhere to the body of the other – precipitates and is confused, before becoming a boundless extension. A non-link replaced by the organ itself having gained citizenship. The time when the clitoris was thought of as a “little button,” tiny and fragile, is over. The invisibility of the clitoris and its reputation for limitless, wild, uncontrollable, histrionic jouissance nourish the form that the unconscious fantasy of man takes, regarding fist-fucking in particular, of being possessed by sensation, of being the captive of the Other (being its possession) through its effects. The now known, visible anatomical form of the clitoris nourishes certain unconscious pairings tending either towards the gate of Heaven, or a vital subterranean source close to the Earth’s core.

Of this, experience still confirms us, for over ten years, so we finally admit it. Confirming, once again, that the object relation always imposes itself as the cornerstone of unconscious formations, where the more invisible it is, the more it seems to function.

 

Where we thought we were reading and interpreting the man’s fantasy of pregnancy as a kind of asymmetrical equivalent of the woman’s penis envy, we were still precisely unaware of the equivalent physical qualities of the two organs (glans/penis, clitoris), as they nourish in the unconscious – which does not suppose, but knows – this beautiful equivalence of desire for possession around what, not without passing through the organ, makes the body feel that it holds what makes it be – and therefore that another possesses it, be it the Other or the partner functioning as such.

But the unconscious knows that its elsewhere logically holds something that is. That it sometimes takes it in reality for what it is not, thanks to what is linked to it in one way or another, is indeed a naive competence of the unconscious that psychoanalysis has taught us. Thus, it is conceived differently that the perceived realities, as well as those barely guessed or hoped for, but adopted by the unconscious in their complete consistency, cannot nourish anything other than an ordinary blunder where what is not perceived in reality, although seen in the unconscious by the gaze that does not need eyes to see clearly, continues to maintain the blur that hides the wolf. We do not see what is not there to be seen and we look at the invisible that we only see by feeling it differently: which makes possible the displacements of objects that the drive, among others, proposes to invest.

So when we occasionally made a rather fantastic correspondence between the girl’s penis envy and the boy’s desire for maternity as two opposable elements distributing frustration and the castration that goes with it for the two sexes thought through this prism, we were committing a serious error, in addition to using a non-analytic, purely rhetorical procedure: one that made believe, and continues to make believe, that the unconscious can produce the figure of something when it can hold its representation. This is a crucial point, for anyone who wants to know, today, the explanatory misunderstanding or abusive interpretation, so often committed, regarding the supposed difference between the sexes thought of as two – which has nothing to do with the reality of the two sexes as encountered in sexual encounters, regardless of the anatomies involved.

Each sex, if one can speak in such an inhuman way, knows that the other has something since it holds a representation of something in the unconscious, and that by having it, the other is still something else that it is not itself – beyond the unconscious this time. This is enough to know what unconscious constructions and the consequent processes of these differences between beings are about. Overrepresentation through figuration is a conscious property, not an unconscious one: of this, we still have to explore the details to continue to precisely give the characteristics of this Unbewusst.

 

Clitoral Envy

Thus, certain unconscious knowledges, made available by the interpretation and construction of the sensitive manifestations of the analyzing language over the sessions, have allowed us to discern the foundational axes of the phantasmatic spectrum of fist-fucking enthusiasts offering their entire body, but distinguished into two movements, both specular and non-specular, for the imaginary incarnation in the reality of the now known parts of the clitoris in its entirety, from its exteriority to its interiority, irrigating the internal vaginal walls capable then of welcoming the external in sensations. Arms, legs, guts, everything is there to be this welcome, this inner maker of the external: this kind of access gate, a stargate. Where the members of their physical body make them the organ of feminine pleasure become a chimerical giant in phenomenal reality: one capable of engaging the body in an integral sensory escalation, where prostatic orgasm and its beyond the restricted jouissance of the penis certify the phallic transcendence of sexual jouissance overwhelmed by that of the Other – non-objectal. Abandoned to the authoritarian hand, real or imaginary, responsible for pleasure and its beyond, by principle, capable of having, these men experience “The woman does not exist.” Not of being feminized because penetrated, quite the contrary, phallicized in all their flesh, leaving being to the fainting of this jouissance, beyond the organ that is principle, between reality and surpassable pleasure, where to faint.

