In this paper feminist questions about an aspect of women's experience, namely aggressive fantasies, are framed in terms of psychoanalytic ideas. Elements of post-Jungian thought are then drawn into the discussion, re-casting psychoanalytic insights to produce a post-Jungian hermeneutic for reading women's aggressive fantasies.
Sue Austin is a psychotherapist working in private practice in Sydney, Australia. She is currently a candidate in the final stage of training with the C.G. Jung Institute of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Jungian Analysts, and is half way through writing a PhD on women's aggressive fantasies through the School of Studies in Religion at Sydney University.
Introduction
In this paper feminist questions about an aspect of women's experience, namely aggressive fantasies, are framed in terms of psychoanalytic ideas. Elements of post-Jungian thought are then drawn into the discussion, re-casting psychoanalytic insights to produce a post-Jungian hermeneutic for reading women's aggressive fantasies (1). In traditional Jungian terms this might be regarded as an examination of how the construction of 'femininity' undermines womens' individuation.
The Inner Critic and Resistance to Identity
While discussing what she refers to as the 'fictioning of femininity', Valerie Walkerdine quotes Jacqueline Rose: '[F]eminism's affinity with psychoanalysis rests above all, I would argue, with [the] recognition that there is a resistance to identity which lies at the very core of psychic life' (Walkerdine, 1990, p.103).
This issue of resistance to identity is crucial when considering the nature of subjective experience, and women's subjectivity in particular since 'woman' has traditionally been constructed as 'other' in cultural discourse. As has been articulated extensively by feminism over the last few decades, to be 'other' in this way is to be at odds with one's subjectivity. One of the common manifestations of this experience was described to me by a patient as 'living life with one eye watching yourself on closed-circuit TV, accompanied by a ruthlessly attacking commentary from an invisible, nameless critic who has the authority of God'.
Experiences associated with living with these phenomena have been documented in feminist literature and are increasingly being taken up by the media and popular psychology, usually in the service of 'women's self-esteem issues'. One of the clearest articulators of the raw phenomena, however, is Doris Lessing who, in 1969, described an interaction between the character Martha Quest and 'her inner critic' thus:
Martha was crying out - sobbing, groveling; she was being wracked by emotion. Then one of the voices detached itself and came close to her inner ear: it was loud, or it was soft; it was jaunty, or it was intimately jeering, but its abiding quality was an antagonism, a dislike of Martha: and Martha was crying out against it - she needed to apologise, to beg for forgiveness, she needed to please and to buy absolution: she was groveling on the carpet, weeping, while the voice uttered accusations of hatred (Demaris Wehr, (1987, p.19) quoting from Doris Lessing, 1969, p.518).
Usually, feminist analysis of this kind of material is given in terms of it being a psychic embed which occurs as a near-inevitable result of women growing up in a patriarchy. The common (feminist and non-feminist) assumption is that if a woman simply learns to 'love herself enough', develop enough 'good internal objects', come to terms with her 'inner masculine', or whatever, either the inner critic will stop, or the woman will somehow be better able to stand up to it (2). I would argue, however, that these experiences are more complex than is usually allowed for and that they say something important about women's experiences of, and fantasies around power, aggression, visibility, agency, and much more besides.
It needs to be made clear that I am not suggesting that such experiences are somehow 'good for women' or 'part of women's essential nature'. Nor am I refuting the notion that, to some degree (possibly in large part), they may be to do with women's experience of life under patriarchy. I am simply more interested in questioning what women can do with these experiences to turn them into something which serves their own interests.
Perhaps the phenomena in question could usefully be regarded as aspects of women's resistance to identity which, as Rose points out, lies at the core of psychic life. Again, this statement is not essentialist, it is simply an attempt to frame observed phenomena in such a way as to make meaningful exploration of them possible.
