The Ongoing Practice: “Analysis Groups” and “Subconscious Groups”

Lea Melandri

Among the unpublished materials documenting the early steps of the “analysis group” and then of the “practice of the subconscious” group, one document is titled Ongoing practice. It includes transcripts of meetings that had been recorded and transcribed in a reduced way. Names are replaced by initials (I will summarize and comment individual contributions).

Lu underlines the need to make psychoanalysis into a purely political device, devoid of other kinds of investment: “When women establish an analytical relation, they fill it with an abnormal meaning, an absolute value; the relation loses its instrumental quality, it becomes in reality what it is in the fantasy: the main affective experience. This induces the danger of losing sight of its political meaning.”

The point, here, is that the analytical relation is brought into the women’s movement with a specific political aim; but, it seems to me, that something deeper is at stake. It seems that the political meaning linked to this displacement of analysis should somehow strip analysis of its surplus of emotional significance. It is implied that what some participants wanted was to build a feminine discourse on sexuality and the symbolic dimension, rather than setting up a practice of the subconscious. Otherwise, there would be no way to make sense of the attempt to strip the analytical relation of its emotional investment, once we know that this consists in the reactivation of this removed substratum of experience. The “analysis group,” of which Lu is part, will actually work mainly towards theorization, a task which will involve only some participants.

E. says how the “analysis group” can set up a “politics of women” that could “make room for what doesn’t emerge within the traditional way of doing politics,” such as sexuality, symptoms, etc.

Lu sees transference as an obstacle: “From what I’ve heard, it seems to me that women tend to react to the analytical relation by enacting a ‘super transference’ making it a relation of absolute dependence. This is why we’re afraid of talking about our external analyses.”

Speaking in front of other women, within a political group, might set aside the patient’s absolute request for love and care. Here, too, the point is freeing analysis from a field thick with emotions, fantasies, dreams. It is as if what participants feared was analysis itself, with its load of fantasies and emotions, the stabilization of dependence and of the infantile requests primarily focused on motherhood. What must be controlled is the enormity ofwomen’s need for love. The comparison between traditional analysis and what the movement would like to start reveals how every peculiarity of analysis becomes something like an obstacle as soon as it is turned into a political practice.

Li: “Granting analysis a subversive meaning, practicing it in a different way, a more inventive one, so that women at last can be able to see themselves.” This choice has been made possible by the discourse on sexuality, seen as politically “central.” Analysis, too, isn’t merely the choice of a single group, but a “political perspective for the whole movement.”

Lu: at the beginning, she focused mainly on attacking the psychoanalytical institution, as well as discussing her own “specific ‘therapeutic’ problem: having to face the issue of homosexuality, and all the related conflicts.” Now, instead, she sees analysis just as one of the relations women have, whose fundamental characteristic is that it involves two women (not two figures, two roles, etc.). “How does this dual relation combine with the movement? What changes does it induce?” She then adds: “This relation has two facets, one dual and the other one collective, and as such it prevents any ideological simplification of our relationships. Listening to our subconscious prevents us from idealizing (seeing nothing but solidarity, empathy), it forces us to face the riddles, the roots of problems. This must crucially takes place among ourselves, not in a ‘calm private place.’”

Even though everyone underlines the need to go to the root of the conflict, they seem anxious to get rid of roles and gender figures, to see women instead of mothers and daughters. They also seem concerned with getting rid of the ideology that sees women as solidary and equals.

E. thinks of the group as a “third,” a “motherly person that receives without saying, almost shapeless.”

This hints at another form of transference: once a patient used to face-to-face analysis finds herself in a collective situation, her transference targets the group, which hence becomes a group-person, an “almost shapeless” motherly figure.

D.: “Another analytic relation would create a resistancy to what we’re already doing out here.”

Throughout this debate, some participants keep pointing out that analysis, as it is practiced within the movement, cannot be reconciled with personal analysis without generating friction; these positions, however, were hardly given any credit.

Lu objects that this concept of “resistance” is what prevents the analytical relation from becoming “omnipotent”: women invest too much in analysis, they make absolute requests, they see it as their sole relation, while doing it collectively allows it to be a little bit demythologized.

Li wonders how the group could ever be felt as a “shapeless, motherly image.” “Shouldn’t it be a third, or fourth, active party?”

