Making Meaning Making Meaníng
Clinical Psychology
Psychologists have tried to divorce themselves from an early marriage with philosophy in order to make a more respectable union with value-free science. Even the second marriage, however, must prove a disappointment, for as Keller has noted, "Science is the name we give to a set of practices and a body of knowledge delineated by a community, not simply defined by the exigencies of logical proof and experimental verification" (I985, p. 4). Fact and value cannot be so easily separated, Descartes notwithstanding. Psychology is always based on subjective decisions from a particular perspective. Philosophy and epistemology are traveling companíons on every scientific journey. It has been rightfully said that whoever claims to have no epistemology has a bad one (Bateson and Bateson I987).
Nevertheless, generations of students have been taught about value-free science and, more surprisingly perhaps, value-free psychotherapy, which is based upon either observation or reflection and introspection (of men). In both cases, however, the theorist/practitioner defines the appropriate method of study and draws the boundary around what is to be studied. These perspectives and values have not only been institutionalized but have come to define reality and normality itself. Women are thus rendered invisible (unreal) or, by definition, abnormal. The absence of the diverse perspectives of women of all cl asses and colors from psychology limits its applicability to less than half of humankind. Add to this the exclusion of the perspectives of other people of color and the relevance of traditional psychology is further reduced.
Justas classification in chemistry is an artifact, an act of the chemist, not of nature (Bateson and Bateson I987, p. I53), psychological classification and explanation are artifacts of the psychologist. The very definitions of woman and man are not real, independently existing entities but functions of the viewer, the definer, the categorizer, the namer and bis values, bis needs, bis experience, and bis physical instrument. That is, the knowledge to which one has access, or, better said, the knowledge that one creates, is a function of one's epistemology, one's manner of knowing, and what one defines as worth being known.
The categories man and woman are examples of a system of classification based upon the dualistic thought inherited in the Western world from Descartes, renowned among us for having validated his own existence by the "fact" that he thought. And indeed he did, but he thought in opposites, in dichotomies, seeking verifiable facts, passing down to his sons the notion that facts are only waiting to be discovered. The old adage that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe that there are two kinds of people, those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don't, points up the impossibility of criticizing this paradigm from within its own confines.
THE NATURE OF (WO)MAN
Consider the Nature of Man, that age-old puzzle that has been addressed by every important male philosopher and psychologist. Note just how the question is formulated, for embedded within the question itself are its potential answers. If one undertakes to study a category of being known as man, whose members are made up of men and "of-men" and "not-men," certain decisions and results are predetermined. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead have demonstrated that "[a] class cannot be a member of itself" (Watzlawick I967) without creating an error of logical typing-that is, an error that results in the creation of a paradox, an undigestible piece of communication. Such an error occurs in the use of the word man to describe an individual member of the category "man." Is man an individual or the category of which "man" is a member? Not to experience consciously this paradoxical concept requires a distortion in perception and cognition that has been well accomplished in our culture and that creates a scotoma of all the senses, a denial of others for men, a virtual denial of self for women.
The trick involved in making sense out of this nonsensical proposition is to render woman either a subset of man or totally invisible, that is, either "of-man" or "not- man." Thus, if she exists at all, a woman becomes a kind of man. From that conceptually flawed starting point, it is a natural step for psychologists to ponder their inability to understand her, for they must wonder, "What kind of man is this anyway?" The answer, of course, follows from the nature of the question and the psychological perspective of the questioner: an abnormal one, a castrated one, a more emotional one, a less morally developed one, un homme manqué. It is from this epistemo-logical framework that prefeminist clinical theories concerning women, whom they define as highly deviant, abnormal, or, at best, inferior men, were developed. Freud, no doubt, understood something about the fantasies and fears of little boys and perhaps adult men when he postulated the presence of castration anxiety, but had no basis for transferring the existence of this fear to little girls, except through the mechanism of projection. To do so was to believe, as Freud apparently did, that little girls, at all times and in all places, upon becoming aware of the difference between their own and the male body, immediately and necessarily experience their own as an inferior, mutilated form of the other. For this to be so, the little girl must be asking herself the question, "What kind of man (boy) am I?"
Could not a female psychologist equivalently project that the male child,upon experiencing the difference between his own body and that of the female, particularly his mother, must immediately and necessarily experi-ence a sense of horror at the presence of an external and highly vulnerable growth? This would be the gynocentric mirror image of the Freudian castration theory, understanding the experience of a little hoy from the perspective of an adult female. His question to himself would be, "What kind of woman am I?"
In fact, either or neither might occur, depending. Depending on the perspective of the viewer, of course, but also on the valuing context within which the hypothetical little girl or boy has developed and the meaning and values by means of which she or he has learned to interpret experience--that is, the valuing of the socially constructed differences between males and females by anyone who makes up part of the meaningful context of experience of that child, including parents, siblings, other family members, peers, other adults, media representations, and so on. Thus a gynocentric mirror image, to work as an analogy, requires a world that values the female as our own values the male, and degrades the male as ours does the female. The term womankind would include all humanity, both female and male. Only in such a world would the male child be prone to experience himself as a deformed female, would he be considered abnormal insofar as he differed from the female form and norm. lt would take a remarkable leap, much like Alice's through the looking glass, for a male child in our culture to experience himself as an inferior female.
Feminist psychologists have had to point out to themselves and to a not-always- receptive community of non-feminist psychologists that women cannot be understood by superimposing on them either the experiences of men in general or the ideas of individual men concerning what it must be like to be a woman. Examples of this bias in dinical psychology abound and not only among its founding fathers. Consider the now well known and oft-quoted studies by Broverman et al. (I970, I972), in which both male and female clinicians described the adult female as virtually opposite to both the adult male and the healthy adult. Both the methodology and the results of this study reflect the acceptance of the dichotomous nature of gender- related variables.
Other examples are all too easy to find. Psychoanalysts, in treating rape victims, have searched for the woman's unconscious masochism or desire to be raped. As we have seen, family therapists have analyzed the function of battering both for the batterer and the victim, whom they consider to have an equal stake in perpetuating her own victimization. For years, psychiatric journals have touted the salutary effects of antidepressants by printing "before" and "after'' pictures showing a woman leaning on a mop looking despondently at her kitchen floor, and then happily mopping it after taking her medication. Case studies in which improvement for women only is inferred from changes in grooming and the application of makeup are common in the literature and in practice.
EMPIRICISM REVISITED
The empirical literature in psychology also provides abundant examples of research projects that use only male subjects but generalize to all people. Frieze et al. list the following common errors in methodology that "reflect and result in biases in the study of women":
Use of only male subjects in the experiment.
I. Not testing for sex differences.
2. Building theories by eliminating data from females that do not correspond to data from males.
3. Lack of knowledge of sex roles and how they influence behavior.
4. Exclusive use of male experimenters and investigators.
5. Ignoring important experimental and situational influences, including the use of male-biased tasks.
6. Viewing behaviors as dichotomous rather than integrated, especially conceptualizing masculinity and femininity as mutually exclusive.
7. Incorporating the value system prevalent in this culture (I978, pp. I6-I7).
These are not potential, but actual, methodological errors that ha ve been made over and over again and were accepted uncritically before the advent of feminist psychology. In fact, many of these errors continue to be made by masculinist and androcentrically based researchers.
THE MEANING OF MEANING
Current masculinist epistemologies are based upon the drawing of boundaries around fact and value and between man and woman, psychological and physical, psychological and sociological, intrapsychic and interpersonal. Categories, taxonomies, things, subjects, and verbs are created. A truth is posited that is independent of the observer, be he scientist or therapist, and that is general rather than relative (Harding I987). Just as men in our society can appear independent if the cadre of female support (wives, mothers, secretaries) is not seen or is defined not as support of the male but as dependence on the part of the female, so can the observer appear independent only if the physical and relational context is made invisible. A slice of experience can be viewed as if it were experience itself.
Aside from its meaning as the study of the "rules" of knowing, epistemology also refers to the attribution of meaning, to the origins, limits, and sources of knowledge. Logical empiricists, for example, seek to set up an impregnable boundary within which reality is contained (Taggart I985). The rest then becomes context or ground to the figure of observable behav- ior. These theorists err in considering themselves to be unaffected by that very context, for it is only by drawing an arbitrary boundary that anything can be considered only a contexr, only a modifier. As modern physics has amply shown, "the subject perceiving apparatus) and object (rhe reality measured) form one seamless whole" (Berman I984, p. I38). Logical em- piricists, Freudians, family therapists, and other makers of boundaries are constantly seeking seams in a seamless tapestry. While it is probably impossible to work without sorne sort of boundary by means of which to organize experience, it must be acknowledged that any distinction between figure and ground is arbitrary and a function of the epistemology of the maker of that boundary. The narrower the focus, the more information is hidden from view.
To illustrate, Gregory Bateson (I987) spoke of his initial foray into Hawaii to study the communication of dolphins. The animals were, at the time, engaged in a behavior that was annoying the behavioral psychologists who were attempting to conduct certain conditioning experiments. According to the psychologists' perspective, the dolphins were interfering with their study. Bateson, who did not draw the boundary where these behav- ioral scientists did, took particular note of the dolphins' so-called annoying behavior rather than considering it noise to be eliminated. He realized that the dolphins were communicating about the very behavior being studied-meta-communications about the nature of the behavior, messages that "This is play" embedded in the rest and the sine qua non of the successful interaction among these creatures. To ignore these messages was to eliminare a crucial aspect of communication, which always involves multiple events.
Unfortunately Bateson remained steadfastly unwilling or unable to apply this principle to an understanding of the development or treatment of women in society, judging from his discussion with his daughter in his last publication, edited and published by her after his death. As she notes, "after all these pages in which 'man' has meant human, perhaps readers will be able to generalize 'woman' to the same degree" (Bateson and Bateson I987, p. I97). He was apparently more easily able to see things from the perspective of a dolphin than from that of a woman.
A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF EARLY FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY As Ernest Gellner (I974) has aptly noted, epistemology is never the product of comfortable times. Having reached the limits of a prior epistemology, scholars are plunged into the uncertainty from which either fear and re- trenching or creativity and intellectual revolution can ensue. Both forces are certainly now at work. Since methodology derives directly from epistemology, the many abuses and oversights of psychology in relation to women led feminist psychologists since the early I970s to question the epistemology upon which the enterprise was based. In the I980s and I990s feminists have begun to refute and re-envision such systems. Feminist approaches themselves are not exempt from the same concerns; to the extent that we separate and reduce experience or consider as universal only one perspec- tive or reality (such as white, middle class, and heterosexual), we are · trapped in the same snares. The seeds of alternative perspectives lie dor- mant in any viewpoint. Making meaning is a process, never an endpoint in itself.
At the inception of the current feminist movement in the early I970s, the discovery, stated simply, that each woman's problems were every woman's problems broadened and altered our perspectives. The invisible was made startlingly visible. Beginning to acknowledge the interrelatedness of various aspects of experience, feminist psychological thought of the time recognized that the personal is political and the political personal (a seamless web) and strove to include what are traditionally considered the psychological and sociological levels of experience and analysis. The private domain, the daily and the ordinary, the irrelevant "noise" in the system, were discovered to be where women's perspectives had been buried. The consciousness- raising group was considered a model for feminist psychotherapy (Brodsky I973), a forum to counteract the consciousness-lowering aspect of women's socialization. The new model of psychology and psychotherapy focused on women's common problems in this society, and often sought collective rather than individual remedies.
This early aspect of feminist psychological revision succeeded in identifying unnamed and untreated issues and in changing the content and the focus of treatment, no mean feat in a society that either ignored or denied the validity of women's voices. Yet it has had relatively little effect upon the masculinist context of psychology itself. As the issues identified by feminists were adopted by the mainstream, they were sanitized of their feminist and societal implications. In this way, the focus of treatment and change is still on women. Male participation in these problems-problems still viewed through the masculinist filter-thus remains unseen. By defining them non-contextually as women's issues, however, even therapists who adhere to the most traditional values can conscientiously work with clients who have survived rape or abuse, who struggle 'with problems with sexuality or food or substance abuse without any societal, and certainly no feminist, understanding of why the problems even exist or what meanings inhere in them.
This approach makes a place for women within existing societal struc- tures, but just what is that place? As mainstream theorists and therapists see it, women now have still more individual problems on which they can focus, resulting in a proliferation of specially designed treatment and self- help programs and literature for women. Women, already the major con- sumers of psychotherapy, have become a greatly expanded market.
A second consequence of the resilience of the sexist system is that a few privileged (mostly white, educated, well behaved, and well dressed) and highly visible women are these days being permitted to share some of society's rewards, while droves of others are being driven into poverty. Looking only at the first slice of experience, one can infer that great progress has been made, the sort of progress that leaves the masculinist psychologist less perplexed. The dressed-for-success woman looks more like a man; one can begin to discern just what sort of man she is after all. As this seeming change occurs, the larger context again fades from conscious view, and even many feminist psychologists are beginning to turn back to the narrower field of vision, to the individual problem and the individual solution.
