Let me summarize. Mothers, we see, have an additional task in rearing a son not needed with a daughter. They must encourage the separation (1) with greater intensity, steadfastness, and vigilance; (2) at the right time(s); (3) with the right amounts of frustration tempered with (4) the right amounts of love, care, and sympathy; (5) enjoying their husband enough to offer this father as a worthy object for identification.
In addition to encouraging the separation, they must also encourage the development of a sense of mastery. This has been studied in regard to many ego functions but perhaps less systematically in regard to those functions that are perceived by others and by oneself as masculinity. It requires of a mother (1) that her own envy of maleness be subdued; (2) that she be feminine, or, if not particularly so, that she be so in certain regards at least when with her sons (146); and (3) that she enjoy infants. It is a great advantage (4) if she is genuinely heterosexual and especially helpful if she is married, so that a loved masculine man can be permanently present in the family.*
In biology—of animals and man—maleness is a quality that differentiates out of a female anlage. Analogously, as hypothesized here, masculinity is a quality that differentiates out of a feminine anlage. To convert this hypothesis to a finding will require that we bring a clinical “microscope” to bear on the mother-infant relation-shipt to examine the manner in which the symbiosis dissolves into two people who know each other’s differences. This act of dissolution will bring the infant boy to the world and to his masculinity.
Here is a proposition that can in time be tested empirically: our culture, as do most others, defines masculinity —for better or worse—by how completely one demonstrates that one is rid of the need for symbiosis with mother.
'These feminine qualities are summed up, in their absence, in McDougall's comment: “In the child destined to a perverse solution of sexual desire the mother’s unconscious plays a vital role. One is tempted to surmise that the mother of the future pervert herself denies sexual reality and denigrates the father’sphallic function. It is possible that she gives the child in addition the feeling that he or she is a phallic substitute" (103, p. 381).
tWe can expect to do so because of—more than anyone else— Mahler. She has pointed the way, with her methodology and her conceptualizations, to our being able to focus precisely on tne dynamics in mother-infant relationships.
Chapter 9
A Crime as a Sexual Act
In this chapter is information that complicates the concept of perversion. The criminal act to be studied is a habitual piece of behavior that falls somewhere between a perversion—an erotic neurosis—and a neurosis whose symptoms are not overtly erotic. For this patient the overt sexual act—arranging a “rape”—is devoid of erotic pleasure, while a nonerotic part of her ritual—breaking into a house—almost literally simulates intercourse without the patient’s conscious awareness, rather like the hysterical convulsions of Victorian days. Her perversion thus illustrates Freud’s point that neurotic and psychotic symptoms are (I would say, may be) disguised, unconscious sexual activity.* This case is presented also to make visible the form of primitive sexual impulses that have been unconscious until made manifest.
The patient, who has been reported on extensively elsewhere (146), is a woman in her thirties who, until
•I do not, however, believe as Schmideberg does "that most acts of pathological delinquency can be classed wholly or partly as perversions or fetiches" (124, p. 45), an odd opinion that she holds simply because both are “repetitive acts” with “a clearly marked and rigid pattern" (p. 4O. That is hardly a sufficient reason to equate the two. Would she call all rituals sexual perversions?
treatment (not analysis) ended, was usually extremely masculine, was intermittently psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, and suffered from trance states and multiple personality. She also was firmly convinced that she possessed a penis of the same anatomical dimensions and quality as a normal male’s, though positioned inside her pelvis. The most important part of treatment for her was her search to find her self, an insoluble task till then because she had times when she clearly felt herself to be the female she wanted to be and at other times just as clearly experienced herself as the male she wanted to be —and sometimes when she wanted to feel like a female, she felt like a male instead; and vice versa.
In her teens and early twenties, she had indulged in numerous forms of criminal behavior—from bad-check writing to attempted murder—for which she was at times arrested and imprisoned. In the following material, from several years ago and after many years of treatment, she reveals for the first time the ritual (the modus operandi, the M.O. that the police know fits many criminals like a fingerprint) she used when breaking into homes for the purpose of robbery. While reading this material, the reader may think of kleptomania, with its known dynamics that relate to a woman’s desire to steal a penis (19, pp. 370-371), a penis that fills one up as only a feeding breast can. However, this patient's experience is not quite that of a kleptomaniac, if only because the dynamics are so poorly disguised as compared with those of the average kleptomaniac. This woman’s criminal act is like perversion in being repetitive, gratifying, driven, built from dynamics of hostility, and in converting a victim into a victor. The difference is that it is not erotic, even though the genitals are the arena, and though one step in the ritual demands intercourse and another is an act in which the body is used as a genital.
Finally, because a crime is committed as part of this complicated sexual ritual, we are thrown into moral questions that, since they concern responsibility for one’s actions, can serve as a bridge to the problem of sin touched on in the last section of this book.
At one point, the transcript reveals the patient slipping from a state of full consciousness into a trance. By this stage, toward the end of treatment, she was able to go into trance at will, an aspect of her capacity to split her self into parts; other aspects of this capacity are her multiple personalities and hallucinatory states. During these trances, she would relive—not just remember—experiences from the past, including events in earliest childhood that she was unable to recall when fully conscious.
In this discussion the patient and I are quite free with each other, trusting, without politeness, tact, or social grace. Most of my extended, explanatory remarks—we both know—are half questions and half probes to stimulate further my, as well as her, understanding; they are not—as they may seem in print—a drumfire of positively stated interpretations. Despite the risks, the case material is presented here by means of the words the patient and I spoke to each other. I have chosen this method in order to let the reader glimpse in what way theory arises from data in my research. There is a great distance between what was said in the treatment (or at least the pallid ghost that remains when talk is printed) and the theory and hypotheses with which this book is loaded. And one should wonder: (when) should any theory in a scientific endeavor be taken seriously if the data behind it are, as in psychoanalysis, not available?
S. Why do you want to do it?