A recent issue of the New York Times included a special section devoted to 12 women; more precisely, 12 “overlooked” women; and, more precisely yet, their previously unpublished obituaries. Reconsidering 167 years of New York Times history, the objective was to make up for the fact that, of the approximately three obituaries selected for publication by the Times each day (that’s three out of some 155,000 people who “die between each day’s print version of the New York Times and the next—enough to fill Yankee Stadium three times over”), most continue to be of men, and white men at that. To say the obituaries desk is focused on the past, on lives lived over a period of decades, and that the past cannot be changed, as does William McDonald, the author of a laudable accompanying statement in the March 11, 2018 Times explaining the discriminatory phenomenon, is to say that a great many women, as well as people of color and those who identify as gender non-conforming, were “overlooked,” disregarded because “relatively few of them were allowed to make such a mark on society.”
Connecting through psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy with women (real or fictive) in the however distant past, women who, as the editors of this compelling volume note, “transcended limits, barriers, and met challenges boldly,” women who overcame, were noticed, mythologized even, is empowering. And such is the premise upon which the volume is based. Women, in a word, find fulfillment and come into themselves as individuals by identifying with and finding inspiration in the strength of the mythic archetypes, in the might of these ancestral figures, a might which they come to possess as worthy heirs. The organization of the book in itself is telling: An insightful introduction by Ronnie Ancona and a moving conclusion by the editors, Arlene Kramer Richards and Lucille Spira, frame six parts—”The Power of Goddesses and Strong Women”; “The Power of Victims, Avengers, and Tricksters”; “The Power of Mothers and the Goddesses Within”; “The Power of Women’s Sexuality”; “The Father’s Contribution to Women’s Power”—with “power,” of course, being the operative word.
Myths of Mighty Women: Their Application in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
By Arlene Kramer Richards and Lucille Spira
246 pages
Karnac Books, 2015
Lest the point be misleading, the idea is not merely that treatment is a source of empowerment by virtue of reference, however discreet or metaphorically explicit, to “myths of mighty women,” but that self-awareness, self-discovery (in both patient and clinician), emboldens by virtue of the very resonance of clinical process with myths that inform our understanding of psychic change itself. In fact, the “implications for psychodynamic psychotherapy” sections that end each part of the book, are essential to our appreciation of just that, our appreciation of the clinical / interpretive value of myth as it relates to the meaning of change.
The scope of this volume is in itself impressive, with myths of Greco-Roman, Asian and biblical origin inciting reflection on the potential and real accomplishments of women today.
The scope of this volume is in itself impressive, with myths of Greco-Roman, Asian and biblical origin inciting reflection on the potential and real accomplishments of women today. The exploration of specific issues pertaining to attachment, narcissism and gender identity, for instance, both in “history’s heroines” and “contemporary girls,” as in Ellen Sinkman’s chapter, broadens it even more insofar as unconscious fantasies that make up the inner world of, say, the adolescent girl, are brought to the fore. For old myths are prototypical of newer ones; mythologies however recent have their source in myths of old. Yet, as Richards relates through her example of the story of Inanna, Queen of Heaven, the earliest myth of mighty women to have survived in written form, myths “mean different things to women at different stages in life.”
We arrive at the inestimable interpretive value of myth for clinical theory and practice via another way too: In a captivating chapter on Joyce’s Molly Bloom, Paul Schwaber demonstrates how a fictive character, in this case from Ulysses, can be so thoroughly depicted as to be truly perceptible to the reader and thereby stimulating of clinical interpretation. “Molly has an actual situation, inner dynamics, and an internalized past,” Schwaber tells us, “She exists,” she is “superbly engaging” and “believable,” while, being nothing more and nothing less than a “sustained illusion of verbal art.”
Indeed, artistic illusion is a narrative thread running throughout the chapters, whether directly alluded to in the context of sublimation or more indirectly implicated in the focus on the value of the myth of the Mighty Woman for strengthening ego function. With regard to the former, taiko—an ancient form of Japanese drumming revived in the mid-20th century and popular throughout this country—appears in an intriguing chapter by Merle Molofsky as an extraordinary example of a cultural phenomenon revealing universal “feelings and urges,” “a vehicle for … communication of the most primal underpinnings of human dreams, wishes, longings, and differentiated unity.” Contrasted with the latter, i.e., woman’s empowering connection to Myths of Mighty Women through psychodynamic exploration, taiko drumming embodies power in the aggressive, even violent perhaps, physicality of the performance
combined with the intense pleasure of the movement and musical artistry. As a mode of expression and of experiencing the power of one’s body, it offers “a useful adjunct to psychoanalysis,” according to Richards and Spira, in that sense not unlike the Chinese myth known as Meng Jiangnü used by Irmgard Dettbarn to give order and coherence to her own inner world as she transitioned to life in China.
At the same time, in each of the chapters the implications of myth for the treatment process, regardless of the variety of focus, are profound. Transference, the capacity for compassion, the delineation of boundaries: all are impacted by the underlying question of the needs—and rights—of women. “The idea that myth can become incorporated into psychoanalysis,” Ancona reminds us, “is, of course, not new. Many today know of Oedipus primarily because of his appearance in Freud’s Oedipus complex, while female figures in classical myth have been appropriated as well, as Elektra was by Jung,” and others have been more recently. But just how mythological figures may provide girls and women with means of understanding and adaptation, pathways to freedom from conflict and guilt, and instruments for self-acceptance (including pride in the female body) is shown by the contributors to reside not only in the growth that comes with insight, but in the capacity for sublimation as well. “As women become more competent in the world,” concludes Spira in her discussion of Helen of Troy and the clinical anecdotes she relates to what she describes not as a tale of passive victimization, but of active avenge, “they are more able to find and assert their voices.”
The book pays tribute to Helen Meyers, a Mighty Woman remembered for her “rigorous logic,” “encyclopedic knowledge of psychoanalytic theory,” “grit, grace, and generosity,” “clinical virtuosity and commitment” and a great deal more, as evidenced by a most informative interview with Henry Schwartz. Several of the chapters were previously presented at a conference of the IPA’s Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP) that took place in New York City in 2014. All are highly original, investigating, as they do, the historical, cultural, and psychological origins and consequences of great courage and their implications for clinical treatment today. Myths of Mighty Women has much to offer the clinician (and the non-clinician as well), for each of the myths, thematically framed and followed by discussion of its integration within psychodynamic thinking, is shown to assist the female patient in developing her sense of self and enriching, by way of her enhanced agency, her own life and the lives of those with whom she engages as well.
In sum, this volume is a stunning exemplification of what, more than a half century ago, Simone de Beauvoir concluded in The Second Sex: “The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.” What the exploration of mythical archetypes (those of “goddess, witch, and the mortal” in the interesting chapter by Philip Matyszak, for instance), of mythical figures (whether Medea, Helen of Troy, Athena, or Antigone, to cite but four), and mythical fantasies (of mother and father alike) successfully demonstrate is that, to again cite de Beauvoir, “It is not a question of abolishing in woman the contingencies and miseries of the human condition, but of giving her the means for transcending them.” Psychoanalytic psychotherapy counters deficits of such means. “Woman is the victim of no mysterious fatality; the peculiarities that identify her as specifically a woman get their importance from the significance placed upon them.”