THE UNCANNINESS OF THE FEMININE IN RELATION TO CONTEMPORARY IDEALS

Abstract

Although, for Freud, libido is always masculine, the enigma is always feminine, for men and women. The difference between the one sex and the other concerns how each is positioned in relation to this enigma, which is the rebellious part that does not submit to the laws of language. This concerns each person’s mode of jouissance. The uncanniness of the feminine has always provoked humans in their relation to truth. In this article, the author explores the current character of the relation to the enigma of the feminine, through an analysis of the ideals and normative discourses that surround it.

Keywords:
feminine; sexual; subjective rift; transformation of the body; contemporary ideals

In Femininity, the twenty-third of his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud states that “throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity”; he goes on, addressing his audience, “Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem - those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply - you are yourselves the problem” (Freud, 1933/1975, p. 113).

For Lacan, who held that anatomy is not destiny, femininity confronts us with the hole in the real; there is a radical lack of signifiers for feminine identity. In other words, it is not only the case that the question of femininity cannot be reduced to any anatomical or biological dimension; it is also true that, because this question has no definitive answer, any meaning that is given to femininity must always be reconstructed, at the crossroads of the singular and the collective. We can begin by emphasizing that if, as Freud thought, “libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature” (Freud, 1905/1975, p. 219), the enigma is always feminine, for women and men alike. The difference between the sexes - the one sex and the other - lies in how each of them is positioned in relation to this enigma, which is the rebellious part, the part that does not submit to the laws of language. This concerns each of us in terms of our modes of jouissance. This enigma, this unnameable part, has always raised questions since the undatable beginning of human reflection; fictions, dreams, and symptoms have been used to make up for our inability to name it. Collective rituals and myths, like the individual myths of neurotics, are nothing other than ways of asking what a woman is, what a man is, what sex or death are…

What place does the enigma or the riddle of the feminine occupy today? What discourses are involved in this question? In this article, I shall try to respond to these questions by exploring the relationship between contemporary ideology and the uncanniness [étrangeté] of the feminine. I shall then consider the potential contributions that psychoanalysis can provide when it is confronted with both the normative discourses that surround the enigma and the related questions that arise in clinical practice.

The enigma of the feminine in our modernity

This enigma concerns all subjects, men and women, in their relation to the Other sex. Yet a woman embodies it more fully, given her particular bond with the part of the unknown that Freud referred to as the “dark continent” (Freud, 1926b/1975, p. 212), and which Lacan took up in terms of his famous aphorism, “Woman does not exist” (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 7), in order to emphasize the “not all [pas tout]” to which the feminine refers.¹ This unthought and unthinkable part that a woman makes present meets up with the opaque, obscure point found in every civilization. This is what makes her man’s symptom (Lacan, 1975/1982, p. 168), or the “other side [envers] of Kultur” (Assoun, 1993, p. 147). Perhaps this is why, at each moment of crisis or rupture in history, women are designated as either the cause or the victim of every problem.

Whether she is cherished or abused, sacralized or cast into the flames, whether she is named Eve, Penelope, Scheherazade, or Antigone: woman, as eminently elusive, even for the women who are supposed to embody her, has always provoked humans in their relation to truth, thereby transmitting the state of their culture or society. It is she who destabilizes contemporary discourses by reminding them of what they are trying to get rid of: the impossible, the stumbling block that eludes all normative logic. The enigmatic message of the feminine has not been stifled, despite all the attempts to master it. On the contrary, it continues to make itself heard, even through new forms of rigid identity and absolute pronouncements. It resounds in a way that is increasingly strange, as it moves into modern figures of a femininity that falls prey to the inflation of signs. It shows itself in religious and even fanatical attire, or in an excess of artifice. In other words, the question of the feminine introduces a “not all” at precisely the place where the dominant imperative is the “all,” which is aligned with having, knowing, and being able to do and be anything and everything.

