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A New Model for Feminist
Psychotherapy
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. -T. S. Eliot
Little Gidding
Psychotherapy has in common with epistemology the focus on meaning and how it is made and acquired in the experience of everyday life. Feminist psychotherapies and epistemologies share a focus on making visible the hidden effects of gender in ordinary life. They are both oriented toward exposing masculinist meanings and their damaging effects in general and in particular, and toward developing alternative meanings and choices based upon the actual lived experience of girls and women. In this way, women can be helped to see for themselves prior to, or instead of from, the perspective of the indeterminate or determinate masculine observer. The more intimate focus is obviously not sufficient to bring about large-scale cultural change in oedipal society. This does not seem tome to be an argument for not doing feminist psychotherapy, but it is an argument for not only doing feminist psychotherapy.
Feminist change must, by its very nature, be multifaceted, involving confrontation with meaning in every sphere of experience.
In so far as feminist psychotherapy concerns itself with the detailed meanings of a particular woman's experience, it contributes to the feminist cultural project of giving a respectful hearing to the diverse, yet similar, experiences of women. In this and many other ways, it can contribute to the individual and cultural resolution of the antigonal and oedipal complexes. The dilemma is not so much whether to work at the micro-or macrofeminist level, but not to separate and dichotomize them in this way, as each feeds and nourishes the other. Psychology and psychotherapy are intimately involved in the integrated understanding of the dis-integrated. Feminist psychotherapy works toward helping women remember forgotten experiences and making invisible meanings visible. lt seeks out both the embodied and the disembodied in women's experiences and takes as its goal returning to women control of their own bodies/minds/hearts.
It is frequently said that feminist psychotherapy does not involve a particular model or method of therapy, but instead adds or integrates a feminist perspective on any of the many models of psychotherapy available. I suggest that we not abandon prematurely the development of an integrated feminist model for psychotherapy. The model of the nature of personal development (in context) that I have developed in this book leads directly to a model of change (in context) upon which feminist psychotherapy can be based. The building blocks of such a model are as follows:
I. All experience is interrelated and is organized by meaning. Meaning is not a. cognitive or an intellectual term, but encompasses thoughts-feelings-behavior or mind-heart-body.
2. Meaning is conveyed in this and in any culture by all agents of socialization, including parents, siblings, other relatives, teachers, peers, the visual and written media, and is also organized and reorganized by each person.
3. The most centrally meaningful principle on our culture's mattering map is gender, which intersects with other culturally and personally meaningful categories such as race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Within all of these categories, people attribute different meanings to femaleness and maleness.
4. The meanings of maleness and femaleness in our society are represented by the oedipal and antigonal complexes and their ínterrelationship.
5. Feminist therapy involves identifying and changing the personal/ cultural meanings explicit and implicit in the unresolved oedipal and antigonal complexes as they are embedded in each woman's (and man's) most personal experience.
Feminist therapy begins with a woman telling her own story or stories. The feminist therapist, as any therapist, must give the dient a respectful audience. This is nothing but effective therapy, but must be underlined here·because the feminist therapy setting is often the first place in which a woman has the opportunity to become visible and seen, and eventually to begin to see for herself. Yet a woman's story is only the starting place. To facilitate the process, the feminist therapist must actively continue the process of questioning her own meanings and ferreting out the indeterminate observer who will be hiding in them as well as in those of her client. She must try to see through the client's eyes at the same time that she sees through her own and those of the indeterminate male observer. This is the multiple perspective familiar to so many women in oedipal society, here used for women's own sake.
Feminist therapy has in common with many other approaches a focus on the relationship between therapist and dient as microcosmic and as a fulcrum for movement and change. This relationship must also be understood within a context of meanings and values. This involves searching for multiple meanings, each connected to a particular perspective and always understanding from what perspective a particular meaning is made, including that of the therapist. A feminist perspective involves acknowledgment of and search for the invisible, for what lies at the margins of any story, and for ways that women's invisibility translates into invisibility to herself.
Where there is visible conflict experienced psychologically or physically, the signposts are already in place.
