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6 December 1990: I dreamt of post-holocaustal cities on a planet known to me only in a previous dream. The tatters of this dream threaten to elude me, as I sit here struggling with signs. Words are difficult, inadequate. What I do remember is that I was expecting too much from myself, given that I had just survived a nuclear war. I am expecting myself to behave well, expecting reason to prevail, expecting irreproachable conduct from myself. I have to keep reminding myself that it's ok to be less than correct--to be a little irrational, emotional, late for things, and unable entirely to cope. There is someone else with me, picking through the rubble with me, as the dream shifts from city to decimated city. But I think this is not someon e else, this is a split-off part of me operating as counsellor, reading me a lecture on what is permissible behaviour under these eerie circumstance, on this alien planet, which I have travelled before, like Marco Polo, in happier dreams.
Is there really life after difference?
The title of this paper and the dream that suggested it identify me as "damaged collateral" in the theoretical conflict over difference that has raged within the feminist scholarly community for the last several years. If I'm not mistaken, there seems no w to be something of a ceasefire, and that has persuaded me to break cover and take stock of where I've been throughout that conflict and where I might now go in this era of postfeminism, as the media like to call it. I feel as if I've been living simult aneously in two different decades. As an instructor of women's studies, I have to do a lot of consciousness raising of the kind we did way back in the sixties. But as a scholar in the sophisticated era of discourse theory, I'm expected to look back on s uch political naiveté with a certain amount of professional contempt. This psychic fault-line has developed along an axis that cuts through the discourse on difference, the two apolitical extremes of which seem to be gender essentialism and gender scepti cism. It's a schizoid split that directly reflects recent feminist history. It seems to me that in the beginning feminists made the mistake of thinking that women had more in common than we really do. Maybe that's because we didn't know one another ver y well. Except then we boomeranged into thinking that women have nothing in common at all, not even gender--a position that's even more counterproductive than the initial one. Nowhere has that been more obvious than in the debate over the ultimate usefu lness of the work of Carol Gilligan.
The industry that's grown up around Gilligan's book, In a Different Voice, has generated at least as much heat as light, and Gilligan has been made to take a lot of that heat. I've felt strongly that much of the criticism of her work falls short of illumination and into the category of downright trashing. I've been reading widely in the area of applied psychoanalytic theory--an area that offers potential support for her work--but because of the fashionable insistence that difference is all there is, I've been instinctively backing off from recognizing obvious connections and similarities between Gilligan's work and related theories--backing off for fear of being accused of making totalizing over-generalizations. Now, however, I've begun to fear something else, namely, the threat of erasure. It has recently occurred to me that the most effective way to erase from history a body of thought--such as feminist thought--is to deny its external connections, cut it out of its historical context, and t hen dismiss it as an abberation which comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with anything. I think Carol Gilligan's work has been subjected to that process. So, by way of countering it, I'd like to return Gilligan's theory to its historical and int ellectual context and re-articulate some obvious connections and similarities between her Ethic of Care and psychoanalytic concepts that have been quietly evolving since the turn of the century.
At two different conferences a couple of years ago, I found myself caught in the crossfire of argument over Gilligan that fairly bristled with accusations of biological determinism, nineteenth-century maternal feminism, and cultural essentialism. Althou gh I'm generally suspicious of wholesale dismissals of that kind, it wasn't until the appearance of an article by Susan Bordo in 1991 that I began to understand where such hostility originates. In "Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism," Bordo d escribes the intensity of the attacks on theories of gender difference and offers the following analysis:
This sort of visceral reaction to theorists of gender difference . . . is specifically directed against what is perceived as their romanticization of female values--empathy, mothering, and so forth. Such a harsh critical stance is protection, perhaps, against being tarred by the brush of female Otherness, of being contaminated by things "female." Of course, to romanticize anything is the last thing that any rigorous scholar would do. Here, disdain for female "sentimentality" intersects with both the modern fashion for the cool and the cult of professionalism in our culture.
