Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (review)

Western feminism has a history of ambivalence about how to handle its cultures' entrenched commitment to mind-body dualism, a dualism that has typically imagined women and femininity (and the poor and racial "others") as having more affinity with the somatic side of the divide. Some feminists have argued, echoing François Poullain de la Barre, that the mind has no sex. In the attempt to argue for the equal opportunity for reason, the body became a rather embarrassing and heavy piece of baggage. Some feminists, particularly during the second wave, have hoped to avoid this problem by trying to re-value embodiment. The danger with this position is that it might appear to be giving up the fight: if women are to revel anew in their bodies, who will challenge male dominance in the world of the mind?

In her fascinating and innovative book, Elizabeth A. Wilson cuts through this Gordian knot with a scalpel edge. Wilson turns her critical eye specifically on the conversation—or rather, lack thereof—between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Neuroscientists, she says, have committed themselves to a nervous system without psyche, while psychoanalysts (feminist and otherwise) have committed themselves to a non-biologized psyche. Bridging the gap left by this disciplinary specialization and uncritical acceptance of dualism, Wilson argues, provides surprisingly liberatory possibilities.

She begins with the radical notion that biological reductionism—long a bogeyman of humanist scholarship—might not necessarily lead to a "static, incoherent, or critically useless" understanding of the body and psyche (3). "For too long," she writes, "the neurosciences have been the target of feminist censure when they could be active, innovative contributors to feminist scholarship" (13). Wilson equally faults biomedical specialists for failing to recognize fully how social, psychological, and other environmental processes can integrate themselves into biological processes.

To bridge the divide, Wilson employs her most creative maneuver, namely to examine the historical and current scientific literature on the nervous system beyond the brain. Psychology, she says, has mistakenly focused on cognitive function and has ignored the equally important psychological events happening in the stomach, in reflex action, or in our "reptile brain." Wilson proposes a "theory of the psyche that is more extensive and less attached to the primacy of rationality, self-control, good judgment, and sound appraisal. If the psychological landscape could be more broadly surveyed, if, for example, it could be seen to be composed of an innately affective nervous system, then psychological events could be more readily integrated into biomedical accounts" (41). In the process of making this argument, she provides truly fresh readings of Freud, Darwin, Simon LeVay, and other biological reductionists, showing that their work need not lead to static or anti-feminist (read: hopelessly reductive) visions of the neurological body. A careful reading of Freud's early work on gastric pain, for example, shows that the enteric nervous system (which handles digestion) develops profound psychological responses that cannot be explained simply by arguing that the ENS takes cues slavishly from the more cognitive central nervous system.

In fact, Wilson's argument for the complexity of biological reductionism proves so convincing that I wondered why she continues to use the concept of psyche at all. Wilson depicts the body, even in its seemingly most automatic functions, as so vital, so complex, that the additional metaphysics of a psyche seems to defeat the purpose. For example, Wilson concludes her chapter on the gut with the point that "the nervous system extends well beyond the skull, and as it so travels through the body it takes the psyche with it" (47). After providing such a persuasive argument that the psyche is not ontologically distinct from the body, but rather emergent from its complex functioning, language like that I have just quoted is jarring.

Four of the six chapters in this brief book have appeared elsewhere, and even here they still could be read independently of each other. The title indicates that the book will contain more direct feminist analysis than it actually does. The...