To better understand defensive avoidance—the unconscious exclusion of unwanted emotive information—recent theories should be consulted. A useful review of psychodynamic theories to account for misogyny is found in David D. Gilmour’s Misogyny: The Male Malady (2001). An anthropologist, Gil-mour surveys theories, from Freud’s to those of the object relations theorists, to account for the misogyny found in a variety of cultures over the globe. Finding Freudian castration anxiety in boys and penis envy in girls misleading, Gilmour favours later theories, such as that of Hans Loewald, of a negative Oedipus complex. But even this is circuitous in claiming that castration fears reflect a boy’s wish for female identity, to be like mother. In surrendering to her the boy feels self-contempt and must reject everything maternal and feminine if he is to become what he imagines father to be. Thus females are self-protectively denigrated in order that the boy feel masculine. Psychoanalytic revisionists such as Wolfgang Lederer and Melford Spiro are cited for their argument that “men’s anger at women is partly due to the little boy’s feeling of rage at the mother for her rejection of him during the Oedipal period ...”.7 The boy’s feeling of emotional betrayal by mother, while trusting father, is generalized to expectations of betrayal by all women.
Gilmour does not consider Matthew Besdine’s theory of “Jocasta Mothering”, a more parsimonious reconsideration of Freud’s Oedipal theory. Jocasta mothering revives Freud’s repudiated account of how early seduction trauma at the hands of caregivers leads to later emotional suffering (in Freud’s examples, hysteria in women). Besdine sees lasting alterations in boys’ sexual orientation resulting from affection-starved mothers sexually attracting their sons while also pushing them away. Both overstimulated and guilty, the boy is confused about his true sexual wishes and suffers from more or less acute ambivalence. Gradations of misogyny are likely outcomes, as is idealization of masculinity.8
While Oedipal theory induced productive thought about maternal relations with infants and children, its limits of explanation were soon reached. Gil-mour’s best lead is the theory of Nancy Chodorow who argued “that a psychic turning away from the mother is less necessary for girls than boys during childhood, because most girls grow up with a feminine identification anyway, which they model on their mother. The male’s switch in identity is made even harder for most boys ... if the father is often absent from the home at the stage of life when disidentifying is taking place”.9 To affirm his masculinity in the absence of father, the boy denies femininity by constructing a hyper-masculine facade, hiding the internal conflict about his mother’s emotional claims. This straightforward theory of the fragility of masculine identity is in keeping with attachment theory and accords well with the psychobiographical profiles offered for the artists studied here. It highlights in general terms the risks of over and under identification with mother without making hard-to-prove assumptions about infantile sexuality or the assumed universality of an Oedipus complex. identity formation and sexual orientation are much better studied in a setting of demonstrable early attachments, but new work by Bowlby and followers lay outside Gilmour’s purview.
When Ronald Fairbairn challenged libido theory in “A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychosis and Psychoneuroses” (1941), he opened a new era of thinking about how relational styles develop. Fairbairn held that the actual quality of care infants and children receive is decisive in how they develop—that they must be unconditionally loved if defensive ego-splitting is not to complicate relationships throughout life. Ego defenses are built up in adverse conditions of separation and reunion which generate anxiety about care-giving by parents. With elaboration and refinement of this “real life” alternative to Freud’s libido theory of more or less fixed developmental stages, it became possible rigorously to observe and test the interaction of mothers, their infants and children to discover how variants of healthy reciprocity came about. The work on early mother-infant attachment of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth and many followers showed the way out of labyrinthine psychoanalytic theory into study of what really happens in setting optimal and sub-optimal courses of development for infants and children. It is this line of “real life” research that I have been following in the psychobiographies of artists as fantasy makers and leaders of their cultures.
Adam Jukes’s Why Men Hate Women (1993) does not look back to Fair-bairn’s revisionist theorizing and so does not expressly follow the line of advance towards the psychobiological insights of attachment theory. The book thoughtfully discusses Freud’s account of sexuality, along with variations by Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott; Jukes is well aware of such feminist theorizing of misogyny as that by Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, the latter being found most in accord with his argument. But Jukes, an experienced therapist with men who are chronically violent towards women, goes his own way on a course parallel with attachment theory’s account of defensive avoidance by males engaging with women as mothers and lovers. The book’s thesis is starkly radical but quite possible to support using refinements of attachment theory in the work on defensive classification by Mary Main and Patricia Crittenden. Jukes’s thesis is: “men exist in a state of perpetual enmity towards women which they express overtly and covertly by controlling and dominating them”, adding that “misogyny exists as a potential in all men until particular circumstances call it out. The control of women is, perhaps, the area where misogyny is most visible. So long as men feel in control of women they are able both implicitly to express and at the same time to repress their hatred of them.”10 His theoretical statements, aggregating throughout the book, may be construed in terms of attachment etiologies and classifications: “the trauma of the birth of the individual subject, the self, in the separation from the primary object, the mother, leads to the development of what I think of as a gendered psychosis which is encapsulated by primitive internalized sado-masochistic objects. I believe that this gendered psychosis is the source of male misogyny.”11 Jukes seems to be interested more in “separation” from mother than in endorsing the controversial “birth trauma” as a source of later disturbance. Further, I have not used such loaded language as “gendered psychosis”. Internalization of “sado-masochistic objects” is translatable into attachment terms, for instance Main’s Avoidant/Dismissing category and Crittenden’s gradation of Avoidant 1-6 and the A/C (de-fended-coercive) defensive strategies. Whatever his terminology, Jukes usefully draws out with new clarity the gendering of attachment.