Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  While there are exceptions, we now understand that the majority of prostitutes are blue-collar wage earners who grow old quickly and die young. Most have fled incestuous and abusive families; they turn to alcohol and drugs in order to endure working lives in which they are repeatedly the victims of profound psychological, physical, and sexual violence.

  In addition, the male demand for sex with children has grown into billion-dollar industries, which include sex tourism, the sale of one’s own children into indentured servitude in brothels, and the kidnapping and luring of female children under false pretenses into the sex industry.

  Only a few shelters or programs exist, worldwide, that are devoted to the needs of prostituted women who wish to escape their slavery.

  These five major clinical viewpoints or biases may or may not be derived from having read the works of traditional theorists and/or from having been professionally trained. In any event, these and other similar biases certainly reflect many themes in the traditional clinical literature.

  TRADITIONAL CLINICAL IDEOLOGY

  Although the ethic and referent of mental health in our society is a masculine one, most psychoanalytic theoreticians have written primarily about women. Whether this choice simply reflects the greater abundance or cooperativeness of female patients, as well as the male desire to “save” and mold them, is unclear. I think something deeper has tempted and excited male psychiatrists for the last century to write about the Eternal Feminine gone “mad.” I think it was both safe and “therapeutic” for them to do this. In women, they could study madness without dread. They would not be turned into stone or pigs—Valerie Solanas (the woman who shot Andy Warhol) was no Medusa; Zelda Fitzgerald was no Circe; mad women had no power.

  I am not saying that Medusa or Circe were mad. On the contrary. Precisely because such women had power, they have become images that are despised and feared. Also, while many “mad” women are hostile and unpredictable, they are still women, and not as physically dangerous as their male counterparts. (Although certainly some are—and are feared as such.) More important, men of science (and art) cannot, except momentarily and romantically, and therefore safely, identify strongly with their female subjects. Their own sanity can remain firmly moored between their legs.

  The subject of women has traditionally elicited the most sentimental yet authoritative pronouncements in the psychoanalytic literature, all of which imply, accept, and desire a double standard of mental health or normality.

  Sigmund Freud:

  [Women] refuse to accept the fact of being castrated and have the hope of someday obtaining a penis in spite of everything…. I cannot escape the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for woman the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in man. We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denials of the feminists who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth.25

  We say also of women that their social interests are weaker than those of men and that their capacity for the sublimation of their interests is less … the difficult development which leads to femininity [seems to] exhaust all the possibilities of the individual.26

  Erik Erikson:

  For the student of development and practitioner of psychoanalysis, the stage of life crucial for the understanding of womanhood is the step from youth to maturity, the state when the young woman relinquishes the care received from the parental family and the extended care of institutions of education, in order to commit herself to the love of a stranger and to the care to be given to his or her offspring … young women often ask, whether they can “have an identity” before they know whom they will marry and for whom they will make a home. Granted that something in the young woman’s identity must keep itself open for the peculiarities of the man to be joined and of the children to be brought up, I think that much of a young woman’s identity is already defined in her kind of attractiveness and in the selectivity of her search for the man (or men) by whom she wishes to be sought.27

  Bruno Bettelheim:

  … as much as women want to be good scientists and engineers, they want, first and foremost, to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers.28

  Joseph Rheingold:

  … woman is nurturance … anatomy decrees the life of a woman…. When women grow up without dread of their biological functions and without subversion by feminist doctrines and therefore enter upon motherhood with a sense of fulfillment and altruistic sentiment we shall attain the goal of a good life and a secure world in which to live.29*

  Carl G.Jung:

  But no one can evade the fact, that in taking up a masculine calling, studying, and working in a man’s way, woman is doing something not wholly in agreement with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature…. [Female] psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and deliverer; while age-old wisdom has ascribed Logos to man as his ruling principle.30

  M. Esther Harding:

  A personal motive will carry a woman through an almost unlimited amount of monotonous work, without risk of losing her soul. For instance, she can make an infinite number of stitches if the embroidery is for a special place in her house; or she can knit sweaters and socks indefinitely for her husband and boys…. [Woman’s real goal is the] creation of the possibility of psychic, or psychological, relation to man…. It is a significant turning point in [the successful woman’s] relation to a man, when she finds that she can no longer look him frankly in the eyes, for it means that her real feeling which may not be shown openly has begun to stir … one of the factors accounting for an older woman’s interest in a man much younger than herself, lies in her own emotional immaturity. Such a woman has put all her energies and attention into developing her individual and professional qualities but little into developing her feminine values … so long as her own emotional nature is immature, she will continue to seek her fulfillment by making someone else dependent on her, her own inner childishness being projected, or reflected, in the man to whom she is attracted.31

