On the Desymbolization of Psychoanalytic Metaphors of Gender:

a Discussion of “Beyond Milk and the Good Breast”

Steven Reisner, Ph.D.

Ceccoli (1999a) argues that, because of their capacity for

maternity, women analysts are capable of certain interventions

that men are not. Taking issue with such assertions, this

commentary argues that although the gendered metaphors of

psychoanalytic intervention have changed usefully since Freud's

paternalistic imagery, in favor of the maternal language of Klein

and Winnicott, these metaphors are regressive if their value as

symbolism is undermined. Ceccoli's case study is revisited and

reevaluated to posit an alternative view: that theory is

sometimes employed to fill gaps that might be more productively

tolerated in the service of the analysis. It is argued that

Ceccoli's use of Kristevan theory to support an essentialist

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position that translocates the paternal phallus into the female

analysts' “gendered, bodily specificity … on the basis of our

capacity for maternity” (p. 695) is an example of such a use of

theory.

Reisner, S. (2000). On the Desymbolization of Psychoanalytic

Metaphors of Gender. Psychoanal. Dial., 10:795-813

The analyst situates himself on a ridge where, on the one hand, the ‘maternal’ position – gratifying needs, ‘holding’ (Winnicott) – and on the other the ‘paternal’ position – thedifferentiation, distance and prohibition that produces bothmeaning and absurdity – are intermingled and severed, infinitely and without end. -- Julia Kristeva,

Histoires d’Amour [1983, p. 246]

The gendered metaphors of psychoanalytic intervention have

changed since Freud and his male cabal dominated the field. In

its uncritical application of the language of stealth, violence

and conquest, the early clinical interaction between analyst and

patient took on the linguistic character of its turn-of-the-

century paternalism: the analyst’s superiority and dominance and

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the patient’s inferiority and submission. Freud, for example,

described the treatment of Dora (1905) as “a case that has

smoothly opened to the existing collection of picklocks” (Masson

1985, p. 427). He described dream interpretation metaphorically

as the search for a point of violent penetration: “the weak spot

in the dream’s disguise: they serve my purpose just as Hagen’s

was served by the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s cloak” (1900,

p.515). Psychoanalysis itself, in Freud’s famous dictum, was

presented as “an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a

progressive conquest of the id” (1923, p. 45).

Although this symbolism of violation was applied equally to

male as well as female patients, turn-of-the-century attitudes

toward sex-roles exacerbated the tendency, particularly, as was

often the case, when a male analyst treated a female patient.

Freud, for example, raised the question of the efficacy of a less

paternalistic approach in the Dora case, but rejected it as out

of character, and perhaps anti-therapeutic as well: “Might I have

kept the girl under my treatment if I myself had acted a part, if

I had exaggerated the importance of her staying on, and had shown

a warm personal interest in her -- a course which, even allowing

for my position as her physician would have been tantamount to

providing her with a substitute for the affection she longed for?

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I do not know...I have always avoided acting a part, and have

contented myself with practicing the humbler arts of psychology”

(1905, p. 109).

Since then, thanks largely to the school of British Object

Relations, the dominant clinical metaphors have changed. Now,

treatment is described as “nourishing,” interpretations are

“satisfying,” (Klein, 1957) and, as Winnicott (1960) put it,

quoting a patient, “‘Good management’ (ego care) ‘such as I have

experienced during this hour is a feed’ (id-satisfaction)” (p.

141). The pendulum has swung; what was a paternalistic

sensibility and metaphoric language is now largely maternalistic;

the consulting room is no longer a laboratory, but a surrogate

womb, a ‘holding environment,’ and “what happens in the

transference...is a form of infant-mother relationship” (p.141).

In her article, “Beyond Milk and the Good Breast,” Ceccoli

(1999a) radicalizes the direction of much contemporary

psychoanalytic theory, particularly with regard to the metaphors

of gender. Pushing the relational envelope in two directions,

Ceccoli expands on both the recent emphasis on the analyst’s

relational subjectivity and the turn to maternal metaphors of the

analytic process. In effect, Ceccoli asks: if the analysis is

informed by the analyst’s subjectivity, isn’t it necessarily

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informed by the analyst’s gender, and further, isn’t the

analyst’s gender influenced in an essential way by the biology of

the analyst’s body? Drawing from the work of American feminist

theorists of gender, from French psychoanalytic theory

(particularly Lacan and Kristeva), and even invoking Freud on his

experience of transference limitations in certain gendered

pairings, Ceccoli argues that “as women, different as we may

be,...we provide a different experience that is filtered through

our sexed identity...[W]hat we share is a physical, anatomical

sameness, influenced as it may be by our cultural position”

(1999b, p.715). Ceccoli is suggesting that, valuable as the

psychoanalytic metaphors of gender may be, there are times when

only the nonmetaphoric gender will do, that ‘beyond milk and the

good breast’ is an analytic capacity that is not symbolic but

immanent in the body of the analyst. Taking a turn on the very

formulation which rendered Freud anathema to early feminists,

Ceccoli asserts that, for some analytic dyads, anatomy is indeed

destiny in the consulting room.

