Desire and the Female Therapist

Engendered Gazes in Psychotherapy and Art Therapy

Joy Schaverien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134883080
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Desire and the Female Therapist is one of the first full-length explorations of erotic transference and countertransference from the point of view of the female therapist. Particular attention is given to the female therapist/male client relationship and to the effects of desire made visible in art objects in analytical forms of psychotherapy. Drawing on aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory, specifically Lacan and Jung, the book offers a significant new approach to desire in therapy. Richly illustrated, with pictures as well as clinical vignettes, this book follows on from Joy Schaverien's innovative previous work The Revealing Image. Written primarily for psychotherapists, art therapists and analysts, Desire and the Female Therapist will be essential reading for all therapists affected by erotic transference and countertransference in the course of clinical practice and all whose clients bring art works to therapy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

There is no analysis if the Other is not an Other who I love (with the corollary, whom I hate), through the good offices of ‘that man/that woman without qualities’ who is my analyst.

(Kristeva 1983:14)

The erotic transference and countertransference as it manifests itself in the area in between the female therapist and male client is the main topic of this book. It will be argued that pictures which are viewed in the area in-between client and therapist may sometimes lure the viewers into a deeper relationship. Through the imagery and the medium of the gaze, they are drawn to each other. Thus the book is centrally about desire—countertransference and transference desire and desire embodied in artworks.

In this introduction I will give a brief overview of the book and a summary of some theories of sexual difference and female desire. This is my starting place. It is the therapist’s desire which comes first (Stein 1974; Hillman 1977; Lacan 1977a). The therapist’s desire is the initial motivation which brings her to be a therapist and without this there would be no therapy. Therefore the book begins with the countertransference, that of the female therapist.

DESIRE AND THE FEMALE THERAPIST

Since Freud first identified what he called ‘transference love’ (Freud 1912, 1915), the erotic transference has been understood to be a feature of any therapeutic relationship. Kristeva puts it thus: ‘Sigmund Freud…thought of turning love into a cure. He went straight to the disorder that love reveals‘(Kristeva 1983:8). Frequently the love experienced in the transference is understood to be based in infantile experience and the corres-ponding countertransference is interpreted as maternal. This is especially the case with female therapists. However, this is only one facet of the dynamic and, it is argued that in all gender combinations, some of the desire expressed in the transference and experienced in the countertransference is based in adult sexual feelings.

First, some explication of desire. Desire is not a fixed term and it could be understood to have many facets and even meanings:

‘To wish or long for, to crave…a wish, a longing, or a sexual appetite… a person or thing that is desired’ (Collins Concise English Dictionary).

‘Unsatisfied appetite, longing, wish, craving, request, thing desired’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Flower MacCannell (1992) traces the term back to its Christian uses: ‘desire is “primitive” with the soul because it is a motive force which leads the soul to God, linking things future (hope), things present (perception) and things past (memory)’ (Flower MacCannell 1992:63–4).

In psychoanalysis, following Freud, the term desire has been associated with Lacan. Sheridan (1977), who is Lacan’s English translator, explains in his note at the beginning of Ecrits (1977b), that Freiud’s French translators used the term ‘desir’ rather than ‘voeu’ which corresponds to the original German ‘Wunsch’ which is rather more a wish. He points out that:

The German and English words are limited to individual isolated acts of wishing, while the French has the much stronger implication of a continuous force. It is this implication that Lacan has elaborated and placed at the centre of his psychoanalytic theory, which is why I have rendered ‘desir’ by ‘desire’. Furthermore, Lacan has linked the concept of ‘desire’ with ‘need’ (besoin) and ‘demand’ (demande).

(Sheridan 1977: viii)

I quote this because, in the text, I shall be applying both Lacanian and Jungian theory and so my use of the term may alter at times. Sometimes one meaning of desire will predominate and then another. Furthermore, I shall be applying the term in relation to artworks and this adds the element of desire in the aesthetic appreciation of pictures.

Chapter 2, ‘Desire and the female therapist’, is about the erotic transference and countertransference experienced by the female therapist and the male client. Here I apply the term mainly, but not exclusively, in relation to sexual appetite. The desire to which I refer has to do with the yearning for human contact and that is fuelled by eros. Theoretical issues are discussed and examples are given from my private psychotherapy practice. I should make it clear that I consider that the erotic transference and countertransference serves a purpose. It is eros which is the connecting link between the client and therapist. Eros forms the bond which enables the relationship to survive the intensity of the extremes of positive and negative emotion which may become manifest in the transference.

