Uncanny (Wo)Man: The Home/Secrets of Psychoanalysis

The hysteric would like to give up sexuality in general by repressing what Freud theorizes is her primary masculinity, the latter of which he clearly equates with sexuality, and also with a highly abstract, pre-Socratic conception of activity. The hysteric represses her primary masculinity too much, whereas the other two lines of development–of homosexuality and "normal" femininity–would repress it too little or just enough respectively. Freud unambiguously posits masculinity as primary, both in terms of sexuality and activity, and therefore in terms of his conception of "subjectivity," and even of Life in the most abstract. His position–which would suggest that females are more bisexual since male bisexuality seems to have no origin–is based on his theory that females start out as males: "We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man" (XXII 118). Freud argues that the girl’s pre-oedipal phase is spent as a little man who takes her mother as "her" primary sexual object, just as the boy does. Strangely, however, the girl identifies with her mother, while the boy somehow identifies with his father, which contradicts Freud’s own 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). The source of the male’s original identification with the father is simply assumed, leaving little room for Freud’s common claim for the universality of bisexuality.

Other evidence of Freud’s theorizing sexuality proper as masculine can be found in "Female Sexuality" where, after positing the two phases of the female’s sexual life–the initial masculine, active phase Freud associates with what he conceptualizes as a phallic clitoris, and the latter feminine, passive phase Freud associates with his conception of the vagina as the passive receptor of the penis–Freud writes that we "do not, of course, know the biological basis of these peculiarities in women" (XXI 228). How could what Freud has just described as the nature of female sexuality be a peculiarity unless male sexuality, with its single sex organ and its one masculine sexuality, is considered primordial? The traditional conception of the "enigma" of female sexuality is based on the assumption that male sexuality is a known norm of sexuality. Yet Freud’s closing words on the "dark continent" (XX 212) of female sexuality and the question "Was will das Weib?" (Jon55 2:421) have the uncanny effect of bringing up disturbing questions regarding his theory of male sexuality–that is, of psychoanalysis in general, insofar as it is a form of hom(m)osexual theory. Male sexuality is assumed as the norm, but it becomes the enigma itself as Freud theorizes female sexuality late in his career, and seemingly once and for all. For example, why does the Oedipus complex seem to be the beginning of male development, whereas it is the end of female development? In other words, what would be the pre-oedipal phase in boys? Why would the boy be bisexual if he begins and ends as a male? Why would the boy not initially identify with his mother? How important is identification? Is it as important as object choice? Wouldn’t a change of identification be as significant as the girl’s supposed change of object? If not, what would be the source of neurosis and homosexuality for boys? In other words, why is there not an equivalent, clearly mapped-out three paths–normality, neurosis, homosexuality–for male sexuality in Freudian theory?

Through my reading of Freud’s essay "The ‘Uncanny,’" I attempt to address these questions, not as much by delving into the fragments of Freudian theory that might be made to cohere in order to providesome answers, but by showing how these questions mark a much more general attribute of psychoanalysis: its primary defense against what is totally other via the reduction of that other to the binary of male/female and the (op)positionality of "castration-truth." Psychoanalysis can be read as a positioning with respect to the Other, a positioning sustained by the Other’s reduction to a simple other of (op)position, and this simple other at times figuring as woman, femininity, or hysteric, while at other times as "the unconscious," the id, or "external reality." The figure of woman becomes the missive of the hom(m)osexual self-posting of psychoanalysis: the other that must be reduced to the One and what reveals the divisions of the One.

More specifically, I try to show in my reading of "The ‘Uncanny’" how the undecidability of "the" unconscious is related to chance and the significance of the mother. I argue here that the home (Heim) of psychoanalysis is established through the repression of a variety of secrets (Geheimnises) related to what is actually the undecidability hidden behind Freud’s rigid male/female (op)position and his "castration-truth." These secrets are not like Freud’s unknown of the navel of the dream, full of sense, but the secret of something otherwise to sense, a hidden unknowable, the partiality of the discourse that represses the secrets. Moreover, these secrets are also the division within the supposed totality. Finally I try to show how psychoanalysis employs many of the major defenses it describes in its relation to the Other, and to the Other in its simple-other guises as hysteric, femininity, female, woman, or mother. I attempt to group all of these defensive strategies together under what I have called "the actual phallic function." My general goal is to show how Freud’s generalization into universal fantasies of memories that were pathogenic and (despite his efforts to make these memories all the same) full of chance is related to the "bedrock" (XXIII 252) of his phallic Weltanschauung, where anatomy is certainly destiny, despite his feints to the contrary. In other words, I want to link Freud’s logic of lack and his destinational theory with his theories of sexual "difference" in order to show how psychoanalysis functions defensively in its "face to face" with actual difference, or différance and chance–how sexual difference in the (op)positional form male/female provides the basis of his reduction of difference to more of the same via a destinational linguistics based on "castration-truth."

