THE TRANSFORMATIVE FEMININE AND HETEROSEXUALITY
Julia Kristeva
>>>le texte en français
‘On ne naît pas femme, on le devient.’ (‘One is not born, but rather
becomes a woman’), wrote Simone de Beauvoir. I would prefer to say: ‘ONE is (biologically) born a woman, but
‘I’ (psychosexual
conscious-unconscious) becomes one.’ Why?
My
clinical experience has led me to understand feminine ‘identity’ as an open,
changing, unfinished process, made up of multiple stages and facets. This feminine
‘identity’ is constructed as a complex journey throughout life, and is structurally transformative. Hence its
capacity to permeate the repressed, mistreated feminine that is prey to sexual
violence and harassment, or instrumentalized by fundamentalist religiosity.
When it is lucid and its complexity is fully accepted, the transformative feminine surprises by its intense, multiform
maturity, in a continuous process of development.
Today, in a chaotic and threatening social
and political context throughout the world, women are emerging as one factor,
if not THE major factor, in the anthropological transformation underway. As
victims, they are forcing legislators to change the laws; as creators of new
languages and behaviours, as in the Mazan trial, they are transforming ethical
standards. The time has come to lay emphasis on this revolt and this reliance,
a vitality inherent in what has long been considered as the ‘second sex’.
I
would like to start by briefly recalling Freud's conception of drive-based
sexuality, often forgotten or ignored, in which the feminine may or may not be constructed.
A
‘psychic revolution of materiality’, evoked in ‘Formulations on the two principles
of mental functioning’ (Freud, 1911), far from evacuating the organic (biological
and anatomic), denatured it through primal
repression, psychization and the emergence of
language. This primordial disjunction displaced the animal instinct in the hitherto
definitively dual, heterogeneous drive (energy-and-meaning). In this recasting
(Spaltung),
the speaking being is constituted as a split
subject to whom the analyst lends an ear.
Female
fertility and eroticism seem to manifest and betray this disjunction, and as a result become the target of desire and envy; they
are to be possessed, mastered and even destroyed, for the benefit of the male
domination that can be observed in all historical societies.
While
male sexuality is formed within a single Oedipal structure, the transformative feminine is constructed within
a two-sided Oedipus complex: primary Oedipus (with the
mother, the object of the child's first desire) and secondary Oedipus (with the father), and is modified in what I call maternal reliance.
1. Two-sided
Oedipus
What
I call the primary Oedipus is the
archaic period that runs from birth to what we call the phallic phase (up to
the age of three to six). Far from the idyllic ‘Minoan-Mycenaean’ era (Freud)
and the serenity of ‘being’ before ‘doing’ (Winnicott), projective
identification (Melanie Klein) is fostered by the mother/daughter resemblance and by the projection of maternal narcissism and
depression onto the daughter.
This eroticized oral-anal-genital bond, namely, the original mother-baby-daughter coexitation, characterizes what I call an endogenous homosexuality in women. In my
view it underlies Melanie Klein’s ‘projective identification’ and remains the
repressed centre of female psychosexuality throughout the subject's life; and it
is as inaccessible, if not more so, to analysis as the ‘bedrock of castration’.
It is marked by the intrusion of the adult, and more particularly the mother,
into the life of the neotenous infans. The child, which lets itself be seduced and seduces
with its skin and its five senses, abandons itself, in fact, with its orifices:
the mouth, the anus, and the vagina for the little girl. It is a seduced, orificial and breached child: Mino-Mycenaean sexuality – or primary Oedipus in my terminology – is that of a sexual
being, the ‘polymorphous pervert’, who anticipates... the penetrated being of
the woman.
