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Kay Reed
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body and helps provide the ability to take pleasure in sensuality and
the physical closeness of a loved person.
More specific points cited by Shapiro include the following.
1. Pregnancy is a sensual experience, but the eroticism is not
genitally focused. Pregnancy and birth emphasize female lineage. The
mothers relationship with her own mother is particularly charged during pregnancy, childbirth, and early childrearing, a time when a woman
may seek the support of other women. A Doula is a woman who offers
support that leads to fewer complications in childbirth.
2. The first connections of mother and baby are sensual: the body,
touch, skin, cuddling, caresses, sound, singing, talking, cooing, sight,
smell, taste, and kinesthetic changes. These form the bedrock of
attachment, of the emergence of the sense of self and other, of relatedness and love.
3. Breastfeeding is a good example of this early erotic trend and
its potential for mutual enjoyment.
4. How the mother feels about her own body influences how she
cares for the baby, and how she touches and feels about her babys
body. Since we know that babies have a sexual life, it is inevitable
that eroticism of some sort is a consistent undercurrent in the dyadic
relationship, physical and emotional, between the mother and her
baby girl. It may be denied, repressed, dissociated, or perverted, but
unless there is no body care of the child, or severe trauma or neglect,
it is there.
5. During the first year, communication is physical and sensual.
Bucci (1997) discusses the subsymbolic nonverbal and symbolic nonverbal communication. These spheres continue, along with the lateremerging verbal symbolic sphere.
6. There is much research showing that mother-daughter relationships and interactions differ from those with the son starting in early
infancy.
Although mother-daughter relationships are each unique, they do
share certain trends. Girl babies do better with a mother who is somewhat more engaged and directive, as long as she is attuned. Girls are
drawn to closeness, stay closer, share their emotions and intentions, and
are physically and emotionally more intimate with mothers than boys
are. Mothers are less likely to provide a developmental push away for
their daughters, are more conflicted about separating, and tend to reexperience their own separation from their mother.
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homosexual trends toward her mother. This is necessary for the identification with the mother, as well as for the development of heterosexual
trends directed toward the father and men in general.
Two phenomena seen in the girl that were studied separately by
Chasseguet-Smirgel, one a long time ago and the second more recently,
are connected, as both are about distancing oneself from the mother and
reaching autonomy. One is widespread and normal, while the other is
extremely pathological, even fatal, asymbolic, and deeply narcissistic.
The second phenomenon (the pathological track) she referred to
as escaping mother through eating disorders. The daughter aims for
autarky, a narcissistic self-sufficiency. Stoller points out that separation from the mothers body is crucial for the development of identity.
Chasseguet- Smirgel hypothesizes that eating disorders begin in adolescence because the girls body acquires secondary sexual features that
make her body similar to her mothers; this increases the daughters
state of nondifferentiation from the mother. She fears merger as her
more adult body blurs the differences between them.
Anorexia and bulimia are desperate attempts at differentiation of
ones own body from the mothers. (In contrast, the adolescent boy is
acquiring secondary sexual features that deeply differentiate him from
the mother.) In most of the eating disorder cases Chasseguet-Smirgel
treated, there had been a difficult relationship between the mother and
the little girl, who had shown a pathological autoeroticism, with violence
against herself such as hair pulling or head banging. This behavior
indicates a lack of narcissistic cathexis by the mother. This schema
can take many forms. Eating disorders are a caricature of autonomy, a
desperate outlet of an insolvable conflict.
The widespread and normal phenomenon that aims at distancing
from the mother and reaching autonomy is penis envy. ChasseguetSmirgel stressed long ago that the main function of the penis,
besides its sexual function, is as a sign of differentiation from the
mother. When the child is driven by desire to become autonomous,
the normal way to distance from the mother is to become an individual through identif ication with the father. (Both boys and girls
identify with both parents in normal development.) The desire to
become autonomous may take diverse paths. Identif ication with the
mother is itself a means of becoming autonomous, by replacing her,
and all need of her, by the possibility of doing for oneself what she
is supposed to do. It is only when penis envy becomes separate from
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libido and seems to occupy the whole scene that it has to be analyzed
as a defense.
