The link of the couple and his articulation with gender difference.

The link of the couple and his articulation with gender difference

Alberto Eiguer^[1]

The theory of links in the couple is a model which offers clinic understanding, therapeutic implementation and conceptualization. Inasmuch as the couple is taken as a differentiated group, its members are treated together. Interpretations of the dysfunctional  aspects of the link are directed towards it unconscious functioning, and give rise to some evolution, as well as furthering changes and, eventually, and at best, solve the problems. The concept of link applies also to the transference and counter-transference therapist-members of the couple.

As the partners undergoing therapy are linked, their unconscious functioning flows according to intersubjectivity deviated by the fantasy and emotional echoes which are brought on by the mere fact of being in love at the beginning of the relationship. The initial illusions can, of course, be tarnished, but the unconscious of each partner would have put in place other types of agreements which create a certain intimacy and complicity which cannot be found in any other type of link.

The link theory has been enriched in the past few decades through the contributions of intersubjectivity and vice versa. Today, a vast field encompasses these concepts and is developing around them, from being put into practice in individual analysis to implementation in institutions and community analysis, not to mention groups, families and workplaces. My contribution shall focus on a primordial aspect of the intersubjective link in the couple: the impact of gender difference on its functioning and dys-functioning.

As the link gradually settles, both subjects tend to harmonize their reactions and behaviour. A kind of groupal illusion makes them feel that they belong to the same kind and share many psychical areas: their understanding of the world, their beliefs and many more. Their mutual dependence can even lead them to forget that they are different, that they have individual wishes. From a certain viewpoint, this change follows roughly the path of mother-baby interaction: illusion, disillusion, transitionality. Obviously, a link between adults includes other facets, but these facets are treated by the link in an interactive and intersubjective manner (Eiguer, 2008).

Each can live the other as a part of oneself; it would be more problematic to live it as oneself completely. A great many conflicts in the couple are created by the feeling that the other exerts too strong a hold on the other, that the influence is too much and that there is a

wish to annihilate the other’s personality.

Any link tends to erase interpersonal limits. What’s more, there is a risk that the identity could lose some consistency. The link comes to life the moment the subject goes from investing the other to identifying with him. When this is done, the investment tends to mutate. Until then the object was «on the outskirts of the self», but now it integrates the identity of the subject. But, in a couple, this creates torments of which the extreme form is the quasi delirious feeling that one is possessed by someone else. (Cf. Decherf and Darchis, 2003.)

We can notice that someone else is generally considered according to three variations: someone else–undifferentiated, someone else-object, someone else–subject, although, one of these will always be prevalent.  A few points. The ethical aspect depends on the feeling of responsibility that one has for this someone else -subject. With this in view, let’s imagine what a reinterpretation of the concept of the superego with the standards of intersubjectivity could mean. Ricœur (1985) suggests it could be morality of virtue and morality of duty. The first comes within the law, the second within the intersubjectivity between the person who gives and the one who receives, their solicitude, and the feeling of duty towards one another.

In the end, to think about the link in couples as if it was any other link does create issues. The couple has specificities, like, for example gender difference which deserves to be revisited.

As can be seen, I use the word gender, where in the past we’d use the word sex. I’ll explain.

Sex or gender

The idea of gender has been submitted for various reasons. It takes into account the influence, amongst other things, of the sexual identity‘s background of the subject, when the concept of sex, rests strongly on biological determining of this identity. In Freud‘s text (1925), anatomical difference in the sexes appears as the «hard» kernel, (the biological rock) on which feminine and masculine, maternal and paternal, and sexual psychical difference will be shaped. Freud gives a leading part to the male organ, principally because of the fact that this anatomical difference is visually identified from birth. Therefore, women would envy men their penis, and this influences their femininity; nevertheless having children would enable them to assuage the feeling of lacking something.  A child, for a mother, would be a phallic equivalent. And this would permeate the maternal. Etc. To talk about gender does not mean neglecting, from my point of view, the importance of anatomical differences, but highlighting interfunctionalities between psychic body and context. Beyond social influences on the child, transmitted by collective representations about the expectations of what it means to be man or woman, to function as such in a given social context, the parent’s wishes, the family’s expectations about the gender, all play a vital role so that the child can take up his own. The behaviour or words through which are expressed wishes and expectations, especially body language, play a role for each and every one of us: so, a parent will not cuddle or carry a girl of a boy in the same way; a mother will not do it in the same way as a father.

