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- Title
מין מגדר שכאלה מחשבות פסיכואנליטיות על הקבוע והמשתנה.
- Authors
ענת פלגי הקר
- Abstract
In this article, I clarify the concepts of sex and gender in psychoanalytic thought and then offer my reflections on the quality of our contemporary definitions and conceptions. The underlying theme of my discussion is the understanding that the conceptual disarray regarding sex and gender, as well as the changes in psychoanalytic thought over the years, cause some distress, open or hidden, among many psychotherapists when they face gendered clinical issues. Two clinical topics are of interest: one deals with changes in the position of classical psychoanalysis regarding the early belief in clear-cut differences between the feminine and masculine. The second concerns the “neutrality” of the therapist, especially as regards gender attitudes in normative and so-called perverse development, which has long been found to be an important but naïve and unattainable ideal. I begin by describing the historical development of the concepts of sex and gender in psychoanalysis: starting with Freud’s earliest formulations of the concepts at a few critical points of time that sharpened different ideas on sexual difference, sexual seduction, the development of sexuality, and, of course, bisexuality (N.B., gender as a concept was not formulated until 1955 by John Money [1921-2006]), so Freud deals with the complicated subject without the useful differentiation between sex and gender). I place particular emphasis on the contributions of Karen Horney (1885-1952) who argued (1932) that each one of the sexes is envious of what it does not have: penis envy is matched by womb envy. In other words, each sex needs to come to terms with its own form of lack of wholeness. The second point of time was characterized by marginalizing sexuality. At this point, it was sidelined by the theory of object relations, first according to the Kleinian approach, and then, by Winnicott’s and Kohut’s approaches which emphasized primary needs and deprivation. The topic re-emerged following Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble (1990), which shook the psychoanalytic world and placed the concept of gender at the center of the discourse. Butler put forth a radical argument against the biological and social coherence of the sexual and gender categories. According to Butler, as soon as babies are born, they are marked by the adults, the social agents, who surround the baby’s cradle. Her arguments reversed the order of things: the thought that the sexual body came first, before the social and cultural discourse, was declared erroneous, since, in her opinion, both sex and gender were social constructs. As a consequence of Butler’s writing, various cultural changes in the way gender was conceptualized took place; the queer position that opposes an essentialist, preformed and clearly-defined identity declared sexual identity to be inherently fluid. I believe that the practice of psychoanalysis was caught unready for the tremor associated with the deconstruction and reconstruction of gender identity, and for the loss of authority in this domain that was built on the longing of the “know-all” well-analyzed psychoanalyst. These developments occurred in parallel with the renewed interest in sexuality. A kind of “return of the repressed” is signified most saliently by André Green’s (1927-2012) well-known essay entitled “Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis?”(1995) that challenges the absurd disconnect between psychoanalysis and sexuality. Green is not alone; in all quarters of psychoanalysis, there is a growing body of deep thinking on these issues. It is fair to say that the postmodern thought budged psychoanalysis from its theoretical fixations and also changed its clinical approaches. As far as I understand, the binary sexual biological-physiological difference is not going to disappear; it is axiomatic for the human psyche that its organization, conceptualization and understanding of a coherent identity revolve around a more complex model of sexuality/gender. At the very basis of our being, there is a need for a binary distinction of male-female, man and woman. On this relatively stable basis, another layer of gendered identity is being built that could fit partly or not at all with the “given” biological sexual form. Consequently, one can point to two layers of the psyche: a fixed layer (“I was born male or female”) and a dynamic layer that could form or be in a constant process of gender formation. With the aid of the distinction between the fixed and the dynamic, it is easier to see the crucial role of our inherent bisexuality, as Freud deeply appreciated, in creating gender richness. In the present sexual reality in which a male (still) cannot conceive and give birth, and a female cannot (yet) fertilize, other possibilities open-up: to be an ‘I’ with feminine characteristics or a woman with some masculine attributes. If it was once emphasized that anatomy is destiny, then it can be said that gendered reality is anti-destiny (David, 2018). I demonstrate this way of thinking by reflecting on patients who come nowadays to the clinics. I examine the dream of a patient from the viewpoint of several possible interpretations that probably would have been given along the history of psychoanalysis. I point to the need to free psychoanalytical thinking from the clock of “gender correctness” precisely by returning to Freud’s thoughts on the bisexual foundation of the psyche. Finally, I suggest a contemporary overview of the concepts of sex and gender. The twentieth-century opened with The Interpretation of Dreams and with the outbreak of modernism, and it ended with the counteraction of postmodernism. Now, well into the twenty-first century, we are in the midst of another transition to a post- postmodern position, a sort of a middle road between modernism and postmodernism, with the suggested title of “metamodernism” (Vermeulen & Van den Akker, 2010). This is a pendulum that swings between the “truth” of modernism and “everything goes” of postmodernism. I suggest considering the concepts of sex and gender in terms of the language of mourning, i.e., the depressive position, referring to the impossibility of being everything, both a girl and a boy. In my opinion, this formulation provides ethical outlines for the psychoanalytical therapist and possible spaces of listening to whomever wishes to define themselves sexually in one way or another.
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019, Vol 9, p327
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article