Report from Freud Reading Group (3)
"there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions but ... it is something innate in everyone" (§7)
Last week we concluded the first essay in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), which is titled “I. The Sexual Aberrations.” The basic structure of this text is very simple: it is a rote list of unmentionables. Every aberration is a deviation – in the sense sometimes of undue intensification, but more often of a literal turning of libido – from either the sexual object (genitalia) or the sexual aim (climax) attributed to the ‘normal.’ The essay is a kind of parodic Victorian taxonomy of just how much variation separates actual human sexual experience from the theoretically normal, and eventually of how even the statistically ‘normal’ is continuous with the deviant. Any list of sexual activities and interests, I suspect, would end up looking somewhat like this essay and sharing its unusual synthesis of the titillating and the banal or repetitive. What’s implied by Freud’s rhetoric here is that sexual normality is an empty form with no self-evident content. All we have is an ‘object’ and an ‘aim,’ which amounts to a map with no directions (except we know that X marks the spot). Any attempt to really specify or fill out that content has a distorting, aberrating effect on the pure form – hence the taboo.
Freud uses a lot of controversial and at-first difficult vocab, relying on strange words like:
normal
abnormal
perversion
deviation
inversion
mucous membrane
He is very much at pains to make a substantial intervention into our speech habits. He uses the word perversion liberally to describe all the neurotic and non-neurotic variations in sexual aim and object, eventually concluding, as I flag in my subtitle, that everyone is a pervert. But this is a serious scientific conclusion, not a flippant joke about seedy bourgeois heterosexuals. He insists on “how inappropriate it is to use the word perversion as a word of reproach” (§3). He also suggests that we discard the word ‘degeneracy,’ which has become a kind of “fashion[able]” and “indiscriminate” term of abuse against homosexual people which serves no scientific or investigative purpose (§1.A.). It is in this spirit that we should take his use of the words that mark variation from a norm – a norm which itself is revealed to be a kind of fantasy of both the popular and the scientific imagination – and his slightly awkward word for homosexuality, ‘inversion,’ which he uses interchangeably with the more modern expression. The real lexical throughline of this essay is the repeated invocation of ‘normality’ and its various valences, which eventually blurs to the point of being the kind of word you can only ironically cite. ‘Mucous membrane’ is the secret hero, though, because Freud uses it when he feels embarrassed about kissing.
On a few occasions I have used some combination of the words ‘monist libidinal geography’ to describe what Freud sets out in this first essay. He writes in §6, for example:
Most psychoneurotics only fall ill after the age of puberty as a result of the demands made upon them by normal sexual life. … Or else illnesses of this kind set in later, when the libido fails to obtain satisfaction along normal lines. In both these cases the libido behaves like a stream whose main bed has become blocked. It proceeds to fill up collateral channels which may hitherto have been empty.
I suppose in this case it is a geology. The ontological status of the channels, through which deviant sexual satisfaction becomes possible, is a bit unclear – what determines the extent of possible divergence from norms for any individual? The ego presides over an infinitely wide and intricately furrowed floodplain – but the image and the point make sense. Freud is telling us a story about the manifold ways in which libidinal investment is ‘normally’ capable of being freed up and redirected as well as fixated, dammed, or frozen. The libido is the nonanthropomorphic main character, not the familiar psychodramatic figures of Oedipus or mommy or daddy. This makes this early work something of a marked contrast to Freud’s later and at times more rigidly stratified sexual metapsychology.
Take the phenomenon of the fetish. This is fairly straightforwardly the substitution of any body part or object for the genitals, the ‘normal sexual object.’ Cases of fetishism sometimes seem quite extreme to the point of tragicomedy, and Freud bravely ventures some quite systematic theories as to the prevalence of specific kinds of fetishes, specifically those involving shoes and feet: they have a particular olfactory character, they orient the subject in a submissive position midway in the journey to the discovery of the genitals, which (perhaps in childhood) they were prevented from completing, thus fixating them at the periphery of the anatomical geography.
