Sexual Difference

Masculinity and Psychoanalysis

Stephen Frosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134915910
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Sexual Difference is a critical exploration of psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference. In particular it explores the way in which masculinity is expressed in theory and practice. Developing from the unsettling impact of these issues on the author's own professional practice, Stephen Frosh examines how the very language and structure of psychoanalysis are loaded with assumptions about gender.
Employing both Kleinian and Lacanian theoretical perspectives this book critically examines these approacheds to sexial difference. In addition, it discusses the application of these issues in the practice of treating sexual violence and in cases of child secual abuse.
Sexual Difference will be of value to all trainees and professionals in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, psychology and social work, as well as all those with an interest in `masculinity', `femininity' and their effects.

Chapter 1
Finding sexual difference

Sexual difference is a subject which will not go away. The questions it poses are always present, hovering over and in us—how are we the same as one another and how are we different? In what ways are we characteristic of our sex and to what extent can we transgress its boundaries? How can we relate constructively to the problematic categories ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’? These are categories that seem to determine the perspectives we use to understand ourselves and others, yet they are also lacking in concreteness, making them the source of sweeping generalisations which then always carry profound exceptions. A common formulation of this kind might read, ‘Men are…Women are…But this particular man or woman is more like this, not like that, has both sides within.’ What can we say or do that might challenge the received wisdom of what is appropriate to being masculine or feminine, whilst also recognising the way people’s experiences of themselves are bound up with deeply felt but often implicit notions of what their gender should and does mean?

I have come to writing about sexual difference a long way round, through the route of academic study and clinical psychological practice. In many respects, I have tried to avoid it, as it is so complicated and embarrassing when compared with the realities of my everyday life as a man. But if I am going to write at all, I have to do something with it, going further than my previous dips into the water of psychoanalytic feminism and psychological gender theory (Frosh, 1987a, 1989). Gradually, I have come to see the ubiquity and unavoidability of the questions surrounding sexual difference in my own everyday experience, in my work, and in writing. There seems never to be a moment at which it disappears, there is nothing that can call itself ‘gender neutral’; always there is a position or set of experiences which is ‘same as mine’ and another which is ‘other’ with which I have to deal, a subject which will not go away.

In 1988, I published, jointly with a female psychiatrist, a book on child sexual abuse (Glaser and Frosh, 1988). For me, the experience of work with sexually abused children was a deeply troubling watershed in my professional life. I was working as a psychologist with children and families, struggling to understand the difficulties for which people were requesting help, but reasonably assured that there was an approach, a set of techniques, or general method of professional practice that could deal with these difficulties, and which in principle I could learn. Child sexual abuse was a new issue, publicly recognised at last because of the efforts of rape crisis and incest survivors’ groups, so that for the first time for decades children who said they had been assaulted were beginning to be believed. This alteration of awareness opened floodgates: a surge of people— children and adults—clamouring to be heard and helped; and also a mass of suspicions, claims, and muddles. Professionals working with children were being asked in some way to respond to this clamour, without clear guidelines for action or knowledge of what it might all mean. But amongst the uncertainty produced by this state of affairs, one of the few facts which appeared clear and irrefutable was that when children are sexually abused, they are abused by men.

I worked in a team of men and women, all ‘mental health professionals’. We saw these cases and heard new stories we had not heard before. The women became aware of experiences and anxieties of their own. I became aware of being on the other side, of being ‘same as’ the abusers in their masculinity, of maybe being seen that way by their victims, and consequently of feeling somehow tarnished myself, by association. I kept on thinking, ‘Could I do that?’, ‘Am I one of those?’, ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ I wrote about this experience and talked about it, informally and formally, aligning myself with a ‘progressive’ position from which abusiveness could be repudiated but also attempting to recognise its existence in all men, and the effects of this on the work of men who are therapists involved with sexually abused children (Frosh, 1987b, 1988). This created some interest and considerable support amongst male and female professionals, but now I wonder how much of a posture it has been—a verbal acknowledgement of the links between masculinity and abusiveness that, through the act of acknowledgement, functions to free men from the responsibility for actually becoming different. Still, it was worth saying and still needs to be said: we do not strip ourselves of our gender when we work as psychologists or psychotherapists or whatever; but we enact that work in the context of our gender, and vice versa.

