Gender and Family Therapy

Charlotte Burck, Gwyn Daniel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914256
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Burck and Daniel share the personal meaning that gender holds for them, and the open and enquiring, rather than definitive, style of their writing makes it easy for the reader to grasp their ideas. The authors' handling in the early chapters of the many intellectual conundrums about gender is clear and assured, and through their many citations of other literature in the field they have managed to align this volume with other scholarly works while at the same time ensuring a very readable and practical book.

Chapter 1
Gender: a systemic understanding

This book addresses how our preoccupations with gender interweave with our systemic thinking and practice, and so we begin by examining gender.

We use the word gender, as different from biological sex which is assigned from birth on the basis of genital difference, to mean the way societies think about and live that sexual difference. Until the last few decades, gender difference was, on the whole, seen as equivalent to sex difference—real, natural, and fixed. However, feministe have brought into question many of the previously held "common-sense" ideas of what it means to be men and women in our society. They have challenged many of the givens of gender and uncovered ways in which our society constructs the concepts of female and male, while at the same time this construction remains hidden.

This argument that "femininity" and "masculinity" are social constructions, built on biological difference but given significance by and through the power relationships in our society, is a central tenet of our thinking. The main tension in this position lies in the way our world has been divided along gender lines, so that, although our gender is mere construction, we tend to experience it as absolute and central to our subjectivity. Grappling with these inherent contradictions has raised interesting and, we think, crucial questions both theoretically and in our clinical work.

Our society explicitly states that it wishes to foster gender equality, but at the same time it continues to preserve structures of domination (Benjamin, 1990). This contributes to many paradoxical experiences. It is particularly difficult to hold on to these contradictions when a satisfactory relationship between a woman and a man exists in which both partners believe in equality, and yet in many contexts they remain unequal. Many of us veer from minimizing to exaggerating gender difference depending on the circumstances; but neither stance moves us to a new paradigm with which to think about gender. It is here that a systemic framework offers a way to think about the individual, relational, and societal levels at which we experience gender and to explore contradictions between them.

The Context of Patriarchy

For systemic thinkers, understanding context is crucial, and in the case of gender this includes the wider societal context. The context of patriarchy renders the meaning of gender difference inseparable from the experience of inequality; in turn, societal structures and social practices—including language, the law, education, etc.—both reflect and produce this meaning. Identifying these connections enables other ideas and meanings about gender to emerge, as well as bringing into question the inevitability of societies based on what Eisler (1987) has termed a domina tor model.

We consider it essential to believe in the reality (although not the inevitability) of patriarchy. We make this point because views that propose that there is no such thing as reality, but only whatever an observer "chooses" to see, have recently become fashionable (see Chapter 2). These views label feminists as "choosing" to see sexist interactions and conveniently dismiss or even blame them for constructing the problem themselves.

Theories of Gender

Understanding gender is a complicated task because our gender so profoundly shapes our identities and experiences. Because gender works as an organizing mode of perception and belief which underlies much of what we talk about as well as how we live our lives, it has been a difficult task to isolate specific influences as gendered. A systemic view helps us clarify the confusion of levels that results from trying to observe something to which you cannot be "meta" (Goldner et al., 1990).

A systemic framework has not yet been applied to an analysis of gendered identities. In the systemic field there has been more of a preoccupation with therapy and change than with understanding human development as such. Feminist family therapists have therefore tended to draw on feminist psychoanalytic work (such as Benjamin, 1990; Chodorow, 1978; Dinnerstein, 1976; Luepnitz, 1988) to provide more radical interpretations of individual gendered experience.

What is femaleness and maleness? The question implies that somewhere, somehow, we could really find out what womanhood and manhood is. We take the view that these categories have been created through language, which in turn has real effects on how we live, think, and feel. This is not to deny that there are actual biological differences, but that these are so profoundly mediated through culture that it is impossible to find a gendered essence; we can only discover the ways in which we "perform" these differences.

So, for example, there are considerable differences in the ways parents behave from the moment that they discover whether their baby is a girl or a boy. When it is difficult to assign a biological sex to a baby because of organic anomalies, there is enormous discomfort because a genderless baby seems too much of a challenge to our beliefs. Parents' and other caretakers' interactions with a baby are shaped by their culture's beliefs about babies and in particular their gender. One study found that within 24 hours of birth, daughters were already described differently from sons (smaller, softer, etc.) although there were no differences in size and weight (Rubin, Provenzano, & Luria, 1974). Parents draw on prevalent gender beliefs to develop a narrative about and with their babies, which then shapes the interactional patterns that develop. When they cried, boys were believed to be angry and frustrated, whereas girls were seen to be sad and depressed (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974). Other studies found that mothers generally held boys more than girls, talked more to girls, and weaned girls earlier than boys (Olivier, 1989). Unfortunately, some research into how infants acquire a sense of self through narratives developed in their relationships (Stern, 1985) has neglected to mention gender at all!

