MOTHER, MADONNA, WHORE

THE IDEALIZATION AND DENIGRATION

OF MOTHERHOOD

Estela V. Welldon

K A R N A C
LONDON NEW YORK
Much is owed to friends and colleagues, but it does not compare with the debt
I owe my patients. It is to thein that I dedicate this book, in gratitude, and also
in the hope that it will help others who are suffering or might come to suffer
from the painful predicaments of my patients.

Copyright 0 1988 by Estela V. Welldon

Foreword and Prelace Copyright 0 1992 Estela V. Welldon

Published in UK 2004 by
H. Karnac
Karnac (Hooks)
Books Ltd. Ltd.
6 Pembroke
118 FinchleyBuildings
Road
London NW3
NW I05HT
6KE

ISBN: 978 1 85575

I 85575 341341
3 9

All rights reservcd. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted. i n any forni or by any means, electronic, mcchanical. photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishcr.

Published in US by Other Press L1,C.

Printed and bound in Grcat Britain by 1,ightning Source 1JK

wvw. kamacbooks.com
FOREWORD

Men are perverse; women neurotic: Estela Welldon was one

of the first-perhaps in her field, the first-to question the
status of this psychosocial truism. Because of her work as a
psychiatrist specializing in sexual perversion and her pro-
fessional and personal contacts with the feminist movement
she came to see this division as arising from a particular male
ideology. Women could not be seen to be perverse because the
model for perversion was male. This nonrecognition of female
perversion has left countless woman in unacknowledged dis-
tress and their children in possible danger. In Mother, Ma-
donna, Whore Welldon sets out her argument that female
psychophysiology gives a completely different pattern to per-
version. At the centre of female perversion is the perversion of
motherhood.
The source of both male and female perversion may lie in
a disturbed infadmother relationship but the aims of subse-
quent adult perversion in the two sexes differ. Both attack the
mother who abused, neglected or deprived them but women
will attack this mother as she is internalized in her own female
body & found within her own mothering. The hated one is
identified with and lies thus within or in the baby who ex-
tends the self as once the perverse woman was her own
mother’s extension. Consequently the typical perversions of
women entail self-mutilation or child abuse. FOREWORD
 iv Welldon argues that to understand the perverse woman
we need to know something of her mother and her mother’s
mother. Perversion of motherhood is the end product of serial
abuse or chronic infantile neglect. The reproduction of
mothering is also the reproduction of perverse mothering. The
adult woman will turn her infantile fear and impotence into
cruel dominance-violence or hatred against someone weak-
er-the prostitute’s client or the mother’s child. Welldon’s
perspective is to try to make sure no-one should any longer
either idealize or denigrate motherhood; instead social policy
and psychological understanding should locate it as the place
at the centre of human difficulty: for worse as certainly as for
better. The odds are stacked with enormous weight on both
sides of maternity: it is the site of wonder and despair; of
spontaneity and hard work.
Welldon treads the ground of her crucially important
thesis with great sensitivity. Her compassion comes not from
sentiment (with its attendant amorality) but from effort-the
enormous effort of understanding another person, be they
perverse, “normal” or neurotic. It is after all not only men,
but women-radical feminists among them-who have un-
questioningly idealized motherhood. A fascinating thesis, a
generous perspective on women and men, Mother, Madonna,
Whore is also an act of courage.

London, September 1991

MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE
PREFACE

This book was first published in the U.K.in October 1988. At

the time it aroused much interest and controversy since it
brought to notice aspects of female psychopathology which
had been previously ignored or undiagnosed. The first reac-
tion was incredulity and disbelief. Assumptions were made
that once again "the blame was put on women" and the book
was immediately banned from feminist bookshops. This ini-
tial reaction changed rapidly after the book was read and the
message was understood. Some women who were in difficult
predicaments and under stress because they felt incapable of
meeting the demands of motherhood had been unable to get
appropriate professional help because "mothers don't do
those things"-an example of the extreme idealization of
motherhood. Now,1 am glad to say, this situation is improv-
ing.
The first dent in certain old-fashioned assumptions about
the problems of some mothers was made in the sixties when
doctors were finally obliged to recognise that the people who
battered their babies were often their mothers. This recogni-
tion prepared the way for serious professional consideration
of my clinical findings, showing the considerable range of
sexual perversions from which women can suffer and analys-
ing their causes, many of which derive from faulty mothering.
Everyone of course understood the manifestations of male PREFACE
 vi sexual perversions but since the same actions were by and
large not observed in women it was assumed that lacking a
penis women could not have perversions. This was another
instance of women’s problems being overlooked because it
was assumed that what was good enough for men was good
enough for women. My work showed that women not only
can have perversions but also that they express them through
the whole body. A resort to self-inflicted injuries in order to
achieve revenge and relief from sexual anxiety is not un-
common. Anorexia nervosa, bulimia and self-mutilation, all
mainly associated with women, could often be considered as
the equivalent of male perversions.
The media responded to the book in a very positive way.
For example, it was nominated by a leading journalist as
Book of the Year 1988. From the several constructive com-
ments 1 would like to single out the following passage from a
review in New Statesman and Society (December 1988) . . .
“Although it is now accepted that an abused child tends to
become a child abuser, even professional opinion seems reluc-
tant to draw the full implications. Diverse theories about
women (feminist and reactionary) seem to unite in regarding
women as victims, the objects rather than perpetrators of
violence, ignoring that being a victim, far from precluding
victimising, may actually entail it.” An editorial in the British
Medicallournal in May 1990 entitled “Women Who Sexually
Abuse Children” demonstrated that the main points had been
accepted into the received wisdom of “the Establishment.”
The ideas in the book rapidly gained ground with the
profession in the U.K. and achieved some currency in the
U.S.A. However, very few copies of the book circulated in
America and so I was glad to accept a proposal from Guilford
Publications for an American edition. Maybe this will lead to
a still wider circulation. 1 hope so, since the reasons which
impelled me to write the book in the first place remain valid:
there is still a great deal of room for improvement in the
understanding and treatment of women who suffer from per-
versions.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
The book, 1 hope, speaks for itself. Its imperfections are
WHORE my own responsibility. It is by no means the last word on the
subject: its strength, such as it is, lies in its having been the vii
first word. But all ideas have precursors and I am grateful to
the many people from whom 1 have learnt. I have acknowl-
edged my main debts of scholarship in the body of the book
but I would also like to thank, through this Preface, the many
other people whose comments over the years, orally and in
print, have contributed to my own insights, and in this cate-
gory I include, above all, my patients.

London, September 1991 ESTELAV. WELLDON

PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Every author constitutes a one-parent family, and, of course, I

have sole responsibility for my child. But this particular child
has had many aunts, uncles and grandparents. Some have taken
great pains to help; others have assisted unknowingly. Some
have contributed to the gestation of the project; others have
encouraged its development; and still others have given it a
degree of coherence and polish which I could not have achieved
on my own. Some, indeed, have influenced the project a t every
stage of its many-layered development: 1 have been greatly
sustained by Dr Earl Hopper, whose confidence and important
insights have been crucial; Grcgorio Kohon has also been a
perceptive and constructive commentator throughout.
If this book can be said to have had a beginning, it sprang
from the decision in 1978 of the Chairman of the Portman
Clinic, Dr Mervin Glasser, to make me responsible for the first
seminars at the Clinic on femaleperversions. My exjxrience at
the Portman of diagnosing and treating problems relating to
perversions and criminality showed me how many more male
than female patients there were, and this helped to set me
thinking. The resiilting ideas formed the subject of numerous
discussions with my colleagues at the Portman Clinic, and I am
grateful to them all for their illuminating comments. These
ideas expanded and took form in a lectureon ‘motherhood and
sexual perversion’, which many of my colleagues - amongst A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
 xthem Luisa Alvarez de Toledo, Pamela Ashurst, Fern Cramer-
Azima, Maria Dufau-Catt, Florencio Escardo, Zaida Hall,
Louise Kaplan, Moises Lemlij, Adam Limentani, Terry Lear,
Norman Morris, Marisa Pastorino, Jonathan Pedder, Malcolm
Pines, Bart de Smit, Frank Tait, Patrick Woodcock, and Monica
Zureti - read with discernment. I would especially like to
thank Dr Janine Puget for her comments and support. An
invitation in 1985 to deliver the same lecture at The Menninger
Foundation at Topeka, Kansas, where I had received much of
my formative training, took my understanding a stage further.
I am particularly grateful to Drs Ramon Ganzarain, Bonnie
Buchele, and Larry Kennedy for their generous comments and
for putting me in touch with much recent relevant literature.
I must acknowledge an influence of a different sort, but no
less potent. I have several women friends who have nothing to
do with this profession, but who nevertheless have had a major
influence on whether or not I persisted, in the midst of distrac-
tions, self-induced and otherwise, with so ambitious a project.
They, in particular, Helena Kennedy and Georgia Brown, have
made me feel in a vivid way that they are interested in my
conclusions, and I am grateful to them all whether this was
their intention or not.
In the final stages of this curious process of turning thoughts
and experiences into a well-baked cake with precisely defined
slices or chapters, a special contribution was made by Sally
Belfrage, who knows how to put together a book and what it is
to be feminine in the modern world.
Facts must - and, I hope, do - underline presentation,
style, and argument. Margaret Walker and her team of the
Tavistock Clinic library have given generously of their time,
and I have benefited from their enormous experience, good
humour, and lasting patience. Over the years others have
helped my accuracy, like the clerical staff at the Portman,
notably Judy Wilkins. Many of them knew what I was aiming
for almost before I did.
There may be some, eminent or otherwise, who have not
been adequately acknowledged in this note. I beg their pardons
M ~ and can~ only say that
~ the material
~ in this
~ book belongs
~ to many
:
WHORE people.
CONTENTS

Foreword iii
Preface V
Acknowledgements ix

1 Female sexual perversion 1

2 Sexuality and the female body 19
3 The power of the womb 42
4 Motherhood as a perversion 63
5 Mothers who commit incest:
the surrogacy of the child 85
6 The symbolic mother as a whore:
whose control is it anyway? 106
7 Substitute motherhood
The whore as an incest survivor:
whose responsibility is it anyway? 129

Epilogue 155
Bib1iography 159

Index 169
FEMALES E X U A LPERVERSION 1

H A V E F O U N D MYSELFrecallingaremarkmadetomea

I long time ago by a man given to reflectionson the oddities

of the human race. He thought it remarkable that, even
though the two sexes had looked at each other throughout all
recorded time, they still seemed unable to understand each
other. I wonder if this sour half-truth is not partly justified by
the tendency of each sex to project on to the other its
expectations of its own kind? In a world where it has been the
prerogative of men to teach and to write books, this would
partly account for the continued poverty of our understanding
about the predicaments of women. It is not that women have
been neglected, rather that false assumptions have been made
and women as well as men have been ready to accept them.
However, these assumptions may have different origins.
Psychoanalysis gave us access to the unconscious mind and
to the motivations underlying our actions. Then we optimistic-
ally believed that we had been enriched in our understanding of
the opposite sex and were nearer to a mutual self-knowledge.
FEMALE
This proved to be a premature assumption; the search for this SEXUAL
enlightenment is still in a developmental stage. PERVERSION
 2 Freud- the originator of all these invaluable discoveries
- though a genius, was as a man unable to convey a full
understanding of the complexities in the libidinal developments
of the two genders. He made the Oedipus complex, based on
the male model, the bedrock of normal libidinal development.
According to Freud, this complex occurs in the phallic stage,
between the ages of three and five. It is based on a dual desire:
firstly for the parent of the opposite sex, and secondly for the
death of the parent of the same sex, which will then enable the
boy to possess his mother. The child fears the father’s
retaliation for these murderous wishes; castration seems the
unavoidable outcome. The only satisfactory way to resolve
castration anxieties is to renounce the incestuous object, so the
Oedipus complex comes to an end and the boy enters the
latency period. This is a traditional theory which is still used by
many practitioners, not only in relation to normal sexuality
but also in the understanding of its perverse manifestations.
This theory has two main foci: firstly the phallus as the
genital organ, and secondly the position of the child in a
triangular relationship in which he first tries to conquer his
mother, but eventually has to accept a position outside the
parental unit. It was first applied to the boy’s libidinal
development, but was soon transplanted to the girl’s. A
‘parallel’ situation to that in boys was created in girls with the
inception of ‘penis-envy’. The girl enters into the Oedipus
complex directed by the castration complex. She changes not
only her sexual object from mother to father, but also her wish
for the penis her mother never gave her for a wish to have a baby
by her father. The symbolic equivalence of penis and baby was
created.
Freud himself thought that female sexuality was a ‘riddle’.
He asked his women colleagues to enlighten him about their
own sexuality since he thought they had the advantage cf being
suit able ‘mother-subst i t Utes’ during the transf erence process
with their patients. This was in itself an odd request since, as
..
Schafer has noted, ‘. He [Freud] continued to neglect the
essentially androgynous role of the psychoanalyst in the
MOTHER,
MADONNA, transference .. . There is little evidence of Freud’s having been
WHORE alert to or impressed by maternal transference to the male
 -
analyst or, for that matter, by maternal counter-transference 3
on the part of the male analyst’ (1974, p. 477). And later:

..
Freud was not prepared to think about mothers very f u r . he
showed virtually no sustained interest in their subjective
experience - except for their negative feelings about their own
femininity and worth and their compensatory cravings to be
.
loved and impregnated, especially with sons. . It seems that he
knew the father and the castrate in himself and other men but
not the mother and the womun. (p. 482)

The response of Freud’s female colleagues was overwhelming.

Many women psychoanalysts were stimulated to come forward
with new ideas full of originality and richness, some agreeing
and others disagreeing with Freud’s postulations. It was most
unfortunate, though, that these were not heard as voices of
legitimate female self-assertion, but instead were taken as
voices of dissent. Among the first to speak out was Horney
who, in her paper ‘On the genesis of castration complex in
.
women’, says‘. .an assertion that one half of the human race
is discontented with the sex assigned to it and can overcome
this discontent only in favourable circumstances - is decidedly
unsatisfying, not only to feminine narcissisms but also to
biological science’ (1924, p. 38).
Many papers and books have recently been published
showing that women psychoanalysts made important contri-
butions, Riviere (1929), Brierley (1932, 1936), and Payne
(1935) among them. At the same time Deutsch (1925, 1930)
and Lamp1 de Groot (1928,1933)’ and later Brunswick (1940)
- all women psychoanalysts, acknowledged the influence of
the pre-oedipal mother and noted Freud’s failure to pay
sufficient attention to the obviouseffect the archaic, powerful,
controlling mother has on the child (see Barglow and Schaefer,
1970).
For their part, Horney (1924, 1926, 1932, 1933), Mullcr
(1932), and Barnett (1966), rather than simply seeing the little
girl as lacking a penis, wrote about her experiencing vaginal
FEMALE
sensations and impulses that made her feel feminine from the SEXUAL
beginning. From her own clinical experiences with adult PERVERSION
 4 women, Greenacre (1950) developed the view that vaginal
awareness is present in females well before puberty.
These professional women offered important insights about
the functioning female body and its symbolic operation in a
woman’s inner world. Together they can be said to have
established an alternative theoretical system. But it was to no
avail. The psychoanalytical world of ideas by then belonged to
men - the supremacy of the phallus had won unlimited, un-
questionable, and irrefutable acceptance. Traditional psycho-
analysis seemed not to be influenced by what these women had
to say, although their ideas about their own territory were so
much more sophisticated and innovative than what men had
previously said. Within the psychoanalytical movement these
ideas appeared in obscure papers which attracted little
attention. Indeed, women psychoanalysts were relegated to
practice in their field as ‘mother-substitutes’ and caretakers of
patients; they were not supposed to postulate new theories.
Whereas the penis is considered as an anatomical reality, the
term ‘phallus’ is used as an embracing symbol meaning all
power; such was the dominance of men in the world of ideas
and philosophy, it became natural t o accept the superior power
of the phallus. The women’s theories have been revived only in
the past two decades, mostly as a result of pressures from the
women’s movement rather than from the world of psycho-
analysis. Before then women had to listen to and acquiesce in
the theories of the male masters. Other workers in this field
still refer to the disagreements over female sexuality between
Freud (1905, 1931, 1933) and Jones (1927), but their female
contemporaries’ ideas are treated with ignorance or patronizing
indifference.
The relative positions of the two sexes in society are very
different, as clearly indicated by Erikson: ‘Woman, through
the ages (at any rate, the patriarchal ones), has lent herself to a
variety of roles conducive to an exploitation of masochistic
potentials: she has let herself be confined and immobilized,
enslaved and infantilized, prostituted and exploited, deriving
from it at best what in psychopathology we call “secondary
MOTHER,
gains” of devious dominance’ (1968, p. 284). Or, as Schafer
...
MADONNA,
WHORE ..
puts it, ‘. human sexuality is indeed psychosexuality
Psychosexuality means mental sexuality, that is, a sexuality of S
meanings and personal relationships that have developed and
been organized around real and imagined experiences and
situations in a social world ... This centring on ultimate
procreative genitality explains some of the imperfections of
Freud’s psychology of women . . .*(1974, pp. 472-3, author’s
italics).
It is only within the past fifteen years that important
theories about female sexuality and perversions postulated by
female colleagues such as Chasseguet-Smirgel(198Sa,198Sb)
and McDougall (1986) have been published and taken ser-
iously by our profession. They have had an enormous and
welcome influence on both ideas and practice.
Within the traditional psychoanalytical framework - that
is, Freud’s theories -perversion in males is viewed as the result
of an unresolved Oedipus complex which has castration
anxiety as its central and main component. When the oedipal
male reaches manhood, he is unable to reach genital primacy
with a person of the opposite sex, since his mother is still in his
unconscious mind, and he feels in extreme anxiety of being
castrated by his father. He then denies thedifferentiation of the
sexes and creates a phallic mother.
The traditional theory with its ‘imposed parallelism’
between boys and girls was abandoned by other investigators in
the light of the systematic studies of observations of the
mother-baby unit and the awareness of the importance for
both sexes of the period of attachment to the mother, the
so-called ‘pre-oedipal’ phase. This phase is currently thought
to account for perverse psychopathology of males, in which the
psychogenesis is deeply related to intense fears of being either
abandoned or seduced by the mother. There is still no
acknowledgement of female perversion, though the evidence is
that male perversion is often the result of early faulty mother-
ing. Why is it so difficult to conceptualize the notion of perverse
motherhood and other female perverse behaviour according to
a separate, completely different psychopathology which origin-
ates from the female body and its inherent attributes? Male
assumptions have made it difficult to understand some female FS E M
XUAAL L
E
behaviour, including female perversions, sometimes to the PERVERSION
 6 extent of denying all evidence that female perversions exist.
Perhaps the reason why the female experiences identified in the
chapters that follow have only rarely been diagnosed is that
there is a long tradition of seeing women’s sexual development
as parallel to men’s - whatever was considered normal for
men was supposed to be so for women.
This book is a study of the neglected area of female
perversions, based on twenty years of clinical work with
women patients. Before we come to the detailed argument, it is
important to recognize that there is a difference between the
everyday and psychoanalytical uses of the term ‘perversion’.
Whereas ordinarily the word is supposed to be pejorative and
carries moral implications, in psychoanalysis it means simply a
dysfunction of the sexual component of personality develop-
ment. (In contrast, ‘deviation’, a term often used inter-
changeably with ‘perversion’, implies a statistical abnormality;
it describes an act not usually performed in certain circum-
stances within a given cultural milieu. I must stress that I use
‘perversion’ in the psychoanalytical sense. This is very different
from a classical neurotic or psychoticcondition, which is why I
shall insist on using the term ‘perversion’, for it defines the
existence of some specific and characteristic features. However,
Storr, among other authorities, prefers to use the term
‘deviation’ when referring to perversion. He says: ‘It is the
compulsive substitution of something else for heterosexual
intercourse in circumstances where the latter is available which
chiefly characterizes the behaviour we call sexually deuiant’
(1964, p. 13, my italics).
Perversion is ‘any form of adult sexual behaviour in which
heterosexual is not the preferred goal’, as simply described by
Rycroft (1968, p. 116). The definition of perversion varies
slightly from author to author. For 1. Rosen (1979a, p. 32) it
should always include the final pathway of sexual discharge
leading to genital orgasm, whereas Laplanche and Pontalis
have a more comprehensive view: they see perversion as
encompassing ‘the whole of psychosexual behaviour that
accompanies such atypical means of obtaining sexual pleasure’
MOTHER,
M A D O N N A , (1973, p. 306). The former descriptions f i t men. However,
W H O R E they become almost impossible to apply to women since they
sometimes use the function of ‘heterosexual intercourse’ for 7
perverse aims. It is well known that the definition of ‘true
sexual perversion’ should always include the participation of
the body. In other words, fantasies about bizarre or perverse
actions are not enough to be labelled as perverse. The ‘body
barrier’ means that the individual must use the body for the
perverse action. However, I believe that the term ‘body’ in the
definition of perversion has been mistakenly identified exclu-
sively with the male anatomy and physiology, specifically with
the penis and genital orgasm. How could we otherwise have
overlooked the fact that women’s bodies are completely taken
over in the course of their inherent functioning by procreative
drives, sometimes accompanied with the most perverse
fantasies, whose outcome materializes in their bodies?
Since men had appealed to perversion as a way to deal with
the fears of losing their penis, women were left in a position in
which perversions were not available to them. As women do
not have a penis, so the argument went, they must have a
different type of Oedipus complex and castration anxiety.
Hence the then popular view that ‘Women can’t have sexual
perversions since they don’t possess a penis’ was seldom
questioned. Freud theorized that the Oedipus complex was
resolved in little girls when they fantasized having Daddy’s
babies inside themselves. Developing his ideas, we could say
provocatively that ‘Women can’t have perversions because they
can have babies.’
In trying to describe perversion, I shall place the main
emphasis on understanding the perverse individual. We shall
look at some landmarks in psychological development, and I
shall speculate on how these link with the form and content of
the perverse action. At the same time we shall have to bear in
mind that, in both sexes, perversion involves a deep split
between genital sexuality as a living - or loving - force and
what appears to be sexual, but actually corresponds to much
more primitive stages where pregenitality pervades the whole
picture.
In male perversion this profound split is between what the
FEMALE
individual experiences as his anatomical maturity, and his SEXUAL
mental representations of his body in which he sces himself as a PERVERSION
 8 raging and desperate baby. Hence, although he responds
physically with a genital orgasm, the fantasies in his mind
belong to pre-oedipal stages.
Later on in life, when he appears very much an adult, he is
ready for revenge. He is not consciously aware of this hatred.
Indeed, usually he does not understand what ‘is taking him
over’ or why he does ‘those things’ which actually provide him
with no pleasure beyond a short-lived feeling of well-being,
though that lasts long enough for him to experience a sense of
relief from his mounting anxiety. He docs not know why a
particular, sometimes bizarre activity, which he knows is
wrong, makes him feel better. It is all the more puzzling t o him
when there are so many alternatives which would obviously be
more satisfactory and more socially acceptable. He is only too
painfully aware of the compulsion to repeat the action, but he
is quite oblivious of the hostility that causes it. Furthermore,
knowledge of whom he hates and on whom he wants to take
revenge remains deep in his unconscious.
So far what I have said refers to both sexes, but 1 shall have
to introduce some modifications in order to illustrate what
goes on in the female world. Accurate diagnosis of these
conditions in women has hitherto been lacking; it was as if we
were afraid of reaching a deeper understanding - perhaps
because, as I have.suggested, women were seen as being
incapable of committing perversions.
As a clinician 1 have observed that the main difference
between a male and female perverse action lies in the aim.
Whereas in men the act is aimed at an outside part-object, in
women it is usually against themselves, either against their
bodies or against objects which they see as their own creations:
their babies. In both cases, bodies and babies are treated as
part-objects.
For the purpose of authenticity andemphasis, I shall use the
‘uncustomary’ pronoun ‘she’ when referring to patterns of
feeling or behaviour that apply equally to both sexes.
The perverse person feels that she has not been allowed to
enjoy a sense of her own development as a separate individual,
MOTHER,
MADONNA, with her own identity; in other words she has not experienced
W H O R E the freedom to be herself. This creates in her the deep belief that
she is not a whole being, but her mother’s part-object, just as 9
she experienced her mother when she was a very young infant.
From early on in her life she felt unwanted, undesired, and
ignored, or alternatively a very important but almost unidenti-
fiable part of her parents’ lives (usually her mother’s). In this
last case she will feel smothered and ‘overprotected’ (which
actually means totally unprotected). Both situations create
enormous insecurity and vulnerability, and induce an intense
hatred of the person who inflicted them on her, and who was
the most important being when she was a baby -her mother.
From being victims, such people become the victimizers. In
their actions they are the perpetrators of the victimization and
humiliation previously inflicted on them. They treat their
victims in the same way they felt treated themselves: as part-
objects who are there only to satisfy their whims and bizarre
expectations. Such apparent sexual acting-out is a manic
defence against formidable fears related to the threat of losing
both mother and a sense of identity.
The main feature of perversion is that, symbolically, the
individual through her perverse action tries to conquer a
tremendous fear of losing her mother. As a baby she never felt
safe with her mother, but instead a t her most vulnerable,
experiencing her mother as a very dangerous person. Conse-
quently the underlying motivation in perversion is a hostile,
sadistic one. This unconscious mechanism is characteristic of
the perverse mind.
My argument is drawn entirely from my own clinical
experience. But now that it has led me to some understanding
of female perversion and the causes of it, not least in
inadequate mothering, it is evident to me that some of the
difficulties that have so far prevented the evidence from being
accepted for what it is arose from a particular and social
milieu. It is not my intention to write social history, but it is
hard to avoid the conclusions that in our time we have
witnessed grave inconsistencies in the way we view women,
their emotional needs, and their biological-reproductive
functions.
FEMALE
For example, I remember all too clearly the 1960s and the S E X U A L
way Laing’s (1961) theory about ‘schizophrenogenic’ mothers P E R V E R S I O N
 10 was misinterpreted and used by both professional and lay
persons to blame such women. The theory claimed that these
mothers were sending contradictory messages (which Bateson
(1956) had earlier termed ‘double bind’) to their babies.
Consequently, confusion prevailed in those babies’ minds; they
felt their mothers never allowed them to know what was right
or wrong. A psychotic organization of their minds was
beginning. At the time, both professional m d lay opinion was
that an ‘understanding’ of these schizophrenic patients had
now become easily available, so much so that they became ‘the
prophets of a new world’. But what about their mothers? They
were automatically considered responsible for their children’s
condition. They got no real or compassionate understanding;
they were to be ‘condemned’ for their ‘bad’ behaviour. But only
a few outside the clinical profession remembered that these
mothers had been through traumatic experiences earlier in their
own lives, which had partly led to ‘double bind’ attitudes
towards their children. They had been victims and in turn were
producing more victims.
Again in the 19609, we neglected to acknowledge what
really happened with ‘battered babies’; nobody, even experi-
enced physicians, could believe that those babies’ injuries had
been caused by their mothers. N o one seemed to understand
these women as mothers: ‘women’ were seen ascapable of such
actions, but not ‘mothers’. But of course they were daughters
and women first, some of whom just by sheer chance had
become mothers. The failure accurately to diagnose such
women came, I believe, partly from society*s glorification of
motherhood, its refusal to admit that motherhood could have
any negative aspects.
Two decades on, we are similarly failing to admit the
possibility of maternal incest. Everyone is ready to recognize
paternal incest, which as far as we know is much more
common, but not what mothers do. Nobody believes it is
happening - sometimes even to the mother’s chagrin.
To understand the problems of perversion and motherhood
which are the central themes of this book, we have to free
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
ourselves from some of the assumptions - both professional
WHORE and social - that I have mentioned, and return to basics. We
must begin with the female body and its inherent attributes. It 11
will not then seem strange to discover that women have a
completely different psychopathology from men.
In my examination of women's psychopathology I shall
focus on this more primitive level of libidinal development.
The perverse individual has been prevented, from a very early
age, from achieving sexual emotional maturity (that is, genital
sexuality) and consequently has difficulties in forming
satisfactory heterosexual relationships. This fact is crucial in
the understanding of perversion. I have observed, during the
course of therapy and from the type of transference which
emerges in this particular group of patients, how fundamental
is that very early relationship with the mother. At thisstage the
father takes a secondary role. As I shall explain, this changes
later on, especially in adolescence.
I shall follow the object-relations theory, put forward by
Klein and others, which stresses the importance of the first few
months of life and the infant-mother relationship, and how
the defence mechanisms the baby uses at that time persist
throughout life and are crucial to emotional and libidinal
development.
Regarding female sexuality, I adhere to the ideas of Jones
(1927), M. Klein (1928, 1932, 1933, 1935), Horney (1924,
1926, 1932, 1933) and others, who not only question the
primacy of penis-envy in the little girl but also stress her early
unconscious awareness of her vagina. Klein links this with an
extremely early oedipal development. Her theories centre on
the infant girl's intense envy of her mother's reproductive
functions. This creates in her a great hostility directed towards
her mother, and develops into frustrated fantasies of entering
her mother's body and robbing it of its entire contents. Using
projective mechanisms, she assumes that her mother will rob
her of her own procreative capacities. I have observed the
occurrence of those mental mechanisms in the women I treat,
and believe they become the equivalent of castration fears in
the boy.
Baby girls as well as baby boys can be subjected to situations
FEMALE
which may lead them, in adult life, into perverse attitudes or SEXUAL
perversions. But women have the opportunity, when they PERVERSION
 12 become mothers, to perform perverting actions towards their
babies.
It is with these general considerations in mind that the
structure of the following chapters has been determined.
Chapter 2 concentrates on the idea that the quality of their
bodies and of their offspring is fundamental to women’s
psychology; it is crucial that the female body is specially
designed to produce and nurture babies. The chapter also
stresses that women’s reproductive organs are more widely
located than men’s. M.Pines puts it thus:

Contrasting the little boy’s and the little girl’s bodies, Deutsch
stresses the manner in which the penis is discovered early, is
constantly stimulated, and becomes an erotogenic zone before
. .
it is ready to fulfil its biological functions . Because the
clitoris is an unsatisfactory sexual organ, it cannot arrogate to
itself as much libido as the penis. Owing to this ‘lessertyranny’
of the clitoris, a female through her life may remain more
infantile, and for her the whole body may remain a sexual
organ. (1969, p. 5 , my emphasis)

These are old-fashioned ideas which stress the importance of

penis-envy and the sense of inferiority that women experience
in their sexual development, but, even so, the whole female
body is acknowledged as a sexual organ.
We know that women frequently act as if their whole body
were a sexual organ. Pathological cases include a wide range of
attacks by women on their own bodies which can be seen as
perverse: for example anorexia, bulimia, and self-mutilation.
It is well known that these conditions occur more often in
women than in men. They are accompanied by disturbances of
the menses, which can be indicators of unresolved problems
these women have, not only about their body images but also
about accepting their sexuality and its inherent biological
functions.
Chapter 3 takes the argument a stage further by stressing the
power of the womb. I t has no less power than the phallus, but
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
operates in a different way. The mother-baby unit is at a
WHORE biological-psychological peak when the mother is ready with
her breasts filled with milk just as her baby is being awakened 13
by hunger. Both parties get together, and a world of bliss is
open to them. Of course, having accepted the reality principle
we know that the two individuals will never be able to relive
these moments in quite the same way. We may try to reproduce
this Utopian situation, but the older we become the more we
grow to appreciate that our expectations are necessarily
limited. However, some people have not come to accept the
reality principle because as babies they went through too many
frustrating and damaging experiences; even now they are still
seeking a promised land of bliss, but treading many dangerous
paths in their quest. This is the first layer of what takes place in
the fantasy world of the perverse. But the whole situation is
more complicated, as we realize when we encounter the
overriding clement of sadistic revenge, so poignantly desaibcd
by Stoller (1975) as 'the erotic form of hatred'.
This leads to Chapter 4 on motherhood and sexual
perversion, which might be considered the heart of the book.
As such, it should speak for itself.
The later chapters deal with the causes and consequences of
the condition described in Chapter 4. They consider both
maternal and paternal incest (Chapter 5 ) with its frequent
consequence, prostitution (Chapter 7). They also discuss the
problems of the men who frequent prostitutes and the
relationship between client and prostitute (Chapter 6).
These are difficult questions which have until recently been
largely submerged under social taboos, but they are clearly
related to the central theme. My findings in this area are, like
the rest of the book, the result of clinical experience and my
reflections on it.
If this hypothesis has something to contribute to the
professional understanding of the predicament of some women,
it is entirely because of the evidence presented by those women
who for one reason or another have become my patients. Some
may think that theclinical vignettes offered here are exceptional
or extreme examples of women in distress. Indeed, some of
them are, but the quality of their tribulations is shared to some
FEMALE
degree by many other women who d o not dare to talk openly SEXUAL
in front of men about such difficulties. They prefer to kcep PERVERSION
 14 their inner thoughts to themselves rather than risk rejection and
misunderstanding. My aim is that the predicaments in which
some women have found themselves, and for which they
themselves have been blamed, should be more widely
recognized. It is not my intention to write about their
treatment. That is another subject, and one which merits
separate consideration in the future. But 1 do hope that, in the
meanwhile, some of my comments will suggest a different
diagnostic approach.
The writing of this book about female sexual perversion has
become for me a matter of great professional concern, as in my
clinical practice I have come to learn more and more about
women, their needs, and aspects of their sexuality. Women
come to me with emotional difficulties which, though not
always immediately related to sexuality, are often found to be
linked to it when their problems are studied in depth. For,
despite the vast increase in the understanding of women
brought about by the world's many feminist movements, most
women still find it very difficult to talk about sexually related
problems for fear of being misunderstood. This fear partly
reflects their own confusion and shame, and partly the still
considerable lack of knowledge on the subject.
I shall write only about the problems of women I know.
They are related, not only directly to their sexuality, but also to
their frustration, insecurity, and loneliness. Sometimes my
patients have covered up these bitter conflicts so well t h a t for a
long time they have not been able to obtain support, let alone
professional help. At other times they have tried to win a
vicarious sense of power through a variety of actions which left
them with only a feeling of great shame.
The women I treat come from all walks of life. Some are
referred for problems specifically related to sexuality. Others
spontaneously seek professional help with conflicts to d o with
their lives in general, and still others come because of
difficulties in their personal relationships. Referral agencies
send patients because of problems related to the law. Some
women politely refuse to admit to needing any help; this is
MADONNA,
usually a sign of their own low self-esteem and leads them to
WHORE maintain that they should not be taken tooseriously. However
they have come t o me, many of these women have been in 15
intensive psychotherapy for some time, and in the course of
psychotherapy the problems which I shall try t o describe begin
to emerge.
Most of the women I see are not obviously psychotic, nor d o
they suffer from complete ego disintegration. They could be
considered to be borderline-narcissistic personalities of various
degrees of severity. Some have been able t o pursue professional
careers, and also t o achieve relationships, though they them-
selves consider these unsatisfactory; others have been able to
lead only a precarious existence in the outside world.
My experience in learning about women has been enriched
by interacting as a group analyst with certain groups of
professional women on the Continent who are in much less
need of help than most of my patients in London. The object of
the participants is t o get to know themselves better and thus to
achieve happier lives. In addition, they want to feel what it is to
be in an all-women's group. This has been a courageous and, I
think, successful enterprise. The degree of intimacy and trust
which prevails in these groups is exceptional. The way these
women express their feelings and voice their difficulties, either
by identifying with or in confrontation with other women, is
markedly different from the way they communicate when they
are in mixed company. The group sometimes provides a way of
containing secrets, traumas, shame, disappointment. At other
times it gives the women the freedom to talk about their
successes, achievements and sense of contentment in their
domestic or professional lives, despite the fear of provoking the
envy of the other women, a reminder of their own mothers'
envy.
This book is partly a result of my finding through these
groups that the difficulties which 'women with severe
problems' bring to me in my clinical practice are shared to some
degree by many other women. There is often a failure to
consider the special problems women face in getting to know
themselves - problems exacerbated by the various and
multiple demands made on them in their important role of
FEMALE
being intimate, not only as women but also as mothers. To SEXUAL
acquire self-knowledge of their own womanhood in a way that PERVERSION
 16 is separate from their motherhood seems to many women a
luxury that is impossible t o achieve, perhaps because both their
minds and their bodies are so much more involved than would
be the case for men.
Experience with these groups of women has brought home
to me that not everything is to be explained solely in terms of
biological or psychological factors. Social structures and
cultural environments also play a part. Indeed, I make a plea,
following Hopper (1986), for the consistent application of the
sociological insight that an intrapsychic phenomenon must be
viewed on an appropriately long timescale and with full
account taken of socio-psychological aspects. At least a three-
generational approach is required, and it should include also
the variety of social and cultural phenomena that confer
importance on motherhood as the main source of power and
control available t o women. In my field, it is impossible togain
a complete understanding of psychopathological behaviour
originating in the mother-baby unit without a knowledge of
events in the mother’s and maternal grandmother’s early lives.
The function of motherhood has given some women the
opportunity to exercise ‘perverting’ attitudes towards their
babies, using them as extensions of their own bodies for
unconscious needs of their own. These phenomena are the
result of combined psychological, physiological, biological,
social, historical, and cultural factors. But considerations of
the same general kind have prevented us from fully acknow-
ledging female perverse behaviour. We have all become silent
conspirators in a system in which change could not be
envisaged since no one would acknowledge that such behaviour
existed. This failure has deprived some women of a better
understanding of their difficulties.
I offer my findings cautiously. I did not start out to
investigate, still less to establish a theory. I simply took note of
the evidence that came before me in clinical practice. I found
this evidence surprising in the light of the existing theories
about perversion, especially in relation to women, and began to
feel a need to record and order my observations and then to
MADONNA,
make sense of them. The present book is the result. Despite my
WHORE commitment to my personal observations, I know that I am by
no means the only practitioner in the field, and 1 hope my 17
comments reflect this recognition. I a m also aware that my
clinical material and observations are sometimes controversial,
and that consequently, for one reason or another, my obser-
vations may meet with misunderstanding and disapproval.
This is painful but probably inevitable with this particular type
of psychopathology, which has only just begun to be studied.
Nevertheless, I should like to avoid unnecessary controversy as
much as I can. Even so, since my main responsibility remains to
my patients, 1 must honour what they have taught me and try
to teach others how to recognize, if necessary to avoid, the
kinds of problems which they have had thecourage to reveal to
me.
This other side of motherhood, or ‘perverse mothering’, will
be examined not only as it occurs in real life, but also in some of
its many symbolic representations. The re-enacting in adult-
hood of some of the aspects of the mother-infant relationship
can lead to grotesque manifestations in which the early
relationship is caricatured. Such is the case with some forms of
female prostitution. This will emerge in Chapter 6 as another
neglected problem, one which concerns not only the prostitutes
but also the men who pursue them. The problems for both are
traceable to a common root - early faulty mothering, which
could be the result of a family background of emotional
deprivation and a threat to gender recognition. Sometimes
incest provides a type of substitute ‘mothering’ experience as
described in Chapter 7. Some girls who have had this
experience see prostitution as the only survival mechanism.
Whatever these women’s backgrounds, a splitting process is in
full operation, together with a feeling of elation at being in
complete control and in a dominant position in which revenge,
conscious or unconscious, is the driving force. These are manic
defences used to counteract a hidden mourning process
associated with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that
these girls encountered when they were very young and abused,
and which were then repressed.
We should not be surprised at the existence of this ‘other
FEMALE
side’ of motherhood. Women are expected to carry out the SEXUAL
difficult and responsible task of motherhood without having PERVERSION
 18 had much, if any, emotional preparation for it. Their
responsibility is to bring up healthy and stable babies who will
adapt happily and adequately to growing external demands. In
fact women really are in too lonely a position to deliver the
goods properly, and this marks a fundamental difference
between men and women. After all, it is within the first few
months of the relationship with its mother that the growing
infant will acquire the psychological rudiments on which its
adult relationships will be based. But this process will take
place whether or not the mother is herself stable and
emotionally mature. Irrespective of the mother’s upbringing, it
is always assumed that ‘maternal instinct’ will come to the fore
.
and will perform miracles. Or, in Kestenberg’s words, ‘. .our
ideal picture of a truly maternal woman is one of an
omnipotent, all-knowing mother who knows what to do with
her infant by sheer intuition’ (1956, p. 260).
Mothers are expected by society to behave as if they had been
provided with magic wands which not only free them from
previous conflicts, but also equip them to deal with the new
emergenciesof motherhood with skill, precision, and dexterity.
Why is it so difficult for us to see that, for some women,
motherhood intensifies their previous problems t o the point
where they are unable to cope any more? They know nothing
about babies, except that with their arrival they are supposed
to find fulfilment and happiness, even if there is also some
distress and practical inconvenience. Fulfilment and happiness
often are achieved, but sometimes unconsciously an old,
painful experience resurfaces. A terrible sense of despair,
despondency, and inadequacy can easily turn into hatred and
revenge directed at the new baby.
The more I have listened to women fumbling, usually in the
dark, with their special problems, the more convinced 1 have
become that as a caring society we need to bridge the large gap
that exists between what we already know of female sexuality
and the full truth about women and the vicissitudes of their
sexual experience.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE
SEXUALITY A N D T H E 2
FEMALEBODY