As Ceccoli’s argument is presented in the context of a

detailed and fascinating case presentation, my discussion of her

argument requires a rather detailed revisiting of that material.

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Dan’s phallus

In the opening sessions of an analysis, a patient often

presents a solution that isn’t working for a problem that isn’t

known. The patient seeks analysis to improve the solution, to

make it work, and in this way may remain incognizant of the

problem. The analyst, in my view, is obliged to refuse to agree,

and in the process of refusing progressively opens the space for

awareness. As Lacan put it, eloquently, “I will even say that it

is on the basis of a certain refusal of understanding that we

open the door into psychoanalytic understanding” (Lacan, 1953-54,

p. 88).

In his opening session, Ceccoli’s patient, Dan, presented

with two problems, one intriguingly abstract, the other

frighteningly concrete. The first took the form of a seductive

opening gambit. Dan told Ceccoli, “My mother wears my balls as

golden earrings...” He presented the solution as well --

treatment with a woman analyst: “...only a woman can help me get

them back” (1999a, p. 683). The second problem, which receives

much less attention in Ceccoli’s presentation, appears to me to

be equally essential. Dan was afraid that he was “dying from a

terminal illness following his acceptance of a large inheritance

from his maternal grandmother” (p. 688).

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In this condensed communication, Dan presented a problem

that he had constructed (“My mother wears my balls...”), along

with its solution (“only a woman...”); but more importantly, he

indirectly made it clear that his was a solution that had already

failed -- and that the problem was threatening to become known.

For a woman (his maternal grandmother), had already offered him

back his ‘golden balls,’ and Dan believed that this gift gave him

a terminal disease. Dan came to Ceccoli to improve on the

solution in order to remain incognizant of the problem.

Ceccoli – and this forms the basis of my disagreement with

her formulation – joins with Dan in his assessment of his problem

and its solution, although for Ceccoli, Dan’s problem was not so

much that his mother wears his balls, but that she did not give

them back. “In the work with Dan, I too had accepted the gift of

the gold balls with pleasure, yet I insisted on returning them to

Dan...” (p. 696). Ceccoli goes further, adding a theoretical

imprimatur to her agreement with Dan’s need for a woman analyst:

“I am arguing for a gendered, bodily specificity...on the basis

of our capacity for maternity...” (p. 695).

While I am respectful of Ceccoli’s candor, her willingness

to take a radical position, and her passion for Dan’s well-being,

I take issue with many of her conclusions. I will turn my

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attention to the issue of problems and solutions in Dan’s

treatment and its conceptualization, particularly as these are

played out in the conceptualization of the role of the phallus in

the relation between patient and analyst.

If Dan’s solution is to retrieve his gold balls from his

mother, via his analyst, what is Dan’s problem? Delineated in the

negative space between ‘golden balls’ and ‘deadly gift,’ Dan’s

problem is detectable by what is left out of the discourse. For

the phallus, as Lacan has pointed out, is always a split

signifier: While Dan’s overt wish is to retrieve what can be seen

as the knowable aspect of the phallic signifier -- the golden

balls -- he strives to do so without having to come upon a

frightening, and potentially lethal aspect of that signifier: the

penis. Throughout Ceccoli’s presentation, Dan’s balls are

described as if they are all that is necessary to constitute a

male genital, with little regard to the split that reduces the

genitals to ‘balls,’ nor to the compensation that renders them

‘golden,’ and with no mention whatever of the third part of the

phallic triumvirate: the penis itself.

There is a sparse but evocative psychoanalytic literature on

both ‘golden phallus’ and ‘balls,’ each of which yields

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surprisingly similar insights. According to Bell’s (1961, 1965,

1971) research, the balls (“the scrotal sac and testes”), because

of their early retractability, are the source of bodily anxiety

in childhood and become identified with female sexuality (Bell,

1961). The boy responds to genital anxiety by dividing his

psychical genital representation; the balls recede in psychic

awareness, in favor of the penis. Because of their shape and

tenderness, they often become associated with breasts (Bell,

1965). Similarly, the symbol of ‘three’ has been seen to

represent the male genital in its entirety initially (Glenn,

1965), and after repression is divided such that it comprises man

(one) and woman (two), derived from penis and breasts (Jeffreys,

1936). The balls have frequently been seen as a symbolic mediator

between breasts and penis.

