On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  Self-effacement is, then, the other face of tyranny: even, she elaborates, ‘a visitation as bull or swan or eagle’.25 I was struck by that bull, swan, eagle, harsh visitants from the fields, waters and skies (each one drawn from the ravages of Zeus, also the perfect evocation of abuse). Perhaps those early physicians had a point. Calling up the shock of human sexuality places us all in mortal danger. As well as everything else it is capable of doing, sexuality threatens. Provided we add that the greatest threat of all stems from the belief that sexuality is your possession, that brandishing sexuality – ‘pussy grabbing’, as one might say – exempts you from human failing, as opposed to exemplifying it in its worst guise. An abuser in the White House is as predictable as it is frightening, because it brings to life the fantasy of sexuality as unqualified power. ‘Fantasy’ is key. For Juliet Mitchell, such men would fall under the category of ‘male hysteric’, another figure from early psychoanalysis which, she suggests, has been lost, though never more in need of recognition than today.26 (‘I might have been too emotional,’ Kavanaugh said later about his own testimony, as if he himself, without explicitly acknowledging it, was trying to head off the slur.) As I understand it, to such a fantasy of power without limit everything creative in psychoanalysis is opposed. We need, then, to hold on to two insights, even if in today’s calling out of harassment they appear at times to be at odds with each other. First, most obviously: sexual abuse is real, whether from fathers, therapists, academics, presidents, Supreme Court judges. The claimant must be heard – the clarion call of #MeToo. Trump’s public mockery of Blasey Ford’s testimony, to the jeering approval of his Mississippi audience – they chanted ‘Lock her up!’ – plus his later dismissal of the charges as a hoax tells us how far on this basic premise we still have to go (needless to say, additional accusations brought against Kavanaugh from his student days made no difference).27 And then: sexuality is aberrant. It is no man’s servant.

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  In one sense that election-night tweet – ‘If you want a country with sixty-three genders, vote Clinton. If you want a country where a man is a man and a woman is a woman, vote Trump’ – was right. Sexual difference, in its accredited version, and trans experience belong in different worlds (a hardening of the arteries versus an opening of the pores). And yet, it is not of course true that for a transsexual person, sexuality falls outside the remit of the law. Indeed, this issue has moved centre stage in debates, at times virulent, on transgender issues in the UK. In January 2016, the House of Commons report Transgender Equality found that the medical certificate required for legal registration of a new gender pathologised transsexuality and was ‘contrary to the dignity and personal autonomy of transsexuals’.28 In response, a consultation on reform of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act was commissioned and published in July 2018. The proposed new Act would make legal recognition of a transgender person no longer dependent on medical sanction but on self-declaration by the person concerned. In June 2020, Boris Johnson shelved the changes indefinitely via a press announcement, doubtless thinking he could avoid controversy by slipping the issue under the wire of the pandemic.

  This idea of self-declaration has uncanny, and no doubt unintended, resonances with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s formula for psychoanalytic training – ‘l’analyste ne s’autorise que de lui-même’ – almost untranslatable but which roughly means: ‘the analyst takes his or her authority from her or himself alone’, or ‘only the analyst can authorise her or himself as analyst’ – a progressive and ultimately failed experiment that came in response to a psychoanalytic training virtually unaltered since 1923.29 In relation to transgender, what is striking about the proposed legal move is that, as with Lacan’s experiment, the law is more or less proposing to do away with itself. On this matter, the UK could not be further from the US, where, as we saw in Chapter Two, the Trump administration has proposed to define transgender subjects legally out of existence.

