Textual Practice 19(3), 2005, 331351

Jan Campbell Hysteria, mimesis and the phenomenological imaginary

This article explores a new way of considering hysteria and Oedipal sexual difference through a phenomenological approach to psychoanalysis and gender performance. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis have historically occupied very different territories, with sociological methods of interpreting reality indebted to the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl set in opposition to psychoanalytic interpretations of an unconscious, empirically unveriable psychic world. Yet, psychoanalysis and phenomenology have historically been brought together under existential phenomenology, a psychology inuenced principally by Husserls assistant Martin Heidegger. R.D. Laing is probably the most famous psychoanalytic thinker who based his work on the existential phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. There is however, a phenomenological narrative inherent to psychoanalysis which has been obscured by the historical emphasis on a Freudian, Oedipal meta-psychology. Against this hierarchical model of the mind is a more phenomenological understanding of the psyche where processes of identication and mimesis disrupt a repressive thesis of Oedipal representation, enabling us to see how divisions between imaginary and real break down when we consider the mimetic nature of psychic and social identity.1 This article explores a phenomenological approach to hysteria and the subsequent rethinking of Oedipal sexual difference as hysterical, imaginary mimesis. Implicit in this argument is the view that current readings of the imaginary are insufcient and need reconceptualizing. Using a concept of mimesis indebted to Borch-Jacobsen, the rst part of this argument denes and compares the terms hysteria and mimesis as they appear in an Oedipal and a phenomenological framework. These different ways of understanding hysteria and mimesis are then developed within a debate on sexual difference and the masquerade, using the thinking ` of Joan Rivieere, Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan. The second move reconceptualizes hysteria through a more phenomenological imaginary, developing arguments by Luce Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty. The nal movement
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2005 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502360500196318

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discusses how we can move beyond hysterical mimesis to a more social imaginary.
Hysteria: a question of representation or affect?

In Freuds Oedipal theory, or his meta-psychology, hysteria is a condition of bodily symptoms which have been converted from repressed ideas and wishes. These repressed wishes relate to the childs triangular relationship of incestuous desire and prohibition in relation to its parents. Generational love and hostility for the mother and father are then at stake. Incestuous love for the mother must be demolished through the law of the father. The hysteric fails to repress desire for the mother; she fails, therefore, to internalize the prohibition on paternal incest. In Freuds famous case history of Dora, he analyses her hysteria as, essentially, identication with her father. Dora becomes her father in order to be successful in her love with the woman her father loves.2 Freuds Oedipal explanation frames hysteria as the conversion into bodily symptoms of a repressed fantasy or wish. In this model, representation of the repressed, past wish, and identication with the paternal Oedipal law, become the route out of hysteria. This emphasis on the Oedipal representational subject is, of course, central to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Freuds Oedipal theory of hysteria is, however, at odds with his original seduction or trauma theory which was indebted to the famous Charcot and Joseph Breuer. For Charcot, traumatic shock was comparable to hypnosis, since both were emotional moments where the will became paralysed and the trauma xated as auto-suggestion. Whereas shock or trauma in normal circumstances is expressed or abreacted, in cases of hysteria the trauma and affect becomes blocked. The cathartic method in Freud and Breuers initial Studies on Hysteria (1895) was to abreact this blocked affect. Cure for the hysteric was not via representation but through abreaction of affect. Both Freud and Breuer followed Charcot in seeing hysteria as the result of a disassociation and a profound splitting of consciousness. Freud gradually abandoned the idea of auto-suggestion caused by trauma, focusing on a more sophisticated psychological explanation. Freuds Oedipal theory singled out his work as unique, whereas an emphasis on disassociation and phenomenological notions of affect rendered his ideas far too close to those of his former colleagues. In his early work on hysteria and psychoanalysis, Carl Jung writes in relation to Freuds thought: As you know, by repression we mean the mechanism by which a conscious content is displaced into a sphere outside consciousness. We call this sphere the unconscious, and we dene it as a psychic element of which we are not conscious.3

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In Jungs view, however, repression was primarily disassociation (tracked through association tests) where complexes tied to painful feelings were forgotten. Hysteria is not a suffering of reminiscences that leads back to the past, but a staged performance in the present that is in ight from present reality and which takes refuge in neurotic infantile complexes. He writes: The fright and the apparently traumatic effect of the childhood experience are merely staged, but staged in the peculiar way charac` teristic of hysteria, so that the mise en scene appears almost exactly like a reality. We know from hundreds of experiences that hysterical pains are staged in order to reap certain advantages from the environment. Nevertheless these pains are entirely real. The patients do not merely think they have pains; from the psychological point of view the pains are just as real as those due to organic causes, and yet they are stage managed.4 ` Hysteria, then, is a staging of affectual emotion a mise en scene rooted in a disassociation and splitting from reality. Repression, here, is not an internal, hierarchical and intra-psychic split between the body and language, but fundamentally speaks to the phenomenological (intersubjective) experience (and splitting) between the self and the world. For Jung, hysteria is not a return of the repressed from the past, but a regression of the libido to infantile states in the present. Freuds early lecture on hysteria seems to agree with Jungs phenomenological description when he describes hysterical symptoms as mnemic symbols of past traumatic experiences. Freud links hysterical symptoms to the mnemic symbols of the past that adorn large cities, such as the Monument of the Fire of London. The melancholic Londoners, who stop and weep at the past destruction of London by re, fail to acknowledge its rebuilt present glory. In similar vein the hysterics behave like these melodramatic and unpractical Londoners, in weeping over past traumas.5 What is striking about Freuds account, here, is that he attributes hysteria to a double consciousness and to a melancholic dwelling in the past, a melancholia that is an escape or ight from the present. This model of hysteria accords with Jungs early thinking and is quite different from the subsequent moves Freud makes in formulating an Oedipal meta-psychology.

