Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Jacqueline Rose

We would like to thank the following publishers and journals for permission to reprint these essays: ‘Dora — Fragment of an Analysis’, m/f; ‘Femininity and its Discontents’, Feminist Review; ‘Feminine Sexuality — Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne’, Macmillan Press and W W Norton; ‘The Imaginary’ and ‘The Cinematic Apparatus — Problems in Current Theory’, Macmillan Press and St. Martin’s Press.

Many people are associated for me with these essays, whether through their encouragement, intellectual advice, or friendship and support. In particular I would like to thank Parveen Adams, Ben Brewster, Constance Penley and Peter Wollen. A number of groups and individual people have at various times been part of a crucial context of discussion and work or have offered detailed advice in relation to separate articles: the Lacan women’s study group which met in London between 1975 and 1977; the women at the conference on ‘The Cinematic Apparatus’ held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1978; the students on the ‘Studies in Feminism’ course at the University of Sussex, especially in the year 1982-83, and Homi Bhabha, Jonathan Dollimore and Cora Kaplan. I owe a special debt to Juliet Mitchell.

Finally, my thanks, and much more, to Sally Alexander and Robert Young.

Introduction

Feminism and the Psychic

In her Tribute to Freud, the American woman poet H.D. writes of the one moment when Freud laid down the law during the brief analysis she conducted with him in 1933. This law (‘he does not lay down the law, only this once — only this one law’), coming from someone who still stands in the image of a patriarch with which feminism has not yet settled its accounts, was in fact no law, but a plea — a plea that H.D. should never defend Freud and his work ‘at any time, in any circumstance’. Freud goes on to explain this plea with the precision of ‘a lesson in geometry’ or of a demonstration of the ‘inevitable course of a disease once a virus has entered the system’.¹ A law which takes the form of a plea that there should be no defence, or which hovers between geometrical precision and the course of a disease — these are contradictions which we might expect from any discussion which has psychoanalysis as its object or which tries to place itself within its terms.

But there is something outrageous in Freud’s demand that psychoanalysis cannot be defended on the grounds that defence will ‘drive the hatred or the fear or the prejudice in deeper’, since it snatches from the opponent the very rationality by which a critique, no less than a defence, of psychoanalysis should take place.² This disarming by Freud of his woman patient draws psychoanalysis back fiercely into its own practice and leaves her with an impasse which H.D. will then resolve — more or less and in her own way—through literary writing, memoirs and, finally, a tribute. A tribute, we could say, is one possible response, and perhaps the only possible response, to the laying down of the law.

On the other hand, Freud’s injunction and H.D.’s place within it reveal a dilemma or set of problems in which all the essays that follow are equally caught. First, the problem of writing of psychoanalysis in a context which exceeds its primary institutional and therapeutic domain. Second, the problem of writing in the form of a defence with regard to something — the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious — which brooks no defence and constantly breaks down the law. Third, the problem of writing as a woman within the terms and discourse largely of two men — Freud, and then the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who also saw his work as a tribute or return to Freud, as nothing less than the preservation of a ‘tradition

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Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Jacqueline Rose

Sexuality in the Field of Vision

SEXUALITY IN THE FIELD OF VISION

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction Feminism and the Psychic

Introduction

Feminism and the Psychic