Rosemary H. Balsam

OEDIPUS REX: WHERE ARE WE GOING, ESPECIALLY WITH FEMALES?

The Oedipus myth usefully informs triangulated object relations, though males, females, and “humankind” can become overly interchangeable. Freud’s intentions to enlighten sexed gender are nowadays obscured. In 1931, he rejected Oedipus for females. Counterreactive gender blindness forecloses exploration about female development. Loewald’s (1979) view of Oedipus Rex emancipates male heterosexuals from a recurring (universal), regressive pull back to mother. Ogden (1987) offers further insights into earliest female development. The author suggests a lifelong, progressive trajectory of mother/daughter closeness, in synch with a girl’s shared slow body development into maturity and childbearing. Freeing the female dyad from obligatory pathological interpretation may inspire fresh sex and gender clinical theory.

Commentary on Patrizio Campanile's "I had twenty-five piercings and pink hair when ...".

Campanile addresses an issue that is abidingly mysterious, nearly a hundred and twenty years into the progression of psychoanalytic theory: how exactly do we integrate our bodies into our mentalized structures? And how does this happen over the course of a lifetime? Preadolesence and early adolescence are chosen here as a critical crossroad for these developmental paths, often at odds directionally, often doubling back to where they came from, yet pressing forward bumpily or smoothly, willy-nilly. As Campanile says here, “the extraordinary investment of the bodily ego that takes place in this developmental phase makes the body … a privileged place for the expression of conflict” (p. 413). With his fresh vision and arresting use of language, he has a special talent for thinking about the role of the body.

Styles of connection in analysis: clinical instances

This paper elaborates on the meaning of Loewalds metaphor of the analyst as sculptor as it relates to the transformation toward new object relatedness. The mutuality of the process is stressed and clinical vignettes are offered.

COMMENTARY ON MELITTA SCHMIDEBERG'S “‘AFTER THE ANALYSIS …’”

“‘After the Analysis . . .’” was written in 1938, but its contents are timeless. It is a bracing mix of psychoanalytic wisdom, frankness, practical realism, clinical experience, cynicism, empathy, analytic understanding, and a weary worldliness, tempered by a dash of fellow-feeling toward analysts about the considerable number of patients who expect far too much of analysis. Not only do patients fall prey to this phenomenon, Schmideberg says, but analysts do, too. In 1938 London, in the atmosphere of sharp theoretical and personal disagreements building within the British Psychoanalytical Society, between the English branch and the Viennese branch of the psychoanalytic movement (otherwise known as the Kleinians and the Freudians), this paper written by Melanie Klein’s only daughter seemed shockingly anti-Kleinian. Schmideberg read it first in the British Society in 1937, and it was heard as a direct attack on her mother. Such theoretical disagreements, augmented by the voices of the Continental analysts—and especially that of Anna Freud, who fled Vienna for London in 1938—fi-

Internalization, After Loewald: A Powerful and Clinically Useful Concept for Psychodynamics

ABSTRACT Her reminiscence of Hans Loewald as a supervisor makes the author indebted to his teaching, and to a central concept that Loewald elaborated in his theory, which was internalization. In creating the functioning mind this fundamental process combines object relations, drive theory, self-concepts and the cultural history of an individual. This concept has been key to analytic understanding of attitudes toward the female body and gender studies. A case vignette, presented in 1988 by the author at a WNE symposium in honor of Hans’s 80th birthday, is here elaborated further to demonstrate the role of internalization.

Response to John Steiner's “Overcoming Obstacles in Analysis: Is it Possible to Relinquish Omnipotence and Accept Receptive Femininity?”

While the author agrees that issues of sex and gender are frequently involved in impasses and often remain clinically unexplored, she highlights how Dr. Steiners thinking and (contemporary) Kleinian theory approach, in spite of seeming to recommend gender balance, suffer from the underlying severe sexed-gender polarities that were accentuated in the old Freudian and early twentieth-century schemata. Instead of setting up either/or propositions between abstract generalized (phantasized) masculine–feminine conflicts (as implied here by “feminine” receptivity, and “masculine” omnipotence as phallic), this commentary argues as an alternative and as apt to this impasse, the forward thinking of proposed varied gender integrations that emerged from work in the transference—such as has been described in clinical work enriched by contemporary theoretical development in the United States. This has been much more influenced by the humans internalized social and historical environs, academic postmodern thinking, feminism, relational thinking, and contemporary Freudian ego psychological developments.

“Castration Anxiety” Revisited: Especially “Female Castration Anxiety”

ABSTRACT I find the term castration anxiety a still relevant and important key body fearful fantasy in males, especially expressing fear of the father; as is female castration anxiety an equivalent key fear of the ablation of the sexual and reproductive organs of females, especially by the avenging mother. Freud’s and his followers’ version of the female anxiety, however, has repetitively been shown to be askew since the 1930s, yet it keeps appearing again, as if still worthy of serious argument. To demonstrate its utter blindness to an emotional or imaginative appreciation of female body reproductive functioning, a detailed critique is offered of the once classic paper, “The Body as Phallus” by Bertram Lewin (1933). I recommend that a straightforward sense of female castration is helpful in exploring female body anxieties as a more defined bodily referent than can be encompassed by separation anxieties that are currently more popular.

APPRECIATING DIFFERENCE: ROY SCHAFER ON PSYCHOANALYSIS AND WOMEN

The author describes and appreciates Roy Schafer’s critique of Freud’s view of female psychology and his other contributions to the psychoanalytic literature on women, noting his then-novel emphasis that took into account social and cultural factors in analytic treatment. She relates the influence on Schafer’s work of his ambiance in that era: the Yale University Student Health Services during the social turmoil of the 1970s (where she was his supervisee), with the university becoming coed, as well as the theoretical plurality even in the early days of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute.