Hasidic Saying:
Why did God create the world?Because he loves stories.
I love stories, conversations too. Especially conversation that includes stories. I thank all of the contributors to this controversial discussion for your erudition, willingness to engage, and especially for taking the clinical situation as the center of our work.
Thank you Daniel for your formidable research and logical thinking. I now see that the link between feeling and thinking is actually metaphor just as all language is metaphor. (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003).
The Oedipus story uses metaphor to embody a child's feelings of love, hate, jealousy and rivalry into a story that evokes childhood feelings. Evoking those feelings in an older person allows more effective ways of dealing with them than six-year-olds can muster. Thinking this way, we can understand the stories in many cultures as conveying what the social world wants of the individual and what the individual requires of the social world.
In many of the stories, copulation is both forbidding and productive. Feelings of love and the desire to be loved, even exclusively loved, are encapsulated in metaphor and transmitted to the social group as “just so” expressions of what is desirable and what is forbidden.
By tracing the reactions of young animals to adult mating behavior Benveniste shows how universal the action is in primates as well as humans of cultures far removed from Western European influence. The expressions of jealousy, rage, love and curiosity by the young are
clear evidence that what Freud saw as the Oedipal story is not unique to Freud's ideas or Sophocles' play.
The appearance of curiosity, jealousy, rage, and love opens up the child's world to contradictory, complex and demanding thought. This kind of thought uses metaphor to reconcile the contradictions of love and hate that adult life will require of a child in any culture. this complexity and contradiction are the key problems of adolescence when a child transitions to adulthood.
Especially important is Benveniste's account of the male and female children's attempts to cope with the triad, keep exclusive control of the mother, and avoid enraging the father. That this is true for both boys and girls makes the work of understanding the way our patients negotiate their love lives and their sexual choices fascinating.
& (2003). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U. Chicago Press
I am grateful for Christina Biedermann's description of the line of thought about mothers and mothering. Surely motherhood and the capability to give birth and to nurture babies is a very powerful source of female experience. And the realities as well as the fantasies of motherhood are important to all people. But most women in our time spend most of our lives not in pregnancy, childbirth and nursing. What most women experience is a life of work inside and/or outside the home. Romance, pleasure and love are far larger in women's minds than the joys of childbirth and nursing. Many mothers experience their pregnancies as exhausting, many experience nausea, vomiting, back pain and fear of the coming birth.
After giving birth the sleepless nights, physical depletion of lactation, uncertainties about what to do about all the details of raising a child make huge demands on a mother. All over the planet women are choosing to have fewer children or none at all.
What do women really want? Freud's question resonates today. It is answered in pop music: Girls just want to have fun. I believe that young women today see themselves as wanting pleasure, wanting to be loved, wanting to be admired, wanting to be desired, wanting to experience their own desire and satisfaction of that desire. Yet apart from the French analytic literature very little attention is paid to these desires.
Boys too want fun; avoiding unpleasure and maximizing pleasure are universal. Whether cis gender or trans, whether heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual, we all crave pleasure. And the sexual organs are neurologically wired to be great source of pleasure. So, the avoidance of thinking, talking, theorizing, and writing about the satisfactions and deprivations of pleasure are, to my mind, the most important next step in our quest for understanding our patients as well as ourselves.
Thank you Dr. DePrima for extending the conversation to include a point of view that no longer restricts our thinking to the sexual binary or the nuclear family paradigm. In other words, for bringing our conversation into the contemporary world. As things seem now, development is no longer a straight (pun intended) path, nor is it predictable or continuous. I worry that analytic theory, derived almost entirely post facto and from pathology, is really relevant to the uncertainties and complexities of clinical practice.
Having worked in the past decade largely in China and having been told in no uncertain terms that I do not understand what is normal in their culture, Chinese analysands, supervises and students have taught me a lot about diversity.