In therapy we often ask questions that tap the family's gendered narratives. Questions to children along the lines of "What if you were a girl and your sister was a boy?" produce fascinating responses and open up areas for parents and children that have clearly never been thought about before.

The theoretical work that has grappled with the question or how gender identities are formed has ranged from ideas about sex-role assignment to psychoanalytic theory. Although some of these theoretical concepts helpfully describe gender, they also mainly reflect the ways in which gender difference is embedded in our society. Sex-role theorists like Bem (1973), for example, ended up contributing to rather fixed ideas about female and male characteristics. After examining the psychoanalytic literature, Benjamin (1990) argued that much of this writing simply reproduces the polarizations of gender differences rather than questions them. For example, she demonstrated the way psychoanalysis continually constructed mothers as people without subjectivity of their own or as feared archaic figures, while fathers stand for progress and reality. This theorizing illustrates the dangers of ignoring the context of our theory building.

Feminist theorists' efforts to understand gendered arrangements can also be seen to contribute to them. Feminist object relation theorist Chodorow (1978) is a good example of this. She reworked traditional psychoanalytic formulations about gender identity to argue that mothers were of central importance in reproducing traditional and problematized gendered identities. Girls' identities, she argued, were constructed through mutual identification with their devalued mothers, characterized by boundary confusions and sensitivity to others' needs rather than their own. Boys' identities were based on differentiation from their mothers, which conveyed value and agency on them but was predicated on staying distant and separate from femaleness. Chodorow saw childcare arrangements as maintaining these troublesome gendered identities and relationships, and she believed these would change only if childcare was shared equally by both parents. Chodorow broke new ground by exploring the development of girls as well as boys and by keeping the societal context and its meanings central, but she and others who have used her work have been criticized by other feminists for shoring up essentializing views of gender and mothering. (By essentializing we mean the belief that there is an "essence" of gender which can be identified.) Systemic thinking, with its emphasis on the relationship between relationships, introduces a more fluid and contextual view (see Goldner's paper, 'Toward a Critical Relational Theory of Gender", 1991, for an attempt to synthesize systemic concepts with psychoanalytic theory).

Historical, psychoanalytic, and anthropological studies can really only provide hypotheses about how gendered differences are "produced" through our relationships and cultural practices, and why our gender has been so central to the way we experience ourselves. An irreverent stance (Cecchin et al., 1992) to these hypotheses helps us generate pertinent questions about their context.

Why has Gender Difference Been so Important?

One of the most striking aspects of gender in ail societies is how important it has been to emphasize and promote gender difference. Gender was constructed as a dualistic category: that is, male and female were thought of as opposite and polarized—female cannot be male, masculine is what is not feminine. Traditional gender characteristics were fixed at opposite ends of continuums (such as active-passive, instrumental-nurturing, rational-emotional) and seen to be natural and inherent properties of men and women. Butler (1990) argued that these gender polarities were centrally linked to the idea of the inevitability and necessity of heterosexuality.

However, gender roles were not always so fixed and polarized. Keller (1985) in her study of the origins of modern science, described the multiplicity of male and female roles offering heterogeneity that were available before the seventeenth century. These were considerably reduced when the rise of early industrial capitalism led to a separation of life into public and private domains, with increasingly limited and polarized roles. Rationality associated with maleness became valued at the time that science was established as a discipline, while alchemists and witchcraft associated with the dangerousness and irrationality of women were dismissed (Chamberlain, 1981; Keller, 1985). Many of these polarizations have lasted until well into this century, although we may now be witnessing their breakdown.

The Process of Change

We live in a time when these gendered polarizations have been brought into question. Feminists began to argue that to move away from gender stereotypes would be advantageous for women's mental health, because so many female characteristics were devalued by society as a whole. As this was taken up by women in the private as well as the public arena, men experienced this possible collapse of traditional gender differences as potentially disastrous. It started to become clear that the polarization of gender difference may have been more essential for males than females.

This could be understood in the light of ideas developed by those feminist writers who had argued that masculine identity was formed through a process of disidentifying with the mother/ woman and refuting anything female (Chodorow, 1978; Dinner-stein, 1976; Mead, 1950). In our society, masculinity has been profoundly tied to its distance from (and therefore dependence on) femininity; men needed to stay at a distance from anything associated with women and to retain control—of themselves, of women, and of nature (Frosh, 1994). Because this was a never-ending process, it has been argued that a sense of masculinity is never secure (Mead, 1950; Segal, 1990) (see also Chapter 5). We think that this continual need to reaffirm maleness, and the power associated with it, has limited the possibilities for men to challenge gendered arrangements in the ways that have proved so liberating for numbers of women, and has also contributed to the feelings of panic and confusion described by men who struggled to adapt to feminism (Norton, 1991; Seidler, 1991).