Mimesis

` The idea that hysteria is a staged mise en scene or melodrama of phenomenological affect may be tracked beyond Freuds early work. In fact this phenomenological narrative as a thesis of identication and mimesis

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may be seen as a presence which never really leaves Freuds thinking. More importantly, it may be seen steadily and consistently to undo his more Oedipal interpretations. In his text Group Psychology, Freud follows Le Bons description of the group mind and argues for it as a primitive, primeval horde bound together through libidinous identications.6 When Freud came to analyse the libidinous identication that lay behind group ties, his theory of the Oedipus complex seriously unravelled. Here bisexual identications and group hysteria led Freud to a theorization of narcissism, the increasing split between ego and ego ideal, and suggestive hypnosis, as the key components of the group mind. Although the Oedipal economy in Freuds work emphasizes the repression of libidinal desire, there is a primary identication at work in his more phenomenological texts which disrupts this notion of subjective desire for an object. Emotional identication or mimesis with the object is an earlier declaration of love, and is expressed in Freuds writings in relation to numerous ideas of imitation, sympathy and mental contagion. Texts such as Mourning and melancholia and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego posit the ambivalence of this primary emotional identication. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud states that identication is a preliminary stage of object choice, where we narcissistically identify with the other, and where the ego wants to devour the object or other, cannibalistically taking it into itself.7 Melancholic mimesis involves loss, hate and love of the other, which is indistinguishable from the loss, hate and love one feels for oneself. Even, or perhaps especially, in Freuds late texts we see this mimesis of phenomenological affect return in papers such as Beyond The Pleasure Principle. It may be argued that Freud, in such texts, is talking about instinctual drives, not affects, but as Michel Henry reiterates we can only know these instincts or neural energies through our experience of their phenomenological affects.8 Mimesis has been a contested term in the history of ideas. Mimesis means the imitation of nature and human behaviour. Classical mimesis, otherwise known as Realism, has, since Platos The Republic, constructed a truthful relation between referent and sign, between the self and the world, between nature and image. For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this is the ction of the paternal phallus, although this does not stop him setting up this paternal law as an immutable symbolic order. In contrast to a platonic reection of truth and reality, Walter Benjamin has drawn on Aristotles notion of mimesis to describe a more creative imitation or copy of human behaviour and nature. Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer have seen mimesis as an adaptive copying of the environment that becomes perverted by capitalism. These Marxist concepts of mimesis are arguably indebted to a psychoanalytic understanding of the childs identication with the world around him. More recently, the work of

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Judith Butler returns the performance of gender to a deconstructive mimesis operant though language. She cites writings by Lacan and Derrida to argue for a performative reiteration that is not reduced to voluntary agency or the ego. For Butler, it is a mimesis of ideal hegemonic norms, of heterosexuality, which represses and incorporates disavowed homosexuality. Rereading Freuds account of mourning and melancholia, Butler sees heterosexual difference as a melancholic denial and disavowal of earlier homosexual loves. Performance allegorizes a loss it cannot grieve.9 Borch-Jacobsens recent re-evaluation of the Freudian project returns to the early emphasis on hypnosis and affect to show how the Oedipal complex may be understood not in terms of the representative, desiring subject, but as a question of mimesis. Rereading Freuds texts in a way that deconstructs any opposition between the narcissistic ego and the object, Borch-Jacobsen posits mimesis and identication as primary and constitutive of the subject. Desire, then, is an identication that does not aim to possess the object: Its basic verb is to be (to be like), not to have (to enjoy).10 For Borch-Jacobsen, then, identication as desire makes no distinction between ego and object. Desire is from the beginning identicatory mime between ego and object. This narcissistic mime or mimesis is thus: the matrix of desire and, by the same token, the matrix of rivalry, hatred, and (in the social order) violence: I want what my brother, my model, my idol wants and I want it in his place.11 Borch-Jacobsen therefore replaces Freuds repressive Oedipal father with a Kleinian notion of envy. For Borch-Jacobsen, mimetic desire has no specic object and he illustrates this through Kleins notion that the Oedipal father is simply an appendage of the mother, envied by the little girl.12 At the heart of the Oedipal complex we nd hysteria and a mimetic splitting; a rereading of repressed incestuous desire as jealousy, envy and rivalry. Mimesis of the other is a relation to someone we do not wish to have but to be. This model of mimesis is not only evocative of Kleinian theory but is also indebted to the work of Rene Girard. Girard argues that mimetic rivalry and violence lie at the centre of the modern social order and the only way of externalizing this internal competitive relation with the other is a more transcendent identication with Christianity and God.13 The idea, here, is that God can mediate the internal rivalry with the other, because he is impossible to identify with as an ego-ideal. BorchJacobsen, whilst taking issue with the privileged status of Christianity in Girards text, also shows how the Oedipal complex can never be a transcendental ideal because the paternal function is both a site of identication and an injunction: Put in more Freudian terms, the law that forbids identication with the Oedipal rival is uttered by the rival with whom one is identifying, and thus has no legal authority whatsoever.14