Li is astonished by how the group-which she considers the place for politics, for the reconquered freedom of women-can be loaded with the same fantasies usually ascribed to transference. She wonders whether the presence within the group of an analyst and her analyzed patient doesn’t cause the two dimensions to overlap: tensions, fantasies, conflicts born within their private relation keep emerging in the group, looking for support and further investments, thereby hindering the process of analysis. The group-person, the “shapeless mother,” is already a fantastic construct of transference.

G. asks what she should do when a problem arises in her analytical relation with Lu. “Should I discuss it with her, and subsequently with the group?” Technically, this is the right solution, but it also grants the group the subordinate position.

A. points out that the dual relation is where things should be discussed in depth. But how does such relation enter the group? This is the central question that remains.

Lu notes that “the two dimensions are not in sequence, one after the other; they are in alternate moments.”

Here, too, the groups would rather see how the two dimensions display a sort of elastic connection of mutual freedom, rather than how they might interfere with each other.

G. is perplexed: if the priority is the dual relation, the group should be subordinated, “or else we’d have the prevalence of the ideology whereby it is in the group that we should discuss and verify things.” The group is inevitably accorded the traits of the controller, whose role is the verification of what happens in face-to-face analysis.

Lu: the real conflict is “having analytical relations outside the group.” Those who practice analysis within the movement have already accepted the two different logics, they have already lived them out: this is the solution.

Nobody wants to see contradictions or conflicts within the group. The obstacle is displaced out of it, so that all that remains is an “acceptance and a solution” of problems based on rationality and ideology.

G.: the third isn’t merely a fantasy, it exists, it is flesh and bones: it is the group.

Lu: we don’t have to give ourselves rules, we must let the two practices act freely.

A.: we need to have a line.

G.: “analysis is historically determined.” What they are doing here is “something therapeutic, but not analysis.” The need for knowledge prevails.

In retrospect, I can but agree with G. What the group carried out had undoubtedly much to do with therapy: something changed, some wounds and distant sufferings were healed; however, it was not analysis, but rather a cognitive process taking place within a very specific relation among women who were all very aware of what could hide behind such discourse.

Lu: “Why give names?” Lu and G. do analysis, the group does the “political work.”

Lu sees things as much simpler. This discussion seems to rest on the rational and abstract presupposition that the two dimensions don’t interfere with each other; psychic life and personal history seem to be wholly removed from politics.

Li: analysis is an invaluable tool to reach a deep knowledge and transformation of the self, but as of now it has no political dimension; the private sphere has political implications, but these need to be revealed. This is what the political practice of women can do, this is the reason of analysis among women. Personal motivations can therefore become subordinate to the political practice.

Li underlines the connections between personal life and political practice, but expects personal motivations to give up their primacy pretty soon; more importantly, it seems to her that only analysis among women could produce meaningful changes, thereby risking to become a norm.

I’d like to concentrate on this point, itself in the center of the discourse: analysis (Freud’s discovery, the analytical practice) is a tool which can actually cause an in-depth transformation of emotional life and sexuality; back then, however, self-awareness had led us to believe that personal lives, sufferings and histories, and bodily sicknesses, bear signs of a sequence of events which aren’t merely personal, but involve the history of civilization: the man-woman relation. Only the deformation caused by the historical dominance of man could have caused personal life to be considered as something uniquely specific to an individual.

We were discovering that the private had political implications; we verified it in the relation among sexes, in our emotional lives, in sexuality, in everything that had to do with the body. We only had to make such implications explicit, to name them, to grant them their place in history, thereby showing them outside of the sphere of what is seen as a personal sickness or limit. This was the great intuition, at the time. We initially thought that the only political tool that could make such a deep-rooted history clear was psychoanalytical practice and knowledge. But soon we had to realize the huge difficulties this led us to face.

