By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
You don’t often hear people talking about dreams in public. It rarely makes it onto the topic list of chat shows. You don’t overhear it in coffee shop conversations between friends. Yes dreams will get a cursory mention here and there but apart from a few details and a shrug that usually suggests ‘how weird is that’, they have almost been relegated to the realm of not really being part of our lives. They happen, they can disturb us but they are ultimately seen as trivial and are quickly forgotten.
Part of the reason for this is that our logical, scientific world has no place for dreams. Dreams do not tell us what it is they are trying to say in any coherent or easily understandable way. And that is enough for them to be ignored.
In contrast, I’m reminded of tribes such as the Sambia in Papua New Guinea, or the Quiche Maya in Central America, or the Aguaruna in Peru and many other indigenous peoples who all view dreaming as an experience of the soul leaving the body at night. Indeed, the Sambia make dream interpretation part of their shared, spoken culture from childhood onwards. As such, the pictures that the ‘soul’ sees on its flight in dreams are to be afforded a respect and an attention that you don’t find in the Western world. We simply don’t believe in any of that.
And yet, psychoanalysis and its understanding of the unconscious was founded on dreams and dreaming by Sigmund Freud. It does not view dreams as the soul leaving the body at night. Rather, it sees dreams as a representation of our inner lives, often disguising our real wishes in order to add to the puzzle they represent.
You will find many therapies today that seek to interpret dreams using various different means in order to crack the code, so to speak. The puzzling nature of dreams is not a good enough reason to ignore them. Quite the opposite, in fact. The can be a valuable route to understanding, or the 'royal road' to the unconscious as Freud once called them.If someone is having difficulty in their lives, the content of their dreams can often give a rare insight into the hidden depths.
I was speaking to a man recently* who said he was having the same dream for a very long time. It wasn’t taking place every night but it always contained the same figures and the same ultimate result: he woke up in a sweat, terrified. He came to me and asked me to interpret the dream. He had heard that dream interpretation was an essential part of the theory of psychoanalysis. He had also heard that it involved listing the elements of the dream and then deciphering what they meant according to a check list of symbols.
There is a form of dream interpretation that uses a check list of symbols but contemporary Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis sees things a little differently. The meaning of any dream depends not on the configuration of symbols and their generally applied meanings. The meaning of a dream depends on who is dreaming it.
So it is less to do with the things that are happening in the dream, although they are important, than on who it is who is having the dream. The man in question was repreatedly having the same very frightening dream and yet his life was effectively trauma free. He had no ugly experiences, nobody had abused him, he was successful in his career and his relationships were solid.
In such circumstances you might ask, how could this be? To get to the bottom of this conundrum, some therapies would probably spend endless hours going over and over the contents of the dream in order to put meaning and sense on them. Instead, our work together focussed not on the dream but on this man’s life. After patient and lengthy work we discovered something in his past that had never been resolved, something he had forgotten about, and something he had only remembered when prompted by an association he had during one of our sessions.
It became clear to this man that he had spent a long time repressing a set of experiences that he had never quite forgotten but had never considered to have had any effect on him. And yet, when he recounted them in our sessions he was aghast at how he could have missed their importance.
The dreams he was having were particularly related to his unique set of experiences in an earlier part of his life. These experiences had been effectively ‘forgotten’ and would have remained that way were it not for the insistence of the same dream occurring repeatedly.
The anxiety that had built up around his earlier experiences had remained untouched and was effectively seeping out into his dream life. His daily life remained unaffected. He had ensured this would be the case when he first believed he had dealt effectively with the original unpleasant experiences. But his dreams were telling him otherwise, in a way that was impossible to ignore.
I mention this example in order to illustrate two popular misconceptions about dreams and their interpretation. Firstly, they are important and while they should not be obsessively attended to, they should not be ignored either. Dreams that affect us should be paid attention to because they occur for a reason that is usually directly related to some part of our inner lives. Secondly, the meaning of any dream is less to do with the 'symbols' and what they purportedly mean and more to do with who is having the dream. The unique and particular details of the life experiences of the dreamer are the keys to unlocking the dream.
*Details of this person have been changed to ensure confidentiality.
Note: The next blog will appear on Tuesday August 30, 2010.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Parents Are Only Human Too
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Have you ever considered the popular view of parenting? You find, broadly speaking, there are two sides to it. There are those who love their children to bits, would do anything for them, give them everything they can and who represent a model of family life. The other side of the coin is the parenting style that is abusive, neglectful , and that sees children as a burden to be resented.
There are no prizes for guessing which of the two our society likes to promote. And is it any wonder? Parents who care are to be encouraged rather than parents who don’t. The problem arises with the ideal of good parenting that emerges from this. It follows that to give everything – both emotionally and materially - and withhold nothing is good parenting. It also follows that those who cannot but who might want to give everything materially are somehow disadvantaged in this regard.
While we can argue these ideas at length, there is another point at stake here. It is that the impression is created that we can always be aware of the effects of our actions, our personalities and our responses on our children. That everything being given or withheld is within our gift to understand and evaluate. You will see this philosophy most at work in the plethora of parenting tips that flourish in the media – do this and everything should work, do that and everything should be fine. It is action-based, practical, tangible, observable and ultimately cosily founded on common sense. As if the simple act of carrying out ‘the right thing’ is enough, be it feeding, educating, playing, communicating or any other aspect of raising children.
