Masculinity is about organizing identifications, not about disidentifying

There has been an important revision to the traditional idea that the development of masculinity requires a little boy to disidentify (Greenson, Stoller) with his preoedipal mother. This revision is a relational and intersubjective one. Diamond brings to the discussion of the development of the boy’s masculinity the emphasis on the importance of the quality of attachment relationships and the capacity of the mother “to recognize and support both her son’s maleness and his father’s presence” and the capacity of the father to allow “a reciprocal identification” with his son. 

The confrontation of the mother’s subjectivity in the separation-individuation phase is a narcissistic blow to a child who now realizes s/he does not possess omnipotent control over mother. If we recall that identifications come about to preserve what has been lost, then the loss of omnipotence vis a vis the mother is for the little boy more traumatic than for the little girl because he has been pressured by the culture since birth to give up his feminine identifications; as Diamond writes, “the pressure to renounce gender-inconsistent traits is greater for boys.” A boy must adapt to this “pre-oedipal disruption;” how he adapts is dependent on the quality of attachments and on pre-oedipal identifications. If these are insufficient, the boy may do so by disavowing his need for his mother and by disavowing femininity itself.

Disidentifying with mother, then, becomes a pathological resolution to loss of the preoedipal dyadic connection with mother, and loss of omnipotence, and to being forced to denounce feminine traits. It can lead to a fragile phallic centricity meant to hide the need for and loss of mother and of omnipotence. This rigid masculinity constrains the boy’s experience of himself and others, and truncates the multiple possibilities of the self.

Corbett (2009b) advocates for fluidy, ambiguity, and multiplicity of gender identifications and expressions. He questions diagnostic authority when it adheres to the binary classification of gender. Corbett  (2009a) also provides a clinical example of the relational influence of the development of masculinity when he reenvisions the dynamics in Freud’s case of ‘Little Hans’ by bringing to light possible domestic violence as well as Hans’ mother’s reluctance to have children in the first place. 

Corbett, K. (2009a). Little Hans: Masculinity Foretold. Psychoanal Q., 78:733-764.

Corbett, K. (2009b). Boyhood femininity, gender identity disorder, masculine presuppositions, and the anxiety of regulation. Psa Dial  19(4):453-470.

Diamond, M. (2004). The shaping of masculinity: Revisioning boys turning away from their mothers to construct male gender identity. IJP 85: 359-380.

More on Gender Identifications

Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia (1917; SE:14), posited that ungrieved loss along with ambivalent identification lead to melancholia. Butler  uses this Freudian idea in her Melancholy Gender (1995) [see post of 4-14-20] and made the very important contribution to gender studies and to psychoanalysis that unmourned homoerotic longing (unmourned because its loss must go unrecognized in a heterosexual culture) constructs melancholic gender identifications with this lost, same sex love object. [Benjamin reminds us that not all identifications come about through exclusion (repudiation, disavowal) or by abandoned love, but come also through inclusion (recognition).]

Jay adds some interesting modifications to Butler’s ground breaking theory. Jay (2007a) refines gender identifications by noting that not all gender identifications are melancholic and she demonstrates that ambivalence is an important component for melancholy gender to develop. Jay also writes (2007b) that Butler does not take into account the ways homoerotic love plays out differently for boys and girls: “Butler does not make a distinction between unavowed loss [in girls] and preemptive foreclosure [in boys].” 

Heteronormatively gendered girls have, then lose, their homoeroctic longing for the same sex parent; Boys, on the other hand, from birth, are prohibited by heteronormative culture from homoerotic longings and so never have this loss to unmourn. [Benjamin, however, also reminds us that the unconscious, having no capacity to hold ‘no,’ does not deal in exclusions, so even what is excluded is represented somewhere in the unconscious mind.] A girl’s identification (to recapture what is lost or to disavow the loss) with mother -- because the loss of homoerotic love is unmourned -- becomes melancholic, whereas boys, having had these homoerotic longings foreclosed, develop anxiety, obsessive-compulsively performing masculinity lest they appear feminine or homosexual in a heterosexual society.

