With Culture in Mind

Psychoanalytic Stories

Muriel Dimen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136893162
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This is a new kind of anthology. More conversation than collection, it locates the psychic and the social in clinical moments illuminating the analyst's struggle to grasp a patient's internal life as voiced through individual political, social, and material contexts. Each chapter is a single detailed case vignette in which aspects of race, gender, sexual orientation, heritage, ethnicity, class – elements of the sociopolitical matrix of culture – are brought to the fore in the transference-countertransference dimension, demonstrating how they affect the analytic encounter. Additionally, discussions by three senior analysts further deconstruct patients' and analysts' cultural embeddedness as illustrated in each chapter. For the practicing clinician as well as the seasoned academic, this highly readable and intellectually compelling book clearly demonstrates that culture saturates subjective experience – something that all mental health professionals should keep in mind.

Part I

The Social Third

1

Melissa

Lost in a Fog, or “How Difficult Is
This MOMMY Stuff, Anyway?”

MAURA SHEEHY

Editor’s Introduction

There is a socially pervasive struggle with intelligibility and abjection that is most often theorized, as it is later in this book, in regard to the sexual sphere. However, as Maura Sheehy recounts, it is also at home in familial and personal life. Here the analyst works with Melissa, a young mother, who, just like her analyst, struggles with the multiple interpellations of motherhood, its idealization and abjection producing both exaltation and utter confused misery. As we read, we witness a parallel process in which the analyst finds and sees how both her patient and she locate themselves in and wrestle with discourse, a process that effects change in both.

Melissa began our first session perched on the edge of the couch and turned toward me at an uncomfortable angle, leaving herself both unsupported and off balance. She had two daughters, she said, ages 3½ years and 8 months, and was feeling sad and overwhelmed due to what she assumed were “postpartum weaning issues.” She said she was sorry to be giving up the symbiotic breast-feeding connection with her infant but also glad to be freed up from the constant nursing demands. Rather than enjoying her new freedom, however, she felt panic and loss. “They’re growing up, I haven’t done the baby books, I’m not recording what’s happening, my older daughter never talks to me about herself, it’s all slipping away,” she said, tearing up.

Simultaneously, she felt she should be getting back to work. An Ivy League educated architect, Melissa had designed and directed the building of their whole apartment while pregnant and now expected herself to perform a similar virtuosity of multitasking. But she couldn’t finish even the tiny lobby design she’d been hired to do by her co-op board and felt a mounting sense of failure and shame. She wondered if she could ever return to architecture after seeing the angry, viciously competitive older women at the firms she’d worked at, who never saw their families. She wondered why she couldn’t find a way to balance her life “like everyone else.”

Everything in Melissa’s life seemed to be where it was by default rather than choice. Chaos reigned. Despite having a full-time babysitter she was often late to sessions, having been derailed by some relative trifle like her daughter’s tantrumy mind changes about who would take her to school. She longed for time to herself but couldn’t separate for fear her girls would suffer somehow, but if she did break away she busied herself with mindless chores. When she did spend time with her children it never seemed terribly satisfying, despite her initial complaint, because she was so anxious about how the interactions and activities should go. She admitted that sometimes the babysitter’s presence made her feel “like I’m on an IV [intravenous] drip in the back room,” but nevertheless the babysitter was omnipresent, even at the, in their case, not-just-mommy-and-me classes. Yet every night she was bedeviled by the thought: “What do I need to do tomorrow to be a good parent?”

Melissa felt a general sense of exile in motherhood, as if she’d been dismissed from the world and was like “a peg that didn’t fit.” She imagined her former colleagues assuming she “couldn’t hack it” and snickering at her retreat into motherhood, the co-op board laughing at the little mother who couldn’t get the job done, and the ultra-trendy professionals in her neighborhood greeting her stroller-pushing presence with a disapproving “what are YOU doing here?” But she couldn’t connect with the other preschool mothers for fear of what they’d think once they found out she had a full-time babysitter, house cleaner, and a SoHo loft, and wasn’t working—again, she’d be dismissed. Above all, she felt she had no right to complain—about anything. As her husband asked whenever she voiced a need, she imagined everyone wondering, “What do you DO all day?”

