The Capacity to Care

Gender and Ethical Subjectivity

Wendy Hollway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134148363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Wendy Hollway explores a subject that is largely absent from the topical literature on care. Humans are not born with a capacity to care, and this volume explores how this capacity is achieved through the experiences of primary care, gender development and later, parenting.

In this book, the author addresses the assumption that the capacity to care is innate. She argues that key processes in the early development of babies and young children create the capability for individuals to care, with a focus on the role of intersubjective experience and parent-child relations. The Capacity to Care also explores the controversial belief that women are better at caring than men and questions whether this is likely to change with contemporary shifts in parenting and gender relations. Similarly, the sensitive domain of the quality of care and how to consider whether care has broken down are also debated, alongside a consideration of what constitutes a 'good enough' family.

The Capacity to Care provides a unique theorization of the nature of selfhood, drawing on developmental and object relations psychoanalysis, as well as philosophical and feminist literatures. It will be of relevance to social scientists studying gender development, gender relations and the family as well as those interested in the ethics of care debate.

1 INTRODUCING THE CAPACITY TO CARE

Approaches to care

What is the capacity to care and why does it matter? How is it acquired? What are its origins in the early development of self and morality? Are women better at caring than men and, if so, is this likely to change with contemporary changes in parenting and gender relations? What would constitute a good-enough family, as opposed to good-enough mothering? How does the capacity to care inform the ethics of care debate about relationality and autonomy and their gender? How do people care across distance and difference? These are the questions that are addressed in this book. Through them I attempt to provide the current social discourses with an adequate psychology as a resource for understanding care, in the domains of theory, policy and practice.

During the week in which I finalised this manuscript, The Observer Sunday newspaper (26 March 2006) had a two-page spread on women who are ‘young successful, well-paid’, asking ‘are they killing feminism?’. It was based on a magazine article by a British academic, Alison Wolf, who argues that this manifestation of young womanhood ‘has dire consequences for society’, one of which is that the pursuit of certain careers (a successful young woman investment banker is profiled) is turning women away from caring, in the form of both having children and entering the caring professions. According to Wolf, we are seeing ‘the end of female altruism’.

In this and many similar ways, the principal theme of this book – the gender of the capacity to care and ethical subjectivity – is central to contemporary public debate. This debate, including the overdrawn claims and ill-conceived arguments, is symptomatic of the profound anxieties that continue to accompany changes in gender relations in the new millennium. I hope that I succeed in my attempt to provide an analysis that is not hijacked by those anxieties – which can lead either to amplifying or denying the problems and potential of changing gender relations for care. ‘Society’ has indeed in many ways depended on women to care, and on their ‘female altruism’ to motivate their ongoing capacity to care. As the realignment of caring is precipitated by the tectonic plate tremors of gender differences, it is a challenge to ensure that everyone has access to good-enough care, not only infants, children, the old, sick and disadvantaged but also so-called independent adults and the carers themselves. Can both women and men access capacities to care freed up by the relaxation of rigid gender binaries? Through conceptualising some universal aspects of self – aspects that go beyond gender as well as those enabled and suppressed by particular gender regimes – I envisage ways that women and men can tap into the identificatory potential of every human being who relates to others through both their individuality and their intersubjectivity.

Why is it important to understand the capacity to care, as well as focusing on the resources and practices concerning care? When individuals fail to care for those they encounter, those others suffer. But that is just the start. The effect is not just suffering (which ameliorates) but psychological trauma. If, as I argue, people are relational in the core of their being, then systematic and continuous failures of care have profound impact on a person’s character and how they relate to others. This then creates a ripple effect in the social relations around each such person: care-less and hate-ful individuals are hard to care for and this has effects on the would-be carer as well as on the person in need of care. When whole groups fail to care, cultures of hate, retribution and vengeance can be created that reproduce the traumatic conditions of their own making. There is less chance of the kind of citizenly care that provides a bulwark against political corruption, unbridled market forces or religious fundamentalism. Moreover, there is created an intergenerational dynamic that is harder to interrupt by social and political interventions when harmful individuals are drawn to reproduce the conditions of their own psychological damage. A convincing test of such an assertion is to look into the biography of any violent criminal, serial killer or psychopathic aggressor. They have invariably suffered deprivation, not necessarily of material resources but of relationships characterised by trust, safety, respect and love. These are enabled by the capacity to care of significant others around them.¹