A restricting attitude, which tries to control the elusive enigma of the other gender, can change the desiring dynamic, which is the guarantee of freedom and alterity in the other.

Having a different gender presents advantages and disadvantages, for example, identifying with the other gender’s body. Seizing its inner being seems utopian. This mystery does attract us, of course, but it is also disturbing and feeds many fantasies, fears and unsuccessful repeated attempts to understand it.

Some spouses will say: «Because of the way you see me, I feel like a man, at last (or a woman)». Or «I can never tell what you think», «Beyond a certain point, I don’t understand you anymore».

Why are therapists reluctant to include this difference in couple analysis? Do they fear that emphasizing this singularity that is the partner’s gender would put us back under the thumb of individual psychology? Would the other’s alterity or his unavoidable difference lead to the loss of the groupal and interactive value of the model? However, to admit that someone else has inaccessible enigmas could be the basis of mutual recognition.

Equals but rivals. Differentiation and confluence

Power issues between men and women prove to be linked to gender difference, using all the variations of phallic rivalry.

Let’s look at the notion of rivalry. Generally speaking, it is situated within envy or «healthy» emulation. This latter is likely to become stimulating so that each member of the couple tries to improve; the one who places himself in situation of rivalry may wish to become more successful. The one who is the object of rivalry can take into account the other’s affect and try to understand him. Emulation is creative; in other words, it furthers the desire to excel oneself.

Envious rivalry, I think, seems to create more difficulties than emulative rivalry; it questions the very basis of the relationship which rest normally on participation, sharing and solidarity. We envy the other because unconsciously we wish to see him fail.

But it can also be observed that the person who is the object of rivalry takes on an exhibitionistic attitude, for example, by bragging in a provocative manner about his achievements and even more so, by reminding the other that he is neither as good nor as strong as him. Sadism gets into the mix: showing off to hurt the other and feel triumphant over him. Rivalry and exhibitionism appear simultaneously, but if envy and sadism are added, it makes matter worse.

This issue is not found outside the gender difference sphere. I would not like to be schematic here, but what do men envy, in general? They envy women’s ability to look after a home and children, to deal with intimate things, express their feelings freely, to explore their own subjectivity and the other‘s and take them into account. They envy the ease with which they express their need for closeness and tenderness.  What’s more, men are envious of women who can do typically masculine tasks better than them, and to which they add a touch of femininity.

What do women envy men for? Their ability to keep calm when faced with worrying situations; the determination with which they react when having to make a decision and a certain ability to defer oral expectations. The masculine is geared towards action (Winnicott, 1971), towards thoughts and universal preoccupations; the feminine is more towards contemplation, introspection, closeness and passivity, but, let’s be careful here, the idea of passivity must not be understood as the ante-room of submission (Benjamin, 1988). I want to make clear that we are talking about masculine and feminine abilities, found in men and women alike, in proportions conversely proportional, and this in every couple, even in gay and lesbian couples. But, we’d like to add: they feed each other.

We can sometimes hear these comments being made by the partners themselves, to defend personal positions or to criticise the other. Thus in a phallic stance, the spouse wants to have all these attributes at his disposal, have everything masculine and feminine and ignore the fact that each gender possesses qualities which complements the other’s qualities.

The phallic approach aims to ensure that each person achieves his own narcissistic project while ignoring the other’s. What is the aim of rivalry between genders? On the whole the aim is to alleviate the fear brought on by the other gender. As long as the subject imposes his will on the other, he has the feeling that he will avoid his castration. Many shared fantasies bring these fears on and dramatise their contents. The fear of erasing the limits is closely linked to the shared fantasy of being devoured or crushed by the other. The fear of losing is linked to the fantasmatic impression of narcissistic unity where the other is lived as being indispensable to ensure security or even existence. The fear of castration prompts the common fantasy of sexual incompleteness and is fed by it. [Etc.]

Fantasies that both partners have in common appear more clearly when they are together. This would be an original creation of shared areas, prompted by unconscious aspects which are normally idle outside married life (Eiguer, 1984). The fantasy of one of the partners frightens the other. This process feeds inter-fantasing.