In the field of psychotherapy, professional programs for treating the problems of modern women spring up everywhere as the societal context and feminist concerns recede and psychology absorbs these issues as individual and appropriate for treatment. The professionalization of the treatment of "women's problems" is not an ally of social change; rather, it creates a group of nonfeminist experts whose investment lies in developing and retaining their expertise and their programs. Traditional professional psychology is, in this way, strengthened, while the potential for the development of more useful and complex psychological models of change is weakened.
During the second decade of feminist psychology, roughly the I980s, several influences converged to lead feminist clinical psychology and psychiatry, in particular, from an emphasis on a societal level of analysis to an almost full swing of the pendulum back to the intrapsychic or the purely personal interpersonal. A well- developed psychosocial analysis of the status of women in our society had been accomplished without an accompanying understanding of its translation to the personal psychological level. Instead of searching for the interstices of the two, many feminist psychologists began to focus narrowly on the latter in a search for complexity and depth in theory, along with professional legitimacy. For women to begin to be believed when they spoke was, in itself, revolutionary. But for the revolution to continue, we must be able to draw a more complete picture of the source of women's problems and the most useful and appropriate loci for intervention and change. As an obvious example, it might be more useful to deal directly with men's violence toward women and children rather than eternally treating the casualities.
Clinical psychology, in general, is now being strongly influenced by object-relations psychology, and feminist psychotherapy, interestingly enough, is following suit. The very term object relations, used to describe relationships with people or parts of people, ought to be anathema to feminists, but instead has been adopted by many feminists without so much as a call to revise the terminology. In a sense, this branch of feminist psychological thought is very much in keeping with mainstream clinical psychology and has used the principles of the object-relations perspective in the service of gender analysis rather than develop a qualitatively different feminist paradigm. This perspective is itself reductionist and revisionist, looking to the pre-oedipal childhood phase of Freudian theory for the source of gender differences.
A significant number of feminist psychologists have looked to the object-relations approach for help in understanding the complexity and tenacity of gender differences and misogyny. The work of Nancy Chodorow (I978), a psychoanalytically oriented sociologist, has been extremely influential in this development. The model she proposes appears to hold promise for the development of an alternative explanation for the traditional distinctions between the psychological styles, if you will, of females and males in our culture and all cultures in which women mother. She attributes gender differences to traditional parenting arrangements in the nuclear family, which she treats as if they were universal. This perspective does not judge women as inferior, but as different.
In fact, many feminist proponents of this approach have come clase to judging the female relational style as psychologically superior or more functional for the needs of the human race as a whole than the more rational style they attribute to men in general (Chodorow I978; Gilligan I982; Miller I984; Dinnerstein I976). To do so, of course, is to adopt a mirror image of prior claims of masculine superiority and is identically based on the post-Cartesian construct of separate, dichotomous gender categories and decontextualized universal attributes. Although offering a pro-rather than an anti- female sentiment, this perspective is still dualistic and universal rather than particular, separating human qualities and choices from the larger social context. For example, is it always better for everyone to be relationally oriented? Is it even better for women and, if so, why? A relational orientation is not just one thing consistently fueled by the same forces and the same consequences, but differs situationally and motivationally in complex ways, some of which strengthen and some of which damage women.
TOWARD A FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY
During the second decade of feminist thought, roughly coinciding with the I980s, another feminist psychological approach considered models of female development and functioning that more accurately reflect the complexity of women's experience, beginning with the epistemological base rather than the masculinist infrastructure built upon it. These theorists have asked important questions concerning epistemology. Rhoda Unger (I983), for example, has pointed out that epistemology is not and cannot be the knowing of absolute truths, but must be relative, contextua!, complex, and subjective. As Morris Taggart I985) and others have noted, truth is not independent of its location and function within the social context. Rather than creating rigid categories and discrete boundaries, feminist epistemologies can allow for interrelated, embedded aspects of the same experience, as well as for the inclusion of different kinds and aspects of information.