While re-reading this today, I realize that one of the misunderstandings of this project was the desire to immediately turn it into a political tool, the need to transform the remote mother-daughter relation into a free relation between two women. The fantastic and emotional complexity of the original psychic event seemed a burden that had to be discarded as soon as possible. The analysis group was theorizing too hurriedly, in the attempt of quickly building a discourse on sexuality, and this resulted in some people within the group speaking instead of some others. The authority principle is immediately accepted as soon as someone says, “we need to theorize,” since those already familiar with theory inevitably become the group’s reference point. Also prevalent was the worry that personal motivations might prevail over political aims. However—as we will see in the Pinarella conferences—the need for total love, or for the other’s total confirmation, was still strong, and clashed against the need for a wider political engagement. That was one of the toughest issues to face, and its solution was what later prompted the group’s division.

Bi: “Are we privileging the analytical relations within the movement, or simply women analysts?”

Lu: “It is important to bring within the movement the discourse on subconscious, to acquire it as a specific practice: it can be proposed by those who practice analysis within the movement, by those who do it outside of it, and even by those who have no analytical relations whatsoever; the point is regaining possession of this knowledge, of this practice.” Lu sees a new possibility in the relations between women, once they are freed from the moral imperatives of mutual love and sympathy. To avoid ideal constructions they had to get rid of that superficial need to be in solidarity and to avoid conflicts. In patients’ accounts, women analysts appeared as figures of the male society, basically as mothers.

Here, Lu implies that in analytical relations within the feminist movement the central role of the motherly figure, a construct of the male culture, withered and vanished. Since the possibility of analytical practice has revealed the obscure areas of the relations between sexes, and hence the infantile background of the relations between women-unknown bonds between nature and culture, which have served as a model for the destinies of men and of women —what is underlined, here, is the need to gain possession and use of that knowledge and practice. More importantly, however, what is now emerging and will subsequently become a crucial theme in the discussion is how the analytical practice could lead to reconsider the need for solidarity and idealization in the relations between women, reducing the filial demand for love and thereby the predominance of the motherly figure, freeing women from the complex contradictions of emotions and fantasies; it seemed that merely changing the situation in which analysis was carried out could lead to a turnaround of sorts: in the relation with an analyst from the movement, for instance, the motherly figure should not appear, since it was seen as belonging to the ideological constructs of the male society. But this figure is deeply enrooted within ourselves, in a background that can’t be wholly ascribed to
the historical and cultural constructions of man. Everyone was concerned with getting rid of the viscosity of the mother-daughter relation, of the egalitarian and supportive components of our self-awareness that had to be reinterpreted, but not erased with such violence. The need of getting rid of maternal and filial feelings, seen as a hindrance to the development of other relations (sexuality, money) will be clearly stated in the final part of the Pratica dell’inconscio e movimento delle donne1 (Practice of the Subconscious and Women’s Movement) document. The point would then be to allow for the emergence of what we have historically always considered masculine-
power, aggressiveness, disparity, seduction-not just to analyze it, but to make it live.

D. says she lives every relation as a mother-daughter relation, even with men.

Lu: “What we’re looking for is a new possibility of relating to a woman and to women without thereby entering the universe of the male society, composed of fathers and mothers. Getting rid of parental figures in the relations among women, getting rid of the imaginary constellations of patriarchy.”

The abstractness of this line of reasoning lies in the conviction that a relation among women could immediately be freed from the roles and figures on which men and women have been constructed. It is clear, here, that inner life and a millennial cultural heritage represent an obstacle, a swamp which is increasingly hard to escape. For others, such as myself, the analytical practice and knowledge meant investigating the roots of the historical construction of man, its subconscious foundation, to understand why the two sexes had confused their destinies so much, and the reason of the reconciling force implicit within the differentiation of complementarity, a sort of unification of opposites.

Self-awareness, at the very beginning of the construction of socialization among women, had already shown how dreams and fantasies hid behind sexuality and emotions: a dark experiential matter that had to be exposed and named, not merely controlled. Analysis helped us understand how relations between women leave room for conflict, aggression, power: to everything we have ascribed to the male world, and which seems to be just as enrooted in ours. Disparity, for instance, is something we had set out to fight: acknowledging it is one thing, but accepting it as given, and as fundamental to the existence of relations is a totally different thing. It would amount to saying that power and disparity, within the relations among women, lose the painful and objectionable character they have in the society of men.

What follows is a brief discussion of the two situations—the dual relation and the collective relation—in which some participants question their overlapping.

Li talks of the political importance of joining two different experiences and logics.

