Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women, Menstruation and Secondary Amenorrhea

Danielle Redland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367467005
• eBook ISBN: 9781000061123
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"I can be a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a woman without having periods." This book explores two of the oldest and most important symbols of all time: menstruation and secondary amenorrhea. Women of menstruating age commonly experience secondary amenorrhea – a cessation of periods – but most people have never heard of the term, nor do they realise what it represents. Danielle Redland's curiosity as to why this is posits that menstrual conditions need to be decoded, not just simply treated.

Surveying menstruation and Secondary Amenorrhea (SA) principally from a psychoanalytic perspective, with sociocultural, historical, political and religious angles also examined, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women, Menstruation and Secondary Amenorrhea draws secondary amenorrhea out of the shadows of its menstruating counterpart, and explores how narratives of womanhood and statehood dominate. Chapters on blood ideology and war amenorrhea, on Freud's treatment of Emma Eckstein and on the psycho-mythology of Pygmalion, present the reader with visions beyond patriarchy towards more thoughtful ideas on the feminine, challenging assumptions about gender, identity and what is deemed "good" for women. Rich in clinical examples, the book locates menses and their cessation at the heart of personal experience and examines psychosomatic phenomena, the link between psyche and body and the value of interpretation. From the author's own analysis to a variety of cases linked to hysteria, anorexia, stress, trauma, abuse, helplessness and hopelessness, individual stories and narratives are sensitively recovered and carefully revealed.

This refreshing example of multi-layered research and psychoanalytic enquiry by a new, female writer will be of great interest to psychologists, psychotherapists, healthcare and social work professionals and readers of gender studies, history, politics and literature.

1 Currencies of blood and laws of the land

This chapter will outline the main ways in which the amenorrheic woman and the menstruating woman are viewed and used by societies and groups. We shall see them in political, cultural, medical, anthropological, religious, literary and historical contexts. The chapter will set about to fill in the gaps in our understanding of amenorrhea and menstruation and will question how and why amenorrhea is experienced as being outside the “natural” order of things. If we look at amenorrhea and menstruation as signifiers in the wider socio-cultural context, both the amenorrheic and the menstruating woman can be construed as possessing both positive and negative forces. They appear in composite guises depending on what is needed of them at any given moment. For example, the menstruating woman is aligned with the very existence and continuation of the whole of the human race. Her monthly menstrual cycles provide the arena in which a procreative act can ensue. She is a force of nature and the survival of the species depends on her. Meanwhile, this very same menstruating woman has been cast aside as inferior and polluting. She has been vilified as insane and a danger to the healthy organisation and progression of the collective. As for the woman with amenorrhea, she can be seen as a saviour, a survivor and a martyr in times of economic hardship, political strife and religious awakenings. Anomalous to the natural order, she represents other worldly qualities on this earth either in light or in shade. During medieval times, she was a sorcerer and a witch. In stark contrast, in biblical times she was revered as being close to the Divine. Our exploration into the way in which menses and non-menses are used as powerful symbols will highlight the need and dependency that “man’s” attachment with them ensues.

Menstrual taboos, rituals and segregation

Wherever primitive man has set up a taboo he fears some danger and it cannot be disputed that a generalised dread of women is expressed in all these rules of avoidance. Perhaps the dread is based on the fact that woman is different from man, forever incomprehensible and mysterious, strange and therefore apparently hostile.

(Freud, 1918 SE XI: 198)

Menstruation has long been a point of power that can cause things to happen, to interrupt or to terminate. In Swazi culture, a menstruating woman who goes near a pregnant cow will cause it to miscarry. If she picks vegetables, they will wilt. But it is also regarded as a life symbol that can purify as well as pollute. It cleanses a woman after she has given birth and only then can her husband cohabit with her (Kuper, 1947: 107). Similarly, menstruation has a dual role in Judaism. In one way “As yeast is good for dough, so is menstruation good for women” (Vosselmann, 1935: 121). At the same time according to Jewish Karaite tradition, if a menstruating woman moves towards and looks at a lactating woman, it is believed that the mother’s milk will stop flowing. To break the spell, the lactating woman urinates over the urine of the menstruating woman. Urine has no link to reproduction and is not a symbol of power of strength (Tsoffar, 2004).

In the early stages of civilisation, menstruation symbolised reverence and sacredness rather than a pollutant and women, who were socially prominent and responsible for social organisation, designed the menstrual taboo to create separateness between themselves and men. As Erich Neumann writes in The Great Mother: An Analysis of The Archetype (1955):

The matriarchal epoch was the source of totemism, and exogamy and taboo as well as the principle of initiation seem to have belonged originally to the central institutions of the female group. One indication of this is that many female mysteries were taken over by the men and that in some the men still wore the more primordial woman’s dress. We even have traditions – among the primitive aborigines of Tierra del Fuego, for example – to the effect that the earliest mysteries of the moon goddess, against which the men rebelled under the leadership of the sun, slaying all grown women and only permitting ignorant and uninitiated little girls to survive.