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The paternal model has no real authority to forbid identication, since his authority only stems from being an ego ideal in the rst place. And of course this analysis also destroys the distinction so loved by psychoanalysts between the ego ideal and the super-ego. To put it bluntly, there is no way out of Oedipal identication or rivalry. If the Oedipal complex is hysterical mimesis and the imaginary, then it cannot be incorporated into linguistic theories of the representational subject, and returns the psychoanalytic project not to questions of language but to questions of affect and a radical phenomenology. Indeed, much of Borch-Jacobsens discussion of hysterical mimesis in his book The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect is indebted to Michel Henrys evaluation of the unconscious as phenomenological affect. Following Borch-Jacobsen, this article argues for mimesis as the affectual and imitative behaviour between ego and object, self and other. Revealing the hypnotic and hysterical mimesis at work in relation to the Oedipal father and the father of the primal horde, Borch-Jacobsen outlines no alternative to this deathly and hysterical rivalry. However, if we understand the hysterical mimesis that Borch-Jacobsen describes in phenomenological terms, we can see it as a retreat into ideal fantasies, a defence against a more uid affectual existence in the present. The Oedipal complex as hysterical mimesis is a ight of identication, as a defence against time, into the idealized model of the family romance. To argue that sexual difference is imaginary is nothing new, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler in different ways would all agree. But these thinkers all want to resolve the question of either sexual difference or gender identity by arguing for its symbolic representation within language. I want to put the question a different way and ask: What would it mean to explore Oedipal sexual difference rst and foremost as imaginary and hysterical? I want to suggest that sexual difference and the ideal mimesis of heterosexuality that Butler describes may be seen as a hysterical mimesis and performance.The hysteric performs the body, but this performance masquerades to cover over a fundamental psychic disembodiment or disassociation. Hysteria is not some pre-Oedipal excessive relation to the mothers body as presumed in classical psychoanalytical accounts; rather it is a disassociated retreat into Oedipal sexual difference and childhood fantasy; a regressive ight into femininity and masculinity and away from reality. Symbiotic, hysterical mimesis is an imaginary defence and retreat into the magical world of the family (not just the mother) as a way of avoiding the loss and conict that the world of reality brings. Hysteria in this analysis becomes a disembodied masquerade of femininity and masculinity; an ideal mimesis which performs and disavows a more variable affectual world.

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Masquerade

The debate on the hysterical or feminine masquerade within the work of Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler can help further elucidate the question of hysterical mimesis. For Lacan, symbolic desire is separate from imaginary demand, and so symbolic desire is something quite different from the sexual needs between a man and a woman. Heterosexuality, in Lacans eyes, is a comedy and a masquerade. Lacan sees femininity as a masquerade within language which is constructed in relation to the phallic sign; femininity masquerades at being the phallus. Lacan writes that it is in order to be the phallus, that is, the signier of desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade.15 In discussing this quotation Judith Butler argues that it offers two possible readings. Either masquerade is a performance of sexual ontology, or masquerade is a denial of feminine desire that presupposes some prior ontological femininity regularly unrepresented by the phallic economy.16 Butler stays with the issue of performance and develops Lacans argument to suggest that the masquerade or mask is part of the incorporative strategy of melancholy, the taking on of attributes of the object/Other that is lost, where loss is the consequence of a refusal of love.17 Butlers development of this idea through describing the melancholic incorporation of gender is now well established. As stated above, the lost object of same-sex love becomes incorporated as a melancholic other. Thus femininity and masculinity are founded on the disavowal of lost homosexual loves. We can understand this performance of ontological gender as the hysterics mimesis; a feminine and masculine masquerade enacted by women and men alike. However, instead of seeing hysteria in classical Freudian terms as the conversion symptoms of repressed thoughts or wishes, I want the reader to consider hysteria as a crisis in ontological being.18 Hysterics, in this narrative, are not in crisis about their sexuality in the Lacanian sense. They are not, as Gregorio Kohon characterizes them as being, in a state of indecision, of being unable to choose between mother and father, or between being a man and a woman.19 Instead, the hysterical performance or mimesis, within the analytic session or outside of it, may be seen as a masquerade of idealized heterosexuality; for example, femininity at its extreme: childish and full of narcissistic longing. Or a masculinity that is macho: a performance of the hero. These are romantic performances that are transcendental, eschewing bodily desire in favour of a symbiotic relating within the imaginary of the Other. This hysterical masquerade is neurotic, but it is also a splitting of sexed identity which defends against ontological experience that has become disassociated. So Lacan says that the woman, in order to be the signier of the desire of the other, masquer-