Lu adds: “The analytical relation enables us to bear all the terrible, heavy, negative and self-destructive aspects of how a woman sees herself and the other women.”

The use of a term such as “bear,” the ambiguity it implies, is particularly interesting to underline. Bearing the “terrible aspects” could mean accepting them and building a socialization among women that includes, with an opposite signs, all real and symbolic forms of power which we historically consider as male. But we had set out to the task with the idea that egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism were a value, even if we knew what we were fighting against in a certain historical moment could have seemed very acceptable in another.

Bi wonders: is the whole point the spreading of analysis?

M.: if we bring about this sort of “change,” every system of relations will change, even for people who are not in analysis. (The idea was that two or three such experiences could sparkle a chain reaction of change even for women who hadn’t tried analysis.)

Le: “The analytical relation within the movement is itself a new political fact.”

R.: sexuality can’t be understood through books alone, it must be faced with a specific practice such as analysis.

Le: “I don’t see how a face-to-face analytical relation could be reinforced by the presence of both in the group, the analyst and the analyzed; this simultaneous presence is a dramatic problem; their relation’s essence is a disparity, a difference, since this is what the sought transformation is based upon. This disparity, albeit functional to their relation, how can it enter a group, where no disparity should be accepted?”

I kept insisting on how valuable was the absence of power and disparity in a collective situation, while in face-to-face analysis it is somehow inevitable.

Li: these years’ political practice has shown how relations between women are all but egalitarian. There is dependence, there is the attribution of power, there is violence. We want to face these issues setting aside the ideology of equality between all women.

In retrospect, the ambiguities which would originate the subsequent divergent choices are more evident. Li was right in pointing out that we all wanted to face those issues; self-awareness had shown us how the relations among women were characterized by everything that we had always condemned and ascribed to the male world—dependence, violence, attribution of power, etc.—we wanted to enact a deep transformation of these behaviors. Getting rid of the egalitarian ideology, as Li remarks, would have been a viable path only if it amounted to “getting out of idealization”; it became objectionable—and actually on this point there would be disagreements, later on—if what it meant was “letting those aggressive impulses act freely” because sexuality, even among women, is made of violence and not only of tenderness. The same is true for money. I have to admit that if we hadn’t given room to these issues, even though we starkly criticized them, we wouldn’t have accomplished anything. The same problems were faced by the “Gervasia Broxon”2 cooperative, for instance, a project evolved out of 150-hour courses, which involved around fifty women and lasted ten years, between 1976 and 1986: the relation between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, money, professional competence, complementarity, etc. But we persisted in analyzing these issues, even when this was conflicting with professional education. Professional knowledge lost its role, stopped functioning; bodily and sexual problems didn’t tolerate abstract languages, so that the measurement of a perimeter could require women to stand in circle holding hands, in an attempt to directly bring the body within knowledge. Their lives were in closer contact than ours with those issues: they were mothers, while none of us was, they had knowledge about some aspects of life which we didn’t have; we have learned something from each other, but this is easier said than done. Complementarity seemed to imply an ideal unity which contrasted with the need for autonomy. Seeing and naming these issues, and subsequently deciding there was no longer a need to analyze them, is different, however from establishing a healthy authority principle that would have solved all conflicts.

Bi: “The dependence from an analyst, within the group, could turn upside down.”

This actually happened: within the group, the analyst hushed while the patient spoke a lot; some situations did, as a matter of fact, turn upside down.

Lu doesn’t seem to be worried by this: “This prevents fixation. The patient and her fantastic attributions feel no awkwardness inside the group: this happens to the analyst, to her fantasies. The analyst doesn’t want to cast doubt on her power, her prestige”, and therefore, according to Lu, the capsizing is more than welcome, since it reduces the analyst’s power.

Once again, this line of reasoning is missing the particular characteristics of analysis: enabling the reenactment of roles, dependence, attributions of power, in order to change them. This sort of capsizing within the group, subsequently became an obstacle to analysis itself, or anyway made it harder. Lu seems to see in an analyst only her function’s power and prestige, instead of someone who adapts to the other’s imaginary pre-history to allow things to be changed.

