Women in Love*

By Kevin Murphy,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

What would you say to a woman who repeatedly gets herself into relationships in which she is exploited? Or what would you say to a woman who is cheated on repeatedly by the same partner? Or what would you say to a woman who knows she has an emotionally abusive partner but still believes it is her best hope of love?
It would make you wonder, wouldn’t it? And I don’t mean make you wonder about these particular women. Rather it would also make you wonder about the position of women generally.
There are many, many women who are intelligent, educated, independent and living contemporary, liberal lifestyles who yet operate on an almost old-fashioned model of what it means to be in a relationship. They find themselves playing curious second fiddle to their partner. And yet in their more public life, if anyone suggested they take up the same position with regard to career, society, or education, they would instantly oppose such a move and rightly so.
Why is that? I ask because we are at the tail end of a revolution in terms of women’s position in Western culture, one that has seen a great deal of the unfair, unequal and undemocratic practices of previous generations completely abolished. Yet now, at a time of greatest freedom and opportunity, we find a great many women occupying a paradoxical position. They enjoy the right to display their femininity as powerfully as they wish – in varied lifestyle and career choices – and yet despite this some can still display profound uncertainty around their position within emotional relationships.
Now obviously there are women who remain impervious to these issues and who can rise above most interpersonal obstacles through sheer force of will. They are interesting too but we might consider them another day. For the moment, it remains a conundrum that so many women can ‘appear’ strong and resilient and yet find themselves on the receiving end of disrespectful and undermining behaviour. And while most who find themselves in this situation can articulate what is going on, few find themselves able to do much about it.
I was reminded of this while reading an article by psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller** in which he sought to apply some deep theoretical notions to this area. Key to any psychoanalytical understanding of the different positions that men and women take up, is the idea that women occupy a rather special place in terms of the road they take to adult maturity. Not for them the rather uniform developmental path that exists for men. Instead, contemporary psychoanalysis sees something of a healthy incompleteness in the path that girls take to becoming women. That’s not to say that women are incomplete, far from it. It is an attempt to show that women are to be found, because of this incompleteness, on the side of the infinite, emotionally unbounded and yet sharing in a connection to enigmatic forces, whereas men are pretty much a finite set.
What this means in reality is that when it comes to love, women are directed at much, much more than a satisfaction of bodily pleasures, although that is important too. There is something of a ‘beyond’ at work to which they intuitively respond.
And if men, by contrast, are pretty much a finite set well that makes them ideal for forming armies and churches and nations and all those other institutions that centre around distant, and not-so-distant ideals. The women we are referring to, on the other hand, have a greater understanding of the here and now, the importance of ordinary things, the basics, the necessity of speech in the conduct of love relationships, the place of human-ness, love and mystery.
But how does this impact on the place some women, such as those suggested above, find themselves in their relationships today? Well, according to the contemporary theory of sexuality, the first action at work in keeping women ‘stuck’ in these kinds of situations is this very thing. Their sense of infinite-ness is one that orients them towards love as a quantifiably different thing from men’s love, a love that, as outlined above, is based on a living, demonstrable, almost tangible sense of itself. This is their way of evaluating the ultimate success of a relationship.
The second action at work is that the person they choose to remain ‘stuck’ with will have, from the outset, represented an ideal so powerful that they will find themselves emotionally invested to a degree they would not have imagined possible. This unconscious ideal will have formed around a great deal of the experiences of the woman’s past life, the figures in it who were important to her, the values they will have represented and these will have combined with her own inner forces driving the imaginative constructions that place the man in this ideal position.
The third action usually at work is the absence of satisfaction, a desire not met, a dream unfulfilled in the relationship but, paradoxically, with the promise of it happening always just out of reach. We are never more hungry than when we are given the promise of food and likewise our desire remains strongest when it is not wholly satisfied.
This is the contradiction of our times. Freedom is available to most women in the developed world, a freedom fought and struggled for, and one that is allied to financial, intellectual and emotional independence. Yet some women, despite partaking in these new freedoms, find an older regime is at work within them when it comes to love relationships.

*The next blog will appear on Tuesday 11th May, 2010.

** ’Of Distribution Between the Sexes’, J-A Miller, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks, A Review of the London Society of the New Lacanian School, Issue 11, London, December 2003, pp.9-27.