The implication is that gender scepticism may be more than just a compelling theory. Those who fear the curse of "female Otherness" may feel there is no other alternative but to reject the concept of gender altogether. Driven by the need to survive prof essionally--or motivated by academic entrepreneurism--gender scepticists reach for what has traditionally been the most effective weapon in the feminist arsenal: the charge of essentialism--a charge implying that all theorists of gender difference, includ ing Gilligan, are by definition a species of backward, anti-intellectual, biological determinists--a brand of R.E.A.L. Women in the academy.
The gender scepticist alternative to gender difference is, according to Bordo, a theory of a variation in human experience so extreme that it forecloses all possibility of social criticism and, by extension, political action. The nature of gender is supposedly so fragmented that any kind of generalization of the female condition does violence to individual experience. "For [as Bordo writes] the inflections that modify experience are endless, and some item of difference can always be produced which w ill shatter any proposed generalization.
If generalization is only permitted in the absence of multiple inflections or interpretive possibilities, then cultural generalizations of any sort . . . are ruled out. What remains is a universe composed entirely of counterexamples, in which the way men and women see the world is purely as particular individuals, shaped by the unique configurations that form that particularity.
In other words, there is nothing that will tolerate theorising, so why are we doing it? More to the point, there is no concept around which feminism can coalesce. Indeed, there are no such things as genders, and no such things as women, so we might just as well disband and return to our nurseries and our kitchens, for there is no one to liberate. For someone like me, who has always harboured the darling illusion that my teaching and my writing were forms of political activism, gender scepticism is bad news indeed. For it traps me in an apolitical double bind: I can either take up a position in the gender essentialist ghetto or enter the supposedly gender undifferentiated world of the status quo. Hence I have decided that, if I have to choose, then I will come down on the side of gender difference and take the risk of essence.
Despite the shifting critical positions vis-ŕ-vis Gilligan's In a Different Voice, I have never really had a problem with Gilligan's claim in her Introduction, where she writes the following:
The different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but by theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through women's voices that I trace its development. But this association is not absolute, and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of though and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex.
Gilligan was almost certainly anticipating charges of essentialism and she wanted to disarm her critics before they could shoot. It didn't work. And the reason it didn't work is because, as Nina Baym has said, in an article subtitled, significantly, "Wh y I don't Do Feminist Theory," "When you start with a theory of difference, you can't see anything but." So what Gilligan ended up with were two different styles of moral reasoning which, despite her protestations, have come to be set in opposition to ea ch other and identified as male and female.
It's too bad, really, because once you've risked the possibility of setting up a binary opposition it's awfully hard to turn it back into a whole greater than the sum of its two impoverished parts. Furthermore, as with all binary oppositions, we are forced into deciding what the hierarchical relationship is between the opposed concepts. A long footnote in Rosemary Tong's textbook of Feminist Thought addresses this dilemma:
Critics probe: "So which is it better to be: just or caring? Should we be like Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac so as to fulfil God's will? Or should we be like the mother whose baby Solomon threatens to cut in half?" (We will recall that in this biblical story, two women claim to be the same child's mother. To be fair to both, Solomon, in his ultimate wisdom, decides to divide the baby in two, causing the true mother to forsake her claim in order to secure the child's su rvival.) Gilligan resisted answering these questions, although she certainly led many of her readers to view Abraham as a religious fanatic and to view the real mother in the Solomon story as a person who has her values properly ordered.
First, I can hardly blame Gilligan for refusing to answer the question about which is the superior mode of moral reasoning. To do so would be to buy into the false opposition. Secondly, I find it interesting that critics focus on the mother in the story of Solomon's Judgement, for I think that misses the point. I think the story is more important for the way in which it suggests that justice versus caring is indeed a false opposition. The way I like to read the story is that Solomon is only secondaril y interested in settling the dispute between the two women. His primary interest is in the welfare of the child. He cares enough about the child to see that justice is done on its behalf. He has no way of knowing who the biological mother is. But is he even interested in that? The ploy he uses cannot be relied upon to determine the identity of the biological mother. It can only pr edict who might be the better mother for the child. Now if we read the story this way, can we really separate out justice from caring? While it is true that the caring implicit in Solomon's judgement is perhaps nothing more than the mercy that tempers justice, and that what is happening in Solomon's courtroom is merely business as usual, this alternative reading of the story nevertheless suggests that there might be something bigger we ought to be looking for, something which the combined concepts of justice and caring are too inadequate to encompass.
