This document discusses theories of melancholia, identification, and masculine psychosis from Freudian and Lacanian perspectives. It analyzes how melancholia forms gender identities through refusal of identification with the same-sex parent. For men, becoming masculine requires repudiating femininity and the mother as a love object. This creates an irreconcilable conflict between homosexual desire for the mother and masculine gender norms. The document questions how individuals like Reinaldo Arenas deal with this "panic" and argues they are condemned to repeat through "acting out" the identifications they wish to repudiate.

1. Melancholia, Identification, and the
Question ofMasculine Psychosis
Presentation made by
Ronald Simoes
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2. Id, Superego and Ego
Pleasure principle Reality principle
Id Super Ego
EGO EGO
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3. Only penis Freud's Psychosexual Stages

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvOoYX45G_0
At this moment,
a person might become
narcissistic
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4. Lacan and Freud
Infant's development
No clear distication between
object and subject, itself
and the external world.
Freud: Pre-oedipal stage
Lacan: Imaginary
Lacks any defined center of
self.
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5. Oedipus and Electra complex

Oedipus complex is for Freud the beginnings of
morality, conscience, law and all forms of social
and religious authority.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvOoYX45G_0

1:29

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA35ys91QJU
How does this commercial contradict the classical
Oedipus complex?
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6. Gender + sexuality
Melancholy and gender Refusal - Butler
Philosophy and Maternal body – Walker
Classical Freudian Oedipus complex
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7. Arena’s Dream
En otro sueno, quiero acercarme a la casa donde estaba mi
madre y hay una tela metálica frente a la puerta. Llamo y llamo
para que me abran la puerta; ella y mi tía están al otro lado de la
tela metálica y yo les hago señales, me llevo la mano al pecho y
de mi mano empiezan a salir pájaros, cotorras de todos los
colores, insectos y aves cada vez más gigantescas; comienzo a
gritar que me abran, y ellas me miran a través de la tela metálica;
yo sigo produciendo toda clase de gritos y animales, pero no
puedo cruzar la puerta. (Arenas 1992: 336)
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8. Cathexis
In psychoanalysis, cathexis is defined as the process of
investment of mental or emotional energy in a
person, object, or idea
Freud conceptualized the question of energy directed at
the self versus energy directed at others, called
cathexis
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9. Reinaldo can ultimately hope to internalise (and hence,
“precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes”
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10. Abandoned object-cathexes
The Ego and the Id”, the final character of the ego to a “precipitate of
abandoned object-cathexes” containing “the history of those object-choices”
At its most radical, Freud’s theory thus implies that identification is not
subsidiary or “exterior” to an allegedly pre-established, “original” self (i.e.
the “Self” qua hupokeimenon, as an entity which literally “under-lies” its
identifications); on the contrary, the subject consists of nothing except those
identifications, identifications which, taking the place of abandoned cathexes,
turn it into a “sedimentation” or “archaeological reminder” (the phrase is
Judith Butler’s) of objects once loved and lost (Butler 1997: 133)
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11. Mourning and Melancholy
In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholy”, Freud
recognizes two mutually exclusive responses to loss
— mourning [Trauer] and melancholia
[Melancholie]. This sharp distinction between the
two responses has long since become almost
synonymous with the understanding of a normal
versus a pathological reaction to loss, and the clear
demarcation between them.
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12. Melancholia, identification and 12
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13. Melancholic identification
Theory of gender as a melancholic identification. Such a theory will enable us to
gain a deeper understanding of Arenas’s relationship to the maternal figure
in Antes que anochezca, under whose light the idea of “acting out”
(understood as the manifestation of an unconscious desire to be or to stand in
for the mother) will give us the final key to the interpretation of the book.
saint
Melancholic identification
witch
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14. Castration
Freud Sprengnether
EGO – From Castration – Oedipus complex EGO- From mourning
Mother’s body is plenitude Mother’s body is strange and different
Father/ phallus No father / There is loss
Separation from the protecting mother at birth Loss and division. Mother is the other, not me.
The very existence of the ego is coincident
with the awareness of loss, there is no time
at which mother has not been Other”
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15. Arena’s Loss and double
Freud enabled us to realise, he preserved the mother as part of himself as a way of
staying or disavowing the recognition of her loss. What I presently wish to
