A Womb of Her Own

Women's Struggle for Sexual and Reproductive Autonomy

Ellen L.K. Toronto, Joann Ponder, Kristin Davisson, Maurine Kelber Kelly, Ellen L.K. Toronto, Joann Ponder, Kristin Davisson, Maurine Kelber Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315532554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Libertad política

Gender and body-based distinctions continue to be a defining component of women's identities, both in psychoanalytic treatment and in life. Although females have made progress in many areas, their status within the human community has remained unstable and subject to societal whim. A Womb of Her Own brings together a distinguished group of contributors to explore, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the ways in which women's sexual and reproductive capabilities, and their bodies, are regarded as societal and patriarchal property, not as the possession of individual women. It further examines how women have been viewed as the "other" and thus become the focus of mistreatment such as rape, sexual slavery, restriction of reproduction rights, and ongoing societal repression.

Postmodern gender theories have greatly enhanced understanding of the fluidity of gender and freed women from repressive stereotypes, butattention has shifted prematurely from the power differential that continues to exist between men and women. Before the male/female binary is transcended, the limitations imposed upon women by the still prevailing patriarchal order must be addressed. To this end, A Womb of Her Own addresses issues such as the prevalence of rape culture and its historical roots; the relationship of the LGBT movement to feminism; current sexual practices such as sexting and tattooing and their meaning to women; reproductive issues including infertility; adoption; postpartum depression and the actual experience of birthing—all from the perspectives of women. The book also explores the cultural definitions of motherhood, and howsuch definitions set exacting standards both for the acceptable face of motherhood and for women generally.

While women's unique anatomy and biology have historically contributed to their oppression in a patriarchal society, it is the exploration and illumination of these capabilities from their own perspective that will allow womento claim and control them as their own. Covering a broad, topical range of contemporary subjects, A Womb of Her Own will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as scholars and students of gender and women's studies.

Section II
Women and sexual trauma

Commentary on Section II

Women and sexual trauma

Kristin Davisson

Women’s bodies and selfhoods are inexorably tangled in a cultural and relational matrix that degrades our autonomy as well as our safety. Our bodies are vessels to be penetrated, objectified, or possessed. Our minds and choices are infiltrated by those persons and systems that hold over us the power to subjugate our existence. Sexual trauma, both implicit and explicit, is all too common a plight for the female gender. Like many women, my personal feelings about this reality contain deeply held anger, fear, disillusionment, and often shock at the lack of progress we have made. These feelings are held in sharp contrast to my everyday selfhood as a woman, often perceiving to be in possession of her safety and enjoying the trust and company of others. How can both realities exist? This identity of “double consciousness” is often the result of “looking at oneself through the eyes of others,” unable to reconcile the repeated oppressions occurring on a psychosocial level (Du Bois, 1903). Whether we are direct victims of violence, harassment, lower pay, reproductive control, or we live in constant awareness of these limitations on our gender, our lives as women are shaped by the irrevocable risks and inequities we face. It also bears mentioning that for women of color, this reality is a “double bind,” increasing the insidiousness of the acts perpetrated against them and reducing the resources for healing and justice.

The authors in this section focus on the specific experience of sexual trauma; the violation of the female body and psyche; as well as the systems, institutions, and cycles of interaction that maintain and condone such abuses. Susan Kavaler-Adler emphasizes the complex interplay of intrapsychic factors that increase a woman’s susceptibility to (male) object choices that further victimize, oppress, or subjugate her. In a poignant case, she provides an example of a woman trapped by introjects that disallow her a true object choice. This dialogue addresses the multifaceted interplay between societal, interpersonal, and intrapsychic factors leading women to accept deferential status to a malignant partner. This method of understanding provides a bridge between interpretation and victim-blaming, offering an avenue for self-empowerment, insight, and autonomy, ultimately providing an escape from the oppressive internal and external forces that constrain our choices as women.

The second chapter takes on the answer to the question: What of women who aren’t direct victims of sexual violence? How are they impacted by the exposure, knowledge, and narratives of the suffering around them? The preliminary research I summarized in this chapter suggests that secondary exposure to trauma results in conflicts in self, identity, and object-relatedness for women “witnessing” sexual violence. The qualitative interviews give specific voice to the conflicts and emotional challenges women face as they support a close friend after her assault. The emotional words of these women linger with me as they suggest a lasting impact on our existential selfhood and sense of safety in an often harsh and threatening world.

Lastly, Katie Gentile considers the direct and repeated sexual assault of young women on college campuses and the systemic failure to institute restorative justice and measures of protection. She examines the process by which institutions separate themselves from the “perpetrator,” and thus the violation itself, removing any accountability for repair, protection, or change. She illuminates the concept of community and bystander interventions, creating accountability and preventive efforts for the system as a whole. As a former counselor in numerous college counseling settings, this chapter resonated with me as it highlighted the tragic oversights as well as the opportunities for change reflective in most institutions of higher learning.

All three authors use psychoanalytic theory to make sense of a patriarchal society whose structures and institutions create and reinforce gender inequities, serve as obstacles to justice, and communicate to women their subservient status. Further, psychoanalytic understanding is used to gain perspective on a gendered experience that at its core must accept, or at the very least acknowledge, the daily threat to the body and autonomous self.

With roots in Freud, the relationship between psychoanalytic understanding and sexual trauma has been a tumultuous one. With the abandonment of seduction theory for his theory of infantile sexuality, Freud changed the direction of analytic inquiry away from listening to the abhorrent wrongs perpetrated against women and towards pathologizing their unconscious motivations. Of note, Freud himself appeared conflicted about this and continued to battle with the significance of sexual trauma for the remainder of his career (Freud, 1905/1953, 1915/1963). Psychoanalytic feminist voices such as Nancy Chodorow and Juliet Mitchell have set the tone for utilizing such ideas to examine the construction of gender roles and critique patriarchy itself (Chodorow, 1978; Mitchell, 1974). In their wisdom, they suggest keeping the integrity of psychoanalytic ideas while considering the context in which they were shaped as well as the intended or even misunderstood impact of their time. Authors in this section follow in their footsteps by considering psychoanalytic theory as a way to conceptualize not just the problem but also the resolutions to the overwhelming and sinister nature of sexual trauma As these injurious circumstances occur with excessive frequency in the lives of women, we can come together as survivors, witnesses, clinicians, scholars, volunteers, first responders, friends, allies, and partners to strengthen the fabric of our communities and change the dialogue around this issue.

References

Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of black folk. New York, NY: Dover.

Freud, S. (1953). Three essays on sexuality. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 7, pp. 135–222). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1905)

Freud, S. (1963). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 15). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1915)

Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and feminism: A radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Basic Books.

4
Date rape and the demon-lover complex

The divine, the deviant, and the diabolical in male/female politics

Susan Kavaler-Adler

In the four decades of psychoanalytic practice, I have frequently worked with women who are trapped by an internal world situation in which they are defined and controlled by a primal father inside of them, interacting with the dynamics of an inadequate, relatively absent, or abandoning mother figure. This situation always influences the way these women interact with, submit to, or fight with men in their current adult lives. In this chapter, we will look into the case of Sherry, a woman who suffered the ultimate seduction and control of a malignant man, a seductive male stranger, who defined her as part of his own psychic ritual in the prologue to raping her. The woman’s susceptibility will be discussed in terms of early life trauma, as well as the character disorder pathology of both her parents. It should be kept in mind that her susceptibility is also symptomatic of a wider cultural dynamic of men defining women as a means to controlling them, which has mushroomed into the political polarization and polemics of the “pro-choice” female reproductive freedom issue. This chapter engages not only the issues of male dominance, but it will offer the psychoanalytic perspective on what allows a woman to develop a psychological capacity for choice. In discussing psychological development, we will zero in onto psychological reparation of “developmental arrest” trauma, as only this reparation could allow a woman to choose. Only when a woman is psychologically evolved as a separated and individuated autonomous person, can she fully embrace the “pro-choice” stance and be responsible for her body and for her own reproductive rights.

The demon-lover complex

When we look at how women may become aroused by and attached to malignant men, the interplay between the pre-oedipal and oedipal becomes profoundly important. The contributions of Melanie Klein and Ronald Fairbairn to the psychoanalytic literature illustrate how a powerful attachment to a bad object can take place. Melanie Klein’s theory helps us to understand the woman’s fantasy of the man as an idealized figure, which can flip to the side of the man as a demon, a “bad object” figure. This view is presented by Melanie Klein in her writings on the “paranoid-schizoid position,” as opposed to the integrated view of the man that would be possible in the “depressive position” (Klein, 1935). In the meantime, Ronald Fairbairn spoke of the attachment to the “bad object” (Fairbairn, 1952) as related to a primal attachment to an inadequate and/or abusive mother. In Fairbairn’s theory the internal “bad object” is not just a fantasy that is only partially related to the actual parent, but is based on an internalization of an actual bad mother parent; or one perceived in a distorted way due to the limitations of infant and childhood perception, but still related to the actual parent. Both the bad mother as an internal fantasy object and as a real internalized part object, can become compounded by the internalization of a bad father parent object. Such internalization of a father can be merged with the internal mother or it can be differentiated from the internal mother to varying degrees. Building on Klein’s and Fairbairn’s ideas, I speak of my theory of the “demon-lover” attachment, within one’s internal psychic world, and of its manifestation in the external world as a “demon-lover complex” (see Kavaler-Adler, 1993a, 1996, 1998, 2003a, 2003b, 2005b, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, and others).

