Alexander - Feminist History and Psychoanalysis

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Feminist History and PsychoanalysisAuthor(s): Sally AlexanderReviewed work(s):Source: History Workshop, No. 32 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 128-133Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289106 .

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Feminist History and Psychoanalysis

by Sally Alexander

Feminist history has been slow to draw on psychoanalysis - which is oddgiven the - to some extent - shared preoccupations of psychoanalysis and the

women's movement. Who they were was of absorbing interest to the

Women's Liberation Movement in Britain and the USA in the late 1960s and

early 1970s. The first British national Women's Liberation Conference held

at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970 was a history conference.1 If feminist

scholarship in the USA was literary and radical feminist, then English

feminist scholarship was historical, its polemic socialist and humanist.

Women's history in the early nineteen seventies sprang from that utopian

and romantic disposition - 200 years old -which sought to tell women's

stories in their own words, to invent new vocabularies for women, and to

re-map the divisions between the personal and political.2 This disposition

reaches back to the feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft - at least - which

struggled to reconcile a reformed femininity with the revolutionary notion of

a democratic political subject.3 Feminist history's first self-designated task -

to recover women's experiences - involved, and was swiftly followed by, the

ambition to transform the whole body of historical knowledge.4

That first wish of feminist history - to fill the gaps and silences of writtenhistory, to uncover new meanings for femininity and women, to propel

sexuality to the forefront of the political mind - shares some of the intentions

and scope of psychoanalysis. Whether the unconscious is traced through the

familiar routes of the early Freud, via slips, jokes, dreams and symptoms; or

installed in primal fantasy as Melanie Klein suggested; or inferred, following

Jacques Lacan, from the gaps, silences, absences in speech, what is central

to both feminism and psychoanalysis is the discovery of a subjective history

through image, symbol and language. There is a close proximity between the



Feminist History and Psychoanalysis 129

concept of the unconscious and the unspoken histories of women's lives at

the very foundation of psychoanalysis. In an encyclopaedia entry of 1923,Freud begins with the relationship between doctor (Josef Breuer of Vienna)and patient (Anna 0) as the 'best way of understanding psychoanalysis'.5 Bylistening to the hysteric and allowing her to speak, Freud uncovered the

place of memory and female desire in the aetiology of hysteria, and shifted

the constellation of neurosis from women's bodies to the centre of psychiclife.6

The coincidence of the appearance of psychoanalysis with the gathering

of the women's movement in Europe and the USA at the turn of the

twentieth century explains the intermittent, if sometimes antagonistic, fasci-

nation between the two (like the feminists, Freud referred to his movement

as 'the cause' in the early twentieth century). For both Freud and feminism,

femininity was a problem to be deciphered and understood. At two import-ant moments, psychoanalysis and feminism have converged in deliberatingthe question of femininity and sexual difference. Psychoanalysis, concernedwith the unconscious and sexuality in the formation of the subject, began toconsider the possibility and meaning of female desire - issues which had

preoccupied feminists since at least the 17th century - only after the firstworld war. During the twenties and thirties, femininity arose as a problemfor psychoanalysis; the issue was - how does a woman come into being, was a

woman born or made?7 Feminism in the '20s was also arguing about the

nature of woman, this time as a political subject. Should women demand

what they want as 'women' on the basis of their different needs, or as

'workers' and 'citizens' like men? Within psychoanalysis, the debate about

femininity was eventually suspended, replaced by an increasing focus on

mother and child. The women's movement faded too during the thirties,surpassed by the political urgency of unemployment and fascism, but alsoundermined from within by irresolution and conflict about women's properplace and what women should want.