  These are all familiar, prescribed, and therefore extremely seductive views of women. Their affirmation by experts has indirectly strengthened such views among men and more directly tyrannized women: events such as childbirth and marriage which, in others centuries, was unavoidable, common, and unromanticized, are here being touted by experts as spiritual luxuries, which women must strive for. The unchosen necessities of the past (perhaps no different from poverty, disease, or early death) were revived as salvation myths for twentieth-century women by the major psychoanalytic theorists. American middle-class women were also “seduced and abandoned” by the institution of psychotherapy and the tyranny of published “expert” opinion which stressed the mother’s importance (and sole responsibility) for healthy child development. Most child development research, like most birth control research, has centered around women, not men: for this is “woman’s work,” for which she is totally responsible, which is “never done,” and for which, in a wage-labor economy, she is never directly paid. She does it for love and is amply rewarded—in the writings of Freud et al.

  Freud’s views and self-professed confusion about women have been embraced, often romantically and devotedly, by female theoreticians, such as Freud’s analysand and disciple Helene Deutsch, and by Marie Bonaparte, Marie Robinson, and Marynia Farnham, and by male theoreticians such as Frederick Lundberg, Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim, and Joseph Rheingold. Freud’s views have been more subtly supported by C. G. Jung and his disciple, Esther Harding, whose approach to human psychology is more “spiritual” and anthropological than Freud’s; however, their female ideal is essentially a maternal-feminine one.

  Women are biologically and therefore psychologically different from men and vive la difference! Woman’s real problems stem from a resistance to her very unique and glorious capacity for a life of love, feeling, and maternity. Of course, modern society devalues such a life, but then, mor
e’s the pity. Women, preferably well-educated and wealthy, like Jung’s female disciples, should, as individuals, transcend such devaluing.

  The “Freudian” vision beholds women as essentially “breeders and bearers,” as potentially warmhearted creatures, but more often as cranky children with uteruses, forever mourning the loss of male organs and male identity. The headaches, fatigue, chronic depression, frigidity, paranoia, and overwhelming sense of inferiority that Freud recorded so accurately about his many female patients was rarely interpreted in remotely accurate terms. Female “symptoms” were certainly not viewed by Freud as the indirect communications characteristic of slave psychologies. Instead, such symptoms were viewed as “hysterical” and neurotic productions, as underhanded domestic tyrannies manufactured by spiteful, self-pitying, and generally unpleasant women whose inability to be happy as women stems from unresolved penis envy, unresolved Electra (or female Oedipal) complexes, or from general, intractable, and mysterious female stubbornness.

  In rereading some of Freud’s early case histories of female “hysterics,” particularly his “Case of Dora,” what is remarkable is not his brilliance or his relative sympathy for the female “hysterics”; rather, it is his tone: cold, intellectual, detective-like, controlling, and sexually Victorian.32 He really does not like his “intelligent” eighteen-year-old patient. For example, he says:

  For several days on end she identified herself with her mother by means of slight symptoms and peculiarities of manner, which gave her an opportunity for some really remarkable achievements in the direction of intolerable behaviour.

  The mother has been diagnosed, unseen, by Freud, as having “housewife’s psychosis.”

  Dr. Leonard Simon reviews the plight of Dora, whose father brought her for therapeutic treatment for a variety of Victorian “symptoms.”33 He notes that Freud’s case study

  could still stand as an exemplary effort were it not for a single, but major, problem having to do with the realities of Dora’s life. For throughout his therapeutic examination of Dora’s unconscious Freud also knew that she was the bait in a monstrous sexual bargain her father had concocted. This man, who during an earlier period in his life had contracted syphilis and apparently infected his wife … was now involved in an affair with the wife of Mr. K. There is clear evidence that her father was using Dora to appease Mr. K., and that Freud was fully aware of this…. At one point Freud states: “Her father was himself partly responsible for her present danger for he had handed her over to this strange man in the interests of his own love-affair.” But despite this reality, despite his full knowledge of her father’s predilections, Freud insisted on examining Dora’s difficulties from a strictly intrapsychic point of view, ignoring the manner in which her father was using her, and denying that her accurate perception of the situation was germane…. Freud appears to accept fully the willingness of these men to sexually exploit the women around them.

  Although Freud eventually conceded (but not to Dora) that her insights into her family situation were correct, he still concluded that these insights would not make her “happy.” Freud’s own insights—based on self-reproach, rather than on Dora’s reproaching of those around her—would hopefully help her to adjust to, or at least to accept, her only alternative in life: housewife’s psychosis. If Dora had not left treatment (which Freud views as an act of revenge), her cure presumably would have involved her regaining (through desperation and self-hypnosis) a grateful respect for her patriarch-father; loving and perhaps serving him for years to come; or getting married and performing these functions for a husband or surrogate patriarch.