But,
on the other hand, this orificial breach that is
specific to the primary Oedipus of
the little girl is compensated not only by clitoral excitation, but also by the
early development of a relationship of introjection
and identification with the seductive
and intrusive object that is the mother. Melanie Klein was the first, it
seems to me, to suggest that, in optimal circumstances, the libidinal cathexis of
the mother’s hollow body, as well as of the child’s own body, is metabolized in
the child as psychic depth. I have noticed
that, through introjection, the daughter establishes the seductive mother
within herself: the excited cavity of
the inner body is transformed into an internal representation. This is the beginning of a slow and lasting process
of psychization that will be accentuated by the secondary Oedipus, in which we can recognize the feminine tendency to favour
psychic or loving representation-idealization as a counterpoint to erotic drive
excitation.
Following
neurobiological maturation and satisfying experiences of separation from the
object, the phallic stage becomes the central organizer of the co-presence of
sexuality and thought in both sexes: the subject can approach the secondary Oedipus. The child, who has
already developed language and thought, is no longer content to cathect his/her
organs and their excitability; but, following the inner movements of his/her drive
excitability, he/she associates and applies cognitive operations to the external world and to personal or sexual identities. In this period that I
call the secondary Oedipus, unlike the boy, the girl changes object: the father replaces the
mother as the object of desire. Let us look at the ambiguity of this change in
more detail.
The
entry into the secondary Oedipus adjoins a decisive moment in the construction
of feminine subjectivity: the cathexis (Besetzung) of what Freud (1923, pp. 31-32) calls ‘the father of
individual prehistory’, who has the
characteristics of both parents. Before sexual differentiation ‘is secured’,
there is only a ‘direct and immediate identification’ (Einfühlung) with the father, not yet as an ‘object’ but already as a third AND identificatory party who, ‘by bringing together the characteristics
of both parents’, ‘leads us back to the emergence of the ego ideal’. I insist
on the ‘bisexuality’ (father and mother) that permeates this primordial thirdness at the origin of the ego ideal.
And I maintain that the ‘mother’ part of this ‘imaginary father’ can only
favour the transition of the primary
feminine Oedipus into the secondary Oedipus, thus supporting the bisexuality which
Freud (1931, p. 228) asserts ‘comes to the fore much more clearly in women than
in men’ .
As
a third figure, separating and
regulating the sensory mother-child dyad, the father must establish himself definitively
as a symbolic father, the figure of interdiction and law, reason, power and moral codes. For both speaking sexes, the penis becomes the phallus – the signifier of privation, of lack,
and thus of desire: the desire to copulate, to signify, to sublimate, and to
create.
The
boy enters the primary Oedipus under
the regime of the murder of the father and castration, and ‘resolves’ them
through the superego. The girl enters the secondary Oedipus favoured by the feminine of the ‘father of prehistory’, who, on the contrary, causes the boy anxiety by referring
him back to castration and passivity. The girl idealizes this bivalent paternal
thirdness and its values but, magnetized by the maternal sameness-intimacy of
the primary Oedipus, she adheres to
the phallic order as foreign to the
phallus, perceiving her sensoriality and her clitoral
excitability as less visible and less remarkable, even and especially if
she ventures to defend herself against them by taking up a phallic posture.
Unless,
that is, she purifies her primary Oedipus
through revolt and insubordination, through the ‘eternal irony of community’ (as
Hegel puts it) or through the insatiable curiosity of a researcher.
If
we follow the twists and turns that accession to the secondary Oedipus forces
upon the female subject, we can understand the irreducible sense of foreignness
a woman experiences in the symbolic-phallic order.
On
the other hand, when a woman manages to complete the complex tourniquet imposed
on her by the primary Oedipus and
the secondary Oedipus, she may have
the opportunity of acquiring the solid maturity that men so often lack, tossed
back and forth as they are between the phallic pose of the ‘macho’ and the
infantile regression of the ‘impossible Mr Baby’. Having accepted and
elucidated the multiple facets of her two-sided
Oedipus, like a portrait by Picasso, the female subject achieves
astonishing psychosexual plasticity.
