Abstract
What, then, is the girl’s relation to castration and the Oedipus complex and how far does this make of her a woman, that is, feminine? For Freud it is castration which impels the girl into the Oedipal complex, whereas for the boy it is what impels him, more or less, out of the Oedipal complex. In each case what is involved is not a real event — though Freud often writes as if it were — but a perception which is both an acknowledgement and an interpretation of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. For the girl, unlike the boy, it involves a simple cognition; she ‘makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it [the boy’s penis] and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.’1 Freud says that the girl will initially see her deficiency or castration as only applying to herself. Later she will understand that it applies to all girls and women and as a result ‘it follows that femaleness — and with it, of course, her mother — suffers a great depreciation in her eyes’.2 Freud does not enquire into what impels the girl to interpret or accept this cognitive event as castration, but does suggest that she may disavow it, that ‘a girl may refuse to accept the fact of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she does possess a penis’, although he sees this as a disavowal of her own ‘castration’, not, as the boy may do, of the mother’s castration.3
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Notes and References
Freud, discussing the strength and duration of the girl’s attachment to her mother, notes that some women never achieve ‘a true changeover towards men. This being so, the pre-Oedipus phase in women gains an importance which we have not attributed to it hitherto’, ‘Female Sexuality’, p. 226. In ‘Femininity’ Freud refers to the work of Ruth Mack Brunswick in showing the importance of the girl’s pre-Oedipal attachment: see Mack Brunswick, ‘The Pre-Oedipal Phase of the Libido Development’ (1940), in The Psycho-Analytic Reader, ed. Robert Fliess (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950), pp. 325–6. Mack Brunswick assumes that in ‘the normal course of development the impossible is given up and the possible retained’, ibid, p. 311, but she also argues that women rarely and only with difficulty give up their attachment to the mother. She sees the wish to have a baby as earlier and not replaced by the wish for a penis. The wish for a penis she sees as arising from the narcissistic wish to have what the boy has, and she sees this as connected to what the mother wants for ‘An object root is formed when the little girl realises that without the penis she is unable to win the mother.’ John Forrester and Lisa Appignanesi suggest that this is ‘an argument that Jacques Lacan would take up and extend considerably’, Freud’s Women (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), p. 450.
There also arises here the question of how the wish to be pleasured in her clitoris becomes, for the woman, a wish for the penis genitally, that is, to have the penis in her vagina. Such pleasure must no doubt be a psychically organised pleasure, since a woman does not at the level of neurology experience an orgasm in her vagina. (The extensive research of William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966) showed the singular role of the clitoris in female sexual pleasure.) This does not to make of it a mental pleasure, however, but rather confirms that for both the man and the woman genital pleasure is a question of the structure of desire which each finds his or her place within, rather than of nerve endings.
Catherine Millot, ‘The Feminine Superego’ (1984), trans. Ben Brewster, The Woman in Question, p. 300.
Kaja Silverman, exploring the possibility of a female fetishism suggested by Freud’s reference above to the woman’s disavowal, cites Sarah Kofman’s claim in The Enigma of Woman, pp. 88–9, that the bisexuality of the hysteric resembles fetishism, in that each hinges upon a fundamental undecidability: Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 119. But the fetishist does not ask a question, as the hysteric does, of whether I am a man or a woman; rather she or he holds both knowledges at once; she knows very well she has no penis, but all the same she does, and, again, it is sexual difference itself which is disavowed.
Ibid, p. 303. She refers here to the unpublished study by Lacan, ‘Le Séminaire livre V: Les Formations de l’inconscient’, 1957–58.
Raquel Zak de Z. Goldstein, ‘The Dark Continent and Its Enigmas’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 65, 1984, p. 179.
Moustafa Safouan, ‘Feminine Sexuality in Psychoanalytic Doctrine’ (1975), in Feminine Sexuality, pp. 134–5.
Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. X, 1929. Riviere had been in analysis with Ernest Jones, then later with Freud himself in Vienna, and in the 1920s she became associated with Melanie Klein and her work. For the context of her article, see Stephen Heath, ‘Joan Riviere and the Masquerade’, in Formations of Fantasy, eds Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (London: Routledge, 1986). Riviere’s article is also reprinted in this collection. Appignanesi and Forrester give a general account Riviere’s work and her place in the development of psychoanalysis in Freud’s Women.
Heath, ‘Joan Riviere and the Masquerade’, pp. 55–6, quoting Lemoine-Luccioni, La Robe (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), p. 124.
For example, the wish of a man to be penetrated like a woman and thus the fantasy of taking up the position of woman does not require the man to have a vagina and may not even involve the rectum as a ‘substitute’ vagina (since the pleasures of anal sex may be separately organised). But for the subject who has taken the ‘middle way’ of perversion as McDougal describes it, this wish which forms the subject’s sexual positioning may only be met by really having a vagina, ultimately through a surgical transformation. Transsexuality is considered by Catherine Milot is her book Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality (1983), trans. Kenneth Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1990).
The film is set in the same period as the play. Söderberg was a successful playwright. His play has not been translated but a discussion in English of the play, and Söderberg’s work as a writer overall, can be found in Sten Rein, Hjalmar Söderberg’s Gertrud (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1962). Rein emphasises that Söderberg sought to move away from Ibsen, ‘he prefers the bitter tragedy of having to go on living even though ideals and happiness have been destroyed. But the most important innovation lies in Söderberg’s dialogue. Conflicts materialise out of apparently trivial conversations, his characters frequently fail to communicate, and mean different things with the same words. Söderberg loves understatement, and in contrast to Ibsen’s heavily emphasised points he often consciously introduces a crucial psychological moment, through a quietly spoken line or even through a silence’, p. 356. Dreyer’s film is faithful to this approach, however — if Rein’s account is correct — it does not reproduce the original, for Dreyer replaces loneliness with solitude, removing the sense of absolute tragedy in Söderberg, and by giving her a life after her loves — her work in Paris — Dreyer makes Gertrud a woman of her own choices and not, as Rein suggests, a woman who sacrifices herself to a fatalistic ideal in her doctrine of love.
Dreyer, ‘A Little on Film Style’ (1943), in Dreyer in Double Reflection, ed. Donald Skoller (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), p. 134.
David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: California University Press, 1981), p. 176.
Söderberg, Dr Glas (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), p. 82.
Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer (London: Tantivy, 1971), p. 168r.
Hence the tendency to ascribe ‘transcendental’ meaning to Dreyer’s films, as in Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: California University Press, 1972).
From an interview with Howard Hawks, Movie, no. 5, 1962, p. 11.
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© 1997 Elizabeth Cowie
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Cowie, E. (1997). Female Sexuality, Feminine Identification and the Masquerade. In: Representing the Woman. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25269-5_7
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