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Studies in the Psychosocial seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought.
Table of contents

Bibliographic Information

We have a dedicated site for Germany. This book examines how people cannot escape being tainted, whether actively engaged or not, by violence in its countless manifestations. The essays encompass a wide range of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and geo-political areas. The authors all work within a psychosocial framework by unsettling the boundaries between psyche-social. Four themes are addressed: violence of speech, violence and domination, repetition and violence, and the possibility of reparation or renewal.


  1. Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought | Lene Auestad | Palgrave Macmillan?
  2. Lene Auestad.
  3. A VOICE AND A FORCE FOR LIBERAL EDUCATION;

Due to its theoretical engagements and the case studies provided, this interdisciplinary collection will be of value to postgraduate and undergraduate students of psychology, philosophy, politics and history. Lene Auestad writes and lectures internationally on ethics, critical theory and psychoanalysis and gained her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oslo, Norway. In she founded the international and interdisciplinary conference series Psychoanalysis and Politics, which continues to this day, and on which this book is based.

In the interim between these two works, Freud had abandoned the seduction hypothesis and replaced it with the thesis of infantile sexuality and the idea that symptoms are brought about via the conflicts and repressions of unconscious fantasy. In other words, it is no longer repressed memory that makes one ill and traumatic sexual violence no longer figures as the primary cause of symptoms. Instead of an actual past experience, Freud posits fantasy as the determining factor of neurotic symptoms.

To understand the significance of this transition in his thinking, we must grasp what Freud means by psychical reality and its distinction from material reality. In contrast to the historical, intersubjective domain of material reality, psychical reality is the vital domain of fantasy and intra-psychic life, operating independently of objective considerations of veracity. In Freud's view, unconscious fantasies are not lies or deceptions, but reveal a truth, not about the objective world, but about the internal life of the subject, who one is and what one wants.

It might be better to say that fantasies conceal this truth, since conscious articulations of desire and identity will often lead us astray, expressing but distorting, manifesting but denying, the subject's wishes. Instead of an external event impinging upon a child's undeveloped sexuality, the idea of infantile sexuality presupposes both an energetic drive force at work from earliest childhood and an internal or intrapsychic dissension, a subject at odds with its own desires.

The thesis of infantile sexuality universalizes the event of trauma, locating its experience in the instinctual excitations that overwhelm the psychical apparatus which is prematurely affected. In discarding the seduction hypothesis, Freud not only discovers the domain of fantasy and psychical reality, but he also paves the way for considering the energetics of the libido, the intrapsychic conflict that is intrinsic to human being, and the idea of responsibility for the dissonances of desire and the skirmishes that shape a life and its patterns.

While controversy has swirled around Freud's rejection of the seduction hypothesis, without the scandalous supposition of infantile sexuality there would be no psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious. Although some revisionists have argued that Freud abandons his principles and betrays his patients, in fact Freud never abjures the reality of sexual abuse or denies that some children are molested.

Rather, the transformation in his thinking concerns the aetiology of hysteria in a diagnostic sense; neuroses are no longer said to originate in presumably rare childhood sexual violence, and thus they can be seen to pervade rather than oppose whatever might be considered normal sexual development. In discarding the idea of a primary or ontological innocence of the psyche which is then violently imposed upon from the outside, Freud arrives at the fundamental premise of psychoanalytic thought.

The exemplar of this phantasmatic activity of the unconscious is the Oedipal Complex. Crucially, Freud maintains that femininity cannot be grasped from a biological or conventional perspective Freud [], Another way of putting this is that sexual difference is centrally concerned with psychical reality rather than material reality, with the realm of fantasy rather than nature or culture.

The Oedipal story is the story of psychic development, the story of how we become subjects and in becoming subjects, how we become sexually differentiated. The boy and the girl start off, pre-Oedipally, in the same emotional place, attached to the mother, and it is because of this shared starting point that Freud claims the little girl is a little man; they are not yet distinct or sexually differentiated.

