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Unidentified Pleasures: Gender Identity

and its Failure

MYRA J. HIRD

Has the modern elation about progress been eclipsed by a postmodern sense of
loss, melancholia and of things coming to an end? Within the field of identity,
contemporary theoretical debates seem drawn to ideas of loss and mourning as
the psychic ‘price’ of identification. The ambiguities at play within this field are
the subject of sustained analysis (Featherstone and Turner, 1995; Turner, 1992).
That our conscious self may be no more than a fairly superficial surface beneath
which a myriad of psychic forces effect a continual play of identifications and
resistances based on object attachments is simultaneously absent from lay under-
standings of self, and the major subject of Freudian psychoanalysis.
True of all theories pertaining to the human condition, psychoanalysis has
courted commingled favour. Feminist philosophical analyses have recently
returned to psychoanalytic theory, this time to bridle identification theory with
questions concerning the origins of gender. I am thinking here particularly of
Judith Butler’s developing interest in psychoanalytic analyses of the loss incurred
when infants attempt to incorporate objects during the process of identity
formation. In the Freudian account, the Oedipus complex and fear of castration
are the major structures that condition the direction of both identification and
desire. Butler draws upon Freud’s insights on mourning to argue that, like all
processes of identification, the acquisition of gender involves loss because the
actual ideal object cannot be fully incorporated into the subject. She is right to
point out that Freud’s dependence on the oedipal complex effects a hetero-
normative assumption of opposite-gender desire. Butler presses psychoanalytic
theory to argue radically that homosexuality, as same-gender identification,
precedes (and indeed produces) heterosexuality.

Body & Society © 2002 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 8(2): 39–54
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40  Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

I am interested in exploring these processes of identification and their possible

relation to gender. Satisfied that these processes do involve loss and are grieved
in some way, I am, however, less convinced that the precedence of either hetero-
sexuality or homosexuality can be logically sustained. I am in sympathy with
Butler’s impatience with the psychoanalytic assumption of heterosexual identifi-
cation and desire, but it seems to me that in order to argue homosexuality as the
preceding source, we must clarify the differences between identification and
desire. Freud is careful to differentiate between these two similar, but distinct
psychical processes thus:
It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between identification with the father and the choice
of the father as an object. In the first case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the
second he is what one would like to have. The distinction, that is, depends upon whether the tie
attaches to the subject or to the object of the ego. The former kind of tie is therefore already
possible before any sexual object-choice has been made. (1959d: 38, emphasis in original)

The radical social constructionism of both Freud and Butler, albeit in distinct
ways, maintains gender as a matter of identification and desire, as opposed to an
ontological condition of being. Although Butler discusses identity at length, I will
suggest that a political commitment to subvert the heteronormative gender
system leads Butler to conflate identification with desire in the case of homo-
sexuality. I want to argue that all gender, not specifically heterosexuality or homo-
sexuality, is melancholic, as any restriction of pleasures entails loss. That is, if we
are, as Freud claimed, ‘polymorphously perverse’, then in acquiring our gender,
whether male or female, and our sexuality, whether homosexual, heterosexual or
bisexual, we necessarily forgo those elements of gender which precisely allow
such identifications to take place at all. As such, any gender identification simul-
taneously signals the failure of pleasures; but the closer to the dominant hetero-
normative system the greater that failure.
For such a claim to persuade, I will return to one of the most famous case
studies to interest the psychiatric community during the late 19th century. Judge
Daniel Paul Schreber was the subject of not only his own analysis (1998), but also
features in Freud’s case studies (1958) and Lacan’s notes on psychosis (1977), as
well as a host of more recent analyses (Macalpine and Hunter, 1998; Sass, 1994;
Schiesari, 1992; Zvi, 1992). Freud considered Schreber to be homosexual, and
analysed his case as a paranoiac reaction to a strong father identification and
severe fear of castration. We find in Schreber’s forthright memoirs of his identifi-
cation as a woman, a strong case not only for the crucial distinction between
identification and desire, but also evidence that the very process of gender
identification, to whatever end, involves loss and trauma. If Freud was correct in
asserting that identification precedes desire, then drawing upon contemporary
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Unidentified Pleasures  41

transsexual narratives, I will suggest that Schreber’s transsexualism may be under-

stood as a refusal of gender identification, and may constitute a radical response
to the contemporary heteronormative gender system, which demands the restric-
tion of pleasures. In particular, I will focus on contemporary transsexual narra-
tives, such as those of Kate Bornstein, who emphasizes a highly agentic ‘bridging’
of gender categories as a resistance to gender restriction. Schreber’s memoirs and
contemporary transsexual narratives underscore both the performative aspect of
gender and its agentic character.

