But did not this normalizing reversal itself almost immediately suffer another peripety, nothing less than a fierce and irrecuperable deconstruction at the decisive hand of Freud when he published in 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a text whose first movement is a study of the perversions generally and inversion specifically? In the first essay, Freud makes an epochal, a “revolutionary,” scission or cut; he severs the heretofore presumed linkage between the sexual instinct and the sexual object (“the person [or thing] from whom sexual attraction proceeds”). Although the passage is well known, I quote at some length:

It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together—a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thought between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.^[78]

Davidson credits this passage with the power of devastation: “By claiming, in effect, that there is no natural object of the sexual instinct, that the sexual object and sexual instinct are merely soldered together, Freud dealt a conceptually devastating blow to the entire structure of nineteenth century theories of sexual psychopathology….If the object is not internal to the instinct, then there can be no intrinsic clinico-pathological meaning to the fact that the instinct can become attached to an inverted object.”^[79]

Thus dissociated from an intrinsic object, Freud’s Sexualtrieb (sexual instinct or drive) remains fundamentally ductile—open to a panoply of fusions, weldings, or “mere” solderings; no reliable law or principle advenes to govern the linkage between the subject’s desire and that desire’s object. “This gives us the hint,” Freud says later in the same essay, “that perhaps the sexual instinct itself may be no simple thing, but put together from components which have come apart again in the perversions.” As an unstable amalgam compounded out of diverse and even contradictory elements, “sexual instinct” for Freud signifies not just a plurivocal constituency but a dynamics of substitution and iterability. This indeed constitutes an epochal break with the logic of inversion. For once the “bond” between Trieb and Objekt has been thus severed, there can be no subsequent recourse to fantasies of a natural or instinctive sexuality, whether hetero, homo, or other-o. Without a definitive standard, how to measure, or even posit, a deviation? Given the theoretical schema Freud here advances, the perversions come virtually to epitomize “the normal picture,” precisely because the sexual instinct is, ab ovo, “independent of its object.” Perversion, then, tout court: the law of nature denatured.

It would thus seem that Freud emphatically submits the inversion metaphor to the vertiginous dispersions of metonymy. Does not Freud, like Sade before him, conceptualize desire as a gender-indifferent tropism liable to labile displacement, which in turn “opens the door,” to recall Gallop’s phrasing, “for a potentially unending series of paradigmatic equivalents”? And yet we know things are not so simple. The inversion metaphor, despite the “conceptually devastating blow” acknowledged above, nonetheless continued to operate with impressive immunity throughout Freud’s subsequent writings on homosexuality. The machinery of inversion would whir on, as if chthonically. How, then, to account for the persistence of a “devastated” metaphor? A facile deconstruction might prefer to see the metaphor’s vigorous afterlife as a kind of nonsignifying epistemic drag, the as-yet-undiscarded effluvia of a retrograde sexology. Davidson gestures toward a more interesting answer. While continuing to claim that Freud had delegitimated “the conceptual preconditions” for the employment of perversion and inversion, he also acknowledges that “Freud continued to use the idea of perversion, as if he failed to grasp the real import of his own work.” “Freud in effect reintroduces, behind his own back, an identification that he has shown to be untenable.”^[80]

It is not possible here to launch a comprehensive critique of Freud’s shifting account of homosexuality or of the ideas (narcissism, castration, Oedipal identification) that make his account intelligible and compelling. But it may be useful, in closing this chapter, to engage one of Freud’s texts, the late essay “Female Sexuality” (1931), in which the inversion metaphor, “devastated” but still vigorous, continues to perform its work of normalization. Freud’s topic in “Female Sexuality” is the problematic trajectory by which the developing female child assumes her adult femininity. By what “path,” Freud asks, “does she reach the final normal female attitude, in which she takes her father as her object and so finds her way to the feminine form of the Oedipus complex?”^[81] As Freud’s language of heterosexual teleology implies, “final normal” femininity is not a given nature; it is, rather, a tortuous achievement governed, as we shall see, by a double displacement. Freud diagrams this developmental itinerary in his opening paragraph:

During the phase of the normal Oedipus complex we find the child tenderly attached to the parent of the opposite sex, while its relation to the parent of its own sex is predominantly hostile. In the case of a boy there is no difficulty in explaining this. His first love-object was his mother. She remains so; and, with the strengthening of his erotic desires and his deeper insight into the relations between his father and mother, the former is bound to become his rival. With the small girl it is different. Her first object, too, was her mother. How does she find her way to her father? How, when, and why does she detach herself from her mother? We have long understood that the development of female sexuality is complicated by the fact that the girl has the task of giving up what was originally her leading genital zone—the clitoris—in favour of a new zone—the vagina. But it now seems to us that there is a second change of the same sort which is no less characteristic and important for the development of the female: the exchange of her original object—her mother—for her father. The way in which the two tasks are connected with each other is not yet clear to us. (225)

The question, then, is this: given the female child’s original homosexual identification with the mother, “how does she find her way to her father?” Freud answers this question by way of a vestigial bisexuality that functions, in Sarah Kofman’s metaphor, as a double-edged sword: “it allows him both to break down the metaphysical opposition of ‘pure’ masculinity and femininity and to continue to keep masculinity in its traditionally privileged position.”^[82] Such ideological duplicity is especially clear, for instance, when Freud writes:

First of all, there can be no doubt that the bisexuality, which is present, as we believe, in the innate disposition of human beings, comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men. A man, after all, has only one leading sexual zone, one sexual organ, whereas a woman has two: the vagina—the female organ proper—and the clitoris, which is analogous to the male organ. We believe we are justified in assuming that for many years the vagina is virtually non-existent.…In women, therefore, the main genital occurrences of childhood must take place in relation to the clitoris. Their sexual life is regularly divided in two phases, of which the first has a masculine character, while only the second is specifically feminine. (227–28)

