.
then persists in a series of references to ‘premature’ weaning, the advent of a rival, the necessary frustration and final ambivalence of the child’s demand for love. None of these factors, however, constitute a sufficient explanation: ‘All these motives seem nevertheless insufficient to justify the girl’s final hostility’,42 which cannot be attributed to the ambivalence of the infantile relation to the object, since this would be true of the boy child too. Thus a question persists that reveals itself as the question, hanging over from that of a demand that has been frustrated and a renunciation that still has not been explained: ‘A further question arises: “What does the little girl require of her mother?”’.43
Freud can only answer this question by reference to the nature of the infantile sexual aim — its activity (rejection of a male/female biological chemistry, a single libido with both active and passive aims), an activity that is not only a corrective to the idea of a naturally passive femininity but functions as repetition (the child repeats a distressing experience through play). Correlating this with the definition of infantile sexuality given earlier in the paper (‘It has, in point of fact, no aim, and is incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction; and principally for that reason is doomed to end in disappointment’.44) it emerges that what specifies the little girl’s aim, and her demand, is that she does not have one. The question persists, or is repeated, therefore, as the impossibility of satisfaction.
In ‘Femininity’ (1933), the sequence is in a sense reversed. The paper starts with the caution against the biological definition of sexual difference and then reposes the question of the girl’s relinquishment of the preoedipal attachment to the mother. The motives for renunciation are listed again — oral frustration, jealousy, prohibition, ambivalence — but in this case the question of how these can explain such renunciation when they apply equally to the boy is answered with the concept of penis envy, with which the question is in a sense closed (the discussion moves on to a consideration of adult modes of feminine sexuality). Thus the question is answered here, and it is as answer that the concept of penis envy has produced, rightly, the anger against Freud. For looking at the paper again, it is clear that nothing has been answered at all, since Freud characterizes each of the earlier motives specifically in terms of its impossibility (see above): oral demand as ‘insatiable’, ‘a child’s demands for love are immoderate’ (rivalry), ‘multifarious sexual wishes … which cannot for the most part be satisfied’, ‘the immoderate charater of the demand for love and the impossibility of fulfilling their sexual wishes’.45 Now, if what characterizes all these demands is the impossibility of their satisfaction, then the fact that there is another impossible demand (‘the wish to get the longed-for penis’)46 cannot strictly explain anything at all, other than the persistence of the demand itself — the question, therefore, of the earlier paper, ‘What does the little girl require of her mother?’47
The question persists, therefore, only insofar as it cannot be answered, and what I want to suggest here is that what we see opening up in the gap between the demand and its impossibility is desire itself, what Lacan calls the effect of the articulation of need as demand, ‘desire endlessly impossible to speak as such’. This is why the demand for love in the transference blocks the passage of the treatment insofar as it insists precisely on its own reality (the possibility of satisfaction). What Freud’s papers on femininity reveal, therefore, is nothing less than the emergence of this concept of desire as the question of sexual difference: how does the little girl become a woman, or does she?
To return to dreams and hysteria, isn’t this exactly the question that reveals itself in the dream of the hysteric analyzed in The Interpretation of Dreams48 who dreamt that her own wish was not fulfilled, through an identification with the woman she posited as her sexual rival? Her desire, therefore, is the desire for an unsatisfied desire: ‘She likes caviar,’ writes Lacan, ‘but she doesn’t want any. It is in that that she desires it.’49 And behind that wish (and that identification) can be seen the question of the woman as object of desire, of how her husband could desire a woman who was incapable of giving him satisfaction (she knows he does not want her), the identification being, therefore, with the question itself: ‘This being the question put forward, which is very generally that of hysterical identification … whereby the woman identifies herself with the man.’50 This can be referred directly back to the case of Dora, woman as object and subject of desire — the impossibility of either position, for if object of desire then whose desire, and if subject of desire then its own impossibility, the impossibility of subject and desire (the one implying the fading of the other). Thus Dora rejects Herr K. at the exact moment when he states that he does not desire his own wife, the very woman through whom the whole question for Dora was posed (the scene at the lake).
Thus what feminine sexuality reveals in these examples is the persistence of the question of desire as a question (exactly the opposite of the feminine as sexual content, substance, or whatever). Finally, to return to the hysterical symptom itself:
It is to the extent that a need gets caught up in the function of desire that the psychosomatic can be conceived of as something more than the idle commonplace which consists in saying that there is a psychic backing to everything somatic. That much we have known for a long time. If we speak of the psychosomatic it is insofar as what must intervene is desire.51
I want to conclude with this, not because I think it answers anything but because I believe it to be a necessary caution to certain current developments within feminist theory. What seems to me to need attention is precisely this movement of psychoanalysis away from sexuality as content (preoedipal or otherwise) to a concept of sexuality as caught up in the register of demand and desire. What does emerge from the above is that it was on the failings in the concept of the feminine (the case of Dora) that this problem emerged in Freud’s own work. To relinquish the idea of a specific feminine discourse may be less discouraging if what it leads to is work on the place of the feminine as somehow revealing more urgently the impossibility of the position of the woman within a discourse that would prefer to suppress the question of desire as such (the question of its splitting). I would suggest that the case of Dora reveals no more, and no less, than this.
Bernini: ‘The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa’ with Cardinal Comero, one of the cardinals and doges of the city in accompanying gallery, Santa Maria della Vittoria. Rome.
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