T
HE O R G A N S used for reproduction also trigger off
the dynamics of sexual gratification. Many individuals
take that for granted. However, some people cannot
integrate into their mental representations of their bodies
either the real or the symbolic connection between the
discharge of sexual tension and its effects on their reproductive
organs. Moreover, some are quite oblivious to any correlation
between the two. They have failed to perceive how their inner
lives could be enriched in the interaction with the outside
world through their sexual organs by intimacy with a person of
the opposite sex.
Orgasm is an invaluable means for couples to come together,
emotionally and physically. Not only does it create an
incomparable physical closeness in which mutual trust prevails,
but also the differentiation of the sexes is truly acknowledged
and accepted as complementary.
So love has made us one
And being one has made us whole. SEXUALITY
AND THE
In such a relationship there is also a myriad of inner events F E M A L E BODY
 20 which reveal many fantasies and wonders about the intricacies
and mysteries of the Other. When it works, this produces an
incredible wealth for both parties.
Knowledge of this realm is essential for the early dcvelop-
ment of gender-identity. For some people this is obvious.
Eventually, as the relationship grows emotionally, they have
in mind not only their bodies but also the reproductive
functions attached to them. It is then that they start to
fantasize about the creation of a new human being who will
possess emotional and physical characteristics representing
both of them and who, they hope, will bring them still closer
together. Bibring et al. drew attention to the fact that ‘an
intense object-relationship to the sexual partner leads to
the event of impregnation, by which a significant repre-
sentation of the love-object becomes part of the self’ (1961,
p. 15).
But many other people do not share this wish/hope/dream.
They put their bodies at the service of fast gratification of thcir
sexual needs in an explosive and impulsive way, without
attending to the loving aspects. Notwithstanding the use of
reproductive organs in those actions, the male perverse
individual does not profit from positive mental symbolic
representations of his reproductive organs; this extra dimension
is simply not available to him.
For a woman, though, it is quite a different matter. She
knows from the very primitive roots of her feminine core
gender-identity that she has a reproductive organ, which in the
event of sexual intercourse might produce a pregnancy that will
change her body drastically, albeit temporarily, and will also
deeply affect her whole life. This profound change takes a
different course in the different stages of pregnancy. To start
with, as already indicated by Bibring et al., the ‘foreign body’
will be responsible for an increase of the libidinal concentration
of the self, and an early enhanced narcissism which ceases when
the quickening appears; the foetus is then experienced as a
separate object within the self and this awareness interrupts the
pregnant woman’s narcissistic process. According to Lester and
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
Notman, this‘quickening initiates theearliest contact with the
WHORE infant and thus signals the awakening of motherliness in the
 ..
mother. that is the urge to nurture and care for the infant’ 21
(1986, p. 364). ‘The child will always remain part of herself,
and at the same time will always have to remain an object that
is part of the outside world and part of her sexual mate’
(Bibringet al., p. 16). Clearly these concepts apply if pregnancy
is regarded as a developmental phase in a maturational process
and as an essential part of growth. However, we should be
aware of pathological outcomes, as D. Pines has pointed out,
especially when considering the first pregnancy. After all, these
changes in the body and the mental representations of self,
object, and object-relationships are bound to alter forever the
pregnant woman’s view of herself (Pines, D., 1972). ‘Once an
adolescent you cannot become a child again; once menopausal
you cannot bear children again; and once a mother you cannot
be a single unit again’ (Bibring et al., p. 13).
For women the act of making love takes on a different
dimension than for men since the former are much more aware
than the latter of using the same organ for sexual pleasure as for
procreation. The indescribable richness which is created when a
man and a woman make love beautifully may come home in a
particularly poignant way to a woman. Several women - not
only my patients - have told me of their certainty during
coitus of the most blissful kind that they had just conceived.
The timing of birth has borne out their sudden feeling that the
communication of bodies and emotions was so complete that
the only fitting and natural outcome was a baby. This is a deep
feminine instinct, for even barren women have told me of their
conviction that had they been able to conceive they would have
done so at some particular moment which was the climax of a
perfect sexual union. Such is - or can be - women’s
awareness of their bodies and their mental representations.
This awareness grounds them in the reality principle in a
much more biological-psychological way than men who, in
this context, are more prone to the pleasure principle.
Women’s drives are object-seeking; as a result some women are
led to certain perverse designs which are alien to men. Some
women get pregnant in the belief that this is the only way to
SEXUALITY
achieve security with a man, even when the man has asserted his A N D THE
wish not to be part of this process. For others, the wish to be FEMALE BODY
 22 pregnant is born of a desire t o inflict revenge on a man they
have learnt to hate because they have been deeply humiliated.
I remember an ex-patient of mine, a woman of thirty-one
who sought professional help because of severe depression
associated with complete frigidity and feelings of revulsion
about sex. She also had compulsive morbid fantasies about her
daughter who had died at the age of one. All these symptoms
had started after she became pregnant with her daughter. Three
years before she had fallen in love and begun a relationship
with an intelligent and successful man, who to start with was
extremely kind to her, but soon began to be sadistic and to beat
her. She felt unable t o defend herself in an open way. Instead,
she resorted to secret monologues, which were a precursor to
sexual intercourse and gave her some bitter comfort.

l f only I could get pregnant by him, he would have to learn then

who is in control, and he’d have to respect me, since I’d be
carrying his child. I hate him, but I don’t want to show it. 1
want to hurt him really deeply and I know this would be the
best way since he won’t be able to get rid of me.

These compulsive ruminations aroused her sexually and she

was able to derive a great sense of erotic pleasure and to achieve
momentary relief from her anxiety, although as soon as sexual
intercourse was over she was filled with self-disgust. Here we
see at work an element of revenge coupled with a compulsive
libidinal repetitive action which includes a quick switch from
ego-syntonic to ego-dystonic, major indicators of perversion.
In other words, the action which is first experienced as being
compatible with the ego’s demands becomes antagonistic to
the self after its execution, and it is followed by feelings of
remorse and guilt. In women these actions are concretely
directed to a self, to an object, and to an object-relationship.
There may be a confusion in the professional literature, as
well as in the minds of these women, between femininity,
sexuality, and motherhood. They of course derive from the
fundamental psychobiological facts of womanhood.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE What matters is not only the anatomy but also the mental
representation: the meaning of man or woman is the experience 23
of a psychic structure which operates as such. This represen-
tation could be envisaged in great dependency on physiology
or, dialectically speaking, on physiological and social factors.
Freud’s categories - castration complex, woman ‘s castration,
penis-envy, phallic stage, unawareness of the vagina, analogy
of clitoris w i t h the penis, viewing it as a masculine organ, child
as a penis-substitute, clitoral masculine orgasm, active
masculine sexuality, passive feminine sexuality - all these
categories lead t o a synthesis between biology and psychology
from which female sexuality is understood. The cultural-
sociological factors are absent or appear merely as a secondary
influence. Hence, the synthesis i s a mechanistic one instead of a
dialectic one. (Arnaiz, Puget and Siquier, 1983, pp. 33-4)

This statement goes beyond the merely anatomical dimension

and embodies a symbolism that goes deeper than the surface.
According to these authors, ‘even with the arrival of M. Klein’s
theories which challenge the phallocentred theories, the female
psychic structure appears in a dialectical way with a mother
who before anything else is a breast, therefore centred in the
nurturing bond and pregnancy. The woman, then, is undcr-
stood from a mammalian ecological viewpoint’ (pp. 33-4, my
translation).
A patient told me of her hatred of her body, and how
repelled she felt at even the idea of being touched by her
husband. During sexual intercourse she would only allow him
to penetrate her, and then she felt at peace; she had never
experienced pleasure from foreplay. During her pregnancies she
had felt content with her body and proud of it. It was as if she
had never experienced her body as belonging to herself for her
own pleasure, but only as a ‘bridge’ either for the man’s sexual
release or for her functioning as a pregnant woman.
Bleichmar points out how ‘the castration complex in the girl
orientates and normalizes sexual desire but not the gender,
which has social values and connotations. In other words, it
will basically decide the organization of the female sexuality
SEXUALITY
but not its femininity’ (1985, p. 27, my translation). AND T H E
Whereas men’s intellectual achievements are viewed as F E M A L E BODY
 24 consistent with their gender, women in parallel situations
sometimes find themselves in conflict, not only with the
successful use of their intellects (something often held to be the
prerogative of the man’s world), but also with their own
femininity, which is often interlinked with the use of their
bodies. At these times women experience a splitting process in
relation to their intellects and their femininity. This is
especially so for women whose mothers have not used their
own intellectual capacities, sometimes because of socio-
economic pressures which do not affect their daughters. Such a
woman will fear success, believing that not only men but also
her internal mother will retaliate against her for her achieve-
ments. This can result in an extreme exaggeration, arising from
underrating of the intelligence while equating an overrating of
the female body with femininity. Some professional women
who come for therapy have considerable intellectual standing
and have reaped concomitant financial rewards. Men in equal
positions would find it easy to boast about their successes, but
these women had difficulties in acknowledging them, and
when they did it was with embarrassment and disbelief. I t is as
if they felt in open rebellion against the traditional standards.
In the course of their professional and social lives, and despite
themselves, they experience a mixed response when sexually
approached by unattractive and uninteresting men. On the one
hand they feel humiliated and angry, but on theother, they feel
secretly reassured and flattered by such unwanted approaches.
Such is the bitter power that the female body and femininity
have been assigned as opposed to the lack of power accorded to
a woman’s intellect.
In this context, one patient came for therapy because of her
difficulties in achieving a high professional standard, despite
her outstanding accomplishments as a student. During her
therapy she talked about her inability to see herself functioning
simultaneously as a woman and as a successful professional.
She then explained how she had overcome her disgust about
sexual intercourse when she began to ‘talk dirty’. By this she
meant that she would describe to her lover fantasies about how
MOTHER,
MADONNA, a strange, ‘tarty and smelly’ woman was seducing him. This she
WHORE would d o in story-telling style, very slowly, using obscene
words and filthy scenarios. The ‘dirtier’ it all got the more 25
excited she would become, and eventually she would have an
orgasm imagining her partner with another woman. This was
accompanied by her being actually chained to the bed,
completely immobilized and utterly subservient to her partner.
Afterwards she would find the whole exercise appalling and
would feel depressed and unworthy of any tenderness or love.
During therapy it became apparent that this woman’s
fantasies had to do with an uncaring and neglectful mother
who had made a very profitable marriage to a man she deeply
despised. My patient was unable to feel deserving of any man’s
love, and she would conjure up the fantasy of her mother and
identify with her during sexual intercourse. Such was the
degree of identification that she would split herself into two
women who were populating her from within. One of them
was seen by her as a despicable creature who could experience
orgasm when denigrated by ‘making hate’ instead of making
love; the other was a professional scholar who would belittle
and undermine men while unable to get satisfaction from any
intimate relationships with them. Professional success was
unconsciously linked with killing her mother, The latter was
literally experienced by her as an ‘internal saboteur’ who would
undermine all her efforts to succeed. We can clearly see in this
patient the splitting between her ‘libidinal ego’ and the
‘internal saboteur’ described by Fairbairn (1944). According to
his theories, the baby adopts this mechanism when she has been
faced with maternal failure. On this point, as Sayers (1986, p.
6 5 ) has reminded us, Fairbairn returns to Homey’s later
theories (Homey, 1939) of the girl’s Oedipus complex in
which she claims that incestuous attachment in the child occurs
only when the parents are so wrapped up in their own interests
that they neglect those of the child.
Lasch calls attention to Reich’s description of women whose
mothers had treated them as surrogates for an absent or unsatis-
factory husband. They reported fantasy-wishes, traceable
to early childhood, to be used as mother’s missing phallus.
One woman, an actress, claimed to have a feeling of euphoria
SEXUALITY
while being admired by the audience: ‘ “intense excitement A N D THE
experienced over the entire body surface and u sensation of FEMALE BODY
 26 standing out, erect, with her whole body. Obviously,” Reich
adds, “she felt like a phallus with her whole body” ’ (1984, p.
171 n., author’s italics).
It is easier and perhaps more conventional to believe in the
use of the female body as a symbolic phallus than to view the
female body and its symbolism as a complete and different
version of the male body. But why should a woman’s body
become a phallus in fantasy - why should it not instead
represent important, complex, and uniquely feminine physical,
physiological, and symbolic characteristics? It may have been
convenient to hold the former view in order to preserve and
perpetuate male superiority. Thus, man is believed to possess
the phallus as a symbol of all power which women are not
allowed to have, except in a vicarious and artificial way, by
psychologically and even ‘anatomically’ transplanting them-
selves as men in disguise. In my view the mothers described by
Annie Reich were suffering from this phenomenon, seeing
themselves as inferior to men and, in their own generation,
unable to develop their own sense of self and intellect with all
their complexities. They were acquiescing in a master model
based on male superiority.
Times are changing and so are freedom and choice.
However, some women who know that their mothers relied on
their female bodies to give men sexual gratification, and on
their capacity for procreativity to secure a position of power in
a man’s world, have a deep dread of challenging those old
principles. These women are in constant fear that their mothers
will envy their own academic and intellectual achievements
which they, their mothers, rarely had access to. This ‘success
anxiety’ in women could become the equivalent of castration
anxiety which earlier writers had ascribed to women. The
mother now becomes the ‘internal saboteur’ which is felt to
repress other accomplishments.
Women’s bodies are designed to accommodate another
living body. But the wonder is more than the static situation,
marvellous though it is, of one body within another. The fact
t h a t the inner body is growing within the outer one is
M ~
impossible~
to ignore,
~
however
~
disturbing
~
or unwelcome
~
may
it :
WHORE be to the mother. Indeed, many women express strong feelings
 of revulsion about it, whereas others (as mentioned above) feel 27
only gratified when pregnant.
Pregnancy concentrates the mind on reality. It has often been
said that female sexuality remains ‘a riddle’, and that this
might have to d o with women’s sexual organs being ‘hidden
away’, making the subject obscure. Certainly this argument
loses part of its power if one attempts to apply it to the changes
in the female reproductive organs during pregnancy. These
changes are so manifest that they give rise to powerful feelings
in both males and females. Breasts and uterus swell and change.
Not only do the breasts have a nurturing function, they also are
a focus of sexual stimulus, called by Freud (1905) an ‘organ
pleasure’, in other words they are capable of producing sexual
pleasure without necessarily having any direct link to a vital
function. This is very well known to the father-to-b;, who
frequently comments that as soon as the baby is born he will be
deprived of all goodies from the matrrnal/libidinal breast
because the baby will be taking it away from him. Incidentally,
many women can experience vaginal orgasm simply by the
caressing and sucking of their breasts by their sexual partner.
In some women any sexual pleasure related to their breasts
ceases not only in pregnancy, but for years after weaning has
occurred. This phenomenon has been described to me by many
women who experience a tremendous sense of loss when they
renew lovemaking with their partners and become aware of
this missing dimension that had previously afforded them such
erotic excitement. Some of them had breast-fed their babies for
up to two years; some had found this sexually gratifying but
not always. They thought it possible that with the arrival of
the baby, an important part of their bodies had been made
redundant as a site of sexual stimulation, and that their right to
this pleasure had been superseded by the new function, so much
more vital in its central role in the nurturing of their offspring.
It is extremely difficult to differentiate femininity from the
function of motherhood, perhaps because its nature is so deeply
intertwined with emotional, physical, biological, hormonal,
cultural, sociological, and physiological factors that are
SEXUALITY
exclusively associated with womanhood. For women, as-for A N D THE
men, orgasm can have a variety of bodily and mental FEMALEBODY
 28 representations; but the fact that women’s bodies accommodate
the enlarged male sexual organ, as well as, potentially, the
growing foetus during pregnancy, for them adds a completely
new dimension.
Many psychoanalysts, from very early on, have researched
the subject of orgasm. I will mention only a few. Ferenczi talks
about the phallus and vagina as cosmic symbols, not by
reference to myths but by his interpretations of embryological,
physiological, and psychological facts. He develops the view
that all life is determined by a tendency to return to the womb,
something very apparent in the sexual act. The sexual
development of the individual culminates in the primacy of the
genital zone, which is achieved by a process leading from
autoerotism via narcissism to genital object-love. There is no
part of the organism which is not represented in the genitalia,
so that in coitus sexual tension is discharged on behalf of the
entire organism. He puts forward the theory that ‘the mutual
attraction is nothing but the expression of the fantasy of
veritably merging one’s self with the body of the partner or
perhaps of forcing one’s way in toto into it (as a substitute for
the mother’s womb)’ (1924, p. 34). Once more we could see
how his theory could apply to the man, but not to the woman.
As Chasseguet-Smirgel points out, ‘Ferenczi finds himself
obliged to write of an identification by the woman with the
man’s penis in coitus in order to ensure a symmetrical
satisfaction for both sexes of the desire to return to the
mother’s womb’ (1985b, p. 33). D. Pines makes an illuminating
comment on this topic:

In my experience there is at times a universal wish to return to

the safety o f the mother’s womb. A man may fulfil this wish
unconsciously when he penetrates his sexual partner’s body, in
fantasy his mother’s, and can feel satisfied and satisfactory to
her. This experience in his adult life may do much t o repair the
wounds of childhood. A woman’s body can only enable her to
do so when she concretely becomes a mother herself and can
identify both with her mother and herself as a child. (1986, p. 7 )
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORF. A woman author friend of mine, while reading the manuscript
of this book, made the following remark: ‘I once asked a large 29
number of men this question: “When you see a pregnant
woman, who do you identify with?” Almost all said “The
baby’’. Can you imagine any womali saying that?’
Female patients have told me of how they experience
orgasm, and even conception, as a symbolic invasion of their
vagina by a baby during sexual intercourse with their partner.
Many women have talked of having fantasies that during
sexual intercourse with a partner a baby is coming into their
vagina; they have felt protective and caring towards that
particular partner because he was experienced as a baby
returning to the womb. This appears to be reciprocated in
men’s fantasies during intercourse. 1 remember a woman
patient who told me about her latest lover’s request while
in the act of making love: ‘I want to get all my body inside
your cunt.’ My patient continued, ‘I felt terrified, it was as if
this man’s body would have become like a baby’s and he
wanted to get back into mother’s body, but it was my own
body’.
According to Lemoine-Luccioni (1982),pregnancy and
labour for a woman are the equivalent of sexual intercourse for
a man. Moreover:

During sexual intercourse the man looks in the woman for the
Other, but he finds his mother, which arouses in him an archaic
libido, from before the sexualization and the differentiation of
the sexes, where he loses his sexuality. The woman seeks in the
man the paternal and omnipotent phallus, to find instead only
a weak penis. The woman, then, in order t o preserue the
paternal phallic fantasies, falls into the maternal function and
becomes phallic. (p. 39, my translation)

Why is it so difficult to view men and women in a symmetrical

way? If we make the attempt, we can envisage the following
parallel situation in both sexes. The little boy envies his
father’s capability to have an intimate sexual relationship with
his mother because the father takes away from him his first
A N D THE
SEXUALITY
object-relationship whom he desires in all ways, including
sexually. The boy is left in a position in which he envies and FEMALE BODY
 30 hates his father and fears his own projective feelings of father’s
retaliation, even t o castration.
The little girl is equally envious of her mother enjoying an
intimate sexual relationship with her father, which, further-
more, can create a new being growing within her mother’s
body. The littlegirl’senvy has todo with mother’scapacity to
be pregnant, and her fears correspond to her own projective
feelings of her mother’s retaliation making her barren or
incapable of procreation; that would be equivalent to the fear
of being castrated (Klein, 1928, 1932, 1933, 1935, 1955).
Thus there is a symmetrical situation for boys and girls with
their adult equivalents, to deny which is to deny the
differentiation of the sexes. Every theory aimed at under-
standing these phenomena through one gender only will create
misunderstandings.
The problem, though, is the change of sexual object in the
girl. As Bleichmar (1985) points out, the question concerns not
only to change from mother to father, but also why the little
girl should wish to be a girl in a paternalistic, masculine, and
phallic world. Mitchell poses a similar and important question
when she says:

The girl has another story to learn. Her love of her mother is
not, like the boy’s, culturally dangerous, just sexually
‘unrealistic’ within the terms of the culture. If she persists in
.
the’belief that she has a penis, . she will be disavowing reality
and this will be the basis of a future psychosis. In the ‘ideal’
case she will recognize her phallic inferiority, identify with the
mother to whom she is to be compared, and then want to take
her place with her father. (1984, p. 231)

I very much agree with Kohon that ‘independently of the sex of

the child - what counts is the threat of the loss of the mother’
(1984, p. 78). In the psychoanalytical literature most authors
have acknowledged this fact. It is especially relevant for
perverse psychopathology, in which faulty pre-oedipal phases
- the oral and anal phases - account for more perverse
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
behaviour than was previously thought. Sperling stresses the
WHORE point when she acknowledges that: ‘The childhood fetish
represents a pathological defence against separation from 31
mother on the oral and anal levels: it seems that separation
anxiety due to loss of the presedipally gratifying mother is of
greater importance than castration anxiety’ (1963, p. 391).
Nevertheless, psychotherapists tend to go for the traditional
theories of the girl’s libidinal development, which are based on
the boy’s. It seems to me that we have stuck to the theory of the
girl’s penis-envy in order to deny an unconscious awareness of
mothers’ unparalleled power over their infants in the early
pre-oedipal phase.
It is not good enough, as Kohon claims, to invoke an
equivalent ‘womb-envy’ applicable to men. Indeed, as he says,
‘instead of trying to explain the differences of the sexes, this
concept would do away with the differences’ (p. 79). In
Mitchell’s words, ‘So long as we reproduce ourselves as social
beings through a heterosexual relationship, human society
must distinguish between the sexes ... For human society to
exist at all, men and women must be marked as different from
each other’ (1980, pp. 234-5).
Let us first try to assess this differentiation and then deal
with the peculiarities in each case. Male and female libidinal
developments are different, as are their psychopathological
aspects. In descriptions of male perversions, there is often the
underlying assumption that there is a ‘universal belief of
children that the mother has a phallus, not in the existence o f a
real penis in the father’ (Kohon, p. 79, author’s italics). I
wonder whether, when we talk about this ‘imaginary maternal
phallus/breast’, we are really referring to a ‘breast/phallus’
which exerts a controlling power that mothers could harness to
guide their young infants’ lives?
In this context I am grateful to Zilbach (1987) for her
original and most illuminating ideas. She challenges Freudian
theories of the development of sexuality in the girl, especially
in relation to the phallic stage, and offers an alternative female
equivalent of the masculine concept of the phallus. She believes
that the primary core femininity in the girl starts to become
established very early on, in identification with her mother,
SEXUALITY
and contains the wish for a baby as a potential creation. Later A N D THE
on, in reaching adulthood, actual procreation will start deeply F E M A L E BODY
 32 within a woman when the sperm is ‘actively engulfed’, and not
passively received as previously thought. This ‘active engulf-
ment’ is the core, the beginning, and the growing essence of
being female. The potential for creation by active engulfment
is non-conflictual and non-oedipal, and it constitutes the base
from which many later psychological steps are taken along the
path to womanhood. In Zilbach’s view the genital phase is not
the end of the separate developmental line for females, for there
are subsequent stages, menarche, pregnancy, and so on; these
stages could also benefit from re-analysis in the light of her
theory.
In my own clinical experience, women sometimes seem able
to perceive their bodies in a whole way only when they are
being penetrated during sexual intercourse. Their vagina
becomes alive and they are now certain that there is an organ
which responds in a complementary way to the Other. This
feeling is again present during labour. According to the old
tales, as Lemoine-Luccioni (1982) has reminded us, pregnancy
not only brings a baby but also sometimes energizes a vaginal
orgasm and, so the myth goes on, procreation can cure
frigidity.
Kubie (1974), in ‘The drive to become both sexes’, describes
a process by which man and woman alike are unconsciously
seeking either to supplement or to complement their own
gender with the opposite one. The more unconscious is this
drive, the more self-destroying it becomes and the more
influential it is in determining basic activities in life, ranging
from choice of partner to professional pursuits. This process,
however, is always doomed to end in failure and to produce
deep frustration, since the unconscious, desired goal is never
realized. Kubie goes on to speculate that, for some, the goal of
sexual intercourse is neither orgasm nor reproduction but a
process of ‘magical change’. Hence ‘post coitum tristum’ may
have to do with the realization that this need for transmutation
into dual gender through sexual intercourse is unattainable.
Kubie expands on the implications, especially the deep
repercussions this drive produces in the lack of commitment
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
these individuals experience in their daily lives, a source of
WHORE much suffering for them. Again, he refers t o the symbolic and
unconscious needs rather than biophysical or biochemical 33
requirements, which are misrepresented by unconscious oral
symbols and therefore become insatiable. The penis has been
unconsciously equated with a frustrated breast, therefore
becoming incapable of affording sexual satisfaction, but
offering instead further frustrations.

This insatiability (the unfulfilment of the impossible) is related

to the fact that human beings so often make bate in bed under
the illusion that they are making love, and bow often and how
tragically even the full physiological gratification of sexual
craving leads not to a sense of fulfilment but to sadness, terror,
and anger, and most important of all to its immediate and
incessant repetition. (p. 417)

He adds that there is no possible escape and no rest since the

immediate orgasmic fulfilment has become a transient betrayal
- an illusion - because it merely triggers off a recurrence of
the need. We can identify in his findings many of the
characteristics of perverse behaviour. He also notes in the same
paper that at some point it will be necessary to consider how
the partial components of the drive to become both sexes could
be related to disturbances such as exhibitionistic behaviour,
transvestitism, overt homosexuality, eating anomalies, and
kleptomania. It seems to me that he is describing two different
processes. In the ‘magical change’ there is neither pleasure nor
procreation, merely the illusion of apprehending both sexes,
with a-resulting gender neutrality. However, when he refers to
‘making hate’ he certainly describes the basic nature of
perversions, which is embodied in the predicament of many of
my ex-patients (see p. 22).
In female perversion not only the whole body but also its
mental representations are used to express sadism and hostility.
Women express their perverse attitudes not only through but
also towards their bodies, very often in a self-destructive way.
If we look at the psychopathologies most frequently associated
with women, we find syndromes of self-injury associated with
SEXUALITY
biological or hormonal disorders affecting the reproductive AND THE
functioning. Such is the case with anorexia nervosa, bulimia, FEMALE BODY
 34 and forms of self-mutilation, where the menses, their absence
or their presence, may act as indicators of the severity of the
pathological condition. These women experience a feeling of
elation from the manipulation of their bodies when they are
starving, and which disappears when they start t o eat again.
They experience a sense of power through being in control of
the shapes and forms their bodies assume as a result of the
physical injuries and abuse they inflict on themselves.
Perversion in women is not so clearly and exclusively
connected with the expression of hostility and release of
anxiety through just one organ as it is with men. Neither does it
have that fixation so characteristic of men. Perhaps this is the
reason why women generally have a better prognosis than men.
In women perversion operates fully through their bodies as
whole. Irigaray asserts the richness of woman’s sexuality thus:
‘Woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences
pleasure almost everywhere. Even without speaking of the
hysterization of her entire body, one can say that the geography
of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in its
differences, more complex, more subtle, than is imagined-in an
imaginary centred a bit too much on one and the same’ (1977,
p. 103). In my view, these ‘multiple pleasure-sources’
mentioned by Irigaray can become in perverse women the focus
for self-inflicted pain, from which they derive perverse
libidinal gratification.
Perhaps my argument will become clearer if 1share with you
some of the predicaments with which my women patients have
entrusted me and which have directed me towards this way of
thinking.
A case of ‘perverse’cosmetic surgery: Mrs Z came to see me
because of ‘premenstrual tension’ (her own words). She was a
very attractive, tall, blonde, slender, and smartly dressed
woman who looked much younger than her chronological age
of thirty-eight. Her eyes, though, looked rather empty, and her
movements were uninhabited by any emotion. Indeed, the
perfection of her looks and the absence of blemishes reminded
me of a male transvestite. Perhaps this first countertrans-
MADONNA,
ferential reaction should have provided me with a more
WHORE immediate insight into some of her problems which, in the
event, did not emerge for many sessions because of her 35
difficulties in putting them into words.
During the first interview she told me that she felt constantly
depressed and that she was ‘intensely bothered’ by an ever-
present sensation which she described as ‘being outside myself’.
By this she meant that she was aware that she was not fully
participating in any given situation, as if neither her mind nor
her body belonged to her. She had become, as it were, the
witness of her own actions and devoid of any feelings,
irrespective of how much they impinged on her life.
She was unable to give me any other relevant information
and eventually began to associate her present condition with
past events. She believed that her problems had started five
years earlier, when she became pregnant by her present husband
(her fifth) before their marriage, and he categorically refused to
let her go ahead with thepregnancy. She felt hurt but unable to
define her own rights, and went along with an abortion both to
please him and also because, in the bargain, she gained a
promise of marriage. Her husband, a very wealthy man, was at
times ‘mothering’ towards her. Nevertheless, reluctantly, she
recalled that the night before the abortion took place he was
callous towards her, especially when he refused to caress her
breasts because they were ‘too big’ as a result of her pregnancy.
He never showed up at the clinic, and she found it all too
painful. Since then she had felt despondent and empty.
To make things worse, three or four months after the start of
the relationship, seven yearsearlier, she had become aware that
he was a transvestite. In her absence he had been wearing her
clothes. She asked him about it and he admitted to his cross-
dressing. He then ‘demanded’ her participation in these
practices. She began to give it, in the belief that it could relieve
him of this problem or perhaps diminish its intensity.
Her cooperation produced exactly the opposite response, as
he became more and more demanding of her time, perfection,
and skills. By now, he wanted to do it every day; this required
not only his getting dressed as a female, but also her wearing
very specific gear, usually extremely tarty. She had to perform
SEXUALITY
several sketches in which she had to play a ‘dominant’ role, but AND THE
always according to his script. To start with these sketches had FEMALE B O D Y
 36 been rather benign, but they had become more and more hostile
and aggressive in nature, with stiletto shoes, chains, whips,
chokers, and so on. She found the whole thing repulsive and
had been turned off sex completely.
So far, you might say, this was simply one more case of
sadomasochistic behaviour, not so unusual in couples with
collusive perverse actions. But what 1 would like to emphasize
here is my patient’s massive denial of herself as a whole human
being and her utter self-denigration as a woman. She came to
consult me under the easy disguise of premenstrual tension, and
per haps half -be1ieved this explanation.
Let me now go to the heart of the matter, which camc up
much later during treatment. After the abortion and the
bargained wedding, a long saga of complaints issued from her
husband about her physical looks. First he objected to the size
of her nose, and proceeded to ‘suggest’ a cosmetic operation for
which he was only too willing t o pay. After she complied with
this ‘recommendation’, he told her that ‘perhaps her teeth were
not completely right’. She then submitted to extensive dental
surgery. After that there were ‘bags under my eyes’ and
eventually he saw her breasts as ‘too big’. She not only
underwent all these operations acquiescently but, when talking
of the last one, she retorted forcefully: ‘it had to d o with a
medical condition’, since her breasts were found to have many
cysts. The surgeon removed her breasts and filled the empty
spaces with silicone; she said that never after the operation had
her breasts been sensitive to any erotic stimuli.
This patient, whom I saw a long time ago, exemplifies
clearly the speculation put forward by Granoff and Perrier
(1980). In explaining the psychopathology of the perverse
woman, they say that the splitting of the ego created by
cosmetic surgery has deep and everlasting effects on the
woman’s personality. According to these authors,

the woman becomes a fetish in herself,endowed like all fetishes

with sexual significance yet at the same time entirely unsuited
t o serve the normal sexual aim. Such a woman responds with
MOTHER,
MADONNA, her fetishistic body to heterosexual relationships as a defence
WHORE against latent homosexuality. The man is instrumental since he
has been rejected by her from the moment he attempts to 37
assume a phallic relationship w i t h her. His firm conviction,
stated as ‘you are my woman ’, is linked t o his collusive attitude
in treating her as a fetish. (p. 80, my translation)

I have observed this complicated mechanism operating in many

women patients. During the course of treatment Mrs Z began
gradually to assert herself. Then her husband became incrcas-
ingly worried about this development and ‘claimed’ to be her
‘owner’; he suddenly manufactured a trip abroad which would
take her away from an increasing awareness of her own sense of
self. I never saw her again. She stopped her process of
individuation when she felt that this might endanger her own
sense of ‘survival’.
Is it surprising that this woman experienced neither her mind
nor her body as belonging to herself? Actually they did not. She
had massive self-contempt for her own body and shape, and
this drove her to act in a perverse and collusive way with her
husband. It had taken her many years and five marriages to
accomplish her goal, which was to find the ‘right’ partner for
the execution of her revenge against her own gender, and to
have her body and mind slaughtered according to her own
unconsciousperverse designs. Her mind had been taken over by
this perverse man, who was so obviously sadistic towards
women, and her body had been redesigned according to his
expectations of what a female body should look like. Nothing
had remained of herself that she could acknowledge as such.
Khan can help us to understand this woman’s and her
husband’s perversion when he describes how

the pervert cannot surrender t o intimacy and instead retains a

split-off, dissociated, manipulative ego-control of the situa-
tion. This is both his achievement and failure in the intimate
situation. It is this failure that supplies the compulsion t o
repeat the process again and again. The nearest that the pervert
cun come to experiencing surrender is through visual, tactile,
and sensory identifications with the other object i n the
SEXUALITY
intimate situation in (I state of surrender. Hence, though the A N D THE
pervert arranges and motivates the idealization of instinct, he F E M A L E BODY
 38 himself remains outside the experiential climax. (1979, pp.
22-3, author’s emphasis)

To understand female sexual perversion we shall have to ignore

the male version and take a new look; otherwise, conclusions
based on comparing female to male perversions become
contrived and inaccurate. This, I believe, is the fault in
Zavitzianos’ (1971) paper on fetishism and exhibitionism in
females. Whereas I appreciate the painstaking and almost
heroic efforts made by this author, I disagree with his
conclusions. I shall try very briefly to demonstrate the reasons
for my disagreement.
Zavitzianos describes his patient, Lilian, as suffering from
fetishism and exhibitionism. Her masturbating while reading
books is interpreted by him as a fetish, replacing not the
‘maternal penis (as in the case of male fetishism) but the penis
of the father’ (p. 302).This started when Lilian was three, after
her brother’s birth, when she was moved out of her parents’
bedroom. Her exhibitionistic behaviour also started when she
was a young girl, when she would walk around naked and play
with her genitalia, surprising those around her. She had also
begun stealing, first money from her mother’s wallet and later
other items that she liked and were useful to her. This was done
in a skilful and careful manner. Both the use of books and her
exhibitionism, which sheenacted from inside her father’s car as
an adult, reappeared while she was in analysis after her
delinquency stopped, and masturbation was resumed. It seems
to me that this reappearance had to do with a deep regression to
an oral phase representing her primitive wish to merge with her
mother/analyst.
My own speculation is that the books would symbolize her
mother’s breasts, which brought her much relief, dispelled her
loneliness and helped her to fall asleep. Her exhibitionism from
within her father’s car had some womb-like qualities which
afforded her safety and a sense of containment, similar also to
the analyst’s consulting room.
Notwithstanding my difference of opinion, I strongly agree
MADONNA,
with Zavitzianos’ diagnosis of Lilian as suffering from
WHORE perversion. However, I believe that her perversion was not an
equivalent to perversions found in males: it was instead 39
intrinsically female. Not only her psychopathological symp-
toms but also her early background confirm my diagnosis.
‘Lilian very much wanted to have children of her own,’
Zavitzianos reports, ‘yet she neglected and mistreated those
who happened to be temporarily in her care. It was a source of
real pleasure to hurt them, usually by poking or pinching them,
often to the point of producing bruises. She would also
masturbate the little boys, and hug (but not masturbate) the
littlegirls, in her charge’ (p. 298). Hegoes on: ‘Lilian’s mother
was also a psychopathic personality, with a behaviour pattern
identical to Lilian’s. Her relationship with the patient was on a
narcissistic and symbiotic basis. She selfishly and jealously kept
her away from the father. She had been using her daughter to
satisfy vicariously her own delinquent strivings.’ H e also
mentions that ‘she was physically overstimulated by being
masturbated in infancy’ (p. 299), though it is not very clear as
to whether she was stimulated by mother or father, but it
appears as if the latter was responsible. However, I would
suspect that she was also subjected to sexual seduction by her
mother. Here we can see the mechanisms of female perversion
at work: while playing a ‘maternal role’, she was doing to
others what had been inflicted upon her at an early age. Her
mother also corresponds to my description of perverse mother-
hood. Lilian’s exhibitionistic behaviour is similar to my
exhibitionistic patient who was sexually abused by her mother
(and whose full clinical account is given in Chapter 5 ) . I believe
that Lilian was yearning for an early pre-oedipal love/hate
relationship with her ‘narcissistic and psychopathic’ mother, of
whom she felt deprived, at the age of three, when her brother
was born.
Zavitzianos also claims that his patient’s delinquent
behaviour was due partly to complete suppression of mastur-
bation. Here again we note his firm adherence to the
equivalence of female and male sexuality. In this respect it is
relevant to quote Laufer’s statement that ‘the assumption [is]
often made that female masturbation has the same normal
SEXUALITY
significance as masturbation for the male’ (1982, p. 301). She AND THE
sees that for some women the avoidance of the use of the hand F E M A L E BODY
 40 for masturbation is a differential characteristic between male
and female sexuality. She then develops the hypothesis that the
little girl unconsciously identifies her hand with that of her
mother’s, and that the quality of the relationship between
mother and daughter will determine the latter’s attitudes
towards masturbation at different stages. In the pre-oedipal
phase, if the girl feels unable to identify with her mother
because of her inability to produce babies she would experience
the activity of her hand as a source of anxiety. During
adolescence, if she h a t e her mother’s sexual body and is unable
to identify with her and her body, the adolescent girl will use
her hand to attack her own body in a compulsive way by, for
example, cutting her wrists or arms. These activities, according
to Laufer, occur as a consequence of ‘an outburst of uncontrol-
led hostility against the mother, the sexual partner, or the
analyst’ (p. 298). I have observed exactly the samesequences in
women who ‘indulge’ in compulsive shoplifting, which I
consider can be female perverse behaviour, as explained by
Greenacre (1953a).
The problems of these women are related to their gender and
implicitly to their reproductive functions. In doing such harm
to their bodies they are expressing tremendous dissatisfaction,
not only with themselves but also with their mothers, who
provided them with the bodies against which they are now
fighting. The power that motherhood conveys can scarcely
be overemphasized; it is a theme to which I shall return in
Chapter 4.
My present point, however, is that the reproductive
functions and organs are used by both sexes to express
perversion. Perverse men use their penises to attack and show
hatred towards symbolic sources of humiliation, usually
represented by part-objects. If perversion in the man is focused
through his penis, in the woman it will similarly be expressed
through her reproductive organs. While man pursues his
perverse goals with his penis, woman does so with her whole
body, since her reproductive organs are much more widespread
and their manifestations are more apparent.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
The power of the womb distinguishes women from men and
WHORE leads to the power of motherhood - truly as potent as, and
usually more far-reaching and more pervasive than, the power 41
of money or law or social position. It is a form of power which
may take years or even generations to become fully manifest,
and it is rarely reversible. It is a power which is normally used
in a beneficent way, but the same instincts that produce love,
fulfilment, and security can, if things go wrong, produce their
opposites. The power of the womb can lead to perversions, as I
shall describe in the next chapter.

