Masculine Scenarios (Psychoanalysis and Women Series)

Editorial Reviews. Review. Masculine Scenarios is the third volume in a unique series edited by Alcira Mariam Alizade for the Committee on Women and.
Table of contents

But research has shown that one-night stands are actually the least common type of casual sex. These encounters are most likely to take place in the context of casual dating relationships, friendships, or hook-ups with exes. Men and women have fundamentally different personalities and orientations toward relationships.

This myth is often perpetuated by the popular media. The truth is that sex differences in most areas are relatively small, and there is much more variation between individual people than there is between genders. And most gender differences in personality are a lot smaller than gender differences in height. There is, in fact, a great deal of similarity in what men and women want from relationships: Both men and women rate kindness, an exciting personality, and intelligence as the three most important characteristics in a partner, for example.

Focusing only on gender differences when dealing with our partners tends to oversimplify things and exaggerate the truth, leading to less , not more , understanding of one another. Men and women have fundamentally different ways of handling conflict. Most research suggests that men and women do not differ significantly in their responses to relationship conflict. The more a demander pushes an issue, the more a withdrawer retreats, only causing the demander to become more intent on discussing the issue, and creating a vicious cycle that leaves both partners frustrated.

But even this exception may have more to do with power dynamics than gender differences. In some studies, couples have been asked to discuss an issue in their relationship. Sometimes, they've been asked to discuss something the woman wants to change; other times they are asked to do the reverse. When the issue under discussion is a change the woman wants, the woman is likely to take the demander role; when the issue is one that the man wants to change, the roles reverse, 20 or we see the pattern only when the issue is something the woman wants to change.

So, why the consistent gender difference in previous research? The person who wants change is typically the person who has less power in the relationship, while his or her partner is motivated to simply maintain the status quo. In our society, men have traditionally had more power in relationships than women, so women often found themselves as the ones pressing for change.

This dynamic is changing, of course. But even when power is not uneven, women are choosing to press issues because they want changes, not because they handle conflict differently than men. Physical abuse in relationships is almost always committed by men. When people think of a domestic violence victim, most immediately visualize a woman. And it is true that the injuries suffered by female domestic violence victims tend to be more serious than those suffered by male victims, and that the abuses inflicted by men are likely to be more frequent and severe.

Nonetheless, males are also frequently the victims of domestic violence. Some are flat out wrong, but even if there is a kernel of truth to them, they tend to exaggerate that truth, and are not constructive in dealing with the unique individuals with whom we have relationships. Development of the 'Romantic Beliefs Scale' and examination of the effects of gender and gender-role orientation.

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 6 4 , Measuring passionate love in intimate relationships.

References

Journal of Adolescence , 9 4 , The surprising secrets of happy couples and what they reveal about creating a new normal in your relationship. Gender differences in effects of physical attractiveness on romantic attraction: A comparison across five research paradigms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59 , Preferences in human mate selection. Importance of physical attractiveness in dating behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4 5 , Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?.

Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers. The social organization of sexuality: Sexual practices in the United States. University of Chicago Press. Overview of sexual practices and attitudes within relational contexts. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

The Psychodynamics Of Gender And Gender Role (Book Review)

Using the bogus pipeline to examine sex differences in self-reported sexuality. The Journal of Sex Research, 40 , Perceived propose personality characteristics and gender differences in acceptance of casual sex offers. An event-level analysis of the sexual characteristics and composition among adults ages 18 to Results from a national probability sample in the United States.

Journal of Sexual Medicine, 7 Suppl 5 , Do alcohol and marijuana use decrease the probability of condom use for college women? The gender of sexuality. A meta-analytic interpretation of intimate and non-intimate interpersonal conflict. Personal Relationships, 9 , Gender differences in marital conflict: Demand-withdraw communication in marital interaction: Tetss of interpersonal contingency and gender role hypotheses.

Journal of Marriage and the Family , 58, Sex differences in physically aggressive acts between heterosexual partners: Aggression and Violent Behavior, 7, Differences in female and male victims and perpetrators of partner violence with respect to WEB scores. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 23 8 , The differential effects of intimate terrorism and situational couple violence: Journal of Family Issues, 26 , Is violence in black families increasing?

