Copyright Hecate Press, English Department Nov 30, 1983
Paris -- On the rue Lakanal, a pleasant part of the southeast of the city, a row of low houses is broken by a fence, behind which rises a block of flats. On the eleventh and top floor of this phallus lives the psychoanalyst and writer Luce Irigaray.
We go up in the lift. She's a short, slight woman with cool, grey eyes, and wears a white track-suit and white Swedish clogs. She doesn't offer her hand. `Do you want to take your boots off?' She's about to have something to eat; we sit in the kitchen on white metal chairs beside each other, in stockinged feet. `This is Aafke, and I'm Kiki,' attempts Kiki. She eats thin macrobiotic pancakes and drinks sage tea.
The flat is white and grey-blue. She does her analyses at home. We go into her work-room -- there's a desk and only one chair. We place ourselves on the white carpet. She talks down to us from her desk-chair, and wants the microphones on the floor. With a mixture of amusement and uncertainty, we accept this setting.
Kiki: We'd like you to introduce yourself and say something about your life. About what you've written, your theories -- rather general. Perhaps you could begin with something about your life...
Luce: No, I don't feel like doing that.
Kiki, after a pause: No? Nothing at all?
Luce: No. But I want to explain why not. It's because people generally ask this sort of thing of women and not of men. In the media, you don't start by asking a professor, a Nobel Prize winner or a writer: what is your private life, are you married, do you have a lover, how's your sex life? They do dare to ask that of women. Besides, these days affective life is absolutely prostituted by the media, and I don't agree with that at all. My private life is my own business, not the papers'.
You go to give a lecture and find people asking you: do you love a man or a woman, are you married or single? Do you want to marry, do you have children, do you want children? (she laughs) I absolutely won't answer that. Let them take what they will out of my books. I don't think that my work can be better understood because I've done this or that. The risk is that such information will disrupt people when they read.
Aafke: You're afraid that they imprison you.
Luce: That's precisely what happens. I need my own territory, or else I'll die. There must be a border between public life and my bed. Without that, the analytic couch would also become a public affair, but I'm bound to confidentiality. No, I don't want to prostitute myself on the public stage.
We're still having a hard time getting the interview started. A new battle. Aafke tries: `You've criticised Freud...Luce: `But if you've read it, you've read it! It's in the texts which have already been published! Would you like to check the sound on your tape?' We play the tape, and she pushes the microphones further away. `If you put the microphone too close, you get noise on the tape and it's not as clear.' Angrily Kiki moves her microphone: `I don't want to irritate you. If you don't like it, then I'll put it here.' Luce: `There's also such a thing as rape by microphone! A human being or an animal needs a minimum of territory! If you put a microphone in their territory, they can't think or talk anymore. You have to respect a minimum of territory! No, now you've put it in a worse position.' We fuss with the microphone. `No, put it there, opposite my voice. I've had people do interviews with me which were worthless because the microphone was pressed on me, damn it!'
Aafke tries to formulate her question. Luce interrupts: `I hope you don't see this as unfriendly. You don't realise what protection of the body and protection of the flesh means...either you become the star who simply performs, who only exists in representation, or you try to retain a certain originality, intimacy of thought, of life, of the flesh. You can't always let yourself be raped by technology.' Aafke exclaims angrily: `But in this situation we are two journalists from Amsterdam, and French culture, philosophy, psychoanalysis, the French manner of speaking, are entirely different. Our culture is more oriented towards Anglo-Saxon culture, and it's more pragmatic and humorous. It's totally different. So I feel unsure in this situation, and shaky about bridging these two cultures. It's a difficult thing to do, and why I want at least the technical things to go well.' Luce, drily: `But I'm not the one who's put you in this situation.'
Over the last few years Luce Irigaray has started to become widely known in the Netherlands for her outspoken views on sexuality and on écriture feminine, women's style of writing. Her background? In bits and pieces we've found out a few things. Her surname, Irigaray, is Basque, but she was born in Belgium. She studied linguistics and philosophy in Leuven, and acquired her masters degree with a thesis on Paul Valery. She lectured for a while, decided to become a psychoanalyst, and studied psychopathology in Paris, which resulted in a second thesis, Le langage des dements (1973). Finally, for her doctorat d'état -- an exam required in order to get a chair at a university -- she presented her book Speculum de l'autre femme (1974). For an academic work, it's an unusually figurative report on female sexuality, and it includes a sharp critique of Freud. After a few problems -- one professor withdrew from the jury -- the manuscript was accepted. But three weeks later Irigaray was sacked from the University of Vincennes. Lacan's followers ruled the roost there.