(Neumann, 1955: 290)

In The Metamorphosis of Baubo (1994), Winifred Lubell explains how the Paleolithic symbols of female power including the vulva and menstrual fluid signified the way in which female energy was aligned with the earth’s sacred energy. Earlier images dating back to 30,000 bce show rituals in which chosen women would squat over fields and their “moon blood” would fall onto the newly ploughed fields. The “magical” regenerative qualities of the menstruating vulva were just as much about religion and cosmology as they were about biology. In tribal communities today such as in the Ebrié tribe of the Ivory Coast, menses is, like the erection, “associated with fertility, not pollution; desirable, and traumatic to lose” (Niangoran-Bouah, 1964: 54). In contrast, the amenorrheic state is the cursed and polluted state, the worst form of punishment that can befall a woman. If a woman picks fruit from a tree, which is mystically protected by its owner, she will become amenorrheic. A man can be inflicted with impotence if he too takes fruit from this tree. Both states are reversible when the crime is confessed. Amenorrhea symbolises lack of potency. The desired state is one imbued with the life force of menstruation and some men will go to extreme lengths to grasp it. Tribal men of New Guinea perform periodic ritual bloodlettings in what anthropologists call “male menstruation” or “imitative menstruation”. Gilmore writes in Misogyny: The Male Malady (2001)

the men believe they can capture not only the potency but also the fertility that nature bestows upon women. The men want this sexual transfiguration desperately because they feel that men are weak and need woman’s attributes to thrive.

(Gilmore, 2001: 184)

Across Melanesia, there are accounts of male nose bloodletting as a way to initiate and imitate female menstruation. Less common is the practice amongst Wogeo men who incise the tongue of young boys to access menstrual agency. Older youths and men make an incision in their penis, as described in Ian Hogbin’s The Island of Menstruating Men (1996).

The felt experience of menstrual blood as a sacred energy has in many societies disappeared. With the development of civilisation driven by aggression, hierarchy and power, wise blood was supplanted by the obscene and polluting. Anthropologist Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) writes about the Mae Enga who believe that to come into contact with a menstruating woman will cause a man to become sick, causing him to vomit, turning his blood black. If there is no counter-magic, he will eventually die. Referring to the 1963 study of the Mae Enga of Papua, New Guinea by Dr Meggitt, Douglas writes: “it is argued that this reflects the strain bought about by inter-clan marriages and exogamy – ‘we marry the people we fight.’ – this Delilah complex is that women weaken or betray” (Douglas, 1966: 148).

Anthropologist René Girard explains in Violence and the Sacred (1979) that the violence implied by menstrual blood is far greater than blood connected to wounds or aggressive acts. This is because of its connection to sexuality and the generative process. It can lead to rivalry and incest inside a community. The threat of menstruation is at its most heightened at menarche, when a prepubescent girl gets her first period. Simone de Beauvoir famously commented on the universal feature of this developmental stage. She wrote that a pre-pubescent “carries no menace, she is under no taboo and has no sacred character … But on the day she can reproduce, woman becomes impure” (de Beauvoir, 1949 [1952]: 180).

This holds true today in many parts of the world. In some communities, stringent rituals that demonstrate people’s affiliation to this belief are steeped in traditions of sacredness but are now viewed as sacrilegious. In some remote parts of Malawi such as in the village of Nsanje, girls as young as 12 and 13 are made to have sex with a male paid sex worker, a “hyena”, once they reach puberty. The ritual “cleansing” takes place over three days after their first menstrual bleed and marks the passage from childhood into the “heat” of womanhood. The girls believe that if they refuse, their family members will be cursed with disease or death. What is significant is that the custodians of this initiation are the elder stateswomen who tell the girls what their duties are as wives and sexual partners. The “hyenas” are often HIV positive and do not use condoms but on the whole the elder women are defiant that the practice must continue. Historically, pubescent girls around the age of 15 were chosen as wives and it was their new husbands who would carry out the ritual. Now though the girls reach the age of menarche much younger and their age is irrelevant when it comes to the initiation act they are forced into with the male “sex workers”.

This story caught the media’s attention across the globe and the government of Malawi knows it must be seen to be investigating this sexual initiation practice. But it is a long-held belief that change can only come when the younger generations are enabled to let go of the cultural and traditional practises that define their older relatives and ancestral forebears. This is the most complex of challenges. Dismantling the menstrual taboo brings with it the threat of dismantling a whole community, society, organisation, civilisation, even. The taboo keeps the abject body at a distance, the pollutant away from the symbolic order. In the case of the ancient Greeks, it was ingeniously played out in the annual autumn festival called Thesmophoria.