Psychosocial Accompaniment

It is for this reason as well that Freud maintains the idea of a single, masculine, libido: the libido is not neutral in Freud's view since its original object is the mother and this desire for the mother is associated by Freud with masculinity and activity, just as he associates infant clitoral pleasure with phallic enjoyment. Still Freud acknowledges that in the libido's most primordial stages, there can be no sexual distinction.

It is not until children pass through the Oedipal Complex that they can properly be said to have a genital organization since this is acquired through a relation to castration and is the last stage in sexual development following oral, anal, and phallic stages. Freud seems genuinely puzzled by how femininity comes about: given the girl's prehistory of love and attachment to the mother, why would she switch allegiances to the father? And since, prior to genital organization, she too goes through a phallic masturbatory stage, why would she switch the site of bodily pleasure from the clitoris to the vagina?

These are among the mysteries he means to designate when referring to the riddle of femininity. That he understands it to be a riddle also intimates that he understands sexual identity not as a natural pre-given essence, rooted in anatomy, but rather as a form of individuation and differentiation realized through complex interaction between the bodily drives and familial others. The boy's story is more seamless and continuous since he retains his phallic pleasure and, although he must displace the immediate object of his desire no longer the mother, but someone like her , can look forward to substitute objects.

The boy's Oedipal attachment to the mother follows uninterruptedly from a pre-Oedipal attachment and it is brought to an end by the threat of castration emanating from the father. At the conclusion of the Oedipal Complex the boy identifies with the father, establishes a super-ego within, and abandons the immediate object of desire with the promise that he too will one day possess a similar object modeled on the mother.

But the girl's Oedipal Complex is necessarily more complicated since it can only be instigated by a break from the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother and is therefore a secondary formation. Freud postulates that it is the realization that the beloved mother is castrated that prompts the little girl to turn her love toward her father. For the girl, in other words, castration does not resolve the Oedipal Complex but leads her to enter it, and for this reason Freud claims that it is never wholly brought to a conclusion or demolished, thus accounting, in his view, for girls' weaker super-egos and lesser capacity for sublimation.

The girl turns from her mother not in fear but in contempt and because of envy for what the mother does not possess. The father represents for her neither a threat she finds herself already castrated nor the prospect of a fulfilled desire in the future the only replacement for the missing penis is a child of her own , as he does for the boy who can identify with him and hope to eventually have what he has.

The father's only promise is thus as a refuge from loss, represented by the mother who bears this loss and who is at fault for the girl's own.

Studies in the Psychosocial

In the girl's Oedipal scenario, the father, unlike the castrated mother, stands for the virile capacity of desire itself, which she herself lacks but might reclaim through another man's provision of the opportunity to have a child. In the trajectory of the girl's Oedipal Complex, femininity is realized as the desire to be the object of masculine desire. Freud's theories of sexuality and the unconscious implicate not only individual psychology but also the constitution of social life.

Formed in ambivalent relation to others, sexuality and sexual identity permeate the bonds of civilization and ramify throughout all social relations. In turning his attention to broader cultural questions, Freud offers a story or myth of the origin of political structures that parallels and echoes his understanding of the individual psyche. To understand the political import of the Oedipal Complex, it will be helpful to place it more generally within the scope of Freud's understanding of group psychology.

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego , Freud contests any clear-cut opposition between group and individual psychology and alleges that human infancy is from the beginning immersed in a world of others. Even in ostensibly individual psychology, there is always another involved, as model or object, as site of identification or as object of love.

It is thus mistaken to sever individual from group psychology as though they were not by nature intermingled or to suppose that there is some kind of special social instinct separate from the drives that energize the individual. Put another way, the individual subject is neither formed wholly independently in a kind of solitary interiority nor formed as merely an effect of exterior social forces. Totem and Taboo is Freud's attempt to explain the origin of social life, the bonds that, on his account, hold men together, on the basis of psychic phenomena. Freud envisages a primitive pre-political sociality in which a primal horde of brothers is oppressed by a powerful father who claims for himself all the women, all the enjoyment, available in the community.

The brothers are deprived or exiled, and they are motivated to bond together to overthrow the father; they aim, that is, to kill the father and take for themselves his women, offenses that mirror, at a collective level, the Oedipal desires of male children. In Freud's story, the father's murder results not in lawless freedom and unlimited access to sexual objects a fraternal civil war , but rather in the creation of totems and taboos—the primal father becomes a totemic figure, a revered ancestral object, and the brother's actions in killing him and claiming his women are reconceived as the prohibited transgressions of murder and incest.

Psychological and Social Consequences of Religious (Dis)belief

The two blood taboos that are instituted as law, the prohibitions on incest and murder, thus have a common origin and emerge simultaneously, and together they mandate the social processes of exogamy marriage outside one's own kin and totemism communal bonds of affiliation established through the medium of a common ancestor. Freud thereby allies political formation with the two primal wishes of children and the two crimes of Oedipus, predicating exogamy on the incest taboo, and fraternal bonds on the sacralization of life and the prohibition on murder.

Totemism and exogamy also entail fraternal equality: in order that no one take the place of the father and assume his singular power, the brothers are equally constrained and equally respected, the distribution of women equally allotted. Depicting the creation of a stable society grounded in law though founded in violence , Freud's tale serves as a paradigm for not only rudimentary, but also enduring and contemporary, political relations, which he views as rooted in unconscious drives but oriented toward achieving a stabilization or equilibrium of those drives at the communal level.

This lineage founds political order in murderous fraternity, with women as objects of exchange not citizen-subjects. Moreover, in explaining the advent of lawful existence, Freud identifies something recalcitrant, intractable in social arrangements—a kind of self-assault the super-ego that links pleasure with aggression, and thus that carries a potentially destabilizing force. The sons' attitude toward the father is one of ambivalence, hatred qualified by admiration, murder followed by guilt and remorse.

The brothers commemorate this loss and maintain their bond with one another in the public ceremony of the totem meal where together they consume a common substance the father's body transubstantiated into the sacrificed totem , and thereby affirm their fellowship and mutual obligation. This confirmation of shared paternal substance and kinship, and the collective affect of love, loss, guilt, and mourning, maintains ties of identity. The law that emerges from the father's murder ritualizes and enforces his edicts, forbidding murder and incest in the public realm, and takes hold internally in the superegoic 'no' of prohibition, producing a permanent sense of guilt that drives civilization and renders it a perpetual source of discontent.

Women, however, appear not as subjects of the law but as objects of its exchange; moreover, given the indefinite prolongation of their Oedipal Complex, women will be more likely to be hostile to the edicts of civilization insofar as these infringe upon family life. The relation between father and son is also contained, if concealed, in the account Freud offers in The Ego and the Id of how the ego emerges.

The subsequent and recurring retreat from object-cathexis investment of instinctual energy in an object to identification withdrawal of that energy into the self , is the primary mechanism of ego-formation, taking the lost object into oneself. Just as the father retains dominance in political life after his death, so he dominates psychic life even prior to the ego's formation.

In Freudian theory, the father's reign is pervasive, his sovereignty extended in every domain. Freud's privileging of paternal and fraternal relations provides the impetus for much of psychoanalytic feminism, as will be discussed below. Even in Freud's circle, not all analysts agreed with Freud's assessment and there were debates concerning women's sexuality and the roles of castration and penis envy therein, notably among Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones, Helene Deutsch, and Karen Horney. Horney in particular argued for an inherent feminine disposition that is not merely a secondary formation premised on castration and she took issue with the ostensible effects of penis envy and women's supposed feelings of inferiority.

