In Light of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

I heard Elisabeth give a paper at a conference once called “Where Do We Fall When We Fall in Love?” I was struck by her wit and eloquence, by the poetry she crafted from the follies of hu-

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man attachment. Afterwards, I asked her to be my analyst. For nearly a decade, Elisabeth saw me through major transitions: my dissertation defense, the choice of a husband, and the birth of my two spirited sons. She often repeated the phrase “take a pause” to me during the psychic upheaval that was new motherhood. Her voice was warm and well-articulated, with a slight lilt of her Maryland home soil. But what did she mean?

She was speaking to me about how parents bring their own narcissistic loves into childrearing. It concerned her that people sometimes imagine children as possessions, animals, or slaves that need to be controlled and dominated. I was to “take a pause” when I felt my children consuming the last of my day’s energies, when I was afraid they would suck the marrow from my bones as breastfeeding infants, when my children were not listening and I had asked them several times already.

Some parents act unwittingly, as if their authority over children is absolute and discipline their main responsibility. Obedience results through heated contest of wills. The purpose of children, from this perspective, is the same as any social group seen as “naturally” subservient—that of serving the needs of others. “Childism” was the word Elisabeth gave to this prejudice in her final book. When children are made into targets of prejudice, we deny their developmental needs and rights (Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, 2012).

The same is true of the denigration of women as another form of what Elisabeth called “obedience training,” a kind of authoritarian rule that inhibits the evolution of selfhood. She well understood the sexual biases in which women have been psychoanalytically entangled. For Elisabeth, psychoanalysis was a form of vocalized biography, two people working together to recover a life story. Of importance was situating this life narrative within a larger historical setting. Penis envy, a girl’s second wave of repression, her turn away from her mother during puberty and the shift of her primary erotic zone—Elisabeth encouraged me to think beyond the effects of patriarchy. She knew that society evolves as the feminist movement grows from infancy, as the nuclear family changes, as habits of coupling and the means and forms of reproduction become more pluralistic.

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Where does prejudice come from? Elisabeth systematically detailed these origins in The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996), where she argues that these habits of thinking are not one, but many. Drawing on Freud’s essay “Libidinal Types” (1931), she outlined how prejudice in America is organized around “ideologies of desire” that correspond to the tripartite structure of the psyche: id, ego, and superego. Unconscious fantasies play out in prejudice according to three character types: the hysterical, the narcissistic, and the obsessional. Hysterical prejudice is epitomized by racist sentiment: it represents genital power and involves projecting forbidden sexual drives onto another. Sexism (usually male, but not always) has a narcissistic foundation and is the most universal of all prejudices. It comes from an offense to the ego: the intolerable notion that there are people who are anatomically different from oneself. Finally, obsessional attitudes are governed by the superego, by fantasies of contamination and desires for purification—by wanting to eliminate something felt to be secretly depleting one from within, anti-Semitism is an obsessional prejudice.

Acknowledging different kinds of prejudice allows for social diagnoses and treatment. This method of classification Elisabeth learned from her professor Hannah Arendt, whose The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she considered the exemplary analysis of a modern prejudice. Reading this field manual on fascism was for her like facing a vast mural, a “historian’s Guernica” that the spectator can never fully absorb.

Before becoming a psychoanalyst, Elisabeth trained as a philosopher and political thinker with Arendt, a Jewish émigré who barely escaped the Nazis prior to coming to the U.S. From her, Elisabeth learned about the viewpoint of the pariah. She brought feminist knowledge of women, children, and minorities into philosophical and psychoanalytic inquiry. She was a great synthesizer.

Elisabeth suggested that masculine biases stem partly from male fantasies about reproduction that date back to Aristotle. Ancient Greeks shared belief in the biological theory that conception was a male act: reproduction resulting from a man implanting a sperm into the womb of a woman, ignoring the function of the ovum. Although this theory and its anatomical distortions were scientifically abandoned in the West, the wish still remains. It is

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manifest today, writes Elisabeth, in abortion debates and homophobia. These wishes express the desire to view men as responsible for the fertilization and cultivation of “their” seed. Thus, children, along with women, are wild and irrational beings who require men’s civilized restraints and domestication (Childism, 2012).

