Reading Classical Theory in the 21st Century: A Discussion of Leon Hoffman's “The Impact of Opposite-Sex Younger Siblings: A Hypothesis Concerning Gender Differences”

Abstract

This discussion takes up Leon Hoffman's (this issue) classical psychoanalytic inclination to interpret gender difference, such as anatomical distinction, as an expression of hierarchies, and as bound with pain. Hoffman finds Colonna and Newman's (1983) assertion that “a girl's penis envy and a boy's castration anxiety are intensified by the birth of an opposite-sexed sibling during the phallic phase” to be “intuitively obvious” (this issue, p. 98). These interpretations are reworked from the Foucauldian position that the body is the scene of cultural inscription. The clinical material is re-read to suggest that such normative formulations bar access to the child-patients' struggles with gender binaries and melancholy, and foreclose possible forms of attachment.

Notes

¹In theater, Brecht's and Beckett, all the way to contemporary performers such as the Wooster Group, who knocked down the distinction front and backstage; in visual art the Dadaists, dragging found objects into the museum and deconstructing how we generate the notion of high Art; in dance theater Pina Bausch and William Forsythe, whose performing dancers speak “out of role” to the technique that constitutes them as dancers. These trends can be found even in a contemporary Canadian kids' animated reality TV spoof, a kind of postmodernism for the young.

²Althusser elaborated on the concept of interpellation to describe the mechanism through which State ideology takes hold of the subject. HEY YOU! Hails the policeman—and we each turn a guilty turn to face our master: What did I do? (Guralnik and Simeon, 2010).

³Elsewhere, L. Hoffman (1999, p. 1161) stated: “Most importantly, it is crucial for an analyst to approach each patient without the reductionism of either a biologic or a sociologic etiologic point of view, without a ready-made preoedipal or oedipal explanation, and without any preconceived notions of what little girls or boys should feel about themselves.” Though seemingly an admirable goal, this statement contains the very problematic I wish to notice.

⁴Or a way to preserve the Oedipal in the pre-Oedipal.

⁵There have been several waves of feminist critiques of classical theory. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1984) saw the father as an important agent in helping the daughter to separate from the mother (the father's perspective brings into knowledge having lost the penis that would have connected her to mother). Even Kristeva (2004) spoke of girl's separation from mother as castration, both through disappointment in the castrated mother and through loss and frustration at not having a penis with which to give the mother a baby. Kristeva's castration is a separation from the archaic omnipotent state through the acceptance of a limitation, of nature, to the father and the law. For more contemporary critiques see Harris (2008), Dimen (2003), and Goldner (1991), who offer us a way out of this bias with theories that allow the consideration of the female body as a locus of meaning in the context of cultural and ideological instructions on how to map the body and its experience.

⁶“To juxtapose the notion of envy and the name of the genital of the other sex in a fundamental definition of one's own gender is, at the very least, to be placed off-balance. Are women really centered outside their own genitals in this way?” (Fitzpatrick-Hanly, 1994).