The Body of Evidence. Psychoanalysis and Sex Difference

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Difference

Thamy Ayouch

To cite this version:

Thamy Ayouch. The Body of Evidence. Psychoanalysis and Sex Difference. Recherches en psych-analyse, Université Paris 7- Denis Diderot, 2013, 15, �10.3917/rep.015.0054a�. �hal-01498418�

THE BODY OF EVIDENCE. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SEX

DIFFERENCE

Thamy Ayouch

Association Recherches en psychanalyse | Recherches en psychanalyse

2013/1 - n° 15 pages 54a à 65a

ISSN 1767-5448

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---Ayouch Thamy, « The Body of Evidence. Psychoanalysis and Sex Difference »,

Recherches en psychanalyse, 2013/1 n° 15, p. 54a-65a. DOI : 10.3917/rep.015.0054a

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The Body of Evidence. Psychoanalysis and Sex Difference

Le corps, un témoin ? Psychanalyse et différence des sexes

Thamy Ayouch

Abstract:

In this article, we wish to examine whether the body actually gives a testimony of sex difference, what this may stand as an evidence of, and how it acts in the structuring of the psyche. The psychoanalytical concepts of sexuation and sexuality will be tackled, questioning how sex difference may proceed from the visibility of bodies, what inscription of the symbolic order it performs and how it is used by psychoanalytical theory.

With the help of Monique Schneider’s analyses, we shall browse through the multi-layered Freudian text, which will lead us to the notion of sex assignment through the look. We shall try to establish a dialogue between psychoanalysis and Judith Butler’s gender theory, which gives an account of this assignment and upsets the meanings of sex difference. We shall eventually analyse the Lacanian concept of phallus and approach it through its social-historical determination.

Résumé:

Dans cet article, l’auteur examine si le corps est bien un témoin de la différence sexuelle, et comment opèrerait ce témoignage sur le plan de la structuration psychique. Il s’agit de faire porter la question sur les concepts analytiques de sexuation et de sexualité en demandant comment la différence des sexes s’articule à la visibilité des corps, quelle inscription de l’ordre symbolique elle permet et comment elle est convoquée par la théorie analytique.

L’examen de la plurivocité de la théorie freudienne à ce sujet, en prenant appui sur les écrits de Monique Schneider, permet d’aboutir à la notion d’assignation de sexe par le regard. Est alors tenté un dialogue entre la psychanalyse et la perspective de Judith Butler, qui rend compte des modalités de cette assignation et redistribue les sens de la différence des sexes. Le concept lacanien de phallus est enfin analysé dans sa dé-naturalisation de la différence des sexes, puis appréhendé dans sa détermination sociale-historique.

Keywords:

Mots-clefs: psychanalyse, différence des sexes, corps, témoin, genre, masculin, féminin, phallus

Plan:

A Testimony of Languages Is Anatomy a Destiny?

Beyond the Binary: Diversity of the Sexes and within the Sexes The Silent Testimony of the Body: the Prescription of Gender Psychoanalysis and Gender

Conclusion

15│2013

[Online] June 24, 2013

A Testimony of Languages

Historically speaking, it was in reference to the visible and attestable material object that the term témoin (“witness”) first appeared in old French. Referring back to “that which serves as proof”, to the document, in 1165 it designated only secondarily the “person who has seen or heard something and can certify it”.

According to the Trésor de la langue française1,

the current use of the term thus distinguishes the sense of a person or a thing: the témoin is a spectator, silently watching an event, or the “person who certifies or who can certify what he has seen or heard”. In the legal system, the

témoin allows the application of the law to

proceed, or allows the accuracy and authenticity of identities and declarations to be attested. However, this word also harbors the sense of “thing”. A material proof, a clue, an exhibit or a piece of evidence, the témoin can be silent, in the shape of an object or a site that bears testimony to an event, or is eloquent, when it allows something to be ascertained and verified, in the manner of a base of comparison in a scientific experiment, or the baton that is passed from runner to runner in a replay race. These different meanings are directly related to a visibility, a tangibility, or an auditory perception, all of which are sense attestations that link the témoin to the perception that the body feels, and to the perception of bodies – “extended substances” – and the body.

This inscription in the body is not absent from the Latin origin of the term testis-is, which displays a homonymy between the témoin and the little témoin, the testis or testiculus, the testicle. The témoin makes direct reference to a token of masculinity: the testicle is testimony to the male sex. Anatomy is none the less caught here in a symbolic network of the juridical: only men testify to a lineage, probably, according to another hypothesis, by swearing on the dearest thing they have.

