11

The Crisis of Oedipal Identity:

The Early Lacan and the
Frankfurt School

Perhaps we do not find it surprising enough that the thought of Jacques

Lacan should have come to function as a major point of reference for
feminist theory in the English-speaking world. Lacan's best-known work,
dating from the inception of his Seminar in 1953, is characterized by an
almost obsessive concern with the relation between language and subjec-
tivity, but Lacan shies away fronl connecting his formal conception of
language to any historical, let alone ideological, dimension of meaning.
Rather, in his reformulation, psychoanalysis is focused on the simultaneous
relation of dependency and non-identity between the subject and language
as such: Lacan is unequivocal that in psychoanalysis 'it is not a question of
the relation of man to language as a social phenomenon'. 1 To this extent,
the appeal of his work for feminists derives not from its historical or socio-
logical insights, but purely from its emphasis on the symbolically
structured character of subjectivity in its gendered dimension, an empha-
sis which undermines any naturalistic conception of the opposition
between the psychology of the two sexes.
At the same time, however, the political advantage which this emphasis
might be considered to bring is profoundly elusive, since - in his later
work, at least - Lacan gives little reason to assume that such symbolic
structuring might be alterable. Even those feminists most sympathetic to
Lacan have found themselves struggling with the dilemma that his thought
appears to establish an intrinsic relation between phallic primacy and the
symbolic order. Thus, Jacqueline Rose has written:
For Lacan, to say that difference is 'phallic' difference is to expose the symbolic
and arbitrary nature of its division as such. It is crucial ... that refusal of the
phallic term brings with it an attempt to reconstitute a form of subjectivity free
of division, and hence a refusal of the notion of symbolization itself. 2

If, however, refusal of the phallic ternl is equivalent to the absolute refusal
of symbolization, then the role of the phallus can hardly be considered

215
216 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

'arbitrary'. Rose recognizes this, for she goes on to defend her position by
suggesting:
While the objection to ... [the] dominant term [i.e. the phallus] must be rec-
ognized, it cannot be answered by an account which returns to a concept of the
feminine as pre-given, nor by a mandatory appeal to an androcentrism in the
symbolic which the phallus would simply reflect. The fornler relegates women
outside language and history, the latter simply subordinates them to both. 3

It is .difficult to understand, however, why the grounding of phallocen-

trism in androcentrism should subordinate women to language and
history, unless this androcentrism itself is considered to be immutable.
Conversely, if the symbolic role of the phallus in the unconscious for-
mation of gender identity is entirely detached fronl the question of the
actual relations, including power relations, between men and women, it is
hard to perceive where the interest of psychoanalysis for fenlinists might
lie.
In the light of these difficulties, it might appear that other intellectual
traditions, both psychoanalytically informed and committed to social cri-
tique, might offer better starting points for a feminist theorization of
sexual difference. The tradition which inevitably springs to mind here is
that of the Frankfurt School, which has in general been much more sensi-
tive than Lacanian approaches to the intersections between psychoanalysis
and social theory. The earlier Frankfurt School, in particular, appreciated
the need to introduce a dimension of historicity into even the most funda-
mental psychoanalytic categories, arguing against Freud himself that
there can be no purely timeless unconscious, since 'concrete historical
conlponents already enter early childhood experience.'4 Until recently,
however, this tradition has had little to say about the specific question of
women's oppression - indeed, the issue is more present, though scarcely
prominent, in the work of the earlier Frankfurt School than in the con-
temporary critical theory of Habermas. Furthermore, although there are
now the beginnings of a fenlinist reception of Critical Theory, particularly
in North America, this reception has not - on the whole been particu-
larly sensitive to the psychoanalytic dimension of earlier Critical
or tried to make use of it to any significant extent. Rather, its principal aim
has been to modify the gender-insensitive universalism of Habermasian
social and moral theory. 5
On the one hand, therefore, we find the powerful influence of a form of
psychoanalytic theory within Anglo-American feminism which appears
remote from sociological and historical concerns; on the other, a tradition
of critical theory, now being adapted and developed by feminists, which
has lost the psychoanalytic emphasis on the complex internal structure of
subjectivity, in its shift to an investigation of the
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 217

intersubjectivity. However, a consideration of the early now almost for-

gotten - phases of Lacan's thinking opens up possibilities of at least
modifying this dichotomy. For Lacan's first forays in psychoanalytic the-
ory, prior to the inception of the Seminar, were by no means as hostile to
historical and sociological perspectives as his later thought appears to be.
Furthermore, the account of the crisis of the modern family which Lacan
developed during the 1930s - and which is most fully presented in a
lengthy encyclopaedia article of 1938, Les complexes familiaux - evinces
many striking similarities with the contemporaneous work of the
Frankfurt School on the same issue. Against the background of these
affinities, the question of why Lacan's work evolved as it did can be posed
in a new way. Indeed, as we shall see, the later Lacan's apparently 'tran-
scendental' n10del of a phallocentric symbolic order can itself be
understood as a response to a specific historical crisis. Simultaneously, the
possibility opens up of comparing Lacan's later work, as a response to the
familial and social crisis which he diagnoses, with recent developments in
psychoanalysis which attempt both to build on and to respond to the ear-
lier thought of the Frankfurt School from a critical, feminist perspective -
most notably the work of Jessica Benjamin.

Lacan on the Oedipus Complex

Perhaps the most striking feature of Les complexes familiaux is the manner
in which Lacan insists, against Freud himself, that the Oedipus complex is
at the centre of a historically specific type of identity-formation, which
emerges within the context of the patriarchal family. Lacan makes it clear
that marriage and the family are two distinct social institutions, and argues
that the modern form of the family, centred on the 'matrimonial' relation
between the parents, should not be confused in its psychological effects
with earlier familial structures, even where these seem to overlap in terms
of personnel. Indeed, he specifically criticizes Freud, on the grounds that
he 'presents this psychological element [of the Oedipus complex] as the
specific form of the human family and subordinates to it all the social vari-
ations of the family. '6 By contrast, Lacan claims, 'The methodological
order proposed here, both in the consideration of mental structures and of
the social facts, will lead to a revision of the complex which will allow us
to situate contemporary neurosis in the history of the paternalistic family,
and to cast further light on it. '7
In the account which Lacan then develops, the specific virtue of Oedipal
identity-formation consists in the extreme psychological tension which is
generated by the role of the father, as both 'the agent of prohibition and
the example of its transgression'. 8 As Lacan writes:
218 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

