various points: 1) whether women and men are born heterosexual or are, thus shaped, by culture; 2) in the potential of psychoanalysis to facilitate change, specially among women, and; 3) on the influence of the sex of the psychotherapist upon transference processes. The writings of pioneering feminists like Juliet Mitchell (1974) and radical ones, such as Kate Millet (1975) , also positioned the debate on female sexuality within critical Gender Theory, and went beyond the sole description of behavioural dichotomies between the sexes. On the other hand, in the 1970´s, new theoretical developments on the role of envy and motherhood permeated British Psychoanalysis and American Ego Psychology, following the work of Winnicott (1957; 1964; 1971) and Bowlby (1969; 1973; 1980), among others. Winnicott, contrary to Klein, showed that envy is not innate. He regarded it as one of many of the potential children´ s reactions to the environment, given repetitive experiences of pain, loss and lack. The envious child could be showing a behaviour similar to that of her/his parents. (Various other congenital traits- physical/ psychological, masculine/feminine, maternal/paternal- were considered also central to the child´ s development of her/his sexual identity). If human beings confronted and accepted early dependency feelings, they would have less of a need to ‘avenge them’, through developing negative cultural habits and political exclusion. A whole new approach to psychology developed around Winnicott’ s writings. It focused upon female power over psychic life and, largely ignored male social and financial power. Stoller (1975), for example, arguing against this trend, stated that, as most men do not sufficiently identify with their mothers during differentiation, they tend to have a more rigid and fragile sexual identity than women. Their identity can only be ‘apparently strengthened’ by the social reproduction of traditional male value supremacy. Early mother/child bonding theories have been more recently expanded, empirically tested and reformulated, through the latest and very valuable research on attachment, attunement and the interpersonal by authors such as, Stern (1990; 2000; 2004), Trevarthen (2001a; 2001b ), Downing (2000) and Schore (2000; 2001; 2003) . Their approach has proved extremely useful to refocus on the substantial impacts of early developmental processes and intersubjectivity on children and adult mental health and provide empirical data. But it does not explicitly or predominantly address difference in behaviour per sex, and, less so, as shaped by social and gender conditioning. Unfortunately, gender constructs or ‘gender blindness’ tends to permeate research designs, methodologies and data interpretation, a situation that can distort or bias research results and conclusions. Since the 1980s , there has also been a renewal of debates on the Father Figure, mainly following the work of Lacan ´s female students and critics. Lacan (1977; 1985) was critical of contemporary theoretical trends that emphasized the mother-child relationship. First, he considered that the Oedipal stage was the central moment of psychic structuring. Second, he thought that boys were idealized by mothers, contrary to girls, due to the latter´ s lack of penises. Also, mothers idealized their boy´ s desire to become their unique and most desired object: their phallus. He showed how patriarchal laws are reproduced in the Unconscious, through identification with a symbolic order, rather than with the father figure. His focus in psychotherapy was the patient´ s need to confront and accept ‘unavoidable castration and lack’, in order to overcome the narcissistic position of early mother-child bonding. Adult sexual and love life were considered necessarily unsatisfactory, as loved ones are regarded as mere substitutes of the lost ‘first love’. Lacan differentiated biology from psychoanalysis, the penis from the phallus, more than Freud had done, showing how the unconscious is shaped through the language of the Other. Neither sex possesses the desired phallus: the desire to posses it (as in the boy); the desire to be it ( as in the girl). Lacan ‘s writings reflect father idealization and mother devaluation, as they predominate in contemporary society. However, he proposes psychic liberation through ‘an impersonal paternal law’. But this Law itself actual stems from specific gender positions within a culture dominated by men and male principles. Irigiray, (1977) discusses Lacan from a feminist psychoanalytic perspective. She shows how the author only recognized male desire and saw all desire as masculine. Contrary to some other feminist authors, she emphasizes not equality and equity but sexual difference, and argues for the creation of a female symbolic order to counteract the omnipresence of male social images. Symbolic language should be recreated between mother and daughter, as she considers that, currently, girls do not have enough healthy women and female images to identify with- a statement open to questioning. However, she adequately reclaims the experience of the female body and of specifically feminine forms, as sources of multiple and diverse pleasures. Jessica Benjamin (1988), another feminist critic of Lacan, substantively contributes to this reclaiming of the specificity of female bodies. She focuses on women´ s difficulty to recognize desire as truly internal, reflected in and through spatial images (6). Metaphors on holding and exploration could account for the active aspects of receptivity. The author also proposes a new reading of the Oedipal complex: Oedipus´ intent to evade the prophecy considered as proof that he could not contain energy & character vol.37 may 2009 51
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