Psychization of the bond
This
psycho-sexuality of interdependence is encoded in the sensory flow, gestures,
images and echolalia (the cathexis of pre-linguistic vocalizations:
intensities, frequencies and rhythms), which I call a semiotic receptacle (chora), that already have sense without having meaning,
the latter developing with the acquisition of symbolic rules (of phonetics, grammar and logic).
The
first pre-symbolic gestures are
coloured by rejection: attraction and repulsion, fascination and disgust, neither ‘subject’ nor ‘object’; a state I have called ab-jection,
which is more violent between the daughter and the mother.
The
feminine, a potential hostage of the pre-object maternal sphere, later emerges
in the Oedipal triangulation, which I have called the secondary Oedipus, and which then becomes the central organiser of
the co-presence of sexuality and thought in both sexes: discovery of sexual
difference and access to language and thought.
The
feminine must thus fight both the maternal sway of the primary Oedipus and the father of the superego in the secondary Oedipus. But the feminine
internalization of this psychosexual kaleidoscope – which I have just sketched out schematically – made
up of this intrapsychic intimacy with
the void, the hollow and the death drive (in its masochistic version), gives
access, in the erotic and maternal encounter, to a cascade of sensorialities, memory traces, fantasies and ideals that sweep
the pleasure of organs into feminine jouissance.
‘All my skin has a soul’, wrote Colette. I would add: all my flesh has a soul. Detotalised completeness and eclipse of the self: absolute
vitality and crossed mortality of the two partners.
Reliance
The
maternal experience, which I call reliance, is another component of the
transformative feminine.
Originally
a biopsychic experience, maternal reliance – in both men and women – may be refused or transposed into the
professions of education and care, or into various social commitments. But it
reverses into a mother-version (a
play on père-version), when the
libido of a woman-as-lover diverts unsatisfied impulses onto the child.
Before
it becomes a ‘container’, from which the creation of psychic bonds will become detached, maternal eroticism is a state: a ‘state of vital exigency’ due
to expulsion from oneself, separation, and collapse. Maternal eroticism is a
quality of energy that is always already psycho-somatic, given and received in
order to ‘be at the level required to preserve life’.
But
while the libido of a woman-as-lover is dominated by the satisfaction of drives, maternal
eroticism deploys the libidinal thrust through tenderness; beyond abjection and separation, tenderness is
the elementary affect of reliance.
Two
factors internal to maternal intersubjectivity promote this metabolism of destructive and reliant passion: a state
of vital exigency, AND tenderness, an identification that is taken up in the
maternal relationship to language. The woman's two-sided Oedipus is relived and reworked in the new parental
couple.
RELIANCE,
then. Having highlighted separation and transitionality, with
Winnicott, and maternal madness, with
Green, I think it is also important to place emphasis on this maternal aspect that
maintains the cathexis and anti-cathexis of binding and unbinding in
psycho-somatic bonds, which are created, undone and recreated. I call this
specific eroticism, which maintains the vital exigency right up to its limits, reliance.
A spiral, rebounding time ensues: maternal time as beginning and beginning again.
2. A late
acquisition: heterosexuality
As
for heterosexuality, it is a late acquisition in the history of men and women.
Love had to be introduced into the contractual
alliance between two people of different sexes responsible for the reproduction
of the species and the transmission of goods. As Lévi-Strauss (1969/1949)
showed in The Elementary Structures of
Kinship, women have always been an object of exchange for men, and not a
‘heterosexual’ object considered as different, as other. Benveniste (1969) has
also clearly shown that marriage between men and women is a late institution in
Latin legislation in which the woman is regarded as the mother.
Which
love? (Love Tales, Kristeva, 1985).
The Platonic love of the True and the Beautiful sublimates Greek homosexuality.
The Song of Songs of the Hebrews was
the first to promote a woman’s love, that of the Shulammite who was in love
with her shepherd-king who, in turn, was running away from her; this was
basically nothing more than the unrepresentable love for God and of God, of
Otherness. Then, the courtly literature of the troubadours (with grafts, it
seems, of Taoist influences, passed on by the Muslim Arabs) opened the way to
the Christian West in love, libertine, modern and post-modern.
