A note about writing during COVID 19: The beginning of the new, the ideas that generate all that can be thought, may be when the psyche and the world are shaken up, almost destroyed. My hope is that the terrible amount of death and grief occurring now will eventually engender transformations in our psychoanalytic thinking and clinical models. It is particularly moving to be part of this group of thinkers about Arlene Kramer Richards' paper as we live through the present terrors and rage—thinking together helps create resilience.
(May 26, 2020)
It takes chutzpah to break away from a thought collective that hides from new knowledge, and then to lay down the groundwork for a new thought collective. Chutzpah is a Yiddish word defined as shameless audacity, impudence, personal conviction, and courage. The description on YouTube of a Ted Talk by Jonathan Howard (The Art of Chutzpah: what blocks us from creative thinking?) states that “… cultivating chutzpah is a powerful way to think about inner boundaries that block our creativity.” In other words, one needs chutzpah to break the block, to create and to join with others in the act of creation. Gathering the strength to be creative requires being able to feel rage, to honor its psychic reality, and to have others who join in recognition of rage. Creative use of rage is the opposite of destructive envy, attack, and perversion. A block in psychoanalytic thought defeats the process of psychoanalysis that always involves layers of the mind and the unconscious fantasies that accompany all of our awareness and thinking. It seems to me that belonging with a group can augment the chutzpah of oneself and become the chutzpah of the group determined to work with the rage. Being invited to comment on Arlene Kramer Richards' paper and accepting to take part in the writing of commentaries gives me more courage to remember what has
enraged me about blind spots toward women (Goodman, 2018, 2019) in society and psychoanalysis. It is important to feel rage when there is basic misunderstanding of female, the female psychic body, and the full dimensions of unconscious fantasy about female. Throughout my experience as a psychoanalyst I have been working on how to understand the way deep overwhelming traumas enter the mind as dead spaces and how discovering and creating living spaces through symbolism brings resilience to the mind (Goodman, 2012). Being part of this commentary group increases the psychic space for making symbolic and meaningful knowledge where nothingness of dead theory, in need of rage reaction, had resided. I am thankful to be part of this thought collective.
In writing about “Rage and Creativity”, Arlene Kramer Richards introduces the thinking of Fleck (1979) who describes “thought style” of a particular time and place that “generates all the concepts capable of being thought” leading to a “thought collective”. Arlene explains that this arises within a group of people who have contact—“through any medium” resulting in a shift of thought. She demonstrates the process by recounting the influences of second generation feminists on the field of psychoanalysis. What would Fleck say about collectives not only gathering together all of the thoughts in a community but then, (I emphasize the ‘then‘) having these thoughts lead to new open un-defined psychic space birthing ever generating multiple thought collectives? In other words I suggest that there are continuous patterns in which a group synergistically produces new thoughts and makes new space as long as the thoughts have a sense of truth and usefulness. There is never one event, but there is a process. By defining a thought collective as a process there is a way, a method for approaching thinking about something. The drum beat heard loudly through the words of Arlene's title: “Rage and Creativity” can be felt as the floor vibrates with the sound. The transmission of anger and creativity influences my taking in and working with this paper. I see the process beginning with a disturbance causing one to fear falling through the earth until stabilization ensues.
The hypothesis I take away from Arlene Kramer Richards' paper is that rage, when able to be felt, especially with others, awakens creativity bringing about new thinking. Rage equals a felt earthquake and creativity provides recovery. Unending rage, especially when turned against oneself does not open the new possibility, so the ingredient of recognizing with others provides the useful fertility of mind.
I identify, not only that the something new takes on a powerful force for a group, but that the way to find the new is part of the potency producing the thought collective. In other words, a methodology is born and is central to the process of finding what had not previously been found. I have written about “finding” unconscious fantasy (Ellman and Goodman, 2017) and here continue to emphasize the import of “finding” in my response to Arlene's paper; that is, the finding of models of thinking that hold validity and appeal to a group that then continually expand the central compelling and useful ideas.
I have decided to concentrate on two events involving the female body that hold the feel of earthquakes taking place. Since both are centered on something opening, I use the image of the speculum as both an actual instrument and as a metaphoric psychic instrument that allows new concepts to be seen and discovered. In Latin, speculum means mirror and it is this new mirror that reflects what had previously been covered over, consciously and unconsciously.