It is ... because it is invested with the power of repression that the paterna
imago projects its original force into the very sublimations which are to sur-
mount it; it is from binding together the progress of its functions in such an
antinomy that the Oedipus complex derives its fecundity.9

In other terms, the paradoxical paternal injunction 'Be and do not be like
me', which confronts the child in the Oedipal situation, makes possible a
form of identification which fuses emulation and difference in an advanced
form of individuation. As Lacan states:
If, as a result of their experience, both the psychoanalyst and the sociologist can
recognize in the prohibition of the n10ther the concrete form of primordial
obligation, they can also demonstrate a real 'opening up' of the social bond in
paternalist authority and affirm that, through the functional conflict of the
Oedipal situation, this authority introduces into repression a promissory ideal. 10

Elaborating this general characterization, Lacan gives three principal rea-

sons for the superiority of Oedipal identity-formation over other
corresponding processes. Firstly, because authority is incarnated in a
familiar form by the nearest generation, it is more readily open to creative
subversion. Secondly, because the psyche is formed not simply by the con-
straint of the adult but by his positive irriage (Lacan considers the
father-son relationship the pre-eminent example here), there occurs a 'pos-
itive selection of tendencies and gifts, and a progressive realization of the
ideal in the character'. 11 Thirdly, the evidence of sexual life on the part of
those imposing moral constraints 'raises the tension of the libido to the
highest degree, and increases the scope of sublimation'.12 On these grounds,
Lacan has only the highest praise for the achieven1ents of the modern
family (by which he means the type of family, based on the free choice of
partners, which began to emerge in Europe from the fifteenth century
onwards):

It is by realizing in the most human form the conflict of man with his most
archaic anxiety, it is by offering the most loyal closed domain where he can mea-
sure himself against the profoundest figures of his destiny, it is by putting the
most complete triumph over his original servitude within his grasp, that the
complex of the conjugal family creates superior successes of character, happi-
ness and creation. 13

By contrast with this view, Lacan is unequivocal about the 'stagnation'

which is implied by non-patriarchal patterns of socialization. In such
forms the repressive social instance and the social ideal are separated:
Lacan cites Malinowski's accounts of societies in which the first of these
Iroles is played by the n1aternal uncle, while the father has a more com-
\panionate relationship to the child. Because of this separation, such forms
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 219

are unable to rival the dialectical, sublimatory tension generated by the

Oedipal model. Commenting caustically on the Melanesian idylls evoked
by Malinowski, Lacan remarks: 'the harmony of these societies contrasts
with the stereotypical quality which marks the creations of the personality,
and of art and morality in such cultures'. 14
Despite his paeans to the patriarchal family, however, Lacan is extrenlely
sensitive to the fact that this social form is caught up in a fateful historical
dialectic. Up to a certain point, a positive cycle occurs in which the 'nor-
mative ideals, juridical statutes and creative inspirations' made possible by
Oedipal identity-formation react back on to the family, thereby helping to
concentrate even further within it the conditions of the Oedipal conflict, and
'reintegrating into psychological progress the social dialectic engendered
by this conflict' .15 However, this self-reinforcing cycle eventually reaches a
crisis point, where the level of individuation achieved begins to undermine
the now highly compacted conditions of Oedipal identity-formation itself.
According to Lacan, the progress of culture is manifested in the increasing
demands which are imposed on the ego with regard to 'coherence and cre-
ative elan', with the result that 'the accidents and caprices of this [Oedipal]
regulation increase step by step with this same social progress which, in
making the fanlily evolve towards the conjugal form, submits it more and
more to individual variations'. And Lacan concludes:

This 'anomie', which made possible the discovery of the complex, gives rise to
the degenerated form in which the analyst recognizes it: a form which we could
define in terms of an incomplete repression of the desire for the mother, with a
reactivation of the anxiety and curiosity inherent in the birth relation; and a
narcissistic debasement of the idealization of the father, which causes the emer-
gence, in Oedipal identification, of the aggressive ambivalence immanent in
the prin10rdial relation to the counterpart. 16

Against the background of this deeply historical account of structures

of subjectivity, Lacan's later thought appears in a new light. On one plau-
sible interpretation, proposed by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, the later Lacan
attempts to shore up the Oedipus complex by transforming it into a'tran-
scendental' structure constitutive of subjectivity as such, while haunted by
the awareness that the Oedipal norm no longer corresponds to the socially
predominant processes of identity-formation. Indeed, Lacan himself sug-
gests in Les complexes familiaux that the emergence of psychoanalysis
itself - in the melting-pot of turn-of-the-century Vienna, with its chaotic
multiplicity of family forms, from the most traditional to the most irregu-
lar - can be explained in terms of the incipient crisis of Oedipal
identity-fornlation. The 'true' Oedipus complex, one might say, can be
recognized only privatively, through the psychoanalytic inventory of the
effects of its distorted and degenerating forms.
220 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

Horkheimer on the Family

Before examining Lacan's own later response to this situation in more

detail, however, I would like to highlight further the distinctive features of
Lacan's account of the crisis of the bourgeois family by comparing it with
the approach of the Frankfurt School at the same period. Significantly,
Max Horkheimer's classic essay on 'Authority and the Family' was written
only two years before Les complexes familiaux, in 1936. Unlike Lacan,
however, Horkheimer grounds his analysis from the normative standpoint
of an anticipated society devoid of institutionalized relations of force and
their internalized equivalents. Fron1 this point of view, the psychic appa-
ratus is understood as serving primarily to 'interiorize, or at least to
rationalize and supplen1ent physical coercion'.17 Horkheimer does not
deny the historical advance represented by the modern patriarchal family,
whose emergence he dates as does Lacan - from the fifteenth century:

At the beginning of the bourgeois age the father's control of his household was
doubtless an indispensable condition of progress. The self-control of the indi-
vidual, the disposition for work and discipline, the ability to hold firmly to
certain ideas, consistency in practical life, application of reason, perseverance
and pleasure in constructive activity could all be developed, in the circum-
stances, only under the dictation and guidance of the father whose own
education had been won in the school of life. 18

