Abstract
The book Femininity, Desire and Sublimation in Psychoanalysis, single-authored by Elda Abrevaya, is a much needed, long-awaited contribution to the evolution in our understanding and deconstructing of the feminine. It brings together English-speaking and French-speaking theorists, significantly moving the feminine revolution forward. The complexity that Abrevaya brings to the topic, both in theory and in clinical presentation, allows a deepening of thought. The exploration of “sublimation” as crucial to the development of female identity, along with consideration of reproductive technology and the separation of sexual act from conception and motherhood, brings layered nuances to how we think about and work with our female patients.
Abrevaya’s end point offers a crucial piece that has been missing from our theory. We are so deeply accustomed to considering the woman’s life fulfillment as being directly tied to becoming and being a mother. However, once an individual becomes a mother, we look on women’s choices with judgement and prejudice: how much do they work; how much time do they take away from their child; if work is not a necessity, why would work be put before time devoted to family life? Each generation brings shifts to our notions of femininity and female desire. Abrevaya writes about “jouissance,” the passion of the woman, that includes not only the wish for a child, to be a mother, but also importantly the passions much like the “traditional” man: the passion for intellectual work, “In the sense the ability to think and create is essential for a woman’s freedom” (p. 82) and includes the capacity for self-reflection, all considered as feminine attributes. She references Kristeva who notes the overemphasis on pregnancy by the “cultural order.” Abrevaya considers the risk of the idealization of motherhood and the perils that can confine women to a private sphere. She writes about the realm of sublimation: only recently could women work, own property, write, create art. And women like Simone de Beauvoir and Lou Andreas-Salomé brought expanding notions to the question of what women want: philosophical, intellectual, and literary work that is essential to their identity and “jouissance.” Femininity and intellectual production can go hand in hand.
Our current generation of young well-resourced mothers (especially in the United States and Western cultures) bring in night nurses after giving birth because they want to sleep. They bring in full-time nannies or full-time day care because even if they do not “have” to work, they “want” to work. They have earned degrees, expertise, want to contribute, want to perform, want to create, want to produce, want to write, want to design in addition to wanting children and a family. The most recent (older) generation, us, we have had the chance to “have it all,” at least that was what we believed. We could be with our children and work part-time when raising them, having the luxury to adjust our schedules. Now there is a change where many mothers work full-time and find competent childcare to carry forward their parenting when working while devoting their evenings and weekends to their children. Abrevaya brings to us a contemporary perspective, yet her book allows for a historical journey to arrive there.
Abrevaya begins with Freud and a specific focus on the relationship of the girl with her mother and the mother with her daughter. She offers the understanding of Freud’s limitation and moves beyond his phallocentric perspective. Freud’s view of the superego in the girl’s development was problematic in comparison with Klein and Lacan with their differing ideas on the impact of the superego. The premise that the female superego is deficient is dated, without contemporary worth, and rooted in a phallocentric, misogynistic, patriarchal system of thought and along with the idea of penis envy as bedrock should be put aside. Emphasized in a new way the author notes that the “girl’s early attachment places in the center of our reflection the question of separation from the mother as an ongoing and never-ending challenge for women during their life-times” (p. 7). This idea is fresh and deserving of her close consideration.
In this context, Abrevaya’s commentary on the female homosexual, specifically Freud’s (1920) paper “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality,” while carrying meaning for our understanding the developmental line of femininity, represents her less than progressive perspective: The girl’s subjectivity bears the marks of the torments caused by her early attachment as well as those of her struggle to tear herself away from her mother to access her eroticism, creativity and sublimation. . . . What makes separation between mother and daughter so conflicted. . . . is . . . the lack of stabilization of the object-choice in the young homosexual illustrative of the girl’s conflicted tie to the mother and her difficulty in detaching herself from the object. . . . Separation implies having gone through the mourning of the maternal object. (p. 8)
Abrevaya’s implicit message is that the homosexual woman is not fully evolved, a problematic position for the responsibility that psychoanalysis has with sustaining our bridge with the contemporary social.
While Abrevaya’s consideration of earlier writings by Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche on homosexuality and the superego is of interest, what emerges is a dated frozen perspective that does not include the current cultural development of gender diversity where contemporary writers have broadened our understanding in necessary ways. Abrevaya’s Istanbul-based International Psychoanalytical Association Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis conference, “Women Analyzing Women” in October 2019, just prior to the pandemic, had papers with such titles as “Mother/Daughter: Destinies of a Passion in the Analytical Process”, “Transforming the Image of the Enslaving Mother Into the Image of the Liberating Mother Through the ‘Analyst’s Womb’ in Transference” and “Female Gender and Sexuality in the Consulting Room.” Interestingly, during the conference discussion from the floor, it was pointed out that the word gender was not a term which existed in Turkish until a few years ago when it was invented. It was noted that gender comes before anatomy and that it is linked to the ego ideal. Turkey has its own sociocultural historical trends that inform its perspectives on gender that we have the opportunity to learn about through Abrevaya’s voice.
