from Hypatia Volume 15, Number 3Conflicted Love
KELLY OLIVER
Hypatia Vol. 15 no. 3 (Summer 2000) © by Kelly Oliver
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Our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis interfere with the ability to imagine loving relationships. The association of maternity with anti-social nature and paternity with disembodied culture are inadequate to set up primary love relationships. Analyzing the conflicts in these associations, I reformulate the maternal body as a social and lawful, and I reformulate the paternal function as embodied, which enables imagining our primary relationships as loving.
Conflicted Love
The popularity of self-help programs, various forms of therapy and counseling, anti-depressant drugs, and new age religions, suggests a wide-spread search for meaning, acceptance, self-esteem, and ultimately, love. 1 Bookstores across the Western World have self-help sections filled with books discussing how to find love, how to maintain love, how to rekindle love, how to feel lovable, how to love yourself.2 Why, as a society, are we haunted with feelings that we are unloved or unlovable? While the prevalence of domestic violence, neglect, and children living in poverty, may contribute to the impossibility of imagining love in contemporary culture, these traumas do not explain why so many children who have so-called normal childhoods and normal relations with their parents growing up to suffer from depression, melancholy, or anxiety. If depression is becoming the norm, perhaps it is time to investigate our fantasies of normality.
In spite of the realities of multiple family forms--single-parent families, blended families, adopted children, lesbian parents, gay parents, communal families--and the fact that the nuclear family with father as breadwinner and mother as home-maker is the minority, our cultural imaginary still revolves around the heterosexual two-parent family. That is still considered the norm in our culture. My purpose in this essay is to investigate some of the conflicting presuppositions upon which the normalcy of the nuclear family is supposed. By pointing to conflicts at the heart of our stereotypes of maternity and paternity, I hope to challenge normal conceptions of the family. In addition, I argue that these norms actually undermine the possibility of imagining loving relationships.
While theories in psychology and psychoanalysis may actually perpetuate the fantasies that give rise to emotional suffering, they do not cause them. Still, examining psychoanalytic theories may help identify some of the problems. If we read psychoanalysis not as the study of the structure and dynamics of the universal human psyche, but as the study of the psychic manifestations of particular aspects of human cultures--which can be described according to structures, systems, and dynamics--then psychoanalysis might become a useful diagnostic indicator for various changes in symptomology across or within cultures. As an indicator of cultural symptoms, psychoanalysis is not limited to diagnosing individuals in relation to norms, but diagnosing those cultural norms themselves.
There are conflicts at the heart of Freudian psychoanalytic theory that reflect cultural stereotypes. Two sets of conflicts fundamental to both psychoanalytic theory and cultural stereotypes are: 1. The conflicting beliefs that an infant's primary relationships become models for her subsequent social relationships and that the infant's relationship with her mother is anti-social and must be broken off. 2. The conflicting beliefs that the father represents the authority of culture against nature and that the father's authority comes from nature. Analysis of these conflicts can indicate why our stereotypes about mothers and fathers make it difficult to imagine loving relationships. If all of our relationships are formed on the basis of our primary relationships, then in order to imagine loving relationships we need to imagine those primary relationships as loving. But, if our stereotypes of mothers and fathers figure them as something other than embodied human beings, then love relationships with embodied human beings becomes difficult. If our stereotypes of mothers and of fathers renders these figures incapable of love, then it becomes difficult to imagine being loved in any relationship.
Given the assumption that all of our relations are modeled on our primary relations, our relations should be modeled on our first relation, the relation to the maternal body. Yet, the way in which the maternal body is conceived within psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and our culture in general, prevents this relation from serving as a model for any subsequent social relation. The relation with the maternal body is imagined as antisocial, a nonrelation, which, if anything, threatens the social. If infants don't separate from their mothers' bodies, then there can be no society. The first relationship with the maternal body, then, is in the paradoxical position of both providing the prototype for all subsequent relations and threatening the very possibility of any social relation.
The paradoxical position of the mother is the result of the imagined opposition between nature and culture. Western philosophy as we know it began with the birth of the soul. Plato proposed a dramatic and antagonistic relationship between body and soul. Aristotle followed by insisting that it is man's capacity for reason that separates him from the animals. Bodies and animals are governed by the laws of the natural world, but the mind and human beings are governed by the higher principles of reason. With its emphasis on reason against body, philosophy has insisted on a sharp distinction between nature and culture. Only human beings are properly social; only human beings have culture; only human beings love. The legacy of this mind/body dualism has been fraught with problems, not the least of which is the paradox of love. If the mother's love is made paradoxical by the identification of mother and antisocial body, the father's love is made abstract or impossible by the identification of father and antibody culture. Within Freud's account, the relationship between father and son is one of rivalry and guilt, while the relationship between father and daughter is one of envy and frustration; the father is the representative of threats and power. Within Lacan's account, the father is associated with the Name or No; that is to say, the father brings language and law to break up the primary dyad. The father's body doesn't matter (Lacan 1977, 199). Why is the father's body irrelevant to procreation? How can paternity just as well be attributed to a spirit? What does this tell us about our cultural images of paternity in an age when so many fathers are absent from the lives of their children?
