The Gender Conundrum

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Femininity and Masculinity

Dana Birksted-Breen, Dana Birksted-Breen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134874057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

In The Gender Conundrum Dana Birksted-Breen brings together for the first time key psychoanalytic papers on the subject of femininity and masculinity from the very different British, French, and American perspectives.

The papers are gathered around the central issue of the interplay of body and psyche in psychoanalysis. The editor sees the positive use of this given tension and duality as the key to real understanding of the questions currently surrounding gender identity. As well as addressing the outspoken controversy over the understanding of femininity, she shows that there has been a more silent revolution in the understanding of masculinity.

Offering an international perspective, this collection of seminal papers with introductions of exemplary clarity fills a considerable gap in the literature, providing a classic text for psychoanalysis and gender studies.

PART ONE
The Oedipus complex

Introduction

The Oedipus complex formed the kernel of Freud’s understanding of human sexuality, and he comments: ‘None of the findings of psychoanalytic research has provoked such embittered denials, such fierce opposition—or such amusing contortions—on the part of critics as this indication of the childhood impulses towards incest which persist in the unconscious’. (Freud, SE4, 1900; footnote, 1914:263).

The tragic story of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, which is on the level of phantasy for the human individual, is subject to repression. It is the unconsciousness of the desire (Oedipus did not know they were his parents since he had been separated from them at birth), as well as its prohibition, which describes human sexuality from a psychoanalytic point of view. When Oedipus discovered his incestuous actions he stabbed his eyes out (symbolic castration) and fled from the land he had polluted. The prohibition of the incestuous act is what leads the boy towards adulthood through repression of the desire and identification with the father. The authority of the father or the parents is introjected into the ego, forming the nucleus of the superego and perpetuating the prohibition against incest. The libidinal trends are desexualized and changed into impulses of affection.¹

The recognition of sexual difference in classical theory has a momentous but not identical consequence for the boy and the girl. The sight of the female genital engenders in the boy the fear that he could lose his penis, giving new, retrospective meaning to earlier threats of castration or experiences of loss (of the feeding breast, of his own faeces). In order to eschew this possibility, the boy abandons and represses his wish to take his father’s place in relation to his mother.

The moment of recognition, on the other hand, arouses anger and envy in the little girl, who up until then was ‘a little man’ in that she too took her mother as her love object, her phallic strivings towards her coming from her clitoris. Acceptance of ‘castration’, and the anger with the mother who deprived her of a penis, will instigate her turning to her father as her love object and to the babies he can give her as a substitute for the penis. This desire will be gradually given up because it is never fulfilled. Whereas the recognition of sexual difference and the fear of castration ultimately leads to the dissolution of the Oedipus complex for the boy, for her the recognition of sexual difference initiates the Oedipus complex when she gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child,

and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a love-object. Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy. The girl has turned into a little woman…this new situation can give rise to physical sensations which would have to be regarded as a premature awakening of the female genital apparatus.

(Freud 1925:256)

The girl’s turn to the father is more than just a change of object, Freud says. Active trends which have been frustrated are abandoned, and some of the passive trends too. The transition to the father-object is accomplished with the help of the passive trends in so far as they have escaped the catastrophe. The path to the development of femininity now lies open to the girl, to the extent to which it is not restricted by the remains of the pre-Oedipal attachment to her mother which she has surmounted. Because the turning to the father is accomplished with the help of the passive trends, a masochistic attitude will be important to female sexuality, while the narcissistic wound of her discovery of sexual difference will lead her to identify her whole body with the phallus in a narcissistic way. Because there is no threat of castration for the girl, the Oedipus complex does not come to an abrupt end as it does for boys, and hence the formation of the superego will suffer.

The Oedipus complex is still, as it was for Freud, considered to be central to the development of masculinity and femininity, shaping identifications, and central to the understanding of deviant sexual development. All psychoanalysts agree upon this. What differs is the timing of the Oedipus complex, what phenomena it encompasses and the understanding of its origin, in particular the role of ‘castration’ in instigating the girl’s Oedipus complex which only ‘classical’ theorists uphold. Its ‘pre-history’ is now generally granted greater importance than it had for Freud, but there is controversy as to what forms the Oedipus complex, with Kleinian writers including manifestations from the pre-genital phase, while for others the Oedipus complex denotes only those manifestations of three-person attraction and rivalry which have a genital basis. There is also a controversy as to when genital sensations take on Oedipal meaning, again with Kleinian authors dating this much earlier than most.

The relationship between pre-Oedipal and Oedipal elements is conceptualized in two different ways. In the one conceptualization, to the classical Oedipus phase is added an earlier, discrete phase. This is Lampl-de Groot’s perspective; she suggests that the separation of sexuality from tenderness which Freud first described as common in men could be understood in terms of the mother of the pre-Oedipal phase and the mother of the Oedipal phase:

the admired and honored woman is chosen according to the mother image of the period of the Oedipus complex. She is the heiress to the great love of little Oedipus for Jocasta. The degraded sexual partner, on the other hand, is the heiress to the image of the mother of the pre-Oedipal phase: she has inherited the intense hostility that the little boy may have felt for her. That hostility, in turn, stems from his early ambivalence toward the mother and is reinforced by the fact that the mother has later become his rival in his love for the father. The adult man can vent his anger against the degraded sexual object; he can mistreat her, can force her to satisfy all his needs and desires, even perverse ones, and can compel her to attend to his wants as he wished his mother to do when he was a little boy.

