Jealousy, Femininity and Desire: A Lacanian Reading 3031464710, 9783031464713

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THE PALGRAVE LACAN SERIES SERIES EDITORS: CALUM NEILL · DEREK HOOK

Jealousy, Femininity and Desire A Lacanian Reading Dana Tor-ZilbersTein

The Palgrave Lacan Series

Series Editors Calum Neill Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, UK Derek Hook Duquesne University Pittsburgh, USA

Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original monographs and thematic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, politics, the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the 21st century.

Dana Tor-Zilberstein

Jealousy, Femininity and Desire A Lacanian Reading

Dana Tor-Zilberstein Tel Aviv, Israel

ISSN 2946-4196     ISSN 2946-420X (electronic) The Palgrave Lacan Series ISBN 978-3-031-46470-6    ISBN 978-3-031-46471-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To Ilan.

Preface

Jealousy always intrigued and attracted me. I saw it everywhere, especially among women, and in my relations with them. Like blazing fire, sometimes cunning and deceitful, at other times the only one who speaks the truth, jealousy captured for me a primordial real that cannot be ignored, a spark that must be recognized because it may turn into a bright light but can also ignite a fire. I have always felt that jealousy condenses something else, probably because it contains the never-ending and unbearable “more,” the Lacanian encore that dwells in the body (en-corps) and which is involved in relentless feminine sexuality. But it was only when the message came back from the other, when the other was jealous, that I decided to start investigating this emotion: firstly, in my MA thesis, and then in my analysis. For me, writing and publishing this book, which became possible only after years of work and training in psychoanalysis, is the release of a particle of jealousy and femininity into the world. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined the term désir, expressing a desire (love) that is beyond passion, but one that is not unrelated to it. This is what directs the Lacanian analyst in his action. The sinthome, also a term coined by Lacan, is the reformulation of the symptom from which the subject suffers, whether through analysis or through singular know-­ how, which allows him to transform his symptom into something else and thus also to tie together the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real vii

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body. I found Lacan’s formulations of desire to be, in more ways than one, the cause of this work, which seeks a kernel of desire within the destructive character of jealousy, or as a means out of it. My introduction with Olivia Shakespear was initiated by my love for English poet William Butler Yeats. I have searched, without knowing what I was looking for, for something beyond him—his inspiration, perhaps. That is how I discovered Shakespear, his muse, his eternal lover, and a rare writer. Shakespear’s work was written at the end of the nineteenth century and was republished only several years ago in the United States. Marguerite Duras holds a special place in my heart, for I began to walk the paths of psychoanalysis along with reading her story of Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (The Ravishing of Lol Stein) and was captivated and ravished by her writing. That was even before I knew that Lacan had written a special article about her and before I encountered the work of Michèle Montrelay, a French psychoanalyst and Lacan’s student, who dedicated the first chapter of her book, L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité (The Shadow and the Name: On Femininity), to Duras. It turned out that in this matter I was definitely not alone. It just so happened that, along with reading The Ravishing of Lol Stein, I came to read Lacan’s twenty-third seminar, Le sinthome, which was also the first seminar of Lacan I have read from start to finish. I read this text without knowing (and without understanding), which allowed me to read Duras differently and to begin to formulate something for myself of my own symptom and maybe even sinthome. Reading Duras’ L’Amant (The Lover) opened a new gate for me to research writing as a work of the body. This book is the product of that work which began many years ago. I would like to thank my thesis advisor in Tel Aviv University, Dr. Roi Tartakovsky, for his ardent willingness to guide me throughout my writing process. I was lucky to receive his diligent and attentive advice. I would also like to give a very special thanks to Prof. Shirley Zisser for her guidance and support, and mostly for her transmission of the mysterious knowledge of psychoanalysis, from which I have learned how to read and listen to the unconscious. The path of desire in which my book partakes would not have been possible without her.

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I would like to thank my friends and family, who have contributed to this book in many ways, and mostly for their loving support, which, even if it was divided at times, was always precious. And lastly, to the dear women I have encountered in my life, all of whom inspired this book, each in her own unique fashion. 

Dana Tor-Zilberstein

Contents

1 I ntroduction  1 2 What Is Jealousy? Jealousy and Envy from Aristotle to Today  9 3 Drive Jealousies in the Development of the Subject 21 4 Two  Instances of Jealousy in Beauty’s Hour and in the Mirror Stage 33 5 Two  Types of Jealousy—Phallic Jealousy and Feminine Jealousy 49 6 Jealousy  and Identification—Dora and the Young Homosexual Woman 61 7 Jealousy  Among Men: Schreber’s Delusional Jealousy and Little Hans’ Feminine Jealousy 71 8 Ravissement and Jealousy Without Pain 81

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9 The Lover: The Writing of Feminine Jealousy 99 I ndex115

About the Author

Dana Tor-Zilberstein  Dana practices psychoanalysis in Tel Aviv, Israel. She is a MA graduate of the department of English at Tel Aviv University, where she also graduated in law. She is a member of the editorial team of the magazine Et Lacan published by the Giep-NLS, the Israeli group of the New Lacanian School. She had translated into Hebrew several works in the psychoanalytic field. Her publications in English include “The Oresteia and the Act of Revenge: of Desire and Jouissance,” (2002).

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1 Introduction

Abstract  Jealousy, this affect that is so common both in literature and life, was described by Sigmund Freud as prevalent from birth through the period of infantile sexuality, the girl's pre-Oedipal phase, the Oedipus complex, and its dissolution. It has been criticized by feminists and thought of by philosophers, literary critics, and psychoanalysts. This chapter provides some necessary introduction for the deviant topic of this book, the theoretical footings and logic for the book’s insights, and the background for the literary works at the core of its analysis. Keywords  Jealousy • Envy • Freud • Lacan • Psychoanalysis • Femininity • Women Jealousy and Envy, these hostile affects that are common in literature as well as in life, were described by Sigmund Freud as prevalent from birth, through the period of infantile sexuality, the girl’s pre-Oedipal phase, the Oedipus complex, and its dissolution. The strong presence of this affect explains why it sometimes remains so dominant in a subject’s adult life as a living remnant of one’s history.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_1

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Sigmund Freud, the man whose wish was to “find out what women want,”1 invented or discovered psychoanalysis through the not-so-simple task of listening to his patients, most of them women who were called “hysterics” at the time and who were dismissed by other doctors. Jacques Lacan declared in the 1950s a “return to Freud,” and dedicated his life and work to reestablish Freudian psychoanalysis and to continue developing it, after it was misinterpreted, in his opinion, by the Ego Psychology movement and those who referred to themselves as post-Freudians. The psychoanalysis that was formulated by Freud, Jacques Lacan, and their followers is mostly based on clinical cases, but in addition to learning from their analysands, both Freud and Lacan turned to authors and poets to learn more about the subject and the unconscious. Both impregnated their oeuvre by reading and analyzing Greek mythology, Shakespearean plays, books and masses written by Thomas Aquinas, Goethe, Balzac, Duras, and other prolific writers from different historical periods. By putting writers as subjects-supposed-to-know, psychoanalysis seeks to learn from literature. Reading the artworks of Olivia Shakespear and Marguerite Duras, I, too, wish to lend my ear to the unconscious of the woman writer, learning from her about the subject. Written by language, literature pronounces the truth of the subject who wrote it, that is, her phantasm, which conceals something of the real for this subject. Therefore, this so-­ called truth may teach us about unconscious mechanisms. The primary, belligerent passion of jealousy is often described in philosophical thinking, literary criticism, and other historical writings and treaties as deleterious, immoral, even devilish. This work will revisit some historical interpretations of the signifiers “jealousy” and “envy” to begin their exploration. However, it is hard to find intellectual and literary discussions referring to jealousy or envy displayed by women, or, specifically the type of jealousy this book will refer to as feminine. This book aims to bring back jealousy into discussion, especially when it is displayed by women. The journey begins with thinkers from the dawn of history who tried to conceptualize jealousy and envy. In this overview of historic  Jones (1955).

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philosophical reflection, I will present fragments of theories conceived by thinkers from Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and modern times so as to provide an idea of how these emotions were interpreted and conceptualized throughout history. Specifically, I will ask why two terms were given to designate this emotion and if there is a difference between them when considering their psychic mechanisms. This chapter testifies to the abundance of philosophic stutter that tries to purify two separate definitions for jealousy and envy and their mechanisms, with an aim of reconceptualizing them in psychoanalytical terms that share a logical consistency. My parashoot is psychoanalysis, as it has been since my first encounter with it. The writings of Freud relating to jealousy and envy tie an inseparable bond between them and the subject’s primal oral impulse. Freud has written plentifully about jealousy and envy, yet interestingly, he did so mainly in his articles on femininity. It is from these writings that this book articulates and characterizes jealousy in early infancy and in the development of the subject. It is worth noting, however, that Freud chose to write an exclusive article about jealousy in relation to homosexuality and paranoiac men, which serves as another depiction of the inherent connection between jealousy and femininity.2 The first step in my psychoanalytical exploration treads through Lacan’s well-known essay, The Mirror Stage. Lacan recognized the fascination of the gaze as another impulse, which he lays out, inter alia, in this text. It is there that Lacan ascribes a central place to jealousy in the development of the subject, even though the final version published in the Écrits does not show it so evidently as the primary versions of it, in Les Complexes Familieux (Family Complexes), do. To examine the relation between the subject’s development, femininity, desire, and unrestrained jealousy, I have approached three literary works: Beauty’s Hour by Olivia Shakespear,3 The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras, and The Lover written by Duras as well. All three novels, in rather precarious ways, revolve around love triangles, desire, and jealousy, and in all three, the other woman in the love triangle is  Freud (1923).  Shakespear (2016).

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presented as psychically or physically unseparated from the story’s female protagonist. The enigmatic and unique plots of these works presented me with a question about jealousy and its vicissitudes. The three works are, in fact, from different literary genres, and were also written in dissimilar time periods. Beauty’s Hour by Shakespear was written during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It was a groundbreaking novella for its time describing a physical, Cinderella-esque transformation and a mental split reminiscent of the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),4 yet until its republication in 2016 it was buried in the archives, as sometimes happens with works authored by women. The candid tone of the narrator reflects a unique mirror of femininity and jealousy that is rarely confronted in literary works, as well as its somewhat bizarre plot: it chronicles the story of a woman who transforms into a beautiful lady every night, yet quickly starts becoming jealous of herself, that is, of the body and persona to which she transforms. The transformation that the novella’s heroine undergoes in front of the mirror embodies Lacan’s mirror stage and echoes Freud’s saying about artists and poets whom he follows in the invention of psychoanalysis. Throughout this novella, and alongside the writings of Freud, Lacan, and Montrelay, I have elaborated two distinct types of jealousy that can be observed in both analytical literature and literary works: phallic jealousy and feminine jealousy. The distinction between the two types of jealousy is made according to Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, presented in his twentieth seminar, Encore.5 Following this, I will offer a reading of Mary, the heroine of Beauty’s Hour, in comparison with Dora, Freud’s patient in one of his paradigmatic case presentations regarding hysteria, and with another Freudian case, that of The Young Homosexual. These cases reveal possible paths of a woman toward her desire, which go through identification and, evidently, jealousy. They not only demonstrate how jealousy may be disastrous to desire when it collapses into an identification, but also how jealousy may lead a subject toward her desire.  Daniel (2016).  Lacan (1999).

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Unlike Beauty’s Hour, which can be considered as somewhat conservative nowadays, The Ravishing of Lol Stein is an erotic phantasy that allures readers, inter alia, because it does not operate according to standard literary rules. It is a living, beating feminine writing that no logic nor meaning can be extrapolated from—only subjective, analytic knowledge. In Lacan’s twelfth seminar, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis,6 Michèle Montrelay presented to Lacan and his students her unique analysis of The Ravishing of Lol Stein, which was later published as the opening chapter of her book, L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité.7 Following Montrelay, Lacan dedicated an “homage” to Duras and The Ravishing of Lol Stein.8 Also, recently, a collection of essays written on Duras’ works, and especially on The Ravishing of Lol Stein, was published by members of the Lacanian school that was established by Jacques-Alain Miller after Lacan’s death, École de la cause freudienne.9 The heroine of The Ravishing of Lol Stein conjures up love triangles that stir her into a mental turmoil, in which she confuses herself with the other woman, calling herself by the name of the other. The title of the work in French inserted a new signifier to psychoanalysis—“ravissement.” This book examines this dumbfounding ravissement as the effect of jealousy. It is debatable whether the word ravissement in French means the same as ravishing in English. This book will focus on the signifier ravissement in French, which was discussed by Lacan in his article about Duras, bearing in mind that the word in English has different connotations, which may have also provoked more feministic commentaries on the book by Anglophone Academics. The Ravishing of Lol Stein also provides an important insight on pain that relates to jealousy and its signs. The pain of jealousy is not unlike the pain of grief about which Freud had written in “Mourning and Melancholia,” thereby allowing to compare jealousy and melancholia.

 Lacan (2002).  Montrelay (1977). 8  Lacan (1965). 9  Miller et al. (2021). Most of the articles in this book will not be discussed here. I will note that most of them are based on Lacan’s article, an article that has also guided me in my writing, and on Montrelay’s writing, which she wrote at the same time as Lacan. 6 7

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The term “ravage,” which characterizes the mother-daughter relationship according to Lacan and Montrelay,10 will be further developed in the light of Duras’ novel, L’Amant (The Lover). At the heart of feminine ­jealousy sits this inseparable bond of mother and daughter, to which Duras testifies in her work, a work that won the prestigious Goncourt prize. There, Duras wrote a fictional autobiographical story in the third person that creates a split between “her” in the past and “her” in the present. This split allows her to place into writing things that she has never written before, or, in Lacanian terms, to write something of that which does not stop not being written. Duras chose to frame the novel as a work of “autofiction,” a literary genre that merges memoir with phantasy, yet after its publication, she declared it to be “autobiographical.” Even though some literary critics tried to demonstrate the gaps existing between the plot of the novel and “reality,” it is nevertheless precisely that act of pronouncing her book as autobiographical that testifies to the singular status of her writing in The Lover. By comparing the two novels of Duras, I will attempt to articulate Duras’ subjective solution to the ravage that haunted her, suggesting that writing enabled her to extricate herself from her maternal and familial heirloom. As an inseparable, inherent, and essential portion of feminine sexuality, it is impossible to fully delineate jealousy. One can only examine its being and its action, in the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. Writing and artistic creation may serve as an option to work with jealousy, fair avec, to use it as a catalyst so as to approach one’s femininity and, finally, to transform the destruction of jealousy into something new—an object or even a book.

Works Cited Daniel, A.  M. (2016). Introduction. In A.  M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s Hour. Valancourt Books. Freud, S. (1923). Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4, 1–10.  Lacan (2009); Montrelay (1977).

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Jones, E. (1955). The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Basic Books. Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972–1973) (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. New York. Lacan, J. (2002). The Seminar, Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1964–1965) (C. Gallagher, Trans., pp. 272–282). Karnac. Lacan, J. (1965). Homage fait à Marguerite Duras. In Cahiers Renauld-Berrault December (pp. 7–13). Gallimard. Lacan, J. (2009). L’étourdit [1972]. The Letter, 41, 31–80. Miller, J.-A., Laurent, É., et al. (2021). Duras avec Lacan: ‘Ne restons pas ravie par le ravissement.’. Michèle. Montrelay, M. (1977). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit. Shakespear, O. (2016). In A.  M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s Hour [1896]. Valancourt Books.

2 What Is Jealousy? Jealousy and Envy from Aristotle to Today

Abstract  This chapter turns to thinkers and sages from the dawn of times, who conceptualized jealousy together with envy in various, intriguing fashions. It provides etymological and philological definitions of jealousy and envy from major dictionaries of English, Hebrew, and French, as well as theoretical elaborations from Aristotle to Pierre Charron and Benedetto Varchi, La Rochefoucauld to Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec. It seeks to underline a consistent difference between the definitions based on logic and reaches the conclusion that current definitions and differences fail to provide it. Keywords  Jealousy • Envy • Women • The bible • Aristotle • Desire • Dictionary • Passion

 ictionary Definitions for Jealousy and Envy D in Hebrew, French, and English In Hebrew, the word for jealousy and envy is the same—kinaa (‫)קנאה‬. In the principal Even-Shushan Dictionary, which predominantly takes its sources from the bible, the Hebrew word for jealousy has four viable © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_2

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definitions, two of which are particularly relevant. The first, based on a verse from The Book of Isaiah, is as follows: “Narrow mindedness, fear of the success of another, agony for the other defeating you in a certain matter.”1 The second interpretation, based on a verse from The Song of Songs, refers to the suspicion of a lack of love or infidelity, especially between husband and wife.2 Thus, the Hebrew language recognizes two possible bifurcations of jealousy yet unites them under the same umbrella. The word envie in French corresponds to the English envy. As a noun, its definition in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française is initially connotated with desire: “Desire, mixed with spite and resentment, inspired by the advantages, the goods, the successes of others.” 3 The second definition of envie in the same dictionary is: “An imperious desire to do or to have something,” situating envie in the same position as desire.4 In fact, in French, the predominant meaning of the word envie is to want something, while the word employed for jealousy is usually jalousie. Jalousie, however, is defined here as “a vivid and shadowy attachment to a good, an advantage that one has and is believed to be threatened”; “[a] feeling of a person who knows himself or believes himself betrayed by the loved one”; and “disappointed not to have what another gets or owns and that one desires for oneself.” 5 It is noticeable that the third and first definitions of jalousie mirror each other, and correlate with the definition of envie, the only difference being that in the definition of envie, desire is emphasized. The second definition of jalousie is related to a person’s loved one. In relation to the Hebrew definitions of the word, it is noticeable that the first Hebrew definition for ‫ קנאה‬is to be found in the definitions for envie, and that the second Hebrew definition is more suitable to the second definition the French dictionary provides for jalousie. It is thus already conspicuous that the difference between the two words is incoherent, as both encompass manifold, interchangeable definitions and meanings.

 Even-Shusan (1993, 1679).  Ibid. 3  Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (2019), Envie, N. 4  Ibid. 5  Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (2019), Jalousie, I, N. 1 2

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Interestingly, the word jalousie has another meaning in French, that is, a specific type of shutters through which one can “see without being seen,” and can even lower or raise jalousie to control the level of seeing and being seen.6 This meaning of the word already links jealousy to the scopic drive, which will be discussed in the next chapter. Clearing the path to the English definitions of the word, The New Shorter OED defines jealousy as follows: 1a. The consuming fear, suspicion, or belief that one is being or might be displaced in someone’s affections; distrust of the fidelity of a spouse or lover. b. Of god: intolerance of the worship of other gods. C. Resentment or envy of another person or of his or her possible or actual success, advantage, or superiority; rivalry. 2a. Anger, wrath. b. Devotion, eagerness. 3. Concern or anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something or someone; vigilance or care in guarding something or someone. 4. Suspicion; apprehension of evil; mistrust.7

Hence, according to the most popular dictionary of English, jealousy ranges from fear of being displaced as a loved one, envy for one’s possession, anger, devotion, anxiety, etc., thus covering most of the possible interpretations and connotations of the word. The New Shorter OED thus includes, in effect, envy as one of the definitions of jealousy.8 In comparison, envy is defined by the same dictionary more modestly, that is, as “1. hostility; malice; enmity; 2a. A feeling of resentful or discontented longing aroused by another person’s better fortune, situation, etc. 3. Longing, desire; enthusiasm.”9 Thus, similar to the French dictionary’s definition of envie which emphasizes desire, The New Shorter OED also includes desire in one of the definitions for envy, but on the other hand, underlines the ill-will nature of envy.

 Ibid., Jalousie, II, N.  Ibid., Jealousy, N. 8  Ibid., Jealousy, N. 9  Ibid., Envie, N. 6 7

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Envy counts as one of the seven deadly sins in the Christian tradition. Accordingly, in the English The Ladies Dictionary (1694), jealousy is treated as the “greatest enemy to marriage in the world.”10 It follows the perhaps traditional concept, according to which jealousy implies being suspicious of a beloved partner’s love for another person that the jealous person values more than him or herself. The dictionary’s definition engages primarily with the husband’s jealousy for his wife, which is said to turn marriage into hell.11 The comparisons between the above definitions in relation to the subject of this research subject, are taken from the major dictionaries of three languages that are relevant to my work, namely Hebrew, being my mother tongue, the language from which my ideas conspire, together with English and French, the languages of the literary works that are posited at the center of this research. Together, the definitions from all three languages reveal that jealousy and envy are not exactly distinct from each other. Initially expecting that The New Shorter OED will provide a clear distinction between jealousy and envy, one finds similar attributes in both definitions that transgress the general idea that jealousy is focused on one’s spouse and his or her devotion and faithfulness, while envy means to desire something that belongs to another, prompting ill will toward such persons. In my research, instead of differentiating between jealousy and envy, I will refer to envy as a type of jealousy, in accordance with the definition of The New Shorter OED, as well as the Hebrew and French definitions, alongside the philosophy of Western thinkers, who also consider envy as a branch of jealousy.

Jealousy and Envy in the History of Thought The revelation of how little distinction was rendered between jealousy and envy in the major dictionaries propelled me to explore what other thinkers and writers thought about these two passions, from classical thinkers to

 Dunton (1694), 233.  Ibid.