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ades and rejects an essential part of her femininity. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that the feminine masquerade is a ight not from authentic sexuality, but from a sexuality that is psychically embodied. Such an embodied imaginary is where affect is not split off or petried, but can enable uid identications that are not invested/constructed in relation to a singular Other imaginary. ` Butlers discussion of the masquerade draws on Joan Rivieres famous ` analysis. In Womanliness as masquerade, Riviere suggests that the feminine masquerade masks more rivalrous masculine identications.20 ` Taking up Rivieres assertion that she cannot draw a line between genuine womanliness and the masquerade, Butler approves of the denition of the feminine masquerade as a disavowal of more masculine homosexual identications. However, she is critical of the homophobic ` way in which Riviere refuses to accord this disavowed female homosexuality with the status of desire. Following the accepted, traditional psychoanalytic view that homosexuality is an immature developmental stage ruled ` not by desire but by hate, Riviere accords the woman in her account a narcissistic masculine identication that cannot actually accede to full sexual desire for another woman. Butler writes: And yet, there is no clear way to read this description of a female ` homosexuality that is not about a sexual desire for women. Riviere would have us believe that this curious typological anomaly cannot be reduced to a repressed female homosexuality or heterosexuality. What is hidden is not sexuality, but rage.21 Although Butlers criticism of the way psychoanalysis refuses desire to ` lesbian women is apt, I want to consider what Riviere is saying about the sexual masquerade as a defence. What if there is not the distance between rage and sexuality, between identication and desire, that seems necessary to distinguish mature Oedipal desire from immature regressive identication and hate? What if all sexual love and desire, not just lesbian desire, is actually just one step away from rivalrous hate? Sexual masquerade, femininity and masculinity, then become a hysterical defence which seems to signal a crisis of sexuality, but actually points to a deeper crisis of ontological being. Fixed sexual identity, most obviously observed in extreme heterosexuality, but also present, I would argue, in very xed homosexual identities, is therefore a hysterical masquerade and disassociation which performs the body. This masquerade defends against the loss of ontological certainty, but may be replayed within the analytic session to elaborate a more plural affectual world. Such a sense of being is not a return to a naturalistic, essential subject. It represents just the opposite: an acknowledgement of

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multiple identications and desires. Merleau-Ponty has always characterized phenomenological being as historically constructed, and Judith Butler, in turn, has also proposed that gender performance may be understood as a series of phenomenological acts. Interestingly, Merleau-Ponty wanted to rescue Freud from a theory of sexual instincts, and in his book The Phenomenology of Perception he rereads Freudian psychoanalysis in a phenomenological mode: For Freud himself the sexual is not the genital, sexual life is not a mere effect of the processes having their seat in the genital organs, the libido is not an instinct, that is an activity directed towards denite ends, it is the general power, which the psychosomatic subject enjoys, of taking root in different settings, of establishing himself through different experiences . . .22 Judith Butler takes issue with Merleau-Pontys claim that the Freudian libido is not an instinct. For her, Freuds theory of psychosexual development relies precisely on the naturalistic account of drives that Merleau-Ponty seeks to reject. Moreover, in Butlers view, MerleauPontys own theory of sexual desire collapses into a naturalistic account, contradicting his more historical, phenomenological emphasis. In particular she ags up how Merleau-Ponty attributes the emergence of sexuality to the purely organic function of the body.23 Perhaps Butler misses the point here, made by Henry and implicitly understood by MerleauPonty, that instinctual drives can only be known through their phenomenological expression: the psychical and physical are inextricably woven together. In Butlers view, both Merleau-Ponty and Freud posit a sexuality that emerges before the historical inuence of culture and, as Foucault has shown, all sexuality is culturally and historically constructed. Butler also criticizes Merleau-Ponty on feminist grounds for avoiding gender and positing a phenomenological lived experience based purely on a male morphology. Of course, this critique chimes with Luce Irigarays challenge to Merleau-Pontys reliance on a universal male subject. However, before I turn to Irigarays work, I want to highlight how Butler does not jettison a phenomenological model completely, how she is, in fact, aware of the importance of a historical phenomenology which refuses the trap of either humanism or sexual difference. Arguing that it is not the paradigm of gender that she is primarily interested in revising, Butler argues cogently for the category of woman to be seen as an historical construction. The problem, of course, with feminists who advocate sexual difference as a primary factor, whether they follow Lacan or Irigaray, is that they immediately reify sexual difference

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as a founding moment of the subject and culture, whether that moment is seen in terms of the real or the symbolic. Butler writes: Although some feminist literary critics suggest that the presupposition of sexual difference is necessary for all discourse, that position reies sexual difference as the founding moment of culture and precludes an analysis not only of how sexual difference is constituted to begin with but how it is continuously constituted.24 She goes on to state the importance of developing a critical genealogy of gender which will: rely on a phenomenological set of suppositions, most important among them the expanded conception of an act which is both socially shared and historically constituted, and which is performative in the sense I previously described.25 Butler is critical of phenomenological and feminist theories that posit an essential self or femininity prior to the historical performance of gender acts, so she challenges Erving Goffmans assumption that the self contains some kind of intrinsic, psychological interiority. For her, the self is an irretrievable outside constituted in social discourse.26 Of course, this is also Foucaults criticism of Freudian meta-psychology, and a hierarchical Oedipal unconscious governed by repression, but psychoanalysis has always, as I have argued, incorporated an alternative phenomenological narrative, emphasizing mimetic identication rather than Oedipal repression. Such mimetic identication is not before or outside culture; neither does it occupy a physical place that is unmediated by the psyche. This phenomenological narrative of psychoanalysis exists in the early dialogue between Freud and Jung, and in Freuds early work on hysteria. More recently, the analytic thinking of Luce Irigaray and R.D. Laing, inuenced by Merleau-Ponty, reveals the phenomenological and intersubjective nature of the unconscious; a theory which completely explodes the idea of psychic interiority. The unconscious, as R.D. Laing spelt out so forcefully in Self and Others, does not reside inside us as a psychic internal world; it is an act of communication.27 Of course, Lacan also subscribed to the notion of an intersubjective transference but in his work emphasis on the scopic gaze ultimately returns the transference to a Hegelian master/slave dialectic where subject and object, imaginary and symbolic are oppositionally positioned. Merleau-Pontys earlier work also subscribes to a social ontology of the look, but his later work The Visible and The Invisible exchanges this emphasis on the gaze for a more sensual description of the transference

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where the eshy, tactile interaction of bodies deconstructs any delineation of subject and object.

