Ramblings of an envious male therapist

Reflections of a Middle-Aged Male Psychotherapist on the Sense of Otherness in Males[1]  ... Howard Covitz (In volume on the Ascending Male XXIst C. , 2000)

He thought he saw  an Argument

That proved he was the Pope;

He looked again, and found it was

A Bar of Mottled Soap.

‘A fact so dread,’ he faintly said,

‘Extinguishes all hope.’

— Refrain  from  the  Gardener’s  Song in 

 Lewis  Carroll’s  Sylvie and Bruno, 1889

            I sometimes imagine an array of mirrors. Some of these surfaces are fine reflectors while others are foggy or cracked or but partially reflective due to some aging process in the surface’s material. Some face each other and others face away. Diagonal, orthogonal, pairwise skewed — a congeries of mirrors set in a never to be replicated  pattern. 

            I imagine choosing a spot in a singular mirror upon which to focus my gaze. I shall have arrived at this moment and this place and this choice of spot after years of trekking through many other such mirror mazes. Still, I shall now marvel and fascinate at the array of sequential visions that are visible through this chosen spot in this mirror. The images will stare back at me at that moment. Not simple images, but compound ones that, if I look with care, may include me, the intrusive observer who has inadvertently been cast as a shadowy figure in his own observations. And after all is done and looked at, what shall I know of what I see? What is? What is smoke and mirrors?  And what may be contingent on the choice of the chosen spot arrived at here at this random point in the midst of travels? And what shall be known of the identity of others who fortuitously may be looking in on this maze of mirrors just as I do? 

            Still and all, we participant-observers draw conclusions about the observed and write up these conclusions following consensually acceptable professional-literary guidelines in well-parsed sentences. Some of these conclusions are communicated to others. Some are maintained in silence.

            Many such conclusions that arise from such observations are responsive to queries relating to who I am in the diverse roles that I come to play in life. Who am I as child to parents? Sibling to brothers and sisters?  Friend to friend? Lover to lover? Parent to child?  Among them are those relating to who I am as a gendered other to my others. Male to Female and other Male? Female to Male and other Female? 

            Walzer, while attempting to define criticality in social thought, opined that (1987, p. 49-52): 

“Criticism requires critical distance. But what does that mean?... critical distance divides the self; when we step back (mentally), we create a double. Self one is still involved, committed, parochial, angry; self two is detached, dispassionate, impartial, quietly watching self one. ... Self three would be better still ... We form a certain picture of ourselves and the picture is painful. But this is most often a picture of ourselves as we are seen or think we are seen ... by people we value. We do not look at ourselves from nowhere in particular but through the eyes of particular other people. ... We apply standards  that we share with the others to the others.

            Walzer has, in some sense perhaps, captured my dilemma. I feel a compelling need for attachment to a multiplicity of constituent  parts of me that meet the World. These allow for the possibility of experience and feeling that are birthed, in part, by some repeated internal feedback mechanism from the others who populate my World and who appear peering back at me in and from my maze of mirrors.          

            Like Carroll’s befuddled and befuddling Gardener (above), I may come to imagine that the organization of my visions about myself and about who I am represent a structured argument about the observed. These may be thought to have the infallible force of the Mathematics that Carroll, the eccentric teacher of this subject, presented as Tutor to Christ College. Like the Gardener, however, who mouths these words with tears rolling down his cheeks, I must be prepared to consider that, in fact, I typically find aught but a cursorily assembled handful of miscolored fats that may well melt away under the pressures of a lone trickle of water.  A voice calls out to me from an inhospitable and poorly landmarked wilderness: Change your focus in the mirrors and change your reality! Maybe so.

            In any case, I shall take this opportunity to reflect on a number of matters that relate to the interweaving of my senses of myself as a person and as a male person. Particularly, I find myself drawn to matters connected to my perception of myself as another to another. I shall be hard-pressed to separate out what others perceive in me from what I imagine they see in me. Therefore, I shall be unable to unambiguously separate between the two that I continue to consider the standard equipment that I bring to any and all considerations of this kind. I shall be satisfied to have shared the views of a singular male who qua child, sibling, lover/husband, father and male therapist has arrived ... somehow and somewhere or other into the Twenty First Century[2] .

Identifications: Am I But My Father’s Son?

            Let me be more direct and personal about my intentions in this brief communication which seeks to place nagging questions in the path of growing theoretical certainties surrounding matters of gendered identifications. To begin! I am a male therapist originally trained in the Freudian genre. who has come to an idiosyncratic object relations perspective in his practice. The visitors who occasion my office are either female or male and typically consider themselves either homosexual or heterosexual, as the case may be.  My image of myself qua therapist is of a carefully attentive but blind beach-walker accompanying a sighted companion. My fellow traveler chooses, from time to time, to share with me his or her visions from the nearby surf to which we both — in our own ways — attend and from which, in some odd fashion, our  forebears first crawled up upon dry land. 

            My blindness is, alas, a part of my ideal image of myself as therapist and not fully realizable. This is to be expected and a flaw for which, due to its ubiquity, I need not apologize. We all arrive at the maze of mirrors (alluded to at the beginning of this discussion) situated at some locus from which we view our world. I am, as just noted, a male. But what can this possibly mean? Does it denote the fact that I was androgenized in utero? Does it refer to the fact that I belong to a group that — statistically speaking — wields more power than the group that remained true to its Universal female origins by eschewing fetal androgenization? Perhaps, the statement that I am male specifies a pathway by which choices were made to identify more strongly with my father than with my mother? I think not! 

