Some Observations on Female Sexuality

JULIA KRISTEVA

The Primary Oedipal Phase: Seduction and Invasion

Female psychosexual development involves two versions of the Oedipus complex, as several authors, including Freud, have stated, and I would now like to put forward a revised interpretation.1 The earliest period, from birth to what we call the phallic phase starting at between three and six years of age, I shall term the primary oedipal phase. It is true that, in his concluding works on female sexuality,2 Freud (1923) emphasizes what is generally termed phallic monism: the main characteristic of this infantile genital organisation consists of the fact that, for both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account. What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals but a primacy of the phallus (p. 142). In other words, psychically speaking there is an inherent masculinity in the child irrespective of its anatomical sexthe little girl is a little man. This axiom, which was initially considered to refer to infantile sexuality (and not adult) or to a fantasy, finally emerges here from Freuds pen as a sine qua non fact of all sexuality. However, in his last writings, Freud (1931) reveals a particular clinging and intense relationship between the little girl and her mother that is not easily accessible to analysis because it is encysted in preverbal sensory experience, which the founder of psychoanalysis likens to Minoan-Mycenean civilization behind the civilization of Greece (p. 226). It forms the basis of psychic bisexuality, which comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men (p. 228). Lacan (1966), however, who strongly emphasizes the primacy of the phallus, supporting the symbolic function and the name of the father (nom du pre) in the psychic organization of the subject of either sex, comments in passing
Translated by Sophie Leighton, M.A. 1 See Kristeva (1996). 2 See Freud (1923, 1925, 1931, 1933, 1938).

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that maternal instinct is a part of female sexuality that is irreducible by analysis because it eludes the ascendancy of phallic primacy.3 Finally, on the basis of contemporary clinical observation, several psychoanalysts suggest that, at the origins of infantile sexuality, the early maturation of human beings exposes the infant to adult, and especially maternal, intrusion. The protective nature of parental anaclisis does not make it any less seductive: First, infantile sexuality develops under the influence of these parental and primarily maternal enigmatic signifiers (Laplanche, 1987, p. 125). These signifiers imprint the mothers unconscious on the childs erogenous zones, along with the erotic link she has with the father and with the fathers own unconscious. This initial coexcitation between mother and baby thus seems a long way from the idyllic models of Minoan-Mycenaean civilization evoked by Freud, or from a serenity of being preceding the drive-related behavior described by Winnicott. Infantile sexuality, which is not that of the instincts but that of the drives understood as psychosomatic constructions and preexistent biology and meaning, is thus formed from the outset in the newborns interaction with his two parents and under the ascendancy of maternal seduction. The fact that it is the mother who takes care of the child, thereby becoming the agent of the unconscious intrusion, does not prevent her female desire for the father (the father of the child or her own) or the childs fathers actions and speech from being the means by which the father plays a part from the outset as the subject of this original imprinting, for the girl as for the boy, and differently according to the sex. The child, who allows himself to be seduced and seduces with his skin and his five senses, engages by the very fact of his orificesthat is, mouth and anus, and vagina for the little girl. Usually this female organ is not appealed to, but it is hard to imagine that it should be covered in the only insensitive membrane, as Freud (1905a) bizarrely and incautiously suggests in his simile of the hard wood (p. 221) unless this supposed insensitivity were to have a defensive function. The founder of psychoanalysis rightly points to the absence in either sex of an unconscious representation of the vagina, other than as something lacunar or cloacal, lent to the anus, as Lou Andreas-Salom (1980, p. 107) expressed it. But does this visual deficit not make the representative of cavernousparticularly vaginal or cloacalexcitation, by the very fact, more unfathomable and problematic for the future unity of the subject? At the origins of Minoan-Mycenaean sexuality, we find a sexual being, the perverse polymorph, prefiguring the penetrated being of the woman. Throughout this first phase of psychic sexualization, the sexuality of the primary oedipal phase, abandoned to the maternalpaternal seduction, however passive,

3 It is worth mentioning here that it does not follow from the fact that everything that is analyzable is sexual that everything sexual is accessible to analysis. What is not drained off by phallic mediation would in fact be the entire current of maternal instinct. See Lacan (1966, p. 730).

