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Schaffner, B. (2001). Androgyny in Indian Art and Culture: Psychoanalytic Implications. J. Amer. Acad. Psychoanal., 29:113-12..
* Supervising Psychoanalyst, and Instructor in Cross-Cultural Psychiatry, Wm. Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis An earlier version of this article was presented at the 43rd Annual Winter Meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, New York, NY, January 7, 2000.
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In my opinion, Webster's first definition has never been clear, and it reflects much confusion in the popular mind. This confusion has resulted from uncritical use of the words male and female, which can be used to designate two related, but quite distinctly different concepts: sex and gender. It is only in the last half century that these terms have been amplified and more clearly redefined in such a way as to be used for finer distinctions. The concept of male and female sex is most clear when sexual organs are the referent. In contrast, gender may now be understood to refer to the behavioral concomitants of male-ness and femaleness. Although gender is sometimes characterized by the words male and female, it is less ambiguously identified by the terms masculine and feminine, which take on meaning in social or psychological contexts.2 Webster's 1975 definition did not seem to acknowledge these distinctions in its definition of androgyny. A more recent definition, taken from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (www.m-w.com, July 2000), avoids any reference to hermaphroditism, and defines androgyny as having the characteristics or nature of both male and female, and neither specifically feminine nor masculine. These definitions are much closer to the Indian point of view about the term, because they do not imply abnormality. For whatever reasons, contemporary Western definitions seem to be converging with an ancient Indian conception of androgyny.
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In India, androgyny is not thought of as an odd mixture of sexual organs, but is usually viewed as a fortunate combination of male and female qualities. Indians stress that men and women are painfully incomplete without each other, that both masculine and feminine traits are needed to be a complete person. Indeed these traits are joined in superior human beings and gods.3 These basic beliefs have been depicted symbolically in sculpture and painting, through iconic details that identify the god or personage, and spell out the didactic and religious significance of the figure. In Indian religious art, images with both male and female features are common. In such images androgyny is symbolized by the conjunction of secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes in a single figure. The Great God is meant to be perceived not as a physical form, but as a symbol of ultimate reality, beyond the male-female biunity of the image. Such sculptures are a kind of literal statement of androgyny. Androgyny is sometimes portrayed, as in images of Shiva and Parvati embracing, not as an anatomical biunity, but as two figures in extraordinarily close physical union and harmony. I have long been self-conscious about my own androgynous characteristics, and even felt ashamed of the relatively strong feminine components in my psychological make-up. I remember being humiliated by peers during my childhood, youth, and college years. Americans tend to take an all or nothing attitude toward gender identity, and are intolerant of men who do not completely fit a masculine stereotype. I realize that I may have felt more at ease in India to a large extent because my feminine identifications somehow seemed acceptable there, in contrast to my feeling them as a constant source of rejection in the United States. By way of a possible explanation for the seeming ease with which Indians accept feminine identifications in men, I initially postulated that Indians have a tremendous respect for women. I thought that this could be the reason for their comfortable, unselfconscious acceptance of feminine qualities in men. But on further reflection, I felt I was neglecting what is known about cruel and disrespectful treatment of women in India. I still knew that in some way Indian women are respected, yet I could not explain what seemed to be a paradox. My postulate about respect for Indian women had resulted, I suspect, from the fact that my contacts were largely with members of the Hindu upper castes. Within these castes there have been many changes from traditional Indian mores in the last 100 years. Privileges that were exclusively masculine have been granted to women in the whole Indian subcontinent. Women have served as prime ministers in India, Sri Lanka,
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and Pakistan, which contributed to my impression that women were widely respected. On the other hand, I had also observed and was troubled by seeing women from lower castes engaged in heavy physical labor that would usually be performed only by men in Western society. Now I understand better that in India heavier work assignments can be given to women because women are considered to be of lower social status than men. I still needed to understand how women's low status in India could be reconciled with another Indian attitude according women very high respect and mystical devotion. This positive evaluation culminates in adoration of a Mother Goddess, a symbol that has consistently appeared in Indian art and mythology since prehistoric times. The crucial factor in the status and respect for women in India depends upon whether they are mothers or not! To understand the factors that make motherhood so respected, it is necessary to examine Indian family life, the psychological implications of arranged marriages, and their effects on mother-son relationships.4 Indian androgyny as a spiritual ideal is derived from and supported by religious traditions and by basic values in the Indian family. The special relationship between Indian mothers and their male children, which is unusually close and intense from a Western perspective, contributes to the formation of androgynous identifications in sons.
It was frequently explained to me that over the years they will come to love each other. A new bride is also a servant to her mother-in-law. She is allowed to visit with her own mother prior to and after the birth of a child. It is taken for granted that she will suppress feelings of unhappiness she may have, for example, about the separation from her
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own family. As a young bride, a woman is still considered to be a person of relatively low status. However, this changes when she becomes a mother. Where and when tradition governs, an Indian woman does not stand alone; her identity is wholly defined by her relationships to others. For although in most societies, a woman (more than a man) defines herself in relation and connection to other intimate people, this is singularly true of Indian women (Kakar, 1978, p. 56). Women acquire enormous status and respect once they become mothers, particularly mothers of sons. The unambiguous reversal in an Indian woman's status is not lost on her. Pregnancy is a woman's ultimate good fortune (Kakar, 1978, p. 77). Each infant born and nurtured by her safely into childhood is both a certification and a redemption, (Kakar, 1978, p. 56). Then she comes into her own, is treated with increased respect, and no longer has to do the menial work that accompanied her lower status. In psychoanalytic terms, her change in status tends to be experienced unconsciously as a gift from the child growing within her. The unborn child is perceived as her savior in combination with a profound gratitude and the readiness for a poignantly high emotional investment in the child (Kakar, 1978, p. 109). If a woman feels any deficiency in the relationship with her husband, she now has the chance for an emotionally and mutually fulfilling relationship with her son. When her son eventually marries, he will not be leaving the household, as she had to do when she married. She does not have to face separation from him, as she will have to do in the future when a daughter marries. In effect, she will never have to fear losing her son through marriage. Instead, he brings his new bride into the mother's household. The birth of a son presents an Indian woman with previously unavailable libidinal potentialities. It is my impression that now she is free to fulfill her need to love, without restraint. As Kakar notes, The longing of her reawakened sensuality can be temporarily sublimated, given over to physical ministrations to her child, (Kakar, 1978, p. 78). While such circumstances may happen anywhere in the world, there are few places where this intense compensatory interaction is sanctioned and supported as much as it is in India.
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cherished time of life, and the formative basis for very highly valued aspects of his personality. Kakar (1989) says, Taken into the child's ego, the good mother's maternal tolerance, emotional vitality, protectiveness and nurturing become the core of every Indian's positive identity (p. 109). Indian male children assume many aspects of their mothers' personalities, which remains a strongly positive value for Indian men throughout their lives. Some common maternal-feminine qualities associated with male behavior in India include a readiness for closeness, compassion, anticipation of others' needs, nonviolence and protectiveness, and providing a sense of security to others. These traits are retained as desirable qualities, important to leading a good life, and are not necessarily associated with womanliness,
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which would have to be discarded as the boy moves toward identification with his father and maleness. (A friend recently pointed out to me that Gandhi chose to make war against the British through nonviolence and the spinning of cotton, rather than with guns.) When I have thanked Indian friends for much appreciated helpfulness to me, they often replied, Oh, this is my duty. This gives them the satisfaction of fulfilling a true spiritual assignment in life, that is, to be a good person. They may also derive pleasure from behaving like the beloved mother of the past.