In his early article, Stragnell (1925) described “The Golden

Phallus” as a “compact symbol” in which the attribute “golden” is

associated with the sun and represents maternal qualities of

“security and nutrition”: “In short, the sun-gold symbol

represents most definitely a source of nourishment. The question

of its attachment to the breast or penis, mother or father,

depending upon many circumstances, the nature of which always

requires careful analysis” (p. 310).

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Seminal fluid, produced by the balls, complete the

condensed mediational symbolism. Stragnell argues, in addition,

that the gold, in the golden phallus symbolism represents, via

anal-erotism, “a ‘gift to the parent’ idea which corresponds to

the wish for a ‘gift from the parent’ which is being sought by

the patient...[But] the [child’s] gift is not wanted. It is not

sufficient. It betrays a lack of potency” (p. 314). The gift is

turned to gold to transform its experienced impotency into a

symbol of its enhanced value, to undo the aggression derived from

giving a gift which is too little in the face of a hunger which

is too big.

Dan’s construct can thus be understood to reflect the

belief that his balls were sacrificed to his mother to feed her

insatiable appetite. Dan’s desire to “get them back” from a woman

reflects his own desire to undo the role reversal, to be fed.

According to Bell, et al (1971), the boy’s anxiety of early

feminine identification associated with the balls is “defended

against by displacement to the penis” (p. 416). Yet this has not

taken place for Dan. Dan appears to have done the opposite; he

has displaced from the penis to the balls/breast condensation. He

has effectively erased penis and breasts, leaving only a partial

male genital that feeds. In Dan’s psychic world, balls feed,

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woman feed on them. It is here that we may discover the solution

that Dan brought with him into the analysis. He sought to be fed

like he fed his mother, he sought a ‘woman with balls’, that is,

balls and no penis.

To understand the anxiety associated with this attempt at

suppression, it helps to turn to Dan’s other presenting symptom,

which, like the penis, is absent in the analytic presentation:

his fear of a terminal disease contracted from intercourse.

Underlying this fear is the dread of AIDS, which reveals his fear

of the penis, his unconscious belief that his desire for balls to

feed him will bring along with it a penis that will kill him. It

is not surprising that after the first consultation Dan dreams of

a male doctor who “tells me that I have [who has given me] a

terminal illness”; and a female doctor who “asks me out on a date

[wants me to feed her]” (p. 689). In Dan’s psychic world balls

feed, women feed on them, and penises kill. Dan’s fear of AIDS

signals that the object of his compromise solution could as

easily have been a man with balls (breasts) and no penis as a

woman with balls (breasts). Yet either solution must fail, the

repressed returns.

His analyst, it turns out, was not the first object in whom

Dan attempted to find balls and no penis. Ceccoli reports that in

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their initial session Dan described a brief encounter with a

woman he met on an airplane, “a married woman who picked him up

and seduced him in her hotel room.” But this attempt failed,

sending Dan into a psychotic decompensation: “He...experienced

this woman as dead during intercourse [and] was also convinced

that this woman had given him AIDS” (p. 688).

There could be no balls without a penis. His seducer’s AIDS,

like his grandmother’s money, indicates that for Dan, every

experience of feeding was simultaneously an experience of being

murdered. The erased signifier remained lethal in Dan’s

unconscious. (His decompensation during the sex act, as well as

his absolute belief in the veridicality of his terminal illness,

reveal a pre-symbolic level of functioning.)

Turning to the family constellation, Dan described his

mother as needing him for her survival, in place of his father,

who was ineffectual, anesthetized and alcoholic. His brother,

volatile and aggressive, tortured Dan with beatings and shamings.

Dan fled into a narcissistic world of specialness. He “believed

himself to be a Messiah”, and lived in a paranoid world of

computers and code breaking (p. 689).

In Dan’s construction, his father was a feeder whose balls

were not up to the job of feeding his voracious wife. Dan’s own

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balls were required as a supplemental feeding. Dan describes his

mother, as “loving but depressed.” Ceccoli continues, “[S]he

interpreted Dan’s passivity as thoughtfulness and quiet

sensitivity, for which she was grateful. She was able to

‘tolerate’ her adolescent sons’ emerging sexuality -- quietly

disposing the stained tissues she found in their beds” (p. 689).