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is nonetheless both reactive and active, as is aggressively emphasized by the expulsion of stools and vocal and gestural expressions. In the boy, penile excitation (later intensified by the phallic phase) is superimposed on the complex range of reactions that results from this original invasionseduction, underlying and structuring the female position of the male subject. This position continues to characterize the mans sexuality, specifically his desire for oral and anal possession of the fathers penis and for its destruction in the maternal breast, which is fantasized as containing this penis and so forth.

Interactive Subjectivity and Psychization

For the girl, the primary oedipal phase contains some more complex ambiguities. Her skin-ego (Anzieu, 1985) and orificial 4 ego lend themselves to the seductionpassivization that simultaneously engages narcissism and masochism, with its sadistic abreactionsdevouring the breast with the penis, bombarding it with stools, and so on. Clitoral excitation, varying from subject to subject and naturally less intense than penile excitation, is nevertheless also mobilized to direct the girl toward active possession of the first object that is constituted by the unconscious seducing mother. But this erectile activity seems to be heavily masked, even surpassed, by orificial excitation and by the erotic participation of the oralanalvaginal cavernous body in the early link with the mother. Whereas Karl Abraham, followed by Melanie Klein and the English school, emphasized this early involvement of a vaginalanal femaleness in the oedipal phase, particularly for the girl, Freud (1905b) refers to it only rarely, for example, in the case of Dora.5 As Jacques Andr (1995) noted that it was highly significant that this text was contemporaneous with Freuds analysis of his own daughter Anna! (p. 54). This was in fact an exceptional opportunity for an analyst both as man and as father to confront the little girls early genital seduction by her father. The strong vaginalcloacal mobilization, like the little girls clitoral excitation, structures her earliest sexuality as a psychic bisexuality that is simultaneously passive and active. This bisexuality is more strongly accentuated in the girl than in the boy More interestingly, what this perspective seems to reveal, as the treatment of adult women confirms, is that the primary oedipal phase with its location of the defensive symptoms is governed not by a simple passivization but, above and beyond this, by the installation of an interactive subjectivity that is not adequately accounted for by the activepassive dichotomy. The orificial invasion is compensated for not only by clitoral excitation but also by the early elaboration of an identificatory and introjective link with the seductive and intrusive object constituted by the mother (insofar as she also relays the fathers desire).
4 5

See Jacques Andrs (1995) commentary and arguments. See also Freud (1905b, 1919).

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The girl introjectively installs the seductive mother inside her: The excited cavity of the inner body mutates into an internal representation. Thus begins slow and long-lasting work of psychization that is later accentuated by the secondary oedipal phase, in which the female tendency to privilege psychic or loving representation-idealization over erotic excitation can be recognized. This female psychization is, however, placed in difficulties by identification with an agent of the parental seductionan identification reinforced by the resemblance between girl and mother and by the projection of maternal narcissism and depressivity onto the girl. For the girl, this process results partly from an early psychization of the object that the young ego introjects by identification and partly from this identification with the mother, the additional creation of a real link of possession and dependence with the same object. The little girls cavernous excitability and its attendant psychic interiority are stabilized by a clinging to the real external object. In other words, the sensory reality of the object and the real presence of the mother are demanded as a compensation for the invasion of the cavernous body and the psychic introjection that are constantly taking place. This real need for the link latches on to a place such as the cloacal interior, claiming an imaginary insatiable premium for the oral, anal, and vaginal pleasures that are undergone rather than taken by the little girl. The little girls link with her maternal object is coupled with the mothers symmetrical attachment to her infant girl. Rather than set up her daughter as a phallic substitute, as is generally the case with the boy, the female parent projects her own narcissistic fantasies and latent masochistic or depressive tendencies, echoing with the little girls orificial pleasures. The economy for the primary oedipal phaseinvasion and passivization of the orificial body by the other, aggression toward and oral, anal, and clitoral possession of the other; compensation by psychic hypercathexis of the object that early on creates an interiority dependent on the objectproves to be more accentuated for the little girl than it is in the little boys monovalent oedipal phase. Because of the anatomical difference between the sexes, as well as for historical and cultural reasons determining the ambivalence of the parental seduction with regard to the second sex, the girls primary oedipal phase precipitates her into a later developmental stage that is both more fragile and more complex than the boys. The girl is more exposed to passivization because clitoral excitation does not eliminate orificial pleasure, unlike the boy, for whom phallicism is supposed to surpass, if not eradicate, oral and anal receptivity. However, the little girl already appears more protected by the formation of an early interiority in which the introjection of the other (of the mother as mediator of the father), relayed by the girlmother identification, transforms this maternal other into an indispensable object. This takes place in the vital copresence of a link to others, experienced as a need that is ready and waiting, like an understudy for desire that is to be