However, Horkheimer argues, the function of authority can change from

being progressive to regressive, relative to the goals of 'self-development
and happiness' which are internal to his normative standpoint. 19 As the
capitalist organization of society is consolidated, the role of the family
increasingly becomes that of inculcating an adaptive and subn1issive atti-
tude to authority, which is now reified and depersonalized in the form of
the economic system itself. Within the family, the authority of the father,
based on superior physical strength and economic power, comes to
embody that irrational facticity of the social in the face of which individ-
uals would be 'irrational' to do anything other than submit.
In Horkheimer's account, the dialectic thus set in motion eventually
leads to the undermining of the role of the father. He argues:
The education of authority-oriented personalities, for which the family is suited
because of its own authority structure, is not a passing phenomenon but part of
a relatively permanent state of affairs. Of course, the more this society enters a
critical phase because of its own immanent laws, the less will the fanlily be able to
exercise its educational function ... The means of protecting the cultural totality
and developing it further have increasingly conle into conflict with the cultural
content itself. The father as an arbitrary power no longer offers possibilities of
identification, and the child instead identifies, with repressive social instances. 20
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 221

The result of this direct identification with social power is the spread of the
malleable narcissistic personality type, lacking those inner capacities for
self-direction which the buffer of paternal authority once provided, ostens-
ibly well-adapted but inwardly cold and emotionless, inclined to
po"rer-worship and masochistic submission.
In considering the validity of this analysis, and its political conse-
quences, it is instructive to compare the reasons which Lacan and
Horkheimer supply for the fateful dialectic of the bourgeois family. In
Horkheimer the essential mediating role is played by the capitalist econ-
omy, on the assumption that 'The idealization of paternal authority, the
. pretense that it comes from a divine decision or the nature of things or
reason, proves on closer examination to be the glorification of an
economically conditioned institution.'2l However, as the development of
the economy moves beyond its private, entrepreneurial phase into an era
characterized by increasing monopolization and bureaucratic interven-
tion, the individual becomes increasingly dependent on processes which lie
beyond his or her control, and capacities for personal initiative become
ever more redundant. In this context, the father is no longer able to pro-
vide a model of authority in the traditional sense, with its inextricable
interweaving of rational and irrational dinlensions. Rather: 'The fullest
possible adaptation of the subject to the reified authority of the economy
is the form which reason really takes in bourgeois society.'22 The family,
while not being abolished, is hollowed out, instrumentalized: the dialectic
of the universal (society), the particular (the family), and the individual, as
envisaged by Hegel, begins to split apart.23
Against the background of Horkheimer's views, it becomes apparent
that there are two strands of diagnosis in Lacan's text. Lacan, too, lays
considerable emphasis on the failure of the father as the crucial factor in
contemporary character disorders. In his view, these disorders find their
'principal determination in the personality of the father, who is always
lacking in some- way, absent, humiliated, divided, or fake'. 24 Furthermore,
his description of the results of this failure converges strikingly with the
Frankfurt School account of the narcissistic personality:

Like sinister godmothers installed at the cradle of the neurotic, impotence and
utopianism enclose his ambition, so that he either smothers within himself the
creations awaited by the world in which he appears, or misrecognizes his own
impulse in the object against which he revolts. 25
Lacan also admits that the decay of the paternal imago is in part, at least,
the result of social and economic factors. It is a

decline conditioned by the rebounding against the individual of the extreme

effects of social progress, a decline which in our time is most pronounced in the
222 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

collectivities which have been most tested by the effects of such progress:
namely, the concentration of economic power and political catastrophes. 26

Horkheimer makes the comparable claim that 'The cell of society is no

longer the family but the social atom, the solitary individual. The struggle
for existence consists in the resolution of the individual, in a world of
apparatuses, machinery and nlanipulation, not to be annihilated at any
moment.'27 Unlike Horkheimer, however; Lacan detects another - per-
haps deeper - reason for this decline, which he connects not with the lack
of genuine individuality in mass society but, rather, with the dialectic of
individuation as such. In his view, Oedipal socialization requires what he
calls a 'typical quality in the psychological relation between the par-
ents' ,28 - in other words, relatively well-defined maternal and paternal
roles. However, in the ever more predominant 'conjugal marriage', domi-
nated by the personal choice and interaction of the partners, this typical
quality tends to disappear. What Lacan terms the 'matrimonial demands'
of the modern conjugal family, generated by the very conception of mar-
riage as a relationship between equals, one might say, leads to the 'social
decline of the paternal imago'.29 At this level, Lacan's diagnosis could be
said to run in the opposite direction to that of Horkheimer. For the latter,
the crisis of individualization occurs at the point at which the tendencies
towards concentration and bureaucratization of the capitalist economy
begin to eliminate the need for individual creativity, judgement and con-
science. For Lacan, however, working in an intellectual tradition
profoundly influenced by Durkheim, it is individualization as such which
poses the fundamental problem. The very 'coherence and creative elan'
which modern culture denlands of individuals produces a degree of anomie
which destroys the minimum of typicality in the relation between the par-
ents necessary for the functioning of the Oedipus complex. Once this
historical turning point is reached, then personalities characterized by a
'narcissistic subduction of the libido' will begin to be formed.

A Critical Response to Lacan

As I have already indicated, a thought-provoking interpretation of the

shift from the Lacan of Les complexes familiaux to the later, and better-
known, Lacan has been provided by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. In his book
Lacan: The Absolute Master, and in a paper on 'The Oedipus Problem in
Freud and Lacan', Borch-Jacobsen suggests that in Les complexes famili-
aux Lacan sets out to resolve a difficulty which had already troubled
Freud: how can the identificatory rivalry of the Oedipus complex be
resolved precisely through a further identification with _
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 223

Jacobsen argues that Lacan attempts to resolve this problem by drawing a

much more rigorous distinction than Freud between the superego and the
ego-ideal - the former forbidding rivalrous identification, the latter
encouraging a sublimatory identification. 30 As we have already seen, for
the Lacan of Les complexes familiaux the contemporary crisis of Oedipal
identity-formation consists in the fact that this distinction is breaking
down: both the 'lacking' father and the arbitrarily authoritarian father fail
to sustain the delicate equilibrium between idealizing identification and
repression.
On Borch-Jacobsen's reading, Lacan's later work, with its strict distinc-
tion between imaginary and symbolic registers, represents an attempt to
shore up a form of identity-formation which has already fallen into decay.
The Lacanian concept of the 'Name-of-the-Father', equivalent to the
totem of 'primitive' societies in its function as the pole of identification
which allows a symbolic resolution of the Oedipal crisis, and the con-
comitant distinction between the 'imaginary' and the 'symbolic' phallus,
are in fact normative concepts and distinctions, vain attempts to sustain an
ideal of subjectivity which no longer maps on to the actual social processes
of identity-formation. As Borch-Jacobsen writes:

how is it possible to prevent the identification with the symbolic father-phallus

from being confounded with the rivalrous and homosexualizing imaginary
father-phallus? ... it does absolutely no good whatsoever to invoke the rightful
difference between the two identifications, since that difference, far from being
a fundamental, a priori structure of every society, turns out actually to be bound
solely to the 'elementary structures of kinship'. Our societies, on the other
hand, are defined by a general crisis of symbolic identifications - 'deficiency of
the paternal function', 'foreclosure of the name of the father', perpetual ques-
tioning of the symbolic 'law' and 'pact', confusion of lineage and general
competition of generations, battle of the sexes, and loss of family landmarks. 31