She divides her time between her therapeutic work and her writing. In 1977 she wrote Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un, a collection of twelve articles, and in 1979 Et l'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre, a short text about the mother-daughter relationship. In 1980 she published Amante Marine, which sets out from a text by Nietzsche about his lover. The book tells the story of the Greek goddesses, and analyses the presuppositions of Christianity and the Maria/Jesus image. Her latest book, Passions Elementaires, was published in 1982.
Her visual style, full of allusion and word games, has produced both irritated criticism and admiring imitation because of its rich complexity and elusiveness. It's often unclear whether her texts should be read as concrete or as symbolic accounts. Often the levels intermingle. In any case, écriture feminine, which plays with words and then sounds, and the spontaneous and associative representation of feelings, has become popular in some feminist circles.
What is most original and challenging about her work is her view of female sexuality and the female genitals. As a psychoanalyst, she developed her own divergent theories of female sexuality which are based on, yet also react against the ideas of Freud and Lacan. Because her theories on sexuality are so revolutionary, we think they could give the women's movement a new direction. Freud developed the theory of the Oedipus complex, which lies at the basis of the development of every man and woman. The little boy competes with the father for the mother's love, but in that struggle has to recognise the father as being bigger and stronger, after which he turns away from his primary love-object, the mother, in fear of castration, the father's punishment. He identifies with the father, giving himself the chance to resume the actual fight with the father at a more opportune time, by means of a substitute mother.
The girl's primary love-object is also the mother. She wants to win the mother for herself and to get rid of the father. But when she sees that the boy has larger and more visible genitals, she thinks that she's been deprived of her genitals because of her forbidden desire for her mother. She relinquishes her love-object, identifies with the mother and chooses the father as love-object. The wish for the penis is replaced by the wish for a child.
The French psychoanalyst Lacan abstracts Freud's theories from this purely biological premise and speaks of the phallus, saying that it is the symbol of the social order. He also calls the social order the Law of the Father. He sees language as the most important means of appropriating the laws of the social order. However there is little room for the female element in language. The female is that which is absent and not expressed.
Irigaray rejects the psychoanalytic account of woman which defines her on the basis of the lack of a penis, or phallus. She sees female sexuality as infinite and overflowing. Irigaray places woman's lips central, and gently points out to Freud and Lacan, who deny the specific speech and the specific sexuality of women, that women have lips down below as well as up above. The lips, she says, are perfect when they talk to each other, they need no intruder.
A quote from `Quand nos lèvres se parlent' (When our lips speak to each other): Us, dissatisfied? Yes, if that means that we are never finished. That our pleasure is to be constantly moving, touching. Always moving: the open is never satisfied, it never dries up.'
Also fundamental is Irigaray's thesis that Western culture is imprisoned in the mother-son relation, which deprives the mother of her identity as a woman, and in men leads to alienation and a fear of women. Irigaray feels that it's a matter of giving back the mother her identity as a woman, as a lover. In `L'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre' (The one doesn't move without the other) she writes about the relation between mother and daughter:
`I wish so much that we could both exist. That the one didn't disappear into the other, the other into the one. That we could enjoy each other, touch, smell each other, could listen to each other, could see each other together.'
Aafke (we've gone from the formal `vous' to the `tu' form): You say that female sexuality is polymorphous, constantly moving, not goal-directed. But then I wonder, is sexuality really so different for men?
Luce: The man's genitals consists of an organ which stands up, which is visible. It changes in form and you can see it change. With the female genitals the lips are, it's true, somewhat visible, but not the interior, unless you use a mirror. When you make love, the female sex also changes form, but you can't see it, you can only feel it. In a culture which has always favoured the visible, the woman isn't in a favourable position because she feels something which isn't visible. Her sex is above all tangible, tactile. Perhaps the fact that women do things like make themselves up and dress up is a way of compensating for the fact that their genitals are invisible.
While you do see images in Greek sculpture of men with an erect penis, the lips of women's bodies are never represented. You see a small curve, but no open lips. In my book Amante Marine I wanted to include an image of the female sex which shows itself, but that image doesn't exist. You'll find them in the East, in Tantric culture, but not in Greek and Judeo-Christian culture.
