Suffering into Truth: Constructing the Patriarchal Sacred

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Feminist Theology

DOI: 10.1177/0966735009102364 2009; 17; 356 Feminist Theology

Mary Condren Suffering into Truth: Constructing the Patriarchal Sacred

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Suffering into Truth:Constructing the Patriarchal Sacred

Mary [email protected]

AbstrAct

Western practices and theories of the sacred have been ritually performed and culturally elaborated mostly by male theorists who ignored the his-torical exclusion of women from sacral arenas. Shaped by male mor-phologies, their practices and descriptions quickly became prescriptions for theological rectitude and/or healthy social functioning. Women’s exclu-sion appears to have been essential rather than epiphenomenal to the political and ecclesiastical structures established. Through the lens of Sigmund Freud, in this article I will attempt to analyse why the question as to how the Western sacred has been achieved, defined, and elaborated is inherently antithetical to the future of the earth and of women. I will argue that Freud’s focus on repression rather than nurture enables the Western sacred to forge gender dichotomies and legitimize those forms of religious and political mentalities that now carry lethal capacities. For that reason, we need to de-construct its most dangerous capacities, challenge the toxic stories, develop spiritual and disciplinary practices that nurture human creativity, foster independent thinking, and radically address the acute gendered imbalance that cur-rently pervades the religious and political social imaginary. I argue that a feminist call for mere equality within existing theological or political frameworks fails to do justice to the issues at stake. I will then point briefly to some alternative approaches to the sacred mentioned above in the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray; anthropolo-gist, Peggy Reeves Sanday; Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, and artist, psychoanalyst and theorist, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger.

Keywords: Freud, repression, sacred, sacrifice, transgression

Epigraph‘the soil is sacred’ he said, ‘but I wish it grew more potatoes…’. I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes

Copyright © 2009 SAGE PublicationsLos Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC

http://FTH.sagepub.comVol. 17(3): 356-392

DOI: 10.1177/0966735009102364



Condren Suffering into Truth 357

standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. (Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.)1

Feminists Contesting the Sacred

Early feminist critics of theology in the late 1960s and 1970s contested the sacred primarily because of the way in which the sacred served as a means for excluding women from decision and ritual making in the mainstream churches; in other words, on the grounds of equality. Mostly they ignored the question as to how the sacred is produced and the roles played by power, gender, psyche, and violence. The question of how guilt is colonized in the service of the sacred was hardly touched. In the feminist theories that emerged since the 1970s, outside of departments of religious and theological studies, few theorists engaged seriously with the question of religion or the sacred believing that reli-gion was the product of an outmoded world view that would soon be superseded by advanced forms of reason. Notable exceptions were feminist anthropologists such as Peggy Reeves Sanday, who sought to interrogate the relationship between systems of representation and their gendered social structures; Nancy Jay who interrogated the gendered underpinnings of sacrifice, and Carol Delaney who sought to correlate mythic structures with their social and political bases. Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, also sought to develop alternative means (through the body), for women to access their own sacrality.2

Important critiques from the post-Freudian and Lacanian schools were developed by Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, originally Bulgar-ian and Belgian respectively, and living in France. Less well known until recently has been the work of the Israeli-born artist, psychoana-lyst and theorist, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger.

1. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (Middlesex: Penguin, 1929, 1970), pp. 143-44. 2. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Carol Delaney, ‘The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate,’, Man 21(3): 494-513; Carol Delaney, The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmol-ogy in Turkish Village Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992); Cf. Body and Soul: Honoring Marion Woodman, special edition of Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture (Spring, 2005).



358 Feminist Theology

The concerns of all these theorists were political as well as theo-logical. European theorists were intimately aware of the politics of the sacred as they had been played out in the First and Second World Wars supporting both religious and ostensibly post-religious regimes. In the case of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, her concerns also derived from intergenerational memories of the Shoah. Their approach was quite distinct from those who had not, in recent history, experienced major wars on their soil. It differed also from Latin American liberation theologians for whom religion was alive and well in their communities. Taking a phenomenological rather than onto-logical stance, their concern has not been with traditional metaphysical questions on the existence of God, or indeed, Goddess. Rather their ques-tions concern the enduring power of religious images, ideas, and prac-tices to form, shape, and discipline congregations and whole societies into adopting particular mindsets and social outcomes. They aim to think through those great human existential questions that traditionally have found expression, mediation, symbolization, and sublimation in religion and that, left un-theorized, could quickly be monopolized and manipulated by various forms of fascism, or other mass movements that had wreaked havoc on the soil of Europe. Now, however, the ongoing fallout of the Balfour Declaration for the Middle East (1917), the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of retrograde nationalisms, and perhaps especially September 11 has concentrated academic minds across disciplines and continents. The sacred is no longer a matter of seeking equality of opportunity. The very words sacred, and its counterpart sacrifice, are now both seen to instantiate and maintain particular hegemonic political and religious forms of power: questions of religion and the sacred as social forces are now firmly on academic agendas. However, except for some con-cerns about Islamic fundamentalisms, and the veiling of women, the strange relationship between the sacred and gender has receded into the background. Dangerous times call for new approaches. In this article, I will revisit the Freudian and post-Freudian approach to the sacred, and present a gendered critique of some of the main suppositions. My argument is that because some of the early theorists’ assumptions about the sacred appear to be uncritically replicated in contemporary work, we need to revisit their premises. I argue that Freud’s theories must be related to the militarist society in which he was writing, and I point to some of the gendered underpinnings of systems of representations of which he was largely unconscious. I will begin by pointing to some of the difficulties involved in defin-ing the sacred, difficulties that illustrate clearly the power relations that




are deeply imbricated in such definitions, and that are often ignored in contemporary approaches.

1. Definitions of the Sacred

Whereas across the world, the word table is (largely) universally acknowledged to refer to an item upon which we put many different things, the words sacred places or sacred items are specific to cultural or religious traditions. One culture’s sacred mountain, image, rite, tradition may not be rec-ognized beyond its geographical territories. To call something sacred is, therefore, to be immersed as a subject in a particular culture, or to come as a cultural analyst to accept and respect that culture’s defini-tions of sacrality. However, for a cultural analyst, such respect does not necessitate that one accepts any substantive or ontological reality to such definitions beyond the confines of that specific cultural linguistic software. Early theorists asked about the origins of the sacred, but now are more likely to ask what the sacred does, or how does it happen, or when does it take place, questions that are not without dangers since they can lead to some forms of uncritical structural functionalism.3 How, therefore, does something achieve the status of sacrality? Roger Caillois, French theorist of religion, in the tradition fostered by Emile Durkheim, once wrote of the sacred:

Basically, with regard to the sacred in general, the only thing that can be validly asserted is contained in the very definition of the term—that it is opposed to the profane. As soon as one attempts to specify the nature and conditions of this opposition, one comes up against serious obstacles.4

Caillois at once recognized the difficulty of definition, but, like Dur-kheim, also took for granted that the sacred and profane were in fun-damental opposition. Furthermore, Caillois recognized the inherent negativity of the definition: the sacred is the not/profane; the profane is the not/sacred. Similarly, when anthropologist of religion, Nancy Jay, attempted to define the closely related word sacrifice she came up against numerous problems, and in the end concluded that defining sacrifice was logi-cally impossible.

3. Cf. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Middlesex: Penguin, 1974), p. 364. 4. Roger Caillois, L’Homme et le Sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 2nd edn, 1950), translated by Meyer Barash as Man and the Sacred (Glencoe, IL: Free Press of Glencoe, 1950), with three added appendices on Sex, Play, and War, p. 13.




To bring sacrifice under our control as a perfectly defined object of analysis, to cut out and classify its constituent elements, is more like doing sacrifice than understanding it… The victim has indeed been brought under a kind of analytic control, but in the process it has indeed been killed.5

Jay effectively maintained that such acts of definition often perform or otherwise bring into being the reality they are claiming to describe. In other words, defining certain words, especially words like sacred or sacrifice, is no mere intellectual or logical exercise, but is performative in the sense elaborated by linguistic philosopher, J.L. Austin.6 That is (much like weddings when the bride and bridegroom say ‘I do’) it brings into being the social reality that it also reflects. Such definitions play a crucial part in establishing, maintaining, and legitimating one’s cultural boundaries. Furthermore, while one must always leave room for dissenting voices and practices, as well as other variables, the narratives under-pinning such exercises can both reflect and effect particular social orders. This becomes clear when we look at some sacred places, rites, and books.

