Neglected or Misunderstood Read online

  This discrimination of political value between the theory and the therapy of psychoanalysis has a long history in radical cultural theory, and it attempts to show that while the latter is a bourgeois individualistic practice, the former has a revolutionary potential, since it points to the existence of some enclave within the self (the unconscious, the drives) that has not been colonized by the logic of patriarchal capitalism and that threatens to turn rebellious against its oppressor. Whatever one thinks of this proposition (and the psychoanalytic categories it employs) there is surely something very relevant today about the critique of psychological therapy, or at least the particular form that it often takes. In both the US and the UK today, someone suffering from psychological distress is more likely to receive cognitive behavioral than psychoanalytic therapy, but Firestone’s charge perhaps applies just as well. Such therapies focus upon the individual, seeing the locus of the problem as being within them, in their difficulty adjusting to particular realities. Whether there might be realities to which one precisely ought not to adjust – of racial discrimination, for example, or poverty – is not a question that falls within the purview of the analysis or practice. Individuals are asked to change how they think and feel about the world, rather than to think about whether or how that world ought to change. In British higher education there is currently a vogue for training in “resilience,” which means helping students and staff to cope with their stress. No matter how well-intentioned the trainers, it is a “solution” to an increasingly widespread psychological distress (anxiety and depression) that displaces attention from likely structural causes – student debt, graduate unemployment, and proliferating workloads and precarious employment in higher education – and onto the individuals themselves and their capacity to endure the intolerable.

  The family and power

  In Firestone’s reinterpretation of Freudian categories, it is power dynamics that are decisive. She writes that it is only through the filter of feminism that Freudianism makes sense. The Oedipus and Electra complexes and “penis envy” shed their logical inconsistencies and manifest absurdities only when considered from the point of view of the operation of domination within the patriarchal family. I will argue, however, that the absurdities of which she accuses Freud are in large part a consequence of her rather incautious reading of him, and that her feminist ‘restatement’ of psychoanalysis (56) actually amounts to a junking of its fundamental concepts. But I shall also argue that this does not matter, for what is really of value in Firestone’s discussion of Freud is not the “Freud” part at all, but what she has to say about the family.

  Let’s take the Oedipus complex. Firestone introduces this as ‘the cornerstone of Freudian theory, in which the male child is said to want to possess his mother sexually and to kill his father’ (43). She grants that a boy (Freud means children under six) will desire his mother, but objects:

  it is absurd what Freud’s literalism can lead to. The child does not actively dream of penetrating his mother. Chances are he cannot yet even imagine how one would go about such an act. Nor is he physically developed enough to have a need for orgasmic release. (46)

  The problem here, however, is not so much Freud’s literalism as Firestone’s. Freud does not mean that the small boy knows what penetrative sex is or has the desire to accomplish this; he means that the boy behaves as a jealous lover. Because the mother is his primary care-giver, she is the object of his most intense longing, and he desires to have the mother’s affection entirely to himself, to have at his constant disposal her attention and her physical caresses and to share these with no one else. Nor does Freud make the mistake of thinking that the infant wishes to “kill” his father, in the sense of the word that an adult would understand. This intense love of the mother makes the father appear in the light of a rival, whether because he intervenes to separate the child from his mother or because his mother also shows him (the father) her affection. Freud writes starkly in The Interpretation of Dreams that the child who formulates a wish for his father to be dead has no conception of corpses in the ground or not existing forever. In his imperfect understanding, typically gleaned from a grandparent’s decease, to be “dead” means only to be gone, and the child is certainly capable in his passionate jealousy of forming this wish in relation to his father, even though it is likely to coexist with an attitude of love towards his father and a paradoxical desire for his presence and affection too.

  But Firestone insists that the Oedipus complex makes sense only when read metaphorically, by which she means in terms of power. The boy desires his mother, but more importantly he also identifies with her, since she is like him in her powerlessness. In the prototypical nuclear family, says Firestone, the husband/father is the breadwinner, and:

  all other members of this family are thus his dependents. He agrees to support a wife in return for her services: housekeeping, sex, and reproduction. The children whom she bears for him are even more dependent. They are legally the property of the father … whose duty it is to feed them and educate them, to ‘mold’ them to take their place in whatever class of society to which he belongs. (44)

  She is actually here describing the family of the late-nineteenth century, but subsequent sentences establish that the nuclear family in its more recent versions is not fundamentally changed, consisting of ‘essentially the same triangle of dependencies’ (44). Firestone acknowledges that the modern wife, unlike her Victorian forebears, may be highly educated and in employment, but claims that her dependency on her husband remains, reinforced by legal and economic arrangements, but driven ultimately (as always) by her role in reproduction:

  she is rarely able, given the inequality of the job market, to make as much money as her husband (and woe betide the marriage in which she does). But even if she could, later, when she bears children and takes care of infants, she is once again totally incapacitated. (44)

