Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004.
In his study of the psychical dynamics of groups, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud argues that identification is the key psychic mechanism of the group. For Freud, ‘social feelings for other persons rest on identifications with other people’ (1923: 377). In this way, it forms a relationship between subject and others, constituting both the subject and its relation to other subjects. If this process establishes the subject and its relation to others, then what sort of identifications or ‘emotional ties’ form feminist subjects?
Spivak points out that feminism asks ‘not merely who am I? but who is the other woman?’ (1987: 150). This question suggests the production of an emotional tie to another: an identification with other women. In that process, a subject recognizes a relation to other women. The identificatory relation forms an emotional tie to, and affective relation with, other women. In the affective relation, a subject identifies her self in the other woman. This affective relation to others is a particular type of identification. According to Freud, it is ‘direct and immediate’, and is an operation of primary identification (1923: 370). In that operation, the ego of the subject incorporates the identificatory object. The incorporation of the object changes the structure of the ego and hence changes the self of the subject (1923: 368). Diana Fuss describes identification as ‘the detour through the other that defines a self’ (1995: 2). In this process, the other woman becomes part of the self, disrupting phallic identifications which otherwise constitute the subject. Using Freud’s account, identification with other women can be seen as a primary identification of a feminist subject, which forms the nucleus of that subject. In that assimilatory process, the figure of an other woman is brought from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ of the subject, changing the subject in terms of its relation to both self and other. The incorporation of the figure of an other woman grounds the production of that subject in an identification with other women. This identification permits the construction of ties between women. For example, Lisa Bowleg offers a typical third-wave account of the relationship between her identification with other women and her sense of feminist community. For Bowleg, ‘[i]f alliances between women symbolize feminism in its broadest sense, then my entire girlhood was a lesson in feminist training’ (1995: 48). 95
It is possible to link this primary feminist identification of a relationship to other women to the formation of the female subject. I argued previously that a relationship to another woman, the mother, constitutes the female subject, which thereby structures her in relation to the maternal object. A primary identification with other women reproduces the originary relation of the young girl and her mother, because it reproduces that affective relation to the mother as an other woman. In this way, an affective relationship to other women finds its antecedent in the formation of a female subject position.
Kaja Silverman argues that ‘without activating the homosexual-maternal fantasmic, feminism would be impossible’ (1988: 125). This affective relation is possible because of the production of the female subject in relation to the maternal figure. I argued earlier that the identificatory relation to the maternal permits mobility of identifications. Crucially, it permits a non-phallic identification with other women, because it is possible to constitute a relation to others not through a relation to the father but through a relation to another woman, the mother. Because the paternal figure does not fix female identifications nor the phallic function define female subjectivity, the female subject has the structural possibility of a non-phallic relation to other women. However, these primary affective relations invoke the incorporation of a relationship to another woman, rather than a loving pre-Oedipal symbiosis.
This affective relationship does not reproduce pre-Oedipal maternal relations without symbolic mediation, since the subject is already produced as a subject and is therefore already within language. Rather, it reproduces the structure of maternal identification, such that the operation of primary identification constructs an affective relation to another subject. For this reason, a primary identification with other women reproduces the maternal relation in all its complexity and difficulty.
That complexity and difficulty is evident in the conflict between self-described second-wave mothers and third-wave daughters (Detloff 1997). A primary affective relation to other women does not itself produce a feminist subject. This relation does not guarantee or secure a political subject, because it does not necessarily produce political commitments to feminism. Third-waver Aminatta Forna points out that ‘[s]isterhood is not a natural bond or empathy, it simply requires a sufficient number of shared political concerns’ (1999: 151).
However, a primary identification permits a relation to other women that disrupts the operation of phallic identification, and thereby opens the subject to other possible models of the subject, including those of feminism. For this reason, it is possible to politicize that affective relation and then to reconstruct it as a political identification with feminism. Freud’s theory of intersubjective identification in Group Psychology provides a useful way to begin to elaborate the construction of those political identifications. In Group Psychology, Freud describes two forms of group identification: a vertical relation to the leader and a horizontal relation between the members of the group (1921: 124). 96