Borch-Jacobsen's own attitude to these social developments, however, is

curiously insouciant. He believes it is possible sinlply to 'stop treating the
Oedipus complex as a problem', and accept the accelerating symbolic
breakdown of our societies. 32 But this response seems far too sanguine:
Lacan was among the first twentieth-century thinkers to grasp the signif-
icance of the rise of what he calls, in Les complexes familiaux, 'an
introversion of the personality through a narcissistic subduction of the
libido' ;33 and in his diagnosis of the social consequences of this introver-
sion he concurs to a considerable extent with other traditions of social
critique. As a number of commentators have argued, the 'postmodern'
disnlantlers of subjectivity and celebrators of symbolic fragmentation,
who view themselves as transcending such a standpoint of critique, in fact
often end up espousing an even more exaggerated form of subjectivist
224 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

voluntarism. 34 Unless one simply brushes aside Lacan's claim that 'the
promotion of the ego, consistent with the utilitiarian conception of man
which reinforces it, culminates today in an ever more advanced realization
of man as individual, that is to say, in an isolation of the soul ever more
akin to its original dereliction',35 the question must be raised of possible
alternative patterns of identity-formation, which would be opposed to the
'deregulation' to which Borch-Jacobsen seems resigned, but would also
bridge the impossible gulf between the pays reel and the pays legal which
appears to open up in later Lacanian theory.
Understandably, it is above all feminist psychoanalysts, and psychoan-
alytically informed feminist theorists, who have tried to address the issue
of possibilities of post-Oedipal identity-forn1ation. For such identity-
formation, even if it is accepted as having been relatively 'successful' during
a certain historical phase, suffers from an intrinsic gender disequilibrium
and distortion. Indeed, it is fascinating to observe that in the final pages of
Les complexes familiaux Lacan hin1self describes the crisis of Oedipal iden-
tity-formation as inevitably arising from the historical suppression of the
feminine principle. In a further dialectical twist, the progressive individu-
alization which Oedipal socialization promotes leads to the rejection by
women of their predetermined familial role. Thus, Lacan suggests, 'One
may perceive in the virile protest of woman the ultimate consequence of
the Oedipus complex.'36. He fully admits that 'The origins of our culture
are too connected to what we willingly describe as the adventure of the
paternalist family, for it not to impose, upon all the forms whose psychic
development it has enriched, a prevalence of the male principle ...',37 and
he is aware that, in the long historical run, this social and cultural bias
must generate an unstable situation. The occultation of the feminine prin-
ciple by the masculine ideal, as he calls it, has resulted, in contemporary
society, in an 'imaginary impasse of sexual polarisation', in which are
'invisibly engaged' the 'forms of culture, n10rals and the arts, struggle and
thought'.38 Significantly, it is with this thought that Les complexes famili-
aux - somewhat abruptly - concludes: contemporary feminist theoreticians
working within a psychoanalytic framework can be seen to be addressing
precisely that 'social antinomy' which Lacan had presciently described,
and found himself unable to circumvent, in 1938.

Feminist Theory and the Oedipus Complex

In the concluding part of this discussion, I shall take the work of Jessica
Benjamin as the primary exan1ple of an attempt to address the issues
raised in Les complexes familiaux from a feminist perspective. Benjamin's
work is of special interest in the present context because it seeks to build on
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 225

and transform the heritage of the earlier Frankfurt School, which - in her
view -leads to the same 'social antinomy' which we have just found
evoked in Lacan. She considers that Horkheimer's view of individual
capacities for nonconformity and critical resistance as grounded in the
internalization of paternal authority fails to acknowledge the distorted
form of identity produced by Oedipal socialization, which is based on an
autarkic separation of the self from others and an instrumental relation to
objects, at the cost of capacities for reciprocity and empathetic communi-
cation. 39
The core of Benjamin's argument consists in the contention that the
symbolic exclusivity of the phallus, although not its primacy as the uncon-
scious embodiment of agency and desire, is the result of an androcentric
social structure. 40 Identifying with the father as bearer of the phallus allows
the male child to separate from the mother, although to an excessive extent
which involves a repudiation of femininity; while this identification is not
adequately available to the female child, who nevertheless has no alterna-
tive route to independence. Benjamin's contention is that a more nurturing
father and a more socially autonomous mother could provide two poles of
idealizing identification, replacing the classical counterposition of pro-
gressive, individuating father against regressive mother.
Benjamin notes that theorists who lament the decline of the paternal
imago rarely foreground the ambivalence of the father figure. Drawing on
Freud's tracing of the genesis of the incest taboo to the overthrowing of
the father of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo, Benjamin argues:
Paternal authority ... is a far more complex emotional web than its defenders
admit: it is not merely rooted in the rational law that forbids incest and patri-
cide, but also in the erotics of ideal love, the guilty identification with power that
undermines the son's desire for freedom. 41

She suggests that it is not possible to make a hard-and-fast distinction

between Oedipal and pre-Oedipal figures, and that it is misleading to do
so in order to defend the notion of the rational, progressive father. To
this extent, her account seems to focus on the crucial problem for Lacan
highlighted by Borch-Jacobsen: Oedipal identity-formation can be
defended as an ideal only on the normative assumption that ego-ideal
and superego can and should be held apart, even though they are embod-
ied in the same person. In Borch-Jacobsen's account, this has never been
possible:
For what mysterious reason should the hate identification with the rival neces-
sarily be transformed into a respectful identification with the bearer of
authority? Identification is precisely the reason for the rivalry and, even more
essentially, for 'affective ambivalence', so there is every reason to believe that the
post-Oedipal identification should, instead, perpetuate that ambivalence. 42
226 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

In response to this problem, Benjamin contends that the pre-Oedipal iden-

tificatory love for the father cannot simply be equated with a rivalrous
homosexual identification. Rather:
To explain what Freud called the 'short step from love to hypnotism', from ordi-
nary identificatory love to bondage, we must look not merely to the distinction
between oedipal and pre-oedipal, but to the fate of the child's love for the father
in each phase ... the idealization of the pre-oedipal father is closely associated
with submission when it is thwarted, unrecognized. 43

