On Thursday February 27, thanks to Professor Rustighi, Assemblea Salute e Cura and the Critical Psychology collective, the book “Sisterhoods for a Feminist Psychoanalysis” was presented with the author, Silvia Lippi, at Spazio Stria in Padua.
The meeting was designed in continuity with Professor Rustighi’s Feminist Philosophy workshop and it made for an enriching moment for feminist activists and psychology scholars in Padua.
The work done by Silvia Lippi and Patrice Maniglier constitutes a feminist critique of psychoanalysis in order to create a new knowledge from the union of these two worlds, which allows for psychoanalysis to be unhinged from classical hetero-patriarchal categories and gives feminist knowledge a tool to understand the bond at the root of feminist struggles.
For Silvia Lippi, the interest and desire to bring a new point of view to the field of psychoanalysis stems from her clinical work as a Lacanian analyst. In her practice she had the opportunity to meet patients who had been abused and were active participants in the Me Too movement. “I was interested in the relationship between women, what relationship there is when bonds of solidarity are established. […] How can I think about women and their relationship without referring to the man? […] I was beginning to see how (for patients) it was important that there were other women to talk to.”
Through clinical work, she recounts that she realized the existence of a bond other than the types of bonds theorized by Freud. The bond described by her patients could not be traced back to the processes of identification with the leader or a common goal theorized by psychoanalysis, “the Me Too movement lacked a classical principle of unity, but was composed of a multitude of women who did not know each other and made their voices heard on social media.”
To explain what the common identifying element among these women was, Silvia Lippi proposed to Patrice Maniglier the writing of this book, in which they formulate the concepts of “bonding” and “sororal symptom”: a symptom resulting from the repression of the instinctual desire for an alliance among women that instead emerges in disruptive ways in collective manifestations. With this conceptualization, feminism and psychoanalysis meet. Psychoanalysis becomes a tool to give voice to the impulses repressed by the patriarchy.
From the author’s point of view, the encounter between these two worlds is natural and has been envisaged from the very birth of the psychoanalytic approach. In the Victorian era, Sigmund Freud set out to listen to female hysteria, practicing a therapeutic methodology in contrast to all those existing at the time. In listening to women Freud noticed a profound relationship between the suffering body and the life situation of the women of the time, who, by bringing to him their own singular problems, provided him with a picture of the patriarchal structure of the time.
Classical psychoanalysis, however, was based on a masculine view of women, perceiving them as inherently lacking. It blamed this for the anxieties of female and male psychosexual development, Penisneid (The penis envy) and Kastrationsangst (castration anxiety), respectively. Silvia Lippi and Patrice and Maniglier’s proposal contrasts with the phallocentric view of psychoanalysis. It involves moving from a phallus-centered trauma core to a trauma core centered on women’s desire to unite in sisterhood bonds.
By proposing to rethink the feminist bond starting from the symptom, the authors capture the importance of the figure of Valerie Solanas as a junction between the unconscious and the political. Manifesto SCUM, which Solanas authored, can be defined as a text of psychotic feminism, both in the form in which it is written and in that it proposes the extermination of all men as a radical feminist practice. The expressive modality of delirium allows for a very broad affective movement: “Valerie inverts the ‘penisneid’ theory, saying that it is not women who want to be like men, but on the contrary men who feel envy toward women.” With her strong and violent statements, Valeris Solanas overturns the language of oppression and makes her book a weapon that speaks directly to desire, not caring that she is on the wrong side.
The figure of Valerie Solanas is central within Sisterhood because the book “does not aim to be a well-thought-out piece of writing but a text capable of accepting irony, violence, and any state of mind.” It is important to recognize the revolutionary role of madness as a way of opposing everything that does not work in the world; a certain degree of madness is therefore necessary and missing in a certain type of extremely rational feminism. Without wishing to oppose theorists such as Judith Butler or Monique Vittigue, it is important not to obscure the importance of madness from a revolutionary perspective. As Silvia Lippi had explained in an earlier interview in Machina, “I needed something so radical to think about it from the point of view of the unconscious, to think about a world where man is absent, since in psychoanalytic discourse everything is hinged on and crossed by the question of the Phallus.”
“Sisterhood, for a Feminist Psychoanalysis” follows the path traced by the work of Paul B. Preciado. In “Je suis un monstre qui vous parle” (2020), the philosopher critiques the gender binarism underlying psychoanalysis, pointing out how a discipline that was once an expression of strong theoretical radicalism has become “deaf to the inventions of desire and bodies that surround it, capable only of appealing to the great laws of Oedipus, castration, the symbolic order or, more recently, the real of sexuation.” Lippi and Maniglier’s feminist critique is therefore part of a broader framework, one that still recognizes the discipline’s potential for critique and analysis, but which believes that some of its cornerstones need to be challenged. As Silvia Lippi explains, however, the process they started cannot be traced back to a process of deconstruction: “We never told each other because it is a very intellectual thing, it is thinking the unthinkable, thinking what psychoanalysis is not. I find it a bit moralistic. We are starting psychoanalysis again, we are starting psychoanalysis from the clinic, it is the eternal return of Nietzsche, we are starting psychoanalysis over and over again.” It is therefore by relocating the word of the patient within society and the social bonds that are formed within it, that psychoanalysis can be reconstructed, thereby rediscovering its political role.
Bibliography
https://www.machina-deriveapprodi.com/post/la-psicoanalisi-%C3%A8-politica