The thing that never gets represented in any of this is the individual who acts as parent, their history, their own desires, their own failings. My point might be best illustrated by an example. I was talking with a woman* some time ago who told me that her life had been filled with anxiety and anguish despite having had a happy childhood with happy caring parents. How does that work? That is a good question. On the face of it there was no trauma, no abuse, no deprivation of any kind. And yet her adult life was stuck in a cycle of anxiety, sadness, low self esteem and broken relationships.
It was only after some time that she came to ask questions about who these people were who had raised her, yes her parents. And the questions were not around the usual clichéd ones like, ‘Did they love me?’ Rather the questions she asked were around the issue of, ‘Who were they before I came along? Who were these people at the time I was born? What were their desires, hopes, fears?’ Even at a glance you can see that framing the questions in this way offered a completely different perspective on something that often gets taken for granted.
When you next look at a glamorised photo of a loving mother with a baby, it might be interesting to do the following exercise. Ask yourself, if one was to include the complexity of that woman’s life into one’s understanding of her happiness, what possible factors would you include? If you assume her to be all-loving and perfect, what factors could have brought that about?
The woman I was referring to above discovered that her mother had actually been engaged to another man before she met her father. This first man died and her mother then met her father and married him. She loved him but the shadow of her first love was always hanging around in the background. And while her mother did everything she could to love her daughter, something of the sadness that she had experienced with the loss of her first love permeated through, almost without realising it.
This is the point I was trying to make earlier about parenting. Parents are people. They have had their own histories before they ever have children. They may well love their children more than anything in the world, but the echoes of an earlier life trickle through. Yes there is an ABC of what to do as good parents. But there is another engine at work also; one at the core of every human being, where their true but often disguised desires and wishes generate ideas, choices, emotions and actions. This is what is continually being put in place up to the moment we become parents. And this is the foundation on which we base our own parenting abilities and style on.
Before our parents ever had children, they already had a rich and complex inner life that brought them to adulthood. And before we, as their children, ever knew anything about it, it was this that formed the backdrop to our experiences of being parented by them.
*This is a composite illustration taken from a number of case histories.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Have you ever considered the popular view of parenting? You find, broadly speaking, there are two sides to it. There are those who love their children to bits, would do anything for them, give them everything they can and who represent a model of family life. The other side of the coin is the parenting style that is abusive, neglectful , and that sees children as a burden to be resented.
There are no prizes for guessing which of the two our society likes to promote. And is it any wonder? Parents who care are to be encouraged rather than parents who don’t. The problem arises with the ideal of good parenting that emerges from this. It follows that to give everything – both emotionally and materially - and withhold nothing is good parenting. It also follows that those who cannot but who might want to give everything materially are somehow disadvantaged in this regard.
While we can argue these ideas at length, there is another point at stake here. It is that the impression is created that we can always be aware of the effects of our actions, our personalities and our responses on our children. That everything being given or withheld is within our gift to understand and evaluate. You will see this philosophy most at work in the plethora of parenting tips that flourish in the media – do this and everything should work, do that and everything should be fine. It is action-based, practical, tangible, observable and ultimately cosily founded on common sense. As if the simple act of carrying out ‘the right thing’ is enough, be it feeding, educating, playing, communicating or any other aspect of raising children.
The thing that never gets represented in any of this is the individual who acts as parent, their history, their own desires, their own failings. My point might be best illustrated by an example. I was talking with a woman* some time ago who told me that her life had been filled with anxiety and anguish despite having had a happy childhood with happy caring parents. How does that work? That is a good question. On the face of it there was no trauma, no abuse, no deprivation of any kind. And yet her adult life was stuck in a cycle of anxiety, sadness, low self esteem and broken relationships.
It was only after some time that she came to ask questions about who these people were who had raised her, yes her parents. And the questions were not around the usual clichéd ones like, ‘Did they love me?’ Rather the questions she asked were around the issue of, ‘Who were they before I came along? Who were these people at the time I was born? What were their desires, hopes, fears?’ Even at a glance you can see that framing the questions in this way offered a completely different perspective on something that often gets taken for granted.
When you next look at a glamorised photo of a loving mother with a baby, it might be interesting to do the following exercise. Ask yourself, if one was to include the complexity of that woman’s life into one’s understanding of her happiness, what possible factors would you include? If you assume her to be all-loving and perfect, what factors could have brought that about?
The woman I was referring to above discovered that her mother had actually been engaged to another man before she met her father. This first man died and her mother then met her father and married him. She loved him but the shadow of her first love was always hanging around in the background. And while her mother did everything she could to love her daughter, something of the sadness that she had experienced with the loss of her first love permeated through, almost without realising it.
This is the point I was trying to make earlier about parenting. Parents are people. They have had their own histories before they ever have children. They may well love their children more than anything in the world, but the echoes of an earlier life trickle through. Yes there is an ABC of what to do as good parents. But there is another engine at work also; one at the core of every human being, where their true but often disguised desires and wishes generate ideas, choices, emotions and actions. This is what is continually being put in place up to the moment we become parents. And this is the foundation on which we base our own parenting abilities and style on.
Before our parents ever had children, they already had a rich and complex inner life that brought them to adulthood. And before we, as their children, ever knew anything about it, it was this that formed the backdrop to our experiences of being parented by them.
*This is a composite illustration taken from a number of case histories.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Man Who Hated Holidays
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
If I can, I’m going to try and draw two things together that, on the face of it, seem worlds apart. Let’s take the first thing first. I was talking to a man once who said he hated going on holidays. He didn’t like being away from home, he didn’t like flying, he didn’t like the sun and he went as rarely as he could. Any time he did go away, he felt uneasy, anxious, was prone to panic attacks and the entire experience was miserable for him and for anyone who happened to be with him.
The second thing is that Jean-Gerard Burzstein, doctor of philosophy and teacher and practitioner of psychoanalysis in Paris, was speaking in Dublin on Saturday and Sunday to the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland about issues of contemporary psychoanalysis. As you would expect, he was attempting to bring an understandable focus to a relatively complex array of concepts and theory.
So how on earth would one bring two things like this together; the nuggets of wisdom from complex theoretical concepts, and the position of a man who didn’t like going on holidays? Not an easy task.
Let’s take the man who hated holidays. An interesting thing about him was that, in his view, it was not ok to hate holidays. He should like holidays. All men liked holidays, going to the sun, or distant places, getting a tan, enjoying freedom of choice. By not being able to do it, and by not liking the fact that he wasn’t able to do it, he was somehow less than other men. An interesting place to see oneself, you might think.
Now Jean-Gerard Burzstein – and I had the privilege of chairing his second talk on Sunday – was pointing out why psychoanalysis is efficient, in contrast to the way some like to paint it. It is efficient he said because it focuses on the cause rather than the symptom. So instead of figuring out ways of trying to help this man get to like going on holidays, it would seek to find out the cause behind why he didn’t like holidays and how he could come to understand it in such a way as to bring about change for him.
In contemporary Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Mr Bursztein said the things that form us most fundamentally are our experiences as infants and young children in terms of dealing with the simplest of things: being loved, being satisfied, and being frustrated in relation to our primary care givers. These are the earliest experiences we have, at an age and stage when words are not available to us. Put in a slightly more formal way, the 'who we are' (identity) and the 'what we truly wish for' (desire)are the result of intersubjective (between people)dynamic.
The man who hated holidays said that he was never been able to understand why it was so unpleasurable for him. He said he hated the feeling of vulnerability when he was away, the feeling that something bad might happen. Yet when he got home, he looked back fondly on the experience and seemed to enjoy it once it was over.
Mr Bursztein in his seminar spoke about a core concept in contemporary theory, the fundamental phantasy. This is a group of imaginary ideas we have about who we are and what we represent to the world, that we form in the earliest part of our lives, particularly when we measure ourselves and decide on our place in relation to the people we have as significant adults around us. Some of us are very lucky in that we have adults who seem to do all the right things. Some of us are not. And some of us are lucky from the start in that we have the right inner resources to deal with ups and downs while some of us are not.
In terms of the few things he said, the predicament of the man who hated holidays can be viewed in a particular way. Let’s recap for a moment: the fundamental phantasy is an imaginary way that we prop ourselves up in relation to others. It is not always helpful but it can be all we have.
What the man who hated holidays seemed to be saying was that the experience of going away made him feel vulnerable, unsafe. Some vague threat was pending in the wings, something that would affect him negatively. It would, whatever it was, see him overcome in a way that he would not be able to cope with. The threat would have to be human so he would be overcome or overwhelmed by another person or persons in some way. The thought of it was enough to create anxiety.
The fundamental phantasy is our way of propping ourselves up, showing ourselves to be capable of withstanding the feeling of helplessness, a feeling that is with us at the earliest stages of our lives until we become independent beings. It is not always a secure construct, sometimes it gives way. Nor is it always a beneficial one - sometimes it runs counter to who we really are.
The man who hated holidays didn’t like hating holidays. It wasn’t manly, it wasn’t how he liked to see himself. It showed him up as being weak and fearful. He liked to see himself as strong, independent, resilient, capable of doing things like anyone else. The fear he experienced when faced with going away was at odds with how he lived the rest of his life. So the mask slipped, some idea he had of himself wasn’t working very well when he was faced with going away.
Mr Burzstein said that according to the man who reformulated Freudian theory – Dr Jacques Lacan with whom he worked and researched up to the latter’s death - said that neurosis occurs when we sacrifice our own desire to the demands of an other or others who we perceive as significant. This way of managing ourselves begins from the earliest stages of our lives. We carry on the habit as adults. It isn’t terminal, however, as we have a second chance of correcting the situation with psychoanalysis.
The man who hated holidays displayed the same characteristics. A fundamental phantasy was at work in his imaginary life, in which he saw himself as incapable of withstanding the supposed threat that the desire of unknown others would impose on him against his will. It only ever came to the surface when he had to travel to an unfamiliar location. In fact, it surfaced with such force that it was deeply unpleasant for him.
This phantasy was held in check during his everyday life by the conscious belief that he was strong, resilient, capable of doing anything he wanted. But when it came to travelling abroad, that belief system collapsed and didn’t support him. Mr Burzstein in his seminar said that belief systems we have about ourselves that are purely in the imaginary realm will always come crashing down. The antidote is to discover the truth about ourselves through analysis. That way we don’t end up spending vast resources of energy and time fending off imaginary threats that threaten to pull down our imaginary ideas about ourselves.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
If I can, I’m going to try and draw two things together that, on the face of it, seem worlds apart. Let’s take the first thing first. I was talking to a man once who said he hated going on holidays. He didn’t like being away from home, he didn’t like flying, he didn’t like the sun and he went as rarely as he could. Any time he did go away, he felt uneasy, anxious, was prone to panic attacks and the entire experience was miserable for him and for anyone who happened to be with him.
The second thing is that Jean-Gerard Burzstein, doctor of philosophy and teacher and practitioner of psychoanalysis in Paris, was speaking in Dublin on Saturday and Sunday to the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland about issues of contemporary psychoanalysis. As you would expect, he was attempting to bring an understandable focus to a relatively complex array of concepts and theory.
So how on earth would one bring two things like this together; the nuggets of wisdom from complex theoretical concepts, and the position of a man who didn’t like going on holidays? Not an easy task.
Let’s take the man who hated holidays. An interesting thing about him was that, in his view, it was not ok to hate holidays. He should like holidays. All men liked holidays, going to the sun, or distant places, getting a tan, enjoying freedom of choice. By not being able to do it, and by not liking the fact that he wasn’t able to do it, he was somehow less than other men. An interesting place to see oneself, you might think.
Now Jean-Gerard Burzstein – and I had the privilege of chairing his second talk on Sunday – was pointing out why psychoanalysis is efficient, in contrast to the way some like to paint it. It is efficient he said because it focuses on the cause rather than the symptom. So instead of figuring out ways of trying to help this man get to like going on holidays, it would seek to find out the cause behind why he didn’t like holidays and how he could come to understand it in such a way as to bring about change for him.
In contemporary Freudian-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Mr Bursztein said the things that form us most fundamentally are our experiences as infants and young children in terms of dealing with the simplest of things: being loved, being satisfied, and being frustrated in relation to our primary care givers. These are the earliest experiences we have, at an age and stage when words are not available to us. Put in a slightly more formal way, the 'who we are' (identity) and the 'what we truly wish for' (desire)are the result of intersubjective (between people)dynamic.
The man who hated holidays said that he was never been able to understand why it was so unpleasurable for him. He said he hated the feeling of vulnerability when he was away, the feeling that something bad might happen. Yet when he got home, he looked back fondly on the experience and seemed to enjoy it once it was over.
Mr Bursztein in his seminar spoke about a core concept in contemporary theory, the fundamental phantasy. This is a group of imaginary ideas we have about who we are and what we represent to the world, that we form in the earliest part of our lives, particularly when we measure ourselves and decide on our place in relation to the people we have as significant adults around us. Some of us are very lucky in that we have adults who seem to do all the right things. Some of us are not. And some of us are lucky from the start in that we have the right inner resources to deal with ups and downs while some of us are not.
In terms of the few things he said, the predicament of the man who hated holidays can be viewed in a particular way. Let’s recap for a moment: the fundamental phantasy is an imaginary way that we prop ourselves up in relation to others. It is not always helpful but it can be all we have.
What the man who hated holidays seemed to be saying was that the experience of going away made him feel vulnerable, unsafe. Some vague threat was pending in the wings, something that would affect him negatively. It would, whatever it was, see him overcome in a way that he would not be able to cope with. The threat would have to be human so he would be overcome or overwhelmed by another person or persons in some way. The thought of it was enough to create anxiety.
The fundamental phantasy is our way of propping ourselves up, showing ourselves to be capable of withstanding the feeling of helplessness, a feeling that is with us at the earliest stages of our lives until we become independent beings. It is not always a secure construct, sometimes it gives way. Nor is it always a beneficial one - sometimes it runs counter to who we really are.
The man who hated holidays didn’t like hating holidays. It wasn’t manly, it wasn’t how he liked to see himself. It showed him up as being weak and fearful. He liked to see himself as strong, independent, resilient, capable of doing things like anyone else. The fear he experienced when faced with going away was at odds with how he lived the rest of his life. So the mask slipped, some idea he had of himself wasn’t working very well when he was faced with going away.
Mr Burzstein said that according to the man who reformulated Freudian theory – Dr Jacques Lacan with whom he worked and researched up to the latter’s death - said that neurosis occurs when we sacrifice our own desire to the demands of an other or others who we perceive as significant. This way of managing ourselves begins from the earliest stages of our lives. We carry on the habit as adults. It isn’t terminal, however, as we have a second chance of correcting the situation with psychoanalysis.
The man who hated holidays displayed the same characteristics. A fundamental phantasy was at work in his imaginary life, in which he saw himself as incapable of withstanding the supposed threat that the desire of unknown others would impose on him against his will. It only ever came to the surface when he had to travel to an unfamiliar location. In fact, it surfaced with such force that it was deeply unpleasant for him.
This phantasy was held in check during his everyday life by the conscious belief that he was strong, resilient, capable of doing anything he wanted. But when it came to travelling abroad, that belief system collapsed and didn’t support him. Mr Burzstein in his seminar said that belief systems we have about ourselves that are purely in the imaginary realm will always come crashing down. The antidote is to discover the truth about ourselves through analysis. That way we don’t end up spending vast resources of energy and time fending off imaginary threats that threaten to pull down our imaginary ideas about ourselves.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Learning How to Be A Better Lover
By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
I was reading a woman’s magazine in a waiting room recently and it prominently featured an article on top ways for a woman to pleasure her man sexually. The tips themselves were hackneyed enough; that is to say, they have been recycled in various formats for many years now. But two things about it caught my attention. Firstly this was the second women’s magazine in a few months to run an article on the importance of women knowing how to sexually satisfy their men. There is obviously a demand for it. The previous article was a little less tasteful and a lot more graphic, despite being a mainstream publication aimed at teens and young twenty year olds.
