The Politics of Pleasure

In 'Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex' and 'Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinctions Between the Sexes', Freud claims to understand the body/sexuality/pleasure beyond culture and history (Laqueur 1990).  Freud's narrative, detaching sexuality from reproduction and problematising the notion of exclusive heterosexuality, ultimately does more to serve the primacy and value of both heterosexual relations and the conventions of the patriarchal organisation of the family (Appignanesi & Forrester 1993).

Freud accounts for the transition from the pleasure of the clitoris in younger women, to the primacy of the vagina, in adult females.  Prior to the 20th Century, medical and pornographic representations of women's orgasm were only clitoral (Laqueur 1990: 233).  Freud's mythology around the development of the healthy adult female asserted vaginal pleasure and an abandonment of clitoral pleasure.  Freud, as an authority on mind, body and normality, was a powerful figure, defining acceptable ways for middle class women to use their bodies.  The medical profession, emerging out of the Middle class, further defined acceptable/rational/healthy ways to use the body.  Internalised notions of normality became powerful forces, where individuals internalise ideas and shame, and label their bodies/pleasures/identities in relation to the sexual degradation of the Other, in this case the mentally disturbed and the lesser classes (Laquer 1990: 235).

In Freud (in Appignanesi & Forrester 1993: 419), women are "made capable of an erotic life based on the masculine type object-love, which can exist alongside the feminine proper, derived from narcissism...it is the baby that makes the transition from narcissistic self-love to object love possible". Freud's narrative, while problematising exclusive heterosexuality (and societal ideas about what women find pleasurable), ends in an adult female, like the homosexual male, defined as narcissistic.  She is able to transcend this authentic selfishness via reproduction and sexual practices/pleasures that are defined in relation to men, and to the penetration of the penis of the vagina.  The sordid complexity of Freud reveals/suggests the extent to which powerful men and dominant institutions consciously and unconsciously prescribed myths about bodies/pleasures/identities.  While Freud may have seen himself as beyond the conventional morality and irrationality of religion, the key organiser of bodies (and identities) before scientific disciplines (gained authority), it would be interesting to explore the extent to which Freud furthers the patriarchal organisation of gender and sexuality through complex modes of self-discipline.  Indeed many feminists have examined the extent to which Freud's theory and practice involved the dismissal of sexual abuse in childhood, explaining his/her patients' complaints of abuse as mere problems of development of the individual and his or her Oedipus Complex (Appignanesi & Forrester 1993: 472). This alludes to a history of the ways in which religion and its supposed anti-thesis science reproduced an existing sexual and gender order (in the modern West) which favoured the powerful, and the ambitions of a society dominated by the Gods of sexual reproduction and the power of men over women, of the middle class over the others, of normality over insanity, of rich over poor, of object over subject, of heterosexual over homosexual.


Bibliography

Appignanesi, L. & Forrester, J. (1993).  Freud's Women, Virago: London.

Freud, S. 1973, New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, Penguin: Harmondsworth.

Freud, S. 1977 (1923), 'Infantile genital organisation', in On Sexuality ed. Angela Richards, Penguin: Harmondsworth.

Freud, S. 1977 (1924), 'Disolution of the oedipus complex', in On Sexuality ed. Angela Richards, Penguin: Harmondsworth.

Freud, S. 1977 (1925), 'Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes', in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards, Penguin: Harmondsworth.

Laqueur, T. (1990), Making Sex:  Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge:  MA.