The importance of this argument is that, in Lacan's account, there is no

equivalent idealizing identificatory love. Lacan, prior to the entry into the
symbolic order brought about by the Oedipus con1plex, knows only the
jealousy and rivalry of narcissistic identification, which in Les complexes
familiaux - he theorizes in terms of the child's relationship to the intruding
sibling. It is this rivalry which is ultimately broken by the identification
with the paternal ego-ideal. Thus Lacan states:
The identification, which was formerly mimetic, has become propitiatory: the
object of sado-masochistic participation detaches itself from the subject,
becomes distant from it in the new ambiguity of fear and love. But, in this step
towards reality, the primitive object of desire [i.e. the mother] seems to vanish. 44

If one distinguishes from this process an initial idealizing paternal iden-

tification, however, then a reinterpretation of the roles of the sexes also
becomes possible. Benjamin stresses that the result of the Oedipus com-
plex is that the male child must abandon not only his incestuous but also
his identificatory love for the mother. This is because, even more than in
the case of the father, such identificatory love is taken to be regressive.
In Lacan's early theory"for example, the maternal imago is described
as embodying the 'the metaphysical mirage of universal harmony, the
n1ystical abyss of affective fusion, the social utopia of a totalitarian
guardianship, all emerging from the haunting sense of the lost paradise
before birth, and the rnore obscure aspiration towards death'.45 Lacan is
undoubtedly justified in pointing out that the interference of 'primordial
identifications' will mark the maternal ego-ideal, and perhaps also in con-
tending that the father presents the ego-ideal in its purest form, but he
provides no explanation for his assertion that the maternal ideal must
'fail', leading to a feeling of repulsion of the part of the female child,
and - presumably by extension in the case of the negative male Oedipus
complex. 46 One might conclude that this failure, as in the paternal case,
which Lacan himself in part, at least - attributes to the pressure of
social and economic factors, derives from the general lack of recognition
of the autonomy of the mother. Benjamin herself is far from suggesting
that the role of the father - and, indeed, of the phallus in the process of
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 227

separation and individuation can be superseded, but she nevertheless

argues that the possibility for separation without exaggerated rupture
would be opened up by a different relationship to the mother. In this case,
the father might also be able more readily to accept the female child's
phallic identification, since this identification would not be driven by the
desperation of the need to break away from an engulfing mother.
It will be apparent that the key to Benjamin's revision of the Oedipus
complex, which she wishes to view as 'only a step in mental life, one that
leaves room for earlier and later levels of integration', 47 consists in her
conception of the identificatory love which she associates with the pre-
Oedipal rapprochement phase, in which the child seeks an initial balance
between unity and separation. It is significant, therefore, that the French
psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva should also be concerned with this type of
love in her atten1pt to break down the rigidities of the Lacanian conception
of Oedipal identity-formation. Like Benjamin, Kristeva is engaged in a re-
evaluation of narcissism, in an atten1pt to circumvent the aporia which she
formulates in the observation: '[T]o seek to maintain, against the winds
and tides of our modern civilization, the requiren1ent of a severe father
who, through his name, bestows on us separation, judgement and identity
is a necessity, a more or less pious wish. '48 Kristeva's more detailed inves-
tigations of the character of pre-Oedipal identificatory love may therefore
provide a useful corroboration and substantiation of the perspective
Jessica Benjamin seeks to propose.
Kristeva's essay 'Freud and Love: Treatment and its Discontents', in her
book Tales of Love, is fundamentally an attempt to retheorize the notion
of narcissism, so that narcissism no longer appears as constituting an
inevitable block to the achievement of individuation. Kristeva seeks to
show, contrary to Lacan's account, that the emergence of the subject can-
not be connected exclusively with the Oedipal crisis, with the breaking
apart of the mother-child dyad through the intervention of the father. In
Kristeva's account, narcissisn1 already represents an advance over an
undifferentiated autoeroticism; it implies an initial gap between self and
other, before the intervention of the symbolic order - or rather, before its
intervention in its purely signifying aspect. Kristeva does not deny that the
symbolic order is always-already in place, but she suggests that there are
diverse 'modalities of access' to the syn1bolic function. In imitating and, at
the same time, libidinally investing the speech of the mother, the child is
already entering into an identification which constitutes an elementary
form of subjectivity. However, the Other with whom the child identifies is
not the purely symbolic Other of Lacanian doctrine:

Finally, by virtue of being the pole of a loving identification, the Other appears
not as a 'pure signifier', but as the space of metaphorical movement itself: as the
228 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

condensation of semic traits as well as the unrepresentable heterogeneity of the

drives which subtends them, exceeds them and escapes them ... Lacan situates
idealization in the field of signifiers and of desire alone, and has detached it
clearly - even brutally both from narcissism and from the heterogeneity of the
drives and their hold on the maternal container. 49

For Kristeva, however, this initial identification does not take place with
the mother figure alone. Here she agrees with Benjamin, who suggests
that during the rapprochement phase the distinction between male and
female identifications has not yet consolidated. Developing a suggestion of
Freud, Kristeva describes an 'imaginary father', a 'coagulation of the
mother and her desire', which allows the mother to function as lack and
plenitude simultaneously, thereby making possible an initial distanciation
prior to the entry into the Oedipal situation. The immediacy of the relation
to this 'father-mother conglomerate', Kristeva suggests, has an in1por-
tant consequence: 'the term "object", like that of "identification", becomes
inappropriate in this logic. A not-yet-identity [of the child] is transferred, or
rather is displaced, to the locus of an Other who is not yet libidinally
invested as an object, but remains an Ego Ideal.'50
It is fascinating to observe how the concerns of Benjamin, emerging
from and reacting to the Frankfurt School, and those of Kristeva, similarly
related to Lacanian thought, converge in this respect. This convergence
should not, however, be taken to imply a strict parallelism between the tra-
ditions which they oppose. For if one looks more closely at Horkheimer's
position, it appears that Horkheimer did not attribute individuation and a
capacity for resistance solely to the role of the father, as Jessica Benjamin
frequently claims. In his 1960 essay 'Autoritat und Familie in der
Gegenwart', he writes:
Earlier, the mother provided the child with a sense of security, which made it
possible for it to develop a certain degree of independence. The child felt that
the mother returned its love, and in a certain way drew on this fund of feeling
throughout its life. The mother, who was cut off from the company of men and
forced into a dependent situation, represented, despite her idealization, another
principle than the reality principle.... 51

