What seems to happen is that the desire to validate the preoedipal instance as resistance to the oedipal structure itself leads to a ‘materialization’ of the bodily relation that underpins it, so that the body of the mother, or more properly the girl’s relation to it, is then placed as being somehow outside repression. What we then have is a constant assimilation in feminist texts of the maternal body and the unrepressed (see Montrelay, quoted at the beginning of this article), or of the maternal body and the dream (Kristeva: ‘different, close to the dream or the maternal body’), or of the maternal body and a primary autoeroticism (Irigaray) whose return would apparently mean the return of the (feminine) exile.23 In the case of Kristeva, the relation to differing modes of language is made explicit to the point of identifying a preoedipal lingustic register (rhythms, intonations) and a postoedipal linguistic register (the phonologico-syntactic structure of the sentence). Hysteria, therefore, and the poetic language of the woman (which becomes the language of women poets, — Woolf, Plath, etc.) are properly then the return of this primary and bodily mode of expressivity.24 It is no coincidence that at this stage it is schizophrenia that is invoked as frequently as hysteria, since the relation between schizophrenia and poetic discourse is a recognized and accredited one within psychoanalysis itself. It is in a sense a feminist version of Laing, but having to include the transference neurosis (hysteria) since the relation of the latter to the feminine is too heavily attested to be ignored. More often than not, the two forms are assimilated the one to the other, so that what happens is that the specificity of the two types of disorder is lost. It is worth, therefore, looking again at Dora’s symptoms, and then (in the next section) at what Freud said about schizophrenia in its relation to language, in order to see whether such a position can be theoretically sustained.
A number of points about Dora first. First, as we saw above, Dora’s bodily symptoms (the aphonia, the cough) are the expression of a masculine identification, through which identification alone access to the maternal and feminine body is possible. This access then threatens Dora with a physical or bodily fragmentation, which constitutes the symptoms of conversion. Thus access to the (maternal) body is only possible now through a masculine identification, which access then threatens the very category of identification itself, that is, Dora as subject. Thus at neither point of her desire for Frau K. can Dora be placed as a ‘true’ feminine, since either she is identified with a man or else the movement is toward an instance in which the category of sexual difference is not established and that of the subject, on which such difference depends, is threatened.
Second, in the second dream, in which Dora’s desire could be defined as the desire for self-possession, her position as subject is at its most precarious. The dream most clearly articulates the split between the subject and object of enunciation at the root of any linguistic utterance (the speaking subject and the subject of the statement),25 here seen in its relation to the question of sexual difference. Thus, if Dora is there to be possessed, then she is not there as a woman (she is a man), and if she is not there to be possessed, her place as a woman is assured (she remains feminine) but she is not there (Lacan’s lethal vel).26
Third, and as a corollary to this, what is revealed behind this dream is nothing other than this question of woman as representation: ‘Here for the third time we come upon “picture” (views of towns, the Dresden gallery), but in a much more significant connection. Because of what appears in the picture (the wood, the nymphs), the “Bild” (picture) is turned into a “Weibsbild” (literally “picture of a woman”)’,27 and then of woman as query, posed by Dora herself, of her relationship to a knowledge designated as present and not present — the sexual knowledge that is the secret behind her relation with Frau K.: ‘Her knowing all about such things and, at the same time, her always pretending not to know where her knowledge came from was really too remarkable. I ought to have attacked this riddle and looked for the motive of such an extraordinary piece of repression’.28 Thus nothing in Dora’s position can be assimilated to an unproblematic concept of the feminine or to any simple notion of the body, since where desire is genital it is charted across a masculine identification, and where it is oral it reveals itself as a query addressed to the category of sexuality itself (Frau K. as the unmistakable ‘oral source of information’).29
Perhaps we should remember here that Freud’s work on hysteria started precisely with a rejection of any simple mapping of the symptom onto the body (Charcot’s hysterogenic zones). By so doing he made of hysteria a language (made it speak) but one whose relation to the body was decentered, since if the body spoke it was precisely because there was something called the unconscious that could not. At this point the relation of dreams and hysteria, from which we started out, can be reasserted as nothing other than the inflection of the body through language in its relation to the unconscious (indirect representation). When Lacan writes that ‘there is nothing in the unconscious which accords with the body’, he means this, and he continues: ‘The unconscious is discordant. The unconscious is that which, by speaking, determines the subject as being, but as a being to be struck through with that metonymy by which I support desire, insofar as it is endlessly impossible to speak as such.’30 We saw this above in the split between subject and object of enunciation, Dora as subject literally fading before her presence in the dream.
Word-presentations and thing-presentations
Freud’s discussion of schizophrenic and hysterical language is at its most explicit in chapter 7 of his metapsychological paper on the unconscious.31 That this discussion should take up the chapter entitled ‘Assessment of the Unconscious’ indicates its importance, and it is in fact the distinction between these two types of disorder that produces Freud’s definition of the concept ucs (the unconscious in his system: unconscious, preconscious, and conscious). Freud starts with schizophrenia in its inaccessibility to analysis, involving as it does a complete withdrawal of object-cathexes in their reversion to the ego. Note that what this produces is unmitigated narcissism, so that while the definition indicates Freud still basing his diagnostic categories on a differential relation to reality, what emerges at another level is a concept of schizophrenia as the ‘embodiment’ of the category of the ego and hence of identification (as opposed to the embodiment of the body). What then appears as symptom is what Freud calls organ-speech, in which ‘the patient’s relation to a bodily organ [arrogates] to itself the representation of the whole content [of her thoughts]’.32Thus the precondition of organ-speech is a reversion to narcissism, and the function of the body is the representation of a thought-content, which, in both of the examples given, reveals the patient’s identification with her lover; this as distinct from the hysterical symptom, where there is not the verbal articulation of a certain relation to the body but the bodily symptom itself, i.e. conversion.
Hence there can be no equating of schizophrenia and hysteria and no assimilation of either to the body in an unmediated form. On the other hand, if the attempt to construct a theory of feminine discourse tends to produce such an identification, it is because of the attraction for such a theory of what Freud says about the schizophrenic’s privileged relation to words (subject to the primary processes and obeying the laws of the unconscious) and the definition that this then leads to of unconscious representation itself: ‘We now seem to know all at once what the difference is between conscious and an unconscious presentation … the conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing and the presentation