But what does the testicle really testify to? This anatomical particularity of the male body lets us

see, as does the prominence of the penis, the anatomical difference between the sexes. The testicle, or preferably, the testicles, are a reference to one of the two sexes of the species, inscribing the male in its contradistinction to the female. This is a strange testimony of the body for maleness in the Latin languages, in contrast to the Semitic language, Hebrew, which refers the témoin to the other sex.

In Hebrew, the word for témoin (or “witness” is

דע ed, and the word for “testimony” is תו דע

edot]. While this word does indeed cover the

same range as testis in Latin, it is none the less by setting itself part particularly in relation to the body: the second meaning of דע, such as it

appears in the dictionary Even Shoshan2, makes

reference to the linen used by a menstruating

woman to absorb the blood of her period.3 Here

the witness attests to the absence of pregnancy, inscribing femaleness as potential maternity and at the same time distinguishing it from maternity. The body is the “witness” to an anatomical difference that assigns a sex, a potentiality that lies in a hollow (maternity) and the certainty of a transmission, that of Judaism. The constitution of the “witness” is then a matter of knowing, even though it is linked to

the unknowable. In effect, דע ed articulates a ע

ayin to a ד dalet. The first letter, ע,

designates the “eye”, the “gaze” and the “source”: to the original meaning of “seeing” and of “consulting”, it adds the meanings of “appearing” and of “disappearing”, thus allowing for the transition from an interior to an exterior, from the depths of the earth to the visibility of the surface, as the “source” performs in the passage of water. The second letter, ד, designates the “door” and “opening”, notably in triangular fashion, and furthermore either the sexual organ or the breast of a

woman.4

The “witness” is also this eye that holds itself at the level of the threshold, at the level of the surface of sex, and attests to a passage from inside to outside. It is the opening of the female body that allows an invisibility to be seen. But the opening is equally the opening of the eye:

the witness is the one that typifies the opening. This is the etymology that would be arrived at

through ףז רצ tserouf, the permutation of

letters, in league with knowing, העי די yediaa,

and the fact of knowing in the Biblical sense,

עדי yedaa. Knowing is thus tantamount to

overstepping the (contemplative) inaction of the witness so as to cross the threshold: to act upon this split between the visible and the invisible, between the inside and the outside, in physical relations.5

The question emerges, therefore, of knowing whether the body might also testify so directly to an assignation of sex, male or female, and how this might come about. The networks of seeing, of touching, of hearing or of tangible

attestation, do not correspond, as

psychoanalysis has underlined very well, to the natural immediacy of an activity of perception, but to the multiplicity of imaginary and symbolic inscriptions in which the body only has any existence and so far as it is symbolized and mentalized. Only a certain type of symbolization of his desire allows a subject to perceive his body, which is not reduced to the sum of raw innervations, but is always approached on the basis of a structuring of the fantasy.

To pose the question of the body is tantamount to asking what the body bears out here, whether it must give an account of it or whether it is on the contrary a silent witness, whether it counts as a piece of evidence in the inscription of sexual difference or whether it testifies to an ideology. Raising this question does not fail to call into question certain analytic notions of both sexuation and sexuality.

It is tantamount to asking what articulation with the visibility of bodies the difference between the sexes stems from, what inscription of the symbolic order it allows for, and how it might be assigned by theory. It is a matter of examining the trajectory from the bodily dimension to the sexuated dimension, and then from the sexuated dimension to the sexual dimension, by examining afresh whether anatomy really is a destiny.

Is Anatomy a Destiny?

The Freudian notion of children’s sexuality, polymorphous perversity, makes a point of introducing, in the very first edition of the Three Essays on Sexual Theory, an utterly new de-biologization of both sexuality and sexuation. Setting sexuality at odds with the popular opinion that ties it to reproduction, this book detaches the drive from any attraction of the

object.6 In this sense, the infantile sexual

dimension, which is conceived of as a “gain in pleasure” that cannot be reduced to a vital function, in its polymorphous dimension, turns out to be a component both of desire and of sexual practice, which is however merely one of its manifestations among others.

This de-naturalization of sexuality, which is detached from reproduction, has the effect of de-biologizing sexuation as well. In effect, the aim of sexual practice is not the biological destiny of reproduction; the complementarity of the two sexes of the species seems to be something that is entirely relative.