Horkheimer goes on explicitly to affirm that the sustaining of the child's

relationship to the mother can help to prevent too rapid an adaptation to
reality, at the cost of individuation.
This conception might appear to be nostalgic, despite the fact that in its
emphasis it coincides with, rather than contradicting, the tenor of Jessica
Benjamin's account. The difference of orientation - bourgeois past rather
than feminist future - derives from Horkheimer's conviction that, with
the increasing incorporation of women into the rationalized extrafamilial
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 229

world, the distinctive structure and emotional quality of the family is being
destroyed: 'The equality of women, their professional activity, the much
quicker emancipation of the children, alters the atmosphere of the
home.... Like existence in general, marriage is tending to become more
rational, more purposive, more sober.'52 Nevertheless, Horkheimer is in
general critical of the separation between the sensual and the ideal in the
traditional image of the mother, and in the father's attitude towards her.
He argues: 'under the pressure of such a family situation the individual
does not learn to understand and respect his mother in her concrete exis-
tence, that is, as this particular social and sexual being ... the suppressed
inclination towards the mother reappears as a fanciful and sentimental
susceptibility to all symbols of the dark, maternal and protective pow-
ers'.53 Thus, against Lacan's view, Horkheimer suggests that it is precisely
the repression of identificatory love which would tend to transform the
in1ago of the mother into a focus for the longing for regressive fusion.
Furthermore, he does not assume that, on logical grounds, a different ori-
entation of social development might not be possible in which, instead of
rationalization transforming the mother into a mere relay of social author-
ity, the specific positive capacities which women have developed because of
their historical exclusion from the public realm might contribute to the
transformation of the instrumentalized structures of society: '[The
woman's] whole position in the family results in an inhibiting of important
psychic energies which might have been effective in shaping the world. '54

Facticity, Normativity and Trauma

At this point, however, it might appear plausible to object, from a

Lacanian standpoint, that Horkheimer misunderstands the fundamental
concepts of psychoanalytic theory, in so far as he equates 'repression' with
a putative suppression of the corporeal, a renunciation of drive-satisfaction
[Triebverzicht]. It is striking, for example, that at the beginning of
'Authority and the Family' Horkheimer quotes not Freud, but Nietzsche's
On the Genealogy of Morals, in order to substantiate his view that 'the
whole psychic apparatus of members of a class society, in so far as they do
not belong to the nucleus of the privileged group, serves in large measure
only to interiorize or at least to rationalize and supplement physical coer-
cion'. 55 Psychoanalysis, on this view, explores the effects within the
individual psyche of the general structures of social power. However, one
could argue, this direct articulation of society and the psyche elides the
complex relation between anxiety and phantasy in the formation of the
, Urverdriingt', the pre-social core of the repressed.
Lacan, by contrast, begins from the assumption that the process of
230 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

weaning, the traumatic series of breaks with the mother which is the pre-
condition of independent subjectivity, is always culturally structured, and
that the subject can transcend this trauma only by internalizing and repeat-
ing it. In this interpretation, castration is not a threat in which real paternal
authority is embodied; rather, it is a phantasy by means of which the sub-
ject both masters through repetition the anxiety of separation from the
mother, and sets up a barrier against the regressive - indeed, deathly - ten-
dencies which the maternal imago embodies. The phantasy of castration,
Lacan suggests:

represents the defence which the narcissistic ego, identified with its specular
double, opposes to the resurgence of anxiety which tends to overwhelm it, in the
first stage of the Oedipus complex: a crisis which is caused not so much by the
irruption of genital desire in the subject, as by the object which it reactualizes,
namely the mother. The subject responds to the anxiety awakened by this object
by reproducing the masochistic rejection through which it overcame its pri-
mordialloss, but it does so according to the structure which it has acquired, that
is through an imaginary localization of the tendency. 56

Thus from his early work onwards it was Lacan's view that the prohibiting
father functions as the support of the phantasy of castration, which allows
the child to master the trauma of separation from the mother.
Furthermore, he suggests that in order for the child to achieve a measure
of psychic independence, to come to be as a subject at all, the father's sta-
tus must appear inexplicable and ungrounded, a sheer social fact to be
accepted, like the facts of birth and weaning themselves. Such an account
seems to entail that the need for authority finds an ultimate anchoring
point in the unconscious, and - as such - is ineradicable.
There can be little doubt that Lacan's position corresponds n10re closely
to the mature insights of Freud, as expressed, for example, in Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety (1926). Here Freud definitively abandons the view,
recurrent throughout his earlier work, that repression is a form of defence
against impulses which are incompatible with the social and ethical norms
which have shaped the personality, and that it is the cathexis of the
repressed idea which is transformed into anxiety. He now argues: 'It was
anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repres-
sion which produced anxiety.'5? In other words, it is the attempt to escape
the feelings of helplessness arising from separation first unavoidably
experienced at birth, and later focused on the threat of castration which
becomes the core motive for the formation of neurotic symptoms, of what-
ever kind. At the same time however, Freud also emphasizes that the ego
learns to use modified 'doses' of anxiety - which he defines as 'a reaction
to the danger of a loss of an object'58 - in order both to master the emotion
and to signal the need to ward off unwanted impulses. The only major
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 231