Aafke: You say that the woman's two genital lips are essential to female sexuality. But there are so many other erogenous zones: breasts, nipples, ears, mouth...
Luce: The mouth, that's also lips! That's exactly what's special about women, that they have lips up here and down there! Perhaps they have silenced her mouth throughout history because she also has lips down there! Man doesn't have a double set of lips, woman does. It seems trivial, but I believe it's extremely important. Throughout history they have wanted to rape the lips below, brutally open them, and not allow women to let their lips touch each other. There are films, texts, fantasies which imagine woman as a devouring mouth...
I see the lips as the entrance to female sexuality. They touch each other, arouse each other in a soft, mucusy way, like a threshold. All holy texts mention a threshold, to me the lips of a woman are that threshold. The entrance to the house. The entrance to intimacy. A lot of people who discuss sexuality, particularly Freud, don't realise that.
Kiki: That idea of the threshold.
Luce: The threshold and what happens past the threshold. For them it's the abyss, the hell, the monstrous. And not warmth, intimacy, happiness.
Kiki: Is that also the entrance to the mother's body for you?
Luce: It's a mistake to think of it as the entrance to the mother. Here too Freud makes a mistake. The vagina is not the womb. People confuse the two because they don't know female sexuality, and this is why I've stressed the two lips. They only see things in terms of the mother-son relation. You have to understand why I become so irritated: for centuries we've been living in the mother-son relation! There is something else we have to discover: the sexuality of women!
Kiki: Women have criticised Freud because he locates women's sexuality in the vagina.
Luce: And watch out! Freud speaks of the vagina as a lack, and he never talks about its fullness, he never talks about it in a positive way. In `Quand nos lèvres se parlent' I describe the female sex as something original, as something which can marry, which can have a feast with the penis. But it's an organ which stands by itself.
Kiki: But women have pointed out that the clitoris is the point of enjoyment, of sexual pleasure. And they have said that the vagina is to a large extent insensitive. Now you return to vaginal sexuality...
Luce (interrupting): I don't return to it! I say that the clitoris is one aspect of female sexuality, and so is the vagina! And if you want to use those words -- I never use them myself -- a vaginal orgasm and a clitoral orgasm are definitely not the same. You don't get the same amorous relation, neither to your own body nor to your partner. And even though the vaginal orgasm is more accepted in our culture, I believe that it's also more hidden.
Kiki: Why?
Luce: Because it's rarely possible -- the whole phenomenon of rape makes this sort of flowing orgasm, coming from sympathy and love, virtually impossible. You also have partners who aren't able to let you enjoy your vagina. It produces too much panic. You have to teach women and men to get to know vaginal sexuality.
Kiki: Many women want to make love without penetration, because they associate it with rape.
Luce: But men can penetrate in another way. The can penetrate with respect, they can cross the threshold, love the entrance, inhabit the threshold and the whole vagina...love a woman's whole intimacy.
Kiki: You speak of the two lips which touch each other. Do you see the lips as symbolic of being sexually satisfied with yourself?
Luce: `Look at the gesture you're making. You rub your outstretched hands against each other. In my analysis I've discovered that when things become overpowering for me as the analysand, I make that gesture, which is a traditional religious gesture. But you can also see that in fact it mirrors the two lips. It's a gesture which you make when you're meditating; you find representations of it in the East. But it can also express: you rape me too much, you cause me too much violence, I have to recover myself. And through that gesture you give eroticism to yourself, you try to recover your intimacy. I've interrupted you, but sometimes this sort of thing helps you understand a lot more than a long argument does.'
Luce: I see the lips as a way of being intimate with yourself.
Kiki: But then surely sexual contact with a man is impossible?
Luce: No, it's not like that. People often think that about me. But it depends on the man. My lips are quite willing to open, if there's a partner or someone I love, who loves my lips. But they can't stay open all the time. A sort of play is necessary, a rhythm, like in music, or with flowers. It's important that the woman be allowed to open herself, to close, to open, to close: to vibrate. Otherwise you get a man taking a woman, and then he loses interest and she's shattered by it. She hasn't been able to express herself through this vibration, this re-opening of intimacy.
Kiki: In our culture there's a fear of women. You've talked about the devouring vagina.
