Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“she replied that the danger lay in the shoulder, not in the crying: she would cry only on a man's shoulder; she was not interested in women”-it’s so interesting to see what humans assign importance to“the heart of gender is not "masculinity" or "femininity" but the difference between them. My thinking is located in two intersecting contexts, feminist and psychoanalytic”“The doubled critique of gender I am proposing can, by defamiliarizing the emotion- and value-laden notions of "femininity" and "masculinity," help to peel away what we think gender is (and believe it ought to be) from what it might be”“[O]ften in patriarchal discourse, sexual difference (the contrast masculine/feminine) serves to encode or establish meanings that are literally unrelated to gender or the body. In that way, the meanings of gender become tied to many kinds of cultural representations, and these in turn establish terms by which relations between women and men are organized and understood”-the category of “sex” is defined by culture“In other words, the category of "sex" is not transparent but is itself a dense weave of cultural significance, and "the contrast masculine/feminine," as the representation of what psychoanalysts commonly refer to as "the anatomical difference," addresses a variety of matters, not all of which are germane to sex, gender, or the genitals. This slippage from sex to culture not only provides us with our understandings of gender as personally experienced but informs gender as a social institution”“Self and gender identity inhabit one another so intimately that questions such as these become familiar: If I feel "womanly," am I at my most "feminine"? Or am I feeling most fully "myself 7 When I do feel "like myself," does that feeling have anything to do with my female identity? If I feel, by contrast and perhaps more pertinently, "unwomanly," am I feeling somehow "not myself? If I am "not myself," is gender identity somehow also, and more secretly, involved?”“Recognizing the force field that marries the inherently unrelated contrasts masculine/feminine, self/ other, and active/passive to one another permits us to understand, for example, that women's anxiety in activity may be a problem equally of gender as of self. On the other hand, this recognition also lets us understand that gender-neutral qualities of self, such as activity and passivity, can reciprocally organize and thereby evoke sexual and gendered splits. I have alluded, for example, to the fact that, for men, passivity may represent both homosexuality and femininity.”-still context and cultural dependent“Not only her flesh but her words protected her. I was both moved and often made to feel helpless by the verbal fence Elizabeth planted around her private self.”“Was she female or male? While watching his performance, was she watching and desiring her idol or identifying with him? It was not clear. The only way she found relief was not to choose, not to be either gender (a dilemma identified by Harris, 1991).”“Frozen between femininity and masculinity, on guard against painful affect, and just out of others' reach, she came, in her adult life, to be cleft between body and mind, a cleavage that was apparently odd but, down deep, a source and sign of shame”“Elizabeth's subsequent outrage on behalf of her niece and her grandniece allowed us to probe her rage about what had happened to her.”“Women, then, are expected to be both, the subject and the object. The development of femininity is, therefore, a compromise, almost, you might say, a compromise formation. It is the process of learning to be both, to take yourself as an object and to expect others to do so too, and all the while you know that you are a subject.”“The pleasure of the tension is, then, intrapsychic as well as intersubjective”“Within desire, this pleasurable oscillation takes place between want and need. Desire is conventionally defined as wish, emergent in the psyche, and is thereby absolutely distinguished from need, rooted in the drives”“If masculinity and femininity were to be regarded as different moments of the self, what would each moment mean to a particular self? What is masculinity? What is femininity? In other words, I question these terms because, although we can name everything we think they are, on examination their meanings become uncertain”“we are not always gendered; sometimes, as the orthodox position traditionally has it, the analyst's gender is irrelevant. Analysts dwell not only in the paradox of being sometimes female, sometimes male, but also in that of feeling and being construed as variably gendered and gender-free. Thus we enter the countertransferential counterpart of our patients' experience, a paradox captured by Boris's (1986) exemplification of Bion's approach: "If the 10:00 [a.m.] patient is one we know to be a married man in his thirties, we know too much, for how are we to attend the four-year-old girl who has just walked in?" (p. 177).”