Freud’s account of feminine development begins with an ideological bifurcation. In a single diacritical cut, he determines the female genitalia as the anatomical representative of gender difference itself: if the vagina is “proper” to the girl’s femininity, the clitoris “with its virile character” definitionally is not (228). As miniaturized simulacrum, the clitoris has been subsumed under a phallic “analogy,” one of whose chief historical operations is what Gayatri Spivak calls “the effacement of the clitoris”—that is, the denial of the clitoris as a “specifically feminine” property. With her body (and psyche) thus virilized and feminized, the little girl is disclosed to be both herself and her own “opposite,” the little boy she must (suicidally) kill in order to assume the vaginal passivity that alone will establish what Freud calls her “definitive femininity” (232).

Once securely in place, this duplicitous gender structure enables the inversion metaphor to resume the work by which it keeps things straight. In Freud’s psychoanalytic itinerary, as in the simpler sexological articulations, a seemingly homosexual desire will disclose itself, willy-nilly, as inverted or displaced heterosexuality. For once it is given a priori that pre-Oedipal female sexuality is primarily clitoral (at this time, Freud defensively claims, “the vagina is virtually non-existent”) and that the clitoris is possessed of (by) “a masculine character,” then the possibility of originary lesbian desire is theoretically nullified. Under the sway of her puny simulacrum and its “characteristic phallic activity—masturbation of the clitoris” (232), the little girl desiring mother operates as a little boy doing same, the lesbian specificity of her desire thus returned, via inversion, to its familiar heterosexual base.

But Freud’s question still remains unanswered: “how does she find her way to her father” and to “the feminine form of the Oedipus complex?” Theoretically at least, the answer is simpler than is sometimes admitted. Given the barely occluded heterosexual origin of her (only apparent) homosexual desire, all that is required to freeze female sexuality in its normalizing Oedipal frame is a diphasic “process of transition” in which the vagina, or “female organ proper,” supplants the virilized clitoris as the female’s “leading sexual zone.” This fantasmatic genital transposition is axiomatically precipitated by “the influence of castration” (230); while still in the phallic phase, the female child is obliged to acknowledge “the fact of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her own inferiority” (229). With this lacerating self-recognition in place, the “normally” developing female must then negotiate a double inversion. An inversion, first, in her subjectivity: a movement from her vestigial “masculine character” to “her final normal female attitude.” This inversion in the subject entails a kind of psychosurgical complicity—in Spivak’s term, “a symbolic clitoridectomy”^[83]—by which the female completes the castration that “nature” has already only half performed. And to this inversion a second corresponds, an inversion in the gender of the object (from feminine/maternal to masculine/paternal): “at the end of her development, her father—a man—should have become her new love object” (228). The heterosexual presumption implicit in this inversion schema should be manifest; Freud himself puts it in the form of an axiom: “to the change in her own sex [i.e., from masculine to feminine] there must correspond a change in the sex of her object [i.e., vice versa]” (228).

In what is perhaps his oblique acknowledgment of the sheer violence of this “very circuitous” itinerary (230), Freud admits that it is subject to considerable deviation, in large part because the female “rebels” against “the fact” of her castration, which Freud (pseudo)sympathetically calls “this unwelcome state of affairs” (229). He specifies two perverse or abnormal “lines of development” in addition to the “normal” Oedipal “path” described above, each involving a presumptively “unnatural” protest against the finality of vaginal accommodation:

The first leads to a general revulsion from sexuality. The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys, grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields. The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity. To an incredibly late age she clings to the hope of getting a penis some time. That hope becomes her life’s aim; and the phantasy of being a man in spite of everything often persists as a formative factor over long periods. This “masculinity complex” in women can also result in a manifest homosexual choice of object. (229–30)

Thus Freud’s castration trope imposes upon the female three nonoptional options, each one teleologically determined: (1) the terminal vaginality of “normal” oedipal compliance, replete with the castration/clitoridectomy that alone situates the female in a “proper” relation to the phallus; (2) the absolute cessation of all sexuality consequent upon her “general revulsion” when confronted with “the fact” of her phallic effacement; and (3) a specifically butch “defiance” of feminine termination (i.e., her “masculinity complex”) , as evidenced by, among other things, “a manifest homosexual choice of object.”

This last “option” clearly discloses the vigorous psychoanalytic afterlife, the continuing hegemonic press, of the (presumably superseded) inversion metaphor, as a vigilant feminism has not failed to notice. Kofman: “We are to understand that constitutionally she is more masculine than feminine, and that therefore she cannot help persisting in this masculinity. She is by nature, as it were, a boy manqué who ends up taking herself to be a boy for real.”^[84] And Irigaray, more tersely: “As soon as she has any relationship with another woman, she is homosexual, and therefore masculine.…Not a word has been said here about feminine homosexuality.”^[85] Indeed, not a word could have been said. Not, that is, without a thorough dismantling of the sexist and heterosexist gender ideology that underwrites the inversion model, whose psychoanalytic deployment, however displaced or “circuitous,” nonetheless betrays a palpable genealogical relation to the more reductive formulations of the sexologists. What had been for Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing a convenient fiction of origination (anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, in the case of the male homosexual) becomes, in the subtler displacements of Freudian narrative, a teleological fiction whose terminus is governed by a now-familiar gender inversion. In the case of the lesbian, this is the story of an Oedipalization whose “failure” or incompletion locks the female in the perverse grip of an unexcised “masculinity” that dutifully inverts her desire even as it reasserts the primacy of the phallus at exactly the site where the penis has no place.