The Melancholy of Selfhood

Although never the subject of its own monograph, we find in Freud’s work a
constant reference to the subject of identification, and the origin of selfhood. In
Totem and Taboo (1950) the origin of law is accounted for in the symbolic story
of family violence. The sons unite to kill and devour their despotic father who
has banished his sons in order to secure exclusive access to all the tribe’s women.
But the sons soon find the father’s memory trace is far more powerful than the
corporeal original. Once the father has been devoured, literally incorporated, the
sons are overcome by feelings of affection for their father and guilt at their evil
deed. Thus the remembered father initiates the shame that leads the sons to invoke
their own moral prohibitions and censures.
Through this symbolic trope Freud explicates the origin of society whose
authority governs our behaviour. As Diana Fuss (1995) points out, key charac-
teristics emerge concerning the character of identification. First, the sons’
eventual identification with their father is ambivalent: they hate their father for
the power that he wields, at the same time that they love and admire him for this
authority. Second, identification involves violence: the sons kill and eat their
father. Extrapolating from the myth we find the love-object itself is not incor-
porated in its entirety, as the unconscious selects those elements which resonate
most with the ego, so a certain degree of object ‘mutilation’ is necessary as the
ego takes from the object its autonomous identity. Third, the ritual meal serves
to re-invoke and undergird the original identification, underscoring the
temporality and fragility of identification.
We find a further account of identification in the later published Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in which Freud describes identification as
the ‘earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person’ (1959d [1921]:
37). By the time he writes this volume, Freud has shifted emphasis from maternal
to paternal identification. The male infant identifies positively with his father as
someone he would like to be, as well as negatively as someone with whom he
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competes for the object-cathexis of his mother. Again, Freud emphasizes that
‘identification . . . is ambivalent from the very first’ (1959d [1921]: 37). It is here
also that Freud distinguishes between identification with a subject and for an
object, the former being the core of identification while the latter more correctly
concerning desire and sexual object-choice. In this way, initial identifications
precede desire (at least of the sexual kind). Identification is, therefore, a highly
emotive process and significant psychic energy is expended in substituting the
original subject through its introjection into the ego. Here Freud recalls his earlier
article on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ as the quintessential illustration of the
process of object introjection.
Published in 1917, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ draws an association
between the loss of a loved one and the symbolic loss of connection the infant
experiences during development. Freud begins by studying the processes
involved with mourning and then compares this with the ‘general state’ of
melancholia. Mourning is a reaction to the loss of things held dear, whether
individuals or countries. Mourning entails acute feelings of pain, loss of interest
in the outside world and an inability or unwillingness to replace the mourned
object with another, that is, a refusal to love again. Mourning of this kind
typically abates over time because the ego incorporates aspects of the lost
object. When a loved object dies, the ego is required to completely give up its
libidinal attachment to this object. This is experienced as so traumatic that the
ego attempts to retain the attachment temporarily by denying the reality of the
loss. The reality principle eventually renders this attempt unsustainable and,
bit by bit, the ego surrenders to the knowledge that the loss is permanent.
Recovery is made possible through the ego’s incorporation of aspects of the
loved object.
Key aspects of the psychical processes of mourning might be taken up in our
exploration of the origin of gender. Incorporation is largely accomplished at an
unconscious level. Mourning involves a certain degree of resistance as ‘people
never willingly abandon a libidinal position’ (Freud, 1959b [1917]: 154). The
incorporation never fully replaces the love-object, so the trauma of loss cannot
be fully removed. The experience of direct object-cathexis differs from that of the
pleasure experienced from identification in that the real object is inaccessible for
identification, and the interpretation or memory trace, as it were, of the object by
the ego must suffice. Absolute replacement is impossible and mourning accounts
for the trauma of this limited assimilation. From the ego’s perspective, there is no
moral value attached to the object of love and desire; that is, there are no ‘right’
or ‘wrong’ identifications. Finally, the motivating force of the ego towards
stability effects a colonizing persistence.
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Unidentified Pleasures  43

Yet identification is anything but whimsical: the object becomes part of the ego
and as such ‘makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called
its “character” ’ (Freud, 1947: 18). Indeed, identification implies the formation of
identity itself. An individual’s ‘character’, to use Freud’s phrase, is thus largely
determined by her/his history of incorporations.

