Gender in Psychoanalysis: The Scope of a Definition

Recherches en Psychoanalysis, no. 17, 2014/1, p. 63-72.

Abstract:

Gender calls Psychoanalysis into question by compelling it, among other things, to address certain criticisms levelled against it. Yet the current state of these discussions is not always satisfactory. Drawing on queer critique, can the modern emancipation of gender be integrated into the epistemological field of Psychoanalysis? What are the coordinates of a possible definition of gender in Psychoanalysis? This article outlines several points of articulation in the theoretical discussions prompted by gender, in an attempt to offer a possible definition based on what it calls into question within Psychoanalysis.

Abstract:

Gender calls into question psychoanalysis by forcing it to discuss some of the criticisms that have been leveled at it. But the point that current discussions have reached is not always satisfactory. In drawing on queer criticism, can the modern day emancipation of gender be integrated into the epistemological field of psychoanalysis? What are the coordinates for a possible definition of gender in psychoanalysis? This article traces out some points of articulation for the theoretical discussion to which gender gives rise, so as to try to offer a possible definition of it on the basis of what it questions in psychoanalysis.

Keywords: gender, psychoanalysis, queer, epistemology

Keywords: gender, psychoanalysis, epistemology, queer

To approach the coordinates of a possible definition of gender in Psychoanalysis—or, in other words, the relations between the concepts of Psychoanalysis and gender—we must find an entry point in order to welcome into our theoretical field a notion that is, a priori, external to it. We might begin with a historical study of the relations between Psychoanalysis and sexual questions emerging from sexual minorities. This would no doubt allow us to pick up the thread of debates engaged since the beginning of Psychoanalysis, by

Freud himself, and with Freud by others. We could thus attempt to answer questions that sometimes arise from so-called

“gender questions,” such as: is Psychoanalysis homophobic¹ or homofriendly²? Is Psychoanalysis “a failed feminist theory”³? But gender is not a psychoanalytic concept, so how should we proceed? In the past, certain writings attest to the interest of some analysts in considering a kind of “outside” of sex (Weininger⁴, Horney⁵), which we can reinterpret today as relating, more or less, to gender. Historically, discussions between gender and Psychoanalysis begin with questions linked to transsexualism, intersexualism (Stoller), and homosexuality. The articulation of interest in gender with transsexual questions remains present in the psychoanalytic field today.⁶ But since Stoller⁷, gender has remained tied, in the “psy” field, to the notion of “gender identity,” which we find narrow and static in light of gender’s epistemological stakes in general, and in Psychoanalysis in particular. Let us therefore take up a few reference points to move forward on what gender does to Psychoanalysis—something that will inevitably open onto some current and historical considerations within our field—in order to attempt to formulate a possible definition based on ethical considerations that philosophy relays alongside Psychoanalysis concerning the subject and the truth of sex.

How is gender currently defined in Psychoanalysis and in the disciplines that dialogue with it? Let us first observe that the psychoanalytic approach often attempts to separate sex and gender when it comes to stating what gender is. The sex/gender relation is thus almost undone in favour of a recomposition of sex; this is what we can read in Houari Maïdi⁸, where the habitual use of sex in Psychoanalysis proves clearly handicapping to the introduction of gender, insofar as sex already seems to make something of the order of gender heard. Along these lines, let us note the opening proposed by Claire Nahon⁹ on the basis of “trans-sexuality,” which offers ways of approaching the sex/gender relation that are useful to our attempts to circumscribe a most troubling object. Yet here again, gender remains outside sex; we cannot grasp it without this split. In a different way, Colette Chiland¹⁰ continues to be concerned with the articulation of words and reality, in which gender seems, in her analysis, to raise issues that psychiatric nosography must define in order to grasp their content. Once again, gender illustrates a malaise of sex from which it would be almost detachable at the end of its deconstruction. This is all the more apparent insofar as the psychoanalytic approach struggles to produce analyses as comfortable and effective as sociological analyses, in particular when they engage more directly in the play of demarcations.¹¹ Thus hindered by an approach that is necessarily partial and difficult to conceptualise, psychoanalytic theorising sometimes takes a detour to ask, “Does the subject have a gender?”¹² This does not provide a definition of gender in Psychoanalysis, but we make progress by handling gender within our epistemological field, and we find a place there for the clinic. Along these lines, Juliet Mitchel¹³ offers an interesting reading of Winnicott, detecting in his reflections elements relating to gender from an unconscious point of view, by taking transference in analysis into account. Thus, in recent years, the possibility has gradually opened up of giving gender a place, a function, and a definition within Psychoanalysis.