The absent father is fundamental to our image of fatherhood and paternity. In important ways the necessity of the father's absence is imbedded in recent rhetoric of family values and manly responsibility. The association between the father and the law, name, or authority, makes the father an abstract disembodied principle. Patriarchy is founded on the father's authority. Paternal authority is associated with culture against maternal nature. But, in both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, it turns out that the paternal authority that legitimates culture and breaks with antisocial nature is founded on the father's natural authority because of his natural strength or aggressive impulses. The paternal authority of culture is founded on the father's naturally stronger body; might makes right. After grounding the father's authority in nature, our philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists have disassociated the father from nature by disembodying him. The father is physically absent from the family scene because he is part of culture.
Even when he is present in the lives of his children, the father is present as an abstraction; his body is merely the representative of abstract authority or law. The association between father and culture, and the opposition between nature and culture or body and mind, disembodies the father. His body must be evacuated to maintain images of his association with culture against nature; his body threatens a fall back into nature. Just as the stereotype of the mother-infant relationship as an antisocial natural relationship does not permit love because love is social, the stereotype of the disembodied abstract father who represents the authority of culture cannot provide love because love is concrete and embodied. Western images of conception, birth, and parental relationships, leave us with a father who is not embodied, who cannot love but only legislates from some abstract position, and a mother who is nothing but body, who can fulfill animal needs but cannot love as a social human being.
My purpose in this essay is to exploit the conflicts in psychoanalytic theory and philosophy in order to suggest that the maternal body itself is social and law-making and that the paternal function is embodied. I argue that love requires both embodiment and sociality. If on the level of our cultural imaginary the maternal body is not social, then it cannot be an adequate model for subsequent love relations. If on the level of our cultural imaginary the paternal function is not embodied, then it cannot be an adequate model for subsequent love relations. The conflicts in our stereotypes of maternity and paternity as they are manifest in the history of philosophy and psychoanalysis point to more complex images of maternity and paternity, our primary relationships, and the possibility of love.
Animal Body Mother
In philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and other disciplines, women have been reduced to their reproductive function, which is seen as a natural animal function. Men, on the other hand, can escape or sublimate their nature in order to perform higher functions. Freud, for example, defines civilization as the sublimation or repression of drives that women, because of their anatomy, cannot fully experience and therefore cannot sublimate. In addition, he argues that civilization is the result of the repression or sublimation of aggressive drives, drives which are primarily related to the infant's relationship with the maternal body.
Although Freud's attention to sexuality, sexual difference, and cultural influences on the body continue to make his work useful for feminists, his descriptions of female sexuality, maternity, and the connections between the two are themselves a product of the sexism of his time. Even as Freud's writings are among the first to blur the distinctions between mind and body, soma and psyche, nature and culture, science and literature, when it comes to his speculations about women he often falls back into a rigid nature-culture binary in which women represent passive nature and men represent active culture. Freud's association between women and nature is apparent in both his social theories of the development of civilization in works such as Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents, and in his psychological theories of individual development in works such as "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex", "Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes", "Female Sexuality", and "On Feminine Sexuality". In the next section on paternity I will draw on the works on the development of civilization and in this section on maternity I will draw on the works on individual sexual development.