Much more than the relativity of a complementarity of the sexes, it is essentially their definition that seems to be problematic. In effect, Freud underlines on several occasions that, although the notions of “masculine” and of “feminine” seem “so unambiguous to ordinary

people”, they remain most “confused”.7

Psychoanalysis “cannot elucidate” the intrinsic essence of these notions, “it simply takes over the two concepts and makes them the

foundation of its work.”8 This difference

between the sexes is declared to be bound; it is supported by a further opposition that is not sufficient:

When we attempt to reduce them further, we find masculinity vanishing into activity and femininity into passivity, and

that does not tell us enough.9

The Oedipal vicissitudes of the individuals of both sexes are “made up of masculine and

feminine traits”10 and “all human individuals, as

a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both

masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain

theoretical constructions of uncertain

content.”11

Does this mean that the body, within this anatomical distinction that gives a weak support to the activity / passivity opposition, only testifies very negligibly to the difference between the sexes?

Freudian theory is far from being univocal on this subject, and the testimony of the body seems to take on a quite particular importance here in the psychical definition both of sexuation and of sexuality. Freud underlines that, “the morphological distinction is bound to find expression in difference of psychical

development.”12 And he concludes in parodying

Napoleon: “Anatomy is Destiny”.13

This line seems to have been radicalized in 1937 when, in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, he underlines that the most powerful source of resistance in analysis remains, for men, the revolt against a passive or feminine attitude towards another man, and for women, penis envy, the aspiration to possess a male genital

organ.14 Biology and its determinism, which had

previously been swept aside, seem here to be summoned anew:

We often have the impression that with the wish for a penis and the masculine protest we have penetrated through all the psychological strata and have reached bedrock, and that thus our activities are at an end. This is probably true, since, for the psychical field, the biological does in fact

play the part of an underlying bedrock.15

We still need to determine the value of this implication of the biological dimension, which stands as a guarantee of a difference between the sexes, here linked to the direct testimony of a difference between the organs: is the biological aspect, in its anatomical expression, the last word on the difference between the sexes, or does it merely step in here as the index of an enigma, the irreducible enigma of sexuality?

Furthermore, what are we to think of the classical definition that was introduced in Moses

and Monotheism, which refers sexuation back to

a not very innovative Platonism in which the male is the intelligible spirit and the female becomes the tangible? In assigning man and woman to specific sexual roles in this way, does not Freudian psychoanalysis introduce a normativity which, over and above the specificity of the field of the unconscious, summons up determining social prescriptions. What then are we to understand of the role of the body as a witness? Would it not be but a precarious witness to the difference between the sexes, a difference which itself seems to be linked to a feeble opposition between passivity and activity, or to the staid opposition between the intelligible and the tangible, more than to the difference between masculine and feminine to which the organs bear witness?

The perspective of Monique Schneider, in

Généalogie du masculin, Le paradigme du féminin and a series of different articles,

underlines with care and erudition the nuances of the Freudian text on this score.

Beyond the Binary: Diversity of the Sexes

and within the Sexes

According to Monique Schneider, sexual difference could never be the object of one self

same binary division in the Freudian

theorization. In turning to the germ cells over and against the death drive in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud seems to be moving beyond the logic of a to have / to have not the

penis as the decisive factor in the sexuation of

the child, and later in the adult, in order to introduce the “theoretical turbulence” (which is specific to Eros) of the partners in the sexual encounter who are at once different and similar.16

From this we deduce that the difference defined by this binarity, and to which the body becomes a witness, is the altogether visible difference of an imaginary inveiglement: it stems from a

infantile sexual theory of boys which, in comparing visually the “genital region” of the young girl, introduces the alternative between a

to have or a to have not.

The perspective is quite different, argues Monique Scheider, when male sexuation is envisaged beyond this comparative scenario. In dealing with the male erection in “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, Freud writes:

Now the familiar prototype of an organ that is painfully tender, that is in some way changed and that is yet not diseased in the ordinary sense, is the genital organ in its states of excitation. In that condition it becomes congested with blood, swollen and humected, and is the seat of a multiplicity

of sensations.17

This congested organ, Blutdurchströmt, shot through with a flow of blood, so underlines Monique Schneider, here appears in a strange

proximity with the female organ18: the

difference between the sexes, when it exceeds the binarity of comparison by visual means, is at once dissemblance and resemblance.

