Home Secrets

I read "The ‘Uncanny’" as study of the roots of the word "heim," or the treatment of the relationship of the home (oikos, proper, position, identity) to the secret (repressed). The secret is the repressed version of the home, or what is repressed in order to achieve the home. The home is repressed secrets: first a logocentric repression of différance that allows for the establishment of an idealistic binary of male/female, then the repression of the difference of the oppositional term, "woman," via the identity-difference or "trauma"-structure term, castration. This home is ultimately split due to the conflict between these two repressions: one requires woman’s presence, the other requires her absence. In "The ‘Uncanny,’" Freud supposedly reveals the secret of castration, but this supposed secret, as the home, the oikonomia, of psychoanalysis and its logic of lack, is based on the secrets, the dissimulations of the actual phallic function.

We find here the "interiority" to psychoanalysis of "hysteria," the divided woman, woman as a "division" that secures phallic Oneness: psychoanalysis/hysteria. The "hysteric," after her figuration wanes, is replaced by "~~Woman~~." As I argued in chapter two, psychoanalysis supposedly begins with its mastery of hysteria, but it constructs hysteria in order to provide a specific absence–specific "gaps" in the masterplot–for it to fill. Thus what is original, psychoanalysis or hysteria, is undecidable: psychoanalysis/hysteria again. To sustain the orthodox origin myth, one must disregard the dizzying polysymptomatology of "hysteria," its inability to sustain a proper disease status; disregard Freud’s diagnosis of his own hysteria, or what would have been the interiority of hysteria; disregard the impossibility of a self-analysis, and the psychoanalytic breakthrough that gives greater power to the system Ucs. than to the system Cs. "Hysteria" was Freud’s specimen neurosis: it was, to a large extent, synonymous with "neurosis." The cure of hysteria, supposedly, is the birth of psychoanalysis and its authority regarding the unconscious in general. It was supposedly the discovery of the truth of the unconscious as Oedipus. Neurosis was a "female malady" (Showalter), a repression of (masculine) sexuality as a reaction to not accepting "castration-truth." With hysteria and this birth of psychoanalysis, woman is linked to the unconscious.

Freud would later say that the "bedrock" of psychoanalysis is "the repudiation of femininity"–and in his later theory of hysteria, posited around the same time he made the above claim, what made the female ill with hysteria was her repudiation of femininity. Here femininity is synonymous with "castration-truth": the hysteric can’t accept her (non)position as castrated. Freud would also argue late in his career that the problem for women was invariably penis envy, a difficulty repudiating what he theorized as their primary masculinity: never giving up the desire to be masculine as the repudiation of femininity. For men, on the other hand, the problem he argues is invariably their "struggle against his passive or feminine attitude to another male" (XXIII 250). Whereas the female neurotic suffers from repudiating her femininity, the male neurotic suffers from not doing it enough. The male, it seems, though Freud never theorizes it in any systematic way, suffers from his bisexuality. Would this be his primary femininity he must repudiate? That which he must repudiate to avoid … what? The homosexual side of his bisexuality (always divided into two: male/female)? Is homosexuality a problem? If so, is it the only problem of male sexual development for Freud? What about neurosis? How is neurosis related to homosexuality and the repudiation of femininity? If libido is male, and both the boy and the girl start out as "little men," what would be the femininity or passivity the male would have to repudiate? As I have argued above, despite Freud’s theory of the conflation of object-cathexes and identification in infancy, the boy somehow identifies with the father. So whence the femininity the boy and man must repudiate, and which forms the bedrock of psychoanalysis? Freud never elaborates beyond the claim that bisexuality is fundamental: he never theorizes the feminine aspect of being male. Indeed, he contradicts his claim to the universality of bisexuality with his adamant and arbitrary theory of what I call primary masculinity. If bisexuality is a crucial aspect to any sexuality, it seems that, with respect to Freudian theory, male sexuality is more the enigma for psychoanalysis.

The answers to these questions are not as much absent or missing as they are impossible, if "possibility" means maintaining the disavowal of the importance of the woman (and therefore femininity) as one pole of the fundamental binary of man/woman, especially with respect to the mother in the primitive of ontogeny where object cathexis and identification are the same. The bedrock of psychoanalysis itself is "the repudiation of femininity" insofar as this repudiation is analogous to the disavowal of woman required by the actual phallic function and its phallic position of the One: the pure presence that is necessarily split, necessarily impure. Behind/within this secret that constitutes the home or the One of psychoanalysis and its split hom(m)osexual positioning, lies another, more basic secret, behind the idealist categories of man/woman. Something totally other is dissimulated by this binary. Behind/within the psychoanalytic sexual "difference" of man/woman is the radical difference of an adestinational postal relay: the différance of the trace.