The
married heterosexual couple continues to fascinate, and is imposed on us ad nauseam by American ‘soap operas’; it
survives in muted form in homosexual couples, when it does not erupt in ‘the
heterosexual comedy’ (Lacan). It is a passion that defies all others and occupies
a place in the social arena. It is only on the basis of this maturity that the
legal act of marriage, when added to it, protects the genitality of the
heterosexual couple, which Freud (1921) thought ‘breaks through the group ties of race, of national divisions, and of
the social class system’ and ‘produces important effects as a factor in civilization’
(p. 141).
Do
we not tend to repress and deny this genitality that ‘breaks through group ties’ and ‘produces
important effects as a factor in civilization’? We would do well to listen
to the desires expressed in defence of marriage for all. And what if the
heterosexual couple and their family were the target, precisely because they
are concerned with overcoming loneliness, prolonging themselves and transmission?
Conventional morality may trivialize them, our televised programmes may depict
them to the point of caricature, but our fantasies converge on them: test
tubes, egg freezing, sperm donations, even female wombs that we buy for the
duration of a pregnancy. Both ‘traditionalists’ and ‘modernists’ are well aware
that ‘it’s not like that’, it’s never like that: but it’s no use, we are indeed
playing at being mummy and daddy by legitimizing marriage for all. As we can
see, heterosexuality does not lie solely in the anatomical difference between
male and female. Nor can heterosexuality be invoked as the surest and only
means of transmitting life or guaranteeing the memory of generations. It
reveals the extreme intensity of eroticism and therefore conceals an unbearable
fragility.
It
took the genius of Freud to formulate what everyone knew intimately: the
procreation that haunts human beings is not a natural act. In the chaotic
social context we are currently living through, sexual
difference is asserted in heterosexuality, which transgresses sexual identities
and conventional codes in a way that gender does not. The heterosexual duo is
the kind of atunement that avoids neither conflicting
identities nor mortal desire, but resolves them in jouissance: a cascade of fantasies, a locus of psychization and creativity. And one that ensures the longevity of the human species.
However that may be, heterosexuality is and will remain the problem. From now on,
starting from and with the transformative feminine, the metamorphoses of
parenthood are and will be infinite, and psychoanalysis is preparing to
accompany them.
References
Benveniste, E. (1969). Le Vocabulaire des institutions
indo-européennes.Paris:
Minuit.
Freud, S. (1911). Formulations on the two principles
of mental functioning. S.E. London: Hogarth, pp. 218-226.
Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. S.E. 21. London: Hogarth, pp. 69-143.
Freud, S. (1923). The
Ego and the Id. S.E. 19. London: Hogarth, pp. 1-66.
Freud, S. (1931).
Female sexuality. S.E. 21. London: Hogarth, pp. 225-243.
Kristeva, J. (1985). Histoires d’amour. Paris: Gallimard.
Lévi-Strauss, (1969/1949). The Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
QUESTIONS
Rachel Boué-Widawsky- I would like to come back to some aspects of your
presentation which, I think, are rarely acknowledged in the psychoanalytic
literature and in our clinical practice.
I will start with the
idea of estrangement to the phallus, within which women live their lives. You
observe it in your practice, you have written about it. In one of your books, Hatred
and Forgiveness (2005, tr. 2010), you
call it a “constitutive exclusion”, “an irreparable”, (p.119) solitude. What, for you, is the estrangement to the phallus and how do
women cope with it?
JK - The
fabulous feminine social adaptability conceals, like a stubborn scar, the
constitutive dissociation that expresses itself as foreign to the phallic order. On the one hand, there is an intense
investment in linking and supportive otherness, a psychosexual movement that
reveals itself in the need to believe:
to believe in the maternal envelope and in the imaginary father. This belief,
but also this identity, is experienced in the register of the illusory, when it
is not that of imposture: it’s a game, ‘I’m participating, but I'm pretending’.
