Gender as Soft Assembly

Adrienne Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136873393
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Gender as Soft Assembly weaves together insights from different disciplinary domains to open up new vistas of clinical understanding of what it means to inhabit, to perform, and to be, gendered. Opposing the traditional notion of development as the linear unfolding of predictable stages, Adrienne Harris argues that children become gendered in multiply configured contexts. And she proffers new developmental models to capture the fluid, constructed, and creative experiences of becoming and being gendered. According to Harris, these models, and the images to which they give rise, articulate not only with contemporary relational psychoanalysis but also with recent research into the origins of mentalization and symbolization.

In urging us to think of gender as co-constructed in a variety of relational contexts, Harris enlarges her psychoanalytic sensibility with the insights of attachment theory, linguistics, queer theory, and feminist criticism. Nor is she inattentive to the impact of history and culture on gender meanings. Special consideration is given to chaos theory, which Harris positions at the cutting edge of developmental psychology and uses to generate new perspectives and new images for comprehending and working clinically with gender.

SECTION II

Gender Assoft Assembly

CHAPTER 4

Gender Narratives in Psychoanalysis

It is increasingly difficult to write with coherence or with innocence about gender as some monolithic, simple, comprehensible concept. We have to keep putting words like feminine and masculine in irony-conveying quotation marks. With these rhetorical devices we signal our understanding that these terms have meaning only in particular and unique contexts and that these contexts shift constantly.

We think and practice and write with such self-consciousness because, in the past 30 years, the experiences knotted into gender identities and sexual life have come under extreme scrutiny. Gender words and the phenomena they signify have come unglued. Assumed to describe easily and unremarkably various ways of being or loving, gender’s language worlds have been breaking down, breaking open, breaking free. We use terms like shape shifting, gender morphing—terms from science fiction and graphic, dynamic, visual medi—to convey the complex fluidity of body and psychic life coming under the various rubrics of gender.

Patients and analysts a like struggle with new and old language, category terms that carry primary process, charged affective meanings, and words we want to bend to new uses. This seems true at the level of popular culture, of social and personal life, of clinical experience, and in the shifting and demanding worlds of gender theory and psychoanalytic theories.

Words bend or they resist. Clinical conversations detail both the necessary coherence and the troubling gaps and excesses in being a gender, or having a body, as the following clinical vignettes suggest. Seen through a relational lens, gender, in these lives and circumstances, is intersubjectively coconstructed and lived in deep intrapsychic complexity and conflict. Gendered experience bounces off personal history and the larger social history. Gender is more usefully imagined as a function than simply as a structure. Gender functions as a way of doing various psychic and relational tasks in certain ways. For some the traffic of gender is pure pain, for some, a mixed blessing. For some, gender’s presence in various psychic functions is rigid and palpable; for others gender seems thin and almost transparent.

Jamie: Gender’s Hidden Torments and Hidden Pleasures

The woman I greet for the first time in my waiting room is slouched against the doorjamb. She is scowling, cap pulled low over her face. As I got to know her, I found Jamie to be attractive, enigmatic, easily androgynous in look and style. But along with this pleasing way of being, there was great internal pain and self-doubt. The dilemma she presented was a newly severe conflict over her artistic work, a conflict sharpened after the birth of a son. This conflict seems not the conventional problem of divided loyalties and constraints on time and energy. To her considerable surprise, Jamie feels both delight and confidence in her maternal capacities. When I ask who it was that I met leaning against the door in the waiting room, she is eager to tell me that the sense of herself as boy has been lifelong, intensely felt, deeply important. The person who mothers and the person who writes simply seem to live in different worlds.

Jamie can play with gender but also, almost without warning, feel herself in the grip of a death struggle, within herself and with me. She conveys much of her difficulty with identity and genderedness by her way of talking. Her speech is split among many genres and many registers. Extremely verbal, she has a magical capacity for speech, a comic style. I notice her liveliness and humor when she is engaging me. She clearly feels that her job in therapy is to keep me entranced and interested, to bring me to life. She can describe with intensity and detail a lifelong project of devoted attention to older women who, finally, in gratitude for her lively love, take her in and animate her, clarifying once and for all what she imagines as the limits and potential of her body self.