When the 1988 book, Child Sexual Abuse, came out, there was a furore that gave us our ‘fifteen minutes of fame’. Here is the crucial passage, which incidentally is built on in Chapter 5 below. We are discussing possible sources of the empirically established link between masculinity and sexual abuse—that is, the finding that the vast majority of abusers are men.

Traditional ‘masculinity’ focuses on dominance and independence, an orientation to the world which is active and assertive, which valorises competitiveness and turns its face from intimacy, achieving esteem in the glorification of force. The fear at the heart of this image is of emotion—that which makes us vulnerable and ‘womanly’; emotion is dangerous not only because it implies dependence, but also because it is alien, a representative of all that masculinity rejects. This fear of emotion in turn makes sex both over- and under-invested in by men. Sex is one of the few socially acceptable ways in which men can aspire to closeness with others, and as such it becomes the carrier of all the unexpressed desires that men’s emotional illiteracy produces. However, this same power of sex to produce emotionality makes it dangerous to men whose identity is built upon the rejection of emotion; sex then becomes split off, limited to the activity of the penis, an act rather than an encounter. It is also a means of taking up a particular place in the world of men: sexual ‘conquest’ as a symbol of male prowess. The link between such a form of masculinity and sexual abuse is apparent: it is not just present, but inherent in a mode of personality organisation that rejects intimacy. Sex as triumph and achievement slides naturally into sex as rejection and degradation of the other.

(Glaser and Frosh, 1988, p. 24)

This passage was taken up energetically in the British press and interpreted to mean that all men are potential abusers—something which was then denied forcefully in the more conservative newspapers. We were accused of ‘abusing the family’ and of making monstrous assertions against normal men, all the worse because it was clear that we were not extreme feminists, but respectable ‘doctors’. In the general context of concern over the Cleveland child abuse controversy in Britain, we were seen as part of a professional conspiracy against traditional values, and in particular against the family.

All this would benefit from some unpicking and analysis, in particular in the light of work on ‘moral panics’, which seems very relevant to understanding many responses to child abuse (see Levidow, 1989). But I am reviewing this personal history here for other reasons. The passage itself arises out of the experience described above, in which, as a man working in a sphere of male oppression, but working primarily with the victims of that oppression, I had to try to make sense of, and come to terms with, the tensions and discontents that situation produced. The energy of the piece derives from that struggle and also from a wish to repudiate the element of masculinity which I came to regard as abusive—the rejection of intimacy and emotion and the potency of this rejection in the abusing male, whom I would wish to make other than myself. So the broad sweep of the passage, its overstatement and overgeneralisation, is fuelled in part by the desire to be rid of this kind of masculinity, to become something different. I do not think the argument in the passage is wrong; indeed, in this book I try to clarify and develop ideas which can be found in outline within it. But it is not purely explanatory; it is partly a claim that, ‘I know this (what masculinity is, what men do) and can own up to it; hence I am different.’ In writing of this kind, an alignment is made from within a gendered position; gender is not external and is not escaped, but it is used as fuel for what is said.

The exaggerated response of the media brought home to me another element of relevance for thinking on sexual difference. Whatever they did with the actual material in the book, the journalists understood one thing: that the claim being made (abusiveness is linked with characteristic patterns of sexual socialisation of men) has a place in arguments over gender, sexuality and domination, which are deeply ideological and also central to the social order. The affront to ‘common sense’ produced by a claim that all men have the possibility of abusive behaviour socialised into them is that this claim challenges the liberal idea that we are all basically reasonable, and that abusive acts are the products of disturbed and criminal personalities. Moreover, it asserts that the taken-for-granted normalities of family life and of childhood sexual and gender socialisation are in fact implicated in a process that institutionalises domination and perpetuates abuse. Challenging these patterns of sexual socialisation is one element in a challenge to the social order which is expressed most cogently in feminism. The added emotional charge of child sexual abuse makes the potency of the challenge that much stronger, but also consequently creates more active resistance in its wake.