Questions about female sexuality, and its multiple lines of development, impressed Elisabeth as she apprehensively sifted through six steamer trunks of Anna Freud’s papers. Following critical acclaim for Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), the executor of Anna Freud’s literary estate asked her to write a biography of the daughter of psychoanalysis. Later in the day, Elisabeth rambled to Hans Loewald, her analyst in New Haven, about how exhausted she felt facing all those German papers and years of work that lay within them. There was also the elaboration of Anna Freud’s partnership with Dorothy Burlingham with whom she directed the Hampstead War Nurseries and Clinic during WWII. Would it be her task, Elisabeth wondered aloud to Loewald, “to brave the homophobia of psychoanalysis with a lesbian life story?” Loewald replied mischievously in his Texas drawl, “Sweetheart, those two ladies lived together harmoniously, really harmoniously, for fifty years—now, I ask you, could that be a sexual relationship?” (Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women’s Lives, 1998).

Elisabeth had a gentle and deeply feeling heart. She rearticulated Freud’s first theory of the instincts, arguing that libido in all of us vacillates throughout our lives between active and passive aims, between our mental images of male and female loved ones. She came away from Anna’s biography thinking that Freud’s youngest child was a woman who could never fully capture her father’s attention so she ceaselessly worked for her father’s cause. Even Freud called his lifework his child, sometimes his problem child. He gave it the solicitous parental attention he could not give his biological children (Anna Freud: A Biography, 1988).

Drawing on the work of Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi and his use of the everyday word “amae,” Elisabeth elaborated an ego instinct for affection. She theorized how a crucial part of ego instinctual life is the expectation of being loved by another and loving that someone. What she described was an empathetic attune-

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ment. Freud recognized this type of relatedness but it resided in what she called “theoretical half light” due to the climactic tumult between Freud and Jung and Freud’s subsequent re-emphasis on sexual energy as a motivating psychological force. This desire for affection is rooted in the infant-caregiver relationship, originally in maternal nourishment and the feeding of a child. It is not just milk received by the baby, but also sweetness. Elisabeth thought Doi himself neglected the sexual instincts, which were not to be overlooked. But she highlighted the interweaving of these instinctual aspects. People oscillate in their instinctual drives, their sexual and affectional needs, as well as their object choices. Languages without a word for the ego instinct of affection are typical of cultures where this dependency is not valued and where children are urged to be independent. Yet Elisabeth gave it a word, “cherishment,” and wrote about the “growth principle” (Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart, co-author, Faith Bethelard, 2000).

What happens to the heart and mind when prejudiced thinking occurs? The denial of human plurality marks an absence of judgment. In Elisabeth’s view, judgment occurs in dialogue more than any other mental faculty, in relation to others, and it does not adhere to rules. If judgment is not rule-bound, then how do we judge? Elisabeth believed Immanuel Kant’s ideas about aesthetic judgment translated into the moral realm and the actions of political life. She cited his pupil, Arendt: “The more people’s perspective I can make present in my thought and hence take into account in my judgments, the more representative [my judgment] will be. The validity of such judgments would be neither objective and universal nor subjective, depending on personal whim, but intersubjective and representative” (Why Arendt Matters, 2006, p. 167). This is how one arrives at common sense.

Elisabeth had a gift for hearing plurality, for holding steady within her mind many particularities at once. Late in her career, she wrote of Urteilskraft or “judgment power.” She disagreed with Freud’s theory of the death instinct and his idea of primary masochism. In the conversations with her that continue in my mind, she desires judgment rather than death. She talks to me of the developmental thrust to judge well and adaptively.

To “take a pause” is to cultivate a passionate mindfulness.

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It means affirming the feelings and needs of children and also realizing that one need not use or dominate them. Discovery is the mode rather than force. Rules cannot define reflective judgment because it relies on a commitment to being creatively open, on the ability to review one’s perspective in light of novel encounters, and on identifying what is unprecedented in the conversation. This is a cherishment exchange. Such self-questioning is key to good judgment and to what Elisabeth described as a revolution of faith and hope.

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