Helen of Troy under the Female’s Gaze

Part of psychoanalysis is about coming into contact with multiplicities of meaning—of seeing the layers within oneself and one’s community and understanding both their independence and interdependence. As Dr. Charles’s piece posits, it is impossible to completely extricate the male gaze and the patriarchy of language from psychoanalysis. Women and men alike are taught to imagine

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the subject behind the de facto gaze as male; the appearance of things takes precedence, even in our efforts to get underneath.

Psychoanalysis, too, can be oversimplified as “talk therapy,” giving verbal language primacy; we can argue that nonverbal interaction is as much, if not more, a part of understanding the unconscious. However, even those who subscribe to that premise are forced to rely on words for much of the dyadic interaction. This is problematic because language, in its construction, inherent power dynamics, and transactional nature, is also rooted in patriarchy, as well as the false premise that it is direct and factual. In fact, it is better described as obscuring and subjective. For what is language but a system of arbitrary signifiers for those things we want to signify to others in an effort to make meaning? Thus, the extent of our connection through language is always an approximation at best.

In reading the story of Diana and the golden apples, I associate to the story of Helen of Troy, a figure in Greek mythology who, depending on the version of the story, draws her power from both the purity of the virgin and the uncontained sexuality of the dynamo. The idea (and the allure) of one woman holding elements of both the virgin and the dynamo is one steeped in patriarchy, internalized by women, and ever-present in psychoanalytic theory, the dynamics of the consultation room, and heteronormative culture at large. Like Homer and Aeschylus relating Helen’s story, we struggle to make sense out of how to integrate what has been commoditized, valued, and denigrated about women: their virtue, bodies, and unrestrained sexuality.

Helen, beautiful and fickle, is often said to have fallen in love with Paris; she then abandons Menelaus and runs away to Troy—thus, the face that launched 1,000 ships, literally responsible for starting a war. However, if we approach from the side, engaging with the fact that her story is one based in a patriarchal oral and written tradition, we recall there is always a subtext, another perspective, another story. Helen’s fate begins with Eris, the goddess of discord who, angry over being snubbed at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, throws the golden apple of discord—inscribed with the phrase “for the most beautiful”—into the wedding, causing a quarrel between Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Paris is asked to judge who of the three is most deserving of the title and, amongst the bribes offered, he rejects power and wisdom in favor of the possession of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. In this less romantic version, Helen is compelled by Aphrodite to accompany

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Paris to Troy, forced to love him against her own will. Interestingly, this is the second time Helen’s fate is not her own, for her marriage to Menelaus is the result of straws that are drawn, a strategy her father, Agamemnon, devised.

The questions of one’s complicity versus autonomy and the slipperiness of how our stories are told are aspects present in any therapy, but they are particularly present in therapeutic encounters in which women seek to better understand who they are and the choices—if they are indeed choices in some cases—that they have made. This is the power of a psychoanalytic toolbox with the emphasis on uncovering, on looking for the non-dominant story and recognizing that as important as the story told in the moment is, the story left unexpressed and silent, perhaps transmitted in some other way, perhaps not.

Ernest Hemingway, a figure who the dominant text tells us is a man revered for his masculinity and conformity to patriarchy (though scholarship has revealed he was a person with a much more complicated relationship to sexuality and gender) argued that, when writing, that which was most significant, most moving, should be left out of the written text; he argued that it was its absence, its silence, its inability to be conveyed in words, that announced its salience and importance. In my own life I have grappled with the intersections of these tensions—I have strained against the dominant story assigned to my life. I have communicated the most significant events in my life by honoring the ways in which they defy words and I have challenged myself to embrace them both/and of my field.

In pursuing psychoanalytically-informed work as a patient or clinician, one is simultaneously complicit in a system that has been and continues to be oppressive. At the same time, we are also doing work that is especially suited to bringing a voice to the marginalized, as the emphasis on the alternate point of approach demonstrates that the dominant, straight-on gaze is often the least direct and the most fantastic. In holding this tension and approaching from the side, we remember that we all carry multiple stories of our lives, none wholly true or false, all there to be uncovered and yet never fully uncoverable, all there to be told and yet never fully speakable.

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