            The first two alternatives sound too pat and the third appears to circumnavigate the complexity of the matter. True, it is, that I was androgenized by some miracle of my mother’s endocrine system! Truth, too, it may well have been preferable during the half-plus century of my life to don the attire and behaviors of other males. And it is even so that in a variety of ways I am identified with my father and (maternal) grandfather; I recognize, for instance, a delight in the visceral that I adopted from my father and an equal pleasure in the ethereal that I borrowed from my ecclesiastical grandpa! But how, pray tell, do I separate out my father or, for that matter, my grandfather from the fathers I visioned or fantasied in my mother’s eyes? Or carrying it a bit closer to my own maze of mirrors, how may I separate either of the above identifications from the one that obtains from looking at my father’s view of my mother’s images of her husband and father? And so on — throughout a never-ending sequence of mirrored images which includes inter alia a multiplicity of identifications with my mother.

            Statistical discoveries about gender identifications are statements about a group and are, in this manner, pertinent only to the study of Social Psychology and to probabilistic guessing about a given individual’s Psyche. Clinically speaking, matters are never so forthright. While Freud’s views on the child’s identification with the similar-sex parent is well known, his doubts about whether children in the post-?dipal phase identified predominantly with the same-sex parent or rather with both parents are less often cited. He notes, for instance (The Ego and the Id, 1923B, S.E. 19, p. 33-4): “In my opinion it is advisable in general, and quite especially where neurotics are concerned, to assume the existence of the complete ?dipus complex ... the four trends of which it consists will group themselves in such a way as to produce a father-identification and a mother-identification.” I would add that, beyond these first-order identifications with mother and father, we must attend to the mirrored second-order ones — father-in-mother and mother-in-father — and others beyond. No template is, alas, available for the gendered maze of mirrors, thus generated! And the experimental literature is no more helpful in extricating this therapist from his perplexities in treating either a nominally female or nominally male patient (see appendix which reviews a number of studies) or in coming to understand his own maleness. I am left, then, with myself and with my singular images of myself as a male and all remarks that follow must be examined in this narrow context — the phenomenology of me.

Being Another: Confessions of an Envious Male[3] 

            Maleness and femaleness elude the boundaried world of measurable biological and psychological gifts passed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Without denying the impact that endocrine/hormonal messengers  may have on behavior, nearly as much of our taste for the world seems to be inherited from our other-sexed parent as from the same-sex parent (again, see Appendix) and variation within each gender class may well be equally far-ranging as comparable variation between these classes. Still and all, my experience of the world as a male — as well as my perception of how this world perceives me — may well possess qualities that are unique to my gender class.

            As I write these words and repeat them to myself, I fear gagging on them. Did I not spend the past twenty two years of my life talking-up,  promoting and writing ponderously (Covitz, 1997 — 400+ pages is always suspiciously ponderous) about a revised ?dipus? This model was a gender-free developmental paradigm whose maturational goal in both sexes was the development of a capacity for cherishing the inner stirrings and relationships of others — an ongoing battle that was to be, in each instance, first tested out on the parents. Was I not the same person who often spoke lightheartedly about the many similarities between the most fundamental wishes of men and women?[4]  Hadn’t my wife and I tried to raise our three children in an unambiguously egalitarian style?  Perhaps I was the same person. Perhaps not. These thoughts bring me to adult memories. In each such instance, the sense of otherness was manifest and may well  — in some manner or another — have related to my sense of maleness. They represent my confessions as an envious male and a sense of the potential healthfulness that may precipitate from the role of the other.

            ? I want Mommy: 

            Bettelheim (1954) studied the envious male in African and Australian tribes and with children in his Orthogenic School.  He went so far as to claim that all creative endeavors relate to mimicry and envy of the fecund mother.  This information was certainly never a necessary condition, however, in order for me to envy my wife and her ability to birth and her further abilities, thereafter, to remain as-one with each child; I came to these, myself[5] . Everywhere I looked, the power of the mother and her relationship to her child were heralded and praised. I recall when my wife and I were dating and joined throngs of souls, cued up from morning till night at the New York World’s Fair to pass by and steal a brief glimpse at Michelangelo’s Pieta. All gathered to view Mary with the crucified Jesus draped over her lap. And when we traveled, everywhere were statues of Maria mit kind and everywhere, too, were youngsters tagging along after mothers, holding on, like devotees clinging with sacred reverence to Goddesses.

            We thought we would be different. My wife and I would rear our young with attachments — more or less equal — to both of us! Ah! But as the youngsters of a later generation might say: Right!

            No. I suspect Abelin (1971,1975,1980) was closer to the truth. He argued (based on observational studies) that among the  father’s most important roles is to permit the child to initiate detachment from the primary symbiotic relationship to mother. This phase of dual-unity with mother is essential to the development and solidification of the all-important ability to love. Important, too, is the child’s capacity to increase the orbit of applicability of this love and to reach out to others. Father appears as a first such other. His presence allows for triangulation out of the maternal dyad, would foster a sort of emotional parallax, and would promote a depth of field in relationships by being background to mother’s foreground. Mater semper certus, the Roman law said, and while it meant to refer to the relative certainty of maternal identity over the relative uncertainty of paternal identity (pater semper incertus), it may well hide a more profound truth. Namely, the relationship to mom is in some fundamental way more substantive and less shadowy than that with dad.

            In this world, a saying goes, you have to take your medicine but you don’t have to lick the spoon. Try as I might to be warm and available, I was not the Mommy and throughout the early years of our children’s lives — at least from time to time — was relegated to the role of some Virgil who might guide a despairing and frightened Dante toward safety but could never be the source of that security. I want Mommy, they would say.  At best, perhaps, I could see myself as the other or surrogate mommy. At worst, I might become the envious outsider not to be permitted, except as an observer, into that sacred meeting.

