D S P P  B U L L E T I N

April 2000

  REVIEW OF MARCH MEETING

Gender and Language
Speaker: Beth Newman, Ph.D.
By
Scott Nelson, Student

We enjoyed the insights of Beth Newman, Ph.D. at the March meeting of DSPP. Our speaker joined us from SMU’s Department of English, where she serves as Associate Professor of English. In addition to authoring commentaries on Jane Eyre, Victorian femininity, and nineteenth-century British literature, Professor Newman has taught courses on feminist theory. Beyond the traditional feminist authors, Dr. Newman’s courses include the work of analytic authorities in readings and class discussion. Her lecture to DSPP extended an already deep relationship with the Dallas analytic community--Dr. Newman is one of the founding members of the Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium.

Dr. Newman presented material from M. Wittig’s "The Mark of Gender," and L. Irigaray’s "This Sex Which is Not One." From Wittig, "To destroy the categories of sex in politics and in philosophy, to destroy gender in language (at least to modify its use) is therefore part of my work in writing as a writer." Dr. Newman’s commentary, and Irigaray’s "This sex which is not one," asked the audience to think of, and visualize, the female definition as the "missing" sex. The feminine lacking of an obtruding organ.

The discussion focused upon the role of gender in language. Specifically, that gender in language, by its nature, divides the world into two separate forces—the masculine and the not male, or feminine. It was stated that in language the feminine is always marked as so, which is not the case for the man. Language excludes women from the "Subject" stance and forces her into the place of "Object." The duty of modern feminism stands "to restore women to the place of subject," from a history as the object.

A question arises in the context of feminine-as-object, or female as not-male language: is there a space for "a specifically feminine desire?" Not in a "masculine language world which does not leave room for the feminine creation." Further, that to discover or create a language which does not differentiate the feminine, one would have to dig before the Greek foundations of our Western culture to discover "pre-masculine" language.

Though only each individual may decide to what extent, this discussion posits that language continuously shapes our experience of, thought about, and language of the body and sexuality. Dr. Newman’s discourse leaves us with many thoughts, insights and questions. Most controversial and provocative of the speakers questions—"why do women allow themselves to be dominated" in language, culture and sexual relations?

REVIEW OF SPRING WORKSHOP

Beyond Either / Or:
Gender, intersubjectivity and the Post-Oedipal
Speaker: Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D.

By Myrna Little, Ph.D.

Following the title of her presentation, Dr. Jessica Benjamin at the April workshop presented to the psychoanalytic community an alternative to the "Either/Or" of masculinity and femininity as originally articulated by Freud, and held by psychoanalytic theory ever since. Without reading her material, Benjamin walked her audience through evolution of the radical notion of the seventies – that the infant actively constructs his own life when/because the mother is there to be recognized – and concluded with a revision of Freud’s ideas concerning gender and identity. This included a consideration of "the active-passive didactic," several case examples, and interaction with the audience. In the afternoon three respondents provided a lively discussion of the relation of Benjamin’s concepts to anthropology, to Women’s Studies, and to a clinical case.

The Evolving Paradigm Change

"The mother’s subjectivity," said Dr. Benjamin in her opening statement, "…changed the whole psychoanalytic paradigm," a change from a subject-to-object, one-person approach, to a subject-to-subject, two-person intersubjectivity. Dinnerstein’s (1976) Mermaid and the Minotaur, Beebe’s seventies research on the bi-directional influence of infants and mothers, and Stern’s (1985) demonstration of the child’s intersubjective birth, generated for Benjamin an interest in subjectivity, particularly the effect on psychic structure of identification relationships and gender development when "subjectivity" also resides in the sovereign self of the mother. For Benjamin, this theme of identification is central in establishing the relationship of sameness to differentness, as well as for transformation to the post oedipal resolution.