My first association to the topic of Arlene's paper was to this Second Wave feminist revolution which took place in New Haven, Connecticut in 1971, when women (both Yale associated and community members) went to meetings where they each received a speculum in order to be able to see that inner private place—the cervix. The anger of the early 1970s led to claiming of the interior female body through collective acts of consciousness raising groups. A background of restriction, discrimination, and being treated as invisible under the elm trees of the Yale campus moved from identifications with the aggressor (“of course we will not cause trouble”) to intensification of a protest movement. Women had recently been admitted to Yale College as undergraduates receiving tremendous backing by faculty. Women in the community and women who were the wives of faculty and graduate students were still considered a pariah for the campus—“you can take a class on cooking, but cannot sit in on any academics” and to those applying to the graduate programs – “stop trying to sneak through the backdoor because your husband is on the faculty”.
In 1971 women who had been meeting in consciousness raising groups
gathered in a large room filled with tables, a speaker's podium, and a film screen. Upon entering the room each woman was handed a plastic speculum in protective wrapping. The main speakers explained that many women were afraid to look at their genitals, so slides of photos of female genitalia were accompanying the presenter's remarks, including naming the features of the female genital. One of the topics was about the recent findings of Masters and Johnson in Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy (published in 1966 and 1970), which legitimized the equality of orgasms from intercourse and from clitoral stimulation alone. Photos of the outer genital were displayed in a slide show as the speaker told of a survey in which many women were sure there was something wrong with their genitals—labia too large, labia too small, etc. The next step was the opportunity to lie on the table with a small group of other women and to show how a speculum could be inserted and opened while holding a mirror to see one's own cervix. This passageway provides an outlet for intimate inner secretions, including menstruation, to flow out. The cervix also marks the place where sperm can enter on a quest to find the ovum and make a baby. And, of crucial importance, the cervix softens and opens (effacement) during labor providing the gateway for birthing. For most of the women in the crowded room, the name cervix was learned in relation to the pap tests done by doctors to rule out disease and through their pregnancies when doctors would pronounce that the cervix was fully dilated and pushing to deliver one's baby could take place. As women revealed this important precious tissue to view, they also admitted that pressure against the cervix provided sexual pleasure—another internal presence that may have been held secret. Not only was the rounded protruding cervix with a small hole in its middle now visible but the means for access belonged to each woman.
The medicalization of female body and the misogynistic attitude that only the physician had visual access was breaking down as women took possession of their full genital, their association with other women, and their anger. As women met, creativity was exploding, including the writing of Our Bodies Ourselves that grew out of 12 women meeting in a women's liberation conference in Boston in 1969 bringing about the publication in 1971. The work was to provide knowledge to women about the female body enabling women to claim their own bodies with
information removing reliance on the medical establishment. The volume has continued to be updated and the original is referred to as a feminist classic. Women were overriding stereotypes with their own experiential knowledge symbolized by the page content being overlaid against a background of newsprint. A new message was born.
A statement was being made that women lived in bodies that belonged to them, including the cervix and ownership of choices around fertility, birth control and abortion. The act of possessing the means for sight arose from anger within a group thus starting the demarcation of a new thought collective. This thought collective was about women, about power, and about body and psyche. Identifications with a paternalistic social order were being questioned and replaced in concert with the political protests also taking place in New Haven (the Bobby Seal trial vigils on the town Green and the anti-war rallies). Later other barriers came down because of the brewing of rage among psychologists and non-medical therapists to bring about a way to have psychoanalytic training which had been considered privy to only psychiatrists. The famous psychoanalytic lawsuit against the American Psychoanalytic Association's training only of psychiatrists, of which Arlene Kramer Richards was an active participant, was initiated in 1985 and settled in 1988 allowing training for many more women. Could momentum have begun because women had access to the new method of seeing inside, the speculum?
As with the women who were gaining access to seeing their inner genital, the cervix; psychoanalysis took a turn which expanded the ability to see the feminine psyche (and the male psyche) by doing away with penis envy as bedrock and expanding psychoanalytic listening to include primary femininity. The development of this line of thinking and the attraction of clinical and theoretical interest produced the ground swell of innovative thoughts defining a new thought collective in regard to the feminine. The new thought collective could now listen for depth of mind, for unconscious fantasies previously covered over, and for compromise formations involving uniquely female form of desire and fear. Bedrock was replaced; new space was opened for understanding of all minds.
Historically Freud had provided a way to deeply know the mind, including
motivations, instinctual forces, and fantasy compromises involving wish, fear, and punishment. A male paradigm developed in which the boy's wish to marry mother was accompanied by fear of castration as retaliation for killing off of the father function. Freud admitted he did not understand the feminine and that it would be women who would eventually discover the mysteries of femininity. I have a vivid recollection of when I read Nancy Chodorow's Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989) and could feel more settled that I could love psychoanalysis and its exploration of deep experience and also be a feminist in approaching the blind spots embedded in psychoanalysis in regard to women. I am still thankful for her revelation of how to manage both. As I see it, the new arose from creativity ignited from rage turned into the defining of primary femininity which then became the speculum for the mind to open to new spaces and new psychoanalytic vision.