            ? Why can’t you be like other fathers: 

            I came to appreciate my role as other and helper, as my children and I developed relationships different than the one they had with my wife but quite intimate and close, nonetheless. If I may paraphrase Ethics of the Fathers: Who is healthy? He who comes to rejoice in his life’s roles. I was better at play than my wife (though, qua fan of such contests, they tended to watch televised professional athletics with her), more comfortable with intellectual frolics (Bettelheim’s comments recalled) and was, perhaps, better at listening without advising. I had gifts to offer, that is,  and enjoyed sharing them. And then came adolescence! One of my kids struck the blow that began, as memory would have it, the demolition of my fantasies for an uninterrupted life of shared moments with my kids:

Dad. I can’t invite people over the house on Sunday. I just can’t. Fathers are supposed to be chilling out, leaning back with a beer can in one hand and the remote in the other, transfixed on the tube. That’s the way dads are. Why can’t you be like other fathers?  You sit there reading and doing stupid stuff.

And so, beginning precipitously — and lasting for some five years — I, again, became the other — this time to our older children. It was not, let me add, that my wife was not distanced from the children, as well, during and after a life’s moment that we came to call pubic shock; she was. In our discussions, however, there has been some considerable agreement that her sense of alienation with the children was never quite so complete. Additionally, in some sense or other, the cooling off between our children and myself had a certain resonance with the past, a curious sense of deja vu, as if I’d been there before and would revisit this space, again and again. And while this period of life has long-since come to a close, I still vividly recall a sense of dejection, as if I’d been prematurely taken away from something wondrous, plucked from a source of nurture ... and alone.       

            ? How do you dare presume:

            By the mid-1980’s, I found myself leading seminars at an institute that trained psychoanalytically-oriented clinicians. The teaching of a two-semester course on Freud fell to me after a senior and much loved colleague died suddenly. I had long-since questioned the precise form of many psychoanalytic constructs and found myself, in this seminar, steering a course between extremes, feeling neither compulsion to deify nor to crucify Freud, and felt a characteristic ease in freely fascinating about this or that in his writings. I was speaking one day of Freud’s much criticized comment on the female conscience, wherein (1925J, SE 19) he notes that it is never quite so inexorably separated from a woman’s feelings as it is in the male. I wondered out loud about how much better it might be if the male conscience were not similarly constructed. I conjectured that the combination of male leaders’ sense of justice and their similarly androgenized foot-soldiers’ propensities for tolerating what Freud referred to as the exigencies of life might well be responsible for the madness we call war. Was it not possible, I queried, that, as anthropos developed, our consciences, our Superegos, might come to more closely resemble the female version described (or invented) by Freud?

            I went on to criticize the Good Doctor from Vienna for his casting my own gender as lost in viewing the world through an erect ureter (something akin to the image of the serpent, Uroboros, swallowing and fixated on his own tail) and to further criticize him for the untenability (from empirical studies) of many of his constructions surrounding penis envy. I was immediately and soundly chastised and  thrashed by one of the students for putting her through such an onerous task — having to listen to a male who not only presented this odious material but preemptively usurped her right to criticize it by criticizing it, himself. How do you dare presume, she queried, to criticize this material before I do? Classes sometimes behave like frenzied sharks and within moments I found myself cast as the designated prey.

            I offer no claims for the reasonability of the feelings of vulnerability I experienced in this classroom situation on that particular day, any more than I would for similar vulnerable feelings I experienced as an outsider to the idyllic bliss of the mother-infant dyad or during my expulsion from the Garden during my children’s adolescences. Feelings are not subject to such scrutiny and would rarely pass muster on any test of reasonability. I was surprised, though, by the degree to which I felt excluded and full of sadness. As a man, as a male teacher, perhaps,  I had no place in and was not permitted entry into this one particular student’s view of the feminist dialogue. And the Lord God cast him out of the Garden of Eden — and I, perchance, had no place to go except into these feelings. 

            ? I want Mommy (again):

            Without ever articulating the I want Mommy, from time to time, it is abundantly clear that in certain rites and rituals, there is little room for me qua father. When hurt, when pained, when anguished, when giving birth, the Mommy, as my wife is good-humoredly and affectionately called by her adult brood, rules! And after many years of scrutinizing my own feelings about this, I have become a good helper and more comfortable in being the arranger, in bringing the Mommy and her grown children together. Planning for our youngest child’s wedding, I accepted the task of making certain that no one was offended in the planning process, that a comfortable blending of ideas would result. I do my tasks well and, still, I occasionally envy the Mommy. I envy her the right to enter into these sacred moments in which not only ideas but souls blend. I shall come back to this soon, but for now: Enough said.

            ? How do you dare presume (once more):

            In 1995, I attended a meeting on multicultural counseling and presented some notes on some consonances of world view that occurred in the treatment of a woman. She was approximately my age, a therapist with an interest in Education as I was, and had grown up, though one hundred miles removed, in a Philadelphia neighborhood similar to the Brooklyn of my childhood. I noted that interestingly the fact that our skin colors were different seemed to play almost no role in our work together, so much so that I had wondered aloud in one such session, how it was that this difference caused no untoward dissonance. Perhaps, I opined, we had colluded not to be disturbed by our differences and were denying the role that it played. The patient responded, apparently having considered this matter at an earlier time. She explained that in her estimation we had been colluding in keeping something silent but it was not related to our skin color. Instead, she reasoned, her Baptist background and my Jewish background were difficult to reconcile. I had, she reasoned, difficulty in recognizing how hard it might be for her to articulate certain thoughts. Her Christian religion taught her that fantasies and words could buy her, maybe not a one-way ticket, but a ticket, nonetheless, to Hell. I might have a hard time understanding that; she was correct. I had, in fact, long been annoyed by the admonition in Matthew V: And I say whosoever shall have committed adultery in his heart, has committed adultery. Every sinew in my Freudian body called out loudly: the non-thought is father to the deed, antithetical to the statement in Matthew. And, yes, this would be something we both needed to understand in our therapeutic relationship, together.

