Psychoanalytic Inquiry

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Anxious? Castration Is the Solution!

Patricia Gherovici

To cite this article: Patricia Gherovici (2018) Anxious? Castration Is the Solution!, Psychoanalytic
Inquiry, 38:1, 83-90, DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2018.1395641

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2018.1395641

Published online: 19 Jan 2018.

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PSYCHOANALYTIC INQUIRY
2018, VOL. 38, NO. 1, 83–90
https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2018.1395641

Anxious? Castration Is the Solution!

Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT
Castration is a contested concept in psychoanalysis. In this article, Gherovici
discusses several clinical examples in order to track the function of castra-
tion and its relation to anxiety in the unfolding of a psychoanalytic treat-
ment. Contesting current assumptions that castration is a hindrance, the
author suggests that castration functions as a welcome separation imposed
by the Oedipal law that helps negotiate sexual difference, advances the
embodiment of sexuality, which ultimately allows subjectivity and desire to
emerge.

The vilification of psychoanalysis is no news. The so-called Freudian wars have been waged with
ferocity for a long time and the casualties have been abundant. Freud’s death has been periodically
announced. Year after year, in magazine covers and monographs, Freud’s demise has been lurking
ominously. Such tenacity makes one wonder: Is Freud dead, yet? Why this wish to declare him dead
over and over again?
For the critics, Freud’s theories have been derided as useless and unscientific and his contribu-
tions reduced to a cultural product. And yet there is still the need to denounce and attack, a strategy
that seems to suggest that he is more powerful dead than alive. It is well known that the last two
decades have been dominated by a preference for empirically demonstrable modalities of treatment
like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Recent studies, however, have shown that CBT is not as
effective as promised. The long-term the effects of CBT are very poor and psychoanalysis shows
superior, more lasting results over time with very low levels of relapse and better social functioning.1
Will the frozen resistance to psychoanalysis’ insights start to melt?
Back behind the couch, as a psychoanalyst one has the opportunity to hear from the analysands
not only testimony of the effectiveness of psychoanalysis but also confirm the recurrence of material
that confirms controversial Freudian ideas such as castration. I start by quoting fragments from an
analytic session with Melissa, a twenty-four-year-old female analysand who seems to suggest that
castration anxiety is alive and well:
I am feeling pretty stable and calmer than I thought I would feel. But at the end of the day, I am always feeling
anxious. I would like to figure out what seems to trigger anxiety in me. Perhaps it’s this recurrent thinking, this
unrelenting questioning …

I want to figure out what the relationship with my boyfriend Peter means to me. I have conflicting feelings
about him. Sometimes I experience a sense of happiness because I love him so much. Sometimes it can be really
wonderful. But when he expresses how much he loves me, I have only regret.

He seems to have a lot of admiration for me; he is loving and supportive. But sometimes his intensity is
overwhelming. I am cut off from him or myself. Something keeps me from connecting with him.

CONTACT Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D. pgherovici@aol.com 420 S. 17th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19146.
1
Johnsen, T. J., & O. Friborg. (2015, May 11). The effects of cognitive behavioral therapy as an anti-depressive treatment is falling: A
meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/bul0000015; Pragmatic randomized
controlled trial of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression: The Tavistock Adult Depression
Study.
Copyright © Patricia Gherovici. Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
84 P. GHEROVICI

Perhaps is the obligation attached to his love, as if he expected something in return. I have a kind of suspicion
about what is the problem, and is emotionally my own. It is the issue of seeing other people. I have had a couple
of dreams and I feel very confused. In the dreams I had sex with this guy. When I woke up, I felt as if I had
betrayed Peter.

His feelings for me are so monogamous; he has not been interested in anyone else. There again, one can see in
which ways we are so different. I have to accept the fact that I have desires; I may have dreamt about sex with a
man, but in fact I have been wanting to be with a woman.

It makes me feel bad.

What’s wrong with me? I do love Peter. I do value our relationship. I wish I didn’t fantasize with other
people. …

I will have to make a choice about the relationship.

