Visions of the Self

Susan Kavaler-Adler rescues the instinctual bodily self from the relative oblivion of current theoretical trends, particularly those of self psychology and poststructuralism. She places it back at the center of the psyche as a powerful organizer of feeling, thought, and behavior. In so doing, she attends to the specifics of female gender identity and sexual development. Lax (1994) notes that Freud's dictum that “anatomy is destiny” is true for the girl, but that for a girl it is her own anatomy and not her reaction to the male anatomy. Bernstein (1993), following the same line of thought, points out that there are specific “traumatic moments” for the girl, these being based on the particular anatomical and physiological constellation—the “equipment”—with which she traverses her developmental path. “Genital anxieties in the female also have their own developmental progression and their specific function in the shaping of psychic structures … these [anxieties] having to do with access, diffusivity, and penetration (p. 7).”

When Kavaler-Adler speaks of the instinctual self, she refers to the core self formation in which subjective desire can be owned and contained in a subjective self. When instinctual desire and erotic longings cannot be contained within the self, that desire is split off and, according to Kavaler-Adler, personified as an impinging masculine force. In effect, there is a condensation of the persecutory object of the preoedipally fixated woman with her father who is now experienced as erotically dangerous.

Through the analysis of major female poets through their work, Kavaler-Adler has traced the vicissitudes of the instinctual self caught in the pathology of the inner object world. Many women developmentally fixated in relation to their primary object bring their desire, their erotic instinctual self into relationship only with other women. Meanwhile their fathers and all men remain essentially irrelevant emotionally and erotically. The woman Kavaler-Adl