Questioning the foundation of psychoanalysis as a cure of neurosis and a theory of the unconscious–the discovery of how repression works with respect to this supposed cure–quickly becomes a questioning of psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference, and of the role of chance in the etiologies of neurosis and therefore in the unconscious. With Freud’s early memory-based etiologies of hysteria, some room had to be made for chance. Despite Freud’s efforts to narrow "seduction" to a scene that only concerned the patient’s father, the chance of this "seduction" still differentiated the normal from the neurotic. I have attempted to problematize the orthodox myth of Freud’s switch from memory-based theories to fantasy-based theories above. If there was a switch at this time, it was one made from an etiology of the traumatic and chance imposition of sexuality on an asexual child to a metapsychology of what constituted normal sexual development: the infant was no longer raped or molested, it was a sexual being with fantasies of seduction. The chance was no longer in terms of a trauma etiology; it would become, after Dora, the chance of a deviation from normal sexuality: too much masturbation, "seduction" by a nurse or sister, inability to give up primary masculinity, etc. Freud’s etiologies after the "seduction" theory are never so definitive, and what exactly is pathogenic is usually left untheorized, thus psychoanalytic claims to authority or to truth based on cure, including or especially those regarding sexual development, are highly dubious.

Freud’s later theory of hysteria is in harmony with his notion from The Interpretation of Dreams that psychoanalysis finds "no fundamental, but only quantitative, distinctions between normal and neurotic life" (V 373): the hysteric represses her primary masculinity too much. Freud is less concerned at this point with the cause, with finding his caput Nili. His primary goal seems to have been to establish a stable position of masculinity via his theory. The metapsychological theory of sexual development, Freud’s phylo-"genetic" masterplot of the PP, achieved this better than any etiology of hysteria ever did. Yet when he attempts to define woman and femininity according to this masterplot–when he tries to appropriate the other and the Other–he ends up destabilizing the very basis of his theory: the oedipal masterplot of masculine sexual development. Disavowing this instability, Freud’s woman is still reduced to functionaries according to his "three lines of deve lopment" and within a phallic economy centered on "castration-truth." This economy (oikonomia) provides the home (oikos, Heim) for the phallic One. The stability of the oikos is achieved through a stable and complete definition (reduction of) woman, and the repression (secret, Heim) of the instability this definition causes (the repression of male bisexuality).

In "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," Freud would switch the dominance between the ego and the id back to the id, after switching his original stance in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. When Freud argues in this essay that the way psychoanalysis has come to understand the nature of resistance means that cure is hard to come by, he is privileging psychoanalysis as a metapsychology over psychoanalysis as a technique. Given that this technique is what originally grounded the metapsychology, we are left wondering what is it that grounds the psychoanalytic metapsychology that theorizes interminable analyses. Whence the authority? What in turn grounds Freud’s theories of sexual difference? With respect to females, analyses are interminable because, Freud argues, females cannot give up their penis envy. But how did Freud arrive at the "truth" of penis-envy but via cure? The foundation of psychoanalysis is not so much Freud theorizing and curing neurosis, but attempting to master sexual difference by theorizing normal sexual development: not curing hysteria as much as defining hysteria in terms of normal female development. In this vein, I have tried to show how the trajectory of psychoanalysis was fundamentally directed toward securing a position, via metapsychology and masterplots, of a masculine One with respect to the unconscious, woman, chance, and difference. Without cure as the basis, Freud’s theories would be mere speculations.

