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Relative Intimacy
Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture
By Rachel Devlin The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2005 The University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 0-8078-5605-3
Chapter One
The Oedipal Age Postwar Psychoanalysis Reinterprets the Adolescent Girl
Born ten years and yet an aeon Too early for the twenties, Mother, you smile As if you saw your Father Inches away yet hidden, as when he groused behind a screen Over a National Geographic Magazine, Whenever young men came to court you Back in those settled years of World War One. Terrible that old life of decency Without unseemly intimacy Or quarrels, when the unemancipated woman still had her Freudian papa and maids! -Robert Lowell, "During Fever," Life Studies, 1956
In 1960, Kata Levy, a psychotherapist who worked with children and adolescents, published an article in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child about "Debby G.," an adolescent girl who suffered from "school phobia." Afraid to interact with children her own age, or even leave the house in the morning, Debby eventually had to withdraw from high school. "Fear, clinging to her mother, aggressive outbreaks, and obsessional habits were the surface manifestations" of a child who could not bear to strike out on her own. After making little headway with her patient, Levy recommended that Debby's mother, "Mrs. G.," undergo treatment as well. Levy found that Mrs. G. was an "overprotective" mother and that, though she "consciously wished to loosen the ties by which her daughter was attached to her," she could not bring herself to "relinquish her pathological hold on the child." However, Mrs. G.'s overprotection was not, according to Levy, unhealthy because it prevented Debby from the achieving independence and personal autonomy. Rather, the attachment between mother and daughter interfered with a far more important goal for Debby: her Oedipal relationship with her father. Mrs. G., Levy discovered, had attempted to "isolate and separate father and daughter" because she wanted to "keep her husband for herself." Debby, for her part, complained that her mother "excluded her from their relationship." Levy's final diagnosis was that Debby's social phobias stemmed from the fact that her Oedipus complex "was belated and unsolved." The cure was to allow Debby access to her father and for her adolescent Oedipal desire be given an outlet for expression.
Though mother and daughter are the only actors in this case history, "Mr. G." is at the center of Levy's analysis. As long as Debby was a child, according to Levy, the exclusive and overinvolved relationship between mother and daughter, while unhealthy, did not keep Debby from maintaining a fairly normal routine. But with the onset of adolescence-a moment when sexual needs asserted themselves with renewed vigor-Debby's lack of contact with her father became a crisis. For Levy, the Oedipus complex was the most powerful and determinative experience of adolescence. The Oedipal relationship was the route through which Debby would grow into sexual maturity, explore the wider world, and find her way among her peers.
In this chapter I will explore how, during the 1940s and 1950s, American psychoanalysts came to view the adolescent girls' Oedipal relationship with her father as the preeminent and defining experience of her development. When Sigmund Freud first introduced the notion of the Oedipus complex in the nineteenth century, and when his followers elaborated upon and enlarged his ideas in the early years of the twentieth century, the conversation about the "Oedipal wish" had revolved around discussions of young children. It was not until World War II that psychoanalysts began to think extensively about how Oedipal desire might influence the process whereby girls matured into women.
The issue proved compelling: whereas with young children knowledge of relations between the sexes was limited, and most likely filled with misconceptions, in the case of adolescent girls, Oedipal desire took place within the psyche of a person who was on the cusp of adulthood, a person who had the capacity to realistically understand the nature of heterosexual desire. Psychoanalysts seized upon the depth and consequential nature of adolescent sexual drives and shaped a theory of female identity and sexuality that was entangled at all levels with her Oedipal drives. A successful Oedipal father-daughter relationship began to be viewed as the key to psychological health, and a diagnosis of "Oedipal conflict" applied to a wide range of adolescent disturbances. Analysts endeavored to understand how girls mobilized Oedipal fantasies in the course of "normal" adolescent development and to assess the impact of frustrated Oedipal desire on female juvenile delinquency and antisocial behavior. Studies appeared on the role that female adolescent Oedipal desire played in sexual assault and father-daughter incest. In short, postwar interest in the female adolescent Oedipus complex exploded.