A comparison of and national survey rates. Journal of Marriage and Family , 51 , The controversy over domestic violence by women: A methodological, theoretical, and sociology of science analysis. Help-seeking among male victims of partner abuse: Journal of Community Psychology, 38, What is it with all these studies and data? This is Psychology Today where anecdotes rule and single women who enjoy sex are shamed. JR Bruns will be livid. What a sick horrible woman-hater and thing to say! Myth 7 men are human,! Why don't you add myth 8 Jews and Blacks are human!

There are some masculine type men and some feminine type males. Other then that, it's generally true that to engage in sex a man needs a place, and a woman needs a reason. Some are flat out wrong, but even if there is a kernel of truth to them they tend to exaggerate that truth, and are not constructive in dealing with the unique individuals that we have relationships with. It's too bad that the numerous ignorant posters on Psychology Today won't read this article, or they will choose to dispute it based on This pertains to "Myth 2.

This is vastly important. In college, earning potential for both men and women is low, so the ability of men to provide resources isn't taken into consideration. Therefore, in college women treat physical attractiveness as a higher priority. Scroll down to "How many messages a man gets by age and income". OKCupid found that college-aged men who are low earners can still do fairly well with women.

However, after graduation women don't appear to want anything to do with low-earning men. High earning men become much more desirable, and get more responses from women. So the author's attempt to bust this myth is itself busted. Her point applies ONLY for college-aged students! Thank you for your comment detailing some of the research on gender differences in importance of income in a mate.

However, I don't think this invalidates the finding that women found looks to be as important as men did. Adult women looking for serious relationships do seem to be more concerned about a mate's income than men - But that doesn't mean they don't care about his appearance!

Looks and income aren't a zero-sum game. That data also shows that the average age men look for in a woman is 22, regardless of how old the man is While women seek men their own age, regardless of how old or young they are I agree that this piece de-emphasizes gender differences unduly, likely because it is not "on trend" to acknowledge even undeniable gender differences. Of course people are individuals, and gender differences are general--like a venn diagram. There are women who are more masculine than some men and men who are more feminine than some women, but the most masculine woman will never be more masculine than the most masculine man, and the most feminine man will never be as feminine as the most feminine woman.

You can't exaggerate a truth--we find truly undeniable, reliable truths so rarely, it's a mistake to ignore them. And this is a truth about our natures, not things that are conditioned. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen which talks about how much abundant consistent psychological research studies find few gender differences,and much more overlap similarities between them.

I don't have a link to this article because I can't find it online anymore. Opposite Sexes or Neighboring Sexes? Sayers, and the Psychology of Gender. Lewis was no fan of the emerging social sciences. He saw practitioners of the social sciences mainly as lackeys of technologically-minded natural scientists, bent on reducing individual freedom and moral accountability to mere epiphenomena of natural processes See Lewis and b.

And not surprisingly given his passion for gender-essentialist archetypes , aside from a qualified appreciation of some aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis See Lewis Book III, Chapter 4 and But the social sciences concerned with the psychology of gender have since shown that Sayers was right, and Lewis and Jung were wrong: There are, it turns out, virtually no large, consistent sex differences in any psychological traits and behaviors, even when we consider the usual stereotypical suspects: When differences are found, they are always average—not absolute—differences.

And in virtually all cases the small, average—and often decreasing—difference between the sexes is greatly exceeded by the amount of variability on that trait within members of each sex.

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This criticism applies as much to C. Lewis and Carl Jung as it does to their currently most visible descendent, John Gray, who continues to claim with no systematic empirical warrant that men are from Mars and women are from Venus Gray Even the late Carl Henry a theologian with impeccable credentials as a conservative evangelical noted a quarter of a century ago that: Masculine and feminine elements are excluded from both the Old Testament and New Testament doctrine of deity.

The God of the Bible is a sexless God. Scripture does not depict God either as ontologically masculine or feminine. And if the God of creation does not privilege maleness or stereotypical masculinity, neither did the Lord of redemption. Perhaps it is no wonder that women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another.

The Lewis who in his younger years so adamantly had defended the doctrine of gender essentialism was beginning to acknowledge the extent to which gendered behavior is socially conditioned. In another letter that same year, he expressed a concern to Sayers that some of the first illustrations for the Narnia Chronicles were a bit too effeminate. Dorothy Sayers surely must have rejoiced to read this declaration. But better late than never. And it would be better still if those who keep trying to turn C. Lewis into an icon for traditionalist views on gender essentialism and gender hierarchy would stop mining his earlier works for isolated proof-texts and instead read what he wrote at every stage of his life.

Wisdom and Humanness in Psychology: Prospects for a Christian Approach.