For Freud, the infant can leave its dyadic dependence on the maternal body only through the agency of the father. The father threatens the child with castration if it does not leave its mother. The male child takes these threats seriously and sublimates his desires for his mother. But he must also give up his identification with his mother; it is this identification that threatens his ability to become social. He is coaxed into identifying with his father with the promise of a future satisfaction of his incestuous desire for his mother with a mother substitute. He identifies with his father's virility, his ability to satisfy his desire and his woman. The male child must give up his primary identification with his mother because she is stuck in nature and he will be too if he doesn't leave her. More than this, she is feminine and he cannot be masculine unless he gives up his identification with her. Freud ties himself into knots trying to explain the relationship between femininity and masculinity and transitions from one to the other with his bisexuality thesis. Elsewhere, I argued that Freud's bisexuality thesis and his theories of feminine sexuality manifest a fear of the femininity in men, and ultimately a fear of birth, the fear that men where once part of a female body.3
For Freud, the female child must separate from her mother in order to become autonomous and social and yet in order to become feminine she must continue her identification with her mother. Because she continues her identification with her mother, and because she cannot completely fear the threat of castration from the father since she is already castrated, the female child does not become fully social. She has an inferior sense of justice since she doesn't have a fully developed super-ego because she doesn't fear castration. She gains what autonomy she has by resenting her mother for not having a penis and envying her father for having one. Her only satisfaction comes from having a baby, which operates as a penis substitute. For Freud, it seems that maternity is the goal of female sexuality. The female child, along with the mother, is stuck in nature because her anatomy prevents her from feeling the father's threats. For Freud, in men and women, femininity becomes associated with passivity and masculinity becomes associated with activity.
The move from nature to culture is a move from the mother to the father. It is motivated by the father's threats, which are effective only if one has a penis. In Freud's account, culture is necessarily and by nature patriarchal. Yet, it is nature that culture leaves behind. Because she is associated with nature, the mother must be left behind in order for the child to become social. As Kristeva points out, for Freud the mother is so unimportant to culture and the development of the psyche that Freud hardly mentions her. In his theory the mother is also left behind. By now, Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex is a familiar story; it is a story of active men fighting over passive women.
In the 20th Century, in more subtle ways, Jacques Lacan promotes theories that oppose the mother to culture and associate the father with culture (cf. Lacan 1977, 200). Entering language and the symbolic require leaving the mother behind. For Lacan, the mother is associated with a realm of need associated with what he calls "the real". The real operates in his theory as something like nature from which we are estranged by our position in culture. For linguistic, symbolic, or cultural beings, nature is always perceived from the vantage point of culture. This is why Lacan claims that we are cut off from the real. Our reality has little to do with the real, which breaks into reality only rarely in extreme moments of trauma or jouissance. This maternal realm of "nature", needs, and the real is "left behind" when the paternal agent intervenes and introduces the infant to language. To say that this maternal realm of plenitude and satisfaction is left behind is complicated for Lacan because he insists that it is imaginary in the first place.
For Lacan the realm of maternity is more nuanced than for Freud. Not only is the maternal body associated with bodily need and its satisfaction and thereby with the real, but also the maternal body is associated with what Lacan calls the imaginary. The infant already inhabits an imaginary world in which it imagines that its needs are met automatically because it imagines itself at one with the maternal body in a dyadic relationship. This imaginary unity with the maternal body is the illusion of plenitude and satisfaction for which we are left forever longing. On Lacan's account, the paternal function necessarily breaks off this mother-infant dyad so that the child can become social. In this sense, the primary relationship with the mother is anti-social and must be abandoned through the agency of the paternal function.
For the infant the mother is not an object or a person; she is nothing more than the satisfaction of natural needs like food, the first bearer of what Lacan calls objet petit a, object small a, named for the first letter of the French word for other, l'autrui. The object small a is connected with the real and therefore inaccessible. It operates as something even more rudimentary than partial objects and becomes the foundation of both trauma and jouissance or what we could call sexual chemistry, that unknown something that attracts us to someone (1981 62-64). When the infant begins to experience a lack of satisfaction, its needs are not met automatically, then it begins to sense that its mother is distinct. Under threats of castration, translated by Lacan into threats of the lack of satisfaction, the infant substitutes demands, or words, for its natural longings or needs. But there is always a gap between the need and the demand that expressed that need (Lacan 1977, 286-287). Ultimately, what the infant needs is to have its needs met automatically without having to ask; it needs to feel at one with the satisfaction of its needs; it needs to be one with its mother, its satisfaction. So, with the onset of language and culture, the infant can no longer get what its needs. Lacan calls this gap between need and demand, desire. Desire is unfulfillable. Like Freud's scenario, with Lacan the infant is forced into a painful world of unfulfillable desires through threats and prohibitions instituted by the father.
In spite of their attempts to theorize between nature and culture, both Freud and Lacan oppose the maternal body to culture and place the father and his law and language on the side of culture. Both leave it to the paternal function or agency to break up the anti-social mother-child dyad so that the infant can enter culture. Even while Freud disconnects sexuality from nature, blurs the distinction between normal sexuality and perversion, and suggests that the drives move between soma and psyche, at the same time he abandons the maternal body to the realm of nature. The remnants of lingering biologism are most apparent in Freud's treatment of feminine sexuality and his statements on maternity. And, even while Lacan attempts to exorcise the remnants of biologism in Freud's theory by turning to linguistics, draws on Freud's more progressive suggestions on the ideational component of our relations to our bodies, and insists that phallocentrism is the product of culture and not nature, his diagnosis of culture does little to challenge the association of the maternal body with an anti-social realm and the paternal function with culture. Although Lacan moves us from the realm of biology to the realm of semiotics and linguistics, he still associates anti-social need and an imaginary anti-social dyad with the maternal body and socialized desire with the paternal function. Within his theory it seems that language is always at odds with the needs associated with the maternal body; language is always nothing more than a frustrated attempt to articulate need, ultimately what he calls an impossible demand for love.
But, what if we need to commune with other people? What if we need to be social? Then, perhaps language does more than fail to articulate bodily drives or needs. Even assuming that it fails to communicate needs, perhaps language succeeds in forming communion between bodies. Language brings us together because it is an activity that we engage in with each other and not because it does or does not succeed in capturing or communicating something in particular. We keep talking not just because we can never say what we are trying to say--that is, what we need--but also because we need to be together through words. For Lacan, demands are always demands for love; and as demands, they can never succeed in getting us what we want. This view of the relationship between love and demand seems to presuppose that language is merely a feeble container for something else. Yet, words are not just symbols that contain various conscious and unconscious significations; they are also part of a process of communicating, in the sense of communing, with each other. Language is not just something we use or something that uses us; rather, it is something we do, something that we do together.
The body and needs are not antithetical to culture; the body, the maternal body in particular, does not have to be sacrificed to culture. Needs, associated with the maternal body, are not left behind once the child can make demands and acquires language. Lacan's notion that language leaves us lacking satisfaction or that it is a necessary but poor substitute for the maternal body, needs, or drives, assumes that drives and needs are antithetical to language (or in Lacanian parlance, that the real is cut off from the symbolic).4 Although Lacan insists that the unconscious is structured like a language so presumably Freudian drives operate according to the logic of language, it is unclear on Lacan's account how drives could be expressed in language. If drives or needs make their way into language, then the maternal realm that Freud and Lacan identify as a hindrance to the properly social realm not only gives birth to the social but also is necessary for the continued operation of the social. We need to be social. And, drives are what motivate language. Culture grows organically out of the body.
Combining Freud's theory of the drives with Lacan's turn to linguistics, Julia Kristeva goes further than either Freud or Lacan when she suggests that drives are discharged in language and that the structure of language is operating within the material of the body. There is no impasse between the body and language. Rather, the body is in language and language is in the body. Kristeva takes up Freud's theory of drives as instinctual energies that operate between biology and culture. Drives have their source in organic tissue and aim at psychological satisfaction. In Revolution, Kristeva describes drives as "material, but they are not solely biological since they both connect and differentiate the biological and symbolic within the dialectic of the signifying body invested in practice" (1984 167). Nearly two decades later, Kristeva emphasizes the same dialectical relationship between the two spheres--biological and social--across which the drives operate. In New Maladies of the Soul, she describes the drives as "a pivot between 'soma' and psyche', between biology and representation" (1995 30).5 Drives can be reduced neither to the biological nor to the social; they operate in between these two realms and bring one realm into the other. Drives are energies or forces that move between the body and representation.
Instead of lamenting what is lost, absent, or impossible in language, Kristeva marvels at this bodily realm that makes its way into language. The force of language is living drive force transferred into language. Signification is like a transfusion of the living body into language. This is why psychoanalysis can be effective; the analyst can diagnose the active drive force as it is manifest in the analysand's language. In Time and Sense, Kristeva suggests that transference in the psychoanalytic session inscribes flesh in words (1996). Psychoanalysts "transform the patient's flesh, which [they] have shared with [their] own, into word-presentations" (1997, 126). In this way, psychoanalysis can treat somatic symptoms by transforming the body through words. And, while, for Kristeva, bodily drives involve a type of violence, negation, or force, this process does not merely necessitate sacrifice and loss. The drives are not sacrificed to signification; rather bodily drives are an essential semiotic element of signification.
In addition to proposing that bodily drives make their way into language, Kristeva maintains that the logic of signification is already present in the material of the body. In Revolution in Poetic Language, she proposes that the processes of identification or incorporation, and differentiation or rejection, that make language use possible are operating within the material of the body. She maintains that before the infant passes through what Freud calls the Oedipal situation, or what Lacan calls the Mirror Stage, the patterns and logic of language are already operating in a preoedipal situation. In Revolution in Poetic Language, she focuses on differentiation or rejection and the oscillation between identification and differentiation. She analyzes how material rejection (for example the expulsion of waste from the body) is part of the process that sets up the possibility of signification.6
For Kristeva the body, like signification, operates according to an oscillation between instability and stability, or negativity and stases. For example, the process of metabolization is a process that oscillates between instability and stability: food is taken into the body and metabolized and expelled from the body. Because the structure of separation is bodily, these bodily operations prepare us for our entrance into language.