Psychotherapeutic approaches have often focused on finding the one true meaning of an experience. Whatever their theoretical orientation, therapists also frequently commit this error. For example, a woman I know tells of having been raped one summer when, as a student, she was hitchhiking through Europe. A roan picked her up, drove her to an isolated area, and ·attacked her in his car. For a few minutes, she fought and screamed, soon realizing that there was no one nearby, or at least that no one was going to respond. At that point she froze and just hoped to get it over with as soon as possible. Being in a foreign country and knowing that she would be blamed for hitchhiking, she did not bother to report the rape or even to tell anyone that it had happened. Yet, over the next few days, she could not rid herself of the idea that her father, whose seventieth birthday was that week, had precipitously died. She called home collect and was reassured that he was fine. She did not speak of this incident until several years later, when she decided to tell her therapist about it. "Obviously," he said, "you were enraged at your father for not protecting you." A few years later another therapist, upon hearing this story, told her, "Of course you called home. You wanted your mommy." Which one was correct? Which therapist was a father and which a mother? Her meanings had met up with theirs.
Both of these therapists sought the correct meaning of the experience.Perhaps the woman was also enraged at her father for being a man, as it is men who rape women.
Perhaps she was enraged at her mother for not being able to protect her. Perhaps she felt damaged and feared they would not love her anymore or that she, by extension, had damaged her father. Perhaps she felt that she had betrayed them both and thát they would want to destroy her. Perhaps she felt damaged, destroyed, dead herself. Perhaps she felt too much shame to tell them directly what had happened. Perhaps she wanted to protect them although they had not protected her. In this way, she could still feel that she had some control and power, although she had just been shown how powerless she really was. Perhaps calling borne made the incident in Europe, and Europe itself, seem less real, home more real. Perhaps calling collect helped her to feel taken care of in some way.
I could go on and on about what meanings were embedded in this experience and never touch on them all, for I am also speaking only from my own perspective. I could ask the woman herself, for whom it would be much more painful to engage in this exercise than it is for me. Most readers could also add to the picture, particularly if I were to sketch in more details about this woman, her family, her ethnic and religious background, the man she was engaged to marry. I do know that she felt it was her fault for hitchhiking, or at least that anyone she told would so believe. She was aware that if she told her parents, they would attempt to curtail her freedom and she would feel even further diminished. She bought her freedom at the high price of aloneness and shame-a very female strategy that allowed her to win by losing.
We could also try to imagine a male hitchhiker having the same experience, and this exercise would lead us to more gendered meanings. Try, for example, the comments of the two therapists: "Obviously you were enraged at your father for not protecting you"; "Of course you called home. You wanted your mommy." Would either have been made to a male client? Would they have made him seem smaller, more helpless, and more con-tained-more feminine? That is, more feminine than the very experience of being raped would have made him? Should this have happened to a man, the oedipal strategy would have entailed enlarging and strengthening himself in sorne way, perhaps by perpetrating the same damage on another individual?
We are not on a quest for the right meaning. Complexities of meaning must be carefully disentangled and disembedded. Part of the feminist therapíst's job is to be able to retain this complexity in the service of moving toward greater simplicity by relieving women of the physical/ psychological burden that gendered meanings engender. Invisible meanings that are damaging and dis-integrating must be separated from those that are enhancing or that can connect the client to herself and to other women.
The surplus of meaning attributed to women is an ongoing focus of the process of feminist therapy. Hidden meanings from the perspective of the indeterminate masculine observer, when made visible, can then be relinquished or replaced by alternatives. One way to unearth these meanings, in listening to any woman's stories, is to ask, Who is this about? ls the experience just about you? ls it about you at all? Who else is it about? Whose perspective is invisible? How would it be interpreted differently if it were about a person in a man's body? The focus on meanings involves freeing women from the prison of meaning by returning those that belong to the indeterminate observer of oedipal culture, as well as to particular identifiable Oedipuses.
Traditional psychotherapies work toward the goal of making conscious the narrowly personal and leaving the rest unconscious. That is, influences other than the narrowly defined personal remain invisible. Feminist psychotherapy involves awareness and understanding of the way everyday experiences, including so-called psychological disorders, are organized according to gender and other culturally salient variables. As meanings are changed, the invisible is made visible. This is not a simple cognitive experience, but one that is highly affect-laden and embodied and that profoundly makes visible the connections among women. lt is consciousness as used by Paulo Freire (I969) and certain European (ltalian) feminists, the making visible of women externally and internally, in society and to themselves.