  The proposed change in UK law was by no means received by the trans community as an unequivocal blow for freedom. Medical certification may well be an affront to a trans person’s dignity and autonomy, but it also can be the sole basis, in the US for example, on which medical insurance for the transition process can be secured. But the divisions also go much deeper. Out of the many objections to the legal proposal in the UK, one, from inside the trans community, stood out for me. In a letter to the Guardian in May 2018, a group of trans signatories argued that a line can and must be drawn between a trans person who has undergone surgery and one who has not. The proposal, they write, ‘blurs the distinction between us and transgender people who remain physically intact’.30 For the signatories, the risk is that ‘male-bodied people’, including sexual fetishists, will use the Act to demand access to women-only spaces. Clearly they do not consider such women to be ‘real’ women – ‘male-bodied’ is the giveaway. They do not, however, reproduce the worst version of this argument: that, by invading women’s spaces, male-to-female transsexuals are the worst embodiments of phallic power (they themselves would not be immune from such a charge).

  Their fear is not groundless. In September 2018, male-to-female transgender inmate Karen White, a paedophile with a history of grievous bodily harm and multiple rapes, sexually assaulted fellow prisoners after she had been transferred to New Hall, a women’s prison in Wakefield, West Yorkshire (she was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment). The Ministry of Justice issued a statement that, before any such transfer, past history of this kind will henceforth be taken into account.31 We need, however, to be wary of the publicity afforded by such examples. Examples such as White’s, stated Jenny-Anne Bishop from the transgender rights group Transforum, are rare.32 Most often the violence flows the other way. Trans subjects, we know, are regularly the objects of sexual violence (a fact which those objecting to the Gender Recognition Act barely, if ever, mention). Trans women are routinely targeted in male jails, as they are when forced to use men’s toilets. Instead, the argument that trans women in women’s facilities are a threat to other women has the upper hand. As we have already seen, it has been inscribed with renewed venom into legislation across the US under Trump which, flouting – indeed courting – the danger faced by trans women in men’s facilities, insists that trans people must use the toilets corresponding to the gender in which they were born.

  What struck me about that Guardian letter’s phrasing – that the proposal ‘blurs the distinction between us and transgender people who remain physically intact’ – are those words ‘physically intact’. Genuine transition, it suggests, relies on the insignia of mutilation or bodily harm. Only a body inscribed with the mark of sexual difference is real. Trans identity must be based on a wound. The law seeks to suspend itself in the domain of sexual life. The response is to summon a version of sexual difference grounded in pain. Nor is this logic wholly absent from another, no less eloquent, side of this debate. Kate Bornstein is one of the trans activists from whom I have learnt most about the idea of a trans life, not as crossover, but as a seemingly endless plethora of sexual behaviours and forms. Rather than bringing her journey to an end, undergoing male-to-female surgery opened the path to sexual infinity. Her memoir, as we saw, begins with her cutting a valentine’s heart into her chest above her own, an act she herself links to her gender reassignment surgery.33 But for Bornstein, the wound grounds nothing in terms of sexual difference. Instead it – sometimes painfully – intensifies the sexual possibilities on offer (the pages on sadomasochism which she advises her reader to skip if they so choose). And as we saw in Chapter Two, Bornstein has also stated publicly – to the anger of others in the trans community – that people should be free to invite who they want into their private spaces, and that trans women who object should ‘stop behaving like men with a sense of entitlement’.

  I know that the idea of a self-inflicted or freely chosen wound is one of the main causes of revulsion towards trans people in the so-called straight or ‘cis’ world (‘How can they
?’ is the refrain; ‘How can we not?’ the reply). This too has been a challenge to psychoanalysis. For Melanie Suchet and Sandra Silverman, in their complex, open-minded and profound rendering of working with trans patients, the prospect of their patients undergoing full surgical transition represents a crossing point, one which they both, as analysts, felt, at least to begin with, unable fully to countenance.34 Although in the last chapter, we also encountered analyst Avgi Saketopoulou, who sees her primary clinical task with patients undergoing surgical transition as being to help them find a way to acknowledge and mourn the reality of the body they are leaving behind.35 But disquieting as this prospect undoubtedly seems to many, might it be that these acts simply bring to the surface of consciousness, or enact in Technicolor, a violence latent for all of us, as Helene Deutsch describes it, in the way that sexuality unconsciously organises itself? ‘The word sex’, writes André Green in his 1973 essay on the neutral gender, ‘is thought to come from secare: to cut, separate.’ Once united, the two sexes had to be split asunder: ‘Where there is a difference,’ Green continues, ‘there is a cut, a caesura.’36