            In any case, I had chosen to present this vignette to the seminar that day from work that was very important to me with the hopes of shedding some light on the subtle differences in culture that might intrude on relationships in and out of therapy. Indeed. Light may not have shone, that morning, but of heat there was a sufficiency! How do you dare presume, a male participant raged, to treat a woman and an African American woman, at that? Where do you come off doing that? 

            As in the case of my chastising student (above), I offer this up not to settle any matter surrounding the correctness of the espoused views. Perchance, it would have been better for this woman to have been treated by another African-American woman; she chose, after interviewing a number of therapists, to be treated by me. Rather, it is my own consistent reaction that continues to surprise me. I felt excluded, once again, disconnected from an acceptable lot of therapists, persona non grata in the seminar and with no right of inclusion. Sadness followed, as  it had in the other situations to which I’ve alluded. Perhaps, after all, sadness in men and women represents a much undervalued sentiment. In any case, my own sadness seems to relate to this sense of exclusion, to this sense of otherness, as I’ve now frequently noted. There are times that I fret that we were better off fifty million years ago before awareness entered our cognitive armamentarium, before we were able to reflect on the sadnesses of everyday life. Most of the time I revel in the joys of this awareness in spite of the feelings it may bring..

The Otherness of Being Male: How Do I Find My Mother[6] ?

            One cannot help but be struck by the compelling nature of our human drive to unite, to join with another — sexually and otherwise. And while I see certain differences, the compulsions seem equally strong among both of these classes that are, in our minds, separated out as male and female. Furthermore, as a result of my own clinical work, it seems likely that both men and women, in their pursuit of lovers, are seeking to reinstate something akin to the dual-unity that exists between a mother and her infant. And similar to that earliest relationship in which all types of needs and sensations are provided for, healthy adult sexuality incorporates sensations and/or behaviors that are customarily thought of as oral, anal and genital. The good enough lover/mother revels in, glorifies and seeks to holistically satisfy — body and soul — the lover/infant. Perhaps, it is no mere linguistic coincidence that since Roman times, marriage is referred to as matrimony (matrimonium), a word that combines the root word for mother (mater) with a word signifying singularity (monium). Perhaps, the use of this word, itself, heralds some subliminal recognition of the pursuit of the mother in any such coupling.  

            Still and all and even now in the Twenty First Century, there do appear to be — at least anecdotally speaking — certain notable differences that may well relate to the  sense of the male qua outsider. I offer three perhaps related and maybe controversial thoughts.

? The female lover can hope to emulate and become (like) mother, while at the same time seeking unity with her; the male lover can only hope to recapture a lost dual-unity with his mother.[7]  

? In humor and common cultural rites, as well as in the reports (anecdotal) of therapy patients, men are more commonly the seekers and women are the gatekeepers and welcomers.

 ? The fantasied[8]  — and to some extent even the realistic — mechanics of the dances representing the varieties of human intercourse are reportedly experienced, by men and women, as following similar patterns — with men seeking and women welcoming. 

One woman reported the fantasy of “repeatedly birthing and expelling, welcoming and exiling” during intercourse. Another noted rather matter of factly: “After penetration, I feel as if I am giving life and after orgasm I feel like I have given life.” One man noted that, until penetration, he felt “removed and denied” by his lover and that it was only after intercourse that he felt “united and together.”  Another man reported his belief that after penetration “in losing a part of myself inside of her, I felt as if I was no longer separate from her, no longer alone.”  The man, it must be said, who has made no peace with and has no ownership over the fantasied nature of these mostly unconscious constructions may well come to believe that his denial by his lover is real and may come to act like a petulant child ... a sulking and/or raging outsider denied entry to some sacred ground. And while my own reaction to being excluded (from the mother-infant dyad, from my children’s adolescences, or from accepted membership in groups) may have centered on sadness, I cannot help but wondering whether or not there is some heightened sense of being an outsider that is intrinsic to maleness. I go on to fascinate about whether these feelings and the awareness of these feelings may not still be usable in pursuit of The Good Life. 

Health & Intersubjectivity

            While uncertainty, for those who require certainty, may breed anxiety, Sextus Empiricus claimed that the suspension of judgment for those with a willingness to tolerate ambiguity and doubt (skepticism) gives birth to what he called ataraxia and that we might translate as quietude. The latter part of last century and the new one have witnessed a welcome-for-many blurring of gender boundaries. My wife and I work and make decisions and make love and spend and save, sometimes together and betimes in parallel! How blessed I feel to be untethered from the specific tasks that previous generations considered masculine. How favored I feel to share the burden of some of the less-blessed tasks of masculinity. And how good-fortuned do I feel to partake in some of those (previously) culturally-designated feminine tasks. Thus, having suggested a sense of otherness that betimes washes over this one male person, I will briefly address the manner in which I see the acceptance of this otherness as consistent with one of the paths that may  lead to the Good Life.