alteration which Lacan introduces into this account is to deny Freud's

assumption that the threat of castration which emerges in response to the
inlpulse is in any sense 'real'. 59 On the contrary, as we have seen, the phan-
tasy of castration, supported by the imputed authority of the father,
protects the subject against the dangers of symbolic de-differentiation and
nlerger. At the same time, however, the subject refuses this acknowledge-
ment of radical insufficiency at the level of consciousness, falling victim to
the narcissistic illusion of autonomy which is the core of the ego. Lacan
summarizes this process, in Les complexes familiaux, with his reference to
'these inherent properties of the human subject, the miming of its own
mutilation, and the seeing of itself as other than it is'.60
It is inlportant to note, hovvever, that by the time he came to co-author
Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, Horkheimer has developed a concep-
tion of the 'primal history of subjectivity' far more complex than that of
'Authority and the Family' and, indeed, far more 'psychoanalytic' in its
interweaving of the themes of traumatic separation, law and sacrifice. In
the Odysseus chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the violence of the
break between self and nature, which cannot help but take place in the
interests of self-preservation, gives rise to a demand for restitution: 'The
self wrests itself free from dissolution in blind nature, whose claim is always
re-asserted by sacrifice. '61 However, the more the self attenlpts to evade this
demand, as Odysseus does through trickery in his repeated encounters
with the nlythic powers, the more the very form of its subjectivity becomes
sacrifice. The denial of the superiority of nature leads merely to an illusion
of independence from nature: 'The self-identical self, which originates in
the overcoming of sacrifice, is indeed once again an unyielding, rigidified
sacrificial ritual that men and women celebrate upon themselves by setting
consciousness in opposition to the nexus of nature. '62 In contrast to the
assumptions of 'Authority and the Family', this opposition, and its disas-
trous consequences, seem to follow inevitably from the emergence of the
self as such, suggesting a convergence with Lacan's conception of irre-
ducible traunla and illusion. There remains, however, one inlportant
distinction between the two accounts. Despite their lack of any coherent
alternative, non-repressive model of the self, Horkheimer and Adorno
seek to suggest that the trauma of separation and its sacrificial repetition
are not necessary preconditions of subjectivity - that 'the institution of
sacrifice is the scar of an historical catastrophe, an act of force that befalls
humanity and nature alike'.63 Only in this way can they defend the valid-
ity of the 'urge for total, universal and undiminished happiness',64 despite
the evidently deathly features of the imago of nature-as-mother, which
emerge - for example - in their commentary on the Sirens episode.
The comparison with Lacan makes it clear that Horkheimer and
Adorno can cling to their extravagant ideal of reconciliation only because
232 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

of a primordial lack of differentiation between mother and father figures.

It is the power of nature which is 'mythically objectified' in the form of
legal relationships, of the archaic contracts which Odysseus seeks to evade,
so that the 'remembrance of nature in the subject' which the book
famously invokes would presun1ably also bring about the dissolution of
legal form. In Dialectic ofEnlightenment this form is no more than a nor-
mative cosmetic for the brute facticity of superior power. By contrast,
Lacan's conception of submission to a symbolic Law which originates
elsewhere than from the mother, and which is essential to the subject as the
precondition of its existence as lack or desire, undermines any antinomian
utopia. It does so, however, at the cost of instating an essentially 'alienated'
subject, capable of sustaining its being only by bowing to an authority
whose prototype is that of the father, and which must ultimately remain
inscrutable.
Is there any way out of this impasse? I would suggest that at least the
direction in which a solution could be sought may emerge if we read a cer-
tain response to Horkheimer and Adorno, within the Frankfurt School
tradition, against the grain of its own intentions. It is well known that
Jiirgen Habermas has criticized Dialectic of Enlightenment for continuing
the type of totalizing critique initiated by Nietzsche, which strives for an
ultimate revelation of the intertwining of genesis and validity, power and
reason, rather than accepting that their disintrication can only be an ongo-
ing, dialogical process. 65 At the same time, however, it could be argued that
Habermas himself seeks to play down the traumatic features of the sepa-
ration between genesis and validity which his own account of the
quasi-transcendental norms of dialogue presupposes. Thus, on the one
hand, he repeatedly refers to the 'Janus-face' of validity-claims, to the fact
that they are torn between particularity and universality, immanence and
transcendence, and he describes their effectivity in violent terms as a force
which 'bursts every provinciality asunder' - indeed, "'blots out" space and
tin1e'.66 Yet on the other hand, Habermas wishes to deny that his position
implies any problematic tension or split between empirical and transcen-
dental, factual and normative dimensions, which would endanger the
general project of a reconciliatory 'de-sublimation' or naturalization of
reason. 67
Yet perhaps we should read Habermas against himself. Such a reading
might make it apparent that entry into the normative dimension of human
comn1unication and social regulation does indeed involve a traumatic
break with the bond we can think of as maternal. But at the same time an
acceptance that the normative as such - the symbolic Law, in Lacan's
tern1S - emanates neither from one subject nor from a collectivity of sub-
jects, should not be equated with submission to specific, contingent social
norms. There is indeed a painful de-centring and wounding of narcissism
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 233

contained in the realization that - as Habermas puts it - 'we are exposed

to the movement of a transcendence from within which is no more at our
disposal than the actuality of the spoken word makes us masters of the
structure of language (or logos)'.68 Yet this realization need not entail the
acceptance of an authority which is ultimately exempt from requirements
of legitimation, as Lacan's notion of the paternal function as support of
the 'Law' often seems to imply. At the same time, however, it is clear that
feminist attempts to think beyond the impasse of Oedipal identity cannot
simply shift the emphasis to the continuities between the emerging self
and its environment, in order to combat the traditional 'masculine' stress
on forms of rupture and radical division. Such attempts must also explore
new ways of figuring the inevitable anguish of loss and self-dispossession.
Significantly, whereas Lacan insists that 'castration anxiety is like a thread
which runs through all the stages of development',69 Freud himself was
more circumspect, sometimes allowing that the castration con1plex was
merely one of a series of encounters with 'the danger of psychical help-
lessness'.70 Thus the founding texts of psychoanalysis leave open the space
for a rethinking of individuation and autonomy, one which could acknowl-
edge an irreducible core of dependency while relativizing the gender-skewed
images of separation as mutilation which are still so centrally embedded in
our culture.

Notes
1. Jacques Lacan, 'La signification du phallus', in Ecrils, Paris: Seui11966, p. 688/'The
Signification of the Phallus', in Ecrils: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London: Tavistock
1977, p. 285. It is worth noting that this claim is explicitly directed against what Lacan takes
to be the 'culturalist' standpoint of feminism, and against any theory of 'ideological
psychogenesis' .
2. Jacqueline Rose, 'Feminine Sexuality - Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne', in
Sexuality in the Field of Vision, London: Verso 1986, p. 80.
3. Ibid., p. 81. Other feminist defences of Lacan's theory of sexual difference are even less
reflective. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, for example, simply asserts that 'culture paradoxically
crowns the male with the empty signifier of difference itself as standing in for limit or law',
without offering any account of why this 'paradox' should arise. See 'The Sexual
Masquerade', in Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher, eds, Lacan and the Subject of
Language, London: Routledge 1991, p. 75. It should be added that Rose's more recent shift
from Lacan towards Klein has not altered her somewhat simplifying conviction that fenlinist
revisions of traditional psychoanalytic doctrine are based on 'the idyll of an early fusion with
the mother'. See 'Negativity in the Work of Melanie Klein', in Jacqueline Rose, Why War?,
Oxford: Blackwell 1993, p. 140.
4. Theodor Adorno, 'Psychology and Sociology', New Left Review 47, January-February
1967, p. 90.
5. See, for example, the essays by Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young and Seyla Benhabib in
Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds, Feminism as Critique, Cambridge: Polity Press 1987.
6. Jacques Lacan, Les complexesfamiliaux, Paris: Navarin 1984, p. 49.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 50.
234 THE LIMITS OF DISENCHANTMENT