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early Anglo-French modern writers and essayists. The question what jealousy is and what envy is had been asked since the days of ancient Greece. Aristotle, in his book On Rhetoric, devoted a section for both jealousy and envy. He regarded envy (pathonos) as close to being indignant yet different from it, and added that it is also “agitated pain [that is] directed at success, but of an equal and a like, not of one who is unworthy.”12 This success can be related to various good things, but the condition for being envious, according to Aristotle, is that the person who is envied is similar to the envious person in their characteristics.13 Envy, therefore, is related to rivalry, and is prominent in those who have reputation and success at the outset. Aristotle adds that the feeling of envy causes the wish for the other to befall from his assets and happiness, which are desired by the envious person. This is why “one who is malicious is also envious.”14 He treats envy and pity as antonyms: envy is wanting to have someone else’s happiness, while pity is wanting to share your happiness with others.15 Zelos, jealousy, is regarded by Aristotle as “the positive counterpart of envy.”16 Both feelings may result from rivalry, but jealousy leads to imitation, and is referred to by Aristotle as “emulation”: “While envy is bad and characteristic of the bad; for the former [person], through emulation, is making an effort to attain good things for himself, while the latter, through envy, tries to prevent his neighbor from having them.”17 Aristotle does not attribute jealousy specifically to a relationship between lovers, but to the desire to attain good things to oneself, which may, evidently, include love. He differentiates envy and jealousy as positive and negative counterparts belonging to the same passion, claiming that jealousy can lead to owning what the person desires. Jumping forward some thousands of years, from a different perspective that perhaps is also akin to Christian morality, François de la Rochefoucauld is in accord with Aristotle in the sense that he treats jealousy as a more  Aristotle (2020), 155.  Ibid. 14  Ibid., 158. 15  Ibid. 16  Ibid., 160. 17  Ibid., 155. 12 13

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justified emotion than envy. Jealousy, according to La Rochefoucauld, aims to maintain possession of what we already own, while “envy is a fury that always makes us wish for the ruin of others.”18 La Rochefoucauld treats envy as worse than hate.19 In that sense, he agrees with Aristotle, situating envy as a certain underside of jealousy, but for different reasons than those of Aristotle. Other thinkers, mainly of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, did not follow Aristotle’s point of view, and chose to focus on jealousy as one of the hindrances of matrimony. Benedetto Varchi speaks of jealousy as a “hellish suspecy,”20 an “uncurable plague,”21 and a “deadly poison,”22 which derives from the desire to enjoy one’s beauty by yourself (i.e., the beauty of one’s spouse).23 Like the French dictionary’s definition, which links envy with desire, Varchi underpins the way jealousy proceeds from passion: Jealousie proceedeth from Passio, when we covet to enjoy or possesse that which we most love and like, wonderfully fearing lest we should loose the possession thereof, as if our Mistresse should become a secret sweet Friend unto another man; and in this pittifful perplexitie and case was propertius, as may appeare, when hee made this mournffull elegie.24

This quote is intriguing because it once again propagates that jealousy stems from passion and treats it like other thinkers treated envy. “Passio” here is similar to the desire described by the English or French dictionaries in relation to envy. In addition, Varchi claims that jealousy is the precursor of envy, and that both are of the same species. Therefore, envy is entrenched in jealousy.25 If, according to Varchi, envy is based on jealousy, then envy cannot exist without jealousy. I would add that it also originates from it.  De la Rochefoucauld (2005), Maxime 28.  Ibid., Maxime 328. 20  Varchi (1615), 5. 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid. 23  Ibid. 24  Ibid., 18. 25  Ibid. 18 19

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This makes jealousy the first and foremost type of emotion, from which envy branches out. This definition of Varchi is the one that I relate to the most, as it settles the many definitions presented herein, and it treats envy as a sort of jealousy, allowing the first to be included in the latter. Sixteenth-century French philosopher, Pierre Charron, treats envy as desire for a good that another possesses that makes us lose the good that is within us. Jealousy, according to Charron, is an emotion that makes us fear the loss of our possession to another.26 Charron also emphasizes envy and jealousy as related to desire, whether it is desire for the person or a possession that we own, or that of another. Charron, Varchi, the various dictionaries, and Aristotle all show us that jealousy and envy were always linked with desire. The essays and theories on jealousy and envy depicted above indicate that from the dawn of humanity, jealousy and envy were subjects of interest as passions that rule the subject. In addition, the multiple definitions also present the enigma that is related to jealousy and envy; none of the definitions is identical to the other, nor clearly discerns between them. This pool of definitions indicates that these two seemingly separated affects are converged together and are both linked with desire. Which type of desire, whether desire for possession, for someone’s love or for something else, remains obscure, and this book will try to dissipate some of this fog by providing explanations for jealousy and types of jealousy based on psychoanalytic theory and the subjective knowledge that literature provides. Before concluding, I should mention the approach of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who wrote about the distinction between jealousy and envy. According to Klein, envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable—the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it. Moreover, envy implies the subject’s relation to one person only and goes back to the earliest exclusive relation with the mother. Jealousy is based on envy but involves a relation to at least two people; it is mainly concerned with love that the subject feels is his due and has been taken away, or is in danger of 26

 Charron (1697).

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being taken away, from him by his rival. In the everyday conception of jealousy, a man or a woman feels deprived of the loved person by somebody else.27

In her explanation, Klein attributed the emotion of envy to the subject’s relationship with his mother, and jealousy to the relationship between three people: presumably the child, the mother, and the father. As opposed to Klein, I would claim that both jealousy and envy always include a third component, that is, an object of desire, which can also be the other woman in a love triangle. Envy is included in jealousy because it is always based on the relation between two people, the one who is envious, the one who is envied, and a third, the object of desire that instigates it. For example, in envy, X is envious of Y because Y has a lovely husband, Z, while in jealousy, X is jealous of Y, because Z, the husband of X likes Y. Jealousy is therefore a more intricate situation of envy: both describe the same situation, with the only difference being that in jealousy, the object a, signified by the letter Z in this example, is also a subject who has agency. The agency of this subject, that is, Y’s desire for Z, is what makes X jealous. Therefore, in both cases there are three, as will be thoroughly explained in psychoanalytic terms in the following chapters. Another interesting analysis of the difference between jealousy and envy can be found in Joan Copjec’s Imagine There’s No Woman. In analyzing the 1944 film Laura, Copjec makes a clear distinction between what she presumes to be jealousy and envy. She adopts a distinction made by English Synonyms and builds upon it. Her claim is that “jealousy is grounded in the possession of a certain pleasure, whereas envy stems precisely from a lack of it.”28 But what is it exactly that one lacks or that one thinks she lacks? Copjec acknowledges that one’s desire would not be satisfied by receiving the other’s jouissance. Therefore, according to this definition, if one were to receive the other’s object of jouissance one is craving for, wouldn’t she still desire something else—and perhaps would be jealous of the other for having it? It means that something else is at stake here.  Klein (1957), 180 (emphases mine).  Copjec (2002), 159.

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Copjec names it the “evil eye,” following Lacan’s use of the Latin word invidia. She puts forth envy as the evil eye, the wish to destroy the other’s jouissance, as opposed to wanting an object for oneself or to not lose the object. Copjec provides the example of the judgment of Solomon, writing that for the woman, the child’s splitting is “not a compromise she is willing to accept, but the sort of ruination for which she longs.”29 Envy, the evil eye, according to Copjec, follows another logic. I shall try to show in the following chapters that this logic is that of feminine jouissance, and that it is also the logic that prevails in jealousy. Copjec’s analysis presents the need for a new kind of thinking of jealousy and envy, one that implicates desire and jouissance, i.e. the object a. Finally, J. Hillis Miller analyzes the vast etymological sources and knowledge that pertains to the word “jealousy,” as he proclaims that his own knowledge of the word is limited. Reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time alongside French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Miller pinpoints two issues regarding jealousy: (i) The jealous person “wants to see without being seen,”30 and so surveillance plays an important role in jealousy; (ii) Being is what is at stake in jealousy: the lover whose love is lost to another does not wish to exist anymore.31 Miller’s definition is based upon the French definition of the word jalousie,32 but is also in accord with the description of psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay. Some twenty years before Miller, reading The Ravishing, Montrelay describes Lol V. Stein as the one who watches but cannot feel.33 Montrelay underlines that jealousy is at the core of the subject’s existence. When the man’s gaze turns away from you to another, one becomes, according to Montrelay, emptied of oneself, hollowed out from desire, “hors de toi.”34 Thus, Montrelay specifies that being is in fact exactly what is at stake when the gaze is turned away from the subject. Even though Miller refers mostly to Derrida, and not to psychoanalysis, his interpretation is psychoanalytical all the  Ibid., 160.  Miller (1995), 122. 31  Ibid. 32  Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (2019). 33  Montrelay (1977). 34  Ibid., 152. 29 30

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same. This should not be a surprise, considering that Derrida based himself on Freud in his writing on jealousy. Miller acknowledges that he refers to the masculine angle of jealousy in his book, and partly explains it by the fact that jealousy was traditionally a part of patriarchy. He invites others to explore the difference between the jealous wife and the jealous husband by naming it an “important enterprise.”35 The various definitions and elaboration of jealousy and envy that I displayed throughout do not, evidently, cover every theory and writing on the topic. It is, instead, a variety that aims to show that thinkers were always in conflict and even at a loss when facing these concepts, or more precisely, these emotions. From Aristotle to today, whether these are philosophers, critics, scholars, or psychoanalysts, each outline and theorize jealousy and envy differently. This lays the ground for new categorization of types of jealousy. My purpose is to deconstruct the so-called distinction between envy and jealousy in order to lead to new kind of thinking of jealousy, from the perspective of the drive and the phallic and feminine logic of sexuation, following Freud and Lacan. Also, this review emphasizes the link between jealousy/envy and the obscure concept of desire, the theorization of which also plays a central part in this book.

Works Cited Aristotle. (2020). The Art of Rhetoric Book II (J. H. Freese, Trans.). HUP. Charron, P. (1697). Of Wisdom: Three Books Written Originally in French by the Sieur De Charron (G. Stanhope, Trans.). M. Gillyflower et al. online edition. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from www.search.proquest.com/books/ wisdom-­t hree-­b ooks-­w ritten-­o riginally-­f rench/docview/2240943775/ se-­2?accountid=14765 Copjec, J. (2002). Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. MIT Press. De la Rochefoucauld, F. (2005). Réflexions ou Sentences et Maximes Morales [1664]. Gutenberg, online edition. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from www. gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14913/pg14913-­images.html Dictionnaire de l’Académie française 9th edition. (2019). Online edition. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from www.dictionnaire-­academie.fr/article/A9E2044  Miller (1995), 122 (emphasis mine).

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Dunton, J. (1694). The Ladies Dictionary: Being a General Entertainment for the Fair Sex: A Work Never Attempted Before in English. John Dunton. Even-Shusan, A., & Ben Haim, D. (1993). Jealousy. In The Hebrew Dictionary, 1679. Kiryat Sefer. Klein, M. (1957). Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Sources. Basic Books. Miller, J. H. (1995). The Other’s Other: Jealousy and Art in Proust. Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History, 9(1), 119–140. Montrelay, M. (1977). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens avec Jeanne Moreau et al (pp. 149–173). Gallimard. Varchi, B. (1615). The Blazon of Jealousy: A Subject Not Written of by any Heretofore (R. Tofte, Trans.). Thomas Snodham.

3 Drive Jealousies in the Development of the Subject

Abstract  This chapter examines various manifestations of jealousy in the development of the subject, mostly in early infancy, which are categorized under the term “drive jealousies”: oral jealousy, scopic jealousy, and sadomasochistic (aggressive) jealousy. This chapter is based mostly on Freud’s writings on jealousy in his articles on femininity and Lacan’s early text, Family Complexes, as well as his well-known The Mirror Stage, together with insights from other psychoanalysts such as Jacques-Alain Miller, Michèle Montrelay, and Alenka Zupančič. Keywords  The Mirror Stage • Narcissism • Aggressiveness • Jealousy • The oral drive • The scopic drive • Invidia

Oral Jealousy First and foremost we may mention jealousy of other people—of brothers and sisters, rivals, among whom the father too has a place. Childhood love is boundless; it demands exclusive possession, it is not content with less

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_3

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than all. But it has a second characteristic: it has, in point of fact, no aim and is incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction; and principally for that reason it is doomed to end in disappointment.1

In this constitutive paragraph about jealousy, Freud teaches us that jealousy in infancy is aimed at whoever is present in the child’s life, who in the child’s eyes, causes him to lose something of the satisfaction he derives from his mother. According to Freud, the baby’s love in the infantile stage is “aimless,” meaning that it is not directed at anyone in particular. Michèle Montrelay explains that the baby at this stage does not differentiate between his mother and father; the body of the father is embedded in the mother’s.2 It means that the infant’s jealousy for his mother is not related to the Oedipus complex, as there is no distinction between the sexes at this stage. At this stage of early infancy, jealousy is aroused whenever satisfaction is taken away from the child. Freud marks this jealousy as an inability to bring upon the full satisfaction of the drive, and designates jealousy as the infant’s insatiability.3 In other words, jealousy is inseparable of any satisfaction, as one can never reach full satisfaction. Therefore, there is always a remnant of jealousy, of dissatisfaction. It appears that the first time Freud notices jealousy in children in relation to a particular person is in relation to their siblings. Regarding infantile jealousy, Freud pinpoints that “It is known that, when their passions awake, children never develop such violent reactions against the brothers and sisters they find already in existence but direct their hostility against the newcomers,”4 that is, jealousy is mostly prevalent in relation to younger siblings. The jealousy of a younger brother or sister is derived from the pain of the child who loses his mother’s breast, and his accusation toward his mother for not sufficiently nourishing him.5 This blame is heard no matter what the circumstances are, mentions Freud, and it will not be surprising to find this complaint also in children who  Freud (1950), 231.  Montrelay (1977a). 3  Freud (1950). 4  Freud (1955a), 149. 5  Freud (1953). 1 2

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were breastfed until the age of three or four.6 According to Lacan, jealousy is inherent in lack but is also related to frustration, the latter of which being imaginary, while the first is symbolic.7 Jealousy in infancy is linked with the oral drive and is attributed to resentment for losing satisfaction, which again “flares up when the next baby appears in the nursery.”8 Then, the lack of satiable breastfeeding becomes linked with the appearance of a new baby. The older sibling develops jealous, hatred, and rage toward the younger baby for being dethroned from his seat.9 The jealousy toward the new baby begins with the child’s inquiries about how babies come into the world. In one place, Freud quotes a toddler’s response to hearing the news about a new member of the family, saying “the stork can take him up again.”10 Thus, the hostility and jealousy toward the new brother dates back to the time of first hearing the news, when one can already estimate the losses he is about to experience.11 Freud discovered in his clinic that sometimes children’s jealousy toward their younger siblings is characterized with acute intensity, which at times can turn in their adult life into a real obstacle in their ability to love.12 Resentment can also be directed toward their parents, that is, for choosing to bring another child into the world. Freud mostly described the outburst of jealousy as a response of older siblings to new ones, but he also recognized that a younger brother or sister may develop jealousy and rage toward older siblings. In “A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung Und Warheit,” Freud analyzes Goethe’s memory of throwing kitchenware out of the window as a young boy, smashing it on the pavement. Freud compares Goethe’s memory with similar stories of his patients, and deciphers that all such incidents are associated with news about a new family member that is about to come into the world. Like the smashed kitchenware and the flying stork, from the sibling’s perspective, the new baby may also fly out  Ibid.  Lacan (2020). 8  Freud (1953), 123. 9  Ibid. 10  Freud (1958), 251. 11  Ibid. 12  Freud (1955a). 6 7

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from the window.13 It should be also mentioned that elsewhere, Freud interprets his patients’ dreams as death wishes directed toward their siblings.14 Based on Freud’s theory of narcissism, Montrelay emphasizes that there are three levels of narcissism: autoerotic, primary, and secondary.15 In autoerotic narcissism, the body parts enjoy themselves in a dismantled way, without the jouissance of the body as a whole. In primary narcissism, the body already enjoys itself as one unit. In secondary narcissism, the subject’s object is not an organ (as opposed to autoerotic narcissism) or an ensemble of organs (as in primary narcissism) but the ego.16 It implies that in secondary narcissism there is already a system of representations between the subject and the object, even though the object is the ego. Freud discovered that the oral drive, which involves the sucking of the breast, dominates jealousy. Lacan adds to it the scopic drive of St. Augustine. These two jealousies dwell in autoeroticism and primary narcissism before the subject recognizes his body as his own in the mirror stage. Hence, in both jealousies, we are in the realm of partial drives of narcissism.17

Scopic Jealousy In Family Complexes, a very early text by Lacan written in 1938,18 he expands the subject of jealousy between siblings, which directs him to the formulation of his famous mirror stage. In 1949, Lacan presented an updated version of it during a lecture he gave in Zurich. In those texts, Lacan recognized jealousy as the experience of the subject when he realizes that he has siblings, and marks jealousy as representing a mental  Ibid.  Freud (1958), 250. 15  Montrelay (1977b). 16  Ibid. 17 .   Montrelay states in L’Ombre et le Nom (1977b) that in primary narcissism, the partial drives, such as the scopic and oral drives, reign. I understand this as true also for the stage of autoeroticism. 18  Lacan (2002). 13 14

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identification that is related to the scopic drive.19 In the heart of the ­institution of the subject in the visual field, there is the gaze.20 The mirror stage is a moment in the birth of the subject of the unconscious, which determines the structure of the ego;21 the child-subject sees an image in the mirror, recognizes it as his own, and identifies with it.22 The “I” with which the subject identifies is “an ideal ‘I’ in a primordial form,23” which Lacan refers to as an imago of the subject. In Family Complexes, Lacan elaborates on the fellow creature of the child, a semblable that may be an image of the subject or the subject’s playmate in the playground, both of which he takes upon himself via the mechanism of identification.24 In this encounter between the semblable and the toddler, primordial jealousy arises, in a drama that is reminiscent of St. Augustine’s confession about being struck by jealousy on the sight of his younger brother suckling at his mother’s breast.25 In his eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan describes this jealousy of Augustine as “Invidia,”26 the Latin term for envy, whose meaning is slightly different than that of the definitions of jealousy and envy that were reviewed in the previous chapter. “Invidia” implies being envious of someone’s possession or goods without actually wanting it; it has to do with the casting of an “evil eye.”27 Lacan underpins that it is not the desire for the mother’s breast that makes Augustine pale when he sees his brother suckling, but a fascinating power of the completeness of the picture that determines the relation between the object a and desire, which does not necessarily give the subject the satisfaction he seeks. This completeness that fascinates the child can be also the completeness of the subject’s own picture in the mirror, which is deadening to him. It is deadening precisely because it includes the object a, which must be lacking so that one would  Ibid.  Lacan (1998). 21  Lacan (2006a). 22  Lacan (1998). 23  Lacan (2006a), 76. 24  Lacan (2002). 25  Ibid. 26  Lacan (1998), 116. 27  Ibid., 116. 19 20

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be able to seek it. Scopic jealousy or Invidia does not arise when lack exists, but quite the opposite, that is, when the image is complete. It freezes the subject and his movement toward his object of desire, fixating him in an ideal I. The evil eye has thus the effect of killing, as lack is necessary for movement—and for life.28 Freud discovered that the oral drive, which involves the sucking of the breast, dominates jealousy. Lacan adds to it the scopic drive, providing the example of St. Augustine. In his twentieth seminar, Encore, Lacan mentions St. Augustine’s invidia once more. This time, he calls it “jealouissance,”29 jealous hatred that “sprimages forth  – s’imagaillisse,”30 from the gaze to object a. Scopic jealousy follows this logic of jealouissance that is related, in my view, to what Jacques Alain-Miller develops in “L’objet jouissance.”31 According to Miller, “in this type of jouissance [object jouissance] the notion of satisfaction is produced on the way of the drive, or, as Lacan would say, by the circuit of the drive.”32 Following this logic, I would say that in this jealouissance the subject produces satisfaction from jealousy itself, which is the circuit of the drive, a part of its course. This jealousy has great repercussions for the subject’s adult life. In What Is Sex,33 Alenka Zupančič writes about “the norm (normative prescriptions of sexuality)” as “taking the place of the image that one has never seen,”34 that of a body completely wrapping itself around the Other’s body. This articulation, based on Lacan’s twentieth seminar, takes us back to the incident described by St. Augustine. It ties together the phantasy of the body of the One that reunites in the sexual relation and the jealousies that dwell in the jouissance of the complete image. According to Zupančič, “the fantasy (and imperative) of the relation comes from (within) the very structuring of the drives,”35 that is, the phantasy about  Ibid.  Lacan (1999), 100. 30  Ibid. 31  Miller (2016). 32  Ibid., 102. 33  Zupančič (2017). 34  Ibid., 18. 35  Ibid., 19. 28 29

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full satisfaction, which can never be fulfilled, related to this primary, narcissistic scopic jealousy, invidia, is what structures, according to Zupančič, the social and ideal impressions about the sexual relation between the sexes. We know from Lacan that this relation does not exist.

 adomasochistic Jealousy in “A Child is S Being Beaten” Another jealouissance I would like to enumerate is the sadomasochistic one provided in Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten.” Freud analyzes in it the sadistic and masochistic tendencies of his patients. The title quotes the first of three sentences that Freud reiterates from his patients in this text: (1) “A child is being beaten”; (2) “I am being beaten by my father”; (3) “My father is beating the child, he loves only me.”36 The second sentence is in fact the unconscious phantasy that Freud constructs after hearing from his patients several versions of the first and third sentences. The first and third sentences are phantasies articulated by the patients, yet the sentence “I am being beaten by my father” is an unconscious phantasy constructed by Freud after hearing several versions of the first and third sentences. In addition, the third sentence adds information about the love of the child to the person who performs the beating.37 The second sentence is an essential example to what Lacan will later term the “phantasm,” the unconscious phantasy through which the subject interprets his world. Even though Freud noted that these phantasies only present themselves toward the age of four, he mentions that they may very well also be the “end product” of something that began much earlier. Freud finds that these phantasies are more prevalent in women, and that they date back to early infancy. Usually, the beater in the phantasy is the girl’s father, and the child who is being beaten is a younger brother or sister.38 The beating received a phantasmatic dimension by the onlooker’s scopic drive, that is,  Freud (1955b), 182–183.  Ibid. 38  Ibid. 36 37

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an unconscious jouissance the children derived from watching their siblings being beaten. Regarding the first sentence, “A child is being beaten,” Freud points out that he cannot indicate clearly if it has a masochistic or sadistic character, as the sex of the beaten child is not constantly identical nor opposite to that of the child who is fantasizing about the beating. This basic sentence that constructs the phantasm is elaborated by Freud’s patients in another part that is added to the sentence, namely “my father is beating the child whom I hate.”39 Hatred enters the picture and brings with it new information about the relation of the subject to the beaten child. The subject hates the child who is being beaten, yet he is also jealous of him. Freud calls this affect “jealous hatred (eifersüchtig gehaßt).”40 Freud also links the love of the object to the hatred toward the person who is competing on this love and the subject’s sadistic tendencies toward his competitor, with whom he also identifies (and therefore, also with the subject’s masochistic tendencies toward himself ).41 Lacan used the term jealous hatred to describe what he referred to as the Invidia of St. Augustine. It means that, at least for Lacan, the same affect of Invidia is that of the sadomasochistic phantasm in “A child is being beaten.” Moreover, the jealousy described in Freud’s text is linked with the death drive as that which manifests itself in children’s hostile feelings toward their siblings. Lacan interprets the previously described death wishes of the subject toward their siblings as related to the death drive of the subject himself. According to Lacan, aggressiveness is, in fact, the refusal to recognize the mere existence of the other, and not the tension between the subject and the other.42 The brother’s or sister’s jealousy is attributed thus to the sadomasochistic drives of the subject, where the subject and the other are not separated from one another. These drives dictate early infancy and are manifested by the death drive.43

 Ibid., 199.  Freud (1987), 219. 41  Freud (1955b). 42  Lacan (2006a). 43  Lacan (2002). 39 40

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Transitivism is the phenomena that takes place during the years of the mirror stage (between six months to two and a half years of age), in which, by identifying with the semblable,44 the child reacts, feels, and responds as if what happened to the other happened to herself.45 The condition for this identification is that the semblable is approximately the same age as the subject.46 Charlotte Buhler recognized the dialectic of transitivism as that which turns jealousy into empathy, as summarized by Lacan: A child can thus, in a complete trance-like state, share in his friend’s tumble or attribute to him, without lying, the punch he himself has given his friend. I will skip the series of the phenomena... All of them are understood by Buhler in the dialectic that goes from jealousy (the jealousy whose instructive value Saint Augustine already glimpsed in a flash) to the first forms of sympathy. They are inscribed in a primordial ambivalence that seems to me, as I am already indicating, to be mirrored, in the sense that the subject identifies, in his feeling of Self, with the other’s image and that the other’s image captivates this feeling in him.47

Freud posits jealousy as the first reason for the girl to abandon her mother as a love object. Other than hating the person one is jealous of, the subject also deeply cares for her and can develop these feelings of identification with the object of jealousy, feelings which Buhler calls “empathy.” These feelings will be further analyzed and explained later in analyzing the case of Mary in Beauty’s Hour and in Freud’s case of Dora. To recapitulate, aggressiveness, the death drive, the scopic drive, and the oral drive all participate in the celebration of jealousy.