SEXUALITY
A N D THE
FEMALE B O D Y
 3 THEP O W E R OF THE W O M B

T
HE STUDY of some of the characteristics of the
female libido and of other features which areexclusive
to the female inner world might help us to understand
the aetiology of perversion in women. We might then no longer
see female perversions as parallels to the psychopathology
found in men, and come t o recognize their own separate and
basic causes.
The essential point lies in women’s capacity for procreation,
the expression of which is fundamentally different from
anything men experience. This capacity drastically affects not
only women’s emotional lives, but also the mental representa-
tions of their bodies and, concretely, their physical bodies,
albeit for a fixed period of time. With this as a starting point,
we need to understand at least two different but interrelated
phenomena if we are to make hypotheses about female sexual
perversions.
One phenomenon concerns ‘inner space’, a term used by
Erikson (1968) to describe not only pregnancy and childbirth,
MADONNA, but also lactation and all parts of the female anatomy
WHORE associated with fullness, warmth, and generosity. According to
him, the inner space has greater actuality than that of the 43
‘missing organ’, the penis. As he was able t o show in his
research at the University of California, boys and girls use space
differently. Whereas boys most frequently use outer space, girls
emphasize inner space. Thus, the two sexes are different in their
‘experience of the ground plan of the human body’ (p. 273).
Erikson goes on to say that ‘in female experience an “inner
space” is at the centre of despair even as it is the very centre of
potential fulfilment’ (p. 278). This ‘inner space’ is related to
the feminine core gender-identity and the mental representa-
tions of the body.
The second phenomenon concerns time, which is related to
rhythmicity and biology. This is ‘the biological clock‘. It is
especially important in adult decisions about motherhood,
particularly when ‘time is running out’.
This phenomenon can become difficult to bear for some
women who have devoted their lives solely to their careers.
They have shown determination at the beginning of their adult
lives not to have children in order to advance professionally.
Women in this group usually come for therapy in their thirties,
suffering from increasing anxiety and ambivalence about their
long-held conviction of not wanting babies. Now they feel
persecuted by time and by the approaching menopause. I have
found that this is by no means a rare phenomenon, but it is far
from inevitable. Many women when subjected to the pressures
of the biological clock nevertheless achieve fulfilled woman-
hood.
A similar point is being made by Lax when she says: ‘Single
women in their late thirties frequently feel threatened by the
“biological clock’*. Such women experience the approach of
menopause much sooner than women who are in a gratifying
relationship and, at this time, their search for a man frequently
reaches frantic proportions’ (1982, p. 160). She adds that
women under these circumstances often engage in unsuitable
relationships, and if an abortion has to be carried out because
the pregnancy is unwanted a severe depression follows. Lax
cites another outcome for this group cpf women: the surfacing
T H E POWER
of lesbian impulses as a result of their giving up hope for a
mutually loving relationship with a man. Such impulses WOMB
 correspond to a partial psychosexual regression to an early
44
relationship with their mothers. Lax goes on to say: ‘these
women show no evidence of homosexual panic. This lack of
panic is undoubtedly due in part to the presentday relaxation
of mores, which also reinforces these women’s lesbian
rationalization’ (p. 160).
There are distinctive areas of anxiety/fulfilment regarding
womanhood and motherhood which are expressions of
resolution or failure in relation to earlier stages of psychological
maturation, and they are subjected to the dictates of the
biological clock.
The inner space and the biological clock are different
phenomena, but their effects intertwine. In the maturational
crises in women’s lives sometimes one is more important,
sometimes the other. In adolescence the ‘inner space’ tends to
be the more important of the two in relation to fantasies about
pregnancy, while later the ‘biological clock’ can be more
dominant. At menopause the two come together. The argument
presented in this chapter roughly follows this chronology.
D. Pines makes an important point when she notes the
‘marked psychic distinction between the wish to become
pregnant and the wish to bring a live child into the world and
become a mother’ (1982, p. 311). The former comes very early
in life. The female core gender-identity includes a pre-oedipal
identification with mother which becomes well established by
the second year of life, when body awareness and internal
representations have become distinct and therefore differen-
tiation between thesexes has been acknowledged. The wish for
a baby has become by then part of the ‘primary femininity’
(Stoller, 1976). This has been widely researched in studies of
mothers and babies, taking in the first three months of infant
life. Such studies give us access to the object-relationship
theory and to assessments of normality and pathology both in
little girls’ gender-identity and in the functioning of adult
women as mothers.
I shall now deal with thecharacteristics of the feminine core
gender-identity and its vicissitudes during the very early phases
MADONNA, and during adolescence. I shall present clinical material from
WHORE the treatment of women who have struggled not only in the
achievement of their own gender-identity, but also in the 45
acknowledgement of their children’s gender.
In the establishment of the core gender-identity, the object-
relationship the baby has with its mother, and her acceptance
and acknowledgement of her baby’s sex from birth, are
crucial. This involves the mother’s acceptance of her own
gender and her own mental representations, which can
sometimes be a difficult and painful process because of her deep
unconscious expectations of her future baby’s sex in relation to
herself.
Boys and girls have very different experience in the formation
of their gender-identities. Abelin (1978) believes that while
early gender-identity is more easily available to boys, girls tend
to establish a ‘generational identity*. By this he means the
location of the self in the girl between two objects, one bigger
than herself - her mother - and one smaller - a symbolic
baby: ‘I am smaller than mother but bigger than baby’ (p. 147).
I consider that this generational identity is associated not only
with the mirroring of the mother*s body in the girl’s, but also
with the biological clock, which exclusively belongs to the
female world. It has been widely noted that boys dis-identify
from mothers much earlier than girls. In a parallel way fathers
play a more important role in boys’ early years of development
than in girls’. Indeed, from the very start men are provided with
a rich and unique experience denied to women. As infants their
first object-relationship is with the opposite sex. This early
situation might enable them later on in life to develop a sense
of familiarity and ease in their relationships with women,
whereas women are distanced from their fathers during the
pre-oedipal stage and may consequently experience difficulties
in their relationships with men. Certainly this does not mean
that boys automatically have an easier life; it all depends on the
quality of that early relationship with mother. Some men
become caring, tender, sensitive, and responsible, whereas
others grow to be exactly the opposite: hating, cruel, sadistic,
and insensitive.
Such is the power that women have when they become
T H E POWER
mothers. Obviously the early experiences do not account for all OF T H E
possible future psychological traits, but certainly they leave a WOMB
 46 strong impression in all human beings. In this light, let us look
at some of the differentiations between the sexes.
Some of these differentiations are concrete features, but
others have to do with a wide range of symbolizations which
derive from an immense world of fantasy for both sexes. I t is
true that boys are born with a penis which could symbolically
(i.e. in phallic fantasies) give them a sense of power and
superiority which women could easily envy. The object of
penis-envy is not so much the physical organ as the male
position of dominance in the world. I believe this has been
overemphasized, and in the process it has been overlooked that
women who feel in an inferior position try in a vicarious but
vigorous way to achieve their own fantasies of power through
their own reproductive organs, and furthermore to act them
out. The outcomes of these fantasies range widely, from
dreadful to hopeful. The underlying motivations vary from the
so-called normal to the very sadistic and cruel. This more
extreme motivation is more likely to underlie the fantasies of
women who feel degraded, humiliated, and discarded because
of their female gender.
Let us start with fantasies about pregnancy. What do these
fantasies mean to young, prepubescent girls? At times, conflicts
originating very early on in their lives can make them feel
undermined, insecure, and in open or hidden rebellion against
their mother because they have not been able to achieve a
positive female identification. These difficulties surface when
they reach puberty.
Young women feel awkward and insecure in dealing with
their powerful feelings about the tremendous changes taking
place inside and outside their bodies, and sometimes they are
not supported by their mothers in their acknowledgement of
their sense of femininity. After all, it is well known that while
some mothers of adolescent boys show off with them and
obtain narcissistic gratification when mistakes are made about
their relationship, the same mothers, when in company with
attractive adolescent daughters, feel put down and disregarded
by the men who make complimentary remarks about their
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
daughters. The fresh beauty of young girls’ bodies becomes all
WHORE the more apparent as their mothers are ageing. A tremendous
sense of competition emerges, especially if mothers are 47
approaching the menopause. Again, we are not talking about
just one organ, as is the case with boys, who, when they
compare themselves with their fathers, may feel inadquate
and small; as a result they acknowledge that father is in
control. Fathers are rarely in such open competition with their
sons. The adolescent boy has an easier transfer of attachment
from mother to another woman than does the adolescent girl,
since the boy does not need to change his first love-object. The
girl, instead, has to make the switch from attachment to
mother to attachment to father. If she is then rejected by father
she may look for revenge in dreams of pregnancy.
The way a father responds to a daughter’s difficulties with
her incipient sexuality is important. If he is dismissive and
inattentive, the adolescent girl will feel undermined and
disparaged; if he is critical and denigrating she will feel
devastated. Such feelings can find expression in the typica:
adolescent rebelliousness, including possibly a compulsive and
indiscriminate ‘sexual’ search, in which the girl’s aim is to win
recognition of herself and her body. This bchaviour has a wide
range of mental representations. The girl feels rejected first by
mother and then by father. The search is now for both, from
one frustrating breast to another breast in the disguise of a
penis. However, this primary need presents itself in a ‘sexual’
disguise because of the overwhelming world of fantasy which is
so reinforced and confused by all the secondary sexual
characteristics emerging so abruptly at that stage of life.
Indeed, each ‘sexual’ encounter, like each clumsy delinquent
action committed by these youngsters, is invested in their
minds with both hope and disillusion. Hope disappears very
soon and is immediately replaced by intense disappointment
since what is sought - a symbolic fusion with mother or, more
precisely, with mother’s breast and all its inherent nourishing
qualities - is never found. They are unaware that this search is
for consistent affection. This is concealed not only from
themselves, but also from the world, where their rebellious
actions meet with so much disapproval and misunderstanding.
THE P O W E R
The reassurance they need is not available from the outside, so THE
they try vicariously to manufacture it from within by means of WOMB
 48 pregnancy fantasies. At such times, pregnancy becomes
incontrovertible proof of belonging to the female gender.
Young girls experience biologically the inner space now
ready to be filled, not only with a penis but also with a
pregnancy/baby, even if their emotional and psychological
equipment is sometimes far too immature to deal with the
profound changes of motherhood and their consequences. This
partly explains why adolescence is such a vulnerable stage in
life. When inadequate and insecure about their femininity they
feel no longer able to fantasize about symbolisms attached to
the inner space; instead they use their bodies in a concrete way
and become pregnant. This is often observed in young
delinquent and promiscuous girls.
To understand promiscuity we have to leave aside sexuality
and learn about the mental representations of these young
women’s bodies. These are linked to the frustrating and
damaging experiences they have had with their mothers when
they were infants. Promiscuity is basically a compulsive,
illusory attempt to create object-relationships which is doomed
to failure, since the young woman is really flying from a
frustrated experience with a mother whom she feels has been
unable to nurture her properly. She is now, compulsively and
indiscriminately, looking in men for what she missed in her
contact with her mother. So, more disappointments are on the
way. They are rooted in two different sources: real mother and
symbolic father/ mother. Such experiences are extreme czses of
a conflict girls face in adolescence. With theawakening of their
inner sexuality and the development of their secondary sexual
characteristics, their bodies become like their mother’s. As a
direct consequence, all unresolved early conflicts with mother
are revived, especially those related to frustration and anger.
I have had experience of young girls who suffered from this
type of problem, for which they were treated at a therapeutic
community. While there they had many indiscriminate sexual
encounters with rebellious young men, in which it was their
secret wish to achieve a degree of intimacy they had never
experienced before. These encounters not only were doomed t o
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
fail, but also provided thegirls with added frustrations. If their
WHORE quest produced a pregnancy, they were elated since they were
now sure of belonging t o the female gender. For some girls the 49
pregnancy itself was the ultimate achievement and they would
quickly seek an abortion. For others the birth was necessary,
but they would intend to give up the baby as soon as it was born
in the belief they could not take proper care of the new being.
For others still, the pregnancy also offered hope of a closeness
with a growing foetus inside their bodies. A t times there was a
sense of triumph, of revenge against their mother. They had
now learnt that their mother’s assumed hostile feelings
towards them had not really damaged their capacities for
procreation. This is why the mental representation of becoming
a mother is at least a three-generational process: a woman
becomes her mother and her mother’s mother. Sometimes, a
feeling of revenge towards their mother or father because of the
way they were treated by them may indicate the kind of future
life the baby boy or girl will have.
Not all authorities would agree with these views. For
example, Limentani says:

Penis-envy can alsp be a major issue in the case of female

perverts. But, again, is it simply the expression of a longing for
a part of the male anatomy? I t could also be that at times it
expresses a deep feeling of frustration at not being able to fulfil
the ambition of giving mother a baby, a symbolic act of
reparation for past fantasy misdeeds: (1987, p. 421)

This view is valid in certain contexts, but my clinical ex-

perience has proved to be different, suggesting (as already
indicated) that penis-envy has been overrated. What looks like
this is often in reality quite different: pregnancy offers many
women the chance to inflict a concrete act of revenge on their
mothers, as opposed to a reparation fantasy directed towards
them.
In this context I recall a patient of sixteen who had been
deserted by her young mother at the age of two, when the
mother decided that it was all too much for her. When I saw
her she had been reunited with her mother, with whom she now
THE POWER
had a difficult and bitter relationship for shecould not forgive OF T H E
her mother for having abandoned her so early in life. The WOMB
 50 mother herself had been given away by her own mother at her
birth. My patient’s first reaction when she learnt of her
pregnancy was one of delight, saying ‘Now my mother will
have to put up with my baby.’ This girl was so full of rage
against her mother that her first pronouncement was‘This will
teach my mother.’
Another patient with a similar background, and who
experienced her mother as cold and dismissiver responded to
her pregnancy by saying ‘My mother will kill me.’ Clearly she
was expressing a hope that her mother would respond in a very
emotional way, and thus acknowledge her as a person and
woman.
Another fantasy (which, by the way, is common t o most
women) is related to fears of having a malformed or
handicapped baby. The degree of severity of this fantasy is an
indicator of a woman’s acceptance of her body’s capability to
produce wonderful or nasty things. In the words of Raphael-
Leff, ‘Pregnancy, like all transitional phases, reawakens earlier
unresolved conflicts and anxieties. The archaic clash between
her inner imagined life-giving and death-dealing forces is now
relocated in the arena of birth, a test, culminating in proof of
whether she is creative or destructive’ (1985, p. 16, author’s
.
italics)
These many and varied expectations - of which the future
mother may be oblivious - might be present in a potentially
dramatic and intense way from her moment of birth. Amongst
them are those related to the sex of the baby to be born.
Sometimes there are emotional residues from having given
birth to a baby of one sex or the other.
At times a sense of bewilderment overrides all other feelings
about the sex of the expected child. Such was the predicament
of a pregnant patient of mine whosaid, ‘I shall bedisappointed
by both: by a boy because I don’t really have any common
interests, especially when I see pictures of nine-year-old boys
with football gear; by a girl because such a high value is placed
in English society on having a boy.’ She continued:

MOTHER,
MADONNA,
There i s only one nephew in the family and it’s disgusting how
WHORE the whole family spends hours about which school he should go
to. He is only aged three. I n the meantime his sister is about t o 51
go to college and nobody gives a damn about her. I was
suddenly infused with an enormoussense of relief that 1 had no
brother, only sisters. Otherwise we should have been treated
very badly.

Bearing in mind the distinction between the desire for

pregnancy and the desire for motherhood, let us examine the
most usual, benign expectations that women have in connection
with becoming mothers. Their fears of motherhood sometimes
run side by side with a tremendous sense of power in
procreativity. When they are ready for procreation their dreams
and fantasies may materialize in the most intimate relationship
with a baby of either sex, such is the degree of emotional
intimacy and physical dependency that women can create in
any new human being, regardless of sex. This early dependency
on women can leave not only physical but also emotional
marks. Only women can have such early and decisive influences
on their offspring, but this monopoly is possible only when
they have reached maturity in their reproductive functions.
Before this, women (or girls, rather) - who are liable to suffer
many frustrations as a result of their early experiences - are
susceptible to strong feelings of envy which may develop into
terrifying sentiments of revenge. They may be led to manu-
facture vengeful dreams in which they can be as good as boys,
and sometimes better in their own fields. Girls usually have
fantasies of procreation played out with their dolls, friends and
siblings in which they behave either as good mothers or as
nasty, ugly surrogate mothers. We are all familiar with such
situations in fairy tales, and we are now beginning to notice
them in the daily lives of unfortunate families.
Let us think just in female terms for a minute. Within the
female body is that male body which, according to traditional
psychoanalytical views, arouses in women feelings of envy,
competition, and rivalry. In their maternal role women
experience a sense of bewilderment and intense excitement
about having baby boys. After all, they are containing within
T H E POWER
themselves the wonders of the opposite sex. In some, a secret OFTHE
wish to produce a baby boy might be associated with feelings of WOMB
 52 accomplishment, because their mother did not give birth to
one. I remember a patient of mine talking of the delivery of her
son and saying ‘When I heard that it was a baby boy I felt
completely at peace. My mother, who has three daughters,
looked at me and angrily said “HOWdare you? How dare
you?” ’
Another patient, whose baby was the first boy in three
generations, first reacted with much pride and a sense of
fulfilment, but this was soon to give way to an uneasy feeling.
She told me how baffled she felt when she realized that she had
begun to address him as a ‘she’, and had a compulsive urge to
buy for him very ‘feminine’ clothes. This was her attempt to
pacify fantasied envious attacks on her by her mother,
grandmother, and sisters. In other words, her sense of
accomplishment had to be covered up by disguising her baby’s
gender in order to feel safe.
For some, the sense of fulfilment has to do with being
intermingled with a male body, to which sex the woman
unconsciously wanted to belong. In contrast, other women
have misgivings about being ‘contaminated in their femininity
by maleness’ (Raphael-Leff, 1985, p. 16). Some express openly
a wish for a son; but others are extremely secretive about it and
profess a need for nobody else to know about this ‘secret wish’.
I have often had such a secret revealed to me by ardent feminists
who did not want their ‘sisters’ to know about it. What does it
mean for a woman to contain in her own body the other sex?
Such feelings are transmitted after birth and can prevail for a
long time. In this way, the attitude of the mother of a baby boy
is a key influence on how her son will develop into manhood.
Let us turn now to the woman having a baby girl. We could
say that girls too have a unique experience in having their first
object-relationship with their own gender. From the moment a
baby girl is born, her mother sees a miniature version of herself,
a woman, as she mothers her daughter. In normal circumstances
this produces a deep feeling of connectiveness and loving
security (Zilbach, 1987). But problems arise from the re-
enactment of motherhood. The mother’s attitude towards the
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
development of her little girl is influenced by how she feels
WHORE towards her own mother, the body her mother provided her
with, and the way she felt accepted or rejected by her mother as 53
a child in her own gender. Thus, the birth of a girl might evoke
in the mother the same response her own birth created in her
own mother.
Another patient felt disgusted by her pregnancy and had
fantasies of becoming such a ‘bad mother’ that she would
neglect her baby, even to the point of letting him die. She
was sure that she would be incapable of breast-feeding him
since she thought that it was a terrible thing to do to her body.
In telling me her history she represented herself as the first
child. It was plain that she had felt confused about her
feminine identity, and she had had some homosexual affairs
during adolescence. When the baby was born she felt
bewildered, but simultaneously rather ‘brave’ in attempting to
do ‘the right thing’. There she was, breast-feeding her baby,
and to her immense surprise even enjoying the mothering
process. She said, ‘I feel so relieved that a boy was born, I now
know that he will be able to distance himself from me.
Becoming independent will be an easier task for him than if I
had had a girl.’ Then she proceeded to tell me for the first time
that she remembered her mother telling her that, beforeshe was
born, an older sister had died at the age of two months because
her mother had been unable to cope with the demands,
especially in relation to feeding. This patient had never
been able to fantasize about the sex of the future child, such
was her terror of causing the death of a baby girl because of her
‘fate’. Her own mother was also a second child, but a first-
surviving child, and her maternal grandmother had had the
same history, her own elder sister having died at the age of three
months. This had all been blocked off in my patient’s
consciousness, but unconscious memories preyed on her during
pregnancy.
This case shows how a woman’s conflicts about her own
gender can result in perverse or perverting attitudes which may
well be traceable across at least three generations. If the young
mother has from birth been the object of her parents’
disappointment for being a girl, and if this parental attitude
T H E POWER
persists for long, it will almost automatically provoke in her a THE
sense of intense dislike and hatred towards her own body. WOMB
 54 Nevertheless, she may eventually overcome these feelings and
consequently accept her own role as a mother.
Most of what I have described so far relates t o the ‘inner
space’. Now let us turn to the ‘biological clock’. There is a wide
and spectacular difference in the sense of temporality in males
and females. Women have a biological clock that is present
from the moment they are born. From menarche to menopause,
this clock dominates a woman’s lifespan and subjects her to the
hope/drcad of pregnancy. This grounds women firmly in the
reality principle. Not only do they have a different libidinal
development from men, but they also experience a feeling of
urgency provided by their sense of the inexorable passage of
time which is exclusive t o their sex and is intimately related to
their reproductive functions. The fixed period of nine months
for pregnancy makes women especially aware of time and
reality, but not necessarily when they are actually pregnant.
The many physical changes that take place during pregnancy
concentrate the mind and help to make women much more
aware than men of important events in life related to their
gender-identity, hormones, and reproductive organs. This
could be partly responsible for differences in abnormal
sexuality between the sexes. This ‘biological inexorability’ is
an overwhelming and irresistible fact and could be responsible
for the marked psychological differences between men and
women.
Adolescence provides us all with a second chance, an
opportunity to mend the damage of traumatic events in early
infancy. However, if circumstances are against us things can be
much more difficult, especially in gender issues. In girls,
adolescence can have serious and drastic effects even when there
is no history of previous traumatic experiences. As we shall see
when we come to look at the background of a particular
ex-patient of mine, the pubescent female body struggles to find
expression for its own gender under adverse circumstances
which could have undermined it.
The first menstrual period - the menarche - heralds the
girl-woman’s fecundity. Subsequently she will have periods
every four weeks - the menses - which are a constant
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE reminder of her hopddread of it. They will remain for years to
come, yet those years are limited. Hence, ambivalence about 55
becoming a mother will in some cases be associated with a great
deal of anxiety that increases as the years go by. Side-effects
such as a kind of ‘mini-mourning’ may follow menstrual
periods; the woman feels bereft of the experience of pregnancy,
even if she has herself chosen not to become a mother for the
time being.
When time is pressing priorities can change. The biological
clock is also set to trigger the end of the reproductive functions
- menopause. This is sometimes greeted with relief and a
sense of peace, but most women experience a tremendous sense
of loss; they feel devalued and sense a lowering of self-esteem.
Sometimes this corresponds to gender-frustrations encountered
during the adolescent period.
That was the case with a professional woman of thirty-one
whom 1 saw some few years ago when she had unexpectedly
begun to feel under extreme pressure because she was unable to
make up her mind whether to become a mother or not. Earlier,
a decision had been made not to have children. The present
conflict was being aggravated by the fact that she had fallen in
love with another professional, and there was nothing to
prevent them from being together and starting a family. She
was in the ‘unfortunate’ predicament of not being able to
blame outside circumstances for her feeling of pressure.
All seemed to have been fairly normal from the beginning of
her life. Her birth had been much welcomed by both parents.
She was the second child in a family of two; her brother was
three years older. The parents were professional middle class,
with the usual aspirations to becoming a ‘well-constituted’
family. So, they were thrilled that their first child was a son
and the second a daughter; this they felt was perfection. The
boy had a predominant role in the family, not only as a male
but also as the elder. H e would come to fulfil his parents’
academic ambitions for him, while they expected the little girl
to continue a familiar, domestic pattern - marry a successful
professional and bring up a family of her own. The father was
emotionally involved with his daughter, and enjoyed her games
T H E POWER
and coquettishness; the mother was proud of ‘her boy’, and THE
showed her affection towards him in an easy and natural way. WOMB
 56 Both children felt secure and confident in their respective roles.
However, this did not prevent them from quarrelling because
of intense sibling rivalry: they each accused the other of being
mother’s or father’s favourite, and often expressed a wish to be
the only child in order to get both parents’ exclusive attention.
This was done with antagonism, but also with warmth since
they were very close to each other.
This well-balanced, harmonious, and symmetrical whole-
ness was abruptly shattered. At the age of fourteen, the boy fell
ill and was taken to a medical practitioner who misdiagnosed
his illness. T w o days later he died in the operating theatre from
an acute abdominal infection. The father reacted catastrophic-
ally to his psychic pain. He completely reversed his feelings for
his daughter, who had suddenly in his eyes become responsible
for her brother’s death. He seized the eleven-year-old girl, lifted
her to face the dead boy inside the coffin, and shrieked: ‘Now,
you have got what you wanted, to get rid of him and to be
alone.’ He immediately dropped her there in front of the
astonished mourners, who did not know how to react to this
dreadful event. The girl experienced intense numbness,
followed by tremendous despair and utter loneliness. She had
now been deserted by her brother, who had been not only her
best friend but also her symmetrical opposite number. She had
been robbed of her father’s love; instead, she had his hatred.
Her previously caring mother now became emotionally absent,
such was her intense grief. This prepubescent eleven-year-old
girl’s whole world, internal and external, had disintegrated in a
few hours. She experienced events that were to fundamentally
change her own destiny. She found her expectations about
herself and her gender completely reversed. The old clichl! of
the academically successful boy and the domestically content
girl was no longer available.
A week later, as she was about to leave for her brother’s
memorial service, she was struck by abdominal pain, and felt
scared when she saw blood coming from her vagina. Nobody
was at hand to help her or reassure her about this sudden event.
Still, her body had taken care of her, making sure that with her
MoTHER’
MADONNA,
menarcheshe would be reaffirmed in her own gender. This was
WHORE a healthy signal that theexpectationsof others, that she would
take her brother’s place and even replace him, could never be 57
fulfilled. She was now sure of her own gender-identity. But,
despite this physiological sign, she remained in need of further
reassurance in the face of her own bereavement and the need
not to disappoint her parents.
Her father’s behaviour became more violent. He could not
accept his son’s death; he was full of revenge and armed himself
with a gun to search for the doctor who had misdiagnosed his
son’s illness. My patient was very much the target for his
pathological mourning. He made her wear black for two years
and forced her to accompany him to the cemetery to visit her
brother’s grave twice a week. The first physical and emotional
expressions of her femininity were met with derision and
contempt by her father. He was now besieged by jealousy, and
any attempts she made at asserting her femininity he answered
with rage. He began to beat her regularly, using any pretext he
could find to make her feel humiliated and ashamed of being a
woman. (In his own way, he was committing a sort of
incestuous pattern with her.) He could not stand the thought of
her being with a boy, and forbade her to meet anyone outside
school hours.
Her mother was still deeply depressed, and remained
emotionally detached from all these events. She herself had
been a bright, cheerful, pretty girl, with much intellectual
potential, but for financial and social reasons she had been
unable to pursue an academic career. She had been affected as a
young girl by a rheumatic illness, and as a sequel had contracted
a heart condition because of which the medical profession had
advised her not to pursue any pregnancy because it could have
harmful effects on her health. Despite this, she had gone ahead
with two pregnancies. After her brother’s death my patient
developed a caring and nursing attitude towards her mother
and secretly hated her father. Just as a son would have done, she
dreamt of getting rid of him and taking care of her mother by
herself.
A t the age of seventeen my patient unexpectedly embarked
on a university degree. She wanted to become a medical doctor.
THE P O W E R
This caused much surprise to everyone who knew her, indeed to OF T H E
herself as well, since she had always been thought to be rather WOMB
 58 unambitious and had never talked of taking up a professional
career. She was by now experiencing a tremendous pressure
from within herself to belong to both genders and to fulfil
expectations associated with both.
From then on, she began to pursue resolutely what was to
prove a highly successful academic career. There were inner
longings trying to make themselves felt, but she adamantly
refused to heed them; they had to do with her own sexuality.
Instead she became anorexic and created much trouble by her
refusal to eat. Her parents would say, ‘The children in Europe
are starving because of the war, so you’d better eat.’ She
thought to herself, ‘How can I eat when all those children are
dying? I’d better die too just like my brother.’
Then events took another important turn. Her father was
now extremely proud of his daughter and of her achievements.
However, her mother did not take kindly to her daughter’s
determination to become a doctor; she saw this as a travesty
and, moreover, as the loss of her nurse, ‘a far more appropriate
profession for a girl’. She felt insufficiently valued as a mother
since the girl was not following in her footsteps; she also
continued to feel the intense pain that motherhood had
brought her. She was full of envy towards her daughter for the
newly acquired freedom and independence which she had never
been able to have in her own life.
Ten years after her brother’s death, when my patient was in
her second year at medical school, her mother suffered a
cerebral thrombosis, became unconscious, and died after
twenty-four hours. My patient had been with her all along. Yet
now her father blamed her for her mother’s death. She was left
alone with her father, still able to pursue her career but leading
a spinster’s lifestyle. She had acquired by now several hysterical
traits and was extremely inhibited and repressed about sexual
matters. She suffered from fainting attacks, and was subject to
moodiness and irritability, until she decided to enter psycho-
therapy. She gained much insight from her therapy, and was
able to see that the only way for her to have an individual life
was to move away from her father.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
My patient had a few close relationships with women of
WHORE different ages which afforded her much satisfaction and gave
her a sense of solidarity. This recreated the good reciprocal 59
relationship which she had once had with her mother. In her
tentative relationships with men she chose either brutish men
who were rather insensitive to her needs, or ineffectual, weak
coevals to whom she devoted her time helping them in their
own advancement. So she was trying either to placate or to
revitalize them, thus reinacting a relationship with an angry
father or a weak, dead brother.
Unsatisfactory as her emotional life may have been, she did
not feel that she could consider becoming a mother. This never
appeared to her as a real choice. Years went by before she came
to xe me following the beginning of her involvement with her
colleague. It was only when we disentangled her previous
history that she was able to look at her longings to become a
mother, which had been suppressed ever since she had felt
forbidden to achieve motherhood. Indeed, when she wrote to
her father telling him about her pregnancy she got an
unprecedcntedly prompt reply from him ‘warning’ her that she
.
might ‘still have time to d o something about it . . After all,
any woman can have children, you are supposed to do more
important things in life.’ She felt both flattered and under-
mined. This duality in her response reflected her male and
female identities.
The history of this particular patient illustrates the intricate
and complicated nature of gender-identity and its achievement,
as well as the vulnerability and brittleness of adolescence
disturbed by a traumatic event. The range of relationships and
expectations that an individual believes to be contained within
herself is really handed down by others (at least three previous
generations). Here is a woman who by most criteria could have
been assessed as a normal and accomplished person. Her firm
determination not to have children could easily have been
considered, as in many other cases, to be the result of clear
thinking and a conscious choice. However, she had never made
a choice of her own. She had always felt at the mercy of her
father’s desire to turn her into the resurrection of her dead
brother for the sake of his own sense of achievement and pride.
T H E POWER
This case history exemplifies the special importance of the OF THE
inner space in adolescence, and of the biological clock when WOMB
 60 time is running out. These two phenomena come together in a
particular way around the time of the menopause. The
menopause is an exclusively female predicament, and its
importance should be understood as one more reason why it is
inappropriate for theories, including theories of perversion,
based on clinical observations of men to be automatically
transferred to women.
Whereas a man owns the ‘freehold’ of his reproductive
organs a woman has them only on ‘leasehold’. O r perhaps it
would be more accurate to say, in Raphael-Leff’s (1985)
words, that in pregnancy the ‘owner-occupier’ is taking over
her body; but when does the woman feel her body to be
completely her own? At the age when women lose their
reproductive abilities, men remain untouched in theirs (albeit
with fewer spermatozoa than in their youth). Lax puts it thus:

Women’s increased narcissistic vulnerability due to the ending

of their procreativity may also be heightened by the fact that
male procreative capacity does not end during middle age. This
fact accounts for a significant difference between the sexes
during this phase of the life cycle, namely, a man can, or could,
start a new family with children but a woman cannot. (1982,
p. 159)

I believe that this difference largely accounts for paedophilia

being much more prevalent in men than in women. The ‘Lolita
syndrome’ is often experienced by ageing males in search of an
‘immortality’ which women of the same age, dominated as
they are by the biological clock, can no longer achieve. When
an ageing man sees an attractive girl, he may not only fantasize
about her sexually, but may also see her as the potential young
mother of his future child. Why is it, then, that when an ageing
woman is in a parallel situation, seeing a young attractive man,
everyone - including herself - assumes that she has in mind
her own son? Is there a cultural, sociological process which
allows such double standards for men and women? Does
narcissism vary according to gender? Or does this ‘mark of
MADONNA,
time’ affect narcissism differently in males and females?
WHORE It may be appropriate to conclude a chapter which
particularly stresses the power of the womb with an account of 61
the traumatic effects that a hysterectomy, the loss of the
womb, can have on women. This is symbolized by the posture
of women entering and leaving gynaecological and obstetrical
wards. Those who are pregnant enter with a pride in their
generous convexity; those who emerge after a hysterectomy
tend to d o so hunched forward, complementing the imagined
concavity of their despoiled abdomen. A U-turn has taken
place from birth to destruction.
Men, lacking that ‘inner space’ which is so important to
women, often find it hard to understand the significance of a
hysterectomy to a woman. It can be more devastating than the
menopause because there is an element of agonizing choice.
Despite the intense bleeding associated with severe abdominal
pain which may make a hysterectomy advisable, it is seldom
medically prescribed on account of ‘subjective’ symptoms.
‘The decision is yours’, says the gynaecologist. ‘Damn it all’ is
the woman’s reaction.
I have seen women who, at a much earlier age than when
menopause would be expected, are going through all sorts of
hesitations and doubts before involving themselves in hyster-
ectomy. They have been of all ages, heterosexual and
homosexual, some already mothers, some not, others too old
to be able to get pregnant but yet in serious doubt because of
the loss of an organ which is deeply associated with femininity
and womanhood. These women experience an excruciating
conflict over giving up that wonderful, creative organ, which
could or did make possible the birth of children, the beautiful
babies of a woman’s real or fantasy world.
The mourning process begins before the operation. For
mothers there is a feeling of betrayal in abandoning the organ
which meant so much to them. For those women who never
experienced the joy and pain of childbirth there is a feeling of
pain and loss at giving up for all time the idea of conceiving a
baby. This mourning can often be associated with memories of
abortion, and there are nightmares in which unborn babies
suddenly reassert themselves in the woman’s mind.
Motherhood is the central theme of this book - mother- THETHE POWER

hood with all its power for good and, occasionally, for WOMB
 62 perversion. The inner space, the womb and its mental
representations, is unique to women and is crucial to mother-
hood. To be deprived of the womb is to experience a true loss of
power in a uniquely female way.

MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE
MOTHERHOOD 4
AS A PERVERSION

DD T H O U G H IT M A Y S O U N D , motherhood pro-

0 vides an excellent vehicle for some women to

exercise perverse and perverting attitudes towards
their offspring, and to retaliate against their own mothers.
Normal child development is generally held to depend pre-
dominantly on healthy mothering, in which mothers derive
much pleasure from the process of taking care of their babies
and helping them to develop into independent and self-assured
human beings with their own unique characteristics. (Winni-
cott (1965) says that babies achieve their ‘true self’ through
‘good enough mothering’.) However, this is more easily said
than done, since mothers are also the children of their own
mothers with their own plethora of early experiences and
traumas. In the words of Chodorow, ‘women’s mothering is
reproduced across generations’ (1978, p. 3)’ and Blum agrees:
‘The human mother continues mothering long after the child’s
abject dependence, into the adult life of the next generation,
and the mothering qualities of grandmotherhood’ (1980,
M 0T H E R H 0 0D
p. 95). .-
AS A
In psychoanalysis the word ‘perversion’ is used exclusively in PERVERSION
 64 relation tosexuality, but before Freud’s time the term was used
to denote ‘deviations of instinct’, as noted by Laplanche and
Pontalis, who add that: ‘Those authors who accept a plurality
of instincts are thus brought to make a very broad category out
of perversion and to posit a multitude of forms for it to take:
perversions of the “moral sense” (delinquency), of the “social
instincts” (prostitution), of the “instinct of nutrition”
(bulimia, dypsomania)’ (1973, p. 307). It is strange, though,
that while theconcept of instinct can be seen tostretch as far as
nutrition and its abuse in dypsomania, no mention is made of
the perversion of the ‘maternal instinct’ - a term which in the
‘normal’ sense has been so widely and loosely used. In other
words, ‘perverse motherhood’ has almost never been acknow-
ledged. A rare exception is J. N. Rosen, who eloquently says:

The concept of perversion of the maternal instinct fits every

fact I have observed about the aetiology of schizophrenia. I t f i t s
the behaviour of the mothers of schizophrenics, it fits the
material obtained.from psychotic patients, and it fits the
biological fact that any instinct, in expressing itself, can
become subject t o perversion. Going through the gamut of
instincts, I cannot think of one that is not subject t o this law. I
cannot think of one that cannot be bent to conform to the
faulty aim-object relationship that we call perversion ...
Poisoning comes from the perverse mother who is not gifted
with the divine attunement that makes her understand what
her baby is crying for and allows her t o return it t o a world of
omnipotent contentment ...A Lhild has to grow. If it has a
parent suffering from a perverted maternal instinct, the child
from the start must build on a weakened psychosexual base.
(1953, pp. 100-1)

Rosen is concerned with the aetiology of schizophrenia and the

understanding of the infant-adult who has suffered through the
effects of the ‘perverse mother’, whereas I am concerned with
the behaviour of the latter.
This chapter deals with the findings on motherhood as a
MADONNA,
perversion and its many implications. These comments are
WHORE supported by clinical material.
 In trying to explain this process, 1shall draw on two separate 65
strands of evidence. Firstly, there are the adult male patients
who have not only told of their early childhood experiences
with their mothers, but also relive in their transference the kind
of engulfment and dependency they have gone through. They
try to make the therapist re-enact or dramatize their own past
histories. In this connection, we can learn from the work of
Mahler (1963) on the ‘symbiosis’ and ‘separation/ individ-
uation’ stages in normal infant development, and from
Glasser’s (1979) work on ‘the core complex’, in which there is a
deep-seated and pervasive longing for an intense and most
intimate closeness to another person, amounting to a ‘merging’,
a ‘state of oneness’, ‘a blissful union’. This is never realized,
partly because whenever such a person has the opportunity to
be emotionally close to another, he experiences a threat to his
identity and withdraws (pp. 278-80). This is very much in
evidence in the transferential process, in which the patient
reenacts a fantasy of fusion originating with his mother, who
allowed him neither individuation nor separation. In my view,
this desire for fusion is not a defence against envy, which is the
usual Kleinian hypothesis, but, as Hopper (1986) has argued, a
defence against aphanisis, or anxieties concerning annihilation
and helplessness, which is just as likely to precede or provoke
envy as to follow or result from it.
Secondly, there are the perverse female patients who have
talked of their relationships with their children and how they
abuse their power and control over their offspring. Again and
again, the mother’s mental health emerges as crucial for the
development of her offspring. We learn this lesson for example
from Greenson, who describes his work with a transsexual-
transvestite f ive-and-a-half -year-old-boy :

I believe women’s certainty about their gender-identity and

men 3 insecurity about theirs are rooted in early identification
.
with the mother. . The mother may promote or hindcr the
dis-identifying and the father does the same for the counter-
.
identification . . The boy must attempt to renounce the
MSOAT H E R H O O D
A
pleasure and security-giving closeness that identification
with the mother affords,and he must form an identification PERVERSION
 66 ..
with the less accessible father. The mother must be willing
to allow the boy t o identify with the father figure. (1968, pp.
371 ff., my emphasis)

Creenacre (1960) and Mahler (1968) have pointed out the

important part the father plays in helping the child t o resolve
the symbiosis with the mother. The father of separation and of
individuation thereby becomes a facilitator of the separation/
individuation process. Loewald sees the role of the father as a
positive supporting force for the pre-oedipal child against the
threat of re-engulfment by the mother: ‘Against this threat of
the maternal engulfment, the paternal position is not another
threat or danger, but a support of powerful force’ (1951,
p. 15).
As early as 1968, Rascovsky and Rascovsky in their now
classical study on filicide called our attention to the frequent
and serious injuries inflicted upon the infant by parental
acting-out. These included ‘the traumatic vicissitudes of
pregnancy and delivery, circumcision, disturbances in natural
or artificial lactation, and especially the qualitative and
quantitative variations in abandonment’. They regarded these
factors as responsible for ‘an increase in born hostility and envy
and consequently responsible for adult acting out and psycho-
pathic behaviour’. These authors noted that the neglect of this
area in the psychoanalytical literature could be regarded as ‘an
aspect of the universal resistance to acknowledging the
mother’s filicide drives, undoubtedly the most dreaded and
uncanny truth for us to face’ (1968, p. 390, my italics). In a
later paper, the same authors stress the decisive importance of
the parental attitude on innate infantile aggressiveness and
assert that parricide ‘must be regarded as a consequence of
filicidal behaviour, and its principal roots must be attributed
to the infant’s identification with the parents’ aggression’
(1972, p. 271). They go on to remind us of parents’ destructive
behaviour towards their children, expressed either through
active or passive attitudes such as ‘early or repeated abandon-
ment, mental or physical punishment, cruelty, physical or
MADONNA, verbal attacks, [and] indifference to suffering’ (p. 272). They
WHORE also add that the affected child introjects these experiences as
internal persecutory objects which are very much connected 67
with the actual parents and not just fantasied ones.
Filicide, though, is an ancient practice and it is related partly
to the parents’ ambivalence. As Blum has remarked: ‘the full
historical and psychological implications of infanticide and of
derivative expressions of child sacrifice in mistreated babies
and battered children have probably only been thoroughly
studied in this century, the century of the child, and the century
of psychoanalysis . .. Psychoanalysis actually began with the
study of child abuse prior to the discovery of universal
incestuous conflicts in children and their parents.’ He argues
that ‘the child’s needs for socialization could be used as a ready
..
target for the discharge of parents’ antisocial impulses. The
omnipotent parent can be assured of victory in power struggles
with the child’ (1980, pp. 109-10).
According to Benedek, ‘Disturbed mothering turns the
symbiotic relationship into a vicious circle. This leads to
introjection of objects and self-representations in the child
charged with aggressive cathexis’ (1959, p. 397).
It is amazing how maltreated babies respond in a com-
plementary way to their mother’s exploitation: it seems they
sense this as a means of survival. ,They are terrified of losing
their mother, and therefore their own existence. The mechanism
of splitting as described by Kernberg (1975) is understood by
Blum (1980) for this purpose as follows: ‘The punitive parent
may be defensively idealized or split off from a “good object”
image. The “denigrated, bad self” identified with the
denigrated punitive parent image is often repressed. Contra-
dictory ego ideals may be maintained in consciousness in a
‘‘vertical split” in which full awareness of the inconsistencies is
defensively avoided’ (Blum, p. 111).After all, the child relies
for survival on an ‘auxiliary ego’ (Spitz, 1946,1951) initially
provided by parents. This has been observed in many studies of
the effects of the parent-child relationship (sec for example
Bowlby, 1951, 1958; Bowlby et al., 1956; Burlingharn and
Freud, 1943). A similar process has been described by
Masterson and Rinsley (1975) in the mother’s role in the
MOTHERHOOD
aetiology of the borderline personality. The authors stress the A S A
effects on the baby of the alternation between maternal P E R V E R S I O N
 68 libidinal availability (reward) and its withdrawal at the time
of separation/ individuation. The baby, a future borderline
personality, responds to its mother’s rewards by the denial of
separateness. This, in itself, confirms the child’s acting out of
his reunion fantasies with that maternal part-object, and
promotes his dependency and his fears of being abandoned if he
dares to individuate. Similar findings are produced by Lothstein
(1979), who stresses the role of the mother in the aetiology of
transsexualism in his studies of the mothers of male and female
transsexuals. According to him, ‘These mothers are unable to
tolerate their sons’ separation and individuation via masculine
identifications and remain attached to their sons via feminine
identifications. They seem to perceive the male child’s gender
separateness as a threat to their own personal integrity.’
Lothstein describes a process which operates in the upbringing
of daughters who become transsexuals:
These mothers also experience their daughters ’ prolonged and
continued identifications as a threat to their personal integrity.
B y actively pushing their daughters away from feminine
identifications, they seem to be protecting themselves from
symbiotic fusion and regression. Our clinical data suggest that
their daughters’male identifications may be partially defensive,
to ward o f f both their and their mothers’ murderous wishes
toward each other. (p. 221)
He then hypothesizes that the mother’s ‘proneness to disrupt
one of her child’s gender-identities will vary as a function of the
sex of the child, the stresses in her marriage, her current
relationship to her own mother, and the current status of her
bisexual conflict’ (p. 222, my italics). These children comply
with their mothers’ wishes as their only way of survival, and in
so doing they create a false sense of self with structural ego
defects and ego weaknesses.
In Benedek’s words, ‘Psychoanalysis often demonstrates
that parents become aware of their own unconscious motiva-
tions towards their children by anticipating the child’s
MOTHER,
behaviour and its unconscious motivations. .. It seems that
MADONNA,
parents and children, like paranoids, achieve what they
WHORE anticipate with anxiety, and intend to avoid’ (1959, p. 406).
 The woman who struggled through her own childhood with 69
a punitive mother, in submission to her own superego,
identifies with the aggressive mother and may easily attack the
disappointing and deprivingchild (Stele, 1970).That child is
experienced by her as not fulfilling her own unconscious
motivations in pursuing motherhood.
Let us examine the raw psychological basis for this process in
familiar, everyday terms. It is generally accepted that we learn
from mistakes, but what is not so easily recognized is that
‘mistakes’ are unconsciously linked to experiences we have
gone through in early life. Therefore, we could be oblivious to
the significance of words or actions which suddenly and
unexpectedly appear in our lives. These make a strong impact
on us, especially when we become parents. They make us feel
alienated and afraid of losing our mental representations of
ourselves. For instance, people who have gone through painful
and humiliating experiences with their own parents have
secretly promised to themselves never to behave in the same
way. But the unconscious tricks us mercilessly, and without
any warning something will emerge from within ourselves that
we do not recognize as ours, and takes us by surprise. We
believe that it comes from our parents. That awful parental
voice or action we tried so carefully to avoid reemerges
forcefully in our dealings with our own children, and
immediately we feel a sense of guilt and shame. I believe that
most of us are only too painfully aware of this happening, and
that, the more aware we are, the more we work through it in
order to solve this inner ‘intrusion’. Our goal is to become our
own person, our ‘true self’ which will enable us to let our
children do the same. But for some this is not so easily achieved,
especially if they have been subjected to repeated humiliating
and damaging experiences.
I tend to agree with Grunbergcr’s (1985) idea that the girl is
unavoidably restricted by being born to someone who is not her
‘true’ sexual object, and that, because she does not receive from
her mother the same kind of cathexis that would be offered to a
son, the girl is more dependent on her love-objects than the boy
MOTHERHOOD
is. There are many ways in which a woman m;Ly become ASA
perverse, but in this chapter I shall explore only those PERVERSION
 70 concerning motherhood and a woman’s reactions to and
acknowledgement of the sex of her own child. Sometimes
women are required to make heroic efforts to d o the ‘right
thing’, considering what they themselves may have had to go
through, especially when they have never felt accepted in their
own gender-identity, and the same has happened to their
mothers. The process then becomes self-repeating, puttingeach
generation at risk.
A fifty-year-old woman came for treatment because of her
proneness to get engaged in extreme sadomasochistic relation-
ships with men. She had been married twice and had had many
love-affairs, all of which eventually led to her lover beating her
up. She was a bright, intelligent, accomplished woman, a
successful professional in the arts. In her first interview she
complained bitterly about her mother, who she still regarded as
a ‘bloody cow’, and who, she claimed, had instilled in her a
submissive and subdued attitude towards men. This, she
believed, had to d o with the fact that when she was four her
brother was born, and she was then sent to boarding school.
She had been made to feel a nuisance all her life, and her mother
was barely able to tolerate her.
She had been her father’s favourite, but this completely
ceased with the arrival of the baby boy. She then felt deserted
and without any affection from either parent. Her mother
went overboard about her son and encouraged a bickering
relationship between the two siblings, which aroused in my
patient intense rivalry and hatred towards men. She was able,
though, to sublimate these feelings in her professional career,
where she felt ‘as good or even better than a man’. However,
she always chose weak and ineffectual men as partners, which
reiniorced her conviction of being better than them. She
became very critical of them, to the point of denigrating them
in a ferocious way, which led them to abuse her physically.
She had twochildren from her first marriage. She found her
own history repeated when she had first a girl and then, four
years later, a boy. Despite her intelligence and insight into her
own situation she was unable to prevent herself from falling
,,”,”,’,”,”~:
into the same pattern as her mother: there she was, trying to
WHORE treat he1 children with equal devotion, but not succeeding. She
felt a tremendous rivalry with her daughter from the moment 71
she was born, and was unable to handle the strong hostility she
felt towards her. This was not easy to acknowledge then, but
much later on, when her daughter became a beautiful young
adolescent, she found herself behaving exactly as her own
mother had to her.
Although she wanted to get rid of her daughter she
nevertheless persisted in her wish to be a good mother. Yet she
was blind to the problems her daughter was experiencing. The
girl had associated with a criminal, and when on one occasion
she came home covered with bruises it transpired that this man
was using the young girl for prostitution and for drug-dealing.
Meanwhile, the son had some notable academic achievements
to his credit, but was unable to make any associations within
his peer group, such was the close bond he had established with
his mother. During treatment my patient arrived at many deep
and painful realizations about herself and the perverse ways in
which she had redirected her intense hatred towards her mother
in her dealings with her own children. She had failed to give her
daughter any reassurance about or support for her femininity;
female self-denigration had taken hold in the third sumssive
generation. Her daughter did not feel deserving of a good
relationship with a coeval and had engaged in sadomasochistic
relationships, just like her mother. As for her son, she had never
allowed any process of individuation to occur.
Greenacre (1968) says that in her experience of dealing with
sexually perverse patients there seems to have been a definite
disturbance of development in the first two years of life. This
affects and undermines the orderly progression of the work of
separation and individuation.

A failure of satisfactory maternal care, the mother either

dcpriuing or overwhelming the infant, makes a fntile ground
for the later deuelopment of petverse tendencies, but this
failure 6y itself does not offer conditions for the specific
perverse content. It means that there is a prolongation of the
uncertainty about the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, and there already
MOTHERHOOD
exists u situation conducive to continued oscillation in
AS A
relationships. These conditions also tend to make for an PERVERSION
 72 impairment or slowing of object-relationship, and consequently
for a greuter retention of primary aggression, and an increase in
..
secondary aggressionby frustration. This i s later transformed
into sadism as a response t o the mother’s assault. (1968, pp.
5 3-4)

My clinical observations show that mothers who display

perverse tendencies towards their offspring do so within the
first two years of their children’s life. In Winnicott’s (1953)
terms, the ‘transitional Object’ is used by the pervert to be
invented, manipulated, used and abused, ravaged and dis-
carded, cherished and idealized, symbiotically identified with
and deanimated all at once. This is exactly what 1 believe takes
place in the perverse mother’s mind and through her manipu-
lationsof her baby. In other words, the baby becomes for such a
mother her ‘transitional object’, as proposed by Stoller (1968).
Granoff and Perrier (1980).make a similar comment on the
type of perverse relationship a mother establishes with her baby
in which the baby is first identified as her missingphallus, and
then becomes her ‘toy’ or ‘thing’; this they see ‘as analogous to
the “part-object” relationships of fetishistic perverts’ (p. 85,
my translation).
As 1 have said, as a clinician I have observed that the main
difference between male and female perverse action lies in the
aim. Whereas in men the act is aimed at an external part-
object, in women it is against themselves: either against their
bodies or against objects of their own creation - that is, their
babies. In both respects, bodies and babies are treated as
part-objects. In this context I remember a patient who was
referred for psychiatric assessment because of violent behaviour
directed towards her second child. Her first pregnancy had
come as a surprise to her, but she decided to go ahead with it,
regarding it as taking out insurance against a dread of being
alone. The child could become utterly dependent on her and
totally under her control. When this first baby arrived, she was
overcome by feelings of repulsion and revulsion against it. She
felt ready to kick it, and after reflection she decided that in
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
order to overcome these feelings she would fix in her mind the
WHORE idea pf the baby being part of herself; on some days she would
choose her right arm to be the baby, on others it would be one 73
of her legs. In this way she felt able to master her impulses to
beat up her first child. Later, with her second baby she asserted,
‘There is no more room in my body for a second one. All has
been used up by the first one.’
She was a careerist thief who had spent more than ten years
in different prisons. From childhood she compulsively stole
money, clothes, jewellery - in fact anything from anybody.
She managed in this early period never to get caught, but
nevertheless was sent to detention centres because she was
unmanageable and her parents were unable to cope with her.
Later on she specialized in stealing from smart department
stores, and also developed a technique for housebreaking. She
did most of the stealing on her own since she did not trust
anyone. She said that, had she used her money correctly, she
would now be rich but that ‘part of the thieves’ personality was
to grab and then spend too freely’. She described graphically
her feelings when tempted in a store. A t no time did she think
of her victims, neither did she show guilt or shame. She stood
before an object trying to convince herself how awful it would
be if she were caught and particularly awful for her pets (she
never mentioned her children in this regard), who would suffer
if she went to prison; in the end she sometimes stole ‘a treat for
them as well’. Sometimes she could pay for the goods in front
of her but she said to herself: ‘You would be silly to eat up
capital.’ All this is not to say that she did not experience much
suffering from the consequences of her actions and she was
miserable at the prospect of more imprisonment, such was her
degree of ambivalence.
When I first saw her she told me that her first child, a boy,
had given her for the first time ‘a sense of consciousness’. She
went on to describe what she meant by saying that before she
became a mother she was completely unaware that her actions
would affect any other human being. She found this discovery
unbearable because she would hear her boy’s voice inside her
head when she was in prison, and she knew that the boy needed
his mother. With a very conscious determination she decided
MOTHERHOOD
that the only way to cope successfully with this situation AS A
would be to stop thinking of him in terms of somebody outside PERVERSION
 74 her, and to believe instead that he was part of her body, so that
they became only one person: ‘both my baby and myself were in
a cocoon’. When the boy was three, a girl was born but she
could not bring herself to include the girl in this cocoon. She
found all the girl’s demands excessive, became violent towards
her, and began to batter her. She hated the girl for a long time
and saw her only as an intruder in her life. She then admitted
how much vengeful satisfaction she had derived from her
compulsive beating of her daughter, although she felt sick
about these actions afterwards.
Another patient sought treatment because of her intense and
compulsive need for physical affection from her daughter, aged
seven. After three years of treatment, when she could look at
her basic distrust towards her therapist and an intense fear of
being swamped in the transferential process, she described how
her daughter had ‘diagnosed’ her disturbance accurately by
saying, ‘Mum, I think that when you decided to have me you
wanted a baby and you never thought that the baby would
grow up. Now I’m ten you still treat me like a baby and you
won’t let me go.’ By then, she had come to terms with her
vicarious source of sensual gratification from her small baby
and her intense anger at her growing up and becoming
independent.
A further patient came to consult me, feeling distraught and
confused. She had a baby of two years with whom she felt
unable to cope, and whenever she felt frustrated or annoyed she
would beat up her baby. This would relieve her of her anxiety
and she would use it for sexual gratification. Suddenly she
stopped these beatings altogether when she realized that her
baby had a triumphant look and, according to her, ‘he was even
enjoying’ her ill treatment of him. She became aware at this
point that the baby had the upper hand since he felt able to
manipulate her into losing her temper. He had now become
‘the master’.
According to Stoller, ‘The hostility in perversion takes form
in a fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the
perversion and serves to convert childhood trauma into adult
MADONNA,
triumph’ (1975, p. 4). In my clinical experience, the
WHORE opportunity that motherhood offers of being in complete
control of a situation creates fertile ground for some women 75
who have experienced injurious and traumatic events in their
own lives to exploit and abuse their babies. Thus are pro-
duced mothers of battered babies, of transsexuals, and -above
all - of male sexual perverts.
It is often the male sexual pervert’s early relationship with
his mother which is the most influential determinant of his
distorted object-relationships in later life. We accept that
mothers of battered babies are insecure and emotionally
deprived people. In their accounts of how beatings take place,
there is an element of triumph over the raging baby. The same
pattern is Seen with mothers who clothe their boy babies as
girls, or vice versa; revenge is always there, as well as a threat of
withdrawal of the mother’s love unless the boy behaves like a
girl. These mothers have not been able to acknowledge their
child’s gender and have exploited their controlling power to
assign it a different gender. It is no coincidence that as babies
they themselves went through experiences humiliating to their
womanhood. There is not only the element of revenge, but also
some dehumanization of the object. As McDougall says,

The eady mother-image plays a continuing, essential role in the

unconscious of all neosexual creators. The idealized maternal
image not only suggests that the mother is devoid of sexual
desire but also containsan implicit denial of the importance of
genital differences. The belief that the differences between the
sexes plays no role in the arousal of sexual desire underlies every
neosexual scenario. (1986, p. 249)

We have learnt from Stoller (1968) that one of the very

important components in the production of the child’s core
gender-identity is the infant-parent relationship, in particular
the psychological aspects of the oedipal and pre-oedipal
relationships. The mother’s acknowledgement of her child’s
sex plays an extremely important part in establishing and
confirming its core gender-ident i ty.
I shall attempt to illustrate the significance of motherhood
MOTHERHOOD
in the production of the child’s core gender-identity by some AS A
clinical material about another patient, this time a male; in his PERVERSION
 76 mid-forties and married with four children, who referred
himself by letter. Let him explain his own predicament:

1 have lived with a condition for most o f my life which

manifests itself in the form of transvestial or transsexual
behaviour and feelings. Whilst I am able to suppress these
feelings for a good deal of the time, there nevertheless comes a
moment when 1 can cope no longer - as has happened now. . .
and for the first time self-mutilation seems to be logical, , , 1
desperately need someone to help me decide upon the best way
to contain or suppress it, or to suggest some way in which 1
could free myself of my now unremitting torment . . . The
symptoms that I am experiencing at the moment fall into two
quite distinct categories, i.e. mental and physical. Mentally, 1
feel that 1 am a woman in the clichk situation of having to
masquerade my way through life simply because I am not as
perfect as 1 want to be. , . I can quite see the clear possibilities
of a ‘change’.To this end 1 have now almost cut myself o f f
emotionally from those around me - and so the conflict rages,
as 1 question: to whom does my first loyalty lie, my family, all
of whom are and will be able to make lives of their own, or to
myself, with one precious life only? , . . On the physical side,
the tension can only be relieved by wearing anything other than
men’s clothes ... More obvious symptoms, physical side that
is, are: morning sickness, vomiting through the day, loss of
appetite, feelingshivery, aching in the small o f the back and the
most obvious sign that tells me when 1 am about to ‘gounder’
again - that my breasts become tender and sore - and it is at
these times that the sensation of my nipples touching against
my woolly jumper makes me just want to scream ...
And so on. From his own description of his problem, we can
vividly experience his enormous despair and sense of des-
pondency and desolation.
There is not much happiness or fulfilment where perversions
are concerned, as this case clearly demonstrates. Let us now
briefly explore the patient’s early background. As might well
M A D O N N A , be expected, it is most complicated and peculiar. He was
WHORE surrounded by all sorts of perverting attitudes throughout his
early life. He was the younger child in a family of two, with an 77
older sister. When he was one year old (during the war) he was
sent to stay with one of his aunts for ‘reasons of safety’. His
early recollections had to do with feelings of being lost. He
remembered his time with his aunt as an extremely confused
one. She was a warm and kind woman, but suddenly at the age
of three she made it very clear to him that unless he complied
with all her wishes, she would withdraw her love. The
conditions she imposed included not only wearing girl’s
clothes, but behaving like one. He still remembers with
trepidation that period of his life. A t the beginning he tried to
go against his aunt’s whims, but soon he realized that the
consequence could be complete isolation. After all, he had
already been given away by his own mother, from whom he
received a few postcards but never a visit. He then started to
comply with everything required of him.
The aunt had had a daughter, who died at a very early age.
She now decided to send her nephew to an all-girls school and
taught him how to behave like a girl; for medical visits she
would come to London and have h i p examined by a doctor
friend of hers. At the age of twelve, he convincingly looked like
a girl. O n the occasion of a family member’s wedding, he was
made the bridesmaid. He became the object of the most
extraordinary scandal when, during the ceremony, his real
mother - who had not seen him since she had sent him to live
with his aunt -suddenly realized that this beautiful ‘girl’ who
was accompanied by ‘her’ aunt was in fact her son. Amid
screams, cries, and shouts he was taken away by his real
mother, who not only severely punished him but proceeded
immediately to send him to an all-boys school. There, his
suffering, torment, and humiliation became so great that
eventually his mother decided to send him back to his aunt,
pronouncing him too sissy and stupid for her to be concerned
with him any further. He was glad to return to his aunt, but
things were never to be as they had been before. H e now had to
suffer his aunt’s denigration for his ‘maleness’. I prefer not to go
any further into this case here; what has been said is sufficient
MOTHERHOOD
to convey the horrors the two women in their role of mother AS A
together inflicted on this poor boy from infancy to adolescence. PERVERSION
 78 There are few psychoanalytical studies dealing with the
particular psychopathology of perverse relations between
mother and child. However, among them Sperling’s (1959,
1964) are helpful in providing further understanding of the
findings I am putting forward. The following quotations are
from these papers: ‘It is difficult to assess correctly the
aetiological value of certain childhood experiences on the lives
of perverts from reconstructions of their analysis, especially if
striking differences of seduction are absent’ (1959, p. 236);
.
‘. . in my opinion, deviate sexual behaviour in children is
dynamically a disturbance of the superego resulting from the
internalization of certain unconscious parental attitudes. I
consider it an essential therapeutic requirement in the case of
children to modify the unconscious attitudes of the objects
from whom this superego is derived’ (1959, p. 238). ‘I have
found that the relationship between mother and child, which I
have described [ 19591 as the petverse type of object-refation-
ship, was a genetic factor in the pathological ego and superego
functioning of the child’ (1964, p. 484, my italics).
Nevertheless, it is disappointing that even though Sperling
refers to a ‘perverse type o f obiect-re.elationship’,and takes
mothers of transvestite boys in analysis prior to taking the
children, she never again refers t o perverse motherhood. An
exception may be when she talks in a casual manner of the two
mothers involved, and says: ‘Both mothers functioned
adequately sexually and enjoyed being women. The role of a
woman was not deprecated: in fact, certain feminine activities,
especially maternal functions, were highly valued. In compari-
son, the role of the man appeared t o be less important in some
respects because he was not trusted with the care of the
children’ (1964, p. 485, my italics). Even when Sperling is
advocating the treatment of mothers of perverse children,
she fails to conceptualize any perverse attitudes in their
motherhood, and refers instead to ‘maternal functions [which]
were highly valued’. For my part, I believe that those patients
were abusing their position of power as mothers, and that they
were exhibiting what I would call perverse maternal attitudes.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
As I have said in Chapter 1, the failure to diagnose these
WHORE women correctly results partly from society’s glorification of
motherhood and its refusal even to consider that it may have a 79
dark side.
Gallwey says:

Women have an advantage over men here by being more able to

use their bodies directly, together with socially based
encouragements to corporal idealization, to support the
fantasy of actually being the early nurturingobjects in idealized
.
form . . This is probably one reason why sexual perversions,
most forms of criminal behaviour, and a general overreliance
on domineering modes of conduct are so much more common
in men who have further to go in sustaining their conviction of
successfully identifying with or dominating prototypic ideal
maternal objects. (1985, p. 134, my emphasis)

In this excellent work Gallwey gets very close to the essence

of perverse female sexuality in motherhood where the
‘nurturing object’ can become, under stressful conditions, an
object of absolute dominance and control, but he veers away
from this conclusion because of his over-idealization of the
female body and of motherhood. He dismisses the mother’s
potent ia I perverting capacities.
The importance of unconscious motivations to become a
mother should not be overlooked. The rtsearch by Raphael-
Leff (1983) on the models of mothering and on the impact the
baby has on the mother is relevant. She describes two basic
models of mothering. One is the ‘regulator’, in which the
mother expects the baby to adapt to herself; the other is the
‘facilitator’, in which the mother adapts to the baby. This
study was carried out on professional middle-class women.
Raphael-Leff is concerned with the effects (pact-impact) the
baby has on its mother’s ‘hopes and promises’. It seems to me
that in women with severe psychopathology the facilitator
mother who welcomes the infant’s intense dependence on her
and the exclusive intimacy of their symbiosis is prone, when
severely disturbed, to bring up transvestite, fetishistic, or
transsexual boys. O n the other hand, the regulator mother
MOTHERHOOD
could be more prone, again in extreme cases, to be the mother AS A
of battered babies. PERVERSION
 80 Rinsley (1978) offers us similar findings in describing the
mother-infant interaction in the genesis of borderline psycho-
pathology. Here, the mother rewards the baby for passiveness
and dependency, and withdraws her affection when confronted
with its aggression or assertiveness. According to Rinsley, the
mother of the future borderline adolescent and adult enjoys her
infant’s abject dependency, and consistently thwarts its innate
drive towards separation/ individuation. This enjoyment in its
pure form is short-lived, lasting only from birth to the second
postnatal month. Thus, says Rinsley,

Typically the borderline mother, embarked upon raising a

future borderline child and adult, smilingly exuded happy
satisfaction when asked about her experiences with her
neonate, only to lapse into frowning, emotional blandness or
disdain when discussing her progressively more active infant
during the latter half o f the first postnatal year and beyond. . .
The mother of the future borderline individual deals with him
essentially as she was herself dealt with during this critical
period by her own mother. .. . There was no joy in motherhood
for the psychotic mother, who could only respond to her
infants by depersonifying them into transitional or fetish-like
objects. (pp. 45-6)

Some women also have perverse attitudes towards functions

related to motherhood, during which the baby’s body has long
occupied their own. We have already seen that a woman may
have perverse unconscious motivations when she gets pregnant,
and is perversely manipulating her own body. At delivery she
feels labour pains in her body which can be very severe. Some
women feel a great need to ‘cling’ to their babies’ bodies and
possess them totally; birth constitutes a challenge to that
primary need. The mother experiences a sense of outrage, even
a desire for revenge, when the baby is alive and in some ways
independent. She now not only sees herself with an impover-
ished body, but also feels deeply humiliated by that crucial
separation. This is experienced as a total blow. The new being
MADONNA,
is now struggling to conquer a space of its own. The shock is
WHORE extrtme. After all, the pregnant woman is immediately
recognized as such, and society awards her all relevant 81
privileges, cares, and benefits, only to withdraw them abruptly
the moment she has the baby. Worse, she is now the sole
recipient of all its new emotional, physiological, and biological
demands. This could partly explain postnatal depression.
Here again, we note the important part that the mother’s
emotional sense of equilibrium plays. It is basic to the infant’s
ability to separate and individuate from its mother, as well as
to assume its own gender-identity. The mother of the future
pervert does exactly the opposite. Like Sperling before her,
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985b) describes the process of the
relationship between mother and son and how the mother
interferes with her son’s development, but she does not
explicitly ascribe this to any perverse maternal attitude. The
mother is considered only in terms of her status as the mother
of a pervert - obviously a boy. She goes further, saying: ‘A
feature of the aetiology of the perversions that has often been
noted is the very frequent occurrenceof an attitude of seduction
and complicity on the part of the mother towards her child’ (p.
12). There is no description of the mother’s psychopathological
features, even though it is she who has promoted the perverse
development of her child’s personality.
I suggest that motherhood is sometimes chosen for
unconscious perverse reasons. The woman would kdow that in
achieving motherhood she is automatically achieving the role
of master, in complete control of another being who has to
submit himself or herself not only emotionally, but also
biologically to the mother’s demands, however inappropriate
they may be. Indeed, as is generally accepted, some women who
feel inadequate and insecure find a child becoma the only
available source of emotional nourishment, and a craving for
physical affection is unloaded on thechild. The mothers I have
worked with sometimes worry about the adverse effects this
could have on the child, but at other times they appear to be
unconcerned.
Parents are sometimes unable to respond in an adequate way
to ‘normal’ demands because they have gone through
MOTHERHOOD
humiliating situations related to their own sense of woman- AS A
hood or manhood. As we know from Stoller’s work, the boy in PERVERSION
 82 becoming a man could react to these cxperiences by producing a
perverse psychic structure. According t o Chasseguet-Smirgel
(1985a), in theboy the perversestructure isestablished when he
is being made to feel, by his mother, that he is her ‘perfect
partner with his prepubescent penis’ (p. 29). But what of the
little girl who has been treated by her parents with the utmost
contempt from the moment of her birth, merely because she
belongs to the female sex? The traditional perverse male
solution is not so easily available for her. When she becomes a
mother, though, she has other, albeit unconscious ways in
which to revenge herself against the fact of being a woman. I
am doubtful about Chasseguet-Smirgel’s (198Sa) idea that
perversion is less common in women than in men because a
woman has a waiting time for her father as the love-object. It
seems to me that the perverse woman is waiting, not so much
for her father’s love, but for revenge against the denigration she
had encountered much earlier on.
Zilbach (1987) fortuitously provides backing for my theory
of perverse motherhood when, as described above, she defines
her own concept of female ‘active engulfment’ as part of
normal female development. I suggest that a perverse mother
makes use of and twists this ‘active engulfment’ in such a way
that she experiences her baby as part of herself, never to let it go
or develop its own gender-identity, let alone individuate. She
derives a great sense of elation in making her baby respond to
her own inappropriate needs.
We can see some of the psychodynamic principles which
operate in perversions appearing in females when they become
mothers. Woman’s capacity for procreation - that is, getting
pregnant and containing the baby within her own body -
provides her with some of the same emotional characteristics in
her object-relationships as are found in exaggerated and highly
distorted forms in perverse relationships. These include the
desires to engulf the other person, to dehumanize the object,
and to invade, take complete control of, and merge with the
Other.
Isn’t it amazing that while Oedipus, Coriolanus, and
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
Hamlet are frequently and fully analysed, little attention has
WHORE been paid to Jocasta, Volumnia, and Gertrude? These are
among the best-known literary examples of deviant mother- 83
hood, mothers who exploit and abuse the power they have over
their sons. So far the literature (with a fewexceptions, notable
among them Stewart’s (1961) ‘Jocasta’s crimes’) has been
exclusively occupied with understanding the psychopathology
of the sons.
Another instance from literature is Medea, who exemplifies
not only the power of motherhood, but also how the
‘biological clock’ determines a woman’s actions. Medea is
highly intelligent, in power, loved and in love. When abruptly
and unexpectedly dispossessed of all this, she becomes aware of
the only power left to her: her children, who become the targets
for her revenge against their father, Jason. When he decides to
abandon her for a much younger and more powerful bride,
Medea skilfully and subtly hatches a plan designed to give as
much pain as possible to Jason - to kill their children. She
feels justified in her actions, such is her agony at her own
predicament, and manages to complete the terrible deed within
the space of twenty-four hours.
My argument is that motherhood as a perversion occurs as a
breakdown of inner mental structures, whereby the mother
feels not only emotionally crippled in dealing with the huge
psychological and physical demands from her baby, but also
impotent and unable to obtain gratification from other
sources. She sees the world around her as non-existent in any
helping, supporting way. It is then that she falls back on
inappropriate and perverse behaviour; this, in turn, makes
her feel powerless. Simultaneously, and paradoxically, she
experiences her perverse behaviour as the only power available
to her through her exclusive emotional and physical authority
over her baby. Hence perverse motherhood must be seen as the
product of emotional instability and inadequate individuation
brought about by a process that spans at least three generations.
But part of the problem lies with society. Our whole culture
supports the idea that mothers have complete dominion over
their babies; thus we encourage the very ideas thie perverse
mother exploits. We help neither her nor her children. nor
MOTHERHOOD
society in general, if we glorify motherhood so blindly as to AS A
exclude the fact that some mothers can act perversely. In the PERVERSION
 84 next chapter I look at specific examples of this, and conclude
with a further comment on society’s expectations of and
attitudes to the position of women.

MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE
MOTHER s 5
W H O COMMITINCEST:
T h e Surrogacy of t h e Child

o M O T H E R Scommit incest more frequently than

D we think, and more at the mother’s initiative than we

imagine? Are we blocked from perceiving this by our
idealization of motherhood? Surely we are, and this is why
even in the original oedipal situation we fail to notice Jocasta’s
responsibility. Hers is the most important case of incest.
We have always blamed Oedipus rather than his mother.
Here we are once more attaching the sole responsibility to the
male child, and consequently developing a whole new concept
of a complex, taking it for granted that Oedipus unconsciously
‘knew’ his mother and was behaving perversely by marrying
her. In fact Jocasta was far better equipped, even consciously,
to recognize Oedipus as her son than vice versa. She was the
only one who knew that Oedipus could be alive; Laius believed
him dead. Why do we not hold her largely, if not entirely
responsible for the enactment of her own incestuous desires? It
is clear that, if not perverse herself, she had associated with a
most perverse individual: her husband Laius, who was not only
homosexual but also paedophiliac - his most important
MOTHERS
WHO
reason for not wanting children. She not only married him, INCEST
 86 already showing signs of being the willing victim of a perverse
partnership (the clinical analogy still applies), but contrived to
get him drunk in order to get herself impregnated. In other
words, she was already exercising her own power over her
offspring, which was to lead her to give him away a t birth. She
might unconsciously have known that she - or indeed he, the
offspring - could pursue the lost relationship, the power of
motherhood later being replaced by that of incest, which
would be more rewarding for her.
It seems unnecessary for researchers t o have developed an
Electra complex to parallel the Oedipus complex when Jocasta
already fulfils that role. Is this again an obstinate tendency t o
see women as the weak sex, always the victims and never the
perpetrators of sexual assault? Women have always been held
to be incapable of effecting their own perverse sexual designs,
and young boys reckoned to be the only ones to enact sexual
fantasies. I believe that many theories of female sexual
development are ill-founded, partly through their being based
on a need for an ever-present ‘earth-mother’, a woman who has
been so idealized or perhaps even idolized that her faults are
overlooked. She is portrayed as powerless in the penis-envy
dilemma or, according to the new feminists, the victim of
social attitudes, even perhaps contemptible because she
seems of less importance than the male. It looks as though we
have all become silent conspirators in a system which, from
whatever angle we look at them, women are either dispossessed
of all power or made the sexual objects and victims of their
male counterparts. We do not accord them any sense of
responsibility for their own unique functions, deeply related to
fecundity and motherhood, and liable at times to manifest
themselves perversely. Why should Jocasta, when both she
and Oedipus learn the facts of their incestuous relationship, be
the one to promptly commit suicide? Apparently Oedipus
cannot immediately grasp what has been happening; the
truth must therefore have been much closer to Jocasta’s
consciousness.
I was professionally consulted abroad some time ago by a
MOTHER,
MADONNA, woman who knew about my concern for women in distress. I
WHORE believe that she talked to me because she could no longer bear
her extreme anxiety, and the fact that I lived elsewhere gave her 87
extra assurance about confidentiality.
She was a young-looking thirtytight, smart and neat in her
appearance, and able to communicate - though with
reluctance and much pain - about her predicament. She
remarked that my being a woman made it possible for her to
reveal a terrible secret she had been living with for many years.
Perhaps, she added, I might understand or at least respond in
some empathetic manner.
At first it was difficult to assess clearly why she was so
concerned. She talked in alarming terms about her son aged
twenty-one and his determination to leave home. What had
seemed to be a genuine interest for her son’s welfare, was later
revealed as an intense despair about herself being left all alone;
she saw this literally as the end of her life.
She told me of her personal history.

1 was brought up in heaven, nothing was denied t o me. Both my

parents doted on me. However, when 1 was seven my father
suddenly died, and my mother withdrew from the world and
made me the exclusive object of her dedication and devotion.
Whereas initially 1 felt very privileged, later 1 became aware of
an intense suffocation and was impeded in my normal
developement. 1 was not allowed t o go t o school or to have any
friends. 1 wanted to fight against this invasion of my life, but to
no avail. My mother was the constant witness of all my
actions. 1 almost felt she interfered in my thoughts and dreams.
If 1 spent too long in the bathroom, she would come and look
at me i n strange ways always asking me all sorts of private
questions. 1 believe that she wanted t o get inside my head, such
was the degree of her intrusion into me. This became much
worse when 1 reached adolescence and 1 had my first menstrual
period. At the beginning she withdrew in horror, as if I had
become a disgusting alien, but later she began t o warn me in
threatening ways of the dangers attached to strange men and
about their exclusiveand dirty interest in sex. M y mother could
barely stand my becoming a young woman. I n our only
MOTHERS
outings, to Mass on Sundays, she would be like a wild beast, WHO C O M M , T
watchinganyone approaching me. She was herself an attractive INCEST
 88 woman, but extremely stern and strict in her religious
upbringing. Nobody was allowed to visit us at home, and we
never went anywhere except on the occasion of religious
festivals when some relatives used to invite us to their homes.
On one of these occasions 1 met a nice-lookingyoung man who
was kind to me, and 1 fell for him - or perhaps for a way out. 1
married hini at sixteen and got pregnant.
M y mother never forgave me for leaving her alone; not even
the baby’s birth changed her mind. When my son was five my
husband was sudenly killed in an accident. M y mother came
back to me as i f 1 had never left her, but 1 told her that it would
be better if we kept apart. 1 soon realized that 1 didn’t want my
mother with me because 1 wanted my son for myself, alone
without any competition. 1 created an idyllic relationship with
my son to the point that 1 didn’t need any other man in my life.
We went together on holidays. 1 remember very vividly once
at the seaside when miniskirts were fashionable. This was a
turning point in my life. M y son was then fourteen. 1 went
dancing in the local hotel with some youngsters, and had quite
a lot to drink. On my return to our room 1 saw my son sobbing
between the sheets. 1 was worried and asked him why he was
upset. He said that he had watched me dancing and had felt
deserted and very jealous of the young men. When he made this
statement 1 experienced an immediate sense of inner peace and
great contentment; all previous sufferings and upheavals now
seemed futile. 1 had won: he was all mine. We were together for
ever, alone. It just seemed natural for me to get into bed with
him and to console him. But 1 wanted to show him my love in a
more natural way. 1 was high, elated and felt randy. 1 initiated
him in the art of making love. Over a period of time 1 taught
him step by step what to do and how to do it. I created the most
wonderful lover and both of us were in ecstasy. This has lasted
ail these years. Neither of us needed anyone else around. Our
world was perfect. He seemed to me to be a happy and relaxed
young man.
1 took ail sorts o f precautions to make it appear t o the world
that we had the normal relationshipof mother and son. All my
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
life has been invested in him; 1 have enough economic security
WHORE for the situation to last for ever. 1 never thought that he could
betray me. But after leaving high school he began to show s i p 89
of restlessness and self-assertion.First, he wanted to go abroad
to further his studies, but 1 could not let him go. To start with
it was easy for me to persuade him to stay, but he is still
unmoving in his decision to go away from me. M y only other
association is with my mother, whom I see every Sunday, and
even then 1 feel so brittle about him taking advantage of my
being away and seeing someone else. I take care of myself to
make myself look younger; 1 have always done so. Our days
and nights are so very rich.
At fifteen be began to write poetry which showed so much
passion and maturity that I felt afraid o f his teachersreading it
and somehow guessing what was going on. He used to recite it
to me, but lately he has refused to show it to me. 1 ’veexamined
his papers and discovered that his poetry is now full of desire
for revenge, sarcastic and bitter. He has even hatched a very
elaborate plot by which he can get rid of me. 1 don’t care if he
does. As I have told him, i f he leaves me I’ll take my life.
Anyway, life seems unnecessary without him.

