by Carol Gilligan
Picking up the voice of pleasure
in girls at the edge of adolescence, I came to the places where
this voice drops off and a tragic story takes over. The tragic
story where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with
death was repeated over and over again in operas, folk songs,
the blues, and novels. We were in love with a tragic story of
love.
Gilligan uses the
myth of Psyche and Cupid to explore the dissociation children
in our culture predictably experience between their natural impulse
to love and to find joy in their bodies, and a need to shut
down in response to the pain of love and the imposed
shame of having bodies.
...emotions - felt in the body - facilitate
and enhance rather than compromise intelligence and thought.
I'm learning about feeling my emotions in
my body with Eugene
Gendlin's Focusing.
I'm starting to feel emotions as bodily sensations, so I can feel
fear as tightness in my throat and chest, while joy radiates in
my belly like the sun. New
studies of infants revealed that we are born primed for relationships
and that as babies we pick up and respond to emotions in a
third of a second, registering pleasure or anger or whatever
emotion is felt by the person relating to us.
I could never understand how my mother's
tragedy - of having my father die two weeks before I was born
- could impact me when I was just an inert lump of
need - a baby. But this tells me babies are primed for
intuition, and that intuition is inherent in all of us, at
least until we start shutting down our intuition and our bodies.
Freud observed that the suppression
of a woman's sexuality leads to a more general inhibition of
desire and curiosity, creating a restriction on wanting and
knowing that spreads throughout her life.
Freud was right! By the way, is it just
me, or is Frued suddenly back in fashion? Women are afraid
of our desires and our hunger and yet women are all about desire.
Do we start out that way and learn to squelch our desire, or
are we born with unsatisfied desire?
The real question is about love:
if I love you, will you leave me? It is a child's question:
if you leave me, how will I survive? It is every lover's question-the
question at the heart of this triangle.
Yes, and every woman I talk to has this
same dilemma - "If I love you, will you leave me, and if
you leave me, how will I survive? We want to feel independent
and very often we do, but we also want to be taken care of.
To be nurtured, and stop having to be so independent. Dependence
and independence whisper to us at the same time.
I hear (the phrase): "I don't
know"- in
my work with adolescent girls they were the marker of a struggle
to know and also to be in relationship.. "I don't
know" often signaled the onset of dissociation-the way in which
psychically we separate ourselves from knowing what we cannot
bear to know.
Yes, and it's always when we DO know! I've
started noticing how often I'll be engaged in a conversation,
saying exactly what I know, and then I'll feel a stab of fear
and inhibition. A shutting off, and my voice will drift
off quietly into an, "I don't know... ". Now when I hear myself
doing it, it's a signal that this is something
I know and desperately need to know I know.
Anne (Frank)'s love is palpably linked with
pleasure, and once pleasure becomes explicitly associated with
sexuality, Anne begins to divide herself from her body and from
herself.
Oh, this is so important, and I think at some
point we all - all of us in our culture - go from having a child's
inate innocence to accepting a stilted, hardened, fearful adult
knowing that's imposed on us from without.
.experiences of sudden loss, shocking betrayal,
and serious rifts in relationship occur so frequently between
mothers and daughters at this time, suggesting the traumas that
other mothers may have experienced or perhaps some common story
that mothers and daughters find themselves enacting at the threshold
where a mother sees her daughter crossing into the room of womanhood.
Yes, for me when I was in young adolescence,
it felt like my mother was torn always between suppressing me
and who I wanted to be, and releasing me to myself, as I stood
between childhood and adulthood. Terrible arguments. Ripping,
breaking, slashing and pain. Like she was preparing me for love.
And today I fear love and loving to my core, and yet I crave
it and hunger desperately for it.
The ascendance of the split between
good and bad women marks the moment of change and also fills
in its motivation. With this split, pleasure-once associated
with vitality, with love, with light, and with life-becomes the
marker of the bad woman. The sexual woman, the curious woman,
the funny, irreverent woman... "What I wanted from you,
Mother, was this," Luce Irigaray, the French feminist, writes
toward the end of the twentieth century, "That in giving me life,
/ You too remained alive."
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