I see this interaction rather differently; not as a mother’s

tolerance of her sons’ “emerging sexuality,” but a mother’s

collusion in the idea that these are her rightful gifts, that her

son’s sexual products sustain her.

Similarly, in the initial phase of the treatment, Dan

attempted to repeat his earliest solution with his mother in the

transference with Ceccoli. “[H]e was verbally productive,

articulate and even brilliant, he often filled up the hour with

intellectualizations.” Meanwhile, Ceccoli writes, he was “unable

to hold even the smallest interpretation from me” (p. 691).

This interaction, obviously unsatisfying, yielded to a new

phase and a new desire: to shift to the couch. Once on the couch

Dan’s associations and affect were noticeably freed. He allowed

himself, in Ceccoli’s representation, to “tell me about my body:

his experience of my breathing and my voice...I was not just his

doctor anymore. He was in my body.” Yet such habitation quickly

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brought “a more frightening voice,” which Ceccoli describes,

surprisingly, as “the voice of his desire”: “He began to speak to

me about his fantasy of overpowering me physically, of his

awareness that he was bigger than I and probably stronger. He was

a man after all! And as a man he could hurt me...” (p.690).

This frightening voice heralds a shift in the months that

followed in which Dan turned from the terror of maternal

identification to the attempt to construct a paternal

identification. He vacillated from being in Ceccoli’s body, to

“totally violating her,” to engaging her in a paternal

transference, asking, “What does it mean to be a man?” A rapist?

A drunk? A stud? “What was it that men do to be loved by women,

anyway?” (p.690).

Ceccoli argues that the transition to the couch facilitated

his use of her as a woman, “as if his eyes had actually

interfered with his ability to experience me and see me as a

woman” (p. 690). I hear the same material quite differently.

Sitting up, Dan’s eyes only allowed him to see her as a woman. On

the couch, he was freed from the physical presence of the

analyst. When he was lying down, and no longer had reality to

contradict his construction, he could experience Ceccoli

alternately as male or female, or a composite. He could be within

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her body and subsequently, when the sexualized aggression evoked

by the incorporative danger emerged, he could place Ceccoli

“behind him” and identify with her as a paternal figure to pull

him from that body.

Each swing of the pendulum, the engulfing maternal body or

the aggressive paternal savior was equally terrifying, and with

either, Dan was left in despair: “Sex seemed to him to be a most

aggressive act, a total violation. It could only bring death and

illness. He longed for the kind of woman who could jump out of

airplanes without fear – the amazon – perhaps she could tolerate

sex with him...” With this imagery, Dan has returned to the

transferential solution with which he began treatment, to find a

“woman” to pull him from the devouring mother (airplane): “Such a

woman would want him as a man, in fact she would teach him to be

a man” (p. 690). Yet, as we have seen, each “woman” turns

poisonous, in that for Dan there can be no savior without

accompanied phallic lethality. Like his grandmother, like his

seducer, the Amazon paratrooper solution, too, implies sexually

transmitted death. The Amazons, after all, were women who cut off

their right breasts in order to more efficiently use their

weapons of war.

At this point, however, Ceccoli’s own desire entered

15

forcefully into the text and into the treatment. “Was this to be

my role?” she asks, “...to help him construct his manhood, both on

the basis of my desire and on the basis of his?...Only with such a woman would

he be able to recover his gold” (p.691). Why, I wondered, did

Ceccoli suddenly and with such passion join the transferential

compromise; what to make of this upsurge of the desire for this

patient to be a man, not to mention Ceccoli’s reification of the

patient’s fantasy construction that his ‘golden’ balls were lost

and needed to be recovered?

Ceccoli reports being “surprised at the intensity of what

followed: multiple attacks upon himself – and an elaborate

narrative involving his death, self imposed as an act of

escapism. What Dan wanted most at this time was to erase himself

from the world” (p.691). Whereas earlier, Dan perceived his lover

as dead, in treatment it was he who became dead, killed by the

very act of being fed.

Ceccoli presents a valiant attempt to revive him. In effect,

she called upon the entire pantheon of good mothers of

psychoanalysis. When she expected “attacks filled with

aggression,” she drew upon Winnicott’s (1971) ‘use-of-an-object’

mother “who could survive his biting and kicking and not withdraw

in fear and pain”; when the attacks did not come, but her patient

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began a suicidal decline, she invoked the Kleinian “nurturing

mother, the breast full of hopeful milk” (p.691). When the breast

was refused, she responded, like Ferenczi (1929) toward his

‘unwelcome child and his death instinct,’ attempting to “show Dan

how to stay alive” (p.692), offering, as Ferenczi, one of the

great maternal figures of psychoanalysis, would do, an “immense

expenditure of love, tenderness, and care,” (1929, p. 105). But

in spite of Ceccoli’s attempts at psychoanalytic mothering, she

discovered that her patient could make no use of them, in fact

her efforts appeared to incite further deterioration.