Splitting and Social Reinforcement of Splits
The resistance to identity which Rose refers to is a discomforting, unsettling, potentially tormenting thing which uproots our attempts to build an illusion of coherence, or makes us suffer for our pains when we try to build it. Here, experience is a coalescing, fragmenting, kaleidescoping uncertainty around identity, with discomfort as a constant and a given.
A way of managing this level of experience is to channel the terror associated with it into socially sanctioned forms backed by the institutions and discursive practices which support and perpetuate them. Thus moving beyond these structures may not be as straightforward as it at first seems. Part of what societal violence towards women offers is a way of locating the instability, danger and madness 'out-there'. None of it is 'in-here', 'inside us', or 'inside me', particularly if 'I' happen to be a member of a socially privileged group. A strong case can be made for the position that women do this as a result of living under a patriarchally defined gender-regime. But that does not facilitate change. It is a position which once understood needs to moved beyond, otherwise it becomes self-victimisation. The question is, how?
The curious thing about female identity is that it is so clearly learnt, a fact which makes it both interesting and disconcerting. Walkerdine points out that Freud commented '[T]he constitution [of the little girl] will not adapt itself to its function [heterosexual femininity] without a struggle (Freud 1933, p.117)', (Walkerdine, 1990, p.88) and Judith Butler (1990) argues that female identity is one of the places in social discourse where the extent to which identity (in this case gender identity) is performance is most obvious. To take the argument further we need to look at work done on how girls learn to be women. Specifically of interest is how girls learn to fabricate an illusion of coherent 'feminine' identity which offers them significant defences against the experiences which arise from a fundamental resistance to identity.
Canalisation of Female Desire and Jouissance-Like Phenomena
Walkerdine's work on the overt and covert practices of pedagogy provides a useful illustration of the way in which social practices embedded in gender-discourse canalise experience. Along the lines of Foucault's work on the social construction of the subject, Walkerdine draws out how women's desires are shaped so that they function in the interests of others (i.e., for a society dominated by male interests) rather than in their own best interests. One of her projects has been to look at the narrative structures offered for the management of desire (and any other strong feelings) in magazines aimed at early adolescent girls.
From her analysis Walkerdine concludes that 'if we want to understand the production of girls as subjects and the production of alternatives for girls, we must pay attention to desire and fantasy. It is no good resorting to a rationalist account which consists simply of changing images and attitudes' (Walkerdine, 1990, p.104). Following this thread of how girls are taught to be girls, Walkerdine looks at how girls are trained to behave in classrooms and the purposes this training serves. She points out that for a classroom to operate in a calm, orderly and smooth way, it is useful to have a number of 'helpful' children (almost invariably girls) in the class. Yet in private interviews:
Many female teachers openly despise the very qualities of helpfulness and careful, neat work which at the same time they constantly demanded from their pupils, often holding up the work books of such girls as examples, or reprimanding the boys for not behaving like the 'responsible' girls. Yet they would simultaneously present such characteristics in the girls as a problem. Furthermore, it was common for female teachers to dislike intensely the girls who displayed them. They would describe them as 'boring', 'wet', and 'wishy-washy'. Such girls had no 'spark', 'fire', or brilliance'. Yet it is such girls who had become these teachers. When describing themselves as children or making reference to girls who reminded them of themselves, it was precisely such qualities that they discussed (ibid., p.75).
These female teachers are split from their own experience of spark and brilliance. Consequently, they cannot tolerate such qualities in the girls they teach. The transgressive, demanding behaviour generally associated with such qualities is admired when it occurs in boys, but not when it occurs in girls. Such behaviour in girls is 'un-feminine' and (at best) regrettable. At worst it becomes directly threatening and must be stopped by constructing it as inextricably linked with unfeminine, unacceptable traits Walkerdine cites an example of a girl who is regarded by a (male) teacher as ' "interested in ideas and abstract problems", "a great problem solver, natural talent". She is "constantly trying out ideas"; this makes her "lazy, selfish" ' (ibid., p.78).
