Chapter 1 - “THE MONOPOLY OF THE ORIGIN” AND THE MUTE FOUNDATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE THEORETICAL INTERVENTIONS OF LUCE IRIGARAY

Summary

The culture, the language, the imaginary and the mythology in which we live at the moment… I say to myself…let's have a look…this edifice that looks so clean and subtle…let's see what ground it is built on. Is it all that acceptable?

The substratum is the woman who reproduces the social order, who is made this order's infrastructure: the whole of our western culture is based upon the murder of the mother. The man-god-father killed the mother in order to take power. And isn't there a fluidity, some flood, that could shake this social order? And if we make the foundations of the social order shift, then everything will shift. That is why they are so careful to keep us on a leash…

(Irigaray, 1991a: 47).

Introduction

In this chapter, my focus is on Irigaray's claim that all Western theoretical models function through an unacknowledged silencing of women, thus perpetuating what she considers to be the foundation of Western culture: the murder of the mother. Specifically, my interest here is with Irigaray's critique of psychoanalysis as a discourse of origins. According to Irigaray, this fascination with beginnings in the West, be they cultural or individual beginnings, has been monopolized by masculine thought and experience, at the expense of women. In particular, psychoanalytic theory perpetuates this silence through its own masculine configurations of individual and cultural genesis.