Unfortunately, Gilligan's theory can too easily be made to support the notion that difference is all there is between men and women. But Gilligan did not so much start with a theory of difference as enter into a dialogue about gender di fference at a particular point in its historical development. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she was imbedded in a particular intellectual tradition and her work and thought were part of an ongoing dialogue that did not originate with her. In a Different Voice appeared at a particular moment in the history of moral discourse as well as feminist discourse. It was a necessary corrective to and an extension of Lawrence Kohlburg's work, which itself was a corrective to and an exte nsion of work by other participants in the dialogue. Moreover, what Gilligan clearly set out in part to do was refute gender essentialism, not be a party to it. If anyone's work within that dialogue is unequivocally grounded in essentialist assumptions it's Kohlberg's, not hers. Gilligan merely started where he ended--or, more accurately, where he paused--and that happened to be with a theory of gender difference that fairly cried out for feminist revision. Gilligan answered that cry.
I think the only way to remove the curse of "female Otherness" from Gilligan's work is to relate it to complementary bodies of knowledge which do not begin with a theory of gender difference. While she may have coined the Ethic of Care as a useful te rm to describe what she was hearing from her research subjects, the concept itself did not spring fully formed from the brow of Carol Gilligan. It had antecedents in a long series of previous studies that reaches all the way back to Freud, and even farth er. Indeed, there is a line of descent, and at every station on that line there is a forking-off in several directions. What that means is that something comparable to the Ethic of Care has probably shown up in several of those other directions, somethi ng that corroborates and complements the Ethic of Care without making any claims for one gender or the other.
While I've been reading a lot of clinical material in the field of psychoanalysis, it was not very long ago that I began to realize that the Ethic of Care has been alive and flourishing in psychotherapeutic consulting rooms for several decades now. M oreover, what happens in the consulting room is often the mirror image of what happens in King Solomon's courtroom. Whereas Solomon's justice is tempered by caring, the psychoanalyst's caring is often tempered by justice. Historically, of course, what m any women have experienced at the hands of psychotherapists has been neither caring nor just--which perhaps explains, at least in part, why psychoanalytic practise has not been given enough attention as a possible source of feminist theoretical insight.
However, I think that many feminist scholars in the discipline of psychology do acknowledge psychotherapy as an instructive model of interrelationship. For example, at a conference on Gender and Knowledge at the University of Calgary in 1989, Blythe Clinchy, one of the authors of Women's Ways of Knowing, a book which owes much to Gilligan, delivered a keynote address in which she enlarged and extended the concept of "connected knowing" and "separate knowing." She talked about the complementar ity of these two ways of knowing, and she used the example of the "fine therapist" who can be at once connected and detached. At the same conference, therapist and academic Sandra Pyke illustrated that example when she spoke of the way in which connected knowing informs her therapeutic technique. While the image of the "fine therapist" later returned to haunt me, at the time I was too preoccupied with difference to recognize its importance. Women's Ways of Knowing was raising serious problems fo r moral theorists, while psychotherapists were embracing the book wholeheartedly, and it seemed to me that these two very different responses turned on the question of moral relativism. To be specific, in psychotherapy, what a client in distress needs mo st from her therapist is unconditional acceptance of her way of knowing; only after that acceptance is acknowledged and internalized by the client can the healing process begin. But the equal and unconditional acceptance of all ways of knowing is not what political feminism needs. For example, while racism is generally held to be unethical and incompatible with feminist politics, a therapist needs to tolerate a client's racist view of the world so that the possible emotional conflict underlying s uch a view can emerge and be worked through. In other words, there's a big difference between the ethics and govern the therapy relationship and ethics in the broader sense.
