We know from our patients and from our own experience that women cherish their camaraderie with other women, and also, that these bonds can be riddled with rivalries throughout the lifespan.
The focus on women’s potential to be competitive, ambitious, greedy, and aggressive with each other seems more frequently and comfortably addressed by contemporary journalists, in feature articles or trade books, by academic psychology and business publications, than it has been by our psychoanalytic colleagues. Without apology or homage to traditional Oedipal dynamics or institute ties, popular articles assume and address varieties of female competition such as workplace rivalry and social jockeying. Gritty language such as “bitchy,” “catty,” and “undercutting” is boldly used to capture the visceral experience and judgment that characterize female competitiveness. The New York theater has seen a recent spate of new plays that engage the complex dynamics of women’s sports. A New York Times commentator surmised that the expectation and desirability of ambition and competitiveness make women’s athletics a safe and fertile setting for exploring these aspects of female identity.
Our journalist contemporaries draw freely upon social Darwinism and research in psychology and business studies to explain and advise about women’s competition. They assert competitiveness is ubiquitous but pushed underground, resulting in pressure for women to compete in indirect ways such as by overvaluing self-promotion to mask rivalry. Contemporary psychoanalysts are rarely if ever cited in their articles. A review of female workplace bullying in the Atlantic, for example, emphasizes social circumstances over psychology to explain why females in power undermine one another. “Tokenism” in a male dominated culture, for example, is invoked to explain a particular pressure on women to compete for scant opportunity, and “favoritism threat” describes why women are hard on each other in order to safeguard against being perceived as favoring other women.
The reluctance of psychoanalysis to more broadly address female competitive behavior in larger cultural settings keeps us outside of the popular discourse and renders us seemingly irrelevant in regard to women’s relationships with each other. This public perception created by our lack of participation is at odds with all our knowledge from inside the consulting room. Clinical work brings us intimately close to women’s conflicts as they strive toward or inhibit their ambitions, while simultaneously needing to support and get along with one another even within a community of rivals. We have the opportunity to contribute to the conversation about how a woman can be a good girl and, at the same time, competitive. How can psychoanalysis help to shape this discourse in ways that might illuminate and even empower?
Women remained mysterious and derivative to Freud, and he had little to say about relationships between them. This contrasted markedly with his elaboration of various aspects of male bonding, such as peer competition and aggression, that he identified and deemed essential to maintaining social cohesiveness and preserving organized society (Totem and Taboo, 1913; Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, 1921). But Freud’s vision of relatedness between females focused narrowly on a daughter’s early childhood contempt of mother for not having a penis, and mortification and rage that mother has failed to give her one. Later her contempt turns competitive, ushering in a new set of dynamics, as she vies with mother for her father’s love.
Attention to infancy and early childhood has established the nuanced subjectivity between mother and child and resulted in varied ways of understanding female development and female psyche. Carolyn Ellman , for example,
built upon Klein’s view of earliest envy to locate one source of competitiveness squarely between mother and daughter. She observes that the girl’s first rivalry with mother remains just between the two of them, enacted around her baby doll before father’s attention is central. The girl wants a baby, not yet her father’s baby, but one that is all hers, under her control, as mother has. Ellman argues that girls are initially less interested in what mother lacks but feel more competitive with all that mother does have and she does not.
Rosemary Balsam establishes the developmental importance of a girl’s fantasies about having her female body, with all its sexual and procreative powers rather than its deficiencies compared to a male body. The girl admires her mother’s body and desires that her own will come to have the same robustness. Balsam offers rich clinical material that demonstrates the unique pleasure that women take in owning and showing their female power, including physical strength, and debunks traditional conclusions that ambitious women be considered masculine. Balsam locates competition just between females in ways that girls compare their changing bodies with not only mother but with sisters and peers. Later, this natural and enlivening female competitiveness echoes through the passionate and competitive exchanges of childbirth tales.
By the 1980s a generation of feminist psychoanalysts had set into play a thoughtful interrogation of the limiting and enduring effects of phallocentrism and patriarchy upon our profession, challenging both theoretical and cultural assumptions that constrict women’s relationship to all varieties of aggression.