It took me quite a while to regain some sort of neutrality, such

was the mixture of strong and confused feelings that this
woman’s account had aroused in me. I tried to figure out how
to respond to her intense pain, desolation, and helplessness. I
began to see her at the age of seven, soon after her father’s
sudden death, and to imagine how this little girl might have
felt overwhelmed by conflicting emotions, perhaps a t first
experiencing extreme shock and numbness, possibly replaced
later by elation at being the object of her mother’s total
attention. Her mother obviously went into a pathological
mourning in which denial and isolation were used extensively.
The little girl was never allowed to mourn her father openly,
for she did not want to upset mother. By then, she was so
enjoying being her mother’s only object of constant care that
she might have felt rather guilty about her father’s death. The
two of them created a closed circle which was broken when the
girl began to approach puberty, for it was then that her mother
MOTHERS
felt threatened in her close association with her daughter, who WHO COMM,T
in turn began to feel the suffocating quality of this relationship INCEST
 90 (which might even have had incestuous overtones). It is
possible that my patient began to harbour murderous designs
against her mother and considered that the only solution was to
flee from her in a manic heterosexual gesture through her
premature marriage.
She might have had sexual problems with her husband, and
felt resentful about being cut off from her mother and loaded
with the many responsibilities of her own motherhood. It was
then that she was faced with yet another unexpected death,
which left her in a parallel situation to that of her mother
during her childhood. However, this time she was in the
controlling position. Like her mother she was unable to work
through her bereavement, but resorted to the familiar, manic
response with her own child, of creating a perfect circle. Could
she escape the destiny of doing to her son whatever had been
done to herself? Could she allow herself to give him some sense
of individuation, to let him grow up and lead a life of his own?
Or would she use the situation in a more skilful way than her
mother had, giving the boy so much gratification that it would
be difficult, almost impossible even, for him to leave her? She
had two alternatives, or let us say she could see only two
options: to try to get back to her mother, or to secure her son as
her future partner. She didn’t need much time to decide upon
the latter course. I had to remind myself that this woman,
because of her own history and her lack of available resources
outside and inside herself, felt unable to see any other solution.
She was caught up; she felt she had no alternative. Was she a
perverse mother, because she used her son as her sexual partner?
I believe that she was a perverse sufferer. Having been a victim,
she had later become a victimizer, using her position of
dominance to sccure her son as her exclusive source of sexual
gratification.
I felt much compassion for this patient and for her
predicament in a three-generational process, and recalled an
insight of Shengold’s: ‘I have found supervisees to be, in
general, more aware of the countertransference tendency to
blame parents than the tendency to spare them. The therapist’s
MADONNA, need (despite intellectual acceptance) to deny when parental
WHORE destructiveness appears is as intense and as complex as the
similarly held need to deny the Oedipus complex’ (1979, 91
p. 554, author’s italics). But ever since I have been asking
myself how I would have reacted had I been a man. I have to
recognize that my initial confused reaction might have been
due to my own masculine component feeling outraged. But if I
had been a man would my reaction have been stronger? Would
I perhaps have identified with the son, full of rage because of
this woman’s outrageous behaviour?
This leads me to the countertransference phenomenon
encountered in the course of my daily professional work: how
our gender leads us to respond to our patients’ explicit
psychopathology. Patients who suffer from gender-dysphoria
problems often have strong feelings about, as they say, ‘the sex’
of the diagnostician or therapist. I have also found that
recorded accounts of the same patient differ according t o the
diagnostician’s gender. This difference of response is certainly
the outcome not only of patients’ transference, but also of our
own way of reacting t o and interpreting their predicaments.
Ganzarain and Buchele (1986) recount their experiences as
co-therapists with a group of adults having a history OE incest.
They provide us with courageous and illuminating comments
about their countertransference to these patients in which
many feelings are apparent, including disbelief, excited
curiosity, sexual fantasies, and desire to rescue. In their own
work they were able to talk to one another as female and male
therapist about how different interventions with patients had
made them feel in their own gender. They also point out that
there is virtually nothing in the psychoanalytical literature
dealing with this subject.
Needless to say, neither gender has the correct answer or is
better equipped than the other to deal with those involved in
incest, abusers or abused; but we have a duty to acknowledge
our own different responses when assessing or treating them.
This might also help us to understand society’s different
responses to the problems posed by our male and female
patients involved in sexual abuse.
I found very refreshing Shengold’s discussion of why
MOTHERS
mother-son incest happens much less frequently than between WHO COMM,T
father and daughter. He asks: ‘Is it because most psychiatrists INCEST
 92 are male and have a deep resistance to the uncovering or the
publication of the fulfilment of the male’s characteristic
forbidden oedipal wish?’ (1980, p. 462). He candidly admits
to his struggle in thinking about the problem, while writing
this paper to overcome his own resistance to the power of this
idea.
In the same paper, he describes his patient as a man who
came for treatment in his thirties because he was depressed and
unhappy. He had been subjected to an incestuous relationship
with his mother when he was a precccious adolescent. He was
the first child; his mother had had a strong wish for a girl, and
forced him to wear a girl’s costume and to look like a girl, but
to behave like a boy. She was obsessed with ministrations to his
body, then forgot about him until he became twelve, when she
began to be intensely curious in him and to behave intrusively
towards him. Eventually, they started an incestuous relation-
ship which lasted for a few weeks. This was characterized by
the mother seducing her son and achieving orgasms from the
encounters, while the son was unable to reach ejaculation. This
state of affairs was never mentioned or acknowledged; it ended
abruptly when the boy had his first ejaculation during sexual
intercourse with his mother. A t this point sheshrieked, became
violently disturbed, and rushed away. The incest was never to
be repeated or even mentioned. Shengold offers the following
explanation: ‘In retrospect 1 feel that my patient, like his
mother, and in identification with his mother, was unable to
face the implications of the possibility of impregnating her’
(1980, p. 471). He clearly sees the mother as the seducer and
describes how the son took much of the responsibility for the
incest and for the parental guilt, blaming himself more than his
mother. Shengold further says that ‘in mother-son incest the
mother is directly involved in the deed, and is central to the
fantasies of both son and mother’ (p. 470, my italics). So,
again, it is disappointing that he fails to recognize or to
speculate about the mother’s perverse psychopathology, even
though he accurately questions the usual diagnosis of such
mothers as . -
Dsychotics and refuses to label his patient’s mother
MOTHER,
MADONNA. such*
WHORE For my own part, I believe that this mother was exhibiting
from early on perverting attitudes towards her son. She appears 93
to me very much the mother of the future pervert described by
Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985a) who finds her pre-oedipal son
with his prepubescent penis her ideal partner. It seems clear to
me that it was not the son’s decision to stop the incest because
of fears of impregnating his mother (though such fears could
have been present), but rather that the mother stopped the
incest when her son was no longer ‘the ideal partner’ or, shall I
say, the part-object ideally designed for her perverse purposes.
As soon as the boy behaved like an adult and achieved
ejaculation, she no longer felt in control of the situation. She
was now, in her mind and body, with a man and therefore - in
her fantasies - at his mercy.
In the range of female perversions, where do the incest cases
f i t ? It seems that the incest offender attacks her offspring, but
simultaneously she is encircling, engulfing, and not letting her
victim go. Is it this quality of possessiveness that makes
..
Shengold ask ‘. is the sexualization of the craving for human
contact that can lead to incest and perversion a healthier turn
[for the child] than the arrest of emotional and sexual
development?’ (1980, p. 464). However, in my experience,
incest and perverting attitudes themselves lead to the arrest of
emotional and sexual development. Action and response are
not incompatible, but complementary. Victims of either incest
or perversion show crippling and lasting effects in their
emotional and sexual development; case after case bears this
out.
Sperling, in remarking upon the aetiology of fetishism in
children, says that ‘in the lives of these children there has been
real seduction and actual overstimulation of these component
instincts in the relationship with the parents, especially with
the mother’ (1963, p. 381, my italics).
In all cases of maternal incest described by Kramer (1980)
and Margolis (1980), the referrals for treatment had been made
because of the children’s behaviour. In other words, the
children became patients because of the parents’ increasing
worries about their child’s aggressive behaviour. (It is
MOTHERS
interesting how often maternal incest comes to light only when W H O COMM,T
the children begin to show open violence. Until fear enters in, INCEST
 94 secrecy is maintained because of the mother’s collusion.) This
strange situation becomes almost grotesque in the case described
by Margolis in which the mother of a twenty-seven-year-old
male was first seen by a psychiatrist because she complained
that he had sexually assaulted her. She also claimed that he had
threatened to kill her and her boyfriend with a shotgun. The
patient had had sexual intercourse with his mother for three
years before his arrest.
Although his mother admitted to only four acts o f intercourse,
the patient conceded to having relations with her at least
eighteen t o twenty times. Due to his shame at reporting these
details, it is doubtful that John inflated this record o f sexual
experience with his mother. It is more likely that the patient’s
mother attempted to minimize the true extent o f their sexual
activities. (p. 268)
Likewise, in the three cases reported by Kramer (1981) the
children were taken into psychiatric consultation because of
their parents’ alarm. In one case the child was brought to
analysis because the parents greatly feared the child’s
aggression; in the other two cases the children so dominated the
parents with their tyrannical behaviour that the parents’
tolerance of the status quo diminished or disappeared.
It looks as if in all cases reported by both authors the
aggression and violence appeared in the victims at a later stage.
Most professionals are familiar with the mechanism of
projective identification (that is, identification with the
aggressor) which emerges in these cases. The perpetrators of
seduction of children often have an early history of having been
seduced themselves. The pervasive, self-perpetuating quality of
perversion and its effects shows itself again and again. In
Margolis’s case this is painfully clear. In one of the cases that
Kramer cites, Abby, a five-year-old victim of her mother’s
sexual molestation, attempts to recreate with her dog the act of
sexual stimulation that her mother had inflicted on her (1980,
p. 332). This could be an instance in which a new perversion -
bestialism - was introduced in which the dog represented the
MADONNA, infantile and undermined parts of herself as seen by her internal
WHORE mother.
 I have similar experience of female patients who have 95
suffered from sexual perversions as a result of a perverse,
incestuous relationship with their mothers. Such is the case of
Miss E, who was sent to me for consultation because of her
compulsion to expose herself sexually to figures of authority,
particularly women. This had led her to be expelled from
everywhere - schools, training centres, jobs, counselling
groups, and even mental hospitals - such was the havoc,
puzzlement, and sense of powerlessness she created.
She was a plump, rather plain-looking woman of thirty-
four. When I first saw her she appeared to be eager to please,
but very scared. She gave me this impression despite the fact
that 1 had previously been warned of her ‘dangerousness’,
meaning her tendency to develop crushes on women in
authority and to make an absolute nuisance of herself to the
point of pestering previous doctors with letters and phonecalls,
and even unexpectedly showing up at their home addresses and
pursuing them with her exhibitionistic behaviour.
She told me that her compulsion to ‘flash’ occurred when she
became attached to someone whom she invested with idealized
‘maternal’qualities. She wanted to get closer to, be noticed by
and be taken care of by that particular person, but she also
wanted a shocked response from her ‘victim’. She was careful
always to wear the ‘appropriate’ gear when she was to meet
that person, usually only an overcoat over a little vest, so she
could respond readily to her urges. She knew this was wrong
and that she would be rejected, but could not stop herself.
She had had this urge since she was very small, but a t first
was able to contain it. At school she had a crush on one of her
female teachers but limited her actions to undressing in her
presence. This gave her much sexual pleasure. At the age of
seventeen, while being trained in an institution, she developed
a crush on the principal and for the first time succumbed to her
compulsion. Since then she had been unable to bear the tension
and had repeated the same action over and over again with
teachers, heads of institutions, doctors, bosses, and so on. Each
time this brought disaster. She was expelled from everywhere
MOTHERS
because of her ‘antisocial’ behaviour, even by psychiatrists and W H O COMM,T
psychotherapists who could not tolerate it. INCEST
 96 On one occasion a victim of hers, an older woman, got
furious and slapped her. My patient was surprised at her own
reaction, which was one of intense enjoyment and sexual
excitement. She then very quickly ‘learnt’ that what she
wanted most from these ‘mother-figures’ was to be either
masturbated or slapped on the bottom by them. The referral
letter stated that her actions seemed to be in response to
masochistic needs rather than being aimed at sexual relation-
ships. She had never had a close relationship, emotionally or
physically, with either sex. She had lived in institutions from
the age of eight as pupil, trainee, employee, or in-patient.
It was not difficult to believe her own account of being
masturbated by her mother from a very early age every time she
felt sad or upset or to make her go to sleep, and her account was
confirmed when her mother was interviewed. The mother had
masturbated not only this little girl, but also her other four
children. In the mother’s own words, ‘it was easier than to use a
dummy’. She said that at the time she felt depressed as she was
in an unhappy marriage to a man who used to get drunk and
beat her up constantly. She also admitted that these actions
with her children gave her an enormous sense of comfort and
elation. It was also the only way she could make herself go to
sleep. She showed no psychotic features.
My patient, like all perverse patients, had used splitting,
projective identification, and sexualization as a survival kit in
dealing with the outside world. She was employing manic
defences in an attempt to deal with her intense, chronic,
masked depression which resulted from a very deprived
childhood, in which she was made to feel a part or continuation
of her mother’s body, existingonly to provide her mother with
narcissistic and sexual gratification. She was literally ‘some-
thing’ located between her thighs that mother would touch,
caress, or rub: whenever the patient felt like crying, that was
the only way to pacify her. Life required little more of her than
her response to this repetitive, incessant and restless motion.
And in this she was not on her own, as all her siblings were
simultaneously living through the same experience. She later
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
learnt that her way of survival was communal living, where the
WHORE law lay with the principal and no independence or self-
assertion were permitted, while making as little trouble as 97
possible among her peer group. The next move in her strategy
was to develop a crush for the female principal who, like
mother, would then use her. She was giving herself as a
sacrificial victim in order to keep everybody together in
harmony.
Her hope for a shocked response in her victims had to do
with a hopeful outcome in which women in authority -
symbolic mothers - would not respond like her own mother,
using and exploiting her as a part-object, but still she had to
test them to the extreme. By pestering them through letters,
phone calls, and visits to their ‘private’ homes, she was in deep
projective identification with her own mother’s intrusiveness
into her own ‘private’ parts. She felt justified in so doing, since
this had been done to her. She had now become the aggressor;
she even saw herself as such by her own admission that what she
was doing was wrong, though she could not help doing it.
So, as usual, behind her perverse actions lay the hope of a
magic, hopeful outcome. She longed to escape from her
traumatic experiences as a child, yet her actions were imbued
with such perverse psychopathology, borrowed from her
mother, that she also sought total revenge. No emotional
relationships had ever populated her inner world.
It is interesting to note that, even though her exhibitionism
appeared superficially to be the equivalent of male ‘flashing’,
this is not so. It is well known that male exhibitionists have the
compulsion to ‘flash’ only at women - and women who are
unknown to them, while my patient would expose herself only
to other women she felt closely attached to. This is yet another
remarkable difference between the genders (see Chapter 2).
Another patient was sent to me for consultation because of a
wide range of problems, which included a feeling of extreme
disgust at the thought of being touched by anybody in any way.
The idea of sexual relationships was abhorrent to her; even
seeing other people touch each other was nauseating. She also
had suicidal impulses of a highly compulsive quality, which
often made her feel obliged to stay in bed. She had severe eating
MOTHERS
problems, alternating between fasting and binges which W H O C O M M , T
sometimes led to vomiting. While eating she sometimes I N C E S T
 98 experienced intrusive images, for example that the grapefruit
she was eating was her dead mother’s brains, or that she was
eating other parts of her mother, whereupon she would vomit
forth the dead flesh. She saw herself as exceptionally ugly and
fat (in fact she was extremely good-looking). Sometimes she
used to masturbate compulsively for hours, most often after
vomiting. She was deeply disgusted by her masturbation. She
was often too frightened to go out to face other people, and
consequently was unable to work regular hours.
She was the only child of a broken marriage, and was
brought up by her mother alone from a very early age. Her
mother was intrusive to the point of never leaving her by
herself. The patient talked of herself as a non-entity, ‘just a
part of my mother’, unable to make decisions. She hated her
legs because they were the same shape as her mother’s (or were
they mother’s?). She still remembered vividly how mother used
to get into bed with her at night, cried a lot and made her
promise never to leave her alone. If she promised, mother
would ‘reward’ her by touching her all over, especially around
her thighs, which would make her feel very excited. This
happened nearly every night.
Kramer states that incestuous mothers have never allowed
their children any sense of individuation. (Perhaps one of the
reasons why the‘Jocasta complex’ was never identified as such
is that she gave up Oedipus from the moment of his birth.)
Kramer considers ‘maternal incest to be more than an
inadvertence: it is the mother’s repetitive, deliberate actions,
aimed at stimulating thechild togratify herself. Thechild may
be male or female’ (1980, p. 328). I suggest that when Kramer
defines her concept of ‘maternal incest’, she is actually
describing a type of female perversion.
In the above descriptions we can see some of the conditions
which characterize a perversion, such as repetition and the
compulsive element in sexual gratification through the
reduction of object to part-object. Another characteristic is
dehumanization, as described in the following passage from
the same paper: ‘I speculate that they [incestuous mothers]
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
could not enjoy their own genitals for sexual pleasure, but
WHORE masturbated the genitals of their incompletely separated and
individuated children as dehumanized extensions of the 99
maternal body’ (p. 330). Kramer also suggests that these
mothers were homosexuals. This quality of dehumanization
was vividly described by my patient who identified her child
with various parts of her own body (see above, pp. 72-3).
Kramcr concentrates on maternal incest, and poses a similar
question to mine about female perversions, especially in
connection with motherhood: ‘Why are authors so loath to
label sexual stimulation by the mother as incest, and relatively
ready to acknowledge paternal incest?’ She offers as a possible
explanation the idea that ‘the resistance to the concept of
“maternal incest” is related to the deep-seated, almost uni-
versal split between mother as madonna and whore’ (p. 328).
My clinical observations confirm this bias. On countless
occasions agencies and establishments have shown signs of
alarm, sometimes almost panic, when referring male patients
to me as sexual abusers. This contrasts strongly with the
difficulty my female patients have often had in being taken
seriously by some agencies. The few women who eventually
refer themselves to me for treatment do so because they are
hoping to find someone prepared to make the effort to
understand their feelings of being too close emotionally and
physically to their child, whether boy or girl. I have noticed
that mothers are more ready to report incestuous feelings and
actions towards their daughters than towards their sons. In the
latter case one does not get to know until much later, and then
usually from the son’s history.
In this context I remember a patient of mine who was
originally referred from a child guidance clinic where her
daughter, aged six, had been sent because of behavioural
problems mainly related to school refusal. Following diagnostic
assessment there, it was decided that the girl’s problems were
the result of a very disturbed and difficult family situation,
particularly her relationship with her mother.
My patient was described as an inadequate mother who
showed intense exhibitionistic behaviour, such as exaggerating
her physical demonstrations of affection towards her daughter.
However, when she had decided some time before to seek a MOTHERS WHO COMM,T
consultation for herself because of these preoccupations, she I N C E S T
 100 was told not to worry; and that ‘it is just natural for a mother
to feel very fond of her children, especially if she is a single
parent’. She had identified soclosely with her daughter that she
had come to act likea little girl herself, expecting her daughter
to take complete care of her needs, including being cuddled and
bathed by her. The little girl defended herself against these
excessive demands by a most primitive and infantile acting-out.
Mother and daughter had created a symbiotic relationship
to the extent of sharing the same bed. The mother had initiated
the girl in active sexual incest which progressed from having her
breasts caressed to her masturbating her daughter’s genitals.
The mother had not allowed the girl to attend school because
she could not bear the idea of her being away. Nor would she
let her have her own friends, or life, or allow her to grow up.
My patient explained:

I want to be the mother I never had, someone who could be all

the time with me and whose attentions could be entirely
devoted to me as her daughter instead of being like my mother,
hating me so much for being a girl and so involved with the
other children and her husband that she never had a minute for
me alone. She never forgave me, either, that I was born a girl,
being the first child. She had so much longed for a boy. I was
always the victim of humiliation, and it became much worse
when all the other children, five, were born. They were all girls.
Then my mother turned to me with even more hatred than ever.
(This patient was born into a culture in which women were
considered as social inferiors (much more overtly than in the
UK) and had very little opportunity to make a life of their
own.] As soon as 1 could I emigrated to this country with the
purpose o f making my own life as a ‘woman’.

Thereafter my patient became a prostitute, a profession she felt

offered her the opportunity of being valued for her female
body, whereas previously she had felt degraded because of it.
According to her, she felt a kick of elation not only that her
body was desired by men, but also that they were ready to pay
MOTHER,
MADONNA, for it. Also, she was able to bring another dimension to her job
WHORE through her intelligence, her wonderful command of language,
and her skilled powers of communication, all of which had 101
long been so overlooked. She became such an expert storyteller
that sometimes she could pocket her clients’ money without it
ever occurring to them to touch her body, so mesmerized were
they by her erotic tales. She too drew some comfort from her
stories, as they temporarily relieved her intense feelings of
depression and low self-esteem. But this proved not to be
enough. Her hidden, suppressed despair and despondency
began to emerge in a way which she felt unable to contain.
There was a raging, sad little girl within her, who demanded
furiously to be taken care of.
Eventually she decided to have a child, through which her
own expectations of childhood would be fulfilled. The man
chosen for this project had merely to impregnate her. She had
even forgotten who he was; perhaps, though, she felt happier at
not acknowledging him, because she was scared to have as
father to her child someone like her own father, who not only
had totally ignored her after her birth, but later hindered her
development and denied her the academic achievement of
which she was clearly capable. She had only contempt towards
her mother, primarily because she had felt so rejected by her for
being a girl. How could she come to terms with having a body
like her mother’s and leadinga life like her mother’s? After all,
as a woman, marrying and having children would be to follow
in her mother’s footsteps. How could she overcome those
feelings of self-deprecation which she had been so used to for so
long? She had experienced her mother as an object of her
father’s contempt for producing only girls, a sex so much
underrated by both of them.
My patient was a highly intelligent and sensitive woman
who had never felt any encouragement as a human being, let
alone as a girl. She had never trusted anyone and had always
kept aloof. Her clients had become ‘her only friends’; all men,
they were never really friends. This she knew. Now her search
was for someone she could trust and who would be completely
dependent on her. Who knows what might have happened had
her child been a boy and not a girl? But she had a girl. In her
MOTHERS
daughter she saw a reflection of herself and her own needs. She W H O COMM,T
viewed herself, to start with, as an excellent mother. She spent INCEST
 102 all her time with her daughter, as her working hours never
interfered with her functioning as a mother: she would only
work at night, when the child was asleep. So it was only when
the daughter began to have emotional problems that the
mother started a long and laborious questioning of her own
motivations. She had so much wanted her daughter to have
everything that she had never had herself, and had been so
determined to make enough money for the girl not to suffer the
same deprivations, that she became overwhelmed by the un-
expected conflicts she now experienced. This was when
treatment began.
The institution, if it can be called that, of substitute
motherhood throws some light on why we have been so alert to
the dangers of paternal incest while being so blind to those of
maternal incest. ‘Incest’ with a substitute mother is quite
frequent in the past where a woman fulfilling a domestic task
(a maid or a cook perhaps) initiates the young boy of the house
into sexual life as he reaches puberty. The boy responds
gratefully, and is later able to exercise his newly acquired
techniques confidently with his coevals. This ‘benevolent’ act
is very different from a substitute father initiating a young girl
into sex. In the former case society turns a blind eye; in the
latter it shouts its outrage. Is this because of the myth that
mothers are madonnas and therefore untouched by sexuality
except for procreation? The participation of the maid (cleaner)
or cook (provider of earthly food) is appropriate in both
concrete and symbolic terms. She is the one who can indulge in
acts of sexuality which are seen as dirty and shameful by those
particular societies but domestically and socially acceptable,
due to her ‘lesser’position. She not only initiates the young boy
into sexuality, but is also seen as securing the mother’s ‘holy’
position.
However, as we observe again and again, the real mother’s
incestuous behaviour towards her son usually causes him to
develop a polymorphous-perverse sexual psychopathology.
Rinsley described the treatment of a patient of his who used to
visit prostitutes, and was sexually potent only if he felt
MADONNA,
‘nothing’ for the woman; as soon as any loving feelings
WHORE appeared he became impotent. According to Rinsley, ‘the
impotency served the interrelated functions of preserving the 103
symbiotic tie to the borderline mother and warding off her
“real” rivals’ (1978, p. 52). The patient had an early history of
being genitally masturbated by his mother at bathtime since
the age of six, just before startingprimary school, a manoeuvre
obviously designed to continue her seduction and prolong his
dependency on and symbiosis with her. I believe this mother
was perverse and not borderline. We shall become familiar
with similar problems in Chapter 6, in which the ‘split object-
relations unit’s0 termed by Masterson and Rinsley (1975)is at
work in both parties, or rather in the self and the object.
Whal(l960) reports two cases of mother-son incest which
led the sons to become schizophrenic. According to Whal, in
the Oedipus complex ‘unconscious fear is not just of the
powerful, retributive, castrating father, but also of the all-
encompassing mother who gives not only the breast but takes,
as the female spider takes - leaving the hollow husk of her
mate as a memento of their ecstasy’ (p. 192). 1 find this
statement useful, though it seems more of a denigration of
women than an attempt to understand their predicaments.
Whal then adds that: ‘Incestuous problems in schizophrenic
patients play a much larger role in the development of
schizophrenia than had hitherto been supposed’ (p. 192).
Society’s different responses to maternal and paternal incest
may be related to inaccessible processes operating in the
unconscious mind of both men and women, starting from early
life. From the moment of conception women go through
obvious physical changes. Both men and women experience a
strange world of conscious and unconscious fantasies about
conception, gestation, and childbirth. Pregnancy not only
transforms the woman’s body, but also creates expectations
about herself, her baby, her object-relationships, and her
personal circumstances; all this, except for the bodily changes,
takes place in the man’s mind too. We could therefore say that
the baby exists before it is born.
The main concern has been with the baby’s fantasies, its
perceptions of the world, and its ability to create images of its
MOTHERS
own. Parents’ perceptions of their baby and the many WHOCOMM,T
implications the birth has for their world are being revised, INCEST
 104 especially in view of the incidence of incest from parents who
were themselves incest victims. In fact, their own childhood,
cspecially how their own parents treated them, will determine
their attitude to the newborn. In studying them we can learn
more about the psychogenic factors in perversion, and gain
some insight into the marked differences in response to
paternal and maternal incest.
The mother is so obviously close t o the baby, biologically
and emotionally, that no ambivalence or hostility towards it is
expected from her. The father is considered to be much more
distant from the infant, and is thus seen as exploiting his own
power when taking advantage of his child’s body and mind.
Whereas society acknowledges paternal incest as some males’
way of dealing with their insecurities, it tends to overlook their
deep motivations. These insecurities are often rooted in infancy
and are linked with the man’s feelings about motherhood
arising from his relationship with his own mother, feelings
which are later reactivated by his partner’s pregnancy.
Why, then, is it so hard to believe in maternal incest, or to
regard it as being as serious as male incest? Even in group
therapy, which offers a microcosm of society where this
phenomenon is mirrored, men and women alike tend to express
not only concern but also shock when confronted with male
offenders. They seem to identify with the little girls, and view
the father’s actions with revulsion and repulsion. In fact this
can prove therapeutic since male offenders are shamed as they
would be in society (though as accepted group members, these
reactions are less punitive). After a period of intolerance, group
members often show concern and care.
By contrast, the female ‘offender’ finds that other patients
minimize her problems. Nobody wants to hear about her
predicament, and nobody takes her very seriously. This
reaction proves very anti-therapeutic, and if the therapist is not
ready to interpret this total denial for them, these women will
never gain any insight into their problems, let alone be able to
change themselves.
The aetiology of perversion, I believe, is intertwined with
MADONNA,
the politics of power; one aspect is psychobiological and the
WHORE other sodial. I t is possible that this difference of response is
caused by society’s inability to see woman as a complete human 105
being. The difficulties in acknowledging that mothers can
abuse their power could be the result of total denial, as a way of
dealing with this unpalatable truth. Woman is seen as a part-
object, a mere receptacle for man’s perverse designs. The
apparent idealization with which society hides female perverse
attitudes (‘Women don’t do those awful things’) actually
contains a denigrating counterpart. Until recently a lack of
legislation on female perversion reflected society’s total denial
of it.
The study of power politics might throw new light on the
understanding of motherhood functions. Perhaps if women
had a longer tradition of belonging to the power structure their
attitudes to men and children would not be governed, as they
are now, by a weakness which they strive to turn into
possessiveness and control.

MOTHERS
W H O COMMIT
INCEST
 6 THES Y M B O L I C MOTHER
A S A WHORE:
w h o s e C o n t r o l is i t A n y w a y ?

EM A L E PROSTITUTION involves both sexes, and the

F men as well as the women have problems that are not

always obvious. In more ways than one double standards
are at work. This is not surprising since a contract based on
money is entered into, and the two parties are in some ways
accomplices, in other ways opponents. They have different
expectations of what is ostensibly just a physical act, but in
reality has many symbolic associations. Cultural, sociological
and economic factors are interlinked with deep emotional
motivations.
It is impossible to comprehend the phenomenon of prosti-
tution by looking just at the prostitute herself, or just at the
man who pursues her. A dynamic process is at work, an
interaction between two people each with their own history,
their own present circumstances, and their separate need to
establish some equilibrium which they hope will be obtained
through this contract. Outsiders or critics may view prosti-
tution as precarious, wrong or immoral, but obviously both
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
prostitute and client see it as a way of fulfilling a need, and
WHORE both hope for a successful and complementary outcome.
 According to my clinical findings, the fact that prostitute 107
and client are anonymous, strangers with no emotional
commitment to each other, appears to be the most important
aspect of prostitution. This strangeness can provide each
partner both with unlimited fantasy material (for example of
belonging to the other gender) and with the ‘safety’ inherent in
the avoidance of intimate relationships, emotional or other-
wise, Without such implications the differentiation of the
sexes and the achievement of a true object-relationship is
impossible. But let us not forget that a financial transaction is
taking place, and that it will affect the fantasies of each party.
We are familiar with the double standards the law Seems to
apply. These can work both ways for either sex leaving both in
an unequal position. Whereas colleagues have been over-
concerned with the intrapsychic functions of men who go to
prostitutes, this has rarely been acknowledged by the legal
system. Legal statistics reveal an enormous difference between
the number of women who appear in court on charges of
prostitution and the near absence of their male counterparts,
the kerb-crawlers, who are almost never charged. Thus, despite
the lip-service which has been paid to the intrapsychic
dysfunction in men who are not only ready to pay for
prostitutes’ services but will roam thestreets to look for them,
‘legal help’ (detection) is not made available to them. In other
words, although men are ‘let off the hook’, they are not being
understood by the law. If it is assumed that the legal system
should operate for both the safety of the citizens and the
welfare of the offenders, this leaves men in an unequal
position. Unlike women, the men can offer no sociocconomical
excuse: they are evidently able to afford the services of
prostitutes, while some women who practise prostitution, say,
do so for financial reasons.
Some researchers have claimed that women who engage in
prostitution do so only for socio-economical reasons, over-
looking their emotional problems; others have claimed the
opposite - that the only problems these women have are
emotional o n e . My main concern, however, is with the double
T H E SYMBOLIC
standard which has allowed us to believe that while women MOTHER AS
have gone into prostitution as a means of overcoming A WHORE
 108 emotional problems, the same is not true for men. In fact, my
clinical experience suggests that in many ways both the women
and their clients are reacting, though in different ways, to their
early experiences with their mothers. Before examining the
evidence for this contention, let us first consider a few
explanations for prostitution put forward by authors from
different schools of thought.
Why is it that prostitution is a much more frequent
phenomenon in women than in men? As Crunberger reminds
us, ‘Freud insisted that the narcissistic woman wants “to be
loved”. To be loved means primarily to be chosen, and above
all to be loved for herself. Without doubt there are many
reasons for this, including the need to free herself from conflict-
producing guilt, on which Chasseguet-Smirgel has remarked
.. .but this is only one aspect of female narcissism.’ Grunberger
goes further, saying: ‘We must try to understand why women
seek narcissistic gratification above all else, even to the
detriment of their strong sexual needs, and why they offer
themselves sexually in order to be loved; whereas men tend to
seek sexual gratification primarily (men love in order to be
satisfied)’ (1985, p. 70).
Kinsey et al. offer the simplistic explanation that ‘Men go to
prostitutes because they can pay for the sexual relations and
forget other responsibilities, whereas coitus with other girls
may involve them socially and legally beyond anything which
they care to undertake’ (1948, p. 607).
Krout Tabin goes further: ‘We can see, however, that
additionally responsibility for sex can be equated with ties to
the love-object and that to a man who has not solidified his
ego-core such closeness threatens engulfment’ (1985, p. 92).
She describes clearly the male pattern and the unconscious
motivations of men who seek prostitutes, but she fails to do the
same for women who engage in prostitution.
Coria has pointed out ‘that in our culture money is clearly
sexualized and associated with manhood and virility’.
According to her, ‘prostitution is considered synonymous with
a woman selling her sexuality, but it curiously omits the man
MADONNA,
who buys it’ (1986, p. 23, my translation).
WHORE Simone de Beauvoir says that ‘In prostitution, male desire
can be satisfied on no matter what body, such desire being 109
specific but not individualized as to object’ (1972, p. 569). She
would seem to be describing a part-object relationship which is
characteristic of perverse relations, but she fails to make the
same observation for women.
According to Gibbens (1957), women who engage in
prostitution have a wish to turn men into swine as a revenge for
a traumatic childhood. He has named this the ‘Circe complex’
(P. 7).
Glover (1943) says that it is impossible tostudy the problem
of prostitution in isolation since, like all sexual problems, it is
two-sided and only part of the wider role of sexuality in human
affairs: He adds that the sexual life of both prostitute and
client contains a marked component of sadism, either manifest
or latent, whose injurious consequences indicate an unconscious
masochistic component in which mutual depreciation is the
rule.
Rolph (1955) develops Glover’s comprehensive analysis of
female prostitution when he argues that the desire to debase the
sexual partner is not exclusive to women. He maintains that
the male client has a need to debase the woman or mother-
figure, and that the prostitute serves this purpose. Consequently
a symbiotic relationship is created in which the prostitute’s and
the client’s pathological needs are each satisfied.
It is my suggestion that at times both men and women
engaged in prostitution unconsciously re-enact an early
mother-boy relationship in which both are concerned with the
symbolism of bodily ministrations, more precisely with his
toilet-training. There is a general assumption that the services
provided by a prostitute are exclusively sexual, but this is not
so, as appears from the accounts of many women who have
engaged in prostitution, and also of men who pay for these
servicesrNot infrequently a ‘supportive’ or ‘reassuring’ meeting
occurs with very littleor no physical contact. However, money
is always involved. A clear contract is made: the woman states
the price which the man has to pay for the ‘goods’ to be
produced. She has the upper hand in these transactions, which
T H E SYMBOLIC
are symbolically associated with anality, the control of the MOTHER A S
sphincter, and therefore with the flow of his emotionality. A WHORE
 110 Krout Tabin has some illuminating comments t o make
about the whore/madonna complex when she describes a two-
year-old boy as feeling in danger from his sexual urges towards
his mother, and pushes them away, so splitting the mother into
two halves. One half offers support but not sexuality, while to
the other half he can react sexually without beingpushed. Both
halves afford him the illusion of being close, but not too close.
This split in adulthood can express itself in sexual impotence
involving the ‘part-object’ use of the penis. As Krout Tabin
observes, ‘the man’s penis seems independent of his will’
(1985, p. 92).
Many people may be surprised at the sense of bewilderment
and despair felt by some men who frequent prostitutes. It can
reach such a pitch that they seek psychiatric help. Let us look at
some of these men’s problems.
Mr R, an attractive, intelligent, thirty-eight-year-old
married man, a successful professional in the arts, came to see
me because of his compulsive need to visit prostitutes. The
better his marriage went, the worse this had become. This had
brought him much unhappiness since, hesaid, he loved his wife
very much and had a most satisfactory sexual relationship with
her. Therefore he was unable to understand this ‘bizarre
obsession’. He felt full of shame and was puzzled by it,
particularly since he had been consistently unable to perform
sexually with prostitutes. Even though ‘it may sound
irrational’, he felt the reason for this had to d o with his ability
to have ‘good sex’ with his wife. H e saw the latter as directly
linked to his compulsion to visit prostitutes.
During the course of psychotherapy his enormous sense of
insecurity emerged clearly, as well as his tremendous fear of
being left alone and his inability to trust anyone. For a long
time he had a strong feeling that I would abruptly stop
treatment because he was not worthy of it, and he feared/hoped
to be humiliated by me in all sorts of ways. H e was trying to
behave like the perfect child, but was reluctant to talk about his
problems. In the transferential interpretations he tried very
hard to struggle against accepting that, superficially, his
MADONNA,
motivation for treatment had to do with replacing ‘acting-in’
WHORE for ‘acting-out’. In other words, he had secretly hoped that by
becoming my patient and paying for my professional services, 111
this would magically ‘cure’ him of his need to pay prostitutes
for their services. Thus his psychotherapy would replace his
perversion.
Whereas at the start I assumed, in transferential terms, that
his fears belonged to an early oral stage in which he might have
felt neglected or under a threat of separation from his mother, I
soon became aware that his fears belonged to the later anal
stage and his relationship to his mother during his toilet-
training. The evidence emerged clearly enough. H e spoke of his
‘messing around’, which he felt I would be very critical of, for
he ‘knew’ that the ‘goods’ he was supposed to deliver to me,
were in fact being delivered elsewhere. All the ‘dirty, smelly
stuff’ had to be dealt with by the prostitutes. I had become the
tyrannical mother who expected him to be clean at all times
and to ‘obey my commands’. It was not unusual for him in this
period of his therapy to visit a prostitute either on the way to
his sessions or on the way back. He then would arrive full of
shame to ‘confess’ to me, again in the hopddread of being
rejected and so being able to continue this painful but familiar
pattern. A t other times, in complaining of his wife’s inability
to please him with hissexual fantasies, hesaw me as his sadistic
father telling him how small and inadequate he was in dealing
with his mother’s ‘moods’.
Later on, though, he became painfully aware of his deeply
ingrained hatred towards his mother. Persistently, from his
earliest days, he had felt emotionally wounded by her and also
used by her in her constant rows with his father, so much so
that he did not know who he really was. He was unable to
visualize himself as a father, such was his fear of becoming like
his own father and of the prospective child becoming like
himself. He was so vulnerable to and dependent on his mother,
and so afraid of her power to abuse him, that his hatred led to
visits to prostitutes. He divided women into two sorts:
madonna and whore. As a matter of fact, the ‘irrational
reasons’ mentioned in his first interview were quite valid. He
was protecting his marriage and indeed his wife from his
T H E SYMBOLIC
fantasied sadistic attacks on his mother, and now on me. This MOTHER A S
was more acceptable to him than the fearful risk of trusting in A WHORE
 112 just one person and failing to come up to that person’s
expectations. Frequenting prostitutes was his only way to
protect himself from all those inner demands and the conse-
quent psychological injuries. In his own words, ‘to experience
the joy of love one must be vulnerable and able to trust; I am
too childish and too selfish for that’.
Another patient, a single man of twenty-eight, came for
treatment because of his inability to establish a satisfactory
relationship with a woman. He looked for perfection. Nobody
‘is good enough for me’, was his statement. He was a successful
businessman who couldn’t believe in his ‘good luck’; never-
theless he felt unable to compete with his father, who had
worked his way up from nothing. This constantly made him
feel inadequate and useless. He was an only child, and was
cautious in talking about his mother, whom he described as a
most beautiful woman. After some time in treatment he was
able to talk - albeit reluctantly - about his search for
prostitutes.
This patient was handsome, well spoken, and had some
superficial charm, but underneath it all he was extremely
domineering and unbending and, despite his claims of being
compassionate and considerate, he could at times become
sadistic in his relentless search for perfection and cleanliness.
This became obvious during therapy, when he would comment
on any changes in either my consulting room or my person. He
would suddenly switch for no apparent reason from absolute
idealization to complete denigration. Whenever he got
emotionally close to me, he would see me as an attractive
woman and fantasize about me in sexual terms. This would
suddenly change into severe vilification conducted in a pitiless,
determined and obstinate manner. At the beginning, he said, he
had found me ugly and repulsive, All this material was treated
in the transference and he would get more and more cross with
me.
I t was obvious that the patient was trying to destroy my
therapeutic skills during an intense period of negative
therapeutic reaction by making highly provocative statements.
MADONNA,
Eventuaily he succeeded, by making hostile remarks about my
WHORE standards of hygiene, highly marked with anality and mostly
related to smells. I was supposed to ‘stink’, to have bad breath, 113
to have terrible body odour. The remarks were extended to the
condition of my consulting room: ‘it’s tarty’, ‘the heater is
leaking’, or perhaps ‘it has to do with your farting in the room’.
His stubbornness had no equal. He had by now begun to win
his battle, by making me feel furious and impotent in my anger.
Any attempt a t my interpreting his projective identification
and his own internal bad objects thrown at me was met with
derision and laughter. I realized these episodes amounted to a
re-enactment of his own toilet-training and the bitter fight
during that period of his life with his mother. Moreover, 1saw
that he had succeeded in making me feel just as he must have
felt as a small child confronted by his mother about his lack of
cleanliness. (I had reacted in ‘complementary identification’,
in Kernberg’s terminology (1980, p. 212). I found Kernberg’s
paper on technique extremely revealing and most helpful in
working through my countertransference with such patients.)
When he heard this interpretation, my patient’s mood
changed from derision to intense despair. He talked of his
mother having had fourteen miscarriages before his own birth.
He produced fantasies associated with his belief that his
mother had been a practising prostitute before her marriage to
his father. His associations with my consulting room and
myself had to d o with very primitive fantasies about his
mother’s reproductive organs, how inadequate and dirty they
had been that they had produced so many deaths before his own
birth. By now he felt deeply contaminated, and it was from his
own body that all this poison emanated because he felt it was
uncontainable. His initial statement, ‘Nothing or nobody is
good enough for me’, was a projection of his own worth-
lessness, and his search for prostitutes reflected a secret
unconscious wish to be in fusion with his mother, whom he
both hated and loved. To be reborn was felt by him to be his
only solution.
Krout Tabin describes a two-year-old boy’s behaviour as his
own way of defining the ‘bad’ self, as opposed to being
engulfed by the ‘good’ mother. She adds: ‘The value of
THE SYMBOLIC
negativism to prove separateness extends to express frustration MOTHER AS
and anger in his ambivalent wish for closeness to his mother. A WHORE
 114 Sexuality thus becomes confused with terror and anger and, at
the extreme of negativism, the inflicting of pain and taking
complete control over the other. To control seems the opposite
of engulfment’ (1985, p. 92). I find this description comparable
to what occurs in prostitution, not only in the man who is
pursuing prostitutes but also in the symbolism of the trans-
action itself. My patient mentioned above was behaving like a
toddler, defying me to enter a situation of power, and hoping
to leave me impotent and full of rage, feeling utterly useless in
my therapeutic aims. However, I was eventually able to
understand his predicament and thus regained my own
therapeutic skills.
I have often wondered whether some women, in becoming
mothers of toddlers, are more demanding or more instrusive
with their sons’ than with their daughters’ toilet-training, since
some of the character traits often associated with this stage of
development, such as stubbornness, defiance, and competitive-
ness, appear more frequently in men than in women. Is it
possible that the position of control over the controlling
orifices and waste products of young children of the opposite
gender could generate the curiosity and excitement responsible
for this different attitude and its subsequent outcome? Or
could it be that girls are able to complete their toilet-training
more quickly in view of the different development of the
libido?
In prostitution both parties are seeking control, but whose
control is it anyway? To start with, there is the false
assumption that the encounter is necessarily a sexual-genital
one. I believe that both parties are involved in somecompromise
whereby the sexual mother is being taken over by the strict
mother, provider of bodily ministrations. The woman is
clearly in charge of the initial contract and, in some cases, of
the outcome too. However, the man shares the same
expectation. In his view, since he pays he is in charge, and he
knows exactly what the outcome will be. He pays for the
illusion that he won’t be taken over by an all-invading mother,
and therefore he feels safe.
MADONNA,
The man is now reduced to thestateof ‘a good boy’ who has
WHORE delivered the ‘goods’, money (faeces), to an ‘anal’ mother in
order to satisfy and gratify her whimsical needs. He wants to 115
believe that he is now ready for sexual gratification, but
actually he behaves as if defying his mother in.toilet-training.
Glover (1943) talks of prostitution as a debased form of love,
and reminds us that unconsciously money is equated with the
excretory products of the body, which children regard as
precious possessions. He also acknowledges that

the man who has compulsive interest in prostitutes is still

fixated to his old profane love and seeks, without knowing it,
to gratify in adult life the tabooed &sires of infancy. For her
part the prostitute has similar unconscious aims, but their
scope is more ambitious. The client, the ‘strange man’ who
pays for her favours, is the dcteriorated image o f her father; at
the same time, she registers her violently jealous dis&proval of
her mother’s marriage by, as it were, debasing her own
feminine currency. (p. 5)

The fact that the woman is trading her body for ‘filthy lucre is
in fact one more proof that prostitution is a primitive and
regressive manifestation’ (p. 7). It looks to me as if Glover is
close to indicating that the man, in pursuing prostitutes, is
looking for a mother he desired as a forbidden sexual object.
But, unable to obtain this sexual gratification, he has had to
content himself with a substitute maternal denigrated figure
who belongs to a regressed anal libidinal phase.
Furthermore, a process of projective identification takes
place within both parties’ minds in an attempt to resolve this
primitive splitting. The prostitute now becomes in fantasy a
mother with a young child - her client - submissive under
her control; simultaneously she is also a whore who is supposed
to provide that ‘youngster’ with sexual gratification. This is
made possible by a process of depersonalization, and by a
mutual and reciprocal splitting and the denial of emotions
which occurs as a result. The process also involves a generational
confusjon, as envisaged by Chasscguet-Smirgel (198Sa) when
she talks of the anal universe in perversion where all differences
T H E SYMBOLIC
are abolished, differences about sexes and about generations. In MOTHER AS
prostitution the woman at times becomes a mother and the A WHORE
 116 man a child. At other times the client becomes ‘the dirty old
man’, with connotations of dirt associated with money, faeces
corresponding to a pre-oedipal stage. At other times, he is the
‘sugar daddy’, easily associated with orality, sugar and milk; in
other words, a mother who is able t o feed the wornadbaby t o
satisfy any whimsical needs she might have. As Sayers (1986)
has reminded us, ‘Irrespective of its sex, the child seeks to
repeat not only the active but also the passive aspects of the
anal as well as oral pleasures it derives from, or “produced” in
it by, its interactions with those who first look after the
physical needs associated with these pleasures.’ She adds that,
‘despite the cultural associations of scoptophilia with mascul-
inity. . .girls also seek to repeat the voyeuristic pleasure, as they
experience it, of the one who supervises the toilet. Like boys
they too contrive to watch others at their toilet’ (pp. 105-6).
In any case, a pre-oedipal perverse dyadic process (mother,
child) is at work, and the associated degree of risk demands a
process of triangulation which is offered by a strict and
punitive superego: the law - a symbolic father who is called
upon to perform his duties. He is expected to extricate both
parties from a perverse, unhealthy association and to create
some sense of order. In other words, prostitute and client are
re-enacting an ‘ideal’, illusory, and collusive situation in which
the symbolic mother-baby unit tries to get away without the
husband/father, but simultaneously they are both knowingly
challenging the law/husband/father with a possible prose-
cution. But the father colludes with his own gender in the
application of the law: the woman ischarged, but the man and
his emotional predicaments are dismissed.
If we attempt t o examine what goes on in the woman’s mind
and body while she is with her client, we soon find that it
cannot be explained by just one pattern. In fact the process,
both consciously and unconsciously, is extremely complicated.
My contention is that prostitute and client become partners in
minds and bodies in a vengeful and denigrating action against
mother. This intimate, anonymous complicity provides both
with some gratification and reassurance. Each partner shares
MADONNA, the same split view of woman in the whore/madonna
WHORE complex. The woman leaves all emotions aside when she works
as a prostitute, and is able, most of the time, t o operate with 117
skill and in complete detachment. The same woman, though,
can react with much emotion, tenderness, and care in her
relationships outside her work. There, unfortunately, she tends
to fall into sadomasochistic relationships in which she is
exploited and frequently beaten up by her partner. I think that
her tendency to masochism is also represented in man in his
relationships with his significant Others when unable to
perform sexually. His impotence works both ways: it is an
expression of his sadistic needs against his loved ones, but it
also puts him in a position where he can easily be humiliated
and belittled.
Sometimes prostitution exists only in fantasy; at other times
it is real, but even then sexual intercourse does not necessarily
take place. For some men the main, unconscious motivation
for the visit is to be mesmerized into a blissful state in which
they feel safe.
Thus 1 maintain that the problems of prostitution are not
exclusively female ones, though they affect women’s internal
and external worlds more frequently. Perhaps it would be more
accurate to speak in the plural, of ‘prostitutions’, since a
many-levelled process is at work: some women fantasize and
daydream about many aspects of becoming a prostitute, and
others act upon the fantasies and make a living out of it.
The main characteristics in women who are practising
prostitutes might superficially appear to be hostility and
contempt towards men, but their self-neglect and the risks to
which they expose their bodies are undeniable. These risks are
not exclusively physical; they relate also to fantasies involving
the mental representations of their bodies.
Such fantasies operate in both concrete and symbolic ways,
and have features corresponding to the women’s intense
depression and self-denigration. Their self-esteem is very low,
and in order to get out of this ‘low’ they start to solicit. When
men appear and are ready to pay for their services they feel
enormously elated. These women now feel wanted in a direct
way. They find this abominable, but simultaneously they feel
THE SYMBOLIC
that their bodies are the only valuable goods they possess. It is MOTHER A S
unfortunate that in thinking so they are not alone. A WHORE
 118 Soliciting, then, is used as a ‘regulator of self-esteem’ as
described by 1. Rosen for perversions in general when he says:
‘The quality of self-experiences in perversion may vary
enormously and exist contradictorily so that a sense of
inferiority (resulting from a depleted self) may supplement
notions of omnipotence’ (1979b, p. 67).
I have heard statements such as this coming from a woman
who was due to appear in court for soliciting:

1 feel rotten, but what else could 1 do? 1 came from the North
where nobody ever wanted me, they had been expecting a boy.
So 1 came to London and began t o pick up men in the streets.
1 ’ve appeared several times in court for the same reason. Men
are always so nice, they treat me like a normal human being.
Every time 1 feel depressed, 1 go and 1 feel much better i f a man
accepts me. 1 charge very little but 1 feel so much more of a
woman.

A woman consulted me for depression, suicidal feelings and a

general sense of being ‘lost in the world’. She was forty-three
years old, an attractive woman who may once have been
beautiful but who had seen rough times. She had been a
practising prostitute for many years, and had appeared in court
several times because of violence to others and soliciting in the
streets. A t the age of seventeen she had been raped, became
-
pregnant, and married the man responsible a thief who had
spent most of his life in prison. A t the time of her baby girl’s
birth, he was once again in prison and unable to provide for
her. She felt detached from her baby, and uninterested in her
welfare to the point of neglect. Her mother then volunteered to
take care of the baby for a while. However, despite my
patient’s attempts tosee her daughter, her mother never let the
child go until she too was seventeen, by which time she had
become a heroin addict.
My patient described her mother as a ‘perfect swine’ who
was always very contemptuous of her and at the same time
passive and uncaring. In her own words, ‘My earliest memory
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
of conflict with my mother was her squeezing me with a
WHORE cushion between us. I was still a baby, but can remember the
intense pressure and my lungs being restricted.’ She had always 119
felt unhappy, singled out at home and at school. After her first
marriage she had many pregnancies by different men, which
was not surprising as she took no precautions, and she kept
aborting herself with a syringe, having done this at least
fourteen times. She added that her compulsive urge for sex led
her to take chances. She was pushed by her husband into
prostitution. She hated him intensely but complied with his
request in the hope that prostitution might have a cheering
effect on her. In a short-lived way it did, but afterwards she felt
more miserable than ever. She tried without success to establish
a relationship with her estranged daughter, who had turned
against her, just as she herself had done with her own mother.
But the daughter was too bitter about her and too preoccupied
with her own problems to allow any relationship to be
established. (Incidentally, the daughter was criticized for this
by a caring boyfriend.) Once more, this patient sought therapy
with a woman in the hope of establishing a good relationship
with a caring mother who could simultaneously deal with her
vengeful feelings.
Her long term of psychotherapy was by no means easy. She
first put me to the test of seduction, and when this failed, she
became angry and confused. A long struggle about separation/
individuation came to the fore, becoming particularly and
painfully apparent during my holidays. How could I care about
her if I could go away and leave her to her own devices, which
were almost non-existent? However, as much pain and distress
as these repeated events caused during psychotherapy, they
eventually proved to have some therapeutic effect on her as she
came to realize that I had my own life and needs, and that I was
there neither to be seduced by her nor to exploit her with my
own emotional demands. Her awareness that I could trust her
to be on her own and that I had my own separate life afforded
her a feeling of freedom to explore her own needs and wants.
Another woman of twenty-eight came to consult me because
of her inability to enjoy sexual intercourse with her husband
since her baby, now aged nine months, had been born. She was
T H E SYMBOLIC
extremely worried about this as she was very fond of her baby’s MOTHER A S
father, and feared he might get fed up and leave home. A WHORE
 120 Later on she told me that she and her husband had been in
trouble with the law for many years. He was a professional
bank-robber, and she a practising prostitute. They had been
able to combine both professions and to get the best out of
them while being together. This was a fitting combination,
since both in their respective occupations were expressing in a
symbolic way their anger at mother and their challenge to
father. Her husband, the bank-robber, was getting inside a
maternal body, robbing something not belonging to him but to
father/bank - a symbol of paternal authority, full of money,
virility, and power.
She described their relationship as being the first positive one
in her life. They had been able to establish strong bonds to the
extent of wanting to have a child of their own. Neither,
though, foresaw stopping work, so it was to their chagrin that
their son’s birth had resulted in turning her off sex altogether.
Despite herself, she found sex disgusting either with her
husband or with any prospective client. So revolting did she
find it that she could not make a career out of it any more,
while her sexual relationship with her husband was so
precarious that she feared it might result in their separation.
Thus both of them, alarmed at her emotional involvement
with her baby, faced a major loss in income and also a
weakening of their relationship. This was why she had come
for consultation.
The patient had an emotionally deprived early history,
which partly accounted for her prostitution. She was now
unconsciously directing all her cathexis in the direction of her
baby through breast-feeding, and feared that if her body were
used for any other purpose she would not be able to look after
baby adequately, so interfering with his normal development.
Evidently motherhood, through an intense identification with
her baby and his emotional and physical needs, had provided
her with some solution for her previous splitting.
In this particular case I considered that the most suitable
option was to offer joint sessions for wife and husband.
Sometimes they brought with them the baby, who was
MADONNA,
occasionally breast-fed. A better understanding of the family
WHORE dynamics emerged which made it possible for them to remain
together. He was able to get an ordinary job with a steady
income, and she did some part-time work which allowed her to
take care of the baby, and eventually to respond to her
husband’s intimate needs. These she no longer saw as con-
flicting so much with her and her baby’s emotional-biological
unit,.which by then was also gratifying to her husband.
I believe that the sort of splitting which this patient had
experienced is related to the taboo about maternal incest. If we
recall some of the fantasies during orgasm described in Chapter
2, it would be a massive reality for some women to take inside
their body the baby which had already nested there. Is there a
point of return to the beginning of life? It is like closing a
circuit, birth/death, and the consequence in fantasy is the son’s
death. That is why, in a ‘detached’ way, such a woman allows a
stranger - her client - to attack the inside of her body in a
sadistic way, since loving is absent; only hatred is alive in both
parties. This corresponds to the way she sees herself as
undeserving of any positive feelings for her self-hated body.
Hence, in the process of projective identification with her
client she attacks her own mother’s body. But at times, as with
this patient, in becoming a mother herself a process of
identification with an ‘ideal’ mother occurs. In this case the
image of the ‘ideal’ mother prevented her from taking risks
with clients. After all, her own sense of self-esteem was at
stake. The birth of this baby had made her feel wanted from
within, with the baby making genuine claims upon her
involving many unexpected emotional and physical gratifi-
cations which she did not want to give up.
I have encountered this phenomenon quite often in my
psychotherapeutic work with women who are working as
prostitutes. Despite their emotional deprivation and their
inability to form a female ego-ideal, some of these women have
achieved the creation of a maternal ego-ideal. Regardless of
how inconsistent and erratic it is, this has come to their rescue
in functioning as mothers.
D. Pines reports a similar finding in her treatment of
‘normal neurotic’ women: ‘For some women the birth of the
T H E SYMBOLIC
first child, particularly if it is a male child, may complicate MOTHER A S
adult sexual relationships since the mother may have problems A WHORE
 122 in using her body for pleasure with her sexual parner as well as
for nurturing. Many women experience a sexual response to
breast-feeding a child which fills them with shame and guilt. It
follows that a woman may become frigid after childbirth if she
has difficulty in integrating adult sexual pleasurable response
with maternal bodily response, and marital friction may ensue’
(1986, p. 5 ) . However, in my own clinical work what some
women areseen to experience with their babies, far from shame
and guilt, is such bliss that they d o not want to spoil it with
anything which might compete for their bodies.
But this does not happen with many other women who are in
a similar predicament of becoming pregnant while working as
prostitutes. Their depression and sense of unworthiness is such
that they feel undeserving of gratification, either in pregnancy
or in their relationships with their infants. It is then that those
feelings of unworthiness become clearly manifest as a result of
an identification with a ‘bad’ and persecutory mother, as in the
following clinical history.
A patient referred herself for psychotherapy because of
intense depression. She had made many suicide attempts:
‘nothing was worth living for’. She was still working as a
prostitute but, according to her own statement, her seeking
help had ‘nothing to do with it’. She was a forty-six-year-old
woman with the most deprived emotional and social back-
ground, having had to take care of her mother from the early
age of eight, when her father had suddenly died. Before that she
had witnessed many violent rows when her father came home
completely drunk and beat her mother up. Her mother used to
say: ‘If only 1 had had a son he could take care of me.’ My
patient was the only child, and was regarded as ‘scum’. Not
only had she never felt wanted, but she saw herself as a heavy
burden to her parents. At the age of thirteen she was sent to
work, since she had to make a living for both her mother and
herself. She had an affair with a married man who advised her
to go into prostitution. Very soon she got to know one of her
clients, who wanted to marry her in order to become her
legitimate pimp. Marriage meant she could easily be recognized
MADONNA,
as ‘a proper woman’, which she wanted for her mother’s sake.
WHORE She had already felt obliged to become her own mother’s
mother, so symbolically taking care of her husband only meant 123
taking care of another mother; she performed this function very
tenderly and caringly. For her mother’s sake she invented a
second life for herself: although she worked as a prostitute for
her husband, to her mother she pretended that she worked in a
restaurant every night as a cashier. She even fabricated
characters and described them to her mother in the finest detail:
a chef, many waiters, and all the regulars at the restaurant.
Every morning after a ‘real’ full night’s work with many
freakish clients who expected her to perform all sorts of sado-
masochistic games, she would come home to her husband and
mother, give her earnings to the former and ‘entertain’ the
latter with funny tales about her nonexistent work in the
restaurant. She was in reality ‘serving’ customers and ‘feeding’
them, so the metaphor was not so far from the truth.
This patient approached motherhood with all kinds of
misgivings and mixed expectations. She gave birth to a hoy
whom she treated from the very beginning with the utmost
contempt, feeling inadequate in dealing with him and very
guilty that she now had what her mother had so much wanted
for herself. She could not allow herself to enjoy having this
child, but had to treat him badly as an extension of her
mother’s frustrated expectations. He was the only being close
to her with whom she felt able to act out thesadistic behaviour
she had been exposed to herself from a mother who had always
resented her, a father who had never acknowledged her, and
subsequently a parasitical husband who lived off her ‘immoral
earnings’. The high price she had to pay for her ill-treatment of
her son was that ultimately he not only became a drug dealer
and a pimp, but also began to blackmail his mother.
It was extremely difficult for this patient to make any sense
out of therapy. She was determined to cling to a subservient
role and to see herself as a victim; however many inter-
pretations were given in this regard, her capacity for insight
remained unchanged. She felt undeserving of the better inner
life that psychotherapy could offer her, and gave up treatment
in the belief it worked only for ‘middle-class’ women.
T H E SYMBOLIC
There are other circumstances in which women seek an MOTHERAS
ostensible reward which in fact disguises, or results in, A WHORE
 124 punishment. That is the case with women who engage in
prostitution with such recklessness that they are easily caught.
When such women appear in court on charges of soliciting
they feel that thecharge in itself will prejudiceeveryone against
them and that nobody will bother to get to know about them,
their upbringing, their emotional needs, and personal circum-
stances. Such is their despondency that, expecting no real
understanding, they usually make the law-enforcers collude
with their inner persecutory needs in acquiescing to dispro-
portionately heavy sentences. And, indeed, society feels so
hostile, not only to their actions but also to their inability to
defend themselves, that it is unable to separate their actions
from their personalities. Therefore their sentencing carries with
it an unconscious recognition of their actions and of their need
for punishment, which is not the case for notorious prostitutes.
Offenders have lived all their lives with others telling them
what is wrong with them. They are always ready for a moral
dissertation, since ‘The antisocial tendency is characterized by
an element in it which compels the environment to be
important’, as Winnicott has said; he adds that ‘the antisocial
tendency implies hope’ (1956, p. 309). Although we can
recognize that these women’s ‘illegal’ actions are often at least
partly a product of their emotional deprivation, and are
sometimes engaged in with hopesof a magical outcome, others
seem unable to stop telling them how wrong they are.
Such was the case of a woman aged twenty-seven, who
looked sixty when I first saw her many years ago. She had been
referred for a psychiatric report to the court because of several
charges of soliciting in the streets. Her sort of prostitution was
a manifestation of the most self-denigrating and depressed
attitudes about herself: she was performing fellatio for f i f t y
pence in the park near where she lived. From the social inquiry I
learnt that this woman had appeared in court several times on
prostitution charges, and that every time she felt depressed she
either relapsed into prostitution or ran away. Her living
conditions were described as ‘appalling’. She had married a
man twenty-nine years her senior who had picked her up once
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
from the streets and had promised to take care of her; he was
WHORE actually a vagrant who saw the chance to make some profits
and to have a companion for his own misery. My patient’s 125
mother had her when she was Seventeen and she was given away
at birth to her maternal grandmother, to whom she was
devoted. The father was unknown. Her running away from
home and her fondness for her grandmother emerged several
times in the social inquiry.
This woman had had twelve miscarriages and felt undeserv-
ing of becoming a mother. Actually she felt that she did not
deserve anything, not even a psychiitric interview. When she
came into my room for her first meeting she seemed very
guarded, suspicious, and insecure. She sat on the edge of the
armchair, was very red in the face, began to sweat profusely,
and showed some shaking in her hands and legs. Her first words
were: ‘Look doctor, I won’t do it again. I don’t want to waste
your time. I’m sure there must be a lot of people with real
problems.’ In saying this she showed a toothless mouth and the
physical appearance of an elderly woman. (The selfdenigration
which we worked through afterwards was already showing in
her physical appearance.) Again she mumbled something like:
‘I’m very ashamed of myself. I won’t d o it again.’ This claim
was obviously made in an attempt to please the interviewer: she
was already complying with the ‘law’ and expecting condem-
nation, not seeking real understanding but just a little
recognition of her ‘unlawful’ actions.
I would like to pursue further this important general
characteristic which appears in female offenders, and to give
special consideration to the inner world of women who have at
some time in their lives practised prostitution. As prostitutes
women are unable to see themselves as separate beings, let
alone as sexual beings. Their self-esteem is very low, they feel
depressed, and they use as defensive mechanisms projection and
splitting. The strong feeling of contempt they show towards
society (‘I don’t care a damn about them’) covers up a massive
projection of their own self-neglect. After all, they are the ones
who are ostracized, despised, isolated, and eventually detained.
They tend to view the external world as something imposed on
them, because they are so much in need of a strong response
T H E SYMBOLIC
from the outside. However negative or severe this response MOTHER A S
could be, it provides them in their daily lives with the A WHORE
 126 narcissistic support which they are unable t o obtain from
within.
Most professions, regardless of how demanding they can be
of our time, emotional involvement, and physical powers, still
leave us able to pursue separate public and private lives. In the
intimacy of the latter we replenish our mental and physical
resources. This is not possible for women who practise
prostitution; indeed, the opposite is the case. This aspect of
their predicament becomes obvious when they appear in court,
where their private lives are exposed to the public. Since their
profession involves them in offering and providing their clients
with gratifications of a very intimate nature, their own private
needs have to be ignored. Everything private becomes public,
this being the nature of the conflict. Some women uncon-
sciously hope that, once their problems are acknowledged and
in the open, help will become available t o them, though usually
it does not.
Crunberger portrays narcissism as an autonomous drive
with two components, a ‘hedonistic’ self-love and a ‘lethal’
component, ‘which can evolve in psychic or psychosomatic
changes and could end up, in serious cases, in death’. He refuses
to identify this ‘lethal’ component with masochism, since he
sees masochism as a relatively advanced mode of object-
relations, and therefore contrasted with narcissism. He sees the
‘lethal’ component as endowed with characteristics of ‘object
mastery, aggression, omnipotence’ (1979, p. 7111.).I believe
that women who have engaged in acts of prostitution are
seeking not the ‘hedonistic’, but the ‘lethal’ component of
narcissism. Certainly they d o not attempt to create object-
relations, for there are none in their professional world. As
Aulagnier (1966) has reminded us, in perversion there is a
devaluation of narcissistic pleasure: the more it appears linked
to dirt, decadence, pain and ignominy, the more it is worn like
a crown of martydom, the reversal of narcissism. According to
her, ‘the perverse woman who has “gone too far” in the erotic
game will be likely to say that she did so “in order to give
pleasure”, presenting her pleasure is a sort of holocaust, a
MADONNA,
sacrifice offered to the god of pleasure’ (p. 75, my translation).
WHORE Those who run brothels or similar establishments seem to
‘know’ the complexities of this narcissistic devaluation pretty 127
well, and do not fail to keep telling the ‘girls’ how special and
unique they are. They even make them compete with one
another to see how many ‘punters’ they are able to book for the
night. This is a trap these women find impossible to resist. It is
then that they feel ‘alive’, excited, and full of vigour.
Consequently the proprietor’s business thrives, but the women
subsequently feel like fools, as they will admit afterwards.
Everything is back to what it was before, if not worse: even the
money they earn has by now lost its financial value and is
thrown away, sometimes in a literal sense.
Throughout my clinical practice I have heard women in all
walks of life relate fantasies about prostitution. I have
examined women who came reluctantly for psychiatric
diagnostic reports after having been charged with soliciting. I
have treated women who have come of their own volition for
psychotherapy and who have been practising prostitutes at
some time in their lives. Others have come while still
‘working’. But they all had one thing in common: they felt
prevented from sharing their intimate lives with their clients.
For example, they could not reveal how depressed they were at
the thought of ageing, since it is the nature of the trade to offer
cheerfulness and youth.
Many times I have heard from middle-aged women who
practise prostitution that they are forced to disguise signs of
ageing since this would automatically spoil their source of
income. (It is moredifficult to acknowledge the other hurts.) A
patient of mine aged forty-two said: ‘I’ll have to give the game
up, otherwise 1’11have to go into kinky activities, since I’m seen
as an old bag.’ So that is what is left for women who pursue
this profession when they reach middle age, just when they
need more reassurance than ever about themselves. The
biological clock is once more working a t maximum speed.
Psychoanalysts often wonder whether sexual perversions
exist in females. So why is it that prostitution is a much more
frequent phenomenon in women than in men? I believe that the
answer is that female prostitution can be seen as a female
T H E SYMBOLIC
perversion. I would say that most of the patients I have seen MOTHER A S
who have worked as prostitutes experience a tremendous sense A WHORE
 128 of emptiness. When this becomes unbearable and they feel
depressed they turn to prostitution, from which they derive a
sense of elation which increases their self-esteem - though this
feeling is short-lived, since it is feeding a ‘false self’ and is
immediately replaced by a sense of futility and abandonment.
Some women in prostitution follow a selective and perverse
path, one taken also by some men. It resembles the traditional
definition of perversion in which intimate relationships are
caricatured. The woman has some perverse designs in her mind,
which involve varied symbolic operations. She is bitter,
assertive and ready for revenge. This revenge, which appears on
the surface to be directed against socio-economic submission
and against a man’s world, is actually directed against her
mother. Her desire for revenge is at the same time a desire to be
in charge, to have conscious control, and an unconscious
denigration of herself and her gender. Like a perverse male
individual, she feels elated while with her client; depression
and despair soon follow. This is an unconscious process in
which she uses denial, splitting, depersonalization and
derealization to avoid the experience of psychic pain. The
woman feels debased and too depressed to harbour vengeful
fantasies against men, as is usually stated. What she really feels
is contempt for herself and for her gender, and it is then that she
identifies with her male client.

MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE
SUBSTITUTEMOTHERHOOD 7
THEWHORE AS A N
INCESTSURVIVOR:
Whose R e s p o n s i b i l i t y is i t A n y w a y ?