  Freud was not the only one who disliked Dora. Twenty-four years later, as a forty-two-year-old married woman, Dora was referred to another psychiatrist, Felix Deutsch, for “hysterical” symptoms. Let me quote his description of her:

  The patient then started a tirade about her husband’s indifference toward her offerings and how unfortunate her marital life had been … this led her to talk about her own frustrated love life and her frigidity … resentfully she expressed her conviction that her husband had been unfaithful to her … tearfully she denounced men in general as selfish, demanding, and ungiving…. [She recalled that] her father had been unfaithful to her mother, [spoke] of her unhappy childhood because of her mother’s exaggerated cleanliness … and her lack of affection for her … she finally spoke with pride about her brother’s career, but she had little hope that her son would follow in his footsteps … more than thirty years have elapsed since my visit at Dora’s sickbed … from [an] informant I learned the additional pertinent facts about the fate of Dora … she clung to [her son] with the same reproachful demands she made on her husband, who had died of a disease—slighted and tortured by her almost paranoid behaviour, strangely enough, he had preferred to die … rather than divorce her. Without question, only a man of this type could have been chosen by Dora for a husband. At the time of her analytic treatment she had stated unequivocally “men are all so detestable that I would rather not marry. This is my revenge!” Thus her marriage had served only to cover up her distaste of men.34

  Thomas Szasz comments on the “hysterical” symptoms of another of Breuer and Freud’s female patients, Anna 0., who fell “ill” while nursing her father.35

  Anna O. thus started to play the hysterical game from a position of distasteful submission: she functioned as an oppressed, unpaid, sick-nurse … young middle-class women in Freud’s day considered it their duty to take care of their sick fathers…. Notice how similar this is to the dilemma in which many contemporary women find themselves, not, however, in relation to their fathers, but rather in relation to their young children. Today, married women are generally expected to take care of their children; they are not supposed to delegate this task to others.

  To Breuer and Freud, however, it was to Anna’s “great sorrow” that she was no longer “allowed to continue nursing the patient.” Anna O.’s identity was first revealed by Ernest Jones in 1953. She was Bertha Pappenheim, an Orthodox Jewish feminist who fought for the rights of unwed mothers, illegitimate children, and prostitutes.

  In my opinion, Bertha Pappenheim did suffer a genuine bona fide breakdown and had to be hospitalized on and off for years. She saw and heard things that weren’t there and spoke nonsense and spoke in tongues. She was also catatonic for long periods of time.

  However, she was the patient who created the “talking cure” and she went on to accomplish great deeds. Melinda Given Guttmann wrote the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman: The Enigma of Anna O.: A Biography of Bertha Pappenheim. The biography is also quite wonderful.

  All or some of Freud’s views about women have been extensively reviewed, criticized, and rejected by many female theoreticians: by Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, Margaret Mead, and more recently Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Eva Figes, and Germaine Greer. Male theoreticians such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Alfred Adler, Harry S. Sullivan, Wilhelm Reich, Ronald Laing, David Cooper, and Thomas Szasz have refuted him also but not necessarily or primarily because of his views of women.

  In her 1926 essay entitled “The Flight from Womanhood,” Karen Horney says:

  The present analytical picture of feminine development (whether that picture be correct or not) differs in no case by a hair’s breadth from the typical ideas that the boy has of the girl.

  We are familiar with the ideas that the boy entertains. I will therefore only sketch them in a few succinct phrases, and for the sake of comparison will place in a parallel column our ideas of the development of women.

  THE BOY’S IDEAS

  Naive assumption that girls as well as boys possess a penis

  Realization of the absence of the penis

  Idea that the girl is a castrated, mutilated boy

  Belief that the girl has suffered punishment that also threatens him

  The girl is regarded as inferior

  The boy is unable to imagine how the gi
rl can ever get over this loss or envy

  The boy dreads her envy

  OUR PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEA OF FEMININE DEVELOPMENT

  For both sexes it is only the male genital which plays any part

  Sad discovery of the absence of the penis

  Belief of the girl that she once possessed a penis and lost it by castration

  Castration is conceived of as the infliction of punishment

  The girl regards herself as inferior

  Penis envy

  The girl never gets over the sense of deficiency and inferiority and has constantly to master afresh her desire to be a man

  The girl desires throughout life to avenge herself on the man for possessing something which she lacks36

  Freud’s indirect rejoinder, made in his 1931 essay entitled “Female Sexuality,” is as follows:

  It is to be anticipated that male analysts with feminist sympathies, and our women analysts also, will hardly fail to object that such notions have their origin in the man’s “masculinity complex,” and are meant to justify theoretically his innate propensity to disparage and suppress women. But this sort of psychoanalytic argument reminds us here, as it so often does, of Dostoevsky’s famous “knife that cuts both ways.” The opponents of those who reason thus will for their part think it quite comprehensible that members of the female sex should refuse to accept a notion that appears to gainsay their eagerly coveted equality with men. The use of analysis as a weapon of controversy leads to no decision.37