44  A footnote in Seminar XX by Bruce Fink summarizes Lacan’s usage of the term “semblable” in his teaching, namely as “the mirroring of two imaginary others (a and a’) who resemble each other (or at least see themselves in each other).” Fink also reminds us that the word is first found in William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, in a usage that seems apt to the Lacanian one (Lacan (1999), 83 n.14). 45  Lacan (2006b). 46  Ibid. 47  Ibid., 81.

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Works Cited Freud, S. (1950). Female Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Other Works (J.  Strachey, Trans., pp. 221–244). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1953). Femininity. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-­ Analysis and Other Works (1931–1936) (J.  Stratchey et  al., Trans.). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1955a). A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung Und Wahrheit. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (J. Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 145–56). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1955b). A Child is Being Beaten. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (J. Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 179–204). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1958). The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IV: The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1987). Gesammelte Werke 12. S. Fischer Verlag. Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964–1965) (A. Sheridan, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972–1973) (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2002). Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual [1938]. (C. Gallagher, Trans.). Antony Rowe. Lacan, J. (2006a). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed., pp. 75–82). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006b). Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed., pp. 82–102). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2020). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: The Object-Relation (1956–1957) (A.R. Price, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press.

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Miller, J.-A. (2016). L’objet jouissance. La Cause du Désir, 3(94), 101–113. Retrieved June 15, 2023, from www.cairn.info/revue-­la-­cause-­du-­ desir-­2016-­3-­page-­101.html Montrelay, M. (1977a). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens avec Jeanne Moreau et al (pp. 149–173). Gallimard. Montrelay, M. (1977b). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit. Zupančič, A. (2017). What Is Sex? MIT Press.

4 Two Instances of Jealousy in Beauty’s Hour and in the Mirror Stage

Abstract  The chapter focuses on Lacan’s mirror stage and locates jealousy as that which plays an important role in the constitution of the subject and her desire. This chapter provides a close reading of Olivia Shakespear’s novella, Beauty’s Hour, alongside Lacan’s texts, so as to articulate two instances of jealousy, one that promotes the development of desire via the Other, and another which enhances the destruction of desire. This chapter aims to show how jealousy is simultaneously an instigator of desire and its impediment. Keywords  Jouissance • Mirror Stage • Desire • Jealousy • Beauty’s Hour • Femininity • Jacques Lacan

The Mirror and the Birth of Desire The mirror stage is the making of the subject’s body, his outlines, dents, cuts, and humps. A new body is born, separated from the breast and from the Other. However, the mirror stage, Montrelay emphasizes, does not eliminate primary narcissism, for it repeats throughout the subject’s life © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_4

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as “the perfect jouissance of oneself,”1 which is reminiscent of the jouissance of the One-all-alone, developed later by Jacques-Alain Miller. 2 The image the child sees in the mirror, which is mediated to him by the gaze of the mother or another Other, is simultaneously the veiling and reflection of the subject’s body. Through the gaze of the mother that enters the scene of the mirror stage, holes are created in the narcissistic bubble of the subject. The image is incomplete. The mother recognizes the subject in the mirror, giving his body its name, marking it as desired, but, preferably, not as her only desire. This body is lacking. Montrelay, following Lacan, referred to those holes that represent lack as repères. These repères are the landmarks that carve the body of the subject, giving him his contours and marking and shaping his jouissance.3 For the image of the subject to receive the dignity of a signifier, for the subject to become an “I” both in language and in speech, it must be re-­ pèred.4 The repèration gives the subject a Name-of-the-Father, a master signifier. This is the first signification through which the subject recognizes his body, through the mother’s gaze indicating to him that it is his figure that he spots in the mirror: “The image is noticed (remarked), perforated, if the child sees it when the mother gazes at it. This image is therefore an element in the chain in the place where the desire of the mother is being articulated.”5 According to Lacan, the Mirror Stage is a “particular case of the function of imagoes”6 creating a relation between the organism and its reality, that is, “between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt,” 7 or between the subject and the object. However, once the “I” is created in the mirror, the subject experiences alienation. The subject feels that the image does not represent him; he is alienated from his own image that will never be able to

 Montrelay (1977a), 44 (translation mine).  Miller (2018). 3  Montrelay (1977a). 4  Ibid. 5  Ibid., 49 (translation mine). 6  Lacan (2006a), 78. 7  Ibid. 1 2

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represent the subject’s object of desire, the objet petit a, the movement of the body that is unfixed.8 In the imaginary register, the subject is whole. It implies the insertion of the subject into the social sphere via the dissolution of the Oedipus complex and the subsequent constitution of the symbolic register, which will enable him to miss the object of desire, and experience alienation. The mother’s words, together with the gaze, will enable the subject to exist in the social sphere and will prompt desire, mediated through the Other’s desire. In addition, “desire of man is the desire of the Other.”9 As Joan Copjec articulates it in Read My Desire, “the subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see.”10 There is a theoretical correlation between what the subject does not see in the mirror and his desire; only that this correlation comes into being together with the subject’s inventions and constructions of desire. Copjec also reminds her readers that desire must always be taken literally: “Desire may register itself negatively in speech … the relation between speech and desire, or social surface and desire, may be a negative one.”11 Desire surfaces in analysis, through the words of the subject that point to his lack. However, alienation is always present, which may also be the reason for the subject’s negative attitude toward his desire, what Freud defined as negation.

Beauty’s Hour: Introduction Pale brows, still hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the old despair Would end in love in the end: She looked in my heart one day And saw your image was there;

 Ibid.  Lacan (2016a), 22. 10  Copjec (2015), 35. 11  Copjec (2015), 35. 8 9

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She has gone weeping away.12

This poem, written by William Butler Yeats, tells the story of the end of his love affair with Olivia Shakespear. The addressee is Maud Gonne, the object of Yeats’ unrequited love. According to Yeats, Olivia Shakespear is the woman who is “gone weeping away” when she envisions the image of Maude Gonne in Yeats’ heart.13 This provocative piece of information about Shakespear engages with psychic mechanisms that are placed at this book’s center of discussion: jealousy, love, desire, and feminine sexuality, all of which are at the heart of Shakespear’s novella. Who is Olivia Shakespear? Shakespear (1863–1938) wrote six books, two plays, and one novella in her lifetime, before she retired from writing to manage her literary salon and patron writers and poets such as Ezra Pound (who was also her son-in-law), James Joyce, and others. Shakespear is mostly recognized as being one of Yeats’ muses, not an unworthy title by itself, yet one that does not do her justice, considering her own literary contributions.14 In 1896, Shakespear wrote Beauty’s Hour, her only work to be distributed also in the last century. Beauty’s Hour revolves around a passion of jealousy that is usually rejected from discussion, even in these so-called liberal times we are living in.15 The candid tone of the narrator reflects a unique mirror of femininity and jealousy that is rarely expressed so bluntly. Why was this novella forsaken in the archives until 2016? Was it because its writer was a woman, or rather the subject of the work is what condemned it to oblivion for so many years? Unlike Shakespear, who was described by Yeats as “a woman of great beauty,”16 the heroine of Beauty’s Hour, Mary Gower, has a “plain” face.17 Gower is an orphan who lives with her former governess and works as a secretary for a wealthy lady. She is in love with her employer’s son, Gerald. Even though she is Gerlad’s close companion and confidant, she claims  Yeats (2022).  Yeats (1972). 14  Daniel (2016). 15  Regarding jealousy between women as an undiscussed, even tabooed topic, see Wyatt (1998). 16  Yeats (1972), 72. 17  Shakespear (2016), 47. 12 13

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he only cares for beautiful women. Gerald denies these accusations made by Mary on several occasions.18 Mary, who is also the narrator, tells her readers about her own fascination with those beautiful women who capture every gaze when they enter a room, and wishes to become a beautiful woman herself.19 Mary is jealous of Bella Sturgis who is meant to marry Gerald. She refers to Bella as the one with the “perfect face,” 20 and wishes to have a face like hers. Her interest in Bella is expressed in her wish for Bella to notice her and talk to her. Mary is intimidated by Bella’s beautiful face. She nearly does not speak when Bella is around, making herself invisible; she also refuses to go to balls because she feels ugly, certain that nobody will want to dance with her.21 Mary idolizes Bella and is jealous of her at the same time. Her interest in Bella instigates her desire to become beautiful. One night, Mary stares intensely at her reflection in the mirror, when suddenly, it becomes blurred, and “from the mist there grew a new face, of wonderful beauty; the face of my desire.”22 From the mist, or the mystic, Mary’s wish comes true: her body changes, her fingers lengthen, and her face becomes beautiful. This physical change recurs every night, following Mary’s desire, but only for the night. Mary is then split into two personas: during the day she is still Mary G., a frustrated woman who lives a gray, unhappy life but who is Gerald’s close friend, and during the nights she introduces herself as Marry Hatherley, Mary Gower’s cousin, who enjoys a life of leisure, is surrounded by suiters, and attends dinners and balls. Quickly, Gerald falls in love with Mary H., and Mary G. develops a bitterness toward him and jealousy toward her other self: “I felt a sudden pang: this was the first tribute offered to my beauty, and it hurt. Was Mary Gower beginning already to be jealous of Mary Hatherley?”23 Mary’s jealousy serves as a fil rouge in the story. Following it unfolds the insights of this novella on feminine sexuality and jealousy. At the novella’s conclusion, Mary chooses to renounce what she calls “the face of [her]  Ibid.  Ibid. 20  Ibid., 48. 21  Ibid. 22  Ibid., 49. 23  Ibid., 59. 18 19

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desire,”24 and leaves Gerald. Not only that, she also directs Gerald toward the other woman, Bella, her initial rival in the competition for his heart. This ending left me with a question: out of every option in this fantastic world, in which a plain looking woman can transform into a stunning one for a few hours each night, why does the heroine choose to forsake the man she was in love with? Why is this the fate Shakespear chose for her character, and can something be learned from this fate about jealousy by and large?

 ary’s Jealousy I: Following Desire Through M the Mirror The identification with the imago and the primary drama of jealousy are, according to Lacan, what inaugurates the dialectic that “binds the ‘I’ to the social sphere.”25 Jealousy is at the stem of desire and subjectivity, pushing the subject toward an existence in the social sphere. However, at the same time, jealousy withdraws the subject away from desire, as it attracts him to the specular ideal. In Beauty’s Hour, the ideal “I” of identification that is reflected in the face of the semblable, a fellow image of the subject, is represented at the beginning of the tale by the “perfect”26 face of Bella Sturgis. Thereafter, it shifts to the face of Mary H. As opposed to Freud, who wrote about jealous hatred as related to aggressiveness and to children’s sadomasochistic drives, in “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan mentions that the aggressiveness he refers to is not a specifically sadomasochistic one, but one that is in line with the formation of the ego.27 This is evident in Mary’s displays of aggressiveness, which are aimed both at herself and at Bella at the same time, and then at Mary H. For example, she refers to herself as “unattractive”28 and

 Ibid., 49.  Lacan (2006a), 79. 26  Shakespear (2016), 48. 27  Lacan (2006b). 28  Shakespear (2016), 48. 24 25

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to her love as “grotesque.”29 Similarly, she describes Bella as one who is “incapable of loving.”30 This aggressiveness that Mary displays in the above monologue will return at the plot’s conclusion, specifically in her choice to leave the man she loves without giving him a real opportunity of loving her back. Mary’s gaze on herself shows the masochistic aggressiveness of primary narcissism that is involved in the mirror stage. In L’Ombre et le Nom, however, Montrelay posits the following rhetorical question: “These drives of destruction that play like opposite forces of narcissism, which are incompatible with the sentiment of the cohesion of the subject, do they not contribute to its organization?”31 In other words, these partial, sadomasochistic drives, do they not contribute to the constitution of the subject, as well as his ego? Based on this question, I will ask, does jealousy not operate in the constitution of both the subject and his ego, as well as in their destruction? Jealousy is a two-way street, as Montrelay enlightens us. The idea of two movements or instances of jealousy before and during/after the mirror stage solves this alleged conflict in Lacan’s statement above, and shows how jealousy is compiled of partial drives, yet at the same time contributes to the constitution of the subject’s body, desire, and ego. I detected these two movements of jealousy in Beauty’s Hour and affirmed them through reading Lacan and Montrelay. They have important ramifications for the subject, as the plot of the novella teaches us. At first, Mary’s jealousy instigates her desire to become beautiful and contributes to the creation of her new mirror image: I... fell to looking into my own eyes again, with the yearning, stronger than it had ever been before, rising like a passion into my face... ...My reflected face grew blurred, and then faded out; and from the mist there grew a new face, of wonderful beauty; the face of my desire. It looked at me from the glass, and when I tried to speak, its lips moved too.32

 Ibid.  Ibid. 31  Montrelay (1977a), 45 (translation mine). 32  Shakespear (2016), 49. 29 30

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The subject is constituted as lack when he identifies with the image in the mirror, that is, when the other identifies the image in the reflection as his own. Like the image, upon the reiteration of the subject’s speech, the subject comes into being. This entire scene resonates with the scene described by Lacan in the mirror stage. When Mary senses her acute jealousy of Bella, she strongly wishes to become beautiful, and suddenly, something magical takes place in front of the mirror. Mary describes her transformation as a passion that entered her face. She also describes the power that caused her transformation as “the power of desire.”33 My reading of it is that Mary’s jealousy enables her to conjure something of her desire, acting as a sort of catalyst. The passion or desire Mary is describing is not necessarily desire in Lacanian terms, but it seems to have made something of that desire emerge. Mary uses the transformation to make something of her desire possible: wearing the face of Mary H., she starts attending dinners and balls, and lives a life of leisure that she had never experienced before. Mary’s new face indeed changes her personality and gives her a new identity; in the body of M. H., she is seductive, flirtatious, and self-confident, and Gerald woos her. The image in the mirror is what gives the subject the alienating armor of his identity.34 This identity is the subject’s persona that allows oneself to exist in the social sphere. “The face of my desire” is an equivocal term. A possible reading of it is that the face that looks at Mary from the mirror, the face of M. H., is the face Mary desires to have. Before her transformation, Mary refers to her face as “my face” and “my eyes,” whereas after the transformation the face turns into an “it.”35 Being referred to as an object of possession, Mary’s face of desire receives a phallic value, the value of something one “has” or “does not have.” The new and beautiful face therefore functions for Mary as a phallic object with which she masquerades herself: after several weeks of transforming into Mary H. every night, Mary declares the following: “I’m tired of masquerading.”36 Interestingly, this term was coined by  Ibid.  Lacan (2006a). 35  Shakespear (2016), 49. 36  Ibid., 70. 33 34

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­ sychoanalyst Joan Riviere in 1929 to designate a woman who is a man p dressed as a woman.37 Lacan borrowed this term from her to refer to the hysteric as a woman who plays the part of a man.38 In psychoanalytic terms, Mary’s sentence can be translated thus as follows: “I am tired of pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man.” The masquerade is the way for a woman to cover her lack by pretending to have a phallus. Olivia Shakespear apparently knew this before psychoanalysis. According to Riviere, a woman who is masquerading is afraid to be found a thief of the phallus that is not her own. This provokes anxiety. Zupančič takes up the subject of masquerade and underlines the feminine anxiety that is attached to it. This anxiety, according to Zupančič, is the anxiety of being revealed as nothing: “In other words, the really troubling question here is: What if I’m not really anything, what if there is no ‘me’ in any of this? This ontological anxiety doesn’t stop at ‘Am I that name?’, rather, it revolves around ‘Do I exist at all?’ All that I have left at this point is a pretense, a mask.”39 Thus, Mary’s tiredness of being, of being a woman with a phallus, of being Mary Hatherley, pronounces the anxiety of a woman caused by her existence in the social sphere. It is a type of an existential anxiety displayed here by Mary that is attached to being a woman pretending to have a phallus. There is no Woman, Lacan tells us: The Woman does not exist, which means that each woman has to invent her own version of being a woman. Masquerading is a manner of hiding this being, namely by pretending to have. Femininity is closely related to the nothing all of us are trying to hide. Marguerite Duras writes around this nothing in her novels, as I will show in the following chapters. Another interesting point to make in this regard is that Mary delineates the feeling of transforming back to the body of Mary G. after being in the body of Mary H. as “a sensation of being in darkness ... from which I emerged with my beauty fallen from me like a garment.”40 Mary’s  Riviere (1929).  Lacan (1999). 39  Zupančič (2017), 56. 40  Shakespear (2016), 51. 37 38

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attitude toward her new body after her transformation is a unique portrayal of what Lacan calls in his twenty-third seminar, Le Sinthome, a possible relationship to one’s body that is constructed during the mirror stage.41 Her description of beauty as a garment, of wearing the imaginary body as an attire, is similar to James Joyce’s description of his body as something that can be peeled off of him like fruit skin, meaning something that is not his own.42 Mary speaks of the face that stares at her from the mirror after her transformation as an object, and the question remains: will she except this image as her own armor of identity, like the child in the mirror, or throw it away? Returning to St. Augustine’s Invidia, in his twentieth seminar, Lacan refers to Augustine’s jealousy as the first substitution of the subject to the jouissance that he derives from his first object, the Other.43 It means that jealousy directs the subject to the little a, the object of desire. This sheds an important light on the function of jealousy in the subject’s life. The question arises whether the subject will be able to move from this object, and be guided toward his desire, or if she will choose to remain with the satisfaction she derives from her jealousy (oral and scopic), from her objet jouissance, which causes her also a considerable amount of suffering, and keeps the child attached to her mother’s lap. The more the subject is closer to the other, the more he is attracted to the specular identification, in which he is the object, and wishes to protect the complete mirror image that he guards.44 Paradoxically, one way to gain satisfaction is to leave this initial other and become an object a in the place of desire for another person. Perhaps this is what Lacan means when he asks the following in his twentieth seminar: “Is having the a the same as being it?”45 Lacan, in other words, designates two possible positions of subjectivity, one of having, and one of being.

 Lacan (2016b).  Ibid. 43  Ibid. 44  Lacan (2016a). 45  Lacan (1999), 100. 41 42

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Mary’s Jealousy II: A Shunning of Desire The experiences Mary goes through during the nights leave a mark on her also during the days, still working in Gerald’s residence, in the body of Mary G. After receiving the attention and privileges of a beautiful woman, Mary’s behavior changes: she “forgets herself,” becomes impatient with her employer and does not act as sympathetic to her environment as she used to before the transformation.46 Mary starts to rebel, advancing a subjective agency that was not enacted by her in the past. However, soon enough, the readers learn that even though her new personality does not fit in with the body and persona of Mary G, Mary also fails to identify with the body of Mary H. The transformation initiates a split in herself, and she becomes jealous of herself.47 In his eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan designates the relation of the subject to the Other according to the logical disjunction of the level of alienation.48 Alienation implies that the subject is torn between a movement, in which he allegedly has two choices, but in fact in one of which he disappears, for example: “your money or your life.”49 Losing your life means also giving up money, losing money means living life deprived of something. Similarly, according to Montrelay, the choice of assuming one’s body upon oneself, to accept one’s body as one’s “own,” has deadly ramifications: “The gaze which fixes the form in the mirror, which helps to repress the drive, the aggressiveness of primary narcissism, is also deadening.”50 What is it that is deadened in this act? As mentioned earlier, the first time that Mary announces her jealousy of M. H. in the novella’s beginning, she asks the following: “Was Mary Gower beginning already to be jealous of Mary Hatherley?”51 It is interesting to note the word “already”; it is as if Mary’s jealousy of herself is to  Shakespear (2016).  Ibid. 48  Lacan (1998). 49  Ibid., 212. 50  Montrelay (1977a), 49 (translation mine). 51  Shakespear (2016), 59. 46 47

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be expected according to Lacan’s saying that a woman is always “other to herself.”52 Mary’s oscillation between the first and third persons in her speech depicts the movement of alienation that Lacan speaks of in his eleventh seminar.53 At the novella’s ending, Mary chooses to stop her transformations to Mary H., leaving both her job and Gerald. In this act, she gives her subjective answer to Lacan’s question, “your money or your life.”54 The jealousy Mary feels after her transformation, her jealousy of herself as M.  H. does not lead her in the direction of desire. It is the destructive side of jealousy that causes Mary to retreat in the face of Gerald’s love. In fact, at the novella’s ending, Mary refuses to be in competition with her semblable, Bella. She destroys her desire and directs Gerald to Bella, telling herself that it is her (Bella) who is really meant for him. To assume one’s body upon oneself requires Mary to relinquish her jealousy, which is turned into empathy toward Bella at the story’s ending. The choice between accepting one’s image in the mirror in exchange for alienation and a deadening of jouissance is also the choice Mary had to make in Shakespear’s novella. This choice is similar to Dora’s choice in the well-known Freudian case, to be discussed later. Montrelay writes that when the woman is jealous of the other woman, she becomes interested in her body, her behavior, her passions. Following the other woman, she says, can be a solution for the woman who is no longer the object of her lover’s gaze, which is turned to another.55 An important point to make is that there exists a difference between “following the other woman” and identifying with her. In the story’s beginning, following Bella’s footsteps is a solution that gives Mary a new body. This body allows her to take part in the social game and opens a gate to her femininity. However, when push comes to shove, Mary is unable to identify with her body, not the one of Mary G., nor that of Mary H., switching her identity from one to another, not admitting to herself or the world of being both women.  Lacan (1999), 81.  Lacan (1998). 54  Ibid., 212. 55  Montrelay (1977b). 52 53

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Instead of embracing her new status as beautiful and enjoying the privileges that she receives as Mary H., as well as Gerald’s love, Mary chooses to empathize with Bella, who was pushed aside by Gerald as a result of his infatuation with Mary H: “A very short while ago you were quite taken up with Bella Sturgis. You don’t care the least for her feelings; you simply follow your impulses, and desert her for a more attractive woman … ‘Poor Bella!’ I cried ‘You may drift into marrying her yet’.”56 Like Dora from Freud’s case, which will be discussed in a later chapter, Mary metaphorically slaps Gerald for turning his back on Bella once he falls in love with (her as) Mary H. Refusing to see herself as the object of Gerald’s desire, Mary identifies with Bella. She is afraid that Gerald’s fickleness may lead him “into marrying her yet.” This sentence supposedly refers to Bella but also exposes her fear that Gerald wants to marry (her as) Mary H., or that if she were to accept his courting of Mary H., he will eventually leave her for Bella. Mary uses Bella’s body as a defense against the man’s love, and shows compassion toward her, in a manner of jealous identification that leads her to betray her own interests—and desire. Mary’s mirror image is deficient; she does not identify with her body as Mary H., and it peels off from her, like a garment. Mary’s denial of her body is so great that she develops a hatred toward it, while over-­ appreciating Bella. It is noticeable in sentences such as “I grew to hate the other Mary’s beautiful face … I seemed to have realized Mary Hatherley as … distinct from myself. She was the woman Gerald Harman loved; she was the woman … she was the woman who had done both Gerald and another a wrong that might never be undone.”57 In this dramatic monologue, we see that Mary’s jealousy of M. H. had turned into hatred toward herself, and compassion toward the other woman, with whom she identifies. Mary’s jealousy is that of narcissistic, primary, feminine jealousy that refuses to separate from the body of the other woman and pushes her to deny her own body. In this display of feminine jealousy and feminine jouissance, both of which will be explained in the following chapter, Mary denies her desire and femininity, and situates Mary H. as The Woman, The One, which Mary is not. In his twentieth seminar, Lacan teaches that 56 57

 Shakespear (2016), 72.  Ibid., 75 (emphases mine).