Le is convinced that the two levels cannot be welded together. The dual relation is more meaningful: its overlap with the collective one is an ideological imposition. The dual relation must allow for the reenactment of the violence every woman’s history is characterized by, it must give rise to fantastic attributions, it must swing between invention and norm. The group, on the other hand, leaves no room for disparity.

Li sees in Le’s words a need for rules, and an attempt to control analysis: refusing the second situation, the collective one, amounts to being an analyst according to institutional rules, though enriched by the movement’s new ideas, to subsequently use within the groups the knowledge acquired through analysis. Maintaining the division between the two situations means keeping them tied to traditional analysis, even more: who does the analysis makes the movement’s knowledge productive, one capitalizes it to subsequently apply within the group what one has learned through analysis. The group must then control these power mechanisms.

Le has the feeling that the group’s aim is denying analysis.

My feeling was, at the time, that the political stance of collectively verifying a dual analysis relation was nothing more than an attempt to neutralize the effects of analysis itself, to empty it of its specifics.

Li: “The need for analysis comes from women within the group; the only ones rejecting it are those who act as analysts, and do so to defend analysis itself.”

In fact, it was the group who wanted to manage and somehow control analysis, while those who didn’t accept the overlapping of the two situations were accused of trying to reproduce the psychoanalytical institution. This already hints at a division among us, as it is apparent in the document that would have been published in L’erba voglio in 1974, under the title “Pratica dell’ inconscio e movimento delle donne” (Practice of the Subconscious and Women’s Movement). This featured no names at all: each of us had written
a piece, which had been later assembled with the others.

This discussion summarizes the whole “practice of the subconscious” project, which in retrospect can be considered not really as an analytical practice, so much as a way to underline every connection between sexuality and woman-to-woman relations, every deep interplay of desire and conflict in the hate-love a woman feels for another woman. Undoubtedly, the discourse on sexuality and homosexuality could emerge specifically because of our effort to scratch at every rational and ideological construction grounded on it.

The effects were more apparent throughout the conferences than in the two analysis groups, since the latter’s experimentation lasted less time. I refer, more specifically, to the meeting held in Milan’s Circolo De Amicis in 1975, Sessualità, maternità, procreazione, aborto3, and to the two national conventions at Pinarella di Cervia, first in November 1974, and later in November 1975. Such occasions showed how an in-depth investigation of the subconscious root of the woman-to-woman relation could lead our thought to display an extraordinary ability at moving erratically, continuously shifting between dream and lucid analysis. I believe, reread today, that these are the most singular qualities (the most unique aspects) of those collective moments which  had the strength of (overcoming) each history’s particularities of revealing the names that had always been hidden in individual lives. This ability had been applied both to theory and to political action: the three aforementioned conferences can be seen as the practice’s most meaningful outcome; as usual, situations specifically devoted to experimentation are of little meaning by themselves, and, when experienced, are much more confused than they seem from outside.

“Pratica dell’ inconscio e movimento delle donne” (Practice of the Subconscious and Women’s Movement) was published on L’erba voglio no. 18/19, October ‘74 – January ‘75. Since its earlier cyclostyled version, some changes have been made: some issues no longer appear, some others are presented as ex-post impressions following the 1974 Pinarella conference. The documents are made of various parts, written by different people whose names, however, don’t appear.

The need to “translate the analytical relation within the movement” is motivated as follows: “Our struggle for freedom has encountered a problematic issue: sexuality, the body. If we don’t want to avoid it with an ideological expedient, we must necessarily come to terms with psychoanalysis. There aren’t so many ways to develop a specific knowledge, and enable the transformation, of sexuality.” This, however, results in a critique of the psychoanalytical institution, seen as hierarchical and power-centered. Transference is considered as a tool to allow for the emergence of the “invisible violence,” and hence as necessary to understand why women, after being dispossessed of everything, have resorted to exerting the same violence on themselves and other women. The document points out the need for a “practice” that could touch “dreams and subconscious fantasies,” to understand why so many women resist feminism. Self-awareness groups, moreover, had seen behind solidarity an increase in “unsaid” and “unanalyzed” “experiential residues,” which could risk becoming the new “private life” behind politics. The major impulse, however, derives from the renewed familiarity among women, which “reactivates and empowers the daughter-mother relation,” complicated by love, hate, desire and aggressiveness: all this obstructs the need to build an ideal unity within groups. This original event, once removed, resurfaces as a “dissonant personal history,” as a wall of silence, of solitude dividing the individual woman from the group. At this point, either personal analysis is sought as a sort of shelter, or the movement’s organization is strengthened. What is needed, then, is a theory encompassing both subjective experience as well as the influence exerted by the history and culture of sexuality. More attention to subconscious processes is needed not only to avoid the groups’ break-up, or an escape within the purely political, but because they are crucial to the repetition that can drive towards change. The point, then, is not the construction of a feminist psychoanalytical school, but of a practice through which the psychoanalytical tradition can be “re-read” so as to invent methods for an “experience-based theoretical research.” They insist on the need to avoid the resurfacing, within groups, of dependence, submission, leadership, authority, power and hierarchy.