Thesmophoria was specifically designed to “celebrate” puberty and menstruation. Suspecting that their womenfolk had the potential to revolt, borne out of their frustration at being so markedly segregated from public view, locked indoors for most of their lives, these women were given their own festival. It is from Aristophanes’ satire Thesmophorizaousae (411 bc) (2015) that we glean much of this cult status. Archaeologists have located Thesmophorion sanctuaries or epigraphic evidence in over fifty sites in Greece and its surrounding areas, with some dating back to the second millennium bc. At the start of this festival, free adult women would leave their homes and congregate in makeshift tents for three days. In Athens, they would meet on the Acropolis and carry out sacred rituals, led by women for women. Men were completely excluded. Importantly though many scholars agree that this was not a shining example of mankind celebrating the totality of women. It was more a case of “nothing else but the periods of the Greek women elevated to an annual festival accommodated with this name in the sphere of Demeter Thesmophoros” (Kerenyi, 1975: 157). It was perhaps a vehicle designed by male citizens to allow the women to let off steam. Men were merely placating their women. Barbara Goff explains it well in her paper “The Priestess of Athena Grows a Beard: Latent Citizenship in Ancient Greek Women’s Ritual Practice” (2007). Goff writes:

women’s latent citizenship emerges and becomes prominent in ritual…To the women, who perform it, the Thesmophoria offers the contours of a kind of citizenship, although it can also be read to construct its female participants as the outsiders who define male citizenship by contrast.

(Goff cited in Pollock & Turvey Sauron, 2007: 51)

That the menstrual taboo is engrained in civilisations is well illustrated in “Reconsidering the Menstrual Taboo: A Portuguese Case” (Lawrence, 1982). The observations recorded by anthropologist Denise Lawrence show the extent to which a town in Southern Portugal adhered to strict taboos relating to the curing of pork and the preparation of pork sausages. The fixed gaze of the menstruating woman on the pork would cause it to spoil. Her contaminated body could contaminate the meat. When a woman arrives at the site of meat preparation, she is asked if she is able to see and she can only enter if she replies, “I can see.” One can wonder whether a woman can ever be completely sure she is “clean” in which case is she intentionally or unintentionally being deceitful? In “Menstrual Politics: Women and Pigs in Rural Portugal”, Lawrence explains that these women maintain prohibitions in their own interest and that

women’s behaviour can be explained not in reference to assumptions of male dominance over women but to women’s conscious choice of modes of behaviour reflecting strategic goals important to their own perceived self-interest. Women are the principle actors in maintaining the menstrual taboo because it allows them to control certain social interactions within and outside the household and affords them a rationale for protecting economic privacy of their homes, for which they hold primary responsibility.

(Lawrence, 1988 cited in Buckley & Gottlieb, 1988: 117)

It might be that all of this props up and colludes with the punishing menstrual taboos and rituals that are principally driven by a man’s envy of woman and his desire to dominate her. But at least Lawrence’s understanding of these women challenges us to question this assumption. If men do feel undermined then perhaps the concentration and focus on a task as important as food preparation can dissolve the tension. As Douglas explains, “when moral principles come into conflict, a pollution rule can reduce confusion by giving a simple focus for concern” (Douglas, 1966: 133). In this way, the clear, open and easily understood practical rules contain the more mystical and spiritual aspects enveloped in the rituals and the taboo. It is all re-branded as a positive movement to bring a sought after order to the group. What is being protected is

perceived creative, spirituality of monstrous women from the influence of others in a more neutral state, as well as protecting the latter in turn from the potent, positive spiritual force ascribed by such women. In other cultures menstrual customs, rather than subordinating women to men fearful of them provide women with the means of ensuring their own autonomy, influence and social control.

(Buckley & Gottlieb, 1988: 7)

Women of the Mogmog Island in the Pacific atoll of Ulithi enjoy being separated out into shelters and huts during their time of menstruation. They talk and weave, taking a break from routine labour. The idea that women self-select their segregation makes me think of primatology studies of baboons in Kenya; these found that in the days leading up to menstruation, the females would seek out a quiet place and reduce contact with group members, spending around 30% of their time up in the trees. Analysis of the data found that premenstrual and perimenstrual behaviour changed amongst female yellow baboons. This shows “some intriguing similarities to several commonly reported behavioural symptoms of premenstrual syndrome” (Hausfater & Skoblick, 1985: 165).

Choosing to separate themselves out from the social group, human females have similar hormonal systems to the baboon in their seeking out “menstrual quietude” (Hood, 1992). The system of segregation is interesting when it comes to groups migrating and relocating. In Ethiopia, Jewish women observed the purity laws according to their literal reading of the biblical text and this was significant in distinguishing them from their Christian neighbours. Women who were menstruating or who had recently given birth lived in their community’s menstruating hut (yamargam gogo), which was often placed centre stage in the middle of the village. Here they were separated from the family home and from the domestic routine. Together, these women shared news and information. W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Currencies of blood and laws of the land
• 2. Nazi blood ideology, the menstruating woman and war amenorrhea
• 3. A far cry from a no thing: commentaries on secondary amenorrhea
• 4. The body boundary, the ego boundary, non-menses and patterns of relating in anorexia and eating disorders
• 5. Metamorphosis – the story of Pygmalion and the process of change in the psychoanalysis and treatment of secondary amenorrhea
• 6. A bloody affair: the case of Emma Eckstein and Freud’s Irma dream
• 7. Viewing a female condition through a psychoanalytic (male?) lens
• Index