This theory of the demon-lover complex is particularly pertinent to a woman like Sherry, the heroine of this chapter. Sherry was unconsciously drawn to narcissistic and psychopathic men like her father, after just having repaired a fragile self-structure from her primal inadequate mothering. In the case to be discussed, we will see how the choice of a man, in the real-life drama to be described, is compelled by unconscious demon-lover attachment, even though the woman’s behavior could look, to the world at large, as a free choice, or even as a consensual sexual act. After all, Sherry becomes the victim of rape, after consenting to go to a man’s apartment!

We must also note that the Jungians speak of a demon-lover archetype that addresses the development of a demon-lover complex, from the view of a component in the “collective unconscious” (Jung, 1981), as opposed to seeing the overt contribution of the actual mother, father, siblings as the primal components of the internal eroticized bad object, which is the object relations point of view. But, the psychic magnet of Jungian demon-lover archetype is quite consonant with my object relations approach. An addiction to an internalized bad object, at a primal level, in the actual parental and family set up, can certainly interact in the unconscious psyche with a demon-lover archetype, which may or may not originate in a separate unconscious area of the collective unconscious. My first book on women writers, The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists (Kavaler-Adler, 1993a), explicitly relates the object relations components of the “demon-lover complex” to the Jungian theory of the demon-lover archetype form of complex.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was the first who acknowledged the role of the mother–infant dyad in pre-oedipal development. Some of his significant American and British followers in infant and child research are Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann; Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergmann; Donald Stern and Donald Winnicott. Freud (1931/1961) first expressed his awareness about the crucial role of pre-oedipal development in his paper on “Female Sexuality.” Despite his other failings in attempting to understand women (as he had admitted in his famous quote: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”), Freud unearthed the Rosetta stone of pre-oedipal derivations of the oedipal dynamics in women. In this paper, Freud had suggested that mother-deprivation (as well as the insatiable primal desire for suckling at the breast, and the primal hunger for maternal nurturance in general) affects the core psychodynamics related to women’s desires for the father, as well as for father figures. Freud further indicated that severe problems at the early oral mothering stage could result in an overly adhesive tie to the father, which would be consistent with vulnerability to indiscriminate attachment to father figures. By extension then, a sadistic father could be a source of a woman’s intense erotic desires for sadistic men, especially when seduction arouses both oedipal and pre-oedipal cravings.

Such thinking is in line with my writings on the demon-lover complex, and with its clinical manifestation, as will be seen in the case of Sherry that follows. In an object relations view of the demon-lover complex, men who stir up oedipal lust in women for a powerful, aggrandized, and seductive father figure are also magnets for a re-enactment of the tragic lack of both maternal attunement and paternal protection, both of which condition a life from its infancy. The demon-lover complex always involves a woman’s destruction by a malignant man, where the woman is unable to assert her power with a man due to early pre-oedipal failings in mothering. When the demon-lover complex is seen in the context of well-known women artists and writers, who express the complex in their work, there is always a woman yearning to merge with an idealized male figure, who takes on the grandiose aspect of their own split-off power, and who is seen as an omnipotent god-like figure (Kavaler-Adler, 1993a, 1996).

Not only is the power of the woman split-off, but the sexual and aggressive impulses that the woman has trouble containing can also be split-off and projected onto the man, lending to the woman an exaggerated form of innocence. Some Victorian literature that talks about this is referenced in Auerbach’s (1982) treatise on Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. In this literature, the repression of female sexuality lends to the woman a contrived aspect of being a “lady,” which drives her to seek an overly aggressive male, demonic figure, to usher instinctual life into the woman’s own repressed and neutered being. In the twentieth century, this mythic “lady” can be seen in the theme of the Stepford wife.

In the demon-lover complex, the lady’s yearning to merge with the male figure has various levels of psychological motivation. Since the lady yearns for a maternal nurturance from a male figure, this kind of female yearning is more oral than genital, although they are often acted out genitally. These female object needs are more like hungry craving than heartfelt yearning. They are constituted by insatiable oral hunger merged with a diffuse and eroticized oedipal instinctual lust. In addition to her cravings for a mother, the woman with the demon-lover complex also craves the erotic thrills of oedipal-level lust arousal, and its adolescent and adult instinct evolutions.

In this state of combined oral craving and oedipal yearning, the woman projects all her power onto the man. However, since she psychologically merges with the man (as opposed to marrying a whole object-d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section I A culture of oppression
• Section II Women and sexual trauma
• Section III Women defining motherhood
• Section IV Mother as therapist / therapist as mother
• Index