Feminine Identity as a loss that Cannot Be Mourned
Rinita Mazumdar, Ph.D.
In the 5th century B.C.E. Aristotle in his Politics divided social space into the public sphere of rationality and free discussion and the private sphere of the oikos or the home. Greek aristocratic males were part of the public sphere, which was not an inclusive space. Women and slaves were prohibited from participating in the public sphere. They inhabited in the private sphere or the oikos. The reason put forth by Aristotle for the exclusion of women and slaves was that they lacked rationality and hence their entry into the public sphere would bring chaos to the rationally arranged hierarchical social order. Women and slaves were not totally devoid of social functions, however. Aristotle allotted to them the function proper to their “nature”. The Greek women, according to Aristotle, did have rationality, but it was “confused” and not proper for the public sphere where reason and rationality reigned; her proper function was to reproduce and nurture the Greek species. The function of the slave was to produce things for daily necessity, for although they lacked rationality they had, according to Aristotle, “great manual strength”. In the post Galilean era and in the age called “Enlightenment” when Europe started to analyze and control the natural forces via the understanding its laws and mathematize nature, the Aristotelian theory of women’s irrational confused mental state found its newer and more scientific expression in modern medical science, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, the theory of evolution, etc. Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy and a man of science modeled the human being in terms of the mind/body “dualism”; according to this model, the body is like a machine that works via irrational mechanistic laws. The mind was housed in the body as an entity that was constructed to work with intentionality and rational free will. Its working could not be reduced to mechanical laws of nature. The rational mind directed the body in all kinds of volitional action. This dualistic model was the basis of modern medicine and survives till today. Freud took the mechanistic model and infused in it evolutionary elements and gave us a picture of the human psyche whose framework is the evolutionary model in biology.
Freud somewhat demystified the human psyche by discovering the libido or pleasure principle. The libido has to be understood as a life force that moves through the different body parts and causes the growth and formation of the human identity and a sense of self. For Freud human identity develops as a result of “castration complex” which he equated with the death instinct in the essay, Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety and other works. Under this threat of annihilation of the life force or “castration complex”, the human child develops an ego. According to Freud, we are not born with an ego; our sense of "having a self", evolves during infancy and early childhood as the life force or libido travels through the oral, anal, and genital stages. In the oral stage and the anal stages when the libido is concentrated on the mouth and in the anal stage on the anus. Pleasure is obtained by passing of the feaces. Freud also calls this the anal sadistic stage. In these stages there is no differentiation, no “other” or “object” or in Freudian term, the ego libido and the object libido and hence no consolidated sense of the ego or Self. It is a time of primary narcissism, where there is an absolute unity of the mother and the child. It is a return to this state, Freud claims that we are striving for in our pursuit of happiness. Returning to his treatment of idealization, Freud suggests that since this ideal (an unattainable) condition is what we are looking for in our sexual and emotional lives, every object of our desire is idealized.
The idea of the “other” or the object libido develops at the genital stage when the child enters the Oedipal Complex. At this stage there is a sense of the other, Phallic mother, a mother in fantasy, the all powerful mother who gives life and nourishment and who is the first object of love for the child. Next, the child develops a complex, known as the castration complex, that is, the loss of pleasure or life force. At this stage, separate identities are developed and consolidated. The little boy “castration complex” gives him the message (instinctually) that if he does not give up his desire for the phallic mother (and masturbation), his most important organ, the phallus, will be cut off. So, to preserve himself, the little boy gives up his first object of love, the phallic mother, and stops his masturbation (auto eroticism). As no desire gets lost, this original desire for the phallic mother goes in the unconscious and in the conscious mind the little boy identifies with the father and consolidates his masculine self.