Incorporating Gender
How does the process of identification relate to gender? For Freud, the active
process of identification is itself ‘typically masculine’ (1959d [1921]: 37). Freud
has now firmly overshadowed the maternal with paternal identification.1 Identifi-
cation becomes an essential part of the Oedipus complex as the boy ‘takes his
father as his ideal . . . he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take
his place everywhere’ (1959d [1921]: 37).
Judith Butler develops ideas about the origin of gender first through Gender
Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), but most importantly in The
Psychic Life of Power (1997). Butler recognizes that while psychoanalysis does
not overtly purport any notion of ‘gender’ (nor for that matter ‘identity’), we find
the sense of these concepts throughout Freud’s work.2 Butler’s developing
account of a radical construction of gender appears in her early work:
. . . we never experience or know ourselves as a body pure and simple, i.e. as our ‘sex’, because
we never know our sex outside of its expression of gender. We do not approach culture with
our gender already in place, but derive our gender from that very embodied life. (1986a: 39)

Butler argues that gender does not alter from some locatable starting point, but
is much more an activity, enactment or performance in constant movement.
Butler suggests that rather than an ontology, sex is no more than an ‘effect’. What
Gender Trouble is most often recognized for is its development of the notion of
‘performativity’ as the expression of gender. A less remarked upon aspect of this
text is Butler’s return to psychoanalysis to explore when and how gender first
begins to be incorporated on the body.3
When the infant reacts to the loss of objects (as s/he begins to understand
her/his own separateness) Butler contends that the ego incorporates gender as
part of an object’s ‘character’. Butler has two important insights here. First, Freud
focused on an identity developed in response to the ego’s negotiation of the
oedipal complex and fear of castration whereby the male child learns to identify
with (incorporate) the father. But the oedipal complex assumes that heterosexual
desire has already been accomplished, when in fact the complex itself is supposed
to effect this transition. Cognizant of this impossibility, Butler focuses instead on
the incest taboo and the infant’s incorporation of the lost object of desire (the
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same-gender parent). Thus it is not the fear of castration but the dominance of
heteronormativity that initiates the identification process. Second, if gender
identification is achieved by similar processes to those operating with other
identifications, gender identification must be incomplete: identification is not of
the object itself but a manipulation – a phantasmatic identification – and the ego
ideal assures the consolidation of heterosexual gender identification through the
sublimation of homosexual desire. Thus, because gender identification is a
reaction to loss, Butler is able to argue that gender is melancholic.
Butler is aware of the importance of gender stability. That the ego attempts to
maintain some permanence is reasonable, given the constant tension between the
psyche and the Real. This stability is chimerical, though, as her work on perfor-
mativity is at pains to demonstrate. Butler argues that gender is actually quite
‘incoherent’: the ego buys the guise of stability, as it were, at the price of melan-
choly.
Thus the most important insight Butler has here has to do with the relation-
ship between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Rather than homosexuality as
an aberration or something gone wrong, it must precede heterosexuality for the
latter to develop at all: ‘homosexuality creates the heterosexuality . . . required to
make the Oedipal conflicts possible’ (1990: 64). Because Butler shifts our atten-
tion from the oedipal complex to the incest taboo, she is able to argue that it is
society’s strictures against same-sex desire (homosexuality) that condition ego
development.
The political aim of Butler’s argument, to reverse the heterosexual matrix, is
laudable given current prohibitions against homosexuality, but its logic is prob-
lematic. In the following paragraphs, I will outline the major difficulties with
Butler’s use of psychoanalytic theory to make her claims about sexuality and
identification. First, it is clear from his work on melancholia that Freud distin-
guishes between the identification process for infants and adults. The adult’s fully
developed ego can effect the kind of identifications familiar in mourning. The
infant’s largely undeveloped and undifferentiated ego, on the other hand, makes
rather fumbling attempts to differentiate itself from objects. As Adam Phillips
remarks quoting Freud, ‘an object is soldered on to instinct’ (1997: 152). If the
ego is as unrefined as Freud suggests, then the characterization of homosexuality
and heterosexuality requires a degree of sophistication the ego cannot possibly
have achieved at this stage. It may indeed mean these initial primary gestures
towards identification may be the most powerful, precisely because of the depen-
dence of the infant and the imperative to achieve autonomy. Yet because the ego
itself has not yet formed, the identifications are also more precarious, incomplete
and ambivalent as we have seen.
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Unidentified Pleasures  45