            In a previous work (Covitz, 1997), I sought to introduce a specific line of psychological growth that, or so it was suggested, was the underbelly of the symbolic ?dipus Complex that Sigmund Freud first reported to his friend and collocutor, Willhelm Fliess, in 1897. This more general (than Freud’s) developmental line claimed to chart the individual’s growth from a paranoid-like state in which even the thoughts of another had to be recast in the language of the self to a mature stage in which the central necessity, perhaps, for membership in communities of mutual concern and interest would be developed. This most progressed endpoint of this developmental line included an ability, at least with specially selected others, to cherish the inner stirrings, thoughts and relationships of these others. This capacity was there referred to as intersubjectivity, a name chosen to connote, in a sense akin to its grammatical one (object vis-a-vis subject), the ability to perceive the other as a subject in their own right. It was argued that there was a natural propensity to imagine that all God’s creations somehow and in some way or another were created to satisfy one’s own needs and that the manner in which the senses worked[9]  also boded poorly for an ability to transcend this narcissistic mode of dealing with one’s others and their silly preoccupations. It was further argued that Freud’s ?dipus, a particular and very special case of these developments,  underscored the need in each of us to first settle this self-referencing matter with our parents in learning to accept and even to cherish the relationship that they had with each other. Freud’s primal scene was reinterpreted, then, as the child’s struggle against accepting that everything the parents do has to do with  ongoing efforts to best raise the child. Freud’s Superego, his uber-Ich, was reconceptualized in this new language, as well.

            The five stages that were suggested may be abbreviated, as follows:

Stage I.              The propensity to reject that another thinks, desires or needs;

Stage II. The refusal to acquiesce to another’s inner world unless it is self referenced back to the Other; 

Stage III.            The propensity to recoil from another’s thinking about yet another.

Stage IV.            The tendency to recoil from the recognition of another’s relationships.

Stage V. Incipient forms of intersubjectivity and a primus inter pares view  of the World as it relates to the other in a given relationship and the resulting ability to cherish the inner thoughts and stirrings and the actual relationships of another.   

            In this particular conceptualization of health, i.e., the attainment of a degree of intersubjectivity, there are two significant benchmarks that must be reached and that must be in some degree of alignment if development is to succeed. The first of these is a capacity for the melding and fusing with another. This precipitates from a healthful period of bonding with a mother-figure who is capable of celebrating the joys of her infant while withstanding the particular threats of this kind of fusion for her that emanate from this lengthy period of attachment required by the human infant.[10]     

            The second benchmark to which I refer has to do with the capacity to stand outside and away from, while supporting, such a fused pairing. Here, too, there are celebratory aspects and dangerous ones. On the joyous side, there is a satisfaction that arises from meeting one’s own expectations relating to how one ideally ought to behave[11] — becoming, so to speak, who one wants to be. In addition, such empathic attunement with a pair of others brings with it the fruits of the gratitude that these others betimes experience. And while there appears to be preciously scant evidence that punishment functions as a deterrent, there seems considerable evidence that empathy breeds empathy (Covitz, 1997, chapters 7 and 8). Still and all, there remain liabilities that may accrue and feelings of exclusion and abandonment do appear quite regularly — and therefore may be assumed to be in some sense intrinsic — with those adopting this position. To have the ability to bond and to choose, instead and for a moment, to function as a support for two others who are thus bonded-together is, simultaneously, a developmental achievement and an opening for the vulnerabilities that may accompany the outsider.

            Freud (in his theory of somatic compliance) and Adler (in his theory of organ inferiority), each in their own way, postulated that psychological defenses were frequently enlisted to compensate for an absence, for something that was weak or missing. I am, in these thoughts, suggesting, instead, a built-in pairing of naturally acquired and evolutionarily required skills or gifts that bring with them expectable liabilities against which we each must defend ourselves[12] . If the female (or the male taking her role) of our species is required by the needs of her infant for long periods of time to give up her sense of separateness, then it is quite expectable that she may defend against this requirement for fusion with another. And if the male (or the female taking her role) is similarly required by the needs of a next generation to become the supportive outsider to the mother-infant dyad, then it is equally expectable for him to defend against his assigned role and to recoil from it. 

            As an aside and without belaboring details in textual analysis, allow me a brief digression into biblical characterology — a detour that may demonstrate a comparable pairing of skill with conflict about that skill. In exegetal writings, the commentaries make no small fuss about Abraham’s capacities as a host, as a welcomer of guests. And in a similar manner, both text and commentaries extol Moses’ virtue as being humbler than any other person who lived. And yet, a fair reading of the texts exposes, if anything, men who struggled with these virtues and, perhaps, never prevailed in these inner battles. Abraham’s singular attempt at being hospitable (opening lines of Genesis 18) sees a man instructing his wife to bake breads and his older son to roast a tender calf. True enough, Abraham makes the decision to provide for his three desert visitors. Still, I wonder how it has been for the generations of wives and children who have read these texts in which their ilk do the work, while pundits credit the virtuousness of the husband and father who, in high fashion, entertains. Similarly, throughout Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, as readers read the explicitly stated humility of the Man Moses, the text screams to be read differently and paints an all too clear picture of a leader who struggles with this very issue as he attempts to govern his obstreperous, petulant and disobedient people, chides his God for burdening him with them, and suffers his lot.

            And so I end my brief phenomenological journey into who I am as a man entering a new century and how the sense of being an outsider may interweave with a male identity, so constructed.