Secondly, the more recent article introduced the topic along the lines that with the right sexual technique, and therefore a fulfilling sexual experience, love can blossom. If I was reading it correctly, this meant that in order for love to be possible, and by love I presumed it meant the vague multimedia-concocted version that is low on ordinary detail and high on promise, then one had to have a successful first sexual encounter with the man of your choice.
Thinking about it now, it must represent an alluring thesis for any woman. If one can turn oneself, through the use of tips and suggestions from a magazine or tv show or movie, into a modern day Mata Hari, then love is guaranteed. Successful sex, the definition of which is sex that satisfies the man according to the magazines, leads to love. As a formula, it is blindingly simple.
Leaving aside for a moment the often heard argument as to how thirty to forty years of feminism could have lead to this, there is a psychoanalytic perspective that probably needs airing in this regard also. From the latter perspective, the message is a curiously twisted one. On the one hand the woman is required – once again – to take responsibility for all things sexual. She must acquire the knowledge that will satisfy the man. Now while it appears to be putting the woman into the position of power, it also has the curious effect of making the woman into a sexual object.
For those who are familiar with psychoanalysis, this is the basis of hysteria – the woman becoming the object for an ‘other’ in a way that links in with her sexuality. This discovery led to Freud’s (and Josef Breuer’s) book ‘Studies on Hysteria’ in 1895, the book that is generally credited with being the start of psychoanalysis.
So, in an unintended twist, while taking on the mantle of all-knowing sexuality, the contemporary woman transforms herself into the object of sexual pleasure. The double-edge of this particular sword is that while the woman will undoubtedly attract the attentions of the opposite sex (if that is her choice) she will also run the risk of being defined in particularly narrow and objectified terms. For some it is not a problem, for others it most definitely is.
What of those women who may well be comfortable with their sexuality but who reject the requirement to become expert man-pleasers in bed or in any other part of their lives? And what of those women who suffer varying degrees of disrespect on account of this predominant ideology at the hands of their male partners? And what of those women who are made to feel inadequate because their brand of femininity precludes them from this way of being a woman?
It’s only when you look beneath the surface of things that you get a glimpse of the real complexities at work. The magazine idea of the perfect sexual woman, alluring as it might be, leaves many women behind. As such it represents an ideal for a section of women but not all women. That section, or constituency of women for whom it works, may well be in the ascendant because it is a value system that is most loudly heard. And we must not forget that powerful commercial organisations have a vested interest in promoting this ideology and fuelling its continued rise.
Now there is certainly an argument to be made that sex should be talked about, rather than hidden. Of course that is the case. But once we accept that it should be talked about and brought out into the open, the next question to be asked is ‘how’ it should be talked about and ‘how’ it should be brought into the open. In a way that elevates? Or in a way that diminishes? Often the world we live in is intent on ensuring that the lines between these two positions remain conveniently blurred.
Of course, to even raise such a topic is to be branded as someone with no sense of humour. Such has been the case, listening to the radio recently, for anyone daring to criticize the new Sex and the City movie. It’s only a bit of fun. Well, I can understand that. I jokingly complained at being called too early for my appointment in the waiting room mentioned above because I had only had time to reach sex tip number three. Now I’ll have to make another appointment.
So the ‘fun argument’ is all very well, but humour is a very subjective thing and to require people to find something fun or funny borders on the dictatorial.
Also, despite those who try to pass something off as ‘just a bit of fun’, every piece of humour has a deeper layer of meaning whether we like it or not. And that is something that was known long before Freud’s ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’ was published in 1905. There’s nothing wrong with being able to enjoy a joke once we can clearly see that the joke is not being made at someone else’s expense.
It is fun to read about sex tips in magazines. We all want to know how we can do things better. And it may even raise awareness of what to do and what not to do to make oneself a better lover. But we also have to remember that other meanings are also being communicated: that 'standards' of sexual performance are now being prescribed; that better sex leads to perfect love; that a woman is a better woman by having more sexual knowledge. But in this rising tide of objectified sexuality something of the richer complexity not just of womanhood but of human relationships is being swept away.
* The next blog will appear on Tuesday June 22nd, 2010.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
I was reading a woman’s magazine in a waiting room recently and it prominently featured an article on top ways for a woman to pleasure her man sexually. The tips themselves were hackneyed enough; that is to say, they have been recycled in various formats for many years now. But two things about it caught my attention. Firstly this was the second women’s magazine in a few months to run an article on the importance of women knowing how to sexually satisfy their men. There is obviously a demand for it. The previous article was a little less tasteful and a lot more graphic, despite being a mainstream publication aimed at teens and young twenty year olds.
Secondly, the more recent article introduced the topic along the lines that with the right sexual technique, and therefore a fulfilling sexual experience, love can blossom. If I was reading it correctly, this meant that in order for love to be possible, and by love I presumed it meant the vague multimedia-concocted version that is low on ordinary detail and high on promise, then one had to have a successful first sexual encounter with the man of your choice.
Thinking about it now, it must represent an alluring thesis for any woman. If one can turn oneself, through the use of tips and suggestions from a magazine or tv show or movie, into a modern day Mata Hari, then love is guaranteed. Successful sex, the definition of which is sex that satisfies the man according to the magazines, leads to love. As a formula, it is blindingly simple.
Leaving aside for a moment the often heard argument as to how thirty to forty years of feminism could have lead to this, there is a psychoanalytic perspective that probably needs airing in this regard also. From the latter perspective, the message is a curiously twisted one. On the one hand the woman is required – once again – to take responsibility for all things sexual. She must acquire the knowledge that will satisfy the man. Now while it appears to be putting the woman into the position of power, it also has the curious effect of making the woman into a sexual object.
For those who are familiar with psychoanalysis, this is the basis of hysteria – the woman becoming the object for an ‘other’ in a way that links in with her sexuality. This discovery led to Freud’s (and Josef Breuer’s) book ‘Studies on Hysteria’ in 1895, the book that is generally credited with being the start of psychoanalysis.
So, in an unintended twist, while taking on the mantle of all-knowing sexuality, the contemporary woman transforms herself into the object of sexual pleasure. The double-edge of this particular sword is that while the woman will undoubtedly attract the attentions of the opposite sex (if that is her choice) she will also run the risk of being defined in particularly narrow and objectified terms. For some it is not a problem, for others it most definitely is.
What of those women who may well be comfortable with their sexuality but who reject the requirement to become expert man-pleasers in bed or in any other part of their lives? And what of those women who suffer varying degrees of disrespect on account of this predominant ideology at the hands of their male partners? And what of those women who are made to feel inadequate because their brand of femininity precludes them from this way of being a woman?
It’s only when you look beneath the surface of things that you get a glimpse of the real complexities at work. The magazine idea of the perfect sexual woman, alluring as it might be, leaves many women behind. As such it represents an ideal for a section of women but not all women. That section, or constituency of women for whom it works, may well be in the ascendant because it is a value system that is most loudly heard. And we must not forget that powerful commercial organisations have a vested interest in promoting this ideology and fuelling its continued rise.
Now there is certainly an argument to be made that sex should be talked about, rather than hidden. Of course that is the case. But once we accept that it should be talked about and brought out into the open, the next question to be asked is ‘how’ it should be talked about and ‘how’ it should be brought into the open. In a way that elevates? Or in a way that diminishes? Often the world we live in is intent on ensuring that the lines between these two positions remain conveniently blurred.
Of course, to even raise such a topic is to be branded as someone with no sense of humour. Such has been the case, listening to the radio recently, for anyone daring to criticize the new Sex and the City movie. It’s only a bit of fun. Well, I can understand that. I jokingly complained at being called too early for my appointment in the waiting room mentioned above because I had only had time to reach sex tip number three. Now I’ll have to make another appointment.
So the ‘fun argument’ is all very well, but humour is a very subjective thing and to require people to find something fun or funny borders on the dictatorial.
Also, despite those who try to pass something off as ‘just a bit of fun’, every piece of humour has a deeper layer of meaning whether we like it or not. And that is something that was known long before Freud’s ‘Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious’ was published in 1905. There’s nothing wrong with being able to enjoy a joke once we can clearly see that the joke is not being made at someone else’s expense.
It is fun to read about sex tips in magazines. We all want to know how we can do things better. And it may even raise awareness of what to do and what not to do to make oneself a better lover. But we also have to remember that other meanings are also being communicated: that 'standards' of sexual performance are now being prescribed; that better sex leads to perfect love; that a woman is a better woman by having more sexual knowledge. But in this rising tide of objectified sexuality something of the richer complexity not just of womanhood but of human relationships is being swept away.
* The next blog will appear on Tuesday June 22nd, 2010.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Seeing Indulgence for What It Is
By Kevin Murphy, MSc,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Every once in a while you will hear people say that their experience of going to therapy is one of indulgence. They are indulging themselves. They are indulging their sense of having something worth talking about. They are over-estimating the issues they have to deal with. In short, they are saying it is a form of vanity.
If someone feels this way then the common sense approach would be to let them go with their instincts and simply stop attending therapy. This is the outcome for some. For others, though, the belief that they are indulging themselves is actually an element of their problem. Distinguishing between the two is important for the therapist to do his or her job properly, although in reality it is usually the person in question who makes the call. And not often the right call.
The belief that one is indulging oneself might play well with the current social discourse that people who go for therapy just need a stiff talking to. It plays into the ‘pull yourself together’ school of thought. But the lived experience of people who come for therapy is that they have repeatedly tried this route. They are in therapy because they actually have tried to ‘pull themselves together’ and it hasn’t worked.
Once they start coming, though, something else happens for them. A gradual lifting of their discomfort, of their fears, or of their sadness, and with it a glimmer of personal well-being, and suddenly, often quite quickly, a negative tone emerges. A little voice says, you see, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with you. The broader social discourse kicks in with plenty of examples of people who do not go to therapy. There are any number of ideal lives out there we can imagine that are trouble free and that we want to imitate.
This negative tone with regard to being in therapy contains within it aspects of a broader attitude that people have towards themselves. The negative, punishing sense of indulging oneself, of being vain enough to believe you have problems, of seeing oneself as unworthy of even attending therapy can, for some people, be part of a wellspring of self-criticism that runs deep. It is the voice that doesn’t allow us feel good about pretty much anything we decide to do to improve ourselves. It makes itself known in company, with new people, when new opportunities for career or relationships emerge. It even seeps into existing relationships and ensures we occupy a back-seat position, even while seeming to be fully in control. It is most felt at times in our lives when we need to move forward.