Second, in The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary (1993),

Butler works a contradiction in the theory of signification to argue that gender
must be an effect rather than an originary signifier. The fear of castration as the
primary impetus for identification implies that the phallus originates significa-
tions, and to do so it must already enjoy a prior status of signifier. Yet this is
impossible, as gender and sexuality have not yet gained any meaning or signifi-
cance for the child. However, Butler then goes on to characterize the female
infant’s attachment to her mother, through the primary action of breast suckling,
as ‘homosexual’. Butler assigns a sexuality to this attachment with the lens of a
culturally defined and established gendered structure of which the infant cannot
be aware, if gender is to remain an effect of, and not a precursor to, development,
as Butler contends. Indeed, it is only at the genital stage, according to psycho-
analytic theory, that we can speak at all of homosexuality or heterosexuality. As
Kessler and McKenna’s (1978) research demonstrates, children appear to gain a
relatively fixed notion of gender around the age of 3 (which is actually earlier than
Freud imagined). This precedes children’s awareness of genital differences.4 Thus,
Butler criticizes Freud for a temporal error in his analysis of the fear of castration
at the same time that she makes a similar temporal error in her characterization
of homosexuality.
Third, Butler’s thesis over-emphasizes gender attachments, when in fact the
infant is involved in the giving up of a range of attachments. Hood-Williams
(1999) wryly notes that Butler does not speak of an ‘ungrievable loss of shit’ in
our prohibition against faeces. His point is that Butler focuses on gender because
that is what she is interested in, but the infant by no means shares this emphasis.
Hood-Williams (1999) also argues that Butler’s theory of homosexual identifi-
cation works better for female infants than male infants, as both infant girls and
boys, it is assumed, first attach to their mothers through foetal development and
breast feeding. While the female infant’s attachment may be said to be homo-
sexual, the male infant’s attachment must be heterosexual. In giving up the mother
as primary love-object, the male infant thus gains his gender identity through the
melancholy loss of heterosexuality, problematic given that most men identify as
heterosexual. How then, do heterosexual men grieve what they supposedly have
not lost?
We must also be cognizant that Freud argued that it is not the object itself that
is incorporated by the infant, not the object in its entirety, but only what the
object represents to the infant: ‘one borrows a single trait from the person who
is object’ (1959d [1921]: 39). Would it not be the breast as object that the child
would incorporate, rather than the breast-attached-to-woman or breast-as-
signifier-of-feminine (Hood-Williams, 1999)? Moreover, Butler’s theory seems to
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suggest that, in the melancholic loss of homosexuality, heterosexuality is the

primary ‘achievement’ of gender identity. But homosexuality is as much of an
achievement, in this sense, as heterosexuality, when characteristics that the child
might otherwise develop freely (without the current gender system) must be
relinquished or sublimated. When Butler claims an anterior position for homo-
sexuality, she implies that homosexuality is an identity, a claim Butler cannot
sustain while also maintaining a theory of gender performativity.
In her attempt to recover a value for homosexuality, I think Butler restricts her
narrative to the identification of only two gender identities among many. Why
confine ourselves to discussions of homosexuality and heterosexuality, as though
these are the only choices? Freud himself spoke alternatively of our inherent
‘bisexuality’ and ‘polymorphous perversity’, to emphasize our original undiffer-
entiated identification and desire (1959a [1905]: 280).5 Further, Freud repeatedly
emphasizes that the undifferentiated infant enjoys a myriad of diffuse pleasures,
which the subject learns to restrict according to societal strictures. It is much more
the restriction of polymorphous pleasures that represent the melancholia of
identification, than just the restriction of homosexuality.
The larger question still remains concerning just what exactly constitutes
gender identification. Apart from acquiescing to the cultural stereotypes of his
time, Freud remained vague as to what, besides heterosexuality and homo-
sexuality, the infant does incorporate. Here Freud acknowledges: ‘what consti-
tutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy
cannot lay hold of’ and ‘with the entry into the phallic phase the differences
between the sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreements’ (1964: 114, 118).
We must be cautious, then, in defining the constitution of lost gender, as Butler
certainly implies by her emphasis on homosexuality and heterosexuality. If
gender is wholly constructed, then the societal strictures that confine masculinity
and femininity to distinct entities define what is lost by what is excluded. Butler
notes, ‘the demarcation of sexual difference does not precede the interpretation
of that difference, but this demarcation is itself an interpretative act laden with
normative assumptions about the binary gender system’, but then seems to
involve herself in this very interpretive act by demarcating both heterosexuality
and homosexuality (1986b: 511).
But the most significant problem with Butler’s discussions of homosexuality
and heterosexuality is the apparent slippage between identification (to be) and
desire (to have). Identification with a same-gendered parent does not necessarily
lead to a desire for same-gender intimacy. This elision is not at all surprising, as
Freud himself remained unwilling to commit his theory to any ability to predict
sexual-object choice from identification. It is this elision between identification
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Unidentified Pleasures  47

and desire that most problematizes Butler’s case for homosexuality as the origi-
nary signifier, and it is to this topic that we now turn.

Gender Failed
We are left with a number of unanswered questions. What exactly determines
what can and cannot be psychically incorporated? How can gender be incorpor-
ated when the infant has no knowledge of gender, and won’t for some time to
come? Can a subject refuse to incorporate gender and what are the consequences
for their identity?
In circumstances in which the intended meaning(s) of Freud’s work on the
origins of subjectivity are generous enough to afford several interpretations, and
given Butler’s highly imaginative and compelling use of Freudian theory to argue
for a particular ‘origin’ reading, it is of singular value to search Freud’s many
writings for clarification. Most feminists turn to the oft-traversed case studies of
‘Dora’ and ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ as illus-
trative of Freud’s emphasis on the importance of the Oedipus complex in male
and female identification.
A less remarked upon case analysis in feminist studies, and yet one which for
our purposes could not be more pertinent, is that of the ‘Psychoanalytic Notes
on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’ or the Schreber case as it
is more popularly known. One suspects that this case received public attention
primarily because of Schreber’s prominent position within the German judiciary.
Senatspräsident Schreber occupied a number of positions, his most prestigious as
the Presiding Judge over a Division of the Saxon Appeal Court in Dresden (1958:
135). Were it not for his wealth, social class background, education and member-
ship of the German ruling class, it is unlikely that Schreber’s case would have been
granted any of the acclaim that it has. It is for these reasons that Freud’s interest
in the case was clearly initiated; but as much because Schreber provided his own
detailed memoirs.
From Schreber’s Memoirs (1998), Freud is able to glean sufficient detail to
build a credible case of paranoia. Between his first two ‘illnesses’, Schreber reports
a dream in which he thought that ‘it really must be very nice to be a woman
submitting to the act of copulation’ (in Freud, 1958: 142). During his second
‘illness’ Schreber reports that his body is decomposing for a divine purpose which
the Court Judgment summarizes thus: ‘he believed that he had a mission to
redeem the world and to restore it to its lost state of bliss. This, however, he could
only bring about if he were first transformed from a man into a woman’ (1958:
146).
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If it were only a case of divine calling for some particular purpose, this case
might not have caught Freud’s attention. It is the specific requirement by God
that Schreber must be a woman in order to fulfil his ordained destiny that
intrigued Freud. As Freud recounts, ‘it is not to be supposed that he wishes to be
transformed into a woman; it is rather a question of a “must” based upon the
Order of Things’ (1958: 146, emphasis in original). Indeed, Schreber is convinced
that he is turning into a woman. Through a discharge of rays, God is transform-
ing Schreber’s body, replacing male with female nerves, causing his skin to become
soft, and to experience the same sense of ‘voluptuousness’ of women. His doctors
are concerned with Schreber’s ‘condition’ not least because he ‘shows no signs of
confusion or of psychical inhibition, nor is his intelligence noticeably impaired’
(1958: 144). Indeed, his doctors seem greatly agitated that Schreber insists,
‘exhaustively’ so, on his transformation into a woman above all other symptoms.
How could such an intelligent, educated, well-spoken, middle-class man desire
so strongly to be a woman? I think the reason Schreber’s case attracted so much
psychiatric interest was because, in so many ways, he exemplified the culture and
intellect of the class of which the psychiatric community was also a part. With the
sense that, but for his identification as a woman, Schreber was just like him, Freud
begins his interpretation. Freud focuses on Schreber’s dreams, which Freud inter-
prets thus: the ‘feminine attitude’ which Schreber reports is directed towards his
doctor, Flechsig. Thus the exciting cause is Schreber’s homosexual impulse
towards his doctor; the symptoms a product of the ego attempting to negotiate
this homosexual impulse. What now might be recognized as (pre-operative) trans-
sexualism, Freud defines within the available terms as homosexuality.6 We antici-
pate from Freud’s notes on homosexuality that he will not find Schreber’s latent
homosexuality problematic in itself, and indeed this is the case: ‘every human
being oscillates all through his life between heterosexual and homosexual feelings,
and any frustration or disappointment in the one direction is apt to drive him over
into the other’ (1958: 180). Schreber’s ego deals with the struggle between the
homosexual impulse and the resistance to it by developing intense feelings of
persecution, particularly from his doctors. Thus ‘his ego found compensation in
his megalomania, while his feminine wishful phantasy made its way through and
became acceptable’ (1958: 183). Freud further interprets Schreber’s constant focus
on the sun as an allusion to his father, to whom Schreber felt a very strong attach-
ment, and whose loss Schreber consequently felt deeply when he died. Thus the
threat of castration presented by the father to the son in the Oedipus complex
manifests as a literal castration that the transformation into a woman effects.
Rather than resolving the threat of castration by abandoning the mother as love-
object and identifying with the father, the homosexual alternative consists in the
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Unidentified Pleasures  49