How does the girl become a woman? The erotic trend or drive is
present from the beginning. First relationships are incestual, with the
child being close to her mothers body. Evelyn Kestemberg (personal
communication) called it primary homosexuality. In ChasseguetSmirgels opinion, there is an important difference between primary
homosexuality and homosexuality that occurs when the girl has
acquired her autonomy and identity. This primary homosexuality is
necessary for the development of genitality directed toward men. To be
a woman requires the ability to love a womans body, and this requires
the girl to pass through an unconscious phase of homosexuality.
One cannot acquire integrative identifications without loving and
admiring the object with whom one identifies. If the relationship with
ones mother was too conf licted, this identif ication through homosexuality is repeated and enacted in adolescence. This trend in adolescence may be a mere confirmation of female identity, as in Freuds
Psycho-genesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman (1920). Had
it not been treated, homosexuality in this case (as an enactment) would
have smoothed away.
Ethel Person, next up, characterized herself as the disobedient child
on the panel, less certain about any primary, inevitable identification
between mother and daughter. She asked, What is the erotic impact
of the mother on the daughter? It was a surprise to her that it had
been a struggle to discover what she really thinks about this. One basic
dilemma: how to distinguish what is inborn from what is acquired.
For the vast majority of women, core gender is congruent with ones
designation at birth. But to what degree is gender role identity innate
or acquired through identity laid down early in life? Some degree of
gender identity is shaped by identification with the same-sex parent.
Some situations, however, suggest that such a simple explanatory hypothesis is inadequate. First, women raised by a father and no
mother may be entirely feminine, their femininity acquired through
a complementary relationship, a counteridentification. Second, crossgender attributes in both sexes may appear so early as to suggest some
inborn cross-gender traits as opposed to acquired homosexuality. Thus,
it appears that some gender attributes are innate, not acquired. What
can intersex situations tell us about the biology of sex and gender?
Biological factors and not just rearing are at play in establishing core
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The third of three children, she had a brother ten years older and a
sister five years older. Unlike her siblings, she had had a nanny and felt
neglected by her mother, experiencing herself as an afterthought. Her
nanny was a source of nurturance but was paid to care for her, so this
love was bought. The patient had an enduring fantasy of her being
too much for her mother to handle and had separation longings for both
parents. Her father was detached but idealized, making her feel special
when he confided to her about his extramarital affairs. The brother
eventually developed a heroin addiction and involved her in his drug
purchases in her adolescence. She developed a tough attitude and rebellious behavior to try to gain the attention she craved.
Other themes from the case included her feelings about being a
female. She felt an emptiness, a lack, a persistent feeling of not being
good enough. The wish to be all sewn up was expressed. She felt a
sense of loathing about her own needs; they seemed like a messy and
unbridled femininity. She felt she was coming undone, too full of shit,
messy, and small. Her tough, crude, and contemptuous presentation
protected her against her deep dependency needs and early longings,
as well as her disturbed ideas about femininity, as she identified with
her maligned maternal figure.
During her experience as the mother to a boy now four years old,
feelings have emerged about her own mother. She decided to stay at
home with her son, who was born by C-section; the surgery reinforced
her terrors of coming undone and her profound early anxieties about
body intactness. Her babys cries were experienced as his assertion of
dominion over her, and she had to remind herself that her baby was not
a monster. During his first two years she felt that a huge gulf separated
her from other women and worried what the analyst thought of her.
Envy of the baby and of other women was prominent. She needed to
convince herself that she could be like other women and mother her
child. Initially she kept a full-time nanny but is now caring for her child
more of the time.
At this point she is in fertility treatment trying for a second pregnancy. She experiences nightmares as she identifies with the internal,
malignant, envious maternal figure whose efforts are to undermine and
destroy her own sense of lively femininity and procreative capacity.
In the transference she experiences the analyst as purposively trying
to torment or taunt her with what she has, to keep her down, in order to
build the analyst up, especially around times of separation from the
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analysis. She senses that the analyst revels in her own triumph, happy
to see the patient suffer. This mirrors the cruel internal object that she
battles constantly. She is frantically pursuing the goal of being a normal
female through in vitro fertilization, in order to counteract horrifying and confusing feelings about herself and her objects.
The case helped demonstrate the variety of identifications that can
occur for a girl, and how the lack of a consistent, primary, nurturing
presence can influence a womans sense of herself and her body, as
well as her capacity to form satisfying love relationships.
REFERENCES
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R ITVO, S. (1976). Adolescent to woman. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 24(Suppl.):127137.
349 Lancaster Avenue
Haverford, PA 19041
E-mail: kayreed2@msn.com
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