David L. Miller: Why Men Are Mad

WHY MEN ARE MAD!
NOTHING-ENVY AND THE FASCRATION COMPLEX

DAVID L. MILLER

The title of this essay announces both that men are crazy and that they are in a rage. This is an essay about the psychology of postmodern men. It aims at a men’s liberation, a resurrection of the male body. Today, men’s bodies tell them that there has all along been something awry in the very patriarchy whose chauvinism should have served their interests. Men themselves have been unwittingly wounded by the same male perspective which has wounded women.

One clue to the hurt men feel, to their crazy rage, can be discerned in an essay entitled “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes: (1925), where Freud describes a traumatic moment of childhood, the discovery of penis envy. The little girl “has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (252), But, according to Freud, the little boy’s experience, or at least the screen-memory of the experience, is different. Only later when confronted with a threat of castration does the boy or man recall the sight of the little girl. Then he knows of the real possibility of losing a part of his body. There arises an anxiety—the so-called “castration complex”—together with two possible reactions to women: either “horror of the mutilated creature” or “triumphant contempt for her” (Freud, 1961: 252; 1959; 1964b; Du Bois: 10–11). The neurotic consequence of the childhood trauma for the woman is envy and inferiority; for the man, anxiety and superiority.

There is an asymmetry in Freud’s theory. Why was he not moved to observe envy in the man as in the woman and anxiety in the woman as in the man? Is there no complex in the woman to correspond to castration in the man? And is there no envy in the man to correspond to the envy for the penis in the woman?

A few theorists and therapists have wondered about these questions. Bruno Bettelheim thought that “penis envy in girls and castration anxiety in boys have been over-emphasized” by psychoanalysis, and that there is “a possibly much deeper psychological layer in boys that has been relatively neglected.” He called this deeper matter “vagina envy”(20). Karen Horney, also, has spoken of a “femininity complex” in men and has raised the question of “why no corresponding impulse to compensate herself for her penis envy is found in women” (61; also 21, 60). But in this theorizing, the envy noted in the male has to do with the woman’s ability to bear children, “pregnancy envy,” as Eric Fromm calls it (233). This focuses the male envy on only one aspect of woman, an aspect which a patriarchal tradition is eager to totalize.

Instead of deciding what the object of the little boy’s envy might be, let us try to describe the bodily experience which gives rise to the envy and give to the male desire the name of what the little boy actually sees.

But what name shall we use to name what the little boy sees? A possible solution may be found in the philological family of terms associated with linguistic negation. The complex of terms includes “not,” “naught,” “naughty” (as in “naughty boy”), “aught,” “wight,” and “thing” (Horney: 62, 68). If the little girl sees something and then envies this thing, one could say that the little boy sees nothing and envies that nothing. The traumatic physical moment produces psychological “nothing-envy.” Nothing-envy is the desire lurking as the dialectical other-side of the castration anxiety. The fundamental ambivalence of the psyche demands that a person face the two-sidedness of fear. There is a latent wish in the symptom of anxiety. Castration is what a man wants as well as what he most fears. What does a man want? Nothing.

A distinction made by Jane Gallop is important, lest nothing-envy be misunderstood. In an essay entitled, “Beyond the Phallus,” Gallop distinguishes penis and phallus, utilizing a story to make her point.

Anna Freud was reaching maturity and began to show an interest in her father’s work, so Freud gave her some of his writings to read. About a month later he asked her if she had any questions about what she had been reading. “Just one,” she replied, “what is a phallus?” Being a man of science, Freud unbuttoned his pants and showed her. “Oh,” Anna exclaimed, thus enlightened, “it’s like a penis, only smaller!” (124)

Gallop argues compellingly that Freud misnamed penis-envy. Women do not desire penises. Rather, they desire the phallus, the symbolic power attached to patriarchy and male-dominance. Gallop points out that it would be silly for a woman to want a penis. It would ruin the sexual pleasure she can have with a man who has one. She wants the man to have the penis, but she desperately desires the power that has come to be associated with the phallus. Freud should have called it phallus-envy (Gallop: 119–31).

Similarly, men have no desire to be deprived of their penises. This is not what nothing-envy is about. The penis, besides being an efficient piece of plumbing, gives a good deal of pleasure. But the phallus is a different thing. The very patriarchy which has connected dominance, power, aggression, initiative, rational meaning, thinking, and commitment to maleness, that perspective which has deprived women of a phallus, has also loaded more on men than they wish to bear. What a relief it would be to be rid of this thing, to have nothing.