boy desiring his father and taking on a feminine position in order to seek out
relationships with men.
Freud’s main axis of interpretation concerns the ‘mechanisms of paranoia’
(1958: 196), which, he argues, are a central theme in the homosexual’s life. In order
to defend his theory, Freud argues that the child’s disparate pleasures are attached
to a love object that is initially his own body. He then states that ‘what is of chief
importance . . . may already be the genitals’. This ‘normally’ leads the individual
to choose an outside object with genitals like his own. It thus appears that Freud
himself is arguing that homosexual object-choice precedes heterosexual object-
choice.7 But in order to confirm the centrality of the Oedipus complex, Freud
also claims that homosexuality is the result, not the cause, of the psychic process
initiated by the Oedipus complex. It seems homosexuality both precedes and
follows heterosexuality – Freud seems to be gerrymandering his theory to
account for homosexuality.
The most obvious and recurring theme of the Memoirs is Schreber’s identifi-
cation as a woman, and I think this case gives important insights into our ques-
tions about the origin of gender. I want to suggest a possible reconciliation
between Freud’s analysis of Schreber and Butler’s analysis of the formation of
heterosexuality.
Melanie Klein acknowledges that ‘we know little about the structure of the early
ego . . . the early ego largely lacks cohesion, and a tendency towards integration
alternates with a tendency towards disintegration, a falling into bits’ (Klein, 1986:
179). This ‘unfathomable’ area, eager to experience pleasure in all of its poly-
morphous possibility, resists any attempts by the ego to narrow its sources of
identification, and thus pleasure. Klein is particularly aware of the anxiety, frus-
tration and sense of loss incurred in the process of identification. She states ‘at a very
early age children become acquainted with reality through the deprivations which it
imposes on them. They try to defend themselves against it by repudiating it’ (Klein,
1986: 59). One sign of the ‘achievement’ of subjectivity is the child’s demonstration
of the ‘ability to sustain real deprivations’ (1986: 59). Klein says, further, that the
ego’s ‘attempts to save the loved object, to repair and restore it, attempts which in
the state of depression are coupled with despair . . . are determining factors for all
sublimations and the whole of . . . ego development’ (1986: 124).
Freud was cognizant that the ego’s struggle with the resistance of pleasures
was unresolvable. In ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, he notes, ‘a perma-
nent settlement of an instinctual demand does not happen. The demand does not
disappear. It is tamed’ (1959e [1937]: 326). Butler, too, invokes this condition in
recognizing the necessary repetition of gender performativity. For Butler, as for
Freud, it is the need for constant repetition that acknowledges the precarious
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constructedness of gender identity, and the very possibility of subversion

through destabilization.
All subjectivities that confine the expression of identifications and desires,
which would include both heterosexuality and homosexuality, thus constitute
compromises. To the extent that this ‘inner world’ is ‘created through the denial
of the “other”, this counts as pain’ and is mourned (Freud, 1959e [1937]: 146).
Jacqueline Rose insightfully links the process of unconscious resistance with the
closure of gender identity:
The unconscious constantly reveals the ‘failure’ of identity. Because there is no continuity of
psychic life, so there is no stability of sexual identity, no position for women (or for men) which
is ever simply achieved. Nor does psycho-analysis see such ‘failure’ as a special-case inability or
an individual deviancy from the norm. ‘Failure’ is not a moment to be regretted in a process of
adaptation, or development into normality . . . ‘failure’ is something endlessly repeated and
relived moment by moment throughout our individual histories . . . there is a resistance to
identity at the very heart of psychic life. (1987: 90–1)

