Fernando de Amorim
Paris, March 15th 2016
Approaching transference in the clinic in my perspective requires that we make a distinction between passion-transference, gift-transference and truth-transference. The first feeds the clinic with affects — affects of love, hatred, sadness. The second is a transference in which the patient or psycho-analysand brings memories or secrets to sessions to be offered up to the clinician. These are gifts that expect an amorous response. This maneuver is more common in the clinic among women and hysterics, both men and women. The maneuver is expertly carried out by the ego. The truth-transference is characterized by words that pass the barrier of the teeth, as Homer put it. The clinician needs to be resilient to endure what is said, and these utterances do not relate to gender but to truth for the being.
Etymologically, the French word femme, from the Latin femina, was defined in the late tenth century as a human being of female sex; femelle was defined between 1121 and 1134 asan animal of female sex. The Anglo-Saxons have never departed from this veterinary reading of women. Testament to this idea is the fact that, to negotiate this impasse, they engage with social discourse but not with the signifier. This is an answer one can come across in a questionnaire in the United States Bureau of Consular Affairs: “No, the only genders available for a passport are male and female.” I think those capable of advancing the most substantial discourseon women, their pleasure, their jouissance, their desire, are French “female” psychoanalysts. On the condition they do not deprive themselves of going through the Other. Thus, Lacan is both the key and the keyhole. The term féminin or féminine, femenin, appeared in 1162 and it designates that which has the characteristics of a woman, an archaic conception admittedly, but imprinted with the ego of a woman. The word féminité appeared around 1265, derived from the Latin femina. Here, women are overwhelmed by the semblant, the semblant of “fashion, beauty, celebrities, society, marriage, leisure, astrology and e-shopping”, signifiers excerpted from the website of a “weekly French magazine.” Is this a reproach? Not in the least. What kind of civilized person could reproach a woman for using a little lipstick or perfume or for following the seasons of fashion houses? One only needbe concerned when a lady starts to get off kilter, if not thoroughly lost in exaggeration or restriction.
Clearly Freud did not want to play the wise-guy because, very early on, he asked the women around him who were analysts to assist him in order to develop a knowledgeon the feminine and on femininity. Through his genius, he identified certain invaluable directions that quite a few men have attempted to pursue and articulate. However, it still appears to me that we remain in the register of insufficiency.
The situation for women in the East is deplorable, as is the violence directed towards women in the West, as is the impossibility for young French women of Muslim heritage to enjoy [jouir de] their body as they seem fit without having to suffer the despotism of some joyless character dressed up as a brother, father or mother. Yes indeed, as a mother, for the orifice that characterizes the affair is not the gender but the imaginary phallus that the unbarred Other takes it upon him- or herself to embody.
Jouissance of the female body is possible for women when they accept the passivity of being loved. But this attitude lasts only for the duration of the sexual embrace. Even though, like a ship’s headway, the attitude can sometimes continue, it does indeed cease, but not, however, with women who present the symptom, be it neurotic, as in hysteria, psychotic, as in paranoia, or perverted, as in masochism. Hence the importance of identifying where a woman is located in relation to her desire. If a woman flashes her lights — and I do not use this expression coined by lorry drivers unwittingly — through such means as visible cleavage, breast implants, short skirts and high heels, it is to signal that there is law and prohibition on the road of desire. The faint-hearted willchoose to avoid her, louts will try to hit on her, and the mad will bang ahead, right into her. In short, they have entirely failed to understand the codes. And this is due to the simple fact that while men do not understand femininity dressed up for masquerade, neither do women comprehend what animates them.
The common denominator for the young girl and the young boy is the encounter with the Other.
It is through the Other, and based on the discourse of the girl that has become a woman — lesbian, then bi-sexual, transgender, then cisgender, intersex, asexual, pansexual, allosexual, altersexual — that one might grasp how to construct her desire as woman, for the scope of the “sexual object”, unfolding from the complaints of some and the demands of others, is such that a pussy would no longer be able to find her kittens.
However, the most interesting element resides in the fact that — moving away from the field of desire where psychoanalysis alone is able to certify, to the being, his or her condition of missing being — it is through the “+” sign that the LGBT community have resolved the endless opening of beings’ relation to sexuality.
If we take a break from the play of repetition of Freud’s and Lacan’s words andget down to real talk on the psychoanalytic operating table, using Freud and Lacan but with the lens of our clinic, the relation of the feminine will begin to don brighter colors than those given to us by domestic tyrants, shrinks, analysts and false prophets.
