Relocation, Gender and Emotion

A Psycho-Social Perspective on the Experiences of Military Wives

Sue Jervis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429918537
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book has two main aims: firstly, to provide a rare, detailed description of the use of a psychoanalytically informed, reflexive research method to achieve an in-depth understanding of social phenomena; and secondly, to throw some much needed light onto the complex, intrapsychic and interpersonal influences that impact upon "military wives" who accompany members of the British Armed Forces to postings overseas. These arguments are particularly relevant at a time when the military is over-stretched, given that unhappy wives can adversely affect the retention of servicemen. This is an important contribution to the on-going development of psycho-social studies.

Chapter One
Introduction

Background to the research that informs this book

This book discusses the emotional responses of British servicemen’s wives to military relocation, addressing both their deeply personal experience and the impact upon that experience of their social connectedness. It is, therefore, a psycho-social study, which is not what I imagined writing when I first considered embarking upon the research that the book describes. My focus at that time, which was informed by my background as a psychodynamic counsellor, was largely restricted to the internal world and what happens within individual psyches.

As I have discussed elsewhere (Jervis, 2007), my personal experience of relocating with my husband whenever he was required to move by his employer, the Royal Navy, meant that I was aware of the emotional upheavals often experienced by women who accompany servicemen to postings overseas. In the early years of our marriage, however, I knew very little about military mobility. For more than a decade my husband and I lived within the same British civilian community, near to a submarine base, and we became very settled there. Although my husband was required to spend long periods at sea, which meant that we were often separated, my life otherwise was hardly affected by the military. Our residential stability had enabled us to purchase our own house and develop valued friendships in the area. I was also able to pursue my established career.

Eventually, however, several overseas postings ensued. Accompanying my husband on these moves meant that I enjoyed some marvellous experiences but it also ended my chosen career, simultaneously moving me further away from my family, away from the good friends that I had made locally, and away from a pleasant home, situated in a place that I loved. It was the various unexpected emotions that I subsequently experienced which aroused my curiosity about other relocated servicemen’s wives’ feelings following similar losses.

Originally I had planned to research those emotional experiences from an exclusively psychoanalytic perspective. However, that plan began to change following a personal encounter which highlighted the importance of social factors too. In a British military community overseas I was shocked to be lambasted by the wife of one of my husband’s colleagues for refusing to take part in a local custom in which officers’ wives arranged the flowers that decorated the tables whenever their husbands held formal dinners. Prior to moving overseas, I had declined several similar requests, in part because I was busy working but also because the requests either involved tasks which did not interest me or I experienced them as out-dated and inappropriate. On those previous occasions I had no sense of being judged for refusing to give up what was, after all, my own time, to indirectly support the military. Now, though, I was accused by my critic of being “disloyal”, not just to my husband but also to the Royal Navy. Moreover, I discovered that my non-compliance with the role expected of me had evoked a public expression of disapproval about my “attitude” from the wife of a very senior officer.

I was left feeling not only hurt and angry but also worried that I was perceived as unsupportive, even subversive, which was not how I saw myself. I became increasingly fearful that my rejection of the serviceman’s wife’s historical support role overseas might damage my husband’s career. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I subsequently recognized that my critic, too, was equally distressed and unsettled by our encounter. With hindsight, I believe that the pressure that she placed upon me to conform with the traditional expectations of “military wives” derived from her own close identification, as a former servicewoman herself, with the military ethos. My refusal to comply induced her to perceive me as deviant and disloyal. As Enloe (2000) argues, wives who adopt military ideology perceive those who challenge it as a threat both to their country’s security and to themselves (2000, p. 197). In other words, I had attracted the woman’s hostility, in part at least, because my noncompliance with the role that she had adopted threatened to undermine a valued aspect of her identity. However, my identity, too, was under threat because I had chosen a different way of being a military officer’s wife; indeed, of being myself; which had now been disparaged. Thus, we had each threatened the other’s identity.