Relational Dilemmas of Change

With a systemic framework, it has been possible to explore the gender premises that influence women and men in relationships and the dilemmas involved in change. Gender characteristics and premises can be seen as interactional and relational, not belonging to individual women and men but to the relationships between them as they have developed over time. We can also question how far these qualities characterize relationships of inequality, rather than gender as such.

Case example

"I'll take care of the worry"

A woman referred herself for some help because she was depressed, and the therapist decided to ask the couple to come to the session. The woman presented herself as crippled by anxiety, often tearful, and worried that she might be damaging her children. Her husband saw her depression as the problem and wanted to know what he could do to help her with managing things better. The couple described how they had recently set up a business but this was now on the brink of failing because of the recession. He stayed optimistic and cheerful in the face of great financial worries, although he was concerned about the effects on his wife and children. The wife's anxiety could be seen to be allowing her husband to demonstrate optimism, which was necessary in their advertising business where a positive outlook was essential. His cheerfulness, on the other hand, meant that she felt she had to worry more about the realities of the possibility of failure. As a therapy team we became interested in what could not be said and which experiences could not be described. The therapist then asked the couple what would have happened if the wife had been in charge of the business. This allowed another description of experience to emerge in which this woman was torn between feeling she had to support her husband's business decisions as a wife, and her own ideas about what would be useful. And her husband went on to talk about the strains of having to be a superman.

Research has shown how the most stereotypical gender behaviour is brought forth in the context of male-female relationships (Skrypnek & Snyder, 1982). When people were blindly paired with a partner, they reacted very differently depending on whether they believed they were paired with someone of the same or the opposite gender. This research fits with our clinical experience of working with families who have separated and divorced, where both women and men found they developed different qualities once they were parenting and living on their own (see Burck & Daniel, 1994, for a fuller discussion).

We see men's and women's relationships with each other as saturated with premises about gender, embedded in and demonstrated over and over again in family and community relationships, as well as explicitly stated in sayings or stories. Each individual is thus not only connected to premises infused from a past network of relationships, but to the interlocking premises, beliefs, and behaviours of the partner. This becomes even more complex when we examine some of the more common gender premises in our society, and how these are played out. Individuals and families often report being influenced by contradictory messages, or messages that were in contradiction with the community as a whole. One example is that of gendered messages about strength and weakness, in which a belief that men were strong and capable and women fragile and needing to be looked after existed alongside a belief that men were actually fragile and needed to be protected by emotionally strong and enduring women. As these beliefs often operate in different contexts, the contradictions may not prove too disruptive, and yet they are difficult to challenge because they are immediately counteracted by the other belief, leaving a sense of a tightly constrained and paradoxical system. Although this may be a feature of many relationships, it is in heterosexual relationships that it seems most fixed.

In recent years, most of the pressure for personal, familial, and societal change has come from women. This has faced women with a number of dilemmas, as these struggles have often occurred in the context of intimate loving relationships with men on whom they depend and through whom they may define their sense of self (Daniel, 1986). Women may blame their male partners for lack of change, with little realization of how powerfully their own gender premises may restrict their choices and also sensitize them to their partners' requests to continue with old ways within the new forms. Similarly, men may attempt to become non-dominant, only to use this as a way of keeping control of their relationships (see Norton, 1991, for an interesting discussion of how "new men" manage this in their sexual relationships). Moving to new experiences in gendered relationships involves struggling with ourselves as well as the beliefs and actions of our partners and communities.

Case example

"My daughter won't let me live my life"

A mother and adult daughter who lived together came to therapy because of the daughter's depression. The father had died three years earlier, and the daughter, an only child, had been very close to him. The mother had developed a relationship with another man, and the daughter appeared very resentful of this. After some sessions of therapy, the daughter became much less depressed, took a job, and started to go out more. However, conflict between mother and daughter escalated, with the mother complaining bitterly about the daughter's selfishness and that she was not "allowing" her to have the same freedom that she (the daughter) now had. When the mother was asked how she would now like to live her life, she could only respond by criticizing her daughter. This pattern only shifted when the therapist explored the mother's life history, which had been entirely constructed around giving up her own needs for others and acknowledged how terrifying this present stage must be for her. Within this frame, the daughter could be seen as helping her mother by giving her the opportunity to fight for her own self-development.

We think there is much to be learned by exploring the different meanings given to gender in different cultural and social contexts, and through these variations to loosen gender constraints and question gendered knowledge. The different gendered experiences of people living in less-traditional family forms, like single-parent households or gay/lesbian relationships, are useful because, although they carry the potential for replicating traditional patterns, they ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Contents
• EDITORS' FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• Introduction
• Chapter one Gender: a systemic understanding
• Chapter two Feminisms and other "isms"
• Chapter three Gender and subjectivity
• Chapter four Gender, power, and systemic thinking
• Chapter five Abuses of power: working with physical and sexual violence
• Chapter six Stories lived and told: language and discourse
• Chapter seven Case studies
• Chapter eight Training and supervision: addressing the context of gender
• Chapter nine Training exercises
• Chapter ten Conclusions and future directions
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX