Glamor & Pain (was Re: Of gods and vampires: an introduction to psychoanalysis)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Oct 5 23:33:40 PDT 1999



>----- Original Message -----
>From: <kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca>
>To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 3:40 PM
>Subject: Re: Of gods and vampires: an introduction to psychoanalysis
>
>
>> On Mon, 4 Oct 1999 14:47:02 -0400 Doug Henwood
>> <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>>
>> > [more address oddities]
>> >
>> > From: "christian a. gregory" <chrisgregory11 at email.msn.com>
>> > Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 13:16:33 -0500
>>
>> > Yeah. God knows we've got to take Lacan at his word.
>>
>> If you don't take people at their word, you put yourself in
>> the unglamorous position of thinking that you know better.
>>
>Oh yeah, and Lacan and Freud *never* do that. And, as everybody knows, it's
>better to be glamorous than not.
>
>christian

And the old meaning of glamor was magic...

As in any glamor, much pain was involved in the production of the glamor of psychoanalysis. From Thomas Laqueur's _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_:

***** Freud knew that the natural locus of woman's erotic pleasure was the clitoris and that it competed with the culturally necessary locus of her pleasure, the vagina. Marie Bonaparte reports that her mentor gave her Felix Bryk's _Neger Eros_ to read. The author argued that the Nandi tribes engaged in clitoral excision on nubile seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls so as to encourage the transfer of orgiastic sensitivity from its "infantile" zone to the vagina, where it must necessarily come to rest. The Nandi were purportedly not interested in suppressing female pleasure but merely in facilitating its redirection to social ends. Freud drew Bonaparte's attention to the fact that Bryk must have been familiar with his views and that the hypothesis regarding Nandi orgasmic transfer was worth investigating.

Bonaparte's efforts to discover the fortunes of "clitoroidal" versus "vaginal" sexuality in women whose clitoris had been excised proved inconclusive, but she did offer a theoretical formulation of the transfer of erotic sensibility that fits my understanding of Freud's theory of female sexuality. "I believe," writes Bonaparte, "that the ritual sexual mutilations imposed on African women...constitute the exact physical counterpart of the psychical intimidations imposed in childhood on the sexuality of European little girls." "Civilized" people no longer seek to destroy the old home of sensibility -- an ironic observation for Bonaparte, since she collected cases of European excision and herself underwent painful and unsuccessful surgery to move her clitoris nearer her vaginal opening so that she might be "normally orgasmic" -- but enforce the occupation, or cathexis, of a new organ by less violent means. (242) *****

Yoshie



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