There then appears a veritable feminization of the male dimension in a good many passages of the Freudian oeuvre. Certainly the comparative approach defines the woman by what, in contradistinction to the cherished “morsel” that the male body uses to enjoy, forms the object of a lack. But here the body of anatomical difference shows itself, by means of a visual dimension that remains of the threshold (as is noted by the etymology of דע), to be a testimony, in the Hebraic sense, in a twofold dimension:

1. It is first of all a canceling out of the Latin

testis. In her Généalogie du masculin, Monique

Schneider underlines the sweeping aside of the testicles from the Freudian definition of masculinity, similar to the child’s visual omission of this part of the genital apparatus:

It is, incidentally, remarkable what a small degree of attention the other part of the male genitals, the little sac with its contents, attracts in children. From all one

hears in analyses, one would not guess that the male genitals consisted of anything

more than the penis.19

The scrotum, the little sac, would proceed from

a female dimension20, linked to fecundity, in

both the infantile sexual theories and in a societal division that separates access to power from the field of fecundity and paternity. So it is that she reminds us that the plural patres stands in opposition to the proletarii, who are defined by Alain Rey as “those who bring children into the world”21 in a societal classification that is close to the tripartite hierarchy that Dumézil attributes to the Indo European civilization: priests, warriors, producers.

Bringing in Françoise Héritier in Masculin /

Féminin : La pensée de la différence, Monique

Schneider concludes that it is not the sexual organ but instead fecundity that would thus constitute the difference between male and female. We may nevertheless specify that the perspective of Monique Schneider remains very distinct from that of Françoise Héritier, who sees the impassable stopping point of the difference between the sexes as the model of all difference, and the structuring point of all thought, at the very point at which Monique Schneider seems to replace this with a diversity. Observe therefore that difference appears here at the heart of the same sex and brings into perspective on one hand power and on the

other hand fecundity. Although Freud

establishes a “logic of the two edged sword” and sometimes coincides with a socialized conception of the difference between the sexes, he no less examines binary thought by introducing a proximity between the sexes. So it is that the “Dream of the Great Achievement” that Freud comments on in The Interpretation of Dreams, and which is reproduced by Monique Schneider, leads him to bring erection and the birth of sex into communication:

The virile dreamer sees himself lying in his bed; he is a pregnant woman. This states becomes very disagreeable for him […]. Behind the bed there was hanging a

geographical map, the bottom edge of which was kept stretched by a strip of wood. He tore the strip of wood down by catching hold of its two ends, so firmly that it did not break across but split into two halves lengthways. This action relieved him

and at the same time helped on delivery.22

The pregnancy and birth here present an “overlap between the markers for male and female”. This dream is once again related back to the fecundity of the male dimension when Monique Schneider reminds us of the link that Françoise Héritier sees in this with the custom of penile subincision that is practiced in some cultures: a hole that some men puncture at the base of their penis in order to become, so they believe, more fertile as a result of this feminization.

The functions of the male dimension would not therefore be able to acquire any universal value: the various historical periods indicate an alternation between the male dimension understood as an “order” or as a fecundity. In turn, the divisions between the male and female do not concern a difference between the sexes but an overlap, a interlinking at the heart of the same sex, a “vacillation in the operations that

aim to give a ruling on difference”.23

2. The second meaning of a body witness in

keeping with the accepted Hebraic use of דע, a gaze stationed at the door through which it does not pass, is linked to the signification of “threshold” which in Freud takes on the paradigm of the female. This is thesis of the

eponymous work24, in which Monique Schneider

compares the Freudian imprecision in the naming of the female sex, more often than not called the “genital region”, with the cultural prescription of a duty of ignorance concerning the original female dimension. Freud none the less develops the image of a slit, back on the final pages of Studies on Hysteria, typifying as much the anatomy as the psychical locus that allows for the admission (Aufnahme) of the repressed in an opening / closing rhythm that replaces the male scheme of advance / retreat:

The female topography that offers this “narrow slit” which affords access to an

internal dwelling will therefore serve as a paradigm to figure the psychical space that can expel or accommodate the various

unpredictable manifestations.25

The female body this offers a paradigm of an available empty space, but one that is curiously delocalized: this internal female compartment is refused to women themselves in order to be attributed to the psyche in general. Thereafter there only remains, as a means of designating the female dimension, the external form of visible absence, and female sexuality is thought of in general by Freud only in regard to the outlying regions of the clitoris and the vagina. This is an operation of the de-symbolization of the female dimension that links the uterine and the internal, that which is withdrawn from the visual, with the cloacal.

