Women and Madness

by Phyllis Chesler

  DONNA: So I left my husband and gave up my “establishment” career. And was I grateful for [my boy friend’s] struggling with his sexism. Gee: he’s actually trying, I owe him even more than I owe a man who doesn’t try. Eternally grateful, that’s me, Polyanna Pure, Earth Mother—and I can’t help it, I love it, I love feeling good vibes….

  So then he tells me I should get into pottery and tie-dyeing and drugs; fuck the career, it sucks—and it does—but he doesn’t drop out. He puts his shoulder to the capitalist wheel so that I can potter around—and while I’m at it, I can cook and clean and be what I love most—Earth Mother.

  Well, it’s not a bad life, and he’s more sensitive than other men, but somehow, psychologically, nothing’s changed.

  KATHRYN: How can a therapist or a love relationship or a single group “help” me with the accumulated and ongoing and constant damage of being a woman in this culture? I’m not supposed to exist—and I’m supposed to be happy about my non-existence. For example, the old, pre-feminist me is not supposed to notice or respond to male insults on the street—but secretly, I’m supposed to like them. I should lay back like a pale ghost and not move too much while I’m being raped, but I’m supposed to like it—see? It’s like I’m not there, like I don’t really exist—and I guess I didn’t. Another example: in restaurants, my date or husband orders my meal for me. I don’t speak to the waiters directly. And such public invisibility or non-existence is supposed to make me feel safe and loved and protected. It’s Leda and the swan all over again: I’m supposed to get my rocks off by being raped. And I suppose I did: I went to beauty parlors and wore high heels and short skirts and makeup. Now that seems very sad and very frightening to me. I know how deep such conditioning goes and how hard it is to shake it.

  Now take the new feminist me. I always pay for myself in restaurants. Often, when I’m with a poorer or younger companion, male or female, I’ll pay for them too. Well, if it’s a male companion, he gets the change and the waiter’s thanks. Even with money, I still don’t exist. Another thing, if I ask directions about how to get somewhere, or how to fix something, and if I have a male companion within hearing distance, he’ll get the instructions. Last week I asked a male clerk in a country supermarket where the nearest liquor store was. A man standing nearby, whom I didn’t even know, got the directions. And, oh yes, if men think you really want to be treated as if you exist, they do it coldly, and with a vengeance. “So you wanna be a man? Okay, take that on the chin.” And you really get hit doubly hard with stiff upper lip, grin and bear it, brutality. They’re saying to you: “It’s nothing but punches to be a ‘man,’ especially if you happen to be a woman, so stay put—or watch out.”

  Most feminists are as concerned with heterosexual relationships and orgasms as other women are. Most feminists are as frightened of being without men, or without monogamous relationships, as other women are.

  MARIA: Well, I thought feminism meant better relations between the sexes, certainly better sexual relations. I mean, the sexual relations couldn’t get any worse but they could, they could. I guess it’s true, and yet I don’t like to think so. Men don’t really like you to be there sexually. If they’re not in control, if they’re not “safe” emotionally—which usually means emotionally distanced, they won’t lay down with you in a loving way. Or they won’t pretend to be “loving”—that’s more like it. If you’re lucky they’ll come and run—literally and figuratively. And if they come too fast, or if they’re impotent, or if they don’t really like oral sex or if they don’t want to see you again—they make you feel guilty—or, to be absolutely fair, they don’t resist the fact that we’re not unwilling to play our guilty parts. And they’re really scared. They’re scared if you seem to be happy. They’re scared if they think you want to trap them. They’re scared if you don’t want to trap them. Because if you don’t—that would be a whole new game, or not a game at all. And they wouldn’t know the roles, they’d have no “edge,” they’d tumble into an abyss of vulnerability. So they’re frightened, and they turn their fear into some kind of cruelty, and familiar scene, we’re still left holding the bag of understanding and compassion. They don’t “understand” us if we’re not “confused” and “unhappy.” If a woman knows what she wants and thinks clearly—forget it!

  ALICE: I always went with men who were older than me. I was a Daddy’s girl like everyone else. Life or feminism or having more money changed that a little. I became more open to having relationships with younger men. If a young girl takes up with an older man, sure, he pays for her, but she supports his ego, she’s there for him sexually, emotionally, domestically. And up to a point she’s probably happy about it. It’s accepted. They can go places together. It all fits. If a young boy takes up with an older woman she may very well pay for him too—but his ego is still the one that needs supporting—especially if he’s kidded or punished by other men or by uncomfortable social situations. Since he’s been conditioned to be a “man,” he really doesn’t know how to support a woman sexually, emotionally, or domestically. The idea of doing so is usually very frightening to him. Even “feminine,” counterculture, type young men can’t handle a woman being “up,” in any sense of the word. It’s too devastating. A woman may get some more support from a group if she’s careful not to engage in any individual acts of success. If you submerge your ego or self into a group process, or even into a private love relationship, and especially if you’re troubled and unhappy and failing—then you might get sympathy from other women or from a man. In other words, if you remain more “female” than “male”—it’s still easier to survive.

  Feminists sought therapy just as other women did: often, for long periods of time, and with men rather than with women. They were “treated” with the same double standard of mental health with which all women are treated.

  DONNA: “Why don’t you fix yourself up?” he always said. “You look like a hobo—I’d almost think you were afraid of men!” Not a word about how right we are to be afraid. Not a word about athletics, lesbianism, politics, or my eternal soul. Just “Dress up for Daddy” as proof of mental health.

  VICTORIA: I was eighteen when I started therapy for the second time. I went to a woman for two years, twice a week. She was constantly trying to get me to admit that what I really wanted was to get married and have babies and lead a “secure” life; she was very preoccupied with how I dressed, and, just like my mother, would scold me if my clothes were not clean, or if I wore my hair down; told me that it would be a really good sign if I started to wear make-up and get my hair done in a beauty parlor (like her, dyed blonde and sprayed); when I told her that I liked to wear pants she told me that I had a confusion of sex roles. I originally went to her when my friends started to experiment with sex, and I felt that I couldn’t make it, and that my women friends with whom I had been close had rejected me for a good lay.

  DEIRDRE: I interviewed six male analysts. Every one of them intimidated me with questions such as, Was I married? Did I want children? Why hadn’t I any children? Why was I divorced? And they never looked up from their notebooks. And I never went back after the first time.

  SUSAN: I’ve had many, many therapists. You might say I’ve been lonely and unhappy for a long time. My first therapist was a woman. She gave me an MMPI which she showed me, and it said I had very high ego strength which she said was a bad thing. I knew it’s bad in the sense that if it’s very high it’s supposed to mean rigidity, but for a woman trying to do well in school, ego strength is very important. I suppose I was using therapy as a substitute for friendship.

  My second therapist, a man, told me that I was the coldest woman he had ever had the misfortune to meet—that I was castrating. His professional judgment was that I would never get into any kind of long relationship. He pitied any man that ever got involved with me. My therapy with him was the worst experience of his life—he said. He went on in that vein for about ten minutes at which point I walked out on him. So then I decided I real
ly didn’t need to be in therapy. About a month later a fellow broke into my apartment—not to steal anything but to have some kind of sexual relations with me, and I finally scared him off. The police obviously didn’t believe my story, and they said I was inviting him because I had long hair and sandals and red curtains in my bedroom and then they had a plan where I was to lie nude in bed with the curtain open. The whole scene got very frightening. I told my boy friend and he suggested I see his psychiatrist, a man. So I did. He kept saying that I should wear my hair long instead of pulled back because it was more feminine. But it got tangled in fifteen minutes and I couldn’t stand it. And he told me to put no pressure on my boy friend, he told me to just be “giving” for a change. At the time, I was very afraid that the things he was saying were true—even though I would fight with him. There must be something wrong with a woman being assertive, intelligent, and capable: I was, and no one was loving me very much, and I was very unhappy.

  You know, I met him [this therapist] a year later by accident, socially. I had been goaded into making a very passionate defense of women’s liberation. [My old therapists’s] wife kept saying, “Right on,” and then when he tried to protest, and said, “Don’t I help out?” she said, “What do you do around the house—you don’t do this and you don’t do that”—it was absolutely a bizarre evening.

  Some feminists attribute major changes in themselves to the women’s movement and to their consciousness-raising groups. Others feel that psychotherapy has accounted for major personal changes—including their conversion to feminism. Some feel that both experiences, occurring simultaneously, were essential for change. Some women are keenly aware of the limitations and dangers, as well as the advantages, of both feminist groups and psychotherapeutic experiences.

  MARILYN: Feminism has helped me feel close to my mother for the first time in my life. My father was always perfect to me and I loved and enjoyed him in a way I never did my mother. Now I begin to see that one of the things that’s gone on is that my father has really forbidden me to be close to my mother. He’s really kind of separated her from her kids in a very sad way. I now feel so sisterly with my mother, it’s incredible. At dinner the other night, I saw that every time I would talk to her he (my father) would put her down, he would try to make her look foolish to me.

  SYLVIA: Modern men get along better in groups than women do. They’ve had more experience at it, from sports on up. That’s why I thought it was very important that women were willing to form groups. But some feminist group rules are really destructive. For example, not being able to criticize a woman who prefers to sit and bullshit rather than grow, or carry off an action. Her fear intimidates me, makes me grow quiet and kind of despairing. Well, once I brought up in a meeting that we should transfer some of the tenderness that we all have toward men to each other and nobody had thought about it! So I think that most feminists are still living their lives much as they would have done anyway or very close to it. We haven’t talked about any kind of structures for our lives. We still have our little apartment and many women are in—or want to be in—a one-to-one relationship. In another group, I brought up the idea of monogamy and how that worked against the women and that it was a very male kind of idea and the women who had close relationships with men were very threatened by that.

  Many very active feminists cannot leave their current therapist, male or female: where else, in this world of shifting political allegiances and violence, can they be assured of some familiar feedback and attention? Some feminists cannot bring themselves to be really angry at former male therapists’ (or husbands’) behavior—even when they understand that it has hurt them.

  LYDIA: Listen, Phyllis, I’m going to tell you something funny but promise me you won’t draw any conclusions from it, okay? And don’t make a big thing of it—it’s not a big thing. Well, remember my shrink—yeah, he’s a man—but he really did help me. Well, after feminism broke like a wave of the future he got very interested in me, very interested, and one thing led to another and he started calling me late at night to talk things over. Now he’d been a very proper shrink and had never behaved like this before. Then he started visiting me at home and one thing led to another—no, there’s a twist. He wanted me to go to bed with him and his wife—he thought it would be good for her. Well, we’re all a little bit crazy but he really was helpful before all this started.

  MARILYN: I’m still seeing a male psychiatrist, and I’m pretty active in the movement. He’s very different: he believed in female oppression before I even knew about it. I need to keep seeing him, mainly because I sometimes get so paranoid, so angry, that I must be wrong. I get scared, and there’s no women’s group that can really deal with this—for me. Sometimes he thinks I fuck men over too much—and I do.

  PHYLLIS: How do you fuck men over? Is stepping out of the inferior—or slave—role “fucking men over”—because they experience it that way?

  MARILYN: (laughing) Okay, okay. Well, I think I raised his [the psychiatrist’s] consciousness the other day.

  PHYLLIS: Did he pay you?

  MARILYN: Oh shut up! (Laughing.) Really. He [the psychiatrist] was saying that if a therapist really has respect for other people he doesn’t need his consciousness raised, he just won’t oppress women. I really disagree with that. I gave Dr. X as an example. He used to be a director at a [private psychiatric hospital] and he had a lot of respect for people, sees people as autonomous, as making choices, and he’s very hesitant to hospitalize a person ever. But this kind of guy could say to my supervisor, “I don’t know why Marilyn is in women’s lib—she’s pretty, smart, and feminine.”

  Some feminists who are aware of the limitations of psychotherapy still see no other viable institutional alternative—especially if they are no longer relying on marriage and motherhood as major psychological and emotional havens.

  PHYLLIS: Given your own bad experiences with psychotherapists, would you say that women should stop seeing therapists?

  SUSAN: I don’t think so, not immediately. I think that a lot of people use it as a substitute for friendship. There are times in your life when you’re under a lot of stress and strain and you don’t know people you can go to because you’re in a new place or all the people you know have left or all the people you know are part of the problem. You want someone else to go to and we don’t have an extended family in which there are people naturally to go to. So, there are therapists, and we go to them.

  PHYLLIS: I agree, but I think that if we’re hurting and we get slightly comforted by therapy, that it then makes it harder to reach out to some other place or persons for comfort or advice.

  SUSAN: That’s true, but I don’t think abolishing or avoiding therapy is going to help because there are too many needy people and we don’t have anything to shift to. I suppose a CR group could help women leave bad therapists, give them strength to find better therapists.

  PHYLLIS: When you feel depressed or anxious, and you want “help” with these feelings, can you count on a feminist group, especially a project-oriented group, to “help” you, to pay as much attention to you as a therapist would—if you paid her?

  SYLVIA: No, unfortunately. It gets boring to listen to someone else always talking about their problems. There’s another girl in the group who is even more depressed than I am and after she talked about her depression everyone got tired of hearing about it. But therapy with a man is absolutely out—and therapy with a woman who’s not a feminist is too painful. I guess I have no fantasy image of a good mother or a wise goddess.

  I would like to close this chapter with a description of what one of the feminists describes as a basically good relationship with a woman therapist.

  ALICE: I was very attracted to this woman. She’s European, verbal, maternal, humane. I always felt I could talk to her about whatever was important to me without being misunderstood. She’s not a feminist, but I sensed an inner peacefulness or wisdom and, most important, a happiness about being a woman. But she’s real
ly unable to share my anger about sexism or about individual men. She alternates from chiding me or indulging me to being disappointed in me or pitying me. When a man—on the street or at work or in a private relationship—starts “coming on,” she doesn’t believe I get really frightened and angry or that I should. For example, I was at a business meeting in a professional capacity. One of the men immediately wanted to know how old I was. He told me how attractive I was and said how I must be something to “date.” I got very angry but didn’t show it. I left, for a therapy appointment, as it happens, and was feeling very anxious. My therapist then told me I was “obsessed” by “this question” of sex and power. “The obsession might be productive,” she said, “but it was extreme and you know extremism is not very grown up or civilized.”

  I suppose on some deep level I’m experiencing with her what all daughters experience with their mothers. I feel she’s abandoning me to the “grown-up” world of men. She’s saying, “You’re a heterosexual woman. Be thankful. Go and try to find that one exceptional man, that one special ‘feminine’ man. Till your private garden and look out for yourself. Don’t tempt too many demons.” Good, solid, philosophical advice, compassionate advice, and yet being thrown out of any Garden of Eden never feels good.

  She’s really telling me I can’t stay in the world of women: with her, with my mother before her, with other women now. I must go out, alone, and bear a man’s child. She feels that the highest level of object-relating is between the sexes. She believes—she said she believes—that even if we were all raised equally, given biological differences, that there would still be a major attraction between the sexes. I don’t know about that. And even if it’s true, I don’t know if it’s the “highest” level of humanity or civilizedness. It’s a very conventional and dominant idea, a very seductive idea. One thing for sure: she’s tempering my passion, my anger, my courage. I do wonder, though, what the world could be like if she (and my mother) agreed with such anger, or had some kind of feminist vision: what would it be like?