of 32 with two children. His father was to have accompanied me on the trip but could not because of illness in his wife's family. He simply informed me that his son insisted on taking his father's place as my companion on the trip. I was a little worried since I barely knew Sunil, but because of my familiarity with Indians I put aside my concerns, somehow knowing that I would be well treated. Indeed, he was always thoughtful, anticipating my needs, protective, flexible, and ready to help. We had just visited an old mosque, and as we emerged we happened on a small provincial market where several foods were being prepared. Sunil became very interested in the food, and was drawn toward a large bowl of milk warming over an open flame. I was leery about drinking uncovered milk, but he was eager to have me try it, exclaiming that this is what he remembered and loved from his days as a child in villages. The milk, which had been sweetened slightly, was lovingly stirred by the man heating it, who seemed very interested in giving the milk to us. The milk was served in freshly baked terracotta cups, which immediately after use are traditionally thrown to the ground and broken under foot. I felt that it was probably safe to drink the cooked milk. It was delicious, and Sunil glowed with pleasure at the taste and the childhood memory. Suddenly I realized with a start that the warm milk tasted like my own memories of mother's milk. The symbolism of the milk did not pass unnoticed by me. Indian men do not reject milk as only fit for babies, as I was once told by German men after World War II, with a clear sense of disapproval. The Indian adults involved in the transaction were clearly enjoying the reliving of a vital infantile aspect of the mother-child relationship. (I could not help but be reminded of the cow as sacred animal and symbol in India.) In addition I thought of the symbolism of drinking from earthenware made from the holy soil of Mother India, which would be returned to earth once the milk had been drunk. The milk we drank clearly evoked treasured memories of the inner mother, a reminiscence of pleasant times, one Indian friend remarked to me. I have questioned Indian male friends as to their feelings about being like their mothers or having a feminine side. I found them quite at ease with the question, not troubled or surprised, as I would generally expect in a Western man. They replied readily that naturally they were aware of and included these traits in their makeup, and felt more complete human beings because of it. They emphasized the benefits of the inclusiveness, and referred to the half-male, half-female sculptures of Shiva, which represent perfection. They emphasized that a woman cannot fulfill her exalted mission in life, that is, motherhood, without the
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cooperation of a man, and that a man without a woman would be forever weak. Kakar (1989) emphasizes the ubiquity and multiformity of the primitive idea of being a woman in patients' dreams and the embeddedness of this fantasy in the maternal configurations of the family and the culture in India (p. 130). In this connection, he relates the story of Freud's allegedly having said to an Indian patient in exasperation, Oh you Indians and your mother-complex! Kakar comments, reading early Indian case histories, one is struck by the fluidity of the patients' cross-sexual and generational identifications. In the Indian patient, the fantasy of taking on the sexual attributes of both the parents seems to have a relatively easier access to awareness (Karkar, 1989, p. 130). Dr. Girindrasekhar Bose, the founder and first president of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society, described a middleaged lawyer's dreams about his parents in which he took up an active male sexual role, treating both of them as females in his unconscious, and sometimes a female attitude, especially toward the father, craving for a child from him (Bose, 1948, in Kakar, 1989, pp. 130-131).
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I was cautious whenever I raised the question of homosexuality because I knew it to be a distasteful, controversial subject for Indians. A young Indian psychiatric resident I met in the US said to me, Androgyny is all right, as long as it doesn't go too far, into homosexuality. Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, observes, homosexuality [in India] is generally regarded as a shameful aberration, [and] is also known to be fairly common in fact but condoned only if practiced in secret (O'Flaherty, 1980, p. 88). It struck me that the men I interviewed frequently raised the issue on their own. One even said to me, There is no homosexuality in India, because two men cannot produce a child. As an analyst, I presume that conscious and unconscious conflicts around sexual orientation inevitably arise for some Indian men. Perhaps the religious injunction to family formation and parenthood is a powerful factor in suppressing potential homosexual behavior. Indian men seem to be able to carry simultaneous masculine and feminine identifications without worrying that this is pathological or that this will automatically lead to homosexuality. Because Indians regard it as normal to have both masculine and feminine attributes, in contrast to the Western insistence on two totally distinct gender identities and having to be real boys or real girls, Indians are more tolerant of shades of gray. They do not assume that androgyny must lead to gender disturbance.
