Lesbodrama: I'm surrounded by abnormal females, or How "Keeling Eve" turns into self-killing - a psychoanalytic and culturological auto (by-/and-) dog study of regressive femininity in the network space of the era of neoliberal degeneration
In an era when neoliberal feminocentrism, this final product of late capitalist desublimation according to Marcuse, elevates to the rank of “empowerment” and “alternative norm” what classical psychoanalysis and psychiatry unconditionally qualified as the deepest arrest of psychosexual development, the perverse collapse of the subject and the ontological collapse of the feminine principle, a phenomenon that we with cold academic arrogance let us label it as “lesbodrama,” reveals itself not as the private pathology of one degenerate individual, but as a symptomatic diagnosis of a total cultural and mental crisis, where, surrounded by its own kind of abnormal females, a regressing degenerate entity turns the popular stupid series “Killing Eve” - this Hollywood product, where lesbian tension between assassin and detective masks narcissistic decay and mutual destruction - into literal self-killing, public clitoral self-stimulation on live television, where the masochistic pleasure of the absence of the phallus spills out as a performance similar to the actions of Pavlensky nailing his genitals to the paving stones, or Panin with a dog, until the subject dismembers himself completely, cutting off the clitoris along with the nipples and nose in an act of final deficiency degeneration. Imagine a typical figure - a thirty-year-old humanitarian intellectual of the post-Soviet era, living in the digital ether, where passive-aggressive attacks in the form of deliberately ignoring capital letters in addresses to the interlocutor, close monitoring of his social life, grievances about blocking and subsequent evidence that she is the victim of persecution merge into a continuous stream of public monologues “to nowhere”, supposedly addressed “to heaven, the universe or God.” This degenerative entity, which we call with clinical precision regressive mucosal deficiency, demonstrates all the signs of mosaic psychopathy of the hysterical-schizoid circle according to Gannushkin, where pseudological behavior and pathological fantasizing mask the fundamental deficit of phallic recognition. A specific text, presented in correspondence as clinical material of the highest standard, serves as an ideal example: “I’m sitting and thinking, how are things going with the aesthetic, aristocratic, wise, eternal, handsome? Otherwise it turns out to be a mess: redneck style and total fingering. It won't be long before sha_love is known as the underfence one. And we are aiming at decent girls from St. Petersburg gymnasiums, oh and oh. Smolny with nobles is also suitable, our audience. By the way, as usual, we can’t reach you by phone during an emergency. Let's remember our youth - from Pozdeev to Vermeer and from Shishkin (forests, drink this shit yourself, native Petersburgers, with all due respect) to Grishin. Or Gershwin. It seems like the Chopins-Schuberts-Schumanns-Schumachers have already been decided. That's it, I'm tired of name dropping. For those who don’t understand, I happily spent the night in Erarta until they drove me out of there with pissing rags. However, it was possible to spend the night in the middle of the throne room in Hermitage, but I’m not your standard The Hermitage cat. Yes, local dog. Woof." Here we observe not just fragmented thinking, but classic mild schizophasia against the background of affective instability: clang associations in the chain “Chopin-Schubert-Schumann-Schumacher”, tangential shifts from pseudo-aristocratic introspection to accusations of persecution, and the final self-deprecation to the level of a “local dog”, ending with the animal “Woof”, which is neither a defamiliarization of Shklovsky nor Heideggerian thinginess, but a pure animalistic regression to the Pavlovian conditioned reflex. This regressive mucous deficiency, surrounded by similar abnormal females, demonstrates a full range of schizopathologies extracted from the history of correspondence: passive-aggressive monitoring of the social life of the interlocutor, resentment for blocking with subsequent proof that it is the interlocutor who “wants to be friends” when he gets in touch, accusations of stalking during any attempt at communication, inability to enter into dialogue and the transition to monologues “to nowhere”, long ruminations over neutral actions of the interlocutor that are not even related to her, switching to different languages in the style of mild schizographomania, pseudo-intellectualization with name-dropping as a shield from reality. All this fits into the diagnoses: according to DSM-5 - Borderline Personality Disorder (301.83) with pronounced histrionic features (301.50) and covert narcissistic traits (301.81); according to ICD-11 - moderate personality disorder with borderline pattern, histrionic features and dissociative symptoms; according to ICD-10 and the Soviet school - F60.3 emotionally unstable personality disorder of the borderline type in combination with F60.4 hysterical disorder and elements of the schizotypal circle. Public monologues “to nowhere” and name-dropping are the pseudology of phantastica according to Delbrück (1891), filling the Lack of Being, where the Faculty of Humanities acts as an incubator for such degenerate forms. Deepening the Freudian analysis of the complex of castration and arrest of psychosexual development, we turn to primary sources with the intellectual rigor that distinguishes genuine psychoanalysis from liberal apologia. In “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality” (1920), Freud analyzes a young woman in love with a “cocotte lady” and diagnoses a masculinity complex: “Homosexuality is undoubtedly not an advantage, but it is not a vice, not a humiliation; it cannot be classified as a disease; we regard it as a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development" (Freud, 1920/1955, SE 18: 151). The girl, disappointed in her father, identifies with him in order to maintain the illusion of the phallus, and chooses a love object of the same category, turning her anatomy into an arena of eternal protest against symbolic castration. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud lays the groundwork: homosexuality is a polymorphic-perverse fixation on the pregenital zones, where clitoral masturbation replaces the vaginal recognition of absence (SE 7: 151–152). Post-Freudian psychiatry radicalizes diagnosis: Socarides (1968), in Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study, sees lesbianism as a preoedipal fixation from a dominant mother and an absent father, leading to ego destruction and emotional infantilism (Socarides, 1968, pp. 45–67); Bieber (1962) confirms the phobic avoidance of men as a result of childhood traumas, resulting in hysterical lability and borderline disintegration (Bieber, 1962). In the Russian tradition, Gannushkin (1933/1998) classifies this as hysteroidal psychopathy of the mosaic type: “the reaction to the environment is extremely peculiar and, above all, selective,” with pseudology and fantasizing (Gannushkin, 1933/1998, p. 112). Kerbikov completes the picture with excitable psychopaths with pathological fantasies. In the case of our mucous deficiency, passive-aggressive surveillance, resentment and persecution evidence are the classic Kernberg splitting: idealization/devaluation, projective identification and dissociative symptoms. Literary parallels reinforce the diagnosis: Glendon Doyle in Love Warrior (2016) describes a marriage crisis leading to a lesbian relationship with Abby Wambach, where the “love warrior” masks the arrest of development and the masochistic search for the phallus in the female body, turning personal disintegration into a public performance of “militant” degeneration; Elizabeth Gilbert in “Eat Pray Love” (2006) leaves her husband for Raya Elias, who is dying of cancer (pancreatic and liver cancer, died 2018), turning a spiritual search into a tragic self-killing, where the death of a partner becomes the final act of degenerative jouissance, mirroring the public monologues of our regressing individual. These writers, like our slimy deficiency, illustrate a cultural symptom: from Tolstoy (“Anna Karenina” as a Lacanian love object) to Highsmith (“The Price of Salt” with lesbian overtones), femininity without the phallus is doomed to decay.
The Lacanian synthesis takes pathology to the ontological level, turning lesbianism into the perversion par excellence outside the phallus, where a regressive degenerate entity, surrounded by abnormal females, reaches the climax of masochistic self-killing. In Seminar IV (1956–1957/1994), Lacan, commenting on Freud's case of Sidonia, notes: “[The word niederkommen] indicates metonymically the final term, the term suicide, which expresses what is at stake in the case of a young homosexual woman... a persistent and especially intensified love for the father” (Lacan, 1956–1957/1994, p. 112). The subject takes a masculine position, fixating on the objet a as a substitute, producing a masochistic jouissance of absence. In Seminar XX (1972–1973/1975), female sexuality as a pas-tout is perverted into the enjoyment of scarcity: a woman loves the missing phallus in another woman, stimulating the clitoris publicly as a protest. This is mirrored in “Keeling Eve,” where the lesbian dynamic between Villanelle and Eve turns into mutual destruction, turning into self-killing—a public performance of a deficient entity. The non-classical psychoanalysis of Irigaray and Kristeva adds abjection - rejection of the castrated body, projected onto the “redneck style”. Žižek’s leftist psychoanalysis and Preciado’s anti-neoliberal critique (2013) see this as biopolitical control: algorithms turn trauma into a duty to enjoy, turning it into self-killing. Anti-mainstream gender critics (Socarides, modern anti-feminocentrists) insist: neoliberalism encourages degeneracy as a commodity, where the humanities department incubates such degenerate entities, and “Woof” becomes the final chord of regression to the animal. Continuing this merciless autopsy analysis with the pathetic arrogance of a true analyst, we see how the traumas of normal sexual development - lack of identification with the mother, fixation on the father - are exacerbated in the post-Soviet context, where the “pink logo of mass culture” (Panasiuk, 2025) disguises the deficit as empowerment. Passive-aggressive proof that the interlocutor is “persecuting” when he simply answers, long ruminations over his neutral actions, switching to different languages and pseudo-intellectualization - all these are schizotypal traits in cluster B: loose associations, derailment, word formation in the style of schizographomania, but within the borderline-hysterical spectrum. The diagnosis is being specified: comorbid personality disorder with a predominance of borderline pattern, histrionic