At this point I would like to discuss the views of four of Freud’s critics who are regarded as “revolutionary” theorists, or as profoundly innovative clinicians. Earlier theoreticians such as Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, and Clara Thompson certainly criticized Freud specifically in terms of his views of women. However, they are not popularly considered as “radical” theoreticians or clinicians—and in a certain broad sense they are not. They were not political or social visionaries, nor did they develop single standards of mental health for both women and men. I suppose that a closer reading of these theoreticians—and of others such as Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Edith Jacobson, etc., might surprise even me with the extent of their “radicalness.” I am not yet familiar enough with their work to competently review them here.*
I am concerned with whether a theoretician’s frame of reference for what is “human” is female. I feel that any clinical theory or practice which does not have, or is opposed to, this concern, is philosophically limited and socially oppressive to both women and men.
The theorists are all male psychiatrists: Wilhelm Reich, Ronald Laing, David Cooper, and Thomas Szasz. Frantz Fanon will be discussed in Chapter Eight, “Third World Women.” All four theorists are concerned with normality as well as abnormality, and with society as well as personality. All are “important”: Reich for his vision of sexual and political freedom; Laing for his descriptions of schizophrenia and for his clinical call to arms; Cooper for his attempt to exorcise the demons of the family and for his feminist sympathies; Szasz for charting the psychology of power relationships, and for his moral and legal sensitivity. I will not weigh, sum up, or compare them on the basis of all their work. I will share my thoughts with you about each theorist in terms of only some of their writing.
Wilhelm Reich
Of course I knew about his jealousy, but I found at that time a moralistic attitude in him such as he usually attacked in others. The double standard of sexual behavior was quite apparent in his attack. I was not allowed to question his faithfulness to me during that period, but I was quite certain that he did not apply to himself the same standards that he expected of me. In fact, I knew that he had had an affair although he didn’t tell me so.
In Oslo, I talked at length to Grethe, the woman who shared Reich’s life during this period. Many of the agonies that I had experienced during my last three years with Reich were repeated in her experiences. Accusations of infidelity during the last month of their life together when the relationship had deteriorated—interestingly enough with some of the same men that had figured in his accusation of me—demands of confessions, often heavy drinking, and frightening moments….
Dr. Havrevold … once tried to refer a very worthy professional man to Reich for training, but when Reich heard that the person was a homosexual he not only refused to accept him, but said, “Ich will mit solchen Schweinereien nichts zu tun haben.” [I don’t want to deal with such filth.]
Ilse Ollendorf Reich38
As a theoretician, Wilhelm Reich was a feminist.39 He consistently condemned the patriarchal family as the primary institution of sexual and political repression in general, and of female enslavement in particular. He was fiercely opposed to prostitution, “compulsive marriage,” and alienated labor. He sought a single (pan-sexual) standard of mental health for women and men. And, although he attaches a clinician’s sense of importance to his own patient’s individual “breakthrough” into sexual-mental health, he nevertheless remained convinced that mental health could never exist without the elimination of poverty and the oppression of women. Ideal mental health, like freedom, exists for one person only if it exists for all people. He stressed the importance of “preventive social measures” in order to rid people of the “psychic plague.” He conducted free sex education clinics and stressed the importance of therapy for the poor at a time when his colleagues were trying to become respectable in order to attract a middle-class clientele. He rarely romanticized the psychology of oppression:
The well-to-do citizen carries his neurosis with dignity or he lives it out in one way or another; in working-class people, it shows itself as the grotesque tragedy it really is.
He was as sensitive to the often early, traumatic, and brutal introduction of poor women to sex as he was to the middle-class woman’s lifelong non-introduction to it.
Reich’s ideas about the nature and importance of “orgastic potency” (or “healthy” orgasms) can easily be, and have been, misinterpreted as “proof” that “good sex will make you free.” Reich’s repetitive expositions about orgasm, and about what constitute a “healthy” one, does assume the proportion of a staunch and hysterical religious doctrine, an idee fixe, that often bizarrely and shrilly invades his analyses of fascism, poverty, the family, and madness. Freud’s ideas about infantile sexuality, repression, and death, and Skinner’s about conditioned learning are like this also.
Reich’s definition of “orgastic potency” is
the capacity for surrender to the flow of biological energy without any inhibition, a complete discharge of all dammed up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body.
Reich certainly understood why feminists, “bluestockings,” the majority of women, and male “moralists” were—and are—intolerant of male-originated notions of “free sex” or sexual liberation. He describes (with a little too much naiveté) how, in his clinical practice, he discovered that sex is experienced by the average man as a debased and degraded activity, in which power and mastery (his) must be expressed. Reich describes the universality of his male patient’s pornographic and sadistic masturbation and other sexual fantasies, and his female patient’s masochistic and passive fantasies. Male fantasies, then as now, involved the penis as a “murderous weapon”; as a means of “proving” potency; as a compulsively Don Juan-like “ejaculation followed by a reaction of disgust.” Reich considered such sexuality as “perverse”—no matter how many orgasms are achieved.