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“The Woman does not exist; ”58 there is no one woman who is She, who is Perfection, who is Everything, who is not lacking, who is not subject to castration. At the heart of feminine jouissance and feminine jealousy, there is a belief that The Woman exists, that is, that another woman possesses something which I do not.59 This belief is related to the pre-­Oedipal period, where the mother is still not lacking, and where castration is still not registered. At the end of the story, Mary refuses to take Mary H.’s body upon herself when she refuses to tell Gerald that the person with whom he is in love is actually her: “Then there came a wild moment in which I was near telling him all … ‘I have one last word to leave you,’ I said to him. ‘You will forget me. When I am only a memory, go back to Bella; for you loved her’.”60 A possible reading of this tragic ending is that Mary’s jealousy prevails her, which is why she renounces her image as Mary Hatherley, leaves Gerald both as Mary Hatherley and Mary Gower, and directs him to Bella’s arms. Mary chooses to isolate herself, when she goes off to live with her father’s old friend and takes care of him. Madeleine Chapsal, in an interview with Montrelay, was curious what does it mean then to follow the other woman. What is this passion toward the other woman and is it, indeed, homosexual?61 Beauty’s Hour, and the road not taken there by Mary, provides further clarification in my opinion for the solution of “following the other woman” as a solution to jealousy. We see that at first, Mary manages to follow the other woman, that is, when she transforms into a beautiful woman and creates a new life for herself. However, at the plot’s conclusion, Mary identifies and sympathizes with Bella, and, as a result, she forsakes the new life she created for herself, thinking it is not her but Bella who deserves this life. Mary’s choices provide crucial knowledge about the possible consequences of jealousy, namely leaving the path that leads to desire. Perhaps Olivia Shakespear did the same thing as well, when leaving Yeats as Maud Gonne  Lacan (1999), 72–73.  Bruce Fink’s translation for Lacan’s phrase “La femme n’existe pas” is “there is no such thing as Woman.” However, Fink explicitly mentions in the footnote that the French version indicates that it is “La femme” who does not exist, and not just “femme” (Lacan 1999, 72 n. 29). 60  Shakespear (2016), 82. 61  Montrelay (1977b). 58 59

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did, identifying with Gonne’s absence that is present even in her name. Shakespear was supposed to leave her husband for Yeats, and there was a change of heart at the last minute, supposedly due to Yeats’ infidelity. She left her husband eventually, but never remarried, and Shakespear and Yeats remained good friends until their deaths. Yeats had married Shakespear’s niece. This speculation is based on some autobiographical details of Shakespear and Yeats found in Yeats’ Memoires and letters, but of course one cannot speak for Shakespear about her desire for her or the decisions she made in her life.

Works Cited Copjec, J. (2015). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Verso Books. Daniel, A. M. (2016). Foreword to Beauty’s Hour. In A. M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s Hour. Valancourt Books. Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964–1965) (A. Sheridan, Trans. & Jacque-Alain Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972–1973) (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006a). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed., pp. 75–82). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006b. Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed., pp. 82–102). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2016a). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety (1962–1963) (A.R. Price, Trans. & J.-Alain Miller, ed.). Polity Press. Lacan, J. (2016b). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome (1975–1976) (A. Price, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press. Miller, J.-A. (2018). L’Un-tout-seul  – L’orientation lacanienne, 2010–2011. La Martinière. Montrelay, M. (1977a). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit. Montrelay, M. (1977b). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens avec Jeanne Moreau et al (pp. 149–173). Gallimard.

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Riviere, J. (1929). Womanliness as Masquerade. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9, 303–313. Shakespear, O. (2016). In A.  M. Daniel (Ed.), Beauty’s Hour [1896]. Valancourt Books. Wyatt, J. (1998). I Want to Be You: Envy, the Lacanian Double, and Feminist Community in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 17, 37–64. Yeats, W. B. (1972). Memoires. Macmillan. Yeats, W. B. (2022). The Lover Mourns for the Loss of Love. American Literature. Retrieved June 15, 2023, from https://americanliterature.com/author/ william-­butler-­yeats/poem/the-­lover-­mourns-­for-­the-­loss-­of-­love Zupančič, A. (2017). What Is Sex? MIT Press.

5 Two Types of Jealousy—Phallic Jealousy and Feminine Jealousy

Abstract  This chapter offers a differentiation between two types of jealousy, phallic and feminine. Building on Freud’s theory of the development of feminine sexuality and on Lacan’s logical formulas of feminine and masculine sexuality in his twentieth seminar, this chapter elaborates these jealousies. It also follows Montrelay’s original thinking about jealousy in women and explores feminine jealousy as the origin of phallic jealousy, what was termed by Freud as penis envy. It also unfolds the term “ravage,” which Lacan coined to designate the mother-daughter relationship, as the main characteristic of feminine jealousy and as its locus. Keywords  Ravage • Feminine jealousy • Phallic jealousy • The Oedipus complex • Sigmund Freud • Penis envy • Jacques Lacan

Phallic Jealousy One of the first articulations of the Oedipus complex is found in Freud’s letter to friend and colleague Wilhelm Fleiss. Freud and Fleiss engaged in a thorough correspondence in the early years of psychoanalysis, a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_5

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correspondence that Freud referred to as his “self-analysis,” which helped him in making some of his grand discoveries. In this letter, Freud describes the Oedipus complex, based on his personal experience, as “the experience of helplessness told by a jealous man.”1 Such description of the Oedipus complex ties jealousy with the experience of helplessness of the child who seeks satisfaction from his mother, and who wishes to murder his father so as to achieve that purpose. Jealousy is thus originated in the most primal need of the child to be nurtured, and his fear that he will cease to be loved and cared for.2 The Oedipus complex is described by Freud as being in love with one parent and wishing to murder the other who is positioned as the subject’s rival and object of jealousy.3 Freud finds proof for the relevance of the Oedipus complex in neurotics in the fact that Oedipus Rex, the play written by Sophocles in ancient Greece, gains timeless popularity, which is true to this day. According to Freud, the play continues to shock audiences in modern times because it touches upon one of the most repressed wishes of every subject.4 In the case of the little boy, the Oedipal situation is supposedly simple. His attachment to the mother is an attachment to the nourishing Other that gave him life, who was also his first love object, before his discovery about the sexual difference. The child’s jealousy at the Oedipal stage is thus directed at his father-rival, and it dissolves only upon the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. However, the situation is not the same for the little girl. The Oedipus complex for the girl is related to her discovery of not having a penis, through her recognition that her mother does not have one.5 During the pre-Oedipus phase, the girl is completely attached  Freud and Masson (1985), 270.  Freud (1953a). 3  Freud and Masson (1985). 4  Freud (1958). 5  A common mistake is to refer to the girl’s Oedipus complex as the “Electra complex.” This term was coined by psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung who developed his own psychoanalytic theory, one that differs from that of Freud. Freud expressly rejected this term and Jung’s theory of sexual development, which creates a parallelism between the sexual development of the two sexes (Cf. Laplanche, 1988, 126). 1 2

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to her mother, and she loves her as a “phallic mother,”6 that is, a mother who allegedly has a phallus. When the girl discovers that her mother “does not have one,” she encounters castration, which leads her to penis envy and to the Oedipus complex that is expressed by turning to her father with the wish to receive the organ that was deprived from her by her mother. According to Freud, this is only mended when the young woman replaces the wish for a phallus with the wish for a baby.7 Penis envy, the term that Freud gives to the girl’s jealousy of the boy for having a penis, makes Freud suspect that jealousy is more prevalent in women.8 It is not that the boy does not feel jealous, but the very particular feeling of penis envy that Freud gathers from listening to his patients, which the girl encounters during her phallic period, greatly influences the girl’s sexuality and love life. In the Oedipus complex, the girl’s jealousy and animosity toward her mother increase.9 The girl identifies with the mother and is jealous of her for having the father’s phallus to play with, or even for having the girl herself, as her phallic replacement.10 Penis envy is what drives the girl’s libido to her father instead of her mother. The disappointment of discovering that her mother does not have one leads the girl to change objects, a change that requires accepting a loss. Penis envy attracts the girl to her father, according to Freud, yet at the same time, it also involves the registration of castration, via the creation of new phallic representations, inter alia, by prescribing the lack of the mother’s organ. Therefore, the term “penis envy” relates a woman’s desire to the lost object, namely the mother’s penis, to the satisfaction she is always missing. This is the lost object, which shall never be found, but which will constitute the subject’s object of desire, according to Lacan.11 One of the implications of this is that the Oedipal stage for a woman already involves separation from her first object. Penis envy acknowledges castration in that sense that it already follows the logic of having or not  Freud (1953b), 126.  Ibid. 8  Ibid. 9  Ibid. 10  Arambourou (1996). 11  Lacan (1992). 6 7

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having a phallus, belonging or not to the group that is subject to castration by the father. In fact, Lacan goes as far as to denote the castration complex—penis envy, also noting that it is “in men and women alike,”12 unlike what Freud figured. In other words, castration is not only present in men and jealousy is not only present in women. Both are present in biological men and women, alike, and differently. The reason Lacan chose to emphasize that penis envy exists in men and women alike, is that the penis and the phallus are not the same. Montrelay reminds us, quoting the writers of “New Psychoanalytic Views,” that “penis envy is always envy of an idealized penis,”13 and one must not confuse the phallus with the penis. The discovery about a woman’s lack also has implications for the boy that are expressed, inter alia, in the dissolution of the boy’s Oedipal complex and in the fear of being castrated like his mother.14 Returning to the little girl, Montrelay indicates that it is the lack of the father’s phallic power, which makes the woman fantasize about having it, to reassert its power, thus making it ideal.15 Therefore, penis envy is one type of jealousy, one that requires castration as it already presumes a lack in the subject. Following Montrelay and peers, I will refer to penis envy as “phallic jealousy.” This type of jealousy, this particular envy, is a jealousy of the phallus, the symbolic value that is ascribed to the penis and not of the penis itself. In his twentieth seminar, Encore, Lacan first introduced the concept of feminine jouissance, and differentiated between it and phallic jouissance. Phallic jouissance follows the law of castration, where the jealous person desires an object as a replacement to the lost object. I should note that the primary feature of this jealousy is that it occurs when the subject already recognizes a sexual difference, an existence of a body that is Other to myself. This body is always the feminine body. Therefore, phallic jealousy is present when the subject already “owns” a body, following the mirror stage.  Lacan (2017), 27.  Chasseguet-Smirgel (1970), 2; Montrelay (1996), 34. 14  Freud (1961). 15  Montrelay (1978). 12 13

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An example for phallic jealousy is found at the beginning of Beauty’s Hour, when Mary is complaining about her “lack,”16 claiming that if she were to have beauty, or even only “personal fascination”17 she would have everything she would need in the world. Mary is sure that the one thing she is missing in order to be happy is beauty, what serves her as a phallic instrument. Montrelay clarified that when it comes to penis envy, one must be reminded that what the girl is envious of is not the penis per se, but the social benefits and status that accompanies the phallus’ owner.18 This means that phallic jealousy is a feeling of deprivation. One can hear it in the clinic quite often by women who complain about “not having,” whether it is a job, money, or even clothes. This feeling of deprivation can cause a substantial amount of suffering. After elaborating phallic jealousy and upon  following the thread of Mary’s jealousy in Beauty’s Hour, I have figured that if there was only phallic jealousy, Mary would have accepted her wish to become beautiful and be with the man she loves. According to my reading, it was not phallic jealousy which caused Mary to denounce her new persona and  her beloved. In the next section, I will present and develop the type of jealousy that I refer to, following Montrelay,19 as feminine jealousy, which has its origins in the pre-Oedipal phase.

Feminine Jealousy In his introductory lecture on femininity, Freud tries to confront “the riddle of femininity.”20 There, and in his other articles on feminine sexuality, Freud discovered and presented the pre-Oedipal phase in the development of feminine sexuality.21 The importance Freud ascribed to the pre-Oedipal phase in women is so significant that he renounced the universality of his prior statement about the Oedipal phase being the “nucleus  Shakespear (2016), 48.  Ibid. 18  Montrelay (1996). 19  Ibid. 20  Freud (1953b), 113. 21  Freud (1950). 16 17

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of the neurosis.”22 It is worth mentioning that according to Freud, the pre-Oedipal phase occurs only in the life of women, as only a woman needs to change her object from the mother to the father in order to enter the Oedipal stage. However, Freud himself admitted that femininity and masculinity are traits that can be found in both sexes, and that femininity is a subjective position. This matter creates a perplexity in relation to the origins of femininity in the sexual development of men, considering that even if there is a pre-Oedipal phase in men, the anatomical difference impacts the consequences of the same stage, which are still enigmatic. In the pre-Oedipal phase of feminine sexuality, a woman experiences attachment to her mother, the satisfier of vital needs. She divests her entire libido in her, while the father at this point is a mere “troublesome rival.”23 This phase contains many early sexual wishes in relation to the mother, and is characterized by “an especially inexorable repression.”24 The end of the pre-Oedipus is typified by strong hatred toward the mother, represented by different reproaches directed at her, one of which is for not providing enough milk. Freud notes that this claim may also be heard in cases where the mother kept nursing her child until the age of three or four, meaning that there is something there that denies satisfaction.25 After Freud establishes that the girl’s hostility toward her mother originates in the pre-Oedipal phase, he counts the factors for turning away from the mother and entering the Oedipal phase, emphasizing that jealousy of other persons, among them siblings as well as the father, is there “first and foremost.”26 According to Freud’s passage, which was also quoted in the beginning of the third chapter, jealousy is the reason for the daughter’s turning of her love from her mother to her father, when her lack is not appeased by the mother’s love. Thus,  the hatred of the girl toward her mother, at the end of the pre-Oedipal phase, is related to one of the major etiologies of jealousy of a younger child, which is based on  Ibid., 226.  Freud (1950), 226. 24  Ibid. 25  Ibid. 26  Freud (1950), 231. 22 23

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the child’s insatiable need for nourishment. With regard to the pre-­ Oedipal phase, Freud found that “in this dependence on the mother we have the germ of later paranoia in women,”27 a notion which he bases on the article “Analysis of Delusional Jealousy” authored by American psychoanalyst Ruth Mack Brunswick, his close student, where she describes a patient’s pre-Oedipal fixation to her sister.28 In this little footnote Freud attributes, in fact, the type of jealousy which he calls delusional to the pre-Oedipal complex, indicating that there is a type of jealousy that finds its source there that is not penis envy. Jacqueline Rose insightfully notes that it is here that penis envy fails. According to Rose, “it is clear that nothing has been answered at all…”29 that is, in reference to penis envy. I do not agree that nothing has been answered and would say that something has been answered but that this something is, following Lacan’s twentieth seminar, not-all. In other words, the nothing of feminine jealousy has not fully been explored, nor can it ever be fully explored. And indeed, the same love that is “boundless” and that “is incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction” 30 articulated by Freud is the love that Lacan would develop in his twentieth seminar, Encore, as feminine jouissance, the limitless, insufferable enjoyment that exists in both men and women, but that is logically attributed to the one who is not fully under castration, the one who in the symbolic-imaginary realm is lacking, that is, woman. Feminine jouissance is a woman’s sexual enjoyment that goes beyond that which takes place in coitus, beyond the phallic instrument, as the myth of Tiresias teaches us, observes Lacan.31 Tiresias, who experienced sex as both man and woman, was asked by the gods whether men or women enjoy more. His answer was that a woman enjoys approximately ten times more than a man. Thus, feminine jouissance can keep on going again and again, encore, as the seminar’s title indicates. According to Lacan, this jouissance serves the nothing and comes to the subject as an imposition from the super ego: “Enjoy! [Jouir!].”32  Ibid., 227.  Ibid., 227, n. 1. 29  Rose (2002), 42. 30  Freud (1950), 231. 31  Lacan (1999). 32  Ibid., 3. 27 28

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Jouissance is the enjoyment of the Other body, the body of the Other, or the body of yourself as other. Phallic jouissance is the jouissance of the organ, the jouissance of the signifier, while the feminine position is situated as not wholly under phallic jouissance, not-all under the phallic function, and not entirely subject to the Law of the ather.33 As such, it goes beyond the desire to have a phallus. It means that the sexuated feminine position dwells in another jouissance, one which is not expressible in words, unrepresented by phallic signification and infinite. It is akin to the dark continent of femininity that Freud articulated, that which goes beyond sense and does not abide by the rule of castration. In L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité, Montrelay developed the feminine organization of the libido, termed the concentric economy, similar to what Lacan would later develop as the discussed feminine jouissance. The concentric economy of the libido is characterized by silence and “stupor; ”34 in it, no representation is registered in the psyche even as unconscious. According to Freud, the condition for representation is repression. If something is not represented in the psyche, it means that it did not go through the process of repression, that is, that it is not symbolized for the subject as a memory trace, as representation.35 Jealousy of the feminine period is that which refuses to separate itself from the mother’s body, refusing to lose the last physical connection of the child to it, namely via the nipple and the mouth. Montrelay writes that in the deepest, wildest formulation of jealousy, the subject, his parents, and his siblings are still one body. It requires a minimum of speech to create at least an initial separation between the members of the family, so that the subject will not feel himself as nothing more than a dismembered body,36 that is, symbolization or representation is necessary for separation. Femininity is characterized by its un-representability in speech and, instead, it comes back in the subject’s life as real, in Lacanian terms, as a repetition that is unexplained and un-signified, causing suffering in the subject’s life.

 Ibid.  Montrelay (1977), 71 (translation mine). 35  Freud and Masson (1985). 36  Montrelay (1996). 33 34

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Based on Freud’s articulations of jealousy in the pre-Oedipal phase, and Montrelay’s and Lacan’s developments of a concentric economy and feminine jouissance, respectively, I discover a type of jealousy that is primal to phallic jealousy, which I refer to as primary jealousy or feminine jealousy, a term Montrelay used in “La jalousie.” Feminine jealousy finds its source in the inability to separate from the object that provides satisfaction, which is also the object of identification in the Oedipal phase for the daughter, that is, the mother. Being under the feminine organization of the unconscious, feminine jealousy is silent, chaotic, and close to the Lacanian Real. Primary, feminine jealousy has a sadomasochistic, aggressive nature, before the constitution of the subject via the mirror stage. It presides in primary narcissism and in the autoerotic jouissance of the body before the subject knows how to differentiate between her own body and that of her semblable.

Feminine Jealousy and Ravage Following the discovery of the pre-Oedipal phase, Freud underlines that the rivalry of the mother-daughter is rooted there, and not in the Oedipus complex. Lacan termed this rivalry as “ravage” in “L’Étourdit.”37 There, Lacan states that woman bases herself on a moiety, being not entirely in the phallic function; her libido is directed toward an Other jouissance, that which is alive in ravage. Ravage, tells us Montrelay, is a battle of non-­ separation that tears and suffocates the mother and daughter.38 The trouble that a woman has with her father, says Lacan, is secondary to the ravaging devastation of her relationship with her mother.39 Originated in the pre-Oedipal phase, ravage is pre-castration, meaning that the metaphors of loss and desire are not operative there. It is located thus outside of sense, outside of the signifier, and before the mirror stage.

 Lacan (2009).  Montrelay (1977). 39  Ibid. 37 38

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Ravage is related to a woman’s relationship to her own body, which Montrelay describes as “simultaneously narcissistic and erotic.”40 It encompasses an intense jealousy of the body that is concurrently your body and other to it. The kernel constituent of ravage is feminine jealousy. In feminine jealousy, the little daughter identifies with the mother, who is all-consuming for the daughter at this stage. She is das Ding, a mythical creature that is both frightening and all-providing at the same time. The feminine body is that unrepresented object, which becomes the battlefield in the mother-daughter relationship; Montrelay describes the mother and daughter as confronted in an interminable battle.41 “Ravage” is the relationship between mother and daughter that stands like a threatening sword over the throat of both, waiting to eliminate one or the other, creating an inseparable bond between them. Loving and “tearing,” “suffocating,” and “caressing,”42 ravage, circled around feminine jealousy, knows no separation. The subject is her mother’s object Each woman must invent her unique solution to feminine jealousy and ravage that repeat in her love life in various ways, taking her back  to the primary relationship with her mother and the primary moments of her sexuality. The encounter with the other woman, usually in relation to a man, who is an object of the subject’s desire, stirs feminine jealousy. The jealousy of the other woman brings with it homosexual feelings that were alive in ravage together with feelings of strong hatred and jealousy of the woman who is both you and not you at the same time. To conclude, the two types of jealousy that I developed in this chapter are based on Lacan’s two types of jouissance and the two libidinal organizations that Montrelay theorizes. Phallic jealousy is situated in the jouissance that is subject to castration and is in the heart of the Oedipus complex. It is the second instance of jealousy that manifests itself first in the development of the subject only after the mirror stage, already recognizing an other. The other jealousy, Feminine jealousy, originates in the pre-Oedipal complex, and follows the logic of feminine jouissance, the infinite jouissance that goes beyond the phallus and the logic of castration.  Ibid., 69 (translation mine).  Ibid. 42  Ibid., 153–154 (translation mine). 40 41

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Feminine jealousy is also the main constituent of ravage that is found in the first and primal instance of jealousy in the subject’s life before she differentiates between herself and the Other. The two types of jealousy exist at the same time in the subject’s unconscious, and do not eliminate one another. Phallic jealousy can accommodate something of feminine jealousy and can perhaps serve as a disguise for feminine jealousy, its masquerade, as the woman is not all under the phallus.

