Psychoanalysis didn't simply investigate (critically or otherwise) 'the way in which human beings form their identity qua ideology.' It has been one of the _ideological_ disciplines through which such 'identities' have been _historically constructed_. For instance, the modern homo/hetero distinction (in contrast to the political epithet 'sodomites') has been constructed in part through the discipline of the 'psyche.' As for the two-sex, two-gender model (in contrast to the two-gender, one-sex model of pre-modern understanding) and its elaboration in the Freudian mind (including his special contribution -- the vaginal orgasm), Thomas Lacquer has this to say (_Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_ 233-243):
***** Freud's account of how the clitoral sexuality of young girls gives way to the vaginal sexuality of mature women powerfully focuses on the issues of my book. On the one hand, Freud is very much a man of the Enlightenment, inheritor of its model of sexual difference. Anatomy is destiny, as he said in a phrase he did not really mean; the vagina is the opposite of the penis, an anatomical marker of women's lack of what a man has. Heterosexuality is the natural state of the architecture of two incommensurable opposite sexes. But Freud, more than any other thinker, also collapses the model. Libido knows no sex. The clitoris is a version of the male organ -- why not the other way around? -- and only by postulating a sort of generalized female hysteria, a disease in which culture takes the causative role of organs, does Freud account for how it supposedly gives up its role in women's sexual lives in favor of the "opposite organ," the vagina. Here, in other words, is a version of the central modern narrative of one sex at war with two.
The story begins in 1905 when Freud rediscovered the clitoris, or in any case clitoral orgasm, by inventing its vaginal counterpart.... After four hundred, perhaps even two thousand, years there was all of a sudden a second place from which women derived sexual pleasure. In 1905, for the first time, a doctor claimed that there were two kinds of orgasm and that the vaginal sort was the expected norm among adult women....
I want to make two points in particular. In the first place, before 1905 no one thought that there was any other kind of female orgasm than the clitoral sort. It is well and accurately described in hundreds of learned and popular medical texts, as well as in a burgeoning pornographic literature.... The clitoris, like the penis, was for two millennia both "precious jewel" and sexual organ, a connection not "lost or mislaid" through the ages, as [Robert] Scholes would have it, but only (if then) since Freud....
My second point, more central to the concern of this book, is that there is nothing in nature about how the clitoris is constructed. It is not self-evidently a female penis, and it is not self-evidently in opposition to the vagina. Nor have men always regarded clitoral orgasm as absent, threatening, or unspeakable because of some primordial male fear of, or fascination with, female sexual pleasure. The history of the clitoris is part of the history of sexual difference generally and of the socialization of the body's pleasures. Like the history of masturbation, it is a story as much about sociability as about sex. And once again,...it is the story of the aporia of anatomy.
Stranger still [than the Freudian migration of pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina] is what happens to biology in Freud's famous essay. A little girl's realization that she does not have a penis and that therefore her sexuality resides in its supposed opposite, in the cavity of the vagina, elevates a "biological fact" into a cultural desideratum. Freud writes as if he has discovered the basis in anatomy for the entire nineteenth-century world of gender....
Freud even goes further by suggesting that the repression of female sexuality in puberty, marked by abandonment of the clitoris, heightens male desire and thus tightens the web of heterosexual union on which reproduction, family, and indeed civilization itself appear to rest: "The intensification of the brake upon sexuality brought about by pubertal repression in women serves as a stimulus to the libido of men and causes an increase in its activity." ...Freud seems to be taking a stab at historical bio-anthropology, claiming that female modesty incites male desire while female acquiescence, in allowing it to be gratified, leads humanity out of the savage's cave.
...Freud...[given his contemporary scientific and popular emphasis on the clitoral pleasure]...must have known that what he wrote in the language of biology regarding the shift of erotogenic sensibility from the clitoris to the vagina had no basis in the facts of anatomy or physiology....The social thuggery that takes a polymorphously perverse infant and bullies it into a heterosexual man or woman finds an organic correlative in the body, in the opposition of the sexes and their organs. Perhaps because Freud is the great theorist of sexual ambiguity, he is also the inventor of a dramatic sexual antithesis: between the embarrassing clitoris that girls desert and the vagina whose erotogenic powers they embrace as mature women.
More generally, what might loosely be called patriarchy may have appeared to Freud as the only possible way to organize the relation between sexes, leading him to write as if its signs in the body, external active penis versus passive vagina, were "natural." [Yoshie: Freud was aware of the discontents of sexist class society, but he couldn't think of any other way of organizing society, because for him discontents were not specific to class, sex, and other oppressions -- discontents were the costs of 'civilization.']
...If we put all of this together, Freud's argument might work as follows. Whatever polymorphous perverse practices might have obtained in the distant past, or today among children and animals, the continuity of the species and the development of civilization depended on the adoption by women of their correct sexuality.... [Yoshie: And Lacan doesn't say otherwise -- hence Kristeva's, Butler's, and others' tortured attempts to put the Lacanian premise to feminist purposes.] *****
>First, Lacan doesn't say that there are two sexes - more
>like two social-imaginary formations which tend to
>predominate.
In this sense, Lacan is no better, for he can't imagine anything else. The only difference between Freud and Lacan is that Lacan shows little explicit interest in biology and that Lacan is more interested in reconciling us with how we 'fail' (as opposed to Freud's interest in 'helping' us adjust ourselves to the social ideals of the gloomy civilization). The civilization and its discontents are as eternal for Lacan as for Freud, for Lacan's Real has the transcendental priority to history (much as Heidegger's Being does). In this sense, Lacan is Platonic.
Moreover, whether in the versions offered by Lacan or Judith Butler or others of similar persuasions, there is no space for historical explanations for the gendered division of labor (and its change that follows the changes in the mode of production and social reproduction). This lack of connection between gender/sex/'sexuality' and labor in Lacanian analyses also makes for a theory of the eternal present (or the eternal 'absence').
Last but not the least, feminists do _not_ need psychoanalysis or deconstruction to repudiate gender without repudiating bodies. If anything, psychoanalysis is a metaphorical hindrance, not a springboard. And deconstruction and other French theories practically hand over biological and other sciences to the Right at the level of practice (if not in 'science studies'). And as Stephen Jay Gould, Ruth Hubbard, etc. have argued, we can't afford to do that.
toward communism with an X-sex, zero-gender model,
Yoshie