The experience made me realize just how powerfully social influences and pressures, which are inevitably gendered, can impact upon an individual’s state of mind. It demonstrated that “emotions cannot be detached from the specific socio-cultural contexts in which they are embedded” (Cranny-Francis et al., 2003, pp. 233–234). That is, how my critic and I felt was influenced not only by our uniquely personal emotions but also by our interaction within a particular social context. Given that similar dynamics were likely to affect the servicemen’s wives whom I wished to study, I realized that my research aim of achieving an in-depth understanding of their emotional experiences following relocation would be best met through adopting a psycho-social approach. In other words, since people are social beings any attempt to understand them requires both intrapsychic and intersubjective theories (Benjamin, 1988; Chodorow, 1989; Hoggett, 1992).

The psychoanalytic theories developed by Melanie Klein and her followers within the object relations school, which I had originally planned to utilize as the sole framework of understanding for my research, do, in fact, address social influences. Indeed, Klein has been described as a “profound social theorist” (Alford, 1989, p. 188) and credited with inspiring intersubjectivity within psychoanalysis (Grotstein, 2006, p. 105). Bion, too, in his development of Klein’s theories, adopts both intrapsychic and intersubjective perspectives to explain human behaviour, thereby bridging the gap between psychoanalysis and sociology (Armstrong, 1997; Green, 2000; Hoggett, 1992).

Nevertheless, psychoanalytic theories have been used, often, in ways that privilege the internal world at the expense of external factors. Today, however, there is increasing recognition of the complexity of the interconnections between social processes and an individual’s unconscious. For example, as Butler (2004) argues, it is impossible to place gender within either sociology or psychology alone. Rather, gender is interdisciplinary, intersecting with, and influencing, all aspects of social life (Chodorow, 1989; Cranny-Francis et al., 2003; Jackson & Scott, 2002). Similarly, unconscious ideas perpetually impact upon society; it is now recognized that society’s power systems are unconsciously maintained (Elliott, 1999; Fairfield et al., 2002).

Consequently, in order to fulfil its stated aim, my research had the following objectives: to explore the complex psycho-social factors that influence the emotions of relocated servicemen’s wives; to do this by drawing from both psychoanalytic and sociological theories as complementary frameworks of understanding; and by utilizing a research method that addresses unconscious processes. Thus, I adopted a “reflexive psychoanalytic research methodology” (Clarke, 2000, p. 150) similar to the free association narrative interview research method described by Hollway & Jefferson (2000).

As Fonagy (2004) argues, one risk that a researcher who uses this sort of multidisciplinary approach faces is that of attracting suspicion from each individual discipline, arousing within the researcher feelings of being incompetent in any of them. My experiences support that argument but I share Fonagy’s conviction that such attempts are, nevertheless, worthwhile. I hope that this book will confirm that using a psycho-social approach enhances research findings and reaches deeper levels of understanding than would be possible by utilizing one discipline alone.

The structure of the book

The interpersonal and intrapsychic are always inextricably intertwined, as I will stress throughout the book. Nevertheless, in order to describe certain social and psychological processes adequately, I want to delineate them separately. Hence, chapters two and three are primarily concerned with sociological factors; chapter four focuses mainly on psychological influences, chapter five discusses the psychoanalytic thinking that informed my research methodology and chapters six and seven bring all of these elements together.

Chapter two discusses the military lifestyle and various stresses associated with it. Frequent mobility and deployment mean that military communities are constantly changing and therefore offer little meaningful emotional support for servicemen’s wives. Moreover, wives’ experiences are strongly influenced by their relationship with the British military, which despite, or perhaps because of, the various changes imposed upon it over recent years, retains both the characteristics of a “total institution” (Goffman, 1961, p. 16) and a patriarchal attitude towards personnel and their families. The military’s gendered expectations of wives have become more subtle, however, which means that women often perceive their continuing compliance with the support roles traditionally assigned to them as their personal “choice”.

