‘Generative Identity’ and Diversity of Desire

In this article, some elusive early sources of desire are explored, stressing the dialogical nature of desire’s formation and the impossibility of its fulfilment. It is argued that emotional schemata and body-image are socially constructed, systematically filtered through others’ representations of desire. Furthermore, as inter-generational transmissions consist of unsymbolized affects—a child’s unconscious identifications retain implicit traces of the parent’s ‘contagious arousal’.

The author introduces her concept of ‘generative identity’, proposing a further psychic construction beyond one’s core gender sense of femaleness or maleness; beyond psychosocial feminine or masculine configurations and psychosexual articulation of erotic desire— of oneself as potential (pro)-creator. Generative identity pivots on acceptance of fundamental restrictions of gender, genesis, generation and generativity that puncture a toddler’s omnipotence. Reworked in adolescence, these are further linked to ‘genitive’ issues of arbitrariness, irreversibility and finitude. Through creative agency in psychoanalytic work and/or disciplined distillation of subsymbolic experience in Art, aspects of desire are generatively articulated. By contrast, some contemporary biotechnological actualisations bypass limitations and psychic work, rendering desire realisable, however farfetched the fantasy.