What Gender Does to Psychoanalysis

Gender translates something of sex by highlighting the gap between the anatomical and the psychic, the genital and the social, assignment and affirmation. When Freud takes up the maxim “anatomy is destiny”¹⁴, the supremacy of the

biological seems to impose itself as the only possible interpretation. In this conception, the supremacy of sex over gender is then asserted, with gender being pre-existing and subordinate within a hierarchical relation. This reading runs entirely counter to what gender raises and reveals: processes of social and cultural construction that ground it, thereby also illuminating the equally social construction of sex, stripped of its naturalness or its genitality, but not desexualised for all that. The surpassing of categories promoted by queer critique does not necessarily imply surpassing the naturalisations present within those categories, which may then circulate without always being called into question. This formulation by Freud, and other propositions of Psychoanalysis in general, are criticised and accused of collaborating with the system of sexual norms that queer critique seeks to denounce in the wake of feminisms.¹⁵ Patriarchy and phallocentrism (as social and political organisations) are sometimes invoked to claim that Psychoanalysis promulgates—willingly or despite itself—a conservative ideological conception of sex (supremacy of the phallus, castration anxiety, penis envy in girls, women’s masochistic passivity). We will not undertake a study of these critiques here. However, we consider that the propositions of psychoanalytic theories, as well as the approaches to psychopathology and clinical psychology that derive from them, need to be subjected to critique. And that, by definition, movements of claims and affirmations linked to “gender questions” are a sign of the emergence of new knowledge about the sexual that is of interest to Psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, we would like to introduce a nuance that seems important to us.

The “anatomical” in the maxim is not the “biological,” which, in Freud, remains a model inspired by the living. The anatomical cannot be thought of here as encompassing the human body as an expression of nature; that would be to misunderstand Freud’s approach to the biological,

which allows us to suggest that this reprise of “anatomy is destiny” says far more than we can circumscribe, even through the critical approach it provokes. We are thus invited to reread, in light of gender, what appears to us as the main lines of tension accounting for the interactions of Psychoanalysis with other discourses.

If we observe the debates generated by theoretical controversies, we can first locate the battle between psychoanalytic theory and queer theory, for example.¹⁶ We note the book by Javier Saez, Queer Theory and Psychoanalysis¹⁷, whose approach brings to mind Tim Dean’s article, Lacan and Queer Theory¹⁸. Both make their way through the psychoanalytic theoretical edifice, particularly since the 1950s and Lacan’s work, thereby inscribing their analyses in the web of French Theory. Out of necessity, no doubt, their analyses admit an explicit or implicit continuum of the history of the homosexual movement, rendered by Saez as “Homosexual, Gay, Queer,” as if it went without saying that this chain of signifiers—certainly appearing in that chronology—could account for a universal homosexual history capable of encompassing gender questions. This gives us pause, because the so-called history of homosexuality as a movement is also, more discreetly but at the same time, being rethought in other terms than those of its apparent forms of existence in the “Market,” as Michael Warner notes:

The most visible forms of gay culture are anything but outside advanced capitalism, particularly with regard to the features most decried by the left. Urban gays of the post-Stonewall era reek of merchandise.¹⁹

It is as if the history of the queer could not correspond with the histories of homosexualities in their present or older diversities²⁰, situated further back in time.²¹ No doubt this is the sign of a historical attachment to the epistemological moment of French Theory that tends to freeze epistemological correspondences with thoughts contemporary to it. These underlying epistemological and historical articulations would need to be developed and studied in depth. Unfortunately, we cannot present that work here.

