Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire / Edition 1

by Jill Gentile, Michael Macrone

Overview

Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire explores the conjunction between psychoanalysis and democracy, in particular their shared commitments to free speech. In the process, it demonstrates how lawful constraints enable an embodied space or "gap" for the potentially disruptive but also liberating and novel flow of desire and its symbols. This space, intuited by the First Amendment as it is by Freud's free association, enables personal and collective sovereignty. By naming a "feminine law," we mark the primacy a space between the conceivable and the inconceivable, between knowledge and mystery. What do political free speech and psychoanalytic free association have in common, besides the word "free"? And what do Sigmund Freud and Justice Louis Brandeis share besides a world between two great wars? How is the female body a neglected key to understanding the conditions and contradictions of free discourse? Drs. Jill Gentile and Michael Macrone take up these questions, and more, in their wide-ranging, often passionate exploration of the hidden legacy of Freud and the Founding Fathers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782202776
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/21/2016
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jill Gentile is an adjunct clinical professor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and a training and supervising analyst at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity in New York. She is a corresponding editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Her essays, describing a semiotic and phenomenological trajectory of agency, desire, and symbolic life, have been published in several psychoanalytic journals. A founding member of the DreamTank collective, dedicated to the application of psychoanalysis to democracy and to public, symbolic life, she is a practicing psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in Highland Park, New Jersey and in Manhattan, New York.

Table of Contents

Acknoweldgements xi

About the Authors xvii

Preface xix

Introduction xxiii

Chapter 1 The space between 1

Chapter 2 The fundamental rule: freedom in psychoanalysis 11

Chapter 3 The paradox of freedom and the first amendment 27

Chapter 4 What is special about speech? 41

Chapter 5 The polis, analysis, and excluded voices 61

Chapter 6 Repression 75

Chapter 7 Free speech? For whom? 87

Chapter 8 Facilitating speech 101

Chapter 9 Hate speech, survival, love 111

Chapter 10 Enshrined ambiguity: drawing lines between speech and action 125

Chapter 11 On having no thoughts: freedom in the context of feminine space 143

Chapter 12 Metaphors of space 157

Chapter 13 Phallic fantasy and vaginal primacy 167

Chapter 14 Laws of lack and the feminine law 181

Chapter 15 Naming the vagina: on the feminine dimension of truth 193

Chapter 16 Clinical interlude: the body announces itself 209

Chapter 17 Free speech on the playground of desire 215

Chapter 18 Coda: homeland security and the secure home base 227

Notes 247

References 255

Index 275

Editorial Reviews

Creatively bringing together the Founding Fathers and the father of psychoanalysis, Jill Gentile begins with the foundational ideas of free speech in democracy and free association on the couch, opening up a fascinating unexplored space that illuminates the magic of language and the paradoxes, limits, and complexities at the heart of desire. This is an erudite, bravura performance that makes good on a long deferred hope that psychoanalysis can bring deeper understanding to our political confusions. —George Makari, MD, author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind and Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis

Jill Gentile has written a passionate love letter to psychoanalysis and democracy, to free association and free speech. Reaching beyond the phallocentrism of earlier psychoanalytic thought, Gentile reconfigures feminine 'lack' as a generative space of potentiality. Gentile revolutionizes Freudian theory while deftly paying homage to what was revolutionary about it in the first place. The effect of her stunningly erudite and original interpretation is akin to what Alain Badiou calls a 'truth-event': it shatters conventional mythologies regarding femininity and its (lack of) social status, and reveals a whole new universe of (feminine) possibility. —Mari Ruti, PhD, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Toronto, and author of Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics

The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex. So stated Freud. Jill Gentile takes this assumption as an invitation to go beyond, in this rich and expansive exploration of the possibility of naming the feminine. Ranging across semiotics, political theory, and the panoply of contemporary psychoanalysis, Gentile renews both clinical theory and democratic philosophy. Playful and incisive, this work opens new spaces for contemplation. —David Lichtenstein, PhD, editor of DIVISION/Review

From the Publisher

"This is perhaps the most unusual psychoanalytic book I have read. And the most unusual essay on the nature of democracy. In assuming the inherent 'rights' of human desire, it frames something essential about both the psychoanalytic and American experiments in claiming our desire. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and the freedom to desire in relation to sexuality, gender and the body are essential elements in this ambitious discussion. That Jill Gentile is able to bring the reader into a shared fascination with what is common in these disparate ideas, is a monumental accomplishment."

Jonathan H. Slavin

"Feminine Law is amazing in its erudition and in the ways it uses a seemingly simple analogy between freedom of speech and free association to explore vast areas of political life. The further analogy between analyst and government is just as illuminating. Gentile gestures towards a particular theory of democracy — call it emancipatory democracy — that restates psychoanalysis’s core mission but in the public sphere. Its project would firstly liberate oppressed or ignored or invisible people. But it would also emancipate the 'people' themselves as a collective actor with an interior life."

John Ferejohn

"The repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact, a part of the great riddle of sex. So stated Freud. Jill Gentile takes this assumption as an invitation to go beyond, in this rich and expansive exploration of the possibility of naming the feminine. Ranging across semiotics, political theory, and the panoply of contemporary psychoanalysis, Gentile renews both clinical theory and democratic philosophy. Playful and incisive, this work opens new spaces for contemplation."

David Lichtenstein

"Jill Gentile has written a passionate love letter to psychoanalysis and democracy, to free association and free speech. Reaching beyond the phallocentrism of earlier psychoanalytic thought, Gentile reconfigures feminine 'lack' as a generative space of potentiality. Gentile revolutionizes Freudian theory while deftly paying homage to what was revolutionary about it in the first place. The effect of her stunningly erudite and original interpretation is akin to what Alain Badiou calls a 'truth-event': it shatters conventional mythologies regarding femininity and its (lack of) social status, and reveals a whole new universe of (feminine) possibility."

Mari Ruti