But everything changes when she speaks of herself, when she is moved to describe her conflicts in terms of her body and her body in relation to others. Her speech is fractured and violent, hateful and hating; the berating of body and mind is overwhelming. She is tearful, confused. The dominant mood in this rumination is hopelessness and horror. Whatever clear, interesting narrative capacity she retains when talking to me, her body talk and body experience fall frighteningly into incoherence.

Her voice and face soften and gleam when she describes her child, but then helplessly she adds that it is unbelievable that this being came from her body. The child is fine and beautiful; she is gross. Where was there space for something lovely to grow? She describes a dream in which a doctor shows her X-rays in which she has two small ovaries with a tiny enigmatic body nestled between them. Will he need to operate? She has another doctor dream at the beginning of her treatment. A woman doctor (the doctor who referred her to me) examines her genitals, tracing her labia, exciting her. Jamie wonders if this is all right. In another dream, I am a therapist working in a perfume shop. I want to sell her a fragrance. Nazi doctor, seductress doctor, and purveyor of femininity: to enter discourse with a doctor or with a woman is to bring the body alive, but also into many dangers danger of extraction, of theft of the insides of the body, and the danger of enchanted takeover.

Jamie’s body is split in ways other than gender or by gender in other ways. Top and bottom are different. Top is strong, defined, liked, female: the bottom is gross, huge, deformed, male. Bad thighs and a dark patch between the legs. The lower body, marked with disgust, is a version of her father’s body and of her father’s contempt for her adolescent body. When she describes her father, she speaks vividly and intensely. It is a relentlessly negative characterization, but there is the thrill of the description, an odd glee mixed with disgust. I notice that the same lexicon, the same style and tone, the same genre of speech is used for her father and for her own body state. Both are gross morons. Morons, I ask? Stupid, nothing to say. She is speechless. A moron who cannot write or think or speak. If she speaks to me as the disgusting moron, the therapy will surely founder. Her only hope is boyish charm, and this she undertakes through speech but cannot carry this agency into her writing.

There are splits within her experience of masculinity. She experiences herself as the strong, silent sentinel, the caretaker. “I’m standing at attention. Break the glass and use me. I will take care. It’s what I do.” The gross father-self is defined by greed, by a kind of wanton permission to have and to be, an indifference to others, an object of disgust and hatred. And, moving around these figures, a charming, seductive boy who knows how to interest a woman. All this experience lives secretly in fantasy, in the context of marriage and family life that is precious and relieving to her and in a relationship with her husband, whose male body seems to her right, clean, and innocent.

The relational history of Jamie’s boy-self is complex and multiply determined. She held a very early conviction that what would have rescued her mother from depression was a vivid, lively, helpful boy, a mama’s boy. There are distant, troubling memories of an attentive, preoedipal father. Her gender constellations are more fractal than unitary.

In the midst of intense demands for love and permanent union, she reminds me that I really am a jerk. She knows and hopes I know that this is play. “What about my womanliness? Am I not a little bit pretty?” she insists, at one moment. Yet almost immediately, she founders on another block. She cannot be in the room as a woman. She reports that she had very carefully chosen a uniform of cap and jeans and boots. Even if she must go to considerable trouble to return home from sessions and change into clothes for work or an interview, there is no way to be a woman in the room with me. So, although I am denounced as someone interested only in men and able to respond only to the man in a woman, two women together are simultaneously beyond words and wonder and hopelessly boring.

For this patient, gender meanings are not only the boiling stew through which she struggles to find coherence and purpose but also an access to creativity. Gender is the deeply saturated space where almost everything that matters to her must be negotiated. Jamie’s gender is a kind of fractal, unstable space where hope and despair conflictually coexist.

Helen: Bodies of Work Without a Gendered Body

Helen is an accomplished, graceful woman, filled with intellectual and aesthetic passions around which she has wound a deeply moral understanding of herself and her projects. In a demanding professional world in which she is a decidedly provocative presence, she struggles with the questions of corruption, ambition, purpose. At a more hidden level, she is engaged in an equally compelling struggle with neglect and poverty of various kinds, a struggle involving pride, shame, and anxiety, often cast in moral terms.