The new sociality which is developing among women allows for the resurfacing of the daughter’s demand of love from the mother, with all of its ambiguities. This is why “the present is loaded with a previous history which must be reconstructed if we don’t want to be trapped in it.” “Homosexuality” is seen as a primary relation common to all women, a form of desire directed to the mother. “Penis envy”—the desire to penetrate and possess one’s mother instead of a man, giving her a child, etc.— is seen in relation to sexuality. The contrasting feelings between a woman and other women are ascribed to the male gaze that has succeeded in dividing them and putting them one against the other. It is little wonder that relations between women can give rise to a “possessive and authoritarian masculinity.”

The 1974 Pinarella conference, seen through some of its participants’ dreams, shows how woman-to-woman relations, especially when living communally, often reactivate the motherly “phantasm” in its double face of “ideal good mother” and “threatening mother” (“clear and crystalline marine waters,” “towering waves”). This is evidence that “the group needs to face the impossible relation to one’s mother.”

In some passages, the document clearly refers to Lacan: “We consider the relation to one’s mother on a symbolic layer, and in one way or another conclude that the penis-phallus is somehow the organizational center of both the mother’s and the daughter’s desire.” The idealization of woman-to-woman relations is strongly criticized, as is the effort to keep aggressiveness out of the picture, since this prevents (censors) also every erotic impulse “entangled” in it (“doesn’t this exclude something repressed that has always been forbidden to women?”). Allowing for the emergence of aggressiveness would enable the “perception” of the “mother-woman’s pleasure and desire” “besides everything that has been said and that we could still say” (the mother’s desire for the child-penis, the daughter’s desire to possess a penis like the father, etc).

A term such as “besides” implies the existence of a feminine desire, sexuality, or pleasure independent from the phallus. The “symbolic layer” is outlined as an order of meaning independent from the bodily reality of feeling and psychological experience. “At the edge” of the names we give things there is supposed to be something like a virgin landscape, already given. Within the woman-mother’s “mute body,” considered “independently” from the “filial relation”—“a censored and blocked-out body”—one perceives “sexual impulses and desires” left untouched, covered by the “ideological shroud.”

The woman-mother’s desire for the man-son, the little girl’s “penis envy” would then be only effects of a disguise induced by male culture, the “veil” derived from an order of meanings and languages imposed by the man, and not the material form that desire has taken, for unexplained reasons, which are unconsciously mixed: biological conditions, (birth, escape from animality), deep psychic stratifications, culture and history. The “materiality” discussed in the document’s final part would then be what is “censored” by the body, by sexuality, something that has been left “behind the veil, beside language, and that could resurface with all of its autonomy and authenticity.”

Criticism is mainly aimed against the “ideal tension” that seems to dominate the women’s groups, in an attempt to see the good side in their mothers-traditionally “feminine” components such as sweetness, solidarity, “feeling well among women”—while they seem hardly concerned by looking at “the abyss of our own aggressiveness” thinking it might “enclose or entrap the erotic impulses.”

Less attention is paid to the “invisible violence”, to subconscious fantasies and processes which bear traces-materialized as symptoms, as sicknesses, as daydreams (love dreams), as hysteria-of the abstract, deforming figures of the masculine and the feminine (activity-passivity, empty-full, etc.), which have become, both in fantasies as well as in imposed social roles, the essence of man and woman, their “differences,” their relations. The “feminine” trait is rejected, as it is considered paralyzing; the “masculine” one (aggressiveness) is accepted in woman-to-woman relations as impulse towards the emergence of a “desire” and a sexuality that do not seem to need any further analysis or modification.

The main object of rejection is then a view of the feminine as censored, passive, dependant on the man. Sexual dualism, which could have been investigated and changed through the practice of the subconscious, is enacted instead of being seen, in ways not unlike those in which “virility” affirms itself. Homosexuality, a woman’s love for another woman, seen as a desire primarily aimed at the mother’s body-a source of nourishment and pleasure during the infancy, but also a place inhabited by the man-seems to lose its ambivalence and dramatic importance as soon as the “woman-mother” is considered “independently from the filial relation,” becoming a sort of specific “joy” deriving from the regained feminine sexuality.

_

Discussion

ALBA: You have discussed analysis as a political tool, and the movement in general has been repeating that “the private is political.” I wonder if, in retrospect, you can consider the feminist movement per se as a political movement, instead of as a social movement with political implications. In other words, has there ever been this true overlapping of private and political, or has it been sought and theorized, but actually obtained only in a few specific occasions, such as in the 1975 demonstrations for abortion, family law, etc.?

LEA: Surely many other people like me have thought, back then, that they could radically question politics, starting an investigation of the private life, the body, sexuality and the relations between sexes which wouldn’t be considered from a merely social and economical perspective. We initially claimed, somewhat triumphantly, that “this is already politics,” to underline our conviction that, as soon as something confined in nature resurfaces, a different idea of history, culture and politics is born. Some of us women still considered politics only in its institutional form-parties, or extra-parliamentary groups. There were deep separations between those who, while maintaining their traditional engagement, felt that feminism brought about something totally different, the rediscovery of a whole landscape of problems which rightfully belonged to history and culture and that as such had always
secretly influenced political action. The investigation of “nexuses,” however, of connections between the different layers of reality-sexuality and economics, individuals and collectives-hasn’t been easy for feminism. Today, I have a better understanding of the complex relations between the movements and the institutions of social life, but I will still consider “politics” a practice which has brought back to history an experiential material that for thousands of years had been confined within personal histories, a way of being together and developing projects that remains sensitive to deep modifications in the way women relate to each others. Undoubtedly, though, over the past fifteen years the term “politics” has turned back to the meaning it has always had, it has become more and more institutional.

ALBA: When you talk about this kind of concrete experience, you always sort of give them for granted. What my experience is missing is even the fantasies of concrete practices among women, so, for instance, what I would like is a more explicit explanation of the experience of the “Gervasia Broxon” cooperative in Affori.

LEA: Where there are written accounts, we should make use of them. A book has been published by Utopia, Rome, in 1987: Verifica d’identità (Identity Check). In it we have reconstructed the cooperative’s history; it also includes the writings of many participants.

EMMA: Your aim, Lea, seems pretty brave: returning to history an erased matter; it amounts to saying that the feminine discourse transcends the lived experience of individual women or groups thereof. I remember that, in the ‘70s, while participating in collective moments I always felt them as parallel lines; the emotional tension, however, was so strong that some degree of contamination surely took place.

ALBA: Emma is insisting on an issue we had already faced: the difference of context between we who speak here-involved in a relation which is not informed by practices of self-awareness or of the subconscious-and past experiences. I feel now a significant gap between the way we imagine communication to have been back then—hidden, predominant or unheard voices—and the way we had decided to tackle the issue now; it seems hard, in today’s conditions, to activate the inner affective resonances that these themes then provoked. I have trouble following my own thought, I don’t know what to focus my attention on: how can we reflect-here and now-on something some of us have participated in, and some others haven’t?

MIA: I think that, if we want to grant actuality to a discourse and a practice, that had played a revolutionary role in reevaluating politics, we have to start once again from issues connected to lived and bodily experience.
I believe that the current perspective on the body, in whatever way one chooses to discuss the topic, is lacking Eros.

ANNAMARIA: The problem is that today we are much more “disembodied” than we were back then; the biggest difficulty is finding our own bodies and desires, which at the time could surface from the ongoing practice. That is what originated some initiatives that have had a strong social impact, for instance in schools. I have experienced a revolution within a school institution, carried out by forty-four people with all of their differences and over three hundred children; I have even been able to publish its results on news outlets such as Scuola italiana moderna, which was one of the most traditionalist specialized publications.