By the 1970's the protagonists were differently aligned, the debate be-tween psychoanalysis and feminism more direct. In the USA, radical femin-ism rejected Freud, seeing psychoanalysis as diagnosing a problem -

femininity - whose political solution - feminism - it either ignored or

repressed.8 In England, on the other hand, some feminists who had read

Freud and Marx drew on Lacan's reading of Freud to explain the consti-

tution of female subjectivity in and through language. The difficulty for

historians was how to reconcile this notion of a sexed speaking subject withhistorical materialism's privileging of class.9 Cora Kaplan's essay on threecenturies of women poets in England and the USA, noting the very highproportion of women's poems which have been about the right to speak and

write, suggested that women's poems - romantic and lyric - use metonymyas a 'way of referring to experience suppressed in public discourse.'10Luisa

Passerini's work on memory and subjectivity in fascism and autobiography,Sally Alexander's on female subjectivity and unconscious fantasy in early-



130 History Workshop Journal

nineteenth century radical movements, and Alex Owen's exploration of

women's mediumship and spiritual possession as forms of resistance andfemale power in the nineteenth century, all employ a psychodynamic notion

of subjectivity;1"while Carolyn Steedman interrogates dreams, memories

and family stories to give an account of the reproduction of mothering in the

1940's and '50's as a process which failed."2Poverty, absence and envy shape

female desire in Steedman's acid yet poignant counter to the nostalgia of

men's autobiographies, which have imprinted a sentimental portrait of

mothering on working class experience in the twentieth century.

And yet, feminist history's interest in Freud and psychoanalysis con-

stantly meets those resistances in the wider profession excavated and so

eloquently challenged by Peter Gay. Historians, he discovers, resist any

deliberate use of psychology and psychoanalysis, in particularbecause of its

ahistoricism, its inapplicability to anything other than neuroses or the

irrational, and its individualism; and they ask anyway how can we analyse

the dead? Gay - rare among historians for having undergone a training

analysis - asks for a 'welding' of historical method with psychoanalysis'sscheme of human nature and development. The historian can, he suggests,

interpret dreams, read private journals as though they were free association,understand public documents as condensations of wishes and exercises in

denial; he can tease out the unconscious fantasies underlying popular novels

and art.13

The unconscious fantasies underlying fascism have preoccupied feminist

historians since the coming of age of the children of those regimes in 1968.

(Psychoanalysis has been allowed to explore the 'irrational' in history).

Maria-Antonetta Macciocchi argues that an intimacy between women and

fascism was carved out by Mussolini in Italy in the 1920s, by the promise ofthe vote (later withdrawn); the creation of a female death squadron; the

production of a 'feminine semiotic'; the injunction to women to give birth;

and the use of public ritual and spectacle.'4

Drawing on Bertholt Brecht's analogy of the pimp/whore relation to

describe the relation fascism/women; on Virginia Woolf's assertion that the

oppression of women and Nazi repression have the same roots; on Antonio

Gramsci for his discussion of the irrationality of fascism; and on Wilhelm

Reich's emphasis on the sexual repression which dictatorship feeds on and

which is linked to death, her urgent task is to uncover the extent and causes

of women's consent to fascism, in order to place women 'as protagonists,

who are responsible, and in any case never innocent'. And in this cause she

evokes - though not as a psychoanalyst, only as a 'political militant' - the

instincts of women; female masochism and the death drive. The problem of

consent, argues Macciocchi, lies within the psychic structures of femininity.

There was no rational reason for women's support for fascism under the

Duce. Their labour was grossly exploited, their sons killed, their husbands

symbolically castrated; they were enjoined in a marriage with Mussoliniwhich was sexless, chaste and deathlike.



FeministHistory and Psychoanalysis 131

Fascism's repudiation of femininity and women's consent are the

concernstoo

ofClaudia Koonz's study of women in the Third Reich. No-onewas innocent, Koonz argues. While women took no part in the planning of

the final solution, nor - except for a few thousand camp guards and matrons

- did they administer murder, almost as many women as men voted for the

National Socialist Party between 1930 and 1932 and supported the women's

bureau under Hitler for as long as it advocated the dream of family and

home. In a social order which polarised the sexes down to the last walk -

MEN TO THE LEFT WOMEN TO THE RIGHT - women left the

business of genocide to the men, or so they remembered, and so Koonz

reconstructs.

Psychoanalysis implicitly informs Koonz's analysis of the Nazi state.