(Lampl-de Groot 1946:76)

In the other conceptualization. Oedipal and pre-Oedipal are more closely interconnected. Blanck writes:

Although Freud applied the Oedipus myth to the normal family, it does not describe a normal family constellation. The normal Oedipal situation requires that there shall have been a pre-Oedipal family life in which preponderantly positive self representations and positive representations of both parents develop out of positive affective experiences. These attenuate the murderous wishes of the Oedipal phase. One questions whether the normally developing child can wish unambivalently to kill the parent of the same sex with whom she or he has built up positive cathexes over the pre-Oedipal years. Murderous wishes have to be transient, not even necesssarily restricted to Oedipal wishes, but more broadly attributable to normal quantities of negative affect. I am not persuaded that the Oedipal wish can overthrow all that went before, although I acknowledge its power.

(Blanck 1984:336)

Blanck does at the same time recognize the Oedipus complex as ‘a critical period in Spitz’s sense of convergence of drive maturation with ego development’ (1984:337).

In the case of the girl, while Freud described a definite developmental move from one object to the other following disappointment, the relationships to mother and father are now conceived as more fluid. Ogden (1987) points out that disruption of the pre-Oedipal relationship to the mother as described by Freud at the time of the change of object would be expected to lead to the erection of narcissistic and omnipotent defences rather than to Oedipal love as the foundation of healthy love relationships. The early relationship to the father is now recognized, and there is seen to be a constant move between negative and positive complex (Laufer 1984). The role of the father before the Oedipus complex is recognized, both in his direct interaction with the child and indirectly in consequence of his interaction with the mother (Formanek 1982). The role of the mother or the parent’s unconscious phantasies and desires in structuring the sexuality of the child has been emphasized (Le Guen 1984). Lichtenstein (1961) believes that the infant is given an identity by the mother, he is ‘the organ, the instrument for the fulfillment of the mother’s unconscious needs’.

For Klein’s followers there is an early Oedipus complex, early femininity and no normal phallic phase since they do not accept the theory of phallic monism (see also Blanck de Cereijido 1983). The Oedipus complex is described as biologically determined since it does not result from the perception of ‘castration’. Most other authors retain the classic phallic phase, even when they describe an earlier ‘primary femininity’, which modifies considerably the classical picture (Phyllis Tyson). Edgcumbe and Burgner (1975) make a further distinction between a ‘phallic-narcissistic phase’ during which the narcissistic investment of sexually differentiated aspects of the body assumes particular importance, and an ‘Oedipal phase’ in the later part of the phallic phase when triangular Oedipal relationships are established.

Roiphe and Galenson (1980), using Mahler’s framework, suggest that the rapprochement crisis is more troubled for girls than it is for boys, because their recognition of sexual difference is not denied as it is by boys and leads to a heightened aggressive aspect of the ambivalence to the mother and a turning to the father, in preparation for the future positive Oedipal constellation.

Using Klein’s later formulations, Kleinians make a distinction between less mature (or early stages of) and more mature forms of the Oedipus complex. While the paranoid-schizoid mode of functioning predominates, the Oedipal conflict will be experienced in a very split fashion (with one parent or part-object idealized and the other experienced as persecuting). The Oedipus complex in its more mature form (which is the true Oedipus complex) is thought to be intrinsically related to the depressive position in that it describes a relationship to whole objects. In fact one could say that the traditional Oedipus story as it is told, although referring to whole objects, operates at the level of murder and talion, which is the paranoid-schizoid mode of functioning. Segal suggests reserving the term ‘Oedipus complex’ for the relationship to the parents as whole people of the depressive position, and that what sometimes appears as an Oedipus complex is not a true triangular relationship but the projection of the hated aspects of the breast onto the penis. This will have the appearance only of an Oedipus complex in the boy.

Whatever the theoretical orientation, and whatever the debates about what is true Oedipus complex and what is not, and about when to locate it in time, the Oedipus complex is still generally thought to have a fundamental role in the structuring of sexuality, in spite of the increasing place given to pre-Oedipal or pre-genital phenomena. An important difference remains around whether it is conceived of as developing in progressive continuity or seen as imposing a distinctive new structure which reorganizes and gives new meaning to earlier perceptions. For instance, Denis (1982), taking up Freud’s own formulation, suggests that although sexual differences are perceived early and play a role as precursors, it takes an extra element (the Oedipus complex and castration) to initiate later a Copernican revolution leading to all differences being re-organized around the sexual difference, which then takes on special and fundamental significance. Hence early bodily experiences and parental attitudes become determining retrospectively. Some contemporary Kleinians have shifted the perspective from the classical Oedipus complex as described by Freud. They suggest that the true Oedipus complex is recognizing the couple as a creative relationship which produces the baby and recognizing the hate, jealousy and envy it provokes.

The fantasies of going off with daddy or going off with mummy are really defensive structures against those feelings, an Oedipal myth as distinct from the reality underneath. Any deviation from sexuality of that kind is an internal attack on the parents as a couple, and in that sense is not really a complete healthy development.

(Segal 1990)

Britton (1989) calls them ‘Oedipal illusions’, intended to deny the Oedipus situation.

Maxwell Gitelson, reviewing the role of pre-genital conflicts in pathology, concluded in 1952 that ‘the Oedipus complex thus has a typical importance not so much as the nucleus of the neuroses but as the nucleus of normal character structure and as the basis of mature life’ (1952:354). This view is still generally held, in spite of the differences in perspective.

The formative role of negative as well as positive Oedipal constellations is also generally recognized. The papers of both Blos (1984) and Laufer (1984) included in Part One, written on either side of the Atlantic, one describing masculine development, the other feminine development, illustrate current thinking which emphasizes a constant fluctuation between positive and negative Oedipus complex rather than a strictly linear development, and progressive change rather than discrete times of trauma and resolution.

In his paper, Blos stresses the importance of the negative Oedipus complex in the formation of masculine identity with its important roots in the pre-Oedipal relationship to the father.

Eglé Laufer describes the vicissitudes of the girl’s giving up of the phantasy of being able to keep the mother’s love for herself, which goes along with her acceptance of ‘castration’; that is, the acceptance of her body and of being of the same sex as the mother. She views this as ‘an organizer’ which lays the foundation to her relationship to herself as a woman.

Part and parcel of the Oedipal situation is the recognition by both sexes that the parents have a relationship to each other. Britton (1989) describes in his paper, from a Kleinian perspective, the function of this ‘triangular space’ and the defensive manoeuvres and organizations which take place when that recognition of the parental link cannot be tolerated.

Note

1 The Oedipus complex came to mean for Freud more than this ‘positive version’ and to denote more broadly the child’s situation in the triangle, both ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, thus emphasizing the centrality of bisexuality.

1
Son and father

PETER BLOS

As the title of this presentation indicates, I shall limit myself to a narrowly confined aspect of object relations. It is a topic that defies precise circumscription partially due to its vast ramifications and to its still contentious and unsettled place in psychoanalytic theory. The fact that my chosen subject is one of momentous importance in human life requires no persuasion nor testimony. In choosing it I emphasize a current trend in clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. I shall begin with a brief overview of recent developments as well as the historical ones in the orbit of son and father.

The discovery of the Oedipus complex, its fateful role in life and, particularly, in neurosogenesis has led to an ever-deepening investigation of its complexity. Originally, gender polarity represented a core configuration in Oedipal conflict formation; this fact is still discernible today in Oedipal terminology when we speak of the positive and the negative Oedipus complex. For brevity’s sake I shall refer in this text simply to the ‘positive complex’ or the ‘negative complex’. As far as I propose modifications of their classical definitions, I trust that my presentation as a whole will convey the qualifications in psychoanalytic theory I intend to suggest.

The case of Dora permits us to contrast early and contemporary views of Oedipal dynamics. Dora illustrates the pathogenic valence that Freud (1905) attributed to the positive complex and its influence on her life, even though he gave ample evidence of his suspicion or, indeed, his conviction that the negative complex was at the root of her illness. This he stated clearly in the case study itself (pp.) and in a letter to Fliess (14 October 1900), even though it played a minor role in the analytic work with the girl—at least, as far as we can glean from the clinical report. The degree as well as the kind of pathogenic valence the clinician assigns to pre-Oedipality and to one or the other of the two complexes in their dynamic inter-play, often remain a matter of emphasis or preconception. In contrast to the treatment of Dora, the pathogenicity of pre-Oedipal object relations is taken for granted in almost any case today, and afforded a prominent place not only in the evolutionary history of a given neurosis, but explicitly and increasingly in the analytic work itself.

The polarity of gender—son-mother, daughter-father—has dominated the concept of the Oedipal constellation since its inception and has weighed heavily in the etiologic formulation of the neurotic conflict. However, clinical observations have attributed an increasingly persuasive significance to isogender early object relations. Indeed, both constellations, namely those of isogender and allogender partnership, have received slowly, at times reluctantly, the recognition of equal significance in the theoretical formulations of normal and pathological development. This historical reference might sound groundless or overstated at its first hearing, yet we cannot deny that the positive complex and its resolution have received far more attention in the analytic literature than the natural history as well as the resolution of the negative complex ever has.

It was this extreme sparseness of investigations in male isogender object relations from the earliest stages of development onward that prompted me to inquire into these neglected issues. My analytic work had convinced me that early isogender experiences not only dominate and shape the son-father relationship at infancy, but influence critically...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Part One: The Oedipus Complex
• Part Two: The Phallic Question
• Part Three: The Representation of the Body
• Part Four: Bisexuality
• Bibliography