The term ‘primary femininity’ came into prominence, and with writings by Stoller (1976) highlighted that the female baby/child has a sense of her femaleness and knowledge of her own body as gender specific. The girl knows she is a girl rather than a boy who has been made into a girl through castration. While patients might themselves may have such a fantasy, it is not a theoretical truth. The concept of primary femininity became central to a new thought collective publishing a body of literature centered on seeing the female body, including the psychic reality of impressions, representations, and unconscious fantasies. The new concept, like a speculum, had the ability to open new vistas in the entire field of psychoanalysis. Not only could women psychoanalysts obtain the freedom to listen to patients and their own minds in new ways, but psychoanalysis could be organized to open theory and thus increase the effectiveness of psychoanalytic listening. The model of mind without bedrock could now be seen as layered and continually in process with one fantasy defending against others and also leading to others, thus expanding the psychoanalytic clinical action of finding unconscious fantasy (Ellman and Goodman, 2017). The unconscious is iterative, not formulaic.
Equivalence of a basic fantasy could move in multiple directions and be listened for by analyst and patient. A new potent form of listening evolved
within the expanding membership of a new thought collective that could make use of the idea of primary femininity to hear more truths of the female psyche.
It takes courage to corral the energy to turn rage into creativity. I discovered how tempting it is to retain allegiance to the enraging paradigm, consciously and unconsciously, when researching primary femininity with a group of colleagues. We discovered a lag between our theoretical knowledge and the clinical use of it. When the rage about being constricted in thought does not have a group, the movement forward to develop more useful thoughts can easily close down. The title of our paper, “Hearing what cannot be seen: A psychoanalytic research group's inquiry into female sexuality” (Basseches, et.al. 1996) emphasized that listening to both theory and practice could address the vacuum that is created when the old set of knowledge—the old thought collective—has fragmented under the force of the new. We identified a lag in translating the new theoretical to the clinical, which resulted in enriching our self-reflection on the vicissitudes of shifting attention needed for working with the new thought collective. I felt I had joined and helped to make the new thought collective able to use listening in a more complete way. This ongoing psychoanalytic self-reflection continued in Margarita Cereijido's edited volume, Changing Notions of the Feminine (2019) in which analysts reflected on the blind spots in their own thinking that have evolved into their current understanding about the feminine psyche.
I highlight here some of the authors who have provided the intellectual groundwork for the new thought collective through emphasis on the soma and psyche of the feminine. Each of these papers is meaningful to me in the way they have used the psychic speculum of listening to primary femininity—of making use of rage with creative insight. Elizabeth Mayer (1991) expanded on the work of Erikson (1950, 1964), who had observed that boys tended to make block designs of towers while girls built more encompassing circular surrounds. She devised a study asking girls to respond to drawings of blocks in various configurations, reporting that girls chose the circular block designs as their favorites. She speculated that both sexes are practicing with representations of their genitals, demonstrating that girls had a sense about their own genital
formation. Galenson and Roiphe (1976) observed genital awareness in little boys and girls between the ages of 15-19 months. Kestenberg (1982) gave name to the inner-genital phase of development for little girls, adding another concept to the phase Freud called the phallic stage of development. Indeed, naming (Lerner, 1976) holds import for mentalization and the sense that one's body is worth knowing. When the mother does not name the little girl's genitals, including labia and clitoris, it can be construed as a wish for the girl to not know herself or to not have sexual awareness. Kulish (1991) addressed the absence in psychoanalytic thought of the representation of the clitoris considered dominant as a place of pleasure for girls and for many women. Holtzman and Kulish (1996) observed that until their paper, “Nevermore: The hymen and the loss of virginity,” there was little attention to the hymen either in psychoanalytic clinical writings or in theory, even though first sexual intercourse was so important to women. Female psychoanalytic writers articulated that women have fears of genital harm which had been overlooked by only speaking of castration. And Kalinich (1993) demonstrated clinically that these fears and resulting compromises could be displaced to compromises around mental functions such as the woman feeling her mind is spacey or empty or damaged, representing the fantasy of her superego punishment. All of these authors have brought enlightenment to the therapeutic action of analyzing women.