The path to feminine identity is more complex. At the beginning of life, during the oral and anal stage all humans are bisexual, the little girl is active and masturbates with her clitoris. As she enters the genital phase, the little girl realizes that she is already castrated and a little of the phallus (the clitoris) is left. The cause of this undergrowth, within the Freudian framework, is evolutionary and biological. The girl undergoes a psychical “castration complex” when she realizes that the Phallic mother does not have the phallus either to give her, that the mother like her is also castrated. This makes her turn against the mother and all those having bodies like her. She starts to hate her own body and all those who are castrated like her. Moreover, she develops an ambivalent attitude towards the mother. So, according to Freud, what is a possibility for the boy, castration, is an accomplished fact for the little girl. She realizes that she does not have the organ of pleasure or the life force. This hurts the little girl’s narcissism and she undergoes a trauma. She goes to father to get the phallus, who does not give it either. To get the phallus in her body, she tries to please father and takes his beatings and rape in order to get the desired organ in her body. When she does not get the organ, she settles for her “biological destiny”. This involves her transforming the original desire for a phallus to a desire for the baby from father or father substitute, the transference of the erotic zone from the clitoris to the vagina, and the substituting the clitoral activity to vaginal passivity. The vagina in Freudian term is a “non organ”, a bloody hole, a wound. Her original desire, the desire for the phallus, goes into the unconscious as in the conscious mind her feminine identity is formed. The unconscious desire of the male is the Phallic mother, the conscious one is the identification with father and consolidated male identity. As his phallus is retained he may get back the primary narcissism and unit with the mother in coitus with identities who lack the phallus, a woman.
With the little girl, on the other hand, the original desire or the desire for the phallus goes to the unconscious, thus the desire for the phallus is a feminine desire par excellence. The little girl suffers a double loss, the loss of her primary object of desire, her primary narcissism, the phallus, and her primary object of love, the Phallic mother. She does not possess the phallus and hence cannot get the primary narcissism back in the unity with the mother. She turns against and hates mother and all women for their loss, which she too suffered. Normal femininity is thus founded on this double loss and not as consolidated as the male identity. If she does not settle for her “biological destiny” she develops two abnormal identities, which are frigidity, where she says to herself, “Since I cannot have as much pleasure as my brother, I cannot have any pleasure at all” or homosexuality, where thinks that father has the phallus and with that phallus there is a possibility of going back to the primary narcissistic unity in coitus with mother.
With the medical model feminine identity is determined by this biological and evolutionary fact of women’s lack of phallus. According to Freud, the original desire for the phallus never goes away and woman never recovers from this trauma of loss of the phallus. This is transformed into other substitutes like the baby and goes as a memory trace in the unconscious. It is this loss or lack that causes the feminine psyche to be envious, jealous, and quarrelsome. In addition, women, according to Freud has little sense of justice and has weak social interest and has not contributed anything to civilization. The only thing which women are good at is plaiting and weaving, which is a metaphor for the pubic hair that covers her shame of her lack or loss.
Analysts like Bonaparte and Deutsch working with the framework theorized that “femininity” is not merely the desire for the phallus (the organ of pleasure and life force), but also masochism. According to Bonaparte the masochistic libido flows through menstruation, coitus, and child birth. Working within the male paradigm Freud did not realize that women’s pleasure is different from male pleasure, and what is painful for men is pleasure for women. The more women can adopt the masochism is her body, the better can she pleasure in sex. Deutsch talks of women’s life cycle as a series of losses. She agrees with Freud that women’s loss of the phallus is overcome when she gets the phallus in coitus from the other, and then loses it after coitus, gains it in pregnancy, loses in childbirth, gain it back in lactation and loses when the baby is weaned. Thus, a woman’s life cycle of coitus, pregnancy, child birth, and lactation is driven by not the pleasure principle but by masochism. Joan Riviera gave a rather radical view that women do not lack the phallus as such, but pretend this lack in order to survive from Father’s wrath. For if father discovers that she has stolen the phallus, then he would take revenge. Thus, femininity is not a loss, but the pretense of loss for survival. On the other hand, Melanie Klein, who primarily worked with children, arrived at the conclusion that the idea of the “other” as object appears much before the genital stage. The first “other” is a part object, the mother’s breast for the infant. The breast is that which gives nourishment and comfort and is responsible for the survival of the infant. I will return to this concept of “part object” and feminine identity later.