Ernest Wallwork has called my attention to evidence of this nothing-envy in men. A bit of play familiar to all men from their days in school locker rooms is that of pulling the penis back and holding it between one’s legs so that one looks like a woman. The play is the symptom of a wish. The little boy looking upon the little girl in wonder experiences both fear and desire. The trauma produces not only a castration complex but also nothing-envy. Mysterium tremendum et fascinosum: I am afraid of nothing, of losing something, and, at the same time, I am drawn to nothing. Freud noticed the former, but he missed the latter.

For several thousand years men have gone after something, after things, after the phallus. And now they are tired of it. Castration-anxiety is “Thank God I don’t have nothing.” But castration-anxiety is the symptom which harbors the wish of nothing-envy. Nothing-envy is “How long, O Lord, will it be until I can have nothing.” Nothing-envy is a jealousy, and when repressed, as it has been, it provokes rage. Men are mad. It is now the time of the return of the repressed. Nothing is coming again. This is the reason that women are so much the object of male desire. Men have expected that women would be something. Indeed, men have again and again attempted to make women into some something of their own projection. But again and again men were disappointed. Women are nothing... no-thing. They are not things. Sex for men is going into the great nothing. Men both fear and hope that in sex with a woman they may lose it. Women, of course, are happy to give men what they want. Nothing. But then men discover that that is not what they wanted at all. So the sadness (I don’t have what I want) turns to rage (I got what I wanted which is not what I wanted at all). It came to nothing. A woman from her perspective of nothing (no-thingness) can look upon the male something and say: “Hey, that’s nothing!” But inevitably a man, from his perspective of something, will look upon a woman’s nothing and say: “Wow, that’s really something!” Sometimes the return of the repressed desire for nothing occurs only in the second half of a man’s life. He spends the first half desiring something, acting-out his castration anxiety. But later he discovers that this accumulation of things does not fulfill his real and deeper wish. All this something begins to seem more and more like nothing. Then he recalls what he really wanted. Nothing. As John Ciardi once wrote: “A boy is a hurry on its way to doing nothing” (8). But the King Lear in every man forgets. This figure, hoisted on his own petard, is in a rage and crazy. And when the Fool asks—“Can you make no use of nothing, Nuncle?”—Lear answers—“Why, no, boy; nothing can be made out of nothing” (King Lear 1.136–39). But God and Lear’s Fool know better. They know that everything comes of nothing. Cordelia knows it too. Nor does she, like her sisters, suffer from phallus-envy.

Just as there is in men a desire that is in dialectical tension with castration-anxiety, so there must be in women an anxiety corresponding to their desire for a phallus. If one were to stay with Freudian thing-language, one could imagine that the anxiety would have to do with the fear of losing her no-thing and the possibility of gaining some-thing. But would it not be in men’s interests to know woman, not only as that person who desires to be a man, but as something other, something more positive, something that is not a some-thing at all?

I believe that one of Freud’s most obnoxious texts may provide a clue to the nature and name of this female complex. In his work, The New Introductory Lectures (1933), in the section on “Femininity,” Freud is talking precisely about penis-envy, and he says this:

It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented—that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together. (1964a: 132)

Freud adds: “If you reject this idea as fantastic and regard my belief in the influence of lack of a penis on the configuration as an idée fixe, I am of course defenseless” (ibid.).

The idea is indeed fantastic, and indeed Freud is defenseless. So, my only intention is to use Freud’s psychic erotics against his own understanding of it. I am encouraged in this by the remarkable importance of the notion of “weaving,” “texturing,” and “text-production” in the women’s movement.

There is a long litany of female affirmations of women’s weavings, and they have little or nothing to do with envy of men. Rather, these testimonies and expressions have deep archetypal rooting in Athena and Arachne, in Persephone, in Philomela, and in Charlotte’s Web (see Gubar: 74, 89, 91). What is the missing female complex to which weaving points? I propose to name it “the fascration complex,” drawing upon a Mediterranean word having to do with weaving. Fasces is a bundle of twigs woven together, a bit of wicker work, the work of the wicca (who is by no means a witch). The term fasces gives us our word “basket,” as well as “fasten,” “fascination,” and “fascist.”

What the little boy sees when he gazes upon what is not-a-thing is the female “basket” and later he will come to admire the webs and tapestries a woman can weave with it. She is anxious about losing her basket, her weaving, her fasces, for this, not the penis, is her power. She is only envious that the phallus has come one-sidedly to be regarded as meaning and power in the phallogocentrism of patriarchal perspective.

An old Gnostic text testifies that “when you make … an image in the place of an image, then you shall enter the Kingdom” (Guillaumont: 17–18). What might happen if, for women, one were to put the fascration-complex in the place of penis-envy and, for men, one were to put nothing-envy in the place of castration-fear?