Freud draws the same conclusions in ‘A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution

to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions’:
With men, what is unconscious and repressed can be reduced to feminine instinctual impulses;
and conversely with women . . . the [psychic] struggle between the two sexes [is] the decisive
cause of repression. (1959c [1919]: 197–8)

Although on numerous occasions Freud is at pains to argue that there is

nothing ‘wrong’ with homosexuality, his dogged insistence on the oedipal
complex and fear of castration necessarily leads to a heteronormative theory of
development. The obvious strength of Butler’s argument is to confound, if not
completely subvert, this dominant discourse. And whereas Butler quite rightly
argues that homosexuals refuse the cross-gender desire required of heteronor-
mativity, I think we can ask whether the possibility exists of refusing cross-
gender identification itself. If identification precedes desire, then Schreber might
have been attempting to refuse the loss required by gender identification. I think
Freud himself sensed in the individual who refused identification a heightened
awareness of the ‘system’ impelling the identification: ‘[the melancholic] has a
keener eye for the truth than others who are not melancholic’ (1959b [1917]:
246).
Whereas Freud focuses on Schreber’s deviation from heterosexual develop-
ment, I suggest that it would be more accurate to say that Schreber refused
identification and paid a high societal price. It is entirely possible that Freud’s
analysis of the strong effect of Schreber’s father is accurate.8 But here the sticky
differentiation between identification and desire separates Schreber’s case from
that of homosexuality. Schreber’s aim was not for a same-gender love object.
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Unidentified Pleasures  51

Schreber did not want to be a homosexual: he wanted to be a woman. The differ-

ence between Schreber’s case and those of other homosexuals analysed by Freud
is precisely that Schreber was not homosexual, a point Freud entirely missed
because his schematic grid did not recognize transsexualism.
A modern psychoanalytic interpretation would argue that transsexualism is
identification gone awry. The infant over-identifies with the opposite-gendered
parent, and/or under-identifies with the same-gendered parent. Yet transsexual
narratives suggest they may be choosing a gendered identification by default.
Modern psychiatric and judicial discourses compel individuals who honestly
express the exact melancholy, loss, trauma and precariousness that gender
identification entails (and which, as we have seen, Freud’s account so powerfully
details), to identify themselves as one gender. The changes taking place within the
male-to-female (MTF) transsexual community reflects both this pressure to
identify as one and only one gender, and a recent refusal to do so.
Recent transsexual narratives contest the conflation of gender and genital attri-
bution, reflecting a tension within the MTF transsexual community between
those who want to ‘pass’ as genitally ‘correct’ women, and those seeking to
question the gender system. Kate Bornstein, for instance, says ‘I know I’m not a
man – about that much I’m very clear, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m
probably not a woman either, at least not according to a lot of people’s rules on
this sort of thing’ (1994: 8). Bornstein argues that transsexuals cannot be men or
women, not because they are ‘inauthentic’ as some believe, but because trans-
sexuals radically bridge gender categories. Transsexuals reveal the ‘failure’ of
gender identity through, first, a refusal to accept a correspondence between
genitals and gender identification (‘chicks with dicks’ for instance); second,
through repeated ‘cross’-gender performative acts; and, third, by refusing to
abandon the same-gender or opposite-gender identification required by homo-
sexuality and heterosexuality respectively. As such, transsexualism is a hyperbolic
performance of gender.9