Intersubjectivity is then organised as a new third party.

When rivalry goes under the colours of envy, phallic and narcissistic demands are at their acme. The other subject is not easily acknowledged as singular; his wishes are seen as a danger. Rivalry producing emulation is more linked to Oedipus: we fight for the link with the parent to whom we are particularly strongly attracted. We want to dazzle.

Generally, gender difference may have a universal function, even with couples troubled by archaic conflicts. Actually, the subject has difficulties acknowledging the other because he fears that the other might suck him in narcissically and that he may not be ready, in turn to acknowledge the other, feel responsible for him and respect him. So, each tries to dominate the other to ensure that if he is not acknowledged as being different, then at least he is not too “put down” if not “ignored”.

Freud (1932) thought that the fight between genders is led by the phallic stance, whose wish is to be one up on the other. This theoretical proposition has advantages and disadvantages, including boiling feminine sexuality down to phallic castration and the mechanisms it stirs up.

We can suggest that feminine castration anxiety includes three aspects: phallic, uterine (maternal) and vaginal, this latter being the fear of not feeling any pleasure when with a man or to deprive him of pleasure.  A woman can live her castration as incompleteness. One of my patients used to say: «I feel I am not finished, I haven’t completed my maturity» (which is not the same as «being immature»).

Castration in men is also manifold. How should we interpret pleasure within the perspective of intersubjective link? For men it is the pleasure to insert himself in the sensitive cavity of a woman who takes pleasure in being penetrated. For women, it is the pleasure of being penetrated by the sensitive organ of a man who takes pleasure in penetrating her.

A couple therapy

Fifteen years ago, this couple (in their forties) came to see me as a matter of extreme urgency. Homère (finance manager) had just confessed to an affair with a divorced woman, mother of several children. He is considering splitting with his wife Pauline (secretary), although he remains still undecided. Pauline, desperate, does not want to split up. «Nobody can understand how it got that far». It is true that the couple had not been getting on for a little while, but not to the point of splitting up. Homère says he is deeply dissatisfied with Pauline; he hasn’t managed to «make her change» in spite of years of talks and requests. She «doesn’t listen to him», not only when he asks for something but also when he mentions his own issues. Furthermore the way she looks exasperates him: she is not well dressed, she is ungainly, and her lack of warmth and her refusal to be caressed annoys him too.

Pauline defends herself by saying that she finds him too forward: he is constantly caressing her and asking to make love. Homère is omnipresent, she says; he «knows everything», «meddles in everything». The way he puts pressure on her to make her change only manages to make her withdraw.

Seven months after the start of the treatment, an essential association happens.  Pauline remembers her miscarriages. She’s very emotional, she remembers Homère being understanding, and caring, apart from the third one when she had the feeling he did not want another child from her. She felt quite affected by this. Losing a child is a woman’s pain; he did not know or was not able to put himself in her shoes. Even now, it still rankles. It’s her deepest secret. Pauline says: « Is a man able to understand a woman‘s pain when she loses a child? » Homère explains he does not feel at ease with bodies, neither his and especially nor his wife’s. Pauline admits she doesn’t understand why Homère needs and appreciates her caresses so much.

I think that to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and acknowledge the other’s nature has some limits. We can, of course, reproach the other this inability, but then this means ignoring his freedom, his own wishes. The crisis was triggered by the revelation of Homère’s affair. Pauline was dumfounded. Homère felt satisfied with the impact this affair had on Pauline because it showed her he could seduce another woman. The fact that this woman had several children certainly played a part in this. This supported his requests for more warmth and more sexuality. But he was bothered because he broke a mutual pact relating to the unique and rare nature of their love. He seemed to have good enough reasons to live the love of his life. In reality, he was afraid he had willingly manipulated Pauline with this unusual way he’d found to tell her that she was wrong if she thought that «her coldness» was normal.

This awareness led to each understanding that they could change their behaviour without doing exactly what the other demanded but in their own way. The habit of exhibiting one’s feeling was demystified: they don’t have to be shown in a really obvious way, as Homère demanded; they can be revealed by indirect and restraint gestures; this would be enough to show an attachment which was otherwise intense. By believing too much that the other understands everything, which is what Pauline thought, we risk creating misunderstandings which, with time, get worse. It is important to recognise the need each person has to have proof of the other person’s availability towards them.

