Forget the phallic symbol and penis envy as a universal psychoanalytic reference. The collective unconscious defined by psychoanalysis can now be organized into a sororal, feminine community, without references to the masculine universe. This is what the psychoanalyst Silvia Lippi and the philosopher Patrice Maniglier defend in their recent essay Sisters. For a feminist psychoanalysis.
By creating a network that transcends borders, the #MeToo movement has allowed women to validate their experiences without requiring the approval of men, the authors argue. This sorority, inclusive and new, could encourage the emergence of a renewed, or rather restarted, psychoanalytic approach.
“Our gesture is sincere, that is to say that we are not doing deconstruction, we are not deconstructing psychoanalysis, as would be the case for a somewhat external criticism,” says psychoanalyst Silvia Lippi, of passage to Montreal.
She also specifies that their approach takes up the themes and words dear to psychoanalysis.
“We use terms that are central to psychoanalysis of all times, like trauma and symptoms, and collective bonds, social bonds that have been used in psychoanalysis,” she says.
However, in the approach they defend, women cease to be isolated, within a “capitalist” society where the phallic symbol represents “the law”, she says, a world defined by Jacques Derrida as ” phallogocentric”. For its part, sorority connects women, men and queers in a network that borrows nothing from masculine symbols.
The end of isolation
Silvia Lippi began this reflection on sisterhood in her practice, where she notably treated patients who launched the #MeToo movement in France. “It was my patients who introduced me a lot. […] I realized the effect that there was when other people intervened in this movement. It was a very special way of not being alone. That’s super important. »
“I also see it in the analyses, in people’s feelings. These people are touched by this new way,” she continues, and ask themselves, for example, “how am I going to be a man” in this context.
The sorority surrounding #MeToo, she continues, does not borrow the same codes as feminist groups, which are “tidy and organized, one could even say phallicly”.
Our gesture is sincere, that is to say that we do not carry out deconstruction, we do not deconstruct psychoanalysis, as would be the case for a somewhat external criticism.
Far from these “ranked” feminists, the authors have chosen as a guide, in their reflection on the psychoanalytic restart, the very subversive Valérie Solanas, “schizophrenic, woman, lesbian, criminal, a figure still relatively unknown outside feminist activist circles, a vagabond who lived in solitude and misery all her life,” the authors write. Indeed, this woman, victim of attacks in her childhood, pursued brilliant studies in psychology although she “lived a large part of her life on the street, begging and prostituting herself, without ever having this life on the margins of society keeps him away from writing. She died [en 1988] of pneumonia at the age of 52. His mother burned his property and his manuscripts after his death.
Valérie Solanas was also sentenced to three years in prison and psychiatric treatment for shooting Andy Warhol, because, it seems, the artist had lost the manuscript of his play, Up Your Asswhich he had to stage.
This action, the authors continue, is not linked to the radical discourse on sorority maintained by Valérie Solanas. “We do not justify Solanas’ criminal act, but we demand the right to speak about his thoughts without being immediately suspected of being complicit in a criminal act,” they write.
What appeals to them is the concept of a radical sorority, in the thinking of Solanas and his SCUM Manifesto. “This literalizes the idea of the autonomy of the feminine in relation to the masculine: men must be eliminated… […] Is she joking, is she serious? We will see that there is no answer to this question because the regime of truth specific to this discourse is properly psychotic, it is undecidable,” they write.
However, delirium is an open unconscious, for analysts.
Hysterical and historical
In an interview, Silvia Lippi adds that detractors of the #MeToo movement have used the term collective hysteria to designate it. However, Lippi claims to be part of collective hysteria, but to reverse its stigma. This sisterhood is not only hysterical, but also historic.
“We must not forget that hysteria is at the origin of psychoanalysis,” she recalls.
If she manages to understand that Freud’s patients were treated from a strictly masculine point of view, in the context of Victorian society, she is less tolerant on this subject towards Jacques Lacan.
“When Freud talks about the penis, in a way, he is right. Born a woman in the era of Freud and the Victorian era, a little girl could want to have a penis because she saw her brother who could play, who could study,” she says.
With Lacan, she adds, it is much less understandable. “We sometimes forget that Lacan had analyzed many feminists and that he never learned anything from them, to put it bluntly. »
Far from repressing hysteria, the authors welcome it as a great liberating symptom.
“Collective hysteria is our great sororal symptom, what binds us, women, outside the world of men,” they write. Then, further, “we are proud to be hysterical. Because we know that it is through this that we become historical, that is to say that we invent an entire world made in our colors, that is to say made of symbols of our own traumas, between which we can finally move around without being riveted to your fantasies, to your pleasures, to your wise advice, supposed to contain our own fury. »