I would distinguish what I mean here from the early model of consciousness raising in the women's movement in the following ways. First, I do not consider it to be a time- limited means to an end, but an ongoing way of making sense of experience. Therapists and the women with whom they work must continue to ask themselves and other women, What are the multiple meanings· in this situation and which ones have salience for me at this time? Which are masculine meanings applied to women? Am I using my eyes to see for myself? Feminist therapists must ask questions of their own as well as of their clients' experiences: Which ones are unique and which are shared by other women? Which other women in particular have been in this situation? An African- American woman may share certain meanings with other African-American women, other meanings with white (European-American) women or particular white (European-American) women, and yet others with African-American women and men. A lesbian woman who is Jewish may have certain experiences and meanings in common with heterosexual Jewish women, others with heterosexual or lesbian women of color, and others with only lesbian women, Jewish and non-Jewish. Points of overlap and of difference help to make visible new and different meanings, to continue to question reality.
What I am describing requires holding the tension of the complex perspective, continuing to look for what or who is being kept invisible. Feminist therapy is an exercise in peripheral vision, double vision, inner vision. Children notice details that seem irrelevant to an adult. Part of becoming an adult in this society means learning to make consistent stories and images, overlooking contradictory and paradoxical details as "natural" or as background rather than as what Teresa de Lauretis calls "a horizon of meanings" (I986, p. 5).
Yet dealing with a woman's pain and fears, joys and pleasures, is not simply a sociopolitical exercise. It is an intimate meeting of the most personal kind, filled with meaning, with fear and caring, courage and sadness, anger and grief, loss and gain. It is meaning as it permeates the body-mind-heart. Some of the meanings are those shared by women in this society and can be anticipated. There are particular aspects of women's experience and identity in current society that will be addressed characteris- tically in feminist therapy and that must be addressed in order to help a woman move through the resolution of the antigonal complexities. I have already explored many of these in the previous chapters, and it remains only to consider them in conjunction with the specific process of psychotherapy.
I do not consider current systems of pathology or pathologizing itself to be useful in understanding the experiences or the problems of women in context. Such taxonomies are not only divisive of experience but narrow and individually based. Locating the interstices of each woman's experience and every woman's experience is a more useful way to begin to understand more fully the source of successes and difficulties. For example, assessment in therapy with a woman, at this historical time and cultural place, might more usefully include understanding the issues in the following list and locating them on her mattering map. Obviously this sort of assessment is a process that is embedded in and not separate from and prior to the therapy, as are more traditional assessment procedures.
1 Quality and centrality of relationships with other women, men, and children.
How much and in what ways do these relationships determine the sense of self and of self-esteem? What particular aspects are enhancing and debilitating to others and to the woman herself?
2 History and current personal experience of limitations imposed by parents, peers, teachers, the media, and other significant sources and of more apparent violations, including, but not limited to, the more obvious ones involving violence, incest, and rape.
3 Own evaluation of appearance and of its centrality on her mattering map.
4 Physical presentation of self, induding habitual aspects of posture, carriage, gait, expression, musculature, movement, as well as situational variations when dealing with specific issues and experiences in therapy.
5 Degree of fragmentation experienced physically and psychologically.
6 Sense of invisibility and hypervisibility or exposure in general and in particular circumstances.
7 Eating/diet strategy.
8 Losses and disappointments, especially loss of the possible and of the sense of self.
9 Anger at and loss of the mother (Jocasta) and enmeshment with an individual father or cultural (oedipal) fathers.
I0 Degree of identification with the indeterminate observer.
11 Extent of sense of responsibility for events and behaviors of people whom she cannot control.
12 Experiences of shame.
13 Sense of self and of self-esteem.
Assessment locates the unresolved antigonal issues. While, in more traditional approaches, some of these are sometimes assessed with clients for whom they appear to be salient, I am suggesting instead that they are issues for every women in this society at this time and should routinely become the focal points of any assessment procedure.
For example, in their initial interview in a traditional family systems-based clinic setting, the female partner in a heterosexual couple was extremely distressed to learn that the therapy would be observed through a one-way mirror. Her male partner, who had made the appointment, had not informed her of this aspect of the interview. Her distress concerned her appearance; she had come from work and was dressed in jeans. She finally agreed to continue the sessions, but requested a later appointment time in the future to give her a chance to go home and change her clothes. Her partner was to all appearances extremely concerned that she look good, and complained bitterly that she was five pounds overweight and did nothing about it. By not informing her that they would be observed, he seemed to be attempting to get the therapy team to see her from his perspective--not looking right. To complete the picture, he was dressed in a suit and tie. Both agreed that his appearance was perfect, hers defective.