Concluding Remarks
I think the spirit of Butler’s work is to challenge current notions of ‘normal’
gender development. This venture, drawing on Freud’s insights into the trauma,
violence, ambivalence and incomplete process of identification, invites an
interpretation of gender as precarious outcome, achieved at significant cost. What
is so appealing about the pleasures of which both Butler and Freud speak is that
they exist prior to their social construction as ‘sexual’ at all. Given Freud’s
emphasis on polymorphous pleasures, the reluctance of the body to allow its
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52  Body and Society Vol. 8 No. 2

pleasures to be restricted and the obvious ego expenditure in the process of

identification, there is little possibility that either heterosexuality or homo-
sexuality is somehow innately given and exposed during childhood development.
Butler is right to expose the heteronormative system that produces desires as
‘natural’. But by focusing mainly on homosexuality, Butler does not do her own
insights full justice. When Butler claims that homosexual males are men who
identify with men, she is confronting the Freudian equation of ‘normal’ hetero-
sexuality. Gay men who desire men, however, do not identify as women. Thus,
in the case of homosexuality, it is not so much identification as desire that is at
stake. On the other hand, it is the refusal to suffer the melancholy of gender loss,
both in terms of identification and desire, which marks the radical possibility of
transsexualism. Freud thought so much of the power of the body’s pleasures that
they were ‘able to defeat the intentions of repression’ (1959c [1919]: 201). This is
not to claim that transsexuals are necessarily subversive, only that they bring the
temporality of gender performativity to the fore. At the same time, transsexuals’
struggle to find and express an authentic gender identity demonstrates how
fundamental the gender system is and how excessive the body is to that system
(Williams, 1998). The fragmented transsexual subject troubles the ‘foundational
illusions’ of identity. Indeed, these identities may be perversions, in the true
Freudian sense of pleasures experienced by our bodies before the loss of pleasures
impelled by the heteronormative gender system.

Notes
The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments received from the anonymous
reviewers and editors on an earlier version of this article.

1. In a footnote Freud states: ‘perhaps it would be safer to say “with the parents”; for before the
child has arrived at definite knowledge of the difference between the sexes, the missing penis, it does
not distinguish in value between its father and its mother . . . in order to simplify my presentment I
shall discuss only identification with the father’ (1947: 39). This shift initiated debates concerning
maternal identification (see Klein, 1986).
2. Freud does repeatedly refer to certain characteristics as masculine and others as feminine in order
to emphasize the salience of sexuality in human development. This is in contrast to much sociological
work which separates sexual and gender identity (see Butler, 1994).
3. Butler is cognizant of Foucault’s claim that psychoanalysis names sexuality as it purports to
explain it. However, Butler is interested in psychoanalysis as precisely a discourse of sexual develop-
ment.
4. Kessler and McKenna’s research (1978) found that children as old as 5 believe that if a dress is put
on a man, he changes into a woman.
5. Freud also speaks of our ‘psychical hermaphroditism’ (1920: 210) and our ‘predisposition towards
bisexuality’ (1905: 136).
6. Schiesari (1992), Macalpine and Hunter (1998), and Fuss (1995) all refer to Schreber as a
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Unidentified Pleasures  53

transvestite, probably because of the passages of his diary in which Schreber details the way he adorned
himself with female clothing. However, the overall purpose of Schreber’s will is not to wear women’s
clothing but to become a woman, which suggests his identity as transsexual.
7. Freud reinforces this point further along in the analysis: ‘we accept the popular distinction between
ego-instincts and a sexual instinct; for such a distinction seems to agree with the biological conception
that the individual has a double orientation, aiming on the one hand at self-preservation and on the other
at the preservation of the species’ (1958: 213). The orientation towards self-preservation equates with
homosexuality, while the preservation of the species initiates the later transition to heterosexuality.
8. In Soul Murder (1976), Schatzman compellingly argues that Schreber’s schizophrenia was the
result of the extreme physical and psychological child abuse he suffered. So Schreber’s ‘attachment’ to
his father, while intense, is not to be assumed to be positive.
9. The permanence of transsexual cross-identification makes its ‘performance’ much more enduring
than the occasional ‘performance’ of drag.

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Myra J. Hird is a lecturer in Sociology at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is the author of several
articles on materiality, sexual difference, intersex and transgender, including ‘Intersex: A Test-case for
Psycho-analytic Theory?’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; ‘Gender’s Nature: Inter-
sexuality, Transsexualism and the “Sex”/“Gender” Binary’ in Feminist Theory; ‘For a Sociology of
Transsexualism’ in Sociology; ‘Out/perfoming Our Selves – Invitation for Dialogue’ in Sexualities; and
is completing a sole-authored book on the relation of intersex and transsex with theories of sexual
difference.