Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
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| al desires within a single psyche. The masculine disposition is, in effect, never oriented toward the father as an object of sexual love, and neither is the feminine disposition oriented toward the mother (the young girl maybe so oriented, but this is before she has renounced that masculine side of her dispositional nature. In repudiating the mother as an object of sexual love, the girl of necessity repudiates her masculinity and, paradoxically, fixes her femininity as a consequence. Hence, Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Heterosexual Matrix 77 within Freud’s thesis of primary bisexuality, there is no homosexuality, and only opposites attract. But what is the proof Freud gives us for the existence of such dispositions If there is noway to distinguish between the femininity acquired through internalizations and that which is strictly dispositional, then what is to preclude the conclusion that all gender-specific affinities are the consequence of internalizations? On what basis are dispositional sexualities and identities ascribed to individuals, and what meaning can we give to femininity and masculinity at the outset Taking the problematic of internalization as a point of departure, let us consider the status of internalized identifications in the formation of gender and, secondarily, the relation between an internalized gender affinity and the self-punishing melancholia of internalized identifications. In Mourning and Melancholia Freud interprets the self-critical attitudes of the melancholic to be the result of the internalization of a lost object of love. Precisely because that object is lost, even though the relationship remains ambivalent and unresolved, the object is “brought inside the ego where the quarrel magically resumes as an interior dialogue between two parts of the psyche. In Mourning and Melancholia,” the lost object is setup within the ego as a critical voice or agency, and the anger originally felt for the object is reversed so that the internalized object now berates the ego: If one listens patiently to the many and various self-accusations of the melancholic, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, some person whom the patient loves, has loved or ought to love. . . the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted onto the patient’s own ego. (The melancholic refuses the loss of the object, and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only Gender Trouble 78 because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt toward the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled. In this early essay, Freud understands grief to be the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the object and the successful transferral of that cathexis onto afresh object. In The Ego and the Id, however, Freud revises this distinction between mourning and melancholia and suggests that the identification process associated with melancholia maybe the sole condition under which the id can give up its objects (19). In other words, the identification with lost loves characteristic of melancholia becomes the precondition for the work of mourning. The two processes, originally conceived as oppositional, are now understood as integrally related aspects of the grieving process. 35 In his later view, Freud remarks that the internalization of loss is compensatory When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id’s loss by saying Look, you can love me too—I am so like the object ”(20). Strictly speaking, the giving up of the object is not a negation of the cathexis, but its internalization and, hence, preservation. What precisely is the topology of the psyche in which the ego and its lost loves reside in perpetual habitation Clearly, Freud conceptualizes the ego in the perpetual company of the ego ideal which acts as amoral agency of various kinds. The internalized losses of the ego are reestablished as part of this agency of moral scrutiny, the internalization of anger and blame originally felt for the object in its external mode. In the act of internalization, that anger and blame, inevitably heightened by the loss itself, are turned inward and sustained the ego changes place with the internalized object, thereby investing this internalized externality with moral agency and power.Thus, the ego forfeits its anger and efficacy to the ego ideal which turns against the very ego by which it is sustained in other words, the ego constructs away to turn against itself. Indeed, Freud warns of the hypermoral possibilities of this ego ideal, which, taken to its extreme, can motivate suicide. 36 The construction of the interior ego ideal involves the internali- Download 0.76 Mb. Share with your friends:
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