Irene Fast

Aspects of core gender identity

Stoller proposes two fundamentally contradictory conceptions of core gender identity. This paper urges that we accept the first, a relational conception: Core gender identity develops in the context of unambiguous sex ascription at birth and the virtually infinite number of daily infant‐parent interactions permeated by all the conscious and unconscious meanings the childs gender has for its parents. The implications of this conception are explored in four contexts. The first shows that a recent case of sex reassignment, purporting to demonstrate a neurological base for gender experience, does not do so. The second argues that childrens core gender identities as “girls”; or “boys”; are as diverse as the meanings that their genders have had for their interaction partners (usually the parents). The third emphasizes the priority of infant‐parent interactions in core gender identity development and in the gendered meanings that childrens genitals have for them. The fourth argues for the rejection of the “di...

Selving : a relational theory of self organization

Preface - Toward the Notion of a Dynamic I-Self - Basic Structures - The I-Self: Our Ways of Making Meaning - Selving Without a Sense of I-Ness-I: Encoding Experience in Global I-Schemes - Selving Without a Sense of I-Ness-II: Id Experiences in Global I-Schemes - From Selving Without a Sense of I-Ness to First-Person Experiencing-I. Toward an Internal World - From Selving Without a Sense of I-Ness to First-Person Experiencing-II. Toward an External World - What Sort of a Self Is This Dynamic Self?

The embodied mind: Toward a relational perspective

Throughout his working life Freud rejected the dualism of mind and body, which suggests that we can study peoples thoughts, feelings, and relationships without taking into account the bodily contexts in which people live their lives. In his conception of the bodily origins of mental functioning, however, children are seen to be oblivious to their environments for a significant period in their early lives (the first 18–24 months). This conception is increasingly found to be untenable: current perspectives and observations both within and outside psychoanalytic psychology suggest that infants interact with their environments from birth. This paper attempts a model for an interactive perspective on the bodily origins of the mind. It proposes that from the beginning of life infant experience occurs in interactions. Because the mental and physical aspects of infants experience are initially not differentiated, these interactions are absolutely body‐bound. That nondifferentiation also results directly in the ...

Women's capacity to give birth a sex‐difference issue for men?

Feelings of loss or abandonment, alternating idealization and disparagement of their wives, envy of their wives, and denial of limits imposed by their own sexual organization are regularly reported in explorations of mens disturbed reactions to their wives’ pregnancies. In women this pattern of reactions, directed by them toward men, has long been understood to reflect little girls’ responses to the recognition of their sex and gender limits. In men it has not been interpreted coordinately as a pattern of reactions to the recognition that the capacity to give birth cannot be theirs because they are male. Freud repeatedly raises this possibility, but he invariably rejects it as incompatible with childrens early knowledge and beliefs. He seems implicitly to give it credence but he can find no way to integrate it into his profoundly phallocentric theory of sex and gender development. A differentiation model of gender development (Fast, 1984) suggests that penis envy and envy of womens childbearing capacit...

Infantile narcissism and the active infant.

Recent proposals to discard the concept of infantile narcissism as incompatible with currently available observations of infants pose a dilemma for psychoanalytic psychology because that concept has been of major importance in concurrent clinical investigations of borderline disorders. A reformulation of Freuds theory of infantile narcissism is proposed, based on Piagets model of child development. It proposes that objectively the child is actively engaged with its environment from the beginning. Subjectively, however, in its own understanding, the infant does not recognize the world as external. Major phenomena of infantile narcissism are entailed by this model. Clinical illustrations are used to show its implications for the observed phenomena of borderline disorder in adults and children.

The dynamic self in psychoanalytic psychology a formulation

Following Hartmanns theoretical formulations, the self has been explored primarily as a body of self‐representations coordinate to object representations; the dynamic organizations of the mind (the id‐egosuperego systems) have been seen as impersonal (nonself) functions. This paper attempts a conception of the id‐ego‐superego structures as self‐functions in intimate relation to self‐representations. Building on an integration of Piagetian and psychoanalytic object relations frameworks (event theory), it proposes that the earliest self‐experience occurs in dynamic schemes of personally motivated interaction between self and nonself. These I‐schemes lay the groundwork for both the dynamic and the representational aspects of the self: Their structure results in experience characteristic of the dynamic id and in their character as undifferentiated interactions provides the base for the development of self‐ and object representations. Development occurs by integration and differentiation in processes of confl...

The sense of being dead and of dying: some perspectives.

Summary The present communication is made in response to a published study (Lester and Schumacher, 1969) which found no support for hypotheses that schizophrenic women might usefully be conceptualized as dying women, and that schizophrenics (men and women) would have more death themes in their TAT stories than non-schizophrenics. The present authors argue that there is no reason to expect schizophrenic women to feel like dying women, do present empirical data strongly supporting the notion of a relation between feelings of unreality and of deadness, and suggest reasons for Lester and Schumachers failure to find schizophrenic-nonschizophrenic differences in TAT themes of death.

Intimacy and Distance in the Interpersonal Relationships of Persons prone to Depression

Abstract Self and ego boundary changes critical to the development of depression are hypothesized to have occurred in the second six months of life. An analysis of these changes suggested that persons prone to depression tend to form interpersonal relations combining intense intimacy with sharp separation. Hypotheses concerning the manifestations on the Rorschach test of these relationships and attendant concerns were supported at a satisfactory level of statistical significance.

Ein Differenzierungsmodell der Identitätsentwicklung

In diesem Kapitel wird ein Modell der allgemeinen Identitatsentwicklung erarbeitet, das auf die Geschlechtsidentitat als Spezialfall anwendbar ist. Der Begriff „Identitat“ ist allgemein gebrauchlich; in welcher Beziehung er aber zu anderen Konzepten der psychologischen Theorie steht, wurde bislang nicht eindeutig geklart. Wie Schafer (1968) zeigt, ist der Terminus in bezug auf andere Begriffe (Selbst, Ich, soziale Rolle, Personlichkeit oder Charakter) auch nicht zufriedenstellend definiert worden. Ubereinstimmend ist man der Ansicht, das Identitat und Identitatsentwicklung unter samtlichen in Frage kommenden Blickwinkeln (z. B. Entwicklungsverlaufe auf psychosexuellen und psychosozialen Stufen, Beziehungen zu Es-, Ich- und Uber-Ich-Konzepten, Entwicklung und Strukturierung von Identifikationen und Objektbeziehungen, Einflus sozialer Krafte) untersucht werden sollten und derartige Untersuchungen sich erst in ihren Anfangen befinden.

Männlichkeits- und Weiblichkeitsvorstellungen bei Männern und Frauen — eine Rorschachuntersuchung

Fur die menschliche Faszination am Zusammenspiel von Mannlichkeitsund Weiblichkeitsvorstellungen innerhalb der Personlichkeit finden sich im Mythos, in der Kunst und im Ritual vielfaltige (historische und kulturubergreifende) Belege. Plato berichtet von einer Sage, in der die Anziehungskraft zwischen Mannern und Frauen mit dem Versuch in Zusammenhang gebracht wird, eine ursprungliche bisexuelle Vollkommenheit wiederherzustellen, die im Laufe der Zeit in einen mannlichen und einen weiblichen Teil gespalten worden war. Der Mythos von Hermaphroditos spricht von der Vereinigung der Liebenden zu einem einzigen Wesen und dem Verlust der Liebesfahigkeit als Folge der Erschaffung dieser Form von Intimitat. Zeus handelte als mannliches Wesen, wenn er Frauen schwangerte, aber er war es auch, der Athena zur Welt brachte. Skulpturen von Gestalten mit mannlichen Genitalien und auch Brusten hat man bei Eskimos1 und in Neuirland (Otten 1971, S. 224) gefunden. Bettelheim (1954) diskutiert anthropologische Untersuchungen mannlicher Pubertatsriten, in denen Transvestismus, Subinzision und andere Zeremonien explizit oder implizit auf die Inanspruchnahme oder den Verzicht auf weibliche Krafte durch die jungen Manner hindeuten.