A psycho-social inquiry does not therefore reduce to individual or interpersonal problems but underpins the big questions of society, politics, ethics and global environmental sustainability. Although I start my inquiry by asking how the capacity to care is first established in the intimate relations of care between maternal figures and infants, by the end of the book I have broadened it out to explore how the capacity to care is implicated in institutional change and caring about strangers across difference and distance. Hardly a day goes by without these issues featuring in the news. In the same week as the newspaper feature about ‘the end of female altruism’, the Archbishop of Canterbury was interviewed on the morning radio news. He talked about the political failure to address global warming and its ethical implications, namely that because of western people’s energy consumption, populations in the developing world would be dramatically destabilised and billions would probably die. On the same evening, two television documentaries showed the particularity of people suffering through political and institutional failures to care; the first was about African economic migrants trying to enter Europe illegally, the second about the underfunding of care for the elderly in the UK, told by the son of an old woman suffering from dementia, as he examined his conscience about putting her in a ‘care home’, rather than caring for her at home.

Many writers concerned with the state of the world, from philosophy to political and social theory, have converged on the question of living with difference (for example, Arendt 1958, Levinas 1985/1999, Mouffe 2000, Connolly 2002). Ideal arrangements or attitudes are discussed in order to imagine ethical connections among people in the public sphere who are different from each other. However, few of these writers ask how – psychologically – respect for difference and care across difference are achieved. I am critical of any paradigm that does not appreciate how psychic structures and processes transform and co-construct experience and culturally dominant forms of living. My aim is to supplement overly social and exclusively abstract paradigms of ethics, morality and care by providing a dynamic psychological account, situated in the relevant social contexts and anchored in life historical time. This produces an approach in which I ask, for example, how the capacity to care across difference is nurtured, from what starting points. The result is a rare focus on the effects of life histories of being cared for and caring; the vicissitudes of self development that are crucial in a person’s later capacity for care across difference.

This is also an unpopular perspective: recent social science has rejected the paradigm of psychological development and focused on situating people in the present. It has also largely rejected the trope of the family, seeing it as a conservative sphere in which difference is defended against. My argument is that certain conditions that start early in life within families (families of all types) are usually decisive for later psychological capacities that produce caring (or hostile) relations to difference in others. These capacities may begin in families but they do not need to end there. Every person’s life history is contained in their internal world and this internal world is active in shaping the ways the person encounters current, everyday events and relationships, including the challenge of caring for familiars and strangers.

Care is a broad term, which perhaps should be broken down into narrower categories, but the fact that the word has come to cover such a broad and varied remit is significant in itself and I shall try to work with the penumbra of meanings to which it gives rise rather than shoehorn these into tidy categories. There is a huge literature on care, but there is a startling absence on the subject of capacity to care in theory, and of research and writing on care. The care literature mainly takes two forms. First there is a philosophical literature, which includes a substantial body of work on ethics discussed at an abstract level. Second are the social work and social policy literatures, which tend to be directed towards advocacy for carers and working out the best arrangements, supports and resources to enable caring, paid and unpaid, to take place. More recently, this has included an empirically focused literature with both theoretical and policy orientations. Williams (2004), reporting the conclusions of a large, empirically based research programme that brings together many of these strands, argues for an ethic of care that extends from private into political domains and recognises the importance of care ethics in people’s lives and how these can be carried out in a diversity of living arrangements and family groups.

Because of women’s historical association with caring, feminist literatures have been prolific and these have reflected the same two emphases, the first taking the shape of an extended debate about the ethics of care and its relation to gender, and the second looking at caring as an activity. Managing the juggling act between paid employment and care is, understandably, a recurring theme in the latter. Both are often premised on understanding care in the light of women’s subordination; often on the position that caring is associated with women’s oppression and reproduces it.

These different tracks often reflect what has become quite a well-established conceptual distinction between caring about and caring for (Fisher and Tronto 1990, Skeggs 1997, Sevenhuijsen 1998):

Caring about which involves social dispositions that operate at a personal level and assume a relationship between the carer and cared for, and caring for which involves the actual practice of caring, involving specific tasks such as lifting, cleaning and cooking, and does not necessarily relate to caring about.

(Skeggs 1997: 67)

My interest is about the psychological capacities involved in care, and this book therefore emphasises caring about: the term ‘capacity to care’ addresses questions to do with caring about. The disadvantage of the phrase ‘capacity to care’ is its connotation of a singular, static entity, whereas I address something dynamic, variable and situated; ideas perhaps better captured by the term ‘caring about’. However, I wish to retain the connotation of relative consistency associated with the idea of core capacity as a result of its early roots, which, although they can be modified, cannot be overridden by rational decision. Moreover, caring about and caring for are not as separable as Skeggs’ neat definitions imply, because in my framework, the practices of care and their meanings are part of a series of mutually affecting dynamics that have an impact on caring about, which likewise affects practices. Caring about occurs in the context of practices and relations involving caring for. For Lynn Froggett, ‘Both [caring for and caring about] are necessary but it is the latter that lifts caring out of the mire of condescension and abuse of power with which it has sometimes been tainted’ (2002: 125). I hope that I shall be able to convey what the qualities of caring about involve if they are to achieve this not inconsiderable feat.