Dan, I believe, perceived Ceccoli’s desire to help him as a

woman, as a mother. But women, in Dan’s psychic vocabulary were

dangerous to him in their very desire. Thus, it is not surprising that

“he would not have any of it” (p.691).

Dan’s analytic anorexia in the face of Ceccoli’s attempt at

maternal nourishment and sacrifice forced her to go beyond what

the legacy of good mothers of psychoanalytic history and metaphor

had provided, forced her to go “beyond milk and the good breast.”

(Her ironic title recalls Freud’s own press to go “beyond” the

pleasure principle when faced with the death drive.) Dan, in his

passivity and in his pleas, made it clear that he required

“action, not words.” “Do something” (p.691), he appeared to be

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saying. Ceccoli responds, at first countertransferentially,

becoming silently aware of the impulse “to say to Dan ‘Enough

whining; be a man’...I stifled the words ‘be a man’ yet I fought

harder, became more persistent and present with him, and then, at

my wits end, I did something: I told him that I could no longer

fight on my own, that I was no longer willing to continue the

treatment without him...” (p. 692).

Ceccoli discovered in herself the only object Dan seemed to

have been capable of making use of, and which Dan was incapable

of discovering in himself without first finding in her. Not the

maternal solution (‘balls’) he thought he was looking for,

certainly not the various maternal solutions Ceccoli offered and

current psychoanalytic theory has made fashionable, but something

wholly different: a life affirming paternal, phallic object, a

penetrating interpretation (‘penis’) that broke through Dan’s

defenses in the service of life, rather than death. Ceccoli’s

breakthrough in Dan’s treatment, to my mind, was her ability to

deliver this object. In a sense, when Ceccoli uttered her

ultimatum to him, Dan experienced a symbolic, life-giving object,

which he could not accept from a maternal figure. As Ceccoli put

it, “with those words, I became the man. I became the father whose

presence he had been demanding” (p. 692).

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It is not surprising that images of his father as a loved

object emerge at this point. In the treatment, Ceccoli paved the

way for them. Dan was now ready to integrate split aspects of his

paternal object; he was able to tolerate feelings of both love

from the father and feelings of having been abandoned by his

father in favor of the all-consuming mother. The success of

Ceccoli’s intervention is revealed clearly by Dan’s re-engagement

in the treatment. His newfound ability to spar with his analyst,

to feel aggressive without fear and, perhaps most significant,

“he could now think of using his penis as an instrument of

pleasure, rather than only as the violent, penetrating object”

(p. 693).

Yet, at this very juncture, where Ceccoli is able to

facilitate progress by inhabiting a paternal transference, she

makes a claim to quite the opposite:

For Dan it was necessary to experience his aggression and desire through a woman. He needed a woman whom he fashioned to be tough enough to manage both his silent rage and his demands for enlivenment. This woman could jump out of planes with him strapped on her back and survive his sexual explorations. A woman who could translate and re-interpret his aggression, as well as his passivity on the basis of her experience as a woman [pp. 693-4].

Again, Ceccoli’s desire makes its appearance. Whereas

before, Ceccoli’s desire emerged at the moment when her very

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femaleness was being attacked and denigrated in the guise of the

patient’s desire for an Amazon savior, here it emerged when her

presence as a woman was elided altogether in favor of a paternal

transference which quickly found its way back to the father.

In each case, Ceccoli’s “desire” was to reassert a female,

maternal presence in the transference precisely where it was

being erased. Nor did the maternal icons available in current

psychoanalytic metaphor help to make a female presence any more

palatable. Ceccoli had to go “beyond” the holding environment,

beyond milk and the good breast. She turned to the writings of

Kristeva (1983) and Oliver (1993) to find a compromise

transference figure that might accomplish this aim by placing the

paternal object within the maternal body.

