Feminine masochism according to Helene Deutsch
A reference to “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”
Inma Guignard-Luz
While reading the beginning of Helene Deutsch’s text on what she calls “feminine masochism”, at first I thought she was trying, as did Freud, to understand the being of woman from the position of masochism. I hope to show you here, however, that further reading reveals how Helene Deutsch describes feminine masochism not as the foundation stone of “feminine being” but rather as a definition of feminine sexuality.
Through case studies we will see her inquire into and explore a certain feminine operation for inscription in discourse that seemed to me to be of the order of privation. As we will see in the cases described to us, this manoeuvre will serve to fabricate, at the level of the body itself, a point of suture between the imaginary and the excessive real jouissance[1] – a risky and painful process but with which, according to Deutsch, women enter a “social reality” that, in some cases, can serve as a limit. This is what Helene Deutsch calls “feminine masochism”; which she does not equate with masculine perversion, any more than Freud did.
A doctor of psychiatry and imbued with the knowledge of her time of the relation of psychoanalysis to biology, Helene Deutsch nevertheless courageously examined the feminine declensions of “the accursed share of human nature” – from which men were not to be spared either – and which had shown many therapies and social services to be inefficient. The untimely interruption of her analysis with Freud in order to give up her place to the Wolf Man, at Freud’s request, seems to have kept her from being able to draw all the conclusions one would have hoped for from her shrewd observations and her pertinent commentaries. From the start, Helene Deutsch describes the woman’s body as the place where two contradictory and not easily reconcilable forces come into play: “those of the individual and those of the species”. She describes the feminine individual’s pursuit of pleasure as unlimited and naïve. By saying that the pain of childbirth, which is “inscribed in nature” and “at the service of the propagation of the species”, is necessary for a woman, she shows that it is through motherhood that feminine masochism takes its place in a type of feminine ontogeny.[2] Directly associating the relationship between suffering and pleasure with the function of “reproduction”, she establishes an important connection that she designates as “the more or less harmonious collaboration between masochism and narcissism”. What caught my attention here was the notion of the necessity of pain as a limit to pleasure, as well as her question about species and a feminine societal role. According to Helene Deutsch, women bear the pain of childbirth in its two aspects: on one side there is the limit to pleasure, on the other social recognition. It is through this painful mark on the body, she says, that women become inscribed in the social bond. Although at first sight it appears that masochism/passivity is indissociably linked to a feminine position, further reading shows us Helene Deutsch does not hesitate to risk going beyond Freud’s stance on the issue in his research at that time. She does this as soon as she separates the question of femininity from motherhood and the propagation of the species. In an attempt to use motherhood as a way to answer the question of a supposed original feminine essence, she goes so far as to make pain an almost homeostatic function for all women: “pain relieves the feeling of guilt and gives rise to pleasure”. However, she notices that corporeal pleasure remains problematic for women who, in their efforts to come to terms with it, even place it in a dialectical relationship with pain. In this way the idea of passivity written in nature is replaced with an active position for the feminine subject. And in this way she points out the problematic and sometimes even ravaging aspects of pleasure for a woman. Helene Deutsch sees here a certain tendency for women in general, which we will qualify, with Lacan, as a jouissance of privation (real hole – symbolic object). We have thus gone from the biological agony of childbirth to a woman’s confusion about the manifestions of her own body – these are not on the same register even if she slides from one to the other without letting us locate precisely where the makes the passage. Rape, she tells us, frees a little girl of her responsibility.