Freud’s movement away from etiologies and cures toward metapsychologies of sexual difference is continued by Lacan, who would de-differentiate normality and neurosis by doing away with the category of normal, and essentially collapsing it into the category of neurotic. For Lacan, neurosis is a clinical structure not differentiated from normality, but from psychosis and perversion, perversion being the other possible structures of subjectivity. Neurosis "is a question being poses for the subject" (Lac93 168). Lacan divides the neurotic structure into two forms, and each form is centered on its own question. The question (asked) of the obsessional neurotic is Hamlet’s basic existential question, "to be or not to be?"–or, "am I dead or alive?" and "why do I exist?" (Lac93 179-80). The question (asked) of the hysteric concerns the subject’s sexual position: "Am I a man or a woman?" or "what is a woman?" (Lac93, 170-75). With respect to this last form of the hysteric’s question, Dylan Evans argues that Lacan "reaffirms the ancient view that there is an intimate connection between hysteria and femininity" (Eva96 78-79). I would first argue that the Lacanian hysteric is the Lacanian woman, since neurosis and normality are the same: two forms of the Lacanian "solution" of "castration-truth," where the irreducibility of division is transformed into the center of identity (though this "solution" itself is divided, hence the quotation marks). "Femininity" for Lacan is reduced to lack, and specifically a lack of being–"woman doesn’t ex-sist" (Lac90 38)–and therefore the hysteric’s question and the obsessional’s question are the same question, since being for Lacan is a question of one’s position within the Symbolic–i.e., one’s sexual identity. Having a position, being, would then be obsessional and masculine. To ask "am I a man or a woman?" would therefore be the same as asking "to be or not to be?" To be is to be a man, and to be obsessional. This would be the onto-theological positioning of the hom(m)osexual One: vigilant about the Other/other potentially within (bisexuality) and against which it had to define itself in its (op)positional stage, and whose non-existence must be assured to maintain its fantasy of Oneness. Yet, since the two questions are the same question, and therefore the same "solution," the One is also divided, which would also explain its vigilance, its obsession, with maintaining not only the repression of "woman" and her division, but the repression of all repression.

The difference between the questions, the sexual difference, would be from whence the questions are asked. According to Ellie Ragland-Sullivan,

The reduction of woman to castration, to its magical presence/absence is also indispensable.

Lacan’s hysteric is woman in his structural economy that collapses the categories of the neurotic and the normal into one. The dignity Lacan gives to the hysteric is the dignity usually afforded to woman for providing this specific absence to presence, where lack (the Real) has its place (opposed to the Symbolic). Lacan’s identification of Socrates, Hegel, and himself as hysterics is less an identification of hysteria with these thinkers who went beyond common knowledge than a manifestation of Lacan’s relationship of disavowal with respect to woman: Lacan, with his usual immodesty, associates himself with those whom he sees as having possessed some Knowledge that might be associated with the phallic mother, if woman were not constantly a threat. "Castration-truth" provides a transcendental place for the specific lack, but the threat always remains, as does the instability due to the logic of disavowal required to sustain the One. The hysteric must exist (Lacan’s mourning) and yet "be" woman who cannot exist. All this must "be" in order to achieve the ideal "hom(m)osexuality" of Being. Man exists (alone) in Lacan’s phallogocentrism, and Lacan presents himself as an example of His ability to transcend the limitations of normal knowledge, beyond the obsessional position, to possess the God-like knowledge of both Self and Other, both sides of the split in the RSI: he supposes himself to be a mystic, a subject of knowledge ("sujet supposé savoir"). Lacan’s association of himself and his three great men with the god-like position of the man-hysteric, what he calls "the mystic" (Lac98 76), and the hysteric’s quintessential lack can be seen as a disavowal of the hysteric as woman: the man-hysteric is akin to the phallic mother, his-her absolute knowledge the product of a totality unbounded. Lacanian psychoanalysis is Lacan’s superstition: a destinational linguistics. With respect to one level of the actual phallic function–the level that hides the small "o" other behind the One of hom(m)osexuality–what remains is the existence and femininity of the hysteric and woman. With respect to a "more primordial" level, the level of das Unheimlich, the "not-being-at-home," what remains, as usual, is the trace of logocentric repression: the différance of a split One, the impropriety of the proper in a self-post.

Lacan’s neurotic structures are thus ideal categories of sexual difference in ontological terms. Lacan extends a trend in Freud’s theorizing that conflates neurosis and normality, and associates ideal categories of masculine and feminine with diagnostic categories, among many other types of categories. In this sense psychoanalysis resembles the ego of the obsessional male. Like the obsessional male, psychoanalysis can be read as a defensive discourse attempting to maintain the masculine position of existence against the threats of feminine uncertainty and undecidability. Laplanche and Pontalis describe obsessional neurosis as follows: