Lesbian Images: Essays

by Jane Rule

  Because Freud did not examine the narrow conventional concepts of “masculine” and “feminine” but simply took them over as the basis of his work, he was forced to think of people as bisexual, achieving male or female identity only after a struggle which represses or sublimates the homosexual component of their natures. His insistence, for instance, that the clitoris is essentially a male organ of inferior proportions, which a woman must give up in order to achieve adult status in vaginal orgasm, is indicative of the dilemma he was in. It would be as ridiculous or as logical to argue that the penis is a grotesque enlargement of the clitoris and essentially a female organ. Just as a woman must give up her masculine clitoris, she must give up her masculinity of mind, that is “acute comprehension and lucid objectivity, not being ruled by passion,” except in perception of the love object when the masculine mind is ruled by “humility and sublime overvaluation of the sexual object.”25 Since Freud’s formula for adult womanhood involved sacrificing essential sexual pleasure and development of the mind, it is no wonder he saw latent and blatant lesbianism all around him and concluded “where inversion is not regarded as a crime it will be found that it answers fully to the sexual inclinations of no small number of people.”26

  His analysis of Dora,27 an eighteen-year-old patient, is a clear example of the arbitrary and subjective method of analysis he used. Freud himself acknowledged that Dora had been used by her father as a kind of consolation prize for the husband of his mistress, but Freud could not believe that Dora was really repelled by the sexual advances of this man since any young girl, if she were normal, would be sexually excited by such an experience. She was father-fixated therefore, rejecting the man as a way of punishing her father for his infidelity to her. Or she had identified with her father and really had a lesbian attachment for her father’s mistress. When Dora broke off treatment, Freud insisted that she had transferred her anger at her father to him and rejected him as well. That Dora married the young man who had all along been courting her in no way discouraged Freud from his diagnosis of latent lesbianism. Dora as a character in a novel would be very hard to believe if she were assigned the motives Freud insisted on against the blatant drama of her being used by her father, by the husband of her father’s mistress, and by Freud himself according to their own needs.

  Freud was often inventive and imaginative, perhaps even sometimes correct in his interpretation of dreams. In order to believe that he could, in his lifetime, learn and teach the language of dreams, he had to assume that the infinite complexity of images had really only simple messages to convey, basically sexual messages conforming to his theories of sexuality. His was a creative and belligerent mind, but it makes no more sense to codify all human behavior from his imagination than it would, say, from the characters in Dostoyevsky; yet that is what has happened in the practice of psychoanalysis.

  It is depressing but understandable enough that some men would be drawn to theories so celebrating of their physical and mental superiority, but Helene Deutsch’s attack on her own sex in Freudian terms is hard to believe as she spells out the three essential traits of femininity: narcissism, passivity, and masochism. There must have been a considerable degree of self-hatred in her attack on the intellectual woman. “All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.”28 “Usually she does not compete with men, for she is intelligent enough to realize the limitations of her talents.”29 Helene Deutsch finds the prototype of the intellectual woman in the image of “the sadistic witch riding on a broom.”30 She concedes that some such women have achieved success and even contributed to the world, but “I do not cite their names, out of respect for their achievements.”31 An odd courtesy. Though she admits that penis envy is too simple a theory and not primary, she is in full agreement with Freud when she assigns, as a cause of female inversion, “impoverished emotional life, resulting from an overgrowth of her intellect.”32 Biology probably plays a part in highly masculine women, but Deutsch, like Freud, is more interested in psychological sources such as disappointment in a father, fear and identification with a father, heterosexual disappointment or fear, longing for a mother, inferiority about femininity which makes one assert masculinity. In dealing with patients, she can be humane, accepting in one mother-fixated patient a change from suicidal unhappiness to overt lesbianism as a good but not the best solution; for love of a mother must be accompanied by “an excess of infantile regressive elements or hate components”33 for pathological distortion into homosexuality to occur. For her insights into lesbians and “other disturbed women,” she has drawn not only on her clinical experience and her access to other case histories but “very often instructive data for this book have been found in creative literature, which is less objective than clinical observation but all the more true because more inspired. After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.”34 Perhaps here Helene Deutsch can dissociate herself from those coldly rational women who have remained nameless.

  Thomas Szasz, a man and therefore perhaps excused for being rational since he has the right genitals for the talent, describes this approach and points out some of its weaknesses. When observations and measurements are made, fair conclusions can be drawn only if the experiment has not been prejudged. Nearly all psychiatric concepts have their roots in “intuitive, inspired truth,”35 that is faith in the unexamined prejudices of our culture. “We cannot, however, forever hold fast to and profit from the morally judgmental and socially manipulative character of our traditional psychiatric and psychoanalytic language without paying a price.”36 That price, Szasz speculates, may be the self-destruction of the profession.

  But as recently as 1972, yet another book written by a woman, Charlotte Wolff, who confesses that she has been influenced by psychoanalysis but is not a practitioner, moves even more deeply into the mire of Freudian myth. Love Between Women has been lauded as the first really sympathetic and fair treatment of lesbians written by a psychiatrist who also took the trouble to interview and test 108 homosexual women and to employ a control group. Like Helene Deutsch, Charlotte Wolff dismisses penis envy as anything but symbolic of an envy of men’s greater freedom, but the clitoris as a male organ is the basis for her theory of homosexuality in women. Everyone is, of course, bisexual, but women are even anatomically so because they are “doubly sexed” with a clitoris and a vagina (though not with the procreative possibilities of certain worms); therefore the sexuality of lesbian relationship is natural to all women though tragic because of the “impossibility of complete sexual fulfillment, and particularly childlessness.”37 But emotion and romanticism are the core of lesbian relationship, physical contact only a by-product, so she was told by those women she interviewed. Resignation and sadness are intrinsic, too, though she was not told, for “even those who denied it simply underlined that it was so.”38 This method of proof is pure Freud. Like him, also, she leaves her mind open to biological research and is particularly interested in Professor Doerner’s speculation that “disorder in the development of the sex glands in foetal life alters permanently our erotisizing zone, seated in the hypothalamus, which is the part of the mid brain mainly responsible for man’s emotional responses. This disorder produces male responses in a female. …”39 But evidence in this field is not yet conclusive. When Charlotte Wolff finds more evidence of homosexuality in the families of lesbians than in the families of the control group, she speculates on the possibility of genetic factors. She does not seem to be aware, even though she knows that most of the lesbians she interviewed were able to hide the fact of their sexuality from their families, that lesbians may simply be more perceptive about other homosexuals in their families than those in the control group would be. In any case, Charlotte Wolff’s field is psychology, not genetics.

  Not only does she transfer her attention from lack of a penis to possession of a clitoris to explain masculinity in women, she also transfers con
ditioning blame from the father to the mother. Girls suffer from being second choice with their mothers, who prefer sons and/or husbands because the culture values the male over the female. Daughters react either by becoming masculine or super-feminine to win love and protection. “Emotional incest with the mother is indeed the very essence of lesbianism.”40 A negative father can reinforce homosexual tendencies to exclusive choice, but he is never the cause.

  Charlotte Wolff claims some positive values for lesbians. They possess “a labile gender identity which might be interpreted as a sign of immaturity or arrested development,” but really “the retention of the capacity to change from feminine into masculine feelings and attitudes, and vice versa, is one of the assets of female homosexuality.”41 “I have no doubt that lesbianism makes a woman virile and open to any sexual stimulation, and that she is more often than not a more adequate and lively partner in bed than a ‘normal’ woman. It is her virility and aggressiveness that enable her to subject herself to heterosexual intercourse without feeling humiliated.”42 Her image of lesbian love-making is a constant changing of sexual roles, and, since she distinguishes between vaginal orgasm and clitoral orgasm (which she calls “male”), she must imagine that partners, depending on the momentary roles they choose, experience vaginal and clitoral orgasms by turn. For this reason, she claims lesbians are less often frigid. But she adds a bewildering qualifier. “However happy physical relations between homosexual women may be, they are deprived of the last step, and have to come to terms with a void.”43 The only clue to her meaning may be in her description of masturbation. “A niggling feeling of discomfort and unease follows masturbation, even in those who do not feel guilty about it.”44 There the dubious virtues of being lesbian come to an end.

  Simone de Beauvoir is right, according to Charlotte Wolff, when she says, “And if nature is to be invoked, one can say that all women are naturally homosexual,”45 but she is wrong when she claims that lesbianism is a choice. Why? Because “hers is not a life chosen, but a destiny beyond choice.”46 Otherwise who would tolerate the disadvantages? Extreme social pressures create defects, “unreliability in personal relationships and emotional instability.”47 “Paranoid tendencies are endemic in lesbianism”48 because of social persecution. Though many of the lesbians she interviewed denied feeling social pressure or persecution, “lesbians are aliens in any heterosexual group whether they admit it or not.”49 Though much of the social inadequacy of the lesbian can be blamed on cultural attitudes toward her, it is also her inability to solve the problem of her mother fixation which prevents her from forming a strong ego, a lack Freud would have claimed she shared with her heterosexual sisters. The lesbians Charlotte Wolff studied turned out to be more aggressive, violent, possessive, inhibited, tense, shy, suggestible, inadaptable, and stressful than the women in the control group. In commenting about the interviews she reproduced for her book, Charlotte Wolff gives the prize to “Miss Smith” as the luckiest of all the women in the study, a near saint she is because she entirely romanticized a female friendship without ever expressing herself sexually, and now that her friend is dead, she intends to remain faithful to her memory and go on looking after Mum. Charlotte Wolff’s only reservation about Miss Smith is that she is too dull ever to be a friend. At least Freud’s admiration for Leonardo da Vinci’s sublimated homosexuality included respect for his work.

  While a great number have followed Freud into the unconscious for explanations of human need and human behavior, others have looked to the visible world of our animal inheritance and to other cultures in hope of establishing scientific meaning for the terms “natural” and “unnatural.” In the work of such researchers, it is common to find such disclaimers as, “Moral evaluations form no part of this work.”50 Clellan Ford and Frank Beach, an anthropologist and a psychologist, come to the conclusion that “we may say on the basis of zoological evidence that human homosexual tendencies have a definite biological basis. Furthermore, and more important, there is little indication that these tendencies are restricted to a few deviant individuals. Instead they appear to exist in a large majority of both sexes.”51 Homosexuality is “the product of the fundamental mammalian heritage of general sexual responsiveness as modified under the impact of experience.”52 Because the brain is more developed, hormones play a less significant part and learning is the key to behavior in human beings. In disapproving of homosexuality, our society differs from the majority of human societies, 64 per cent of which accept some form of homosexuality as normal. Desmond Morris, a zoologist, says homosexuals, “providing they are well adjusted and valuable members of the society outside the reproductive sphere … must now be considered as valuable noncontributors to the population explosion.”53

  Kinsey researchers obviously share these attitudes. “The inherent physiologic capacity of an animal to respond to any sufficient stimulus seems, then, the basic explanation of the fact that some individuals respond to stimuli originating in other individuals of their own sex—and it appears to indicate that every individual could so respond if the opportunity offered and one were not conditioned against making such responses.”54

  In interviewing a number of women, they were able to test some of Freud’s theories of sexual development, which led him to describe homosexuals as people arrested at one stage, normal for everyone to pass through. The development from narcissism to homosexuality to heterosexuality was not borne out by the experience of preadolescent girls whose involvement was just as apt to be with boys as with girls. Freud’s theory of female sexual latency in late preadolescence is seen as no more than social conditioning from test results. In fact, all theories of perversion are referred to by Kinsey researchers as “mystical” or “philosophical,” not based on scientific observation and knowledge.55

  Their findings about factors leading to homosexuality in women are given in point form:

  1. the basic physiologic capacity of every mammal to respond to any sufficient stimulus.

  2. the accident which leads an individual into his or her first sexual experience with a person of the same sex.

  3. the conditioning effects of such an experience.

  4. the indirect but powerful conditioning which the opinions of other persons and the social codes may have on an individual’s decision to accept or reject this type of sexual contact.56

  “Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures.”57

  Of the women they interviewed, 25 per cent had recognized erotic responses to other women, 19 per cent had had sexual experiences. There was a higher frequency of orgasm in homosexual contacts. “Females in their heterosexual relationships are actually more likely to prefer techniques which are closer to those which are commonly utilized in homosexual relationships.”58 Seventy-one per cent of women involved in homosexual experience had no regret. (Charlotte Wolff wouldn’t have believed them.) The researchers observe that for many professional women, “heterosexual relations or marriage would have been difficult while they maintained their professional careers.”59 They attack the statistically unsupported opinion that homosexual women have more masculine traits than heterosexual women.

  Naomi Weisstein points out some of the many other studies which call all psychoanalytic theory into question. Tests have shown that experienced clinicians cannot identify homosexuality in widely used projective tests and change their judgment of the same material from week to week. Clinicians and psychiatrists have “never considered it necessary to offer evidence to support their theories,”60 offering their years of experience instead. “The problem with insight, sensitivity, and intuition (in ‘years of intensive clinical experience’) is that they can confirm for all time the biases that one started out with.”61 Obedience experiments have indicated to what an alarming degree people’s behavior is determined by their circumstance. “In some extremely important ways, people are what you expect them to be, or at least they behave as you expe
ct them to behave.”62 “A study of human behavior requires, first and foremost, a study of those social contexts within which people move, of the expectations about how they will behave, and of the authority that tells them who they are and what they are supposed to do.”63

  The knowledge that man is a conditioned animal is morally neutral. Its application is not. Behaviorists like Skinner and many others are impatient with those people who suffer from moral reluctance in programing people to behave in certain ways. Skinner’s argument is that people are conditioned anyway by chance, and it would make a lot more sense to bring that conditioning under the control of reason. Though Skinner avoids much discussion about sexual conditioning, it is clear that he would “program” a rather loose heterosexual monogamy for everyone. Other behaviorists, less reluctant to be specific about the task, enthusiastically report homosexual cures by means of aversion therapy, a technique which includes the use of emetics to induce vomiting at the sight of erotic pictures of one’s own sex, lysergic acid to encourage heterosexual fantasies, and shock treatment, as well as encouragement for sexual experience with anyone of the opposite sex who happens to be available. Most of these experiments are being performed on male patients, not only on those who volunteer with a genuine desire to change their orientation but on those who have been referred for psychiatric treatment by the courts. At least one death has been reported as a result of therapy.64 There is very little information about what is being done to involuntary mental patients, among whom there are a great many women, but Phyllis Chesler includes a case in her Women and Madness of a woman who, when she was ten yean old, was given shock treatment for indulging in lesbian play.