The Oedipus complex is, of course, the defining discovery of the science of psychoanalysis. What distinguishes war and postwar psychoanalysts, however, from their prewar counterparts is their belief in the relative psychological power of the adolescent Oedipus complex in girls and, somewhat contradictorily, their perception that American girls were failing to adequately enter into the adolescent Oedipal situation. The reasons for postwar interest in the female adolescent Oedipus complex cannot be entirely accounted for. However, the timing is tellingly commensurate with the rising anxiety within the profession about the overwhelming-even dangerous-influence of mothers on child development. By the late 1950s almost any and every kind of childhood disorder, like a fingerprint, had come to be seen as the stamp of a certain kind of mothering. There was the "seductive," mother, the mother who was "cold," and the "rejecting" mother. Most famously, there was, as we saw in the case of "Mrs. G.," the "overprotective" mother, first delineated (in psychoanalytic terms) by David Levy in 1943. "Maternal overprotection," according to Levy, was synonymous with "excessive maternal care" and the prevention of independent behavior. It was within this context that the emphasis on the necessity of paternal intervention into the mother-daughter relationship emerged. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of the depiction of female adolescence during the postwar period is the extent to which a girl's engagement with her father was invariably represented as a form of psychological progress-simply because Oedipal feelings led away from the mother.
The changing behavior of adolescent girls themselves was also an important historical factor. Psychoanalysis, though rarified enough, did not exist in a vacuum. It was animated by the dominant preoccupations of the period-rising rates of juvenile delinquency among adolescent girls, sexual precocity, and the sense that paternal authority in particular was threatened by transformations in youth culture in the United States. When psychoanalysts recorded their case histories on adolescent girls, many-as we shall see in later chapters-had these larger social concerns in mind.
However, psychoanalytic theories, it is important to point out, both mirrored larger social desires and anxieties in America and drove them. Indeed, the father-daughter relationships depicted in a range of cultural forms over the course of the postwar period-from the sexual crisis induced by the absent father in Carson McCullers's novel (and play/movie) The Member of the Wedding (1946), to the description of the ideal father-daughter relationship in Dr. Spock's Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1945), to the depiction of father-daughter incest in William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness (1952)-were all informed by the psychoanalytic perspective. Playwrights, screenwriters, authors of fiction, and social scientists viewed the father-daughter relationship, to greater and lesser degrees, through the lens of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. The conceptualization of the erotic content of the father-adolescent daughter relationship elsewhere in postwar culture is unimaginable without the emphasis on girls' Oedipal desire that occurred in psychoanalysis during this time.
The impact of the psychoanalytic perspective on female adolescence on American culture was due, in no small part, to the stature of psychoanalysis itself during and just after World War II. Embraced simultaneously by the psychiatric profession and by a postwar public eager for explanations of "war neuroses," psychoanalysis had a kind of authority during these years that was unparalleled, not just in the history of psychiatry, but in the history of social-scientific ideas. During the first wave of interest in psychoanalysis in the 1920s, Freudian concepts were glamorized by the urban upper classes and the bohemian avant-garde, who sought, in the adventurous spirit of sexual modernism, to challenge the taboos of Victorian culture, to revalue female sexuality, and to explore what Joel Pfister has called the "primitive within." The second wave of interest in psychoanalysis, after World War II, was far more sober and wide-reaching. A large majority of American physicians, according to Nathan Hale, simply came to feel that "psychoanalysis possessed a superior explanatory power." The brand of psychoanalysis that was embraced with such enthusiasm during the 1950s was one that was easily reconcilable with the conservative social values of the day. Adopted less as a tool of individual liberation than as a way to understand family dynamics, it was used primarily as a technique for interpreting what has been called "intrafamilial erotic life."