For myself, all this has meant that it has been impossible to keep an academic interest in sexual difference separate from professional and personal concerns. The criticism of myself and my co-author were personal, but also professional in the sense that we were taken as representative of a strand of anti-establishment, anti-family welfare work usually seen as the province of leftist social workers rather than psychiatrists and psychologists. But even in this, the stakes were personal: asserting that all men are implicated in the processes leading to sexual abuse makes men feel accused. I have that feeling myself, and find myself working with and against it much of the time.

The therapeutic work with which I have been primarily engaged as a psychologist has been in child and family contexts, in which a sphere defined primarily in ‘feminine’ terms—family life—is subjected to the scrutiny of a professional world largely inhabited by women, but including a fair sprinkling of ‘expert’ men. I find myself talking with women and children, and with men when they can be persuaded to come to meetings, about personal concerns and worries which they may have; and I experience myself as positioned as expert, yet also as potentially not understanding what is happening, because I am ‘wrongly’ gendered, not knowing the women’s view. Before introducing the more academic thinking around which much of this book is organised, I want to recognise the effects of this, and to note how my attempts to deal with it practically and theoretically have been marked by an impulse to establish the value of difference. This involves an attempt to create a gender identity which has some ambiguity and flexibility (so that it is possible to take up the position of the woman, to understand or empathise), but which is consciously not a denial of difference, thus allowing for the possibility that a man might bring in another point of view. Much of what follows in this book concerns the tension created by this enterprise, simultaneously constructing and denying the fixed categories of masculine and feminine distinctiveness. Here, however, I want to give an example of the processes at work, and to do this I will reproduce and then comment on a section from some previously published material. In this, I try to show how my status as a male therapist intersects with a relatively ‘maternal’ stance towards ‘containing’ the distress of the patient (a stance linked in this passage with Bion’s (1962) notion of ‘reverie’), to construct an alternative set of meanings which might only be available through the challenge presented by gender difference. This material was originally published in a slightly altered form in a book on Gender Issues in Clinical Psychology (edited by Ussher and Nicolson, 1992), to which I was the only male contributor—a situation that created a whole set of affiliations and tensions of its own. It begins with a short case description, which is then discussed in terms of its gender elements.

The referral to the child and family clinic was made by Mrs M., on the advice of her child Mary’s school. Mary, aged six, was compulsively masturbating, constantly rubbing herself against tables. She used to do this at home but had recently stopped. The rubbing was so severe that Mary made herself sore and had bruises in the genital area. There had been considerable involvement in the family from their health visitor and family doctor, who did not believe that Mary was being sexually abused.

The family consisted of Mr M. (aged 35), Mrs M. (aged 33), who had worked in the same office as her husband but was now at home with the children full time, Mary and three other young children. They were seen by myself and a female psychiatric social worker with whom I had never previously worked.

In the first session, Mrs M. was very dominant. Mr M. was quiet and took no initiative with respect to the children, although when his wife told him to do something he was quite effective. Mrs M. was very aggressive towards us—an aggression symbolised by her bringing her knitting to the session, which coincided with the anniversary of the French revolution. She confronted us, demanding explanations for her child’s behaviour, but she also made fun of us—for instance saying about me, ‘he just sits there and takes it all in’. She described how Mary used to masturbate at home but stopped when she was firm with her and shouted at her. Mrs M. portrayed her husband in angry and derogatory terms, particularly because of his unavailability to the children or her. She said that he spends his time working in the garden shed, leaving her to do everything in the house. He is quiet, she talks. Mary was described as reasonably assertive at home, but she was noticeably passive and frightened in the session, while her siblings took easy control of the room. Mrs M. told us that she interceded for Mary at home, because her sister is always taking away her things or hurting her and there is a great deal of competitiveness between them.

The second session began in the same way. Mrs M. told us that she had been appalled that we had discussed Mary in front of her—she claimed that the school and the health visitor were equally critical of us. She doubted our ability to do anything and had brought her knitting with her again so as not to waste the time. Mr M. sat quietly, answering questions asked of him but saying little else. My colleague and I were acutely conscious of Mrs M.’s sardonic glances at us. We felt antagonistic towards her, wondering how the children could manage to survive—it was not surprising, we thought, that Mary was in such a state. Her masturbation was the same as ever, almost constant at school. Mrs M. got annoyed when we asked if she ever went into school, saying that the other mothers did, but how could she when she had young children to look after at home? She challenged my silence, asking if I had anything to offer her at all. I responded with a very direct intervention, developing and verbalising a hypothesis there and then, suggesting that Mary found school harder than people realise, that she knew her mother could not come in to help her as she does at home unless something really extreme happens, and that she had realised that her constant rubbing was just such an extreme thing. Mrs M. suddenly began to listen, seeming very engaged in what was being said. We left the family to think about this idea, also asking Mr M. to take more control over the children.

