House

I’m currently reading the fourth chapter of Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: “Seduction and the Scene of Reading.” It involves, among other things, a feminist criticism of Freud’s analysis of Dora: in essence, an account of Freud’s phallocentrism and of his sexual mystifications of female desire.

I know I’m curious about Armstrong’s argument because of my own contrarian intuition that Freud was more right about Dora than Armstrong’s account of the case allows for. And I know that I believe it’s important to return to the questions around the case in order to understand exactly how and where Freud went wrong. Why did Dora feel the need to abruptly end the analysis? Was it because Freud failed to listen? All this has to do with the broader question of how and why men who are interested in women’s speech, who do listen to it, come to deny women’s speech, or come to anger women to the extent that no further dialogue becomes possible. And what do women—Nancy Armstrong, Dora, and Virginia Woolf—do with the phenomenon of men who fail to listen to women in such flamboyant, provocative, frustrating fashion? What do women get out of thinking about men’s interest in the enigma of woman?

Dora, famously, cut off her analysis with Freud after he failed to listen to her. She was suffering from various hysterical symptoms: “dyspnoea, tussis nervosa, aphonia, and possibly migraines, together with depression, hysterical unsociability, and a taedium vitae which was probably not entirely genuine” around the age of eighteen, though some of these symptoms had been going on for longer. Freud knows from her father’s account that at some point she had been on summer vacation in the Alps with a family friend, the couple Herr and Frau K.; Frau K was taking care of her father during his illness, and during this vaction, Herr K. made a pass at Dora. Dora tells Freud that when she was fourteen, Herr K. “suddenly clasped [Dora] to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips.” After receiving more information about her father’s relationship with Frau K., and on the overlap between Dora’s symptoms and Herr K.’s absence, Freud proposes to Dora “that she had all these years been in love with Herr K.”

Her response, recorded as follows: “When I informed her of this conclusion she did not assent to it.”

Later, after an arduous second session which involves the discussion of a dream, Freud provides Dora with an interpretation, regarding her wish to become pregnant by Herr K. Freud describes her response to the interpretation as “depreciatory.” She asks, “Why, has anything so very remarkable come out?”

It would be annoying and ridiculous to be told that one had a secret, repressed crush on a man who had produced in you some measure of disgust when he assaulted you, came on to you, unwanted. Even if it was true that Herr K.’s kiss had aroused some form of excitation, the whole scenario of Freud attempting to convince her that she in fact desired him seems to me obtuse and uncharacteristic of the silent wiles I associate with the ideal psychoanalyst, who manages to get the analysand to speak out what has been repressed of their own accidental volition. Freud risked his interpretations and was bitten in response.

Armstrong observes that modern theories of sexuality say something about female desire in order to liberate desire from the constraint of repression, and therefore support the articulation of female subjectivity. But this is only in appearance. In reality, theories of sexuality only constrain women by making visible only their relation to the phallus, and men like Freud “invoke the figure of the house as a woman’s body that contains something they need.” (242). His “psychoanalytic fables of desire” mystify the cultural and historical constructedness of the woman’s situation as a vacant house for male desire.

Freud seems to have said something important about female desire, nevertheless—and this thing he discovered or uncovered in the “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” could only come out of the fact that he listened to and recorded what Dora said to him; that she negated what he said and refused to continue the analysis seems to prove that she wasn’t merely a vessel for meaning-making.

I don’t think, as Armstrong writes, that Freud has managed to create an ideal woman “who feels herself lacking as such and, in order to fill the lack, desires nothing so much as the male organ.” I don’t get a sense that Dora feels herself as lacking. I see in the case history a man, Freud, who experiences himself as lacking the male organ which could have completed the fragment of the analysis with her. He’s perplexed and moved by her “vengefulness” and “depreciatory” remarks, and clearly experiences some humiliation when she says she’s decided, a “fortnight ago,” to dismiss him, as if he were a governess.

On a different matter—I’m kind of annoyed with the writing I posted about my decision to detransition last summer; though it served its purpose at the time as a sort of push to think about what it meant for me to detransition, it seems too neat and therefore outdated; I’m thinking about what it would mean to respond to it now—the response would have to be careful but aggressive. I think I treated myself as a kind of “house of woman”—an enigmatic source of knowledge for something I had no embodied sense of; and rather then letting the thing I didn’t know about rest, I had to use writing and speaking in analysis to justify and put into motion the decision to go off testosterone and to position myself as a woman in the world; I was obsessed with getting to know that desire for femininity in language. By addressing the bulk of that language to my analyst, I participated in a hysteric’s discourse: I needed to address a man in order to feel “verified” as a woman before I could become a woman in public. The act of trying very hard and failing to say what I wanted to say about femininity had its hold over me, it compelled me to finish what I hadn’t even started. I’d normally approve of such efforts, regardless of the success of their outcomes, but somehow seeing that stuttering desire to write about detransition now makes me uncomfortable. I want to say to myself, What do you think you could accomplish by saying something like that about that? And yet I refuse to read what I wrote with the necessary care and suspension of familiarity that it should be read with. Maybe it isn’t all that bad, but the narrative I’ve produced above on account of instinct still stands. Thesis: what I produced then was distinctively male writing.

Essentialist? Mystifying? Perhaps. I like the drama of essentialism, of mystification, if that’s what writing about “man” and “woman” as separate categories involves. But this isn’t all about theory. I find that in practice, writing about being a woman, and becoming a woman, for me now seems to involve writing about men. I see this currently in the works of Mary Gaitskill, who clearly loves both men and women very much, and on their own terms (as “men” and “women”). The way women write about men matters to me a lot, and I want to be able to write something about men too. I write about dead men—Freud, Swinburne, Lawrence, Meredith. Writing about men doesn’t produce this sense of discomfort that I associate with trying to write about women or being a woman. Somehow writing about women desexualizes writing, and maybe this is because writing about women involves some form of identification: identification with specific women, identification with laws around women.

On the other hand, there’s something embarrassing and flagrantly exhibitionistic about the sexuality of a woman writing about men. The detransition essay was uncomfortable for me to write because it involved a desire to discuss specific men and their effects on my sense of my gender. Which would represent a kind of subservience, though in reality writing about men—Freud, or my dissertation subjects: Swinburne, Meredith, Lawrence, and James—involves an attempt to construct a kind of House of Men. And if I can create that house, it means that I’ve been able to articulate something that makes me a little freer in the world. I’ll have a ground from which to wander, and ownership over an edifice I can sell.