Primary Femininity

"The ‘Uncanny’" is another candidate for an athetic text, just as Beyond… is, according to Derrida. Freud’s hypotheses in "The ‘Uncanny’" are fragmentary, and his explication of them incomplete. Freud asks more questions here than he answers, and many of the enigmas he introduces remain as such at the end: they are left to haunt the text. For example, the uncanny is an affect for Freud–Freud "feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics" (XVII 219)–and he initially associates this affect with fear. Later, however, he will wonder if there is also something about it that is at the same time pleasurable. In his discussion of Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffman’s "The Sand-Man," and of automatons in general, he notes that a "living doll" (XVII 233), while often associated with the uncanny, would also suggest the realization of a basic desire of children to have their dolls come alive. Freud could simply be refuting here the typical reading of Olympia as the primary uncanny aspect of Hoffman’s tale in order to make space for his own reading focusing on the eyes and castration. Freud’s later discussion of what is required for any literary author’s "success" at evoking the feeling of the uncanny, however, suggests that he conceives of this feeling as being analogous to the feeling of pleasure a tragic play might provide its audience. Regardless, Freud acknowledges a "contradiction" between the association of the uncanny with unpleasure and pleasure at the same time (ibid.). This possible mixture of pleasure and unpleasure suggests the uncanny at least paradoxically combines opposites with regard to pleasure and defies any simple definition in terms of the pleasure principle, if not pointing towards something beyond it.

Yet, paradox seems to be right at home with the uncanny. That the meaning of "das Heimlich" contains both the sense of what is familiar and unfamiliar makes the English translation of its opposite, "the uncanny," lose the sense of uncertainty and undecidability of the German word. Freud’s 1910 essay "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words" reveals his fascination with words with two antithetical meanings, and his association of these words with the primitive, which for Freud always points to early infancy, the inner layers of the unconscious, and the pre-history of human kind at the same time. Freud associates such a conflicted unity with the system Ucs., which remains a unity even when it "holds" contradictory ideas simultaneously. Such a "holding" splits the ego, but not the unconscious. Freud sees these words as being common in the primitive form of Egyptian, yet not in modern languages. The system Ucs. is more archaic for Freud, whereas the ego would be associated with what is more contemporary, such as civilization. Linguistically and psychologically, Freud might have seen "Unheimlichkeit" as something remaining in the present from the past, a ghostly inheritance. I would argue that Freud’s fascination with these words is in a significant way related to the recurring trauma-structure tropes of psychoanalysis, his fascination with the primitive, and his consistent connection of these metaphors with the primitive and all it entails for him, especially the ontological primitive of the mother-infant monad/dyad.

For Freud in general, "the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been repressed" (XVII 247), but he also relies heavily on Schelling's related definition: "‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light" (qtd. in XVII 224). Freud’s definition relies on both the root meanings of heim as home (familiar) and secret (private). So the uncanny for Freud, at least as his essay sets out, seems to be a feeling associated with something that was once familiar, that something having since been repressed or made secret from oneself, and then the return of that something. Not only does Freud not fully explicate any of his examples of what evokes uncanny feelings according to this definition, he will also contradict this definition with other definitions. The closest he comes to explicating one of his examples fully–fully meaning accounting for issues of familiarity, repression, and return–occurs when he describes the feeling of "neurotic men" who "declare they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs":

Why would this heim be a secret or repressed? Why just neurotic men if it is everyone’s former home? What about healthy men? Or women in general? Obviously, Freud is alluding to castration as the source of the uncanny here, as he does repeatedly throughout the essay (e.g., XVII 227, 231, 232n1, 233, 235, 243, 244, 248, 248-49, 252, 252n1). But why does he keep it vague? Is it a secret for him in some way? We might read Freud’s vagueness regarding the Unheimlichkeit of castration as a manifestation of the threat it represents of bringing woman to the fore, and, therefore, of revealing the secret of the repression of her significance.

Just before his explication of the uncanny with respect to viewing female genitalia above, Freud gives what he claims to be a thorough list of examples of what constitutes the uncanny:

Towards the end of the essay Freud divides the uncanny into two categories: those having to do with "infantile complexes" and those having to do with "animistic beliefs." Freud argues that the uncanny feeling associated with infantile complexes concerns the repression of "a particular ideational content" (XVII 249) and its return, whereas the uncanny feeling associated with animistic beliefs concerns the truth or reality of such beliefs: superstitions, the occult, magic, the omnipotence of thought, telepathy, etc. Freud argues that animistic beliefs are not repressed but "surmounted," therefore we are left with a choice: either one of the primary categories of the uncanny does not fit the general definition provided above, or the "secret and hidden" of Schelling’s definition should be understood not simply in terms of repression. Though something simply surmounted would not necessarily be secret in terms of repression (secret from oneself), and therefore its return would not necessarily be disturbing, Freud’s concluding definition takes into account the difference between repression and surmounting, which he recognizes would extend "the term ‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning" (ibid.):

We might ask why Freud feels it is necessary to differentiate between repression and surmounting with respect to animistic beliefs, especially when it comes to his self-positioning and his own beliefs? I return to this question below.