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God, Revelation, and Authority. The Collected Letters of C. An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

INTRODUCTION

Essays and Stories, ed. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, This article aims to contribute to interdisciplinary readings on domestic violence and its impacts on the family. The motivation of this study starts from the construction of a dialogue between Psychoanalysis and gender theory in studies focused on Collective Health, as a field of integration between disciplines of human and social sciences or philosophy and knowledge aimed at the health-disease processes and their social determinants.

We are driven by the question: We immediately need to specify these references. In this study, we articulate our ideas with Scott's historicist approach, which will allow us to develop two additional elaborations: The articulation with health issues and their harms will be sought within these formulations Schraiber et al. Similarly, from the psychoanalytic perspective, we are based on Freud, a , b and Klein, , already in dialogue with a psychosocial perspective Mandelbaum, , , seeking to problematize the dynamics of family relationships between the affections and anguishes associated with paternal authority, and this relation is already problematized as an unequal historic construction of male and female individuals in private life, exposing the permission of culture on the establishment of "terror" inside the house.

This interdisciplinary dialogue serves for building a more complex and comprehensive set of tools that enable us to approach the experience lived by people - mostly women and children - who are victims of violence within the family. The experience can and must be thought of in its psychic, relational, and social dimensions, which are inextricably articulated in singular ways in each case, if we are concerned with the possible interventions in the field of violence. The father enters the silent house late at night. The mother and two daughters, aged 5 and 8 years, are watching TV in the children's bedroom, in the dark and quietly.

They hear the noise of the entrance of the father - the key in the lock, the steps toward the room, and the silence sinks in apprehension. He walks into the room where they are, turns the beds, one of them over the older girl, on top of her nose, which bleeds. Nothing is said, the mood is of muted and paralyzing terror. The silence of mother and daughters with the father comes from several days and foreshadows the departure from home.

The terror is extended beyond these days and the ones of separation. At the sight of the father, each time, the girls are taken by anxiety and by the desire that this meeting would not occur. One day, in an unexpected meeting in the street, the father strongly holds the younger girl, who struggles with fear, trying to escape from the scary hug. Impossible, as the father is much bigger and stronger. The experience of the child is of desperation and annihilation. Oral report collected from family psychotherapy session. The presented report fragment was extracted from the record of the care service for families that experience different situations of violence.

It presents a terrifying atmosphere, exposing one of the concrete expressions of domestic violence - and here we understand violence as the action of someone that can invade the limit of other and, by force, impose oneself Berenstein, This domestic violence is chronic and daily repeated, creating an experience in which mind and body merge into sensations of disintegration, helplessness, and fear. The experiences in the relationship of intimacy with the other make this fear emotionally unreachable and "almighty" in relation to the victim's life and body.

Arendt, indicates an "extreme" nature of violence that Freud since his early work of therapy with hysterical patients stated as an "excessive" nature of the violent situations of sexual nature experienced in childhood and perpetrated by the adults of the same house. Psychoanalysis finds there its origins; Freud relies on this occurrences to propose the first model of psychic apparatus: Freud could observe with his female patients that these experiences fall into silence, but not into oblivion. They remain active and are repeated in various expressive modalities, such as symptoms, inhibitions, and anguishes lacking in representation.

These experiences ask for elaboration; not to be properly forgotten - according to Freud there is never complete oblivion - but to gain understanding in forms accessible to the conscience and no more as disabling and enigmatic psychic or somatic symptoms. They are "traumatic" events, as Freud has appointed. They are part of our psychic identity and continuously demand the search for construction of meanings to the lived experiences. If Freud assigned to Psychoanalysis an etiological character, i. The trauma, in this case, is a psychic commotion, meaning ruin, destruction, or loss of one's own form Ferenczi, In one of the first psychoanalytic writings of Freud, Studies on hysteria , the trauma is assumed to be the origin of the psychic conflict that generates the symptom.

It is a shock in the real experience that hits, like a quake, the defenses of the I. Freud, b describes it in terms of "shame and silence". According to him, at the time of its production, the shame would be one of the responsible reasons for the inability to speak or even think about the event, which tends to express itself, as we said, symptomatically, in various forms of psychic and physical suffering.