At bottom, Kristeva criticizes the traditional account because it cannot adequately explain the child's move to signification. If what motivates the move to signification are threats and the pain of separation, then why would anyone make this move? Why not remain in the safe haven of the maternal body and refuse the social and signification with its threats? Kristeva suggests that if the accounts of Freud and Lacan were correct, then more people would be psychotic (see 1984 132; 1987, 30, 31, 125). The logic of signification is already operating in the body and therefore the transition to language is not as dramatic and mysterious as traditional psychoanalytic theory makes it out to be.
Kristeva tries to rescue the mother from the crypt of nature by separating the maternal body as a container that meets the infant's needs from the maternal function that sets up the possibility of language and law. The maternal body as the satisfier of needs must be abjected; "matricide," says Kristeva, is "our vital necessity" (1989, 27). But the mother is more than a container; she is a desiring subject and as such she is social. Moreover, in her relations with her infant she provides regulation, what Kristeva calls the maternal law before the law, that sets up paternal law. So, although Kristeva insists that the maternal body must be abjected, she describes the maternal body as proto-social. Maternity is between nature and culture and the maternal body can never be left behind by culture. In Kristeva's texts, the maternal body challenges the opposition between nature and culture. If the mother is not reducible to her body and if her body encourages rather than threatens the social, then we might go one step further than Kristeva and imagine a loving mother. If the maternal body cannot be reduced to antisocial nature, we might go two steps further than Kristeva and suggest that matricide is necessary only to maintain patriarchy.
If the logic and structure of bodily drives is the same as the logic and structure of language, then the primary relation between the bodies of mother and child does not have to be anti-social or threatening. In addition, the drive themselves can be seen as social. The drives themselves are also proto-social in that they are not contained within one body or psyche; rather, as Teresa Brennan argues in The Interpretation of the Flesh, drives move between bodies; they are exchanged (1992). Affective energy is transferred between people. For example, a person can walk into a room and her mood can affect everyone in the room; it is as if her mood radiates through out the room. Emotions and affects migrate or radiate between human beings.
Affective energy transfers take place in all interpersonal interactions. The idea that we can transfer affects through contact and conversation resonates with most people who have had the experience of a conversation with a loved one in which s/he is upset during the conversation and after the conversation s/he feels much better but now the other party to the conversation is upset. This kind of situation suggests a transfer of affect. Even our language in such interpersonal situations suggests an exchange of affect: For example, "I won't take it any more." "Don't give me that." This intersubjective theory of drives points to the sociality of the body. If bodily drives are not contained within the boundaries of one body or subject but are interpsychic, then bodily drives are always a matter of social exchanges. These exchanges are protodialogues that take place between bodies, bodies that are social even if they are not properly subjects.
Language has its source in the body and not just because it takes a mouth to speak and a hand to write. Language speaks and writes bodily affects and bodily drives, without which there would be no motivation for language. We use language not only to communicate information but also to make psycho-physical connections to others. Lacan might be right that every demand is a demand for love. But, he is wrong that these demands are doomed to failure. If we need to speak, we need to make demands, just as we need food, then demands are not cut off from our basic need for satisfaction from our mothers that Lacan associates with love. Also, if drives and bodily needs are discharged in language, then they are not lost and we need not mourn the loss in order to enter culture; the maternal body is not killed and we need not mourn her death. Law and regulation implicit in language are already operating within the body. Law is not antithetical to the maternal body. It is not necessary to reject the maternal body in order to enter the realm of law and society. Rather, the maternal body as a social and lawful sets up the possibility of sociality, relationship, and love.
Nobody Father
It is commonplace that our traditions associate the father with authority. From John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jacques Lacan, father knows best. Liberal theorists try to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate authority by insisting that might does not make right. Yet, there are conflicts in the beginnings of liberal theory between the might of the father and his legitimate authority and the authority of the government. Both Locke and Rousseau present contradictory accounts of the relationship between the family and the state. Locke attempts to distinguish the "master of the family" from the leaders of political society by delineating the limitations of the paternal authority and appealing to a more democratic form of government than that of the patriarchal family. At the same time, he identifies the father as the natural ruler of the family "as the abler and the stronger" (Locke 1980, 44). Moreover, he describes the evolution to political society from patriarchal families as the evolution of paternal authority which nourishes political society: "without such nursing father's tender and careful of the public weal, all governments would have sun under the weakness and infirmities of their infancy, and the prince and the people had soon perished together" (1980, 60). Paternal authority, founded in might, takes on the tender maternal role of nourishing and nursing political society.
Rousseau is also concerned that political society be based on legitimate authority and not just the brute strength of natural authority. "The more these natural forces are dead and obliterated, and the greater and more durable are the acquired forces, the more too is the institution solid and perfect" (Rousseau 1987, 163). The father is by nature the authority in the family: "For several reasons derived from the nature of things, in the family it is the father who should command....a husband should oversee his wife's conduct, for it is important to him to be assured that the children he is forced to recognize and nurture belong to no one but himself" (Rousseau 1987, 112). Yet, while nature governs the family through the father, the state can only exist against nature. The laws of society are at odds with the laws of nature. "In effect, though nature's voice is the best advice a good father could listen to in the fulfillment of his duty, for the magistrate it is merely a false guide which works constantly to divert him from his duties which sooner or later leads to his downfall or to that of the state unless he is restrained by the most sublime virtue" ( Rousseau 1987, 113).
Still, in On the Social Contract, Rousseau maintains that "the most ancient of all societies and the only natural one, is that of the family.....The family therefore is, so to speak, the prototype of political societies; the leader is the image of the father, the populace is the image of the children....The entire difference consists in the fact that in the family the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes for them, while in the state, where the leader does not have love for his people, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of this feeling" (1987, 142). In the very next section, he goes on to insist that might does not make right and that physical power has nothing to do with moral or civil duty.
Implicit in the theories of both Locke and Rousseau are the contradictory claims that the authority of political society is based on right and not might, that only in nature does might constitute authority, that civil society supersedes nature, that the father's authority is based on natural physical strength, that political society is based on the father's authority. The father's authority is based in nature and physical strength and yet it becomes the basis for a legitimate patriarchal government that is based in right and not might. How does the father's natural strength come to represent right and not might? How does the father transcend his natural authority based solely in his physical strength in order to take up his civil authority based in his moral and intellectual strength?
This question is answered by Hegel, who moves man into the social at the expense of woman. Man can enter culture because woman never leaves nature. In Philosophy of Right, Hegel says that man has his "actual substantive life in the state" and woman has her "substantive destiny in the family" (Hegel 1952, 114). Whereas men are capable of higher intellectual life, women inhabit a realm of feelings; "women correspond to plants because their development is more placid and the principle that underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling" (Hegel 1952, 263). Women are "educated" into this natural realm of feeling "who knows how?--as it were by breathing in ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood, on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much technical exertion" (Hegel 1952, 264). Whereas love governs the domain of the family, law governs the state; love, a feeling, is subjective and contingent and therefore the unity of the family can dissolve, whereas law is objective and necessary and therefore the unity of the state is stronger than the unity of the family (Hegel 1952, 265). In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes how man leaves the world of the family and feelings and enters the world of the state and laws through the recognition of the women in his family who provide the support against which he can pull himself up to a higher level of consciousness. For Hegel, man's nature seems to be paradoxical in itself insofar as man's nature is to go beyond nature. Woman's nature is to love while man's nature is to lay down the law.
We might think that the association between woman and love and man and law was an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century idea that we have outgrown. But, these associations have only been fortified in the 20th Century by psychoanalysis. With psychoanalysis might makes right in that the father's threats set up and fortify the child's superego or moral sense. The authority of the father, based in his physical strength and virility, is internalized to form the moral conscience. While Locke and Rousseau covertly appeal to the father's might in their explanations of the formation of civil society and moral right, in Civilization and its Discontents, Freud openly identifies moral right and civil law with paternal authority, based as it is in the father's bulling castration threats which lead the son to wish to kill the father and the inevitable guilt associated with that wish. "What began in relation to the father is completed in relation to the group" (Freud 1961, 80).
Freud continues the argument that men are naturally more civilized than women who belong at home with the children: "[W]omen soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence--those very women who, in the beginning, laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love. Women represent the interests of the family and sexual life. The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations of which women are little capable" (Freud 1961, 50). Women are not capable of instinctual sublimations because their anatomy does not permit them to act on those very instincts that must be sublimated in order to become civilized--namely, urinating on fire and presumably incest with their mothers.
Freud identifies control over fire as one of the primary achievements of primitive man that allowed him to become civilized. In a footnote in Civilization and its Discontents, he hazards a conjecture on the origins of civilization as the origins of control over fire:
The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating...was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. (Freud 1961, 37)
Civilization begins when man curbs his desire to display his virility by urinating on phallic flames. Woman cannot sublimate the desire to pee on the fire because she cannot first act on the desire. We might wonder why Freud doesn't conclude that woman necessarily sublimate this desire since she can't act on it; that her anatomy demands sublimation whereas the male's does not; that in woman, nature has insured sublimation of aggressive instincts and therefore the advancement of the species. In stead, Freud identifies civilization, law, and morality with man's virility and its sublimation, where this sublimation is also described as man's virile act of control over himself.
Like Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel before him, Freud identifies the father as the first authority, upon which the authority of all subsequent government develops. "A Prince is known as the father of his country; the father is the oldest, first, and for children the only authority; and from his autocratic power the other social authorities have developed in the course of the history of human civilization" (Freud 1967, 251). For Freud, the father and his threats of castration intervene in the mother-child relationship to break the son out of this natural bond and propel him into culture. The daughter never fully enters culture since, already castrated, she does not feel the same effects of the castration threat and cannot internalize the paternal authority to the same degree. The internalization of the father's authority marks the child's proper entrance into the social.
Following Freud, Jacques Lacan describes the child's acquisition of language and socialization in terms of the father's authority. The father's "no," or prohibition, along with his name, or symbols, move the child away from the natural relationship with the mother to a social relationship. Lacan reiterates the association between father and culture and mother and nature: "the father is the representative, the incarnation, of a symbolic function which concentrates in itself those things most essential in other cultural structures: namely, the tranquil, or rather, symbolic, enjoyment, culturally determined and established, of the mother's love, that is to say, of the pole to which the subject is linked by a bond that is irrefutably natural" (Lacan 1979, 422-423). Here Lacan explicitly associates the mother with nature and the father with culture. Once again the father's threats and prohibitions propel the child into culture and away from its relationship with its mother. The child's identification with the desire of the mother, its image of itself as her fulfillment, must be replaced by the father's name, words and symbols. The father's name is a symbol that also designates ownership; the children, marked by his name, belong to the father.
For Lacan the father represents law and language while the mother represents love and need. Her body, the imaginary satisfaction of needs, is lost to culture. What of the father's body? As far as Lacan is concerned, the father has no body; his body is irrelevant: "For, if the symbolic context requires it, paternity will nonetheless be attributed to the fact that the woman met a spirit at some fountain or some rock in which he is supposed to live...It is certainly this that demonstrates that the attribution of procreation to the father can only be the effect of a pure signifier, of a recognition, not of a real father, but of what religion had taught us to refer to as the Name-of-the-Father" (Lacan 1977, 199). Procreation is attributed to the father through his name; his name is the guarantee that the child belongs to him. And, if the real father plays a role in the child's development, that role is dwarfed by the ever present ideal of fatherhood. The greater the discrepancy between the role of the real father and the ideal father, the more powerful the ideal father becomes in psychic development.7
It is the power associated with traditional paternal authority that makes the father's body and his phallus/penis represent power and authority. For Freud (and arguably for Lacan) this power is explicitly associated with the phallus/penis. Paradoxically, the ultimate virility of this masculine power is the sublimation of aggressive sex drives into productive and reproductive social economy. Aggressive instincts turn inward to aggress the self; this becomes self-control. Within this economy the penis takes on tremendous exchange value insofar as it, and control over it, is what makes society possible--recall Freud's account of control over fire. Freud's penis becomes Lacan's phallus, a transcendental signifier that makes economy and exchange possible. In the words of Alphonso Lingis, "the paternal body presents itself as the supreme value in human commerce, the incarnation of law, reason, and ideals, in the measure that it incarnates the renunciation of the productive libido--infantile, insignificant, and uneconomical--the libido without character--disordered, contaminating, squandering. It governs a domestic economy in which commodities are accumulated as accouterments of the phallic order" (Lingis 1994, 128). The paternal body, then, is the supreme value in human commerce insofar as it represents the repudiation of the body.
Yet, the paternal repudiation of the body in favor of law and reason is based on the body. For Freud it is the anatomy of the male body that makes the repudiation and sublimation of the aggressive sexual instincts possible. The male body is powerful only because it can act on its aggressive instincts in ways that the female body cannot. Paradoxically, for Freud it is not these acts that make men dominant, but the control over and repudiation of these acts. Men can control the body but only because their bodies are so hard to control. The force of the control required to subdue the body is proportionate to the strength of the body.
