Jill Gentile and the feminine 'gap'

Members of the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society and attendees to its presentation were treated to Invited speaker Jill Gentile on Sept 15, 2018. In the earliest discussion of the day “Desire, Agency, and the Eternal Validity of Psychoanalysis” Gentile emphasized a change in psychoanalysis from viewing agency as the purview of an autonomous subject to that of the dialectically constituted subject, stating that agency cannot be claimed as a one person phenomenon but instead emerges within intersubjectivity. Agency is associated with initiative and intentionality and what Winnicott called the “spontaneous gesture.” 

Additionally, how we become semiotic agents, able to communicate through signs and symbols our very selves, is of great interest to Gentile. Through being held [imagistic symbols] in infancy in the mind of an other, and through naming (verbal symbols) the physical and psychological parts of ourselves (including our genitals), we are aided in the emergence of self. It made enormous sense to me when Gentile posited that the failure to freely name aloud female genitals and inner space (vagina), leaves a “void” or “gap” in discourse, and vitiates the subjectivity, therefore the agency, of women, i.e. if materiality leads to subjectivity [her interpretation of Winnicott], and material things must be named to have substance, to be substantively held in mind, then society’s inability to name and symbolize, to speak freely about the female genitalia and female inner spaces vitiates woman as substantive, vitiates her ability to participate in the conversation.

Yet, despite psychoanalysis’ “hierarchy of patriarchy,” Gentile says Freud derived the fundamental rule from his treatment of women, hysterics whose symptoms were bodily based, and as such, speaks to a feminine law based in Nature, rooted in the Lacanian Real [the feminine], not in Totem law [masculine]. She also notes that the discovery of anatomical differences does not merely lead to penis envy but, more importantly, evokes curiosity in children. The ‘gap’ [of the missing penis], she says, inspires scientific inquiry in children, leading to a quest for knowledge, truth, and a “reckoning of speech.” A child has questions and seeks answers, skeptical of parents’ inauthentic explanations. Gentile states that children seek out their own truth, [Bion’s truth telling instinct]. [My own father handled my question gracefully, filling me with pride, when he answered my curiosity at age three with ‘Girls are of modern design; They have indoor plumbing.’] When a child has something to be curious about, a desire for knowledge is kindled. She posits that this may be truer for girls who ‘get it’ and do not deny the ‘gap’ as boys do -- boys fantasize, according to Freud, that it was cut off -- foreclosing further explanation and exploration of the mystery.