  The child born into such a structure ‘is sensitive to the hierarchy of power’ (44). She/he understands that they are completely dependent upon the two parents, but they also see that it is the father who is in ‘total control,’ and that the mother resides ‘halfway between authority and helplessness’ (45). The boy child sees ‘in most cases’ that the father bullies his mother and makes her unhappy, and as such he bonds with his mother in their shared oppression. But he also comes to understand that this identification binds him to that oppression. Since he is precisely a male child, his father, whom at first the boy is likely to fear as a distant and authoritarian figure, will come to offer him a place in the privileged world of the male – what Firestone calls, quoting Erich Fromm, ‘the exciting world of “travel and adventure.”’ ‘Most children aren’t fools,’ writes Firestone. ‘They don’t plan to be stuck with the lousy limited lives of women’ (47). So the boy has to ‘“repress”’ (Firestone’s quotation marks) his attachment to his mother and his hostility to his father: he has to ‘abandon and betray his mother and join ranks with her oppressor’ (47). It is a betrayal that will leave him guilt-ridden, and that will distort his relationships to women in adulthood, to whom he will relate through the ‘good/bad women syndrome, with which whole cultures are diseased’ (54). Good women resemble the mother, and as such cannot be the objects of sexual feelings. Those women who do elicit such feelings must therefore be bad. ‘A good portion of our language degrades women to the level where it is permissible to have sexual feelings for them,’ she notes (54).

  Firestone thus rewrites the Freudian Oedipal drama in terms of the dynamics of power that operate within the bourgeois family unit. She does a similar thing when it comes to the sexual development of the girl. The Electra Complex (in fact, Freud hardly uses this term) occurs, according to Firestone, when the little girl, who also initially loves her mother more than her father, transfers her identification to her father and ‘rejects her mother as dull and familiar’ (48). She does so because of her awareness that her father has access to a wider world of experience than does her mother,
and just like the boy, she desires this world for herself. If a girl should see a penis (perhaps her brother’s) and wish that she had one, this is not because there is anything enviable about this protuberance of flesh in itself. Rather, as an obvious physical difference between herself and the brother whom she has come to perceive is valued more highly than herself, and given greater freedoms, it takes on the power of explaining this differential treatment. Firestone here anticipates a great deal of feminist psychoanalytic work which, refusing simply to dismiss “penis envy” as laughable male fantasy, instead interprets it in social rather than biological or purely psychological terms. The penis is envied not for itself, but for the privilege that in a patriarchal culture it seems to the child to symbolize or even obscurely explain.

  Nothing of what is said here about the shaping of a child’s mind within a structure of gender-based domination seems to me implausible. But nor does it seem particularly Freudian. I agree here with psychoanalytic feminist, Juliet Mitchell, and with Rosemary Delmar (editor of the 1979 edition of the Dialectic), both of whom argue that Firestone actually sidelines the key ideas of psychoanalysis, such as the unconscious and the strength of irrationality.43 Freud had theorized that rationality took only the smaller share in the functioning of our minds. To a much larger degree our attitudes and actions are motivated by ideas and wishes that are hidden to us, that perhaps have their origins in an early infancy that has been distanced from us not only through the passing of time but more significantly through a repression that sinks “unacceptable” recollections into a sea of amnesia, but that survive and have influence through a chain of unconscious associations, images and memories. As such, for him, much of what we feel and do is precisely irrational, because the forces that induce us so to think or act lie beyond the reach of our consciousness and therefore our capacity rationally to sort or assess them. But there is not much sense of this in the ‘Freudianism’ that emerges after Firestone’s ‘restatement’ of it. In fact, as Mitchell and Delmar also note, the choices made by the little boy and girl of Firestone’s re-descriptions appear as largely conscious and eminently rational responses to their circumstances. It is not that psychoanalytic concepts have been reformulated, or alternatively interrogated and refuted, but that they have been in large part eschewed in favor of an analysis that could proceed perfectly well without them.

  The insecure, aggressive/defensive, obnoxious little person we call a child

  For Firestone, the family, as the institutionalization of a gendered imbalance of power, must inevitably produce relationships that harm those within them. But this is in many ways not really the fault of mothers or even fathers, since the psychological damage they themselves accrued as children means they really cannot help but return the favor. Boy children, asked to turn away in contempt from their mothers and sisters, become adult men who must maintain this precarious superiority through assertions of ego, and who invest in their own children as securing ‘that continuation of name and property which is often confused with immortality’ (44). Mothers, meanwhile, having their access to the world beyond the home severely curtailed, make their children the center of their lives, placing upon them an intolerable burden, especially as the child grows and desires for itself a sphere of freedom outside of parental/maternal control. Laurie Penny has noted the reluctance of most feminists to acknowledge ‘the real harm done by women as well as men in the domestic sphere,’ as mothers ‘have handed down suffering, guilt and the expectation of patriarchal servitude to their children.’44 But Firestone is a clear-sighted exception here. She insists upon how, for as long as women are valued in a patriarchal culture primarily for their role in raising men’s heirs, mothers will have a powerful motivation to keep children in a situation of dependency – since when they no longer need her, what then is her justification in life?