Adrienne Harris, for example, in 1989, had described the inordinate struggle of adult women to manage competition, envy, and aggression. She critiques psychoanalysis itself for its role in perpetuating multigenerational histories of female powerlessness and subjugation. By casting maternal aggression as maternal destructiveness, we continue to pathologize female aggression. The feminist ideas of Harris and others, however, are not widely integrated into psychoanalysis. For many, they remain outside of the mainstream and in psychoanalytic training are electives if even part of the curriculum at all.
Female competition feels counterintuitive to attunement and threatening to positive female bonds, and is largely dissociated in our professional discussions. Our literature continues to largely privilege the nurturing and affiliative maternal qualities. Aggression may be a valuable asset for separation, but the idealized healthy mother is expected to display optimal tolerance for her daughter’s challenges and to facilitate her process of separation with minimal impingement.
Experience shows rivalry between adult women is ubiquitous and not limited to securing the possessions, attention, and desire of men. Adult women size each other up, comparing and contrasting, feeling competitive and denying competitiveness, in areas ranging from hairstyles to lifestyles, work life, social status, and parenting. At the same time, women are discouraged from hurting each other’s feelings or from being better at someone else’s expense.
A personal experience with a dear friend abruptly brought my attention to ways I can disavow my own competitiveness within the context of a close and positive female relationship. Dressed up at a special occasion, we warmly posed for a photo together. At the moment of the camera click, she angled her body behind mine, so I would face the camera straight on, my body appearing to be much wider than the sliver left showing hers as she quickly tucked herself behind me. In a flash I realized she was posing to look slender at the expense of me looking wider in the photo. How could she? And to me?
I was surprised and hurt, as Harris and Ellman describe when women are confronted by unexpected competitiveness. At the same time, I admired my friend’s agility and guile, and freedom to claim a win. It hadn’t even occurred to me that competition could infuse this act of taking a photo at a party, but when it did, I quickly found my own competitive impulse. Muriel Dimen shared a deeply personal account of her competitive streak and concluded that when women disavow or inhibit personal competitiveness as a natural part of interpersonal life, they often miss out on its power to motivate and inspire. In that brief flash of the camera, standing next to my friend, something exciting and constructive had happened. As Dimen suggested, I found myself inspired to think more about putting my best self forward and, additionally, motivated to buy a new dress.
More importantly, I was also inspired to turn my attention to the presence of female competition within the consulting room. Today’s women in our profession have been affected by the same cultural surround and embedded biases against aggression as our patients. Female treatment dyads are thus poised to collude in both passing on and challenging the psychic and cultural prohibitions against experiences seen as disloyal and disruptive to camaraderie.
Women who treat women have the opportunity to explore competitiveness more directly and as an essential part of good enough mothering. This task demands each female therapist to wrestle with her psychic and cultural inheritance that may inhibit awareness of the manifestations, omissions, and disguises of her own competitiveness. She must confront her own pleasure in competing, whether secretly or overtly, as well as her denial and shame. She must examine her feelings toward patients who display uninhibited striving as well as those who don’t, and toward those who surpass her as well as
those who don’t seem to. Whatever her relationship to her own competitiveness, she must consider its effect upon those she treats.
There is much in the structure of the treatment dyad that may keep competitiveness tucked away and unattended. Shared assumptions about authority and asymmetry can institutionally disguise the ways it is stimulated and inhibited. The patient’s emotional state of need magnifies fear of the spoiling effects of her competitiveness or of retaliation that threatens the safety established in the treatment. Female patients tend to hedge competitiveness, more likely to discuss the tensions it causes and fantasies it stirs in their interpersonal lives, rather than talk about these feelings inside the consulting room. The hedging keeps us comfortably in a maternal nurturant role and we feel gratified to facilitate a patient’s discovery and fulfillment of her own desire. It feels unsettling when competitiveness and envy are in the room. And it is not only the patient’s envy that is disturbing; we may feel awkward and ashamed if we find ourselves jealous of her opportunities or clarity, or if we covet her shoes.