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cultivated and maintained in external reality and that endures an absolute necessity of female psychosexuality. In other words, the little girls dependence on her mothers love directly prepares the status of the womans erotic object. Only rarely a partner of desire, the womans object is, more exclusively, a lover whom she asks to understand her as if he werea mother. The psychic link that the female lover wants to have with him is not easily interchangeable, and this asymmetry inexorably determines the discord between the sexes. As for the possibility of a woman blossoming in the erotic quest itself, she would need a very strong phallic identification to conceal her invaded interiority and need for a psychic link, so as to be satisfied with those thousand and one objects, little o other, that fail to gratify the fetishistic longings of Don Juan himself. Beyond the two stumbling blocks of narcissism and passivizing masochism, the complexity of the primary oedipal phase therefore establishes the little girl as a psychic being and a binding agent. With the emergence of the little girls sexuality, we witness the dawn of love and sociability. Of course this economy is also one that, to varying degrees, governs the mans femaleness, which remains repressed by conquering phallicism, providing that it is not abreacted in a contrary manner by passage to the homosexual act. My reflections on the girls primary oedipal phase are not intended to diminish the structuring role that phallic authority and its attendant castration anxiety play in the psyche. My intention is to assign them to their place as organizers of the unconscious while bearing in mind that they appear in the infants psyche by mediation of the parental seduction, adding to the reactive excitability of the seduced child.

The Secondary Oedipal Phase: Encounter With Phallicism

In post-Freudian treatment, it is maintained that the structuring phallic component, participating in the repression of excess infantile excitation, is matched by another libido that is not exclusively passive but is worked through by anaclisis on to a stable link with the object that founds psychic interiority and the link with others. The hypothesis I am putting forward, that the female position of both sexes, and particularly the little girls, is immediately accompanied by the phallic experience in the primary oedipal phase, presupposes a bisexuality from the beginnings of the psyche. Is it not precisely this female position, taking shape from the primary oedipal phase, more violent than the castration anxiety that, strictly, appears in the phallic phase, that underlies the fact that the female, in Freuds (1937) words is the most inaccessible to both sexes? (p. 251). The female constitutes the first working out of the infants phobiasfears of passivization, of narcissistic and masochistic regression, of losing the visible reference points of identity through a sensory engulfment that risks dispersing

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the subject into an endogenous if not pathogenic autismand it is repressed by the subsequent accession to the phallic. In the woman, however, the polymorphous femaleness of the primary oedipal phase remains a continent that is scarcely repressed. More precisely, it becomes masked by reactional femininity and the attendant displays of beautification or narcissistic reparation with which the womans later phallicism reacts to the castration complex. It is in the course of the phallic phase, which situates that subject in the oedipal triangulation between the ages of three and five years, that the female subject carries out a further psychic mutation by which the choice of sexual identity is definitively accomplished. There is a widespread view that so readily pictures psychoanalysis as a biologization of the essence of man that it is worth reminding ourselves at this point that the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality is a theory of the copresence of sexuality with thought. Optimal frustration, motherchild separation, the depressive position, lack, primary identification, sublimation, idealization, and attainment of the ego ideal and the superego are only particular well-known stages by which the subject is positioned in the web of both energy and meaning, both excitability and law, that characterizes human sexuality in the analytic perspective. The phallic phase constitutes its exemplary experience, which I have for this very reason termed a phallic kairos, the Greek term kairos evoking a mythic encounter or a fated parting. How is this encounter organized? Following neurobiological maturation and optimal experiences of separation from the object, the phallic stage becomes the central organizer of the copresence of sexuality and thought in both sexes. Having already developed language and thought, the child is not satisfied with cathecting his genital organs and their excitability, but associates the cognitive operations that he applies to the external world with the interior movements of his drive excitability. An equivalence emerges between the pleasure of the phallic organ and access to language and to the functioning of speech and thought. At this stage of development, the subject in formation is able to establish that the father is not only the person he wants to kill in order to appropriate the mother. From now on, he perceives what must be termed the fathers separability. As a third figure, regulating the sensorial motherchild dyad, the father becomes a symbolic father, authority of the forbidden and of the law. As bearer of the penis, the little boys cathexis of this organ of pleasure is only strengthened by the fact that it is first and foremost the fathers, whose organizing role in his familial and psychic world the child is now in a position to recognize. Many authors have noted the specific features that destine the penis to be cathected by both sexes to become the phallus, that is, the signifier of privation and lack of being, but also of desire and the desire for meaningall the components that make the phallus the signifier of the symbolic law. Visible and narcissistically recognized, erectile and filled with strong erogenous sensitivity, detachable and

