Abstract
Ever since Anglo-American feminist critics first exposed the masculine bias and misogyny of the work of Sigmund Freud to a general readership,1 it has been fashionable in Anglo—American feminist circles to reject not only Freud but the whole area of psychoanalysis. Whilst I am not suggesting that Freud and psychoanalytic theory have been universally or uncritically adopted by French feminism,2 Freud is widely taught as part of a general philosophy course in French schools, and the insights and mode of thinking of psychoanalysis imbue the work of a number of French feminist theorists and writers. As Hélène Cixous argues in Writing Differences,3 Freud’s description of human development and the unconscious offers crucial insights into the way patriarchy operates to construct us as men and women. The recent French interpreter of Freud, Jacques Lacan, has re-read Freud’s theory to highlight the role of language in self-identity, and his work thus also has a bearing on French feminism.
Why would there be no desire for … a difference that would not be repeatedly and eternally co-opted and trapped within an economy of ‘sameness’?
Why would it be impossible for there to be any desire for difference, any desire for the other?
Luce Irigaray
But nothing compels us to deposit our lives in these lack-banks; to think that the subject is constituted in a drama of bruising rehearsals; to endlessly bail out the father’s religion.
Write yourself: your body must make itself heard. Then the huge resources of the unconscious will burst out.
Hélène Cixous
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Notes and References
See, for example, Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1969) (London: Virago Press, 1977) (pp. 176–203).
Hélène Cixous, ‘Conversations’, in Writing Differences, Susan Sellers (ed.) (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) p. 144.
Another French feminist, journalist and writer Benoîte Groult, in her book Ainsi Soit-elle (‘Let Her Be Thus’) (Paris: Editions Grasset, 1975) similarly condemns Freud for having conceived ‘the whole of psychoanalysis in the masculine’ (p. 131), and suggests that if Freud had been equally biased and a woman s/he would have created a ‘psychoanalysis’ in which boys were disadvantaged because of their inability to have babies.
Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1900-), edited by James Strachey in 24 volumes (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974).
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
See Roman Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language, with Moris Halle (The Hague: Mouton, 1971).
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, translated by Jacqueline Rose (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982),offers helpful introduction to Lacan’s work for English readers.
Freudian and Lacanian theory can be usefully compared with other interpretations of human development, such as that given by Nancy Chodorow in her The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), translated by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
See, Ernest Jones, ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality’ (1927), International Journal of Psychoanalysis 8, pp. 459–72.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’ (1972), in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1980; and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 221–36.
Irigaray’s attack on the masculine bias of Freud’s theory can be compared with that of Michèle Montrelay who, in an influential text L’Ombre et le nom: sur la féminité (‘The Shadow and the Name: On Femininity’) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), criticises Freud’s a ccount for its expression of a single, ‘male’ desire.
In an essay entitled ‘Recherches sur la féminité’, translated as ‘Inquiry Into Femininity’ by Parveen Adams in French Feminist Thought: A Reader, Toril Moi (ed.), (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987) pp. 227–4.
See ‘Conversations’, in Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Helene Cixous, Susan Sellers (ed.), pp. 144–5.
Readers interested in their role in the overall development of French feminism might consult Claire Duchen’s Feminism in France: From May ‘68 to Mitterand (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).
For an interesting discussion of this point, see Juliet Mitchell, Women the Longest Revolution: Essays in Feminism, Literature and Psychoanalysis, (London: Virago, 1984) pp. 290–2. The relevant extract is also printed in Mary Eagleton’s reader, Feminist Literary Theory, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) pp. 100–102.
Irène Schavelzon, Le Réduit (Paris: des femmes, 1984).
Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, (London and New York: Methuen, 1985) offers a good example of this materialist-socialist critique of French feminist reliance on psychoanalystic models as a means to women’s liberation.
Christiane Rochefort’s Quand tu vas chez les femmes (‘When you go to the women’s house’) (Paris: Grasset, 1972) referred to in the Introduction, also touches on the mother-child relation.
Chantal Chawaf, L’Intérieur des heures (Paris: des femmes, 1987).
Emma Santos, La Malcastrée (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1976; first published Paris: Editions Maspéro, 1973).
Jeanne Hyvrard, Mère la mort (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1976).
Chantal Chawaf, Elwina, le roman fée (Paris: Flammarion, 1985).
Chantal Chawaf, Le Soleil et la terre (Paris: Jean Jacques Pauvert, 1977).
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© 1991 Susan Sellers
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Susan, S. (1991). The (feminine) unconscious. In: Language and Sexual Difference. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21782-3_3
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