Freud refers to both sources of the uncanny as the primitive, archaic, primal, and primeval–and to "the distinction between the two" categories of uncanny as both "theoretically very important" and yet "hazy" (ibid.). Freud argues, "[w]hen we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we shall not be greatly astonished to find that the distinction is a hazy one" (ibid.). How might superstition be based on the castration or Oedipus complexes? Magical thinking? The omnipotence of thought? Any answer to these questions must come to terms with how much Freud conflates the two infancies of "man" and "Man." My general thesis here is that Freud’s thesis, his positioning in terms of his formulation of the uncanny, cannot be understood, does not make sense, unless it is understood in terms of, not just the archetypal scenes of both infancies, but with respect to both plays in their entirety, and to how these plays relate to each other. For Freud, they are remarkably similar since the scenes of the ontogenetic play of infancy is a repetition of the phylogenetic one. Therefore, I argue here that Freud does not simply reduce das Unheimlich to castration and (op)positionality–though many of his examples are simply reducible in this way–but that he does so with reference to what might be called his primal play, which is made up of specific primal scenes and primal phantasies. Moreover, I see this primal play as the manifestation of the "actual phallic function" and the "three (self-) deceptions" of what I am arguing is the "mainstyle" of Freudian theory.

If we compare the plays of primitive "Man" and "man" as treated by Freud, a possible differentiation would be the role of woman in each: in the former "she" is largely absent except as an exchange commodity, whereas in the latter "her" role as mother seems central. This main role in the ontogenetic play, however, is ultimately effaced in the proper resolution of the Oedipus complex: as in the phylogenetic play, she becomes a place holder for the phallus. In both plays the protagonists are sons (or a son) and a father, and the mother and females are not players as much as commodities of exchange and conduits of desire for the phallus: the girl is even "a little man." On one level, the importance of woman in these plays–even as conduit, place holder, and commodity–seems to be the secret of the phallocentric home of psychoanalysis: the familiar that has been repressed and yet keeps returning. On another level, the figuring of woman hides the secret of difference (différance) beyond binaries, which I would argue constitutes the primal repressed of psychoanalysis, as with any phallogocentric discourse. The former level attempts to achieve hom(m)osexuality, a phallic One (phallocentrism), while the latter attempts to dissimulate the Other behind the binary of man/woman (dualisms as an aspect of logocentrism). The staging and casting of the phylogenetic play, which is ultimately privileged by Freud, can be read as a denial of the importance of woman, specifically of the mother. The "origin of origins" is constructed with the primal father and his sons already in place at the beginning of the play; the women are not as much mothers as wives and daughters. The players are outside of time: phylo-"genetics."

It may be useful to turn to Lacan’s treatment of these two plays in his return to Freud since Lacan’s reading of Freud, as an example of such a reading according to a strict logic of lack, assumes the effacement of woman’s role in terms of presence: "woman doesn’t ex-sist" (Lac90 38). "Her" absence, as we might suspect, is ultimately God for Lacan (see Lac98, chapter VI). For Lacan the two plays are One, and the One is the Symbolic of "le ‘non’ du père"/"le nom du père." In Lacan’s Kojèvian reading of Freudian desire, desire is essentially about recognition: "Man’s desire is desire of the Other’s desire" (Lac77b 235; see Bor92). Via Kojève’s reading of Hegel, Lacan’s mother is reduced to her lack and subsequent desire for the phallus. Woman is simultaneously other and absent in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and as other she is reduced to the absence-presence of the phallus: woman as phallus is the commodity of exchange between father and son; woman as lack is the conduit of phallic desire. Her mutually exclusive dual roles require a logic of disavowal. This phallic economy, one in which difference is reduced to identity and position is thus secured, is the Freudian heim to which Lacan returns. Derrida points out the common Greek root of "home" and "economy," oikos and oikonomia (Der97 359): home and economy based on the repression and disavowal (a secret).

