On the Natal Body and Its Confusing Place in Mental Life

Abstract

These reflections concern ongoing confusions in holding together the gestalt of the natal body, sex, gender, and procreation. Highlighting theoretical confusions is the shifting history of relations among the material body, the “psychoanalytic body,”:sex, and gender. Studying these confusions and collecting more data may help the field advance where a rush to theoretical foreclosure will not. Observe, for example, how commonly foreclosing are the terms “masculine” and “feminine” when automatically applied to the merely biological attributes of a sexed body. More confusions arise from theorizing gender identity using split-off images of body parts divorced from any natal referent. In a published clinical case, for instance, the role of the procreative body is characteristically ignored in gender theorizing. Apparently unspeakable horrors of the female body come with its birthing potential and may be a motive for erasure. Julia Kristeva, an exemplary writer, accepts simultaneously a sexed, procreative, and gendered layering in the mind. Her account of the “abject” can shed light on the suppressive horror in our field, which remains almost silent on the body’s procreative potential in everyday life. By contrast, even Ice Age sculptors were engaged with procreative female bodies.