  Barely a century ago, the idea that we all harboured in our unconscious the residues of a bisexual polymorphous perversity was unassimilable to most (another reason why Freud’s move from abuse to unconscious fantasy can hardly be read as him playing safe or trying to restore his credibility with the establishment). After all, it is surely fundamental to psychoanalysis that the most troubling components of sexual life are something we all would be better off recognising hidden inside ourselves. To put it at its most simple, psychoanalysis, as I see it, presents us – presents the world – with two unassailable propositions: things are harder than we would wish, and we are all weirder than we like to think we are. Both of course carve through the pretensions and iniquities of our present neoliberal world, which pretends that, if you only try and buy hard enough, perfection is on offer for all. In the words of Moustapha Safouan in his book on post-Oedipal civilisation, ‘there is nothing as remote from sexuality as capital.’37

  Granted, the cut is not a wish shared by many. Unless perhaps in some of our dreams. To recall one of the striking moments encountered by Vanessa Grigoriadis while researching US campus sexual harassment: the student who explained how he had come to understand that women’s so-called rape fantasies are not real because ‘men don’t want their penises cut off but dream about it anyway’ (somewhat unbelievably, he was one of the most sympathetic male students whom she met in the course of her investigation).38 Lacan once stated that, in the case of the hysteric, the membrane between ego and unconscious is wafer thin, thereby allowing us to glimpse what usually remains invisible. Perhaps, then, by placing the agon of sexual difference in full light, the trans world is speaking a truth on behalf of everyone. At the very least, trans discourse brings to the surface of consciousness the damage and injustice at the heart of the norm, something which the trans community experiences perhaps more acutely than most. In the words of Susan Stryker:

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  A gendering violence is the founding condition of human subjectivity; having gender is the tribal tattoo that makes one’s personhood cognizable. I stood for a moment between the two violations, the mark of gender and the unlivability of its absence. Could I say which one was worse? Or could I only say which one I felt could best be survived?39

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  We know that trans existence is a life-or-death matter: the murder rate of transsexual people is significantly higher than among the non-trans population and is on the rise, as is the rate of suicide and attempted suicide. ‘Everyone needs to vote on November 6 as if lives depend on it,’ LGBT activist Diego Sanchez of PFlag National stated just before the 2018 US mid-term elections, in response to Trump’s proposal to abolish the legal existence of transgender people, ‘because they do.’40 In his essay in the first Transgender Reader, Dean Spade cites a male-to-female transsexual addressing the therapeutic profession at a time when clinical screenings were obligatory: ‘What right do you have to determine whether I live or die?’ (The article is called ‘Mutilating Gender’.)41 ‘We have been raised’, Audre Lorde wrote in her 1981 paper ‘The Uses of Anger’, ‘to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction.’42 She was of course referring to differences of age, class and race – above all of race. We seem, in the worst sense, to have come a long way since then. Today violent racism is still with us, while sexuality has become one of the most violently contested realities of the modern world.

  At opposite poles of the political spectrum, abuse and transgender confront us with the most disturbing dimensions of human sexuality (a bit of a stand-off, it would seem). On condition that we recognise, as Freud began to in the Alps, that these aspects of sexuality are not supplements to human sexuality but reside at its very core. In their starkly different ways, abuse and transgender both alert us that our sexual arrangements are not innocent. To believe otherwise is truly to return to the era before Freud. Sexuality is tarred with the brush of violence, the phantom limb of the normality we are all so blithely and deceptively meant to share.