The demanding, greedy, selfish qualities of such talents in girls are intolerable for these teachers, male and female alike. Girls are supposed to be feminine; that is part of what makes them girls: it is a circular definition. Yet to stay within role is to despise oneself, and to despise others who do the same. At this point we see a link to the phenomenon of the internal critic.
The pleasures of breaking up ideas, smashing through systems of thought, cracking the bones of someone else's work are not seemly for a girl. Wresting a solution from a stubborn and lumpish problem is not acceptable. Things are even worse if the solution is clever or nimble: somehow that implies dubious moral fibre if the protagonist is female.
I would suggest that when we try to produce alternatives for girls we run up against the levels of experience Lacan referred to as jouissance (3). Suspending for a moment the debate about the nature and existence of female jouissance, we might start from some simple definitions based on Lacan's later work:
The symbolic prohibition of enjoyment in the Oedipus complex (the incest taboo) is thus, paradoxically, the prohibition of something which is already impossible; its function is therefore to sustain the neurotic illusion that enjoyment would be attainable if it were not forbidden. The very prohibition creates the desire to transgress it, and jouissance is therefore fundamentally transgressive (Evans, 1996, p.92).Lacan develops his classic opposition between jouissance and pleasure, an opposition which alludes to the Hegelian/Kojevian distinction between Genuß (enjoyment) and Lust (pleasure). The pleasure principle functions as a limit to enjoyment; it is a law which commands the subject to 'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go 'beyond the pleasure principle'. However, the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful pleasure' is what Lacan calls jouissance; 'jouissance is suffering'. The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suffering he derives from his own satisfaction (Freud's primary gain from illness') (ibid.)
While the 'closed-circuit TV/critic' phenomenon can be seen as a fantasy attempt to bring the experience of being the object of Foucault's Panopticon gaze under control, the perspective which emerges from the above synopses of Lacan's model offers a different insight. From this point of view such fantasies might become an attempt to have a taboo fantasy about being seen, being the object of fascination, and of being looked on with desire. If the subject matter of the fantasy is taboo, the transgressive impulse at the core of the fantasy has to be converted into something painful, something which prevents fulfillment.
This would seem to fit with the masturbatory, and indeed, unconsummative fantasy of beauty and desirability offered to us by women's magazines. A narrow (to the point of fetishised), fictional account of desirability and beauty is offered to women which is almost universally unobtainable (and from any sane point of view, actually undesirable). With this toy, women can play endlessly with the edges of the potentially transgressive fantasy of being desirable, and suffer mightily for it in the form of disappointment and sense of inadequacy. As with jouissance, the suffering and the satisfaction are threaded inextricably together. Thus if feminist discourse is to provide alternative notions of subjectivity for girls, it needs to engage with the neurotic illusion of enjoyment, the nature of its forbiddeness, and the transgressive impulses it invokes.
I am not arguing that women are essentially masochistic and deserve the advertising industry as some sort of cruel play-mate. Indeed Walkerdine's researches into the narrative structures of cartoon stories in adolescent girl's magazines explore how an advertising-receptive female subjectivity is formed. In these stories (taken from mid-1980s magazines), girls' desire and ambition are only tolerable when held on behalf of others, or in the role of supporting others. One of the most commonly recurring themes was of the immensely high moral value placed on girls showing super-human tolerance for cruelty, discomfort and being the object of attack: being 'good' will win through. What is more, what will be won is a paradoxical and impossible prize: a secret sense of goodness at the core of one's being which will be evident to some judging, God-like figure, while unknown to the people one deals with in life, lest it make them uncomfortable, or feel inadequate. Walkerdine's point is that these stories are an example par excellence of how female adolescent desire can be canalised along socially acceptable lines.
My argument is that, in the light of Lacan's analysis, this entwined relationship between desire and suffering is easy to exploit. Unless, that is, one becomes more familiar with the transgressive desires which women usually prefer to let society canalise into shapes which produce sitting ducks as advertising targets. Therein, I would argue, lies a possible response to Walkerdine's question of how might we begin to think about alternative subjectivities for girls.
As Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen argue however, feminism has failed to look for an 'unsymbolized signifier that would allow girls access to desire and the symbolic code' (Gamman and Mekinen, 1994, p.108). Consequently, an exploration of the experiences out of which notions of this unsymbolised signifier might develop is called for.
If, as David Miller points out through the work of Barthes, pleasure (plaisir) ' "contents, fills, grants euphoria", "does not break with culture", "is linked to what is comfortable, -is connective while jouissance imposes as state of loss discomforts unsettles assumptions [leaves] nothing . . . the same" ', (Miller, 1990, p.326) we could say that Walkerdine's school girls are offered by their female teachers a fantasy of plaisir if they learn their roles well and excel within their narrow definition. What is not allowed is the jouissance of rigorous engagement with anything, ideas in particular. Clearly excluded is the kind of engagement that means that nothing is left the same, that what was assumed to be true may get knocked to bits. The taboo for these girls is aggression, most clearly visible here as the kind of aggression which accompanies spirit and brilliance.
Actually, the situation is a little more complex: what is offered as plaisir as a reward to those who behave themselves is not quite what it seems. It is not possible to be nice enough, thoughtful enough or kind enough to claim plaisir from the 'feminine' role. But here we find ourselves back at the possibility of jouissance: the satisfaction derived from the symptom, and the suffering derived from satisfaction. The pursuit of a secret sense of goodness offers endless possibilities for torturing oneself and others, be they with an eating disorder, the self-hating internal critic, or whatever. Thus perhaps the pursuit of plaisir is subverted into something which glimpses jouissance. The problem is that this is a jouissance which cannot be recognised as such: it operates as a perverse passion and accesses the thrill of destruction in a compulsively repetitious and trivialising way.
Female Jouissance?
For Lacan, the pleasure that is women's jouissance lies in what goes beyond the phallic fantasy of totalization on the part of the male (i.e., lies beyond his fantasy of 'the' woman) (Wright, 1992, p.197). Let us speculate then, that the unsymbolized signifier that would allow women access to desire and the symbolic code lies in the realm of what is outside of the social definition of 'the' woman, where impulses towards selfishness, greed and above all aggression can be mobilised.
In the post-Kleinian world, the notion that the ability to tolerate and respond creatively to one's aggressive impulses is tied to the experience of a sense of agency. If this is accurate, the realm of aggressive fantasy could provide a vehicle for women to develop an increased sense of agency, one of the core interests of the feminist movement.
David Hart provides a useful illustration when he discusses his work with a male client who had a 'serious problem with passive-aggressive behaviour', and who saw himself as 'a victim'.
This man was on vacation far away from home and from analysis, in fact on a trek in the mountains of Nepal, when a decisive event occurred. He was resting in a mountain pass over an abyss when there walked by him a Sherpa carrying an immense load of baggage. My client had a sudden, almost over-powering urge to push this little man off the pass and into the abyss. He struggled with the temptation and the moment passed: the Sherpa went by. But he was left with a shattering realisation of what he could actually do to another person, not merely, as before, of what others were always doing to him. He had a new and vivid sense of himself as the agent of his life and not merely as a reactive victim (Hart, 1997, p.97, emphasis added).
Note the link between an experience of one's own destructive potential and a sense of agency. This agency entails a sense of being able to effect change in one's life and move towards what one wants in a way which is experienced as meaningful. Sense of agency, based on an awareness of one's own capacity for destructiveness, offers a way out of the position of habitual victim.
The problem is that, as we have seen, part of the definition of female gender identity hinges on the exclusion of aggression. Indeed the common criticism of feminism is that 'feminists are too butch, too aggressive'. Perhaps, however, these comments (although undoubtedly based on the insecurities of those threatened by women no longer being submissive and docile) have a story to tell. Maybe the problem is not that 'feminism makes women aggressive', but that it has yet to develop mature models of aggression which serve women and help them to develop a sense of agency (4).