Abrevaya reminds us of Deutsch’s contribution on the early attachment of women patient as the first woman to write about female psychology in 1925 and the very first to write on menopause. She also brings our attention to Freud’s deemphasizing the maternal transference, reminding us that he affirmed in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that “libido was masculine.” Kristeva’s idea of oscillations echoes Juliet Mitchell’s conception of femininity. “The girl’s sexual development creates a complexity as she moves from the mother to the father and this displacement “makes heterosexuality always a precarious substitute” (Mitchel 2008, p. xvi). Here Abrevaya explores the complexity of the object of the woman especially in light of what she sees as the difficulty in “primary homosexuality” as one of the challenges of separation, characterizing the relation of child to the first object of love and identification. French authors consider conflicted forms of primary homosexuality as the “black version of the feminine” impeding differentiation from the object, and the hatred in the homosexual transference as revealing facets of the early attachment. Abrevaya offers a clarifying discussion of the perspective of classical psychoanalysis with an elaboration on the processes of identification, introjection, and incorporation relevant for her discussion of the effort needed for the girl to detach from the mother. Paraphrasing Kristeva: “the excited cavity of the interior of the body is transformed into an internal representation . . . the little girl’s appropriation of her body as having an interior depends on the mother’s relation to her own body” (p. 43); the girl’s separation depends on mother’s differentiation from her own mother. Clinical material describes a patient who dreams of tearing off four of her fingers in order to leave her mother, giving them to mother, and moving to a new house with the husband—the price of being oneself consists of separating and mourning the maternal object. A “melancholic core” characterizing the relation between mother and daughter accompanies the “black pact,” the daughter’s disturbed tie to the mother. This intractable pact with the narcissistic mother impedes the possibility to be autonomous and makes it impossible to renounce “the object of prehistory, a period beyond memory” (p. 48). Often the analyst becomes the object of hate, capturing the archaic maternal imago. “To hate the object becomes a way of freeing herself (the girl) from an invasive identification” (p. 47).
Like the difficulty here in the viewing of homosexuality/queerness as being less evolved, Abrevaya’s perspective on infertility is problematic. Abrevaya sees the infertility problem as one of conceiving of the baby in the mind that depends on the libidinally investment in the interior of the mother’s body and introjecting the good tender mother with whose protection she can conceive. A most recent conference presentation on the history of homosexuality in psychoanalysis in the United States by Jack Drescher was eye opening as to the primitivity of psychoanalytic ideas.
Yet Abrevaya allows for contemporary considerations of gender when she discusses instances when assigned gender is not necessarily the one that is identified with. Her review of Laplanche, Butler, Foucault, Ferenczi, and Paul Denis focuses on the weight of the socius in gender assignment emanating from the adults’ unconscious sexual fantasies.
In her book’s journey, Abrevaya brings us to current times with her revisiting of the concepts of gender and motherhood, demanding a revision of our psychoanalytic theories as she interrogates our phallocentric conceptions. She refers to Heenen-Wolff (2017) who points to the danger in adopting theories embedded in a normative point of view on heterosexuality, homosexuality, and the masculine and the feminine. Here specifically she calls our attention to maternity “not being the inevitable and unique solution” for bringing “jouissance” to the woman. No longer can there be the reductive equation between maternity and femininity as many women choose to not be mothers. In her consideration of gender, she references Glocer Fiorini (2019), an important contributor in making current our dated, stratified, patriarchal, phallocentric analytic theories.
Consider the process of subjectivation, on basis of a paradigm of hyper-complexity that includes plurality, multiplicity and heterogeneity. . . . A paradigm of hyper-complicity should inevitably include the binary logic, that is dualism inherent in the masculine and feminine, which is deeply anchored in our representations and traverses culture and language. But at the same time we should be able to go beyond the binary logic and examine post-binary logics that can help us understand the actual tendencies with respect of sexuality and gender as well as the multiplicity of the subject’s positions with respect to desire. (pp. 68–69)
Bringing forward Glocer-Fiorini’s ideas allows a depth of conversation about gender subjectivity that must be included with the contemporary lens of today’s psychoanalysis.
The paradigm of hypercomplexity includes the pivotal role of sublimation in terms of desire and concerns the erogenous female body and the affects. Our conceptions of maternity and femininity differ and we must consider the singularity of each woman patient.
Sublimation constitutes one of the privileged means for self-expression, self-creation and growth in women, despite Freud not recognizing it as a real possibility . . . the production of cultural objects, which include art and science, corresponds to a principle means of self-realization in women, who can have their place in the public sphere and express themselves by means of their creations. (p. 70)
Freud’s idea of the poor capacity for sublimation in women being due to the lack of castration anxiety is a model painfully limited to male sexuality. He viewed contributions of women analysts as phallic contributions. With the right to choose, along with reproductive technology, motherhood is no longer a privileged expression of femininity and shakes perceptions in terms of gender, sexuality and motherhood. Rich clinical examples elaborate further these ideas.
