Note on the reorganisation of psychoanalysis : marginal topia and vulvic network

Psychoanalysis operates on three levels of the cure :

1) Deconstruction – analysis ;

2) Tackling the blind spot of the mind – the topia ;

3) Symbolic reconstruction.

The deconstruction phase operates inside of the system of difference, of tension between morally and socially marked identities (gender, colour, social class).

The blind spot is the non-communicable part of the self, defined in its non-definition by the tensor in paradoxical theory, by the concept of marginal topia in analytic theory  The topia agglutinates all the socially and symbolically marked attributes that are closest to it, by which the self manifests itself in the intermediary spaces ruled by the symbolic and by which it can be identified by others as one identity.

As Michel Foucault stated as to sexuality (in his Clermont-Ferrand’s classes), all that is passing through the filtrer of the law is constructed negatively as referred to the licit and the illicit. Social interactions as well are dependent on relations of power (according to Angela Davis’s categories of gender, race and class) to determine what is licit or not, to and with whom  in which particular social and moral spaces.

The symbolic reconstruction occurs consequently to the workings of deconstruction. In a society where the relations of power are structured from a male-orientated point of view, part of the realities lived by most women and queer people is denied, not visible nor symbolically represented, outcast to a blank zone.

The self-established unique mythical referent of the phallus, in the symbolic system of difference for representation, must be revised to allow a sane critic of masculine dominance, physical and symbolic domination, as well as a positive reconstruction.

We would have to turn from a system of difference to a system of singularity.

New paradigms must be provided with. First of all, we propose the paradigm of a vulvic symbolic network, stating that the female sex is not just a hole that means the complement to the male’s. Women’s concrete genital organ, the vulva, as well as the penis  can show, is a signifying object, singular and able to support a highly structured mental organisation.

The clitoris is sometimes compared to a small version of the penis (read Liv Strömquist’s « The origin of the world »), but the labia can also determine an arborescent spreading structure, from the vulva itself to the tailbone, legs and belly. Not mentioning its waving flesh, the touch of it, the hair and the relation to the fluids.

Vulvic structure pushes forward then a positive and constructive symbolic vision of women and queer people’s body  out of the injunction to work the tension of a politically and socially based system of difference ; but experienced in their singularity.

Psychoanalysis must  in the facts as well as in theory, retie with reality and its plurality.

A system of singularity, contrarily to a system of difference, can allow the superimposition of the social, moral and symbolic spaces, and reconcile with the intermediary.