From the perspective of critical masculinity studies, psychoanalytic accounts of gender formation offer one great benefit, which is that they are indeed accounts. Despite Freud’s easily misconstrued assertions equating anatomy with destiny, in fact neither he nor his follower Jacques Lacan view gender or sexuality as biologically determined or as proceeding from instinctual nature. Rather, both insist upon gender and sexuation as psychic formations, socio-symbolic organisations for which accounts are precisely what need to be given, even if the accounts themselves are inevitably imprecise. Although patriarchal and misogynist assumptions are demonstrably at work in their accounts, Freud and Lacan also provide critical strategies for questioning, or at least de-naturalising, those very assumptions. Even at their most normative, both remain discernibly ambivalent towards the norm. Both see psychic and sexual normativity as essentially fictional, emerging not from a determining nature but as part of the complex representational structure that is human reality itself. Norms, such as those that regulate the performance of masculinity, are for psychoanalysis not innately given but socially produced, enforced through structures of repression and orders of symbolisation. Complete conformity to those norms is thus never a matter of happy organic development but remains rather only a fragile and tenuous achievement that always leaves a residue of dissatisfaction and unconscious desire. Psychoanalysis is concerned with exactly this residue. It addresses the failure of normal human beings ever to simply be normal human beings.
For psychoanalysis, then, failure to ‘be a man’ is all it can ever finally mean to ‘be a man’. As psychoanalysis conceives it, all it can ever mean to be a man, or to be human in the first place, is the all too human failure to have been an animal. I refer to a ‘first place’, because in describing psychoanalytic accounts of gendered subjectivity it is best to begin there, not exactly in the womb, but from the hard fact that we leave that ‘first place’ too soon. Lacan speaks of our species’ prematurity at birth, while Freud emphasises its consequence: a prolonged period of helpless dependency for human offspring compared with other animal neonates. A conjectural evolutionary explanation for this deficiency is that premature birthing developed as a strategy of adaptation when our primate ancestors’ assumption of an upright gait precipitated a contraction of the pelvic cavity in females such that heads of fully formed foetuses were suddenly too big to be born. But whatever the speculative prehistorical cause, the ongoing effect is that, unlike the animal, we are not born human but have to be made that way. While any other animal that survives its neonativity will grow to become an adult of its species, the infant of our species, congenitally inadequate to its own animality, requires extensive assistance and training if it is actually going to become a human being—accede to the symbolic order, become a speaking subject, enjoy (or endure) a meaningful (if discontented) existence as a recognised participant in a specifically human, socio-symbolic reality.
Forget gender for a moment: for psychoanalysis, humanness itself is an acquisition, the result of various processes of humanisation/ socialisation. For psychoanalysis the human subject is the anthropomorphised animal, the organism that must sacrifice an already inadequate animality to accede to an anthropomorphic status that—because it is constitutionally representational—must mean, must be meaningful, but is itself never finally settled or secured in its being or its meanings. The processes of humanisation (which vary culturally and historically but are universal and transhistorical in their necessity) require us to give up or renounce what was impossible for us anyway—an immediate, purely natural, animal existence—in order to live in an inherently unstable social network of signs. If the unconscious is structured like a language, as Lacan has it, then language is the slippery foundation of psychoanalysis as the ‘talking cure’. But if there is a biological ‘bedrock’ in psychoanalytic theory, it can only be these always already crumbling grounds of human natal prematurity, a biological determination that seems the very failure of biological determination and which allows psychoanalysis its vision of a primordial discord—a radical rupture or gap—at the heart of our organic, subjective and sexual existence. For psychoanalysis, humanness is itself the compensatory symptom of failed and sacrificed animality. It is a substitute satisfaction, a consolation prize not only for not having succeeded as animals but also for the symbolic scission that, installing us in language, separates us from what little real animality we ever briefly enjoyed. And yet, since the permanently real animal can never act to transform the terms of its existence, this sacrifice of impossible animality becomes the very condition of possibility for human freedom. Such potentiating failure helps account for the fact that human sexuality always exceeds the imperatives of mere species reproduction as well as for the fact that we are never only physically, chromosomally male or female but must always live subjectively in some relation to the fictions of masculinity and femininity that prevail (fictions that, as fictions, are conceivably open to revision, historical transformation). As physical bodies, we are of course prey to biology: we are anatomically destined or driven to die. But as psychical entities we are subject to representation, and it is only as decentred representational structures that we live in our bodies or have relations with the bodies of others.
Freud conveys his understanding of the fundamental antagonism—between deficient organic existence and the overarching structures of representation and socialisation that constrain and sustain it—in various terms throughout the course of his career: as the conflict between primary and secondary processes; as the negotiation between the pleasure and reality principles; as the distinction between free and bound libidinal cathexes; as the developmental organisation of infantile ‘polymorphous perversity’ into Oedipalised normality; as (for the early Freud) the topography of the unconscious, preconscious and conscious; as (for the later Freud) the intricate agons among the ego, the superego and the id; even, finally, as the radical tension between Eros and Thanatos, the representatives of the drives of life and death.