The above theory of human identity development by Freud was made more complex and nuanced in his essay, “Mourning and Melancholia”. In the above essay Freud analyzes melancholia by comparing and contrasting it with mourning; the two express similar symptoms and concludes that melancholia is a pathology, while mourning is a temporary condition. According to Freud, mourning affects the psyche as a result of the loss of an object of love due to death. In melancholia, on the other hand, the object of love need not be dead, but may have withdrawn the love or have slighted, jilted, and abandoned the person. Both melancholia and mourning show the following symptoms: painful dejection, loss of interest in life and love, and inhibition of all kinds of actions. Moreover in mourning the mourner exactly knows what caused his pain and can point to the lost object. In melancholia one knows what cause it but not how it is caused, there is something unknown in melancholia that the melancholic cannot name or point her finger at, which is at the root of her psychic discomfort. One further intriguing thing in melancholia, according to Freud is that the melancholic has an ambivalent attitude towards the lost object of love, there is both love and hate. The melancholic has given up the object of love but not the love itself. Via the observation of cases in the clinical setting, Freud concludes that a mourner can be brought back to a happy and the normal state via intense therapy where the client and the therapist go through the arduous task of recalling memories involving the lost object. Then slowly through this working through and with time, the mourner sees the reality and comes to term with the loss and his ego is re-established.
In melancholia the task of reinstating the normal psyche is much more difficult. For it is not a condition but a complex. The most intriguing thing about melancholia is that the melancholic critiques himself or herself in most severe terms and declares herself as worthless and of no or little value. The melancholic also has a desire to be punished for the loss. All the criticism and judgment have moral tones. The melancholic does not critique his own social status or the lack of his material wealth, although he is worried about scarcity. Despite declaring oneself to be worthless and having no value, the melancholic does not treat others around him with humility or respect. In fact the melancholic flaunts her condition of being slighted and relishes all the injustice done to her. In this sense, the condition of the melancholic is similar to that of the hypochondriac who enjoys his symptoms and relishes his illness.
According to Freud, what happens is a split in the ego of the melancholic. She identifies a part of the ego with the lost object and becomes that object. On the other hand the other part of the ego becomes the moral supervisor who critiques that part of the ego that identifies with the lost object. Thus, Freud’s analysis of the melancholic is that by critiquing the self which identifies with the lost object, the melancholic is actually critiquing the lost object. In addition, by relishing her illness she is creating a sense of guilt in the lost object. Part of the ego is identified and part carries back to sadism. When the melancholic tries to commit suicide, it is when he turns part of himself to the ego and wants to kill that part. According to Freud, the complex of melancholia draws all the libido energy and impoverishes the ego and in this sense like an open wound, where all the energy or libido of the melancholic is concentrated and her ego is impoverished. As his narcissism is hurt, the ego wants to identify with the object by devouring it. So, in many melancholic there is an inhibition against taking food. It regresses back to the oral stage, something that Freud says is derived from clinical observation and then inferred. Sometimes this identification with the object results in symptoms in the form of hysteria.
We said above that the melancholic cannot point his finger at what is causing the anxiety, the pain, the loss of interest in love and life. The source is not in the conscious mind. For Freud the source of this has to be located in the unconscious where the memory traces of the lost object is located. The pre conscious represses the memory and does not let it penetrate in the conscious mind. Often melancholia is followed by maniac phases. When the energy is stifled, and then often it gushes out. This kind of cyclic melancholic and maniac phases do not happen in mourning, for all energy is not concentrated on the open wound and then suddenly gushes out.