Who is this about? When the therapist had them tell their story, from their perspective it was about the wife and her defects, with the husband's disappointment and hostility perhaps secondary. The therapist, trained in a family systems perspective, understood them to be in a power struggle in which both were equal participants. The fact that the struggle centered on her appearance was not considered meaningful by the therapist. The goal of therapy was to recalibrate the system so that the struggle could be resolved.
From the feminist therapist's viewpoint, what is most immediately noticeable is the unresolved Oedipus-Antigone relationship. The battleground is her body and appearance, which are charged with containing both their conflicts. Both see through his eyes, although she no doubt has her own buried perspective. Both accept his right to comment upon and define her appearance and appropriate size. As a result, her sense of hypervisibility and shame is apparent. His sense of entitlement and weakly defined boundaries is also part of the picture, as are his fear of clearer self-definition and of standing alone. His dependency is hidden behind hers. Her sense of lesser worth, along with his avoidance of his own fears and conflicts, is part of the complex picture. Their relationship could not simply be recalibrated. If these issues are not addressed, they will manifest themselves in another way. Even if they are addressed, they are manifested in a myriad of ways. From this broader perspective, this cannot be a struggle between equals, as the entire weight of the indeterminate male observer is behind him.
As another example, a woman client I saw often worried about how her son was developing. She felt that she had not been a good enough parent to him and had damaged him by working outside the home when he was young. It had never occurred to her even to consider whether her husband had influenced their 'son's development by also working outside the home. It is more than likely that the employment arrangements of both parents affected the son, with the effect mediated by the meanings he learned to attribute to it. That is, if he understood his mother's working outside the home as his father's failure, the effect would be quite different than if he understood it as his father's success as a man. It would differ again if he understood it to have meaning about his mother and not his father at all and/or about himself.
I needed to understand which of these meanings had become part of this woman's sense of self. In this case, the son was not resentful, but the father/husband was. He didn't overtly blame her, but she did the job for both of them, seeing the situation through his eyes and those of the indeterminate male observer. Family relations were her responsibility and her fault. How her children "turned out" (as if they were products rather than people) reflected on her and was a measure not just of her job performance but of her self-worth. She worried incessantly although, in fact, her son's ailments existed mostly in her imagination and were mainly a comment on her own imperfection in her eyes.
In understanding this situation, we begin with the woman's own story and try to ferret out the perspectives of the determinare and indeterminate (oedipal) male observers. Unlike the prior case, they are not situated in the meaning of her appearance but in the meaning of her responsibility for relationships, for what she cannot control. She experienced these discrepancies, however, much as did the woman in the prior case, through a pervasive sense of shame and impaired self-esteem. She also felt the guilt of someone who is responsible to and for others. She would often become quiet, de- pressed, and self-critical. The strategy of the first woman client was to dress up and be physically hypervisible. This one became quiet and invisible. Both are easily located among the unresolved issues of Antigone.
Another woman let me know that her boss at work had confided in her that an extremely ugly woman had applied for a management position in the company. She laughed nervously as she told me this story. Predictably, her boss did not add a qualifier that this was so in his eyes, but assumed instead that his eyes were universal, that he was simply describing something about the woman. Implicitly he affirmed his own right to judge her, a classic oedipal move. This particular client experienced recurrent bouts of depression, which she believed she should be able to overcome or control by sheer will. She suggested to me that if she could be freed of this problem, she might even consider trading places with the ugly woman, such was her sense of desperation. With this comment, she pointed out her own perceived attractiveness. She also implicitly affirmed his power to judge. She had joined his perspective as the oedipal observer; their eyes were one. That is, implicit in her comment was his judgment of her as attractive and not worthy of ridicule for her appearance (at this time), but probably for her inability to control her depression, which was interfering with her job performance.
She was both relieved at the current assessment and frightened at a potential future one that might be out of her control. Ashamed of joining with him and letting herself and me see her doing so, she was yet more ashamed of her inability to control her depression. In her own way, she was attempting to connect with the other woman to remove herself from a vulnerable antigonal position. This she accomplished by connecting with the shamefulness of her position. Yet she also both gained and lost sornething by seeing with her boss. Her own sense of self-esteem was, at this moment, both increased and decreased. She may have won the battle, but ir was a pyrrhic victory. The work of her feminist therapy involved helping her to see and deal with several unresolved antigonal issues.