With the primitive of "Man" one can assume, as Freud does, a mythical patriarchal society where females are insignificant outside their role in the commodity exchange. With the primitive of "man"–that is, with ontogenetic infancy–it is harder to efface the significance of the role of the mother, but both Freud and Lacan manage to a large extent to do just this. One way of conceptualizing the secret Freud seems to be hiding in "The ‘Uncanny’" is what he would later call in his essay "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" the "bedrock" of psychoanalysis: "the repudiation of femininity" (XXIII 252). In "The ‘Uncanny,’" Freud repudiates the importance of femininity. The secret is the importance of femininity, and the home is its repudiation. Given that this so-called bedrock of psychoanalysis had formerly been conceptualized as repression–Freud wrote in 1914 that the "theory of repression is the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests" (XIV 16)–it is not hard to imagine that, for Freud, these two themes of femininity and repression are intimately related, though never fully spelled out. For primeval "man," exogamy becomes the result of the taboo of incest, and the privation of the mother (secret, private, Geheimnis) and the threat of the son’s castration (trauma, Unheimlichkeit) become two sides of the same coin ("trauma"-structure) in the law of the totemic or Symbolic father. The desire for the mother–that is, for her desire–becomes a secret that is repressed, as is the father’s threat of castration. Resolution of the race’s Oedipus complex translates into the establishment of the transcendental law of the symbolic father, or "civilization."

Yet this is not the whole story. The differentiation between the two plays becomes clear when we consider that, in the ontogenetic play, identity, positioning, or subjectification is part of the process, whereas phylogenesis privileges the race or group above the individual. In Freud’s phylo-"genetic" play, the establishment of the law, the relationship of individual to the group, is more the issue: the identity of the group. The Freudian ontogenetic split of Freud’s later work should be conceived as one between selfish or individualist instincts and the requirements of the group or law (see Civilization and Its Discontents). This split, however, would be preprogrammed in the "trauma"-structure of the primal phantasies the individual inherits (instincts of law? drive of proper?). Regardless, the plays differ when it comes to the mother’s central role in the establishment of the primary institution in question: the mother would seem to play a leading role in the ontogenetic play where there seems to be a conflation of desire for the mother and identification with the mother–or, as cited before, Freud’s conception in The Ego and the Id that, at "the very beginning, in the individual’s primitive oral phase, object-cathexis and identification are no doubt indistinguishable from each other" (XIX 29, my emphasis).

And this may point us toward another way of conceptualizing the secret which Freud keeps repressed in "The ‘Uncanny.’" This conflation of "desire for" and "identification with" is an especially pertinent theme for 1919 and the war years when Freud was struggling with a concept that ultimately could threaten the primacy of the unconscious: primary narcissism. In the abyme of the mother-infant "dyad," a two which is one, "love of the mother" and "love of self" would be supposedly indistinguishable. When we consider how separation from the mother is theorized by Freud as a form of castration in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, we can now begin to piece together the connections between the mother, positioning-identity, and castration. If the loss of the loved object conflates the mother and the penis, and the primary love object may be a conflation of the ego (primary narcissism) and the mother, then a loss of identity or sense of place or position or self, would also be a form of castration for Freud, and would associate castration with death. Within the phallic economy, it is important that the mother’s role not be too significant or else it might eclipse the (male) infant’s identity/position/existence. Again the mother is merely a conduit for a phallic economy. Regardless of her significance being displaced by castration (of not-being as castration), what is important here is the connection of identity, castration, death, and the mother’s effacement/role. With respect to these themes, the male infant’s identity would be analogous to the positioning of "Freud" and psychoanalysis: castration as both an "infantile sexual theory" and the truth that is found.

"The ‘Uncanny’" is a position(ing) paper which, at the same time, attempts to establish phallocentrism and base itself on phallocentrism: self-posting. The secret of "The ‘Uncanny,’" behind which lies the secret of non-binary difference and chance, is the importance of the mother’s role to establishing identity, the importance of the primary identification with the mother for any individual, and the intensity of this bedrock of identity. It is as if, with psychoanalysis, Freud is acting out the male infant’s anxiety with respect to the secret of the power and significance of the mother and his primary identification with her, the latter being theoretically repressed with the assumption of "primary masculinity." We might call the secret "primary femininity," where the little boy and the little girl start out as "little women" with respect to identification–that is, according to the explicit logic of The Ego and Id. Of course, there would be a "more primordial" (Heidegger) Otherness behind this "primary femininity" as primary small "o" other. This femininity, however, would be primary for any such identitarian ego within such a system, a system that would establish an origin, where there was a feminine mother and the mother was the first object ofidentification and desire. In this vein–one which suffers from being essentialist with respect to the male/female and father/mother binaries–primary femininity in terms of identification could have been coupled with primary masculinity in terms of object-cathexes, which would make the primary state of being a bisexual one, and therefore give masculinity a source for bisexuality (again, it lacks such a source with Freud’s primary masculinity).