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Coates, 1997; Volkan, 1987) have described pathways to identification, some distinctly pathological, and some largely innocuous, as in my foregoing descriptions of processes within traditional Indian family life. There can also be antenatal causes that lead to similar strong identifications. I have indicated one such example in the young bride's expected but abrupt separation from her original family, predisposing her to an especially strong emotional relationship with her firstborn son. I am much indebted to Akhtar's (1999) thought-provoking review of psychoanalytic studies of identity development, which helped me to understand how some of my own strong maternal identifications may have come about. Akhtar writes, The specific family myths, conflictual wishes on the part of the parents, and intergenerational transmission of traumatic events play an important role in the future child's identity formation (p. 50). He regards events such as emigration to an inhospitable foreign land and the unresolved recent loss of a beloved parent as typical incidents that may generate strong predispositions toward identification with a mother. In my own history, both of these factors were realized: at the time of my birth, my mother had just arrived in the US from a small village in Germany, and she had not yet recovered from the loss of her own beloved mother, 1 year before. In this sense, my mother suffered a disruption, in the abrupt dislocation from her original family, similar to that experienced by young Indian brides. It is therefore likely that the androgyny I struggled to understand within myself, and the androgyny I have appreciated in Indian men, have common origins. It is interesting to speculate about the reasons androgyny can be esteemed in one culture and regarded negatively in others. It
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occurs to me that androgyny can be more easily tolerated in a society when the relative balance of power between men and women in that society is clear, firmly entrenched, and unquestioned. When gender power relations are securely established, there is little or no danger of a man's losing status by assuming characteristics associated with androgyny. When power relations are insecure, there is accompanying anxiety, and under such conditions, a society is less able to live with ambiguity and uncertainty. In the United States, feminine gender characteristics in males generate assumptions about the sexual characteristics of the man, evidence of the conflation of sex and gender that I took pains to describe at the beginning of this paper. Androgyny in Indian men implies some gender differences, but is not perceived as a threat to their sexual maleness. Indian men have had clearly higher status and authority than women, and Indian women have historically accepted their subservient position and roles. In my opinion, this very rigid system provided conditions for
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Indian men's comfortable acceptance of the subject of androgyny, because their status as men has been secure.
Notes
I would like to acknowledge the important intellectual contributions and support that I have received during the preparation of this article from Mark Sammons, M.A., a doctoral candidate in Clinical Psychology at Adelphi University, who is at present also my secretary.
1 This article applies primarily to the Hindu population in India, and I assume the reader will understand that is what I am referring to when I use the term Indian. I would like to insert a word of caution. I am definitely not speaking as an expert on India. The huge subcontinent is too vast and varied for anyone to draw comprehensive generalizations. I am merely reporting patterns that I felt to be rather prevalent. Anything one tries to describe about India will vary from place to place, the time in history, the expertise of the informant, and the particular cultural subgroup involved. 2 The concept of gender attains greater clarity by recognizing two aspects: gender identity and gender role. Money and Ehrhardt (1972) indicate that gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity. Stoller (1985) further clarifies gender identity as a term used for one's sense of masculinity and femininity; it was introduced to contrast with sex, a term that summarizes the biological attributes that add up to male and female (p. 1034). In this article, I will be examining both aspects of gender in the Indian response to the concept of androgyny. 3 Webster's (1975), in its definition of hermaphrodite, locates the origin of this word in the myth of Hermaphroditis, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who while bathing became united in one body with the nymph Salmacis (p. 851).
I am deeply indebted to Dr. Sara Webber, who introduced me to the writings of Professor Sudhir Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst trained at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, who has written extensively on the Indian psyche with an emphasis on family relations and personality development. I found his writings delightfully accessible and useful. I supplemented my readings with four hours of personal discussion with him in New Delhi in February 1999. When I met with Dr. Kakar, I told him about my sense that my psychological androgyny was accepted in India, and asked if he could offer an explanation. He seemed to find my view easy to understand, saying, No wonder, because many Indian men are a lot like you.
References
Akhtar, S. (1999), Immigration and Identity, Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ. Coates, S., & Wolfe, S. (1997), Gender identity disorders of childhood, In J. Noshpitz, S. Greenspan, S. Wieder, & J. Osofsky, (Eds.), Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Wiley, New York, Vol. 1, pp. 452-473. Freud, S. (1917), Mourning and melancholia. Standard Edition, Vol. 14, Hogarth Press, London, pp. 243-258. [] Kakar, S. (1978), The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kakar, S. (1989), Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
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Kakar, S. (1997), Culture and Psyche: Selected Essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kramrisch, S. (1981), Manifestations of Shiva, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Money, J., & Ehrhardt, A. A. (1972), Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. O'Flaherty, W. D. (1980), Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Stoller, R. J. (1985), Gender identity disorders in children and adults. In H. I. Kaplan & B. J. Sadock, (Eds.), Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, Williams & Willkins, Baltimore, Vol. 1, 4th ed., pp. 1034-1041. Volkan, V. (1987), Six Steps in the Treatment of Borderline Personality Organization, Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ. Webster, N., & McKechnie, J. L. (1975), Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, Second Edition. The World Publishing Co.
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