In philosophy and in psychoanalysis the father's authority as representative of law and culture has been based on his physical strength. Whereas the mother's relationship to the family is natural, the father transcends this natural relationship and engenders society. But it turns out that the father's authority can be justified only by appeals to the very nature that he is said to transcend. From Locke to Lacan, the authority of culture is legitimated in its opposition to the brute force of nature. But, insofar as the authority of culture, ultimately of patriarchy, is justified by appealing to the father's natural authority in the family, culture collapses back into nature. The authority of culture comes from the brute force of nature. Might does make right. And culture is not the antithesis of nature after all. On the other hand, if the law takes us beyond nature's triumph of the strongest, then patriarchy has no justification and there is no necessary connection between law and paternity.
Conclusion
It seems that whereas the female body has been reduced to the maternal body and relegated to nature, the male body has been a ghostly absent paternal body that safeguards culture. Whereas the female/maternal has been reduced to body, the male/paternal has been dissociated from body. The disassociation of the father from the body suggests that all fathers are absent fathers. The reduction of the mother to the body suggests that relations between children and mothers are anti-social.
I have pointed to conflicts and inconsistencies at the core of these traditional images of anti-social natural mothers and anti-body cultural fathers. I have argued that rather than threaten the social relationship and cultural law, the maternal body sets up the possibility of the social, law, and therefore love. The body is not opposed to culture and the maternal body need not be sacrificed to culture. If the body is not opposed to culture, then the father's body need not be sacrificed either. The father can be social or part of culture and embodied at the same time, which makes paternal love possible. Traditional theories of paternal authority which seem to exempt all bodies, including the male body, from culture ultimately base paternal authority and patriarchy itself on the authority and strength of the male body. By challenging the opposition between nature and culture, between the body and the social, we can challenge stereotypes that associate the maternal with nature and the paternal with culture. Conversely, by calling into question the association of maternal and nature and paternal and culture, we can call into question the opposition between nature and culture. By bringing nature and culture together in our primary relationships, we can imagine subsequent relationships that are both embodied and social, prerequisites for human love.
Without prominent images of an embodied father and a social mother, the images of maternity and paternity in western culture leave us with melancholy images of isolation and unlovability. If we are to recreate images of ourselves as lovable and social, then we have to recreate love. And to recreate love, we have to recreate ourselves out of the possibility of loving mothers and loving fathers, mothers who are social and fathers who are embodied. Only then can we feel lovable and love each other. Changing the stereotypes and images that populate our cultural imaginary is an important step in changing our social situations. Our relationships, family structures, and family dynamics change when we can imagine them differently; and as we recreate our families outside of the restrictive and unrealistic ideal of the nuclear family, we transform our images of ourselves, our relations to others, and the possibility of love.
Notes
1. The attempt to find meaning through new age religions is particularly interesting. Before the scientific revolution, religion with its sacred mysteries provided meaning for people's lives. After the scientific revolution, science replaced religion and demystified religion. Recently, science has lost the ability to explain our world. The experts present such conflicting data on everything from oat bran to ozone that people have lost faith in science. New age religion is a synthesis of sorts of science and religion. It uses the rhetoric of science, with talk of harnessing energies and forces, in order to promote self esteem and a better future.
While Nancy Reagan consulted an astrologer, Hillary Clinton consults a new age psychologist, a "global midwife" The New York Times, June 24, 1996, p. 1.
2. Veroff, et.al., Mental Health in America, indicate that the number of people going to therapy has dramatically increased since W.W. II (1981, 166-7, 176-7). Robert Bellah, et. al, Habits of the Heart, suggests that people go to therapy looking for love (1985).
3. See chapter one of my Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to the "Feminine" (1995).
4. For Freud, drives make their way into language only by tricking the ego and superego.
5. For a more developed account of Kristeva's theory of drives, see my introduction to The Portable Kristeva (1997).
6. Kristeva's writings themselves can be read as an oscillation between an emphasis on separation and rejection and an emphasis on identification and incorporation. In Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) and Powers of Horror (1982) she focuses on separation and rejection; in Tales of Love (1987) and Black Sun (1993) she focuses on identification and incorporation. In Strangers to Ourselves (1995) she again analyzes separation and rejection. And in New Maladies of the Soul (1996) she again analyzes identification and incorporation. In an interview with Rosalind Coward in 1984 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Kristeva claims that for this reason, Powers of Horror and Tales of Love should be read together; alone each provides only half of the story (1984a).
7. John Brenkman makes this argument in Straight Male Modern (1993).
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