Closing Thoughts

            Who among us fails to wish for some guiding star or for a mentor (saffron-robed or cigar-smoking and bearded — it makes little difference) who might light the path that best follows that star? Alas! There are preciously few compasses and no well-marked charts to follow in pursuit of understanding ourselves or others! In meeting another — or ourselves, for that matter —  we have, in the end, no druthers but to follow the exquisitely intercalated structure of each person’s maze of mirrors and to patiently wait until this other admits us to gaze inside from the unique position that they have come to occupy. Looking from within this labyrinth, reflecting on my own experiences as a man and inviting others to see what I believe to have witnessed, I chose to focus on a singular difference that I imagined or observed — who can tell —   between men and women. This difference had to do with a relative dominance of either inclinations to meld and to defend against such fusing or else to function as an outside supporter with its defensive liabilities of envious onlooking and feelings of exclusion.        

            And yet I hold to my belief, the one which flies in the face of the experiences I have elaborated (above), that both men and women, in order to partake of the richness of life, must make some peace with both the subjectivity that arises in dyadic blending and with the lesser-subjectivity that is a part of the legacy of those who must — from time to time and as outsiders to the dyad — be content with observing and supporting. The balancing of these is, alas, no mean task!

            Perhaps, the emphasis nowadays on Gender Studies is best understood as another complex optical illusion, this one a reflection of certain societal movements  that  have dictated the paradigmatic divisions of the world that we are led to study by our philosophies. Betimes, we may come to believe that we can abbreviate the job of learning about another by coming to understand group statements about a culture to which we imagine s/he belongs — racial, sexual, ethnic or otherwise. There is, however, no way to avoid the complexity of the often messy task of being with another — sometimes fused and sometimes watching. As we men and women meet, we are  unalterably an admixture of mother, father and a host of others. Each of us is an oleo of all the caricatured dichotomies, including: male and female; narcissist and object-related lover; war-mongerer and pacifist; white and black; fused lover and envious voyeur; and all the other splits that sentient beings bring — fortunately or otherwise — to order the madness of differences. 

            As a therapist and as a person, I cannot afford the luxury of these simplifications, of even the tentative application of statistical conclusions about the group to an individual — even the ones to which I’ve tentatively admitted in these pages. Interestingly for me, experience suggests that the visitors who occasion my office are frequently less inured to these dichotomies than are the clinicians and theoreticians whose volumes adorn my shelves. As healer, I move throughout any given clinical day, becoming this person’s father and another’s mother or sister or brother. I become an older sibling to an octogenarian and either a John Birchist or  loving kin to a member of some racial or ethnic minority group to which I do or do not belong. On some psychic-scape, perhaps, I am and we are all these beings that look into and peer back from the maze of mirrors. And still, I do wonder about some of these differences that seem to occasion my own trek as a man.

?     Appendix     ? 

Some Empirical Studies Relating to Gender Indentifications

         These appended notes are included as antidote to my suggested and tentative bifurcation of our species into predominantly fusing types and those who view themselves as outsiders to the sacred dyad.  As any such split would require evidence for a predominant identification of son with father and daughter with mother which the following researches fail to rigorously support. And such an appendix may function as a reparation for the essentialist heresy that I have proposed and may permit a comfortable return to my origins as generic offspring of two parents!

            A number of studies have attempted to demonstrate the dominance of same sex identifications in the child; and while I have found no studies that directly tested the two-sided propensity for identification, as a group, it may be said, they support this view, as I shall attempt to demonstrate in this brief review of some empirical studies. [13] 

            Levy (1954) had 10 to 11 year-olds match male and female names to objects and found no preferential patterns.  Acord (1962) discovered that third, sixth and ninth graders failed to demonstrate such same sex identifications, while Lessler (1964), using similar techniques, found that fourth and ninth graders’ behaviors did follow this prescription of same-sex identification. Ward (1969) had children (K-2 in school) associate a variety of adjectives to self, mother and father; he, thereafter, analyzed the frequency of consonance with each parent. While no statistically significant difference was noted (i.e., the  hypothesis that identifications were equally distributed was not rejectable), there was a non-significant trend for the boys in the group to be more identified with mother. Hartup (1962) attempted to investigate this matter with doll-play, wherein, children (aged: 3.5-5.5) were asked to carry out a series of activities and then to carry them out as their mothers and fathers might. Here, the group-as-a-whole behaved in a manner consistent with the hypothesis of same-sex identification — but only in a statistically significant sense with the actual proportions being quite close. The conventional prediction collapsed, however, when the groups were split into older and younger subgroups, where it might be anticipated that the older children would identify more strenuously with the same-sex parent than the younger group. Here, too, it should be noted that the difference, while statistically significant, was not quantitatively significant. Like Hartup (above), Kohlberg and Zigler (1966) utilized doll play to examine consonant styles of behavior in children and their parents. Their results generally supported the hypothesis of same-sex identification. However, while in the case of females, there was a greater identification with mothers than with fathers during the explored ages (4-6 year olds), there was increased identification with father during this same period of time. So far, one sees no overwhelming evidence to support one-sided or predominant identifications. But allow me to continue.

            Brown and Tolor (1957) reviewed more than sixteen studies that  claimed to examine preferential identification patterns manifest by the gender of the first figure drawn in Draw-A-Person techniques. While confirming the conventional view that normal college men (91%) and women (63%) draw a picture of their own sex first, they conclude their study noting (p. 210): “At the present time, the only valid conclusion is that the basis or significance of drawing a person of the opposite sex first is not known.”