I was struck by Melissa’s near-complete lostness—as if she could not find comfort in any part of her identity or the world—and her lack of definition was evident in her wandering, overgeneralized, contradictory associations. She felt “lost in a fog,” and so did I. Nothing we did seemed to get at what was really “slipping away” or to provide much relief. And then I began to dismiss her, too. After all, she was easy to dismiss: a wealthy, White, educated, stylish woman, rolling in help and lost in an abundance of options. Were the voices of censure that bedeviled her not somehow deserved, not perhaps a symptom of her privilege?

My fantasies of a meaty attachment-related analysis devolved into disappointment as once again she brought in one of the self-help/parenting books she studied hungrily and recited their simple revelations. Our sessions began to feel like mommy coaching 101, and my mind became cluttered with reductive prescriptions such as, “She needs to cut back on that babysitter so she can feel more connected to her kids, and then we’ll help her get back to work part-time.” Impatiently, dismissively, I kept wondering, “Where is the second-time mother with her game in place; why can’t she get control of those kids, set the schedule, send her sitter on errands, do what she wants?” As I reflected on what was at the base of my impatience, I heard a voice say, “How difficult IS this MOMMY stuff, anyway?”

Dimly, I was aware that something about this reaction was off. All my own mother chaos, ambivalence, trouble balancing all the desires and needs—my own and my children’s—was disavowed. My confidence wavered. I couldn’t stop wondering if I was reacting to her as a mother or analyst (and what exactly the difference might be), prescribing my own biased cures or meeting her needs. The identifications and disidentifications were disorienting. I was back to work only 4 months since having my second child and felt my mother self to be barely hidden behind a too-shaky hologram of my analyst self. It felt reductive to be thinking of her, and myself, at such a binary dead end, in terms of a self that was independent, separate from children, and defined by work, or as a mother self, as if it were possible to separate our desire and identities into neat piles. I felt stuck but could not see what I was stuck in. So I resolved for a while to examine her history more closely—an analytic fallback position, to be sure, but somewhere that I hoped would anchor us.

As we peeled back the historical layers we found the mother who was a poster child for pre-feminist domestic enslavement and the father who was a first-generation immigrant grooming Melissa for greatness, teaching her to leave play for after work and to be anything but her mother. Her early talent for painting had been immediately commodified into a product to be bought by her father or his friends and then pushed aside for “real” work. But the work was never done, until she finished graduate school and realized the mountain she’d climbed to the cutting-edge career “was really,” she said, “just a cliff” that led to more endless work, no play, no time for family. Now she feared she’d pour herself in to her daughters and they would use her up like a commodity, then eventually dismissing her as everyone else in the world did.

Around this time, I wrote an essay for a writing group of analysts exploring my own conflicts over separation from and connection with my children, my heated desire for both, and the elemental fears that could arise from either state during the course of a day. I related my search through the attachment, object relations, and relational canons to find something that spoke to MY experience—MY maternal identity—rather than only my effect on my child and my child’s maternal experience. To my utter surprise, someone said they didn’t get why I had to read books at all, why didn’t I just know what I wanted and then do it? It was the voice I’d heard in myself in response to Melissa, now coming from outside: “How difficult is this MOMMY stuff, anyway?” Mothers were supposed to KNOW how to manage motherhood, not flip around like a fish out of water or talk about their own desire. While writing I had noticed the feeling that revealing my mother self felt humiliating and inappropriate outside the home sphere, not worthy of intellectual inquiry, just mommy talk, mommy crap. Now it seemed confirmed, and as I went home suffused in shame I felt a sudden surge of identification with Melissa. As Melissa and I answered society’s hailing as mothers, had we, as Judith Butler (1993) suggested, taken our new, maternal identity in as a “reprimand” that had repressed other parts of ourselves in return for offering us recognition as mothers?