Helen has solved the problem of access to creativity by bracketing her gender, experiencing it almost as a well-cut suit, architecturally structured and attractive, useful rather than decorative. It is not that her bodily sense is erased, but that its strength and pliability and vitality are foregrounded. What is backgrounded and quite unseen by Helen is the sense of her body as the gendered object of another’s excitement. Her own pleasure in her body seems centered on its activity and vitality, not on the interior sites of excitement. Hers is a body to be of service, not always to be inwardly felt. It was not until well into adulthood that her active, owned experience of her body-self encompassed a genital experience.

Her body is a kind of “innocent” instrument, her sensorimotor sensibility not erotized until well into adulthood. Her body state is a mode of perception. The body is for use, not display, and in this notion her artistic and aesthetic senses are mirrored as well. Mostly she does not deploy gender terms in describing herself. She has captured the problems of ambition and her history with the extraspecies metaphor of topdog or underdog.

A woman of achievement, of early promise fulfilled, Helen is a woman who sees herself in a professional lineage of men. She was mentored more as an oedipal son than as a daughter and lives in suspended mourning for an adored, glamorous, and productive father, an adolescent girl’s idealized lost father. The oedipal gender-ambiguous offspring to her mentor, Helen appears to shake gender conventions off like an animal shaking off water. She feels a creaturelyness to her body, the gender arrangements and the sexual demand/need of others. She is most comfortable with men. In male mentors the homage to her lost father stays lit. These mentoring relations are often endowed with almost magical properties, eerie, clanging coincidences, and strange parallels. The world of fantasy and magic lives close to the surface, spurring Helen’s intense creativity but also a suspended mourning.

Yet another pattern emerges, a triangle of a very particular kind: a powerful, twining connection to a man who is himself enmeshed with an older woman, sometimes sexually, sometimes financially. The older woman is seen as holding the man captive in a corrupt and incestuous trap from which Helen hopes to liberate him. A familial scene surely, but an interesting one, collapsing generations.

As we came to explore these matters more deeply, gender became more foregrounded. Her body sense serves many functions, not the least of which is a suspended melancholy, a young, androgynous, pre-pubescent girl waiting for father, but also an androgyny (not exactly a tomboy, an identity less saturated with gender) that stepped aside from sexual rivalry for oedipal winning as a girl. For Helen the women in her family constitute trouble in different ways. The images of the early maternal environment are of dirt, neglect, incompetence, images that her gleaming, clear-lined aesthetics are designed to repair. Her relations with women are much more difficult and contradictory. She gets bound into cycles of envy and contempt with women perceived to be rich and pampered. She toggles back and forth between the position of degraded, impoverished girl envious of the cared-for woman and the position of a winner, a person of power and accomplishment, living with some contempt for the emptiness of the pampered woman cast against the genuine richness and scope of her professional accomplishment.

Here a shifting self–other constellation ebbs and flows, connects and reverses. Helen lives out a neglected, disheveled relation as child to mother. She has a memory/dream image of a tumble down a flight of stairs. She is a small child but alone, unsupervised, and left alone to recover. But in the family she was also explicitly made into the center of rivalries, triangles of mother, father, and grandmother in varying permutations. Her mother combined neglect with narcissistic identification and the complex envy of a mother that can develop in relation to an oedipal-winner child.

For Helen, precocity was partially a covering for neglect. This mix of potency and destitution is replicated in her current relation to resources. She traverses grandeur and poverty, and the line between ampleness and emptiness can be very thin. This makes for a complex experience for Helen and anyone she is in relation to. Her potency and creativity are palpable, existing in real space. Her convictions of having a moral dimension to her work are deep. And yet, lurking in the background and sometimes in the foreground of her life and work, degradation, economic ruin, and destruction loom.

