study of the modifications of instinct is in no way an unessential bagatelle, but is of the greatest importance theoretically as well as practically. The statement that the production and dissemination of the ideology of a society must be understood from the actual economic conditions of this society, the ‘superstructure’ of which is the ideology; that further they are to be understood from the fact that this ‘superstructure’ by means of the actions of human beings, reacts back again upon the ‘foundation’, the economic conditions modifying them — these statements are correct but general. They become more specific when we succeed in comprehending scientifically the details of the mechanisms of these transformations, and only psychoanalysis is able to help us in that.8
Fenichel’s objective was a form of analysis which would understand the psychic force of ideological process while avoiding the twin pitfalls of sociological and psychological reductionism—the sociologists dismissing the psychic investments of social life as ‘mere bagatelle’, the psychoanalysts, as he saw it, falling into an equivalent trap which makes the realm of the psychic the primary determining factor in the social mechanisms which it serves to drive (Fenichel on Glover: ‘all psychological factors which partake of war he treats as the cause of war’; and on money: ‘nothing justifies the assertion that its symbolic significance is the cause of the origin of money’9).
But this objective of Fenichel’s, to use psychoanalysis in order to understand the internalisation, effectivity and persistence of some of the most oppressive social norms is striking for the way that it anticipates, in the similarity of terms, the argument with which Juliet Mitchell introduced the case for psychoanalysis and feminism in 1974:
The way we live as ‘ideas’ the necessary laws of human society is not so much conscious as unconscious — the particular task of psychoanalysis is to decipher how we acquire our heritage of the ideas and laws of human society within the unconscious mind, or, to put it another way, the unconscious mind is the way we acquire these laws … where Marxist theory explains the historical and economic situation, psychoanalysis, in conjunction with the notions of ideology already gained by dialectical materialism, is the way into understanding ideology and sexuality.10
The feminist move was, accordingly, to add sexuality to the historically established links between psychoanalysis and the understanding of how ideology works. It was in this context that sexual difference was analysed as one of the most fundamental, if not the most fundamental, of human laws. This was therefore a theoretical case for a political necessity: that sexual difference should be acknowledged in the fullest range of its effects and then privileged in political understanding and debate. By presenting this case through psychoanalysis, Juliet Mitchell was not, however, only arguing for the importance of psychoanalysis for feminism. She was equally inserting the question of femininity back into a project which, as long ago as the 1930s, had seen psychoanalysis as the only means of explaining the exact mechanisms whereby ideological processes are transformed, via individual subjects, into human actions and beliefs.
Like Marxism, psychoanalysis sees the mechanisms which produce those transformations as determinant, but also as leaving something in excess. If psychoanalysis can give an account of how women experience the path to femininity, it also insists, through the concept of the unconscious, that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is it ever complete. The political case for psychoanalysis rests on these two insights together — otherwise it would be indistinguishable from a functionalist account of the internalisation of norms. In fact the argument from a biological pre-given and the argument from sociological role have in common the image of utter passivity they produce: the woman receives her natural destiny or else is marked over by an equally ineluctable social world.
The difficulty is to pull psychoanalysis in the direction of both of these insights — towards a recognition of the fully social constitution of identity and norms, and then back again to that point of tension between ego and unconscious where they are endlessly remodelled and endlessly break. In the 1930s, neither the celebration of the unconscious as pure force (Wilhelm Reich), nor the accusation of the restrictiveness of culture which forgets or would ideally abandon the unconscious altogether (culturalists such as Karen Horney) were adequate to that dynamic. The problem at that time was as it still is: how to articulate the unconscious as a point of resistance or defence without filling it out with visions of psychic and/or social utopia, whether one calls this unbound genital energy as Reich did then, or another femininity — site of an absolute or uncontaminated truth — as we are sometimes tempted to do now. The alternate discarding and reification of the unconscious has been the constant refrain (curse almost) of the Freudian left.
The feminist debate about psychoanalysis is therefore a repetition with a significant difference. We know now that the radical feminist critique of Freud’s phallocentrism was anticipated by the quarrels of the 1920s and 30s when analysts such as Jones, Horney and Klein objected to Freud’s account of sexual difference because of a fundamental asymmetry which was seen to work to the actual, as well as theoretical, disadvantage of the female. Turning that objection around, Juliet Mitchell could argue that asymmetry at the level of psychic life was precisely what psychoanalysis could be used to explain. But this quarrel should also be referred outside itself to the discussion of the political import of the Freudian concept of the unconscious and the sexual drive simultaneously conducted by analysts like Otto Fenichel and his group. Looking back at this moment, it is rather as if the theoretical/clinical debate about female sexuality and the more explicitly Marxist debate about ideology and its forms were historically severed from each other — at least until feminism itself forged, or rather demonstrated, the links.
Thus in the 1930s, the controversy over Freud’s account of femininity (roughly the division between the London and Vienna schools) was paralleled by the simultaneous controversy over the political import of psychoanalysis (again roughly the division between Vienna and Berlin).11 The objective of Fenichel and the Berlin group was a political psychoanalysis which would use Freudian insights into psychic processes as the basis for a radical social critique — an issue never broached in the debate over femininity which was then simultaneously taking place. The Berlin group was in no sense simply opposed to Vienna, which had been the site of Reich’s own seminars in the thirties, but their Marxism distinguished them as a group. At the same time their commitment to the basic psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious and the sexual drive was constant, and this cut them off from the psychic utopianism of the better known Freudian left, whose simplistic notion of libidinal repression collapsed the concept of unconscious psychic conflict into that of cultural malaise.
In this debate we can see the deployment of all the terms within which the political controversy about psychoanalysis continues to be played out to this day. Fenichel himself was clearly caught between the theorisation of the unconscious and sexuality in all their complex difficulty on the one hand, and the need to give an account of the repressiveness of social norms on the other. The uniqueness of his position (one which is wholly travestied by the idea that he was simply put down or repressed)12 is the fact that he refused to go over to either side. Which meant that the account of social constraint was always matched by a recognition of the perverse and aberrant nature of the sexual forces bound over into the oppressive and unjust services of social forms.
For historically, whenever the political argument is made for psychoanalysis, this dynamic is polarised into a crude opposition between inside and outside — a radical Freudianism always having to argue that the social produces the misery of the psychic in a one-way process, which utterly divests the psychic of its own mechanisms and drives. Each time the psychoanalytic description of internal conflict and psychic division is referred to its social conditions, the latter absorb the former, and the unconscious shifts — in that same moment—from the site of a division into the vision of an ideal unity to come. As if the tension between the unconscious and the image to which we cling of ourselves as unified subjects were split off from each other, and the second were idealised and then projected forward into historical time. Thus sexual radicalism seems to construct its image of a free sexuality in the image of the