emphasise, however, is the fact that, at a more superficial level, the mother
constitutes also, in Antes que anochezca, a signifier which Reinaldo constantly
repudiates or escapes from (“huir”) in an attempt to retain a sense of “his own”
identity
The state of division experienced as
consciousness is mirrored in [the
mother’s] body as the site of division
itself […]
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16. Phallus or Self-castration
Some crucial consequences of such insights, for feminism as well as
for psychoanalytic theory in general, is the collapsing of the very
hierarchical relationship between the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal periods
(or in Lacan’s terms between the Imaginary and Symbolic stages): no
longer associated with the intervention of the father/Phallus, the
child’s knowledge of “castration” (and hence his/her access to the
world of symbolic relations) are now considered to begin “with the
onset of life itself”( page 73)
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17. Girls develops penis envy –
Electra complex
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18. “Normal sexuality”
Butler’s “Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification” analyses the
existence of the “normal” (heterosexual) “masculine” versus
“feminine” identity as the result of a primary (homosexual) object-
choice—one involving the parental figure of the same sex,
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19. Butler – Man and femininity
Becoming a “man” within this logic requires repudiating femininity as a
precondition for the heterosexualization of sexual desire and its fundamental
ambivalence […]
Indeed, the desire for the feminine is marked by that repudiation: he wants
the woman he would never be. He wouldn’t be caught dead being her:
therefore he wants her […]
His wanting will be haunted by a dread of being what he wants, so that his
wanting will also always be a kind of dread.
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20. Drag
[D]rag exposes or allegorizes the mundane psychic and performative
practices by which heterosexualized genders form themselves
through renouncing the possibility of homosexuality
[…] Drag thus allegorizes heterosexual melancholy, the melancholy by
which a masculine gender is formed from the refusal to grieve the
masculine as a possibility of love; a feminine gender is formed
(taken on, assumed) through the incorporative fantasy by which the
feminine is excluded as a possible object of love. (1997: 146
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21. Desire and Gender
Homosexual desire, if we choose to stay within the classical Freudian
parameters, presents clear incompatibilitie s with “gender Butler notes,
“homosexual desire thus panics gender how can a (homosexually identified)
man acknowledge and properly “grieve” the mother as a love object without
succumbing to an identification which threatens to do away with his
“masculinity” qua constituted both from the disavowal of a primordial
libidinal bond to the father, and from a repudiation of “femininity”?
Cathexis – Love object
Repudiate femininity but
at the same time the
mother is the love
object, and he has his
libidinal energy towards
man.
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22. Question?
How can Reinaldo deal with the “panic” of mourning and recognising
the mother as part of “himself” vis-a`-vis an identification which is
clearly incompatible with his existence within the (heterosexualised )
matrix of a “masculine” versus “feminine” identity?
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23. Mirrowing
Reinaldo fails to recognise the ways in which his “huidas” and
“abandonments” (of the mother) cannot themselves avoid the
identificatory pattern (cannot themselves avoid “repeating” or
“miming” the very model from which they wish to part).
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24. Reinaldo’s self-confessed answer, as we have seen, is to run
away, to “repudiate”: “My whole life had been a constant
running away from my mother
[…] [I] could only abandon my mother or become like her”
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25. Conclusion
“pervasive melancholia” which characterises a “masculine”
versus “feminine” identity leads to the question of
unconscious “miming”, of “repetition” understood in the
Freudian sense of “acting out”: “Melancholy is both the
refusal to grief”
As Dylan Evans indicates in his entry on “acting out” in the Introductory
80 “A BOY’S BEST FRIEND IS HIS (M)OTHER” Dictionary of Lacanian
Psychoanalysis: “If past events are repressed from memory, they return by
expressing themselves in actions; when the subject does not remember the
past […] he is condemned to repeat it by acting it out”
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26. Arena’s
The choice of sexual “promiscuity” in Arenas’s adult life, which at an
analytical level reproduces rather than challenges the position of (constitutive
) grief that characterises the mother in regard to the lost husband/Phallus.
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27. Problems

What are the possible problems for the Oedipus
complex in relation to the Melancholic theory?

Sexist? Phalocentric?

Psychoanalysis used as a medical practice is a form
of social control?

Which theory presents only one model for
sexuality?

Indigenous societies with a 3rd gender? Western-
centered?
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