On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  ‘The requirement […] that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone’, Freud writes in Civilisation and Its Discontents, is ‘the source of serious injustice’ (‘Ungerechtigkeit’).6 For a woman, Freud comes close to saying, normality in and of itself is an injury from which no girl will fully recover. The news that she is a girl will arrive, not as biological revelation from inside her body as the traditionalists insist against Freud, but more as a form of psychic puzzlement, when the outside world inflicts its demand that she crunch her sexuality into shape. It is a type of invasion. In her 1930 paper on masochism in the mental life of women, deemed by feminist critics to be one of her most offensive, psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch makes the remarkable observation that it is through masochism – fantasies of castration or rape at the hands of the father – that a woman enters her sexual role (in another paper she talks of the ‘primary traumata’ of the little girl’s early sexual life). She is not, as I see it, licensing misogyny and assault but making the far more startling suggestion that violence against women is psychically inscribed at the heart of a woman’s journey into her sexual ‘destiny’.7 As if on cue, nearly a century later, Melanie Suchet’s trans patient Raphael, discussed in Chapter Two, will explain that only if ‘boy’ is written on his body will he be able to avoid this threatening internal scenario and allow himself to be penetrated without dread. ‘To be vulnerable from the position of a girl’, Suchet comments, ‘is too dangerous.’8

  One of the boldest images from Freud’s early work is his description of the hysterical patient to whom he briefly alludes in his 1908 paper ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’, who pressed her dress up against her body with one hand (as a woman) while trying to tear it off with the other (as a man), which he reads as a scenario of rape.9 And shorn of its chauvinistic underpinnings – something I always recommend wherever possible in relation to Freud – the concept of castration is best read, surely, as indicating the brute reality of sexual difference, the axe that must fall for both boy and girl to be frogmarched into their allotted sexual place. We might call it the savagery of sexual difference in a so-called civilised world.

  So, psychoanalysis begins with the abuse of the landlady’s daughter by her father, a coercion that then spreads into the very heart of the norm – of what is being asked of women by asking them to be women – and from there across the warring landscape of nations. As trauma widens its remit, one of its hardest and most persistent calls, it turns out, is that girls should be girls, and one of psychoanalysis’s most radical propositions, for me to this day, is that no girl or woman ever simply is. Sexual abuse, we might then speculate, has as one of its aims to mark the woman’s body, to destroy any ambiguity on the matter. (The ‘corrective’ rape of lesbians reported in post-apartheid South Africa would just be one expression of what is somewhere always at stake.) And it goes without saying, if sexual abuse is designed to remind the girl or woman of what she is, it is also intended to confer on the mostly male agents who carry it out a similarly fraudulent authority about a masculinity no less unsteady and unconvinced by itself. Abuse could be described as male performativity in its degenerate mode: ‘I am a man.’ It is a form of policing. ‘Pain’, writes Sara Ahmed, ‘involves the violation or transgression of the border between inside and outside, and it is through this transgression that I feel the border in the first place.’10 Ahmed is the feminist philosopher who resigned from Goldsmiths University in London in 2016 over its failure to deal adequately with issues of sexual harassment. Abuse, I read her as saying, lays down its fraudulent law, violating the border and enforcing it in one and the same breath.

  Behind the issue of sexual harassment, therefore, lies, barely concealed, the vexed question of sexual difference. Blood brothers, as one might say. And the question of sexual difference, which Freud acknowledges as ‘interminable’ in his late work, brings us back to the voices of trans people. ‘Everyone’, writes Kate Bornstein, ‘has to work at being a man or a woman’ but ‘transgender people are probably more aware of doing the work.’11 Despite the recent attention to trans experience and the real shift in public consciousness, such an idea remains anathema to many (no surprise for psychoanalysis, which knows that change at the level of conscious life is never enough). Or even an abomination, an ‘impossible breach in the normality of life, like a sudden vicious murder’ – words used by Esi Edugyan in Washington Black, one of the novels shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, to describe two porpoises joined in utero, foetuses sharing a single body: miracle and monstrosity, both.12 Indeed, for such a way of thinking, the very idea of ‘work’ in relation not only to trans but also non-trans identity – Bornstein is nothing if not inclusive – would be as abhorrent as it is senseless. ‘If you want a country with sixty-three genders, vote Clinton,’ read one tweet on the night of the 2016 US election. ‘If you want a country where a man is a man and a woman is a woman, vote Trump.’13

  To which we might add, ‘If you want a harasser in the White House, vote Trump’ – which is of course exactly what happened, as it turns out not only in the White House but also on the Supreme Court, both of them with bluster and without apology. When Brett Kavanaugh, then nominee to the Court, testified in his defence against the allegation of sexual assault by Christine Blasey Ford – an assault she experienced as life-threatening at the time – I know I was not alone in hearing his words as one of the most brazen and panicked displays of male entitlement on record, with no awareness, or at least not at the time, that it was this self-same version of masculinity that inculpated him and makes him unfit for office.14 Trump’s statement that now everyone could see why he had nominated Kavanaugh had an irony of which he too was manifestly unaware. At the height of the 2016 election campaign, Rudy Giuliani agreed on CNN that Trump’s ‘pussy grabbing’ remarks had delivered a picture of sexual assault that was ‘really offensive on a basic human level’ (although it did not stop him a few years later from wading in on the side of Kavanaugh). Trump is reported as responding to his ‘treachery’: ‘Rudy, you’re a baby! They took your diaper off right there […] When are you going to be a man?’ (The title of Bob Woodward’s book from which that quote is taken is Fear).15

