There’s a difficult, sticky claim at the heart of psychoanalysis: that women tend more towards hysteria than men. This is highly contentious, I think partly because it seems a crude signifier of sexual difference (which today is in itself an idea to be avoided), and partly because it seems to reinforce a highly stereotypical and stigmatising view of women.
And yet, it seems to me, there is something in it that is worth keeping, worth expanding even, or understanding. Charles Melman is a French analyst, and I find he can explain psychoanalytic concepts, especially those of Lacan, in a charming and sometimes plainspoken way. So it is here, in a lecture given in 1995 on Lacan’s Seminar 11.
Psychoanalysis is an effort to make someone speak. Specifically, to speak what has not previously been spoken, what has previously been mute. This is what an hysterical symptom is – something that has remained dumb, and that erupts without speaking.
You speak the unspeakable, and the symptom disappears.
But there is this: “Lacan says the problem for the hysteric … is that it is in the very movement of speaking that the hysteric constitutes her desire.”
Melman says: “This means that … normally women are mute and it is only in speaking that they constitute or establish their desire.”
Why so? Melman’s answer is worth quoting in full.
“Because the girl is not marked by castration in the same way as the boy. She does not have a place, as he has, from which her word, her speech, can be organised. What makes a boy speak? It is the gap that there is in him. It is in that gap that the subject can take up its place.
“But if there isn’t this gap, if I am not marked by this gap, I no longer know what I have to say. I don’t have a place in me that can organise and give rise to my word. So then it is only if I speak to my counterpart, if I share hysterically in his cut, that I can express a desire.”
The key here is that the hysteric must address her speech to an other in order to realise her desire. This is what Lacan means by the movement of speaking. So, “if I am not marked by this split or this gap, I remain within myself and I don’t know what I want – I don’t even know who I am – and so it is in speaking to the other and by coming to share in his castration that I can discover my desire.”
Freud talks of sharing in the other’s castration in Group Psychology – the girls whose friend doesn’t get the love-letter she is waiting for. My friend is distraught and retires to bed, so what do I do? Perhaps I retire to bed too (this is hysterical identification), or perhaps I go to her, try to console her, try to cure or save her. In Freud’s example, the girls all retire to their own beds. In a sense, they each try to curl up in the friend’s wound. Her wound is the position they take up.
The hysteric never wants her desire to be satisfied, which leaves us with the classic confusion of the sexes: the man asks the woman what she wants because he thinks he can fulfil her desire. He tries – and either she accepts, and immediately creates a new unfulfilled desire, or she does not accept his attempt at satisfaction at all. Like Dora, she will leave him. (This, says Lacan, is the original sin of psychoanalysis – Freud failed with hysterics because of his own desire, which was never analysed.)
Why won’t she accept satisfaction once and for all? We have already seen the answer to this: it is in the gap that the woman finds the position in which she exists, desires, finds her self and her word. The absence of the gap – which is what satisfaction is – would be intolerable.
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