A phenomenological bodily imaginary

How can we conceptualize a more phenomenological imaginary? And how would such an imaginary enable us to reconceptualize the bodily performance of the hysteric? Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray have both challenged and displaced Lacans mental and linguistic imaginary with a more embodied account. Lacans theory of the imaginary is synonymous with the ego. He depicts this imaginary in his account of the mirror stage as a developmental stage where the small unintegrated infant sees his bodily image reected in a mirror, and then misrecognizes that reection, seeing itself as unitary and whole, rather than fragmented.28 For Lacan, the imaginary is an illusory whole or projective spatial identication, where phantasy is elaborated from a fragmented body-image to a form of totality that I shall call orthopaedic.29 Merleau-Ponty sees this mirror stage differently. Instead of the total Gestalt body image in the mirror being a ction, he sees it as a necessary stage for the child in working out a spatial intersubjectivity. Whereas, for Lacan, the mirror stage is a process of imaginary narcissistic misrecognition, and this imaginary is a mental counterpart of a linguistic symbolic separated from the bodily real, for Merleau-Ponty the imaginary is embodied. Merleau-Ponty, unlike Lacan, sees the subject as present in a primordial, perceptive, sensual being, before the reective self appears. The imaginary is not an illusion covering primary fragmentation, but a stage where the perceptual relations between self and other, or self and object are dialectically put into play. In Merleau-Pontys view the image in the mirror is other. The child knows that what he sees is not where he experiences himself introceptively. But at the same time he is aware that he can be seen, by an external other at the place where he feels himself to be, but with the same visual appearance of the image in the mirror. This means that the child must displace the mirror image, bringing it from the apparent and virtual place it occupies in the depth of the mirror back to himself, whom he identies at a distance with his introceptive body.30 In Lacans account, the perceptual I becomes social through the rupture and lack of the phallic symbolic. Merleau-Pontys primary and embodied self other relations, as Vivian Sobchack points out, are not necessarily rivalrous, but can be co-operative gures constituted against the ground of the primordial experience of the body-being-in-theworld.31 The young infant is therefore centred but continously intertwined with objects in the world; there is no integrated subject that is boundaried from the social. Luce Irigaray is much inuenced by

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Merleau-Pontys account of intersubjectivity, but she takes issue with what she sees as its masculine imaginary. For although Merleau-Ponty argues for an embodied intersubjective imaginary, in Irigarays view he subsumes the question of esh and embodiment between two to sight, making vision complete the body.32 He thus makes the intersubjective relationship between the infant and mother reversible through vision, a relation between self and mother/world that locates itself as a pre-Oedipal and masculine imaginary because it does not acknowledge the subject, symbolic and sexually differentiate status of the mothers body.33 Irigarays argument for a more embodied imaginary questions the complicity between language, knowledge and a metaphysical privileging of sight and vision. She questions the Freudian and Oedipal analytic practice for its continual desire to know and deconstruct, where light is always subordinated to sound and bodily esh colours have to make way for interpretive rules and linguistic language. A language, then, that in its voyeuristic urge to know will decentre and fragment the subject but will do little to give back to the client the necessary powers of imagination to resynthesize, to psychically explore and integrate a sense of self. She asks, why is there such a desire to know? Knowledge alone cannot constitute the unity of the subject; in fact it tends to splinter the subject, or even force its obedience to some absolute cause.34 Instead of an interminable analysis where the subject is continually deconstructed by language, but in the process suffers sensory deprivation, Irigaray suggests a form of analysis that can give the subject back his or her perceptual balance within space-time. Her proposal is to take painting as an example of a practice that promises to restore perceptual balance. She writes: The point about painting is to spatialize perception and make time simultaneous, to quote Klee. This is also the point about dreaming. The analyst should direct his or her attention not only to the repetition of former images and their possible interpretation, but also to the subjects ability to paint, to make time simultaneous, to build bridges, establish perspectives between present-past-future.35 This notion of unconscious creativity and painting is very different from an Oedipal scenario, where the voyeuristic gaze of the other represses the body. In this Oedipal framework the imaginary goes to war with the real and we are left with the symptoms: hysteria, obsession, psychosis. But within a more embodied imaginary, the imagination works in harmony with the senses, enabling creative work for the subject and providing them with not only a harmonious relation to space and time, but also a situated and embodied perception and identity within history. Irigaray dis-