If the body is a witness here, it is through this gaze posted at the threshold: the eye remains at the door, as is indicated by the meaning of דע. We may wager that a double movement is being produced here, when the theory takes up the prohibition of knowing that is specific to the horrified fascination felt in the face of the female sex. In as much as this theory reproduces, in its movement, an infantile sexual theory, when it understands the difference between the sexes in visual terms, it produces a double imaginary inveiglement: it is through the gaze that bears upon the “genital region” of the girl that the boy deduces, comparatively, sexual difference, and that the theory stations her within the binarity of to have / to have not. But it is also by means of this gaze that it assigns to the girl a sexuation that the theorization makes quite sure to reproduce.

The Silent Testimony of the Body: the

Prescription of Gender

How is this assignation to a sex brought about, an assignation that happens at once through the gaze of the child and the gaze of theory? This

question stands at the crossroads of

psychoanalysis and gender studies. “It is from

the angle of sexual difference that psychoanalysis was concerned, in an initial

phase, with gender studies.”26 The perspective

of Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism

and the Subversion of Identity gives an account

of this by means of a penetrating remodeling of the relations between sex and gender and a redistribution of meanings in the difference between the sexes. The opposition between sex and gender is no longer thought through on the model of a divorce between nature and culture, which, in the last resort, always moves towards the founding of a social construction upon a substrate of biological identity, thus naturalizing the difference between the sexes in order to historicize the difference between the genders. No less than gender, sex is also a social construction: Anatomy is not Destiny but an

historical fabrication.27

For Judith Butler, there is no ontological nature, no anatomical sex distinction, that is not always and already taken up in the instituted, constructed, and culturally and historically defined meaning of gender. Gender thus designates precisely the apparatus for the production and the institution of the sexes themselves: it is the full set of discursive and cultural means by which a

“sexed nature” or a “natural sex” is

produced and established as “pre

discursive,” prior to culture, a politically

neutral surface on which culture acts.28

The body would thus no longer be a witness to anything whatsoever. It would not indicate any natural substrate of sexual difference because it only appears as a cultural construction put into shape, erected and modeled by assignations of gender that give rise to “sex”. It is not, however, a matter of denying the materiality of the body, as Judith Butler indicates in Bodies that Matter:

On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”29, but of broaching it not as a pre existent reality but as the real effect of social regulations and normative assignations.

Gender, and the sex that it produces, thus turn out to be performative, in Austin’s sense of the term: the acts, gestures and expressed and

fulfilled desires create the illusion of an internal kernel, that is maintained precisely be a constant repetition of the norm. This is an odd repetition which creates, though renewed imitation, the idea of an original model. Such a model does not, however, exist, but stems precisely from this performativity.

The performativity of gender and the production of the sex which it decides upon is not however a deliberated choice, but a social interpellation: it is not an isolated subjective act but a collective reiteration, a normative assignation.

Gender is thus not contrasted with sex, but rather it produces it by establishing norms that run through sex and sexuality in a veritable bodily inscription that is defined as a “melancholy of gender”.

Let us conclude here that the body is a silent witness: it has no validity as a mark, as an index, as a piece of evidence in which a sexed inscription would be attested. It looks on, as a silent and forgetful spectator, at this melancholy of gender that outlines its surface, its sexuation and its desire.

Psychoanalysis and Gender

Would it not be more suitable then to think more in terms of the rapprochement between theories of gender and psychoanalysis, in this attempt to circumscribe what is operative in the gender differences in sexuation? This, so it seems to me, is an intersubjective and likewise wholly social difference between the genders that is operating here in the assignation of a sexuation. As Jean Laplanche underlines in

Castration, symbolisations, prior to the

difference between the sexes there is a difference between the genders, between the masculine and the feminine, which is admitted by psychoanalysis without being theorized. Whereas the child, plunged into an adult universe, receives unquestioningly the socially transmitted opposition between masculine and feminine, psychoanalysis accounts for this in an essentialized manner, through its “tendency to

situate the masculine / feminine distinction as an altogether terminal distinction, at which one must

arrive.”30 It would seem, as Mélanie Jacquot has

underlined31, that this assignation, which is more

an assignation of gender than of sex, is a means of breaking away from the slippery slope of naturalism that one interpretation of the clinic can entertain (on this occasion, for the author in question, an interpretation of a clinic of intersexuation) on the basis of an anatomical difference between the sexes.