A client complained to me that a male co-worker consistendy commented on her appearance, but not in an offensive way; he said something only when she looked nice. She wondered why it always annoyed her. She blamed herself for getting angry inappropriately. Another woman told me that her teenage son is playful and teases her a lot as a way of .showing affection. The night before, when she asked him where he was going for the evening, he replied that he and his friends were going to pledge a fraternity and participate in a "gang bang." By this "joke" he was telling her that he was not really like that, but that he has a right to be. She laughed awkwardly (the awkwardness being manifested mostly in her body) as she told me about the comment, worried about his eyes and mine and lowering her own (a characteristically feminine gesture). The awkwardness contained her inexplicable to her) sense of exposure, violation, and shame combined with the inability to see all this dearly through her own eyes. After all, he was only joking and he was her son (but it was time for him to be bigger than she was).
Another client explained that where she worked, women were not treated fairly and promoted equally with male employees of the same leve] and ability. She had been angry about it, but explained that the women could never pinpoint any reason for not being promoted, as the reasons were kept invisible. Whispering campaigns indicating that the particular woman was not "a team player" would circulate.
In academia, there is a similar criterion for promotion called "collegiality." Is she one of the boys or not? Most women respond by trying harder and doing more work. They feel responsible for what they cannot control and assume that they are facing an individual problem. All these issues refer back to the unresolved antigonal and oedipal relationship and consistently involve, whatever the combination of other issues, a woman's self-esteem, responsibility for what she cannot control, and sense of shame. These aspects of the unresolved Antigone phase are invariably at the heart of the matter for women and, thus, for feminist therapeutic work.
The artificial separation of mind and body must be approached in a unified fashion in feminist therapy, first and foremost because they are not separate; second, because the physical focus of meanings attributed to women, the ordinariness of violations of women's physicality, and the surplus of meaning attributed to appearance and to doing any particular activity in a woman's body are such central experiences. As this becomes an increasingly visual culture, so do visual meanings become more central.
Meanings are inscribed in the musculature, skin, bones, internal organs, and, most likely, even the endocrine and immune systems. The therapist must notice how women move, sit, stand, and use their bodies characteristically and situationally. In this way, they express general and specific effects of gender. When do they get very still or freeze or appear to be making their bodies either invisible or hypervisible? Meanings are expressed through multiple and redundant channels of communication, the physical being a pnmary one.
The therapist is also subject to all the attributions to and violations of physicality that come with having a woman's body. The meanings of the physicality of both participants and their interaction are also part of the therapeutic relationship. For example, judgments about their own and each other's appearance may need to be considered, along with the meanings that each and the indeterminate male observer make of them. As they have both experienced the limits and violations involved in learning to be a woman, either or both may manifest tensions and fear in their bodies situationally or characteristically. Obviously it is the job of the therapist not to have these experiences unconsciously whenever possible, but to be aware of and work with her own Antigone issues. My point is that the physical is not to be screened out, but included, in feminist therapy in all the ways that it manifests itself. The entire spectrum of physicality and not just sexuality narrowly defined is meaningful in and out of feminist therapy. How meanings are embodied, as well as how being in a female body defines any experience, is an ongoing aspect of feminist therapy.
A therapist of my acquaintance introduced the topic of her move to a new downtown office to several of her women clients with the comment, "You can window-shop on the way over." The most overt meaning this comment carried was that the move, which was inconvenient for many of her clients, who had been seeing her in a less congested neighborhood, also had its positive aspect. While this comment was certainly multiply meaningful, I want to focus on its surplus of meaning to her as a woman and to these other women. lt had not occurred to her to make such a comment to her male clients, since she thought they would not be as interested in window shopping and certainly not interested enough to make the change a positive one for them. She may or may not have been correct, but I want to make a slightly different point with this example from the point I have already made about the equation between women and appearance. The feminist therapist is also a woman and may herself be unaware of the surplus of meaning with which she is operating and may slip into the perspective of the indeterminate observer. Appearance is extremely important to this particular therapist and a way to cover other deficiencies. The role of physical/psychological self- consciousness was as important to t