Works Cited Arambourou, M. (1996). Arrêt sur image. In C. Maillet et al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi? Series no. 6: Revue du Cercle Freudien. L’Harmattan. Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1970). Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic Views. University Michigan Press. Freud, S. (1950). Female Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works (J.  Strachey, Trans., pp. 221–244). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1953a). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII: A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works 1901–1905 (J. Stratchey et al., Trans.). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1953b). Femininity. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis and other works (1931–1936) (J. Stratchey et al., Trans.). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1958). The Interpretation of Dreams. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IV: The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part). Hogarth Press.. Freud, S. (1961). The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX: The Ego and the Id and Other Works 1923–1925 (J.  Stratchey et  al., Trans.). Hogarth Press. Freud, S., & Masson, J. M. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss: 1887–1904. Belknap Press of HUP.

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Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960) (D.  Porter, Trans. & J.-A.  Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (1999). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1972–1973) (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2009). L’étourdit [1972]. The Letter, 41, 31–80. Lacan, J. (2017). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press. Laplanche, J. (1988). The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Montrelay, M. (1977). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit. Montrelay, M. (1978). Inquiry into Femininity. In M/F: A Feminist Journal 1, ed. Parveen Adams, Rosalind Coward, Elizabeth Cowie. Montrelay, M. (1996). La Jalousie: Un branchement direct sur l’inconscient. In C.  Maillet et  al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi? Series ni. 6 Revue du Cercle Freudien. L’Harmattan. Rose, J. (2002). Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Verso Books. Shakespear, O. (2016). Beauty’s Hour [1896]. Ed. Anne Margaret Daniel. Valancourt Books.

6 Jealousy and Identification—Dora and the Young Homosexual Woman

Abstract  This chapter examines feminine jealousy and identification through a reading of Freud’s case of Dora and Freud’s case of the young homosexual. These cases, together with the reading that was provided in previous chapter of the case of Mary, Shakespear’s character in Beauty’s Hour, illustrate that on the one hand, identification with the other woman as a vicissitude of jealousy can unlock the gate for a woman to explore her femininity, but on the other hand, it can also lead a woman to reject her femininity. In addition, it studies the difference between empathy and identification among women and how it relates to jealousy. Keywords  Identification • Homosexuality • Femininity • Freud • Dora

The Dora Case: A Case of Hysteria In “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” Freud provides a description of his analysis with Dora, a teenage girl with persistent cough symptoms, who accuses her father’s friend, Mr. K, for pursuing her. Freud notices Dora’s jealousy of Mrs. K, who is the wife of Mr. K, and the lover © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_6

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of Dora’s father, and deems it as derived from Dora’s love for her father.1 Freud notices Dora’s admirable words in praise of Mrs. K: “When Dora talked about Frau K., she used to praise her ‘adorable white body’ in accents more appropriate to a lover than to a defeated rival...”.2 Nonetheless, Freud did not put all the weight on Dora’s little infatuation with Mrs. K, but on Dora’s jealousy of her, commenting that such homosexual feelings are common in the unconscious life of hysterical girls.3 After analyzing Dora’s dream, Freud concluded that Dora’s jealousy of Mrs. K is in fact an unconscious mechanism meant to conceal Dora’s love to Mr. K. and her fear of surrendering to his temptation.4 Even though Freud notices Dora’s favorable attitude toward Mrs. K, his emphasis in her treatment returns time and again to Dora’s supposed feelings toward Mr. K. This is Freud’s error in the case of Dora, according to Lacan. Lacan read Freud’s analytic work in Dora’s case and constructed it in three dialectic reversals.5 The second reversal, Lacan notes, is “far from the alleged object of jealousy providing her true motive … [it] conceals an interest in the rival-subject herself.”6 According to Lacan, this reversal leads to the development of the truth. Lacan recognizes Dora’s fascination with Mrs. K not necessarily as homosexual, but as a relation to an object that carries with it “the mystery of Dora’s own femininity, by which I mean her bodily femininity.”7 Dora is fascinated with the feminine body and finds an answer to her fascination, namely in the body of Mrs. K, which provides her a portal to explore her own femininity. Dora’s interest in Mrs. K leads her to identify with her. Jealousy and identification work in a similar way, as both mask the interest in femininity and present a kind of reversal of it. Freud designated identification as the “earliest expression of an emotional tie” with an object.8 However, he stated that not every identification is based on strong empathy and that  Freud (1953).  Ibid., 61–62. 3  Ibid. 4  Ibid. 5  Lacan (2006). 6  Ibid., 179. 7  Ibid., 180. 8  Freud (1955), 120. 1 2

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as a hysterical symptom, it can also be within a competition for a love object.9 Freud exposed Dora’s manifold identifications in several incidents. I would like to focus on the presentations of feminine identifications in Dora’s case, rather than the phallic ones. For example, Dora’s identification with Mrs. K is present also in her coughs, the symptom with which she arrived for treatment with Freud: Dora announced that she learned from Mrs. K that a health condition may sometimes allow you to evade unwanted duties. Mrs. K often felt unwell exactly when Mr. K would come home from his excursions. In conjunction, Dora mentioned her cough that comes and goes, which, as Freud discovered, coincided with Mr. K’s absence or presence, like Mrs. K’s cough—but with an opposite reaction to the trigger (Dora coughed when Mr. K was gone). However, in his interpretation of her cough, Freud also attributes greater emphasis to Dora’s love for Mr. K than to her identification with Mrs. K.10 Elsewhere, Freud concludes that Dora’s behavior in relation to her father’s love affair is more like that of a “jealous wife”11 than that of a daughter, as it is characterized by an identification with the father’s love object, whether the present one (Mrs. K.) or the past one (Dora’s mother). By identifying with the object of her father’s desire, Dora could have theoretically paved her own path to becoming a woman and an object of another man’s desire. However, the question is how the subject uses her identification, and what does she do with it, following the Lacanian formula of savoir y faire, knowing how to do with it. Another crucial identification of Dora is found in the made-famous incident by the lake, where Mr. K., in trying to seduce Dora, told her a sentence that enraged her: “I get nothing out of my wife,”12 and in exchange was rewarded with a slap. Freud analyzes Dora’s slap as deriving from her identification with the governess of the K’s children, with whom Mr. K. had an affair, and to whom he said the exact same sentence. The governess confessed to Dora about her affair with Mr. K., an affair that resulted in pregnancy. Mr. K. promised the governess that he will leave  Ibid.  Freud (1953). 11  Ibid., 56. 12  Freud (1953), 98. 9

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his wife for her, a promise he failed to fulfill, following which the governess left her position at the Ks by a fortnight notice, as was customary at the time. Dora’s termination of her analysis with Freud is also made by a fortnight’s notice. In the aftermath, Freud interprets Dora’s act as putting him in the place of Mr. K and identifying again with the governess.13 Lacan’s analysis of Dora’s slap introduces a different angle to the case. For Lacan, the slap indicates that Dora is mad at Mr. K for disparaging his wife, who is Dora’s object of idealization and interest. Dora’s love for Mrs. K and anger at Mr. K allow her to flee from the place of being Mr. K’s object of desire.14 This way, her identification acts as a hindrance to her femininity. In my reading of the slap incident, I agree with both Freud and Lacan. Dora has many reasons to be jealous of Mrs. K: she takes her father’s attention, she is married to Mr. K, she is attractive, she has jewelries, etc. However, Dora chose to convert her jealousy into empathy, love, identification, and idealization. Dora’s identification is an identification with a woman whose husband betrayed her and chose another man who is impotent (Dora’s father). This identification with a betrayed woman or a woman who chose to be with an impotent man returns in Dora’s identification with the governess, with whom Mr. K. consummated his attraction, and betrayed her afterwards.15 Therefore, it is important to notice that it is not only phallic identification Dora is enacting, as emphasized by Jacqueline Rose,16 but more significantly, an identification with the body of the rejected woman. When Mr. K. told Dora that he gets nothing out of his wife, Dora becomes infuriated because she idolized Mrs. K, who also provided her with a gate to her femininity. However, Lacan underestimated Dora’s jealousy, which Freud exalted. It is not that Dora is not jealous, but rather it is jealousy that attracted her to Mrs. K in the first place, as part of her research into her femininity. When Dora slapped Mr. K, she supposedly “chose sides,” being empathetic toward the governess and Mrs. K. and  Ibid.  Lacan (2006). 15  Freud (1953). 16  Rose (2002). 13 14

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identifying with both, while situating herself in the place of a woman who is no longer a man’s object of desire. However, empathy is not the only transfiguration of jealousy. A hypothetical question that I evoke is the following: What could have Dora done differently with her jealousy were she to go through a Lacanian rather than a Freudian analysis? What could be a possible vicissitude of jealousy that is not empathy and identification that goes in tandem with the Lacanian ethics of desire? In relation to Dora, Lacan articulated what is true for every woman: “In order for her to gain access to this recognition of her femininity, she would have to assume [assumer] her own body, failing which she remains open to the functional fragmentation (to refer to the theoretical contribution of the mirror stage) that constitutes conversion symptoms.”17 For Lacan, the subject’s body is always an imaginary body, and it is through identification with one’s own body that the subject chooses to assume her body upon herself. Instead of assuming her own body upon herself, Dora seems to be identifying with the body of her semblable, the governess. This imaginary body of the governess that Dora assumes, situating herself in the governess’s shoes, continues until the end of her analysis, the result of which is that she flees both Mr. K. and Freud. Whether Dora was interested in Mr. K. or not is not pertinent; what is pertinent is that her actions prevented her from facing the mere possibility of being an object of his desire, from accessing something of her femininity. Dora’s jealousy of Mrs. K and of the governess is appeased by her identification with them. Dora’s identification protects her from her other femininity, allowing her to escape both men and analysis. Freud’s conduct in the analysis and his own identification and countertransference contributed to it. Dora’s protective mechanism fails once Dora hears of Mrs. K’s own betrayal of her by spilling Dora’s secrets to Mr. K.18 In that moment, Dora chooses the body of the governess to veil her femininity, both from herself and others, so that she will not have to compete for Mr. K’s love, becoming a rival of the governess and Mrs. K. Such interpretation is not 17 18

 Lacan (2006), 181.  Freud (1953).

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stated directly by Lacan. Lacan showed that Dora’s feminine idealization of Mrs. K. made her worship the feminine body. Being enchanted by Mrs. K, Dora began researching her own femininity. However, this infatuation led to her identification and a refusal to assume her own feminine body upon herself, being the object of a man’s infatuation. There is something in common between Mary’s Case and Dora’s Case, because in both cases feminine identification operates as a displacement of jealousy. Instead of jealousy, there is empathy and identification which derail the subject from her object of desire, making her relinquish it instead of competing for it. The cases of Dora and Mary present a solution for feminine jealousy, which may be referred to as the “homosexual” solution, even though it is not homosexual per se. This solution is homosexual because it includes empathy toward the other woman that is in fact an embodiment of jealous identification, this time in a manner that serves to veil one’s interest in her femininity. This type of jealous identification is not the one Montrelay refers to, namely a solution for jealousy by “following the other woman.”19 Rather, this solution sustains the body of the other woman as an idealized body, as the body of The Woman, and simultaneously maintains the body of the subject as an inferior one, and not as an object of desire. This empathy, which is meant to protect the subject from her feminine jealousy or from her femininity, distances her from her desire and from becoming a woman in her subjective and unique manner.

The Case of the Young Homosexual In this case analysis, Freud described the preliminary meetings he had with a girl whose parents had referred her for his treatment. Her parents asked Freud to “cure” the girl of her homosexuality, a request Freud rejected since it goes against the ethics of psychoanalytic treatment. Freud was interested in the case and met with the patient for some time until he decided to terminate the sessions. The case revolves around a nineteen-year-old girl, who began courting a young woman. That woman was notorious for living with a married  Montrelay (1977), 156 (translation mine).

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woman while engaging in intimate relations with other men. The case came to Freud’s doorstep about six months after the girl tried to kill herself by jumping to the train tracks. This suicide attempt happened while she was walking down the street with the woman she adored, and whom she courted, when suddenly her father passed them by and ignored her. According to Freud, the girl’s position toward that woman is a masculine position, meaning that the girl acts as a man.20 This is also known in psychoanalytic terms as “phallic identification.” Freud emphasized that the erotic precondition for the girl’s infatuation was that the object is a “Lady.”21 Following Lacan, it can be said that the way in which the girl wooed the woman is similar to the sublimation of courtly poets who adored noble ladies and who raised these women to the level of an ideal in their sonnet sequences.22 This was the poets’ ways to adore women from afar, not putting themselves in a real risk of being in a love-­ relationship with them, due to the supposed unattainability of the women they adored. Freud noted that the analytical material presented to him led him to the conclusion that that girl’s interest in women in general and in older women in particular began at the age of sixteen, and more specifically with the birth of her third brother. By that time, Freud said, the girl had developed a relationship with a three-year-old boy she met at the playground, and her strong desire for motherhood was evident. Freud analyzed this strange result of having a brother and turning to female objects as a “revival of the infantile Oedipus-complex so common at puberty.”23 According to his analysis, the girl had a strong desire for a baby boy and, unconsciously, for a baby boy from her father: “And then: it was not she who bore the child, but the unconsciously hated rival, her mother. Exasperated and embittered, she turned away from the father and from men altogether.”24 Thus, according to Freud, following the failure to receive a baby from her father, the girl made a strategic decision to  Freud (1920).  Ibid., 137. 22  Lacan (1992). 23  Freud (1920), 135. 24  Ibid. 20 21

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abandon her competition with her mother, up to the point of eliminating her own femininity. This jealousy may be labeled as phallic jealousy if we follow Freud’s assumption that the girl’s jealousy of the mother was directed at having a son of her own, a phallus. Nonetheless, as I have demonstrated above, phallic jealousy also veils primal, feminine jealousy. In this case, the homosexual girl’s jealousy of her mother took over her in such a way that she could no longer bear the competition with the mother, who was herself a young woman, as Freud pointed out, admired and coveted by men—“an inconvenient competitor.”25 When the girl chose a homosexual object, she also enjoyed the fact that she removed her mother’s displeasure at being a competition, and this can even be seen in the patience that the mother displayed toward the daughter’s choice of an object.26 What is this display of consideration if not the empathy that Mary shows Bella and that Dora shows Mrs. K. and the governess? These clear observations of Freud in the case of the young homosexual supports the analysis of jealousy in these cases. However, Freud overemphasizes the father once more. For him, the girl’s choice for the homosexual object displeased the father greatly, which reinforced her in return as her goal, which according to Freud, was “out of defiance against her father.”27 However, in my reading of the case, in comparison with the case of Dora, Mary, and my study of jealousy, I would claim that the mother’s new liking of her daughter serves as much as an incentive as her father’s disliking. Not being able to compete with her mother’s femininity, the girl decided to drop out of the race. The father’s disliking was a poor after-affect, which caused her great displeasure that reached its height when she received his indifferent gaze. Her jealousy of the phallic type retreated to feminine jealousy, a more archaic one, and was then converted into empathy for the mother and a phallic identification with the father.

 Ibid., 135.  Ibid. 27  Ibid., 137. 25 26

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However, this phallic identification did not work well for that girl, for when the father ignored the girl as he passed her on the street, the latent love for him, as well as jealousy of her mother, arose from the repressed, and the girl could not bear to have his gaze diverted from her. This diversion of the gaze reminisces Montrelay’s words about the woman who feels empty of jealousy after the gaze has been lifted from her, as will be further explored in the literary case of Lol V. Stein. The girl’s jealousy pushed her into the abyss, and she jumped into the train rails. Furthermore, her father’s avoidance of her seemed to strip her of her phallic identification and left her to fall as a discarded object. This case illustrates what can occur to someone who loses her identification at an instant.

Works Cited Freud, S. (1920). The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. In The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 1, 2. Retrieved June 15, 2023, from https://The.Psychogenesis.of.a.case.of.female.Homosexuality.pdf Freud, S. (1953). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume VII: A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works 1901–1905 (J. Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 1–122). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1955). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922):: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (J. Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 65–144). Hogarth Press. Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2006). Presentation on Transference. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed., pp. 176–188). W.W. Norton. Montrelay, M. (1977). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens avec Jeanne Moreau et al (pp. 149–173). Gallimard. Rose, J. (2002). Sexuality in the Field of Vision. Verso Books.

7 Jealousy Among Men: Schreber’s Delusional Jealousy and Little Hans’ Feminine Jealousy

Abstract  This chapter explores the subject of jealousy in biological men and in their early childhood. It turns to Freud’s cases of Schreber and Little Hans, as well as his articles on the link between jealousy and homosexuality so to extract a certain logic relating to jealousy among biological men. It also elaborates on Lacan’s reading of Freud’s analysis of the case of Little Hans in his fourth seminar, and on Michèle Montrelay’s criticism of the case and its analysis. Finally, it illustrates how every case explored by Freud provides a connecting thread between jealousy and one’s repressed femininity. Keywords  Feminine jealousy • Delusional jealousy • Homosexuality • Femininity • Freud • Paranoia

 elusional Jealousy and Repressed D Femininity—Freud’s Case of Schreber The question this chapter engages with is as follows: how is feminine jealousy displayed among men, and from where does it originate? Freud asserted in various places that “there is yet another difference between the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_7

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sexes, which relates to the Oedipus complex,”1 and that, as opposed to men, women’s sexual development is divided into two main phases, the Oedipal and the pre-Oedipal, the latter of which is the origin of feminine jealousy. How does feminine jealousy, which is also the main feature of ravage among women, exist in biological men, and is there any difference at the way it manifests itself them? In “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,” Freud distinguishes three types of jealousy: competitive or normal, projected, and delusional.2 About the “competitive or normal” type Freud states that it is rooted deep in the unconscious; it is a continuation of the earliest stirrings of the child’s affective life, and it originates in the Oedipus or family complex of the first sexual period … It is noteworthy that in many persons it is experienced bisexually; that is to say, in a man, beside the suffering in regard to the loved woman and the hatred against the man rival, grief in regard to the unconsciously loved man and the hatred of the woman as a rival will add to its intensity.3

Freud refers to jealousy here in the context of jealous spouses. This introductory paragraph condenses a lot of information regarding jealousy in men. Freud underlines that competitive jealousy is something that is considered normal, that is, it is healthy and common among neurotics. Freud adds that on many occasions, this jealousy among men has to do with grief relating to an unrequited love for a certain man, evidently an unconscious one. In view of his observations on jealous male patients who revealed unconscious homosexual love feelings, Freud thus underlines that competitive or normal jealousy can be experienced bisexually.4 Freud equates the normal type of jealousy with the process of grief and relates it to the narcissistic wound of the subject. At the same time, he underlines feminine identification at the core of his patients’ jealousy, mentioning that he “went through unendurable torments by consciously  Freud (1950), 228.  Freud (1923). 3  Ibid., 1–2. 4  Ibid. 1 2

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imagining himself in the position of the faithless woman.”5 The patient Freud is referring to here had associated his jealousy with sexual assaults he experienced by a man in his childhood. This case, as well as others, made Freud reach the conclusion about the link between jealousy and feminine identification. The relation between feminine identification and jealousy among men can also be spotted in the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, who was a candidate for the presidency of the Reichstag, the highest court in Germany. He described his memories of his mental illness and hospitalization in a book that was analyzed by Freud.6 In a first psychotic outbreak about which Schreber did not provide many details, Schreber was hospitalized for six months in a mental institution, where he was treated by Professor Flechsig.7 After that, the disease was dormant for eight years. An interesting detail in Schreber’s story that Freud points out is the admiration his wife held for the Professor who treated him: “The gratitude of my wife … was perhaps even more heartfelt; for she revered Professor Flechsig as the man who had restored her husband to her, and hence it was that for years she kept his portrait standing upon her writing-table (36).”8 At the night of the disease’s outbreak, Schreber described that after he had dreamt, for the second time, that his disease returned, an image arose in him “that after all it really must be very nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation.”9 In his analysis of the case, Freud concluded that the reason for the outbreak of his psychosis the second time was Schreber’s rejection of this very thought, of this phantasy of being a woman who submits herself to intercourse. Freud attributed this phantasy to Schreber’s erotic thought about Professor Flechsig: “The exciting cause of his illness, then, was an outburst of homosexual libido; the object of his libido was probably from the very first his doctor, Flechsig; and his struggles against the libidinal impulse produced the conflict which gave rise to the symptoms.”10  Ibid.  Freud (1958). 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid., 12. 9  Ibid., 13. 10  Ibid., 43. 5 6

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Thus, like his male patients who expressed jealousy, Freud identified in Schreber a homosexual thought that was rejected by the subject and led to the outburst of paranoia. It is not the thought itself that instigated the outbreak, but rather its rejection. I would say that this thought was, in fact, already a solution to Schreber’s jealousy. It is interesting to note that shortly before Schreber’s phantasy, he writes about his wife’s reverence of the Professor, as quoted above.11 Schreber’s phantasy may be a manner to relate to his femininity as a solution to feelings of jealousy he felt due to his wife’s reverence. Freud emphasized Schreber’s love for Professor Flechsig but overlooked his repressed jealousy of him. Schreber’s feminine phantasy may already be the solution for this jealousy. In fact, it is this identification with femininity, becoming the wife of God, which ascribes him the cure to his illness. The Aufheben of femininity provided president Schreber a way out of his jealous paranoia. Through his jealous, male patients, Freud discovered delusional jealousy. This jealousy operates as a mechanism that is aimed at repressing homosexual tendencies and unfaithfulness among men. According to Freud, it usually appears in addition to the first and second layers of jealousy he noted, that is, competitive or normal and projectional. Delusional jealousy could be described by the following formula: “It is not I who loves the man, she loves him,”12 referring to another man the male subject desires. In other words, the subject’s denial of his own homosexual love toward another man culminates in a delusion that his wife is in love with another man or cheating on him with another.13 Freud states that it occurs just the same among women: “It is no I who love the women- he loves them. The jealous woman suspects her husband in relation to all the women by whom she is herself attracted owing to homosexuality and the dispositional effect of her excessive narcissism.”14 This homosexuality is an effect of the woman’s own interest in her sexuality (that Freud related to here as narcissism), which was described in the previous chapter.

 Ibid.  Ibid., 64. 13  Freud (1923). 14  Freud (1958), 64. 11 12

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Therefore, in both men and women, delusional jealousy has to do with a repressed interest in femininity, whether homosexual or not. But, what arrives first, jealousy or homosexual tendencies? It is interesting that in his article about jealousy among men, Freud attributed these homosexual tendencies of identification with a woman and the passive position to the period I discussed at the book’s beginning, the period before sexual difference is registered, which is characterized by aggressiveness and death wishes directed toward siblings.15 According to Freud, in this period “rivals of the earlier period became the first homosexual love-­ objects.”16 It can be assumed that on this basis, inter alia, developmental psychologist Charlotte Buhler formulated the insight according to which jealousy converts to empathy. In this context, Freud described a case of a homosexual whose mother often praised another boy in his youth and after a short period of intense jealousy, the rival became an object of love. According to Freud, when homosexuality grows out of repressed jealousy, persecutorial paranoia develops. Therefore, Freud situates jealousy or repressed jealousy here as the instigator of homosexuality. In this case, Freud’s patient suffered from paranoia that presented itself through incessant obsessive thoughts about his wife’s infidelity (Freud did not believe the wife had cheated on his patient). Therefore, the reversal begins here by shifting from jealousy of the rival to repressed homosexuality, that is, his love for him, to paranoid-delusional jealousy in an imaginary love triangle. At the article’s ending, Freud declared the discovery of this new type of homosexuality. This type involves an identification with the feminine position as explained. The men analyzed by Freud are not necessarily homosexuals per se, yet they manifest homosexual tendencies that are suppressed due to unresolved jealousy of the first period. The “earlier period” mentioned by Freud in the above quote is the pre-Oedipal period in the life of women. In men, as well as in women, this is also the period of rivalry between siblings, between myself and my undistinguished imago, where the partial drives of primary narcissism reign.

