The Second Sex (12 page)

Adler departed from Freud because he understood the inadequacies of a system that bases the development of human life on sexuality alone: he means to reintegrate sexuality into the total personality; while for Freud all behavior is driven by desire, that is, by seeking pleasure, Adler sees man as aiming at certain goals; he replaces drives with motives, finality, and plans; he raises intelligence to such heights that for him sexuality often has only symbolic value. According to his theories, the human drama is divided into three steps: each individual has a will to power but along with it an inferiority complex; this conflict leads him to use countless ruses rather than confront real-life obstacles that he fears may be insurmountable; the subject establishes a distance between himself and the society he fears: thus develop neuroses that are disturbances of the social sense. As for woman, her inferiority complex manifests itself in a rejection out of shame of her femininity: it is not the absence of a penis that unleashes this complex but the total situation; the girl envies the phallus only as a symbol of the privileges granted to boys; the father’s place in the family, the universal predominance of males, and upbringing all confirm her idea of masculine superiority. Later, in the course of sexual relations, even the coital posture that places the woman underneath the man is an added humiliation. She reacts by a “masculine protest”; she either tries to masculinize herself or uses her feminine wiles to go into battle against man. Through motherhood she can find in her child the equivalent of the penis. But this supposes that she must first accept herself completely as woman, and thus accept her inferiority. She is far more deeply divided against herself than is man.

It is unnecessary to underline here the theoretical differences between Adler and Freud or the possibilities of reconciliation: neither the explanation based on drive nor the one based on motive is ever sufficient: all drives posit a motive, but motive is never grasped except through drives; a synthesis of Adlerism and Freudianism thus seems possible. In fact, while bringing in notions of aim and finality, Adler retains in full the idea of psychic causality; his relation to Freud resembles somewhat the relation of energeticism to mechanism: whether it is a question of impact or force of
attraction, the physicist always recognizes determinism. This is the postulate common to all psychoanalysts: for them, human history is explained by an interplay of determined elements. They all allot the same destiny to woman. Her drama is summed up in a conflict between her “viriloid” and her “feminine” tendencies; the former are expressed in the clitoral system, the latter in vaginal eroticism; as a very young girl, she identifies with her father; she then experiences feelings of inferiority relative to man and is faced with the alternative of either maintaining her autonomy, becoming virilized—which, with an underlying inferiority complex, provokes a tension that risks bringing on neuroses—or else finding happy self-fulfillment in amorous submission, a solution facilitated by the love she felt for her sovereign father; it is he whom she is looking for in her lover or husband, and her sexual love is mingled with her desire to be dominated. Maternity will be her reward, restoring to her a new kind of autonomy. This drama seems to be endowed with its own dynamism; it continues to work itself out through all the mishaps that distort it, and every woman passively endures it.

Psychoanalysts have no trouble finding empirical confirmations of their theories: it is known that if Ptolemy’s system is subtly complicated, his version of the position of the planets could be upheld for a long time; if an inverse Oedipus complex is superimposed onto the Oedipus complex and by showing a desire in every anxiety, the very facts that contradicted Freudianism will be successfully integrated into it. For a figure to be perceived, it must stand out from its background, and how the figure is perceived brings out the ground behind it in positive delineation; thus if one is determined to describe a particular case from a Freudian perspective, one will find the Freudian schema as the background behind it; but when a doctrine demands the multiplication of secondary explanations in an indefinite and arbitrary way, when observation uncovers as many anomalies as normal cases, it is better to give up the old frameworks. Today as well, every psychoanalyst works at adapting Freudian concepts to suit himself; he attempts compromises; for example, a contemporary psychoanalyst writes: “Whenever there is a complex, there are by definition several components … The complex consists in grouping these disparate elements and not in representing one of them by the others.”
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But the idea of a simple grouping of elements is unacceptable: psychic life is not a mosaic; it is altogether complete in every one of its moments, and this unity must be
respected. This is possible only by recovering the original intentionality of existence through the disparate facts. Without going back to this source, man appears a battlefield of drives and prohibitions equally devoid of meaning and contingent. All psychoanalysts systematically refuse the idea of choice and its corollary, the notion of value; and herein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system. Cutting out drives and prohibitions from existential choice, Freud fails to explain their origin: he takes them as givens. He tried to replace the notion of value with that of authority; but he admits in
Moses and Monotheism
that he has no way to account for this authority. Incest, for example, is forbidden because the father forbade it: But why did he forbid it? It is a mystery. The superego interiorizes orders and prohibitions emanating from an arbitrary tyranny; instinctive tendencies exist, but we do not know why; these two realities are heterogeneous because morality is posited as foreign to sexuality; human unity appears as shattered, there is no passage from the individual to the society: Freud is forced to invent strange fictions to reunite them.
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Adler saw clearly that the castration complex could be explained only in a social context; he approached the problem of valorization, but he did not go back to the ontological source of values recognized by society, and he did not understand that values were involved in sexuality itself, which led him to misunderstand their importance.