This question reactivates the real that is unbearable, the real that we try to subvert with the means of the day, even if the result is that we veer off course or wreak havoc. Such subversion - whether the constructions that surround it are traditional or modernized, religious or supposedly scientific - is part of the necessary, of that which “doesn’t stop being written” (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 94); it continues, against and despite everything, to cast a veil over what humans can never face directly, but can only glimpse fleetingly. Subversion can lead to creativity, but it can also explode into chaos when it gets frozen into the demonic certitude of a form of speech that would have no flaw, or a thought that would aim at omnipotence.

In parallel with the question of sexuality, the question of the feminine is currently being drawn into the issues raised by new techniques of fertility treatment. For the past few years, two sides of a passionate debate have emerged.

• On one side, there are those who consider that the new forms of reproduction of the species are ushering in a new era of asexual kinship relations. Women have now been given a supplementary power, for they have been freed from their cultural function of procreation, and can decide to have children on their own, without men.

• On the other side, there are those who hold that women are once again being objectified and subjugated to science, which, by dispossessing them of the unknown that they harbor, reinforces the asymmetry between the sexes and favors male dominance.

In thinking that the enigma of the feminine and the sexual can be mastered, and by reducing sexual difference to a question of superiority or inferiority, both sides create the illusion that there is some Unisex that can be salvaged and that human beings are the cause of their own internal division. However, even if the way of bearing children and giving birth is changing, what each woman bears within herself as a potential mother would still come from somewhere else. Relations between women and men are necessarily conflictual, as a result of both the division of the subject and the cut that establishes these relations (this is what is implied by the oft-misunderstood Lacanian expression “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” [Lacan, 2011/2018, p. 192]). Such relations are subject to the dialectic of language, below which something that escapes from the symbolic dimension is to be found. Perhaps this dimension could be the starting point of an examination, one that would be neither sexist nor objectifying, of how people confront difference and subvert what it is impossible in identity.

Has it now become possible, as some believe, to make human beings fit into their sex as we try to make them fit into a culture?

Clinical experience shows that, in fact, the technical possibility of changing from one sex to another neither reconciles subjects to their sexed identities nor eliminates the psychic conflict that divides the subject. This division, which is evoked in the statement “I’m not myself” and which opens up onto what is entirely Other, entails the radical impossibility of knowing, possessing, or articulating my being. This is the human enigma, which is both within and beyond us: in our relation to the world and to the objects we create. We are ceaselessly reminded of this enigma, which constantly moves into new contexts. Thus, it cannot be eliminated. It can, however, be disavowed, as can be seen in the unstoppable will to mastery that is activated in the contemporary biopolitics of the female body. We live in a time when the feminine, as embodied, is being medicalized in a new way, one that reduces the body to its biological dimension. Menstrual periods, pregnancy, and menopause are all becoming risk factors or possible sources or pathology. Of late, a certain amount of attention has been devoted to premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Studies of this severe form of premenstrual syndrome are being promoted with the promise that they will provide a so-called neuroanatomical model that would supposedly also complete our understanding of mood disorders and the impact of sex hormones on behavior.

There is not much that is new in the biologism of this approach to the feminine. In fact, psychoanalysis itself was born out of the failure of a certain conception of medicine to recognize that symptoms are riddles to be deciphered in relation to the unconscious. By proposing a new way of listening to and a fresh way of looking at the feminine, Freud revolutionized the doctor-patient relationship.

What has become of Freud’s contribution? What place does medicine, when confronted with women’s suffering, accord to speech, the psyche, and subjectivity? Medicine is currently one of the conceptual frameworks marked by new ideologies; these ideologies reveal both the problems that society is having with itself and its attempt to manage its relation to the uncanniness that it carries within itself. Medicine is moving further and further away from a humanistic, Hippocratic practice that emphasizes the importance of listening to patients and of being more interested in them than in their illnesses. In Exilés de l’intime, Gori and Del-Volgo (2008) provide a convincing account of how, in the grip of the new economic order, we are witnessing a real hijacking of the role of care; it is increasingly being used for purposes of surveillance and control, thereby harming the subject and the social bond. This contemporary imperative is dominated by both what Foucault (2004/2008) called “biopower” and the profit motive; untethered from human interaction, these rest on the disavowal of the part of the impossible that is intrinsically bound up with the human and the rift within the subject. Such a rift never stops being transformed into a flaw or an anomaly, thus creating the intense need to test, evaluate, standardize, and normalize everything on the basis of an ideal of prevention [prévention] that, instead of being considerate [prévenante], has now become predictive. Clinical experience shows that, paradoxically, such normalizing security measures themselves reactivate anxiety and generate a new figure to be feared.