To move beyond this is to step into (or, more likely, fling or hurl oneself onto) something which cannot be expressed within the performance of 'feminine' womanhood. Perhaps this is female jouissance. It certainly lies beyond the socially circulated phallic fantasy of female identity and where it fits into the 'natural' order of things.
Resistance to Identity Revisited
One of the questions Walkerdine goes on to ask is: '[W]hat is the struggle which results from the attempt to be or live as a unitary identity?' (Walkerdine, 1990, p.103). As has been discussed, aggressive fantasy seems to be one of the places where women refuse their role. It is here that the transgressive, disruptive qualities associated with jouissance start to become visible, implying links between the capacity for aggressive fantasy and sense of individuality, if not agency.
How does resistance to identity actually manifest? Giles Clark, while exploring the complex, unconscious aims which motivate people to investigate therapy outlines the following:
. . . by 'change' I mean the desire to change impotent, stuck, defensive and/or repetitive patterns. Under this there is a desire not to change even to have one's neurotic defences affirmed and strengthened. .. . By 'understanding' I mean the desire to have another person to see into and know one at depth. Under this, as Winnicott says, there is a desire not to be seen, to be unknown and hidden, to maintain a precious secret core. . . . By 'self-preservation' I mean the desire not to fall to bits, not to lose control or go mad. To preserve a sense of self and self-esteem. Under this there is a need to collapse, to lose control and to break down.. . . The fourth motivating aim for seeking psychotherapy is the (fantastic) desire for an absolute and eternal loving relationship, to be loved and to love absolutely and for ever. Hopefully, this omnipotent, infantile illusion . . . will be challenged and transformed by the disillusioning realities and necessities of human nature and relations (Clark, 1995, p.345).
From this we catch a glimpse of the mass of tensions which underlie not only the decision whether or not to embark on therapy, but perhaps the whole of identity.
Dissociability
Since resistance to identity is our core concern, theories which provide ways of viewing this as not being necessarily pathological will be of interest. Gary Hartman comments that Freud was aware of the dissociative split in libido, but saw it as pathological and pathogenic, while Jung saw it as normal and the natural prerequisite for the movement of psychic energy. Clark's comments (above) imply a post-Jungian acceptance of non-pathological refusal of psychological coherence, with part of the task of analysis being gaining some consciousness of it.
While Freud saw dissociation as pathological, the dissociationists who influenced Jung saw it as an exaggeration of the normal (Meier, 1992, p.201). This difference in perspectives has powerful implications and Sonu Shamdasani has argued that locating Jung as primarily a Freudian thinker who broke away misses the point of much of Jung's work. Shamdasani traces the influence of Janet's work on Jung (through Flournoy) and offers strong evidence that Jung's model was far closer to the French dissociationist tradition than it was to Freud's work (Shamdasani, 1998b).
Carl Meier points out that 'many impressions are obliterated in the moment of perception on account of their incompatibility with the habitual attitude of the conscious mind; this seems to occur automatically and unconsciously' (Meier, 1992, p.205). These ego-distonic impression cluster together to create centres of 'Not-I-ness' in the psyche (complexes), hence Jung's taking up of two principles in line with the dissociationist perspective: '1) recognizing and attending to the "Not-I" and, 2) allowing the time necessary for the characteristics and personality of the "Not-I" to emerge' (Hartman).