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cusses how this creative bodily imaginary is a crucial tool in working analytically with the hysteric. She writes: Hysteria has been and is still the source of energy that has not been coded the esh, the seed of analysis. Hysteria stands between woman and mother, women and mothers. It is in tension between them. Hysteria must not be destroyed but allowed access to the imagination and creativeness. For the hysteric access to such an identity is effected through a sexualised art, a coloured and sonorous art, an art whose libidinal resources blossom in duality and reconciliation, within one woman, between mother and wife, and among women.36 Now Irigaray names this creative bodily imaginary as vital in giving back the hysteric her gender and her sexually specic subjectivity. In other words, cure for the hysteric is through some imaginary and symbolic rendering of feminine sexual difference. Like Butler, I reject sexual difference as the primary founding moment of culture. Irigarays project, in proposing feminine sexual specicity, is trying to nd an alternative feminine subjectivity that will not be reduced to a projection or abject ground for a male, Oedipal imaginary. Nevertheless, to make feminine, sexed specicity the imaginary and symbolic alternative to the Oedipal complex is to ignore how sexual difference operates in fantasy as a regression to the privatized family and a defence against time. Oedipal femininity is the hysterical masquerade and an alternative cannot be found through some kind of reication of sexual difference. So what Irigaray is saying about a creative phenomenological imaginary and the hysteric is important. But this is not, I suggest, because a phenomenological imaginary elaborates a needed modality of feminine subjectivity for the woman, but because it offers an explanation of how the hysteric performs the body, as ideal heterosexuality, in a defence against inhabiting a more embodied sense of time. Although Irigaray criticizes Merleau-Ponty for subsuming the embodied nature of the imaginary to a masculine privilege of vision, her work is obviously indebted to the way Merleau-Ponty counters the Lacanian imaginary by bringing the body back into the reversable, intersubjective gaze of the mirror. Thus whereas an Oedipal account splits symbolic language from the imaginary body, a phenomenological narrative negotiates a more uid relationship between real and imaginary. A phenomenological imaginary thus reverses the perception, between embodiment and the social, that exists within Oedipal psychoanalysis. Whereas in the latter account of a phallic unconscious, pre-Oedipal experience and the unconscious are predicated in terms of a symbiotic, instinctual excess of the body, within a phenomenological imaginary the infant

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is seen as disembodied and disassociated when merged symbiotically with the mother because it participates only in terms of the Others dominant imaginary.37 A more embodied subjectivity is then attained when the child nds a more transitional and creative imaginary where multiple identications may be socially and symbolically claimed. Hysteria is a good example of this distinction between an Oedipal and a phenomenological imaginary. In an Oedipal scenario, hysteria becomes an excessive bodily and symbiotic relating, often characterizing a mother daughter relationship that has failed to achieve symbolic, paternal triangulation and mediation. If we understand the hysterics dilemma in phenomenological terms, her symbiotic connection to the mother renders her disembodied, restricting her relation to one, unmediated, imaginary world which is hard for her to own or inhabit. The hysteric then performs and masquerades the body, precisely because she cannot psychically integrate its affects. Oedipal psychoanalysis polarizes the pre-Oedipal maternal body to a phallic, linguistic symbolic. Within phenomenological psychoanalysis you are always within language and culture, there is no prior organic sexuality. Libidinal experiences are on a continuum of being psychically embodied and hence performed and brought to life within language, or they are disassociated. Here, bodily symptoms perform and speak precisely because parts of the psychic experiential world have become lost and split off. In terms of the analytic session this means that the imaginary is not simply an unconscious negativity of murderous maternal identication that has to be escaped/repressed through a privileged phallic symbolic. Instead, the imaginary is a world of embodied or disembodied objects and images which can be creatively elaborated on within an intersubjective transference; to become, as Merleau-Ponty would put it, a gestural sense or language.

Moving beyond hysterical mimesis

Following Borch-Jacobsen, we can argue that desire and identication are an indissoluble mimesis from the beginning. We are born into a world of desire, and it is our present Oedipal and family arrangements that personalize desire in relation to oppositional, heterosexual relations between a mother and father. Desire becomes socialized as sexual difference, but as Deleuze and Guattari argue this is a perversion and a privatization of the real social and political nature of desire. It is this privatization of the imaginary that we can see as both Oedipal and hysterical. The Oedipal is a hysterical and privatized imaginary that masquerades as symbolic law. Borch-Jacobsen and Irigaray have both in differing ways tried to rethink Oedipal desire as mimetic. For Borch-Jacobsen, it becomes the

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deathly and hysterical rivalry and imaginary that lies between father and son. In Irigarays view, it is the masquerade and exchange that women are forced to enter into as commodities on the market. Irigaray also sees this mimesis as a doubling, a more subversive feminist mimicry of the male principle of realist mimesis: the Oedipal symbolic order. Mimesis, for Irigaray, is therefore not just unconscious; it is also a conscious and playful strategy for revealing the place of the feminine within language. Butler also suggests that mimesis is a strategy. However, for Butler there is no subject, feminine or otherwise, that is revealed through mimesis. Instead, gender is a performative cultural ction, constructed through a Foucauldian law. It is only the reiteration of this law as a mimesis within language that can produce alterity or the possibility of miming differently.38 But is social mimesis simply a question of reiteration within language? Freud places the Oedipal complex and the art of repression as the resolution of our rivalrous mimetic death drives, and yet when he comes to discuss group psychology, his thesis of identication as a mimesis steadily undoes his more Oedipal interpretations. Rene Girard and Jean-Michel Oughourlian profess the need to move beyond mimesis as repression, rivalry or obstacle and submit to the mimetic process.39 For Girard and Oughourlain, only peaceful submission to the mimetic model enables the route out of hysterical rivalry and neurosis. However, in Freuds discussion of the social group we see mimesis as a rivalry that will brook no such acceptance. We must remember that Freud is talking about neurosis and that for him no real difference exists between analysis of the individual or the group. We can understand the early emotional mimesis between mother and child in a phenomenological sense; as a mimesis where the mother is understood not as preOedipal but as an extension of the world. From this viewpoint, the difference between mimetic identication for the child or the group becomes a question or rather a description of that affectual world. In Freuds account of Oedipal neurosis as desire, the neurotic cannot accept paternal prohibition and law. But in a phenomenological sense the neurotic is simply trapped in a restricted, repetitive mimesis with the mother/world. The relation to the father here is merely another repetition of that hysterical tie. Overcoming this rivalry means accepting identications that are more exible, and open to change and difference. It is perhaps the ultimate myth of Freudian and Lacanian discourse that the Oedipal complex is a reexive sublimation of the hysterics mimetic rivalry within language and culture. Freud abandoned hypnosis and developed his fundamental rule of analysis: the free association with words as the key to returning repressed affects to their proper representation. In much the same way, Lacan saw language as the route out of