This difference still remains however, as was developed by Jean Laplanche in a later text, assigned by the social sphere:

Gender, to my mind, so as to define it, the crucial term, and moreover I am not the only one to say so, is the term of “assignation”. Assignation underlines the primacy of the other in the process. […] Assignation is a complex set of acts that is extended into language and into meaningful types of behavior in one’s social surroundings. One could speak of continuous assignation or of a veritable prescription. This idea of assignation or of “identification as…” completely changes the vector of identification. I think here that there is a way of getting out of the aporia of this altogether “neat” formula that Freud set out and which has given rise to so much cogitation and commentary: “the primal identification with the father of personal prehistory”. […] Would this not be, rather than an “identification with”, an “identification by”. In other terms, I would say: primal identification by the socius of personal

prehistory.32

If the body is a witness, in this inveiglement of the gaze, it is then, through the fantasmatic inflation specific to seeing, which situates an irreducible imaginary under any perception, which stations a difference between the genders, a difference assigned by the primal

socius, to a difference of sexes that is entirely

binary and which is defined by the logic of to

have / to have not.

As Andrea Linhares underlines, citing this passage from Laplanche:

Gender would come to the subject via the social, via the gaze that the primal socius levels at the subject, via the place that it

gives him, and which the subject translates and appropriates for himself […]. The underlying examination of these questions is to find out whether or not the concept of gender would allow us to think through and name analytically certain types of suffering that are linked to assignation by the social

sphere.33

Rereading this Butlerian / Laplanchian social ontology in phenomenological terms thus amounts to asserting, as does Kim Sang Ong Van

Cung34, that for the subject to have a gender is a

structure of the mitsein, of the Being-for-the-other.

This prevalence of gender, which determines a sexuation more than resulting from it, is what seems to be pointed up by Jeanne during several sessions. This young woman of twenty five years of age affirms, in our first meeting, that she detests the word “woman” which she finds indecent if and when it is applied to her. Next she indicates that as a last resort she accepts the word “girl”, while still refusing a whole series of activities that are associated with this. This dis-identification with conventional femininity is, however, flaunted neither in her style nor in her appearance. Having completed medical studies which she passed quite brilliantly, she justifies her choice to specialize in traumatology by her will not to correspond to what would be expected of her. Whereas a woman might be more likely to follow the route of pediatrics, because of her “maternal instinct”, this is, so she says, a “boy’s thing”, which she

will be appropriating for herself in

traumatology. The traumatologists are “strong brutes” who do not hesitate when it comes to “getting to the heart of the matter”. “They don’t have feelings”, she adds, “it is always more straightforward to cut into sleeping flesh than to speak to someone.”

Her associations during this session lead her to develop a series of oppositions: the girl / boy opposition is propped up, in this practice of traumatology, by the distinctions kind / cruel, week / strong, and fat / thin, this last distinction being significant in its determination of her behavior with food and eating. She then

resituates the accusation of weakness from the third opposition in the words of her brother, whom she is quick to incriminate for this, or else to qualify with this term all those who do not show themselves to be sufficiently cruel.

She thus comes round to speaking about the birth of this first brother, when she was three years old. She detested the young babe in arms, “a bawling lump of meat”, whom she would have killed if only she had been able to. Each time he would try to sleep, she would throw objects into his cradle so as to wake him up. I intervened saying, “All in all, you cut into sleeping flesh”, which leaves her perplexed, no doubt in the face of the similarity between her desire to be a traumatologist and the complex of

intrusion of which it would be the sublimation.

Here, the difference between the sexes is merely a distinction that functions within a series of other differences (fat / thin; weak / strong; kind / cruel) which are just as well established, and whose base is not so much anatomical differentiation as the arrival of the first brother and then of the second, dethroning Jeanne from the centrality of her parents’ attention. It is neither Penis-neid nor the fantasy of having been deprived that determines her sexuation, but the assignation by others to a contested gender identification, contested because it is linked to an opposition with her brothers.

