{ TNTRODUCTION-I Juliet Mitchell I object to all of you (Horney, Jones,Rado, etc.,) to the extent that you do not distinguish more clearly and cleanly between what is psychic and what is biological, that you try to establish a neatparallelism between the two and that you, motivated by such intent, unthinkingly construe psychic facts which are unprovable and that you, in the processof doing so, must declareas reactiveor regressivemuch that without doubt is primary. Of course,these reproaches must remain obscure.In addition, I would only like to emphasizethat we must keep psychoanalysisseparate from biology just as we have kept it scparatefrom anatomy and physiology (Freud,letter to Carl Miiller-Braunschweig, 1935) f.rr ques Lacan dedicatedhimself to the task of refinding and re- l,rrnulating the work of Sigmund Freud.Psychoanalytic theory totlay is a variegateddiscipline. There are contradictionswithin I rt'ud's writings and subsequentanalysts have developedone .rrpcctand rejectedanother, thereby using one theme asajump- rrrlioff point for a new theory. Lacanconceived his own project ,lrlii'rcntly: despitethe contradictionsand impasses,there is a , .hcrqnt theoristin Freudwhose ideas do not needto be diverged Irorrr; rather they should be setwithin a cohesiveframework that rlrt'y :rnticipatedbut which, for historicalreasons, Freud himself ,.rrltl not formulate. The development of linguistic science l,r,rvitles this framework. It rs certainly arguablethat from the way psychoanalysishas f,fo\\,1'rduring this century we have gained a wider range of rlrrr.rpcutic understanding and the multiplication of fruitful r,lr',rr,btrt we have lost the possibilityof a clarificationof an ''.'t'rrtiel theory. To say that Freud's work containscontra- Ir,t rorrsshould not be the equivalentof arguingthat it is hetero- r'rn('otrs and that it is thereforelegitimate for everyoneto take rlrr'rrPick arrddevelop it as they wish. Lacanset his faceagainst 1 FeminineSexuality Introduction- I { what he saw as such illegitimate and over-tolerant notions of r,achother asin the sequentiallogic of consciousnessbut by con- more-or-less peacefully co-existent lines of psychoanalytic tlensingonto eachother or by.6eing displacedonro something thought. From the outset he went back to Freud's basic concepts. clse.Because it is unconscious,direct i.."ri to it is impossibt. u"t Here, initially, there is agreernent among psychoanalysts as to its manifestationsare apparent most notably in dreams,everyday the terrain on which they work: psychoanalysis is about human slips,jokes, the 'normal' splits and divisions within the h,r-"r, sexuality and the unconscious. subjectand in psychoticand neuroricbehaviour. The psychoanalytic concept of sexuality confronts head-on all Lacanbelieved that though all psychoanalystssubscribe ro rhe popular conceptions. It can never be equated with genitality nor rnrportanceof rhe unconsciousand to the piivileged position of is it the simple expression of a biological drive. It is always psycho- scxualitywithin the dewelopmentof the human ,ib1.it, the way sexuality, a system of conscious and uncottscious human fan- rn which many post-Freudians have elaborated tireir theories tasiesinvolving a range of excitations and activities that produce rrltimately reduces or distorts the significanceeven of these pleasure beyond the satisfaction of any basic physiological need. furda.mental postulates.-fo Lacan most current psychoanalytic It arisesfrom various sources, seekssatisfaction in many different rhinking is tangledrp in popular ideologiesand ih,r, missesihe ways and makes use of many diverse objects for its airn of rcv.olutionary nature of Freud'swork and replicateswhat it is its achieving pleasure. Only with great difficulty and then never t.rsk to expose: psychoanalysisshould not subscribeto ideas perfectly does it move from being a drive with many component .rb.ut how men and women do or should live as sexuallydiG parts - a single 'libido' expressed through very different pheno- It'rcntiatedbeings, but insteadit should analysehow thev .o-. mena - to being what is normally understood assexuality, some- to be such beingsin the first place. thing which appearsto be a unified instinct in which genitality [.acan'swork has always to be seenwithin the context of a predominates. rwo.