Homosexualities

Psychogenesis, Polymorphism, and Countertransference

Elda Abrevaya, Frances Thomson-Salo, Elda Abrevaya, Frances Thomson-Salo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429914560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This latest volume in the Psychoanalysis and Women Series for the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association presents and discusses theoretical and clinical work from a number of authors worldwide. It clearly demonstrates that there is no typical development of homosexuality and that each individual's object-choice can only be grasped by examining their psychic history. While the therapeutic work requires no special adaptation of technique, countertransferential difficulties which may arise and stem in part from cultural representations about gender differences are fully explored. The book includes a unique retrospective view by Ralph Roughton over three time points which charts changes in considering the analyst's response within the wider cultural context.

Chapter One
Gender as heritage of the first qualitative differentiation

Paul Denis

The question of gender is, today, a central topic in many psychoanalytic and psychopathological studies. Stoller (1964), by focusing on the very early organisation of what he called “gender identity”, has profoundly changed our ideas about identity building in girls and boys.

The gender identity nucleus in Stoller's view

For Stoller (1964), gender identity development—to be masculine or to be feminine—is built on what he calls “gender identity nucleus”. The latter consists of the conviction that his or her sexual assignation is anatomically and eventually psychologically correct and that it is the first step toward the individual’s eventual gender identity. Yet, is it legitimate to speak in terms of “conviction” at such early stages in psychic development? We think that it is more correct to consider such a conviction as the result of the whole developmental process.

Stoller also expresses something curious, that gender identity has nothing to do with any role or object relation. What we understand from this statement is that gender identity is independent of sexual object choice. It is true, for instance, that a very feminine woman with a clear feminine gender identity can chose a homosexual or heterosexual love object. Nevertheless, this independence is only relative and a very firm gender identity may lead to a specific object choice or to a specific kind of role in the social area. In a sense, Stoller’s statement indicates the narcissistic value of gender identity, which is independent from object choice.

In another way, Stoller tells us about the importance of the parents’ attitude, their overextended role in their child’s perception of his or her own sex. The child is taken into a kind of a narcissistic relationship with his or her parents. They impose on their child the role of a girl or that of a boy, and the child’s role responsiveness to it is very strong. However, this influence is not unilateral. Both parents’ attitudes can play complementary or contradictory roles in building gender identity. It is important to see that gender identity is a qualitative distinction; anatomical sex is an objective fact, while gender is a subjective one and admits contradictions.

Another point that Stoller affirms as obvious for building gender identity is the fact that the boy lives in a state of fusion with his mother. The same is also true for the girl, and this fusion creates the feeling of a femininity canvas. Therefore, the boy would have inside, in the very core of his gender identity nucleus, a feeling of femaleness, but why should we think that the mother and the female correspond to the same thing in the baby’s mind? In addition, why should we consider the mother and child relationship in terms of fusion? The mother is part of the baby’s psyche; the father is also part of the baby’s psyche, if he is included in the maternal care. Why should the mother be immediately a female in the baby’s mind?

The mother is feminine before becoming a female

If we follow Gaddini’s (1968) views, the baby’s identifications with his or her mother are, in the beginning, mimetic ones. The baby tries to produce in him or herself the effects of the maternal presence, but also those of the paternal presence or those of another person. These are the first partners of the baby’s formless primary sexuality. The first vocalisations are imitations of the mother’s voice, but this kind of imitation is independent of sex, even if the voice is feminine. Voice has a gender, but no sex. In the same way, we consider that, as Laplanche (1997) states, enigmatic signifiers which are transmitted by the mother’s behaviour are more linked with gender than sex. For Laplanche, the mother gives her baby, through her way of loving, caring and feeding him or her, messages that carry sexual latent significations. Those messages are not enigmatic for the mother herself but for the baby, who is unknowingly soaked in a gender pattern given by the mother. But the mother is not alone and other gender patterns are assigned by other persons, such as the father.

Gender is, first, qualitative

Gender is essentially qualitative and admits different nuances— gender nuances—for the person him or herself or for others.

It is necessary to distinguish between the two sides in the development of different gender aspects. First, the perception of the other person’s gender from the baby’s point of view, and, second, the perception of the way in which this person lives the masculine/feminine opposition, his or her gender, and the contradictions driven by this opposition.

In the beginning, differences between parents are qualitative. The baby lives a formless sexuality, without differentiation between sexes. It is possible to consider it in terms of primary homosexuality, because, in the baby‘s mind, the other’s sex is the same as his or her own. The difference between persons is similar to the difference between hard and soft toys.

During this phase of formless sexuality, undifferentiated in regard to sex, differences between male and female, and especially between mother and father, are only made from qualities: their smells are not the same, they do not take the baby in their arms in the same way, some cheeks are soft, others have beards, and so on. The first distinction between parents is made from qualities, before the recognition of anatomical difference.

However, the sexual anatomical difference is, at first, a small difference: it is only when it is understood as a constitutional difference ruling sexual roles and procreation that there is a Copernican revolution in the child’s mind. The mother is a woman, a female, only after this change, retrospectively, gives another value to the past relationship. It is the same with the father. It is when this recognition is achieved that the child’s identity will become a proper sexual identity, not only a gender identity.

Gender and psychic bisexuality

The formless sexuality comes to differentiation qualitatively at the gender level. The sexual level, the anatomical, is a second one. The two levels, gender and sexual, run in parallel ways. It is not possible to be simultaneously male and female, but it is possible to be feminine in one way, masculine in another. Feminine and masculine are also dependent on social context. Sex is objective, whereas gender is subjective.

