Feminization (pousse-à-la-femme)

Feminization (pousse-à-la-femme) names the specific trajectory by which Schreber's psychotic reconstruction of subjectivity takes the form of an assumption of the feminine position in relation to God. The concept is not a descriptor of sexual preference or biological identity but of a structural drift compelled by the logic of foreclosure: with the Name-of-the-Father absent from the Symbolic, the paternal metaphor that would ordinarily organise phallic signification and anchor desire is missing. In its place, Schreber's delusional work substitutes a direct relationship to the Other (God), and the position he comes to occupy is that of God's object — wife, phallus, instrument of divine jouissance. The "push toward the woman" is thus not an erotic inclination but a structural consequence: the subject, deprived of the symbolic mediation of castration, is "pushed" into a position defined by the Other's gaze and conviction rather than by the subject's own desire.

The theoretical weight of the concept lies in the interplay between foreclosure, the imaginary, and the absence of fundamental fantasy. In neurosis, castration installs the minus-phi (−φ) and the fundamental fantasy ($◇a) organises desire by providing coordinates; in psychosis, neither operation is successfully completed. The I-schema shows that without the paternal metaphor, Schreber's reality becomes "parabolic" — he regresses to the imaginary dyadic register of the mirror stage and attempts to reconstitute a liveable world through delusion. Feminization is the name for the particular solution Schreber's delusion produces: a compensatory imaginary identification with what God "sees" him as, filling the void left by the absent symbolic function with a delusionally sustained conviction about his place in the Other's desire.

The concept appears in derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t (p. 195) in the context of a close reading of the I-schema as applied to Schreber's case. It sits at the intersection of several canonical Lacanian concepts. Foreclosure is the enabling condition: the non-inscription of the Name-of-the-Father creates the structural hole from which feminization emerges as a delusional solution. Rather than foreclosed content returning within the Symbolic (as in repression), it erupts in the Real — here not merely as hallucination but as a sustained conviction that restructures Schreber's entire relation to the Other. Feminization is therefore a specification of what foreclosure produces at the level of subjective position, not just at the level of perception.

The concept also draws on the registers of the Imaginary and Castration. In the absence of the symbolic operation of castration — which would ordinarily install the minus-phi and set desire in motion — Schreber cannot access the fundamental fantasy ($◇a) that would give his desire coordinates. Instead, the imaginary register takes over: Schreber reconstitutes a coherent (if delusional) world by occupying a specular, dyadic position vis-à-vis God's gaze. The feminization is, in this sense, an imaginary solution to a symbolic deficit — the subject becomes what the Other (God) sees, in place of what the subject would desire. As an extension of the foreclosure concept, pousse-à-la-femme specifies the direction of psychotic subjectivity's reconstruction: not random dissolution but a structured push toward a particular position within the delusional Other's desire.

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.195)

Schreber does not undergo this process of feminization because he loves men, but because he complies with the conviction that God sees him as a woman.

The theoretical load of the quote rests on the opposition between "loves men" (libidinal motivation, desire-from-the-subject) and "complies with the conviction that God sees him as a woman" (structural compulsion from the Other's gaze): it precisely displaces the explanation from the register of desire/fantasy to the register of foreclosure and imaginary submission to the Other, showing that feminization is driven by the Other's attributed perception rather than by the subject's own articulated desire.