The ambivalence for a little girl in coming to identify with the ‘second’ sex “... suggest[s] that femininity becomes melancholic, at least in part, because the internalization of the feminine places the little girl not just in a disagreeable, one-down position but in an ambivalent, double bind: on the one hand, she internalizes the mother as her only route to preserving same-sex love yet, on the other hand, this feminine identification may reduce her to passive object status.” 

She notes a different, less circuitous, path for boys: [Because] “boys tend to take mother, not father, as their first love” … “For males, then, heterosexual object-choice is often experientially continuous from the pre-Oedipal through the Oedipal stages.” 

Benjamin, H. (1998). Shadow of the Other. Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. Routledge, New York and London

Jay, M. (2007a). Individual Differences in Melancholy Gender Among Women: Does Ambivalence Matter?. J. Amer. 

      Psychoanal. Assn., 55(4):1279-1320. 

Jay, M. (2007b) Melancholy femininity and obsessive-compulsive masculinity: Sex differences in melancholy 

      gender, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 8 (2): 115-135.

Gender Performance, Gender Melancholy

Judith Butler, like Foucault (social construction of gender in The History of Sexuality, 1976) before her, stresses the performativity of gender. Gender identities are not constitutive but rather  are constructed from repeated performances of gender norms. Butler critiques compulsory heterosexuality and its binary dictates, and sees no need to pathologize performances that do not conform to norms. She critiques as well core gender identity: There is no core identity, only attributes of identity constructed from citation of cultural norms. Normative gender performativity requires the splitting of stereotypical feminine and masculine traits (such as dependency/agency; passivity/activity) which must be repudiated to attain normative gender identity. These binary heterosexual constructs  are performed, while the unmourned, lost homosexual components are barred from performance, and the more entrenchedly their loss is disavowed, the more intolerant of them in others one becomes. Viewed this way, it is normative femininity and masculinity which are pathological for they are sustained by splitting and projection. Performance of them is both symptomatic as well as bulwarking of cultural norms.

Butler  emphasizes a second contribution to the construction of gender identities: Gender identity is constructed from lost and ungrieved homosexual love (e.g. the boy for his father, the girl for her mother) which results in melancholy gender. Melancholy gender results both from repudiation of that of the opposite sex split off as the ‘other,’  as well as from repudiation of same-sex love objects whose loss remain unmourned. Relying heavily on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia (1917; SE:14), Butler accepts Freud's theory that the ego is constructed from internalization of lost (because forbidden) love objects. This forbidding of love objects in the oedipal period is preceded by the taboo on homosexual love. In repudiating this same sex love, normative femininity and masculinity are embued with melancholy.  (Freud, of course, denying the importance of relationships, reduced this to the intrapsychic, cementing the one-person psychology.) 

Lynn Layton updates Butler to a two person psychology by reminding us that norms are conveyed in a relational matrix and come in a multiplicity of competing norms. Layton critiques Butler stating that dominant norms are not always repressive, and also that internalized relationships are varied and “do not necessarily conform to dominant norms.” Instead of melancholia as described by Freud, Layton sees a resemblance closer to Lacan’s ‘narcissistic’ development of identity: “the Lacanian ego is a structure built on the refusal to mourn losses.”

Layton connects dysthymia to the pain from disappointing relational patterns [insecure attachments?]. This, she says, is what creates melancholy, not -- as Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930, SE: 21) noted -- a trade off to be part of civilization. Instead, “dysthymia is produced by narcissistic intergenerational relationships that do not tolerate difference…”  She further states, in a beautiful tribute to intersubjectivity, “Difference that does not reduce to sameness (Irigaray, 1985) is only produced in relationships where self and other are both subjects, in relationships of mutual recognition (Benjamin, 1988). In this mode of relating, identifications are not solely forged from a refusal to mourn, the ego is not a substrate of such identifications, and performances of gender or anything else need not violate self or other.”   