[3] “The primordial reason behind all these methods of masochistic pleasure resides in the erotic needs of the components that were repressed and that openly appear in the imagination. It is clear that these imaginings can only appear in consciousness under the guise of painful punishment and a non-acceptance of the real object”. We can therefore ask ourselves why it is that a little girl must call on the reinforcement of an imperative and severe law in order to restrain the emergence of drives that show up on the stage of her own body. This mechanism of recourse indicates a clinical phenomenon that has its importance even now in our era of men’s and women’s rights. In a recent film entitled The Antichrist, a woman’s psychosis triggered by her maternity hardly serves as an alibi, in order to put exclusively on the side of feminine psychosis a shapeless surplus jouissance which a woman vaguely experiences throughout her body, and that the female role in the film unsuccessfully tries to expel up to her death. With the Lacanian notion of a jouissance that is not-all phallic, the equation that Helene Deutsch makes between feminine passivism and the “quasi-biological manifestations” associated with masochism acquires a different resonance for us. For her, the cause is on the side of what she calls repressed components of erotic needs, “instinctual forces from childhood that return in strength at puberty”. But the body – a field of drive manifestations and inhabited from the start by the language of the Other – is not appeased by this bond with the Other. There is always a certain failure with regards to the bond (a failure of the pleasure principle), a failure of the repressed that is manifested by its return. “The little girl’s substitutive imaginings (repression) can only become conscious under the guise of a painful punishment”; this is an attempt to re-bind the body to a signifying sanction, of which pain will constitute the mark, as a cover, an envelope. The girl is confronted by real jouissance, shapeless in her own body, without the help of a penile compass to orient her drive.[4] She must invent her own. The imaginary of the girl cannot take hold on her body; there is really no organ that will do. For example, Marie Bonaparte tried in vain to find a condenser of jouissance on the female body, that it might limit and protect a woman from devastation. Helene Deutsch calls this “non-acceptance of the real object”. For Deutsch, “Masochistic tendencies do not manifest themselves as obscure and unconscious premonitions, but as precise imaginings in contact with reality”.[5] She gives importance to their fantasmatic character. Directly involving the body, “they are nevertheless not as dangerous as other perverse, masochistic imaginings”. She thus very clearly establishes the difference with perversion. “If the imaginings were directly satisfied they would lead directly to perversion, which is extremely rare for women.” “When we do encounter it” she adds, “it consists of the desire to be beaten.” Indeed, in the cases she describes, the bodies of these women do not seem to sustain any division, any devastation, any signification of pain, nor any pleasure, she says. Instead, the pain seems to be completely disconnected from the jouissance. “They had no sensation of pleasure when they were beaten.”[6] From these she distinguishes those women who offered themselves as “love sacrifices” to their sadistic lovers. Here she is more likely indicating the register of psychosis. Yet she justifiably points out in these examples the symptomatic value of what she calls masochistic desire, which in this case will be satisfied in another way, by a detour, she says. In other words, by the choice of a sadistic love object and indulgence in perversion, given that direct satisfaction is refused. She doesn’t enjoy it, she is enjoyed; it is the sacrifice of a not-all jouissance to an uncastrated absolute Master. In what she calls feminine masochism, on the other hand, it is more a question of division at the level of the body itself as well as a return of the repressed, and not therefore of the denial of the castration of the Other. It is a masochism, she says, that is “not devoid of sexual meaning”. She locates the cause in the obscure fluctuations of sexual excitation which are imprecise, not genitally localised, and which at puberty come up against pressing social entreaties. A state of anxiety follows these “idealist-narcissist demands” on which are built “masochistic imaginings”.[7] Thus feminine masochism, at first considered to be a natural tendency, is now seen as a “result” of the tension between non-homogenous “opposing” forces. Their strangeness and monotony are already indicators, to Helene Deutsch, of the ineffaceable pulsionality that organises them. The best way to reach them, she says, is through psychoanalysis, where they can be unveiled; the sexual act’s profound roots make it inaccessible to any purely intellectual treatment. The defenders of Ego Psychology could have taken note of this! She then gives us some precious clinical indications with regards to psychoses. In the cases where the woman adopts a position of refuse, the Ideal Ego repudiates all sexual liberty, including the freedom to imagine; hence the lack of capacity for fantasmatic constructions. Their own imaginings, as she calls them, come back to the subject as insults or self-reproach. There is no possible dialectic or contradiction. The love of the father, in the cases where one girl is preferred over the others (which was in fact the case of Helene Deutsch), favours feminine division, leading to the relaying of the mother’s body to the father. This is a way for the girl to consider herself protected in her division, pushing her headlong towards the idea of ideal love.