This sexuality is a pathological caricature of natural love. The usual evaluation of sexuality refers to its caricatures and its condemnation is justified. Thus, any controversy in the sense of fighting for or against sexuality is senseless and leads nowhere. In such a controversy the moralists would and should win. The caricature of sexuality should not be tolerated. The sexuality exercised in brothels is disgusting.
Reich claimed that once his male patients became “orgastically potent” they were
no longer able to go to prostitutes … wives, once they were orgastically potent, could no longer submit to husbands they didn’t love or submit when they were unaroused.
Unlike Freud, he does not suggest that we “sublimate” our sexuality for the sake of “civilization”: quite the contrary. Reich claims that, once healthy genitality was asserted in his patients, they tried to find more meaningful relationships in work and in love. He claims (with no less and no more proof than Freud’s) to have found a “decent nature” in every patient—if he (Reich) was able to penetrate deeply enough. “Sex-economy regulation” always led to a natural morality that was superior to a compulsive morality.
Reich, like all those who wish to understand and “champion” the insane, is caught in a dilemma: on the one hand, he says that “the profundity of some mental patients makes them more valuable from the human point of view than the Babbitts with their nationalistic ideals”; yet he also sees the insane as people who “act out,” often grotesquely and suicidally, and with a great deal of suffering, both what is “wrong” and what is “repressed” in all of us. The insane are both heroines and victims, courageous and doomed. Doomed, certainly, in no small part, because of the way they are treated by sane people.
For Reich, the schizophrenic is schizophrenic because she is overwhelmed by anxiety (as she has been conditioned to be), when pleasurable genital and body sensations “break through”—sensations which she has not been conditioned to feel, and which, therefore, break through rather mysteriously. Reich is absolu
tely correct in stressing the importance of the body in madness. I think, in fact, that a person is considered mad, both by herself and by others, when she acts out her thoughts and feelings with her body. When a person does this alone, without any group support or consensus, she is considered “mad.” As I noted elsewhere, Valerie Solanas was “crazy” (as well as “criminal”) because she acted on what many people are content to just think about or criticize in print: namely, gross male misogeny as embodied by a particular man. Traditionally, misogyny, or woman-hating, has been so widespread that it is almost invisible; and, when highly visible, has been deemed understandable and acceptable.
Like Freud, Reich found sexual repression at the heart of every neurosis and psychosis. Its purpose was the ultimate and total submission of the individual to the family, to the state, and to work. It is sexual repression, beginning with the repression of infantile sexuality, that leads to the “fixation” on the family (to the necessity of re-creating family-like relationships for the rest of one’s life). It is never quite clear whether Reich is seriously recommending that we break the incest taboo and, if so, in what manner; i.e., women in a patriarchal society are already, and to their detriment, encouraged to break the incest taboo. Reich is also unclear about the type and stages of infantile sexuality and in what way it is repressed in the infant. The prohibition against adolescent sexuality makes the now twice-repressed child “submissive” and capable of “compulsive marriage.”
Reich sees sexual energy at work in the whole body, not just in the genitals. He is careful to distinguish between perverted and healthy sexuality, and between sexuality and reproduction. He views, without contempt or superficiality, the results of total and lifelong sexual unhappiness in women. He is seriously concerned with the role of the body, and with our difficulty in uniting body and mind. He views an element of “involuntary surrender” as essential for both men and women in “healthy” heterosexual intercourse.
However, in a patriarchal culture it is destructively romantic to talk too much about female “surrender” in heterosexual intercourse and, for that matter, to talk too much about the importance of female sexual happiness, without talking about the importance of female power. The use of sex, like drugs, can become a compulsive pacification-opiate, especially for those without the power to define themselves.
In his zeal to create a pan-sexual, normal psychology (and in his sympathy for men), Reich fails to emphasize the enormous male-female differences that exist in the quality and quantity of “submissiveness” and “sexual monogamy” in women and men. The family does repress both male and female children—but female children more so. We may also have to consider the possibility that what Reich calls a “caricature” of sexuality is actually male sexuality. As such, men may not be as sexually unsatisfied as women—or as open to making certain changes in the interest of sexual happiness. (Men may not really be that interested in a female-dictated definition of sexual happiness.)
