More Thoughts On The Psychoanalytic Question: “What Does A Woman Want?”
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis is not a recommendation FOR patriarchy, but rather an analysis OF one. One should have a healthy concern with the misguided feminist beliefs that identify Freud as the enemy of women. Psychoanalysis is not a recommendation nor is it a normative prescription for, but rather an analysis of the patriarchal symbolic system in which we live. Even though Freud’s views of feminity were tainted, or distorted, by the sexual ideologies of his times, Freud made history.
Freud’s question, “What does woman want?” exposes the very masculine crisis, the very critical need to find the answer to, and find a resolution for this very crisis. Freud provided to us, in his dream of Irma, a strong masculine bias, perhaps even a gross rather male supremacist bias. In his Irma dream, Irma’s suffering defies and threatens Freud’s “solution”, and it is to male authority Freud turns to for answers in collaboration. That is, in his dream, “Irma’s riddle” is submitted to exclusively male examinations. This ends with questions of “Irma’s riddle,” which in his dream is the symbolism for feminity, posed to an inclusive male authoritative knowledge, a knowledge whose authority is ratified by male complicity. In Freud’s dream, Irma DOES NOT SPEAK whereas the male group speaks ABOUT her, but not TO her. The riddle, it would seem, does not apply to Irma, because she is herself the riddle. And it is here we can make a connection to Plato’s Cave metaphor.
This does not mean to disqualify Freud’s insights or that his genius is irrelevant to women or to feminism. What it does mean is that his insights are inhabited by certain systematic oversights and that the light it sheds also casts shadows. I’d like to share a great excerpt from Shoshana Felman’s book:
“Let us pause a moment and reflect: let us try to grasp the creatively outrageous, visionary, revolutionary imagination that it must of taken to historically articulate this question as a serious question. Let us listen to the question. Let us listen to it’s unheard confession and to it’s unheard of challenge.
What does a woman want? Doesn’t everybody KNOW what a woman wants? Doesn’t what a woman wants go without saying? In a patriarchal society, what CAN a woman want except, as everybody knows, to be a mother, daughter, wife? What CAN a woman want except to be protected, loved by a man? And what could a woman want in Freud’s own eyes except, as every feminist well knows, to have and/or to be the phallus, to realize, in one way or another, her own penisneid (penis envy).”
What’s furthermore is, he goes beyond asking the common sense-defying question: “What IS a woman?” telling us for the first time that WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT A WOMAN IS, that, counter to all conventional expectations, what constitutes masculinity or feminity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of. Freud also puts into question, puts into focus, woman’s WANT as the unresolved problem of psychoanalysis and, by implication, as the unresolved problem of patriarchy, telling us again, that WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT A WOMAN REALLY WANTS. Presumably what a woman wants is of the utmost importance. Presumably what a woman really wants is something altogether different than what patriarchy prescribes for her, assumes to be her “natural” desire: otherwise, there is no room for such a question.
Furthermore, how does a woman differentiate what she wants from what patriarchy is clandestinely prescribing for her? Obscuring her own self-knowledge by blinding her to a patriarchal brain washing machine? And how do we change the thinking of those in charge who possess the systematic oversights that go on to create these blind spots? Can it even be effectively addressed and corrected?
NOTE: This writing was inspired by the writing of Shoshana Felman. The author is not only a woman but a Targeted Individual who feels this discussion is relevant to and should be made part of the issues surrounding female and male Targeted Individuals because as Felman exposes, what femininity and masculinity IS anatomy cannot lay hold of.
SOURCE: Shoshana Felman. (1991). What Does A Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. The John’s Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, MD.