The important question here is that the unconscious will not resign itself to its effects, despite the recognition of anatomical differences. Psychic bisexuality elaborated by identifications with both parents continues to be operative, even after the recognition of anatomical differences between them and even after the child’s awareness of his/her anatomical sex.

What Freud describes as the child’s identification with “the father in his own personal prehistory” (1923b, p. 31) and his or her identification with the mother as the first form of link with the object, both refer to gender identifications. These identifications are polymorphic and are not organised as a demanding nucleus imposing sexual identification. We are leaving aside here Stoller’s idea of a “gender identity nucleus” which has been established early. We consider that gender remains bivalent and is the basis of psychic bisexuality. It does not concern a “gender identity nucleus”, but a “gender complex” organised like an ellipse with two focuses, one masculine and the other feminine. Sexual identity will take form on this first background. In this sense, each child builds his or her sexual identity in their own way, mixing the knowledge of anatomical sex and gender complex.

Divorce between gender and anatomy

How can we understand the fact that some persons affirm a sexual identity opposed to their anatomical sex, considering a qualitative gender difference as a constitutional one? They give primacy to qualitative differences in anatomical difference. They might request a surgical sex change. I presume that the idea of a “gender identity nucleus”, powerful enough to induce sexual identity, was transmitted to Stoller by his patients’ conviction that they had a woman’s soul in a man’s body and the feeling that it had always been like that. “My mind is right whereas my anatomy is false.” The conviction in regard to gender negates the reality of sex. This situation is similar to the organisation of a fetish in which the lack of a penis on a woman’s body is negated by cathecting a fetish. To affirm a gender identity contrary to the sexual anatomy is a kind of psychic fetish.

A “gender fixation” of this kind would appear in an early traumatic situation, after a moment of psychic disorganisation. In a psychic situation of abandonment by the mother, the child would identify with her in order to keep her inside him. In the case of one boy, who had developed a cissy-boy syndrome after the birth of a brother, his mother was very eager to have a girl, a fact that facilitated the choice of a gender identity that expelled male identifications. It was an identification with the lost object, as in melancholia.

I proposed some years ago the idea that fixations were organised during a depressive period (Denis, 1992). Gender is a qualitative notion and precedes the recognition of anatomical difference between the sexes. If a subject builds his or her identity based on this qualitative difference and not on the anatomical difference, it is because of an early fixation, the survival of a period where sexuality was formless. The fixation to a gender identity would be organised in an early depressive period, in a struggle against a state of depersonalisation.

The value of this kind of gender-based identity is essentially narcissistic and it is a means to restore an early wounded narcissism.

References

Denis, P. (1992). Depression and fixations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 73: 87–94.

Freud, S. (1923b). The Ego and the Id. S.E., 19: 3–66. London: Hogarth.

Gaddini, E. (1968). Sulla imitazione. Rivista di Psicoanalisi, 14: 235–260.

Laplanche, J. (1997). The theory of seduction and the problem of the other. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 78: 653–666.

Stoller, R. J. (1964). A contribution to the study of gender identity. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 45: 220–226.

Chapter Two
Male homosexuality in analytic treatment

Jacques André

Florent

Florent’s sexual life seems to be a classical example of Freud’s “On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love” (1912d). “Classical”, in the sense that Freud is trying to define a generic pattern of male sexuality: “Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love” (p. 183). A rather dismal view of men’s sexual life, reduced to a binary opposition: tenderness with one woman versus sensuality with the others. This is the stuff of most novels; an example is Kundera’s Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). (1994, p. 24)

Freud is convinced that for the “man of culture”, it is extremely rare, if not impossible, to have the “highest psychical estimation” and experience the “greatest intensity of sensual passion” with one and the same woman. The common solution is to split that which cannot be joined together. With “my dearest darling wife”, sexual activity “is capricious, easily disturbed, often not properly carried out, and not accompanied by much pleasure” (p. 182)—what a sinister account of marital life! But with the other woman, the “mistress”, “sensuality can be freely expressed, and important sexual capacities and a high degree of pleasure can develop” (p. 183). However, this is at a very high price, that of “psychic debasement”, the only solution allowing the doing away with “refinement in their modes of behaviour in love” (p. 183).

Florent speaks of his partner, and mother of his children, with love and respect, but never with passion. Sex is reduced to minimal frequency, but this does not seem to be a source of conflict. The only exception was when they decided to conceive, at which point each made the necessary effort and, while other couples find it so hard to conceive, they were surprisingly successful, since both times they tried they succeeded.

“A bitch in bed, but not in life.” Florent has a taste for formulaic maxims, and this one guides his sex life. He has mistresses, brief affairs that never last more than a few months, and avoids relationships that could put his married life at risk. With these encounters, he can let loose his dominant fantasy: “They’re all bitches asking for it.” The words, the positions, are an enactment of “debasement”.

So far, nothing very original: the classical division between tenderness and sensuality, a clear separation between the two faces of the first love object, the mother and the whore. Had Florent lived in Freud’s time, his sexual life would probably have followed this well-trodden path. Since then, however, the sexual lives of adults have undergone deep transformations. Sex used to be one of the most private things in the world; today, it has “gone public”, owing to what has been called the “sexual liberation” or “revolution”. Although the first signs began to appear in the 1920s, this “liberation” gained full speed in the 1960s. Both sexes were concerned, of course, but, first and foremost, it affected women. In all times and cultures, whether repressive or not, men’s sexual freedom had been inversely proportional to the control imposed on women: on the one hand, frigid conjugal order, and, on the other, the sensuous heat of the whorehouse. But times have changed, and, as a result of contraception, “woman” is no longer synonymous with “mother”, and sexual desire no longer tied to having children. Perhaps a sign of these new times is that the taboo of lost virginity has become relatively obsolete in recent decades. More so today, with globalisation, the t...