Whereas Leon Hoffman contended that Freud’s inability to recognize woman’s subjectivity was at the heart of Freud’s problematic assumptions about femininity (where ‘subjectivity’ is defined as the capacity of the self to posit itself as independent), Benjamin asserted the problem was that Freud correlated activity with masculinity, when, more accurately, activity is correlated with ownership and authorship, regardless of gender. It was the Kleinians, and most clearly Ogden (1986), who had said there is no subjectivity in the paranoid-schizoid position; that subjectivity comes when there is a mediating space which the subject creates between self and an object. While Stern extended the idea of the subject’s space to include the space of "the other," a Winnicottian view, Benjamin’s point is that neither Hoffman, Ogden, Stern, nor Winnicott resolve Freud’s repeated statements about femininity and masculinity. As a consequence, no one has understood femininity since Freud except in terms of castration, in terms of the father, in terms of the penis, and in terms of the reviled mother.

Whereas Juliet Mitchell (1974) followed Lacan (the only way to understand the relation to the father is through the absence of the phallus), Chodorow (1978), following Stoller, argued that neither the presence nor the absence of the phallus is determinative, but, rather, identification with the mother. Benjamin contends instead that neither the mother, the father, nor the phallus is constitutive of femininity, and that Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976) first revised Freud in her claim that both boys and girls deny mother’s sex because of her frightening, invasive womb. For both Dinnerstein and Chasseguet-Smirgel, phallic power is a hedge against maternal power. They (and Benjamin) acknowledged Freud’s awareness of little girls action when he compared their doll-play to their mother’s child-care, but because he continued to hold the mutually exclusive binary poles of active and passive, an unconscious theory became: if a woman reverses and becomes active, she will eat us up. Men will be devoured if women become rapacious and/or sexual. This, argued Benjamin, is where Freud left us. In his formulation of the Oedipus complex there is no depressive position, there is only reversal. Subjectivity – the "I" of ownership of meaning – resides with the father. Further, Freud’s inability to identify passion and aggression in girls toward their mothers normalizes a notion that the girl turns away from the mother, leaving women with a legacy of either rivalry or remaining in a preoedipal position with the mother, while boys loose a preoedipal position with her.

Revision of Freud’s Gender Formulation

Benjamin’s thesis regarding the dilemma underlying subject-object complementarity – and why it affects differential recognition of the mother’s subjectivity – was supported by an explication of Freud’s 1914 paper "On Narcissism." In this paper "anaclitic love" (loving the one who feeds or protects you) describes only men who love women. Woman, on the other hand, loves narcissistically, and wants to be loved just as the child was by the mother. She is not interested in reciprocal love, and so the adored woman takes the place of "his majesty the baby." From this representation a mass of confusions arise and a variety of constellations result. For example, a woman loving a man is a reversal; men love unobtainable mothers; the beautiful, adoring love of the baby for the mother is absent; neither girls nor boys are seen to experience erotic love for the same sex parent. Thus there is no mutuality, no reciprocal love, only a one-way street. Freud’s enduring problem is not only his inability to conceive of reciprocal love, he does not know what to do with the problem behind mutual loving; i.e., he cannot see a man identify with maternal activity as the lost ideal of his feminine self because of his repudiation of the ever vexing maternal. Identification would mean reversal, he would become passive. The boy cannot relate to an active breast, and therefore must turn the female into a baby. Because everything written later builds on this, the structure of our gender thinking must be unraveled from here.

The Active-Passive Didactic.

In describing the dynamics of the active-passive didactic for boys, Benjamin first redressed the sexual excitement evoked by the mother in the boy (in contrast to being only an anaclitic object). This can be both shaming and/or terrifying – shaming because he cannot have it, terrifying if he can. When actual excitement evokes the fear of being excited and passive, the masculine coping mechanism typically is repression. Whereas the classic view holds that the mother’s containing function protects the boy, such a view under represents erotic containment, as the boy is barred from identifying with mother’s containing function. Having no internal container, various constellations can result: he must either find a woman to contain his sexual feelings, create a container through the male phallus, or discharge into a container without a desire of her own. In this latter situation the object of demand becomes most often the oedipal daughter whose passivity is potentially stimulating, evoking as it does the former boy in relation to his mother, when he felt passively stimulated. This is a reason that little girls are so stimulating to men. The movie, "American Beauty" demonstrates this eroticized energy, and shows at the end a man recognizing himself in lovely little girls without a parent.