            Cameron (1967) took a different attack on the question of identification, choosing, one might say, to highlight developmental movements in the identification process. A sample of 2,336 children were asked to choose between twelve pairs of pictures (originally utilized by McElroy, 1954) with each pair containing a phallic-shaped object and another with a rounded, containing, and, presumably, more female shape. He predicted that: until the age of four, no preference would be manifest in the data; from 4-6 years of age, children would prefer the shapes associated with the opposite sex; from 7-11 preference would be for objects associated with the same-sex; and from aged 12 onward, preference would return to the opposite sex. Cameron’s hypotheses were, he suggests, confirmed (sig: .10). While one may argue for or against the clinical utility of such group preference tests in evaluating such complex responses,  even the question of their support remains unanswered. Let me explain.

            Cameron’s data (p. 36) for Latency aged children (ages 7-12, N=965), those who (theoretically) should demonstrate a strongly skewed same-sex identification, are as follows (I list only the totals for the 12 modified McElroy Cards):

                        Boy’s  Choices                                 Girl’s Choices         

            Male Symbol   Female Symbol           Male Symbol   Female Symbol

                 3668                                   2281                      3530                                  2364

Cameron appears to argue (p. 34-35) that these results support a view of same sex identification during the post-?dipal period if we control for factors in a “U.S.... male-oriented culture.” In spite of his arguments, however, I leave Cameron’s study struck by the similarity of values in these two subgroups. While one may accept Cameron’s statistics and not be notably concerned with choice of significance levels for his tests (sign: .10), I remain unconvinced of their relevance to an hypothesis of preferential identifications. 

            Fisher and Greenberg (1977), in reviewing this literature (while citing works by:  Gray and Klaus, 1956; Beier and Ratzenburg, 1953; Sopchak, 1952; Pishkin, 1960; Ryle and Lunghi, 1972; and Byrne, 1965) suggest that the hypothesis of same-sex identification seems to be generally supported. They go on to note (p. 186):

It is true that a number of studies have not found evidence for identification  with the same-sex parent ... But it is still fair to say that the majority of evidence indicates that same-sex identification is the prevalent pattern.

I should like to suggest, to the contrary, that the conjoin of these studies seems to suggest that whatever method one chooses, there are notable identifications with both parents qua individuals, and, perhaps, identifications with culturally-masculine and culturally-feminine stereotypes — as, for instance, in Cameron’s study.  Kohlberg (1966) and Lynn (1969) have each, interestingly, argued that what may be thought of as identifications with the same-sex parent may well relate to both parties’ coincidental membership in the same gender-class — an early articulation, one might say, of theories of the socially-constructed nature of gender. 

            A number of studies sought to investigate an association between identification or its absence and psychological disturbances. Cava and Raush (1952), in a study with 37 twelfth grade high school boys, sought to demonstrate that (p. 855) “those individuals who show greater conflict in areas ... related to identification ... will indirectly perceive themselves as less-similar to their like-sex parent than will those who show less conflict in these areas.” The Strong Interest Inventory was administered twice, first as they would answer it themselves and, then three days later, as they imagined their father might. A Blacky Test (Blum, 1949) was administered five days later. Students were rated as weak or strong in ?dipality on five dimensions of the Blacky Test. Differences between the two groups were significant only on the Castration Anxiety Dimension and for the Total Identification Score — and, once again, showed no overwhelming differences that might permit generalization to any given individual in clinical treatment[14] .

            In a similarly designed study of a possible connection between identification and conflict or disturbance, Sopchak (1952, p. 159) examined “the relation between the tendency toward identification with parents and tendencies towards specific types of abnormalities as measured by the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).” He sought to test two psychoanalytic hypotheses: one suggesting that normal development requires identification and the second that certain psychopathological conditions arise due to identifications. The MMPI was given four times to 78 men and 30 women. It was to be taken: as Self, as father, as mother and as most people. A straightforward count of similar responses was used as a measure of identification.

            Sopchak was able to confirm the following hypotheses, among others. He confirmed that — once again, as a group — normal men tend to identify with fathers somewhat more often than with mothers. Men in the group with tendencies toward abnormality showed a greater lack of identification with father than with mother, but showed less identification with both than normals. Men who failed to identify with their father tended toward the MMPI’s psychotic triad (paranoia, schizophrenia and hypomania) more than toward the neurotic dimensions; this held true for women, as well. Women with abnormal scores on the MMPI showed a similar tendency to be less identified with their fathers. Positive identification with mother — among women — was correlated with some types of abnormality. Johnson’s (1987) study of delinquents confirmed some of these differences, as well.

            I leave these studies, then, unmoved and without a compass to guide the way in understanding my own responses to life’s surprises and without unambiguous means of interpreting within the gender maze of mirrors with which I began. Life is, after all is said and done, complex and messy.

??????

?      Bibliography     ?

Acord, L. (1962). Sexual symbolism as a correlate of age. Journal of Consulting Psychology,   26,  pp. 279-281.

Blum, G. (1949). A study of the psychoanalytic theory of psychosexual development. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 39, pp. 3-99.

Brown, D. and A. Tolor (1957). Human figure drawings as indicators of sexual identification and inversion. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 7, pp. 199-211.

Cameron, P. (1967). Confirmation of the Freudian psychosexual stages utilizing sexual symbolism. Psychological Reports, 21, pp. 33-39.

Cava, E. and H. Raush (1952). Identification and the adolescent boy’s perception of his father. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47, pp. 855-856.

Covitz, H. (1997). ?dipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon (1897-1997). New York/Bern:Peter Lang Publishers.

Fisher, S. and R. Greenberg (1977). The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, S. (1923B). The Ego and the Id. Standard Edition. 19:12.

Freud, S. (1925J). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinctions between the sexes. Standard Edition. 19:243.