Each subsequent generation of female therapists may be better suited, having integrated broader perspectives on female unconscious life, to recognize and constructively embrace the opportunity to engage the competitive in the dyad. Less disavowal also necessitates a heightened sensitivity to effects of stark differences in mental health, class, and race that carry their own heavy legacies into the dyad. For example, my patient Alice suffers with bouts of serious depression that inflict many women in her family. Comparisons to what she sees as my success, privilege, and general well-being lead her to withdraw hopelessly. Treatment gets stuck as all Alice can do to compete is to show me only how poorly she can do.
My work with Paula, on the other hand, has benefited greatly from leaning into the dynamics of female competitiveness. Paula vigilantly keeps score of her standing and of the achievements of her colleagues and friends, and those of their partners and children. Upon discovery of a rival’s achievement, she juggles acknowledgement with resentment, often withdrawing from the victor in order to sooth herself by lamenting unfair external and psychological advantages.
Paula had repeatedly turned down my invitations to explore her competitiveness, as if I had accused her of inferior morality. Looking back to the earlier part of the treatment, her avoidant stance had likely suited me too. My own desire to keep our working camaraderie had likely made me ambivalent and tempered my approach. In contrast to the self-reliance that was necessary for thriving within her coldly neglectful family, it was a long-won achievement that Paula developed some trust, never missed a session, and shared a broad range of experience and emotions, secrets and fantasies in ways she hadn’t before. Much good came from allowing herself to latch on and indulge in the receptive space of our therapeutic relationship.
Paula made comparisons between us only in indirect ways. For example, in response to my occasional need to change our schedule she boasted about her own organizational skills. She criticized details in my office, like my failure to remove an old phone jack, indicating that she would never be so sloppy. She ridiculed the clichéd book titles on my shelves. She became hostile if I contributed something she hadn’t already thought about, feeling indignant about being misunderstood rather than curious about what I have to say and even speaking over me to literally blot out my voice. Yet Paula denied any direct invitation to explore how competitiveness might play a role in our relationship. At the same time, her style of dressing and accessorizing evolved to be similar to mine, and she began reading serious psychoanalytic books.
Paula’s striking lack of interest not only in my original thoughts but also about me more generally had come to reveal her competitiveness. For some time she seemed understandably protective of keeping the focus of our relationship only on herself, without familiar impingements and demands that she accommodate others. But this omission over so much time felt like a barrier that, among other functions, served to keep me from becoming a possible rival. A New York Times opinion columnist borrowed the biological concept of warning coloration to understand her own way of coping with competitiveness as a young adult. Convinced she was an unattractive and unappealing rival in her social circle, the author “marked” herself, like butterflies with warning spots, to announce her undesirability on her own terms. She signaled not that she was poisonous, as this defense mechanism indicates in nature, but that clearly she was an unworthy opponent.
I wondered how this metaphor might apply. Had Paula somehow marked me as outside of the running, keeping me distanced to ensure that I would not release my toxins and hurt her? Or was Paula the one with bright marks, signaling me to back off to prevent her sting? Or perhaps I had generated the warning signals, whether by my personal style or in my role as analyst, that advertise “stay away”? I learned these warnings occur in nature not only through the display of obvious brightly colored markings; they are also communicated through chemical odors, ultrasonic warning noises, or warning postures. Like the projections that hide female competition within camaraderie, I could not be certain of who was warning whom, or who was afraid of whose poison.
Through an ongoing process of detoxification, the competitive has become more regularly one of the characters in our sessions. We have sparred productively, and compliment one another with a generosity previously restrained. Paula has become more direct about her ambitions in ways that are conducive to reflection and to using our space to consider her options. Our foray into this uncomfortable area has been freeing for both of us.
Women are coming together, not because they have been put there by the dominant social order nor submitted internally to its expectations, but by volition, proactively and in protest. Women in America are on a trajectory toward more entrepreneurship, corporate presence, and political clout. It follows that there will be more overt competition between women in these areas of power and influence. Rather than leave the analysis of competition between women to journalists, it is important that psychoanalysis, with all its understanding of psychic and interpersonal life, join the larger cultural conversation about how women relate to one another.
Editor’s Note:
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