2. Sacred Places

Sacred places often have been designated as such for generations by particular communities. Usually these will refer to natural phenomena, rivers, wells, mountains, lands or forests on which particular commu-nities have depended for their natural subsistence or communal iden-tity, where energetic leylines are positioned, or where the rhythms of the seasons can be observed, culturally elaborated, and interpreted, i.e. Newgrange in Ireland. However, sacred places are also those that have been achieved vio-lently through the election narratives of a god such as Yahweh who instructed the Israelites to take all the women captive etc. Such chosen status has recently been addressed by Carol Christ and Rebecca Schwartz as one of the founding problematics of omnipotent forms of monotheism.7 Alternatively, the violent deaths of warriors in acts designated as sacrifice serve to legitimize any further attempts to secure such places on behalf of those communities for which they died. The warriors give

5. Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992), pp. xxv-xxvi. 6. J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 7. Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997); Carol Christ, She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World (New York: Palgrave, 2003).




life through their deaths, exerting a commissive force over their com-munities, usually self-perpetuating and productive, in that further lives will most likely be lost in defending such territories, which the original sacrifices serve to make possible and legitimate. Already, therefore in these brief examples, we can see that beyond acknowledging the capacity of the natural order to elicit awe, rever-ence, and gratitude, violence has entered the picture and is inextricably linked with whichever way we define the sacred.

3. Sacred Rites

Actions designated as rituals also follow a similar trajectory. Family or local community rites will usually centre on significant individual milestones (births, marriages, deaths) or significant communal places (wells, shrines, or icons) that have special significance, but whose sacrality does not extend beyond those boundaries. In some communi-ties, therefore, people offered what they termed sacrifice to the land or their gods in gratitude for a good harvest, or acknowledgment of the role their divinities played in protecting their communities. However, in patriarchal societies, sacrifice takes a very different shape. Very often such rites either repeat a founding sacrifice, or at least ritually commemorate the sacrifices of those who died giving birth to the nation. Other rites and rituals, however, have been said to be prescribed by gods, or in memory of gods, or of a saving event, and these rites will claim anything from ontological efficacy in an order of salvation or politi-cal sacrality within certain communities.

4. Sacred Books

We see a similar process with regard to designating specific books as sacred. Individuals might regard certain books as sacred to them in the sense that they treasure their contents, authors, photographs or other memories they evoke, or whoever might have given the book to them in special circumstances. Such designations do not go beyond the indi-viduals or communities. However, if a certain book is said to have been revealed by particular gods, its prescriptions will carry special force, not only in any particular community of the book, but also beyond its territorial borders its sacrality will ideally be respected or, if necessary, be enforced. Once again, the legitimacy of such books will often be gained through a founding death of someone, thereafter designated as divine. Furthermore, any apparent slights against such books will be defended, violently if necessary.




5. Sacrifice and the Sacred

Once we break apart the relationship between the nature and the sacred, violence appears to enter the picture, originating from God and enforced by men. The historian of Greek religion summarized the issue:

To make the elements of a nature-religion human is inevitably to make them vicious. There is no great moral harm in worshipping a thunder-storm, even though the lightning strikes the good and evil quite reck-lessly. There is no need to pretend that the Lightning is exercising a wise and righteous choice. But when once you worship an imaginary quasi-human being who throws the lightning, you are in a dilemma. Either you have to admit that you are worshipping and flattering a being with no moral sense, because he happens to be dangerous, or else you have to invent reasons for his wrath against the people who happen to be struck. And they are pretty sure to be bad reasons. The god, if personal, becomes capricious and cruel.8

Murray’s comments reflect a subtle change in religious consciousness where images of divinity were asked to bear the burden of explain-ing suffering and death, and perhaps just as importantly, disparities between rich and poor, victors and vanquished. Death, in other words, is no longer part of the natural cycle, but must be explained, justified, and, if necessary, theologically overcome. Violent death through mar-tyrdom or sacrifice acquires overriding significance. The question of particular forms of theodicy has entered the picture and ideally, as Peter Berger points out, the best theodicies (all encom-passing systems of explanation) are those that give to social structures such self-evident plausibility that ideally they legitimate the system for both oppressor and oppressed alike.9 But how are such theodicies secured, and what are the implications for gender?

6. Sacrality and Gender

Where religious traditions honour nature, women are usually respected and dialectical relationships between the sexes often pertain.10 However, and despite some differences, the main Abrahamic faiths implicitly agree that control of the sacred is vital to maintaining control of sexual-ity, of women, and of righteous gendered relationships.

8. Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), p. 88. 9. Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 59. 10. See Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1983).




These traditions appear to thrive on, if not demand, strict gender dichotomies, and female subservience. Women and their fluids are impure, abject, and antithetical to culture’s most holy objects and prac-tices. Ritual practices, in particular, comprise a form of cultural labour in which only males can approach what is culturally designated as sacred. Even where women are ordained priests, they often experience forms of discrimination and outright hostility. For instance, forty years ago, in the Swedish Lutheran tradition, following the first ordinations of women, many feared that the traditional rites would not take. In one famous debate, a female ordinand was pregnant. Traditionalists were sure that the rites of ordination would not be valid, but what about her foetus? Would ordination automatically apply to him, should he be male? In many mythological or theological systems, women are respon-sible for bringing death into the world through disobedience, chaos or uncontrolled sensuality. Not surprisingly, therefore, the theodicy undergirding the now acute distinctions between the sacred and the profane appears to parallel gender relations, i.e. male and female. Gender conservatism, veiling, sequestering, abjecting women or female fluids is commonplace, and compulsory heterosexuality, often imposed through violence, is the norm. The social necessity or existence of such gender splitting is cultur-ally specific rather than comprising a necessary outcome of any civi-lizing process. Furthermore, the elaboration of such splitting through rites such as that of sacrifice often serves to establish and maintain hegemonic male domination in that it reflects, and legitimates specific gender relationships. It is important, however, to remember that such distinctions (between sacred/profane, male/female) are mythological rather than being grounded in any ontological reality, and we should remember this especially in the face of those violent attempts to instantiate their truth status, usually in the interests of fundamentalist gender relations. In fact, the repetitive and violent protestation of the necessity of such splitting testifies to a deep underlying insecurity, and perhaps even the unconscious realization that the realm of the sacred is intimately linked to and dependent on that which it ostensibly repudiates—the violently suppressed maternal substrate.11

11. Mary Condren, ‘Women, shame and abjection: reflections in the light of Julia Kristeva’, Contact: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Pastoral Studies 130 (1999), pp. 10-19; Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘The Red Cow Effect: The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow’, ACT 2 Beautiful Translations (London: Pluto,




7. Summary

Several factors stand out in constituting the socially constructed sacred: the first is violence; the second, guilt; the third, gender. In ideal cir-cumstances, the force of guilt (for the debt incurred through a saviour’s death, or martyred soldiers) will be enough to secure a particular com-munity’s compliance to whatever religious or political agreements are said to have been arrived at. Even in so-called post-religious times, the force of guilt for those who died to make our lives possible exercises an enor-mous burden fuelling the militarist mentality. However, when the hegemony of certain social orders is being con-tested, either from within or without, violence will quickly be used to assure compliance. Violence can take many forms. Even in relatively simple communities, individuals can be forced through the violence of social approbation, and at the risk of being socially ostracized, to adhere to certain norms. However, in today’s society that violence will usually take military form. The might of whole armies will be used to secure the sacrality of places, books, or rites. Furthermore, any attempt to defile or interrupt such ceremonies, or to cast aspersions on their para-phernalia (flags, shrines, songs, rubrics) can incur serious personal and political consequences, even death.12

Gender is also crucial. Maintaining the myth of the sacred/profane, and male/female dichotomies is a form of cultural labour that serves to mystify social relations, and also instantiates the A/Not-A mentality that fosters splitting. Such splitting is at the level of power as much as at the level of theory.13

Constituting the sacred, therefore, goes to the heart of the gendered and violent social order, and interrogating the foundations of sacral-ity is no mere academically esoteric activity. On the contrary, defin-ing the sacred is at once an act that both performs the sacred/profane dichotomies and informs us of the terms of its central tenets. Given the relationships between sacrifice and the sacred, such work also estab-lishes and maintains what Julia Kristeva terms the sacrificial social contract.14

1996), pp. 82-119; Mary Condren, ‘Sacrifice and Political Legitimation: The Production of a Gendered Social Order’, Journal of Women’s History 6.4/7.1 (Winter/Spring, 1995): 160-89. 12. Cf. Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 13. Nancy Jay, ‘Gender and Dichotomy’, Feminist Studies 7 (1981): 38-56. 14. Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 187-213.




Kristeva has made invaluable contributions to the study of religion. However, and especially in some of her recent work, Kristeva (like Freud) comes perilously close to failing to distinguish between histori-cal social forms and absolute psychic necessities.15

Furthermore, as Griselda Pollock argues of Kaja Silverman and Kristeva, neither dares to think beyond the Oedipal model laid down by Freud.16 It is important, therefore, to revisit Freud’s work, given its ongoing significance for theories of the sacred, and especially given the spilling over of gendered sacrificial mythologies concerning right rela-tions between parents (especially fathers) and children, into dangerous new secular, and political imaginaries where their symbolic violence develops lethal capacities.

