Helene Moglen

Female Subjects in Black and White Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism

CONTRIBUTORS: Elizabeth Abel Katherine Clay Bassard Judith Butler Barbara Christian Ann duCille Mae G. Henderson Margaret Homans Akasha (Gloria) Hull Barbara Johnson Tania Modleski Helene Moglen Cynthia D. Schrager Carolyn Martin Shaw Hortense J. Spillers Jean Walton Laura Wexler

Ageing and Transageing: Transgenerational Hauntings of the Self

In this article, I examine the dissonant experience of ageing in the context of two different but related models of the psyche: a vertical model to which repression is central and a horizontal model that emphasizes dissociation. I compare the structure of Freuds melancholic self, as Abraham and Torok (1994) have revised it, with the postmodern, poststructuralist, and post-Freudian self, which is characterized by dissociation and emphasized by relational psychoanalytic theorists. I argue that dissociation is the more capacious model for the consideration of the experience of ageing because it can serve an incorporative or an introjective function. In its defensive, incorporative role, it maintains ghostly specters of youth as consuming objects of loss and desire. In its creative introjective role, dissociation initiates a dynamic and creative process in which multiple self-states of past and present are available for recognition and enactment. In this latter form of the dissociative state, the melancholic longings of ageing are transformed into a productive process, which I call transageing. In the final section of the article, I compare the complexities and contradictions of transageing with those of other projects of category crossing, specifically to those that pertain to sex and gender.

Power and empowerment

Abstract Feminists are understandably ambivalent about accepting and using power within mainstream hierarchical structures that support relationships of domination and inequity. Many feminists accept their membership in a marginalized group but are wary of relating to the dominant culture which threatens to absorb them. Instead, they emphasize the importance of empowering women by helping them to see the special values of their ‘proper sphere’. This position involves a choice to continue operating within the boundaries of womens oppression, since it ignores the extent to which language and consciousness, as well as the structures of power, are all socially determined. It seems more desirable for feminists to reject idealist views of female nature. Instead of disassociating ourselves from power, we should determine the ways in which power can itself be purged of its own crippling effects. An oppositional consciousness must be developed which allows engagement between those feminists at the margins and those who accept responsibility at the center.

Feminism, Transageing, and Ageism: A Response to Lynne Segal

I thank Lynne Segal for her generous and provocative response to my essay. I am particularly interested in the political emphasis of her comments, which explore the impact of misogynistic ageism on women’s personal and collective experience of ageing. Segal’s activist perspective prompts me to bring my own assumptions about ageism to the surface of my argument in order to make my feminist stakes more apparent. It is in this context, therefore, that I respond to the issues that Segal raises about my theorization of ageing and creative dissociation, considering how that theory is influenced by the strengthening of its political dimension. Of course I agree with Segal that sexism plays a crucial role in the social and psychological construction of ageism. With her, I see the mythic female figures that haunt our culture—the witch, the hag, the gorgon, and the crone—as representing the antipathy that ageing women both encounter and internalize. Defined in opposition to the benignly maternal, these fantastic females exceed social laws and cultural practices, which govern the reproductive body that grounds gender roles and social differences. Conceptualized as anarchic, these haunting specters threaten to reclaim the primal energies and secret knowledge of their excluded sphere for their own resistant and subversive purposes. The powers attributed to them are rooted in male and female fears because they are

Leaving Analysis and Moving Beyond Pain

As an analyst and an analysand, we explore reasons for not “doing” psychoanalysis in the last third of life when our own experience became sufficiently intense to make self-exploration through pain undesirable. For the analyst, self-knowledge was inseparable from the therapeutic process: she discovered and created her selves in therapeutic relationships, which meant living in the pain of others. The analysand needed to know whether she could reinvent her life, after one of its lengthiest and most complex phases had ended. The analyst decided to turn away from a primary focus on the therapeutic other in order to commit herself to being alive with more pleasure. The analysand decided that she did not need to go back in order to move forward. For both, it was the formation of a new relationship in the last third of life that created the environment for mutual recognition and libratory self-discovery.