From popular culture we hear a lot about “mean girls,” wicked stepmothers and stepsisters, and, in our practices, about reworking mother/daughter conflicts and bad mothering. Too often we forget that in female-to-female relationships, there is another side to the story. Psychoanalysts have not paid much attention to the many ways in which women and girls support, love, and work with each other as mothers, daughters, sisters, colleagues, helpers, and friends.
For over two decades until her death from cancer in 2016, Deanna Holtzman and I worked together writing a series of articles and books and giving presentations on female psychology. At least once a week, we met for three or more hours to do our collaborating, which was fruitful and very meaningful to me. We wrote and talked about psychoanalysis, but we also talked about our shared love for movies, novels, plays, art, our children and grandchildren, ate lunch and snacks, and added a sprinkling of gossip, for good measure.
To some extent, in our working together, we lived out what we wrote about. We shared an interest in myths and fairy tales and always tried to work something into our writing from these genres. In our reworking of the female triangular Oedipal situation in the ancient Greek myth of Demeter, we came across a singular and astonishing figure, Baubo. She became one of our favorite mythical characters, a figure who makes a brief, but pivotal appearance in the story of Persephone and Demeter. Baubo is an old hag or servant who works for a mortal family who befriends Demeter, the goddess of fertility, as she roams the earth in despair searching for her daughter Persephone, who has been abducted by the god Hades. Bereft and enraged, Demeter has brought a famine on the earth. As Demeter sits miserably in the midst of the family, Baubo approaches and lifts her skirt to exhibit her genitals. This action makes Demeter laugh and brings her out of her depression.
The gesture of lifting the skirt to expose the female genitals cannot be thought of in terms of castration and penis envy; the skirt is lifted to show what is there, not what is absent. On the contrary, it is a celebration and sharing of what two females have and share—the female genitals and the power of reproduction. This reminder to the powerful goddess of fertility brings an end to her depression. Thus, we interpreted this part of the story as an age-old demonstration of healthy female exhibitionism and pride in the female body, genitals and their reproductive powers. This offers a dramatic example of a different view of women from the early psychoanalytic characterizations as castrated, lacking and inadequate. Moreover, this episode from a myth written down many years ago also shows the kind of camaraderie and connection that exists between women of all eras and cultures.
In our writing we found our collaboration helped us to be bolder than we would have been individually in putting forth new and radical ideas. Like many women who grew up during the 1940s and ‘50s, we had to overcome inhibition and biases; so together we gave each other permission to be outspoken: We suggested that Freud was erroneous about the female Oedipal situation and development and that it be renamed and conceptualized as the Persephone Complex (Kulish and Holtzman, 2008).
At the same time we modulated each other. We gave ourselves assignments like good schoolgirls. One of us was to write up notes on an article or write a chapter before the next week that the other would edit. One of the areas we wrote about was how women inhibited their aggression, handling it in roundabout or covert ways. We had to find a way to assert our opinions, to disagree and not always have to worry about being “nice,” as is often the case for girls and women. We argued over theory and interpretations, but respected each other and found a middle ground or became convinced the other was right (not easy for two headstrong women). If we could not agree on a point, it would not be included. This made for some interesting and long afternoons.
Parallel to this, we wrote about how important it was for girls to safeguard their relationships with each other and with their mothers, to find ways to disguise or subordinate their rivalries, competiveness, and angers to keep the connection. We thought this was a crucial part of the female triangular situation: the need to balance loyalties and loves for father and mother, to keep the nurturance and love from the mother even as one is in competition with her. We wrote about the need for little girls to carry over these adaptations into late childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—to find ways to keep friendships and relationships safe and, even though there may be underlying conflicts, to find adaptive ways to balance the sides of these conflicts.
These patterns can be discerned in girls’ friendships and relationships with their sisters. The Finnish psychoanalyst Elina Reenkola introduces the concept of the “sister fantasy” that many women hold. She feels psychoanalysis has paid little attention to the positive influence a sister has on a woman, but instead has focused on sibling rivalry and jealousy. She writes, “In the close friendships of girls and women, the sister fantasy is present in a sublimated form, mutually complementing and reinforcing the value of femininity and invigorating the feeling of lovability.”
Along with most contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about girls and women, we stressed the crucial importance of the relationship and identification with the mother for a daughter’s future development. For example, Rosemary Balsam puts it clearly: “A girl’s mother is the unconscious and sometimes conscious gold standard in any daughter’s eyes and in her way of inhabiting the female body as female—the lover of men or other women, the bearer of pregnancies, the survivor of childbirth.” Nancy Chodorow suggests that girls do not simply identify with their mothers or want to be like them. Rather, mother and daughter maintain elements of their primary relationship which means they will feel alike in fundamental ways. These feelings carry forward into girls’ relationships with other girls, into their friendships in adolescence and adulthood.
Women’s connections with each other shore them up through traumas and hardships. One of the most striking illustrations of this is in a wonderful Tunisian movie, unfortunately little known, called Silences of the Palace. Set in a decaying palace of a prince just before the fall of colonization in Tunisia, it focusses on the relationships among the female servants and the girls and women in the prince’s family who live shut up in the palace. Silences represent the secrets of rape, slavery, and abuse that went on in the palace, but the women themselves were not quiet—they sang, cried, talked, and comforted each other.
And in the last year of her life, when she was struggling with chemotherapy, pain, exhaustion and nausea, Deanna insisted we keep meeting, keep writing, keep on going. Like for all the female figures we read, wrote and spoke about, friendship and mutual work brought comfort. She died before we finished the last project, a paper about friendships among women and girls.
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