FreudWe know that the emerging science of psychoanalysis began with the search for more appropriate paradigms for interpreting mental illness, and especially for understanding unexplained bodily symptoms. In other words, psychoanalysis sought to overcome the body/mind or subject/object split. However, its efficacy might be aid to have been fatally compro-mised at the outset by Freud’s choice of narratives. His choice included stories that reinforced gender dichotomies, and established or legiti-mized patriarchal rule. On the other hand, he largely ignored stories or narratives (such as the Garden of Paradise) that described beautifully the process whereby such gendered splitting took place at the heart of its social order. Freud wrote several articles and monographs specifically on reli-gion: Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices in 1907; Totem and Taboo in 1918; Future of an Illusion 1927; Civilization and its Discontents 1930, and Moses and Monotheism which was published in 1939 although he had been working on it for many years. Freud focused on the figure of Moses, and ignored the role of Abra-ham and the Abraham and Isaac story (Akedah), despite its pivotal role in the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.17

15. Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psycho-analysis (trans. Jeanine Herman; New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred (trans. Jane Marie Todd; New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 16. Griselda Pollock, ‘Re-thinking the Artist in the Woman: The Woman in the Artist, and that Old Chestnut, the Gaze’, in Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (eds.), Women Artists at the Millennium (Cambridge, MA: October Books, MIT Press, 2006), p. 56. 17. Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: the Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).




Freud focussed on Greek stories, and his theories on religion centre on the Greek myth of Oedipus, even though there is no evidence that it played any major role in the social imaginary. We know that he was aware of Aeschylus’s trilogy, Oresteia, which was not merely performed in a theatre, as we know them today, but to the early Greeks was like a Mass, that was ritually reiterated to secure the terms of the founding social contract. However, Freud refers to it only to laud the spiritual superiority of proclaiming paternity over maternity.

An echo of this revolution seems still to be audible in the Oresteia of Aeschy-lus. But this turning from the mother to the father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality—that is, an advance in civiliza-tion, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the sense while pater-nity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step.18

8. Freud and Oedipus

The major tenets of his Oedipus Complex can be briefly reiterated. In his analysis of childhood trauma, Freud determined that children originally were freely sexual until the age of about five when, under the influence of the Oedipus Complex, they entered a latency period. The first five years of any child’s experience were crucial. Traumas encoun-tered then could permanently affect a child’s psychic health. Following latency, such traumas could again arise and only under the influence of psychoanalysis be mediated in such a way that the individual could attain psychic health. Freud argued that boy children at a certain age relinquish their desire to sleep with their mothers, for fear of their father’s wrath and threat of castration. They enter latency, putting their sexual needs on ice, as it were. This repression, and the fear of castration by the father, is enough to persuade males to obey law and order. Girl children, however, to their horror, discover that they are missing a very valuable organ. Already castrated, women never quite had to achieve the sublimation necessary on the part of males. Their insufficient sublimation rendered their social ties problematic, which probably accounted for their exclusion from the social order, a factor that Freud (like most theorists of his generation) never felt it necessary to interrogate. This radical renunciation of the mother, the fear of castration, and envy of the father’s penis is key to all Freud’s work and shapes his social theory thereafter.

18. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, S.E. xxiii, p. 114.




9. Totem and Taboo

In his psychoanalytic practice Freud worked with and developed the Oedipus Complex applying its structure to individual cases. However, when he came across the work of evolutionist Charles Darwin, and theorist of religion, W. Robertson Smith in Religion of the Semites, Freud considered that he had the key, not only to the origin of the Oedipus Complex, but to culture itself.19

Freud argued in Totem and Taboo (1918) and re-iterated in Moses and Monotheism (1939) that societies are held together by post-sacrificial taboos. In Freud’s scheme, the specific taboos were instantiated follow-ing the murder of the primal father by the sons in order to gain sexual access to the mother. Freud’s social analysis built on his Oedipus theo-ries—children want to sleep with their mothers and kill their fathers because they are the obstacle. Freud placed the father at the center of psychic development. Having killed the father, the mythical band of brothers established the totem (the father) to remind them of what not to do in the future. These prohibitions formed the basis of the social contract and were reflected in classical and other myths. Freud’s sacrificial social con-tract (as well as some current theories on the relationship between war and sacrifice) placed fathers and sons at center stage, a point to which we will return. Totem and Taboo represents one of Freud’s first attempts to extrapo-late from his growing knowledge of individual trauma discovered on the couch to social psychology and indeed, social pathologies. Approaching the end of his life, far from revising some of his earlier ideas regarding religion, in Moses and Monotheism (1939) he was content to re-iterate and indeed to reinforce the main suppositions in Totem and Taboo. Two other works on religion had intervened, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and its Discontents. Although hugely problematic now for several reasons, Totem and Taboo is often the launching pad for contemporary speculations on our psychic origins, theories of sacrifice, repression, transgression, religion, and the Oedipus Complex whose main tenets still hold sway in the major schools of psychoanalysis. Freud’s hypotheses were endorsed by his contemporary interpreter and his most influential disciple, Jacques Lacan, who attempted to rescue Freud’s work from the charges of biol-ogism with which he had been apparently discredited. Lacan, consid-ered Totem and Taboo to be Freud’s most important work.20

19. Freud, Totem and Taboo, S.E. xiii, p. 143. 20. Tom McGrath, ‘Existential Psychoanalysis’, Journal of the Irish Forum for Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy 1.2 (1988).




In addition, the widely influential theorist of sacrifice, René Girard, although critical of Freud’s Oedipus Complex (and said to have even launched an Oedipal attack on Freud),21 also considered that while the main assumptions in Totem and Taboo are often largely challenged, nev-ertheless, that Freud’s thesis that (murder is at heart of every society) was basically correct and has been unfairly disregarded.22 Where Freud erred, according to Girard, was in the identification of the primordial victim with the father. Girard holds the identity of the first victim to be irrelevant and theoretically should be made subordinate to the ques-tion of the founding murder itself, an act that revealed the origins upon which society had been established. Underlying Freud’s work and made central in the work of Girard is the notion that envy and its lethal consequences required extensive social prohibitions to keep it in check. Relying on selective myths, Freud assumed that the totem figure was the father. Relying on literature, Girard considered that Freud was mistaken; that he inappropriately projected paternal death wishes onto infants; that the identity of the original victim was irrelevant; and that mimetic conflict was primary and resolved only at the expense of a victim. According to Girard, such victimage mechanisms resulted in sacrificial practices and sacrificial substitutions. Unlike Freud’s successor, Melanie Klein, neither consid-ered the possibility that envy of the female body (or the source of life itself) could be primary.

Critiques of FreudFreud has been widely critiqued for his comments on female sexual-ity, and we will not take up that issue here: our main focus is on the gendered assumptions he brings to the sacred and profane dichotomy. Many other interdisciplinary critiques have been made of Freud’s main assumptions and can be briefly summarized. It is said that he used outdated mythical and anthropological theory; that totemism is by no means universal, and that he ignored apparently contradictory evidence (or was himself contradictory) with regard to the existence or

21. Toril Moi, ‘The Missing Mother: The Oedipal Rivalries of René Girard’, Diacrit-ics 12 (1982): 24 22. Cf. René Girard, Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde (Research under-taken in collaboration with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, Paris, 1978); trans. by Stephen Bann (Books 11 and 111, and Michel Metteer (Book 1) as Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London: Athlone Press, 1987, with revisions to the English edition), pp. 24-25, 96-97. Cf. also René Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Editions. Bernard Grasset, 1972) trans. by Patrick Gregory as Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 197-201.




non-existence of female deities or female centred civilizations. In addi-tion, Freud was heavily influenced by theories of evolution, by the opti-mism of Reason, by the advances of science, and by the hope that the superstitions found in religion would be overcome by superior forms of consciousness.23

In summary: Freud implicitly acknowledges the role of the rise of father-right in developing specific forms of the sacred which he then appears to conflate with sacrality itself. Second, in presenting a thesis that prioritizes repression over nurture, he effectively ignores the socialization work of parenting (and work of women, in particu-lar). Freud simply ignores socialization practices that, far from being repressive, offer alternative paradigms of child development, and often reflect alternative social constellations not ruled by father-right but that encourage dialectical relationships between the sexes.24

But in what kind of culture was Freud writing, and how does that culture reflect Freud’s mind, or, in turn, be affected later by his find-ings, not to mention his omissions? Freud wrote Totem and Taboo in 1918, and he finally published Moses and Monotheism in 1939. In other words, his work spanned the two World Wars. He wrote many other works as well, the most significant of which for our topic here were those on war. To put Freud in context and to understand his gender blindness at a new level, we need to turn briefly into that area.

10. Gender and War

Studies of the interrelationship between gender and war have prolif-erated over the past thirty years, and they are comprehensively sum-marized by Joshua Goldstein in his book, War and Gender.25 Goldstein found that all societies have engaged in war, and all societies meet the challenge by assembling groups of fighters, predominantly male. Exceptions to this rule count for less than one per cent. However, using qualitative and quantitative analyses, Goldstein can find absolutely no reason (biological, physiological, ethological, ethno-logical, sociological, hormonal etc.) as to why (with some very minor exceptions) women do not initiate wars or act as fighting soldiers.

23. Cf. Explorations in Psychoanalytic Ethnography (ed. Jadran Mimica; Bergahn Books, 2007); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage Books, 1959). 24. Cf. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 25. Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).




As he formulates his findings:the gendering of war appears to result from a combination of factors, with two main causes finding robust empirical support: (1) small, innate bio-logical gender differences in average size, strength, and roughness; and (2) cultural molding of tough, brave men, who feminize enemies in domi-nating them. The gendering of war thus results from the combination of culturally constructed gender roles with real but modest biological differ-ences. Neither alone would solve the puzzle.26

He is dismissive of hypotheses claiming that hunter gatherer societies or matriarchies were peaceful, but, significantly, he found that democ-racies do not war against one another. Goldstein concludes that causality works both ways—gender shapes war, and war shapes gender—but cannot elaborate on how this happens.27 Of the six hypotheses that Goldstein examines to explain the almost universal exclusion of women as warriors, none of the first four would account for his final conclusion: However, the remaining two contain possibilities. Goldstein argues that killing does not come naturally to men; they have to be trained and socialized into killing. Cultures unilaterally con-struct cultural stereotypes: tough men and tender women. As children, males are emotionally conditioned to endure trauma. Furthermore, he argues that in almost all societies male sexuality is aggressive, and that the feminization of enemies in warfare is widespread. In today’s wars, gendered insults constitute psychological weaponry. In brief, Goldstein’s extensive research and findings flatly contra-dicts Freud’s theories on innate aggression and the absolute necessity for social repression, and turns the focus once again onto socialization practices.

11. The Great Father

Freud does not ignore the question of parents. When Freud and his fol-lowers such as Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, and later on Jacques Lacan, focussed on the role of the father in constructing the identity of the infant the role of the father was essentially one of fantasy rather than reality. The difficulty is that the Father in Freud’s writing almost perfectly reflects the authoritarian, paternal, distant disciplinarian of Victorian and Germanic society, rather than a nurturing father actively involved in child raising and nurture. Nevertheless, this father plays a major role.

26. Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 6. 27. Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 6.




Freud considered that only the persuasion or force of a number of exemplary individuals whom the masses follow can hold society together:

It is just as impossible to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization.28

Rather than entirely rely on coercion, society must find ways of encour-aging individuals to internalize social norms. One such way is establish-ing national social ideals to which individuals can aspire and then take pride. In turn, such cultural ideals allow even the most socially disad-vantaged in particular societies to feel superior in relation to competi-tive national social ideals. Without such internalization, or collective representations of mutual interest, societies would fall apart.29

However, ignoring the socialization work of parents, and women in particular, he looks again for the Great Father by asking the question:

It may be asked where the number of superior, unswerving and disinter-ested leaders are to come from who are to act as educators of the future generations, and it may be alarming to think of the enormous amount of coercion that will inevitably be required before these intentions can be carried out.30

Alongside the incestuously inclined brothers who need to be brought in to line, Freud’s question was answered by the Great Father, the one who represented (and perhaps embodied) national ideals. It is perhaps unnecessary to remind readers again of the political context in which Freud was writing—a time when Hitler was running riot all over Europe. Freud’s father-image had further consequences. Judith Van Herik claims that inherent in Freud’s work is the assumption that key to male psychic health is the question of renunciation, primarily of incestuous wishes toward the mother which the male has to keep in check for fear of castration. Freud assumes that such wishes are sexual (and therefore inappropriate) rather than for intimacy, holding, nurturing—wishes that must be mediated in the context of loving parenthood.31

However, in the context of a patriarchal society, such stark renunci-ation of the mother also serves to promote and create the fantasy of the armoured male who serves the needs of war. Furthermore, the violent forms of individuation are reinforced by military forms of induction. As Jessica Benjamin argues:

28. Freud, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, 1927 S.E. vol. xxi, p. 7. 29. Freud, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, pp. 13-14. 30. Freud, ‘The Future of an Illusion’, p. 8. 31. Judith Van Herik, Freud on Femininity and Faith (Berkeley, CA: University of California 1982).




When individuals lose access to internal and external forms of maternal identification, independence backfires: it stimulates a new kind of help-lessness, one which has to be countered by a still greater idealization of control and self-sufficiency.32

However, the emotional deprivation inherent in military life and the renounced craving for intimacy finds compensation in several ways. The first is the exacerbated brotherhood made possible under war conditions and that carries with it extreme forms of misogyny.33 The second is the idealization of the private sphere, the Home.34 In other words, renuncia-tion, sacrifice, and repression all go hand in hand.35 However, the ideal-ization of the Home does not extend to considering what goes on there to have any relevance for social life, and herein lies a major dilemma. According to Benjamin, while we operate under the myth of ratio-nalism, in effect, the rationality underlying the social order has led to new forms of communal and private expression of irrational emotions, especially revolving around sacrifice. As Benjamin argues, increased privatization and instrumentality has led to more desperate measures toward boundary breaking.

Consequently, sexual eroticism has become the heir to religious eroticism. Erotic masochism or submission expresses the same need for transcen-dence of self—the same flight from separation and discontinuity—for-merly satisfied and expressed by religion. Love is the new religion, and the psychological components of erotic domination are repeated in the eroticized cult politics of our era.36

32. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 174. 33. Dubravka Zarkov, ‘The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Con-struction of Maculinity, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in the Croatian Media’, in Caroline O.N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark (eds.), Victims, Perpetrators, or Actors: Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence (London and New York: Zed Books, 2001), pp. 69-81; Abigail E. Adams, ‘Dyke to Dyke: Ritual Reproduction at a US Men’s Military College’, Anthropol-ogy Today 9.5 (1993): 3-6; Chapkis, Wendy, ‘Sexuality and Militarism’, in Eva Isaakson (ed.), Women and the Military System (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988). 34. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 204-205. 35. Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). Recent research on war conducted by feminist scholars internationally would suggest that beneath the seemingly rational discourse of those who, for instance, develop, and make decisions about, nuclear weaponry, are impetuses that are far from ‘rational’ and indeed are at the mercy of erotic and gendered subcurrents that radically undermine rational decision making. Cf. Carol Cohn, ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs 12.4 (1987); Wendy Chapkis, ‘Sexuality and Militarism’, and Cynthia Enloe, ‘Beyond “Rambo”: Women and the Varieties of Militarized Masculinity’, in Eva Isaakson (ed.), Women and the Military System (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 36. Jessica Benjamin, ‘The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domina-tion’, Feminist Studies 6.1 (Spring, 1980): 169.




Benjamin ties this technological rationality not to repression, or to nar-cissism, but to an exacerbated gender polarity which runs over into a generalized contempt for the needy and dependent, a mythical culture of self-reliance, and a rejection of the values of nurture, where the men-tality of opposition pits freedom against nurturance.37

She goes on to argue that such gender conservatism serves to exac-erbate the split between public and private, work and home, and is functional only, as she argues, as long as society permits the existence of a private refuge.38 In other words, she argues that exacerbated gender conservatism is functional to the needs of war.

12. Religion versus War

In correlating the Oedipus Complex with totemism, Freud recognized not only the link between the psyche and the social, but also that the system of representation—the images and stories regarding gods and goddesses of a society—were directly related to the psychic needs they might be ful-filling. In simple terms, Freud considered religion to be simply a form of obsessional neurosis. In turn, such psychic needs took cultural expression. In his approach to religion Freud focuses partly on the incredibility of its belief systems, and also on its social form as this obsessional neu-rosis which would have to be cured, especially in relation to its role in channelling the guilt of the Oedipus Complex. Religion, for Freud, is, therefore, a form of cultural labour whose necessity might be surpassed (but not anytime soon) by advanced forms of reason and natural evolu-tion. He fails to make the connection between religious forms of obses-sional neurosis and that of the military. In other words, he fails to ask about the power of the military apparatus to institute repressions in its own right in the interests of a form of power that has developed a productive life of its own. In both instances, he fails to make the connections between religious cultural labour and military cultural labour and their role in establish-ing and maintaining violently achieved gendered social orders. The totemic brother’s radical renunciation of women (who had little voice in the matter), coupled with the Great Father’s (military) leader-ship, may have reflected, and at the very least, did not challenge, the militarist mindset. Religion for Freud may have been largely illusion, but military might was a reality and an absolute necessity. At the end of his life, Freud’s contempt for religion remains (he remarks of the Soviets that they have been rash enough to withdraw the ‘opium’ of reli-

37. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 171-72. 38. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, p. 204.




gion from their populations). Even as he went into forced exile, ironically, and somewhat to his chagrin, aided by the Catholic Church the old enemy, he remarked, with some irony, on the correspondence between religious and military means of oppression and repression:

Such violent means of suppression are, indeed, by no means alien to the Church; the fact is rather than it feels it as an invasion of its privileges if someone else makes use of those methods.39

13. Guilt

In today’s societies, fuelled by various forms of religious and political fundamentalisms, the validity of the religious sacred has often broken down. Nevertheless the sacred is used to legitimate the validity of either and both realms. Both religion and war, therefore, play a major role in social legitimation, albeit in different ways. Furthermore, guilt has not gone away; indeed, in those societies where Abrahamic religions still hold sway, violence and guilt go hand in hand. But from where is this guilt derived? For instance, watching the kneeling, swaying, crouching, and exclaiming taking place in mass religious rallies one cannot but wonder at the sources of the profound sense of guilt being expressed, bodily and verbally. Often such great displays are presided over by religious or military officiaries who ostensibly hold the keys to the goods of salvation, or at least the key to interpreting those Scriptures needed to be followed to the letter of the law if salvation is to be achieved. Watching military rallies, one wonders how such enormous group compliance is achieved and assured. Military officiants are obsessed with military insignia and other paraphernalia designed to recognize and validate soldier’s compliance to militarist mythologies. Social theo-rists wonder how such compliance is secured. Sociologists such as Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu have argued that a vital part of legitimating strategies lies in the competition for the goods of salvation. But in the light of the discussion here, and especially the relationship between the sacred and war, we might ask the ques-tion: salvation from what? The main Abrahamic faiths relate this sense of guilt or indebtedness to their founding charter accounts of sacrifice, those actually carried out, or those (like Isaac) arrested at the last moment. Freud relates such guilt to the effects of the Oedipus Complex and the various forms of adequate or inadequate sexual repression. In

39. Moses and Monotheism, ‘Preface’, 1938, S.E. xxiii, p. 55.




Totem and Taboo Freud related guilt to the crime that had been com-mitted at the dawn of history and to the ontogenetic and phylogenetic memories that had passed down in cellular form to the human race. In Moses and Monotheism he identifies the Great Father as none other than Moses himself. However, Freud then goes on to argue about the return of the repressed: the Son, Jesus, who atones for the Original Sin commit-ted against his Father. By naming the source of this guilt through religious form of sacri-fice, or Freud’s early murder, such guilt is colonized in the service of a political or repressive social order. In other words, it begins to consti-tute what Pierre Bourdieu considers to be a form of symbolic violence, further adding to the actual violence that has been perpetrated.40

What about other sources of this guilt, and what might this have to do with child rearing practices? Contemporary psychologists now recognize the relationship between abuse and excessive guilt. People who are abused often feel profoundly unworthy, engaging in practices of scrupulosity or other measures designed to alleviate the pressure of their own unworthi-ness. Seeking the goods of salvation they often turn to idealized figures, political or religious, to help them bear the burden. Yet, further abuse happens when guilt is colonized in the service of an abusing society or, even worse, by various forms of spiritual abuse practiced in the name of salvation. Often the actions of abused persons are repetitive in that they seek, by repeating the original action, to overcome its traumatic effects. Sado-masochistic acts (often performed in the name of religion) would be one such manifestation. Freud has been heavily criticized for ignoring or misinterpreting sexual abuse, but in Germanic societies physical child abuse was also rampant.41 As the massive armies thundered across Europe, and mil-lions of young men and some women were killed, Freud appears to have failed (because they were so insignificant) to interrogate the social-ization practices then pertaining. This was despite the effects that he so carefully documented of the importance of early childhood trauma. He also seems unaware of those societies colonized by Western-ers in which the natives were absolutely shocked at the childrearing

40. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (trans. Richard Nice; London: Sage Publications, 1977). 41. Linda Rennie Forcey, ‘Making of Men in the Military: Perspectives From Mothers’, Women Studies International Forum 7.6 (1984): pp. 477-86; Nancy Hartsock, ‘Gender and Sexuality: Masculinity, Violence and Domination’, Humanities in Society 7.1/2 (1984): 19-45; Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1984); Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society’s Betrayal of the Child (New York: New American Library, 1986).




and child beating practices of their subjugators. In one such society, a colonizer complained that because of the excessive love the Savages bear their children…the Savages prevent their instruction; they will not tolerate the chastisement of their children, whatever they may do, they permit only a simple reprimand.42

Psychoanalysis may have begun with a focus on symptoms in the body, but that focus now appeared long forgotten as generations of young men, in particular, were socialized into various forms of barbar-ity. For all classes, but perhaps especially in public schools designed for future rulers, vicious forms of child abuse were practiced as chil-dren were taught to suffer into truth.43 Far from challenging such abuse, Freud’s theory of repression, his assumptions regarding male psychic health, and his focus on sexual guilt might have actively contributed towards such violent forms of child raising and its relationship to war. The Swiss psychiatrist, Alice Miller, has, in several works, corre-lated the creation of violent political personalities with their abusive treatment in childhood. Her findings indicate that in Germanic coun-tries up to sixty per cent of children were physically violently abused. She argues that adults often take out their own abusive treatment on their children, but when lacking children of their own, or alternative means of revenge, they take it out (like Hitler) on the general popula-tion. As Roger Money-Kryle formulated the problem:

The impulse to dominate grew in proportion to the impulse to submit, and both combined to mould the state into something that could be worshipped as a god and in whose apotheosis they could also feel their own.44

In other words, if one’s early experiences were nurturing rather than repressive, would there be such a pronounced need for the violence of individuation that Freud considered essential to psychic health? If physical abuse had not been so taken for granted, would there have been the reservoir of guilt that found alleviation in the Supreme father figure, Hitler? Would there have been such a pronounced need to exter-nalize and project such guilt upon the Jews? And would the various

42. Eleanor Burke Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross Culturally (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), pp. 46-47. David Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600–1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 209. 43. Cf. Ian Gibson, The English Vice (London: Duckworth, 1978); Phillip J. Greven, The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Child Abuse (London: Vintage, 1990). 44. R.E. Money-Kyrle, Psychoanalysis and Politics: A Contribution to the Psychology of Politics and Morals (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1951), p. 114.




forms of sacrality then used to legitimize the militarist efforts have retained so much of their commissive force under the circumstances?

14. Father-right and Sacrality

Like his contemporary, Emile Durkheim, Freud takes the sacred/profane dichotomy almost as a precondition for religion: Durkheim con-sidered religion to be a primitive form of science. However, the distinc-tion between the sacred and the profane is by no means as absolute as either Freud or the Durkheimian school considered it to be. At times of crisis the realm of the sacred is called upon by the profane to intervene, and in any case, in national religions, the role of the sacred in legitimat-ing the profane world of law and order appears indispensable. In Totem and Taboo, Freud claimed that there was an original corre-spondence between what was holy and what was unclean which only later became differentiated.45 However, he quickly went on to examine some social taboos for their possible psychic roots and classical com-pulsion neurosis. These included prohibitions against incest, such as contact with one’s sister, formal relations with one’s mother (after a certain age), and penalties, such as hanging, for brother/sister incest.46

Here, however, Freud effectively lets the cat out of the bag with regard to gender relations when he goes on to explain the relationship between the sacred and incest:

We confidently expect that an investigation of all the other cases of a sacred prohibition would lead to the same conclusion as in that of the horror of incest: that what is sacred was originally nothing other than the prolonga-tion of the will of the primal father. This would throw light on the hitherto incomprehensible ambivalence of the words which express the concept of sacredness. It is the ambivalence which in general dominates the relation to the father. [The Latin] sacer means not only ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, but also something that we can only translate as ‘infamous’, ‘detestable’ (e.g. ‘auri sacra fames’) [trans. ‘execrable hunger for gold’].47

Forgetting the original correspondence between what is now sacred and profane enabled him to consider the Oedipus Complex to be a cultural

45. Wundt offered us about the double meaning of the word taboo, namely, holy and unclean (see above). It was supposed that originally the word taboo did not yet mean holy and unclean but signified something demonic, something which may not be touched, thus emphasizing a characteristic common to both extremes of the later con-ception; this persistent common trait proves, however, that an original correspondence existed between what was holy and what was unclean, which only later became differ-entiated. Totem and Taboo, S.E. xiii, pp. 66-67. 46. Totem and Taboo, S.E. xiii. 47. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, S.E. xxiii, p. 120.




universal and a psychic necessity. Furthermore, he effectively ignores the fact that the sacred and the profane have been forced apart by new arrangements that facilitate the patriarchal social structure. Furthermore, he misses the fact (or does not consider it to be impor-tant) that, in patriarchal society, women are not allowed any form of public religious officiation. Therefore, as Nancy Jay argued in relation to Durkheim, if this form of religion is the pre-condition for conceptual thought, given the exclusion of women, as reason and emotion grow apart, women’s very crania are shrinking.48

15. Repression

Freud also considered that culture as we know it only came into being with the advent of advanced forms of repression. He argued that civi-lization can only be achieved and held together by repressing libidinal impulses toward aggression or unlicensed sexuality. However, he also argued that civilization arose because of the great philosophical leap made possible by our knowledge of paternity. These two central hypotheses do not appear ever to have been brought together or teased out to their logical conclusion. We will take these two issues separately, to begin with. Freud argued that such libidinal repressions are far too stringent for our human good. For instance, in answering Albert Einstein’s question as to the intractability of war, he argued that instinctual repressions necessary for civilization exacted undue force on the psychic health of individuals and that they would periodically need to be lifted and instinctual urges given free rein. War was one such occasion. As he wrote,

our grievous disillusionment regarding the uncivilized behaviour of our world-compatriots in this war are shown to be unjustified. They were based on an illusion to which we had abandoned ourselves. In reality our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we had feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed.49

In ‘The Future of an Illusion’ Freud makes several assumptions derived from hegemonic masculinism. Freud assumes that when repressions are lifted that humankind reverted to instincts, and that such instincts were inherently violent. He assumed (or at least did not consider other possibilities) that women’s instincts were parallel to those of men.

48. Jay, Throughout Your Generations, p. 136. 49. Freud, ‘The Disillusionment of War’, in John Rickman (ed.), Civilisation, War and Death (London: Hogarth Press, 1969).




Freud assumes that force and civilization must go hand in hand. As he wrote of war:

Thus the attempt to replace actual force by the force of ideas seems at present to be doomed to failure. We shall be making a false calculation if we disregard the fact that law was originally brute violence and that even today it cannot do without the support of violence.50

He thereby explicitly ignores the socialization work of women, and implicitly fails to critique the gender relations then pertaining in Europe in which, especially where the splits between Home and Work pertained, most fathers were distant, authoritarian, disciplinarians of children, rather than nurturers. Freud implicitly argues that violence is a necessary feature of the human condition. And whereas his work on female sexuality is now largely discredited, statements such as these are hugely problematic for several reasons. Freud assumes that the basis for all ethics was repression and girl children and women (lacking the means to offend) do not suffer a similar level of repression and seldom attain to high ethical development.51

In assuming that individuals must achieve instinctual renuncia-tion for the sake of human society, as we have seen, he ignores (even on his own terms) the maternal instincts of care and nurture, or the maternal role of socialization: if women were to renounce their mater-nal instincts, human societies would collapse. Since only love, force, or the leadership of some disinterested individuals can hold societies together, Freud totally discounts the evidence of the matri-centred hordes evident even then to practicing anthropologists. In view of all that, his exclusive focus on stories that supported father-right and the exclusion of those that featured goddesses or even contained remnants of an historic struggle between the two systems, becomes significant. But even more importantly, his ignoring the social-izing work of parents, and especially women, in favour of theories of repression has widespread implications, especially in relation to his failure to contextualize his insights as deriving fundamentally from a culture of war.

16. Transgression

Freud’s totemic theories have supported his theories of sacrality, and they have further implications for a culture of war. If repression was

50. Freud, ‘Why War’, S.E. xxii, p. 208. 51. Cf. Eli Sagan, Freud, Women, and Morality: the Psychology of Good and Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1988).




the problem for Freud, then transgression may have the solution for his successors. Totemism was also an issue for Emile Durkheim whose work we cannot take up here. However, Durkheimian theorist, Caillois, in tones reminiscent of Freud, continued to write of the taboos set in place to maintain the sacred, in these terms.

The sole manifestation of the sacred may be in the forms of taboos, which protect against anything capable of threatening the cosmic regularity, or of expiations and reparations for all that can disturb it.52

However, he claims of taboos that they are unable:to maintain the integration of nature and society. They are unable to restore it to its early youth. Rules do not possess any inherent principle capable of reinvigorating it. It is necessary to invoke the creative quality of the Gods, to return to the beginning of the world, and to resort to the powers which at that time transformed chaos into cosmos.53

Caillois made an interesting statement regarding the sacred, and its dual nature, as creative and destructive:

The sacred as regulation, as taboos, organizes creation, conquered by the sacred as infraction, and makes it endure. One governs the normal course of social life, the other governs its paroxysm.54

Caillois goes on to add:At times of war, this is reversed. What has been forbidden must now be indulged.

It must be stressed that these sacriligious acts are regarded as just as ritu-alistic and holy as the very taboos they violate. Like the taboos, they free man from the sacred. In the course of the pilou, the great New Caledonian festival, writes Leenhardt, a masked character arrives who contradicts all the rules. He does everything that is forbidden to others. Reincarnating the ancestor whose mask identifies him, he pantomimes and repeats the actions of his mythical patron who ‘pursues pregnant women and reverses emotional and social concepts’.55

Caillois recognizes the two-sided sacred, but fails to comment on the gender implications: Pursuing pregnant women is unproblematic. Caillois appears to assert here that the forces of repression require an occasional lifting of the lid. In this he is at one with Freud on war who also appears to consider that the pressures of repression are so great that they require periodic lancing, or even bloodletting!

52. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, p. 101. 53. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, p. 103. 54. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, p. 125. 55. Caillois, Man and the Sacred, p. 117.




For that reason, Caillois and his colleague, Georges Bataille, have developed theories of the festival, or various forms of transgressive eroticism that they consider necessary to counter the advanced forms of repression of Western society. Such occasions are socially fertile in that, following periods of license, usually sexual, they renew the terms of the founding contract often in exacerbated ways. Unfortunately, however, such festivals often take the form of war, and, as Rosi Braidotti points out, and as behaviour in war confirms, such transgression often takes place over the bodies of women.56 Fur-thermore, they often involve pre-Oedipal fantasies, sadistic fantasies enacted in war under the aegis of Hero mythologies.57

17. Two-sided Sacred

Freud’s trajectories of the sacred have ongoing repercussions that per-colate through feminist theory, especially through the work of Julia Kristeva, who is influenced by Durkheim through Georges Bataille and his colleague, Roger Caillois. Following Caillois, and drawing on Melanie Klein, Kristeva asks the question:

Could the sacred be, whatever its variants, a two sided formation? One aspect founded by murder and the social bond made up of murder’s guilt ridden atonement, with all the projective mechanisms and obsessive rituals that accompany it; and another aspect, like a lining, more secret still and invisible, non-representable, oriented towards those uncertain spaces of unstable identity, toward the fragility—both threatening and fusional—of the archaic dyad, toward the non separation of subject, object, on which language has no hold but one woven of fright and repulsion?58

In other words, Kristeva appears to accept the definitions of the sacred as they have been developed in Freudian and post-Durkheimian work. But Griselda Pollock, reflecting on the work of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, relates this firmly to Freud’s absolute necessity of the incest taboo and asks pertinently regarding Kristeva’s definition:

This second aspect is, therefore, the ‘confrontation with the feminine’. Does it, however, have to be ‘woven of fright and repulsion?’ Accord-ing to Freud, all primally repressed foundations of subjectivity acquire

56. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philoso-phy (Oxford: Polity Press, 1991); Anne Llewellyn Barstow (ed.), War’s Dirty Secret: Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes Against Women (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2000). 57. Cf. Griselda Pollock, ‘Painting as a Backward Glance that Does Not Kill’, Renais-sance and Modern Studies 46 (2001): 117-44 (125). 58. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 58.




anxiety when they, the repressed, uncannily return to haunt us. But that does not mean, as Ettinger has so eloquently argued, that all of our archaic experiences were, in themselves frightening and full of anxiety.59

However, at another level it may well be the case that in Western culture, for historical and political reasons, Caillois and Kristeva describe a social reality that might now be capable of explanation. In order to do this, we will have to turn to one of those narratives which Freud knew about but actively ignored, except when, as recounted above, the narrative lauded the superiority of paternity over maternity.

18. Suffering into Truth

When one of Freud’s successors, Melanie Klein, turned to a myth, she focused on the Eumenides, the third part of Aeschylus’s trilogy Orest-eia where the struggle between the old matri-centred society and the emerging patriarchal order was fully played out. Like Freud, Klein acknowledged that murder lay at the heart of the social contract: it was not just a complex, but a reality. Her essay remained unfinished at her death; however, Klein may have differed from Freud on the nature of that crime. The Oresteia outlines the transition from matri-centred to patri-centred social orders, lauds the triumph of paternity over maternity, and instantiates the goddess Athena (no mother gave me birth) as ruler of Athens. Significantly, the old goddesses of the kin, the Furies, (whose job was to punish matricides) as they approach the shrine of Apollo, (previously dedicated to Pythia, the serpentine goddess/priestess), cry out in anguish:

Such is your triumph, you young gods, world dominion past all rights.Your throne is streaming blood, blood at the foot, blood at the crowning head—

I can see the Navelstone of the Earth, it’s bleeding,Bristling corruption, oh, the guilt it has to bear (The Eumenides, lines, 162-67).

The Furies, in other words, record the death of an ancient establishment and clearly point to the guilt incurred: the Navelstones that are bleeding. Aeschylus’s lines indelibly record the significance of what has taken place in the change over from matri-centred to patriarchal forms of civ-ilization. The lines provide a unique acknowledgement of the seismic epistemic shift that, from that point on, is consciously ignored. Unlike

59. Griselda Pollock, ‘Sacred Cows’, in Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey Sauron (eds.), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 33.




Freud, Aeschylus clearly acknowledges the gendered implications: like the Furies, the social reality goes underground to become the ever threatening and gendered source of irruption into the social contract. When Freud largely ignored Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia, he also ignored the banishing of the Furies, the old goddesses of the kin and punishers of matricide, underground. Whereas there is very little evi-dence of a murder of an early father, matricides are attested to world in mythological systems. For those reasons, Luce Irigaray argues that underneath the totem father another sacrifice has been made: that of the mother, the totem before any totem is designated.60

For Irigaray, the sacrifice that takes place in the rituals of Western culture is the sacrifice of the mother.61 This primordial murder is repli-cated symbolically and actually by contemporary rites of sacrifice, and the refusal to allow female officiation is consistent with the fact that the ritual event is performative.62

According to Luce Irigaray, therefore, we need to distinguish between historical descriptions of the sacrificial process, such as that provided by Freud, René Girard (and to some extent by Kristeva), and the positing of such mechanisms as being essential to human culture. It may well be, according to Irigaray, that if we see such mechanisms as being essential, ‘another victim’ lies under the apparent sacrificed victim.63

19. Paranoid Schizoid Position

The failure to acknowledge this alternative primal murder, in other words our investment in remaining unconscious of the gendered underpinnings of our social order, has profound political implications. Melanie Klein, for instance, argued that psychic health can be achieved only when we make the transition from the paranoid/schizoid,

60. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies (1987) (trans. G.C. Gill; New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1993), p. 11. 61. ‘When Freud, notably in Totem and Taboo, describes and theorizes about the murder of the father as the founding act for the primal horde, he is forgetting an even more ancient murder, that of the woman-mother, which was necessary to the founda-tion of a specific order in the city.’ Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, p. 11. 62. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, pp. 78, 83. 63. ‘Most of our societies have been built on sacrifice. Social space exists only through an immolation. René Girard (as well as Mircea Eliade, for example) offers numerous instances of this. Girard’s demonstration can be applied to a large number of social phenomena. But he says little about how his work is relevant to women… It would seem to me to be more appropriate to inquire whether, under the sacrificed victim, another victim is often hidden.’ Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, pp. 75-76.




to the depressive position. By paranoid/schizoid she referred to the split-ting, scapegoating, projecting mechanisms through which we gain our identity at another’s (usually the Mother’s) expense. The depressive posi-tion, in contrast, is when we pull our projections back, acknowledge the complexity of the human condition, and take responsibility for our own lives. The depressive position radically reduces our capacity to scapegoat, or to establish our identity at another’s expense. However, given the assumptions that underlie Western social con-tracts, at a political level, we have never gone beyond the paranoid/schiz-oid position. At the end of Aeschylus’s Oresteian trilogy, the goddess Athena urges the Athenians to unite and stop the cycles of civil war then ravaging their polity. But her injunctions should give us serious pause for thought in the context of today’s militarist adventures:

Let our warsRage on abroad, with all their force, to satisfyOur powerful lust for fame. But as for the bird that fights at home—my curse on civil war (The Eumenides, lines, 867-75, p. 296).

Give joy in return for joy,One common will for love,And hate with one strong heart:Such union heals a thousand ills of man.(The Eumenides, line 986. p. 303).

The formulation perfectly expresses the deep pathologies that currently exist in our culture, often fuelled by sacrificial narratives, disciplinary practices and forms of sacrality that reinforce, rather than challenge, the potential for splitting, projection, and externalization of guilt onto enemies. In secular society, such mythologies merely take another form. As Roger Money-Kyrle, theorist of the Second World War once wrote:

Now it can be no accident that a decline in religion has been accompanied by a recrudescence of political ideologies, each promising if in a less exag-gerated and more prosaic form, a restored and better world.64

If violence, repression and guilt are key elements in Freud’s theory of the sacred, and if, as I have argued here, gender relations are instanti-ated and maintained by performative acts of sacrality (whether reli-gious or political), then interrogating the sacred—the theological and philosophical assumptions, and the ritual practices through which it is constituted—becomes critical for contemporary feminist theorists. For all of these reasons, art historian, Griselda Pollock, on the grounds that the fascists, …stole the sacred welcomes our return to the sacred:

64. R.E. Money Kyrle, Psychoanalysis and Politics, p. 175.




We need to think the history of the sacred and see the sacred as active within the structuration of subjectivities; thinking through the history of religions with the histories of the subject. We need to seek the poetic, creative, transformative model that will not imperialistically or phalli-cally replace its other(s), but shift and supplement, allowing the genera-tive play of masculine and the feminine as principles of structural, sexual differences, not mirrors of each other in some dumb and ultimately asym-metrical equality.65

20. Cultural Splitting

It is hard to avoid the conclusion, therefore, that the sacred and profane are not categories eternally given down from on high (to be taken as preconditions for religion): they are not only socially constructed, but also constructed in the interests of patriarchal social relations. In other words, maintaining the sacred/profane dichotomies is a form of cul-tural labour with profound gendered implications. Like Durkheim, Freud took the sacred/profane dichotomy as the uncritically grounded precondition of religion itself and Nancy Jay’s critique of Durkheim’s system of contradictory dichotomies can also be applied to Freud. This dichotomy provided Jay with an insight into the logic of sacrifice, the A/Not-A that informs the exclusively male religious construction of reality.66 Such dichotomies are grounded not in divinity, or the structure of logic, but in gendered relations of power. In other words, establishing such dichotomies is a form of cultural labour uniquely carried out by the officiaries of the sacred. Not surpris-ingly, they carry profound implications for gender relationships, com-pulsory heterosexuality, and even social fertility. Here we can return to the relationship between Freud’s theories of repression and his uncon-sciousness with regard to paternity. Freud thought that war was not entirely bad since it brought larger political entities into being where the imperatives toward war would be mitigated. War, therefore, like sacrifice, was fertile and productive. As Jacqueline Rose formulates the issue:

Freud…talks of the advance of war in terms reminiscent of the gradual completion, cohering, mastering of the polymorphous or partial drives: `Hitherto, the unification created by conquest, though of considerable extent, have only been partial, and the conflict between these have called out more than ever for violent solutions (p. 207). Unification becomes a necessary violence like, we might say, the subordination of a partial,

65. Pollock, ‘Sacred Cows’, pp. 19, 46-47. 66. Cf. Jay, Throughout Your Generations, p. 137.




multifarious, or even perverse sexuality to the dictates of a one-track, singular, and unified genital sex.67

Rose’s insights have several major implications. At the outset we noted that Freud’s theory of repression and his views on the dis-covery of paternity have seldom been correlated, but here we can begin to see the connections. The question of paternity and the development of the social institution of primogeniture may neces-sitate violent forms of repression, not necessarily in relation to inces-tuous wishes towards one’s mother, but more generally toward those females belonging (sic!) to another male. In turn, such females may need to be cloistered, sequestered, veiled, or otherwise signified as inaccessible in the interests of securing exclusive male access to her reproductive capacities. Second, war is in itself a form of fertility rite bringing larger social entities into being. In that sense, like sacrifice, war becomes in the terms of Nancy Jay, ‘birth, done better, on purpose, on a more spiritual, more exalted level than mother’s do it’.68

Third, the system of representation generated by militarist societ-ies, especially with regard to appropriate norms for male sexuality, has widespread implications for attitudes toward and real violence against women. Peggy Reeves Sanday in her work, Fraternity Gang Rape, analy-ses the socialization and induction rituals of campus fraternity and makes exactly that point at a micro level: that such rituals are used to instantiate an exacerbated heterosexuality, to punish any sign of non-compliance with the standards of masculinity, and that rape is the weapon of choice used to establish social dominance among the fraternities. In this context the rituals are also sacrificial and the ‘woman plays the role of ritual scapegoat who receives the brunt of collective male sexual aggression that would otherwise turn a group of privileged heterosexual males into despised homosexuals’.69

If in different ways contemporary theorists agree with Freud’s correlation of sacrifice and social fertility,70 we must remember again,

67. Jacqueline Rose, Why War: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford, UK/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993), p. 35. 68. Nancy Jay, ‘Sacrifice as a Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman’, in Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan and Margaret R. Miles (eds.), Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Reality (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 294. 69. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus (New York: New York University Press, 2nd edn, 2007), p. 82. 70. Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation; Edward Tabor Linenthal, Changing Images of the Warrior in America (New York: Edward Mellen Press, 1982).




however, that they describe (mostly Western) social processes and, like Freud, assume their universal applicability. Juliet Mitchell, therefore, summarizes Freud’s limitations in one of the first feminist treatments of psychoanalysis:

the myth that Freud rewrote as the Oedipus complex epitomizes man’s entry into culture itself. It reflects the original exogamous incest taboo, the role of the father, the exchange of women and the consequent difference between the sexes. It is not about the nuclear family, but about the institu-tion of culture with the kinship structure and the exchange relationship of exogamy. It is thus about what Freud regarded as the order of all human culture. It is specific to nothing but patriarchy which is itself, according to Freud, specific to all human civilization.71

Conclusions

In this article I have argued that the patriarchally constructed sacred may be at least a form of patriarchal cultural labour effecting the instantiation of a gendered social order. In that sense, it could be a form of symbolic violence, against women in particular, regardless of the forms of internalized oppressions, holy incest, mystic masochisms, holy anorexia or other forms of sublimation that are ultimately counter-productive, in that they encourage women to seek meaning and solace through the various ways in which it names, gives meaning to, and even appears to alleviate suffering within a patriarchal social order.72

However, I have also argued that the construction of the patriarchal sacred is intimately tied to repression and transgression. At a macro level this takes the form of war; at a micro level, it can take the form of pornography and erotic domination. At the very least, naming the sacred appears to colonize some pre-cious and vulnerable components of our humanity, channelling their energies toward purposes, that in the light of our present history, now needs to be radically challenged and deconstructed. Furthermore, those narratives that re-inforce and reiterate a totemic origins of society (whether they involve the murder or attempted murders of fathers or sons) must also be challenged, first at the level of their interpretation, but also at the levels of their effects.73

71. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 377. 72. Cf. Griselda Pollock, ‘To Inscribe in the Feminine: A Kristevan Impossibility? Or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation’, Parallax 8(4/3): 81-117 (98); Carolyn Waller Bynum, Holy Fast, Holy Feast: The Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987); Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1985). 73. Delaney, Abraham on Trial; David Lee Miller, Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrifi-cial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2003).