A having whose sexual equivocation never ceases, in coitus as it is said, to make having pass for taking when it is a gift to be. “I take you” gives as much as it receives from being taken by, under the guise of accepting the meaning, in its inverse, admitted to guarantee the back and forth that then becomes necessary to verify the proper functioning of the signifiers that turn back, and send what is not taken from being towards the having of a coming being – hidden/peek-a-boo, inside/outside, taking/being taken, etc. Hence penetration always marks its cunning tempo.

The enviable clitoris more than anything else, a marvelous object, captures the unconscious gaze of these patients, relieved not to have to find its real compensation in reality, since they are informed of its ek-sistence. Freed from the organ besieged by its desiring and phantasmatic function, sex, definitively, holds to the Other of jouissance, not to the articulated/flying Phallus of the pulsional object that gender supports to be here, and to be also that of boys for whom it is suitable (cisgender boys).

Clitoris or prostate can be thought of here, and beyond, as symbols of entry towards jouissance which, from the Other, regulates its pace of objecting, from time to time, to the approach by the edge, even if it means reducing the field of being, without however supporting the election of said organs to the rank of Phallus, although they are nourished by the phallic stakes traversing the experience from the field of the Other.

Thus, what we designate as clitoral envy in boys and access to prostatic orgasm, linked in these clinical examples, traces, in our era, the contours of another sexual geography, including in anatomo-physiological reality, where the raw seen continues to prevail over the real existence, nevertheless felt and perceived, that conscious representation still holds compatible with the imaginary scenario, while the unconscious discusses, if one can say so, with the sole proponents of this story: one will have from the Other only the jouissance not acquired by the Phallus to orchestrate its symbolic score for lack of the rest.

Let us be sure of this, and well beyond the apparent specificities of so-called minority sexualities, here classified among BDSM. The books on sale these days, for the end-of-year holidays, are full of sexological compilations where the prostate holds a prominent place. Sexological instruction manuals are flourishing on bookstore tables. The equivalence of the “P-spot” with that of the “G-spot,” as we so often hear today, speaks volumes and, so to speak, concludes the question. From now on, we know that the clitoris has not finished haunting the secret dreams of little boys envying the much-reputed sexual experience of their human sisters, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, that in the unconscious, or let’s say, for the unconscious body image, the clitoris and the prostate share qualities otherwise contradictory for anatomy, but are what still clothes for some time effective pulsional economic links. Thanks to this, for a time, human males can experience this penis envy of the girl that is not and will never be the penis envy of the human female: here lies an obvious fact to reconsider, because the girl caught by this envy is not just any girl, she is the little girl of the Western, white world, of modern European societies of the early twentieth century: she alone does not summarize female humanity.

 

Sexual jouissance, not so phallic, not so sexual

Given these clinical elements, the jouissance of the organ strictly speaking, i.e., of the clitoris or the penis, for example, cannot be maintained as solely sexual, being able to be both phallic and other: where sex is no longer dependent on the genital organ. Sexual jouissance could now be called genital to free sex from its anatomy, without which Freud would be contradicted, and we, forced to reduce the Phallus to the penile or clitoral organ, which is not systematically appropriate: the organ, if it can be elected to this rank, does not thereby possess any qualities – neither natural nor cultural – so strong that they would surely impose their effects.

That it is organic does not presuppose it more, nor less, to be phallic or of the Other. jouissance does not bring bodies together, it separates them, whether phallic or of the Other, and confirms that if bodies relate, sexually speaking, it is not necessarily jouissant; it can simply signal love. In another text, we will try to identify the interest of a separation, by logical identification, of the significance of sex and its representative.

This leads us to note the recurring observation that sexual jouissance is not a logically phallic jouissance, even if we would have also appreciated – perhaps politically – being able to qualify as phallic jouissance that linked to the clitoris, for example, at a time when new sexual arrangements of the human species are still being revealed. No, sexual jouissance linked to the so-called genital sexual organ (whether it is the penis, the glans, the labia, the vagina, the clitoris) falls, by default, under the jouissance of the Other. Which soon makes us think of the beyond of pleasure, this time as beyond (phallic) jouissance.