I witnessed how Arlene Kramer Richards turned rage into creativity one evening at a scientific program of the newly founded Washington DC branch of the New York Freudian Society. Arlene took up a topic which had been previously ignored, namely that girls do have inner genital sensation. She used theoretical and clinical material to illustrate the main thesis of her paper that the little girl realizes the presence of her inner genital, discovering sensations through sphincter sensations of urethral and anal functions. She later published this paper with the title: The Influence of Sphincter Control and Genital Sensation on Body Image and Gender Identity in Women (1992). Her compelling paper relating the influence of sphincter control and genital sensation on psychic truths for women was greeted by many men, members of the old thought collective, with disdain. Rather than being haunted by castration anxieties, women now could be seen as in possession of their own set of genital fears, such as having the vagina closed up, or not being able to have a
baby, or of being raped. These imaginings were based in the knowledge of pleasurable genital sensations, including orgasm. Arlene received a number of questions and comments directly confronting her thinking, such as, “How do you know that girls have inner sensations?”; and “Isn't this your fantasy? Girls often report thinking of themselves as boys and feeling envy and you are saying they know they are girls.” Arlene listened and asked if there were other comments and thoughts; and she continued to be treated as if she were making it up. With directness and a clear voice, she said she was a woman living in a woman's body and that she listened to her female patients who talked about their bodies. She added that men were free to write about what they knew from their body sensations. To me and to others in the room this was a wonderfully earthshaking moment—a shift in thought was now a magnet for a new thought collective. Through Arlene's proclamation, a kind of revolution was taking place. And, rage at being up against a brick wall had turned into creativity.
The figure of woman as mother and of becoming mother is taken up by Rosemary Balsam in the volume Women's Bodies in Psychoanalysis (2012). I delved into the pages of this book for this essay, discovering the body and the resistance of culture and psychoanalysis to know the full force of the pregnant female body and birthing (just an inverted male body). Having decided to write about the gathering rage of feminism in New Haven in 1971 and the (outrageous) handing out of speculums so women, with other women, could own the sight of the cervix, I called Rosemary to ask if she knew of psychoanalytic papers referring to imaginings and fantasies about the cervix. We could not think of any papers and discussed her idea that following the feminist revolution of thinking about female passion, body, and fantasy life, something closed down. There is more writing about early attachments and less writing about female erotic life and purely feminine fears about genital harm for wishes, competitions, and orgasms.
There are many ways that fear of female birthing power and orgasmic power can get erased from the mind. Why have I not interpreted the presence of cervix in the mind, a special feminine powerful passage for birth and pleasure? How often have I heard dream material about two
spaces being discovered in a house and never thought of naming the cervix as a connector with almost magical features. As in my research group's discovery of a lag in turning theory into clinical interventions, I am now conscious of what I could not think and now will be able to use the cervix imagery and wonder at the compromise formations that had covered it over—the fear of having a pleasure place removed, once known. I now will be able to conceptualize interpretations and name this ever so feminine birthing place with its symbolic meanings.
Concluding my associations to Arlene Kramer Richards paper, “Rage and Creativity: How Second Generation Feminist Thought Collective Influenced Psychoanalysis”, I think about Nancy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974) and imagine us all seated at the triangular table, each at our own vulva shaped place setting. She honored historic female figures with place settings, then commandeering friends and colleagues to help make the installation which continues to be exhibited in museums. There are 39 place settings and each place setting includes a shape of a vulva with the name of a female historic figure. As written in Wikipedia's descriptions, Nancy Chicago, described as the first feminist artist, was inspired to create her dinner party after attending a real dinner party. “The men at the table were all professors,” she recalled, “and the women all had doctorates but weren't professors. The women had all the talent, and they sat there silent while the men held forth. I started thinking that women have never had a Last Supper, but they have had dinner parties.” You can feel her rage and her creative force.
The Second Wave feminist rage of the 1970s led to use of a speculum for seeing within the female genital. The rage of psychoanalysts about the blind spots related to the idea of penis envy as bedrock led to use of listening to primary femininity as a psychic speculum to open the unconscious representations and fantasies about the feminine, including the genital, orgasm, and the making of babies. Many of the “new” papers focused on seeing evidence of the girl's knowledge about female body experience clarifying the presence of body representation and desire for erotic pleasure releasing theory from the idea that women must accept inferiority and adaptation to it. Naming what is being seen, that had not previously been seen, begins a possibility for further discovery able to
draw together a movement, a group becoming identified with the discovery and with the discovery process. Most importantly the “new” enters thought, often with anxiety and excitement, and then can ignite a way to know more, to find more about unconscious fantasy.
Bringing the female body out of the dark continent into the light formed the thought collective that was and is listening to the full psychic experience of women. However, the dark continent ideation is appealing to those who cannot bear to use the speculum to see inner woman. The new thought collective could collapse if there is not continued courage and creative use of rage. The new thought collective receives nurturance through Arlene Kramer Richards' paper and the group that can tolerate the excitement of seeing together.