In "The ‘Uncanny,’" I read Freud as being in a Levinasian "face to face" (Lev69 79) with the beyond of "the" unconscious in a different mode than in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Whereas Beyond … dealt with trauma and the contingency and violence of "external reality," this text deals with what would seem to be the contingency or conflict of "psychic reality": the beyond of the outside of the inside. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud was clear where he stood on the question of psychic determinism and the nature of the simple inside in general: "nothing in the mind is arbitrary or undetermined" (242). What I see as being at stake in "The ‘Uncanny’" is whether Freud reduces what he called "the unconscious" to more of the same via the psychoanalytic trope of (op)positionality, castration–therefore securing the position of his "I." A simpler way to put it–in line with how I read Derrida’s essay "My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies"–might be to say that what is at stake is whether there is any space (or time) for chance and difference in Freud’s conception of the psyche. "The" unconscious that is tolerant of contradiction seems to be for Freud intolerant of the chance that the letter might not arrive at its destination. "Freud" depends upon all possible "beyonds" to the PP–these potential radical alterities–being reduced to what is known, predictable, and calculable, in order to secure his totality-based position and his transmissibility-dependent legacy. With the Wolf Man case and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, we see Freud extending his determinism-seeking logic from "psychical reality" to "external reality" by a reduction of the latter to the "trauma"-structure of the former and therefore attempting to extend his determinism of the inside to the outside in order to achieve a totality of calculable terrain.

I conclude that Freud’s ultimate system, and the positioning of totality it attempts to secure, requires a split along the lines of the existence of woman and therefore along the lines of the (male, phallic) self as being One. The positioning of psychoanalysis is much like the positioning of man I derive from Freudian theory: a split ego that must at the same time believe in woman’s absence and presence, the product of a fort/da game (with a slash, where there is equivalence, repetition, and interminability). We might call this a fetishist’s position of disavowal if not for the fact that Freud’s conception of the fetishist is centered on the presence/absence of the maternal phallus, and not the presence/absence of woman: the concept of the (male) fetishist is part of "the actual phallic function" in that it displaces the role of woman with the identity-difference term of castration. What I am arguing here is that this disavowal is first of all the dissimulation of the Other behind man/woman, and then of the simple, or small-"o" other behind the One of man via the magical identity-difference term of castration. What the concept of the fetish hides behind its phallocentrism, its "castration-truth," is difference. Here I attempt to map out the (op)positioning of Freudian theory with respect to the dissimulation of difference via the (op)positioning sexual "difference" as man/woman, Masculinity/Femininity, or Male/Female. I argue that this dualistic sexual "difference" is part of the "actual phallic function"–that is, part of that which hides difference behind the "difference" of (op)positional and ideal binaries.

I attempt to relate here themes of chance (the possibility of difference) with themes of sexual "difference" in Freudian theory. In "The ‘Uncanny,’" this relationship can be found with respect to the themes of superstition and the mother-infant monad/dyad. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, besides being one of the primary texts where Freud makes his position on psychic determinism clear, is also the text where Freud treats superstition as a projection of repressed or unconscious wishes into "external reality." Given this position, one might assume that Freud is simply a committed materialist waging war on such beliefs. Yet Freud is radically split on issues such as the relationship of psychoanalysis to what he considered to be two primary sub-categories of superstition: occultism and telepathy. Whereas he rarely if ever took a definitive stance on the various beliefs he classified as occultism, Freud’s belief in telepathy was clearly stated later in his career (see Gay88 443-45).

I read "The ‘Uncanny’" as evidence of Freud’s profound conflict regarding his superstitious beliefs, the lure these beliefs held out for him, and his desire to be a paragon of the materialist scientist–this despite his understanding of these two belief systems as mutually-exclusive. I attribute this conflict, this splitting of Freud, to his desire to master "external reality" as a determinism, as he believed he had done with psychical reality. I show how Freud associated superstition with "animistic beliefs," and therefore with the primitive of man and ontogenetic infancy when the relationship to the mother is dominant. Superstition thus is one theme that illustrates the splitting of the "castration-truth" positioning of the One in terms of the significance of the mother, or in terms of her presence/absence. Castration, like animistic beliefs, is first theorized by Freud as a childhood sexual theory, a childhood belief–but it later becomes for Freud a grand truth. Freud seems quite tempted to have animistic beliefs follow the same path from an aspect of infantile or childish psychology to a grand truth. A determinism of "external reality" might be called Fate or Destiny, and, for the materialist scientist Freud, such superstitious beliefs assume a God-like or demonic Other who has framed the determinism as such. The determinism of these beliefs held out the lure of Freud’s mastery over "external reality," though the God-like Other they assumed conflicted with his identity as a materialist scientist.