T IS NOT U N U S U A L to find in women who have

I practised prostitution in adolescence and adulthood an

early history of incest. Of course this is not to say that all
victims of incest become prostitutes, or vice versa, but
prostitution, as many authors have indicated, is a frequent
sequel in cases of father-daughter incest.
As the Ciba Foundation (1984) reports, most clinical studies
show that the main long-term effects from which incest victims
suffer are promiscuity and sexual coldness, together with an
inability to form lasting emotional and sexual relationships. I
shall leave aside the group with ‘noill effects’, which the nature
of my work makes rather inaccessible to me. However, it Seems
that girls who were incest victims and did not suffer from
serious’effects have not been blamed and have unconditional
support from friends and family members during childhood, an
important factor not to be forgotten and one which is very
much associated with social and cultural conditions.
It is my suggestion that girls who have been victims of incest
see very few alternatives to prostitution upon reaching adult-
hood. In any event, their bodies will respond in a massive way, MOTHERHOOD
 130 either with an exaggeration of the libido or with completely
repressed sexuality. Their severe problems range from prosti-
tution to chronic psychosomatic symptoms. In my work over
twenty years I have observed acute psychopathology, but have
not encountered more positive outcomes such as the absence of
sexual or emotional conflicts arising in adulthood in incest
survivors.
The two damaging effects, promiscuity and sexual coldness,
might seem to be complete opposites, but there are strong
connections: I have often encountered women who are
promiscuous, or have been involved in promiscuity, whose
problems are related to sexual coldness. More often than not
promiscuity is accompanied by frigidity, and prostitution by
sexual coldness which leads to promiscuous behaviour and
perverse sexual fantasies.
Let’s start with the ‘prostitution solution’. The disparity in
statistics reveals a confused picture, but one which corresponds
to the nature of the problem - the secrecy surrounding incest.
Sloane and Karpinski (1942) found that one out of three
female incest victims they studied subsequently became a
prostitute. Gagnon (1965) found that 80% of the women he
studied had serious sexual problems, including prostitution.
Lukianowicz (1972) found that 15% of the incest victims he
studied became prostitutes. Goodwin quotes: ‘in studies of
prostitutes it has been reported that 59% are incest victims’
(1982, p. 4); Peters (1976) is another researcher who mentions
prostitution as a sequel to incest. Justice and Justice include
prostitution as a possible outcome in the adult lives of incest
victims, and they add: ‘Being a prostitute is consistent with
how these women see themselves: tainted, bad, gcqd only for
delivering sex’ (1979, p. 188). They remind us of a survey
conducted in Seattle of two hundred prostitutes, 20% of whom
had been incestuously assaulted as children, and also of the
Chicago Vice Commission report which had similar findings
- 51 of the 103 women questioned said their first sexual
experience had been with their own fathers. Silbert and Pines
(1981), in their study of two hundred juvenile and adult street
MADONNA,
prostitutes, found high levels of sexual child abuse in their
WHORE backgrounds: 70% of the women they studied reported that
early sexual abuse was a strong motivation to become 131
prostitutes. Rcnshaw (1982) found that for some women who
practise prostitution there was an early history of sexual
contact with a member of the family. These figures are so at
variance (2O%, 50%, 70%) that surely they are either question-
able, or reflect the difficulties of obtaining accurate figures.
In the dynamic process of incest, girls have learnt how to
keep to themselves important and intimate secrets. This
knowledge is turned into primitive defence mechanisms such as
splitting and denial. As Okell Jones and Bentovim (1984) have
indicated, ‘Children who have been sexually abused often
display seductive or sexually provocative behaviour; it is the
only way they know of getting attention and is undoubtedly
the secondary outcome of being taught that sexual behaviour is
what is expected’ (p. 6 ) . Their ‘knowing it all’ and their
tendency to self-sacrifice, flamboyancy, and self-destructive-
ness could be bitterly exploited in adulthood for the ‘excellence’
of this ‘new trade’. It is well known that most incest survivors
‘may attract later on in life sexually aggressive and demanding
partners’ (Ciba Foundation, 1984, p. 16). Are those early
acquired ‘skills’ determining their fate?
Bentovim (1977) has produced an extensive and invaluable
study which has highlighted the importance of the family
dysfunction in the understanding, treatment, and management
of the families with histories of incest. Incest is very much a
matter of family dynamics.
Such is the power of incest to produce an exaggerated
emotional response that we psychotherapists can easily forget
our therapeutic stance and begin to take sides. Counter-
transference can be affected, as our response in these cases is
usually complete empathy with the victim and outrage against
the perpetrator. Incest is larger than life, and the victims make
us feel possessive about them and very special. Indeed, we are,
according to incest victims, imbued with all the ‘good’
qualities which will enable us to understand them better than
anyone else. If we believe this, we are already repeating the
emotional characteristics of the incest situation. This ‘belief’
could make us collude with either the perpetrator or incest SUBST,TUTE
victim. We tend to be so much more sympathetic towards the MOTHERHOOD
 132 victims than to the perpetrators that it is easy to forget or to
ignore the fact that the perpetrators may well have been victims
at an earlier stage in their lives. This prejudiced view leaves us
in a biased position, unable to comprehend the phenomenon
completely. Thus the victim may have our sympathy but she is
left without an accurate assessment of her situation, since what
happened to her in reality corresponded partly t o her own
unconscious fantasies. Let us apply the medical model and treat
the entire family as the patient, otherwise we may easily
become silent conspirators in a system in which only victims
are heard. Such a situation could produce undesirable outcomes
for everyone concerned, including the abused child.
The importance of family dynamics in incest can hardly be
overstressed. Nevertheless, it is not always recognized.
Professional workers, especially in the past, have often made
incredulous or sceptical remarks about a mother’s denial of any
knowledge that paternal incest had occurred. Such attitudes are
not conducive to accurate diagnosis of the family dynamics.
The mother in these cases cannot acknowledge the incest
because temporarily she is emotionally and/or physically
unable to respond to the demands placed on her as a mother,
caretaker, wife, and partner. She is too depressed, detached, or
exhausted to accept and fulfil her ‘duties’. She can no longer
cope. Bitter comments are made about mothers who knew, but
didn’t know. Some disbelieve their daughters; others ill-treat
them when confronted with the reality. A t other times, when
mother is on the threshold between not knowing and knowing
(something like a twilight zone) she is able to hear and
acknowledge what is going on, and then she may call upon
outside help, from general practitioners, social services, the
law, the police. But there must be many cases which remain
secret.
Sometimes the ‘secret’ of incest has been hidden away for
years and years. When patients involved in incest situations are
very cautious in making critical remarks about their parents or
early life history (‘Everything was just normal, absolutely
fine’), their statements should not necessarily be taken as true.
MADONNA, If we listen carefully for what has been omitted from their own
WHORE histories, incidents usually emerge which point to an early
traumatic event or events that occurred when they were small. 133
In other cases, when there is an apparent lack of memory about
early childhood events in people who have committed or have
been involved in sexual offences, it may be fruitful to
investigate further to see whether they have blocked off
episodes from early childhood which are too painful to recall.
This could be particularly relevant for the incest victim’s
mother, who not infrequently turns out to have been an incest
victim herself.
Sometimes the daughter unconsciously colludes in the
incest, not only because of her father’s demands but also
because she is responding to her mother’s inability to cope.
That is why most girls report their fathers’ sexual assaults on
them only when the father takes another daughter for this
‘duty’. The first girl then feels debased and betrayed, not so
much because her position as her father’s favourite is being
usurped but because she is no longer the one chosen to fulfil this
‘duty’ for her mother. Before the incest, she felt her mother did
not understand her and she longed to get closer to her.
Sometimes, she has even become her own mother’s mother in
an effort to create some senseof intimacy with her. So incest, if
this is required, Seems inevitable.
I repeat that secrecy, especially in paternal incest, is at the
core of the situation: each member of the family is involved,
whether ‘knowing’ or ‘unknowing’, but nobody talks about it.
Indeed, it is irrelevant when paternal incest has occurred
whether mother acknowledges the possibility of incest or not;
had she been able to acknowledge it in the first place, incest
would never have happened. Incest is committed in an effort to
create ties to ‘keep the family together’. Secrecy is the new
taboo which has emerged from the breakdown of the taboo
against incest (Ciba Foundation, 1984, p. 13). Nobody
‘knows’ about it, or rather nobody acknowledges it.
I have seen some female patients with a history of early
incest who, when entering group analytical therapy, behave
from the very start as ‘ideal assistants’ to the therapist. Even
those who had previously never been familiar with the
unconscious processes seem to discover immediately appro-
priatc ways to ‘help’ the therapist/mother/father keep the MOTHERHOOD
 134 grouplfamily together. Fellow patients often react with
surprise and bewilderment, and later with competitiveness.
When interpretations are made to the effect that the newcomer
is repeating a pathological pattern learnt early in life, fellow
patients seem relieved by this understanding but it is then the
turn for the newcomer to be filled with rage at this inter-
pretation. After all, ‘she is doing her best’; why is she being so
‘harshly criticized’?
Is prostitution also a symbolic manoeuvre to keep a family
together? Does the function of prostitution preserve the family
by means of an outside ‘sex provider’ when things d o not seem
to work at home or when there are strains that need to be
relieved by an outside agency? Are incest victims better able
than others todeal with the professional hazards of prostitution
in later life? In this light incest could almost be considered a
sort of apprenticeship. This has been simply stated by Herman:
.
‘. . the father, in effect, forces the daughter to pay with her
body for affection and care which should be freely given. In so
doing he destroys the protective bond between parent and child
and initiates his daughter into prostitution’ (1981, p. 4).
Herman also expands on the feelings of power over others that
these women experience as ‘guardians of the incest secret’. The
girls’ fantasies are often confirmed by their fathers who tell
them in a threatening way that they are able either to destroy
their families or keep them together. Herman notes that in the
course of prostitution these women learnt, some by mere
chance, that among men who pursue prostitutes are those who
are easily ‘turned on’ by accounts of incest (p. 9 8 ) .
The evolution of an incest situation goes through many
stages. Typically it begins with a masked breakdown of the
family structure, which perhaps is not consciously felt by any
of its members. There may be, or appear to be, some specific
events which, when they come to light later on, are identified as
‘causes’ of incest. For example, very often the process begins
with the wife refusing t o have sex with her husband. This
makes the husband feel insecure and inadequate, and leads to
the distress and marked regression which is characteristic of the
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
incest perpetrator. When he feels unwanted by his wife he seeks
WHORE in his daughters or sons not simply sexual gratification, but
also warmth and reassurance. These men react in such an 135
exaggerated way because this new situation often brings
nightmarish echoes from their own childhood in which similar
cumulative traumas occurred. Once more we have to use the
thrw-generational approach, its dynamics, and its links to
socio-economic and cultural factors if we are to understand the
actions of each and every member of the family.
I have heard from many male patients who have committed
incest how much they have felt rejected by their wives, and also
been made to feel small, humiliated and inadequate just as they
did when they were young children with a very possessive,
domineering, or neglectful mother. A period of impotence
towards their wife can be a clinical indication that the incest is
about to begin. In quite a number of cases this relates to the
wife’s new pregnancy and labour, or depression. The patient
usually talks about his wife’s coolness, distancing, and
frigidity, and describes her as not wanting to have sex with
him. He feels unable to pursue any extramarital affairs, indeed
he claims he has never dreamt of being unfaithful to his wife.
He even talks about incest as ‘keeping sex in the family’ (to him
this seems to be less of a betrayal of his wife than were he to go
outside the family), and there is no cynicism attached to this
statement. The ‘solution’ in these cases, especially for a couple
in which there is some emotional deprivation and lack of
communication, seems to be the seduction of a child.
I remember a male patient who had maintained sexual
relationships with his stepdaughter for five years, starting
when the girl was six. His attraction towards her started when
his wife became pregnant and refused to have sex with him. He
felt able to contain his sexual urges, to wait until after the
baby’s birth and the readjustment of the family situation. A
few months later when the baby died a cot death, his wife
became deeply depressed and unable to meet his sexual
requirements. The baby’s short life had been a very stormy
period, with daily fights between the parents. After the baby’s
death the husband withdrew, but was unable to express any
feelings of grief. Instead, he suddenly felt prompted from
within to approach his stepdaughter sexually. He did not know
why he did it, except that he was in great need of warmth, care, MOTHERHOOD
 136 and human contact. In his own words: ‘It occurred t o me that it
might be preferable to approach my girl since she is part of the
family and very much part of myself.’ During treatment he
became aware of his intense anger, his own very low sense of
self-esteem, and his wish for revenge against his wife as
represented by her daughter. The situation had been com-
plicated by the fact that he had secretly accused his wife of the
baby’s death, which happened one night when he was away
from home after a fight. He was projecting his own guilt on to
his wife, since in his view the baby would not have died had he
been there. He also observed his own inability to mourn his
child, and his manic defence in abusing the child who had
survived.
Incest operates on a number of different levels simultaneously
in different family members: (1) A discharge of tension
between husband and wife. (2) Satisfaction and sexual
gratification where the object, or actually part-object, is easily
available and can be seduced, always in a very secretive manner.
(3) This secrecy which, it must be stressed, is the key to
understanding incest, because it includes a degree of special
recognition and favour within the family situation for that
particular child ... (These three characteristics appear very
vividly in the transference, not only in the course of treatment
but also during the first interview, meeting, or diagnostic
session.) (4) A discharge of intense hostility: revenge directed
towards the wife in the person of ‘her child’. ( 5 ) Re-
establishment of some sort of family dynamics or balance. (6)
Disclosure of the secret after a certain point, when incest is no
longer necessary to the family dynamics.
It is very important to notice the family circumstances when
the facts are disclosed. Is the wife over her depression, or her
mourning period? Is she able to be ‘present’ now? Has she
resumed sexual intercourse with her husband? Or has another
daughter become aware that her sister is the‘favourite one’ and
so felt undermined? Is this the moment at which another
sibling suffering from intense jealousy towards the incest
victim denounces father and sister?
MADONNA,
Let q e share with you some of the predicaments my patients
WHORE have entrusted me with, and the few means of escape they
contrive for their survival. The degree of intensity of the 137
trauma and the age at which they were abused determine their
subsequent level of self-esteem, and accordingly the quality of
life they feel they deserve.
An intelligent, divorced woman of thirty-five was referred
by her GP (family doctor) for psychiatric diagnosis on account
of her susceptibility to becoming involved in violent relation-
ships with men. A fixed pattern had been established in which
she always chose boyfriends who had a violent nature, and she
encouraged this violence in them by striking the first blow. The
outcome was always the same - she ended up covered with
bruises, for which she frequently consulted her GP. She also
helped her lovers to manipulate her physically and mentally,
though this only took place when she felt emotionally close to
them. She had had three children, by three different men with
whom she had had erratic relationships until they were
abruptly terminated by the men, in each case after her
pregnancy.
When I saw this patient for the first time she was yearning to
enter into individual therapy with a woman. This, I believed,
was the manifestation of a deep longing for a union with a
responsive and caring mother who valued her own femininity,
and was also able to put up with her hate and revenge towards
her own mother. She feared that a man could easily be
manipulated and seduced by her, since in a way she uncon-
sciously ‘knew’ this would be her fantasized outcome, for her
to feel so powerfully seductive but simultaneously deprived of
any ‘real’ help. It had taken her a long time and many painful
experiences to come to the conclusion that she had to ‘risk’
trusting a woman.
She mentioned casually that prostitution ‘was my profession’
and that in this field she had always felt safe from any
emotional or physical problems. For instance, she had never
encountered any violent attacks during the course of her work,
nor had she felt emotionally involved with any of her clients.
Her own speciality was sadomasochism, in which her clients
would ask her to play out with them masochistic games in
which they were subject to her physical punishment and
denigration. MOTHERHOOD
 138 She regarded her work not only as the source of a good
income, but also as providing her with the freedom to choose
her own working hours ‘during school time’, leaving her
adequate free time to spend with her three children, whose
company she very much enjoyed. The oldest child, a boy, when
he got to know about her prostitution, said, according to her,
‘It’s better to keep quiet about it. If it brings money who cares?’
The extreme ‘splitting’ that characterized her daily life was
only too obvious. Her relationships functioned on two totally
separate levels and with two completely different sets of needs.
This splitting was an asset to her in her successful pursuit of her
profession. In her work she was self-assured and assertive, but
also sadistic; her need for revenge was alive here. But she was
completely cut off from her other needs and fears, and there
was no real involvement on her side. On the other hand, in her
emotional relationships she felt anxious and inadequate, and
she was very self-critical. She was preoccupied with herself, to
the point of self-obsession, and with the needs that arose from
her extreme dependency and fear of being left alone. She
showed a most masochistic nature.
You might well wonder now what her early life was like.
Her mother had left home when the child was only eleven
months old. Her first memories were of her father blaming her
for her mother’s departure from home. She had always felt
humiliated, denigrated, and abandoned because of being a girl.
Who knows what had happened to her mother around the time
of her own birth which may have prompted her to leave home
soon after a daughter arrived? When my patient reached the age
of four a male relative sexually assaulted her. She felt extreme
pain, and was utterly confused and unable to make any sense of
what was happening. She broke down and in tears managed to
tell her father about it. His angry - and by his own standards,
‘justifiable’ - response was to start an incestuous relationship
with her which lasted for many years. After all, if she had been
held responsible for mother’s absence, why not cast her as
mother’s replacement? This was to be the start of many other
incestuous situations, since whatever male in the family she
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
approached about her predicament, he too was to join the list
WHORE of her sexual abusers.
 Despite this, when in need of help she had until now 139
approached only men. Her complete lack of trust in women
had to do with the way she had experienced her own mother
leaving her. Her father, on the other hand, had not only stayed
with her, but had also taken care of her. Even in the incest she
felt that there was some quality of involvement, and she had
been made to feel very special to him, though she was not at all
able to control the situation. So why not approach men rather
than women about her problems? She ‘knew’ that, at the very
least, she could get a physical response if not an emotional one.
She had never got either from her mother. But the high price
which she had to pay for survival was a complete division of her
emotional and physical needs and gratifications from normal
life. It was only too consistent with her life history that
prostitution seemed a suitable solution. After all, nobody had
been very concerned with her emotions when she was an infant.
Her body had been the only successful vehicle through which to
convey or to elicit any emotions or sensations.
This woman found prostitution to be the solution, not only
because it relieved her of the intense pain, depression,
hopelessness, and impotence she had gone through so very early
in life, but also because it provided her with a means to gain
revenge for those traumatic and damaging experiences. Now,
as opposed to before, she felt in complete control, and was
herself the perpetrator of humiliations. She viewed her work in
utilitarian terms: ‘only two days in the week and it’s never
bothered me’. Again, in her own words: ‘It was only five years
ago that 1 realized I was not here in the world for men’s
pleasure, but for myself.’
Paradoxically, this woman experienced prostitution as her
one and only way to do something for herself and not for men.
But her self-betrayal was evident in her emotional relationships,
in which she was punished terribly for what her ‘other half’ was
doing.
In psychoanalytical terms you could say that her superego,
however erratic, was as in many perversions still functioning in
the most implacable manner. It kept on punishing her for her
extremely guilty feelings. Where did this guilt come from? It
may have had to d o with her own incestuous fantasies about MOTHERHOOD
 140 her father; perhaps it was linked to an enormous distaste for
herself and her body, present since her arrival in the world,
when her birth was not at all welcomed because she was a girl
and therefore more easily available for her father’s incest.
Are we then really talking in terms of a social, generalized
guilt, one which can create such a powerful superego? It had
taken her a long time to ask for help, even if it was not directly
related to her prostitution, which she actually felt to be ego-
syntonic (in other words, compatible with her ego’s integrity)
because of her early experiences. 1 believe that age is an
important factor. This woman was thirty-five: she had had
enough of it. The ‘as if’ personality with its secondary gains
was fading away, and she now felt ready to embark on an
exploratory voyage which might lead her to the realization of
her true self.
Another patient was referred by her probation officer on
account of ‘her depression, her very unsatisfactory relation-
ships, and her work as a prostitute’. She was half an hour late
for her appointment, already an indication of her mixed
feelings about consulting a psychiatrist, though she was able to
admit to this and also to the uncertainty she experienced about
her own motivations for being sent to me. She had been in
conflict with the law for soliciting over the previous six years;
she had been the subject of probation orders and had received
custodial sentences of eighteen, six and three months. She also
remarked that her present three-year probation order was
coming to an end and that she was faced with another court
appearance because she had been caught soliciting after a long
period of being ‘clear’. There is often a relapse into new
troubles with the law when the sense of containment which is
provided by a probation order is removed. The new acting-out
is an unconscious substitute for more outside control.
My patient had a most traumatic and deprived background.
Her mother died when she was two months old. Her father
tried to have her fostered, but this did not occur until she was
five years old. Until then she lived with her father, his second
wife and later on two half-brothers. She remembered being
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
ill-treated by her stepmother, and thingsdid not improve at all
WHORE with her new adoptive family: she was again physically
punished. She quite liked going to school, because it took her 141
away from home, and she did six ‘0’ levels. She used to run
away from home frequently. O n one of these escapades, when
she was thirteen years old, she contacted her real father hoping
for support and reassurance. She did not get it. Her father drove
her in his car to a nearby park and attempted to have sexual
intercourse with her. She protested vehemently and, in order to
get away, told him that she was menstruating. H e then forced
her to perform fellatio on him under the threat of beating her
up and of telling her adoptive parents of her bitter complaints
about them. She still vividly remembered how terrified and
disgusted she was. She went back to her foster-parents feeling
utterly despondent. At seventeen she met a boy of the same age
and got pregnant. He was very reluctant to take any responsi-
bility to start with, and wanted her to have an abortion. She
insisted on having the baby, and he married her after their
daughter was born. During their short marriage she was
constantly humiliated and physically punished by him. A
separation took place. After that she met a man who suggested
she took up prostitution, and she began to go to Park Lane
every night with other girls also ‘on the game’. She used to
make around €500 a night, all of which went into the pocket of
this man, with whom she was living. Sometimes she would go
to her clients’ places, and sometimes to her own place, where
her partner in the next room would force her to extract more
and more money from her clients.
It was very painful to my patient when her former husband
won custody of their daughter, but she was unable to contest it.
When the girl was about four years old, she went to the school
and took her daughter away. She kept her daughter for almost a
year, but then her partner made her give her daughter up since
this arrangement seriously affected her capacity to make
money. From then on she began to take overdoses, and was
taken to hospital more than once, until her partner decided to
leave her. Three months before my interview with her she had
had to spend two days in gaol, and then was released on bail
through the intervention of her probation officer, with whom
she got on very well. After that she decided to apply for a job in SUBSf,TUTE
order to be considered fit to have access to her daughter. MOTHERHOOD
 142 Eventually she was allowed, under close supervision, to see her
daughter once a fortnight, but these were difficult visits,
leaving mother resentful and daughter confused. She then
opted out and never saw her daughter again, in the belief that
‘this would be better for the two of us’.
Mrs C, a woman of thirty-five, referred herself for treatment
by letter on account of having ‘reached desperation point with
a psychosexual problem’. When she first came to see me she
appeared as a charming, bright woman, open about her
problems, with a capacity for insight and motivation for
treatment.
She was an accomplished and very successful scholar, and
said that nobody who knew her in her professional life would
ever dream of her being in need of psychiatric help, such was the
picture of self-containment and contentment she showed to the
outside world. Her inner world was another matter. She said
she ‘had had enough of hopping around in bed with new guys’
and admitted to feelings of despair, hopelessness, and general
misery.
Some years ago, after her divorce, she had taken up part-time
prostitution as an attempt to solve her inner conflicts
‘intellectually’, without having to appeal for professional help
or ‘wasting her friends’ and acquaintances’ timeor giving them
cause for embarrassment’ with her ‘ridiculous problems’. After
looking through some of the relevant publications she made
contacts which allowed her to develop her problems into
‘skills’ and ‘advantages’ to be used in her new part-time
occupation. During that period of her lifeshe was in control of
all her ‘newly acquired relationships’ in such a way that she
soon became uninterested and bored with it all, since everyone
who paid for her services did exactly what she demanded of
them. Stoller remarks on this very same phenomenon when he
describes a prostitute talking about mystery and boredom after
a year in the trade: ‘The wrong kind of excitement, that which
threatens to reveal its origins, withers excitement’ (1975, p.
107). My patient would excite her clients by offering every-
thing but giving very little of herself; this, she said, thrilled
MADONNA,
them. She would ‘torture them without pity’, letting them see
WHORE bits of her body, and eventually allowing them ‘to touch her a
little’. This display was accompanied by her ordering them 143
about. The more she did so, the more excited the men became.
It was obvious that she had become an expert in the
sadomasochistic speciality of prostitution. After a while she
gave it all up, even though she got her ‘mystery’ and an
enormous sense of satisfaction from wondering what her
colleagues would have made out of her ‘extramural’ activity.
She told me of a pattern which had evolved in her life over
the past eighteen years. She would meet a man and fall for him
and find him sexually extremely attractive, and they would
start sexual activities in which she was very much the teacher.
She found this exciting, but around three or four months later
something seemed suddenly to switch off. What she had at first
found so gratifying and elating would now become the object
of her contempt and disgust. Then she would find it terrifying
to have men close to her, even to the extent of becoming
phobic, and she would abruptly end the affair. Immediately
afterwards she would proceed to get involved in a new
relationship which developed in the same way. She felt
distressed and wanted to be able to maintain a steady
relationship.
This pattern was established after her search for her
estranged father succeeded. The problem was not only that she
met her father at the age of seventeen for the first time in her
life, but that in their first meeting he was only too obvious in
his sexual approach to her. She said she wanted so much to be
close to him, and was shocked that while she wanted affection,
she received instead a sexual response. After the initial blunder
she gave in, since both of them wanted very badly to have
sexual intercourse. Despite the fact that this happened on many
occasidns, her father was always impotent with her. She felt
deeply frustrated about his non-performance. When she began
to make links between her present predicament and her
experiences with her father she decided not to see her father
again, and she became aware of her need for professional help.
Her birth was due to an accident: ‘just the result of fucking
on the lawn between two people in between two marriages’.
Her mother was twenty, had never wanted to have children, SUBST,TUTE
and tried to abort her without success. As a young girl she was MOTHERHOOD
 144 told that after her birth her mother had tried to strangle her.
According to my patient, her mother was obsessed with sex,
promiscuous, not at all interested in emotional involvements
but concerned only about the erotic pleasures she could obtain
from her body. She separated from her husband as soon as my
patient was born and sent her to be brought up with her own
mother, who was very strict and puritanical and never allowed
mother and daughter toget together. She was sent to a Catholic
convent.
Mrs C had no early recollection, and I assume that there was
very little for her to remember which was pleasant or caring.
However she remembered her grandmother’s death when she
was fifteen, since she then decided t o harden herself and not to
experience any grief. She became close to her mother, who
showed an obsessive preoccupation with her adolescent
daughter’s body and sexual education. This was done in a
rather perverse way, pushing and encouraging her to get
involved in sex, but advising her to do so with only very
experienced and skilful men.
Mrs C considered in hindsight that this had not been wise
since she began a series of associations with ‘macho’ men and
their male friends, who were technically experienced but lacked
any tenderness or care. Her mother was so involved with her
daughter’s sexuality that she could not wait for her to come
home, when she would demand detailed descriptions of her
daughter’s sexual experiences. Eventually my patient got
pregnant and had a back-street abortion, which was very
traumatic.
It was at this point, when she was completely disillusioned
with her mother, that she decided to turn to her unknown
father for some recognition, and there began the ordeal already
described, Her academic achievements were her only source of
gratification and self-value. Even this began to wear thin as the
years went by; the split between affect and intellect had gone
too far for her to sustain it any longer. She felt on the verge of
being uncontained and sensed the imminence of a complete
breakdown of her precariously maintained defences.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
Yet another patient, Mrs M,aged twenty-five, was referred
WHORE for treatment by a general hospital because of her difficulties in
relationships and her frigidity, following a four-year period 145
working as a ‘high-class’ prostitute. When Ifirst saw her I was
struck by her physical appearance of naivety, virginity, and
purity; she looked the epitome of the ‘English Rose’. I was also
impressed by her firm determination to get help for her
problems. However, she had let two years elapse since breaking
away from ‘the game’ beforeshe felt entitled toclaim a genuine
need for herself. In her own words:

I decided t o give i t all up because the price I had to pay for the
money I was making was excessive. That lifestyle transfonned
sex into an ugly and rotten thing which had nothing to do w i t h
love or intimacy. .. I began t o see men at their worst, and I
considered them to be just like animals, but very fast I learnt
how to switch off my feelings, and began to experience myself
as if there were two different persons inhabiting me. 1 never
saw the daylight, since I lived only by night. I was unable to
make any friends because I was full of shame, but on the other
hand I was made to feel very important because in the
nightclubs where I worked as a ‘hostess’ everyone was
considered to be extremely special. Soon afterwards I realized
this had to do w i t h scoring against other hostesses, how many
screws we were asked for, and how much we charged. So we
were just objects t o be used. I began t o feel utterly depressed
and drank a lot. Money was important in the making, but as
soon as I got it I would throw it away, even on the platform at
Paddington Station, and I was never able to buy anything nice
for myself. Money was just asymbol of what I was worth in the
eyes of others. I thought, ‘Shit, I’m getting a raw deal, I want
out of this’.

Then she proceeded to tell me how carefully she had thought

about what sort of work she would be fit to do. Firstly, she
decided against any night-time occupation, she had had enough
of it. But what about people? She had had more than enough of
them too. So she dismissed the idea of working in close
association with either men or women: men, because she had
seen their ‘animal’ characteristics; women, because she had SUBST,TUTE
suffered through their competitiveness and false feelings of MOTHERHOOD
 146 being so special, ‘all very deceptive’. What was left for her? She
was a young, articulate, intelligent woman who felt that she
owed her life to others, and wanted to make things better for
everyone around. I must say, I was impressed by her professional
choice. She loved growing things, so she became a florist -
‘flowers are beautiful and they make you feel good by
arranging them in particular ways’. She had become a
prestigious professional in the field, and it was then that she
sought psychotherapy.
Mrs M had a disturbed background. She was the ninth in a
family of thirteen, and at the agcof eight she wassent together
with an older brother to live with a maternal uncle and his
wife. She was told that this was because her parents were poor
and could not cope with all the children’s demands, but could
not understand why she and her brother were ‘the chosen ones’
for this removal from their home. However, the new home was
much better, and at first she was able to adjust quite well to the
change. But problems soon began. Her old and ailing uncle
began to make tentative physical approaches to her. At thestart
she felt inadequate in dealing with them, since she had been
told by her mother that she should feel grateful to her uncle and
aunt for welcoming her into their home. Presently, she was the
object of her uncle’s sexual provocation, and in no time she was
fulfilling a mistress’s task. She was revolted by it all, but was
still unable to reject her uncle because she felt it was ‘her duty’
to go along with his requests. When she was sixteen her uncle
developed osteo-rheumatoid arthritis, and she had to give up
school to look after him. Her aunt told her that that was the
price she had to pay for having been brought up by them. She
made some rebellious moves but desisted when her uncle, on
account of his illness, tried to commit suicide. When he died,
her aunt kicked her out and she went to work as a nanny for a
married couple with a young child. In no time she had an affair
with the man. Both wife and husband tried to make this work
as a threesome, but it didn’t so she left for London. Here she
fell into the nightclub scene and the world of prostitution.
The case of this woman is quite remarkable. I was impressed
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
with her from the very beginning, and 1 knew she would do
WHORE well since she had been able to achieve a lot on her own before
she approached anyone for help. She had fought her way out of 147
the brothels and rejected the pimps. Clearly her early life, at
least until the age of eight, had been secure and solid, even if
economically precarious. This was an important reassurance in
her later life and provided her with some self-assertiveness for
survival in her predicament. But as soon as she left the home
where she had felt herself t o be the victim of abuse, she turned
towards revenge and self-destruction.
The ‘prostitution solution’ is a repetition of earlier traumas
in which the survivor tries without success to sort out her life
but fails to d o so, because she feels imprisoned in the old,
familial or familiar pattern, and yet again exploited.
As I have mentioned, another possible outcome in adult life
of incest is a total repression of sexuality associated with severe
psychosomatic symptoms. This is usually diagnosed as a
‘neurotic* disturbance. However, sometimes the damage such
sufferers inflict on their bodies and minds is such that it has
made me wonder if there are not underlying perverse aspects to
their ‘neurotic* problems, especially in view of the intrinsic
conflicts to do with female sexuality and the way these women
abuse their bodies. .This would be especially so when sadism,
beginning as an expression of revenge against parental figures,
is later generalized to everyone who dares to get close.
Such was the case with a patient I saw some years ago, who
was urgently referred by her GP.He telephoned in great alarm
about a forty-two-year-old woman who had been his patient
for twenty years with severe psychosomatic complaints. These
ranged from asthma, palpitations, headaches, migraines, and
sharp pains in the chest to disorders of the digestive tract. When
no solution was found she began to beg for surgical operations
to relieve her of excruciating pains. She had never been able to
feel close to anyone.
The GP was a caring practitioner, well-informed on psycho-
somatic disorders, who found himself in the hopeless situation
of not being able to understand what was wrong with his
patient, of refusing to collude in her schemes of self-
mutilation, and of being unable to help her. Hedescribed her as
a sensitive, pleasant, intelligent, undemanding woman, and
not at all ‘hysterical’. She lived in completesocial isolation and MOTHERHOOD
 148 was a successful academic, had never had any relationships
with either sex, and appeared to be self-contained and stable
except for her physical condition which would at times, render
her unable to fulfil her duties. She never got any secondary
gains from her symptoms (unless you could so describe a
complete inability to establish any intimate relationship).
Suddenly, after all those years of hopelessness and helpless-
ness, she appeared one day in a state of complete emotional
distraction. She was then able to tell her CP,for the first time
in her life, of an incestuous relationship with her father which
had begun when she was ten and had continued until she was
twenty-two, when she had found strength enough to break it
off and leave home. To start with she had complied with her
father’s demands because she felt terrified and unable to
‘disobey’ him. These demands began when her mother had a
pregnancy following a stillbirth.
In this context, Lewis (1979) makes an important contri-
bution to the discussion of stillbirth followed by a ‘quick
replacement pregnancy’ which prevents these mothers from
mourning the lost baby. He considers this to be a hidden
predisposing factor towards child abuse. According to his
clinical experience, some mothers who find themselves in this
particular predicament of not being able to mourn, coupled
with the demands of the newly born baby, could abuse the new
infant. In the cases he mentions a mother threatened to batter
her baby, and another murdered her eldest child eight months
after the birth of a baby, her husband having died suddenly
during the pregnancy. He adds that the stillbirth can produce
family difficulties that lead to violence (p. 327).I wonder if the
Occurrenceof stillbirth could be another predisposing factor for
father- or mother-daughter incest in the family dynamics?
To return to the history of my forty-two-year-old patient:
she was the eldest daughter and felt very protective towards her
mother, longing for an intimate relationship with her which
never took place. After breaking off the incestuous situation
with her father and leaving home, she promised to herself never
ever to remember this again. She successfully cornplied with
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
this inner mandate for twenty-two years. Her mind had never
WHORE bothered her again with those terrible memories, but instead
her body had started a relentless and exhausting persecution, 149
manufacturing psychosomatic complaints from unconscious
motivations to which she did not have access. She had never
told anyone of her attacks against her body. She indulged in
self-mutilation, with rituals which involved masturbatory
practices of the most sadomasochistic nature.
It is my contention that women who fight against their
bodies in such a formidable, repetitive, direct, and symbolical
manner, including a sadistic element of revenge against their
mothers, are displaying perverse manifestations. I am very
much aware that in thcx particular cases there are grounds for
preferring the designation ‘neurotic’ to ‘perverse’, but again
there is much to be gained from attempting to understand how
the female superego develops.
As Irigaray has asked: ‘For why is the woman’s, the
hysteric’s, superego so “critical”, so cruel? Several reasons
..’
might be adduced. There is ‘one reason that overlaps several
others: whatever works as a superego for women apparently
has no love for women, and particularly of women’s sex/
organ($)’(quoted by Sayers, 1986, pp. 43-4, author’s italics).
Any attempt to study the formation of ego-ideal, superego,
and mental representations in the development of a woman
who as a young girl had a history of incest appears either as a
formidable task or a futile pursuit. A typical background
includes a withdrawn and depressed mother who was there, but
not there, and an insecure, necdy, demanding, violent, and
sexual father. Not only was the girl deprived of maternal care
and consistent love, for which mourning is not considered to be
appropriate, but manic defences were used in the family
dynamics to cope with the mother’s ‘absenteeism’. She felt
‘forced’ by those parental figures to take over her mother’s
place in the family in order to secure its stability. So, those who
were supposed to contribute to the formation of her ego and
superego submitted her to a role reversal and made her feel
unable to assert herself against those parental pressures. She
became her own mother’s mother and wife/mistress to her
father, with all the inherent harmful implications. Conse-
quently, her ego, ego-ideal, superego, and id are all mixed up
and lacking any external or internal frame of reference. MOTHERHOOD
 150 If we look at such a girl’s internal world and its mental
representations, a chaotic picture emerges. Let us try to make
some sense of the formation of those mental mechanisms as
described by various authors. For example, when Nunberg
(1955) differentiates the ego-ideal from the superego, he says
that the ego submits to the ego-ideal out of love and to the
superego out of fear of punishment. In other words the ego-
ideal is to be formed by identification with love-objects
(mother) while the superego is to be formed later by identi-
fication with that of dreaded figures (p. 146) - later fear of
the father. For the girl victim of incest, it seems to me that her
formation of an ego-ideal with a quasi-absent mother is
seriously impeded, and simultaneously the dreaded figure of
her father, theoretical provider of her superego, erupts into her
life and demands from her an identification with her mother’s
role. No wonder that her formation of an ego-ideal and a
superego are extremely distorted and intermeshed with one
another, or that fragments of both are present in a most erratic
and inconsistent way.
Lagache’s description of the ego-ideal responding to the way
in which the subject must behave in order t o comply with the
expectations of authority, and of the superego corresponding
to authority (quoted by Laplancheand Pontalis, 1973, p. 145),
seems to me particularly relevant to incest, in which girls are so
vulnerable to the forces of authority.
According to Reich (1986), the ego-ideal is in direct relation
to the regulation of self-esteem and corresponds to a deep
longing that the child has to become like the parent, and ‘under
certain conditions magic identification with the glorified
parent - megalomaniac feelings - may replace the wish to be
like him’ (p. 303, author’s italics). She also mentions that in
narcissistic persons (though she is talking just of women) there
appears a fantasy of the whole body being a phallus, the
paternal phallus, which arises from deep fixations and over-
sexualization; all this occurs in the phallic phase.
There is a great gap in these women’s stages of development,
mostly a generational one, in which there is a role reversal.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
They have had to function as a mistress, as a mother, and as an
WHORE adult when they are often prepubescent. Unable to grow
emotionally, thay have been forced to grow sexually. It is 151
immensely significant that everything takes place within the
family and that the basic boundaries between responsibilities
normally defined by the generations are not respected. The
normal parents-children relationship is no longer one in which
the paknts take care of a daughter and allow her to develop at
her own pace. At an early age, the girl who is the victim of
incest is the mistress of the household, privy to the most
intimate secrets of the family.
The clinical histories of my patients relevant to this theme
include seduction and emotional deprivation, being seen and
treated as part-objects, being prevented from individuating
themselves from parental figures, and being prematurely
sexualized by their parents. These are similar characteristics to
those found not only in the psychogenesis but also in the
clinical manifestations of perversion.
These women suffer from a masked depression covered by a
compulsive, disguised, genital sexual activity which is
motivated by a deep need for revenge. These ‘sexual’ inter-
actions lack intimacy, emotional nurturing, a sense of con-
tinuity, and sexual gratification. Instead, they provide only a
short-lived period of elation which is soon replaced by a sense
of isolation and despair. Successful soliciting produces a manic
response, ‘a sense of high’ which is very short-lived. This
system of regulating the self-esteem is doomed to failure since
the motivation for physical encounters is based on hatred
rather than love, and the objects encountered - whether
represented by their own bodies or their clients’ - are mere
symbolic replacements for the real ones to which they are
directing their revenge.
Incest gives much and then takes everything away, all at
once. The little girl is now supposed to have all that she could
have dreamt of in her wildest unconscious fantasies, including
her father as her lover. And what does this situation bring for
her? She shares a secret with Daddy that nobody knows about.
Her dreams have become true. Now she has Daddy’s love,
penis, the lot. And she is left in utter misery, with a complete
lack of trust in anyone. Those who were supposed to look after
her, and to keep firm boundaries between her worldsof fantasy MOTHERHOOD
 152 and reality, have failed her, and all is now confusion. She has
an enormous sense of loneliness. Such girls have difficulties in
acknowledging any angry feelings because these feelings are
extremely intense. They feel angry with their mother, who they
see as having failed to protect them, and angry with their father
because he has abused them. As a patient of mine said, ‘I hate
women and distrust men.’ They have been left with deep scars
which will have a marked impact not only on their emotional
lives, but also on all their physical relationships since they often
feel that the only way to gain love is through sexualization.
This phenomenon is comparable to the one described by
Chasseguet-Smirgel in the creation of the future male pervert,
in which his mother makes him believe he is ‘her perfect partner
with his prepubescent penis and there is nothing left to envy his
father’ (1985a, p. 29). In my view, the girl seduced by her
father is also made to believe, by her father, that she is his
perfect partner, but instead of the ‘prepubescent penis’ of the
boy counterpart, she responds to her father’s seduction with her
whole prepubescent body. Everything is there to be developed
and to be tuned in; shecan now learn how to respond with her
whole body, all her erogenous zones, to her father’s seduction.
She is just like the boy that Chasseguet-Smirgel talks about,
left with nothing to envy his father for, except that the
prepubescent girl can still envy her mother’s fecundity; but this
is a transitional stage, and after the menarche she too is capable
of becoming fecund. While in the case of the seduced boy there
is usually an open conspiracy of mother-boy and denigration of
the father, for father-girl incest secrecy is the rule. The
generation boundaries have been offended and violated in both
cases. And just as the boy will react later on with perverse
personality traits, so likewise will girls.
Chasseguet-Smirgel does not compare the two cases as such,
because she believes that for the little girl this realization does
not have the ‘same sense of return to a primitive state of fusion
which is only possible through union with the primary object’
(1985a, p. 32). However, the girl is doing so through her bodily
association with her father. Whereas Chasseguet-Smirgel
MADONNA,
believes that the gcncration difference has to be acknowledged
WHORE by the boy because his mother has a vagina that he cannot
satisfy, the girl on the contrary, is left in a position that while 153
she might not be ready for father to impregnate her, she can
satisfy her father’s sexual desires or demands by offering him
her vagina.
Chasscguet-Smirgel admits that the situation of a girl loved
too tenderly by father, who ostensibly prefers her to his wife, is
often met with. However, she insists that this girl becomes
neurotic and not perverse and adds that ‘perhaps this is the
reason why perversion is less common in women than in men’
(1985b,p. 14).She adheres faithfully to Freud’s change in his
‘seduction theory’, that is, that reported cases of sexual abuse
by fathers in his female patients were products of their fantasy.
But I think that we have enough evidence by now to go back to
his early theory of real seduction, which gives us a rudimentary
approach to the object-relationship, since the cause of the
sexual problem is rooted in a person (Klein, I. M.,1981)
McCarthy clearly and courageously states: ‘I think it is a
criticism of the contribution of Psychoanalysis to Psychiatry
and allied professions that locating the theme of incest in the
world of unconscious fantasy deflected attention away from
the reality of incest and delayed the discovery of sexual abuse
within the family’ (1982,p. 11). He notes that very often
patients describing incestuous experiences were labelled
psychotic or grossly hysterical.
Time and again we observe the disastrous effects of fathers’
interfering with their daughters’ emotional and sexual develop-
ment, similar to the effects on a boy of a seductive and
incestuous mother. It is to be hoped that the recognition of
these problems could lead to their accurate diagnosis.
In this chapter I have described some cases of paternal incest
with which I am familiar and which have led some female
incest survivors to prostitution, and others to experience a
complete suppression of any intimate relationships. Incest
survivors of either sex have enormous difficulties in forming
relationships. This is consistent with the state of confusion
produced by early, traumatic, and abusive experiences. O n the
one hand, they feel exploited, abused, and treated as part-
objects, completely sexualized; on the other hand, they feel SU~ST,TUTE
superior, omnipotent, precocious, and precious. MOTHERHOOD
 154 The defence mechanisms employed in these caws include
deep splitting, denial, and depersonalization. The actions of
these women are the products of an intense disgust towards
their bodies which they try to resolve by different means, not
just by prostitution. However, a relentless sadistic attack on
their whole bodies is frequently the norm, sometimes with
exaggerated libidinal activity and sometimes with its repres-
sion. This distinctive behaviour seems to contain perverse traits
which are different from male perversions.

MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE
EPILOGUE

The foregoing chapters have in a sense written themselves.

They arose more or less spontaneously out of the evidence my
patients brought to me. This process has left some looseends. It
would be tidy to draw them together and to end the book with
a set of conclusions; tidy, but premature. Despite the flood of
publications and advances of recent years, we do not fully
understand female sexuality and family dynamics. We are still
a long way from being able to write the last word on the
subject, and I have not tried to do so. I have been more
concerned to say what is perhaps the first word on some of the
predicaments that happen to have come to my notice. But since
novelty can be provocative, even if in some cases it is only a
variant of what has been said before, it may be helpful to
conclude with a few remarks and to try to put my findings into
focus.
Firstly, it is important to remember the point made in
Chapter 1: that throughout the book the word ‘perversion’ has
been used to define an accepted clinical entity in which the
individual afflicted does not feel free to obtain sexual genital
satisfaction, but instead feels subjected to a compulsive activity EPILOGUE
 156 that takes over and involves unconscious hostility. In this usage
it is a technical, psychoanalytical term and carries no moral
connotations. 1prefer to use ‘perversion’rather than ‘deviation’,
since the latter implies only a statistical abnormality.
Secondly, it is obvious but important to recognize that in the
main I have been talking about people who have come to me or
have been referred to me because they are suffering from very
considerable problems. The fact that these problems can be
traced to certain specific events or attitudes does not mean that
all those who have experienced similar events or attitudes will
suffer the same consequences. Thus, for example, not every girl
who is the victim of incest will become a prostitute; nor are all
prostitutes victims of incest. To put it more generally, the
victims of perverse actions or attitudes will not necessarily act
in a perverse way themselves. But no one should doubt the extra
strain and difficulty of achieving mental equilibrium if
perverse parental behaviour has been inflicted in early life.
Morality is unquestionably involved in the way individuals,
and society itself, act and re-act. But this is a book based
entirely on clinical evidence and, moreover, on evidence from
people who have been involved in perverse actions. Moral
judgements are beyond my prcsent purpose.
Similarly, the treatment of perversion is beyond the scope of
this volume. It is natural for readers to want to know the end of
the story - what has happened to my patients? But that would
require at least another volume. All that is appropriate to say
here is that understanding is a prerequisite to accurate
diagnosis, and that with both understanding and proper
diagnosis of the mental dynamics, treatment can be and has
been successful.
This is so for both men and women in distress, facing
conflicts which they feel unable to manage on their own. In my
twenty-five years of practice, I have observed over and over
again a dynamic interplay in psychotherapy. I feel optimistic
about its potential achievements, but these will, of course,
depend upon the accuracy of diagnosis, and this brings me back
to my patients.
MOTHER,
I feel and have felt honoured and often deeply moved by my
W H O R E clinical work, especially by the degree of intimacy and trust
that individuals confer on me, a complete stranger, in their 157
struggles to achieve a better self-understanding and in the
process rid themselves of traumas which have frequently arisen
within the privileged intimacy of their own families. I also
repeat my acknowledgement of what I owe to my experience
with groups of professional women in Europe. This is a
different generation from our mothers’, many of whom felt in
open or secret competition with other women. To be without a
man was seen as a sign of failure, and all other women were
experienced as prospective rivals. This upbringing left them
with little feeling of feminine solidarity and without much
confidence in their own gender. By contrast, the women in the
groups I have worked with have encouraged each other to
develop their hidden skills and to view other women’s success
as a hopeful outcome for themselves, since they experience a
deep sharing.
This private knowledge has had a considerable effect on me.
At times I have felt the force of Ckzanne’s observation when
looking at pictures which deeply affected him: ‘Sometimes the
process revealed in those pictures demands one’s participation,
not just one’s understanding, a process that left no room for the
distance of detached observation and compassion.’ 1 have felt
proud of the trust placed in me by other women, and convinced
that my gender has sometimes been an advantage in my
profession.
Finally, I must repeat that I did not set out to invent or to
prove a theory. It was no part of my intention to construct
paradoxes. But it would be naive to deny that, given the normal
attitudes of our (Western) society, there appears to be a
paradox in linking perversion with motherhood. Of course,
perversion in motherhood is an exception, but is not so rare as
we would like to suppose.
There may be some readers who are unwilling to recognize
that it is only our thinking of it as a paradox that makes it so.
To them I would like, in conclusion, to say two things. The
first is that knowledge is the beginning of wisdom; to treat
patients you must act on evidence, not presuppositions. The
second has to do with power, the status of mothers. My
findings do not downgrade motherhood, quite the opposite, in EPILOGUE
 158 fact. But obvious though the point may be, it is worth stressing
that the clinical evidence supports the maxim: ‘Never under-
estimate the power of a mother’.

MOTHER,
MADONNA,
WHORE
BIBLIOGRAPHY

All books are published in London unless otherwise indicated.