Still seeking to clean up my countertransference and return to some supposed “solid” analytic stance toward Melissa, I brought Melissa’s case to an all-female supervision group. To my surprise, they reacted to the case with pained anxiety and identification with the patient as all their unresolved conflicts about their work and motherhood choices and their shifting sense of their own subjectivity surfaced. I began to see how filled we were with negative maternal images and impossible expectations of ourselves, how little we understood the forces at work upon and within us, how we blamed ourselves for our own confusion and inability to find balance, thinking we had so many choices. But did we?

According to a Harvard University study by the Project for Global Working Families, out of 173 countries the United States is one of five that doesn’t provide paid maternity leave (Heymann, Earle, & Hayes, 2007). The others are Lesotho, Swaziland, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea. And our access to basic supports such as family sick leave, national child-care standards, and affordable health-care coverage not tied to a full-time job lag far behind those of most developed countries. Judy Warner, in her book Perfect Madness (2005), made a strident argument that the lack of social policy supporting families has made it impossible for women not to feel betrayed, as Melissa does, by the message that we can have it all—work and motherhood—and develop a fairly stable and positive maternal identity when in fact we can’t, easily if at all.

But Melissa’s case opened my eyes to an even more insidious set of internal obstacles to the development of a maternal subjectivity that includes a sense of agency. First, the tendency to think in binaries—work versus motherhood, good mother versus bad, separate versus connected. Reflecting and reproducing the bifurcated social structure within which women try to be both workers and mothers, these binaries leave women without any psychic in-between territory for exploration or creation of a maternal subjectivity that doesn’t, still, contain shame.

Melissa’s personal financial and class advantages had blinded me to the more universal conflicts she and I were caught in and had anesthetized me to her real anguish. But as we unpacked her maternal shame, I found my own. I had thought myself very different from her, less ambivalent about my delight in the maternal experience. But there I was, feeling my maternal identity was something to hide and wanting to solve her confusion as it reminded me too painfully of my own. I realized how lost I was in the confusing web of social constructions of women and mothers that no amount of feminist reading or consciousness raising had been able to free me from, despite how enlightened, and therefore immune, I had thought myself.

I began to wonder about this self-hating mother introject and how it prevents women from taking their own maternal desire seriously. By maternal desire I mean not only what Daphne de Marneffe (2004) called the profound, drive-like need to have physical and emotional contact with one’s children but also our maternal subjectivity in the larger sense—who we become and what we desire for ourselves when we become mothers. There is almost no way to think about ourselves as having aching desires for deeply intimate relationships with our children while also remaining connected to the larger world and to ourselves. We are taught to think about ourselves only in two absolutely opposed categories: as maternal facilitators and holders who can have no desire but to respond to our children’s needs and not our own; or as women who can clearly and consistently individuate away from the maternal role (which, we are told, is good for us and them). But individuate too much, desire too much in either direction, and one is a bad mother: engulfing, engulfed, regressed, or too separate.

I no longer felt that our conversations about motherhood texts were beside the point. After all, where else was discussion of a mother’s experience to be found but in those steerage class, self-help regions of the bookstore, or in the work, usually memoir, of women writing from and about the same binary- and shame-defined confines we were stuck in. I also didn’t cringe when Melissa saw an article I’d written for Child magazine (Sheehy, 2004), in which I revealed some of my messy maternal process, or when my bag tipped over and a sea of Cheerios skittered across the floor, or when she asked me how I’d figured it all out. “What makes you think I have?” I answered. “I’m struggling too, doing what you are: reading, talking with other mothers, looking for mentors and models. There is no other way.”

One night around this time Melissa went to hear a panel of artists discuss their process, and the next day she came to session feeling inspired to resume her painting. Then she announced triumphantly that she knew why her oldest daughter wasn’t sharing anything about herself: “I’m not talking to her about my process, my secrets!” said Melissa, “so she’s not talking to me about hers.” I was struck by Melissa’s use of the evening’s gift and my decision to share my maternal “secrets.” She wasn’t just following the healthy development script of Mother separating from her children to fulfill herself, finding identity in separation and individuation. Rather, in finding more of her own voice she found more of a voice as a mother, too—the parts of herself not opposed in a binary, but intertwined.