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the hysterical imaginary and the key to intersubjective relating. But the hysterics mimesis/transference is not resolved primarily through representation. The hysteric does not stage herself as Lacan thought in order to narrate herself for the other, for she mimes and exists as the other.40 It is not language per se that rescues the hysteric, but a language attached to a more affectual or embodied imaginary, where she can own not just one, but many desires. A focus on language and representation misses the fundamental meaning of the hysterics mimesis which is a staged performance for the other, but it is a peculiar narration in the sense that it is one-sided. Hysteria is, as Jung says, a staged performance that communicates a disassociated and restricted way of being in the world. Hysteria is thus conceived as disassociation and reminiscences of the past which tell only one part of the hysterics experiential subjectivity. For hysteria is melodrama, and whereas in optimum health we have access to multiple selves, the hysteric has lost the ability to have dialogue with or representation of important parts or characters in her psychic world. She is like a soap opera star forced to play the same role, over and over again. In much the same way, our Oedipal identications as heterosexual femininity and masculinity become such binary, hysterical melodramas. If the Oedipal complex is not a repression of pre-Oedipal bodily instincts, but is instead inherently hysterical and mimetic, then we still need to add to this an account of how mimesis moves beyond rivalry and disassociation to encompass embodied, psychic and social difference. One way of understanding this is to see mimesis as a series of phenomenological identications and acts which can travel beyond xed, hysterical sexual difference and be acknowledged in their multiplicity. In this latter account we move from hysterical, disassociated heterosexuality to a more uid performance where lost homosexual loves can also be acknowledged. Butlers account of the performative mimesis of gender eschews phenomenological models of identication that position a sealed and interior subject. If mimesis is the performative basis of gender identication, how do we mobilize a more embodied identication and desire which is not rooted in the imaginary of the other? The answer, it seems, for Butler is a mimesis within language which will reiterate and thereby produce difference within the hegemonic norm. But linguistic representation, as Irigaray and Borch-Jacobsen have in different ways argued, is not the key to releasing the hysteric into more intersubjective relating. A more embodied performance or mimesis entails a meaningful communication where disassociated selves can nd elaboration within a creative transference. Language is not causal in this scenario; it is just part of a wider relational and communicative mimesis within the transference.

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Irigaray has described this embodied mimesis in a phenomenological sense, as a painting of the world within a creative imaginary and the transference. Now, for Irigaray, this intersubjective painting leads optimally for the hysteric to a sexually specied feminine subject. But what if it doesnt? What if, instead of the creation of the subject of sexual difference, this embodied imaginary actually dissolves the xed and hysterical performance of our gendered identities? In this latter account the imaginary leads not to sexed, symbolic desire but to creative, social desires; a collective desire more like that envisioned by Deleuze and Guattarri which both precedes and outlives the subject and develops the many identities at our disposal. In order to develop this phenomenological imaginary we have to abandon the masculine subject adhered to by Merleau-Ponty and the feminine subject proposed by Irigaray. Instead we can understand this imaginary as a mimesis; a mimesis which cannot be reduced to notions of a conscious role and therefore retains the notion of an unconscious.41 But this unconscious is not understood in terms of castration or the Lacanian, Hegelian dialectic which opposes imaginary life to the symbolic. As Freud realized in his more phenomenological moments, there is no cut between real and imaginary; the unconscious traverses both. Castration is a myth that locks the unconscious inside the patient, and the patient on the analysts couch, instead of opening both to a more social transience of time. We can therefore understand gender performance, as Butler herself has done, as a series of phenomenological acts. In this scenario, gender mimesis is an act performed in the imaginary, which moves between language and experience, between the imaginary and the symbolic and in so doing conates their distinction. Such mimetic phenomenological acts do not constitute a subject, except as a ction. But this ction is not simply a function of language and the law; it is experiential, the movement of a phenomenological imaginary that moves hysterically out of time and, in more embodied acts, within it. Social desire and mimesis, then, mean occupying a larger world and not restricting oneself to parents, child or couple. The difculty, as Freud showed in Group Psychology, in moving beyond hysterical mimesis and rivalry, is how we live with the pain of being excluded. In a conversation with Judith Butler, Adam Phillips suggests that sexual difference is not something we can transcend, for it explains how the child has to accept that there is no third sex, no position beyond exclusion. Phillips seems, then, to accept some sort of sexual difference as constitutive. He argues that there is logic in the opposition Freud places between identication and desire: In Freuds view we become what we cannot have, and we desire (and punish) what we are compelled to disown.42 Butler is not so sure, and whilet accepting that there is no place beyond exclusion asks, But why is sexual difference the primary guarantor of loss in our psychic lives?43

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I suggest that sexual difference is not the primary guarantor of loss for us psychically.44 In fact desire, as Deleuze and Guattarri note, cannot be reduced to desire between persons. They argue that the incest taboo and the rst primary bond between mother and child are cultural ctions which personalize desire as Oedipal, thus removing it from its proper collective and political function.45 One of the great myths of personal desire, whether between lovers, or between parents and children, is that the other is knowable, that the beloved is who we think they are, when in fact elsewhere they are many other things. Freud never really worked out what leads melancholia to mourning, or how the Oedipal complex is ever really given up. We are given Oedipus as the solution, but far from being the solution it is actually only the hysterical dilemma of our disassociated Oedipal relations which leads us to the analysts couch.