Increasing evidence has arisen of the role such narratives and their theological elaborations have played in both political and personal forms of abuse.74 In reality, Western culture has never proceeded beyond the lines of the Chorus in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: we must suffer, suffer into truth. In contrast, when, in the Oresteia, in one of the few recorded moments of (mythological?) history women challenged sacrifice, Clytemnestra railed against her husband Agamemnon who had sacrificed their daugh-ter, Iphigenia, in order that his ships could set sail, she upraided him in these terms:

Name one charge you brought against him then.He thought no more of it than killing a beast,And his flocks were rich, teeming in their fleece,But he sacrificed his own child, our daughter,The agony I labored into loveTo charm away the savage winds of Thrace.75

Clytemnestra’s The agony I laboured into love contrasts sharply with suf-fering into truth. It recuperates theoretically the radical importance of our socialization practices and implicitly questions the necessity of the violent forms of individuation that the founder of psychoanalysis con-sidered essential, and that warrior cultures exploit for nefarious ends. For those reasons, it is simply inadequate and short sighted that we stop short at equality feminism. But where do we find hope? A Rabbini-cal story will illustrate:

One day when R. Rabbi Yohanan b. Zakkai came out from Jerusalem, and R. Joshua, walking behind him, saw that the Temple had been destroyed, the disciple exclaimed, ‘Woe to us that this has been destroyed, the place where they atoned for the sins of Israel!’ R. Yohanan said to him, ‘My son, grieve not, we have a means of atonement that is like it, as it says, Hos. 6:6, “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice” ’.76

At this time in our human history, we need to return to the prophetic injunction: I desire mercy not sacrifice: Hos. 6.1-6; Mt. 9.13, 12.1-8. In par-

74. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs in Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001); Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008). 75. Aeschylus, The Oresteia (trans. Robert Fagles; intro. W. B. Stanford; New York: Viking Press, 1975), lines, 1439-1444, p. 172. 76. Aboth de Rabbi Nathan version 1. ch. 4, cited in Robert J. Daly, Christian Sacrifice. The Judaeo-Christian Background before Origen (Washington, D.C. The Catholic University of America Press), cited in Nancy Jay, ‘Throughout Your Generations Forever: A Sociol-ogy of Blood Sacrifice’ (Unpublished dissertation, Department of Sociology, Brandeis University, 1980), p. 330.




ticular, we need to pay serious attention to those theorists working to recuperate, theoretically and practically, alternative options for approaching or cultivating, what we might loosely call spiritual energies or divine vibrations, or our relationship to ultimate reality. In approaching that realm that we traditionally call the divine or the sacred we need to find new images, new strategies that will enable our decolonisation from enthrallment to the traditional forms. This could be the moment in history when we finally pay attention to the call of mercy. The recuperation of mercy has already begun in the work of several feminist theorists. These approaches offer new ways of de-colonizing the social imaginary and channelling the most precious hopes and longings of the human community through disciplinary practices and spiritualities that foster personal authenticity rather than group com-pliance to religious, political, or militarist mythologies that now pose such dangers for the human community. In the space remaining, these can be merely named.

21. Feminist Theorists of the Sacred

Luce Irigaray offers the most potent critique of Freud and other theo-rists, such as Hegel and Plato, whose metaphysical speculations reflect male morphologies and reinforce otherworldly, and antifeminist philosophical systems. In addition, however, Irigaray’s speculation on Eastern and ecological philosophies and spiritualities offers alternative disciplinary practices designed to cultivate holistic ways of being and to decolonize women, in particular. Irigaray emphasizes the radical importance of systems of representation (images and symbols) in our path toward spiritual and psychic wholeness.77

Irigaray seeks, not radical separatism, but a dialectical relationship between the sexes, a dialectic she considers missing from the work of Hegel and supplying an alternative to the dynamism of the master/slave relationship that he espouses.78

Peggy Reeves Sanday, following her initial studies of the relationship between socialization practices, images of divinity, and social violence then spent twenty years studying a society in which such dialectical relationships existed.79 Her groundbreaking work, Women at the Center:

77. Cf. Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Morny Joy, Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 78. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, p. 140. 79. See her Female Power and Male Dominance (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983).




Life in a Modern Matriarchy details the social life of the Minangkabau, a self-styled matriarchy (meaning arché as in the beginning) of four million people with a modern economy, offers an alternative vision of a society where paternity did not manage to supersede maternity, with all of the concomitant social and political implications that this entails.80 Likewise, Shanshan Du in her work, ‘Chopsticks only work in Pairs’ outlines the social relationships and commitments of a matriarchy in present day China.81

These works (and others) serve to challenge the inevitability of patriarchal social relations, and they relativise the dogmatic claims of the inevitability of totemism and the sacred orders established through its mechanisms. Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst and literary scholar, has, together with Mary Hamilton and Anne Skinner, devised a BodySoul Rhythms Program, designed, through intensive dream, body, voice, and symbolic work to enable participants to overcome the abjection of the body, so prevalent in patriarchal social relations, and reinforced by patriarchal theory. Woodman, in other words, returns back to the source of psychoanalysis, the bodily symptoms that originate in the psyche. The work enables participants to recuperate from within their own traumatized body/containers, those symbols of healing appropri-ate to their own spiritual cultivation. Marion Woodman argues for the importance of mirroring. In other words, if one’s subjectivity is mirrored back through exclusively male images of divinity, or by trauma inducing parental figures, this can further contribute to the radical dissociation that feeds those impera-tives that suspend one’s critical faculties in favour of violent regimes. The BodySoul Rhythms Program offers alternative forms of mirroring or witnessing with profound healing potential. Woodman’s work, drawing extensively on Jung’s critique of Nietz-sche’s Zarathustra, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and emerging scientific paradigms of energy at the level of cellular life, offers a means to decolonise bodies and psyches damaged by various forms of ecological, physical, sexual, spiritual, and other forms of abuse.82 In other words, she offers a means to overcome various forms

80. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 81. Shanshan Du, ‘Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs’: Gender—Unity and Gender Equality Among the Lahu of Southwest China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 82. Cf. C.G. Jung, The Seminars: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–9 (Bollingen Series XCIX; ed. James L. Jarrett; 2 vols.; London: Routledge, 1994); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945; et. Phe-nomenology of Perception (Humanities Press, 1962); The Visible and Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).




of repression that do not need to be transgressive, i.e. at the expense of others. In that sense, her work embodies the precepts of mercy.83

Finally, (and with due apologies to each of these four theorists for the brevity here), Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, artist, psychoanalyst, and theorist, daughter of Shoah survivors, radically interrogates the exclusively phallic assumptions that govern the Freudian and early Lacanian work. Her matrixial paradigm stresses our interrelatedness and also challenges the necessity of the violence of individuation that so successfully serves the war machines.84

In the light of the Shoah, she argues that the Western cultural imagi-nary is fundamentally flawed. In a reflection on a passage in The Book of Numbers, ch. 19 she finds (in the sacrifice of the Red Cow) evidence of a she-law that has becomes lost to religious consciousness in the further elaborations of the sacred.85

The work of all these feminist theorists is challenging at many levels, and offers us a way forward, through the exclusively phallic social construc-tion we have hitherto encountered, toward new forms of becoming, and new ethical horizons.

They each enable us to go radically beyond equality feminism, or those forms of equality where women are content to act as pitbulls with lipstick (Sarah Palin), especially in those societies fuelled by political and reli-gious fundamentalisms. If violence, guilt and distorted gender relations have been at the heart of the patriarchally constructed sacred, the challenge now is to go beyond Aeschylus’ suffering into truth and to return, theoretically and practically to the possibility that our ritual, disciplinary, and theologi-cal efforts be directed toward labouring into love, the challenge of mercy not sacrifice.86

83. Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996); Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation (Toronto, ON: Toronto, Inner City Books, 1996). Website: www.mwoodmanfoundation.org 84. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, Foreword by Judith Butler, Introduction by Griselda Pollock (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); See also: ‘Special Section on Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Memory, Rep-resentation and Post-Lacanian Subjectivity’, a special issue of Theory Culture and Society 21.1 (February 2004). 85. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘The Red Cow Effect: The Metramorphosis of Hal-lowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow’, ACT 2 Beautiful Translations (London: Pluto, 1996), pp. 82-119. 86. Cf. Mary Condren, ‘Melting Hearts of Stone: Mercy not Sacrifice’, in Lisa Ish-erwood and Kathleen McPhillips (eds.), Post-Christian Feminisms: A Critical Appraisal (Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2008), pp. 147-66.



Suffering into Truth: Constructing the Patriarchal Sacred

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