It can often be hard for someone to see this for themselves, although some people are acutely aware of it. It is easiest for an independent observer to pick it up, often immediately. The message that we give ourselves about therapy being an indulgence can be so strong that people simply drop out and leave all possibilities for change unexplored. There is a comfort in that. The opposite of the no-pain, no-gain mantra favoured by sports coaches is the no-change, no-risk mantra of those in this situation.
There is a part of ourselves that wants us to remain as we are, unchallenged, unchanged, unquestioned. If a person is happy that way, then that is fine. But if a person sees therapy as an indulgence, decides to walk away and then finds that their life is still a confusing, dissatisfying, badly joined-up jigsaw, then that is probably clear evidence that the experience of it as an indulgence was designed to stop them in their tracks. After all, that is essentially the effect it had. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is possible to want to feel better but not want to feel better at one and the same time.
On this basis, you could say that the experience of therapy as an indulgence could be the signal that a degree of resilience against it is required, so as not to believe wholeheartedly in what it appears to be telling us. The negative image about ourselves that it tries to portray can often be designed to stop us moving forward, to keep us fixed in the same place. If it arises, the negativity implicit in it, along with its consequences, can usually be found in many other aspects of our lives also.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Every once in a while you will hear people say that their experience of going to therapy is one of indulgence. They are indulging themselves. They are indulging their sense of having something worth talking about. They are over-estimating the issues they have to deal with. In short, they are saying it is a form of vanity.
If someone feels this way then the common sense approach would be to let them go with their instincts and simply stop attending therapy. This is the outcome for some. For others, though, the belief that they are indulging themselves is actually an element of their problem. Distinguishing between the two is important for the therapist to do his or her job properly, although in reality it is usually the person in question who makes the call. And not often the right call.
The belief that one is indulging oneself might play well with the current social discourse that people who go for therapy just need a stiff talking to. It plays into the ‘pull yourself together’ school of thought. But the lived experience of people who come for therapy is that they have repeatedly tried this route. They are in therapy because they actually have tried to ‘pull themselves together’ and it hasn’t worked.
Once they start coming, though, something else happens for them. A gradual lifting of their discomfort, of their fears, or of their sadness, and with it a glimmer of personal well-being, and suddenly, often quite quickly, a negative tone emerges. A little voice says, you see, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with you. The broader social discourse kicks in with plenty of examples of people who do not go to therapy. There are any number of ideal lives out there we can imagine that are trouble free and that we want to imitate.
This negative tone with regard to being in therapy contains within it aspects of a broader attitude that people have towards themselves. The negative, punishing sense of indulging oneself, of being vain enough to believe you have problems, of seeing oneself as unworthy of even attending therapy can, for some people, be part of a wellspring of self-criticism that runs deep. It is the voice that doesn’t allow us feel good about pretty much anything we decide to do to improve ourselves. It makes itself known in company, with new people, when new opportunities for career or relationships emerge. It even seeps into existing relationships and ensures we occupy a back-seat position, even while seeming to be fully in control. It is most felt at times in our lives when we need to move forward.
It can often be hard for someone to see this for themselves, although some people are acutely aware of it. It is easiest for an independent observer to pick it up, often immediately. The message that we give ourselves about therapy being an indulgence can be so strong that people simply drop out and leave all possibilities for change unexplored. There is a comfort in that. The opposite of the no-pain, no-gain mantra favoured by sports coaches is the no-change, no-risk mantra of those in this situation.
There is a part of ourselves that wants us to remain as we are, unchallenged, unchanged, unquestioned. If a person is happy that way, then that is fine. But if a person sees therapy as an indulgence, decides to walk away and then finds that their life is still a confusing, dissatisfying, badly joined-up jigsaw, then that is probably clear evidence that the experience of it as an indulgence was designed to stop them in their tracks. After all, that is essentially the effect it had. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is possible to want to feel better but not want to feel better at one and the same time.
On this basis, you could say that the experience of therapy as an indulgence could be the signal that a degree of resilience against it is required, so as not to believe wholeheartedly in what it appears to be telling us. The negative image about ourselves that it tries to portray can often be designed to stop us moving forward, to keep us fixed in the same place. If it arises, the negativity implicit in it, along with its consequences, can usually be found in many other aspects of our lives also.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Death of a Famous Man
By Kevin Murphy, MSc,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
In the wake of the untimely death of broadcaster Gerry Ryan I was talking with a group of people about it and one of them said he could not understand the huge emphasis that was put on it across the Irish media. He felt that more important news was being downgraded while news of the death was given prominence. Now you could put this down to what we call Irish begrudgery. Or was it a genuine astonishment at the outpouring of sorrow, one that pushed everything else off the front pages? Or was it a cynical response to the fact that a mere entertainer could have had such a place in the country’s collective heart?
Why would we not mourn the untimely death of someone who was so well known? It seems such an obvious question doesn’t it? But not everyone gets it. And yet we did display, through the media, a large outpouring of grief for him. You could say we did it for Princess Diana too. Or that we did it for Michael Jackson. Or for any number of famous people who died young or tragically.
The individuals themselves had become symbols of various kinds for us and so we mourned their passing for many reasons. The common element was that each encountered death with all its finality and bluntness. As such, we too had to encounter some of that finality and bluntness in their passing. Death ensures the speaking stops, that no more questions about future possibilities get asked or answered, that all relationships are truncated, that impenetrable absences are created and that living memory must now become a precious archive.