But Freud is very clear that fetishisation is also just another spectrum of possible libidinal investments, a natural consequence of the fact that the ‘normal sexual aim’ requires the cooperation of a number of senses and activities and that the ‘normal sexual object’ happens to be a part of a complete human body dressed in various significant and signifying accoutrements of civilised life.
The point of contact with the normal is provided by the psychologically essential overvaluation of the sexual object, which inevitably extends to everything that is associated with it. A certain degree of fetishism is thus habitually present in normal love. (§2.A)
This is the libidinal monism that I spoke of. We all know very well how to fetishise: it is the libidinal relation we take (if we are ‘normal’) to the genitals. It becomes ‘abnormal’ the moment the object is displaced, even if merely by inches. But this abnormality cannot be avoided. In fact, if you aren’t fetishising your partner and their stuff at least a bit, you’re not doing it right.
In Freud’s much later 1927 text, “Fetishism,” he goes in a totally different direction with this analysis:
In every instance, the meaning and the purpose of the fetish turned out, in analysis, to be the same … When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost.
This is one of those slightly funny Freud texts, and the wry self-awareness (“I know you are all waiting for me to say penis”) is rather too witty for us serious readers. The special lost object Freud has in mind here is “the woman’s (the mother’s) penis1 that the little boy once believed in,” one of the originary moments of the Oedipal drama. Gilles Deleuze, in his book Coldness and Cruelty, where he is at pains to criticise Freud along largely anti-Oedipal lines, summarises it very clearly:
the fetish is the image or substitute of the female phallus, that is the means by which we deny that the woman lacks a penis. The fetishist’s choice of a fetish is determined by the last object he saw as child before becoming aware of the missing penis (a shoe, for example, in the case of a glance directed from the feet upward). (31)
This is nothing like the story in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. We have made a bit of a fetish of the fetish, reifying it into a stage play of the infant getting to know mommy. I also don’t really know what the “female phallus” is – the expression implies the existence of a “male phallus,” which is even less believable. Deleuze is not happy that things are “determined” in this way, although the task of Coldness and Cruelty is to take up this theatrical structure and attempt a thorough and sensitive transformation of it in the literary techniques that inhabit and disseminate the fantasies of sexual non-normality upon which we all rely. I just wonder whether he would have preferred the early Freud’s rather less stereotyped flows.
These two accounts, 1905 versus 1927, are helpful landmarks within the Freudian canon. Freud also formulates originary sadism in the Three Essays (which derives, again in a libidinally monistic and general way) from the non-specific aggressivity associated with the death drive (this is a kind of lower-case death drive, perhaps), where masochism is the narcissistic turning of libidinal aggressivity onto the ego (narcissism being in a sense the archetypal ‘perversion,’ producing the 180-degree turn of many kinds of outwardly intended libido). A similar contrast in landmarks might be noted between this position in 1905 and “The Economic Problem of Masochism” from 1924, which is a text that seems more like a postscript to Beyond the Pleasure Principle and which similarly produces a taxonomy of masochisms less compatible with a totally flat geology of libidinal possibilities, equally ripe for Deleuze’s critique.
The extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the normal constitution. (§7)
The Renoir painting invests the visual field with the sensuous, slightly delirious quality of continuous organic beauty – an aesthetic pleasure that Freud, in the first of the Three Essays, reveals theoretically latent in every object and every sensation. Renoir’s made everything slightly wavy and pink, and the floor is very unsteady. The brushstroke is Renoir’s infant-egoic tool for refusing the boundary between objects, binding them in the monist flow of pleasure and cathexis. The painted floor induces disorientation, an affective response that then might (as if metonymically) reproduce that figurative disorientation in your own attitude to the actual floor upon which you stand. The shoe is on a little pillow, although it blends into the colour of the floor, like a weird flexion of the painted space, marking – indeed, leaning down towards, taking the body on a journey through memory – the place where the imaginary child about to discover their fetish object would be standing on their first encounter with lack. The painting is in these ways narrowly exemplary of the fetish in form and in content, but so are, I suppose, all serious aesthetic projects of representation of the more or less normal.
Note the double genitive.