Illusioned, the feminine is equally disillusioned and disappointed: a radical
disappointment, more intractable than melancholia, because the subject is
confronted not with the meaninglessness of being, but the absence of being. The feminine accepts this ab-sence and goes on living with it.
This is a formidable region where the strength (to live) rubs shoulders with
indifference. This repressed, mistreated feminine, entrenched in its
strangeness and absence, this disillusioned feminine, is also the stuff of the
most hardened atheists.
Apparent
feminine realism is also supported by this illusion: women are constantly doing
and doing everything, because they don’t totally believe in it: they think it’s
an illusion... to be repeated.
Q2- Saying that
“the feminine accepts this absence and goes living with it”, turns absence as a
plus, in the sense that the feminine is constantly in the making, transformative,
oscillating btw attachment/separation through the two oedipal phases (biface),
through the duality of the imaginary father and the real one, through the
complex experience of motherhood, all predisposes women to a constant
maintenance of the links to an Other, thus, continuously weaves the canvas of the
reliance. For all these reasons, would you say that your conception of the
Feminine constitutes the primary ethical foundation for psychoanalysis and
perhaps for the future of our humanity?
JK - The feminine and ethics both need to be approached with caution and sensitivity, since they are so heavily
weighed down and distorted by the stigmas of metaphysics and politics. Lacan
was already careful not to use the feminine definite article, in French, LA,
with the noun ‘femme’. ‘La femme n'existe pas’
(‘Woman does not exist’), he said, so as not to essentialize this “notion” or
block its capacity for transformation. Without being an ‘enigma’ as Freud
thought, the feminine now appears to me, in my clinical experience and in the
socio-political breakthrough of women in the world, as a radical yet equally undefinable
constituent of our psychosexual identities, like the Higgs boson. Elusive yet
indispensable, the Higgs boson is one of the keystones of the standard model of
particle physics, and as such is sometimes referred to as the ‘God particle’.
Could the feminine be the boson of the unconscious for both sexes?
The subtlety of the feminine, understood in
this way, is not suited to the rigid grids of transcendent values – good and evil, law, duty,
judgement – and the
constrictive imperatives of morality. The ethics that replace morality in an
immanent ontology (with Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze) take as their model the
‘powers’ and ‘limits’ of the body, with its aptitudes for affects, and their capacity to affect other bodies, or to be affected by them.
Freudian psychoanalysis shares this ethic,
which ‘suspends’ judgement in order to analyze constituted and constitutive
singularities, and to actualize them in the practice of transference over the
course of time. In short, it is an ethical task, which gives itself a
direction: ‘Where Id/It was, I shall become’, with two opposing
principles, ‘the pleasure principle’ and ‘the reality principle’. The
analytical process is an ethical gesture, not a moral one, because it opens up
an interpretative tension based on instinctual drive capacities, their power
and their limits, as well as on questionable meaning and the need for mutual
recognition.
The ‘open structure’ that
is the Feminine thus plays a part in the ongoing supersession and
legitimization of sexed and gender-based identities, of their singular and
sharable evolution. The liberating scope of gender theories is part of the current anthropological
acceleration, and insofar as desires are encouraged by scientific advances, it
is pointless to deny them. On the other hand, it is essential to respond to
requests for help and symptoms in their singularity in order to accompany these
‘beings otherwise’ (‘êtres-autrement’ ) towards creativity. This polyphonic psychic bisexuality reveals
the traumatic zones of subjectivity where the primordial link to life – sexuation – is cracked. This can be a source of anxiety, a
factor in symptoms that sometimes call for hormonal or genetic manipulation,
neutralizing the transformative feminine and devitalizing its binding and
creative function.
Freud meditated, right up
to his Outline of Psychoanalysis (1939-40), on the ‘trauma’ of the
difference between the sexes, which must not be overlooked in the passionate assertion
of identity. We must not forget that the sexuality with which the theory of the
unconscious ‘dynamited’ normative morality is a ‘de-natured’ sexuality, because
from the outset and always, it is biology-AND-meaning, organs-AND-speech,
excitation-and-psychization.
I will conclude by saying
that Transformability and Reliance, which is the Feminine – the prerogative of
both sexes – form the basis of a future ethic which psychoanalysis, through its
theoretical plasticity, can only help to develop.
In continuation with the ethical foundation of
psychoanalysis, I’d love to ask you how you have addressed this question of the
feminine beyond psychoanalysis.
Q3- You
have also addressed the question of the feminine in a trilogy, called the
Female Genius, on Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000), Colette (2002). Why did you choose the term
“genius”?
JK - Why the provocative hyperbole of ‘genius’?
Our era now has the means to pay attention to singularity, to care about its development, to develop
a concern for the advent of ‘who’ in
the ‘whatever’ – ‘genius’ being the most complex and seductive version of this singularity; only under these conditions can it
stand the test of time and be universal.
Beyond the immeasurable
differences and originality of the works of Arendt, Klein and Colette, a few
common traits emerge: the permanence of linking and the object; the concern to
safeguard the life of thought because thought is life; and the insistence on
the time of blossoming and rebirth.
Arendt turned her political
struggle against totalitarianism into a philosophical battle not for
calculating thought, but for questioning thought, the taste thought, forgiving thought.
In founding child
psychoanalysis, Melanie Klein did not trade eroticism, which Freud had placed
at the foundations of psychic life, for the pain of the newborn, which she
assumed to be schizo-paranoid and then depressive, something
of which she has often been accused . By focusing on infantile psychosis, which
impairs the cognitive faculty, Klein was the first to make psychoanalysis an
art of treating the ability to think.
Colette, for her part,
practised the art of words not as rhetoric or pure form, and even less as a
message of ideas. If she thinks as she writes, it is because this written
thought is immediately a new life that she conveys in her perfumed and tactile,
sensual, gustatory and sonorous writing; it is thought made flesh.
Each in their own way,
these three women identify life and thought. For them, living amounts to thinking-sublimating-writing.
In the talent of these women, I recognize feminine psychosexuality par
excellence, where meaning is rooted in the sensitive, where word-presentations
rub shoulders with thing-presentations, where ideas give the drives their
rightful place.
Finally, these three women
experience and think of freedom as birth and rebirth. Although she did not
experience motherhood, Arendt ascribes to the fact of being in the world the
ontological experience of a new beginning, a new meaning, a new world. Klein,
the depressive, was reborn as an analyst, thanks to two analyses with Abraham
and Ferenczi and the abandonment of German for English. She was reborn in the
countertransference of her child analyses – something for which she was reproached. Finally, for
Colette, writing was a perpetual new beginning: ‘Reinventing myself, rebuilding,
rising from the ashes, was never beyond my strength’.
In the works of Arendt,
Klein and Colette, I have found specific features of female psychosexuality
that do not lead to a war of the sexes, but insist on the irreducible
difference between the feminine and the masculine. I can detect this difference
in the particular way that is specific to men and women of thinking about and
experiencing the death drive, and which has never been so clear to me as when
reading Freud and Sabina Spielrein, – Freud stipulating that ‘the pleasure principle is quite
simply at the service of the death drive’ (‘Female sexuality’, 1931); whereas
for Spielrein, who had theorised it in 1912, before
Freud, it’s the other way around: ‘The need for destruction is inherent in the
sexual instinct’ but ‘destructiveness [is] [but] the precondition of all coming
into being’ (‘Destruction as the cause of coming into being’ (1912).
Reading Arendt, Klein and
Colette helps us to maintain these differences, but also to make it possible to
harmonize them creatively.
- Thank you very much
JK for this rich and deep conversation that opens up and frees so many new psychoanalytic
thinking perspectives which the audience
is probably now eager to explore with you.
Mar 30, 2025
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