A feminist epistemology must take as its starting place the experience of women and, in the individual case, the experience of each woman within the complex personal, interpersonal, cultural, and evaluative context. In a lifetime of scholarly work, the phenomenological world of even one woman could not be completely mapped in all its complexity, but only approximated. Nevertheless, to begin means to acknowledge that every aspect of experience is complexly intertwined with and embedded in all the others, that the personal and interpersonal do not stand alone, that categories of cognition are not separate from the experiencer's physical body, feelings, and abilities to organize the raw flux of sensory information impinging at any time.
At an earlier time in human experience, there was no separation between the ohserver and the observed. One learned of the world through immersion in it, through participation. The Greek word psyche, from which derives our word for mental processes, originally meant "blood" or "soul." But masculine values judge a lack of separateness as seriously problematic, nonobjective, or, even worse, feminine in nature. Contemporary approaches have instead divided experience into levels ranging from the individual physical or biological to the intrapsychic to the interpersonal to the societal or cultural, and divided psychology into cognitive, affective, or behaviorallevels of experience. Depending on the perspective, one of these aspects is typically considered to be prior to and causative of the others. For example, the Gestalt approach considers feelings as fundamental; the cognitive and rational-emotive take thoughts as the starting place for psychological experience. These are all chicken-and- egg disputes and cannot be re- solved from within the confines of an epistemology that subscribes to linear causality.
Psychology, sociology, history, economics, and philosophy have been separated into different "disciplines," although a feminist understanding clearly involves them all, along with other related disciplines. Psychology itself has also tended to separate cognition, affect, behavior, and the physícal body of the individual. Most of our clinical models focus on one or the other of these aspects of human experience, which, while perhaps pragmati- cally more manageable, reflects a narrow, often reductionist and linear epistemology. A new feminist discipline that does not make this artificial division in women's experience but views these aspects as inextricably intertwined would be a giant step forward.
A catalog of separate treatments for discrete disorders or even categories of people, such as survivors of abuse or adult children of a variety of family dysfunctions, ignores the complexity of human experience and its interrelatedness. It is not simply external experience internalized, but intertwined with personal meaning, feeling, and fantasy, that contributes ro sameness as well as allowing for differences in functioning among females or males. This dividing and fragmenting of human experience is yet another inheritance of the Cartesian viewpoint. Many of our recently spawned treatment programs for these narrowly defined problems, as well as the media, have popularized this kind of fragmented thought by discussing problems as if they were discrete categories of people, such as Adult Children of Alcoholics,
Adults Molested as Children, or Co-Dependents. The task of the third decade lies before us: to continue to develop more complex and integrated feminist models of epistemology and change. We must not look for one correct way to describe or explain all women's experience. We must seek instead the interstices of the complex influences that make up psychological experience within a particular context.
lt is difficult even to think this way without the language to do so. I am left to talk about combining levels and aspects, still the language of parts rather than of a complexly integrated whole. Attempted explanations must stress that physical, intrapsychic, interpersonal, and cultural-evaluative influences are intertwined with interpersonal communication and behavior, which are intertwined with physical representations of all of these, which are in rurn intertwined with sociocultural prescriptions and proscriptions. Embedded within each intrapsychic event and interpersonal act are also influences of culture, class, race, and ethnicity and the meanings and evaluations attributed to any characteristic or behavior of the individual by these systems. All these elements are implicate in any particular act-thought feeling.
There are only imaginary boundaries. Each aspect of experience contains all the others. The physical aspect of experience may be thought of as including the genetic, the biological, and all aspects of the body and its environment in its current state. The body, as it grows and develops from the embryonic stage, contains, embedded within each of its cells, the result of genetic programming, biological makeup. In addition, every experience at each of the other levels is embedded within the physical being of each person. These all become part of the musculature, the development of bone structure, and so on. One learns what is natural. As Bateson (Bateson and Bateson I987, p. 35) has pointed out, "the shell has the narrative of its individual growth pickled within its geometric form as well as the story of its evolution." Abraham Lincoln remarked that one can read in a man's face, by the time he reaches middle age, the sort of life he has lived.
Embedded within the intrapsychic aspect of experience are influences of the physical, the interpersonal, the cultural, and the societal. The interpersonal aspect also encompasses and includes aspects of the physical and the intrapsychic, including cognitive, affective, behavioral, and existential levels. Perhaps even more important, no aspect of experience escapes being gendered and assigned meaning.
Context
Culture may be defined as a framework of values and beliefs and a means of organizin