Body and Symbol: Introduction to Hansbury and Commentators

. . . perpetually unnamed, the female genital preserves its status as that which resists naming and being known. And so why name it, or try? Because the vagina is the quintessential representation of and symbol for space—the space for generation, the space for intercourse, the space for discourse, Winnicott’s “potential space” for play, for the emergence of what he called the “spontaneous gesture.” As long as that (vaginal) space—metaphorical and literal—remains unspeakable, it remains diffuse, it remains inconceivable.

In his classic text “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan (1958) put the anatomical penis in a truly psychoanalytic context by showing that its human function is not biological but instead symbolic. As the fundamental signifier of difference (linguistic, gendered, sexual, generational), the phallus, Lacan argued, is not one signifier among many; rather, it grounds the entire symbolic order in which the human subject lives. While the phallus has had a complex, and contested, ¹ trajectory within the Lacanian theoretical corpus, this crucial step from body to symbol—from the normative constraints of “anatomy is destiny” to a theorization of the phallus-as-signifier unmoored by a bodily anchor—has had consequences that reach far beyond psychoanalytic theory. In fact, many lives have been changed by this move. If we are all “symbolically castrated subjects,” and if any subject can be in some meaningful relation to the phallic signifier, then whole worlds of gender performativity and polymorphous sexual object choice can be not only imagined as possible but also engaged-in-fact. Back when the symbolic phallus was “just” a penis—when a man was just a man, and a woman was less than a man—these worlds had been foreclosed to imagination, thought, and action.

In many ways, Lacan’s innovation is but one of several seminal efforts by psychoanalysts to expand our capacity to imagine human possibility, and to implicitly legitimate forms of thought and modes of living that had hitherto been censored as pathological, sick, diseased. Once upon a time, projective identification was viewed as a pathological mechanism of defense; in Bion’s hands it became a principal mode of unconscious communication. Kohut achieved a similar result with the status of narcissism. Ditto with the entire realm of the countertransference and enactments. Homosexual object choice, formerly seen as both perverse and remediable, is now conceptualized by most (surely not all) analysts as a genuine, if complexly assembled, desiring position, on the same footing as the no less complex and no more genuine heterosexual position. As Gentile says in my own epigraph, if something remains unspeakable, it remains inconceivable.

While it seems inarguably the case that the move from body to symbol—from the limit of the one to the potential of the many—is the move from animal to human, from relative constraint to relative freedom, it is also true that in recent times psychoanalysts have become fascinated again by the body—though we might put the “body” in scare quotes, as it is now in fact, as well as in the imagination, more fungible, more mutable, than the concrete anatomical body one finds in Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy. If more fungible and mutable, the body (and its parts) is today the hot topic in psychoanalysis. Not only are feelings, sensations, and qualities of attention, initiation, and action routinely discussed in many recent clinical papers, but such feelings and sensations are brought to bear on various body parts and orifices. Anatomical form and function—a classically normative pairing—are increasingly queered, as the simple binaries of male/female, heterosexual/ homosexual, vagina/anus are questioned, problematized, and deconstructed. New ways of experiencing one’s body and its capacities for pleasure have emerged. In light of this highly cathected and ever evolving engagement with the body, one might be tempted to conclude that our field’s commitment to the symbolic—to meaning, representation, speech, and interpretation—is over. Which would mean, perhaps, that our commitment to structure and difference is over too.

Into this corporeal zeitgeist comes Griffin Hansbury’s “The Masculine Vaginal.” His paper treads directly on this rocky and unstable territory, in which the very question of the relationship of the body to its various representations is up for grabs. This territory he calls the “transgender edge.” As he writes in his opening paragraph, “Running along the slippery margins, the transgender edge is a border that, when unpoliced, becomes porous, allowing outlaws to penetrate, sliding into a zone not easily defined” (p. 1010). “Unpoliced,” and “allowing outlaws to penetrate” are phrases that alert the reader to the existence of laws and zones, and that, importantly, suggest that how we unconsciously structure who, or what, is “in” or “out” (in our minds as well as in the consulting room) is never a neutral happening. Power, ideology, passion, and fear condition who or what is “allowed in.” Those situated—perhaps banished, perhaps unimagined—on the outskirts not only want to get in (“to penetrate”), but by virtue of “getting in” make that zone harder to figure, harder to define. Categories become confused, as they swim, Hansbury writes, “in a flux of multiplicity.”

What is permissible to imagine, to think, in psychoanalysis, and in a lived life? Hansbury invites us to imagine the masculine vaginal, and thus directly places the status of the vaginal on a par with the phallic. “I wish,” he tells us, “to consider cisgender men and their relationship to what I call the capital-V ‘Vaginal’—not the vagina per se, but the symbolic counterpart to the Phallic, a counterpart that has too long been denied attention and conceptualization by psychoanalysis” (p. 1010). In Hansbury’s paper one finds many things: intense emotional commitment, erudition, a very contemporary sensibility, and an extensive, intricate, and quite moving clinical case. There is also not a little provocation—of thought and feeling, reaction and counterreaction. The reader will be well rewarded by studying his text carefully.

As Francisco González, Donald Moss, and Avgi Saketopoulou each make clear in their illuminating commentaries, Hansbury’s paper, and especially the clinical case of Kevin, reaches into the deepest fault lines of psychoanalytic theory of mind and conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. González is interested in making manifest the “unarticulated premises that underlie” Hansbury’s paper: (1) “the importance of actual trans bodies as objects of identification” and (2) “the incipient exploration of a sexuality that presumes such bodies” (p. 1062). Here the question of bodily mutability (trans-ness) directly informs what a given subject can imagine, via identification, as possible for him- or herself. This question is a profound one, as it points directly to the role of the actual (what is actually there to experience in the world, in this case trans bodies) in the formation of mind. Moss is more skeptical. He methodically questions the soundness of Hansbury’s argument (and looks closely at a key moment in the clinical case), precisely because the concept of “transgender edge” appears to “play” loosely with crucial psychoanalytic distinctions, especially the one that is the organizing theme of this introduction: body and symbol. In Moss’s reading, the “masculine vaginal” loses its signifierness: it too easily “materializes”—it becomes a concrete thing—and so ceases to be a meaningful and interpretable object of analytic scrutiny. Moss credits Freud for already, at least implicitly, covering this territory; the “psychoanalytic edge,” he argues, subsumes the transgender edge. Saketopoulou, on the other hand, sees “emergent possibilities” (p. 1036) in the concept of the masculine Vaginal. Deftly discussing Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, she uses Laplanche’s concept of translation to show how “new translational forms” allow for the patient’s Vaginality to become thinkable to the analytic pair.

In truth, my brief summaries of these commentaries do not at all do justice to their intelligence, scholarship, and intense commitment to clarifying the foundational questions Hansbury’s paper raises.