Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

7. On Splitting the Sexual Object: Before and After Freud

7 On Splitting the Sexual Object: Before and After Freud A. LBOUT the best explanation that I have ever come across of the search for Mr., Miss, or Ms. Right occurs in Plato's Symposium , where Aristophanes speaks of the origin of both love and the sexes as we know them. Originally double—either all male, all female, or androgynous (a combination of the two)—because of their hubris, our ancestors were split in two by the gods. And ever since, we have been forced to look for our other half. Those of us who were originally all male or all female search for homosexual lovers to complete us; those who were originally androgynous now look for members of the opposite sex. As if this didn't lead to enough problems, Zeus warned that should we continue to be insolent, he would split us yet again, leaving us to hobble about on one leg. At least symbolically, this further splitting has already occurred, but mainly to women and not through any hubris of theirs that I can figure out; furthermore, it is men rather than Zeus who have visited this splitting on them. To jump from Aristophanes to another great myth maker, Freud, in the second of his "Contributions to the Psychology of Love," wrote of the tendency for men who suffer from psychical or selective impotence to split women into two component parts: "The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love. Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love."1 The wording here—a translation, of course —would lead one to believe that Freud thought such splitting was 103 104 WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER limited. Yet the essay in question is called "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" ("Über die allgemeinste Erniedrigung des Liebeslebens," 1912).2 Of course, by "universal," Freud meant male. Freud saw the origin of this splitting in the incest barrier, noting that "the sensual current that has remained active seeks only objects which do not recall the incestuous figures forbidden to it." Men "seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their sensuality away from the objects they love" (183). In other terms, the object of affection, who recalls the good preOedipal mother, must be kept separate from the object of desire, who recalls the forbidden Oedipal mother. Perhaps the Romantics cannot consummate their desire because they are caught in this dilemma. The splitting of the sexual object into the domestic and approved figure of wife/mother and the more exciting but feared one of sexual temptress was of course not Freud's fabrication. The fantasy of the nurturant woman who is at home waiting and the sensual creature that one encounters on one's journeys is at least as old as the Penelope and Circe of Homer's Odyssey. It is doubtful whether such splitting of the sexual object can be legislated out of existence; yet, we are beginning to feel, some of us at least, that some kind of synthesis is being effected at last. Is it possible that such splitting was as much the result of culture as of men's psychobiology? Where a cultural tendency is so pervasive, I find it of small comfort to think so. But I leave the question for the moment. The Romantics also attempted a synthesis of the two types. As I indicate later, they did not entirely succeed, and the Victorians who came after them were perhaps more extreme than any other group in history in their splitting of the object into two antithetical components, the angel in the house and the prostitute in the street, to name two extremes, a regression which, coming after the Romantics, makes one wonder about the possibility of any progressive form of liberation. We are now in the process of putting back together the female figure whose limbs the Victorians tore asunder so pitilessly. But the question remains to haunt us. Will we succeed where others have failed? And if so, what ON SPLITTING THE SEXUAL OBJECT 105 effects might such synthesis have that we are perhaps not considering ? Romanticism transvaluated the demonic as a source of vitality and energy. Therefore it is not surprising that it tried to validate the sorceress, seeing her not...