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Saussure and psychoanalytic feminism — a made match

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2014

Olga Cox
Olga Cox*
Affiliation:
Irish Psycho-Analytical Association, 2 Belgrave Terrace, Monkstown, Dublin
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Abstract

Over the past thirty years Lacanian psychoanalysis, by mapping psychoanalytic concepts onto the terminology of modern linguistics has seemed to radically alter the former, and to a large extent has done so. However, Lacan's insistence that we are formed by, and enmeshed in, language, occults an opposite truth; one that is evidenced by the history of politics and of art, and although psychoanalysis has traditionally remained rigidly apolitical, concentrating on the private and familial rather than the public sphere, it can hardly avoid, even in this sphere, a confrontation with the politics of feminism. Because of its particular appropriation of ‘word’ and ‘language’, Lacanian psychoanalysis finds itself in a contraditory position here. In the private sphere it liberates the little girl by the true ‘word’, while continuing to maintain, in the wider world of language, a now archaic discourse which subsumes both discourses into one, masculine one.

Keywords

‘Word’ ‘languageDiscourseMetaphor’
Type
Perspectives
Information
Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , September 1989 , pp. 100 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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