On the madness of lecturing on gender: a psychoanalytic discussion

Abstract

This essay comments on the emotional difficulties psychoanalytic discussion introduces to conceptualising the poesis of gender through its reconsideration of the valence of aggression and its development in psychical reality. It returns to the 1936 lectures on the emotional life of gender given by Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere to a public about to go to war. These psychoanalysts are known for representing ‘the mad side’ of gender and consider femininity and masculinity as lending emotional weight to the body and as one source for phantasy material that propels gender’s reach into symbolisation, conflicts, and intersubjectivity. Their views are brought into tension with Winnicott’s reconceptualisation of aggression in gender development. While historical questions on the relation between psychoanalytic theories of gender and the context of World War II are raised, Winnicott turns to a little war in the emotional life of gender to analyse traces of mental pain that its history leaves in its wake. He raises the new problem of the play between internal and external reality and how a one‐sided take on gender as either masculine or feminine as the entire experience and goal of the body forecloses attempts to understand the self’s gender work as both internal conflict and intersubjectivity. Loyalty to one side, or the defence of splitting into good and bad, itself the condition for war, has as one of its roots gender polarity. The madness of lecturing on gender resides in conveying this problem. My contribution leans on psychoanalytic allegory: that a return to historical discussion of psychoanalysis on the problems of representations of gender may allow reflection on our world of war and create elbow room needed to reconceptualise the currency, difficulties, and emotional obstacles repeated in contemporary pedagogical efforts and research.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• gender
• aggression
• phantasy

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was originally given as an invited keynote to the Gender and Education Association’s 7th International Conference in London, 25–27 March 2009.

Notes

1. André Green takes on the old word of ‘madness’ this way: ‘Rather than characterize it as a disorder of reason, one should on the contrary stress the affective passionate element which modifies the subject’s relation to reality, electing a part or whole object, becoming more or less exclusively attached to it, reorganizing his perception of the world around it, and giving it a unique or irreplaceable aura by which the ego is captivated and alienated’ (1986, 223). Its model is ordered by love, and the use of the term ‘madness’ in my essay follows along Green’s lines of research.

2. The psychoanalytic idea of aggression is drawn from the Freudian view of the life and death drives and the sadomasochistic element in psychical life. It can be thought of as an unconscious wish to destroy the object, although the unconscious logic behind this wish takes great force from any experience of frustration given the human’s long maturation process, primal dependency, and radical need for care. Aggression, however, is a needed element for identification and creativity. For a discussion of aggression in cultural life, see Freud (2002).

3. While it is beyond the scope of this paper, Riviere (1991b) further develops the emotional force of splitting masculinity and femininity when she writes about femininity as in conflict with intellectual desire that tends to be considered a masculine possession and in phantasy, a diminishment of femininity. One outcome of this symbolic collapse, she argues, is an exaggerated femininity, or ‘a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and retribution feared from men’ (1991b, 91).