  Indeed, as we shall explore further in Chapter 8, Firestone sees “childhood” itself as a construct, and one according to which the dependence of young people upon parents is artificially prolonged. A large part of the problem, she seems to be saying, is that both parents live vicariously through the child, instrumentalizing him or her as something through which their own lives may be validated. In fact, Firestone observes, both fathers and mothers all too often relate to the child as property: as an extension of their own selves, and thus as something in relation to which they have rights of ownership. The term ‘family,’ she notes, ‘was first used by the Romans to denote a social unit the head of which ruled over wife, children, and slaves’ (67). Childhood is thus a state of subjection to the needs and the will of others. ‘Childhood is hell,’ writes Firestone, and ‘The result is the insecure, and therefore aggressive/defensive, often obnoxious little person we call a child’ (93).

  Racism: the cultural pathology of the family?

  For Firestone, however, the biological family with its unequal power dynamics produces not just individual but also cultural pathologies. In Firestone’s analysis, as we have seen, sex oppression is the first (historical) oppression, and it has generated subsequent oppressions. According to her, the power enjoyed by men that results from women’s dependence, leads them to produce further groupings of people to dominate. Sexism, therefore, causally produces both economic class and ideas of “caste” and “race.” It is racism rather than economic oppression to which she dedicates sustained analysis, however, in a chapter that argues that ‘Racism is sexism extended’ (97).

  Firestone develops this thesis by pointing to what she calls the ‘analogy’ (99) between the nuclear family and American society conceived along the lines of “race.” The position of black people within this family, she argues, is that of the children of the nuclear family, while the position of white men is that of the patriarchal father, and white women that of wife and mother. The psychological pathologies of domination, identification and betrayal that she argues operate within the Oedipal triangle of the family operate too, she thinks, at this larger scale. White women ‘tend to trust and sympathize with black men’ since they see that they too are relatively powerless; although sometimes they are led to side with the white man in his racism in the hope of thereby attaining his approval (99). The black man, however, faces the dilemma of the male child in the nuclear family: he is torn between reciprocal identification with white women and the desire to assert his own claim to patriarchal status, and often responds by ‘degrading’ white women in an attempt to show that, if he cannot be ‘a “man” in the eyes of white society, at least he is not a woman’ (101). The situation of the black woman, meanwhile, is that of being doubly exploited: by black men, who desire that she become the ‘traditional passive female’ as a ‘negative backdrop’ against which their own assertions of masculinity may be more forcefully made; and by white men, who construct her as the ‘Whore’ who – in contrast to the white Mother – is sufficiently degraded to be the object of sexual desire (110, 104).

  The chapter in which this thesis is elaborated – entitled, ‘Racism: The Sexism of the Family of Man’ – is the weakest of Firestone’s book. It has been rightly taken to task. Hortense Spillers, for example, has criticized Firestone for restricting her consideration of non-white women to just a single chapter, and for employing “woman” elsewhere in the book as ‘a universal and unmodified noun [which] does not mean them.’45 When Firestone does discuss black women, Spillers notes, she ‘actually reinforces the very notions of victimization that she claims she would undo,’ denying them effective political agency by ‘overstating [and] misstating the black female “condition.”’ And Spillers takes issue with Firestone for her ‘disdainfully sustained’ account of the Black Nationalist Movement as ‘only the last picture show of domination.’ In another important critique, Angela Y. Davis has interrogated the way that Firestone’s use of the Oedipal model constructs black men as ‘harbor[ing] an uncontrollable desire for sexual relations with white women.’46 Davis identifies Firestone as one of several white feminists who, ‘whether innocently or consciously [
have] facilitated the resurrection of the timeworn myth of the Black rapist.’

  These criticisms are well-founded; and indeed, still others might be made. The chapter is startlingly presumptuous in the hugely generalizing claims it makes about what black men and women feel. Firestone proposes, for example, that black men feel ‘an even greater bitterness’ about the racism of white women as opposed to white men, since the former ‘betokens a betrayal by the Mother’ (99). These passages are also suggestive of a desire to exculpate white women of racism. Her claim that white women and black men ‘have a special bond in oppression’ which accounts for white women’s support of the historical ‘abolitionist movement’ and the ‘present black movement’ presents a distortingly selective history that occludes, for example, the opposition of nineteenth-century white feminists to black men gaining the suffrage before them (98).47 And to the extent that she does acknowledge the racism of white women she calls this an ‘inauthentic form of racism,’ since it ‘arises from a false class consciousness’ – the illusion that the white woman’s and the white man’s interests are the same (99, my italics). Firestone’s very thesis that racism is sexism extended in fact characterizes racism as essentially masculine: as originating with white men, and as constituting only a secondary phenomenon in white women.