-pronged polemic. Most simply he took on, sometimesby For all psychoanalyststhe development of the human subject, .xplicit, named reference,more oft.n by indirect insult or im- its unconscious and its sexuality go hand-in-hand, they are causa- l'lrcetion, almost all analystsof note since Freud. Both inter- tively intertwined. A psychoanalyst could not subscribe to a rr.rtionallyand within France,Lacan's history was one ofrepeated currently popular sociological distinction in which conflict a person is 'rstitutional and ceaselessopposition to .ttrblirh.d born with their biological gcnder to which society - gencral 'r('ws. Outside Francehis targetswere the theoriesof American ,l'rrr.inated environment, parents, education, the media - adds a socially ego-psychology, of Melanie Klein and of object- "and defined sex, masculine or feminine. Psychoanalvsiscannot make rr'l,rrions analysts,l most notably, Balint, Fairbairn such a distinction: a person is formed through their sexuality, it w rrrrricott. Lecan was more kindly disposed to the clinical could not be 'added' to him or her. The ways in which psycho- rr^rghrsof some than he was towaids thore of others but he sexuality and the unconscious are closely bound together arc ,.rpitrcd that they areall guilty of misunderstandingand debasing complex, but most obviously, the unconscious contains wishes rlrc thcory inauguratedby Freud. that canrrot be satisfied and hence have beerr rcpressed. Prc- : lt dominant among such wishes are the tabooed incestuons desircs ts tmPortant to keep-psychoanalytic object-relations theory distinct from of childhood. l".rtlrological or sociological accounts to which it might bear sorne super- trr r.rl rcscmblance. The'object'in question is, of course, the human obj".t; The unconscious contains all that has been repressed fronr I'rtr, tt)t)re importantly, it is its internalisationby the subject that is the issie at cotrsciot-tsness,but it is not co-terminous with this. There is arr "t'rkt'. lt is never only an actual object but also always the fantasies of it, that it as an internal fbr evident lack of continuity in conscious psychic life - psycho- "lr.rPc lmgse the subject. Object-relations rheory origi- ,, rr.rl analysis concerns itseli with the gaps. Frend's contribution was .rsan attcmpt to shift psychoanalysis away f.om. one-pcrson to a two- r\()tr l''| theory stressing that there is always a relationship Letween at least to demonstrate that thesegaps coltstitute a system that is entirely r\\,' l)('()plc. In objcct-rclations theory thc objcct is active in relation diffcrent front that of consciousncss:the lrnconscious. Thc trn- ro tl-re '111r;r'ttwho is formed in complex interaction with it. This contrasts with conscious is governed by its owll laws, its images do not follow I r, .ru's :rccount of the objcct, sce p. 31 bclow. FeminineSexuality Introduction- I 5 The secondprong of Lacan'spolemic relatesto a mistake he comesinto being'(Freud, xxu, 1933,p. 116:italics added). felt Freud himielf initiated: paradoxically,while chcrishing thc Lacan dedicated himself to reorienting psychoanalysisto its wounds ofhis rejectionby a lay and medicalpublic, Freudstrove task of deciphering the ways in which the human subjectis con- to be easilyundlrstood. The preposterousdifficulty of l.aca.n's structed - how it comes into being - out of the small human style is a challengeto easycomprehension, to the popularisation animal. It is becauseof this aim that Lacanoffered psychoanalytic and secularisationof psychoarralysisas it has occurred most theory the new scienceof linguistics which he developed and notably in North America. Psychoanalysisshould aim to show :rltered in relation to the concept of subjectivity. The human us that we do rrot krrow thosethings we think we do; it therefore .rnimal is born into language and it is within the terms of cannotassault our popular conceptionsby usingthe very idiom it languagethat the human subject is constructed. Language does is iptendedto confront; a challengeto ideology cannot rest oll a not arise from within the individual, it is always out there in the linguistic appealto that sameideology. dominant ideology world outside, lying in wait for the neonate. Language always Th. 'bclongs' of ioday, il*tt ofthe time andplacervhen psychoanalysis was to another person. The human subjectis createdfrom a "t establis'hed,is humanism. Humanism believesthat man is at the gcnerallaw that comes to it from outside itself and through the more or of other people, though this speechin its turn must relate centreof his own history and of himselfi he is a subject 'pcech lessin control of his own actiotls,exercising choice. Humanistic to the generallaw. of seeing the patient as Lacan'shuman subject is the obverseof the humanists'. His psychoanalytic practice is in _danger io-.on. who his lost control and a sense of a real or true self srrbjectis not an entity with an identity, but a being createdin the (identity) and it aims to help regain these. The matter and marlner fissure of a radicalsplit. The identity that seemsto be that of the of all Lacan's work challenges this notion of the human subject: rrrbjectis in fact a mirage arising when the subjectforms an image thereis uone such.