Once I started reading the care literatures with a question in mind about the capacity to care, I noticed that they were often based on an unexamined assumption, namely that, given the appropriate resources and supports, people will care adequately. Of course, given the long history of belief that women are natural carers, it is not surprising that the assumption continues that women want, and know how, to care. I hope that a sustained focus on the capacity to care can further expose the residues of this assumption, which remains despite the fact that the natural ability of women to care has been profoundly called into question, both ideologically and empirically. What is more, women’s identities and roles are changing within changing gender relations. Where the care of children is concerned, the assumption of an unproblematic capacity to care now often includes fathers as well as mothers, as we can see in the shift to the term ‘parenting’ where ‘mothering’ used to be the common term. In describing and theorising the vicissitudes of acquiring the capacities involved in caring, I want first to problematise the assumption that the capacity to care is natural, which has led to it being taken for granted, and second to challenge the notion that it is simply social, the result of habit, training or practice.

Babies are not born with capacities to care and the acquisition of the morality that underpins good caring is a complex and conflictual process that is an integral part of psychological development. Boys and girls experience the development of identity in very different ways because of the deeply entrenched meanings of gender everywhere around them. The meanings of care are gendered too and so the acquisition of the capacities associated with caring is never a gender-neutral process. So, throughout this book my account keeps in mind the gendering of the capacity to care. It sets this question in the contemporary context of seismic changes in gender relations (in Western cultures in particular) in order to be able to explore what are likely to be their effects on women’s and men’s capacities to care.

I do not subscribe to assumptions about care being the natural capacity of women. However, social science has been afflicted by the kind of binary thinking that argues that if it is not natural it must be social. Post-structuralist feminist accounts have evolved out of the political imperative to challenge arguments based on women’s biology and also out of a trenchant critique of views of subjectivity that assumed a pre-given, unitary and rational (masculine) subject. As a result, however, they commonly risk evacuating subjectivity and ending up with a socially determined subject. This applies even to the more sophisticated treatments of care as in positioning theory.

Beverley Skeggs (1997), for example, is interested in the way that the particular group of working class women that she studied in depth and over time came to construe themselves as caring in the context of the training that they were following. She draws on a Foucauldian idea of subject positions, for example when she inquires into ‘the processes by which the caring self is produced through the negotiation and performances of subject positions given by the organisation of the caring courses and caring curricula’ (Skeggs 1997: 56). These courses were developed as part of a history of ‘many attempts to induce women to enjoy their domestic labour and responsibilities, which Foucault identifies as a form of productive power whereby social regulation can be achieved willingly, even pleasurably, by the participants themselves’ (op cit 41). Foucault’s account of the production of selves within the circuits of power–knowledge–practice relations is frequently criticised for being deterministic, while being a powerful analysis of the social forces that frame, constrain and produce subjects. Skeggs positions her participants in the range of opportunities and discourses that are available and attempts to splice these together with more psychological considerations, such as the importance of being recognised as ‘respectable’ in the wider social gaze or her claim that ‘the caring subject is constructed by the conflation of caring for with caring about, in which the practices of caring become inseparable from the personal dispositions’ (1997: 51). She does not inquire about these personal dispositions. In this book, these dispositions, their origins and trajectories are my primary focus.

Likewise in the more applied literatures, there is a sociological reductionism. Where there is breakdown of care, material and social factors are emphasised as causative: insufficient money and time, competing demands, the low status of caring work, inadequate training and safeguards, women competing with men in the world of work. Perhaps these have been adequate working assumptions. Capacities to care will certainly be put under greater strain if resources and supports are lacking. Where policy is concerned, the greatest help can perhaps be delivered on this terrain (Williams 2004: 73). The longer-term, intergenerational influences on the development of a capacity to care that I shall be focusing on are more likely to elude policy interventions and do not happen within the length of a government’s term of office. Uncared for children, growing into anti-social teenagers and perhaps incapable parents themselves, are widespread and the pattern does not straightforwardly reflect economic circumstances or changes in welfare provision. My question is therefore not just what kind of adult, parental care is good enough to raise happy, well-adjusted children but how this will affect the care that these children are capable of as adults and parents themselves, in families and beyond. The focus of this book is parenting and the care of children because I regard families (in whatever shape and form) as the crucible of subsequent caring relationships.