Peter talks in such an emotional tone. I really didn’t think he was capable to express himself that way. When I
heard him talk like that, I cried, and almost immediately, I felt distant. I just think that the feeling of being with
another person is so scary to me. I think what I am scared of is that if I imagine being in a close relationship is
maintaining aspects of myself; I get scared it will become the devouring love I have for my mother. …

I forged my own way outside my relationship with my mother but acquitting my own sexuality. …

It is scary for me to have sexual desire for Peter. He is the main focus of my sexual attention. I can’t do that.
What feels really scary for me is that I haven’t had any real relationship with a woman, but this is part of my
sexuality. It is really confusing. I would not identify as lesbian, but I do not really know if I am really myself
with Peter.

… What’s the difference between men and women? My mother would say that gender is societal. How much do
I disagree? Men and women are different. Yes, there are women who are masculine and men who have
feminine sides. But still this is very confusing for me. …

I feel attraction to both men and women. It is physical. …

I think that’s how I know; this physical attraction to women is not going to go away. I also have emotional and
intellectual attractions to women. Being around women feels right. What is the source of the attraction? It has
to do with issues of gender and sexuality. …

How can I accept Peter’s love? I enjoy sex with him but feel that a part of me is excluded. I feel dirty being
sexualized by him. I backtracked. Actually being with him is strange for me. I did feel comfortable with my
sexuality before him. My sexuality was not a source of shame or anxiety. Maybe the issue is: Am I straight or
bisexual?

Why is Melissa anxious? Are her words motivated by the desire to understand an issue about gender
and sex, or does she confuse object choice with identity politics? Is Melissa truly bisexual because she
fantasizes about having an affair with a woman? When she asks: “Am I straight or bisexual?” is she
asking, in fact: “Am I a man or a woman?” If that is the case, then the traditional question of sexual
identity that we find at the core of hysteria is shifting from a question of gender identity (“Am I a
man or a woman?”) to one of sexual orientation (“Am I straight or bisexual?”). Melisa’s comments
seem to remap the whole terrain of sexual politics (compulsory heterosexuality, sexual choices,
monogamy, love, reciprocity in relationships, attachment, sexuality). Melissa becomes aware of her
boyfriend’s love and although she admits that she is happy with him, this realization makes her
experience regret, and it is then that she questions her sexuality while becoming distant, or, as she
puts it, “cut off from him or myself.” Does Melissa’s account replay the classic Oedipal familial
scenario of identifications and rivalries? Does she question her sexual identity as a phobic reaction to
intimacy? Is her sexual ambiguity a strategy that defends her from desire while cancelling out the
mother? As she said, she forged a way out of a “devouring” relationship with her mother, “acquitting
my own sexuality.” Is her uncertainty about her sexuality a sort of father substitute (a stand in for a
name or NO! which separates mother and child)? Furthermore, are contested notions like phallic
attribution and castration still valid tools in the clinical practice?
 ANXIOUS? CASTRATION IS THE SOLUTION! 85

Melissa is not the only case of someone who seemingly breaks away from the paradigm of social
conformity to normal sexual orientation or even of gender identification. But does it escape the
traditional psychoanalytic paradigm of castration and the anxiety linked to it? Another analysand
came to see me, full of questions because, despite being a happily married woman, she became
restless and had sex with a woman once. This was just because, as she said, she wanted to find out
how women’s skin felt like and how they smelled. Was this an issue of identification, because she
admired and wanted to resemble the seductive, aggressive woman she had the sexual encounter
with? Was she fascinated with an idealized femininity that would help her define her sexual identity
on the basis of sexual practice? Or was she “done with men,” as she once blurted out exasperatedly
and had, at last, followed her desire?`
There was also the analysand who ran away from a marriage proposal from a man she said she
was in love with, only to rush into the arms of a lesbian friend, who she claimed, she was not even
that erotically attracted to. There was, again, another declared feminist analysand who defined
herself as bisexual but never had a sexual encounter with a woman; she detested make-up and
“girly” things and insisted that she wanted to be loved for who she really was, without being
“objectified by a male”; but then she appeared smitten by a boyfriend who told her almost offensively
that she should wear sexy clothes; moreover, he was constantly comparing her to other women he
was ogling. These cases seem to be variations on a universal theme: the inconsistency of the relation
of the subject to sex. These cases seem to position themselves in a zone of what Genevieve Morel
(2011) called sexual ambiguity. This uncertainty makes one rethink how one defines sex and
sexuality, especially if one contrasts the previous examples with other cases that hinge more explicitly
around issues of sexual attributes, like that of a trans man who was deeply unhappy in his sexual life
because he was certain that he lacked the phallic attribute that he thought was desired by all women,
because he did not have a penis? Or the case of a patient explaining that, in the past, someone like
her would be thought of “as a man with a mental problem but that it’s just the opposite, I am a
woman with a physical problem: the worst birth defect a woman can have, I was born with a penis
and testicles?”
For these analysands who ask whether they are “straight or bisexual” they seem lost in their sexuality
because they fail to distinguish sexual orientation from gender, a reasoning that, as Stephen Frosch
argued, results from an “obvious category confusion” because “there is no necessary connection between
object choice and gender identity” (2006, p. 236). The normative slant in classical psychoanalysis, which
has led to troubling standards of normalcy like elevating the genitals to the status of fetish organs of a
mature heterosexual genitality or to the pathologization of homosexuality, was indeed a post-Freudian
deviation. It was based on what Lacan would consider as delusional notions of normalcy. As Dean and
Lane (2001) have shown, the founder of psychoanalysis never considered same sex desire pathological.
For Freud, homosexuality was a sexual orientation as any other, and as contingent as heterosexuality.
Already in 1915, Freud (1905/1915) observed “that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual
object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious” (145n). Contrary to the standard view of
traditional psychoanalysis, as Dean and Lane (2001) noted, Freud “queered” human sexuality when he
proposed a sexuality that operates in a mysterious, capricious way, contra natura, veering off the
reproductive aims. Freud perverted sexuality when he separated the drive from any instinctual function
and described its object as indifferent. What irritated people most in Freud’s first interventions was not
the scandalous claim that children were sexual beings, but rather his nonessentialism in the definition of
sexuality.
The unconscious, the Other, or what Freud called “the other scene,” das Andere Schauplatz
(quoted in Lacan, 2006), is a scene from which analysts are alienated. It is characterized as a
disruptive, decentering instance. Lacan (1981) provided this definition: “The reality of the uncon-
scious is sexual reality—an untenable truth” (p. 150). This unreachable sexual reality is the enigmatic
scene that emerges in the suffering of analysands who attempt to adjudicate a definite answer to the
question of sexual identity.
86 P. GHEROVICI

Perhaps those analysands who confuse object choice with identity are searching for a totalizing
answer that introduces a paradox: They ask whether they are straight or bisexual as if the simple
fact of posing the question would mean that they are neither; but if they are neither, they feel
obligated to choose what they are. Jacqueline Rose observee that the unconscious always reveals
the failure of identity. Rose went as far as to say that there is no stability in sexual identity
because “there is a resistance to identity at the very heart of psychic life” (1986, p. 91). For Rose,
this “failure” is not a fact of individual pathology or a special case of deviance from the norm but
rather a general psychic feature which appears in all formations of the unconscious (dreams, slips
of the tongue, and jokes), as well as in “forms of sexual pleasure that are pushed to the sidelines
of the norm” (p. 91).
From a psychoanalytic perspective, identity is an artificial construct that results from imaginary
identifications with an other who grants a sense of self. Identity relies on the assumption of an image
and is something that eventually may come to an end during a psychoanalysis because the subject
emerges exactly there where identity fails.
Rose’s emphasis on the failure of identity is central because it contradicts the usual reading of lack
as a loss or as an injury that women would have suffered and that men would fear. Lack is neither a
negative wound due to the loss of an object, nor a deficiency. For Lacan (2006), lack is a productive
force. For Lacan, all subjects must confront and assume their lack; furthermore, the Lacanian subject
is subjectivized lack. Such a lack carries several effects on the subject—it divides the subject, whose
entry in the symbolic order is positivized into the being of desire as lack-of-being; desire is born
through lack and can never be finally fulfilled.
In the psychoanalytic perspective, desire is rooted in lack. How everyone relates to their sexual
bodies is determined by the way they relate to lack: This is what psychoanalysis calls castration. A
relation to lack will be the foundation of structures of desire, whether neurotic or perverse. We note
here that perversion is taken as a structure and not as sexual practice.
Let me consider another clinical example. A woman in her fifties, who I call Amanda, consults me
because she is unhappy with her husband. She is surprised that he has not left her yet because, as she
acknowledges without any regret, she is horrible to him, disrespectful and demeaning, insulting, even
abusive. Amanda says with a smirk that nothing happens in bed—“We are like brother and sister”—
but admits that when he makes any sexual advance or even tries a tender gesture, she rejects him
violently and calls him names. Amanda tells me an anecdote: In her twenties, she was in love with a
man. They met in a hotel to make love for the first time. But when he embraced her, she became
aware that he really loved her and, scared by the intensity of his attraction to her, she blurted out a
lie: She told him she was pregnant. The encounter came to an abrupt end. He left immediately and
their relationship ended. In spite of her desire for him, Amanda pushed him to reject her, as she
admits, because she could not tolerate his love.
For reasons unknown to her, Amanda cannot put up with a man’s investment in her. All of a
sudden, at the moment of the sexual act, the blade of castration appeared and, with it, anxiety. She
stopped it by inventing a lie that inhibited the possibility of being this man’s desired object—his
phallus. The lie moved her from been seen as a desired woman to pretending to be the impersona-
tion of an untouchable mother-to-be. The lie about being pregnant had also the function of allowing
her to avoid her own desire for him. Having sex with a man, Amanda would have to come to terms
with her position as an object of desire, as his partner’s phallus, that is, as the representative of what
a man is missing, but also as a desiring woman, she might have seen him as the holder of the phallus,
of what she may be missing, thus, potentially implying a threat of castration for both sexual partners.
Amanda’s maneuver accomplished a transfer of her own anxiety to her boyfriend; the anxiety she
experienced as a result of his palpable attraction to her, became her boyfriend’s.
In psychoanalytic terms, her anxiety and its avoidance pose several problems. This analysand also told
me that whenever she likes a man she takes extreme care of her appearance. If they have a date, Amanda
chooses her clothes carefully, gets her hair done at a beauty salon, and then puts on a lot of make-up. She
says that when all her grooming is done, she looks at herself in the mirror and thinks that she looks like a
 ANXIOUS? CASTRATION IS THE SOLUTION! 87

man cross-dressing. As a result of this impression, Amanda keeps on putting more make-up and the
feeling of looking like a man exacerbates. Her comment calls up Lacan’s remark that the “virile display in
human beings seem[s] feminine” (Lacan, 2006, p. 584). This means that even when the positions are not
symmetric, there is an element of deception in both masculinity and femininity, even of imposture, what
Joan Copjec describes as “the fraudulence at the heart of every claim to positive identity” (1994, p. 41). In
masquerade and imposture, the phallus plays a role—masculinity would imply the pretense of having the
phallus; femininity would be the pretense of not having the phallus but of being the phallus.
What happens when Amanda tries to become what she imagines is desirable (nice fashionable
clothes, hairstyle, make-up)? Amanda feels that her feminine masquerade is a sham, and rather than
feeling like a woman, she feels like a man with mask. The more she wants to look feminine, the less
she feels like a woman. Amanda can only pretend to be a mother, otherwise she is a man in drag. It
was as if Amanda was saying that she cannot be seen as a woman when she tries so hard to look like
a woman. Ultimately, the meaning is woman, is sexual difference, a conundrum upon which the
castration complex is predicated. Hence, Amanda avoids the threat of castration, and avoiding being
woman; she no longer tries to attract a man. She gives up the bluff, despite the all the effort at artifice
(fake eyelashes or hair extensions, and so on) she needs an even stronger recourse than merely
pretending, thus she makes up a big lie. Amanda moves from feminine masquerade, as a strategy to
embody the object of desire, to masculinity as a travesty. It seems very difficult to make sense of this
case without any further reference to the difference of sexes and how difficult it is for the
unconscious which comes out with a failed solution—the phallus.
For psychoanalysis, sexual difference is not a norm but a real impossibility, which is to say, it is a
limit to the speakable and thinkable. “Anatomy is not destiny,” as Freud (1912, p. 189) famously
declared. One’s relationship to the body is structured by the symbolic system of language, yet
language lacks a signifier to signify sexual difference. Sexual identity for both males and females is
always precarious because the human infant becomes a sexed subject in a symbolic system in which
there is no signifier of sexual difference. This unconscious sexual reality about which the subject has
no knowledge (does not know what is to be a man or a woman) is a reality that psychoanalysis
presupposes.
The speaking body is worked over in the symbolic; it is sexed through castration. The body knots
the elementary structures of social functioning, its sexual reality, its imaginary aspects (Lacan, 1991).
From a psychoanalytic perspective, sexual identity is not determined by biology or any other innate
factor; sexual identity is learned through a language one is born into and through the given dynamics
of identifications. Identity is constructed around loss, a loss that dates to the inaugural moment when
one fell from a pregendered wholeness into sexual difference, the instant when someone sanctioned
one’s being by crying out either “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” For psychoanalysis, unconscious choice has
nothing to do with a voluntaristic free will. In this choice, the two alternatives available are not
isomorphous; thus, discordances emerge between one’s erogenous sex and one’s declared sex. In the
unconscious, there is no representation or symbol of the opposition masculine-feminine. Sexual
identity for both males and females is always precarious, because the human infant becomes sexed
without fully symbolizing unconsciously a normal, finished sexual positioning. Psychoanalysis attempts
to throw light on the ways in which sexuality fails to conform to the social norms by which it is
regulated and on the various fantasies that are constructed to veil this structural failure.
When a baby is born with ambiguous genitalia, it is considered a medical emergency (Fausto-Sterling,
1999). According to the current standards of treatment, within the first 24 hours after birth the child will
have to have a declared sex “and the parents must feel certain about the decision” (p. 45). Their decision is
typically guided by a team of specialists: geneticists, endocrinologists, pediatric urologists, and so on (Dreger,
1998). The imperative to rush to a decision has been influenced by one of the most prominent researchers in
the field: John Money, whose recommendation in cases of intersexuality has been that a child needs to
assume a psychosocial gender before the age of 18 months. Babies may be born gender neutral, but to help
construct their psychological identity, their anatomy must match the standard for their sex.
88 P. GHEROVICI

Today’s practitioners, “unlike the doctors of the nineteenth century … do not search deeply into
an intersexual’s body in hopes of finding a material marker of ontological ‘true’ sex” (Dreger, 1998,
p. 181). The answer is not skin deep, but foreskin deep. According to the protocol, a girl cannot have
a too noticeable phallus (as the scientific literature calls it; Muram and Dewhurst, 1984; Newman,
Randolph, and Anderson, 1992). Indeed, the medical decision concerning the assignment of sex is
made on the basis of phallic size: “Infants with male-like structures are assigned to the male sex,
while those with smaller phallic structures (micropenises or ‘normal’ clitorises …) will be assigned
the female sex” (Kessler, 1990, p. 13). Others may follow the protocol set up by Patricia Donohoe at
Harvard Medical School. Donohoe recommends testing the newborn’s chromosomes to predict, with
some accuracy, how the genitalia may develop. Once this is established, genetic females are raised as
females to preserve the reproductive abilities, regardless of how much they may be virilized. In the
case of the genetic male, the sex assignment is based on external anatomy, most exactly, on the size
of the phallus (American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Genetics, Section on Endocrinology,
Section on Urology, 2000). A phallus less than 1.5 cm long and 0.7 cm wide results in an assignment
as female (Donahoe, 1991, cited in Fausto-Sterling, 1999, p. 57). Stressing that the uncertainties in
such gender choices are determined by considerations that are more social than medical, Fausto-
Sterling (1999) dubs this standard “phallometrics” (p. 59).
It is quite remarkable that the semantic use of phallus in current medical terminology for cases of
ambiguous sex because it exhibits all the properties of the Lacanian phallus. Indeed, the Lacanian
phallus is an instrument: It is the mean and ratio by which sexual difference is introduced. The
phallus is not “an object (part-internal, good, bad, etc.) inasmuch as ‘object’ tends to gauge the
reality involved in a relationship. Still less it is the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes. And it
is no accident that Freud adopted as a reference the “simulacrum it represented to the Ancients”
(Lacan, 2006, p. 579). Note that in Ancient Greek drama, the phallus was represented as a gigantic,
ridiculous prop whose mere appearance on stage would elicit roaring laughter. This is the trajectory
of the phallus: It is just a prop, a stand in, a signifier, a signifier of the desire of the Other, therefore a
signifier of lack, a signifier of lost jouissance.
If one assumes that there are two sexual positions (male-female), the problem is that in the
unconscious this signifer (the phallus) does not have a corresponding opposite signifier. Analysts
have two positions but, due to this basic dissymmetry, both male and female assume their sexual
positioning by way of one signifier only, the symbolic phallus. For Lacan (2006), castration is even a
more fundamental loss affecting both sexes since both sexes are castrated. Nobody can have the
phallus or can be it. It is not that the child discovers that the mother does not have a penis—in the
real of the mother’s body, nothing is missing. Lack is purely logical limit—the mother is deprived of
something she does not have. Lacan even affirms that the mother can be seen by the child as phallic
because she does not have a penis. The phallus is the object that appears to veil a symbolic lack to
create it.
One can appreciate the use of the phallus as the means to establish a relation to the order of sexual
difference without regard to anatomy, when a chromosomically male intersex newborn may be
assigned either a female or male gender according to phallic size. Freud made a notorious error
when calling castration a procedure that should more adequately be called eviration (as any cattle raiser
or veterinarian knows, castration only refers to the ablation of testicles; this is why any medical
dictionary defines castration as bilateral orchidectomy). This mistake shows that Freud’s very invention
of the castration complex was affected by the castration complex; that is, that it cannot be reduced to
anatomical reality and is marked by the error of taking an organ for a signifier of sexual difference.
What characterizes the phallus is its ability to be embodied as a detachable and transformable object.
Freud’s confusion between the operation of gelding or castration with the potential amputation of the
penis has been perpetuated by the doctors who determine a baby’s sex in cases of ambiguous genitalia:
They look at the length of the phallus—which is seen as an organ both girls and boys have—and
according to size, guess whether it will grow to reach an acceptable virile size and hence whether it has
to be cut. Here, the phallus is displayed in its function as a “stand in” to resolve the unsolvable.
 ANXIOUS? CASTRATION IS THE SOLUTION! 89