As Sabine Prokhoris notes, it is so as to take up our place in human bonds that we “swallow down signifiers, starting with those of

sexuation”.35

To found the difference between the sexes on an essentialization of nature in this way, a “biological bedrock”, stems, besides the imaginary inveiglement of the gaze of the young boy and of the theoretician leveled at the mere edging of the woman’s sexual organ, from a repetition of the norms of gender and creates an original illusory dimension of the masculine and the feminine. On the other hand, this essentialization can give rise to an analytic deafness with respect to new configurations of the clinic, such as the request for sex

reassignment surgery from trans gender subjects. As Jean-Pierre Jacques has noted, subjects such as these lead us to rethink the notion of sexual identity as a psychical fact and to form a different conception of the Freudian concepts of the difference between the sexes

that goes beyond our castration anxiety.36

Conclusion

Analytic theory does not operate in the same way as do other theories. In its readings and its writings, it calls upon the work of analysis in itself which is never concluded or ended even though it will meet moments of interpretative synthesis and extends into a relationship of analytic praxis that, in being more than a mere technique, corresponds to the encounter with clinical singularity and societal transformations. Would it not be more suitable then to take note of the multiplicity of the levels of the theory? If the masculine and the feminine are relativized, polysemic and denaturalized in Freud, they carry no less, elsewhere, the assignation of historicized identities of man and of woman which are presented as biological bedrock. What is the body a witness to? The difference can only be the effect of a simple observation that is effectuated by the perceiving body and which concerns the body. What experience seems to encounter is not difference inscribed into an opposing binary, but a diversity of figures that diverge or converge in order to build sexuations. The signifiers of sexualtion are not expressed in an ontological reality, but translate the angle of perception of similarities and dissimilarities between the sexes. If one forms a conception of sex as produced by gender, the difference between the sexes thereafter only longer emerges from a particular way in which bodies relate, from an interpretative operation.

What then is the body a witness to? It is a witness to the fact that the difference between the sexes is not the first, the principle or the only difference to structure the psyche: it comes

to be signified in a series of other differences by which it is produced. The silent witness to the constructing, and not to an ontological pre-given, of the difference between the sexes would thus be the social body in which this difference is produced.

Is not the task of psychoanalysis then to allow for some plasticity in the construction of these dissimilarities and similarities, a psychical creativity in constant movement, beyond any binary theory that threatens to become bogged down?

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(1994). Paris : CNRS Éditions.

2_{Even Shoshan, A. (2009). Hebrew-Hebrew Dictionary.}

Jerusalem: Hamilon Hechadash.

3

I would like to thank Keren Gitai for having confirmed this etymology for me.

4

Ouaknin, M. A., (1997). Les mystères de l'alphabet. Paris: Assouline.

5_{I would like to thank warmy both Esther and Laurent}

Picard for their precious analyses. They were also able to inform me that the genatria of “witness, דע, the sum of the numerical value of its letters, is 74 (ע having the value of 70 and ד the value of 4), the same numerical figure that designates the sum of the letters of the letter ל, (ל, ם and ד are equal to 74), the letter that symbolises both study and knowing. The paradigm of the witness, besides the fact of “knowing”, would thus be “study”.

6

“It seems probable”, writes Freud, “that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely due to its object’s attractions.” In Freud, S., “The Sexual Aberrations”, First Essay from Three

Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), translated by J.

Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VII, Hogarth

Press, London, 1953; reprinted in Penguin Freud Library

Vol. VII: On Sexuality, The Penguin Press, Harmondsworth,

1991, pp. 59 – 60.

7_{Freud, S., “Transformations of Puberty” Third Essay from}

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), translated

by J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VII, Hogarth

Press, London, 1953; reprinted in Penguin Freud Library

Vol. VII: On Sexuality, The Penguin Press, Harmondsworth,

1991, p. 141, footnote 1.

8_{Freud, S., “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality}

in a Woman” (1920) translated by J. Strachey in The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII, Hogarth Press, London, 1955;

reprinted in Penguin Freud Library Vol. IX: Case Studies II, The Penguin Press, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 399.

9_{Ibid., pp. 399-400.} 10

Freud, S., “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925), translated by J. Strachey in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX,

Hogarth Press, London, 1961; reprinted in Penguin Freud

Library Vol. VII: On Sexuality, The Penguin Press,

Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 339.

11

Ibid., p. 342.

12_{Freud, S., “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex”,}

translated by J. Riviere in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX,

Hogarth Press, London, 1961; reprinted in Penguin Freud

Library Vol. VII: On Sexuality, The Penguin Press,

Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 320.

13_Ibid. 14

Freud, S., “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, translated by J. Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII, Hogarth Press, London, 1964, pp. 252; retranslated

by A. Bance in Wild Analysis, Penguin Modern Classics, London, 2002, p. 206.

