Chapter 16 The Severed Self: Gender as Trauma

Brew us a magic in which all limits dissolve

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Dissolve with a few drops whatever excludes in the limit of the ages, which makes our past wisdom a fraud;

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Don't rest until the boundary that keeps the sexes in meaningless conflict has disappeared.

We see the pain caused by this “meaningless conflict” day after day. Sadly, we are often trained to see this particular pain as either idiosyncratic or somehow inevitable. But we know from our own lives and our own struggles that neither of those approaches reflects the whole truth. Thus we continue to attempt to understand more deeply the “boundary” of which Rilke speaks.

This chapter seeks to question whether in fact the gender system as we have come to construct and maintain it is itself a major source of conflict between the biological sexes and within the self. Does this gender system ultimately obstruct rather than contribute to, at the very least, cohesive self-experience and, at most, aspects of the numinous self-experience Kohut (1966) referred to as “cosmic narcissism”?