Marilyn Charles Replies

I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect on the position of women in relation to psychoanalysis and to read the thoughtful responses to my commentary. As Alford and Barglow note, there is a counter-voice running through psychoanalysis from the beginning, with Horney taking a stand for a psychoanalysis that is both embodied and contextual and Klein becoming a force that would alter psychoanalytic theory and practice profoundly. Yet, in spite of the notable contributions by women, there is a paternalism that runs through psychoanalysis that remains problematic to the extent that we are not able to see it. A woman’s voice does not necessarily solve our problem in a culture in which the values associated with the female are devalued. Seymour, for example, notes that it is only in retrospect that she can see ways in which her “free choices” had not been in line with her own intrinsic desires but rather had been shaped by culture in ways that had been invisible to her.

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My omission of Klein in my original reflections was notable given that my clinical work and theoretical orientation owe so much to her. Yet, Klein was so embedded in what Freud had begun that at times the Freudian canon creates an overlay through which one must peer in order to touch the depths of her insights. It is not that women have not made significant contributions. The question, rather, has to do with the possibility of using psychoanalysis in ways that allow the layers of culture and context to reveal themselves such that the particularity of a given individual—man or woman—can be revealed and explored in ways that afford greater choice in living and greater creativity.

In these final reflections, then, I speak not for women but as a woman, a woman who sees the hope of psychoanalysis in the lineage of those who pass along their wisdom born of living and reflecting deeply such that they can nourish whatever is incipient in those whose lives they touch. As a woman of a particular generation and social context, I am aware of the formative and at times constricting layers in my history. For me, Lacan’s knots come closest to providing a metaphor that holds that complexity—the mystery of an individual human life—in a way that holds reverence and respect for that particularity and thereby the person’s unique creative potential. Perhaps that is my womb-nature, to have in mind the creative potential that seems to be at the core of what it means to be human and yet, notably, Winnicott, stood there before me.

As Barglow notes, culture matters and, in psychoanalysis, explanatory power is crucial. His anecdote could be countered by a myriad of others, each of which might affirm a different theory or perspective. That multiplicity, for me, is the power of psychoanalysis, accepting the complexity of experience, recognizing the basic forms and structures of the human experience, and also the inevitably idiosyncratic ways in which meanings register and cohere for any given individual. While I might agree with Barglow regarding Lacan’s human failings, I still value the extraordinarily insightful metaphors offered by Lacan that help us recognize and work effectively with these complexities.

Castelloe describes ways in which art, like theory, can afford a vantage point that cuts into our presumptions and exposes aspects of experience that are otherwise hidden from view. Ceccoli highlights the beauty and potential of recognizing and valuing difference itself. Her reflections leave me thinking about the “dark continent” in men, the territory that is left unexplored by loading it

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into the woman. In many ways, psychoanalysis has been precisely an exploration of that “dark continent,” through a lens that was often unnamed and itself insufficiently explored. Thus, we encounter the particularity of Freud’s lens as it was contextualized in space and time within the frame of one man’s experience. His willingness to explore his own “dark continent” gave a brilliance that was both illuminating and obscuring to those who followed, inviting us to follow the method rather than adopting the lens.

Covitz marks the difficulty posed by dichotomization and offers a view from another side, much as we find in Dimen’s willingness to engage with my different voice in reflecting on questions that, as she wisely notes, are never entirely answered but rather continue to animate our explorations of what it means—and can potentially mean—to be human. Like Ceccoli, Dimen points to the two sides—the lived experience versus the symbolic—those essential aspects of what it means to be human and require a complex model in order to be able to even consider reflectively. In psychoanalysis, there tends to be a confusion of tongues, and I have appreciated the willingness of individuals who speak in different tongues to move past the particularities of my language and struggle with the questions I hoped to explore. By looking at these questions through their own lenses, the variety seems true to the topic at hand and to psychoanalysis as an instrument that cannot answer the basic human questions with any finality but, rather, takes a stand on the importance of the exploration.

Elovitz, in his own direct way, goes to the heart of the matter of denigration of that “other” who otherwise would seem too threatening. He points to the early battle between wills that I see playing out with my grandchildren, that poignant battle for autonomy within the context of utter dependency. Given that we are born from the mother’s womb and deeply entangled with her at a psychic level, it may be inevitable that we will find ourselves at war with that cord that binds. Negotiating those deep and conflicting ties seems to endure over the course of a lifetime, renegotiated from other angles as we take up different roles within the generational relationships. That capacity to locate ourselves in these various positions may be what is needed regarding the subject of gender, as well as to be able to locate what has been “othered” within ourselves and to consider to what extent we are willing to accept these foreclosures. The strength of the women’s movement, it seems to me, lay in raising the issue of “equal opportunity,” a very American

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ideal that is also confusing. Certainly, equal opportunity has never truly meant equal opportunity but rather, perhaps, equal possibility. In this country, one can envision the possibility of attaining one’s desire. In psychoanalysis, one can discover that desire.

Turning the question around, Meyers highlights ways in which women may become caught in a male ambivalence that speaks more profoundly to difficulties in relation to their own female parts than to a devaluation of women as women. Perhaps it is the woman’s failure to recognize this particularity of the male dilemma that leaves her further captured in what would otherwise be his problem. Lotto notes the power, for the man, of the female gaze. Female power, according to Lotto, is relational and indirect, and relies on the currency of love. Potency may not be the crucial issue here but rather to what extent it is possible to make a direct claim on one’s values, beliefs, and desires. There is an important difference between the subtlety that speaks from beneath the surface and the shame that keeps one silent, locked below a force that keeps its stranglehold precisely because one cannot meet the light of public scrutiny.

Psychoanalysis is, at essence, an art and science of self-understanding, predicated on the hope that greater individual understanding would lend itself to greater humanity within the culture at large. Being able to recognize the sense and nonsense, the ways in which culture becomes implicated but is not at the heart of the matter, is part of what this lens can show in the inevitable Möebius strip, the hall of mirrors pointed to so eloquently by Covitz.

Rosenberg, too, points to the mystification that is at the heart of the human experience, the impossibility of truly knowing another person’s heart or mind. As Neubauer notes, it is in the multiplicity of voices that a larger truth emerges. In this way, we might move closer to being able to answer questions being raised regarding a difference that, as Covitz notes, is more about differences among individuals than between genders. Gender is merely one thread. In describing her efforts to locate herself within the changing lenses of culture imposed by emigration, Perez-Stromolo notes the challenge of being able to locate oneself in a heritage sufficiently enough to be able to invite one’s children (and one’s students) to be suitably mindful and to envision the possibilities within the constraints.

DeVinney counterposes my myth with her own, considering

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ways in which a text can both hide and reveal alternative readings, in this way coming to the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise, whose value lies in that very ineluctable duality such that the dream has value because we can say the impossible in a way that enables us to unsay it at the same time. Truths can be told because we can strain at their edges and soften them sufficiently that they can be allowed to register in their own way, in their own time, and evolve along with our reflective capacities.

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