National Socialism constituted a social order founded on gender and race,

on eugenics and genocide. Whatever its contradictions in practice, the heart

of its vision lay in 'a dream of a strong man and a gentle woman, cooperating

under the stern guidance of an orderly state'. The SS administrators of the

'death machine' 'managed to remain sane while committing subhuman

jobs'. These men were not brutal or hardened sadists, Kocnz asserts, but

imposed on themselves a split reality. Obeying orders was their publicresponsibility, while in their private fantasy - sustained by wife, family and

home (strong family men were chosen for these jobs) - they deceived

themselves into thinking they were not 'bad after all'.15

Koonz shares with the Frankfurt school anemphasis on the internalisation

of a punitive and relentless authority in the psychic formation of fascism but,

like Macciocchi and Klaus Theweleit, the responsibility for fascism is placed

firmlyon the mentalities, the psyches of the fascists themselves.

Klaus Theweleit's study of the Freikorps literature (the volunteer armiesof 1918-1923 which, he claims, prefiguredthe Nazis) assumes that these men

meant what they said. What they spoke about was their hatred of women,

their dread of women's bodies and sexuality and their wish to kill them.

Anti-semitism discovers its emotional source in this revulsion which itself

springs from the infant and its fear of being engulfed, swallowed up, suckedin by the mother's body. Theweleit thinks that these fantasies belong to allmen, whereas BarbaraEhrenreich points out first, 'that not allmen murder',

and secondly, that 'these Freikorpsmen do not emerge on the plain of

history fresh from the pre-oedipal nursery of primal emotions, but from the

First World War'.16

If we follow the logic of fascism's deathly antinomy, the full horror of its

unconscious repertoire, then it is easier, perhaps, to understand the recent

withdrawal from sexual difference by some feminist historians. Two

influential books refuse the 'monotony' of a psychoanalytic understanding

of sexual difference.

Joan Scott moves in favour of deconstruction which evacuates the subject

from the centre of both history and language. The concept of gender(understood as knowledge of the relations of power between women and



132 History Workshop Journal

men) is divested of any psychic subjectivityand adjudicatesthe manymeaningsassigned o sexualdifference,classorrace(thoughrace, asin mostnorthAmericanandEuropean eministhistory s muted).17

Denise Riley, poet and philosopheras well as historian,prefers thediscursiveconstructionof the category 'women' in the hope, followingFoucault, of an eventual dissolutionof all identities. Can anyone 'fullyinhabit a gender without a degree of horror'she asks, recalling MaryWollstonecraft's aution hatwomenshould orgettheirsex, 'exceptingwitha lover'.18

The placeof the psychoanalytic otion of sexual difference n historical

work cannot be insisted upon. A history which takes into account anunderstandingf memoryascontingent,of cultureas inimical o thedrives,of mental ifewhich s irreducibleoconsciousness,andof subjectivitywhichis both forced and irresolute, is in no way an easy one to write. But theproblem s thatbyexcluding heunconscious,we losetheconceptof psychicinstability.We also jettison fantasy, the generative figurative form ofpsychic life, an integrative moment in all mentalities. Such a loss hasimplicationsbeyond the reachof feministhistory.19

Julia Kristevahas writtenof two notions of time whichhave hauntedphilosophy, literature and science since the beginning of the twentiethcentury:monumental ndcursive ime on theone hand,and thesequential,linear time of history and language on the other. Women, she implies,insofar as they are mothers, inhabit the former, which converges withFreud'sunderstanding f unconscious ime - timelessnessand repetition.Women do seem to slip - in daily life as in philosophy into this lattertemporality.But rather hanacceptthis placingof femalesubjectivityand

the severanceof the twotemporalities,we couldbring o bearan awarenessof repetition, antasy,andtheresistanceswhichconstitutepsychic ife, as wewritethe historiesof women, of sexualdifference,of mentalities.20

NOTES

A slightlyabbreviated ersionof thisessaywillappear n ElizabethWright,A Dictionary fPsychoanalysis nd Feminism,Basil Blackwell,Oxford,in the autumnof 1991. ThankstoJacquelineRose.

1 MicheleneWandor ed.), Oncea Feminist,London,1990.2 SheilaRowbotham,Hiddenrom History,LondonandNewYork, 1973,p. xxx ... 'we

have to dig deeperthanconscioussystemsof ideas. Ourvery sexualresponsesandwaysofrelatingare notremoved romsocietyorhistory'. . forexample.

3 Cora Kaplan, 'Wild Nights', Sea-Changes, Culture and Feminism, London, 1986.4 OlwenHuftonandJoanScott,'SurveyArticlesWomen nHistory:No. 1EarlyModern

Europe'; No. 2 Women n History,The ModernPeriod',PastandPresent,November,1983.For an earliergenerationof feministhistory,JoanThirsk'sForeward, n MaryPrior(ed.),Women in English Society 1500-1800, London, 1985.

5 SigmundFreud,TwoEncyclopaediaArticles nJamesStrachey ed.), Psychoanalysis,1923, see The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,vol. XVIII, London,1981,p. 235.



Feminist History and Psychoanalysis 133

6 JacquelineRose, 'Femininityand its Discontents', Sexuality n the Field of Vision,London, 1986.

7 JulietMitchell, Introduction',n JulietMitchellandJacquelineRose (eds), FeminineSexuality, acquesLacanand the EcoleFreudienne, ondon,1983.

8 For anEnglishradical eministhistory, ee LondonFeministHistoryGroup,TheSexualDynamicsof History,Men'sPower,Women'sResistance,London,1983.

9 JaneLewis,'The Debate on Sex andClass',NewLeftReview,no. 149,Jan/Feb.1985,London.

10 Kaplan, Language nd Gender' nSea-Changes.11 Luisa Passerini,Fascismand PopularMemory, The CulturalExperience f the Turin

WorkingClass, Cambridge,1987;Sally Alexander, Women, Class and SexualDifference,some reflectionson the writingof a feministhistory',History Workshop ournal, ssue 17,Spring 1984;Alex Owen, The DarkenedRoom. Women,Power and Spiritualismn lateVictorianEngland,London,1989.

12 CarolynSteedman,Landscapeor a Good Woman,London,1984.13 Peter Gay, Freud, or Historians,Oxford,1985; General ntroduction',TheBourgeois

Experience,Victoria o Freud,vol. 1, 'Education f the Senses', OxfordandNew York, 1984,p. 8. In this and vol. 2, 'The TenderPassion', Gay recoversVictorianbourgeois ove andpassionfromcontemporary rurienceand condescension,and findsthem to be less abouthypocrisy nd privateperversion, hanshapedby anxietiesaboutchangeand innovation.SeealsoTimothyAshplant, PsychoanalysisndHistoricalWriting',HistoryWorkshop ournal,Issue26, Autumn1988.

14 Maria-AntonettaMacciocchi, FemaleSexualitynFascist deology',FeministReview,no. 1, 1979.

15 ClaudiaKoonz, Mothers n the Fatherland,Women,the Familyand Nazi Politics,London, 1987,pp. 405, 413,xx.

16 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies,2 vols, Cambridge,1987, 1989, see particularly'Introduction',ol. 1, p. xvi.

17 JoanWallachScott, Gender nd thePoliticsof History,New York andLondon,1988.18 Denise Riley, 'Am I thatname'?;Feminismand the categoryof Women n History,

London, 1988,p. 6. MaryWollstonecraft,A Vindication f theRightsof Woman,Letchworth,1965,p. 109.

19 TheFrenchhistorians, he Annales, n their irstgeneration t least, were unrepentantabout heomissionof theunconscious.

20 JuliaKristeva,Women'sTime',Signs,vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn,1981, ranslated yAlice

Jardine ndHarryBlake. MaxineBerg,'Women'swork,mechanisation nd he earlyphasesofindustrialisationEngland', in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work,Cambridge, 987,employscircular ndcyclicalnotionof time in her studyof industrialisation.Seetoo, TamaraHarevan,FamilyTimeand IndustrialTime,Cambridge, 982.

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Alexander - Feminist History and Psychoanalysis