15 16

 Ibid.  Ibid., 9.

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Little Hans’ Solution for Feminine Jealousy The case of Little Hans and its analysis by Freud, Lacan, and Montrelay sheds more light on the dialectical reversals of jealousy in the life of a male subject. In the case of Little Hans, a four-year-old boy whose father was a student of Freud and has decided to bring him to analysis, there is an indication for how the boy found a solution to his feminine jealousy, which was based on repressed homosexual feelings. The solution was to access his femininity, as will now be elaborated. Freud did not formulate Hans’ solution this way, yet from his meticulous writing on the case and the analysis provided by Lacan and Montrelay, some valuable knowledge about dealings with archaic jealousy can be extracted. The analysis that Freud performed on Hans was mediated through Hans’ father and in correspondence with him, whereas Freud only met Hans few times. Little Hans from Vienna developed a phobia of horses and did not agree to stay or walk near horses (which, at the time, served as a common means of transportation). This phobia had developed after several events that occurred in Hans’ life: an experience of unwanted erections; a threat made by his mother not to play with his “widdler” so that the doctor will not come and take it away from him; the birth of his sister, and around the same time an awakening of greater curiosity about female genitalia, accompanied by questions about the arrival of children into the world.17 When Hans saw a horse, he was interested in its genitalia and asked his mother about her own genitals. His mother did not tell Hans that women do not have a penis (Freud suggested to the father to clarify it for Hans), and Hans declared that his mother has a penis as big as the horse’s. Hans’ parents did not provide him with answers to his questions about sexuality. They evaded his questions about how children come into the world and fed him with stories about storks. In response, Hans wanted the stork to take back his baby sister. In several events, Hans played a game with other children in a stroller, in which they were his children.

 Freud (1955).

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For Freud, Hans’ case confirms his invention of the Oedipus complex and his theories on sexuality in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. According to Freud, Hans presented a panic from his father and a fear of castration, but unlike Lacan and Montrelay, he did not consider that Hans’ father had a rather pleasant and not particularly threatening personality. Lacan illustrated that Hans’ father was unable to situate a barrier between Hans and his mother so as to create the necessary separation, when the mother enjoys her child in her bed without limits.18 According to Lacan, Hans’ phantasy about the plumber who will come to replace the organ makes it possible to convert the continuous movement of the real into a symbolic replacement.19 Other than the validation of the castration complex, Hans’ case contains many insights into jealousy and feminine sexuality in biological men. Michèle Montrelay’s analysis of the case of Little Hans provides another input about the relationship between jealousy, homosexual love, and feminine identification among men. Reading the case alongside Lacan’s analysis of it, Montrelay recognized that the solution that helped Hans soothe his anxiety was the separation from his mother that was made possible by his phantasies. Hans’ phantasies, declares Montrelay, serve him as an instrument that aids him in dealing with his phobia. Hans’ first phantasy is a reaction to his fear of being drowned in the bath; Hans fantasized about a bath being unplugged and based in his belly.20 The phantasy is described by Hans as follows: “I was in the bath, and then the plumber came and unscrewed it. Then he took a big borer and stuck it in my stomach.”21 The bath here is the mother’s uterus, as Freud discerns.22 It is a symbol of femininity that frightens Hans because it involves the lack, attributed to castration, which is not yet or just in the process of becoming symbolized at this time of Hans’ life. According to Montrelay,

 Lacan (2020).  Ibid. 20  Montrelay (1994). 21  Freud (1955), 65. 22  Ibid. 18 19

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in this phantasy the maternal body, long before the ‘widdler,’ becomes a mobile object that can be unscrewed, dismantled, and carried away, to be repaired, as Freud specified. Here we see the dangerous, huge container, worked on by a handyman who dismantles it without incurring harm or danger; the proof, says Lacan, that the mother is then the object of the work of symbolization.23

The plumber phantasies enable Hans to symbolize both feminine and masculine genitalia so as to convert them into signifiers, the “bath” and the “bore.” This way, separation from the mother, who becomes a detachable object, is made possible. After Lacan’s later conceptualizations of feminine jouissance, it can be said that the symbolic enables Hans to position a certain limit to the infinity of feminine jouissance, evidently related to the mother’s enjoyment. This is strengthened by the second part of the phantasy, where a plumber unscrews Hans’s organ and provides him with another.24 Montrelay directs the readers’ attention to the fact that in this phantasy, Hans’ belly is being penetrated by the organ that is given to him from the plumber, in the bellybutton which is non-other than a hole.25 By becoming female, or “accepting” the feminine, passive position of the one being penetrated, Hans is able to conquer his phobia. In this way, Hans’ identification with femininity enables him to also cope with his jealousy of his little sister, and introduces a new separation from the mother. Montrelay discerns that by dismantling the bath, the femininity of Hans’ mother becomes masculine, “phallic,” “fitted up,”26 and thus less threatening, but at the same time, by the second part of the phantasy, that of being “bored” by the plumber, Hans is fixated entirely in the position of a woman. The plumber in this scenario is the ideal lover, a prolongation of the father. For Montrelay, Hans’ love for his father renders the father an even more intensive object of rivalry and death wishes. This stage of homosexuality of the boy that Montrelay designated through the case of Little Hans works in tandem with Freud’s analysis of  Montrelay (1994), 218.  Freud (1955). 25  Montrelay (1994). 26  Ibid., 221. 23 24

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what he calls “delusional jealousy,” in which the jealousy for a woman veils latent homosexual feelings toward a man, which are themselves a reversal of jealousy. The more femininity is repressed by a man or the more a man suppresses his jealousy or his homosexual feelings that his jealousy attempts to veil, so will his jealousy present itself in the register of the real, as an uncontrollable impulse. The same line of thought is noticeable in Montrelay’s statement that a man who does not have a positive relationship with his mother’s body in his infancy, will grow to be pathologically jealous.27 In conclusion, Freud’s analysis of jealousy among men as concealing repressed homosexuality indicates the existence of feminine jealousy in male subjects and contributes to its understanding. Montrelay’s analysis of the case of Little Hans provides a new perspective about feminine identification in the case of feminine jealousy among men by illustrating that it is not the strong and threatening character of the father that facilitates the child’s separation from his mother as a solution to his jealousy, but rather his identification with the mother.28 The identification with the mother enables the subject to become separated from her, that is, by becoming more feminine than her, so as to step outside of his narcissistic, jealous, Oedipal wound. These notes about the link between homosexual phantasies and feminine jealousy display a difference in the manner male subjects react to jealousy, but also a similarity in the fact that what is at stake in feminine jealousy for male and female subjects alike is essentially the same thing, that is, separation from the mother.

Works Cited Freud, S. (1923). Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4, 1–10. Freud, S. (1950). Female Sexuality. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (1927–1931): The Future of 27 28

 Montrelay (1977).  Montrelay (1994).

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an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works (J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 221–244). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1955). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909): Two Case Histories: ‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’ (J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 5–152). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1958). Psychoanalytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Schreber). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911[1910]): The Case of Schreber, Paper on Technique and Other Works (J. Strachey, Trans., pp. 4–82). Hogarth Press. Lacan, J. (2020). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV: The Object-Relation (1956–1957) (A. R. Price, Trans. & J.-A. Miller, ed.). Polity Press. Montrelay, M. (1977). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens avec Jeanne Moreau et al (pp. 149–173). Gallimard. Montrelay, M. (1994). Why Did You Tell Me I Love Mommy and That’s Why I’m Frightened When I Love You. American Imago, 51, 213–227.

8 Ravissement and Jealousy Without Pain

Abstract  This chapter studies jealousy by reading Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. It elaborates on the aphorisms “following the other woman” and “assuming one’s body upon oneself,” articulated by Montrelay and Lacan, as possible solutions to feminine jealousy. It tracks down Freud’s elaborations of pain in The Project for Scientific Psychology as an important psychic mechanism that has to do with the registration of memories, and asks, following Montrelay and Duras— what is jealousy without its pain? It then ties together the concept of ravissement, which was developed by Lacan and his followers after Duras’ novel, with jealousy and pain. Keywords  The other woman • Marguerite Duras • Lol Stein • Ravissement • Jealousy • Pain • Jacques Lacan

The Ravishing of Lol Stein: Plot Summary The narrator of Duras’ novel wishes to know all there is to know about Lola Valery Stein. He begins the story from the middle of the investigation he holds about her, telling us, the readers, what information he © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_8

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managed to draw until now.1 Later in the story, the readers find out that he is also a character in the story named Jacques Hold. One of the first things Hold discovers about Lol is that there is something missing in Lol, Lol has a hole, and her story is full of holes as well: Lol was never really there, as her friend Tatiana testifies.2 This missing something, we are told right at the plot’s beginning, has to do with Lol’s inability to feel pain. Tatiana said she had never even seen a tear on Lol’s eye: she thinks that what is missing from Lol has to do with emotions, a flaw in Lol’s heart.3 Soon, it is clarified that Hold’s inquiry is the result of his surging infatuation with Lol and her mysterious character. Hold continues to unravel Lol and the tale by providing the readers details about Lol’s history: at the age of nineteen, Lol was engaged to Michael Richardson and the couple attended a ball at the Town Beach Casino in S. Tahla when suddenly, an older woman entered the room, along with her daughter. From the moment they entered, everything changed. Michael Richardson was captivated by the older woman, who is named Anne-Marie Stretter and spent the entire night dancing with her. Initially, he dances with her with Lol’s approval, but as the night proceeds, he seems to have forgotten all about Lol. Throughout the night, Lol stays motionless by the plants (the place where she stood when Michael Richardson first asked the other woman to dance) next to her good friend Tatiana Karl, who does not leave her side the entire night. The couple dances all night long, even after the band stops playing. It is only when dawn breaks, and Lol’s mother enters the room, that their dance ceases. Then, Lol starts screaming; she yells to Michael Richardson that the hour is wrong, that there is still time, but the lovers escape, and Lol is forcefully dragged outside the ballroom.4 During the months that follow the night of the ball, Lol falls into madness; she keeps repeating the same words: that the hour was wrong, that there was still time... She occasionally cries, repeating her name, Lola Valery Stein. During these months, Lol does not leave her mother’s house, and she is annoyed about her inability to find a single word to describe  Duras (1964).  Ibid. 3  Ibid. 4  Ibid. 1 2

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what she feels.5 After a while, she starts taking walks, during one of which, she meets the man who would become her husband. The new couple leaves the town of S. Tahla, according to the wish of Lol’s mother. Ten years later, Lol returns to her hometown of S. Tahla alongside her husband. Her mother has died in the meantime, and Lol moves to her old house. She starts taking walks, and in one of them, she follows the footsteps of a stranger who reminds her of her ex-fiancé. She tails him until they reach the hôtel du bois, a hotel in the woods, where he meets none other than her old friend Tatiana Karl. This man turns out to be Jacques Hold, Tatiana’s lover and the novel’s narrator, who suddenly enters the plot that he recounts as one of its characters, switching the novel’s narration style from that of a detached, omniscient, extradiegetic observer to diegetic, first-person narrator. After he sees the lovers make love in the hotel room, Lol reconnects with Tatiana and at the same time, starts a non-physical affair with Hold. She forces him to continue his meetings with Tatiana at the hotel, while she is lying outside in a field of rye, watching them through the window of their room having intercourse. Hold craves Lol, who urges him to stay with Tatiana. He is eager to consummate his relations with Lol, and they plan a trip to Town Beach, the town of the infamous ball. However, when Lol remains alone with Hold at a hotel room in Town Beach, after visiting the old ballroom, her mind/body disentangles; she asks Hold to call her by her name, Tatiana Karl.6

An Analysis of Lol’s Case The Ravishing of Lol Stein had received many interpretations from psychoanalysts, including Jacques Lacan and Michèle Montrelay. My analysis is based on their interpretation, emphasizing jealousy and what can be learned from it regarding Lol.

 Ibid.  Ibid.

5 6

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Lol is vague, flimsy, too slim to grasp, as if she does not really exist. In Lacan’s twelfth seminar, Critical Problems for Psychoanalysis,7 Montrelay offered a unique analysis of The Ravishing of Lol Stein, later edited and published in her book.8 There, she underscores that Lol’s body and mind do not connect, do not make a tie, and yet the ball in Town Beach is the only place where Lol exists, body and mind together, as Duras writes.9 According to Montrelay’s reading, there, at the ball, Lol functions as an object that provides “space, pause”10 and break to the new couple that is formed under her eyes. During the ball, Lol allows her fiancé to dance with an-other woman, and she watches them all night, holding them together with her gaze in a threefold relationship.11 According to Montrelay, it is Lol who enables the lovers to form a couple during this ball, and the threesome she creates functions for her as a body.12 Following Montrelay, Lacan also explored this captivating story, which ravished him, as he testified in a special article he dedicated to it. Lacan finds that Lol creates at the scene of the ball a knot composed of three components, in which Lol is the object of the ternary.13 Lacan’s knots were further elaborated in his twenty-third seminar, Le Sinthome. There, Lacan reticulated the structure of the psyche in topological terms, namely as a Borromean knot of three registers: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.14 The Borromean knot is each subject’s symptom, a unique tying of the three registers, which is also the subject’s relation to the Name-of-the-Father, his equivocal per-version (pèrversion). Without the Name-of-the-Father, which is another name for castration, the three rings in the Borromean knot untie, creating chaos, a dismantling of the body and a void in the psyche. The subject will then have to find a solution to write this void by using knots,15 that is, when  Lacan (2002).  Montrelay (1977). 9  Duras (1964); Montrelay (1977). 10  Montrelay (1977), 19 (translation mine). 11  Duras (1964). 12  Montrelay (1977). 13  Lacan (1965). 14  Lacan (2016). 15  Ibid. 7 8

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the Name-of-the-Father does not operate, the subject has to create his symptom or rather his sinthome, as Lacan renames the invented symptom of the subject. The knot is the way of the psychotic subject to retrieve his own body to himself, which is currently under risk of explosion and which does not hold.16 In the ball, the knot provides Lol with a body, a body that functions as the center of the knot she has created.17 It means that the threesomes in the story, both during the ball and Jacques Hold and Tatiana in the woods function for Lol as a type of sinthome. During the hours of the ball, the walls of the casino safeguard the lovers, and together with Lol, they represent the structure, the body that surrounds Lol and holds her together. Montrelay points out that Duras repeatedly constructs walls in her books, for example in The Lover (L’Amant) and in The Sea Wall (Un barrage contre le Pacifique) to protect herself against la mèr-e.18 In The Lover, as well as in her other autobiographical novels, Duras describes how her mother purchased rice fields that everybody knew were prone to floods by the river. They planned to fight the gushing current of the river with barricades, but these did not work, and the family lost everything they had. A possible reading would be that the gushing river and the sea represent in Duras’ books the jouissance of the mother, feminine jouissance that is too much alive in ravage, and is infinite, overflooding the system. In The Ravishing, the walls hold Lol together as part of the ternary, separate her from feminine jouissance that is coming from the other, protecting her from devastating jealousy. The knot that Lol creates with the lovers at the ball is “retying itself there”19 a decade later with the novel’s narrator, Jacques Hold, and her old high school friend Tatiana Karl. Like Holden Caulfield, Hold and Tatiana are Lol’s catchers in the rye, as this new threesome provides Lol with another body to enjoy when she is lying in the rye field, watching them having sex through the window frame. Lol enjoys in her ravissement when she watches the couple make love at the hotel room and when the couple dances at the ball.  Miller et al. (1999).  Lacan (1965). 18  Montrelay (1977). 19  Lacan (1965), 8. 16 17

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At the story’s ending, without the other woman to hold her body or her pain, Lol breaks into pieces. When Lol is left alone with Hold in bed at a Town Beach hotel, the knot of three untangles again. Lol remains alone with the pain of the real of (non)separation from the Other woman. Lacan quotes poet Guillaume Apollinaire in reference to Lol: “je me deux [d’être tout seul],”20 as she renders herself two in this last scene by asking Hold to call her Tatiana Karl.21 Once the room closes down on Jacques Hold and Lol, Lol cannot face the “nakedness”22 of her body, she makes herself deux, which comes from douloir, douleur in ancient French, of being alone. Thus, in this final scene, Lol uses the double to treat this error of her knot; she imagines herself as both Tatiana and Lol, as she cannot survive without the covering of the other woman. What exactly is this ravissement the story circles around? As I described above, Lol enjoys in the threesomes she creates, and as long as the other woman is there, she does not feel jealousy. But is she really not jealous?

 avissement, Nothingness and Being as Close R as Possible to das Ding Marguerite Duras referred to The Ravishing of Lol Stein as moments of her “delirium.”23 Through Duras’ delirium, we can learn about jealousy in subjects whose body is not completely there, whose mirror image is missing, like the character of Lol who is described as not really being “there.” The unique writing and perspective of Duras teach about jealousy from the position of the subject whose body is disintegrated, whose sense of self is fractured, and who carries a void in the psyche. The emptiness of Lol reflects ravissement. How would you describe a word that describes nothingness? Through Montrelay and Lacan, The Ravishing of Lol Stein introduced a new signifier into the theory of  Qtd. In Lacan (1965), 8.  Duras (1964). 22  Lacan (1965), 10 (translation mine). 23  Qtd. in Montrelay (1996), 37. 20 21

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psychoanalysis. In his “Homage” to Duras, Lacan reminds his readers that the effect of beauty on the soul that is as close to das Ding has a relation to ravissement.24 Das Ding or the Thing can be interpreted in multiple ways. It is, for example, the mother’s penis, the ultimate lost object that was never really there and that cannot be attained. According to Lacan, the Thing is “that which in the real suffers from the signifier,” 25 something that is unrepresentable, represented in art as emptiness. Pain, the unsayable word Lol cannot find, and Duras’ writing, are involved in what Lacan calls, following Freud, das Ding. Francois Peraldi, a French- Canadian psychoanalyst who was Lacan’s student, designated Anne-Marie Stretter as a ”living metaphor” 26 of das Ding, a stranger, a piece of the real, to which Duras’ writing strives. Das Ding is what answers the most primal need. It is the mythic body of the mother, the “most archaic of objects” 27 to which the subject is attached. It is also the locus of real satisfaction, and it “will never be found again” but is sought nonetheless.28 The pleasure principle is designed to circle around the Thing while maintaining a safe distance from it.29 Pain serves the pleasure principle as a limit that protects the subject from too much excitations, thus regulating the quantity of libido in the psyche. Lacan draws our attention that this field of pain “opens precisely onto that limit where a living being has no possibility of escape.” 30 However, reading the tragedy of Antigone, Lacan finds another limit, a limit that protects the subject from absolute destruction in front of radical desire, which Biberman and Sharon-Zisser articulate as : “an effect of splendor that is the effect of beauty of the character Antigone.”31 However, this splendor, the writers argue, is “generated[…] also from an encounter […], with the unrepresentable hole of

 Lacan (1965).  Lacan (1992), 129. 26  Peraldi (1990), 20. 27  Lacan (1992), 106. 28  Ibid., 52. 29  Ibid. 30  Ibid., 60. 31  Biberman and Zisser-Sharon (2017), 94. 24 25

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the lost object or Thing. ”32 According to French psychoanalyst Éric Laurent, Lacan situates ravissement in a place of misery: the place where Antigone stood, crossing the limit of beauty, without any identifications, when she insisted on burying her brother in violation of the law of the state.33 Ravissement, therefore, is beyond two limits: the limit of the pleasure principle and the limit of beauty. It is a sort of misery that is the result of crossing all boundaries and being close to the devastating Thing, which is also the closest possible relation to desire. In “Homage,” however, Lacan wrote about the woman who ravishes as someone who is “exiled” from things.34 This exile is related to the emptiness of the self, which is also the emptiness that Lol experiences. Psychoanalyst Marie-Hélène Brousse stated that ravissement is what cannot be spoken, an emptiness of the body that “seeks to write itself. ”35 This ravissement, the emptiness of the body, is what happens to Lol in the locus in which we would assume to find jealousy, that is, when the limit of pain, which is also a part of jealousy, as will be described, does not exist. There, Lol crosses the limit of beauty so as to arrive in the realm of ravissement.