  In the course of his life, not least faced with the darkness descending over Europe throughout the 1930s, this was an issue by which Freud became increasingly preoccupied, scrambling his best attempts at lucidity. In his second attempt to map the human mind, he divided psychic life between Eros and destructiveness, as if they were opposites or poles apart from each other. This dualism came close on the heels of the binaries of his first mental schema – reality versus the pleasure principle, or ego- versus object-drives – but like all great binaries, this one too will fail. ‘The satisfaction of [the] destructive impulses’, he concedes in his renowned exchange with Einstein on war, ‘is of course facilitated by their admixture with others of an erotic and idealistic kind.’43 Far from subduing the worst of the human heart, Eros can fuel its cruelty. Freud has come a long way from his 1914 essays on war where he had more confidently proposed that the erotic impulses were best suited to keeping the destructiveness of the ego at bay. But it is now 1932. Freud is struggling to preserve Eros as unequivocal force for the good in an increasingly perilous world.44 Hitler will be elected to the chancellery the following year.

  I do not wish to run the line from Trump to Hitler – as Michael Moore does in Fahrenheit 11/9, which at one point grafts Trump’s voice onto footage of Hitler addressing a Nazi rally. I do not think today we are (yet) dealing with fascism, though Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, India are getting close. But the two leaders surely have in common their ability to mobilise and license as sheer pleasure the closely guarded obscenity of the unconscious. Think of the boost given to the Republican voting base in the immediate aftermath of the Kavanaugh affair: the ‘virtual mob that has assaulted all of us in the course of this process’, observed Republican majority leader Senator Mitch McConnell after the confirmation, ‘has turned our base on fire’.45 Only brute sex was rousing enough, whereas tax cuts and a ‘booming’ economy up to that point had provoked indifference. More simply, I would suggest that if we do not recognise Eros as fuelling the present danger, we will be ever more powerless to halt it. We might of course be powerless anyway.

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  So where’s the hope? At moments, surely, it is to be found in the consulting room where the most angular defences, the walls that obstruct a life lived, fully and painfully, can at moments, for both patient and analyst, fall away. Although even in the consulting room, the powers of resistance to the inner world know no bounds (another mournful discovery of Freud’s later working life). Still, for many years, as a kind of opening gambit, I would ask students who were sometimes hostile to psychoanalysis to identify the places in the wider culture where a woman could freely state that she is not a woman, or a man that he is not a man, with no danger of being mocked or carted away. One of my favourite moments in the whole of Freud’s work is a 1915 footnote to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: ‘Thus
, from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating [‘ein der Aufklärung bedürftiges Problem’] and is not a self-evident fact that is ultimately of a chemical nature.’46 ‘A problem that needs elucidating’ – imagine for a second going to your doctor to say you had a problem, that you were only attracted to members of the opposite sex (come to think of it, this might be no bad thing).

  The answer to my question, I suggested, was therefore first psychoanalysis, then, and no less, literary writing – where as a matter of course a woman author is licensed to enter without inhibition the bodies and minds of her male characters, and the reverse. Like the speech of the analytic patient, literature is also best registered with the free-floating attention of what Freud once described as the ‘third’ ear. So my final turn in this chapter will be to literary fiction, a constant companion throughout this book. Not least because, with renewed conviction after reading the 171 submissions to the Man Booker Prize in 2018, literature remains for me the place where, as part of the ever more urgent bid to change the world, the unthinkable can still be written and heard: ‘unspeakable things unspoken’, in Toni Morrison’s words. At the very beginning of psychoanalysis, in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud insisted that the poets and writers, to whom he so often appealed, had got there before him, that they were the only ones who really knew what he was talking about. Along similar lines, Lacan once stated that only students and literary enthusiasts could possibly grasp the concept of the unconscious because, unlike scientific and historical positivists, they were not fazed by the idea that one word, one sign, one gesture, one fragment of a dream – in a potentially infinite trail of significations – could, in the very same moment, mean more than one thing (like sexual identity, one might say).