In Chapter 2, the literature is reviewed with particular attention to the experience of the female therapist and male patient. Much has been written about the mother/daughter dyad from the perspective of the feminist therapist; far less attention has been accorded the mother/son transfer-ence/ countertransference. Male therapists write about the erotic transfer-ences of their female patients and there are an increasing number of recorded cases of sexual abuse by male psychotherapists (Carotenuto 1982; Rutter 1989; Russell 1993; Jehu 1994). Although there is less evidence of acting out by female therapists there have been cases of female therapists breaching the boundaries when working with male and female patients (Russell 1994; McNamara 1994). Some female therapists suggest that the reason sexual abuse is less common is because they are not aroused by their patients, male or female. I challenge this claim; if there is less acting out from this dyad, it is not because there is no erotic countertransference.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 follow on from this chapter and the focus is the male patient’s transference. This is an exploration of desire and denial of desire in anorexia, through a case study of a male patient. This is unusual in several ways, first in that the patient discussed is male and eating disorders are predominantly suffered by women. In Chapter 3, I discuss the male anorexic, describe the clinical setting and introduce the patient. Chapter 4 is a detailed illustrated case study. The pictures reveal many of the images which are present, but unseen, in other forms of psychotherapy. Here desire is considered in relation to the initial denial of want, wishes and need in anorexia and the pictures demonstrate the emergence of desire (eros) in the transference. This case demonstrates the need for separation from the initial undifferentiated state. Desire presupposes a gap, a distance between the subject and its object and so, in the merged state, there is no desire. The coming to life of desire for an ‘Other’ brings differentiation. In this case there was, at first, a fused—a half-alive—state in which there was no separation. Later, through the formative effects of making pictures, showing them, and subsequently speaking of them, the undifferentiated state gave way to differentiation, symbolisation and, eventually, entry into language and the ‘Symbolic order’ (Lacan 1977b).

In Chapter 5, I introduce a new understanding of the significance and efficacy of art as a form of treatment in anorexia. I propose that the benefit to be gained from the art process is in its role as a ‘transactional object’. The anorexic is relating to people and the world through a concrete medium— food. I suggest that art, which is also a concrete medium, may come to take the place of food. Pictures may become objects through which desire and need are channelled and the intensity of the obsession with food may then diminish.

The pictures are shown early in the book because I will draw on them for discussion throughout. These three linked chapters illustrate many of the themes which follow. The pictures reveal the developmental processes discussed in Chapter 2, as well as those described in the later chapters. The intention is to show the dynamic imagery which emerges between a female therapist and male patient. This chapter is drawn from my time as an art therapist working in a psychiatric hospital. The difference in the management of an erotic transference in psychiatry and psychotherapy accounts, in part, for a change in tempo between Chapter 2 and Chapter 4.

Chapters 6 and 7 are linked. In Chapter 6 the theme of desire widens to include discussion of cultural and aesthetic affects of pictures. I develop the aesthetic countertransference (a term introduced in an earlier work (Schaverien 1991)), in relation to desire in art and in psychoanalysis. In this chapter I draw on Bion and Kant, as well as Lacan, to elucidate the idea that pictures may have the power to seduce the therapist and that this may be a positive factor in therapy. In Chapter 7, the topic of infantile desires and the erotic transference/countertransference is illustrated by pictures which reveal the emergence of the child image. The case discussion of a female patient suffering from depression is central and the child image reveals the return of the repressed. Throughout these two chapters it is argued that the silence in psychotherapy is similar to the figure/ground relationships within pictures. Thus, it is argued, pictures may reveal that which is present in the silence in the interpersonal transference/counter-transference.

Chapters 8 and 9 are also linked. The seduction through the pictorial image is developed in Chapter 8, with an investigation of the lure of the image. Here desire is related to the surface attraction; there is discussion of reflections in mirrors and water and this leads to Narcissus. There are parallels here with the two-way relating of some patients in therapy. Chapter 9 continues the theme through exploration of the gaze. The three-way relating of the client-picture-therapist is developed in relation to the gaze of the picture, which is also the gaze of the client and of the unconscious. The gaze deepens the relationship of the transference and countertransference. Thus it deepens the artist’s relationship to her/himself.

This is a book about desire in art and in psychotherapy. It is about the desire which manifests in the female therapist/male patient pairing and the desire which manifests in pictures. Thus some preliminary discussion of debates regarding sexual difference and female desire is germane.