Women’s bodies are at the heart of this normalizing imperative, which, in the name of emancipation, freedom, and well-being, promotes the illusion of a femininity that has no gaps, one that has been unburdened of its enigmas and other encumbrances, and conforms perfectly to contemporary expectations and norms. Behind this display of liberation, there are new constraints, and new forms of subjugation are taking shape. The craze for norms feeds the pressure of a society that fetishizes the body, objectifying and instrumentalizing it, transforming it into capital, scrutinizing it for its slightest anomaly or defect.

The massive and sometimes compulsive recourse to plastic surgery is a powerful testament to the ever more invasive demand for performance. Doctors and surgeons are called upon to be the agents of this demand, in the name of a scientistic ideology that is allied with political and economic liberalism. Face lifts, labial reduction, breast augmentation, liposuction, body contouring, and so on have become commonplace. Of late, vaginal rejuvenation surgery has become extraordinarily popular. Such kinds of surgery seek to provide women with tailor-made support in all their movements, promising them greater enjoyment of their sexuality, along with greater ease and self-determination. It is able not only to repair birth defects but also to reconstruct the hymen or allow women to rediscover sensation and regain possession of zones of the body that have been injured by female genital mutilation.

The female body has become a place where what is at stake exceeds medical or surgical intervention. By means of this body, there is a blurring of the boundaries that separate the subject’s intimate, private, and fantasmatic sphere from the social, political, and economic scene. What, likewise, happens to the points of demarcation or separation between therapy, prevention, and submission to the ideals of the day? Where does the ethical role of doctors begin? Where do we find a limit?

The fragility of this borderline disrupts the relation to ethics, and this is accentuated by the growing numbers of teens who, often with the encouragement of their parents, and especially their mothers, want to have cosmetic surgery. Let us recall that adolescence is particularly marked by the relationship to the body and its image. This transformed and “otherized” body confronts developing teens with their own incompleteness, with the lack in their knowledge of sexuality and femininity, which leads to a loss of psychological bearings. For, unlike animals, human beings, as speaking beings, have no certain knowledge of how to answer the questions: “What is a man?” and “What is a woman?”. It is the recognition of this indeterminacy, authenticated by the gaze of the parental and social Other, that enables the subject and identity to be reconstructed.

What happens, however, when the social gaze demonizes or rejects this part of the unknown? Many adolescent girls end up mistaking themselves for society’s image of them as deficient. In this case, cosmetic surgery can seem like a technical solution that makes it possible to do away with what is irreducible in them, while sparing them the effort of psychological work. Modifying the body also involves modifying one’s image, one’s history, and the femininity that is being constructed. For example, some young women justify their wish for cosmetic surgery by saying that they feel that a lack or defect inhabits their bodies. While some teenage girls turn to plastic surgery out of necessity, after an accident or other physical injury, others do so because they either feel lost or see it as a way to get beyond childhood wounds or psychic conflict. Others would like to look like a celebrity they idolize, to attain true femininity, or to erase a trait that ties them to their family. For example, certain adolescents, in their search for identity, reject a part of their bodies in the same way they reject their parental figures.

Each case is infinitely singular, but cosmetic surgery always has subjective resonances, and it can lead us astray when it seems to provide the perfection of completeness or when it short-circuits the work of restructuring that is inherent in adolescence; such work is required for reconstructing the image of the body. This can also cover over a completely different problem, as is illustrated by the case of Jasmine, of which I will now present an overview.

