HEALTH-ARGENTINA: Psychoanalysis Embraces Gender Perspective

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 7 2000 (IPS) - Argentina is making swift progress towards incorporating a gender perspective in psychoanalysis, a field in which the capital city is the world leader in terms of the number of psychologists per capita.

In 1995, the Buenos Aires Association of Psychologists created the Forum on Psychoanalysis and Gender, which meets every two months to discuss how to best tackle problems and conflicts arising from the social roles men and women are assigned by their culture.

The Forum also holds an annual refresher seminar for psychologists to share their academic research and papers. “Some of the studies are well-founded in terms of psychoanalysis, but lack a gender focus, which we help factor in,” Irene Meller, one of the Forum’s founders, told IPS.

Argentina is in the vanguard of the movement incorporating a gender perspective in this field of therapy in Latin America, just as it has been at the forefront of the development of psychoanalysis itself in the region.

The Inter-American Society of Psychologists estimates that there are 500 professionals for every 100,000 Buenos Aires residents, a world record. It also reports that 85 percent of psychologists in the capital are women, and that a similar proportion of the total are actively involved in therapy, attending patients.

What is known locally as the city’s “psy” culture has made Buenos Aires the world’s third biggest market for Woody Allen films.

Studies on gender aspects in psychoanalysis, which began to be conducted in the United States and Europe in the past decade, are increasingly being carried out in this Southern Cone country.

Meller, the co-author of the books “Gender and Family” and “Males: Gender and Masculine Subjectivity”, stressed that training with a gender perspective “in no way replaces a solid background in psychoanalysis, but permits a restructuring of the classic knowledge that has a male-centred bias.

“The social disciplines were constructed by men, and reflect that social dominion,” said Meller. “Gender studies shed light on that bias, critically analyse it and rework knowledge to attempt to overcome that inclination within the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis itself.”

The author explained that in psychoanalysis, “blind spots” occur when the analyst is unable to see or understand a problem plaguing the patient because they themselves are affected by the very same issue.

According to Meller, blind spots can also be created by theoretical limitations that can leave the therapist without answers for a specific issue. For example, she said, “I believe that blind spots regarding certain aspects can crop up when there is a lack of training or information on gender questions.”

The recent experience of one professional could be taken as an illustration of this phenomenon. When the patient mentioned in therapy how overwhelmed and exhausted she felt on spending more time at home with her young children, her (male) therapist told her that home was her “kingdom,” and that it was the place where a mother should find enjoyment at that stage of her life.

In Meller’s view, “that is a common sexist position that confines women to a traditional role instead of acknowledging the anxieties of an educated, career-oriented person who feels shut in because she has to stay at home.

“Analysts with traditional training often unwittingly reproduce the ‘common sense’ prejudices of the social strata they come from. It is a sort of ideological contraband that fatally creeps into treatment when psychologists are not keeping their eyes open for changes in gender roles.”

Conflicts over gender questions also emerge in couple counselling, such as when men refuse to accept their wives’ decision to work for the first time.

The same thing occurs in the development of theory, Meller pointed out. David Liberman, a renowned Argentine psychoanalyst, wrote in the prologue to a work by other authors that a man should make sure his wife cuts off ties with her family in order to form a new family unit.

Meller suggested a reformulation of Liberman’s statement: “many of the difficulties faced by couples arise from the family ties of both members, and it is very important for the couple to give priority to their relationship over those other ties in order to form a new family.”

She added that a gender perspective is essential at a time when society is in the midst of a major transition. “We are working with old textbooks, with a terribly sexist bias, to attend patients who are totally infused with and caught up in such conflicts.”

Meller cited a psychoanalyst, Jessica Benjamin in the United States, who found that once the male or female identity has been consolidated in each individual during the Oedipal stage, there is a “post Oedipal” phase during which boys and girls allow themselves to toy around with the other gender identity.

Boys, already sure of their male identity, play at being “nurturing” like mommy, while girls pretend they go to work like daddy, said Meller. “This does not indicate identity confusion, but a rich personality,” she underlined.

In the past, men and women were “stuck” in stereotypes of what was feminine and masculine, and did not evolve. But today, it is becoming more and more acceptable for children to play around with the concept of gender, a new flexibility seen in the area of theory as well.

“The problem is that the analyst with a traditional outlook could misinterpret an indication of mental health for a pathology,” pointed out Meller, who said it was healthy for psychoanalysis to renew itself within the established theoretical frameworks, and for the gender perspective to shed a new light on the field.