Now, two years after that conference, I still maintain that there's a significant difference between psychoanalytic practise and moral theory, but I'm also beginning to see that difference is not all there is. It's true that women have endured many a buses at the hands of male psychotherapists, but that does not refute the fact that many men are "fine therapists"--connected knowers who operate within the ethic of care. This overturns the binary logic that has been carelessly imposed on Gilligan's wor k; it also refutes the claim that connected knowing is a woman's way of knowing. As Lorraine Code has pointed out in her excellent critique of Women's Ways of Knowing, it's perhaps more accurate to describe connected knowing as an undervalued way of knowing, and the Ethic of Care as an undervalued ethic.
Except within the psychoanalytic community, that is. There, unlike women's traditional caretaking, which is "often simply unpaid or underpaid labor performed from a variety of motives," caretaking which promotes psychological healing and growth fetch es the respect and financial recognition our culture denies to wives and mothers. Indeed, among a growing number of psychoanalytically oriented therapists, good therapy is not merely analogous to good parenting, it is often consciously conducted as the c lient's second chance at receiving the good parenting she probably missed in childhood. To that end, object relations therapists model themselves on D.W. Winnicott's "good-enough-mother"--the hypothetical mother who has somehow managed to provide just th e right amount of caring at the right times throughout all the stages of her child's development. The end product of this hypothetical good-enough-mother's efforts is the hypothetical pathology-free individual. That no real woman, operating within the c onstraints of patriarchy and her own gender conditioning, can possibly be this perfectly-good-enough-mother at least partly accounts for the millions of people in quest of the good-enough-therapist.
The Ethic of Care as it operates in psychotherapy has its origins in the concept of countertransference. Transference and countertransference are conceptual categories distinguishing two parts of a phenomenon, which characterizes most medium-and long -term therapeutic relationships. For my purposes here it might be useful to identify transference quite simply as the process by which a client unconsciously displaces on to her analyst feelings, behaviours, attitudes, and desires which derive from previ ous figures in her life--usually parental figures. It's through transference that archaic patterns of relating, dating back as far as infancy, are repeated and thereby reinforce old and often inappropriate ways of relating. In therapy as it's now practi sed by therapists of most theoretical persuasions, the therapist takes on the transference in order to allow the client to become conscious of and hence exchange inappropriate ways of relating for more appropriate ones. Countertransference is the necessa ry complement of transference and consists of the feelings evoked in the therapist by the feelings displaced upon him. But the usefulness of these subjective responses has not been recognized until quite recently.
Freud thought that countertransference was a disturbing, distorting element in treatment. Indeed, it was years before analysts dared speak or write about their countertransference experiences, much less regard them as a positive factor in treatment. In other words, this intersubjective way of knowing was once as undervalued in psychoanalytic circles as it still seems to be among mainstream philosophers and scientists. Even today, there is a relative paucity of literature on the topic. Evidence of Freud's pernicious influence is implicit in Ellen Bassin Ruderman's recent study of twenty extensively experienced female psychotherapists, who indicated that despite their recognition of the positive value of countertransference responses, "they still te nded to criticise the evidence of countertransference in themselves." Clearly these women therapists would be well served by the kind of feminist theoretical investigation I am calling for here.
Despite that persistent undercurrent of ambivalence, theories of transference and countertransference have undergone profound revision since Freud first named them as evidence of pathology. During the 1950s, the concept of countertransference was ext ended and considerably depathologised; it came to include the analyst's non-neurotic responses, and he could now use his countertransference as clinical evidence, that is, he could assume that his own emotional response was based on a reasonably accurate interpretation of the client's unconscious intentions or meaning. There, in that extended concept, is the first real evidence of the analyst as an actively connected knower. As the concept of the good-enough-therapist suggests, over the last thirty year s, much more emphasis has been placed on countertransference as the basis of empathy, caring, and even love.