The culmination of this book, I believe, is in the chapter titled “Femininity, Desire and Sublimation” “The study of sublimation in women becomes an attempt to invert this conception that consisted in confining women to a unique role that of motherhood.” (p. 79)The idea of the feminine is constituted more secretly under the cover of femininity which is presented as something to be seen and erected
and resides on the surface of the body to be exhibited, even though the interior of the body and erotogenic sensations relate to them. Abrevaya leads us into the thoughtful consideration of the woman’s display of the masqerade, the surface of the body, onto which internal processes are projected. “The division that operates between a woman’s presentation with respect to the gaze of the other, and her being, constitutes a source of fragility and vulnerability” (p. 93). Kristeva (2007) calls attention to the overemphasis of pregnancy by culture serving to obliterate the passionate aspect of motherhood. She contends that maternal passion must include at the same time the renunciation of passion: “the necessity to expel and detach the child from the self is inherent in maternal passion. Both motherhood and sublimation . . . provide ‘jouissance’ beyond the phallus . . . the ability to think and create is essential for women’s freedom” (p. 82). For Freud, motherhood is the destiny of women, while for Andreas-Salomé and Simone de Beauvoir, philosophical literary and intellectual work are needed for identity and for jouissance.
Abrevaya reviews contributions by major female writers and thinkers: Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and Julia Kristeva, telling us about their pasts, their historical contexts, their suffering and passion for the mother, and where their writings becomes the means to accomplish the mourning of the object and liberation from the maternal imago: to write means to tear oneself from the moral and physical misery of childhood. While destructive aspects of the mother-daughter relationship exist, to build one’s own femininity, motherhood is a possible route to identify with and find fulfillment as a woman, whereas “sublimation as part of ‘itineraries of desire’ (Glocer Fiorini, 2019) becomes a means of liberation and fulfillment” (p. 91). Herein lies the urgency to write, the effort to articulate a woman’s experiences, her inner world in relation with the external, that which shapes female subjectivity. Evelyne Sechaud, Michel de M’Uzan (1977) and Andre Green (1992) are considered in terms of a loss as the origin of the work of writing, the après-coup, with the possibility of symbolization and transformation of the traumatic. For Marguerite Duras, creation is the means to overcome melancholic grief with the maternal object, where writing is equivalent to act of matricide (the killing off of the mother with the establishment of the self).
Here I want to further Abrevaya’s ideas to include Kristeva’s thoughts about the “abject” as it is relevant to her discussion of the woman’s development. Andrea Celenza and Jamieson Webster presented online on “Maternal Eroticism in the Analytic Setting,” where Julia Kristeva’s ideas on aspects of maternal eroticism are considered as both vitalizing and devitalizing, taking from Winnicott and Laplanche, and that the transmission of unconscious fantasies to the infant by the mother initiates the infant’s relation to the world as the first signifier of the erotic. These forces can have a vitalizing effect, or the abject eroticism located in the other’s body can convey the dreaded void, deadness. The analyst, à la Kristeva, is the revitalizing component, creating the envelope around which the signifier of the abject is retranscribed through the care of the analyst, working with the living destructive unrepresented presence of unconscious fantasy. The abject is not an object facing me which I name or imagine. . . . The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to the “I.” If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1)
Abrevaya considers the place of writing as the means by which the woman overcomes trauma; the solitude becomes a necessary space for creation and the transgression of the social cultural order, causing both liberation and melancholia. The artistic, literary, and intellectual are psychically related to the original sexual aim. The drive operates its displacement from original sexual aim to objects socially valorized without losing intensity (Laplanche 1998) (Abrevaya’s Femininity, p. 101). De M’Uzan emphasizes the presence of the traumatic experience at the origin of the creative process. “Trauma consists of the irruption of the real in the form of something that cannot be represented and symbolized” (Abrevaya’s Femininity, p. 103). Creation means to master and elaborate painful experiences. Sublimation becomes the fruit of the work of elaboration and with the symbolization of trauma bring effects on the growth and expansion of the ego inclusive of the joy of life, sensuality, love, and eroticism.
Abrevaya shifts to discussing the position of the analyst and to psychoanalytic knowledge as it relates to the unknown and also as the motive for writing. Analytic function is a particular way of relating not only to psychoanalytic knowledge but also to the unknown which is precisely the motive for writing. The processes of transference and countertransference is at the center of why analysts write, grasping what has been not yet represented. Meaningfully, the editors of the book review section of JAPA have instituted a regular section titled “Why I Write,” where with each issue, an analyst is invited to write an essay on this topic, relevant to Abrevaya’s offerings and to contemporary times.
Abrevaya’s writing, her offering, provides us with much nourishment of history and current thought on women and femininity, demonstrating her analytic competence in her rich and broad theoretical knowledge and in her clinical descriptions.