2

Darren and Stephen

Erotic Interludes in Political Transference

STEPHEN HARTMAN

Editor’s Introduction

The concept of interpellation is enhanced when we add to it Judith Butler’s (2000/1990) concept of intelligibility, which she theorizes as key to subjectivity because it is what permits recognition. In “Darren and Stephen: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference,” Stephen Hartman shows how interpellation makes both him and Darren intelligible and therefore anxious: The power of discourse to legitimate desire means that you can lose your legitimacy and fall into abjection if you ever refuse your interpellation. Here Hartman, interpellated by the New York Times announcement of his marriage to another man, desexualizes and abjects his patient by interpellating his desire as a desire to be a married gay guy, a “good gay” too.

Darren bursts into my office 10 minutes late: 10 minutes I have grown to anticipate. I usually take the moment to scan the headlines. Today’s news is grim. The New York State Court of Appeals has ruled that gays have no rational, constitutional right to marry. I am scowling as Darren saunters by. Not noticing, or trying not to notice, he offers a quick, anemic “Hey!” and sprawls on his chair as if unfolding on a hammock. Then a look to reprimand: “Come on, already, put the fucking newspaper down; let’s get on with it.” His arms are crossed above his head, and his biceps peek out of an unseasonable polo shirt, flexed for me to enjoy.

Darren makes no bones about wanting to turn me on. He is lean and sexy but not so appealing to me because he is plaintive and a tad desperate in his seductive overtures. I assume that he approaches other men with the same flirt and destroy, which I take to explain why he has an easy time getting laid but a hellish time finding a boyfriend. Until this session, I hadn’t fully grasped the way Darren falls back in his chair. His biceps ride up past his ears where his feet want to go: The gesture contains a wish as dangerous as Darren’s wish to surrender emotionally, the wish to be intelligible as a man who takes another man into him.

I don’t consider Darren’s sexual pleasure when I say that I like him very much. I imagine him as a man I could take as a peer, not a partner I could take in more carnal ways. We would be friends in another life. Perhaps in the life that Darren read about in the New York Times when my boyfriend, Henry, and I were married. There it was in print: We were interpellated “good gays,” gentlemen with Princeton educations—our class struggles as obscure as our rowdiest fucking. The Times rejected a slightly racy picture of Henry spooning me from behind in favor of the eyebrows at the same level, life-partner look. We were presented with a storybook gay life to match Darren’s parents’ storybook Connecticut marriage: ours imagined among A-list gays who trade in design hotels and Rainbow fundraisers; theirs supplemented by a pack of healthy children, well mannered and well educated, bred during long nights of athletic, hetero-normal sex, Darren figures, telling me repeatedly about the banging of the headboard on the primal party wall.

That Darren’s fantasy of marital bliss is, to say the least, idealized, we know. Much of our work focuses on the way idealization breathes eros into a hopelessly depressed father hiding the night away in his office, libidinizes a resentful exhausted mother, and stations Darren in the role of arbitrator between dueling parents to ensure they present a Town and Country façade. And me: still working at this unglamorously late hour. No headboard banging for this hard-working gay. And something very important missed about Darren. Marriage is not only lace curtains and tender lovemaking. If I could marry Darren, I could have him on his knees, and if I could give him the thrill of servicing me, I could also destroy him by naming him the fag. Cleansed by the bright hope of gay marriage, Darren and I had allowed the darkest timbres in the conjugal aria to elude us. Imagine being able to tolerate binding the most degenerate sex with the surest love? Darren can’t. We haven’t. I am, for Darren, married, and he is, for me, a patient.

Something is off today, though. Not the faux-affirmative, “we play on the same team” kick-off, this round. Darren gets right down to the scrimmage where our sessions typically end—looks like teammates even though I kicked him in the knee to steal the ball. No boasting about the latest Latin. Darren is pissed about his paltry share of romance, and once again caring for others.

Darren is chronically single. Our conversation turns to a long list of the men he has sex with who don’t measure up to partner status. This one is a hopeless b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: The Social Third
• Part II: Interpellations
• Part III: Subjective Experience, Collective Narratives
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index