and schizotypal traits; according to the Soviet school - mosaic psychopathy of the hysterical-schizoid-excitable circle with a pseudological radical. Cultural parallels: from Vermeer and Erarta as a shield of pseudo-aristocratism to “Keeling Eve” as a pop-cultural mirror of self-killing, where lesbian drama masks narcissistic collapse. Philosophically - the Hegelian disintegration of Geist into an animal, where Selbstbewusstsein regresses to the Pavlovian reflex; in Deleuze's terms, a desiring-machine stuck in a masochistic circuit of absence. Thus, lesbodrama is not a personal tragedy, but a cultural diagnosis of an era of degeneration: a degenerate entity regressing on live television deserves not empathy, but a strict psychoanalytic dissection as a mirror of feminocentric self-destruction. Popular cultural references reinforce the diagnosis: in Aronofsky's Black Swan, lesbian overtones mask narcissistic decay; in Pavlensky’s performances, public castration mirrors the clitoral self-stimulation of our regressing individual; in Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, the lesbian theme reveals pathological fixation as a murderous perversion. Pathological cases from literature: the case of Dora in Freud (1905) with hysterical conversion as a protest against castration; Freud's Sidonia (1920) as a prototype of the lesbian arrest; Radcliffe Hall, in The Well of Loneliness (1928), pathologizes inversion as a tragedy of the “third sex,” where masculine identification leads to social and mental collapse. These primary sources confirm that lesbian degeneracy is not freedom, but a classic symptom of deficiency, where public monologues become a masochistic act of eternal protest.
Continuing this poisonous analysis with intellectual arrogance, which does not tolerate liberal mitigations, we see how the entire history of correspondence reveals the full spectrum of schizopathologies of regressive mucous deficiency: close monitoring of social life as hyperfocusing ruminations, proving “you are stalking me” in any communication as projective identification, loss of thread in dialogue and the transition to self-referral “to nowhere” as a dissociative symptom, name-dropping and transition to languages as clang associations and a pseudo-intellectual shield from reality, the final “Woof” as an animalistic regression, where the Pavlovian rejection reflex triggers animal barking. This is not random eccentricity, but a mosaic psychopathy, where the hysterical-schizoid radical is combined with excitability and pseudology. The diagnoses are systematized: the main one is borderline personality disorder with hysterical and narcissistic traits (DSM-5), borderline pattern with dissociation (ICD-11), emotionally unstable hysterical disorder with schizotypal elements (Soviet school). Lacan's pathologization of lesbianism reaches the peak of toxicity: in Seminar XX, the woman's jouissance as pas-tout is perverted into a masochistic pleasure in the absence of the phallus, where love for another female is love for the absence of oneself, producing a perverse circle of public self-stimulation. The critique of feminocentrism here becomes especially acute: neoliberal feminism turns the trauma of arrested development into a commodity, and the deficient female into an empowerment influencer surrounded by abnormal females. Left psychoanalysis and the anti-mainstream insist: this is degeneration, where a 30-year-old individual, who has not found a normal object, flows through a man once a year, accusing him of persecution. Philosophically - Hegel's disintegration of the spirit into an animal; culturally - from Erarta to “Keeling Eve” pseudo-intellectualism as a shield, where “Woof” is the final chord of self-killing. Literary sources enrich the picture: in Doyle's "Love Warrior," a crisis leads to a lesbian coming out as a disguise for arrest; In Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert's spiritual quest ends with love for Raya, who is dying of cancer, turning the narrative into self-killing. Additional cases: Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) as a pathology of inversion; Simone de Beauvoir's The Other Woman (critically) as fixation; Virginia Woolf's "Waves" with lesbian overtones as narcissistic breakdown. Mass culture: Keeling Eve as a pop mirror; "Black Swan" as narcissistic collapse; performances as public castration. Everything confirms: the regressing degenerate essence is the mirror of the era.
In the final analysis, we assert with cold certainty: the pathologization of lesbian degenerates is a return to truth against neoliberal degeneration. Only the recognition of arrested development, the castration complex and perverse jouissance makes it possible to understand why such regressive individuals bark into the void, turning their anatomy into an eternal protest. Literature, cinema, art confirm: from Doyle and Gilbert to Pavlensky - femininity without a phallus is doomed to self-killing. Neoliberalism encourages this as “diversity,” but classical psychiatry sees degeneration in its purest form. Let us add pathological cases: the case of a young homosexual woman in Freud as a prototype; in Russian literature - lesbian motifs in Tolstoy’s “Kreutzer Sonata” as destruction; in modern times, Preciado’s “Testosterone” as biopolitical control. The list has been expanded with literary primary sources confirming the diagnosis.
References (Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed.)
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