Ceccoli’s phallus

Ceccoli argues, and this is the crux of her paper, that it

is the female analyst’s “capacity for maternity” which provides

for a “unique opportunity” to facilitate the infant’s transition

from “the maternal body to the paternal/symbolic.” It is worth

citing this passage in some detail:

This is consistent with Kristeva’s notion that the dynamics that operate the symbolic order already exist and are preinscribed in the maternal body. Thus, bodily drives make their way into language. In her view, the mother’s desire and subjectivity actively create a dialectic with the

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infant. So, too in the consulting room, the analyst’s desireand subjectivity actively create a transference with the patient. This allows for the creation of a transference to the jouissance of the primal scene through a metaphorical reunion with the maternal body (Oliver, 1993). Kristeva’s maternal body holds the imaginary father (other) within it and brings it to life through love and desire. Through the mother’s love for the imaginary father, the infant is able to experience mother’s desire. This experience gives birth to the infant’s own desire. Identification with the mother’sdesire for the phallus allows for an identification with thepaternal function as it already exists within her...This is a journey to wholeness, one that allowed my patient to reengage his internal objects within a different womb. In the dialectic between Dan and me, it was my pleasure and satisfaction, my jouissance – my love for the imaginary man/father – that Dan identified with and engaged and that gave way to his own desire [p. 695].Two problems emerge at this point. First, I simply do not

see support for this view in the clinical material. In fact, I

see the opposite: any incursion of the analyst/mother’s body or

desire into the treatment reduced this patient’s aliveness. Dan

had transferred the maternal feeding function over to the balls,

and experienced the womb as symbolic of his mother’s desire at

his expense. As Ceccoli acknowledges, it does not appear to have

been the maternal function that freed this patient to begin to

imagine pleasure with a woman, but the identification with and

mourning for the absent father -- not because he felt the

mother’s desire for the father (other), but because the mother

was, for the moment, not in the picture. In the transference, Dan

found and integrated a parental object, but it was the paternal

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object, discovered not within the maternal body but in place of

the maternal body.

Furthermore, just as I seem to be reading the clinical

material differently from Ceccoli, I also read Kristeva quite

differently as well. For Kristeva, the transition from maternal

body to the paternal/symbolic is indeed traversed via a process

of infantile identification with an Other, which, following

Freud, Kristeva labels “the father of personal prehistory.” And

to an extent, this primary identificatory passage from the

semiotic is prefigured in the maternal body insofar as it desires.

Ceccoli cites Kristeva on this very point: “The imaginary father

would thus be an indication that the mother is not complete but

that she wants...Who? What? The question has no answer other than

the one that covers narcissistic emptiness; ‘At any rate, not I’”

(Kristeva, 1983, p. 257).1 But it is a theoretical leap away from

Kristevan theory (and from Lacanian theory which it extends) to

locate this Other within the maternal body, since it heralds the

very identification which shifts the subject from that body into

symbolism and language. Kristeva is quite explicit on this point,

citing Freud precisely in his capacity as an analyst, and, by

1 Kristeva, here is elaborating on Lacan when he asks, “What is it that the mother desires when she desires something other than me, the child?”(Lacan, Seminar IV, cited in Boothby, 1991, p. 155).

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implication, situating analysis itself outside the maternal body:

Freud...speaks foremost as an analyst. He in fact dissociates idealization (and with it the amatory relationship) from the bodily exchanges between mother and child, and he introduces the Third Party as a condition of psychic life, to the extent that it is a loving life. If love stems from narcissistic idealization, it has nothing todo with the protective wrapping over skin and sphincters thematernal care provides for the baby. Worse yet, if that protection continues, if the mother ‘clings’ to her offspring, laying on it the request that originates in her own request as confused neotenic and hysteric in want of love, the chances are that neither love nor psychic life will ever hatch from such an egg [pp. 250-251].

It is from a fixation point at this psychic crossroads that

Dan has entered upon the scene of analysis, believing that his

mother is not complete, and having constructed (apparently along

with her) the idea that his balls will complete her, that he will

be the mother to complete his mother. As Lacan (1958) put it, “If

the desire of the mother is the phallus, then the child wishes to

be the phallus so as to satisfy this desire” (p. 83).

But this solution was untenable, for it required the

perpetual disavowal of the mother’s desire. The child’s

impossible attempt to disavow that the mother desires by

attempting to be what satisfies that desire is what splits the

phallic signifier into a part of imaginary unity (the feeding

balls) and a part of deadly aggression (the lethal penis).

Ceccoli’s analysis of Dan, to continue the Kristevan

23

argument, brought him through a process of “abjecting”2 the

mother and finding a paternal identification to pull him out of

the maternal vortex:

The immediate transference toward the imaginary father, who is such a godsend that you have the impression that it is he who is transferred into you, withstands a process of rejection involving what mayhave been chaos and is about to become abject...In short, primary identification appears to be a transference to (from) the imaginary father, correlative to the establishment of the mother as ‘ab-jected’ [Kristeva, 1983, p. 257, emphasis added].