My analysis is informed by the use of a psycho-social approach; a long-running theme in my work. Broadly, it says that capacities to care are psycho-social in the sense that they develop as part of self development, which is intersubjective, and that the life histories of individuals during the course of this development are inextricably relational and also derive their meaning from their social setting (structures, cultures, practices and discourses). The experience of being cared for is essential in developing the capacity to care. However, one’s ongoing experiences of care, and its lack, are profoundly mediated by internal psychological processes. My choice to focus on the capacity to care is a way of providing a psychological account of self to address the absence of a theory of subjectivity in understanding care. However, by taking a psycho-social perspective I avoid falling back into an individualistic account, even while challenging dominant forms of social constructionism.

I draw on a set of psychoanalytic principles that revolve around unconscious conflict in early relational dynamics, starting with mother–child relationships. Take, as an example, the significance for new mothers of having their own mothers around. This should not be reduced to the principle that the mother provides practical child-care support – although it will probably help if she does. Her mother is also central to the meaning of being a mother through that woman’s experience of being her mother’s child (Chodorow 2002). Her identifications with her mother’s care (including its quality) will be expressed in her own mothering practices, which will continue her own course of ethical development, particularised by her contemporary circumstances – her housing, employment, partner status, for example – whose meanings are all influenced by how she grew up and what her home, her parents and their work meant to her. These are, of course, not a copy of her parents’ meanings because of generational changes in her world (Brannen et al. 2004). As well as always including the social, the psychological capacity to care is also linked to biological characteristics. In my analysis I include the importance of the female, maternal body and the significance of the different reproductive capacities of women and men in early parenting and the effects of these on gendered capacities to care and their likely changes in the twenty-first century.

Because care practices and practising care are not in themselves guarantees of quality, the capacities or dispositions to care need to be addressed. Consequently, this book enters the sensitive terrain of the quality of care. What constitutes goodenough care? There is not one single model for good-quality care and there are probably as many different practices of care as there are contexts, relationships and meanings within which care is exercised. But I shall take the view that there are universal ethical principles too (for example the principle of avoiding violence against others) and consider these alongside the specifics of contemporary Western settings in the idea of capacities to care and how these are expressed in good quality care.

Family conflict and break-up is widely agreed to be influential in children’s development, but not all such families produce problem children and not all problem children have experienced conflict among and loss of primary parental figures. What makes the difference? Often, as feminism has regularly pointed out, mothers are blamed for how children turn out, and often they have been the lynchpin of childrearing. Can women’s willingness and capacity to care (neither as automatic as the ideology would have us believe) survive changes in gender relations as they are currently manifesting in Britain and other Western countries? The individualisation thesis that is central to current social theory debate argues that the individualisation of late modern societies tends towards self- rather than otheroriented motivations and practices. Is the individualising of women undermining their traditional caring capacities? The newspaper article with which I began this introduction provided an example of this social science debate expressed in popular form.

Individualisation theory provides a literature about social changes impacting on the self that does not assume care to be natural and unalterable. On the contrary, the concept of individualisation refers to the complex processes of social transformation that increasingly produce individuals with a capacity for autonomy, freedom of choice and self reflection, and these processes are assumed to run counter to the affiliations and care obligations that are traditionally rooted in kinship and unequal gender relations in which women put the care of others before their own freedom of choice (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1983/2002). They may also run counter to the wishes and needs for dependency, which survive in a conflictual form, jarring with the injunctions of autonomy (Hoggett, 2000). However, this sociological literature does not address changes in the capacity to care, in early or late modernity, perhaps because its exclusive focus on large-scale social transformations leads to an implicit assumption that selves result from these. In contrast, from a psychosocial perspective, I shall emphasise the recalcitrant aspects of selves that make them not so malleable and also render them vulnerable: the anxious, needy, desirous, controlling and above all relational features of self that underpin care. My emphasis on intergenerational transmission suggests that the account of social change in individualisation theory (as in much of social theory) needs modification. Its account of how social change produces changed subjectivity assumes a rapid adjust...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing the Capacity to Care
• 2 Care, Ethics and Relational Subjectivity
• 3 Intersubjectivity in Self Development
• 4 Maternal Subjectivity and the Capacity to Care
• 5 The Gender of Parenting, the Gender of Care
• 6 Difference, Ethics and the Capacity to Care
• 7 Conclusions
• Afterword
• Notes
• References