Here I will focus on the pleasure/reality negotiation. By ‘pleasure’, Freud means the reduction of unpleasurable tension. By ‘pleasure principle’ he means a principle of psychic functioning that demands unpleasure’s immediate reduction. Under the pleasure principle’s dominance, the infant experiencing unpleasure attempts to reduce it by immediately hallucinating the object of gratification (say, the breast). But since the instant image fails to satisfy, the pleasure principle must give way to the mediations of the reality principle: the infant must articulate a demand, cry out for a real object that may only eventually appear, may appear in altered or diminished form (pacifier instead of breast) or may never appear again at all. Crucial here is the way the reality principle impels the infant’s accession to temporality and exchange, the way the infant must renounce the immediate pleasures of hallucinated images in order to accept not only the delayed, partial, substitutive or withdrawn gratifications that reality offers but the fact that human reality is itself delay, partiality, substitution, withdrawal—is itself language, which must always unfold in time and involve delay and deferral, the endless substitution of words for missing, withdrawn or prohibited things. The displacement of pleasure by reality is the sacrifice of being for meaning (I’etre pour la lettre), and without this exchange the infant won’t become a ‘meaningfully’ human being, much less a properly gendered subject. If it prefers its own internally conjured image of the breast to the point of refusing the externally real thing, it will starve to death. If it refuses the reality principle altogether, refuses to swap its demand for immediate gratification for its desire for the other’s recognition, refuses to renounce the present pleasure for the promise of a more significant, more culturally important pleasure in the future, then it will fail to absorb linguistic training, much less the social processes of gendered ego-ideal formation. It will not accede to the symbolic order. Freud’s thesis is that in reality no one ever seamlessly exchanges pleasure for reality: there is always an incommensurable leftover, unconscious but unceasingly productive of symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, perversions, literature, art, philosophy, religion and other substitutive satisfactions or signs of our discontent.
The ‘symbolic order’ mentioned above is in Lacan’s view the order of language and culture, an order of symbols, a grammatically organised concatenation of words. But it also involves an order to symbolise, the social imperative to mean. Lacan’s insight intimately links this symbolic imperative with the taboo against incest that founds and structures the exogamic social order. Oedipalising the ‘extimate’ acquisition of language, Lacan recasts the line that joins the signifier and the signified in structural linguistics as a bar of prohibition separating the infant from the mother, alienating the subject from the real. Just as language cannot completely ‘coincide’ with the real (signification depends upon dividing rather than uniting signifier and signified, sign and referent, word and thing), so the infant cannot completely ‘coincide’ with the mother, nor can the subject be ‘at one’ with the real. Lacan conflates the mythical ‘no to the real’ that initiates language with the structurating ‘no of the father’ that prohibits incest: both prevent impossible mergers. Because the infant enters the symbolic order by acceding to the father’s law and agreeing to symbolise the mother rather than be (with) or ‘possess’ her, symbolisation entails sacrifice of the fantasised merger with the mother (and, beyond her, the oceanic, unsymbolisable totality of the real). This sacrifice opens up language as a structure of desire. Because desire is the presence of the absence of a reality in the same way that a word is the presence of the absence of a thing, language and desire are co(in)substantial. The speaking subject is a subject of desire.
For Lacan, desire always entails lack, always means something is missing. This conflation of language with desire as lack allows him to characterise accession to the signifier as symbolic castration: in language, as in castration, the subject is always missing something, missing (from) the mother, missing (from) the real. In Freud’s interpretation, castration anxiety precipitates the dissolution of the ‘simple’ Oedipus complex for boys: seeing a female body, misinterpreting absence as loss, fearing castration as punishment for his own desire, the boy gives up on his mother in order to save his penis (though he may still dream about penetrating chrysanthemums) and represses aggression against the father in favour of identification (though he may still dream about sawing off the nozzle of a bottle of pop). Lacan revises the Oedipal scenario to focus not on the child’s repressed desire for the mother but on the child’s desire to ascertain and be the mother’s desire. This desire presupposes that the mother in fact desires, lacks something, and Lacan joins Freud in having the child interpret the mother’s lack as castration. Hence the child, in wanting to be what the mother wants, wants to ‘complete’ the mother by being the phallus he thinks she lacks. But the father’s putative possession of the phallus prohibits this fantasy of completion. Thus, in the Lacanian account, the disappointed child must attempt to install itself into the fantasised position of either having the phallus (masculine) or being the phallus for another (feminine). But because the phallus is not a real organ but the signifier of lack, both ‘sexuated’ positions are impostures, masquerades: the phallus is what no one can fully have or be (hence Lacan asserts that there is no sexual relation and that genital activity involves the attempt to give what one doesn’t have to someone who doesn’t exist). No one has or is the phallus, and yet everyone must continue to speak, to symbolise, as the phallic function dictates. In Lacan’s account, the phallus is what makes signification possible because its function is not only to separate infant from mother, but also to divide symbolic from real, signifier from signified. Any word is thus always an emblem of unconscious desire, of prohibited merger—not because of what it means, but because it means at all—and any completed sentence is only the nostalgic echo of a lost mythic plenitude, a dissatisfying substitute for the phantasmatically ‘completed’ mother restored to phallic wholeness.
Psychoanalytic accounts of gender formation are obviously problematic, but they are at least accounts. Psychoanalytic accounts are also necessarily prolonged and complicated, imprecise and incomplete, but mainly because they attempt to describe formations that are themselves prolonged, complicated, imprecise and incomplete. There are countless ways to get gender wrong but no way to get it fully and happily right. This is why the ‘talking cure’ is in one sense interminable: no one is ever one; no one is ever done; no one can ever finally say or be enough. There is no cure for talking. The constitutive failure of psychoanalysis is thus the exact source of its value.
References and further reading
Freud, S. (1953) The Standard Edition qfthe Complete Psychological Works, 24 vols, London: Hogarth.
Frosh, S. (1994) Sexual Difference, New York: Routledge.
LacanJ. [1966] (2002) Ecrits, New York, Norton.
Moi, T. (2000) ‘Is anatomy destiny? Freud and biological determinism’, in P.Brooks and A. Woloch (eds) Whose Freud? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 71–92.
Shepherdson, C. (2000) Vital Signs, New York: Routledge.
Van Haute, P. (2002) Against Adaptation, New York: Other Press.