  Of course feminists have been calling out this fraudulent, dangerous version of masculinity for ever. As I was first writing this chapter, I came home one evening to an email from a complete stranger from Pennsylvania reminding me and thanking me, with reference to the drama unfolding in the Supreme Court, for these words I had written decades ago about Virginia Woolf: ‘What interested Woolf was patriarchy not as untrammelled authority, but as a form of raging – authority gone frantic because it is losing its grip.’ To cite Hannah Arendt once more, it is illegitimate and/or waning power that turns most readily to violence. ‘The ego’ of the narcissistic patient, writes analyst Benjamin Margolis, ‘is unstable, shifting in outline, unsure of its functions, and insecure in relation to the external world.’16 He was writing in 1983, but he could just as well have been describing the beyond-crass masculinity of Donald Trump. We could say that both trans experience and abuse are in touch with the injustice of sexual difference, to which the first responds with a cry for freedom, the second with unmitigated terror.

  From abuse to the myth of masculinity and femininity in a pure unadulterated state – psychoanalysis, I suggest, was the first to make the connection, which trails from one end of Freud’s work to the other. Psychoanalysis is, therefore, one of the places we need to go to understand the fraught and potentially generative line that runs back and forth between sexual harassment and trans experience. My basic proposition is that, psychoanalytically speaking, they are the flip sides of the same coin, or even, in the domain of the unconscious, one and the same thing. Or to put it another way, for a culture not unduly sympathetic to psychoanalysis – and some would say the hostility is getting worse in an increasingly commodified world – the fact of abuse and the increasing visibility of trans experience, as they clamour mor
e loudly for our attention, together constitute the return of the psychoanalytic repressed. Returning here to the voices and stories from which I have learnt most, my aim is to open up the dialogue, to get them to talk to each other.

  * * *

  The real name of Katharina in the Alps was Aurelia Öhm-Kronich. In fact, this case, contrary to Freud’s own suggestion, is not simple at all, and its complexity still resonates today. Katharina was suffering from attacks of suffocation, from dizziness, from the feeling of a weight crushing her chest. ‘I always think I am going to die.’ She is hallucinating a face which, it will emerge, is the face of her abusive father, a face whose terrifying contortions are due not solely to lust, but also to rage: ‘He kept threatening he would do something to me; and if he caught sight of me at a distance, his face would get distorted with rage and he would make for me with his hand raised. The face I always see now is his face when he was in a rage.’17 This face condenses sexual power and vengeance; the suffocation experienced by Katharina shows her as the quarry of both. In fact the revelation of abuse comes late – or late-ish since the whole story emerges, somewhat unbelievably, in the course of one brief afternoon stroll. And, when it does, it is a cause of ‘astonishment’ to Freud. What Freud starts by looking for and first elicits from Katharina – though he also admits this is pure guesswork – is a more recent memory when she caught her father with her cousin, Franziska, and then told her mother. It is this that precipitated the break-up of her family and her father’s wrath. Wrongly, Freud believes this later memory to be the source of all her troubles because it confronts her with the full truth of what she had experienced at the hands of her father, but barely understood, those several years before. ‘I had found often enough’, he states, ‘that in girls [hysterical] anxiety was a consequence of the horror by which a virginal mind is overcome when it is faced for the first time with the world of sexuality.’18 On 30 May 1893, the year of Studies, Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess: ‘I see quite a possibility of filling another gap in the sexual aetiology of the neuroses. I believe I understand the anxiety neuroses of young people who must be regarded as virgins with no history of sexual abuse.’ Sexuality, he wrote, was ‘coming closer and closer’, a background of things ‘seen or heard and only half-understood’. This letter, the editors comment, is the first hint of sexual seduction in Freud’s thought.19 Katharina’s story comes part way, but only part way, in support. She is indeed horrified, she can barely catch breath, but whether this is the outcome of the early abuse, of her later-dawning, fuller understanding of sexuality, or of her father’s vicious rage is unclear – most likely all three.