In The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, Sarah Kofman writes,

Freud’s "affirmation" of "primary masculinity" (the predominance of masculinity) is a negation of his earlier numerous affirmations of bisexuality. What becomes enigmatic if we accept both the predominance of masculinity and bisexuality is, first, how these conflicting conceptions can both be primary, and, second, how male sexuality could ever be bisexual: the bisexuality of femininity could be, and is, explained with respect to this logic. Male sexuality becomes the riddle of primary-masculinity psychoanalysis. The "development into womanhood of a little girl who has first been a little boy" is not enigmatic here. Both Freudian "affirmations" or assumptions–of bisexuality and primary masculinity–work for females, but not for males. Freud’s unexplained assumption that the boy’s primary identification is to his father–an aspect of his primary masculinity–can also be found in The Ego and the Id (XIX 31; see also XIII 115 ff, 259; XVIII 105 ff), directly contradicting his other position in The Ego and the Id quoted above conflating early object cathexes and identification. The little girl as solely a "little man" and the boy’s identification with the father appear magically despite Freud’s general assumption of bisexuality and his concept of object and identity being initially conflated. Freud’s assumptions allow for femininity to be theorized in Freudian terms and with respect to bisexuality, neurosis, homosexuality, and normality, but not masculinity. Bisexuality is required for Freud’s theoretical mastery of woman, but he never systematically applies it to man. Primary masculinity is at once assumed as a known and stable thing, while also making masculinity in general into an enigma. Freud’s later theorization of female sexuality makes male sexuality the enigma, and this theorization requires the ideal of masculinity as an unquestionable ideal category and origin of full presence and identity. Moreover, Freud’s assumption of a primary "masculinity" would not be limited to human subjects. It would also include the nature of libido and the most abstract of philosophical categories: activity. Freud’s extension of his primary-masculinity assumption beyond human subjects and into Nature makes inescapable, contrary to Kofman’s claims, Freud’s multiple appeals to ideal categories of masculinity and femininity.

Primary femininity–as we might extrapolate it from Freud’s position in The Ego and the Id where object-cathexes and identification are the same with respect to the supposed female mother of early infancy–would solve many of the enigmas of his conception of male sexuality, which I find his work on female sexuality complicates and uncovers. A concept of primary femininity would account for Freud’s position in "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" that the male’s "passive or feminine attitude to another male" (XXIII 250), like penis envy for the female, is one of the "themes" that "give the analyst an unusual amount of trouble" (ibid.). Without such a concept, whence this attitude of the typical male analysand? It would be an especially inexplicable attitude given the awesome fear associated with the castration complex. Primary femininity in this respect could also constitute one aspect of a primary bisexuality. It would also account for a pre-oedipal phase for the boy: one whose negative Oedipus complex would be based on identification, unlike the girl’s, whose pre-oedipal phase is theorized as a negative Oedipus complex based on object-choice. From this primary femininity, Freud might have also developed an analogous three lines of masculine development: a normal one with the proper repression of primary femininity, a neurotic one with too much repression, and a homosexual one with not enough.

It should be understood that I am not arguing for primary femininity as a gap-filling measure for Freudian theory; I am not advocating for the acceptance of primary femininity in terms of identification. To do so would be to accept the very ideal categories I am trying to deconstruct. I am trying to draw attention to a lacuna in Freud’s theorization in order to put into relief what I feel are primary secrets of psychoanalysis, secrets that establish its home: the significance of the mother, male identification with the mother, the obvious necessity of male bisexuality if bisexuality is theorized as primary and universal, and the absence of an equivalent three-path theorization of masculinity in Freud’s later work. My goal has been to suggest a connection between these secrets and the logic of lack of psychoanalysis, its "castration-truth," its "actual phallic function"–that is, its mode of reducing the Other to more of the Same. Freud’s theorization of the development of female sexuality destabilizes the basis of psychoanalysis itself: his theorization of the development of male sexuality in terms of the Oedipus and castration complexes. We might see the three-path theory as a move to theorize woman once and for all, a mastery of the other. But this move destabilizes the basis of the original position, and this destabilization goes unacknowledged.

next —>