Psychoanalytic Feminism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

As with some later feminist criticisms of Freud, Horney attempted to retrieve female sexuality, and by extension a valid form of feminine existence, by appealing to a genuinely independent nature and holding culture culpable for women's subordinate status. By thus reasserting the primacy of biological and social forces, however, Horney disputes precisely the idea that is central to Freud's hypothesis and that marks psychoanalysis as a unique field of inquiry, that of a distinctive psychical realm of representation that is unconscious.

Freud, in her view, takes for granted what he needs to account for, namely the value placed on virility. Beauvoir takes Freud to task for not considering the social origins of masculine and paternal power and privilege and deems his theory inadequate to account for woman's otherness. If women envy men, she argues, it is because of the social power and privilege they enjoy, and not because of anatomical superiority. Most seriously, in Beauvoir's view, psychoanalysis allots to women the same destiny of self-division and conflict between subjectivity and femininity that follows from social dictates and biological norms.

Psychoanalysis presents the characteristics of femininity and subjectivity as divergent paths, incompatible with one another. Women might be able to be full persons, subjects with agency, but only at the expense of their femininity; or they can embark on the course of femininity, but only by sacrificing their independence and agency. Beauvoir alleges that psychoanalysis holds women to a fixed destiny, a developmental and teleological life process, precisely insofar as it defines subjects with reference to a past beyond their control.

By assigning to women an essence or determinate identity, the psychoanalytic reliance on sexual categories once again renders woman as the other to a subject rather than a subject herself, and thereby denies her existential freedom. In Beauvoir's view, however, if women are not themselves subjects, but that in contrast with which men's subjectivities are constituted, they are still freely responsible for this situation, insofar as women collaborate in this process by seeing themselves through the eyes of men, justifying their existence through their romantic relationships, and attempting to mirror men's being.

Beauvoir's misgivings about Freud's account of femininity stem from two sources, a feminist suspicion that women, in psychoanalytic discourse, are understood on the basis of a masculine model, and an existentialist conviction that human beings are self-defining, choosing themselves through their own actions. Following her existentialist convictions, Beauvoir insists that even when women abdicate their freedom, they do so as agents responsible for their own destinies, not merely as passive victims following a developmentally determined fate. Following her feminist convictions, Beauvoir recognizes that women's choices may be constrained by powerful social and bodily forces, but insists that women nonetheless bear ultimate responsibility for realizing their own possibilities by emancipating themselves.

Nonetheless, Beauvoir's dispute with Freud appears to be less about whether constraint is part of our being in the world, and more about where that constraint is located: psychoanalysis locates constraint internally, in the constitution of the psyche itself, not only in the situations of social life, whereas Beauvoir locates it externally, in the cultural forces that impact even the most intimate sense of our own agency.

Beauvoir thus claims that her own interpretations of women's femininity will disclose women in their liberty, oriented freely by the future and not simply explained by a past. She thereby ratifies the promise of existentialism for feminism.

Account Options

Beauvoir's own project of elucidating the paradoxical relation between femininity and subjectivity is nonetheless influenced by psychoanalytic concepts and appropriates its theoretical insights in various ways. The Second Sex highlights the practices by which women become women through their appropriation of bodily sexual difference, as well as the manner in which a human being generally is limited and compelled by bodily and unconscious forces. Indeed Beauvoir and Freud seem to agree that one is not born but becomes a woman, i.

Moreover, in her articulation of women's ambivalent attitudes toward embodiment, sexuality, and maternity, Beauvoir is clearly indebted to the attention psychoanalytic practice gives to listening to women's first person narratives, interpreting the emotional impact of events that can not be easily categorized, and heeding attachments that carry both affection and resentment. Like Freud, Beauvoir recognizes that we are embodied as sexual beings and that our bodies not only testify to our own finitude and limits but also matter as sites of encounters with others, encounters that are multivalent—including loving connections and threatening defenses, moments of affirmation and of dissolution.

Beauvoir refuses any political program that demands we deny our bodily possibilities in order to be fully human and proclaims that bodies and bodily difference are integral to projects of selfhood, and not merely accidental contingencies of a rational and disembodied mind.