How We Become Who We Are - 2

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

As I said last week, we arrive at the age of five or so and have already come to an understanding of a genderised positioning in terms of our identity. We have done this through experiencing the interaction of not just our primary carers (usually mother and father) but also our own interactions within that dynamic .
As it is a genderised positioning we are fairly clear, even if we are still too young to put words on it, about whether we consider ourselves to be boy or girl. I put it this way to underline what I said last week about the psychoanalytic concept and belief that biology does not determine gender.
And, equally, contemporary psychoanalytic theory suggests that while there can only ever be two genders, the barriers between the two are not absolute. That’s why we can find one position shading into the other – men with varying degrees of female elements in their psychological make-up and women with varying degrees of male elements in theirs.
I mention this because once the issue is approached from this perspective it not only throws a new and interesting light on the issue of identity (with its core element of sexuality) but also on our ideal image of what we should be. If a man sees himself as a man, then what kind of man does he believe he is or should be? And remember, there are many, many answers to the question of what it is to be man and often the culturally accepted stereotypes do not do justice to the complexity of people’s lived experiences. The same applies to women. If a woman sees herself as a woman, then what kind of woman does she believe she is or should be?
If we go back a little to what I was saying about the developmental path we all travel in order to emerge into who we are, psychoanalytic thinking has traditionally given central importance to the Oedipus Complex. This is the period in life, starting from infancy until about 5 (by 7 it is finished) when every child goes through the rivalry and competing struggles for attention, love and desire for the opposite sex parent.
This period ends, for the vast majority of people, with the child coming to an understanding that the one they want is not only unavailable to them but more importantly is out of bounds as an object of desire. And it is the installing of this simple and yet universal truth that brings with it a plethora of variations in terms of the adults that it produces. At base, the very act of installing this message dictates that we must let go of something we like and seek sustainable pleasure elsewhere in the wider world.
This, as modern psychoanalytic theory is at pains to point out, is not just about the incest taboo. Yes the boy must separate emotionally from the mother figure, the girl likewise from the father figure. But this action is also about conveying to us fundamentally essential tools that we will need if we are to take up our positions as fully functioning, independent adults. These ‘tools’ include the notions of metaphor, sublimation, meaning, signification, law, the intrinsic understanding of ‘no’ and the acceptance of loss.
Contemporary psychoanalytical thinking groups these under the broad heading of castration, keeping the word that Freud used to first identify this phenomenon. For him, the driving fear within the Oedipus Complex for boys was the threat of castration by the father; his penis would be cut off in retaliation for desiring the mother in rivalry to the father. The girl, in traditional thinking, would already have suffered castration, being without a penis, but be driven during this phase to seek a substitute for it in the eyes of father.
However, contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers have considerably broadened out the notion of castration to include the obvious but necessary loss that occurs for both boys and girls when the objects of their infantile desire are put beyond their reach. It is a universal rule that applies to all cultures and is as relevant today as it has always been.
So the act of symbolic castration conveys the notion of metaphor because another image must be inserted or substituted in place of the early and idealised love image of our mother or father. Like metaphor, the substitute found elsewhere will also offer love or the promise of it but it will not be our parent figure that remains the object of desire.
Sublimation, as the act of diverting sexual energy away from the primary sexual object, is another tool. Learning this at an early age allows us as adults to channel sexual energies into other activities, not necessarily directly sexual but ones that bring a degree of pleasure nevertheless.
The very fact of separation being successful, and it is successful to varying degrees depending on the individual child and the family setting, ensures that meaning is achieved. With this grasping of meaning, the child is better prepared for the plethora of encounters in his development to adulthood that will also require him to interpret in order to arrive at meaning.
The child also learns the ‘no’ that society expects every family to teach its children in terms of the incest taboo. A boy cannot continue loving his mother as the sole provider of his psycho-sexual needs and it is obvious to understand why. Likewise a girl must separate from the father.
And, finally, although there is a cutting free of the more incestuous bonds that can threaten to bind us and strangle our progress towards individuality, there is also a necessary loss involved in all of this. We are, after all, losing an almost nirvana-like sense of belonging and symbiosis with an unconditionally loving object. Although we are being separated for our own psychical good, we feel the loss. Some of us feel it more intensely than others. It is this loss that often recurs in depression in childhood, early teens or adult life. But the ability to cope with loss is an essential ‘tool’ for all of us on the road to independent living.
But before we get there another equally important stage now emerges. From 5 years or so onwards, there is a placid period for most children – provided the first five years have not been overly traumatic. This is the latency period during which all the sexual tensions go underground. Again and again in therapy people will refer to this period of their lives when they describe the happy childhood they had. And they are right. Free from the pull and push of internal and sexualised desires, this is a relatively straightforward time in children’s lives.
And then at the end of this, around the age of 12 and it can vary in individuals, we have the re-emergence of the sexual drive as the process of physical maturation shifts gear. This, for psychoanalytic theory, is effectively the second time that we as individuals experience sexual turbulence in our lives. For most theories, puberty is the onset of the sexual being. For psychoanalysis, it is the powerful return of it. So essentially we are now set on the threshold to re-experience the psychical patterns that have been already laid down at an earlier stage of our development.
Next week I will conclude on this theme.