Luce: The devouring vagina is a male anxiety. It happens because men have always equated women with the mother. That goes back a long way, it comes up in the mythology of classical antiquity. There has to be autonomy for both partners, otherwise it's dead for both. If the man, as often happens, simply confuses making love with returning to the womb, he's afraid.
Kiki: Lots of people are afraid of losing themselves.
Luce: That means that you always stay in the mother-child relation.
Kiki: So as soon as the mother-child relation disappears, you can afford to lose yourself?
Luce: I didn't say that the relation shouldn't exist. I think that the good love-partner can fulfill all those roles. He's the mother, the father, the brother and the sister, the child, the lover...There's a risk of fusion, of disappearance into the other, if one of those possibilities is blocked.
Kiki: The auto-eroticism of the lips and the relation with an other: how do you relate the two?
Luce: In my opinion you can't have a real relation with another without auto-eroticism. By auto-eroticism I mean intimacy with yourself. It's important that women discover that they also have love for other vomen. That doesn't per se have to mean that you actually make love, but you do whatever your desire inspires you to do. In fact, a woman can't love a man unless she also loves other women, and her mother.
Two days later she opens the door in a grey-blue jumper and pants. Exactly the colour of her eyes. Suddenly there's more contact. Perhaps because we've grown accustomed to her manner of speaking. The atmosphere is more open.
Luce: What we have to do is to give the mother the identity of a woman, so that she's no longer reduced to just her mothering function, but is also a lover. That's fundamental. Because little children all come from her and pass through her hands. If mothers don't have the identities of woman and lover, then we'll simply continue the same society. Then mothers would do nothing more than cling to their children and mother them too much. Besides, they mother in a language which is the language of men, in a male culture.
Aafke: I think it's quite complicated. From the children's point of view, you could say that the mother hardly exists at all as a sexual woman. But if the woman hardly even exists, why is everyone so frightened of her? Why is the mother such an important symbol in our culture?
Luce: Because it's the mother who's carried the child in her womb, who fed it, gave it warmth, who answered the baby's cries, who took the child in her arms, who caressed it. But besides that the mother also has to be a woman! So that children don't completely fuse with and disappear into the mother pole, but at the same time also see a person standing before them, in relation to whom they can determine their own position.
Kiki: And how can the mother be woman?
Luce: Through her relation with her lover and her relation with other women. And by having a sort of intimacy with herself.
Kiki: In an interview with Libération you said the same thing: that we have to conceive of our mothers as women.
Luce: Yes, recognising your mother as a woman means distancing yourself from motherly omnipotence. You recognise her as a finite person with limits, and not as the person you can ask everything of, to whom you can endlessly complain that she hasn't given you enough, on whom you can keep making demands or claims, to whom you can say: more, more, more. If you recognise her as a woman with her own limitations, it means you can also live with your own limitations. And let her experience infinity in her relation with her partner, in her sexuality. Or in the sublimation of that sexuality.
Kiki: In the same interview you also speak of avorter la mère, aborting the mother. What do you mean by that?
Luce: The traditional situation is: if my mother isn't a person, the only way to relate to her is to take her place. But if I take my mother's place, I don't have any relation to her. Either I don't exist, or she no longer exists. The same thing happens in rivalry among women, which is a frequent result of a bad relation with the mother. If you can't see your mother as having relations with other women, you abort her.
There's another thing, and I don't mention it just to pat myself on the back. I know women who've been able to reconcile themselves with their mother thanks to L'une ne bouge pas sans l'autre. It led them to start talking to each other. They began to talk a little about their sexuality. I believe that's very important. From the moment that you begin to talk with your mother about her sexuality, she starts to identify herself as a woman in relation to you. So the risk of fusion, of losing yourself, disappears. Perhaps remnants of that fusion will remain, but the risk decreases. If I understand her life as a woman, I don't have to take her place in order to become a mother. Besides, every woman -- and this is important to note -- is a potential mother. Giving birth to a child is absolutely an extraordinary event, but you can also `give birth' in your work or in your relations with others. You can mother your friends. You could say: just as the mother is also a woman, every woman, even if she doesn't actually bring forth a child, has a motherly dimension to her. You have to loosen that motherly dimension from material reproduction.
Kiki: Could you give a definition of female identity?