SEX AND GENDER

In order to locate the discussion of gendered relations in psychotherapy, it is necessary to distinguish the terms sex and gender. Stoller (1968) restricts sex to biology; sex is determined by physical conditions, i.e.: chromo-somes, genitalia, hormonal states and secondary sexual characteristics. The terms which apply to sex are male and female. Gender is different; it is psychological or cultural rather than biological. The terms for gender are masculinity and femininity. There are elements of both in many humans but the male has a preponderance of masculinity and the female has a preponderance of femininity’ (Stoller 1968:9). ‘Gender identity’ and ‘gender role’ are conditioned by both the above and develop, beginning at birth, into a ‘core gender identity’ (Stoller 1968:29–30). Stoller argues, based on a wealth of clinical evidence, that the reinforcement of the environment establishes gender identity, irrespective of abnormalities in biological development. If parents are told their child is male or female at birth, the child develops an awareness that this is their identity (Stoller 1968, 1975). Thus, ‘gender identity and gender role’ are affected by both biological and environmental factors.

Oakley (1972) makes a similar distinction between sex and gender. On the basis of accumulated social and anthropological research data, she concludes that: ‘The evidence of how people acquire their gender identities…suggests strongly that gender has no biological origin, that the connections between sex and gender are not really “natural” at all’ (Oakley 1972:188). This is not to deny differences but for these we have to look to the social and so, psychological, construction of gendered relations to attempt to understand some of the differences in the ways in which women and men experience themselves and each other (Oakley 1972).

The wider social construction of gender is explored by Cockburn through analysis of the gender relations surrounding technology. Through detailed exploration of the allocation of labour in relation to machines, she demonstrates the ways in which production, manufacture and use of technology, at work and in the home, are allocated according to gender role expectations. These reflect, and also contribute to, the social and economic status of women and men, respectively (Cockburn 1983, 1985; Cockburn & Ormrod 1993). She suggests that: ‘genders should be seen as the product of history’ [as is class] (Cockburn 1983:7). Her thesis is relevant because it demonstrates how gender relations are constructed. She reveals the ways in which we are conditioned to accept certain states of being as inevitable, or even natural, when, in effect, they are a product of a system of beliefs or unquestioned assumptions.

These sociological views provide a reminder that inner worlds are also a product of outer worlds and that, when we discuss psychological processes, these cannot be divorced from the environment in which they develop. In this, psychoanalysis has a problematic heritage and numerous texts have been written with reference to Freud’s original contributions, particularly with regard to female sexuality. His main works in this field are: Three essays on the theory of sexuality’ (Freud 1905), ‘The differences between the sexes’ (Freud 1925), ‘Female sexuality’ (Freud 1931), Temininity’ (Freud 1933). The extensive influence of these essays on his followers means that they contain many insights which are apposite today, even if we cannot agree with them all. However, in the context of debates regarding the biological or cultural origins of gender, his view was that women’s ‘nature is determined by their sexual function’ (Freud 1933:135). Following this, the traditional psychoanalytic standpoint is that we are determined by our biology.

Mitchell (1974) has done much to contextualise Freud’s views and so make them applicable to our thinking today. In an introduction to the post-Freudian Lacanian school of psychoanalysis, Mitchell (1982) argues that, for psychoanalysts ‘the unconscious and sexuality go hand in hand’. Thus psychoanalysts cannot subscribe to a view in which biology comes first and then is formed by culture (Mitchell 1982:2).

The ways in which psychosexuality and the unconscious are closely bound together are complex, but most obviously the unconscious contains wishes that cannot be satisfied and hence have been repressed. Predominant among such wishes are the tabooed incestuous desires of childhood.

(Mitchell 1982:2)

This traditional psychoanalytic view has generated much of the feminist discourse on the topic, as we shall see in Chapter 2.

DESIRE AND DIFFERENCE

One of the current debates in feminism centres on whether men and women are ‘essentially’, that is ‘naturally’ different. ‘Essentialist theories’ are those which consider that the experience of the world is determined by biology before culture (Brennan 1989:7). The type of thinking which follows from this is that women are the weaker sex; that they are naturally more nurturant and intuitive than men. In the 1960s and 1970s feminism set out to challenge such beliefs:

If it was allowed in any context that there was something fixed in sexual identity, then that argument was open to abuse: if women were naturally more nurturant, then by the same logic, women could be naturally incompetent. To admit even a positive argument from nature was to foreclose…on the belief in the ultimately social account of sexual difference; to rule out strategies for change directed against the social order as it stands.