According to Luce Irigary, within the Freudian and in general in the medical model of human identity development, femininity or feminine identity is melancholia and hence pathological. Freud said that after the discovery of her “already castrated state” the little girl’s primary narcissism is severely hurt and she is traumatized. She realizes that the clitoris is not the organ of pleasure the source of life the origin of energy or the vital force or libido. This leads to her inhibition of sexual activity and passivity, a symptom similar to the inhibition of the melancholic. Like the melancholic she loses interest in other things, for she has lesser social interest and the outer world. Her vagina is like the open wound which gathers all the energy and her ego is impoverished and she suffers from low self esteem, which causes her to be envious and jealous. Irigary says that the most important trauma in the life of the little girl is when she has to be adopt her identity as feminine she has to give up her primary object of love, the mother and all women. This primary narcissism and the unity of the mother and child cannot be represented in the phallo centric language, for it is something beyond language. It is a loss that is unnamable like the melancholic’s reason for pain cannot be pointed out specifically. The little girl does not possess a phallus and hence never go back to the primary narcissistic unity with mother in coitus. For her mother does not possess the phallus and hence cannot give her the phallus. A part of the little girl’s ego identifies with the lost mother, her primary object of love and the other part becomes a critique of that part. So, her attitude towards the lost mother is one of ambivalence. This feature of femininity is like the melancholic. The mourner knows what is lost, the object of love, the loss of the melancholic is unknown, he does not know how it is lost, for it remains in the unconscious. Similarly, feminine identity develops via the loss of the primary narcissism and the bonding with the mother. It is also a loss that cannot be represented in the phallocentric language and hence it is a loss that cannot be mourned. Femininity, is thus, melancholia, par excellence. It remains in the unconscious and shapes the feminine identity. Only with the death of woman- mother can there be the birth of a child with a feminine identity. .
The trauma of this loss that cannot be represented within the phallocentric language is passed down intergenerational. When she discovers her “lack” and the open wound or vagina, all her energy is concentrated on the open wound and as a result her ego is impoverished, she suffers from low self-esteem. Like the melancholic, feminine identity identifies with bodily infirmity and ugliness and social inferiority. Like the melancholic, she actually relishes her slight, shame, and her inferior position, but in reality, that part of the ego that identifies with the mother is critiqued and castigated by the other part of her ego, just as the melancholic does. The libido is withdraws to the ego, and ego incorporates this object and regresses back, to the oral stages, the melancholic refuses nourishment. Thus, fasting, and anorexia are “feminine” acts. We can now substitute what Jean Riviera says and says that the loss is not a real loss but the performance of a loss to avoid father’s revenge, but within the symbolic order she cannot represent the performance of loss of her bonding with mother and other women. For her death as the mother woman is her identity as a woman-feminine or normal woman is obtained. She cannot mourn this loss of the mother, for she has no language, and hence the loss becomes pathological and her identity, she is a melancholic. She relishes her lack, her illness, and pathology. All she has left is hysteria without which there is death of her femininity or her identity. Femininity is thus a state between life and death, waking and dreaming, ambiguous, unclear, ambivalent, non -consolidated, and hysteric.
Now a word about the part object identity. Melanie Klein says that the first “other” happens much before the genital stage of the libido’s travel. The first “other” is a part object, the mother’s breast that gives the infant its life support. The child develops envy and frustration with this part object, and conceives it along the lines of “good” versus “bad” breast, according to Klein. This recognition of the infantile part object, or body part remain for us throughout our lives and is the basis of our seeing the “other” partially. Sarah J. Gervais,Theresa K. Vescio,Jens Förster,Anne Maass,Caterina Suitner in their essay, “Seeing women as body parts: recognition bias”. Objectification theory suggests that the bodies of women are sometimes reduced to their sexual body parts. As well, an extensive literature in cognitive psychology suggests that global processing underlies person recognition, whereas local processing underlies object recognition. Integrating these literatures, we introduced and tested the sexual body part recognition bias hypothesis that women's (versus men's) bodies would be reduced to their sexual body parts in the minds of perceivers.”