The journal Champ Psy, edited by Laurie Laufer and Andréa Linhares, devoted an issue very explicitly to this question under the title What Gender Does to Psychoanalysis. Restored to its historical context of emergence within the medical and social fields, gender is considered there from various angles as opening up, between politics and the clinic, a field of study in which we encounter love and its forms of expression, desire, the body, the social bond, motherhood, women, and creation.

The aim here, then, is to shed light on the notion of gender, which is now part of the contemporary epistemological landscape. Psychoanalysis is a cultural fact, and gender studies remind it of this. […], this issue seeks to put into perspective what gender makes it possible to think and what it does to Psychoanalysis.²²

Can gender, in analytic practice, shed light on this primitive bond to the social? This is the question posed by Andréa Linhares:

While at first glance the notion of gender seemed confined to clinical work on disorders of sexual identity, political, historical, sociological, and psychoanalytic work on the subject sometimes suggests the possibility of a much broader clinical field. Is not this field—concerned with the social and with the way the subject appropriates the messages addressed to them—also within the remit of Psychoanalysis? ²³

Jean Laplanche wrote specifically on gender—and he is one of the rare psychoanalysts to have done so—by proposing a new delineation of gender vis-à-vis sex, closer to psychoanalytic considerations. He clearly distinguishes himself from what Stoller contributed,

by refuting the anatomy/psychology split, preferring instead:

Sex should designate the set of physical or psychic determinations—behaviours, fantasies, etc.—directly related to sexual function and pleasure. And gender should designate the set of physical or psychic determinations—behaviours, fantasies, etc.—related to the masculine/feminine distinction.²⁴

The anatomical and the psychic are therefore involved each time, and it is the feminine and the masculine that hold the historical keys to a division or a recognition of the other. This echoes, in certain respects, what Jessica Benjamin advances in her book Imaginary and Sex²⁵. A representative of the intersubjectivity current in the United States, she devoted many of her works to these questions. In particular, she proposes carefully examining the feminine/masculine division as well as the way Psychoanalysis (Freud) articulated it through the active/passive pair; Benjamin, with Horney, takes up the critique of this to question the Oedipal reversal of active and passive in the girl, thereby integrating the feminine.²⁶ We then find readings and analyses of Freud’s work by Horney, Rivière, Klein, Abraham, and Deutsch.

Abraham, Horney and Deutsch

What did Freud’s contemporaries say about these questions, at a time when the notion of gender was not explicitly set out, but perhaps was already at work in its social and cultural aspects in particular? Freud’s proposition concerning “penis envy” was widely taken up and commented on by women psychoanalysts, notably on the occasion of the publication of Freud’s article devoted to female sexuality²⁷ in 1931. If gender is not directly the object of these reflections, we can today read, between the lines, certain resonances with the way these questions are posed in our modern era. Long before the publication of his 1925 article on the

consequences of anatomy, Freud was already being discussed very directly in articles by Abraham, Horney, and Deutsch, who produced highly important clinical observations and theoretical elaborations on the castration complex in women and its consequences for understanding sexual development. Freud’s article only finds its full meaning when restored to this context of intersecting propositions. For the feminine approach is not absent from the analytic elaborations of the time—quite the contrary. Horney and Deutsch discuss, point by point, on the basis of their own clinical experience, Freud’s observations and deductions; and what they in turn advance does not fail to nourish Freud’s reflections. The influence of a feminine analytic thought would deserve to be developed in its own right; unfortunately, we cannot undertake it here. After 1931 and On Female Sexuality, other texts appeared and extended the debates, such as “Femininity” in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis²⁸, in 1933.