Homère’s confession triggered a process. It was as if the couple’s sexuality had been shared with another woman, a woman with many children; this is a reality which provoked a choc leading to the memory of the miscarriages surfacing during therapy sessions. In there appears rivalry between women, and the lack of acknowledgement of the other’s unknown, and the mystery of sexed bodies for each person. The couple was haunted and persecuted by the representation of the decomposing corpses of the dead children/foetus, which « poisoned » their link. Each of the symptoms reflects the shared group subconscious inhabited by these objects-remains: with Pauline, her lack of self-care, her lack of investment, and her sexual distaste; with Homère, his hyperactivity, rage and dissatisfaction, then looking for vitality and lost happiness with another woman.

This would confirm the hypothesis that conflicts become more severe because of the enigma of the other gender with its pleasures and afflictions. When recalling the miscarriages, we touched upon the foundations of this couple: both spouses wanted to ignore the other’s body and their castration.

Rows or how to recognise misappreciation

One question remains: why should the crisis go towards open conflict? The partner being different represents a danger; one risk the link presents is slavery and conflict appears sometimes as a cry of rebellion to protect oneself against fantasised enslaving. To dominate the other is better than being dominated by him. From this are born a great many attitudes which, while aiming to protect oneself against the other, have as an effect an increase in suspicions and misunderstandings.

The narcissism of one of the link’s subjects, which asks to be seen urgently and helped as a matter of priority, stops the subject from seeing that the other could find himself in a similar situation and that both are fatally bound to help each other. A similar blindness towards acknowledgment means that we ignore any resources the other is likely to start up. If the other is full of attentions, we may be wary because of any underlying possible obligations to reimburse which would create in the end a greater dependence from this person (Eiguer, 2005). The word «emprise», to have a hold over somebody, in fact comes from a medieval custom: if the person in debt was incapable to pay up ,they could be forced to give their land and sometimes their freedom to the lender. ”Emprise”, a hold is a type of expropriation. In modern language, «être sous emprise», to be under somebody’s hold means, by extension, to submit to another person. To start with, it is simply a request. Enslavement is the sinister face of the link.

More precisely, the unknown of the other gender explain the frequency of conjugal conflicts which happen around phallic power: demands about one’s territory, about being free to make one’s own decisions, or personal achievements. The row will be even more violent because it is not understood that it is part of the fight for acknowledgement. But acknowledge what? «Acknowledge that I misappreciate the other, that he shall never fully know me and that I, myself, shall never know parts of me».

Conclusion

The theory of couples’ intersubjective links should take into account analogies as well as differences and in particular gender difference. Indeed, practicing psychoanalytic couples’ therapy demands a careful listening of the dissensions which go towards increased violence, in parallel with the current evolution of men and women’s places in society. The difficulty of perceiving and understanding these dissensions is reinforced by the refusal to admit that the changes in these places allow for more stimulating relationships and a more complete and joyous personal development.

---

Bibliography

Benjamin J. (1988), Les liens d’amour, tr. fr. Paris, Métalié.

Decherf G. et Darchis E. (2003), in Decherf G., Knéra L., Darchis E. Souffrances dans la famille. Thérapies familiales psychanalytiques d’aujourd’hui, Paris, In Press.

Eiguer A. (sous la dir.) (1984), La thérapie psychanalytique du couple, Paris, Dunod.

Eiguer A. (2005), in Ouvrage coll. La part des ancêtres, Paris, Dunod.

Eiguer A. (2008), Jamais moi sans toi, Paris, Dunod.

Freud S. (1925), Quelques conséquences psychiques de la différence des sexes au niveau anatomique, tr. fr. in OC XVII, Paris, PUF, p. 189-202.

Freud S. (1932), La féminité, in Nouvelle suite des leçons d’introduction à la psychanalyse, tr. fr. in OC XIX, Paris, PUF, 83-268.

Ricœur P. (1985), Temps et récit III, Paris, Le Seuil.

Winnicott D. (1971), Jeu et réalité, tr. fr. Paris, Gallimard.

---

[1] Psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, holder of an Habilitation to direct research in psychology (Université Paris V), director of the review Le divan familial, President of the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. AIPCF, 154 Rue d’Alésia, 75014 Paris, France.