Hartup, W. (1962). Some Correlates of Parental Imitation in Young Children. Child  Development,            33, pp. 85-96.

Johnson, R. (1987). Mother’s versus father’s role in causing delinquency. Adolescence, 22(86), pp. 305-315.

Kohlberg, L. (1966). Moral and religious education in the public schools. In T. Sizer, Religion and Public Education. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Kohlberg, L. and E. Zigler (1966). The impact of cognitive maturity on the development of sex-role attitudes in the years 4 - 8. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 75, pp. 89-165.

Lessler, K. (1964). Cultural and Freudian dimensions of sexual symbols. Journal of  Consulting Psychology, 28(1), pp. 46-53.

Levy, L. (1954). Sexual symbolism: a validity study. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 7, pp. 881-918.

Lynn, D. (1969). Parental and Sex-Role Identification.  Berkeley: McCutchan.

Sarnoff, I. (1971). Testing Freudian Concepts: An Experimental Social Approach. New York:  Springer.

Sopchak, A. (1952). Parental identification and tendency toward disorder as  measured     by the    Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Journal of Abnormal and  Social  Psychology, 47, pp. 159-165.

Walzer, M (1987). Interpretation and Social Criticism. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 

Ward, W. (1969). Process of sex-role development. Developmental Psychology 1, pp. 163-168.

Howard H. Covitz, N.C.PsyA., Ph.D.

Director

Inst. for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies

24 Latham Parkway

Melrose Park, PA 19027-3148

tele: 215-635-5368

[email protected]

Howard Covitz, Ph.D., is  Director of and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies (Bryn Mawr, PA) and sits on a variety of psychoanalytic boards. His trek to these roles encompassed interests in Religious and Secular Education and Administration, and the teaching of Statistics and Mathematics (Temple & Villanova Universities). He trained psychoanalytically at the Psychoanalytic Studies Institute (Philadelphia), deciding only later and nearing mid-life to complete the doctorate in Clinical Psychology. He practices and lives with his wife in Melrose Park (PA) — from whence they travel to visit their children who, with their spouses, have acted as able and persistent collocutors in his writings.

[1] While these thoughts borrow freely from ideas set forth in this author’s ?dipal Paradigms in Collision: A Centennial Emendation of a Piece of Freudian Canon (1897-1997), a volume  which proffered a gender-free object relational model for ?dipal development, they owe their origins with all due thanks to Marsha, with whom I have been involved for some thirty five years in matrimonial experiments surrounding matters of similarities  and differences, of male and female, of mother and father. The author would like to extend thanks, as well, to the editors of this volume for affording a quite rare opportunity to speak about and to be heard articulating  the life and private theories of a singular therapist.

[2] As an aside, I find it a daunting experience to have entered this new century and, yet, to be aware that I shall always be thought of as a Twentieth Century thinker. It is only recently that I have been able to experience the violence that my own generation perpetrated against those who came before us and whose works straddled two centuries. These subdivisions and their ilk, be they like century markers cutting up time or gender classes separating people, are among the most curious  and, perhaps, gratuitously destructive creations of clan anthropos.

[3]  There is always some danger in providing personal anecdotes. This study is, after all, an attempt to offer a contribution to the sense of maleness at the turn of the Century. Many in the world of Science equate objectivity with rigor — and subjectivity with either sloppiness or polemics. And one who openly demonstrates his personal interest in the subject matter of his work is, at times, not looked upon favorably. I have, however, so frequently exposed this penchant of mine that one more occurrence can hardly change the world’s view of this author or his work. 

[4] When asked to address an audience in 1995 about Gray’s  popular Mars-Venus model, I agreed providing only that the talk was titled: Women are from Mars and Men Have a Penis.

[5] I use the word envy generically, separating out in my own mind between malignant envy in which one seeks harm for the possessor of the envied object and benevolent envy where good wishes may be directed at the other, in spite of their good fortune!

[6] In the brief discussion that follows and in these thoughts, in general, I mean to suggest no substantive distinctions between homophillic and heterophillic relationships.

[7] The male envy of the woman (Bettelheim, 1954) fits quite nicely with this inability to become mother, which in turn logically aligns with the substantially greater prevalence of men’s violence towards women than vice-versa.

[8] It would have been safer to omit reference to this discussion. Truth be told, writing a personal paper with anecdotal information is never as safe as writing a statistical paper or one which, in any case, avoids one’s own experiences and what one personally imagines to have seen/heard. In the end, the varieties of human sexual/fantasied experience are so diverse that any such attempt at clarification will be incomplete and inconsistent with many people’s experience.

[9] The senses tell us, for instance, that all sounds come to our ears and that we are situated in the center of all visually perceivable activity.

[10] My wife and I sit in awe, sometimes, watching our youngest child’s ability to revel in each and every step forward taken by the brilliant two year old grand-daughter she shares with us! The mother-figure’s life is on partial-hold, as her ability to tolerate daily regressions is tested, 

[11] Psychoanalysts speak of the pressing urgency of aligning the Ego Ideal (how I feel I ideally ought to be) with who and what I am.

[12] It is fair, perhaps, to say that I am near, in these thoughts, to Jung’s paired Anima/Animus model of forces and counterforces.

[13] The reader is referred to Covitz (1997, Chapters 7-9) for further discussion of the misapplication of grouped data conclusions to gender differences rooted in identification with the same-sex parent.

[14] The Blacky Test was a popular test for such studies; it showed pictures of various members of a dog family doing such things as cutting off a puppy’s tail, a sight which might make many two-legged puppies and even some upright middle-aged curs shudder.