This last section of the session proved to be a turning point in our work with the family: subsequently Mrs M., whilst still provocative and demeaning of her husband, worked hard with us to understand and help her child. Indeed, following one low-key visit by us to the school, Mary’s compulsive rubbing ceased with no particular intervention, and the focus of the sessions shifted to Mrs M.’s anger at the lack of support she felt herself to be receiving from her husband—in particular, his lack of emotional responsiveness.

There are obviously a number of reasons why the changes in this family may have occurred, some at least of which might have been located outside therapy, for instance in changes in the schoolteacher’s perception of Mary. Moreover, this was by no means a perfect piece of family therapy, nor does it have perfectly anti-sexist credentials. Perhaps characteristically for a male therapist, my focus was not on the male patient; indeed, it may have been that the relative insignificance of my female colleague in this session was due to my usurpation of her isometry with Mrs M.—we both competed for the ear of the woman. Change came about, but as usual through the mother; the opportunity to challenge the father’s secure unavailability to his wife and children was left mainly unrecognised. A few suggestions, but not too much conflict or pain. Or maybe there is another, partially contradictory source to this overdetermined sequence: by not challenging the male, by focusing on changes in the woman, we men are in a happy identificatory collusion. After all, structuralists claim the woman to be the object of exchange between men. Also, of course, my potency as therapist has its competitive edge with my colleague/rival: when the male takes over, the professional voice is heard. We all wait to see what rabbit will be pulled out of his hat.

But I want, or need, to find something positive in this by focusing on just one element in the family-therapist relationship, the meaning of the therapy for Mrs M. There appeared to be a ‘transformational moment’ in the second session when, riled by Mrs M.’s challenge, I managed to offer something that both surprised and engaged her. Some of it may have had to do with the content of the ‘hypothesis’ about Mary’s behaviour, which seemed to make sense to Mrs M. But I think something else happened too. With her husband, the pattern was for his withdrawal to be reinforced by her aggressive attacks—her withering remarks, experienced by him as emasculating. Alongside this dynamic, Mrs M. actually felt terrible about what Mary was doing, believing that it indicated a severe failure in parenting on her own part, for after all she was charged with—and had taken on for herself— complete responsibility for all that happened with her children. In addition, she felt strongly identified with Mary, seeing Mary’s personality as just like her own. I think that this combination of factors, plus other elements in Mrs M.’s history, led her to feel quite desperate about herself, overwhelmed both by anger and by an intolerable sense that Mary, by damaging herself, was actually damaging her. My response, in most respects quite accidentally (or unconsciously?), broke into this vicious cycle. First, the content of it was not blaming of her. More importantly, however, its context was as a response to Mrs M.’s challenge; it was animated by my sense of being disturbed by her, as a man and a therapist and a male therapist, but it was not really an aggressive assault. I had neither withdrawn nor exploded, the two categories of masculine response in Mrs M.’s fantasy and in the cultural order as a whole; instead, I had accidentally, unconsciously cued into her own emotional tone—desperation and rage rather than violence— and made something of it.

I was not particularly full of reverie that day, but perhaps just enough to register the message underneath the words. Moreover, I think it was important that it was I rather than my female co-worker who hit upon the response. The sexual challenge in Mrs M.’s behaviour was very strong, as it was too in her daughter’s behaviour—which may have been an unconscious echo of Mrs M.’s sense of the destructiveness of her own sexuality. In any event, my maleness was significant to her, bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Finding sexual difference
• 2 Psychoanalysis and sexual difference
• 3 Inside the dream
• 4 Masculine mastery and fantasy, or the meaning of the phallus
• 5 The seeds of masculine sexuality
• 6 Transgressing sexual difference
• References
• Name index
• Subject index