(Brennan 1989:7)

French and Anglo-American feminists are at variance regarding sexual difference. Many French feminists argue that women are different and, accepting this, they attempt to establish the nature of the difference; seeing in it positive value. They challenge the ‘phallocentric thinking and patriarchal structures of language’ (Brennan 1989:2). Conversely the writing of Anglo-American feminists ‘is characterized by the insistence that women are equal, and its concern with the real world’ (Brennan 1989:2). Some express concern, perceiving a return to essentialist views from within the feminist movement itself and particularly from psychoanalytic views of mother-child relations (Doane & Hodges 1992). Lynne Segal (1987) is critical of many of the views of established feminism: ‘There has always been a danger that in re-valuing our notions of the female and appealing to the experiences of women we are reinforcing the ideas of sexual polarity which feminism originally aimed to challenge’ (Segal 1987: xii). What was once revolutionary offers a new kind of orthodoxy: ‘we have come full circle with a fundamental and essentialist theory of gender difference’ (Segal 1987:142).

In writing about female therapists working with male patients I will be suggesting that difference in the experiences of women and men, culturally and socially, will affect their relationships in therapy. There may be discrepancies in the ways in which women view themselves and are viewed by their male clients. This may have a direct bearing on the therapy. Much of the feminist debate regarding sexual difference centres on the interpretation of the Lacanian Symbolic. The Symbolic is not about symbolism in the traditionally understood form but rather about the speaking subject. It is about the move towards the Other. It is about psychical organisation and is the condition of sanity. Without a symbolic law, human beings cannot function. ‘The Symbolic places all human beings in relation to others, and gives them a sense of their place in the world, and the ability to speak and be understood by others’ (Brennan 1989:2). It does this by enabling them to distinguish themselves from others through establishing a relation to language. ‘Outside the symbolic law there is psychosis’ (Brennan 1989:2–3). Sanity relies on the Symbolic because it offers a means of differentiation. The Symbolic enables separation and so, relationship.

Lacan developed his thinking from Freudian theory in which women are viewed as castrated because they do not have the phallus. Lacan considers that they are thus outside the symbolic order. The father is needed to bring separation from the state of identification with the mother. Much feminist discourse centres around Lacan’s attribution of language to the father. Separation is the law of the father but ‘For Lacan the actual father matters …less than his structural, symbolic position as an intervening third party’ (Brennan 1989:3). ‘Generally, Lacanians insist that the symbolic is patriarchal because the woman is the primary care giver, the man is the intervening third party, occupying the position co-incident with language’ (Brennan 1989:3).

The Symbolic order appears to refer to a symbolic structure based on a ‘linguistic model made up of chains of signifiers’ (Benvenuto & Kennedy 1986:102). It is the move from the speaking subject towards the Other which is the Symbolic order. The male possesses the visible sex organ and so it is he who makes the move towards the Other. The phallus, which is not the same as the actual penis, is the mark of lack; of difference in general and sexual difference in particular. It refers to the fact that the subject is not complete unto itself.

Ragland-Sullivan develops this in a more positive way and suggests that: ‘Lacan’s “lack” is a “lack-in-being”, common to both sexes’ (Ragland-Sullivan 1992:423) and that:

Although many feminists still think of the Symbolic order as masculinist, synonymous with the father’s name or some phallic law, the crucial point for contemporary feminism is an ethical one. It needs to address the clinical issue of a mediative function of the Symbolic as that which separates the Imaginary from the Real, creates loss and forms the necessary distance from the other’s jouissance. If the mother desires that her child be one with her, her desired object, that child, whether male or female, will lack the basis for exchange out of the family plot.

(Ragland-Sullivan 1992:423)

This is a crucial point, too, in the context of the discussion in this book. I am applying Lacanian theory clinically and this understanding of the lack accords with the way it manifests itself in pictures, as I will demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 7. I will suggest that there are times when pictures in therapy may reveal the lack. This reveals both the unconscious desire and its denial.

Furthermore, pictures may come to be experienced as Other in themselves. It is thus that the mediating function of pictures in the clinical setting offers an opportunity for differentiation. It separates the Imaginary from the Real and in this way creates loss, or brings the loss to consciousness. The Real is the fused state; the undifferentiated identification with the original state—with the maternal (Ragland-Sullivan 1992:377). The Imaginary is linked to the ‘mirror stage’ which will be elaborated in Chapter 8. This is the stage in which the image of the self is confronted; it does not relate to either fantasy or to imagination in its traditional form. The Imaginary is described by Benvenuto & Kennedy (1986:82) as being the area in which the subject may get lost without access to the Symbolic order. It ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Definition of terms
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Notes
• Organisations
• Bibliography