  For me this case contains all the traces of the drama that will erupt in the form of abuse in our times, indicating at one level that not much has changed. A father abusing his daughter, making her feel her life is at risk, both in the act – think Christine Blasey Ford – and in the repercussions when she dares to speak. ‘We’ll keep that in reserve,’ Katharina’s mother responds to the revelations of abuse by her daughter. ‘If he causes trouble in the Court, we’ll say that too’ (we can only hope that they would get a better hearing than likely today).20 At the same time, in his somewhat gauche attempts to theorise this moment, Freud introduces concepts which will progressively take up their central place in the account of human sexuality to come – deferred action or ‘afterwardness’, in which the mind takes time to fully register what confronts it, and the primal scene through which the child mentally stages a sexual act which remains beyond their full knowledge. For psychoanalysis, sexuality is bound to the time of the unconscious, and is first registered by the psyche as a staged drama before anything else. (Already we can see in outline Judith Butler’s idea of the performative dimension of human sexuality, the idea that the sexual identities we assume only work if, like puppets, they are made to enact themselves.21)

  The question becomes – what does the discovery of human sexuality, as pleasure and/or danger, do to the human mind? Freud will progressively downplay the fact and extent of abuse, as he will relinquish the idea of the sexual innocence of young girls, but in this earliest of his cases, another insight seems to me to be struggling to be born. Sexuality is anguish. It first erupts in another place – ein anderer Schauplatz (Freud’s term for the unconscious). There is something in sexuality that evades our mental grasp. Acknowledging that much might, however, be a first step in avoiding its worst outcomes – a sexual identity which brooks no argument and subjects the other to unremitting power: whether in the shape of fathers who abuse their daughters, or anyone who asserts, in the teeth of all the evidence, that there is no problem, that as far as human sexuality is concerned, the world is exactly as it should and always will be; above all, that in the realm of sexual matters, we all know exactly who we think we are. Trans experience of course tells the other story. Which is why I see it as no coincidence that the two realities – sexual abuse and trans – have erupted into public consciousness at more or less exactly the same time.

  It is worth recalling the disturbance that these early ideas provoked. Freud had thrown a spanner into a version of sexuality, as graced and enforced by God and his servants, that persists, in all its numbing coerciveness, to this day. He had added an unnameable dimension. Track this a little further, and we then find that the issue of harassment rears its head once more in the earliest days of psychoanalysis. Dr T. D. Savill was a London-based physician and pathologist, working at the start of the new century when Freud’s ideas had just begun to circulate (like Freud, he had also translated the Clinical Lectures of the eminent neurologist Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where Freud first encountered hysteria as a young doctor). Savill was one of the three members of the Medical Committee set up in 1908 at the London West End Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System, Paralysis and Epilepsy, to adjudicate the charges brought against Ernest Jones – a key figure in the history of psychoanalysis who was Freud’s close colleague and would become his first biographer – in response to allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour towards one of the young female patients in the hospital’s care. The girl complained that Jones raised sexual matters during their conversation; Jones responded that he had been encouraged to do so, more or less to test out Freud’s hypothesis, by one of the physicians on the case. He resigned from the hospital and left the UK for Canada under a cloud the following year.22

  At this stage in his career Jones was known in psychoanalytic circles for his minimal grasp of Freud’s views on the place of sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses (if anything he seems to have alluded to these views to get himself off the hook). Savill, on the other hand, was up to speed and rejected them completely. For Savill, writing in The Lancet in 1909, hysterical disorder was precipitated by physiological alterations in the brain, by vasomotor or vascular change. Refusing to acknowledge this reality, he argued, psychoanalysis was needlessly and destructively calling ‘into activity […] the dead memories of a sexual past’, reviving emotional ‘shocks’ related ‘directly or indirectly to sexual matters’ and thereby placing the patient and the physician at risk: ‘there is a good deal of danger’, he writes, ‘both to the patient and to the physician in undertaking such investigations and such a line of treatment.’23

  What is being said here, if not that a therapy which invokes past trauma is no better, in some ways worse, than the original trauma itself? (‘Hazardous’, ‘harmful’, ‘wholly unjustifiable’.) ‘Shock’ is eloquent, a concept first borrowed by Freud from Charcot, who used it to describe the shocks to the nervous system which he saw as the cause of hysteria. Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher, gives the concept an added political dimension when he lifts it straight from Freud to describe the mind stunned by the crushing modernity of the city streets: sexuality and rampant capitalism both rendering the psyche defenceless. Savill’s vocabulary is telling: it is the medical establishment itself which becomes the ‘virginal mind’ overcome with ‘horror’ in the face of sexuality. As if ps
ychoanalysis were a form of assault – playing fast and loose with the bodies and minds it is meant to cure.

  As is now known, the case of Jones is not aberrant or exceptional. Abuse will track the profession in ways surely unanticipated by Freud, even though, for some, his analysis of his own daughter, Anna, is felt to have been inappropriate and left a legacy of misjudgement in its train. In her powerful book Mortal Gifts – Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter, Boston-based psychoanalyst Ellen Pinsky has recently argued that sexual misconduct is more or less endemic to psychoanalysis. At the very least, it is latent to the ‘Olympian delusion’ of mastery which nestles inside the psychoanalytic scene. Against any such delusion, the task of the analyst, she suggests, is to allow fallibility and death, including the mortality of the analyst, into the consulting room, as the sole true way to abrogate her or his own powers. Nor does a recourse to selflessness, or putting the interests of the patient first, guarantee the avoidance of harm: ‘The more the therapist believes in an heroic capacity for selfless service to the patient,’ writes Pinsky, ‘the more he’s conceptualised as above being a subject himself, the greater the danger of erasing the line that keeps the patient safe.’24