We read above the melancholic goes through a circular process of maniac, when she gets a lot of pent up energy and exhibits over abundance of joy and life. How does this apply to the femininity that is melancholic? Historically, femininity has undergone a lot of changes. Femininity is no longer confined to the oikos and excluded from the rational sphere of public discourse. Femininity no longer means lack of education, exclusion from politics and public decision making. We have seen the first, second, and even a third wave. If we take the words of Julia Kristeva women went from the assimilative stage. Using the above framework of femininity as melancholia, we can say that each of these waves of feminist movement are manic stages and after which it goes back again to the melancholic stage, for its loss of the primary narcissism is never overcome via assimilation in the patriarchical order. The loss of bonding with the primary object of love, the narcissism, the absolute unity cannot be represented in the phallocentric language, so a manic phase of women’s liberation will be followed by a depressive one.
Since femininity arose from sacrificing the original desire for the species, one way of liberating women is to do away with being mothers, which means that her loss is not needed to establish the feminine identity. This was envisioned by some feminist in the Second Wave. Feminists like Firestone envisioned this via a technological revolution where there will not be identities that reproduce and identities that do not, everyone can reproduce artificially and there will be no difference between genders. With this the private family will dissolve and there will be a classless society. Children will be born artificially and raised in communes where all work will be shared. A second type of emancipation of the femininity and the loss of the primary object of love was envisioned by Haraway in her vision of a society filled with Cyborgs.
Donna Haraway conceives of a hybrid entity called the Cyborg substituting the human species. The Cyborg is both a machine and a human being. Modern life is filled with Cyborgs as we experience social reality via machines. Our way of growing food, our consumption, our sexuality, and reproduction are all mechanized and nothing is “natural”. The Cyborg is a mixture of machine and organism and does not have to go through the Castration Complex (Freud), masochism (Bonaparte, Deutsch), or be part of the “care labor” and compulsory division of labor (Marxist feminism). In the Cyborg there is no “original” bisexuality and alienated labor, no difference between “care labor” and “commodity production”. The Cyborg does not have an “original desire” (Freud: For the Phallus), there is no “private” public” dichotomy and the division between “home” and “market”. The Cyborg does not have to struggle over the meaning of what is “private” and what is “public”, the meaning of sexuality, health, politics, and power. There will be no division between family and work and no domination of the “market” over “life”. The wealthy enter the market by being consumers through advertisements. The poor are mostly in the informal sectors, like domestic laborers or care givers. The above creates power and domination, which is going to go away with the Cyborg. The feminization of domestic unpaid labor will go and there will be a new way of organizing society.
In the modern Western society, women and slaves are no longer unfree and lack choices. A lot of social opportunities have opened up. Nonetheless, a new way of creating “femininity” has evolved in the Western society, much of which is done within the above framework. One example is the Welfare system in the USA. While “masculinity” is constructed as “possessive individualism”, “exchanger of labor in the market”, “citizen”, femininity is constructed as “dependent on public charity”, “non working” “non deserving of unemployment benefit”, and most of all pathological. The State provides for therapies to assimilate these pathological identities into the mainstream. The First, Second, and Third Waves are the manic phases of femininity, when the melancholic feminine suddenly gets a lot of energy from the patriarchical system and is included in the system. Nonetheless, this inclusion is inclusion as the “other” and as pathologies. Similarly, all subalterns like undocumented people, refugees, low wage laborer are considered as pathologies. They are no longer excluded totally from the polis, as Aristotle theorized, but included as “others”. These identities thus live alienated lives, like Marx said about the 19th century workers in England, the worker is alienated from his own labor. Unlike Antigone, who was excluded from the polis for her birth violated the norms of Greek society, as she was born of incest, the fundamental taboo in all cultures, modern society is filled with taboos around work, home, faith, sexuality, and reproduction. The path to end biological reproduction and emancipation to technology is not acceptable to me unless there are changes in consciousness of people. For example, a group of scientist with high skills will control the technology and make decisions about other people’s lives. The division between the “have” and “have nots” and the taboos against all inclusive communities will resurface in new ways.