A clinical fragment

Jasmine, an adolescent girl (age 17) was referred to me by her family doctor, who found her to be “ill-at-ease” and uncomfortable with herself. She was described as a young woman who was confused and unable to tolerate frustration, and who spent long hours sitting in front of her mirror scrutinizing the different parts of her body. Jasmine had already undergone cosmetic surgery twice, and although she was not satisfied with the results, she wanted to continue with a third procedure. She had had two rhinoplasties and now wanted a breast augmentation because she felt her chest was too flat and unfeminine. Jasmine was an only child from a wealthy family. Her parents did not think there was any real reason for her new request, but they were willing to pay for the procedure if it would make her happy and lessen her rejection of and opposition to them. For her part, Jasmine said that she could not stand how her parents looked at her; it was as if she would always be their little girl.

Jasmine’s way of presenting herself during our initial sessions seemed to correspond closely to how she had been described; she was a “modern young woman who had lost her way”. What she said seemed detached from any sort of subjective involvement. Her words focused on her body, the defects that needed to be fixed, and the possible success of her next cosmetic surgery. She departed from this repetitive theme only when, in the context of the transference, the question of her relation to the feminine was posed. This question emerged in a slip of the tongue: instead of using the French phrase, “je m’affame pour avoir un corps mince” - “I’m starving myself so that I’ll be thin” - she replaced “m’affame” with “me femme” which has a similar pronunciation, but which transforms the word for “woman” into a verb. The resulting slip stated that “I am womaning myself so that I’ll be thin”.

Following this slip of the tongue, Jasmine began to justify her requests for more plastic surgery in terms of her feelings of strangeness or weirdness [étrangeté] about her body. She did not recognize herself (in her breasts and her nose); she felt odd and infinitely lacking, as if there were something that could not be symbolized. Yet in this case, that lack, which referred especially to what was unknowable within herself, was transformed into another kind of lack which she concerned having: she did not have a body that conformed to her image of it, and which would be the sort of body that our society’s dominant discourse had promised to her. This prompted her to try to fill or to repair from the outside a defect that concerned what was most private and intimate about herself.

Although the manifestations of her suffering were marked by the ideals of our day, this language must be heard and grasped in terms of what silently underlies it. In other words, behind the statements [l’énoncé], there is the subject’s enunciation, which must be taken into account; that is where the effects of metaphor and metonymy come into play. Jasmine seemed to emphasize the discourse produced by the social, and did not object to the repeated dissatisfactions that it entailed. Without going further into the details of her case, we can affirm that her complaint about her body, and her wish to change her appearance, could not be reduced to an expectation that was solely anatomical. Instead, it covered over a completely different dimension related both to her struggles with adolescence - which she experienced as a true ordeal of the strange and foreign - and to the traces of the infantile that this ordeal revived. This involved a plea [appel] arising from the subject’s being, at the fringes of language, insistent in its repetition, and which, when taken literally, can only appear in a veiled form. This plea served to undermine the work of the psyche through which adolescent processes seek to deal with the enigma of the feminine.

A compulsive request for surgical intervention on her body can concern different modes of psychic functioning; it is not always neurotic, as it was for Jasmine. The question is singular for each subject, but this does not mean that it does not call the social into question.

New forms of expressing uneasiness and malaise lead us to reconsider psychoanalytic practice and its frame. More than ever, it is important to allow time for the construction of both a request for analysis and the symptom, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. This helps the subject to reengage with the unconscious. In every epoch, the unconscious is always unsettling. It is crucial to take into account what connects and separates the manifest side of what a patient says from the Other that lies beneath. That is what authorizes the possibility of a new relation to the symptom, by returning to it the dimension of its dialectic in language and its openness to the unconscious, which constitutes an enigma for the subject. This can elicit speech that touches on what it does not master, where both analyst and analysand can be surprised by some new fact of saying [dire] that emerges beyond what is being said [dit] (Lacan, 2011/2018, p. 14), and points to some other horizon. This may happen through a dream or a slip of the tongue, as it did in Jasmine’s case; this is how the path of metaphorization opens up.

