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Put your head on my shoulder
Hold me in your arms, baby
What a pleasure we had reading Muriel Dimen’s thoughts in an article (Dimen, 1991) published in this journal more than thirty years ago. Given the space limitations for our response, we decided to begin with some associations to the issues Muriel touched upon in her paper.
AD:
My first thought was of Paul Anka’s song, “Put Your Head on My Shoulder.” Then, I thought how Muriel’s analysand, Elizabeth, “knew” there were dangers inherent in crying on her analyst’s shoulder. The need to be loved was Elizabeth’s greatest wish but she feared some kinds of love (that of a woman) would adversely interfere with her tenuous gender identification as a woman. As Muriel notes, she was caught in her culture’s prescriptions of gender (and perhaps sexual) norms. As she put it, “I don’t want to cry on your shoulder” – she would only cry “on a man’s shoulder; she was not interested in women.”
Muriel’s opening discussion of gender/sex/sexuality/society/self and the constant configuration and reconfiguration of those ideas were cutting edge at that time. She gives voice to a feminist psychoanalytic interrogation of identity categories when she says, “The idea of leaning on a man defended against dependency longings because, in culture and psyche alike, heterosexuality lines up with, and symbolizes, adulthood and autonomy.”
JD:
Reading Muriel’s notion of a transitional space between masculinity and femininity brought to mind the equally pioneering work of Robert Stoller (1985) who wrote about a patient, Jack, nee Mary – assigned to be a girl at birth but found at age fourteen to be a genetic male having what today is called a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD) or intersex condition.
Stoller described Mary/Jack as an unfeminine girl throughout childhood. Given that he found the child “grotesque as a girl,” and had an impression of the “naturalness of the child’s ‘masculinity,’” he told the 14-year-old “…to become a boy. ‘S