Luce: That's what I've spent my whole life doing! In our culture women aren't allowed to identify themselves as woman-lover. In love that role gets confused with reproduction. Thus, there's no place for the woman as lover and as loved. It's a matter of loving yourself and other women, and the mystery of sexual differences. That seems to me to be a great mystery; the difference between man and woman. At the moment I'm writing an article about Emmanuel Levinas. He speaks very well about love. He says that in caressing, and in making love, the man comes to stand at the edge of an abyss. He becomes anxious about returning to the womb. And he asks the woman to be a prostitute...
What I think is the most important to reveal now is the discovery of the woman as lover, and of the couple as a loving couple. The couple that shapes the world.
Aafke: When you refer to a loving couple, do you mean particularly a man and a woman?
Luce: I think that man and woman is the most mysterious and creative couple. That isn't to say that other couples may not also have a lot in them, but man and woman is the most mysterious and creative.
Aafke: Does that include the concept of a couple which is permanent, who stay together for life?
Luce: No, that's the moralists (laughs). One of the most important things now is working to change the couple relationship. You could also imagine a couple who play a role in political power. Do you understand what I'm saying: people who are sexually different and who create a different relation to the world. Perhaps that could happen in the future.
I often think that reproduction becomes a hindrance. By forcing couples to reproduce they are prevented from being creators of the world. To have a child you first have to love each other, to create a living fabric of love between each other. There has to be a communal home. It's something you make with your love, with your body.
Kiki: You always put a lot of emphasis on touching, the skin. Do you think that's the most important facet of love?
Luce: You're always involved with the body, the skin. You also say: faire l'amour, make love. And further, you eat together, you talk together, you have various arrangements, but the most complete act is the love-act.I think there tend to be problems between people when a complete loveact hasn't taken place.
Making love with someone is like being re-born. If the love-act has really been completed, it's like being brought into the world anew. You lose yourself, in a certain sense, in the other, but the other also loses their-self in you. If the other is a man, he gives you something to drink, he gives his sperm, he feeds you with his desire. Sperm is often frowned upon. It's either being used to reproduce children, then it's une tdche, a task. Or it's something dirty, something you have to wipe away, une tâche, a stain. Whereas you can consider sperm as food, as eating, drinking, the gift of desire. And if you make love as a woman, there's also liquid. In the love-act you can return your birth to each other. And your death too, for that matter. There is no fusion, no disappearance, if everyone accepts their rebirth and their death.
We talk about types of orgasms. Irigaray says that the tissue of the outer lips constantly changes, becomes more or less soft, mucusy, porous. `Even within her genitals, a woman can experience different types of orgasms.' She believes that orgasm can last a day, or even two days. `Isn't it then difficult to concentrate on anything else?' we ask, slightly surprised. `On conducting an interview, yes, not on my writing.' We say, `Surely women don't only have a flowing, polymorphous, endless sexuality. Surely they also have a nervous, powerful sexuality which contains some violence and tension, which wants to release itself.' Luce: `Freud sees the male sexual model as a model of tension and release, as a physical process. In my opinion male sexuality doesn't fit into that model very well, but female sexuality far less so.' Aafke: `But don't you believe that there's a relation between the life you lead and the type of sexuality you have? In a working situation with a lot of pressure and haste you have a tenser sexuality than when you lead an easy-going life.' Luce: `And where will that lead you to, this double tension? To a world war? If you fall back onto that sort of sex, that kind of life, you'll spend all your time in a shell, in a panzer. Then you'll have a harnessed sexuality. For me that's not female sex. It can be amusing and it can also be useful. But for me sexuality is also letting myself go, surrender.'
Aafke: Many feminists see androgyny as the solution to their problems...
Luce: A temporary, and slightly hypocritical solution.
Aafke: Why?
Luce: Do you have to become androgynous to have the right as a woman to think? Then you endlessly reproduce the society which exploits women, in which the only identity women have is to be stupid. The little woman, njam, njam, njam. Androgyny means to me that you've got the two poles of sexual difference within you, and so you don't need the other: neither as someone who's different, nor the other as infinite. Even though at a certain moment androgyny can be a stage, you still have to be careful. It just leaves things as they are. Unfortunately androgyny is often used to prevent women from gaining a positive identity. So at best you, as a woman, could become androgynous. But do you see the mother as androgynous?
Aafke (after a pause): No, you're right. You can see the mother as a woman, but as an androgynous person -- no.