Today, although plastic surgeons may be relying more heavily on psychologists, this does not always include an attentiveness to the singularity of what patients say. Surgeons frequently look to specialists in mental health to fill in, scientifically and objectively, what is lacking in medical knowledge. Psychological evaluation is increasingly becoming part of the ideology of treatment, which is becoming a new form of governance. Yet we must ask how effective it can really ever be when the most irreducible aspects of the subject’s speech are dismissed and no room is left for what lies silently beneath the demand. This is not to downplay the importance of psychological evaluation and even less that of medicine, cosmetic surgery, and scientific progress in general. Instead, it is to emphasize the importance of being attentive to the abuses that can occur in a world where the relationship with the human has been impoverished. We cannot abstract ourselves from the social transformations that subjects draw upon in order to construct their own, unique identifications, to find a place in the world, and to express their suffering and desires.

Cultural transformations and their foundations

Cultural transformations imply the taking into account not only of what changes but also of the unchanging: of what comes back, remaining as a vestige, which is constantly migrating, being repeated and reactivated in new contexts. The unchanging does this while also challenging the subject in its foundation, division, and connection with the Other.

What does not change - what always remains relevant in Freudian and Lacanian analyses - is the difficulty that people have with consenting to the fundamental lack in being that is found within them, the lack that connects them to others. This lack is constantly reactivated in both every incidental difficulty and every change or rupture in history. It is transhistorical, belonging to that which is immemorial; since people began to speak, they have been trying to subvert it with whatever means were afforded in their day.

What can be said about the changes that are related to our modernity? At present, science and technology, especially digital technologies, are shaking up how we relate to our bodies, the world, and other people. We are witnessing the emergence of a new conception of the social bond, of the relationship between men and women, and of our experience of suffering, illness, and their forms of treatment. Changes in values, norms, ideals, and the models in which people and communities can recognize themselves do not occur without both hesitation and damage to their identifications. Society no longer provides the same circuits that enabled people to find a way to regulate their desire. Where mythical or heroic figures once allowed us to deal with impediments and hindrances by symbolizing them through fictions, we now find instantaneous imagery, ready to be consumed and tossed away. Human relationships are only conceived of in terms of productivity. The increasingly sophisticated objects that technology, in its excesses, offers to our appetite can become prostheses for the ego and barriers to desire and speech. Further, the social bond is becoming more and more fragmented as it extends throughout the world through globalization and the universalizing power of scientistic discourse. This can be seen in the withdrawal of groups into ethnically segregated enclaves, the emergence of regional identities, the proliferation of sects, and other identitarian tensions. Confronting such new stumbling blocks, our modernity hopes to prevent risk by reducing the lack in our being to a lack of having-knowing-power.

What, for example, is currently transforming advances in medicine and science - which are, in themselves, meaningful and useful - into sources of disorder? The answer could well be the fixation on doing and having at the expense of language that underpins them and the enigma they carry. Abuses and excesses arise when human beings unconsciously make themselves into absolute masters of language and take systems of logic as their starting point and horizon.

What can psychoanalysis contribute?

The situation just described leads us to ask what psychoanalysis can contribute in relation to the cultural changes and normative discourses that surround the body, femininity, and sexuality. Psychoanalysis has itself been criticized as a result of conceptual misunderstandings and misreadings. Feminists and queer authors have reproached psychoanalysis for having a phallocentric conception of femininity that clings to the patriarchy and the universality of the Oedipus complex. According to these critics, who often rely upon the work of Foucault, psychoanalysis serves as an agent of the normative. Here it is useful to recall that Freud himself recognized that his own ability to define the feminine was quite limited. Lacan, for his part, was already, as early as the 1950s, denouncing the normalization that was being introduced into psychoanalysis by ego psychology in the United States. He held that psychoanalysis, both as act and as discourse,² can only be subversive in reference to that orientation. Lacan not only called the Freudian Oedipus complex into question long before Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1977) published Anti-Oedipus, but also, in the final teachings, distanced himself from the structuralist approach; he focused instead on Borromean knotting, or the manner in which each subject attempts to cope with the real and the hole in knowledge - in other words, sexuality, desire, and the body… This later approach especially takes into consideration the diversity of the modes of jouissance and the singular accommodations that allow the subject to discover a way of dealing with the real.