The question naturally follows, why would a girl accept this position? Benjamin said because the girl perceives the dependent, baby aspect of the father, aligns with the mother, and wants to take care of him, just as Anna O and Dora both found something gratifying in nursing sick fathers. Father becomes the tyrannical baby she is never allowed to be, and she is enslaved by motherhood. Benjamin talked of the image in our culture of the girl who is helpless, androgynous, waif-like, and enormously appealing. She can look like a boy and escape mother’s power, satisfying both masculinity and femininity simultaneously.

Benjamin's post Oedipal resolution calls for going beyond the active-passive dichotomy, one that reworks Freud and relies on identifications of both sexes with both parents. Even Little Hans wanted to have a baby, which was not pathology, but doing that which we hope for all our children--imaginatively splitting the ego--recognizing desire when he knew he could not have a baby. Whereas latency in this culture is characterized by "I am OK and the other (sex) is weird, i.e., a role-dominated period, in adolescence and after both conscious and unconscious identifications with both mother and father can be integrated. Benjamin spoke of the many girls who have used their father for identification preoedipally, have been dad's buddy until they develop breasts, (depending upon the organization of family life), and the great tendency then to become masochistically attached to another man. The case illustrations presented examples of a girl conflicted by her own repudiation of the active, and lodging it in the therapist; of another whose father was seductive yet humiliated her erotic interest; of another woman who invited sadomasochistic complementarity as a means of being both passive and aggressive. With each case the countertransference situation as a key to the transference was also discussed.

The first respondent following the lunch break was psychoanalyst Dr. David Hershey, who, speaking from an anthropological perspective suggested that Dr. Benjamin's views lack empirical evidence and universal applicability. This evidence, he argued, can be found in cultures where women are fulfilled, perhaps even dominant. This evoked considerable controversy from Dr. Benjamin and from the audience, who found the argument more anecdotal than substantive, but which provided a useful counterpoint for the day’s presentation

Speaking from the standpoint of Women’s Issues, Professor Nina Schwartz addressed modern feminism in relation to patriarchy and the great difficulty in coming to consciousness of the loss that Lacan conceptualizes as lack. Since the phallus is a myth, men and women alike are castrated, experience sacrifice and loss, and it is this that constitutes human subjectivity.

The final respondent was Dr. Melissa Black, representing DSPP, who presented an ongoing case of extraordinary difficulty. The highlight of the afternoon, perhaps of the day, was this case as Dr. Benjamin seamlessly drew out the countertransference and the presymbolic containment which in fact the therapist was adequately, though painfully, providing.

Dr. Benjamin closed the day with comments concerning who contains the container, a dynamic that was apparent to this reviewer as active within the large group process. As Bion has said, in our work what matters more than love or hate is knowledge, knowledge of the other’s subjectivity, that is, the L, H, and K of intersubjectivity.

References

Chassequet-Smirgel, J. (1976). Freud and female sexuality. IJPA, 57, 275.

Chodorow, N. (1978). The Reproduction of Mothering. Berkeley: U of CA.

Dinnerstein, D. (1976). The Mermaid and the Minotaur. New York: Harper and Row.

Freud, S. (1914). On narcissism. SE 14, 67-102. London: Hogarth.

Ogden, T. (1986). The Matrix of the Mind. Northvale NJ: Aronson.

Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Pantheon.

Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books

Looking at the Impact of Managed Care on Psychoanalytic Psychologists

Margie Yavil, Psy.D.
Philadelphia Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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