Symbiosis Anxiety
Symbiosis anxiety, then, is the fear that one will not be able to remain separate from mother. Let us now look more closely at that fear and see how it contributes to the development of masculinity. The argument begins with the observation that the ever-present memory of oneness with mother acts like a magnet, drawing one back toward repeating the blissful experience against mother’s body. This, however, is a risky business for one who has struggled and attained independence from her. It is especially risky if one aspect of that independence is those behaviors called masculinity. A vital part of the process of separating from mother, then, is release from her female body and feminine psyche.
The ubiquitous fear that one’s sense of maleness and masculinity are in danger and that one must build into character structure ever-vigilant defenses against succumbing to the pull of merging again with mother, I shall call symbiosis anxiety. While ostensibly set up to protect us from outer threats and insults, it must ultimately be established against our own inner, primitive yearning for oneness with mother.* If this is so, then the dim outlines appear of a major factor in creating masculinity, so intertwined with other contributing factors that by the time
*In women as well as men, though in women fear of being like mother in body and gender identity is usually not a danger.
behavior called masculine begins to be manifest (at a year or so of age), the masculinity is already inextricably tangled with the effects of symbiosis anxiety. The latter, potentiated by the biological forcefulness of maleness (in fish, lizards, rats, monkeys, and man), produces the greater aggressiveness and competitiveness seen in males as compared with females. This is to suggest that masculinity as we observe it in boys and men does not exist without the component of continuous pushing away from mother, both literally in the first years of life and psychologically in the development of character structure that forces the inner mother down and out of awareness. I shall no more than mention the idea that mother, in her representation as an evil, hated creature, may also lend herself to the task of permitting the symbiosis-mother to be repressed; one would hardly wish to merge with a witch. One can wonder if at its most primitive level, perversion is that ultimate in separations, mother murder (more than, as Freud may have felt, father murder). It would be ironic if some of the forms that masculinity takes, some of its strength, insistence, fierceness—machismo—require anlagen of femininity; the potential to be feminine is an unacceptable temptation that must be resisted by behavior and attitudes that society labels “masculine.” Perhaps it is clearer, then, why most men seem so sensitive about their masculinity.
Greenson, in treating a transsexual boy whose mother I analyzed, came to similar conclusions. He talks of “dis-identifying” from mother. It is not proper to cite Green-son’s work as objective confirmation, since we have worked together for years, but his clear exposition, already published some years ago, is worth our attention. (I retain his bibliographic citations for their use to the present reader.)
It is my clinical impression that the dread of homosexuality in the neurotic, which is at bottom the fear of losing
one’s gender identity, is stronger and more persistent in men than women (Greenson, 1964). ... I believe that we would all agree that in early infancy both girls and boys form a primitive symbiotic-identification with the mothering person on the basis of the fusion of early visual and tactile perception, motor activity, introjection and imitation (Freud, 1914, 1921, >923. 1925; Fenichel, 1945; Jacobson, 1964). This results in the formation of a symbiotic relationship to the mother (Mahler, 1963). The next step in the development of ego functions and object relations is the differentiation of self-representation from object representations. Mahler (1957), Greenacre (1958), Jacobson (1964), and others have elucidated how different forms of identification play a central role in this transition as maturation makes it possible to progress from total incorporation to selective identifications. The capacity to differentiate between similarities and contrasts eventuates in the capacity to discriminate between inside and outside and ultimately the self and the non-self. In this process, the child learns he is a distinct entity, different from mother, dog, table, etc. However, he also gradually learns by identification to behave and perform certain activities like the mothering person, such as speaking, walking, eating with a spoon, etc. These activities are not duplications, but are modified in accordance with the child's constitution and his mental and physical endowment. The style of his behaviour and activities are further changed by his later identification with others in the environment. What we call identity seems to be the result of the synthesis and integration of different isolated self-representations (Jacobson, 1964; Spiegel, »959>- (6». PP- 37»-S7*)
Finally, Greenson notes:
The boy must attempt to renounce the pleasure and security-giving closeness that identification with the mothering person affords, and he must form an identification with the less accessible father. The outcome will be determined by several elements. The mother must be willing to allow the boy to identify with the father figure.
She can facilitate this by genuinely enjoying and admiring the boy's boyish features and skills and must look
forward to his further development along this line (A.
Freud, 1965). (61, pp. 372-373)
Perversion
We should not be fooled by those men who do not seem to protect this masculinity, reaching back through it to the earlier identification with mother to create perversion. I think especially of effeminate homosexuals and fetishistic cross-dressers. Although such men want all too much to be like (merge with) their mother—“Perverse rituals serve the function of undoing separation" (1, p. 29)—the rituals serve at the same time, I believe, to promote separation; the essential feature at the bottom of these perversions is that masculinity is being preserved. These men, by means of their perversion, retain the potency of their penis, their sense of maleness: that core of masculinity. They have at least some masculinity, to be preserved at any cost. That was why I counted transsexualism not a perversion but more simply a sexual variant. The transsexual never had such an episode of masculinity in his childhood nor can we find such in the adult transsexual, while in effeminate homosexuals, fetishistic cross-dressers, and other men with gender disorders, masculinity is easy to find in their childhood and in the adult. Perhaps perversions are fracture lines resulting from this process of oscillating between desire to merge and desire to separate, and while they may be cemented shut in the nonperverse, covered over in the neurotic, and kept open as channels in the perversions, these faults nonetheless run into the depths of males' identity and require greater reparative work and vigilance than in females. (This is not to say that perversions are simply the product of a disturbance in the separation process undertaken by both mother and infant. I am suggesting, rather, that failure to separate well can be a matrix that encourages perversion if events occur later in childhood that require such a detour in sexual development.)
Remember how these ideas fit with conditions in which a male with some masculinity does identify sufficiently with females that he puts on some of their behavior as well as their clothes. To repeat: Such an aberration is a perversion if the femininity (or effeminacy) is determined by an unconsciously remembered, ever-active childhood trauma or frustration with a resultant conflict that must continually be resolved; the resolution is the perversion. The effeminate homosexual values his penis, gets pleasure from it, and is focused on it. He is not feminine (behavior that should be indistinguishable from femininity in a woman) but rather is a caricature of femininity. His identification with women is clouded by hostility. He has good cause for hidden anger: as a child his mother offered him the pleasures of excessive closeness but only when he, because of her bullying, gave up his tendencies toward what his mother considered masculine behavior (144). His masculinity is there, preserved, disguised in the effeminate—hostile—mimicry (144)-