Psychoanalysis does not in any sense seek either to normalize the feminine or to specify what a man or a woman should be. In fact, concerning masculine sexuality, Lacan was rather ironic about the “norme mâle” (Lacan, 2001, p. 479).³ He took up the difference between the sexes in terms of a radical dissymmetry instead of a binary logic. In its respect for the singularity of the subject, the work of psychoanalysts allows subjects to discover what constitutes them in their most intimate aspects, to let go of that which hinders their existence, and to find a unique way of dealing with sexuality and creating bonds with others. One of the greatest discoveries of psychoanalysis is that it is impossible for the subject to attain completeness. Incompleteness forms the core of the subject and is the foundation of the social; it is inherent in the condition of speaking beings and in the fact that language cannot say everything. It cannot tell us anything about our origins, death, or sex. Confronted with this impediment, it is up to each of us to find our own solution.

Conclusion

By restoring to femininity its uncanniness, by recognizing that it contains a part that is Other - a part of fecund alterity and of enigma at the very heart of what we call sexual identity - psychoanalysis allows us to thwart the logic of discourses that freeze or immobilize us. To conclude, it is important to reiterate several points concerning why psychoanalysis cannot submit to contemporary ideology’s imperative of excessive standardization.

• One aim of the normalizing imperative is to make subjects shut up; it treats their suffering or symptoms by acting as if the feminine were independent of the subject. Psychoanalysis cannot deal with suffering by undoing the ties that bind the symptom to its linguistic dimension, i.e., by placing it outside the subject. Instead, psychoanalysis restores enigma and the force of speech to the symptom.

• The normalizing imperative also locates conformity in the foreground. It promotes a homogenization that is expressed in the form of a collective ideal: that of an illusory harmony that makes it seem as if it were possible to rid each subject of the irreducible, making each of us identical with ourselves and with others. To such assimilationist discourses, which set up a fantasy of completeness that would run the risk of inhibiting alterity and destabilizing our sense of identity, psychoanalysis provides a counterpoint. Psychoanalysis is sustained by the intimate part of the subject, its radically singular dimension, which can indeed be connected to the collective, but which does not meld into and become confounded with it.

• Finally, this imperative seeks to prevent all risk and fill every lack, thus making us believe that the unknown that abides in the heart of what is human can be grasped and mastered. In contrast, psychoanalysis encourages each of us to take into account what divides and becomes an enigma for us. It teaches us that the lack in being should, instead of being filled up, be symbolized. This means taking the risk of desire, without which all creativity is impossible.

Now more than ever, clinicians who follow a psychoanalytic orientation need to reconsider what serves as the foundation of their actions and responsibility. They need to make present the untreatable and immeasurable part that is inherent in the human, and for which the feminine serves as a paradigm. This is how a path that leads to speech can be forged. Here we can recall that, for the ancient Greeks, logos referred not only to what is spoken, but also to what cannot be said.

References

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• 1
  1. In Éncore, Lacan emphasized that “not all” of a woman is situated within the phallic function (Lacan, 1975/1998, p. 72). A woman has a relation with that which is of the order of the unsayable, i.e., the jouissance that is properly feminine. Thus, there is, for each woman, something that exceeds language and that language cannot account for, which is what Lacan calls the “supplementary” (and not complementary) part of her (p. 73). This is what leads Lacan to highlight that women never stop eluding the universal and normative.
• 2
  2. Psychoanalytic discourse is a counterpoint to the tyranny of the norm generated by what Lacan called the “copulation” of the scientistic and capitalist discourse.
• 3
  3. [Translator’s note] In French, the two words “norme mâle” or “male norm” are pronounced like the word “normale” or “normal”
• 4
  Translated from Franch by John Holland

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  08 Aug 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  28 Aug 2024
• Accepted
  09 July 2025