It was also the golden age of popularization. Journalistic accounts were more expert and favorable than they had once been, and detailed exegeses of psychoanalytic theories appeared in publications like Scientific American. The analyst, complete with couch and notepad, was so ubiquitous that he soon became a cartoon stereotype. Despite the ambivalence that these caricatures reflected, they also embodied, according to John Burnham, "an astonishing popular belief in [the analyst's] knowledge and power." Indeed, by 1956, Freud had come to be seen as the equal of Copernicus or Galileo by the general public; and largely because of the popular interest and faith in psychoanalysis, the entire psychiatric profession took on a mantle of wisdom, even omnipotence. "Vulgarizations" of Freudian ideas-very often ideas about fathers and daughters-appeared in publications ranging from Time to Mademoiselle, and small paperback publications explaining the theories of psychoanalysis, with titles like The Story of My Psychoanalysis (1950) and The Fifty Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales (1956), proliferated. But perhaps just as important to the process of popularization, the liberal intelligentsia embraced Freud's teachings. The number of Hollywood screenwriters and New York playwrights who were psychoanalyzed in the late 1940s and 1950s was legion, and they often dealt with questions of psychoanalysis directly in their writing.
Nonetheless, the psychoanalytic portrayal of the Oedipal father-adolescent daughter relationship-no matter the enormity of its social relevance and scientific authority-was of a delicate, and ultimately unstable, design. For the pervasive enthusiasm about the benefits of the Oedipal father-daughter relationship overwhelmed the question of how girls grew out of or resolved the Oedipus complex-an issue that had, in the period before World War II, been an integral part of the debate among psychoanalysts. The postwar perspective that viewed the onset of Oedipal desire solely as a positive achievement-rather than as a quandary that presented difficult psychological obstacles-ultimately threatened the very foundation of the father-daughter relationship itself: the incest taboo. In fact, some psychoanalysts became so convinced of the positive nature of the adolescent Oedipus complex that they came to view father-adolescent daughter incest as a relatively benign event-one that was bound up with a healthy sexual attachment to the father on the part of the adolescent girl.
Psychoanalysts and Adolescence in the United States: World War II and Beyond
Though psychoanalysts like to call Freud's case history of "Dora" (1905) the "first analysis of an adolescent girl," little else was published on the subject up to the end of the Second World War. In the years before World War II, questions about early childhood female development predominated; indeed, rancorous debate on the subject prevailed. Writing in Berlin, England, and Central Europe, the most important early figures of the psychoanalytic movement, such as Helene Deutsch, Jeanne Lampl-De Groot, Karen Horney, Ernst Jones, and Melanie Klein, did battle over the concepts of penis envy, the masculinity complex, and genital transference and the genesis of homosexuality. According to Mari Jo Buhle, the "disharmony in the ranks" over early childhood female sexuality lasted over a decade, from the mid-1920s through the late 1930s, and eventually forced Freud himself to attempt to stem the controversy by clarifying his own views on the matter, which he did in his essay "Female Sexuality," published in 1932.
By the time the psychoanalytic community became interested in the nature of female adolescence, much had changed. Over the course of World War II, many of the most prominent psychoanalysts had emigrated to the United States, finding positions in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore; many found work through contacts with American-born doctors and analysts who had once sought them out as teachers in Europe. Following the political tenor of their adopted country, these analysts tended toward consensus rather than discord and were influenced by the development of psychiatric institutions as they had begun to emerge in the United States. The child guidance clinic, developed in the United States by Ethel Sturges and William Healy at the turn of the century, had become a well-established part of American urban life by the mid-1940s, employing large numbers of psychoanalysts. With the exception of Anna Freud, who continued to live and work in London, the American refugee analysts and their native-born protégés worked on the question of adolescence with the most vigor.
Many of the new children's agencies and clinics addressed problems of adolescent adjustment, juvenile delinquency, and sexual precocity. Psychoanalysts were not only confronted with a steep rise in juvenile crime during the war; they were also influenced by sensational reports of teenage girls flocking to soldiers' training camps, "determined to have one fling or better" while they could.
Continues...
Excerpted from Relative Intimacy by Rachel Devlin Copyright © 2005 by The University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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