We talked about the melancholic is someone who suffers from a loss that cannot be names. Femininity is an identity that is created in this loss, which is why it will remain an open wound. It is, as psychiatrist Gabor Mate says, a trauma. Being a woman, the transition to femininity from bisexuality or pain sexuality is a trauma within the Freudian scheme that involves not only the loss of the primary narcissism or unity with the Phallic mother, but also the realization of the loss of already lost phallus, the organ of pleasure. So, as Irigary says, femininity itself in the way it is constructed in society is an open wound, a trauma.
I will apply this to the case of Ashapurna Devis’s trilogy, the mother daughter relationship in the first two of the trilogy, the relationship between Satyavati and Subarnalata. Satyavati was not dead, but she was lost to her daughter, Subarnalata. For Subarnalata to be born as a woman, for her femininity, she had to lose her mother. Using psychoanalytic framework, one can say that Satyvati is the unconscious of Subarnalata. The idealization of the other, as I said at the beginning of this essay, the desire to return to the absolute unity, the primary narcissism. Our identities are formed in this loss of the primary narcissism. This is forever a lost desire, and it is this desire that makes people unhappy. That is why Subarnalata’s journey was based on the loss of the mother, as the loss of a Self is the birth of the human species, society is based on the loss of this primary narcissism, the mother. Since, this loss cannot be represented symbolically, it cannot be mourned, it is ingrained in the melancholia of human civilization, of its aggression, war, envy, and pain.
According to Helen Deutsch, as we saw above, women’s time is circular, taking a cue from Freudian framework, Deutsch says that the masochistic libido circulates in order to fulfill the lack, the getting of the phallus in coitus, the losing of the phallus, the getting of the phallus via pregnancy, the losing of the phallus via childbirth, the getting of the phallus in lactation, and the losing in weaning, and getting the phallus back. This continuous circular process creates the mother in which feminine identity is established and the primary narcissism is lost. One cannot both be adhere to the primary narcissism and absolute unity, the jouissance as Julia Kristeva says, and one’s role in the reproduction of the species.
Similarly identities such as refugees, undocumented people, the working class, war veterans, all happen via a process of loss and social exclusion and can never go back to their primary unity, their original desires. On the body of the lost mother can we build civilization, by transforming the “natural” into culture, the natural earth has to be lost in order for our survival, and give us the primary nourishment. Without the loss of this primary attachment, we cannot build our civilization. The solution is not top down therapy that constructs these identities as pathological nor the solution to change our evolutionary history via technology. We cannot go back to our primary narcissism and our absolute unity with the mother, but we can build communities across cultures and participate in the process of healing. Haraway thinks that building these communities are fictional and cannot happen. I, on the other hand, believe that a such communities that survived loss and traumatized can regain their sense of self via collective healing and sharing. Human civilization cannot go back to the primary narcissism, but we can fantasize it and at least mimic or via collective healing. The pandemic has led to a new culture of work from home, and the ideological dimension of the separation of “home” (oikos) and work (polis or the market) is exposed. Capitalism only values work that has an exchange value, while slave labor confines one in the “private”, capitalism incorporates the slave and women, and other identities, as the “other”. In advanced capitalism this inclusion is a brutal process, first these identities are pathologized and then they are offered therapy that are top down and not bottom up. A safe space is where one could actually talk about their experiences without being ridiculed and disbelieved. A safe space is “an environment in which everyone feels comfortable expressing themselves and participating fully, without fear of attack, ridicule, or denial of experience”. To create this one has to develop trust and safety. Together with this we add the more radical theory of brave space. Bravery is needed because learning necessarily involves not merely risk, but the pain of giving up a former condition in favor of a new way of seeing things”. Feminist methodologies of consciousness raising includes all of these. First women speak in safe spaces and then when they build collective trust, they speak in brave spaces. When marginalized groups slowly come face to face with their marginalization, what is needed is collective healing for true inclusion ,that does not mimic the older systems of “othering”. Collective healing is probably starting in the margins, and here we see the first glimmer of a truly inclusive polis