The basket that is the soul (animus) of woman belonged in antiquity to Dionysos. It was called the liknon, and in sacred ritual women carried phalloi in it. But, as Euripides’s play observes, as long as the fascration complex was located in the male organization (Pentheus, Dionysos), it drove women crazy. Similarly, in antiquity the masculine soul (anima) that was identified with phallic power belonged to Athena. She carried this strength in her sword. The Greek male hero went to war for her civilization, her wisdom, her history, her arts, her justice, her people. The man did it for the woman. And it was too much to bear. It drove him mad. “The gods,” as Jung said, “have become diseases” (1953–83: 13/54). Men have been castrated by Athena’s own sword, and postmodern maenads have lost their likna in bacchic furor. Men are jealous of the dance of Dionysos, and women desire a forum to express Athena’s wisdom.

Women are right. Not only have they been deprived of power by the metaphysics of presence stemming from the Greeks, but they have also been kept from the wisdom of their own, a potential metaphysics of absence based on the female body and woman’s experience of it. When the little boy looked upon the little girl, he surely exclaimed: “Why is there nothing rather than something?” And when the little girl looked upon the little boy, she surely asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Now, we all know from Plato and Aristotle, and from Spinoza and Heidegger, that it is the little girl’s question that is the foundation of metaphysics. It is the experience of wonder which gives rise to her question that is the motivation for philosophy. Thinking belongs properly to the woman. That it has been co-opted by men in the Occident is a compensatory symptom. It is an acting-out of nothing-envy. For men, such thinking is a substitute gratification, a sublimation of the true male desire, which is, of course, why men have been such terrible thinkers in the intellectualistic, rationalistic, substantialistic Western tradition, and it is why that tradition from Plato to Nietzsche is finished. Men are giving (it) up. Nothing is coming again … the return of the repressed. Men are discovering that philosophy is not what they want.

Philosophia: an erotics of wisdom. Philosophy should not be men loving Lady Sophia (as has been the case), which is only philosophy as voyeurism, gazing into the abyss of nothing. Rather, philosophy should be Lady Wisdom’s loving, which would be, as we were promised by men, philosophy as wonder, amazement and embrace at the sight of something rather than nothing. Women are the true philosophers, which is one of the reasons men are so jealous of women in the academy.

There is some indication that men are beginning to learn to weave, that they are beginning to learn to do nothing. Men are showing that they have le gout du néant, as Baudelaire said, and that, as he also put it, “the nothingness goes with him, everything being a void—action, desire, dream, and word” (Scarfe: 181, 245). Norman O. Brown, writing on “Nothing,” foresaw the return of the repressed nothing. “Get the nothingness back into words,” Brown advised. “The aim is words with nothing to them: words that point beyond themselves rather than to themselves; transparencies, empty words. Empty words, corresponding to the void in things” (259, cf. 260, 261). The problem with men has been the same as that which Heidegger noted about Being: we have wanted to make Being, that is, No-thing, into a being. The prophets of Israel complained similarly that men want to make God into a thing. To compensate our nothing-envy, we men are always attempting to make something. But, like metaphysics and religion, the study of religion is nothing. This is, of course, what we are afraid of, and so, like the bravado of the little boy, we say: “Wanna make something of it!” If we could learn to weave nothing, scholars of religion might be more like Wallace Stevens’s snowman, “who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (10).

An erotics of male desire discloses a projection of a wish based on a lack …a lack of nothing. It is a desire for nothing because men don’t got plenty of nothing. The irony, of course, is that that is exactly what they have plenty of … which is why they’re mad. The return of the repressed is the return of something that never went away. A man never did not have nothing. If a man could withdraw his projection onto women of nothing, he could be who he is, one-in-himself, male and female, something and nothing. There is nothing of which to be envious. We are always and already nothing.

Gahan Wilson once said about Tofu Roshi: “Many teachers in their pride, vainly boast that they know nothing, but it is Tofu alone who has truly succeeded in achieving total ignorance … It is not merely that the Roshi’s teaching is totally devoid of content or any hint of meaning—many other teachers have achieved that; its most remarkable aspect is the impossibility of remembering a single word he’s spoken, or even if he spoke at all” (Moon: ix). Indeed, one would like to be able to say what Coomaraswamy said should be on everyman’s tomb: Hic jacet nemo—“No one lies here.” Why should one be able to say this? The answer is the same as the answer Tofu Roshi gave when Auntie Matter asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” The Roshi said: “You have probably heard the wise old saying: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Similarly, something manifests in order to keep nothing from taking up all the space …” (Moon: 137–38).

WORKS CITED

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―. “Some Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes,” in Standard Edition, 1961.

―. “New Introductory Lectures,” in Standard Edition, 1964a.

―. “Splitting of the Ego in Defense,” in Standard Edition, 1964b.

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