In searching for the female equivalent of “phallic” in psychoanalysis, the word “yonic” comes to mind—and with it, much of we need to know about the role of women in the field so far.
The word ‘phallic’ comes from Greek, ‘yonic’ from Sanskrit—it is a bit mystical and uncomfortably displaced. While the word ‘phallic’ imbues a kind of clinical respectability to mens’ private sexual lives, the equivalent term for women almost categorically acknowledges an Orientalist sublimation of puritanical European discomfort with the subject.
The ‘yonic’ is safe to discuss, perhaps, because it is elsewhere, disembodied, perhaps legendary like Arabian Nights, and spared the terse medical pragmatism invested by Freud into dissecting male psychosexual development under the robust, merciless, dutiful Western medical gaze. (The Oedipal complex was developed almost in the place of women—in their polite absence—they were excused from the vital functions of becoming.)
It is likely no coincidence then that the span of psychosexual development of the child ranges almost exactly the ages of natural breastfeeding and biological codependency in the human animal—from birth to around 5-8 years of age. In this time, clinicians saw fit to examine the private formation of individuals as isolated psychic fragments, yet devoid of relationships to their world as such—they are, in theory, a function of objects and introjections that happen internally; the body is a predecessor to social induction.
Perhaps clinical evaluation of the intimate and often terse, uncomfortable details of psychoanalysis would be uncomfortable if undertaken on real people—their awkward teenage years, their first romances, their domestic disputes and aggrivations. It would seem clinically (and legally) impolite to intervene.
The child may have been a conceptual allowance of isolation and instrumentalization in microcosm exactly because of the erasure of the mother.
(It is more than ironic that ‘castration anxiety’ has such a presence in psychoanalytic texts when boys are introduced to the world through circumcision—as though it were theoretical ritual mutilation. In my age, at least, it was the clinical standard. I have yet to read Freud’s opinion.)
It’s worth noting atbthe outset that Martha Freud saw her husband’s fixation on early childhood psychosexual development exactly as we feel about it instinctively—it’s weird. Once you get accustomed to the language and theory of psychoanalysis, of course, it all becomes the grounds for deeply compassionate metacognitive liberation.
But how can we do justice to this principle of tender critique without a healthy understanding of the psychosexual development of women? (I absolutely refuse to say “young girls” although it would be accurate.)
It seems to imply that the erasure of the mother as a biological body is what allows for the clinical divestment of the young childhood from their individuality enough to analyze.
The obverse of young male psychosexual development is not simply a dual biological morphology of womens’ early childhood, but a recognition of the mother—and the maternal role in the literal formation of human subjects—not as a kind of nurse for clinical objects or individual citizens still in formation, but as a living body. (We can not, in any case, forget the core conception in both medical and legal philosophy of the individual as the root denomination of human life—both for the forensic identification of pathology, and for taxable billing purposes.)
Neurological science is not abstract about the reality of sociolinguistic development in epigenetics—and the prenatal landscape is one of living tissue and continuity spanning generations, even if it is one beset by the arbitration of cultural and rearing rituals (the name, the birth certificate, the crib, the baby shoes, the saliva and teething), and complex emotions (love, resentment, exhaustion, comfort, and of course—the raving penis envy that they all hide so demurely).
Klein’s insights provide a kind of perscriptive parenting as intergenerational cure for the extravegancies of developmental pathology, yet they do so by internalizing the object and externalizing maternity. This is accurate and rational for neurological phenomenology, and for test tube babies raised in clear enclosures for study.
What is missing is not an individual or a relationship to social life—the complete formation of such almost exactly defines the bounds of psychoanalytic development, and by no coincidence terminates at the natural age of biological weaning.
Then an individual is free to be adopted—often as a recognized rite of passage—into communal upbringing and the cultural pupilhood of pre-pubescence. What we fail to recognize, perhaps, is that we have presumed that biologically erasing women as a part of the body in childhood is necessary to imbue subjectivity to individuals as adults—and thus excused all irrational development as a recourse of personal dysfunction or medical pathology.
The fact that the reflex and compliment of the male ‘phallus’ as reproductive organ is not the dualism of a feminine ‘yoni’ but the universalism of the umbilical cord may explain why female psychoanalysts have refrained from divulging the secrets of their childhood fantasies to match and mirror the god-like complexes Freud portrays in his attempts at bridging sexuality and infancy.
As though there were some part of the body mysteriously missing…
I do not blame women for reserving their wisdom, so it seems to me, until common sense and a fair compassion for their children dawns on the brightest minds in the field—as the little lovable freeloaders that they are.
The body is seperate at birth. The cord is cut. But they do have this pesky way of—well, nevermind. They are on their own now. But a lifelong scar of the tether remains.
The obverse, and compliment, then, to the phallic in psychoanalysis is not the ‘yonic,’ but the umbillical.
The ‘perfect object’ sought by analysts is the tabala rasa: the blank slate. A theoretical semiotic impression of human possibility and capability uncorrupted by bodily circumstance upon which to gauge the universality of individual expression. There is no such thing in reality—no perfect mind.
There is, however, the epigenetic, the maternal symbiotic, and the umbillical.
Update : Vulnerable Narcissism and the Hunger for the Missing Breast in Object Relations (Anecdotal)