Nevertheless, servicemen’s wives are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with, and more inclined to reject, demanding military lifestyles. Irrespective of their dissatisfactions, though, wives continue to be incorporated into the military institution, particularly overseas. Indeed, they often collude with that incorporation, which comes at a cost to their individuality and autonomy. Wives become “positioned paradoxically as if they are (n)either members of the military, (n)or completely apart from it” (Jervis, 2007, p. 103). One reason for their collusion with this positioning is to avoid the sort of social censure that I unwittingly attracted when I refused to prepare floral table decorations as was expected of me. I suggest that such tasks serve as distracting “removal activities” (Goffman, 1961, p. 67) that keep wives occupied and largely oblivious to the restrictions that their incorporation into the military places upon their lives.

Chapter three focuses upon relocation, arguing that as a significant life-change it involves loss; arousing grief and disrupting the inner world. The ensuing distress and anxiety must then be worked through. Although military mobility means that servicemen’s wives suffer various painful personal losses, which can evoke emotional disturbances, their collusive identification with military stoicism means that these losses are often denied. This impedes the mourning that would facilitate wives’ recovery and the related re-building of their undermined personal identities. Until both the military and servicemen’s wives recognize their respective roles in colluding to maintain the status quo, wives’ problems will remain unexpressed and unaddressed. Meanwhile, the distressing losses and personal disempowerment that they frequently experience as a result of their mobility will result in servicemen’s wives suffering something akin to the culture shock experienced by exiles.

In chapter four, the focus shifts from primarily social factors to the psychoanalytic theories that can help to explain these phenomena. Outside multidisciplinary fields such as psycho-social research, these theories will be more familiar to psychoanalysts, analytic psychotherapists, and also to many counsellors, particularly those who belong to the psychodynamic tradition, while, perhaps, being less familiar to other readers. Indeed, for anyone whose main interest in this book is its exploration of the social impact of the gendered military institution and/or repeated relocation upon servicemen’s wives’ lives, rather than on the related psychological factors that influence their emotions, some of the concepts discussed in this chapter might seem to be unhelpfully complex or even rather strange. Nevertheless, I would like to encourage any readers who are unfamiliar with psychoanalytic thinking to at least skim through the chapter to gather the gist of my argument. A more thorough reading could then be left until later, when the relevance of these theories should become clearer.

For me, Klein’s (1940, 1946) development of Freud’s (1917e, 1923b) thinking about mourning is particularly useful. She explains how external losses, such as those associated with relocation, reawaken depressive anxieties akin to those experienced during infancy. Moreover, her emphasis on the catastrophic elements of the depressive position helps to explain why relocation sometimes has a devastating impact upon servicemen’s wives. Recent comparisons between Klein’s ideas about splitting and projection, and Marx’s (1844) notion of alienation, are helpful too. Both of these processes derive from a combination of psychological and sociological factors, and result in a similar depletion of the self. I believe that when relocated servicemen’s wives encounter the combined psychosocial experience of sustaining fragmenting personal losses while simultaneously becoming incorporated into the military institution, their identities are especially likely to be undermined. In order to restore their emotional equilibrium and sense of self, wives must renegotiate the depressive position. However, military procedures unwittingly impede this process, as the accounts of respondents who participated in my research will confirm.

Chapter five describes how I conducted the research, which took place during 2004 and 2005 at a location in North-Western Europe. The fieldwork involved twenty-five in-depth, qualitative interviews with fifteen spouses of service personnel. These respondents, who were aged between 26 and 60, were married to personnel belonging to various commissioned and other ranks within all three British Armed Forces. Additional material was provided by two servicemen’s wives who wrote to me when they heard about my research and also from an account (Anon, 2005) published in a military community magazine. All of the respondents have been given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.

The chapter also discusses how the psychoanalytically informed research method that I used elicited respondents’ free associations and subsequently helped me to consider their meaning. Since this involved exploring unconscious material, it was essential that I adopted ethical safeguards throughout my research similar to those which originated within psychoanalysis. Just as the ethics applied to psychoanalytic work have influenced many psychotherapeutic and counselling practitioners today, psycho-social researchers, too, can learn much from psychoanalysis. This is especially so with regard to the use that they make of any emotions evoked within themselves, which can be understood as akin to analysts’ countertransference responses to their analysands. As I recently highlighted (Jervis, 2009), it is important that researchers learn how to feel and think simultaneously, separating their own psychic material from that belonging to respondents. Researchers must also ensure that there is additional evidence within their data to support any research conclusions that they draw from their personal feelings. They might need to consult with other psycho-social researchers for help with these tasks, as I found.

In chapter six, the research material that I collected is described and analysed. For most of the respondents, military relocation had brought a variety of personal losses which evoked disturbing emotions, although this was not always recognized. Extracts taken from my research interviews provide evidence that respondents’ losses aroused distress and anxiety, as well as defences against such feelings, and reduced their self-esteem. The pressure placed upon respondents to comply with the gendered expectations traditionally made of servicemen’s wives is also evidenced. For me, the notion of the “normative unconscious” (Layton, 2006, p. 107) goes some way to explaining why such compliance is sometimes rationalized today as a “choice”. Nevertheless, becoming incorporated into the military institution imposed additional losses; of personal autonomy and freedom of expression; upon the female respondents, impeding their attempts to work through their post-relocation distress and creatively rebuild their fragmented identities.

The sole male respondent, however, was less emotionally disturbed by military relocation, probably because he had sustained fewer personal losses and, given the gender inequalities that exist within military communities, because he was not incorporated into the military institution. Thus, he did not need to renegotiate the depressive position, whereas it was necessary for the women to do so if they were to recover from their losses and find themselves again. An important part of this working through involved symbolization, a process wherein aspects of the outer world become represented internally. For example, when respondents became familiar with their changed external environment and therefore less likely to become physically lost in it, their perception of feeling emotionally lost also decreased. Unfortunately, one useful form of symbolization, talking, was often unavailable to respondents because their identification with military stoicism rendered the expression of their distress taboo.

Finally, the concluding chapter highlights the complexity of the interacting psychological and sociological processes that affect relocated servicemen’s wives; arguing that it was only through utilizing a psychoanalytically informed research method capable of exposing these ordinarily unnoticed dynamics that it became possible for my understanding of their emotional experiences to emerge. Drawing from this in-depth understanding, I have developed various recommendations as to how the military might address the problems that servicemen’s wives’ enforced mobility brings to them and thus help to ameliorate those difficulties. The book ends, then, with my suggestions for improving the lives of servicemen’s wives in the future.

Chapter Two
Military life

Introduction

Before introducing this chapter I want to clarify what I mean when I use certain terms. “Military” refers primarily to the British Armed Forces and includes members from any, or all, of its three services; the Army, Royal Air Force, and Royal Navy. However, the word sometimes also refers to other Western militaries and their personnel, when they encounter similar experiences to those of the British military. “Wives” usually means, or includes, women married to servicemen, unless otherwise indicated.

Throughout the chapter I will develop several arguments that I have outlined previously (Jervis, 2007) about the military lifestyle, military communities, and the demands that the military makes of its personnel and their families. Historically, the British military’s distinctive identity set it apart...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• CHAPTER ONE Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO Military life
• CHAPTER THREE Change, loss, and relocation
• CHAPTER FOUR The influence of reactivated primitive psychological processes
• CHAPTER FIVE Using psychoanalytic thinking to enhance understanding
• CHAPTER SIX Making psycho-social sense of emotional experiences
• CHAPTER SEVEN Concluding remarks and policy implications
• APPENDIX
• REFERENCES
• INDEX