Sexuality certainly plays a considerable role in human life: it could be said to penetrate it completely; physiology has already demonstrated how the activity of testes and ovaries is intermixed with that of the soma. The existent is a sexed body; in its relations with other existents that are also sexed bodies, sexuality is thus always involved; but as the body and sexuality are concrete expressions of existence, it is also from here that their significance can be ascertained: without this perspective, psychoanalysis takes unexplained facts for granted. For example, a young girl is said to be “ashamed” of urinating in a squatting position, with her bottom exposed; but what is shame? Likewise, before asking if the male is proud because he has a penis or if his penis is the expression of his pride, we need to know what pride is and how the subject’s aspirations can be embodied in an object. Sexuality must not be taken as an irreducible given; the existent possesses a more primary “quest for being”; sexuality is only one of these aspects. Sartre demonstrates this in
Being and Nothingness;
Bachelard also says it in his works on Earth, Air, and Water: psychoanalysts believe that man’s quintessential truth lies in his relation to his own body and that of
others like him within society; but man has a primordial interest in the substance of the natural world surrounding him that he attempts to discover in work, play, and all experiences of the “dynamic imagination”; man seeks to connect concretely with existence through the whole world, grasped in all possible ways. Working the soil and digging a hole are activities as primal as an embrace or coitus: it is an error to see them only as sexual symbols; a hole, slime, a gash, hardness, and wholeness are primary realities; man’s interest in them is not dictated by libido; instead, the libido will be influenced by the way these realities were revealed to him. Man is not fascinated by wholeness because it symbolizes feminine virginity: rather, his love for wholeness makes virginity precious. Work, war, play, and art define ways of being in the world that cannot be reduced to any others; they bring to light features that impinge on those that sexuality reveals; it is both through them and through these erotic experiences that the individual chooses himself. But only an ontological point of view can restore the unity of this choice.

Psychoanalysts vehemently reject this notion of choice in the name of determinism and “the collective unconscious”; this unconscious would provide man with ready-made imagery and universal symbolism; it would explain analogies found in dreams, lapses, delusions, allegories, and human destinies; to speak of freedom would be to reject the possibility of explaining these disturbing concordances. But the idea of freedom is not incompatible with the existence of certain constants. If the psychoanalytical method is often productive in spite of errors in theory, it is because there are givens in every individual case so generalized that no one would dream of denying them: situations and behavior patterns recur; the moment of decision springs out of generality and repetition. “Anatomy is destiny,” said Freud; and this phrase is echoed by Merleau-Ponty: “The body is generality.” Existence is one, across and through the separation of existents, manifesting itself in analogous organisms; so there will be constants in the relationship between the ontological and the sexual. At any given period, technology and the economic and social structure of a group reveal an identical world for all its members: there will also be a constant relation of sexuality to social forms; analogous individuals, placed in analogous conditions, will grasp analogous significations in the given; this analogy is not the basis of a rigorous universality, but it can account for finding general types in individual cases. A symbol does not emerge as an allegory worked out by a mysterious unconscious: it is the apprehension of a signification through an analogue of the signifying object; because of the identity of the existential situation cutting across all existents and the identity of the facticity
they have to cope with, significations are revealed to many individuals in the same way; symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality that is at once
Mitsein
and separation; and this explains that singular invention also has its place: in practice the psychoanalytical method must accept this whether or not doctrine authorizes it. This approach enables us to understand, for example, the value generally given to the penis.
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It is impossible to account for this without starting from an existential fact: the subject’s tendency toward
alienation;
the anxiety of his freedom leads the subject to search for himself in things, which is a way to flee from himself; it is so fundamental a tendency that as soon as he is weaned and separated from the Whole, the infant endeavors to grasp his alienated existence in the mirror, in his parents’ gaze. Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. The penis is singularly adapted to play this role of “double” for the little boy: for him it is both a foreign object and himself; it is a plaything, a doll, and it is his own flesh; parents and nurses treat it like a little person. So, clearly, it becomes for the child “an alter ego usually craftier, more intelligent, and more clever than the individual”;
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because the urinary function and later the erection are midway between voluntary processes and spontaneous processes, because it is the impulsive, quasi-foreign source of subjectively experienced pleasure, the penis is posited by the subject as himself and other than himself; specific transcendence is embodied in it in a graspable way, and it is a source of pride; because the phallus is set apart, man can integrate into his personality the life that flows from it. This is why, then, the length of the penis, the force of the urine stream, the erection, and the ejaculation become for him the measure of his own worth.
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It is thus a constant that the phallus is the fleshly incarnation of transcendence; since it is also a constant that the child feels transcended, that is, frustrated in his transcendence by his father, the Freudian idea of the castration complex will persist. Deprived of this alter ego, the little girl does not alienate herself in a graspable thing, does not reclaim herself: she
is thus led to make her entire self an object, to posit herself as the Other; the question of knowing whether or not she has compared herself with boys is secondary; what is important is that, even without her knowing it, the absence of a penis keeps her from being aware of herself as a sex; many consequences result from this. But these constants we point out nevertheless do not define a destiny: the phallus takes on such importance because it symbolizes a sovereignty that is realized in other areas. If woman succeeded in affirming herself as subject, she would invent equivalents of the phallus: the doll that embodies the promise of the child may become a more precious possession than a penis.
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There are matrilineal societies where the women possess the masks in which the collectivity alienates itself; the penis then loses much of its glory. Only within the situation grasped in its totality does anatomical privilege found a truly human privilege. Psychoanalysis could only find its truth within a historical context.

Likewise, woman can no more be defined by the consciousness of her own femininity than by merely saying that woman is a female: she finds this consciousness within the society of which she is a member. Interiorizing the unconscious and all psychic life, the very language of psychoanalysis suggests that the drama of the individual unfolds within him: the terms “complex,” “tendencies,” and so forth imply this. But a life is a relation with the world; the individual defines himself by choosing himself through the world; we must turn to the world to answer the questions that preoccupy us. In particular, psychoanalysis fails to explain why woman is the
Other
. Even Freud accepts that the prestige of the penis is explained by the father’s sovereignty, and he admits that he does not know the source of male supremacy.