For her part, Horney published in 1939 New Ways in Psychoanalysis²⁹, where her disagreements with Freud become more precise. She attempts to open up several avenues of work based on what she encountered as therapeutic and theoretical impasses, requiring, in her view, that certain data in the psychoanalytic corpus be revised. Freud’s conception of femininity, in her eyes, deserves to be approached critically, in order to note its insufficient consideration of the weight of social and cultural determinants on women, seen as complementing biological determinants that, in her view, are overemphasised. Moreover, her clinical experience as a woman psychoanalyst gave her the opportunity to observe that “penis envy” is not a universal of sexual development, and that it cannot, in any case, from her point of view, be conceived primarily on the anatomical factor, insofar as its suggestive force for patients seems to respond to other factors—on the basis of which she suggests in conclusion:

On the basis of his early “biological” conceptions, Freud cannot appreciate the scope of these other factors. He cannot gauge their impact on the formation of desires and attitudes, nor consider the interactions between the cultural context and female psychology. Everyone shares Freud’s view regarding the influence of sexual differences in terms of constitution and function on mental life. But it seems unproductive to speculate on the exact nature of this influence. The American woman is different from the German woman, who is herself different from the Indian woman. The social environment of the New York woman is different from that of a farmer’s wife in the state of Idaho. We may hope to understand the ways in which the cultural environment influences the development of qualities in men that differ from those in women.³⁰

Deutsch published in 1945 The Psychology of Women³¹. This book takes up her early advances from 1925 and extends her reflections. On female psychology, she devotes the final chapter to the psychoanalytic conception of this question in its relations with social conditions.

She develops a reading and analysis of the history of three generations of Russian women caught up in the revolutionary momentum and the war of the period, which brings the political dimension of the question of female psychology to the fore during this period of global conflict, particularly through their integration into the country’s economic life.³² Deutsch clearly argues for recognising another way of seeing and reading social and cultural interactions, in order to grasp their psychic repercussions, whose importance she suggests must be reconsidered. The sociological gaze enters the discussion in an even more emphatic way. We are then tempted to say that gender does to Psychoanalysis what Psychoanalysis does to women, and that the work of certain women psychoanalysts bears witness to this in an instructive critical dialogue.

Scope of the Dialogue and Ethical Questions

As we have seen very briefly, gender calls Psychoanalysis into question by compelling it, among other things, to address certain criticisms levelled against it. Yet the current state of these discussions is not always satisfactory. Certainly, the dialogue continues with authors—Butler in particular—and questions abound in order to reconsider the links between the political and the sexual, insofar as the sexual pertains to Psychoanalysis in interaction. A conference addressed this in 2010, with certain articles published in the journal Recherches en Psychoanalysis³³; and there was also a study day, Psychoanalysis Tested by Gender³⁴, which sought, among other things, to answer the question of whether Psychoanalysis has the means to think gender on its own. This is an important question, because it is true that the incessant intersections of disciplines on these issues—sociology, philosophy, medicine, politics, etc.—suggest that only by pooling modes of thought and analysis can gender be approached. Strictly speaking, we can then say that no definition of gender is possible in Psychoanalysis alone—just as no other discipline manages to hold it for its own account—but this is not very satisfactory. There remains a kind of lack in being able to circumscribe the object of gender more fully, since in Psychoanalysis the object is of interest, prompts thought, and accounts for the possibilities of psychic processes, investments, etc. But perhaps we can nonetheless attempt to venture a definition.

Gender engages the question of sex and renews it. And here we are, rethinking what sex represents for the psyche in terms of place, function, object, etc. In his article The True Sex³⁵, Michel Foucault undertakes a genealogy of the sexed body. He explains that, until the eighteenth century, there was a relative tolerance for those who, as hermaphrodites, had to determine their sex. Afterwards, things changed: assignment to a gender as the substrate of sex was imposed by medicine and no longer fell within the freedom of the family or the person concerned. The examined body reveals that true sex is a normative and discursive production, insofar as it is founded by law and medicine. Sex is no longer a choice but is prescribed by the discourses and practices that hold its truth—of which Psychoanalysis is sometimes accused of being the agent, when it “enjoins” the subject to proceed toward the truth of their sex. From our point of view, this is a confusion of the truths at stake in medicine and Psychoanalysis, which diverge, as do the subjects in question, which cannot be compared so quickly: the subject of the unconscious is not the subject of law, nor that of medicine or philosophy. The relation between sex and truth in medicine and in Psychoanalysis is not the same, and yet Psychoanalysis is sometimes criticised for relaying it. How are we to understand this? For this is an important question that gender has renewed in recent years, perhaps somewhat differently from the way intellectuals such as Foucault did at the time. What is the value of assigning the subject to their sex, which philosophy discusses through cultural and queer studies, and for which truths—truths that could be compared to assignment to sex by language and sexuation, or again to the psychic consequences of sexual difference at the anatomical level? How could a relay of political constraint have operated from one to the other that we would not be able to traverse in reverse—and which nonetheless seems very difficult to achieve, if we are to believe the truth of the obstacles that gender asks us to overcome in order to bring it into discussion with Psychoanalysis? We believe this is an important question, since it commits Psychoanalysis on the question of its politics and its ethics, its politics of the body in particular—if it has one. And beyond that, it is the question of the existence of sex in the psyche that is posed: for if it exists in the body, in law, in medicine, does it exist in the psychic structure outside the objects dedicated to it through the mediation of the drive? For we must still traverse the distinction Freud draws between object and drive: they are not naturally but unconsciously determined in their relation; unconscious motives take precedence over a supposed source of excitation in the object.³⁶ Since the drive is independent of its object, it cannot bear a subjective truth when it is from subjectivity that confessions are extracted. The subject of the unconscious, the subject of Psychoanalysis, is not a subject who confesses.