Butler, J. (1995). Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification. Psychoanal. Dial., 5(2):165-180.                                                 
Layton, Lynn. (1997). The Doer behind the Deed. Gender and Psychoanal., 2(2):131-155

Grief in the Time of Corona

David Kessler, a grief specialist and author of “Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief,” interviewed on Amanpour & Company on Mar 26, 2020 says, “We’re grieving the world we have now lost: our normal life, our routines, seeing people, our work. Everything has changed. ...That normal world is probably gone forever...a change we didn’t want...a loss of our world. Our world as we knew it has died and we’re feeling the sadness. ...so if we name it [grief] it allows us to be sad, to feel those emotions… [As every therapist knows] Our emotions need motion. We need to feel them. Suppressing them isn’t going to work.”

Moreover, we, for the first time in history, are facing so many tragedies as a result of Covid19 without being able to mark deaths with funerals and memorials. We are isolated with our sadness and loss, a hallmark for creating trauma. Kessler says, “... a death needs to be marked when it happens” and recommends that we have virtual funerals for shared grief. In addition, he recommends that we stay in the present moment [e.g. ‘I have food today.’ or ‘ My loved ones are safe today.’] to avoid anticipatory grief [where we might imagine horrible future things such as imaging illness and poverty befalling us and those we love]; and that we find what we can control such as following guidelines: washing hands, staying at home or staying at least six feet apart.

“This is really a time for us to truly become a community...to truly become our brothers’ and sisters' keeper...a moment for us to share what we have.” Having spent time with Mother Teresa, Kessler shares what she noted: that sometimes poverty in America is ‘worse than ours. Here, if a person has one banana, they share it with everyone while in the USA one may have many bananas and not share them.’ Kessler recommends we create an online network to check in on neighbors, find out what people need and what can be shared, to deliver food, for example, to doorsteps (and then step back six feet).

Kessler knows from his work with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross that the five five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, are not linear, and not easy, and that everyone traverses them differently. (Keesler fears that many in the world [Bolsonare of Brazil, until recently, Trump of the USA] are stuck in denial.) From the death of his own son, Kessler found that acceptance was not enough. He introduces the 6th stage of grief, that of meaning. He contemplates: What is there to learn? Where do we find hope? Can we bring about Post traumatic growth instead of PTSD? He says, “We can’t let people die and not find something honorable to bring forth to the future about them.” He gives the instance of his son: In kindergarten his son was voted “most likely to be a helper” which never came to full fruition due to his son’s death at age 21. For Kessler his son’s death brought about his book which now helps others and that gives meaning to his son’s death for his son has now, indeed, become a helper.

Stay safe, everybody. Be strong. Be kind.

Goldner Contemporizes Gender

Gender, “a necessary fiction;” “a false truth;” “an artifice,” is assembled and constructed from our unique history of relationships both expressing our traumas and losses and preserving our earliest relational paradigms. Gender is not an essence, not an identity, but is constituted kaleidoscopically by cultural, especially family, messages. Normative gender masks our multiplicity and requires that we alienate parts of our subjectivity, thereby doing violence to the self. The myth of a stable gender, like the myth of a unitary self, is a pathological compromise, a carapace, which limits the breadth of possible experiences and expression. Giving up parts of ourselves, including the homoerotic longings for the same sex parent, engenders melancholy.

Freud, in conflating biology (anatomical sex), sexuality and gender, gave us the triple legacy of derogation of women, normative heterosexuality, and dichotomous gender. The division of normative gender into the dichotomy feminine/masculine sets up a hierarchy and power differential where agency is masculine and where misogyny and homophobia reside. Feminist theory, skeptical of essentialism and this artifical division, claims that the gender polarity exaggerates differences and suppresses similarities. The excitement of the erotic is housed in otherness, in the unknown, not just those of the partner, but in confronting the exotic, unkown other selves in the muliplicitous self.

Goldner, V. (1991) Toward a critical relational theory of gender. Psa Dialogues, 1:249-272. 

Goldner, V. (2003) Ironic gender/Authentic sex. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 4:113-139.