9. Ibid., pp. 66-7.

10. Ibid., p. 68.
11. Ibid., p. 70.
12. Ibid., p. 71.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 66.
15. Ibid., p. 67.
16. Ibid., pp. 95-6.
17. Max Horkheimer, 'Authority and the Family', in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, New
York: Continuum 1972, p. 56.
18. Ibid., p. 101.
19. Ibid., p. 71.
20. Ibid., p. 127.
21. Ibid., p. 123.
22. Ibid., p. 83.
23. Ibid., p. 128.
24. Les complexes familiaux, p. 73.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 72.
27. Max Horkheimer, 'Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung' (1942), in Traditionelle und kritische
Theorie, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag 1992, p. 288.
28. Les complexesfamiliaux, p. 103.
29. Ibid, p. 72.
30. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, 'The Oedipus Problem in Freud and Lacan', Critical
Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 2, Winter 1994.
31. Ibid., p. 282.
32. Ibid. See also the comparable discussion in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The
Absolute Master, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1991, ch. 1. As we shall see, Borch-
Jacobsen's suggestion, in both texts, that Lacan is merely nostalgic for 'good old traditional
societies, where one still knew who one was' (The Absolute Master, p. 41) fails to consider his
awareness of the basic instability of patriarchal structures.
33. Les complexes familiaux, p. 107.
34. See, for example, Charles Taylor, 'Logics of Disintegration', New Left Review 170,
July-August 1988.
35. Jacques Lacan, 'Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis', in Bcrits: A Selection, p. 27.
36. Les complexesfamiliaux, pp. 110-11.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., p. 112.
39. See Jessica Benjamin, 'Authority and the Family Revisited: or, A World without
Fathers', New German Critique, no. 13, 1978.
40. In fact, this is Jessica Benjamin's implicit rather than explicitly stated position. At a
nurnber of points in The Bonds of Love (London: Virago 1990), she makes the argument
against the Lacanian position that 'In the pre-oedipal world, the father and his phallus are
powerful because of their ability to stand for separation from the mother' (p. 95). At the san1e
time, however, she also admits that 'the ... problem is that the syITlbolic level of the psyche
already seems to be occupied by the phallus' (p. 124). Her solution is to propose a symbol-
ization of woman's desire in terms of Winnicott's notion of 'holding space', which would seek
not to rival or supplant the symbolism of the phallus but, rather, to coexist with it. See The
Bonds ofLove, pp. 123-32.
41. The Bonds ofLove, p. 143.
42. 'The Oedipus Problem', pp. 273-4.
43. The Bonds ofLove, pp. 145-6.
44. Les complexesfamiliaux, p. 63.
45. Ibid., p. 35.
46. See ibid., pp. 64--5.
47. The Bonds ofLove, p. 177. Benjamin has recently pushed this revision further by empha-
sizing the potential 'post-Oedipal' role of early cross-gender identifications in helping to
 THE CRISIS OF OEDIPAL IDENTITY 235

overcome the rigidity of Oedipal identity. See 'Sameness and Difference: Toward an "Over-
inclusive" Model of Gender Development', in Anthony Elliott and Stephen Frosh, eds,
Psychoanalysis in Contexts, London: Routledge 1995.
48. Julia Kristeva, 'Freud et l'amour: Ie malaise dans la cure', in Histoires d'amour, Paris:
Editions Denoel (paperback edn) 1983, p. 621'Freud and Love: Treatment and its
Discontents', in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University
Press 1987, p. 46.
49. Ibid., p. 53/p. 38.
50. Ibid., p. 56/p. 41.
51. Max Horkheimer, 'AutoriHit und Faniilie in der Gegenwart', in Zur Kritik der instru-
mentel/en Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag 1985, p. 278.
52. Max Horkheimer, 'Die Zukunft der Ehe', in ibid., p. 2981'The Future of Marriage', in
Critique of Instrumental Reason, trans. Matthew 1. Connell, New York: Seabury Press 1974,
p.97.
53. 'Authority and the Family', p. 121.
54. Ibid., p. 120. For a further critical response to Benjamin's critique of Horkheimer, see
Pauline Johnson, 'Feminism and Images of Autonomy', Radical Philosophy, no. 50, Autumn
1988.
55. 'Authority and the Family', p. 56.
56. Les complexesfamiliaux, p. 61.
57. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, in Sigmund Freud, On Psychopathology, Pelican
Freud Library vol. 10, Harmondsworth: Pelican 1979, p. 263.
58. Ibid., p. 329.
59. Freud persists bizarrely, throughout this text, in speaking as though castration were a
genuine danger. For example: 'We have also come to the conclusion that an instinctual
demand often only becomes an (internal) danger because its satisfaction would bring on an
external danger - that is, because the internal danger represents an external one' (p. 328).
60. Les complexes familiaux, pp. 93-4.
61. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, 'Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment' (new
translation by Robert Hullot-Kentnor), New German Critique, no. 56, Spring/Summer 1992,
p. 118.
62. Ibid., pp. 118-19.
63. Ibid., p. 116 (emphasis added).
64. Ibid., p. 122.
65. Jlirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse ofModernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988, p. 130.
66. Ibid., pp. 322, 323.
67. Herbert Schnadelbach has skilfully highlighted the incompatibility between the
Kantian structures of Habermas's theory and his attachment to a naturalistic version of re-
conciliation motifs inherited from Hegel and the Left Hegelians. See 'The Face in the Sand:
Foucault and the Anthropological Slumber', in Axel Honneth et al., eds, Philosophical
Interventions in the Unfinished Process ofEnlightenment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992.
68. Jiirgen Habermas, 'Transzendenz von innen, Transzendenz ins Diesseits', in Texte und
Kontexte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1991, p. 142.
69. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire livre XI: Les quatres concepts fondamentaux de la psych-
analyse, Paris: Seuill973, p. 62/The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis, trans. A.
Sheridan, Harmondsworth: Peregrine 1986, p. 64.
70. See Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, pp. 299-301; and the commentary in Jean
Laplanche, Problematiques II: Castration. Symbolisations, Paris: PDF 1980, pp. 154-61.