Jealousy and Pain: Lol’s Deflection Montrelay describes the feeling of jealousy, based on her experience with her patients, as a moment in which the soul is torn from the body. The “jointer”36 between body and soul does not function, in a horrible sensation of the woman (or man) who feels dismembered, “disjointed.” 37 This is reminiscent of the description of Lol as someone whose being is missing from her. 38 According to Montrelay, when the man’s gaze is turned to  Ibid.  Laurent (2017). 34  Lacan (1965), 7 (translation mine). 35  Brousse (2010), 2–3. 36  Montrelay (1996), 34 (translation mine). 37  Ibid. 38  Duras (1964). 32 33

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another, a woman’s desire is lifted from her, leaving her feeling empty up to the point of not even producing the pain of jealousy. In that case, jealousy is not felt: it is outside of her, as Lol depicted.39 At the ball, Lol is rapped by feminine jouissance as an effect of her painless jealousy, a jealousy without a body to feel it, which is why she uses the body of Anne-Marie Stretter to protect herself from such affect. However, the manner in which Lol uses the body of the other woman does not permit her to rebuild herself anew, as she does not feel the necessary pain of jealousy. Jacques Hold wishes to love “tout Lol,” 40 (all of Lol), only Lol has a hole, as Tatiana Karl describes, one which is related to her inability to feel pain and her being not being entirely there.41 Feminine jealousy, this devastating affect situated at the heart of feminine jouissance, ravishes the body of a woman, and makes her feel empty, disjointed, and disconnected. This experience is depicted in The Ravishing after the ball, once the couple leaves the room. During the ball, Lol watches how her fiancée changes under the influence of the stranger with whom he dances, yet until dawn, which brings her mother along, she does not move, does not talk, and does not suffer: La nuit avançant, il paraissait que les chances qu’aurait eues Lol de souffrir s’étaient encore raréfiées, que la souffrance n’avait pas trouvé en elle ou se glisser, qu’elle avait oublié la vielle algèbre des peines d’amour.42

In the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud found that the “failure”43 of the neuronal system results in pain that is inscribed in the psyche. According to his research, when there is an excess of neuronal quantity (Q), they turn phi neurons (ɸ) to permeable and reach the psyche, where they register pain as unconscious memory representations, what Freud calls “Vurstellungsrerasentanz. ”44 Freud describes pain as a limit to the  Montrelay (1977).  Duras (1964), 12. 41  Ibid. 42  Duras (1964), 12. 43  Freud (1966), 368. 44  Ibid. 39 40

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increasing degree of excitation that arrives from the outside world.45 According to Lacan, physical movement works together with the pleasure principle to reach homeostasis.46 Through movement, the body can discharge libido, the excess psychical energy (neurons) that was accumulated in the system. However, excitation in the system can also come from within the subject. Then, movement will not be of help, and pain will thrive.47 During the hour of the ball, Lol does not move and does not feel pain. But when the scene alternates, when the couple escapes and dawn breaks, Lol screams and falls to the ground. According to Montrelay, there are “white stripes of shores of insensitivity in Duras’s novel, of Lol’s inability to suffer.”48 The white stripe is at the center of pain, a pain that Lol cannot experience. The thought of Lol’s inability to suffer as white shores of insensibility provokes the idea of sand that no line can draw on, sand that is washed up with water and wind. Pain is registered in the psyche during an event that raises “excitation,” that is, a traumatic event with an excess of libido that floods the system and does not receive registration in the form of unconscious representations. Lol represents oblivion both during the ball, and a decade later, when she is lying in the rye field, watching Tatiana Karl and Jacques Hold doing their deeds. In ravissement, there is no registration of the pain of jealousy: it is forgotten, erased, forclosed. Montrelay states that pain is what situates a limit to feminine jealousy: “It is a diabolic limit, but a limit nonetheless,” which does not operate for Lol.49 The one who is not entirely there is not jealous at the same way we understand and experience jealousy: Lol knows only half of the movement of jealousy, which means that she experiences jealousy without feeling the stinging pain of it.50 Pain is what lifts the anchors of the jealous subject and enables her to become mad.51 Pain enables psychical movement, if the external change is not possible. Lol is ravished, enraptured in  Ibid.  Lacan (1992). 47  Ibid. 48  Montrelay (1977), 13 (translation mine). 49  Ibid. (translation mine). 50  Ibid. 51  Ibid. 45 46

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her jealousy, as pain does not function for her, and its limits do not contain her jealousy. This ravissement is depicted in the narrator’s description of Lol’s thoughts, how she enjoys the vanishment of her body that occurs upon the turning of the man’s gaze to the other woman.52 Being completely consumed in jealousy, without the limit of pain, Lol cannot hold herself together. Lol needs the gaze to sustain her body, and when that gaze disappears, she draws it back by assimilating with the other woman, the one who is being looked at. The more Michael Richardson is hypnotized by the other woman, the more Lol vanishes in her jealouissance and ravissement. Anne-Marie Stretter functioned for Lol during the ball as a body that held her together, yet Lol does not manage to construct herself through her desire, that is, through the other woman’s desire. Rather, she becomes a parasite to a body that is not hers. After the ball, even though pain is still not quite there for Lol during those months in which she does not leave her mother’s house, there are signs of it: “La prostration de Lol, dit-on, fut alors marquée par des signes de souffrance. Mais qu’est-ce à dire qu’une souffrance sans sujet?”53 Lol is manifesting signs of suffering, of pain. It is somewhere there, but it is “sans sujet,” without a subject to hold it together. Duras asks her readers a peculiar question, probably not without a relation to her own subjective experience: what is pain without a subject? The effects of the confused image we have of our body, and the fact we talk about our body as something that we possess, is the explanation Lacan gives to the apathy Joyce describes in his novel, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, while being attacked by his classmates; it is as if his body is not his own.54 This is the same way Mary Gower treats her body after its transformation. This description is also similar to the suffering of Lol, a suffering that remains without a subject. There is something in the psyche that reacts to the event, but this something remains under the possibility of the relationship to one’s body as foreign.55 It is as if suffering here is foreclosed, the term Lacan uses to describe the psychical rejection  Duras (1964).  Ibid., 23. 54  Lacan (2016). 55  Ibid. 52 53

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of an affect, which, in legal jargon, also implies a foreclosure of property, that is, in this situation one has an asset in one’s ownership which is unusable because of a certain debt. In this metaphor, the psychotic cannot use his body as his own: he has it, but not really, because he did not pay his debt to castration, the debt that requires a consent to lose something, and therefore, his body is foreclosed. In conclusion, Lol’s jealousy is feminine jealousy that goes beyond the pleasure principle. Lol does not feel the pain of jealousy, and therefore does not fight or resist the presence of the other woman (Anne-Marie Stretter or Tatiana Karl), but assimilates into her body, delights in it, and devours it with her gaze. During the ball, Lol is a woman whose lover abandons her for another, but the pain expresses signs only afterwards, when jealousy leaves Lol bedridden in her mother’s house and drains her of her desire to live. As soon as her fiancé’s gaze was turned from her to the other woman, Lol’s body and body were pulled away from her. Her emptiness, which was there all along, is the emptiness of her body, the hole in the imaginary and the symbolic that renders her inability to experience pain, pain that is necessary for her to be able to get out of bed and fight for her being by following the Other’s desire.

Duras’ Pain: Melancholic Jealousy What is this pain that Lol does not experience that takes away from her being? Perhaps it is the pain that is entailed in the loss of satisfaction, which the subject experiences in castration. Castration, lack, is what enables the subject to desire, yet it does not come without pain. Marguerite Duras herself has a complicated relationship with pain, douleur, which comes from the hour, du l’heure. In the dedication of La Douleur, Duras pronounced that it is one of the most important things in her life: “Le Douleur est une des choses les plus importantes de ma vie. Le mot écrit; ne conviendrait pas.”56 The written word, or writing, says Duras, does not capture pain. What is this pain that occupies Duras so badly in her writing, which does not occupy her character at all? La Douleur was  Duras (1985), 10.

56

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written by Duras while she was waiting for her husband, who was seized by the Nazis and sent to Dachau, to come back from the war. The extraordinary thing about this book, which Duras confesses in its prologue, is that she does not remember writing it: Je sais que je l’ai fait, que c’est moi qui l’ai écrit, je reconnais mon écriture et le détail de ce que je raconte … Mais je ne me vois pas écrivant ce journal. Quand l’aurais-je écrit, en quelle année, à quelles heures du jour, dans quelle maison? Je ne sais plus rien.57

Like in the case of Lol, there is a pain that is not registered for Duras, something that is forgotten, which transforms pain to one of the most important things in Duras’ life. There is a difference between Duras’ relation to pain and that of her fictional character, Lol: Lol does not remember exactly what happened at the night of the ball, except having a faint recollection about not suffering. Duras called her book, a book that was written in an hour of great pain, “Douleur,” yet she does not remember writing it. In her writing, Duras writes what is not entirely registered in her psyche. Even though she does not remember that she wrote the book, the book has been written nonetheless, and Duras describes its writing in a manner that is reminiscent of Freud’s description of the effect of pain on the psyche, like “a stroke of lightening.”58 Throughout the night of the ball in its entirety, Lol does not suffer. When does she fall apart? When her mother arrives and interrupts her bodily attachment to the dancing couple. The night ends when dawn arises, and Lol’s mother comes to take her.59 In this act, Lol’s mother erects a new wall between Lol and the lovers, a wall that replaces that of the casino. The mother interrupts the threefold phantasm, the knot that Lol creates, which keeps her together. Lol resists this interruption. She drops this wall forcefully to the floor, but something stops, and suddenly, she screams: “Lol cria pour la première fois…. Lol avait crié sans discontinuer des choses sensées: il n’était pas tard, l’heure d’été trompait.” 60  Ibid.  Freud (1966), 368. 59  Duras (1964). 60  Ibid., 22. 57 58

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Like a baby that comes out of the womb, Lol screams for the first time, manifesting the first sign of pain—and of life. In another Durasian work, mentioned by Danielle Bajomée in Duras ou la douleur, Duras talks about pain as the birth of an infant: L’accouchement, je le vois comme une culpabilité. Plus proche de l’assassinat, ce sont des accouchements. La sortie de l’enfant qui dort. C’est la vie qui dort, complètement, dans une béatitude incroyable, et qui se réveille. Le premier signe de vie, c’est le hurlement de douleur.61

In this text, Duras draws the connection between the pain of death, assassination and birth, the separation from the mother, and the first sign of life. At birth, the baby is separated from his mother. The first sign of life is the baby’s scream of pain when he comes out from the womb, which Freud termed  Nos des Lebens. The pain of life is inherent to the pain of separation between the flesh of the baby and that of the mother. The mother gives away a part of her own body at birth, and the baby must survive for the first time with a body of his own, without an exterior shield. Both the mother and the baby must cope with their new body after birth, and the pain of becoming two bodies out of one. The scream that Lol cries out when the couple leaves the room is heard like the scream of the child who cries for the first time when she is physically separated from her mother. This is the scream of the separation from das Ding. Ironically, it occurs in the story when the mother walks in, marking that separation. Understanding the pain with which Duras coped and Lol did not feel as the pain of the separation from the mother, clarifies what can situate a limit to feminine jealousy, namely separation from the mother. This separation is made possible by following one’s desire through the other woman, while marking the limits of one’s own body, tying a Borromean knot that replaces the Name-of-the-Father that is lacking for the psychotic, and which does not fully operate for the neurotic. The subject’s desire is registered in the unconscious, and by articulating it in analysis it provides the subject with an opportunity to create for herself an  Bajomée (1989), 11.

61

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identifiable body. It is a body that is assembled of desire and whose components also came to her from the Other. It is a body with limits that separate one from the Other and from the mother. French psychoanalyst Miren Arambourou reads the mother’s entrance into the ballroom in The Ravishing of Lol Stein as what evokes the reworking of separation, of weaning, which she attributes to the Oedipus complex.62 She designates Anne-Marie Stretter and Tatiana Karl as Lol’s semblables, in a narcissistic world that does not contain others. Recalling the instances of jealousy which I detected in Lacan’s Complexes Familiaux, the semblable, whether it is an image or a peer, enhances jealousy, desire, and competition. During the hour of the ball Lol does not manage to “kill” 63 her semblable, her rival, in the competition that is at play in feminine jealousy, as she is not able to feel the pain of separation from her mother, which is also a consent to the loss of satisfaction. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud discerned between the healthy process of mourning, during which the subject conjures up the memories of the person or thing lost, and melancholia, in which a person “swallows” 64 the person that was lost in his ego, refusing to relinquish them, entering a depressive and melancholic state. In “Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality,” Freud equates the process of so-called healthy jealousy with the process of mourning, as opposed to the type of jealousy that he calls “jealousy paranoia.”65 Lol’s behavior after the ball can be read as a sort of melancholy, or melancholic jealousy, one which is related to her inability to let go, to separate. The process of mourning is a process that involves pain. The one who cannot feel the pain of losing the other, cannot really mourn and remains melancholic. Feminine jealousy is a jealousy that is prior to the separation from the subject’s first love object, the mother, and thus it does not follow the logic of castration, of losing, and of mourning. Therefore, we learn from both Freud and Lol that feminine jealousy has a melancholic nature.

 Arambourou (1996).  Ibid., 83 (translation mine). 64  Freud (1964), 246. 65  Freud (1923), 1. 62 63

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Works Cited Arambourou, M. (1996). Arrêt sur image. In C. Maillet et al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi? Series no. 6: Revue du Cercle Freudien. L’Harmattan. Bajomée, D. (1989). Duras ou la douleur. Éditions Universitaires. Biberman, E., & Zisser-Sharon, S. (2017). Art, Death and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge. Brousse, Marie-Hélène. (2010). Feminine Know-How with Relationship: The Three Rs: Ruse, Ravage, Ravishing. In NLS-Messager 669, Congres NLS VIII, Geneva (H.  Chamberlain, Trans.). AMP-NLS.  Retrieved June 15, 2023, from https://amp-­nls.org/nlsmessager/2009/669.html Duras, M. (1964). Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Gallimard. Duras, M. (1985). La Douleur. P.O.L. Freud, S. (1923). Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4, 1–10. Freud, S. (1964). Mourning and Melancholia. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud XIV (1914–1916):: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (James Stratchey et al., Trans.). Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1966). Project for a Scientific Psychology. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud I (1886–1899) (James Stratchey et al., Trans.). Hogarth Press. Lacan, J. (1965). Homage fait à Marguerite Duras. In Cahiers Renauld-Berrault December (pp. 7–13). Gallimard. Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960) (Dennis Porter, Trans. & Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2002). The Seminar, Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1964–1965) (Cormac Gallagher, Trans.). Karnac. Lacan, J. (2016). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome (1975–1976) (Adrian Price, Trans. & Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Cambridge: Polity Press. Laurent, E. (2017). A Sophism of Courtly Love. In The Symptom 17. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from www.lacan.com/symptom17-­sophism.html Miller, J.-A., et  al. (1999). La psychose ordinaire, la convention d’Antibes. Agalma-Seuil.

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Montrelay, M. (1977). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit. Montrelay, M. (1996). La Jalousie: Un branchement direct sur l’inconscient. In C.  Maillet et  al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi? Series ni. 6 Revue du Cercle Freudien. L’Harmattan. Peraldi, F. (1990). The Passion of Death: A Free Associative Reading of Freud and Marguerite Duras. In L’Esprit Créateur, 30(1), 19–27.

9 The Lover: The Writing of Feminine Jealousy

Abstract  In this final chapter the author turns to Marguerite Duras’ novel, The Lover. Through its unique narration, The Lover chronicles the story of a young Duras in the eyes of Duras the writer, creating a split in the subject that allows her to follow her other femininity—through writing. This chapter suggests that through writing The Lover, Duras managed to find a solution to her feminine jealousy, namely by expressing something of the unwritten of jealousy and producing a phallic third, creating thus a separation between her and her mother, the original object of feminine jealousy in the subject’s life. This reading is made possible, inter alia, through a comparison between certain motifs, scenes, and characters that repeat in The Ravishing of Lol Stein and The Lover. This chapter suggests in its conclusion that art and creation may serve for certain subjects as a solution for the destruction and emptiness of jealousy and ravissement, one that fills the subject with desire. Keywords  Marguerite Duras • The Lover • Feminine jealousy • Ravage • Separation • Femininity • Writing

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3_9

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The Lover: Introduction The Lover, written almost two decades after Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, is an autobiographical novel in which Duras unfolds her adolescent years as a white girl in the French colony of Vietnam. The story is told from the viewpoint of adult Duras, 1 who narrates the story of young Duras, referred to as “elle” or “la petite.” Elle, young Duras, is a fifteen-year-old girl who is abused by her brother and mother, falling in love with a young, rich Chinese man. The affair, socially “forbidden” because of age, social and racial differences between the couple, brings some new wealth into the family that turned poor after the death of the father and some poor financial decisions of the mother. The Lover was written nearly twenty years after The Ravishing of Lol Stein and was published by Duras as a work of “autofiction,” that is, a novel that is based on reality but that includes fictional elements as well.2 Duras’ critics said about The Lover that it should be “read as the origin of all the other works,”3 meaning that many of Duras’ works, both fictional and autobiographical, must be compared to it. Author Rachel Kushner wrote an introduction to the new translation of the novel in 2017, in which she mentioned that Duras’ close acquaintances suggested that she had started to confuse reality with fiction when she claimed this book to be her memoir, because it is, in fact, much more of a fairytale-like description of her love affair with a Vietnamese businessman in her adolescent years in the colony. Moreover, some critics discern that works such as “Wartime Notebooks,” written by Duras and published posthumously, reveal the exigencies between truth and imagination in The Lover.4 In psychoanalytic terms, however, Duras’ saying has a precious, subjective value. Similar to feminist, socially oriented critiques of displays of jealousy in literature, many Anglo-American criticisms of The Lover is concerned   In this chapter, when I refer to Marguerite Duras the narrator/writer I use her last name only, and when I refer to young Duras, the character in the novel, I call her young Duras/elle/la petite. 2  Duras was one of the pioneers of this genre (Kushner (2017). 3  Ladimer (2009), 104. 4  Ibid. 1.

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with liberal ideals against colonialism and feminist dogmas that condemn an affair between an adolescent girl and a young man. 5 However, the unique style of Duras’ writing and her candid exploration of her exotic childhood produced many other types of criticisms as well, an abundance of which following the orientation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is partly thanks to Lacan’s rare declaration about Duras that “she knows what I teach without me,”6 a saying that resonated throughout the literary and psychoanalytic worlds. Duras’ texts, as the critic Mary Lydon said, “exert a mesmeric power that is hard to account for, but which this reader would attribute to the privilege Lacan and Duras both accord (the former explicitly, the latter implicitly) to the Freudian unconscious.”7 This saying expresses the notion that Duras’ writing is in close proximity to the writing of the unconscious. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Duras’ writing is so loyal to the writing of the unconscious that it establishes a new kind of pact between literary criticism and psychoanalysis.

“Ma mère mon amour”: The Story of Ravage In The Lover, Duras, using her gentle words, paints the picture of an adolescent girl crossing the Mekong River on a ferry, on the way to meet her lover for the first time. The image that Duras writes throughout the novel is the missing picture from the photo album of her psyche. From all her memories, this image was not written. The novel is thus presented as an answer, a writing of what is not represented in the psyche (the photo album), or rather, presented there as a hole: Ç’est au cours de ce voyage que l’image se serait détachée, qu’elle aurait été à la somme. Elle aurait pu exister, une photographie aurait pu être prise, comme une autre, ailleurs, dans d’autres circonstances. Mais elle ne l’a pas été. L’objet était trop mince pour la provoquer… C’est pourquoi, cette image, et il ne pouvait pas en être autrement, elle n’existe pas. Elle a été omise. Elle a été oubliée. Elle n’a pas été détachée, enlevée à la somme.   For one out of many examples, see the article by Thompson (2016).  Lacan (1965), 12 (translation mine). 7  Lydon (1988), 353. 5. 6

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C'est à ce manque d’avoir été faite qu’elle doit sa vertu, celle de représenter un absolu, d’en être justement l’auteur. 8

A photo could have been taken, Duras writes, but the object was too slim to evoke it. The subject of Duras’ creation is the photo that was not taken. This photo is reminiscent of the indescribable word that repeats throughout Duras’ novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Like the word that is unrepresentable in its essence, like das Ding or the ravissement of feminine jealousy that is described in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, the picture of crossing the Mekong River is a sort of void, a hole, that Duras tries to veil or sow with her writing. For the psychotic subject, and perhaps for other subjects as well, the signifier that marks castration—“P” for phallus, or for “Père,” Father, is missing. The art object comes to supplement this void, the phallus that is foreclosed for the subject who refuses castration.9 In The Lover, Duras’ literary style receives another body, another carved form, in a manner that provided her with a shelter from the ravaging femininity of her mother that dwells in this void that refuses castration. In Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Lol’s ravage is so overwhelming that it denies Lol from having a body of her own, yet in The Lover, Duras delineates the relationship with her mother and its ravage to minutia. Duras describes her mother throughout the novel as sometimes crazy, sometimes terrifying, sometimes cruel, sometimes wise, and impressive, but mostly desperate. The battlefield of the mother-daughter relationship is there right from the novel’s beginning: a man walks over to Duras, in her adulthood, and comments to her that her face has changed. Today, he says, she is “ravaged.”10 The readers discover that after the events told in The Lover, and after young Duras leaves her mother and goes to Paris, Duras gained a new face, and she testifies to keeping it.11 In the original French, Duras describes her new face as “dévaste,”12 devastated, and in the English  Duras (1984), 17.  Miller (1988). 10  Duras (1985), 3. 11  Duras (1984), 9. 12  Ibid. 8 9

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translation of the novel, the word “dévaste” is accurately translated as “ravaged.”13 The devastation, the ruin of Duras’ face, is the result of the mother-daughter ravage, which is entangled in every piece of this love story. Duras’ ruined, perforated face is the consequence of her history; the fact that it is ruined indicates that this is not the story of maturation, but rather the story of re-membering, a work of psychic writing that leaves its mark on the flesh. This act of writing provides Duras with the new face she keeps to herself, which may be perforated but is more beautiful than ever. After describing her new face, Duras starts to talk about her mother. She looks at a family photo in the album and describes her Mother’s neglect, her folly, but most of all, her deep desperation.14 Duras’ mother will accompany her throughout the love affair with the Chinese lover: she will buy her the cloths she wears, ask the caretakers in her boarding school to keep their eyes closed when young Duras does not return to the dorms until early morning, and even undress and spank her daughter to punish her for her promiscuity, which the mother herself advanced.15 When Duras tells her mother that she wants to learn French because she aspires to be a writer, the mother becomes silent: “Jalouse elle est.”16 The gaze is then turned away, the mother’s shoulders are pulled up, not giving much of a response, which is unforgettable for Duras: “Pas de response, un regard bref aussitôt détourne, le petit haussement d’épaules, inoubliable.”17 The jealousy and the aloof gaze that replaces the loving one, are carved in her memory. Soon after, in the other form of ravage, her mother is her lover: “Ma mère mon amour.”18 How does a young girl start an affair with a rich Chinese man? The girl is dressed as a prostitute, says the mother, who lets her dress like that, and who does not protect her from the gazes of older men, but rather encourages it, knowing that this can endow the family with a financial benefit: “Et c’est pour cela aussi que l’enfant sait bien y faire déjà, pour détourner  Duras (1985), 3.  Duras (1984). 15  Ibid. 16  Ibid., 30. 17  Ibid., 30. 18  Ibid., 31. 13 14

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l’attention qu’on lui porte à elle vers celle que, elle, elle porte à l’argent. Ça fait sourire la mère…”:19 The mother’s enjoyment is evident by her smile; she advances the attention seeking of her daughter, because perhaps she can provide for the family in one way or another. After the mother finds out about the forbidden relationship, she is mad; however, if she had believed that the girl only meets him for the money, she would have been satisfied.20 In other words, where ravage inhabits, it is not acceptable for the girl to love anyone, to have a relationship outside of the bounds of the family, unless it is to provide for it. Eventually, the mother gives her implicit consent to the affair, and when the girl invites the mother and brothers to dinners at her lover’s expense, everyone agrees to the relationship. The mother-daughter ravage that is described so feverishly in this story, in which Duras tells of her mother and brothers for the first time, is an act that enables her to separate from her mother, as I will describe. Reading The Lover vis-à-vis The Ravishing of Lol Stein, I find that it is in the former that Duras manages to find a way to symbolize the pain that is not registered in the latter for Lol, the pain of jealousy that is also the pain of ravage. Through her writing, Duras manages to assume upon herself the body of the other woman, of herself as other, which Mary and Lol did not manage to do.