Reich proclaims the existence of a primary vaginal eroticism in female children, which he feels is “socialized” out of them. This, together with the fact that he is far too silent on the importance of the clitoris in female sexuality, is disturbing; but for a pioneer of sexual liberation to also proclaim that all bi- and homosexuality is “unhealthy” and “regressed” is positively alarming. (Of course, he doesn’t clearly differentiate homosexuality from lesbianism.)
Reich is dangerous or certainly limited when he or his devotees romanticize human sexuality to the exclusion of other human activities—or when they assume, rather naively, that ego, self, peace, and love will, like children, simply and “naturally” follow the Pied Piper of orgasm. The right to “sexual happiness” may exist in the most advanced technological-fascist state.
Ronald D. Laing
Here he is, in his own words:
What we call “normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive action on experience … it is radically estranged from the structure of being … if our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive.
Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on “bringing it up.” He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: “It’s all in your imagination.” Further still, he can invalidate the content: “It never happened that way.” Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so in the bargain.
This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it is being done by ascriptions such as “How can you think such a thing?” “You must be paranoid.” And so on.
There are sudden, apparently inexplicable suicides that must be understood as the dawn of a hope so horrible and harrowing that it is unendurable.
In our “normal” alienation from being, the person who has a perilous awareness of the non-being of what we take to be being (the pseudo-wants, pseudo-values, pseudo-realities of the endemic delusions of what are taken to be life and death and so on) gives us in our present epoch the acts of creation that we despise and crave.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Ronald D. Laing
In the book entitled Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing, like Freud before him, chose women as his subjects.40 Like Freud, he is “sympathetic” to his English female “schizophrenic” subjects. His clinical and journalistic method of interviewing is highly successful. Like Freud, however, Laing is describing the phenomena correctly, but without fully understanding their significance. Throughout the book, he remains unaware of the universal and objective oppression of women and of its particular relation to madness in women.
Most of the “schizophrenogenic” families that Laing describes are not atypical in their treatment of their daughters. All the families are involved in: (1) the sexual and intellectual repression of their daughters; (2) covert and overt patterns of paternal tyranny and incest; (3) the deep division between mother and daughter, which is characterized, on the mother’s part, by an obsessive “policing” coupled with a lack of physical affection for her daughter, and on both mother’s and daughter’s parts, by a preference for the father-husband, and a sacrificing of each other for family stability or for temporary feelings of well-being.
(1)This repression occurs in all eleven families that Laing depth-interviewed. One of the women, Ruby Eden, became pregnant when she was seventeen. Her mother and aunts called her “slut,” blamed her for the “mess” and “disgrace” she got herself into, and subjected her to all the well-known home ordeals to induce an abortion—so much for the reification of maternity in male-dominated society. We should really be asking, How do women cope with such brutal rejection of their bodies? Another of the women, Lucie Blair, is sterilized after giving birth to a baby girl. Both her family and the psychiatrists have viewed her as “sexually wanton.” Her father says he wanted her to be a pure, virginal, “spinster gentlewoman.” Maya Abbott’s family is obsessed with “cleanliness and neatness” for her; Hazel King’s mother is completely—and typically—sexually uninformed. According to Laing, Mrs. King
doesn’t know whether she has an o
rgasm, whether she has intercourse “properly” with her husband or not, whether or not he uses a contraceptive, or whether he ejaculates inside or outside of her.
This same Mrs. King has “hardly ever been outside the house unaccompanied by her own mother and father”—since her marriage.
The intellectual and artistic repression of daughters (and wives) is fairly total in these eleven families. Only one of the daughters interviewed (Ruth Gold) even wants to be an artist—and, unlike her brother, she is discouraged and punished for it. The fact that she even attempts such a task is what makes her family think she is “mentally ill.” Most of these families act as if their daughters won’t ever have to work at menial employment in the outside world—let alone at higher forms of self-development. Lucie Blair says:
My father doesn’t believe in the emancipation of women. He doesn’t believe women should support themselves.
She further tells the interviewer that she “gets no support in anything she wants.” Ruth Gold, the would-be artist, answers Laing’s question, “Do you feel you have to agree with what most of the people around you believe?” with “Well, if I don’t, I usually land up in a hospital.” Women are often psychiatrically incarcerated for rejecting their “femininity” as defined by those close to them—and are released or are considered as “improved” when they regain it.
(2)Lucie Blair’s father is typically maniacal in his (sexual) possessiveness of his daughter. He constantly told her that she would be “raped or murdered” if she went out alone. Lucie’s “illegitimate” child (illegitimate because her father had not conceived it) could never be mentioned in the house. Another of the daughters, Agnes Lawson, sat on her father’s (not her mother’s) lap every evening while he read stories to her until she was fourteen.
Women and Madness Page 17