15 Ibid. 16

Schneider, M., “La pulsion de mort et la différence sexuelle”, in Analyse Freudienne Presse 2 / 2002, (Issue 6), pp. 29-40.

17

Freud, S., “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914) translated by C. M. Baines & J. Strachey, in The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV: On the History of the Psycho – Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works,

Hogarth Press, London, 1957; reprinted in Penguin Freud

Library Vol. XI: On Metapsychology, The Penguin Press,

Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 77.

18_{Schneider, M., “La pulsion de mort et la différence}

sexuelle”, in Analyse Freudienne Presse 2 / 2002 (Issue 6), pp. 29 - 40.

19_{Freud, S., “The Infantile Genital Organization (An}

Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality)” (1923), translated by J. Riviere in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX,

Hogarth Press, London, 1961; reprinted in Penguin Freud

Library Vol. VII: On Sexuality, The Penguin Press,

Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 309, footnote 1.

20

We may observe that in various Arab dialects from the Middle East, the female sexual organ is designated by the sac, سي ك.

21_{Schneider, M., (2010), “Le corps masculin : une}

production culturelle ?”, in Champ psychosomatique 3 / 2010 (Issue 59), pp. 15 - 29.

22_{Example XIII in “Some Examples – Calculations and}

Speeches in Dreams”, in Freud, S., The Interpretation of

Dreams, (1900) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IV & V (pp.

339-627), Hogarth Press, London, 1953; reprinted as

Penguin Freud Library Vol. IV, The Penguin Press,

Harmondsworth, 1991; retranslated by J. A. Underwood as Interpreting Dreams, Penguin Modern Classics, London, 2006; cited by M. Schneider in “Surimpressions sexuelles”, in Cliniques méditerranéennes 2 / 2006 (Issue 74), pp. 27 – 42.

23

Schneider, M., (2006), “Surimpressions sexuelles”, in

Cliniques méditerranéennes, 2 / 2006 (Issue 74), pp. 27 -

42.

24

Schneider, M., (2004), Le paradigme féminin, Paris, Aubier.

25_{Ibid., p. 99.}

26_{Laufer, L. & Linhares, A., (2011), “Avant-propos”, in}

Champ Psy. Ce que fait le genre à la psychanalyse, 2010 –

Issue 58, p. 7.

27_{Thomas Laqueur has already shown this in Laqueur, T.,}

(1992), La Fabrique du sexe. Essai sur le corps et le genre

en Occident, Paris : Gallimard

28_{Butler, J., Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion}

of Identity, (1990), Routledge, New York /London, p. 7. 29

Butler, J., Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of

“Sex”, (1993), Routledge, New York /London. 30

Laplanche, J., (1980), Problématiques II. Castration,

symbolisation, Paris, P. U. F., p. 170.

31_{Jacquot, M., “Comment penser la clinique de}

l'intersexuation ?”, in Champ psychosomatique 2 / 2010 (Issue 58), pp. 107 - 23.

The author:

Thamy Ayouch

Psychoanalyst. Associate Professor in

Psychopathology, University Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3. Visiting Professor at Universidade de São Paulo.

Université Lille 3

Domaine Universitaire du Pont de Bois BP 60149

59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex France

32_{Laplanche, J., (2003), Sexual. La sexualité élargie au sens}

freudien, Paris, P. U .F, p. 167. 33

Linhares, A., (2011), “Le genre : de la politique à la clinique”, in Champ Psy. Ce que fait le genre à la

psychanalyse, 2010 – Issue 58, pp. 33-4. 34

Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung (2010), “Le sujet a-t-il un genre ?”, in Recherches en psychanalyse 2 / 2010 (Issue 10), p. 220-30.

35

Prokhoris, S., (2009), “Genres et sexualités, questions ouvertes par l’expérience psychanalytique”, in Genres &

sexualités, Proceedings of the Colloquium held over 31

March and 1 April 2006 under the direction of Elsa Dorlin, Paris: P. B. I., 2009, pp. 41 - 62.

36_{Jacques, J. P., “Le discours transsexuel sur le corps”, in}

Cahiers de psychologie clinique 1 / 2008 (Issue 30), pp.

147 – 58.

Electronic reference:

Thamy Ayouch, “The Body of Evidence. Psychoanalysis and Sex Difference”, Research of Psychoanalysis [Online], 15|2013 published June 24, 2013.

This article is a translation of Le corps, un

témoin ? Psychanalyse et différence des sexes.

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