Of this we can be assured by the exploration of these aforementioned clinical events, but also other clinical elements already addressed: firstly, those of the relationship between genders in place of the non-sexual relationship in Chemsex, to which we have contributed through some publications , to which we can secondly associate the phantasmatic becoming of the feminized prostate organ – and phallicized by the same stroke, not made phallic, which is the essence of our present reflection – in the contemporary manifestations of the recompositions of the geography of so-called masculine pleasure (in connection with the practice of fist-fucking, notably, but more globally, the anal penetration of M by his F or FtM partners which reveals what was not perceived in the narrow representations of the homosexual M/M relationship). Through this, we have supported the questioning of a relationship between genders where that between sexes continues not to be written.

We can therefore rectify this historical error in our discipline: man has no predisposition for phallic jouissance, while woman has no more access to the jouissance of the Other than man: these are interpretations revealing the desire in circulation in which we are involved, let’s say culturally or collectively; interpretations that are the desire they pinpoint.

This reminds us of our 2016 proposal to situate sex on the Borromean knot, which would be located near the jouissance of the Other, while gender would be illustrated by phallic jouissance where the real and the symbolic support each other without the imaginary: outside the body, therefore, capable of claiming a precise erotic recognition for the organ .

With this, invited by experience, we must emphasize this observation: sex does not interest the Phallus, except through masturbation, and through this same auto-erotic dimension in sexual exchanges – particularly those illuminated by the consumption of certain drugs which, better than other more ordinary practices, are equally based on an auto-satisfying and phallic partition of the jouissance at play in the sexual act, illuminating this jouissance – whatever it may be – which leaves no chance for the so-called relationship.

 

The non-equivalence between man and woman conceived as sexes, which Lacan particularly supports in The Sinthome, bypasses the assignment not of a sex/gender to a born/identified body, but of the signifier to a supposed sex for its signified (where the formulas of sexuation discuss a little too easily with the male side and the female side, vestiges of urinary segregation). When he asks: “[…] it is quite clear that there is a need to find another name for what it is about man for a woman […]” (p. 101), we identify in it the premise of a detachment of what gender, in the meantime, has come to confirm and has made possible from Lacanian anticipation: separating sex from the signifier beyond its distinction from the anatomy that precedes its possibility, this in support of sexuation and not against it when confused with sexual difference.

This allows us, a posteriori, to leave Lacan’s point of view for whom man is an “affliction for woman,” and to extract from it, to support ourselves, the principle of the non-sexual relationship consequent to his elaborations: sexes, however they are conceived, are contradictory without being contrary. And, in doing so, to free our thought of sexuation and that on jouissance from what would be linked to Man and Woman according to the experience lived until then; to try to truly welcome, without presupposition, the incredible psychic constructions that we are given to discover in those and all the others who come to speak to tell. Even if it means attempting one more table for identification , even if it means getting lost to discover.

 

May these outlandish proposals in the eyes of some contribute a little to considering the clitoris as an organ of thought , which, by this fact, is no longer the exclusive mark of women, but sees its adornments disputed by all, and inspires modes of feminine jouissance surpassing the anatomy of the human female as well as that of the human male, but also the prerogatives of man and woman freed from their de-signified sexes, made free to find new moorings with words, and who knows, perhaps a new quilting point with love. For the clitoris remains a place of wounds poorly justified by the feminine enigma to which many humans come to dream, jouir, and fantasize, rather than mutilate, silence, kill, and deny.

 

Vincent Bourseul

Paris, January 2, 2021.

 

Editor: Vincent Simon (simonvincent006@gmail.com)

 

Mapping of three jouissances (2020)

 

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Genital jouissance	object	instance	impossible process
jouissance of the Other	process	object	impossible instance
Phallic jouissance	instance	process	impossible object

 

Situations of sex and gender on the Borromean knot (2013)

Editor: Vincent Simon (simonvincent006@gmail.com)