Pyschoanalysis, Anthropology and the Subject

"Kleinian and Lacanian approaches also differ in terms of their ontologies and epistemologies (Frosh 1987: ch. 5; Rustin 1991: ch. 7, 1995). These are expressed in different views of the potential outcome of the clinical process, which are linked in turn to differentattitudes to the potential for transformation and change. For Lacanians the subject is conceived as immured inan ontological condition of psychic alienation, and the psychoanalytic process aims above all to rid the analysand of humanist and essentialist illusions, including those of selfhood and of "cure" (Bowie 1991: ch. 2; Rustin 1991:187). " Pp.375"Minimally, gender classification amounts to systems of beliefs and/or practices, some of which devalue or oppress the category "woman," which is implicitly defined in some way by opposition to the category "man." The binary division is at the same time highly evaluative. This most basic of classification systems, in its great variety of enunciations, characteristically evinces splitting. Moore calls these phenomena "gender stereotypes." But they are more: they are derogatory, reductive, emotive, reified, naturalized, and legitimized by reference to physiology or to powerful metaphors. In short, they have all the properties of ideology.14" Pp.376"I do not imply that all cultural systems tend toward simple reproduction. As Marshall Sahlins (1981, 1985) has argued, in deciphering the reproduction and transformation of cultural systems it is necessary to explore the interplay of structure and practice, to take account of both internal logics of change and external conditions. The outcome of such a series of forces is then an empirical question. I suggest, however, that certain dominant cultural systems tend toward continuity and the absorption or suppression of difference because of the cumulative momentum of historical authority and power, their capacity as antidiscourses for the omnipotent denial of rival discourses, and their capacity for forming subjectivities in the image of their own psychic dynamics." Pp.380