Towards a Possible Definition of Gender in Psychoanalysis

We have seen that gender more or less eludes attempts at definition, which attests to its usefulness as a category of critical analysis, as has been evident for more than thirty years. In this spirit, a risk has been identified of seeing it ossified³⁷ in various applications, tempted to reduce it to a function of data processing, most often confining it to observations of social roles between men and women—something all the more evident insofar as gender is sometimes defined as a stable concept. In the medical and psychiatric fields—under the influence of the human and social sciences—gender asserts the subject’s social existence, to which its identity dimension is linked as its spokesperson. A boundary-blurrer, gender flattens the line separating anatomical (or denaturalised) sex, as well as the line delimiting itself as an outside of the body or an identity extension. In being undone, gender undoes sex, and creates sex, in a circulation that is of interest to psychic processes: as a redoubling of its own effects, gender—an effective revealer of what discourses and power relations harbour in terms of norms and constraints—seems to have produced a thing and its opposite. The

Gender then takes its source at the site of sex when sex calls into question the lived experience of the sexed body, where the anatomical does not cover the biological. For if biology sexes the body, it is indeed sexuation that situates it in the sexual landscape through the mediation of language (whether conceived as performative or as signifier). A spoken gender, then, bearing the psychic processes that ground it, opening onto the consideration of the social and the political in their intrapsychic and unconscious repercussions, between identity movements and subjective emergences. It is produced, in our view, by the opening of the subversion of the sexual that Psychoanalysis initiated, and whose recent theoretical productions continue the narrative (represented by French Theory, cultural studies, etc.). Not absorbable by psychoanalytic theories—just as no other discipline can truly absorb it—gender is situated as a soft concept, at once inside and outside sex, revealing its depth of field. It acts, as we have just briefly traced, by transgressing instituted knowledges under the influence of desire and unconscious knowledges, reviving the question of the link between the collective and the individual when we must situate the subject there (the subject of the unconscious), as psychoanalytic experience teaches us.

Gender is useful if it allows us to maintain this tension toward deepening sexual difference as an experience, and the knowledges extracted from it. It is of no use if it is only an additional variable for describing social relations and male–female roles—at least not in psychopathology or in Psychoanalysis. Gender is useful to us if it serves as a subversive operator, capable of sustaining disturbance—an experience of disturbance that brings us back to, and exposes us to, the experience of sexual difference as it never ceases to be produced, even though what we fabricate from it as knowledge, as sexual identity and others, allows us no longer to see it at work, nor to feel it too intensely. Gender is useful if, along these lines, it allows us to account for new arrangements of sexuation and sexual difference, where ambiguity in particular is no longer always the object of an effort at clarification up to its dissolution. As a consequence, we can propose a definition of gender in Psychoanalysis: in Psychoanalysis, gender designates the limit situated both outside and inside sex—the shoreline or margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it interrogates the unconscious knowledges of sexual difference and makes identifications waver until they are renewed. Thus, gender creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent disturbance, at the moment of stability in which it is experienced.