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thus culpable,6 capable of being lostthe penis is, by this fact, suited to become the medium for difference, the privileged actor in the 0/1 binarism that forms the basis of all systems of meaning (marked/unmarked), the organic maker (therefore real and imaginary) of our psychosexual computer. For the little girl as well, a decisive encounter (kairos) between the mastery of signs and sexual excitation fuses her being as a thinking and desiring subject. It is no longer oral or anal excitation but principally clitoral excitation, with or without the perception of the vagina, that predominates at this period that we call the secondary oedipal phase and in which, unlike the boy, the little girl changes object: the father replaces the mother as the target of desire.

The Ambiguity of the Female Secondary Oedipal Phase

Let us examine, however, the ambiguity of this change. On the one hand, like the boy, and like all subjects of speech, of thought and law, the girl identifies with the phallus and with the father who represents it. Without this phallic assumption, she would be unable to maintain her role in the universal human condition, a condition that makes her a speaking being according to the law. At the heart of this phallic position, however, the girl is at a comparative disadvantage to the boy. Deprived of the penis and devalued by this fact in all known patriarchal and patrilineal cultures, she adheres to the phallic order while carrying the unconscious trace of the primary oedipal phase, of her polymorphous sensoriality, dedicated to desire for the mother, which imprints on her an indelible mark of endogenous female homosexuality. From then on, the girl accomplishes her access to the phallic orderconstructed on the depths of the dark or MinoanMycenaean continentwithin the as-if, illusory modality of I am playing the game but I know very well that I am not part of it because I do not have it. Accordingly, unless the woman freezes the phallic position in the pose of the virago, the female phallic position then establishes the female subject in the register of radical strangeness, of an intrinsic exclusion, of an irreparable solitude. Furthermore, as if this necessary but artificial phallicism were not already conflictual enough to accept, it then has to be modulated by a new psychic position for which the primary oedipal phase has already prepared the way but which is accomplished only during the secondary oedipal phase: As phallic subject of speech, thought, and the law, the girl falls back not on the passive position as is usually suggested but on the receptive position to become the object of the father. As a speaking subject, she is a phallic subject of symbolic special order, but as a woman she nevertheless desires to receive the penis and obtain a child from the father, from the place of the mother with whom she is constantly settling the scores of the original coexcitation in the primary oedipal phase.
Translators note: There is a pun in the French coupable, which implies cuttable (coupable) as well as culpable.
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By tracing the twists and turns required of the female subject by her accession to the secondary oedipal phase, we can understand the irreducible strangeness that a woman feels in the phallic-symbolic order and that leads to a display of anxiety or conversion symptoms in the hysteric, when she settles for denial of the phallus and of castration. At best, this strangeness takes on the aspect of anti-authoritarian dissatisfaction, incomprehensible to social rationality, hence, What do women want?the insistent question that Freud is not alone in having posed. But this strangeness can be refined into revolt or insubordination, what Hegel acclaimed in women as the eternal irony of the community. If this exile that establishes the woman in the phallicsymbolic universe turns out to be irreconcilable, it can shift into chronic depressivity, or even incurable melancholia. Alternatively, it can lead to anorexia and bulimia, those failed suicidal consequences of the refusal of femaleness (that of the primary oedipal phase encountering the refusal of castration with which the hysteric reacts to the secondary oedipal phase), equally morbid symptoms in which the gaping excitability of the (passively eroticized) cavernous body of the primary oedipal phase is accentuated and incapable of defending itself against the intrusion of the maternalpaternal seduction except by force-feeding or filling the erogenous zones. By contrast, when the female subject manages to accomplish the complex tourniquet imposed on her by the primary and secondary oedipal phases, she can have the good fortune to acquire that strange maturity that the man so often lacks, buffeted as he is between the phallic pose of the macho and the infantile regression of the impossible Mr. Baby. With the benefit of this maturity, the woman is able to encounter her child not as a phallic or narcissistic substitute (which it mostly is) but as the real presence of the other, perhaps for the first time, unless it is the only possible one, and with which civilization begins as a totality of connections based no longer on Eros but in its sublimation of Agape (Kristeva, 2001). Freud (1930), who thought that only a small minority of human beings was capable of displacing what they mainly value from being loved on to loving (p. 102), interpreted this sublimation as a defense against object loss, without deciphering in addition to this a working through of narcissistic love, as suggested by the biblical and evangelical injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself. He was more than willing to admit that it was mystics such as Francis of Assisi who went furthest in the interior life created by such methods, but he stressed that this interiority with an inhibited aim (p. 102), this evenly suspended, steadfast and affectionate feeling bore, however, little external resemblance [anymore to the stormy agitations of genital love] (p. 102). Had he forgotten, in saying this, to consider motherhood? In fact, the founder of psychoanalysis separates this work of civilization (p. 103) that entails the readiness for a universal love of mankind (p. 102) from the interests of the family to which