Thus for Jung, the psyche was fundamentally dissociable. The benefit of this model was that, as Richard Noll argues, it allowed the 'expansion of the personality through greater differentiation' of its contents; it was seen as 'an adaptive move', but one which 'creates an inevitable instability' (Noll, 1992, p.213). At this point we can begin to see why the dissociationist model of the psyche which Jung inherited and developed might offer something to a feminist project based on a fundamental resistance to identity. Of particular interest is the fact that this is a model with an inherent instability at the core of it, which is seen as having creative potential. Hence we could say that the elements of complex-based psychological experience we are interested in are the (meaningful) symptoms of the struggle between resistance to identity and the need to create a level of coherent identity (or at least the illusion of it) which permits day-to-day life to be engaged with. The post-Jungian, dissociationist perspective on this struggle is that for normal psychological development, relationships need to develop between the 'I' and the 'Not-I'. Furthermore, elements of the 'Not-I' exist in clusters, each of which has something akin to a personality of its own. As an example, we might re-consider the man on the pass, wanting to push the Sherpa to his death. The impulse to do this was way outside of the man's 'I', but 'I' needed to come into relationship with the impulses of this part of the 'Not-I' (and the destructive character of it) in order to move forward and mature.
This way of thinking about the 'Not-I' offers an imaginal embodiment of it, capturing the fleshy compulsiveness of the impulses in question. Clearly a danger is that the 'Not-I' may become over-characterised to such a degree that sense of responsibility for it is undermined. Avoiding that extreme, however, provides a model in which instability and conflict have to co-habit with coherence within identity.
Change, Death and Destruction
To lose or abandon the struggle for a unitary identity completely is to move into madness or a form of death: death of the 'I' that wrestles with what it is to be me. To become over-identified with a unitary identity is to become trapped in a fiction. That fiction also becomes death unless something interrupts it. Given that the stakes of this struggle are so high, its presence is likely to be visible as emotionally highly-charged, split-off fantasies, images, terrors and pleasures. It is a battle which, by its nature, usually takes place on the edges of consciousness so that it appears primarily in dreams, fantasies, hallucinations which take up the conflicts, cracks or gaps in the apparent continuity of the fabric of identity.
Here we return again to Walkerdine's initial comments on the psychoanalytic insight into resistance to identity, and add a Lacanian-psychoanalytic elaboration which links jouissance with death.
The death drive is the name given to that constant desire in the subject to break through the pleasure principle towards the thing [the object of desire] and a certain excess of jouissance; thus jouissance is 'the path towards death' . . . Insofar as the drives are attempts to break through the pleasure principle in search of jouissance, every drive is a death drive (Evans, 1996, p.92).
Surrender to the transgressive drive of resistance to identity is a form of death; it is also a search for jouissance.
A post-Jungian dissociationist-based reading of the situation of the man on the pass might run as follows. Change was affected in the protagonist by a flash of fantasy which broke through his notion of coherent self-identity (i.e., 'victim'). What was particularly important about this fantasy was that in an instant the protagonist became acquainted with his desire to destroy. Not only that, but the desire he encountered was the desire to destroy another human being in an act of senseless violence. The crucial thing about this fantasy is that it was not acted upon it was reflected on, and the 'Not-I' it contained was explored. Quite apart from the moral unacceptability of acting on such an impulse, action would have destroyed the possibility of psychological change. It was precisely because the protagonist had done enough analytic work for the fantasy to be able to break though and then be sat with that change occurred.
In terms of providing a theory to frame this, we might look to the work of Sabina Spielrein, who argued that destruction is the cause of coming into being. Her argument stems from the observation that the sexual drive contains the instinct for destruction, inextricably linked with the instinct for transformation (Spielrein, 1994, p.155).
Thus one cannot experience the desire to create without experiencing the desire to destroy. This is what Walkerdine's female teachers could not bear in their girl pupils, and it is why aggressive fantasy is so important to women. It is something which Jung refers to:
women often pick up tremendously [in therapy] when they are allowed to think all the disagreeable things which they had denied themselves before (via Douglas, 1990, p.77) (5).
I would suggest, however, that if the client who wanted to push the Sherpa off the track had been female, few indeed would be the analysts who would follow Jung's dictum and work with it in the productive way Hart did with his male client. More commonly, women are pathologised for their anger or elaborate justification is given for it, rendering women's aggressive fantasies an aberration.