What is primitive, irrational, uneducated, and childlike Freud often associates with femininity, in contrast to what he associates with masculinity: what is civilized, rational, enlightened, and adult. What I will show as Freud’s severe ambivalence with respect to "animistic beliefs" might be understood in terms of two mutually exclusive methods of achieving a certain mastery over "external reality," chance, difference, and the figure of the mother or woman, which all should be associated with each other in this context: (1) by assuming the (phallic) position of materialist scientist and reducing the chance and difference of "external reality" to the absence of this position, that is, to lack or castration; and (2) by accepting the beliefs of occultism, superstitions, and possibly religions as partially true, or true if reformulated in a way more amenable to Freud’s psychoanalytic logic of determinism as applied to "psychic reality." Freud is split by maintaining both methods, both positions, simultaneously, which I argue is similar to what Freud describes as disavowal, where two mutually exclusive positions are held together: the fetishist boy "has retained that belief [in castration], but he has also given it up" (XXI 154).

I argue below that "The ‘Uncanny’" is a position(ing) paper of "Freud’s," much as Beyond … is one, where the positioning becomes abyssal because "the related is related to the relating," and where the self-posting suggests something totally other beyond what the text admits: something that might be called das Unheimlich if Freud’s essay didn’t reduce this category to a logic of lack. I show that Freud’s positioning in "The ‘Uncanny’" is primarily one made against difference and chance, which are first figured as the (op)positional other, the other against which the self-same is defined, the figure of woman, who is then (dis)figured as non-existent or absence in terms of castration: it is a positioning that employs the aforementioned triple (self-)deception of the actual phallic function. Since the other of the positioning of "The ‘Uncanny’" remains repressed, the text becomes, again, an example of self-posting, an attempt at establishment of the One via the One. This essay, which was written shortly before Beyond …, is, like Beyond …, a text where its self-posting ends up revealing an insecure positioning, and in this case with respect to chance, difference, and woman. The feeling that this positional insecurity would produce could be called "uncanny," though it might also simply be called anxiety. The difference between the two here is that the uncanny marks the feeling ofthe return of something repressed, something that had once been familiar. Yet, since Freud reduces all anxiety to castration anxiety, anxiety would also be the return of something familiar. What differentiates the uncanny from anxiety is one question to keep in mind here. Another would be whether Freud’s conception of the feeling of the uncanny would be specific to the (op)positionings determined by "castration-truth." Would it be, like fetishism, male-specific since females in this context are already castrated?

"The ‘Uncanny’" is another example of a self-posting text of logocentric repression that reveals the uncanny remains of a ghostly inheritance due to the necessity of dispatching the self to the self in this postal relay and the necessary impropriety of this relay’s proper. These are the remains of the original repetition, the essential division, and the logic of dissemination of what Derrida calls iterability. This self-posting is based on a "castration-truth," castration as identity-difference, a material-ideal phallus/letter that always arrives at its destination. I argue here that the feeling of the uncanny, as Freud theorizes it, cannot be differentiated from Freud’s later, castration-based theory of anxiety, and is male-specific like Freud’s theory of fetishism. In addition, I attempt to reveal how this self-posting of the "actual phallic function" goes beyond (op)positionality to a position where the self must be split–an impropriety of the proper à la Derrida, a "splitting of the ego" à la Freud–in order to simultaneously "believe" in the presence and absence of woman: not the presence or absence of woman’s phallus, the fetishist’s position, but the presence and absence of woman, the psychoanalytic position. Psychoanalysis theorizes the fetishist position in order to center the phallus in defense against the opposition of woman, but ultimately against what is totally other that this opposition represses. This present/absent woman, and the totally other her presence/absence hides, is the secret and the home, the familiar that returns with what we might call an uncanny feeling, if Freud had not theorized das Unheimlich in terms of what reduces the totally other to more of the phallic same via castration. Heidegger writes the following in Being and Time: "Not-being-at-home [Ex-propriation] must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon" (Hei96 177). This primordialness of "Not-being-at-home," the familiarity of the impropriety of the proper, could be said to be the secret of Freudian theory, hidden by the (op)positionality of "castration-truth" and the (non)origin before the origin of phylo-"genetics," and requiring this disavowal logic with respect to woman. Therefore this psychoanalytic secret (Geheimnis) would constitute the psychoanalytic home (Heim), which is another way of theorizing that these psychoanalytic concepts "belong to the history of metaphysics, that is, to the system of logocentric repression" (Der78 197), where this logocentric repression is carried out via a "castration-truth" and its destinational linguistics: phallogocentrism.

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