Abelin, E. (1978) ‘The role of the father in the preoedipal

years’, 1. Amer. Psycboanal. A m 26: 143-61.
Arnaiz, M.,Puget, J. and Siquier, M. (1983) ‘Paradigmas
contrapuestos en las teorfas psicoapallticas sobre sexualidad
feminina’, in Cboques y Annonias entre Teorfus Psico-
anafiticas.Buenos Aim: Asociacibn Argentina de Epistemo-
logla del Psicoadlisis y de la Psicologla Profunda, pp.
29-40.
Aulagnier, P. (1966) ‘Observaciones sobre la fernininidad y sus
atavares’, in El Deseo y la Perversidn. Buenos Aires:
Sudamericana, pp. 63-93.
Barglow, P. and Schaefer, M. (1970) ‘A new female
psychology?’, in H. Blum, ed. Female Psychology. New
York: International Universities Press (1977), pp. 393-438.
Barnett, M. (1966) ‘Vaginal awareness in the infancy
and childhood in girls’, /. Amer. Psychoanal. A m 14:
129-4 1. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 160 Bateson, G. (1956) ‘Towards a theory of schizophrenia’,
Behau. Sci. 1: 251-64.
Beauvoir, S. de (1942) The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley, trans.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.
Benedek, T. (1959) ‘Parenthood as a developmental phase’, /.
Amer. Psychoanal. Assn 7: 389-417.
Bentovim, A. (1976) ‘Shame and other anxieties associated
with breast feeding: a systems theory and psychodynamic
approach’, in Breast Feeding and the Mother, Ciba Symp.
45. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 159-78.
- (1977) ‘Therapeutic systems and settings in the treatment
of child abuse’, in A. W. Franklin, ed. The Challenge of
Child Abuse. Academic Press, pp. 249-59.
Bibring, G., Dwyer, T., Huntington, D. and Valenstein, A.
(1961) ‘A study of the psychological process in pregnancy
and of the earliest mother-child relationship’, Psychoanal.
Study Child 16: 9-44.
Bleichmar, E. D. (1985) El Feminism0 Espontdneo de la
Histeria. Madrid: Adotraf.
Blum, H. P. (1980) ‘The maternal ego ideal and the regulation
of maternal qualities’, in S.L. Greenspan and G. H. Pollock,
eds The Course o f Life: Psychoanalytic Contributions
Toward Understanding Personality Development, vol. 3,
Adulthood and the Ageing Process. NIMH, pp. 91-114.
Bonaparte, M. (1935) ‘Passivity, masochism and femininity’,
Jnt. 1. Psycho-Anal. 16: 325-33.
Bowlby, J. (1951) Maternal Care and Mental Health, W H O
Monograph No. 2. Geneva: World Health Organization.
-
(19S8) ‘The nature of the child’s tie to his mother’, Int. 1.
Psycho-Anal. 39: 350-73.
Bowlby, J., Ainsworth, M., Boston, M.and Rosenbluth, D.
(1956) ‘The effectsof mother-child separation: a follow-up
study’, Br. /. Med. Psychol. 29: 211-47.
Brierley, M.(1932) ‘Some problems of integration of women’,
Jnt. /. Psycho-Anal. 13: 433-48.
-
(1936) ‘Specific determinants in feminine development’,
lnt. /. Psycho-Anal. 7: 163-80.
MADONNA,
Brunswick, R. M.(1940) ‘The pre-oedipal phase of the libido
WHORE development’, Psychoanal. Q. 9: 293-319.
Burlingham, D. and Freud, A. (1943) Infmts without Families. 161
Allen & Unwin.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1985a) Creativity and Perversion.Free
Association.
- (1985b) The Ego Ideal. Free Association.
Chodorow, N. (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Ciba Foundation (1984) Sexual Abuse Within the Family.
Tavistock.
Coria, C. (1986) El Sex0 Oculto del Dinero. Buenos Aim:
Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, Coleccion Controversia.
Deutsch, H. (1925) ‘The psychology of women in relation to
the functions of reproduction’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 6:
405-18.
- (1930) ‘The significance of masochism in the mental life of
women’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 11: 48-60.
Erikson, E. (1968) Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York:
Norton.
Fairbairn, W.R.D.. (1944) ‘Endopsychic structure considered
in terms of object-relationships’, in Sayers (1986), pp.
64-78.
Ferenni, S. (1924) Thalussa: A Theory of Gmitality. New
York: Norton, 1968.
Freud, S. (1905) ‘Three essays on the theory of sexuality’, in J.
Strachey, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. Hogarth,
1953-73. VOI. 4, pp. 182-83.
- (1931) ‘Female sexuality’, S.E. 21, pp. 225-43.
- (1933) ‘Femininity’, S.E. 22, pp. 112-35.
Cagnon, J. (1965) ‘Female child victims of sex offences’, Social
Problems 13: 176-92.
Gallwey, P. (1985) ‘The psychodynamics of borderline per-
sonality’, in D. P. Farringdon and J. J. Cunn, eds Aggression
and Dangerousness. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 127-52.
Canzarain, R. and Buchele, B. (1986) ‘Countertransference
when incest is the problem’, Int. J. Group Psychother. 36:
549-66.
Gibbens, T.C.N. (1957) ‘Juvenile prostitution’, Br. J .
Delinquency 8: 3-12. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 162 Glasser, M. (1979) ‘Some aspects of the role of aggression in
the perversions’, in 1. Rosen, ed. Sexual Deviation. Oxford
University Press, pp. 278-305.
Glover, E. (1943) ‘The Psychopathology of Prostitution’,
Edward Glover Lecture, Institute of Study and Treatment of
Delinquency Publication, pp. 1-16.
Goodwin, J. (1982) Sexual Abuse. Boston, M A : John Wright.
Granoff, W. and Perrier, F. (1980) El Problema de la
Perversidn en la Muier. Barcelona: Editorial Critica.
Greenacre, P. (1950) ‘Special problems of early female sexual
development’, Psychoanal. Study Child 5 : 122-38.
- (1953a) ‘Certain relationships between fetishism and the
faulty development of the body image’, Psychoanal. Study
Child 8: 79-98.
- (1953b) Trauma, Growth and Personality. Hogarth.
- (1960) ‘Considerations regarding the parent-infant rela-
tionship’, Int. /. Psycho-Anal. 41: 571-84.
- (1968) ‘Perversions: general considerations regarding their
genetic and dynamic background’, Psychoanal. Study Child
23: 47-62.
Greenson, R. (1968) ‘Dis-identifying from mother: its special
importance for the boy’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 49: 370-4.
Grunberger, B. (1979) Narcissism. New York: International
Universities Press.
- (1985) ‘Outline for a study of narcissism in female
sexuality’, in J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, ed. Female Sexuality.
H. Karnac, 1985, pp. 68-83.
Herman, H. L. (1981) Father-Daughter Incest. Harvard
University Press.
Hopper, E. (1986) ‘The problem of context in group-analytic
psychotherapy’, in M. Pines, ed. Bion and Group Psycho-
therapy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 330-53.
Horney, K. (1924) ‘On the genesis of castration complex in
women’, in Horney, Feminine Psychology. New York:
Norton, 1973, pp. 37-5’.
-(1926) ‘The flight from womanhood’, Int. /. Psycho-Anal.
12: 360-74.
SrOTHER,
MADONNA, - (1932) ‘The dread of women’, Int. /. Psycho-Anal. 13:
WHORE 348-60.
- (1933) ‘The denial of the vagina’, Int. J . Psycho-Anal. 14: 163
57-70.
- (1939) N e w Ways in Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.
Irigaray, L. (1977) ‘This sex which is not one’, in Sayers
(1986), pp. 43-4.
- (1985) Speculum ofthe Other Woman.New York: Cornell
University Press.
Jones, E. (1927) ‘The early development of female sexuality’,
Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 8: 459-72.
Justice, B. and Justice, R. (1979) The Broken Taboo. New
York: Human Sciences.
Kernberg, 0. ( 1975) Borderline Conditions and Pathological
Narcissism. New York: Jason Aronson.
- (1980) ‘Some implications of object relations theory for
psychoanalytical technique’, in H. Blum, ed. Psychoanalytic
Explorations of Technique. New York: International
Universities Press, pp. 207-39.
Kestenberg, J. S. (1956) ‘On the development of maternal
feelings in early childhood’, Psychoanal. Study Child 11:
257-90.
Khan, M.M.R. (1979) Alienation in Perversions. Hogarth/
Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Kinsey, A., Pomeroy, W. and Martin, C. (1948) Sexual
Behavior in the Human Mule. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders.
Klein, I. M. (1981) ‘Freud’s seduction theory: its implications
in fantasy and memory in psychoanalytical terms’, Bull.
Menninger Clinic 45: 185-208.
Klein, M.(1928) ‘Early stages of the Oedipus conflict’, Int. J.
Psycho-Anal. 9: 167-80.
- (1932) ‘The effects of early anxiety situations on the sexual
development of the girl’, in Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of
Children. HogarthAnstitute of Psycho-Analysis, 1932, pp.
268-325.
- (1933) ‘The phallic phase’, Int. 1. Psycho-Anal. 14: 1-33.
- (1935) ‘Early female sexuality’, Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 16:
263-73.
- (1955) ‘The psycho-analytic play technique’, in Klein, Envy
and Gratitude. Hogarth, 1975, pp. 122-40. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 164 Kohon, G. (1984) ‘Reflections on Dora: the case of hysteria’,
lnt. /. Psycho-Anal. 65: 73-84.
Kramer, S. (1980) ‘Object-coercive doubting: a pathological
defensive response to maternal incest’,]. Amer. Psychoanal.
Assn 31: 325-51.
-(1981) ‘Transactions of The Topeka Psychoanalytical
Society’, Bull. Menninger Clinic 45: 557-60.
Krout Tabin, J. (1985) O n the Way to Self. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Kubie, L. (1974) ‘The drive to become both sexes’, Psychoanal.
Q.43: 349-426.
Laing, R. D . (1961) The Self and Others. Tavistock.
Lamp1 de Groot, J. (1928) ‘The evolution of the Oedipus
complex in women’, lnt. /. Psycho-Anal. 9: 332-45.
- (1933) ‘Contribution to the problem of femininity’,
Psychoanal. Q.2: 489-518.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1973) The Language o f
Psychoanalysis. Hogarth/Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
Lasch, C. (1984) The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in
Troubled Times. Picador.
Laufer, E. (1982) ‘Female masturbation in adolescence and the
development of the relationship to the body’, lnt. /. Psycho-
Anal. 63: 295-302.
Lax, R. (1982) ‘The expectable depressive climacteric reaction’,
Bull. Menninger Clinic 46: 151-67.
Lemoine-Luccioni, E. (1982) La Particion de l a Mujeres.
Buenos A i m : Amorrortu.
Lester, E. and Notman, M.(1986) ‘Pregnancy, developmental
crisis and object relations: psychoanalytical considerations’,
Int. /. Psycho-Anal. 67: 357-66.
Lewis, E. (1979) ‘Two hidden predisposing factors in child
abuse’, Child Abuse Neglect 3: 327-30.
Limentani, A. (1987) ‘Perversions: treatable and untreatable’,
Contemp. Psychoanal. 23: 415-37.
Loewald, H.W.(1951) ‘Egoand reality’, h t . /. Psycho-Anal.
32: 10-18.
MOTHER,
MADONNA,
Lothstein, L. M . (1979) ‘Psychodynamics and sociodynamics
WHORE of gender-dysphoric states’, Am. /. Psychother. 33: 214-38.
Lukianowin, H. (1972) ‘Incest: 1. paternal incest’, Br. 1. 165
Psychiatry 120: 301-13.
McCarxhy, B. (1982) ‘Incest and psychotherapy’, Irish. 1.
Psychother. 1: 11-16.
McDougall, J. (1970) ‘Homosexuality in women’, in J.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, ed. Female Sexuality. H. Karnac,
1985, pp. 171-212.
- (1986) Theutres of the Mind. Free Association, 1986.
Mahler, M. S. (1963) ‘Thoughts about development and indi-
viduation’, Psychoanal. Study Child 18: 307-24.
- (1968) O n Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of lndi-
viduation. New York: International Universities Press.
Margolis, M. (1980) ‘A preliminary report of a case of
consummated mother-son incest’, The Annual of Psycho-
analysis 5: 267-94.
Masterson, J. F. and Rinsley, D. B. (1975) ‘The borderline
syndrome: the role of the mother in the genesis and psychic
structure of the borderline personality’, Znt. 1. Psycho-Anal.
56: 163-77.
Mitchell, J. (1980) ‘On the differences between men and
women’, in Sayers (1986), p. 91.
- (1984) Women: The Longest Revolution. Virago.
Muller, J. (1932) ‘The problem of the libidinal development of
the genital phase in girls’, lnt. J. Psycho-Anal. 13: 361-8.
Nunberg, H. (1955) Principles of Psychoanalysis. New York:
International Universities Press, p. 146; in Laplanche and
Pontalis (1973), p. 145.
Okell Jones, C. and Bentovim, A. (1984) ‘Sexual abuse of
children: fleeting trauma or lasting disaster’, Tavistock
Clinic Paper 15: 1-17.
Payne, S. (1935) ‘A concept of femininity’, Br. 1.Med. Psychol.
15: 18-33.
Peters, J. J. (1976) ‘Children who are victims of sexual assault
and the psychology of offenders’, Am. J. Psychother. 30:
398-421.
Pines, D. (1972) ‘Pregnancy and motherhood: interaction
between fantasy and reality’, Br. j . Med. Psychol. 45:
333-43. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 166 - (1982) ‘The relevance of early psychic development to
pregnancy and abortion’, Inr. /. Psycho-Anal. 63: 31 1-19.
- (1986) ‘A woman’s unconscious use of her body: a psycho-
analytic perspective’, Carol Dilling Memorial Lecture, New
York.
Pines, M. (1969) ‘Human sexuality revisited’, Bull. Br.
Psycho-Anal. Society Inst. Psycho-Anal. (private circulation)
23: 1-26.
Raphael-Leff, J. (1983) ‘Facilitators and regulators: two
approaches to mothering’, Br. 1.Med. Psychol. 56: 379-90.
- (1985) ‘Fears and fantasies of childbirth’, /. Pre and
Perinatal Psychol. 1: 14-18.
Rascovsky, A. and Rascovsky, M. (1968) ‘On the genesis of
acting out and psychopathic behaviour in Sophocles’
Oedipus’, Int. j . Psycho-Anal. 49: 390-5.
- (1972) ‘The prohibition of incest, filicide and the socio-
cultural process’, Int. 1.Psycho-Anal. 53: 271-6.
Reich, A. (1986) ‘Narcissistic object choice in women’, in P.
Buckley, ed. Essential Papers on Object Relations. New
York University Press, pp. 297-317.
Renshaw, D. (1982) Incest. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.
Rinsley, D. B. (1978)‘Borderlinepsychopathology: a review of
aetiology, dynamics and treatment’, f n t . Rev. Psycho-Anal.
5 : 45-54.
Riviere, J. (1929) ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’, Int. /.
Psycho-Anal. 10: 303-13.
Rolph, C. H., ed. (1955) W o m e n of the Streets. Secker &
Warburg.
Rosen, I., ed. (1979a) Sexual Deviation, 2nd edn. Oxford
University Press.
- (1979b) ‘Perversion as a regulator of self-esteem’, in Rosen
(1979a), pp. 65-78.
Rosen, J. N. (1953) ‘The perverse mother’, in Rosen, Direct
Analysis: Selected Papers. New York: Grune & Stratton, pp.
97- 105.
Rycroft, C. (1968) A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis.
MOTHER,
MADONNA.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
WHORE Sayers, J. (1986) Sexual Contradictions. Tavistock.
Schafer, R. (1974) ‘Problems in Freud’s psychology of women’, 167
Am. J. Psychoanal. 22: 459-85.
Shengold, L. (1979) ‘Child abuse and deprivation: soul
murder’, J. Amer. Psychoanal. A m 27: 533-59.
- (1980) ‘Some reflections on a case of mother/adolescent
son incest’, Znt. J. Psycho-Anal. 61: 461-76.
Silbert, M.H. and Pines, A. M.(1981) ‘Sexual abuse as an
antecedent to prostitution’, Child Abuse Neglect 5: 407-12.
Sloane, F. and Karpinski, E. (1942) ‘Effects of incest on the
participants’, Am. J. Orthopsychiatry 12: 666-73.
Sperling, M. (1959) ‘A study of deviate sexual behaviour in
children by the method of simultaneous analysis of mother
and child’, in L. Jessner and E. Pavenstedt, eds Dynamic
Psychopathology in Childhood. New York: Grune 8i
Stratton, pp. 221-43.
- (1963) ‘Fetishism in children’, Psychoanal. Q. 32: 374-92.
- (1964) ‘The analysis of a boy with transvestite tendencies: a
contribution to the genesis and dynamics of transvestism’,
Psychoanal. Study Child 19: 470-93.
Spitz, R. (1946) ‘Anaclitic depression’, Psychoanal. Study
Child 2: 313-42.
- (1951) ‘The psychogenic diseases in infancy: an attempt at
their aetiologic classification’, Psychoanal. Study Child 6:
255-75.
Steelc, B. (1970) ‘Parental abuse of infants and small children’,
in E. Anthony and T. Benedck, eds Parenthood: Its
Psychology and Psychopathology.New York: Little, Brown,
pp. 449-77.
Stewart, H.(1961) ‘Jocasta’s crimes’, Znt. J. Psycho-Anal.42:
424-30.
Stoller, R . (1968) Sex and Gender: On the Development of
Musculinity and Femininity. New York: Science House.
- (1975) Perversion. New York: Pantheon.
- (1976) ‘Primary femininity’, in H. Blum, ed. Female
Psychology. New York: International Universities Prcss,
1977, pp. 59-78.
Storr, A. (1964) Sexual Deviation. Pelican.
Whal, C. W. (1960) ‘The psychodynamics of consummated
maternal incest’, Archives Gen. Psychiatry 3: 188-92. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 168 Winnicott, D. W. (1953) ‘Transitional objects and transitional
phenomena’, Int. /. Psycho-Anal. 34: 89-97.
- (1956) ‘The antisocial tendency’, in The Collected Papers.
Tavistock, 1958, pp. 306-15.
- (1965) The Maturational Process and the Facilitating
Environment. New York: International Universities Press.
Zavitzianos, G. (1971) ‘Fetishism and exhibitionism in the
female and their relationship to psychopathy and klepto-
mania’, Int. 1. Psycho-Anal. 52: 297-305.
Zilbach, J. (1987) ‘I in the I of the Beholder: Towards a
Separate Line of Women’s Development’, S. R. Slavson
Lecture, 44th Group Psychotherapy. New Orleans, LA:
American Group Psychotherapy Association.

MOTHER,
MAD 0 N N A ,
WHORE
JNDEX

abandonment, 5,49,66,68 ‘as if’ personality, 140

Abelin, E., 45 Aulagnier, P., 126
abortion, 35, 36,43,49, 141, autoerotism, 28
143,144 ‘auxiliary ego’, 67
active engulfment, 32,82 see
also engulfment
adolescence, 11, 21,40,44,47, babies:
48,54,55,59, 80 see also abused, 67,74 see also
boys; girls battered
affection, craving for, 81 as part-objects, 8, 72
aggression, 66,72,94 battered, 10, 72,74,75,
all-women’s groups see 79
women’s groups existence before birth, 103
anality, 109, 112 see also fantasies of, 103
following entries gender of, 50-1,51-2
anal phase, 30,111,115 maternal availability and
anal pleasures, 116 withdrawal, 67-8
annihilation anxieties, 65 penis, symbolic equivalence
anorexia nervosa, 12, 33, 58 see with, 2,23, 72
also eating anomalies; fasting see also children; infants
aphanisis, 65 Barglow, P. and Schaefer, M.,
Arnaiz, M.,Puget, J. and 3
Siquier, M.,23 Barnett, M.,3 INDEX
 170 Bateson, G., 10 binges; eating anomalies;
Beauvoir, S. de, 108-9 fasting
Benedek, T., 67,68 Burlingham, D. and Freud, A,,
Bentovim, A., 131 67
bestialism, 94
Bibring, G. et al., 20
binges, 97 see also bulimia castration anxieties, 2,5,7, 11,
biological clock, 43,44, 45, 26, 30, 31
54, 59, 83, 127 castration complex, 2, 3, 23 see
Bleichmar, E. D., 23, 30 also previous entry
Blum, H.P., 63, 67 cathexis, 120
bodies: Ckzanne, Paul, 157
as part-objects, 8, 72 Chasseguet-Smirgel, J., 5, 28,
as sexual organs, 12,26, 150 81,82,93,108,115,152-3
attributes of, 11 Chicago Vice Commission
changes in, 46 report, 130
mental representations of, 7, child abuse, 67 see also babies:
19, 33,42, 43.48, 117 abused
perception of, 32 childbirth, 42, 80, 103
perversion and, 7 child development, 63
sexuality and, 19-41 child guidance clinic, 99
symbolic operation of, 4 children:
'body barrier', 7 battered, 67
borderline personality, 67-8, perverse, 78
80 sexual behaviour, deviant, 78
Bowlby, J., 67 violence and, 93, 94
boys: see also preceding entries and
incestuous feelings, 10 babies; infants
libidinal development, 2 child sacrifice, 67
mothers, dis-identity from, Chodorow, N., 63
45 Ciba Foundation, 129,131,
mothers, object-relationship 133
with, 45 'Circe complex', 109
mothers, transfer of clitoris, 12, 23
attachment from, 47 coitus, 21, 108 see also sexual
mothers' attitudes to, 50, 51, intercourse
52 coldness see frigidity
wish for, 52 'complementary identification',
breast-feeding, 120, 122 113
breasts, 13, 23, 27, 31, 33, 35, conception, fantasies about,
36, 38,47 20-1, 103
Brierley, M.,3 'core complex', 65
M O T H E R , brothel keepers, 126-7 core gender-identity, 44,45, 75
M A D O N N A , Brunswick, R. M.,3 see also gender-identity;
W H O R E bulimia, 12, 33, 64 see also primary core femininity
Coria, C., 108 ego-syntonic, 22, 140 171
Coriolanus, 82 ego weakness, 68
cosmetic surgery, 34, 36 Electra complex, 86
cot deaths, 135 emotional development, 93
countertransference, 91, 131 engulfment, 65,66,82, 108,
culture, 106 113, 114 see olsoactive
engulfment
envy, 11, 15, 26, 30,46,51,
debasement, 109 58,65,66
defence mechanisms, 11, 17, Erikson, E., 4,42
125, 131 exhibitionism, 33, 38, 39,95,
dehumanization, 75, 82, 98 see 97,99
also depersonalization
delinquency, 64
denial, 128, 131, 154 ‘facilitator’, 79
dependency, 51,63,65, 80 Fairbairn, W.R. D.,25
depersonalization, 115, fantasia:
128, 154 see also babies’, 103
dehumanization body and, 7
depression: childbirth, 103
abortion and, 43 conception, 103
deprived childhood and, 96 during orgasm, 121
frigidity and, 22 gestation, 103
incest and, 135, 136 girls’, of evacuating mothers’
prostitution and, 101, 117, bodies, 11
140 incest, 139-40
sex and, 22 mothers, 111, 113
despair, 101 Other, 20
Deutsch, H.,3, 12 perversion and, 7, 8
‘deviatjon’, 6, 156 phallic, 46
‘double bind’, 10 phallus, mothers’ missing,
dyadic process, 116 25
dypsomania, 64 power, 46
pregnancy, 44,47,48, SO
presedipal, 8
eating anomalies, 33, 97 see prostitution and, 107, 113,
also anorexia nervosa; 117,127,128
bulimia reproductive organs, 113
economic factors, 106 secondary sexual
ego, 36 see also following characteristics and, 47
entries uncaring mother and, 2.5
ego-control, 37 fasting, 97 see ofso anorexia
ego defects, 68 nervosa; bul i m ia
ego-dystonic, 22 fathers:
ego-ideal, 121, 149, 150 castrating, 2, 30, 103 IfNDEX
 172 daughters’ sexuality and, 47, female sexuality and, 2, 4, 7,
151-3 27, 31, 108
prostitution and, 115 libidinal development and,
role of, 66 2
substitute, 102 mothers and, 3
symbolic, 116 Oedipus complex and, 7
fellatio, 124 ‘seduction theory’, 153
female sexuality, theories women’s psychology and, 5
about, 2, 3,4, 5 see also frigidity, 22, 129, 130
Freud: female sexuality
female sexual perversion, 1-18:
acknowledgement of, Gagnon, J., 131
lacking, 5, 16, 99, 104 Callwey, P.,79
aetiology, 42 Canzarain, R. and Buchele, B.,
aim, 8, 7 2 91
body and, 34,40 gender:
denial of, 6,7, 8, 105 acknowledgement of, 70, 75
existence of, doubt about, conflicts about, 53
127 dual, drive to, 32, 33
incest and, 93 narcissism and, 6 0
legislation, lack of, 105 rejection and, 46, 82
male perversion and, 8, 38, toilet-training and, 114
39,42, 60, 72 see also following entries
prostitution and, 127 gender-dysphoria, 91
sadism and, 9 gender-identity, 20, 43, 44, 45,
theories about, 5 54, 57, 59, 65, 70, 81, 82
see also incest: maternal; see also core gender-identity;
male sexual perversion; primary core femininity
perversion ‘generational identity’, 45
femininity, 22, 24, 27 see also genital object-love, 28
core gender-identity genital orgasm, 6,7, 8
feminism, 14, 52, 86 see also genital phase, 32
women’s movement genital primacy, 5
Ferenczi, S., 28 genital sexuality, 11
fetishism, 38, 72, 78: genital supremacy, 2 , 4
aetiology, 93 Gertrude, 82
child, 93 gestation, fantasies about, 103
filicide, 66, 67 Gibbens, T. C. N., 109
‘flashing’, 97 see also girls:
exhibit ionism fathers, distanced from, 45
foetus, 20,49 gender-identity, 44
‘foreign body’, 20 libidinal development, 2
A4 OTH E R ,
foreplay, 23 mothers, damaging
MADONNA, Freud, Sigmund: experiences with, 48
WHORE categories, 23 mothers’ attitudes to, 52-3
 mothers’ rcproduct ive paternal, 10,91, 102, 103, 173
functions, envy of, 11 104,151-3
vaginal awareness, 3, 11 perpetrator’s seduction, 94,
Glasser, M.,65 104,132
Glover, E., 109, 115 prostitution and, 129-54
Goodwin, J., 130 schizophrenia and, 103
grandmothers, 16 secrecy surrounding, 130,
Granoff, W. and‘Perrier, F., 131,132,133,136, 151
36.72 self-perception and, 130
Creenacre, P., 4,40,66,?1 ‘sex in the family, keeping’,
Greenson, R., 65 135
Grunberger, B., 69,107,126 sociozconomic factors, 135
guilt, 22 substitute mothering and, 17
survivors, 128-54
victims:
Hamlet, 82 effects on, 93,94,95,
hatred, 8, 9, 18, 111 102,129,130,151-4
Herman, H. L., 134 mothers and, 133
homosexuality, 33, 36,53, 85, sexual partners of, 131
99 support for, 129
homosexual panic, 44 infants:
Hopper, E., 16,65 incestuous wishes of, 2
hormones, 54 murderous wishes of, 2
Horney, K., 3, 11,25 see also babies
hostility, 33, 66 inner space, 42-3,44,48, 54,
hysterectomy, 61 59,61,62
insecurity, 9, 104, 110
intellect, 23, 24
id, 149 ‘internal saboteur’, 25,26
identity, 8: intimacy, 14,19,37,51,79,152
uncertainty about, 71 intrapsychic dysfunction, 107
impotence, 135 Irigaray, L., 34, 149
incest:
collusion, 131
cultural factors and, 135 Jason, 83
denial of, 132 Jocasta, 82, 85, 86
family and, 131, 132, 133, ‘Jocasta complex’, 98
134,151-4 Jones, E., 4, 11
fantasies about, 139-40, 151 Justice, B. and Justice, R., 130
impotence and, 135
individuation and, 98
levels of, 136 kerb crawlers, 107
maternal, 10, 39, 85-105, Kernberg, O., 67, 113
121, 151-3 Kestenberg, J. S., 18
multipk, 133 Khan, M.M.R., 37 INDEX
 174 Kinsey, A. el al., 108 making love, 21, 33 see also
Klein, I. M., 153 sexual intercourse
Klein, M., 11, 23, 65 male sexual perversion, 5,7:
kleptomania, 33, 73 aim of, 8,72
Kohon, G., 30, 31 descriptions, 31
Kramer, S., 93, 94, 98, 99 female perversion and, 8, 154
Kubie, L., 32 mothers, relationship with,
7s
see also female sexual
labour, 32, 80 perversion; perversion
lactation, 42, 66 Margolis, M., 93, 94
Laing, R. D., 9-10 masochism, 96, 109, 126,
Laius, 85 138 see also sadism;
Lamp1 de Groot, J., 3 sadomasochism
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, Masterson, J. F. and Rinsley,
J.-B., 6, 64 D. B., 67, 103
Lasch, C.,25 masturbation, 38, 39-40, 96,
latency period, 2 98-9, 103,149
Laufer, E., 39, 40 ‘maternal instinct’, 18, 64
Lax, R., 43, 44, 60 Medea, 83
Lemoine-Luccioni, E., 29, 32 menarche, 32, 54, 56, 152
lesbian impulses, 43 menopause, 43, 44, 47, 5S, 60,
Lester, E. and Norman, M., 61
20 menses, 12, 34, 54
Lewis, E., 148 mental rrpresen ta tion:
libidinal development, 2, 11, of body, 7, 19, 33, 42, 43,
31,54, 114 48, 117
libidinal gratification, 34 of motherhood, 49
libido, 12, 42: of object, 21
exaggeration of, 130 of self, 21
see also previous entries of womb, 62
Limentani, A., 49 miscarriages, 113, 125
Loewald, €3. W., 66 ‘mistakes’, 69
Lothstein, L. M., 68 Mitchell, J., 30, 31
love-objects, 69 money:
Lukianowicz, H., 130 faeces and, 114, 115
prostitution and, 106, 107,
108,109, 114, 127, 145
McCarthy, B., 153 mother-baby unit, 5, 16
McGougall, J., 5, 75 motherhood:
madonna/whore complex, 110, anxicty/fulfilment and, 44
111 expectations of, 51
MOTHER, ‘magical change’, 32, 33 femininity and, 27
MADONNA, Mahler, M . S., 65, 66 glorification of, 10, 78-9,
WHORE making hate, 25, 33 83,85
 motivations towards, 79 narcissism, 20, 28, 39, 60, 96, 175
negative aspects, 10 108, 126,127,150
perverse, 5,39,63-84 negativism, 113, 114
power of, 40, 74-5 Nunberg, H.,150
pregnancy and, 51
significance, 75
society and, 10, 18 object-relationships:
womanhood and, 15-16 baby’s, with mother, 45
see also following entries boys’, 29
mothering: impairment, 72
faulty, 5, 9, 17 perversion and, 22, 78
models of, 79 pregnancy and, 21
mot her1iness, 20- 1 procreation and, 82
mothers: promiscuity and, 48
anal, 114 prostitution and, 126
attitude to, 99 to sexual partner, 20
bisexual conflict and, 68 see also following entry
daughters, competition with, object-relations theory, 11,44
47 object-seeking, 21
daughters’ ident if icat ion Oedipus, 82, 85-6
with, 31 Oedipus complex, 2,5, 7, 25,
fantasies about, 111, 113 91, 103
‘ideal’, 121 Okell Jones, C. and Bentovim,
importance of attachment A., 131
to, 5 oral phase, 30,38,111
incest, 10, 39, 85-105 oral pleasures, 116
losing, fear of, 9 oral symbols, 33
perverse, 72 orgasm, 6,7, 19, 27,28, 29,
perverted actions of, 12 32, 121:
power of, 3, 16,45 vaginal, 32
prostitution and, 108, 109, outer space, 43
114-15,116,121,128 ‘overprotection’, 9
reproductive functions, envy
of, 11
revenge against, 49, 50 paedophilia, 60, 85
schizophrenia, 9-10 parricide, 6
separation from, 31 part-objects, 8, 9,40, 72, 93,
symbolic, 97 97,98,105,109,110,151
see also preceding and Payne, S., 3
following entries penis:
mother-substitutes, 2.4, 17, baby, symbolic equivalence
102,115 with, 2, 23
mourning, 61, 136, breasts, equation with, 33,
148 47
Muller, J., 3 loss, fear of, 7 INDEX
 176 part-object use of, 110 'post coitum tristum', 32
perversion and, 7.40 postnatal depression, 81
phallus and, 4 power, politics of, 104, 105
prepubescent, 93 pregenitality, 7
women's identification with, pregnancy, 20-1, 23, 26-7:
28 body changes and, 20,21,54
see also following entry and earlier conflict and, 50
phallus envy and, 30
penis-envy, 2, 11, 12, 23, 31, fantasies about, 44, 47, 48,
46,49 50, 103
perversion: gender confirmation and, 48,
aetiology, 104 49
anal universe in, 115 'inner space' and, 42
body and, 7,40 male foetus, 52
childhood experience and, 78 motherhood and, 51
definition, 6, 63-4, 155 motivation for, 80
expression of, 40 prostitution and, 122
narcissism and, 126 reality and, 27
psychogenic factors in, 104, 'replacement', 148
151 revenge and, 22, 49,SO
self-perpetuat ion, 94 revulsion at, 27
term, use of, 6 security and, 21
treatment of, 152 sexual intercourse and, 29
see also female sexual premenstrual tension, 34, 36
perversion; male sexual pre-oedipal mother, 3
perversion; pre-oedipal phase, 5, 40, 44, 45
masochism; sadism pre-oedipal son, 93
Peters, J. J., 130 primary core femininity, 31,44
phallic mother, 5 see also gender-identity
phallic stage, 2, 23, 150 probation, 140, 141
phallus: procreation, 5, 21, 30, 42, 51,
as power symbol, 26 82:
as symbol, 26, 28 frigidity and, 32
as the genital organ, 2,4 procreative capacities, 11
female equivalent, 31 procreative drives, 7
penis and, 4 procreativity, 26
supremacy of, 4 professional success, 15, 24, 25,
see also preceding entries and 43
penis projective identification, 94,
phantasies see fantasies 96,113,115,121
Pines, D., 21, 28,44, 121-2 promiscuity, 411, 129, 130,
Pines, M., 12 144
MOTHER, pleasure principle, 21 see also prostitution:
MADONNA, reality principle anality and, 109
WHORE possessiv'eness, 93 anonymity of, 107
 as perversion, 127 psychotherapists: incest and, 177
bewilderment in, 110 131-2 see also
bodies, risks to, 117 psychoanalysts
emotion and, 116-17 puberty, 46
emptiness and, 128 punishment, 124
explanations of, 108
fantasy and, 107, 113, 117,
127,128 Raphael-Leff, J., 50,60, 79
father and, 115 Rascovsky, A. and Rascovsky,
gender differences in, 107, M.,66
108 reality principle, 13, 21, 54 see
incest and, 129-54 also pleasure principle
law’s double standard, 107, reingulfment, 66
116 regression, 134
levels of, 117 ‘regulator’, 79
love and, 115 Reich, A., 25, 26,150
middle age and, 127 Renshaw, D., 131
money and, 106,107, 108, repetition, 33, 37, 98
109,114,127,145 repression, 44, 130
mothers and, 108,109, reproductive functions, 11
114-15,116,121,128 reproductive organs, 19, 20, 27,
motivation for, 107-8, 109, 40,54,113
114 repulsion, 72
narcissism and, 126 revenge:
pregnancy and, 122 denigration and, 82
problems of, 117 gender and, 37,82
self-esteem and, 117, 118, mothers and, 18,49,75
125 perversion and, 8, 74
sexual intercourse not pregnancy and, 22,47,49,50
necessary, 117 prostitutionand, 128,147,151
society and, 124, 125 sadistic, 13
splitting and, 17, 115, 154 revulsion, 72
symbolism of, 106, 114, 134 Rinsley, D. B., 80,
two-sided nature of, 109 102-3
psychoanalysis, 1, 67,68: Riviere, J., 3
literature of, 3,4, 5, 78, 91 robbery, 120
male domination of, 4 Rolph, C. H.,109
see also following entries Rosen, I., 6, 118
psychoanalysts: Rosen, J. N., 64
role of, 2 Rycroft, C., 6
women, 3.4, 5
see also psychotherapists
psychosexuality, 4-5 sadism, 9, 13, 22, 33, 37, 72,
psychosomatic symptoms, 130, 109, 112, 123, 138, 147 see
147,149 also following entry INDEX
 178 sadomasochism, 36,70, 71, Silbert, M.H. and Pines,
117, 137, 143 see also A. M.,130
masochism Sloane, F. and Karpinski, E.,
Sayers, J., 25, 116, 149 130
Schafer, R., 2, 4 smells, 113
schizophrenia, 9-10, 64, smothering, 9
103 socialization, 67
scoptophilia, 116 society, 83, 91, 105, 124, 125
Seattle, 130 soliciting, 118, 151
‘secondary gains’, 4 space: gender differences and
seduction, 5, 39 use of, 43
self, false sense of, 68 Sperling, M.,30, 7d, 81
self-contempt, 37 Spitz, R.,67
self-denigration, 117, 128 ‘split object-relations unit’,
self-esteem, 117, 118, 125, 103
128,136,137,150,151 splitting:
self-injury, 12, 34, 40, 76, 147, genital sexuality and, 7
149 incest and, 96, 110, 121,
self-knowledge, 15 131, 154
self-love, 126 intellect and femininity, 24
self-mutilation, 34 maltreatment and, 67
self-neglect, 117, 125 motherhood and, 120
‘separation/individuation’ prostitution and, 17, 115,
stages, 65, 71, 80, 81, 119 128
sexes, differentiation of, 5, 19, Stewart, H., 83
30,44,46, 107 stillbirth, 148
sexes, relative position in Stoller, R., 13, 72, 74, 75,
society of, 4 142
sexual coldness see frigidity Storr, A,, 6
sexual development, 28, 93: substitute mothers see
parallelism, 6 mother-substi tutes
sexual gratification, 19, 20, 21, ‘success anxiety’, 26
74, 96, 98, 108, 115, 136, ‘sugar daddy’, 116
151, 155 suicide, 97
sexual intercourse: superego, 69, 78, 116, 139,
aims in, 29, 32 140,149,150
body perception and, 32 surgery, cosmetic, 34, 36
fantasy and, 25, 29 symbiosis, 39, 65, 66, 67, 79,
perversion of, 7 100, 109
see also making love symbolic mothers, 97
sexual object, 2, 30 symbolism, 23, 46, 48, 109,
sexual tension, 19, 28 114, 128
MOTHER, shame, 14
MADONNA. Shengold, L., 90,91, 92, 93
W H O R E shoplifting, 40 Tabin, Krout, 108, 110, 113
three-generational vulnerability, 9 179
approach/process, 16,49,
83,90,135
time, 43, 54 see also biological Whal, C. W., 103
clock whorelmadonna complex, 110,
toilet-training, 109, 111, 113, 111
114, 115 whores see prostitution
transference process, 2, 11, 65, Winnicott, D. W., 72, 124
74,110,111, 112,136 womanhood: anxiety/
‘transitional object’, 72 fulfilmect, 44
transsexualism, 68, 75, 76, 79 woman’s castration, 23
transvestitism, 33, 34, 35, 76, womb:
78,79 power of, 12,40,41,42-62
true self, 140 return to, wish for, 28
women:
as fetish, 36, 37
vagina, 32, 152-3: inconsistency in viewing,
as symbol, 28 9- 10
awareness of, 3, 11, 23 psychopathology of, 11
symbolic invasion of, 29 sex organs ubiquitous, 34
victims: women’s groups, 15, 16, 157
as victimizers, 9 women’s movement, 4, 14 see
see also under incest also feminism
violence, 137, 148 see also
sadism
Volumnia, 82 Zavitzianos, G., 38-40
vomiting, 97, 98 Zilbach, J., 31, 32, 82

INDEX