Nancy Chodorow - "Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots"

People generally marry heterosexually. Male-female relationships seem to be strained in regularized ways that we recognize and expect. In this article, Chodorow argues that this is not accidental. We must understand these facts as part of the routine process of family reproduction.". . . the psychological propensities, needs, and wants which lead people to form new family or family-like relationships undermine those very relationships they serve to form" (pg. 454).

Freud:

Sexual repression is a key element in socialization in the bourgeois family. For women this repression is absolute, men occasionally are allowed a double standard that allows premarital sex. So, when a girl finally falls in love, she is not ready and confused. Because she has been trained to repress sexual feelings, she is unresponsive when sex is finally allowed (in marriage). She does not enjoy sex and therefore does not care much about the resulting children. By the time she matures and is able to love and desire her husband, he no longer cares for her or their marriage. She redirects her attention to her children. But since they are a socially inappropriate sexualized interest, she awakens in them a sexual desire which must be repressed and the cycle repeats. So the training that requires primarily women to repress their sexual feelings before marriage in the end frustrates the very marriage they are being prepared for and starts the cycle again with their children.

Two other outcomes of the training that frustrate the marriage: 1) the message is mostly directed towards heterosexual sex. So Freud argues that this leads young men and women to experiment with substitute sexual gratification - masturbation and homosexual sex. Or for men, a separation between the "good" nonsexual woman and the sexual woman who cannot be respected. 2) a woman may resent her husband deeply because of the disappointing sex and marriage but repress these feelings by playing the dutiful, loving wife because she was socialized to be so.

So the main idea is that bourgeois marriage reproduces sexual repression and hetersosexual sex while at the same time undermining them. There are fundamental, concrete contradictions in this family form.

Gayle Rubin

Rubin follows Levi-Strauss argument that all kinship systems rest to some degree on marriage and the sexual division of labor. She points out that all known kinship systems assume heterosexual unions. Heterosexuality, therefore, is a fundamental organizing principle of the family and what Rubin calls the sex/gender system of any society. A second organizing principle is the sexual and familial division of labor. These two principles describe all family systems and they reinforce each other. The sexual division of labor in the family creates gendered, heterosexual children who marry heterosexually and repeat the cycle.

The fact that women mother creates a difference in the development of this hetersosexual object choice and adult heterosexual experiences for men and women. As marriage and family become more emotional than economic and political (production, religion, education, care for the sick and aged no longer occur within the family) all that is left is the psychological and personal functions. Because of this, the contradictions between the heterosexuality of men and women that women's mothering creates are now more obvious and significant.

According to psychoanalytic theory, heterosexuality is the primary outcome of the oedipus complex for both sexes. But the development differs for boys and girls. Boys retain one primary love object (females) through their boyhood, their development is relatively continuous. In adulthood he finds someone like his mother (a woman) to marry. Girls' development, however, is more complicated. Her first love object is a woman (her mother), but to become "properly" heterosexual, she must transfer these feelings to her father and men. But fathers are traditionally unavailable physically and emotionally. This creates an asymmetry in the feminine and masculine oedipus complex and difficulties in the development of female sexuality. Freud describes the asymmetry: boys simultaneously love one parent (the mother) and hates the other as a rival (the father). Girls, however, turns to the father as a primary love object, but does not substitute this relationship for that with her mother. She retains and builds upon her original attachment to her mother. Her transfer of interest to the opposite sex is therefore not absolute. Her erotic interest transfers, but her affective interest remains dual.

The important thing to recognize is that the feminine oedipus complex has an internal and external complexity that the masculine does not. For the girl, her relation of dependence to her mother continues. Her attachment is added on to this and is often secondary, but never more important than that to her mother. The girl is "in a bisexual relational triangle, in which her relation to her father is emotionally in reaction to, interwoven and competing for primacy with, her relation to her mother" (pg. 459).

Two implications of this situation: 1) heterosexual relationships differ for boys and girls. Women emerge for their oedipus complex oriented to men as primary erotic objects, but men remain secondary emotionally. Men emerge with a primary and exclusive emotional tie to women. 2)because of the relational triangle between daughter, father and mother, the feminine inner object world is more complex than the masculine.

Because mothers and fathers are different kinds of parents, the girl's relation to her father differs in nature and intensity. The father has never been part of the oneness that children experience with the mother, he has always been separate and the child has never been completely dependent on him. So, the girl's relationship with her father is also an attempt to break her primary dependence and unity with the mother whose relationship threatens the daughters selfhood. On the other hand, since the father is more distant and in a position of authority, he and men in general are idealized, whereas the boy's relationship with his mother is grounded in reality. So girls may enter the oedipal complex later than boys. Boys may enter it earlier because of the availability of the mother and the distance of the father. Then, girls do not resolve the complex as completely as boys do because she maintains her preoedipal and eodipal attachment to her mother. Boys repress their oedipal attachment and preoedipal dependence on his mother more absolutely. Chodorow argues, unlike Freud who focuses on genital differences, that the nature of the complex is the cause of the above difference. Boys attachment to the mother is so intense that it is a threat that must be repressed. Since the girl's attachment to her father is less intense and non-exclusive, it is less of a threat and the triangle therefore can remain an ongoing part of her psychic world.

So the masculine personality is based on repression of affect, denial of relational needs and connection which prepares the boy for life in the working world. For girls, however, the secondary nature of men continues into womanhood. Women are more important emotionally for men than men are for women. Women have intimate relationships with other women throughout their lives, unlike men with other men. Chodorow describes studies that show that men fall in love emotionally while women fall in love rationally. Women who are more economically dependent on men, must make sensible calculations in love and marriage which they mask with romanticism. This goes back to the distant but idealized father. Their relationship with their father prepares them for the relationship they will have in marriage. Their development also provides an emotional distance and rationality in relationships with men in comparison to close and emotional relationships with women. Women have other relationships and therefore other resources. Men play a part in this as well by repressing their affective needs as a result of their own oedipal resolution. According to several psychoanalysts, because of these repressed needs, men are often intolerant of those who can express them, namely women. This makes heterosexual marriage difficult. Women, who remain erotically heterosexual, are encouraged to look elsewhere for relational needs. She may do this through relationships with other women or by have children. Having children recreates the primary intense unit that a heterosexual relationship recreates for men.

The point is that women and men are raised to be "meant for each other" and so seek intimacy with one another, but are unable to fulfill each others' needs as a result of the social organization of parenting (women mother). Both sexes are looking for a return to the emotional and physical union with the mother. Men simultaneously seek and fear exclusivity. Women have different and more complex relational needs that an exclusive relationship with a man cannot fulfill.

So the two structural principles of the family are in contradiction with each other. The family reproduces itself in form but at the same time undercuts itself in content. People form heterosexual couples, but as a result of men and women being parented by women, these heterosexual relationships are strained and difficult. In earlier times the father was less absent, the family was centered on production and the sexes were economically interdependent. The heterosexual asymmetry did not overwhelm the family. With industrial capitalism, however, the family has become primarily emotionally important, isolated, and mobile. Other primary relationships are less available. "The heterosexual relationship itself gains in emotional importance at the very moment when the heterosexual strains which mothering produces are themselves sharpened" (pg. 465). This is why divorce rates are high and the family has become such a problematic issue.

Key Words:

- asymmetry

- heterosexual marriage

- bisexual relational triangle

- contradiction

Discussion:

- Contradiction in heterosexual marriage is interesting, but it is limited to the traditional white middle class family structure.

- Is the problem the same today as in earlier decades? People are marrying later in life now and at least some women have gained some economic independence. What are the implications of these trends?