ABSTRACT
This chapter probes patriarchy's enduring stamp on psychoanalysis by revisiting the significance of its primal myth: the child's discovery of anatomical difference. By means of a re-reading of Freud's tale, an ironical metanarrative is revealed which exposes the subject's initiation into patriarchy and its masculinist symbolic economy. Psychoanalysis's failure to read the cautionary dimension of Freud's tale undermines its subversive, democratizing, and revolutionary calling, perpetuating instead its collusion with patriarchal forces. Yet, this chapter argues, in the spirit of Gerda Lerner's groundbreaking insistence that patriarchy is a human invention, that Freud's myth not only conceals but illuminates a path for shattering patriarchy's grip. The discovery of (sexual) difference—when not denied or eclipsed—recognizes and affirms an otherwise obscured feminine gap that holds significance as a foundational marker of ineradicable otherness. As a portal (between the Real and symbolic, the inconceivable and the conceivable) for the unappeasable alterity of desire and its passionate and eruptive tensions, this gap both grounds and destabilizes us, gesturing towards an emancipatory, egalitarian, and ethical democratizing praxis.
