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Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-free Case : Ellen L. K. Toronto :
Karnac Books on Facebook. Child and Adolescent Studies. Family, Couple and Systemic Therapy. Jung and Analytical Psychology. Selected Fiction, Biography and Memoir. Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-free Case: Into the Void Editor: The assignment of gender carries with it a host of assumptions, yet without it we can feel lost in a void, unmoored from the world of rationality, stability and meaning.
The feminist analytic thinkers whose work is collected here confront the meaning established by the assignment of gender and the uncertainty created by its absence.
Book Details
The contributions brought together in Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-free Case address a cross-section of significant issues that have both chronicled and facilitated the changes in feminist psychoanalysis since the mid s. Difficult issues which have previously been ignored such as the pregnancy of the therapist or sexual abuse regarded as more than a fantasy are considered first.
The book goes on to address family perspectives as they interact and shape the child's experience of growing up male or female. Other topics covered are the authority of personal agency as influenced by the language and theory of patriarchy, male-centred concepts that consistently define women as inferior, and the concept of gender as being co-constructed within a relationship.
The gender-free case presented here will fascinate all psychoanalysts interested in exploring ways of grappling with the elusive nature of gender, as well as those studying gender studies. The past two decades of psychoanalytic discourse have witnessed a marked transformation in the way we think about women and gender. Toronto breathes new life into some pre-relational views that some authors in this collection have cast into their own void in order to promote a new and sometime fallaciously one-sided relational, postmodern moralism, instead of what postmodern feminism actually is—a new turn, and not an extirpation and replacement of older historically valuable perspectives on sex and gender.
Toronto and her co-workers at times seem to have exhumed old ghosts that psychoanalytic theorists of sex and gender have tilted at over the generations in order to kill them off again. Besides this ghost exhuming, there is also an apparent booting out of much of the ancestral good in modern psychoanalytic theory.
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Postmodern deconstruction need not be nihilistic, but it sometimes reads that way when it assumes an exclusively pejorative emphasis on essentialism or material reality. I totally agree with her belief that we have bisexuality to thank for female heterosexuality and for a fulfilled male heterosexuality. Without acknowledging mother—daughter erotics as normative, primary femaleness, she says, becomes stripped of agentic erotics and becomes a painful and stereotypic waiting game. In this primary feministic reverse view of anatomy is destiny, male fears of the sexually agentic woman replace the female waiting game for men to take the initiative in all-important matters with them.
Nonetheless, I worry lest primary femininity, which is not a gender-free view, risks, when taken to its extreme, replacing a simple one-sided patriarchal view with the other side of the same coin exclusively matriarchal worldview. For Molly Donovan, as well, gender contains something essential and not merely constructed. She seems to be imprisoned, defiantly, in a patriarchcally biased epistemology in splendid isolation from the work in psychoanalytic feminism of the past two decades. Gwendolyn Gerber, too, in her chapter on gender stereotypes claims for them one positive function: Making stereotypes real such as: There are some unfortunate overtones of sexism, sometimes in reverse, and the battle of the sexes—when we make too many or too hardened essentialized categories of what is normative.
Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-free Case : Into the Void
An emphasis on present-day relational theory on occasion leads to gaps in accounting for historical antecedents. A couple of chapters focus on child abuse, one by Judith Alpert and the other by Joan Sarnat. While not written explicitly for this book, they pertain in that they deal with what reasonably could resemble or at the very least stand as an analogue for a gender void: Representations that are filled in, by both patient and analyst, that are not veridically or isomorphically representative of what actually occurred in cases of early childhood experiences of abuse, echoes the theme of allowing versions of gender to emerge that do not actually reflect any essential gender reality.
Sarnat puts it well in her belief that trauma-oriented listening means receiving the trauma story the way a witness receives a historically factual narrative. To me, these chapters underscore that issues of psychic reality preceded historically, issues of hermeneutics, and historical and narrative truth, movements in psychoanalysis leading up to the postmodern turn.
Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-Free Case: Into the Void (Book Review)
However, the positions Sarnat and others advocate, and that I am also endorsing, are not uniquely relational or feminist. That claim is overdone frequently in this otherwise most valuable and challenging book. A number of authors, mainly Nancy McWilliams, Molly Donovan, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Kimberlyn Leary, Ruth Lax, and Gemma Ainslie, as commentator, are more comfortable than others with the fact of gender differences between males and females, but approach these differences with variable underlying assumptions.
Ainslie wonders how we talk about one another without some gender marking. Children suffer over the fact of difference and over the biological implications of difference.