Affects in Men and Women: Gender Differences

This was a challenging panel for which to be a Reporter, as the Moderator and two panellists decided that their presentations would be read not in English but in Spanish and French, without simultaneous translation being available, and so the discussion cannot be fully reported.

Overall there was quite a marked divide between the point of view as represented on the one hand by the Moderator, Susana Dupetit, and presenters Mathilde Caplansky and Evelyne Séchaud, and on the other hand that expressed by Beth Seelig. Caplansky and particularly Séchaud recapitulated the theory of sexuality outlined by Freud, and Dupetit in introducing the papers said that all three presenters emphasised castration as the loss of love. Seelig pointed out that this was not part of her paper. Her presentation spanned several disciplines in an attempt to integrate what they have to offer to psychoanalytic theorising.

Caplansky's hypothesis, illustrated by two short clinical vignettes and two poems, was that men and women experience the same affects but there are gender-related differences in the way they express them. Primarily this consists of what she calls dissociation in the case of men, and the ‘eternal demand for company’ in the case of women. Caplansky saw these differences as stemming from the earliest experiences in mother-infant interaction. She conceptualised affect as the result of a ‘sensorial drive complex’ that comes into play in the field of inter-subjectivity. In the very early mother-infant relationship boys and girls are equally ‘at the mercy’ of the maternal function or dysfunction, and the experiences the child has at this time contain the key to the psychic differences in the expression of affects. As man is brought into the world by woman and raised by her he is involved for the rest of his life in the task of convincing himself and others that he has escaped from that—that he is not a woman nor a baby, nor a homosexual. To get away from that experience of absolute depen