Such deaths bring us face to face with the unexpected. We don’t encounter death as a possibility in our daily lives. It is discreetly veiled off. No matter how many war reports or crime reports we read about or watch, death remains subtly out of view. It is a human thing. We drive cars at break-neck speed because we believe it will never happen to us. No soldier goes to war believing he will meet death. Even though death is the inevitable end to all of us, we could not jump out of bed in the mornings if we kept that thought to the forefront of our minds. You could say we know it and we don’t allow ourselves know it at the same time.
And of course we are helped in that by science which through its advances helps us live longer. And by medicine which ensures that we can overcome most of the serious setbacks and recover, thus continuing on life’s long road. Civil laws too ensure, for most but not all, that we can walk home safely, that our homes will not be invaded, that our towns will not be overtaken by some marauding gang and our lives abruptly ended. Despite the risk of national wars, the prospect of close, imminent, unpredictable death has been staved off. Yes cancer and other bodily diseases threaten us but we don’t expect to be randomly murdered on our doorstep. The possibility has been edged further and further off toward the far horizon of most of our lives. We simply expect to be around for a long, long time. The untimeliness of the deaths of famous people upsets this mindset.
Yet for most of mankind’s history, life was short, brutal and bloody. Our ancestors who built the Newgrange megalithic tomb some 5000 years ago had a life expectancy of 35 years. The same thing existed until recently in remote tribes that still lived in a traditional way. But the onset of democracy ensured at least we had a right to a life without oppression. Along with that, we had advances in medicine culminating in the mass production of antibiotics in the late 1940s thus making us immune to many traditionally fatal infections. Our lives may have gotten longer but the untimeliness of the death of someone famous triggers a dim recollection of a time when life was short, or could be cut short by the most unexpected circumstances.
And so our lengthening life expectancy has brought with it an inevitable belief that life will be long. Not only will it be long, but the enduring peace that has existed in Western society since World War 2 has convinced us that we will not have to face our own death until a long life is behind us. Until someone famous or someone close to us dies, we carry on whistling past the graveyard, as the saying goes.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
In the wake of the untimely death of broadcaster Gerry Ryan I was talking with a group of people about it and one of them said he could not understand the huge emphasis that was put on it across the Irish media. He felt that more important news was being downgraded while news of the death was given prominence. Now you could put this down to what we call Irish begrudgery. Or was it a genuine astonishment at the outpouring of sorrow, one that pushed everything else off the front pages? Or was it a cynical response to the fact that a mere entertainer could have had such a place in the country’s collective heart?
Why would we not mourn the untimely death of someone who was so well known? It seems such an obvious question doesn’t it? But not everyone gets it. And yet we did display, through the media, a large outpouring of grief for him. You could say we did it for Princess Diana too. Or that we did it for Michael Jackson. Or for any number of famous people who died young or tragically.
The individuals themselves had become symbols of various kinds for us and so we mourned their passing for many reasons. The common element was that each encountered death with all its finality and bluntness. As such, we too had to encounter some of that finality and bluntness in their passing. Death ensures the speaking stops, that no more questions about future possibilities get asked or answered, that all relationships are truncated, that impenetrable absences are created and that living memory must now become a precious archive.
Such deaths bring us face to face with the unexpected. We don’t encounter death as a possibility in our daily lives. It is discreetly veiled off. No matter how many war reports or crime reports we read about or watch, death remains subtly out of view. It is a human thing. We drive cars at break-neck speed because we believe it will never happen to us. No soldier goes to war believing he will meet death. Even though death is the inevitable end to all of us, we could not jump out of bed in the mornings if we kept that thought to the forefront of our minds. You could say we know it and we don’t allow ourselves know it at the same time.
And of course we are helped in that by science which through its advances helps us live longer. And by medicine which ensures that we can overcome most of the serious setbacks and recover, thus continuing on life’s long road. Civil laws too ensure, for most but not all, that we can walk home safely, that our homes will not be invaded, that our towns will not be overtaken by some marauding gang and our lives abruptly ended. Despite the risk of national wars, the prospect of close, imminent, unpredictable death has been staved off. Yes cancer and other bodily diseases threaten us but we don’t expect to be randomly murdered on our doorstep. The possibility has been edged further and further off toward the far horizon of most of our lives. We simply expect to be around for a long, long time. The untimeliness of the deaths of famous people upsets this mindset.
Yet for most of mankind’s history, life was short, brutal and bloody. Our ancestors who built the Newgrange megalithic tomb some 5000 years ago had a life expectancy of 35 years. The same thing existed until recently in remote tribes that still lived in a traditional way. But the onset of democracy ensured at least we had a right to a life without oppression. Along with that, we had advances in medicine culminating in the mass production of antibiotics in the late 1940s thus making us immune to many traditionally fatal infections. Our lives may have gotten longer but the untimeliness of the death of someone famous triggers a dim recollection of a time when life was short, or could be cut short by the most unexpected circumstances.
And so our lengthening life expectancy has brought with it an inevitable belief that life will be long. Not only will it be long, but the enduring peace that has existed in Western society since World War 2 has convinced us that we will not have to face our own death until a long life is behind us. Until someone famous or someone close to us dies, we carry on whistling past the graveyard, as the saying goes.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
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.
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.
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