One should keep in mind that sexual difference is intractable, and castration appears as a partial,
failed answer to this deadlock. From a Lacanian point of view, homosexuality and heterosexuality are
not the two sides of the same coin. Human sexuality is based on a lack of a sexual rapport, which
means a lack of relation, a lack of proportion. Sexual division is asymmetric. Masculine and feminine
positions are predicated on contradictory systems; they follow dissymmetrical logics that are two
ways of exemplifying how language fails to signify sex.
The affirmation that there is sexual difference does not mean that people know what it is about. The
human infant is initially not aware of the existence of two sexes and will eventually discover sexual
differences and assume a sexual positioning. This is a complex process in which one particular organ will
be privileged, the penis for Freud, a signifier for Lacan, the phallus. The problem emerges because the
unconscious does not seem to be able to recognize this elaborate system of difference we call gender.
In the simplest, schematic version of the Freudian Oedipal model, people have a binary of having or
not having it, of presence or absence: Boys have it, girls do not. For Freud, castration is a loss that
women think they have suffered and that men fear to suffer; hence, it organizes the sexual imaginary.
This process is called by Freud castration complex. As I’ve shown, the phallus is a signifer without a
signifed (Lacan, 1998), and it works through absence. Lacan links lack, or rather the lack of lack, to
anxiety. Although Freud distinguished between fear, which focuses on a specific object, and anxiety,
which does not have one, Lacan argued that anxiety has an object, a different kind of object, and when
another object appears in its place, anxiety arises. As I’ve shown, castration represents a separation
from the mother; anxiety arises when this symbolic cut does not occur, if not the fear of a loss but
rather the fear that the loss could never happen, anxiety is caused when castration does not happen.
Clinical work shows that some breakdowns occur precisely when the unconscious identifications
that produced a sexual positioning fall. I have a vivid memory of one patient in crisis who stormed
into the barrio’s clinic one afternoon shouting that her sons had been transformed into dogs. She
yelled that she would not have minded seeing her sons being turned into patos (ducks, but also
Puerto Rican slang for gays), but she wept because they had become perros (dogs). Her crisis exposed
her innovative strategy for coming up with an answer to the enigma of sexual difference. Pato and
perro introduced opposing pairs, a principle of order, a set of norms comparable to the order of the
phallus as a mark of difference between signifiers. Her delusional elaboration, articulated at the top
of her lungs in the crowded waiting room, was an improvised invention, an emergency patch
responding to the impossible of sexual difference.
Freud’s pioneering psychoanalytic treatments of hysteria thought him a key lesson: that the
unconscious concerns the body as sexed. However, Freud’s originality in his view of that enigmatic
area of human life—sexuality—was to discover a common foundation in normal and abnormal
sexuality. Freud’s work on hysteria called attention to the skewed relation of subjects to their
sexuality that takes an oblique course that separates them from sex, it queers sexuality for all.
I propose to further the usual psychoanalytic treatment of castration anxiety. Psychoanalysis has a
history of heteronormatization and pathologization of non-normative sexualities. Queer activism
and scholarship have been wary of psychoanalysis, with good reasons. The subject’s sexual identity
does not depend on an identification with an image (which would fall under the category of
performativity) but on a symbolic position (thus closer to performance) that is related to what
psychoanalysts call phallus—the tool to negotiate the real that eludes analysts. The phallus is an
obstacle. It is nothing other than a failed answer to the conundrum of sexual difference. This
difference cannot be fully grasped (it is just speculation constructed on the real of the impossibility
of a sexual rapport). Situating oneself as a man, or a woman, is a complex process, directly connected
with the symbolization of the law and castration. My perspective follows Lacan’s later theory of the
sinthome to rethink sexual difference. This theory is a departure from the classical Freudian theory
of the Oedipus complex and even from Lacan’s first formulations that insisted on the Symbolic and
the father. It departs, as well, from a second period in Lacan’s work when he would put the emphasis
on the theory of fantasy and the object cause of desire. As I’ve shown, Lacan modified his whole
position a last time in the mid-1970s, when he elaborated a new conception of sexuality, just before
90 P. GHEROVICI

discussing Joyce’s writings. Lacan discovered then a new paradigm and a new relation to the body,
which is very helpful in advancing the understanding of all forms of genderism and their unavoid-
able discontents and allow analysts to think about the possibility of assuming a sexual positioning
without the phallus and as absolute norm.
For those still skeptical about the benefits of castration anxiety, let me say that castration is a
movement of separation imposed by the Oedipal law of incest taboo. This law offers a limit to the
fantasy of a hyperbolically phallic subject entailing an instinctual renunciation required by civiliza-
tion. Psychically, castration anxiety can help formalize and contain other, more primal, amorphous
anxieties; as I’ve shown, the most anxiety-provoking situation is when lack is lacking. One might say
that psychoanalysis is due to undergo its own castration, to experience a depletion of prejudice,
ushering in new forms of desire.

Acknowledgment
Some sections of this article appear in a revised version in P. Gherovici, Transgender Psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2017.

Notes on contributor
Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. Her books include The Puerto Rican Syndrome
(Other Press: 2003), winner of the Gradiva Award and the Boyer Prize, Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of
Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (Routledge: 2010), Lacan On Madness: Madness, Yes You Can't (with
Manya Steinkoler; Routledge: 2015), Lacan, Psychoanalysis, and Comedy (with Manya Steinkoler; Cambridge University
Press: 2016), and Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge: 2017).

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