We had ten classes which were no longer split into five grades, bur organized according to the comprehension level in mathematics and Italian; besides that, there were collective moments in which we could discuss our roles, and the way we could reach objectively verifiable evaluations; to this aim, we weekly traded our classes so as to be able to control each other: this also allowed us to grow. I think it was then that I truly learned how to teach, through this continuous operation of dialogue and construction. Most of all, the starting point of everything were concrete bodies moving alongside each other, a discourse on equality that didn’t deny differences.

VOICES: Today, we’re all dead!

VOICES: No, we aren’t all dead: we are disembodied, it’s different, death is much better, at least it’s relaxing . . .

protests: No—it’s stiffening—no, it’s relaxing!

ANNAMARIA: At times I wonder what our desires are, today; the framework in which we move has shifted: what can allow us to understand whether our actions are correct, good and bad? We’re the ones who decide, there is no shared common sense as there used to be.

LAURA B.: I have the feeling that some interventions are actually proposals for new topics. There could be an infinite amount of these: for instance, remaining on a traditional vein for women, such as the relation to the man, I’d really be interested to analyze this issue in self-awareness, after entire life, thirty years, I could also have something more to say. I am terrorized by the absence of female voices.

MARGHERITA: I have come with a specific need: hearing once again from your voice, Lea, the voice of a protagonist, an experience to which I have participated. The young girls here have expectations concerning your work, but they all expect something different. I’d like to understand if there is a way to combine them. I have come here because I feel for you, because I was curious, because I wanted to understand the meaning of your proposal, but also because, as all of us have noticed, it’s hard to depict now what happened then. All in all, this research of yours in which we’re being involved has raised
a pretty thorny issue, and I see no possible outcome.

ANNA: May I dissent? I have no expectation, to me this is already political work. As for outcomes, they’d sure be welcome: but my point, here, was understanding, not only remembering.

DANIELA: I’d like to read out some reflections I’ve written: The wild bunch.

In all simplicity, the teacher of a course on female friendship held at the Women’s University has told us the course will also be her way of mourning a dead friend.

I wonder if this is also the reason why Lea has gathered us all: only that here we’re not sure of who’s dead.

We know, though, he was someone important: he was one of those meetings that change your life, and subsequently leave a void that’s impossible to fill. We know he raised scandal, since he uncovered nudities; we know he was jealous, possessive, asked for the sacrifice of important relationships. But he was a young, enthusiastic lover, who penetrated the secrets of your vagina and your mind, who penetrated pleasure and fears, and who could be tender: he made us dance.

I never allowed him to discover me: I always preferred dark cinemas to the limelight of other women’s eyes: it was there that I feasted over the male imagery, western and war movies.

So, if I was asked, now, to visually represent that long lost lover, the feminism of the ‘70s (at least as I have seen it through these accounts), I couldn’t but link it to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, to that extraordinary gang of outlaws that people greeted with flowers, with eyes full of fear and admiration, and hope: because they knew that only from them, from the Wild Bunch, revolution could come.

Peckinpah’s rebels are all dead, now; I no longer remember what their last battle was for. What about ours?

How did our wild bunch die? Did it turn into orderly groups? Did it shatter in a thousand shards that carry on living by themselves?

And still I’d like to be able to summon him once again in its entirety; but I’d have to become an outlaw myself, I’d have to ask Lea to let us fill the silences, overlap our voices, commenting every reading on the spot; to let us live, for one night, for one hour, what she has lived, what some of you have lived. I know it’s impossible, it is not the time and place, we are no longer the same. What could I say, today, to a young lover I once rejected? . . . That I miss him.

1. Alcune Femministe Milanesi, Pratica dell’inconscio e movimento delle Donne (Milan: F. Angeli, 2002).

2. On the experience of the “Gervasia Broxon” cooperative, cf. Paola Melchiorri (ed.), Verifica di identità. Materiali, esperienze, riflessioni sul fare cultura tra donne (Rome: Utopia, 1987).

3. Symposium, Sessualità, maternità, procreazione, aborto, Circolo de Amicis, Milan, 1975.

Translated from Italian by Vincenzo Latronico