[8] But she also points out the disadvantages: a lack of mourning due to this privileged position with her father would be the cause of certain feminine self-deceptions, seen in, for example, those dupes of the father who give themselves to anyone, believing anything they are told. On the other hand, she attributes to the “non-dupes of the father” those women who frequent, without contradiction, the coded world of prostitution without any moral shame, while cynically denouncing their inability to overcome the unfairness of their division. Finally, Helene Deutsch problematises the question of feminine masochism by introducing female subjects grappling with acquired, and not innate, psychic conflicts.[9] Concerning what she calls “the masochistic love bond”, however, it seems to me that we must be careful to question her hasty equation: heroism – need to do away with oneself. She mentions a case of a woman who leaves her husband when he was imprisoned. The woman then marries a rich man who gives her everything she wants: a pleasant life, a position in society, a child, only to leave him as well when her first husband, now free, becomes furious with her for having abandoned him. Knowing full well that he will not give her what she wants, she remarries him. She says she is satisfied and regrets nothing. It appears that this case highlights the difference between being and having for a woman: What exactly was the trade-off? What is that thing beyond having, that is of such great importance to a woman?[10] The second case, a woman “subjugated by a partner who beats her continuously”, raises for us the following question: Is it only the sadistic Master who can respond to certain women’s necessarily imperative demand for love? In what way is a man a “partner of devastation” for a woman? From a clinical point of view this is an important question, for Helene Deutsch’s case testimonies show that behind these requests for social assistance there is not necessarily a psychic suffering or disatisfaction, as we would normally understand it. In the cases she describes, Helene Deutsch pinpoints the vitality and efficiency of certain feminine psychological processes that cannot be reduced to the position of an object of refuse. Moreover, she in no way equates the feminine subject’s and the masculine subject’s recourse to masochism. Contrary to the man’s version, feminine masochism is sexualised from the start; it is implicated in the erotic bond to the partner, which is not the case for men. For women her own body is immediately put at stake in relation to a partner. Masculine masochism, on the other hand, is more of a moral order, the erotic feminine character being of secondary importance. To clarify this she turns to the register of neuroses! The question of feminine masochism thus appears for Helene Deutsch to be indissolubly related to the neuroses, and therefore to the question of every woman’s unconscious political choice to establish a social bond with her body. In conclusion, the subject of woman’s sublimation, which she also brings up, deserves in and of itself a discussion that would not restrict it to the field of great causes, great destinies, or great works. Instead it seems to me important to locate its fundamental function in every subject’s construction of reality, as well as in the feminine subject’s declinations. I will stop here, and just say that a good place to start this debate might be around women artists’ role in contemporary art (a role to be precisely discerned, beyond the success of their creations). Translated by Pamela King NOTES [1] The notion of “excess” (L’excédent), precisely formalised in Civilization and its Discontents, and from which Lacan organised his earliest teachings, greatly helped to clarify my reading of Helene Deutsch. Also helpful have been Jacques-Alain Miller’s latest elaborations on Lacan’s Seminar XX in his class “Orientation lacanienne” concerning the necessity of a ‘sinthomatic’ articulation for every subject between the three different and scattered registers (R S I ). In his class XI, “On the Nature of Semblants”, JAM reminds us that « inside a shapeless and open protuberance that seems to hang on the real point of a triangle whose points are named respectively I, S, R. » lies the letter J for jouissance of the pleasure principle, already evoked by Freud in Analysis Terminable and Interminable. [2] Deutsch H., “Feminine Masochism”, The Psychology of Women, vol. I, chapter VII, Oxford, Grune and Stratton 1945, p. 210. [3] Ibid., p.221. [4] Ibid., p.223. [5] Ibid., p.220. [6] Ibid., p.222. [7] Ibid., p.223. [8] Ibid., p.225. [9] Ibid., p.227. [10] Ibid., p.231.