She particularly loves the myth of Atlantis, the great graceful runner, daughter of Apollo, who must be outrun to be won in marriage. The speedy androgynous girl stoops for the golden apples thrown to distract her. So does Helen carry a covert and worrying gender theory. Willfulness in personal ambition, in the determination to be respected and admired for work, makes for a kind of clarity and insistence that gender and sexuality be irrelevant to judgment and approval. In some way Helen’s indifference to gender both is historically structured and is a deep conviction of the toll on her mother and on her parent’s marriage that dependency and passivity took.

Helen has contempt for women who use female power; contempt for women drawing on dependence. Certainly there is a disavowed need in her self. Helen has made a virtue of necessity. Precocity or empty neglect and pride, self-beratement, and mental acuity build a structure to encompass fear and emptiness and neglect. Rage and aggression are skillfully tempered into will and work. Activity is kept clear of gender. And clean of gender too.

In the transference, I am sometimes the older woman called on to admire and be feared as envious spoiler, my care complexly welcomed and spoiled. Helen and I have interesting, sometimes exhausting struggles about fees and resources, struggles that I see she is learning to manage better in her life. There is the wish to care for me endlessly and yet to impoverish me, to place me in conditions of dangerous depletion. And there is, inside and outside treatment, a sacrifice to an older woman, often a sharply alternating process whereby a public moment of power and admiration is paid for by private debasement and attunement to an older woman’s needs.

Charles: Gender Façades and a Longing to be “Real”

In another clinical vignette gender and desire are parsed in a very different way. Charles is a young scientist whose analysis with me is his first treatment with a woman. He has been plunged, to his surprise, into an intense experience that oscillates dramatically between tender dependency and erotic excitement. He can feel “weepy” during or after sessions. He has much to weep about but prides himself on never crying. He imagines that his tears would make me disgusted or angry. This conviction stems from a strong, unsubtle paternal pressure to remain allied with masculinity and stay away from those aspects of family life identified with his mother, viewed by all as disturbed and needy. This is the way he divides the gender world as well. He is both chained and set up by this division. Therapy itself constitutes one of the few points on which he has crossed into the mother-world. Therapy is necessary and must be spoiled.

Over time Charles adopts façades of character and gender through which he functions and produces these personas very creatively in his analysis. Very much drawing on an idealized image of an urbane, smooth-talking father, Charles is genial, agreeable, and apparently eager to please, in particular to please women. But he has become able to notice what a house of cards this is, that he was clinging to a kind of cartoon masculinity, not likely even very real to his father, as a necessary way to distance himself from the mother he longed for and feared.

Being chosen and taken up by his father, while his siblings and mother were consigned to the category of the feminine and the disturbed, gave Charles great relief. But painfully he has had to notice what was airbrushed out of the picture. Charles has a father who is alcoholic, mean spirited, emotionally absent. His father’s callous indifference to his wife and his children has rendered masculine identifications virtually useless to Charles. He increasingly doubts his own brittle phallic constructions but fears the slide into emotional turmoil and depression that such shaky structures are meant to forestall.

Even as a child he intuited the shaky mental representation of himself and his family: the unreality of parental speech, the emptiness of family life, the loneliness that was constant and from which he turned to fantasy, and a rich, often lurid internal world. Charles fears that this internal world is often more real than his daily life and relationships, and he has always felt the line between fantasy and reality to be blurry and permeable. His fears of his internal world, its affects, scenes, and meanings, are intense.

When we finally get to hear about them, his fantasies boil with erotic and aggressive scenes, and he is sure that, if and when I learn of them, I will get rid of him. One fantasy he can talk about is the slightly confusing, inchoate sense that “things” can get out of control in the consulting room. What if we both had sexual thoughts in the same moment? These fantasies are sometimes violently sexual and sometimes tenderly erotic. Maybe I would just join him on the couch in a scene that seems right on the edge of erotica and maternal tenderness.

On the other hand, anger and aggression in relation to me are frightening. What if he were angry and wanted to th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to Paperback Edition
• Introduction
• I. Relational Developmental Theory
• II. Gender as Soft Assembly
• III. Developmental Theory and Research
• Endnotes
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index