Kiki: What about sexual relations between women: do you think that you can have a deeper relation with a woman than with a man?
Luce: I've already said the opposite. If you ask me the question like that, then I'll say: it is deeper (laughs) with a man (she's poking fun). I've never been able to fuse with another woman.
But what you can sometimes discover with a woman...in the first place you rediscover and re-experience the mother relation anew. That's very shocking. And further, there's -- but you can also experience it with men -- a great physical tenderness. And there's a sort of complicity.
What I regret is that our society operates too much in alternatives. Either you love a man or a woman. On the basis of some texts people say that I only love women. And sometimes I'm accused of loving men. Why does society pose that alternative? I believe that you can love the difference, but only if you're also able to love those who are the same as yourself. Whatever form love takes. Loving a woman, feeling sympathy, warmth, affection for a woman hasn't destroyed my love for men. On the contrary.
Aafke: I've read parts of your book Le Langage des déments. It's written very academically.
Luce: The academic researchers are also very pleased with it. They're a lot less satisfied with Spéculum de l'autre femme. But now I much prefer to write texts in which I'm in harmony with myself, with my inner life. Not long ago I met with some women scientists. I tried to explain to them that every time they work in their laboratory, that they then have to cut themselves up in pieces because they have to use a language which has nothing to do with the language they use when they love. Of course I can produce a logical text, and those signatures, Luc or Luce, no one notices the difference. But I'd rather `create' something else.
Aafke: But is there such a thing as écriture feminine? In the women's bookshop here in Paris we saw a beautifully produced book by Irma Garcia. It's called Promenade Femmilière, Recherches sur l'écriture féminine. Three volumes in a dust cover. The third volume was empty, so that women could write their own écriture féminine. It seems rather commercial.
Luce (hesitant): When you start talking about écriture féminine, you run the risk of putting woman once again in her place as an object, just when she's barely begun to approach being a subject. I believe that it's important that women dare to express themselves, in all their dimensions, but also that they don't immediately get imprisoned in literature or on the fringe.
Kiki: Don't you call your writing écriture féminine?
Luce (laughing): I don't call! I write! What I can say is that my writing is consonant and continuous with my manner of loving. And my manner of loving differs, it's always different...I keep discovering, partly through the affective, loving relations with other women, the mystery of sexual difference.
I believe that women write differently because they have a different sexuality. You can sometimes make love and constantly stay in the same state for 24 or 48 hours. And in the meantime you still have to go on with living, which is a little difficult. But after that I can also get back to work. Only I don't write the same things. I write books which are closer to...you could say that it's a creation out of the love-act. And if I don't make love I have a lot of difficulty in creating something.
Aafke: I think that often women have more personality than men. Many women see men as children, as boys who aren't adult and who get involved in the wrong things. And that's odd, because in the powerful institutions, the political world, the economy, the financial world, women hardly participate at all. But at the same time women look on the men placed there as little boys who play with gadgets.
Luce: I don't really understand what you're trying to say.
Aafke: There's a contradiction there. You can't both be afraid of men, who have so much power, and also look on them as little boys.
Luce: Your words contain a mixture of the objective and the subjective. You confuse social and psychological explanations. Perhaps social life is indeed constructed in that way: men with their governments, their costumes, their presentation, exercise power in their work. And at the same time they want a home in which they can be the little boy. But it's impossible to regard someone who lays down the law as a little boy! Impossible!
Aafke: But if you look at Reagan, on television, or in photos, you see a fool.
Luce (vehemently): But it's easy to say that he's an odd fool! That's a nice description, and perhaps not incorrect, but those people make vital decisions with their power! You can use psychoanalytic categories to say that he's a little child, but I don't agree. They have the fate of the world in their hands!
Aafke: Psychoanalysis is very popular at the moment. Psychological insight is increasing, but it surprises me that there's very little work done on the psychoanalysis of political behaviour. We're living in such a tense political situation, which strikes at the root of individuals' lives.
Luce: Unfortunately psychoanalysts don't make that connection often enough. Often one finds that if you take part in politics, that you aren't a good analyst. For myself I believe that psychoanalysis has the means -- but you have to be careful with it -- to analyse the subjective reasons for a social crisis.
It's as if analysts don't want to dirty their hands on politics. And as if politics repels psychoanalysis. And as well, analysis must stay outside the social arena, so that people can continue talking in secret.