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women commit themselves, finding these women who had nevertheless laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love (p. 103) incapable of a work of civilization (p. 10) on the grounds of an incapacity for instinctual sublimation. Had he perhaps not analyzed the experience of motherhood enough? When the mother manages to go beyond the dominion over the child as a phallic substitute and to calm the intensity of the link with others, beyond the time of desire which is that of death, the cyclical time of renewal and rebirth opens up for her.

The Female and Femininity

Henceforth, this woman is no longer playing a game of masquerade, however amusing and attractive, which constructs femininity as a simulacrum of femaleness. She has metabolized the cavernous receptivity of the primary oedipal phase into a psychic depth: this is the female. She is aware, however, of the femininity that knows how to pretend in order to protect itself from the female, by excelling in seduction and even in masculine competition. What we perceive as a harmonious female personality is one that manages to create a coexistence between femaleness and femininity, receptivity and seduction, accommodation and performance: a mental hermaphrodite, diagnoses Colette. This calm polyphony of flexible connections confers a peaceful social and historical existence on the lacunar female of the origins. That is to say in effect that Woman does not exist; rather, there is a plurality of versions of femaleness and the female community is only ever of one woman.

References
Andr, J. (1995), Aux Origines Fminines de la Sexualit [At the Female Origins of Sexuality]. Paris: PUF. Andreas-Salom, L. (1980), LAmour du Narcissisme [The Love of Narcissism], trans. I. Hildenbrand. Paris: Gallimard. Anzieu, D. (1985), Le Moi-Peau [The Skin Ego], trans. C. Turner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Freud, S. (1905a), Three essays on sexuality. Standard Edition, 7:130243. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. (1905b), Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. Standard Edition, 7: 7122. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. (1919), A child is being beaten: A contribution to the study of the origin of perversions. Standard Edition, 17:179204. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. (1923), The infantile genital organization: An interpolation into the theory of sexuality. Standard Edition, 19:141145. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. (1925), Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. Standard Edition, 19:248-258. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.

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(1930), Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition, 21:64145. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. (1931), Female sexuality. Standard Edition, 21:225243. London: Hogarth Press, 1961. (1933), Femininity. Standard Edition, 22:112135. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. (1937), Analysis: terminable and interminable. Standard Edition, 23:216253. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. (1940), An outline of psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 23:144207. London: Hogarth Press, 1964. Kristeva, J. (1996), Oedipus again; or phallic monism. In: The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. J. Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 6593. (2001), De la passion selon la maternit [The passion according to maternity]. In: Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse: Debats de Psychanalyse, Nov. Paris: Societe Psychanalytique de Paris, pp. 105120. Lacan, J. (1966), On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. B. Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. Laplanche, J. (1987), New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Macey. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989.