Castrating the castration complex

Textual Practice

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 101-119

  Bates, Catherine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Castration complex; Disavowal; Fetishism; Freud; Lacan; Psychoanalysis

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249253747     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369808582302     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Quotations from An Autobiographical Study (1925), xx, p. 37,
2. and An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), xxiii, p. 191.
3. All references to Freud in English are to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 24 vols; references in German are to Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940-52), 17 vols, hereafter GW.
4. 'Infantile genital organization', xix, p. 142.
5. Much is contained within my 'controversially' here. Freud's problematic conception of female penis envy aroused scepticism among his colleagues from the very beginning, and lay behind the 'great debate' of the 1920s and 1930s surrounding the psychoanalytic account of feminine sexuality. More recently, Luce Irigaray has taken issue with the Freudian theoretical procedure by which 'the feminine is always described in terms of deficiency or atrophy, as the other side of the sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex'; she has argued for taking the specificity of the female genitals as in them- selves structuring of feminine sexuality: see This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), this quotation p. 69,
6. and Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), passim.
7. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 17.
8. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Tum-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 105;
9. for similar studies, see Naomi Schor, 'Female fetishism: the case of George Sand', in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 363-72;
10. and Elizabeth Grosz, 'Lesbian fetishism', in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse: Gender, Commodity, and Vision, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 101-15.
11. Three Essays, vii, p. 214, GW v, pp. 115-16. In a similar way, Freud repeatedly links castration with circumcision in a manner that suggests a psychical equivalence between the two operations. It need hardly be pointed out, however, that the removal of the foreskin leaves the member in place and in no way diminishes sexual functioning. As with the term 'castration', so circumcision also allows Freud to discuss the loss of a part while still, by implication, retaining the whole.
12. On the link between castration and circum- cision, see: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17), xv, p. 165; 'Little Hans', x, p. 36 n; Leonardo, xi, p. 95 n;
13. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), xxii, pp. 86-7;
14. Moses and Monotheism (1939), xxiii, pp. 91, 92 n., 122; and Outline, xxii, p. 190.
15. 'Infantile genital organization', xix, p. 142 n.
16. Outline, xxiii, p. 190.
17. OED dates 'peotomy' from 1890; for equivalents in other European languages, see A. F. Dorian, Elsevier's Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Medicine in Five Languages (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1987-90), 4 vols, i, p. 8710.
18. 'Fetishism', xxi, p. 154.
19. 'Most remarkably well' from 'Little Hans', x, pp. 122-3; 'fragment of real truth' and 'not so far wrong' from 'Sexual theories', ix, pp. 215, 217; 'show more understanding' from Three Essays, vii, p. 196; 'mixture of truth and error' from Autobiographical Study, xx, p. 37. Freud expostulates against the pervasive and deliberate mystification of children in sexual matters in 'The sexual enlightenment of children' (1907).
20. 'Sexual theories', ix, pp. 219, 224;
21. GW vii, pp. 181, 186.
22. 'Dissolution of the Oedipus complex', xix, p. 174;
23. and 'Femininity' (1933), xxii, p. 118.
24. Compare Ernest Jones: '[Freud] maintained stoutly that at the age in question [5] no boy had ever discovered the existence of a female organ. In spite of the truth of Freud's clinical observations, on which these conclusions were based, it is doubtful whether his generalizations here were not too absolute; further research has in some respects modified them' (Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-57), 3 vols, iii, p. 279).
25. 'Dissolution of The Oedipus complex', xix, pp. 177, 179; GW xiii, pp. 400, 401.
26. On the fetishistic suspension of disbelief as a critical concept in film theory, see, for example: Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan, 1982); Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 'Fetishism' has become a somewhat over-invested term in recent cultural and critical theory; Emily Apter provides a useful summary of the term's treatment in cultural theory in Chapter 1 of Feminizing the Fetish, adding that 'within contemporary discourse a kind of fetishism of fetishism is in the air' (p. 3). For a classic formulation of the fetishist's claim to 'know very well, but all the same', see Octave Mannoni's seminal essay, 'Je sais bien, mais quand même', in Clefs pour l'Imaginaire, ou I'Autre Scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 9-33.
27. For Silverman's reading of Freud's fetishism essay, see The Acoustic Mirror, pp. 13-22,
28. and also her Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 45-6. While Freud ostensibly strives to defend the male subject from female lack, Silverman demonstrates that his very procedure in fact serves as a defence against male lack. The disavowal of male lack and its implications for a theory of female fetishism in cultural production are discussed at length in Chapter 2 of Male Subjectivity at the Margins, esp. pp. 118-21.
29. GW xiv, p. 314.
30. 'The uncanny' (1919), xvii, p. 220. One could perhaps trace Freud's semantic associations for the word 'uncanny' further back, for in his essay on Leonardo (1910) he discusses the castration complex in the following terms: 'that the penis could be missing strikes him as an uncanny [unheimliche] and intolerable idea' (xi, p. 95, GW viii, p. 164). It is possible that Freud's meditation on the uncanny in his essay of that name was already informed, at some level, by an association with castration anxiety.
31. Lacan's most detailed accounts of the castration complex are to be found in 'The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power' and in 'The signification of the phallus', both in Écrits: A Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977).
32. The latter essay also appears, as 'The meaning of the phallus', in Feminine Sexuality, ed. and trans. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 74-85, as does a closely related essay by one of Lacan's collaborators on 'The phallic phase in the subjective import of the castration complex', pp. 99-122.
33. 'Depressed persons . . . disavow the negation: they cancel it out, suspend it, and nostalgically fall back on the real object (the Thing) of their loss, which is just what they do not manage to lose, to which they remain painfully riveted. The denial (Verleugnung) of negation would thus be the exercise of an impossible mourning, the setting up of a fundamental sadness and an artificial, unbelievable language, cut out of the painful background that is not accessible to any signifier and that intonation alone, intermittently, succeeds in inflecting' (Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 43-4, Kristeva's emphases).
34. As one of Lacan's colleagues writes, the castration complex creates 'a theoretical impasse, because any theory tends as if by its very nature to cover over this radical fissure' as well as a 'subjective impasse, because the subject is called on to face in it the lack through which he is constituted. This is the uncomfortable point Freud has left us at by designating the castration complex as the bedrock of his experience' (from 'The phallic phase and the subjective import of the castration complex', in Feminine Sexuality, ed. Mitchell and Rose, pp. 115-16).
35. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Routledge, 1971), quotations from pp. 72, 73. Winnicott himself gives a somewhat different slant to his interpretation, using the coexistence of male and female elements within this patient to illustrate his account of the origins of creativity.
36. 'its being unrealizable' from 'Analysis terminable and inter- minable' (1937, xxiii, p. 252).
37. 'Splitting of the ego', xxiii, pp. 277, 278.
38. Jones, Freud: Life and Work, iii, p. 255: Jones speculates that Freud might perhaps have left the paper unfinished because he feared breaching confiden- tiality if he published it, the patient in question being a well-known figure. For Strachey's comment, see Standard Edition, xxiii, p. 273.