Ceccoli (expanding upon a view espoused by Oliver, 1993)

sidesteps abjection through what appears to be an act of

theoretical slippage in which what is discovered within the

maternal body is the paternal phallus itself (the phallus of

Imaginary unity), rather than the desire for the phallus (the

phallus of the Symbolic register). As Oliver (1993) put it, “The

mother’s desire is her desire for the Father, her desire to be

satisfied, her implication in the paternal function. Insofar as

the mother is a speaking being, the Other is already within

her...It is a father within the mother, a ‘maternal father’” (p.

79). However, Kristeva would likely view such a solution as 2 “The abject, then, represents the first effort of the future subject to separate itself from the pre-Oedipal mother. Nausea, distaste, horror: these are the signs of a radical revulsion (or expulsion) which serves to situate the ‘I’, or, more accurately, to create a first, fragile sense of ‘I’ in a space where before there was only emptiness...Abjecting the archaic mother, the child tentatively creates its first separate space” (Moi, 1986, pp. 238-239).

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tantamount to a fetishistic compromise, in that fetishism can be

defined in this light as the retreat from (disavowal of) the

symbolic phallus in favor of the imaginary phallus. Oliver

tacitly acknowledges this in a footnote: “Kristeva herself

describes fetishism as the attribution of phallic power to the

mother that results in the ‘maternal father’” (p. 194).

Theory as phallus

Just as our patients often enter treatment with a solution

which obscures the problem in the hope that psychic trauma can be

averted, we analysts often generate theory as a similarly

obscurant interim solution in the interest of mitigating analytic

trauma (Boulanger, 1999; Reisner, 1999).

The split in Ceccoli’s presentation, between the clinical

practice evidenced and the theory constructed to account for the

practice, is striking. In practice, she was able to keep a man

with seriously impaired interpersonal capabilities and brittle

defenses in treatment in a way that made it possible for him to

tolerate his alternating destructiveness and fragmented states.

Ceccoli navigated a dangerous path between transferential gender

attributes which destabilized and those which organized this

patient. And she was able to tolerate the patient’s attempts to

attack her, cut her into pieces, negate her, or make her

25

responsible for his suicide or annihilation; all the while

facilitating his transition from decompensating terror in the

face of his own and his analyst’s desire, to identification with

a loving paternal image in the service of integrating a symbolic

phallus, achieving in the process a significant piece of psychic

integration.

Yet Ceccoli constructed a theory that made requisite the

continued presence and psychic efficacy of the very gender which

evoked destructiveness or negation, the very gender

identification that, it turns out, had to be overcome for the

integration to proceed. To give added weight to the argument for

the continued presence of the analyst’s gender in the psychic

life of the patient, the analyst’s theory asserts the view that

the impact of gender is biologically exigent.

The eruption of theory here might be seen, on one level, as

an attempt to reassert the analyst’s bodily gender in the face of

the patient’s attempts to obliterate it. It is not surprising in

the face of the kind of primitive gender murder and dismemberment

that this patient showed himself capable of committing in the

transference, that Ceccoli would feel that she was “fighting for

her life.” I believe that, more often than we like to admit, we

all draw on our theory-making ability to help us remain alive and

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present in the room with fragmented, primitive, aggressive,

impossible, or frightening patients.

But at another level there is a danger that must be

mentioned. Every theory contains that which it permits and that

which it omits. Ceccoli’s argument, that certain male patients

needed the continued presence of women analysts as women, permits

a useful understanding of the fear certain patients have of male

aggression and their need to have their fantasy resolutions

appear reified in order to remain in treatment long enough to

make use of treatment. It also permits the analysts to feel alive

and gendered in the face of the patients’ attempts at gender

obliteration.

But insofar as Ceccoli’s theoretical stance avoids analyzing

the patient’s destructiveness by theoretically denying it’s

impact, asserting that the “man needs a woman” just when the man

may need to destroy (or ‘abject’) the woman transferentially, her

theoretical ‘solution’ may provide a collusion with the patient’s

defensive ‘solution.’ At no point is this danger more acute than

when the patient is facing the transferential maternal desire;

the gap in the mother which he would fill with himself as phallus

(fetish), and which Ceccoli would fill with her “capacity for

maternity” as phallus, but which, I would suggest cannot be

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filled, but only transformed into the symbol of desire itself

(the symbolic phallus). This transformation requires the

transition away from the material or biological object, into

speech (symbolic representation), which is not the domain of

either gender, but is precisely the domain of the analyst,

regardless of gender. As Weber (1991) has put it “...even the

father cannot possess the phallus, but only speak in its name”