In an article entitled "Mature Love in Countertransference," Irwin Hirsch briefly summarizes four prominent analysts' view of love. Hirsch maintains that some or all of these characterize countertransference. Here's what he says:
In discussing mature love, [Eric] Fromm speaks of it as an openness to receiving and a wish to give. It is an active concern for the life of another and the growth of another. It is reflected in an ability to be responsive to the other and to let one self see the other and fully know the other. [Michael] Balint's discussion of mature love focusses on tenderness. One who is capable of mature loving is able to feel tender regard for long periods of time without necessarily demanding the same in return for that period of time. [Rollo] May emphasizes care as a precondition for love. He sees this as the ability fully to see or to recognize the other, to identify with pain and joy, to feel a tender concern and an ability to experience sadness in relatio n to the other [Otto] Kernberg also speaks of tenderness and the capacity to feel depressed by or to mourn the loss of the other.
Hirsch comments on these views by saying that although "many analysts do not write about or publicly discuss their experience of such feelings, it is difficult to imagine not having any of [them] over a prolonged analysis." While the therapist's consiste ncy in relating is regarded as a primary agent of change, skilled analysts can usually act on their feelings in ways that enhance change. If they are sufficiently experienced in interpreting their own countertransference, analysts can arrive at a reasona bly accurate idea of what intervention is appropriate at a given moment: an interpretation, a self-disclosure, a gesture of affection, a pause to allow for a moment of quiet reflection, a show of tolerance for the client's inevitable expressions of love a nd rage. There is, of course, always the potential for emotional and sexual exploitation in such an intensely intimate relationship, and unanalysed countertransference has been targeted as the major cause of such abuse. However, the competent analyst, w ho has himself undergone rigorous analysis, monitors his emotional investment in the client and is skilled at recognizing when his own transference issues are impeding useful countertransference responses. While this refinement of the art of caring curre ntly finds few analogues outside the therapeutic setting, the theories generated by the practise resonate well with the feminist discourse of care.
But psychotherapy is not merely a matter of dispensing loving care. As analyst Peter Lomas maintains, there is also a need for compassionate judgement in therapy, for often people who enter therapy are, in Lomas's words, "willingly seeking judgement. " Lomas goes on to say that "there can be no harsher judge of a person than herself, and this severity is . . . often a scrupulous desire on the part of the patient to present the truth about herself and, if judged, to be judged fairly." In other words, the therapist is often required to rule on the client's self-judgement.
As the term "compassionate judgement" implies, the analyst must operate within both the Ethic of Care and the Ethic of Justice. The rhetoric of both justice and care, and the image of simultaneous connection and detachment, can hardly be missed in th is summary of Lomas's argument:
The fact that therapist and patient share a moral culture means that the therapist has no access to special knowledge of a moral kind. His intervention is valuable in so far as it is made with fairness and impartiality. The chances of this occurring are quite good because of the likelihood that, over a period of time in favourable circumstances, the therapist may well have come to understand and feel warmth towards the patient. Thus the moral perspective that the therapist brings to bear is "special " not because he has special access to moral knowledge but because he does so in a careful and considerate way; he is careful in how much to say, how and when to say it, perceptive about the moral dilemma that the patient cannot fully express, and so on. In other words, the moral content of the therapist's judgement is no different from, and no more authentic than, that of other people; what is different is the way it is exercised.
Clearly, Lomas would disagree with my position that there's a big difference between the ethics that govern the therapy relationship and ethics in the broader sense, for he sees no difference in content between the therapist's judgements and those of othe r people. But what is important here is the implication that fair and impartial justice in the therapeutic setting is facilitated by countertransference feelings of empathy and warmth, and therein lies the difference. Lomas's position complements that o f philosopher Annette Baier in her article entitled "A Need for More than Justice." However, Baier maintains that the difference between justice and justice informed by caring is a difference in both emphasis and content. Her position is an explicitly f eminist one, while Lomas's is not. Further, the differing contexts of the discourses also have to be taken into account. Nevertheless, I think that feminist moral theory does find a salutary echo in psychoanalytic practise.
