Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Jacqueline Rose
fact appear to be predicated on the notion of some direct (‘truer’ even) relation to the object itself: ‘The system ucs contains the thing-cathexes of the objects, the first and true object-cathexes’.34
It is on the collapse of this concept, in Freud’s text itself, that the assimilation schizophrenia/body/unconscious can again be seen to fail. First, Freud does in fact state even within this definition that what is involved in the first (primary) cathexis of the object is the memory-trace of the object, and in the appendix on aphasia he states the relation between object and thing-presentation to be a mediate one. Second, in the choice that his distinction leaves him — for if the unconscious comprises the thing-presentation alone, repression involving a withdrawal of the word, then for the schizophrenic either there is no repression or else the schizophrenic’s use of language indicates the first stage of a recovery, the recovery of the object-cathexes themselves. The schizophrenic’s relation to the word would therefore reveal at its most transparent the loss of the object that is at the root of linguistic representation (‘These endeavours are directed towards regaining the lost object’).35 This is the concept at the basis of the concept of the unconscious as the effect of the subject’s insertion into language: the loss of the object and production of the subject in that moment (the moment of its fading).
A number of conceptions about language that underpin discussion about the feminine and discourse, the feminine as discourse can now be disengaged. First, the idea of an unmediated relation between the body and language is contrary to the linguistic definition of the sign, implying as it does a type of anatomical mimesis of language on the body (for example, Irigaray’s ‘two lips’ as indicating the place of woman outside (phallo-)monistic discourse). Second, the concept of the feminine as outside discourse involves a theory of language in which a nonexcentric relation to language would be possible, the subject as control and origin of meaning, which is to render meaningless both the concept of the unconscious and that of the subject.
It is on this latter factor that the relation of psychoanalysis to language exceeds that of linguistics, precisely insofar as it poses this problem of the subject’s relation to discourse. Freud did not formulate this as such, but it is there in the contradictions of his text, in this further sense, too, and most clearly, I would suggest, in what he has to say about feminine sexuality and transference — which brings us back to the case of Dora.
The question of femininity
In this final section I want to look at the two ‘vanishing points’ of the case of Dora — the theory of feminine sexuality and the concept of transference. For if the case failed it was because Freud failed to recognize the specificity of either of these two factors, and where he saw their pertinence (addenda, postscript, footnote) they were left in a type of offstage of the case, as the thing that was missing (the ‘secret’) or the element that he had failed to ‘master’, as if both were a content, an object to be identified, placed, and resolved (transference as the recovery of an actual event). What I want to do here, therefore, is to show how in both of these concepts something of the subject’s relation to discourse as we saw it emerging above — in Dora’s second dream, and then in the schizophrenic relation to the word — can be discerned and to suggest the pertinence of that theory for discussion of the feminine not as discourse but, within discourse, as a relationship to it.
First, the transference, as it was elaborated by Freud in his papers on technique (‘The Dynamics of Transference’, ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’, ‘Observations on Transference-Love’),36 where he starts again with a definition of neurosis as a libidinal turning away from reality, is first seen as a resistance in the chain of associations that would lead logically to the repairing or completing of the patient’s memory. Dora’s case also started, in Freud’s discussion of the fragment, with this insistence that cure of the symptom and completion of memory were synonymous — psychoanalysis being defined here as the creation of a full history to which the subject would be restored. It is a concept also present at the beginning of Lacan’s work on the idea of full speech,37 retranscription of the history of the patient through language, before the development of the concept of the unconscious precisely as the effect of language, and hence behind it a moment of failing that can never be restored, that is nothing other than that of the subject itself (primary repression). Thus Freud starts by stressing transference as the obstacle to the reality of the patient’s history, in a simple sense corresponding to the notion that behind neurosis is an event (seduction theory) and in front of it, if all goes well, another event (neurosis vanquished by reality), transference appearing here as something that ‘flings’ the patient ‘out of his real relation to the doctor’.38
Yet, taken together, these three texts inscribe an opposite movement. In the discussion of recollection (‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’), Freud interpolates a discussion of amnesia that starts with the concept of total recall as the objective of analysis but ends up with a discussion of primary or primal fantasy, indicating that concept of Freud’s which was most completely to undermine the concept of the cure as the retrieval of a real occurrence. In fact, in his article on the two principles of mental functioning,39 Freud assigned to fantasy the whole domain of sexuality, whereby it escapes the reality principle altogether (pleasure in sexuality revealing itself as pleasure in the act of representation itself).40
Through this a different concept of the transference emerges, one seen most clearly in ‘Observations on Transference-Love’, where what is objected to in transference is its status as a demand (the demand for love) and, more important, one that insists on being recognized as real (which it is, Freud has to concede), so that what now ‘irrupts’ into the analytic situation is reality itself, a reality that is totally out of place: ‘There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality’.41 The patient insists therefore on repeating ‘in real life’ what should only have been reproduced as ‘psychical material’ — thus the relationship to the real has been reversed. What this indicates for this discussion is that Freud himself was forced to correct or to revise the concept of transference to which he ascribed the failure of the case of Dora, and this in a way that is not satisfactorily or exhaustively defined by reference to the countertransference (Freud’s implication in the case). For what is at stake is transference as an impossible demand for recognition (a return of love in ‘Observations on the Transference-Love’), a demand that has to be displaced onto another register, indicated here by the corresponding emphasis on the concepts of fantasy (‘make-believe’), representation, psychical material (the only meaning of material that has any value here). Note the proximity of these terms to the query, image, Bild, of Dora’s second dream, sexuality precisely not as demand (the demand for love) but as question.
In the discussion of the case itself, I suggested that Freud’s concept of the transference as the retrieval of an event corresponded to the concept of a pregiven normal feminine sexuality, neurosis being defined as the failure to meet a ‘real erotic demand’. Thus if the concept of reality has to go in relation to the notion of transference, we can reasonably assume that it also goes in relation to that of sexuality itself. I have already suggested briefly that it does, in what Freud says about the pleasure principle. What is important to grasp is that, while it is undoubtedly correct to state that Freud’s analysis of Dora failed because of the theory of feminine sexuality to which he then held, this concept cannot be corrected by a simple reference to his later theses on feminine sexuality (preoedipality, etc.), crucial as these may be, since that is simply to.replace one content with another, whereas what must be seen in Freud’s work on femininity is exactly the same movement we have just seen in the concept of transference, which is nothing less than the collapse of the category of sexuality as content altogether.
Freud starts both his papers on femininity (‘Female Sexuality’ and ‘Femininity’) with recognition of the girl’s preoedipal attachment to the mother, its strength and duration, as it had been overlooked within psychoanalytic theory, thus feminine sexuality as an earlier stage, a more repressed content, something archaic. Yet although the two papers in one sense say the same thing, their logic or sequence