Between The Lover and The Ravishing of Lol: The Creation of a New Knot The Lover was the first time in which Duras wrote about her family, about her meeting with her lover, sustained in the love and secrets they shared with each other for the first time in their lives. Poverty, little Duras tells her lover, is what crushed the walls of her family; the room where they meet to love, talk, and exist, is the room she had been waiting for.21

 Ibid., 32.  Ibid. 21  Ibid. 19 20

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In writing The Lover, Duras recreated the knot of Lol again, the knot that provided Lol with a body in the transient threesomes she created with the other women in the story and the men. Only this time, a different knot is created, one that is comprised of young Duras (elle), her Chinese lover, and Duras herself as narrator and observer. The other woman that was Anne-Marie Stretter or Tatiana Karl in The Ravishing becomes young Duras in The Lover. She is now participating in the sexual act, her and not anyone else. Michael Richardson and Jacques Hold are replaced by the Chinese lover. Lol, who was the onlooker in the two knots, the one who created them and also their center, is now Duras the writer and observer of her young self, the one who performs the sexual act with her Chinese lover. I found several motifs and recurring scenes in The Ravishing that receive an analogous transformation in The Lover, which helped me to reach the conclusion about the new knot that Duras ties in writing The Lover. 1. The black dress of Anne-Marie Stretter and the black hairs of Tatiana Karl in The Ravishing and the black limousine in The Lover In The Ravishing, during the hour of the ball, Lol dresses herself with the black dress of Anne-Marie Stretter. Also, when Lol watches Tatiana and Hold making love, she adorns herself with Tatiana’s black hairs: La nudité de Tatiana déjà nue grandit dans une surexposition qui la prive toujours davantage du moindre sens possible. Le vide est Tatiana nue sous ses cheveux noirs, le fait. Il se transforme, se prodigue, le fait ne contient plus le fait, Tatiana sort d’elle-même, se répand par les fenêtres ouvertes, sur la ville, les routes, boue, liquide, marée de nudité. La voici, Tatiana Karl nue sous ses cheveux, soudain, entre Lol V. Stein et moi. La phrase vient de mourir, je n’entends plus rien, Tatiana est à sa place. Comme un aveugle, je touche, je ne reconnais rien que j’aie déjà touche. Lol attend que je reconnaisse non un accordement a son regard mais que je n’aie plus peur de Tatiana. Je n’ai plus peur. Nous sommes deux, on ce moment, à voir Tatiana nue sous ses cheveux noirs. Je dis en aveugle: ‘Admirable putain, Tatiana’.22

 Duras (1964), 116–7 (emphases mine).

22

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The curls veil the nudity, which is Lol’s void.23 The nudity spreads everywhere, blinding Hold. The blackness of the dress and the curls that are of the other woman (perhaps also related to the darkness of the unexplorable continent of femininity) protect Lol. It works until the story’ ending, until Lol is alone, naked with Hold, losing her mind because she is not able to face the nakedness of her own body.24 Duras manages to conjure again the blackness of femininity with which she adorns herself, in The Lover, when young Duras enters the Chinese lover’s black limousine, after crossing the Mekong. The image starts once she sees him stepping out of the black limousine: “L’image commence bien avant qu’il ait abordé l’enfant blanche près du bastingage, au moment où il est descendu de la limousine noire, quand il a commencé à s’approcher d’elle, et qu’elle, elle le savait, savait qu’il avait peur.”25 Duras writes here in the third person, calling herself “elle” and “l’enfant blanche.” By referring to her young self in this way, Duras creates a separation between herself and the image she paints of herself in her youth, the image of the other woman that is herself. When she enters the limousine, young Duras steps into the dress of an Other femininity, a dress that is a veil for the void. This veil enables her to be both herself and the Other woman at the same time, without needing another person. Also, in this quote, Duras states that she knew from the beginning that the lover feared her young self, while in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Lol knew that Hold no longer fears Tatiana. Apparently, for Duras, fear is an indication of infatuation. By describing the lover’s fear of her young self, in The Lover, Duras situates herself in the feminine position, the position of the other woman, Tatiana, for example. After she knows that the Chinese lover fears her, young Duras goes with him to his bachelor’s apartment, where they make love for the first time. 2. The hotel room in The Ravishing/the bachelor’s apartment in The Lover

 Lacan (1965).  Ibid. 25  Duras (1984), 44 (emphases mine). 23 24

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The love making scene of Tatiana Karl and Jacques Hold in the hotel room is recreated with elle and the Chinese lover in his bachelor’s apartment, where she reveals to him her dark family secrets. Through this scene, Duras renders herself two—only without the other woman, but with the veil of her young self as other, as the other’s desire, creating herself a body. Duras described in detail how the lover undresses young her from her clothes, and how she undresses him.26 The whore, the “putain” that was Tatiana in The Ravishing quoted above is now little Duras. In a scene that is reminiscent of the love making scene of Tatiana and Hold, Duras situates herself as a woman who is the object of a man’s desire and his gaze, doing so by identifying with the whore. In the love making scene in The Lover, Duras is now in the position of the Other woman, the position of her Other femininity, rendering herself two without the other woman but with herself as other, becoming a split subject. 3. Anne-Marie Stretter As the ghost of excess, of surplus feminine jouissance, as das Ding, Anne-Marie Stretter reappears in The Lover, namely when young Duras bids farewell to her Chinese lover, and he becomes impotent due to their breakup. It is when they lay together in bed that suddenly, a paragraph splits open the page; the plot evaporates and the one who is called “La dame,” who can be recognized by her traits from other Durasian tales as Anne-Marie Stretter, emerges in a new paragraph, without any warning: “La Dame on l’applait, elle venait de Savannakhet.”27 After this paragraph, the story of young Duras and the lover continues, but then, once again, Anne-Marie Stretter emerges, this time with another familiar character, the Vice-Consul. 28 This ping-pong between two seemingly unrelated stories continues for several pages. The paragraphs that chronicle the story of “La Dame” in the middle of the story of young Duras have no logical connection to the plot that comes prior to it and that continues thereafter. It is as if another tale is suddenly  Ibid.  Ibid., 105. 28  The Vice-Consul is a character in another novel by Duras entitled Le vice-consul, which describes Anne-Marie Stretter’s life in Calcutta after she and Michael Richardson left S. Tahala. 26 27

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inserted into the story, barging in. In Duras' novella The Vice-­Consul, an unpronounceable, unspeakable word dominates the plot and drives the Vice-Consul crazy.29 The unspeakable word, together with Anne-Marie Stretter tie The Ravishment with The Vice Consul. The two characters emerge in The Lover alongside another character that travels through the pages from one story to another, the beggar. She appears when Duras feels that her mother is disappearing and there is nothing there to occupy her picture anymore.30 The beggar intimidates Duras, chasing her from Savannakhet to Calcutta, Vinh Long and Sa Đéc, but Anne-Marie comes to the rescue. These characters emerge like delirium from a hole that splits open in the middle of the novel, inducing anxiety for the readers. When something does not work in this last bedroom scene, when the knot between Duras, young Duras, and the lover is jeopardized, Anne-Marie Stretter is again conjured up to designate this place which François Peraldi referred to as “the rift of the real.”31 However, she appears only for a moment, as a sort of reminder (or remainder) of the hole that Duras manages to veil via her writing of the novel. Through joint motifs, scenes, signifiers, and characters that repeat in the two stories, I read The Lover as a retelling of the primal scene told in The Ravishing, only this time, Duras is in the place of a woman, an object of desire. This rewriting of the scene is what Lacan calls a “new type of writing,” 32 the writing of the real using knots, which provides Duras access to her femininity and a path out of feminine jealousy and ravage, as I will now conclude. In The Lover, something that was not written in Duras’ other novels, The Ravishing or The Vice-Consul, finally receives a space, a patch is being written to cover the real via the symbolic register. The new knot that Duras ties between herself, young Duras, and the Chinese lover, will continue to be sustained forever because of that which sustains it, the fourth, are the readers that will continue to read, analyze, and be ravished by Duras.33  Duras (1965).  Duras (1984). 31  Peraldi (1990), 21–2. 32  Miller (2018), 31. 33  Cf. Lacan’s analysis of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in his twenty-third seminar, Le Sinthome, and also Joyce’s epiphany as that which will be read by critics for three centuries (Lacan 2016). 29 30

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 riting: Duras’ Solution for Feminine Jealousy W and Ravage On the very first page of The Lover, before meeting the Chinese lover, Duras describes the face of her young self with a longing. This picture, which does not exist, is where, according to Duras, she recognizes herself the most, but also where she enchants herself “où je m'énchante.”34 This enchantment indicates that the other woman for Duras is now, instead of Anne-Marie Stretter or Tatiana Karl, Duras herself as a young girl. This enchantment is reminiscent of the enchantment of Dora from the painting of the Sistine Madonna, on which she gazed for two hours “rapt in silent admiration.”35 Dora’s enchantment, like Duras’, indicates her fascination with her femininity. Dora admires the Madonna, as she does Mrs. K., as a solution for the anxiety of being an object of desire, a solution which is a Christian one, according to Lacan.36 Duras begins the story from this enchantment, but it is her own picture that enchants her; she is making use of this enchantment-fascination, of herself as an object of desire. Another thing that enchants Duras is her writing: “Écrire, c’était ça la seule chose qui me-plait ma vie et qui l’enchantait. Je l’ai fait. L’écriture ne m’a jamais quittée.”37 Writing was the only thing that satisfied and enchanted Duras in her life. Marie-Hélène Brousse wrote that “ravage is the relation a woman produces with a man through the consummated sacrifice of the phallic third, herself sometimes.”38 The ravage between the mother and daughter is reenacted by the relationship between young Duras and her lover, in which Duras sacrifices herself for the sake of her family. But this is not the entire essence of her relationship with the lover. Duras makes sure to underline her passion toward that man. By writing herself as other in The Lover and creating a book, a literary work, Duras manages to conjure up again the phallic third that is missing in ravage  Duras (1984), 9.  Freud (1953), 96. 36  Lacan (2006), 181. 37  Duras (1993), 18. 38  Brousse (2010), 2–3. 34 35

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and in feminine jealousy, without sacrificing herself. The writing of The Lover provided Duras with an empty space where she can articulate in words something of her ravage and her femininity, which enabled Duras to psychically separate from her mother. Michèle Montrelay reminds her readers that in chemistry, the operation of sublimation is separation, and it occurs through combustion. Sublimation for a woman is what castration is for a man, writes Montrelay, in the sense that this is what enables the woman to separate.39 In another text, Montrelay emphasizes that movement is the first attempt of symbolization in the helpless state of jealousy. Symbolization is what enables us to not be a mere body.40 To recall, in jealousy, desire is sucked out of you, as Montrelay states. Following the other woman, the desire of the Other, is what resuscitates the jealous woman. Integrating Montrelay’s statements, I find that following the other woman is an act that involves symbolization and the writing of the unconscious. Intriguingly, in her interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Montrelay shares her own experience of the moment before creation, the moment before she starts writing, as a feeling that is the same feeling as being jealous in love. She mentions that she received validation that this feeling occurs in other artists as well.41 Montrelay describes this sensation before she starts writing as abandonment, absolute solitude, feeling of hate and desire to destroy the Other. Only women who can create, who can overcome this feeling of the blank canvas, Montrelay suggests, are able to support this destructive jealousy.42 In her mass Écrire (writing), Duras describes writing as that which comes from the bottom of the abyss, from the hole: Se trouver dans un trou, au fond d’un trou, dans une solitude quasi-totale et découvrir que seule l’écriture vous sauver. Être sans sujet aucun de livre, sans aucune idée de livre c’est se trouver, se retrouver, devant un livre. Une immensité vide. Un livre éventuel. Devant rien. Devant comme une écriture vivante et nue, comme terrible, terrible à surmonter. Je crois que la personne qui écrit  Montrelay (1977a).  Montrelay (1996). 41  Montrelay (1977b). 42  Ibid. 39 40

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est sans idée de livre, qu’elle a les mains vides, la tête vide, et qu’elle ne connait de cette aventure du livre que l’écriture sèche et nue, sans avenir, sans écho, lointaine, avec ses règles d’or, élémentaires : l’orthographe, le sens.43

Duras’ ability to face the void and to write over it, to write a patch so as to veil it, enabled her existence. In The Lover, Duras’ writing reaches a level of sublimation that enables separation. If we compare young Duras to Lol, we see that Lol does not manage to separate from the other woman at the novel’s ending. In contrast, Duras told (or imagined) at the novel’s ending that her lover married another woman, but it was still her who was the object of his desire. Unlike Lol, and unlike Mary, and, possibly, also unlike Olivia Shakespear, after separating from her mother, Duras assumed something of her body upon herself by following the other woman (herself ); following her Other femininity, her own Otherness that she sought after and that she sometimes even found in her unique writing. Duras had kept her new face, the face of Duras the writer: “Ce visage-la, nouveau, je l’ai gardé.”44 The fact that she “keeps” her face proves that through her writing, Duras managed to support her femininity and accept the other woman that is in herself. The case of Duras illustrates that jealousy veils with it the possibility of creation. Art and writing have the potential to fill a subject with desire, enabling her to write something of the real, of the unwritten of jealousy and of ravage, and to veil the hole that they bore. Through creation, a woman can follow the shimmering light and build herself anew from the ruins like a phoenix, recreating herself from the ashes of her jealousy.45  Duras (1993), 24.  Duras (1984), 10. 45  Cf. William Shakespeare’s (n.d.) The History of Henri VIII: ARCHIBISHOP CRANMER: Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new create another heir, As great in admiration as herself; So shall she leave her blessedness to one, When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness, Who from the sacred ashes of her honour Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was, And so stand fix’d. (5.5.3425). 43 44

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Works Cited Brousse, Marie-Hélène. (2010). Feminine Know-How with Relationship: The Three Rs: Ruse, Ravage, Ravishing. NLS-Messager 669, Congres NLS VIII, Geneva (Heather Chamberlain, Trans.). AMP-NLS. Retrieved June 15, 2023, from https://amp-­nls.org/nlsmessager/2009/669.html Duras, M. (1964). Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Gallimard. Duras, M. (1965). Le vice-consul. Gallimard. Duras, M. (1984). L’Amant. Minuit. Duras, M. (1985). The Lover. Random House. Duras, M. (1993). Écrire. Gallimard. Freud, S. (1953). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume VII: A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works 1901–1905 (James Stratchey et al., Trans., pp. 1–122). Hogarth Press. Kushner, R. (2017). Introduction. In The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities (pp. vii–xv). Everyman’s Library. Lacan, J. (1965). Homage fait à Marguerite Duras. In Cahiers Renauld-Berrault December (pp. 7–13). Gallimard. Lacan, J. (2006). Presentation on Transference. In Écrits (Bruce Fink, Trans. & Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., pp. 176–88). W.W. Norton. Lacan, J. (2016). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome (1975–1976) (Adrian Price, Trans. & Jacques-Alain Miller, ed.). Polity Press. Ladimer, B. (2009). Wartime Writings, or the Imaginary Lover of Marguerite Duras. In Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, vol. 33(1), Article 7. New Prairie Press. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://doi.org/10.414 8/2334-­4415.1694 Lydon, Mary. 1988. The Forgetfulness of Memory: Jacques Lacan, Marguerite Duras, and the Text. In Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Theory 29(3), 351-368. University of Wisconsin. Miller, J.-A. (1988). Sept remarques sur la création. In Lettre Mensuelle – École de la Cause freudienne, 68, 9–13. Miller, J.-A. (2018). The Real Unconscious. The Lacanian Review, 6, 28–45. Montrelay, M. (1996). La Jalousie: Un branchement direct sur l’inconscient. In C. Maillet et al. (Eds.), Che Vuoi? Series ni. 6 Revue du Cercle Freudien. L’Harmattan. Montrelay, M. (1977a). L’Ombre et le Nom: Sur la féminité. Minuit.

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Montrelay, M. (1977b). La Jalousie. In M. Chapsal (Ed.), La Jalousie: Entretiens avec Jeanne Moreau et al (pp. 149–173). Gallimard. Peraldi, F. (1990). The Passion of Death: A Free Associative Reading of Freud and Marguerite Duras. L’Esprit Créateur, 30(1), 19–27. Shakespeare, W. (n.d.). History of Henri VIII, V, 5 3425. Retrieved December 19, 2020, Opensource Shakespeare: https://www.opensourceshakespeare. org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry8&Act=5&Scene=5 &Scope=scene Thompson, Z. B. (2016). Beyond Symbolic Rape: The Insidious Trauma of Conquest in Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and Eileen Chang’s “Lust, Caution”. Feminist Formations, 28, 1–26.

Index1

A

C

Aggressiveness, 28, 29 Alienation, 34, 35, 43, 44 Antigone, 87, 88 Anxiety, 77, 108, 109 Arambourou, Miren, 95 Aristotle, 9–18 Augustine, St., 24–26, 28, 29 Autobiography, 6

Castration, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, 84, 92, 95 Chapsal, Madeleine, 46 Charron, Pierre, 15 Christian, 12, 13 Copjec, Joan, 16, 17, 35 D

B

Bajomée, Danielle, 94 Beauty's Hour, 3–5, 33–47, 53 Biberman, Efrat, 87 Bible, the, 9 Borromean knot, 84, 94 Brousse, Marie-Hélène, 88 Buhler, Charlotte, 29

Dark continent, 56 Das Ding, 58, 86–88, 94 Delusional jealousy, 55, 71–79 Derrida, Jacques, 17 Desire, 3, 4, 10–18, 25, 26, 33–47, 51, 52, 56–58, 63–67, 87–89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 107–111 Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, 50

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Tor-Zilberstein, Jealousy, Femininity and Desire, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46471-3

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116 Index

Dora, 4, 29, 44, 45, 61–69 Duras, Marguerite, 2, 3, 5, 6, 81, 84–87, 90–95, 100–111, 100n1, 107n28

H

E

Hatherley, Mary, 37, 41, 43, 45, 46 Hillis Miller, J., 17 Hold, Jacques, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 105–107 Homosexual, 61–69 Homosexuality, 72, 74, 75, 78, 79

Empathy, 29, 62, 64–66, 68 Envy, 9–18 Even-Shusan, Avraham, 9

I

F

Feminine identification, 63, 66 Feminine jealousy, 45, 46, 49–59, 66, 68, 71–79, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 100–111 Feminine jouissance, 45, 46, 52, 55–58, 85, 89, 107 Feminine sexuality, 6 Femininity, 3, 4, 6, 36, 41, 44, 45, 53, 54, 56, 62, 64–66, 68, 71–79, 102, 106–111 Fleiss, Wilhelm, 49 Following the other woman, 44, 46, 66, 86, 89, 91, 92, 94 Freud, Sigmund, 1–5, 22–24, 26–29, 35, 38, 45, 49–57, 50n5, 61–68, 71–79, 87, 89, 93–95, 109n35 Full satisfaction, 22, 27

Idealization, 64, 66 Identification, 25, 29, 38, 42, 45, 61–69 Identifies, 40, 43–46 Identity, 40, 42, 44 The imaginary, 35, 42 Imago, 25 Invidia, 25–28 J

Jealouissance, 26, 27, 91 Jealous, 12, 16–18, 37, 38, 43–45 Jealous hatred, 26, 28 Jealous identification, 66 Jealousy, 1–6, 9–18, 22–29, 33–47, 49–59, 61–69, 81–95, 100–111 Jouissance, 24, 26, 28, 34, 42, 44, 85 Joyce, James, 36, 42, 91 K

G

The gaze, 34, 35, 43 Gonne, Maud, 36, 46, 47 Gower, Mary, 36, 37, 43, 46

Karl, Tatiana, 105–107, 109 Klein, Melanie, 15, 16 Knot, 104–108 Kushner, Rachel, 100, 100n2

 Index  L

N

La Rochefoucauld, François, 13, 14 Lacan, Jacques, 2–6, 5n9, 17, 18, 23–29, 29n44, 34, 38–45, 46n59, 51, 52, 55–58, 62, 64–67, 76–78, 83–88, 90, 91, 95, 101, 108, 108n33, 109 Lack, 34, 35, 40, 41, 51–54 Ladimer, Bethany, 100n3 L'amant, 6, 102n8, 102n11, 103n14, 106n25, 108n30, 109n34, 111n44 Laurent, Eric, 88 Little Hans, 71–79 Lol V. Stein, 81–83 Love object, 63 The Lover, 3, 6, 100–111 Lydon, Mary, 101

Name-of-the-Father, 84, 85, 94 Narcissism, 24, 24n17 O

Object a, 25, 26 Object of desire, 64–66 Oedipal phase, 53, 54, 57 Oedipus complex, 22, 49–51, 50n5, 57, 58 Oral drive, 23, 24, 24n17, 26, 29 Oral jealousy, 22–24 The other woman, 82, 86, 104–107, 109–111 P

M

Mack Brunswick, Ruth, 55 Masochistic, 27, 28 Masquerade, 40, 41, 59 Masquerading, 40, 41 Melancholic, 95 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 5n9, 26, 34, 85n16, 102n9, 108n32 Mirror image, 39, 42, 45 Mirror stage, 24, 25, 29, 33–47 Montrelay, Michèle, 4–6, 5n9, 17, 22, 24, 24n17, 33, 34, 39, 43, 44, 46, 52, 53, 56–58, 66, 69, 76–79, 83–86, 88, 90, 110 Mother and daughter, 57, 58 Mourning and Melancholia, 5, 95 Mr. K, 61–65 Mrs. K, 61–66, 68

Pain, 81–95, 104 Paranoia, 55, 72, 74, 75 Passion, 12–15 Penis envy, 51, 52, 55 Peraldi, François, 87, 108 Phallic, 40 function, 56 identification, 64, 67–69 jealousy, 49–59, 68 jouissance, 52, 56 mother, 51 Phallus, 41, 51–53, 56, 58, 59 Phantasm, 27, 28 Phantasy, 73, 74, 77, 78 Pity, 13 Pre-Oedipal phase, 53–55, 57 Pre-Oedipus, 50, 54 Proust, Marcel, 17

117

118 Index R

Ravage, 6, 57–59, 85, 102–104, 108–111 The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 3, 5 Ravissement, 5, 81–95, 102 The real, 84, 86, 87 Repères, 34 Repressed femininity, 71–75 Repressed jealousy, 74, 75 Repression, 54, 56 Rival, 50, 54, 62, 65, 67, 95 Rivalry, 11, 13, 57 Riviere, Joan, 41 Rose, Jacqueline, 55, 64

Sinthome, 85 Stein, Lol. V., 81, 82, 105 Stretter, Anne-Marie, 82, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 105–109 Symptom, 84, 85 T

Transitivism, 29 V

Varchi, Benedetto, 14, 15 W

S

Sadomasochistic, 27, 28 drive, 28 jealousy, 27–29 Satisfaction, 22, 23, 25, 26 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 71–79 Scopic drive, 24–27, 29 Scopic jealousy, 24–27 Semblable, 25, 29, 29n44, 57, 95 Separation, 51, 56, 58, 86, 94, 95, 106, 110, 111 Shakespear, Olivia, 2–4, 36, 38, 41, 44, 46, 47 Sinthom, 84

Widdler, 76, 78 The Woman, 41, 45 The Woman does not exist, 46 Writing, 100–111 Y

Yeats, W. B., 36, 46, 47 The Young Homosexual, 4 Z

Zelos, 13 Zisser, Shirley, 87 Zupančič, Alenka, 26, 27