The relationship between theories of caring and the phenomenon of countertransference is not a new discovery. In the feminist literature, it is sometimes explicit but only peripheral, as in Blythe Clinchy's conference address referred to above, or el se it is central but only implicit, as in Sandra Pyke's comments at the same conference. However, I'm wondering if more can't be made of that relationship. In fact, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that the psychoanalytic model of theorising, with its emphasis on the interdependence of theory and practise, is a good model for feminist theorising. As Luise Eichenbaum and Suzie Orbach have written, "all new theories of psychological development usher in changes in the actual practis e of psychoanalytic therapy. As the theory develops, it refines aspects of the practise, and these tried-out interventions in turn further refine the theory." Now that is a model of theorising as a process rather than armed conflict. Most import ant of all, the fact that, almost from the beginning, women have been relatively well represented among clinicians and theorists of psychoanalysis makes the profession itself worthy of feminist scrutiny. Perhaps its history can help us predict the ways in which all professions and disciplines and institutions might evolve if women and what we presently regard as women's values were given a significant role to play in that evolution.
There are many other prior systems of thought, besides psychoanalytic theory, to which the work of Carol Gilligan can be related. There are several examples in philosophy--the 19th century philosophy of David Hume, for example. But this is not meant to suggest that the Ethic of Care can now be turned into some kind of grand metatheory. On the contrary, theories often compete and contradict one another, yet I am impressed by the way theories also complement one another and often operate in tandem to give us a variety of useful perspectives on a given phenomenon. Most important, I think that we, in our desire to acknowledge the diversity in human experience in general and female experience in particular, also have to recognize the simple fact that a ll theorising, not just moral theorising, is a process by which generalizations are developed. According to binary logic, generalizations obscure difference. But we can escape that binary logic by recognizing that similarity and difference are often com plementary rather than opposed, for generalizations also help us get a grip on enormously complex realities. This liberation from dualistic habits of thought requires that both theorists and practitioners be aware of what kinds of historical circumscript ions and contextualizations are needed to pare down overly-reductive generalizations in order to permit their interplay with diversity. Most of all, if feminism is to avoid becoming hypocritical, respect for difference must be extended to include respec t for the different theoretical positions within it.
Footnotes:
Baier, A. 1987. A need for more than justice. Science, morality and feminist theory. M. Hanen and K. Nielsen, eds. Calgary, AB: UCP.
Belenky, MF., B.M. Clinchy, N.R. Goldberger, and J.M. Tarule. 1984. Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind. New York: Basic Books.
Baym, N. 1987. The madwoman and her languages: Why I don't do feminist literary theory. Feminist issues in literary scholarship. S. Benstock, ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Bordo, S. 1990. Feminism, postmodernism and gender scepticism. Feminism/postmodernism. L. Nicholson, ed. New York: Routledge.
Clinchy, B.M. 1989 (31 May). Women's ways of knowing: Extensions and applications. Keynote address, Gender and Knowledge conference, Calgary, Canada.
Code. L. 1989 (2 June). Subjectivity or subjectivism? Unpublished paper, Gender and Knowledge conference, Calgary, Canada.
Eichenbaum, L., and S. Orbach. 1983. Understanding women: A feminist psychoanalytic approach. New York: Basic Books.
Gilligan, C. 1982. In a different voice: Psychological theory and women's development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
Hirsch, I. 1988. Mature love in countertransference. Love: Psychoanalytic perspectives. J.F. Lasky and H.W. Silverman, eds. New York: NYUP.
Houston, B. 1987. Rescuing womanly virtues: Some dangers of moral reclamation. Science, morality and feminist theory. M. Hanen and K. Nielsen, eds. Calgary, AB: UCP.
Ruderman, Ellen Bassin. 1989. Creative and reparative uses of countertransference by women psychotherapists treating women patience: A clinical research study. The psychology of today's woman: New Psychoanalytic visions. T. Bernay and D.W. Cant or, eds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP.
Silverman, H.W. 1988. Aspects of the erotic transference. Love: Psychoanalytic perspectives. J.F. Lasky and H. W. Silverman, eds. New York: NYUP.
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