Vagina Envy in Men
(1993)
A challenge is offered to the characterization of psychoanalysis as suffering from potentially fatal epistemic flaws and needing to ground itself in the language of hermeneutics, neuropsychology, or infant observation in order to survive. Psychoanalytic truth is neither made up nor discovered. Psychoanalytic propositions are true in the important sense of being the most useful statements we can make right now about the nature and functioning of the human unconscious. Psychoanalytic theories evolve through rational critical discourse just as theories evolve in all fields of science and scholarship.
The hermeneutic turn in psychoanalysis may be less a move toward soft science than an attempt to address certain failures in the classical tradition. The latter has failed to convert Freud's many metaphors into anything like responsible science it has been unable to give up its fascination with Freud and move on to other thinkers and other points of view it has been unable to find an answer to the problem of secrecy and privileged access to clinical data under the heavy hand of theory, it has all but eliminated research from the psychoanalytic enterprise and finally, it has been unable to find a home for the Roshomon effect and the fact that almost everything worth looking at has at least two sides. Above all, psychoanalysis needs to recognize that our theory is often the projection of either our Zeitgeist or our personal history. Until we can make room for the problem of subjectivity in our theory-building, we will never be able to separate the singer from the song.
An underlying premise of this paper is that human beings actively and purposefully impose meanings on their experiences of psychic injury and that these meanings then have important implications for character development. Specifically, the paper examines how individuals, in defensive reaction to psychic injury, may repress their >impossible-to-fulfill< wishes, only to find those wishes eventually reborn as needs. In this way, a person's oppressive cruelty to his own wishes gives rise to resentment, indignation, and entitlement, which, in turn, fuel the experience of need. While wish implicitly communicates a request to receive from another, need, with its vicissitudes of demand and urgency, may do violence to the free social discourse of giving and receiving. The interpersonal field of give-and-take may be so constrained by the circular compulsivity of mandated giving and entitled needfulness that it is emptied of any spontaneous desire. The differential impact of communicating needs and wishes on the wider social contract – of which psychotherapy is an influential constituent – is then addressed. The paper then discusses how need and entitlement may be manifested in the transference along a passivity-activity dimension and thus illuminate the theme of responsibility for the treatment. Finally, the view of need as an entitled demand for gratification is contrasted with a view of need as a fervent wish for recognition in conjunction with the process of mourning. Mourning is viewed as a process of reintegrating impossible-to-fulfill wishes for >what could have been< and relinquishing the necessity of their fulfillment.
Reply to the Commentaries
(1993)
Mind and Brain in the 1990s
(1993)