For example, the practice of having children sleep with parents until well into latency is commonplace in China but seems an invitation to incest and child abuse in Western terms. Having children live for extended periods with grandparents or more distant relatives challenges my ideas of the need for continuity and consistency in living arrangements, despite my own experience of being cared for by grandparents and teen-age uncles. And the sense of parenting responsibilities and responsibilities
of grown children to aging parents who may have taken little or no part in their children's upbringing does not match Western practices.
But the cultural differences also exist between different generations living in the same place because they have grown up in different times. Acceptance of trans people has been a recent challenge in Western culture that separates current teens and young adults from their parents just as acceptance of homosexual love has been and still is an issue between older and younger generations of people who are now middle aged and aged.
Differences like these can also separate therapist or analyst from patient. It takes work on the part of the therapist to understand such differences. It takes even more work to empathize with people whose mores differ from those of the therapist. It helps to have a cohort dealing with the same problems. So, I welcome being reminded of the tremendous changes in our own culture.
Merle Molofsky gives us a serious and comprehensive account of her experiences and her reading in the analytic theories about the female Oedipus. I appreciate her willingness to add to the literature I cited the work of Doris Bernstein.
Unfortunately, I do not agree with Bernstein's view that the little girl inevitably experiences her vulva as a void with no closure. Every little girl who has experienced toilet training knows that she has powerful muscles that can contain or withhold urination. She also has experienced the power of her sphincter muscles in defecating and in withholding defecation until she is in a suitable place for it.
According to Bernstein the little girl grows up believing herself to have an uncontrollable, indefensible hole in her body. Bernstein believed that this led to vagueness of thought and failure to master such thinking as that required for science, mathematics and philosophy. I do not agree that this is a realistic view of ordinary female development.
In ordinary toddler development autonomy and separation from the mothering person are central. A very key feature of the development of
autonomy is the awareness of the power of one's own body, what Freud called the body ego. The individuation part of the separation-individuation line of development centers on the body ego.
For some girls this can be interfered with by intrusion. I many years ago treated a young woman who had been intruded upon in her early years by having her urinary tract stretched in an attempt to deal with her excessive withholding of urine and explosive release of it when pressure of the bladder forced its release. Her insistence on constant contact with her mother was seen as a separation problem by previous therapists. In the course of a stormy analysis, we found that she was passionately defending her autonomy by her insistence on dominating her mother.
The Oedipal aspect of this development had to do with having, like Electra, an absent father and a fear of the violence of men. Electra had a father who sacrificed her older sister to fulfill his own image of himself as a powerful man. Her mother Clytemnestra hated Electra's father for killing their daughter and Electra's older sister Iphigenia. So, Electra had reason to hate and fear her parents and the identifications with them that formed a dynamic part of herself. This is not a prototype of ordinary female development either. My point in the paper is that we need multiple perspectives to understand female development and that we cannot find a single prototypic story that covers all that happens in a girl's development into a woman. I thank Merle Molofsky for her important contribution to this conclusion.
Adriana Prengler opens up the theory of the Oedipus to a new level of understanding by emphasizing the contributions of Spanish and Latinx analysts to the deeper questions of identity and desire. Especially important to me is her understanding of the developmental status of identity as prior to the institution of desire.
While we have long known that children between 18 and 36 months can reliably indicate their connection understanding of themselves as like a girl doll or like a boy doll. This occurs before the 3–6-year Oedipal period.
Prengler is the first to use this observation and elaborate it into a clinical proposition. No one before Prengler to my knowledge has drawn the conclusion that identity formation precedes falling in love with another. The beautiful thing about this is that we share identity issues with all others. Both boys and girls work on understanding themselves before falling in love. Both can envy, both can hate, both can experience a variety of emotions. Rivalry and guilt are not exclusive to biological males; envy and shame are not the province of biological females.
Understanding our patients in this way frees us to follow their particular paths to the selves they construct and the way they love so that they can feel themselves authentic and acceptable to themselves and others. I am very grateful for Prengler's sophisticated, scholarly, and original response.