CHAPTER TWO THEORETICAL POSITION
2.7. Psychoanalytic explanations
Freud argued that gender identity is shaped by the tensions of innate drives, the sanctioning of society, visual recognition of anatomical difference and Oedipal
identification with the same-sex parent at the phallic stage (Frosh, 1994). Feminist critics including Julia Kristeva and others have suggested that Freud's claims were misogynistic, presupposed heteronormativity and privileged male experience as normative (Hird, 2003). Feminist critique has also suggested that Freud privileged the phallic body in his account of the female's deduction of inferiority from visual comparison (Frosh, 1994).
This carries the implication that the feminine is an acquired identity based on deficit, a failed form of masculinity (Edley & Wetherell, 1995). Hird (2003) however claims that a
feminist re-reading of Freud yields two distinct explanations of gender identity. The first is the more orthodox view that the pre-social body forms the basis for a 'healthy'
resolution of the Oedipal complex in the direction of the 'sexual aim' of reproduction, the view that has been criticised for its phallocentric and heterosexist assumptions (Hird, 2003). The second explanation is based on Freud's later views that there exists a pre- Oedipal state of'polymorphous perversity' where object choices are based on undifferentiated desire and predisposition towards bisexuality (Hird, 2003). This interpretation also allows for regressive or ambivalent identifications with same or opposite sex parents at the Oedipal stage, a position which emphasises an enduring ambivalence in what are always fragile gender identifications and heterogeneity of sexual desire (Hird, 2003; Frosh, 1994). What should not be overlooked is how radical Freud's sexual politics were for his time and that his theories were evolving hypotheses rather than fixed conclusions (Edley & Wetherell, 1995; Frosh, 1994).
Freud's theories of subject formation, gender and sexuality were radically revised in the work of Jacques Lacan who made the ambiguous claim that the social or cultural is both regulatory and constitutive of subjectivity (Frosh et al., 2003). Through language and self-recognition the meanings of subjects and objects are produced in an order of
linguistic signs and representations (Kimmel, 2000). Gender is thus not only meaningful but is also the very structure of meaning itself. Lacan emphasises the paternal prohibitive (the non), attached to the name of the father, the 'nom', as a significant moment which creates a cultural subject by demanding a symbolic break in the illusions of narcissistic oneness with the mother, creating the 'Symbolic' (Frosh, 2002). At the 'mirroring' stage, a moment of mistaken self-identification in which the mother presents the child with her own vision, an illusion of wholeness that confines and protects the child in the realm of the 'Literal' (Frosh et al., 2003). The mirroring stage suggests a process whereby the ego is externally structured and identity becomes what is mirrored to it in social interaction (Frosh et al., 2003). This process, argues Frosh et al (2003), offers leverage on the question of how enculturation operates at the level of personal
subjectivity and in early relationships. A limitation of the Lacanian system may be its emphasis on the subject as carried along by the cultural and linguistic processes
embedded in family life (Frosh et al., 2003). What it may contribute to a psychology of masculinity is a theory for the contradiction, anxiety, 'objectification' of women and representations of impossible 'hegemonic' or 'phallic' ideals (Adams & Savran, 2002).
The other major school of Freudian revisionism, Kleinian psychoanalysis and its elaboration in the work of Bion, describe subjectivity in terms of the intense mutual entanglement of mother and infant - a web of bodily sensation, phantasy, projective and introjective processes (Frosh, 2002). Critics notes that Kleinian 'mother-psychology' privileges mothering in an early primal scene involving only the exclusive maternal dyad, depicting the mother as the sole means by which the infant of either sex becomes an integrated subject (Frosh, 2002). Unlike the Lacanian 'father-psychology', Kleinian thought locates images of regulation not within the paternal limits in the relational triad, but within the mother as a means of containment (Frosh, 2002).
Object relations theory offers a grounded alternative to classic psychoanalytic drive theory and its revisionists by depicting subjectivity as the infant's alignment with the loved other and the sense of separateness received from the loved object (Frosh et al., 2003). Chodorow's work on the psychoanalysis of gender bridges the gap between the primacy of early relationships as emphasised by the object relationists, and the later processes of dis-identification with the primary caregiver and re-identification (in girls) or identification (for boys) with the same-sex parent (Rabinowitz & Cochran, 2002).
Chorodow posits a qualitative difference in the relationships mothers build with male and female children based on the gender difference or similarity between caregiver and child (Rabinowitz & Cochran, 2002). By 'othering' the gender of their male infant, mothers reinforce an intensified ambivalence towards intimacy and 'soft' feelings of oneness (Edley & Wetherell, 1995). Chodorow also suggests that cultural contexts which exclude men from parenting during the early phases of life tend to reproduce male domination by requiring the disavowal of women to achieve a gender identity (Attwell, 2002).
Chodorow explains masculinity as a negative identity which is premised on the boy's disengagement from the primary caregiver during the Oedipal stage. For boys, this process of renunciating the feminine involves intense loss, denial and grieving (Kimmel,
2000). For the male child, identification with the same-sex parent is combined with a devastating sense of abandonment, whereas, for girls, identity is established through re- identification and fusing with the primary caregiver (Kimmel, 2000). The boy is forced to relinquish and repress deeply held early identifications with the mother and must make a considerable effort to prove the successful accomplishing of this task (Kimmel, 2000).
Pollack suggests that the boy's repressed experience of abandonment amounts to a normative disjuncture in empathic holding (Rabinowitz & Cochran, 2002). This makes boys more vulnerable than girls to developing narcissistic compensatory self-structures because of the firming of ego boundaries and ambivalence related to dependency that the loss trauma creates (Rabinowitz & Cochran, 2002). For Benjamin (1995, cited in Frosh, 2002), it is not so much the loss of his mother that poses an emotional risk for the boy, as much as the challenge of finding an embodied father who is 'really there' for the boy in any form other than a symbolic prohibition. Benjamin suggests that 'over-inclusive' identification with either one of the parents leads to polarised gender development.
The value of these explanations is that they describe how cultural expectations are played out in the experience of early dependence, and how men and boys experience and
suppress early grief and loss in a way that makes sense of male autonomy, the denigration of women and unconscious fears of intimacy (Rabinowitz & Cochran, 2002). The limitation is that psychoanalytic approaches may underestimate the cultural differences in child-rearing practices and gender expectations that contribute significantly to the
environment of early childhood. Applegate (1990) argues that the traditional dyadic narrative of mother and child, and the Oedipal drama reflect a cultural pattern of family relations and infant caregiving. Super and Harkness (1994) suggest that development occurs in a culturally mediated developmental niche which includes the culturally relative physical and social settings and differentially organised customs and practices of child rearing. Studies show numerous examples of non-Western cultures in which children have access to multiple caregivers who may act as protective barriers to the patterns of triangulation which occur the Western nuclear family (Applegate, 1990). Roland (1996) suggests that a valid psychoanalytic paradigm should account for unique cultural
configurations in terms of their early relationships and holding environments. Critics of psychoanalysis have also noted a general neglect of diversity factors such as class, racial and ethnic diversities (Edley & Wetherell, 1995). Psychoanalytic formulations which equate heteronormativity with wellness or assume a single 'true' explanation for masculinity or assume that there is one preferable or healthy masculinity may also be problematic in that they do not allow for a diversity of possibilities for integration (Edley
& Wetherell, 1995).