(p. 146). 3

Concluding remarks

Ceccoli has attempted a radical intersect of American

relational and French Lacanian/Kristevan theory in a way which

3 There is a growing literature on the use of various aspects of the analytical encounter in the service of fetishism. Renik (1992), for example, has written that the analyst him/herself might be made use of in this fashion, “The practice of constructing a wishful fantasy to reassure against a threatening perception of reality is ubiquitous. Thespecial feature of fetishism is that an unusual degree of conviction about the reality of a reassuring idea is achieved when a particular material object (the fetish) is actually present. Ordinarily we think of fetishes as inanimate objects, but a person can be used as a fetish too” (pp. 544-545) Renik continues, “The fundamental investment...is in the experience of having the analyst replace a fantasy missing part, notin the process of self-investigation” (p. 557). And Reed (1997) has written in a similar vein on the use of the analyst’s interpretations, “Certain...transference enactments use an ordinarily neutral activity ofthe analyst as a source of sexual excitement in order to defend against intertwined fantasies of castration, separation, and object loss...In the transference the analyst’s interventions become equated with the fantasied danger but are transformed through the enactment into its reassuring opposite. Thus the transference enactments play out alternative fantasies, such as that of the phallic woman or the provision of the phallus by a father, and assert the possibility of omnipotence and the magical exchange of gender” (p. 1179). I would add that analytic theory, too, can be used in the service of fetishism.

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radicalizes the impact of the physical presence of the analyst.

She has constructed a middle territory within the “female

gendered space” where the American view of the phallus as the

symbol of paternal agency and the French view of the phallus as

the “pure representation of absence” (Weber, 1991, p.146) are

mediated: “our capacity for maternity gives us as women the

unique opportunity to become passageways which help navigate from

maternal body to a paternal/symbolic one” (Ceccoli, 1999a, p.

695). My view is that in so doing she has taken what can be a

productive tension between two schools of thought and two

essentially distinct modes of analytic interaction and combined

them into an imaginary unity precisely where there is a psychic

rift. As Weber (1991) states, “it must be remembered that,

whatever else it may be, the phallus is first of all the idea of

something that has never really existed: the maternal penis” (p.

146).

Asserting a biological exigency to fill the gap created by

this tension, whether by recourse to the penis (as Freud has been

accused of doing) or the womb (which Ceccoli now asserts) is, in

my view, a retreat from, rather than a passageway to, the

symbolic.

There are times when the analyst’s phallic agency is

29

required, times when his or her capacity for maternal holding is

necessary, and times when his or her desire is the spur to

symbolization. Ceccoli has offered Dan each, but, in her theory

at least, seems not to believe him capable of acting similarly in

his own life, in that it is “women’s capacity for maternity and

its meaning...[which] provided a psychic and physical container

from which desire could emerge” (1999b, p. 713-714). While I

agree that the passage to the symbolic is, perhaps, foremost

among analytic tasks; it is itself a task of symbolic creativity,

drawing from psychic capacities for maternity and paternity, as

they are available in the analyst and the analysand and

discovered in the analysis. As Lacan (1958) put it in his classic

text, “The Meaning of the Phallus”: “For each partner in the

relation, the subject and the Other, it is not enough to be the

subjects of need, nor objects of love, but they must stand as the

cause of desire...To disguise this gap by relying on the virtue

of the ‘genital’ to resolve it through the maturation of

tenderness (that is by a recourse to the Other solely as reality)

however piously intended, is none the less a fraud” (p. 81).

Are Ceccoli’s and my disparate views born of essential

differences? Or are they the assertion of theoretical

differences? Whose provenance are the metaphors of birth and

30

assertion anyway? I feel that we must be wary of the traps of our

gendered metaphors. In the transference, as in the unconscious,

the potential for gendered embodiment transcends the limits of

the actual body and its mechanisms.4 Holding is not always

birthing and aggression is not always destructive, and neither is

the possession of either gender exclusively.

The analyst, like Tiresias, cannot avoid being at times male

and at times female. But when Tiresias made the mistake of

privileging one gender over the other, he was blinded for his

efforts, and later compensated with a golden scepter and the gift

of prophecy. As analysts we must resist desymbolization and

strive to achieve second sight making use of the gold that is

available to us, male or female: the “pure gold” of the analytic

process (Freud, 1919, p. 168).

4 For an excellent example of the use of multi-gendered transferences, see Lachmann & Kiersky, 1995.

31

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