Conclusion

I have argued for sexual difference as a gender performance which is both Oedipal and hysterical. While Butler locates gender performativity within a reiteration of linguistic law, I have explored it as part of a phenomenological imaginary, not as some sealed subject, but as a mimesis of phenomenological acts. If hysteria and our xed gender performances are a mimetic defence against a more transient relation to time and the social, and if femininity and masculinity are masquerades that do not have to be upheld and subscribed to within the symbolic, then perhaps we can also recognize the myth and ction of castration and Oedipus a myth which is not a necessary representative function of language, but a myth of the imaginary, that has been historically produced, and can be just as creatively lost. This view is of course indebted to Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus. However, I suggest that an alternative to the Lacanian symbolic does not rest in the destruction of the imaginary and a reication of a schizoid desiring real. Contrary to the desiring machines advocated in Anti-Oedipus, productive desire is not just real and its realization depends on the imaginative production of a more social and phenomenological imaginary. Such an imaginary is not reliant on the hysterical sexual subject. In fact, a more phenomenological reading of the unconscious can perhaps allow us to see that there is no place beyond exclusion; but also that exclusion is not based on sexual difference. On the contrary, exclusion can lead us away from the hysterical rivalry of sexual difference to a social performativity of our many transient desires. University of Birmingham

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Notes

1 The argument that a phenomenological reading negates the idea of the unconscious need not jettison the psychoanalytic project. As Carl Jung has famously said, the unconscious is simply a negative borderline concept. 2 Sigmund Freud, A fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (1895), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 195374), vol 7. Further references will be given to SE. 3 Carl, G. Jung, The theory of psychoanalysis (1913), trans R.F.C. Hull, ed. Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, Collected Works of C.G. Jung (London: Routledge, 1954), 4: 92. 4 Carl G. Jung, The theory of psychoanalysis, pp. 1612. 5 Sigmund Freud, Five lectures on psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, Two Short Accounts of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 40. 6 Sigmund Freud, Group psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921), SE, 18. 7 Sigmund Freud, Melancholia and mourning (1917), SE, 14. 8 Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 309. 9 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 146. 10 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 28. 11 Ibid., p. 27. 12 Ibid., p. 27. 13 Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and The Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 14 Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, pp. 21718. 15 Jacques Lacan, The meaning of the phallus, in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole freudienne, trans. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose e (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 84. 16 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 60. 17 Ibid., p. 62. 18 Freud understood hysteria as the conversion symptoms of repressed wishes. Later more object relations accounts such as those by Fairburn focus on a more ontological and narcissistic aetiology. See W.R.D. Fairburn, A revised psychopathology of the psychoses and psychoneuroses, in Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality (London: Tavistock, 1952). 19 Gregorio Kohon, No Lost Certainties to be Recovered (London: Karnac, 1999). ` 20 Joan Riviere, Womanliness as masquerade (1929), in Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (eds), Formations of Fantasy. (London: Methuen, 1986). 21 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 67.

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22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 158. 23 Judith Butler, Sexual ideology and phenomenological description: a feminist critique of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of perception, in ed. J. Allen and I.M. Young (eds). The Thinking Muse (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 91. 24 Judith Butler, Performative acts and gender constitution: an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory, in S.E. Case (ed.) Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 281. 25 Ibid., p. 281. 26 Ibid., p. 279. 27 Ronald D. Laing, Self and Others (London: Penguin, 1969). 28 Jacques Lacan, The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I, trans. Alan Sheridan, in Ecrits: A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977). 29 Ibid., p. 4. 30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The childs relation with others, in J.M. Edie (ed.), The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: North Western University Press, 1964), pp. 135 6. 31 Vivien Sobchack, Being with ones own eyes, in The Address of The Eye: The Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 121. 32 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of SexualDifference., trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: Athlone Press, 1993), p. 174. 33 See my Postlacanian feminism: reading the symbolic, imaginary and real, in Arguing With The Phallus, Feminist, Queer and Postcolonial Theory (London: Zed Books, 2000), where I discuss Irigarays feminine in terms of a sexually symbolic, and an embodied imaginary. 34 Luce Irigaray, Fleshcolours, in Female Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 164. 35 Ibid., p. 155. 36 Ibid., p. 164. 37 Symbiosis in my clinical experience is not an early developmental state, but a fantasy of oneness that is used as a defence against anxiety, pain and difference. 38 Butler, Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power. 39 Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans S. Bann (London: Athlone Press, 1987) and Jean Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession and Hypnosis, trans. Eugene Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 40 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Hypnosis in psychoanalysis, trans. A. Brewer and X.P. Callahan, in The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1993). 41 Erving Goffmans phenomenology and the early work of MerleauPonty emphasize a conscious subject and role, a delimited subject and object, at the expense of an unconscious that would seek to dissolve these distinctions.

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42 Adam Phillips, Keeping it moving: commentary on Judith Butlers Melancholy gender/refused identication , in The Psychic Life of Power, p. 155. 43 Judith Butler, Reply to Adam Phillips commentary on Melancholy gender/ refused identication, in The Psychic Life of Power, p. 165. 44 An alternative to castration and sexual difference means rethinking the notion of the primary maternal object, not as prohibited through paternal law, but as a phenomenological arena of identication and difference. Why cant there be all sorts of different identications and losses that we have to negotiate in terms of moving into a more social identication with the world? 45 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984).

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