For this reason, therapeutically, Freud sought to break the silence and surpass shame, by hypnosis or listening to the patients, so that the traumatic experience could be reported and elaborated. We note, still, that the importance of shame to the silencing of the traumatic experience and the resulting illness have been recovered by contemporary psychoanalysts, particularly those dealing with the psychological impacts of social disasters such as wars, genocide, mass rape, and torture Benghozi, According to Freud, a , the psychic reality is formed in response to reality: Psychoanalysis, however, over its construction of more than a century, relativized the events of reality in favor of the drive of each of us and of the others in us and for us, in the production of the disorders.

Psychoanalysts, in general, gave up trying to discover the historical events that produce trauma to look into the internal reality of their patients. Freud himself reports, in a letter to Fliess Freud; Fliess, , the discovery of the importance of fantasy in the configuration of reality, blurring the boundaries between internal and external realities, with complex and important impacts for Psychoanalysis. This is one of the reasons why we consider the interdisciplinary dialogue essential, although difficult, since the different disciplines operate from diversified theoretical and methodological references.

In the specific case of the studies and interventions in the field of domestic violence, Psychoanalysis is nourished by the dialogue with sociology, history, and the cultural and gender studies to remember that it is not possible to reduce the understanding of the phenomenon, if we want to operate some transformation in it, only to an intrapsychic dimension. The "abused child" and the "woman who is beaten up" are not only sexual fantasies, but relational standards that occur in diverse forms in different sociocultural contexts, closely linked to hegemonic ideas of masculinity and femininity.

When Psychoanalysis put these elements of social reality aside and deal with violence against women or children only in its intrapsychic dimensions - although this is a present dimension and that demands understanding - at best this science performs a partial and fragile therapeutic, since it silences aspects from reality that tend to perpetuate. Ferenczi, says that trauma occurs in two stages: American Psychological Association, Reviewed By: Pincus, Fall , pp. The considerable difficulties psychoanalysis has had in conceptualizing female development and dynamics has been documented from both within and outside of the field.

Freud on: Sublimation

Given our checkered history, some may be dubious of the payoff to be found in the efforts reviewed in this volume. However, the editors side strongly in support of empirical research in combination with clinical observation as a necessary element in revising and strengthening psychoanalysis, and perhaps even saving us from extinction Bornstein, They argue fervently and persuasively in this regard.

Certainly the understanding of gender and gender role qualifies as a universal problem of human existence! The editors and their colleagues have even examined the role of gender in conducting psychoanalytically informed empirical research. Combining these meta-analytic results with our history of theoretical misfires in the area of gender leads me to agree with Bornstien and Masling in welcoming the chapters in this volume as genuinely needed in advancing psychoanalytic understanding.

All but one of the chapters discusses core psychoanalytic constructs, including primary process thinking, defense mechanisms, superego functioning, object-relations, and unconscious cognition. Three of the chapters explicitly focus on issues of gender or gender differences, while the other four review basic research with an eye toward articulating gender differences in the trends of accumulated results. Chapters range from broad integrative reviews of research to specific reports of one or more empirical investigations. As might be expected, the research reviewed and reported utilize a broad and impressive array of methodologies that are psychoanalytically informed, including Rorschach coding, Thematic Apperception Test coding, tachistoscopic Subliminal Activation, and a variety of self-report methods questionnaires, narratives.

The variety of methods presented and referenced makes this volume of the series invaluable for psychoanalytically informed investigators in any area of interest. She provides both classical background on the conceptualization of primary process in terms of energetic and economic psychodynamic principles and contemporary approaches that consider primary process in terms of affectively organized cognitive processing. Russ derives a contemporary view of primary process as a subtype of affect in cognition that consists of content around which the child had experienced early intense feeling states e.

Both psychoanalytic and cognitive theories predict a relation between primary process thinking and creativity. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that greater access to primary process is concomitant with less restriction i. Russ notes that neither of these interrelated theories would predict gender differences in the relation between primary process and creativity, yet research consistently finds the predicted relations much more frequently in males than in females.

When these measures are related to creativity, operationalized in terms of divergent thinking and transformational thought, boys often show the expected relationship and girls do not or show weaker trends. Is it the case that psychoanalytic theory is applicable to males but not females? Russ points out that boys exhibit significantly more primary process content in both Rorschach responses and free play, but this is mainly due to greater levels of aggressive content.

She hypothesizes that in western culture boys are freer than girls to express primary process thinking in play and thus learn to use it more adaptively. Developmental studies reviewed suggest girls express less primary process as they mature, reflecting the influence of external controls. Beyond such socialization issues, Russ reminds us that physiological differences in hormonal and brain functioning as well as possible evolutionary trends are potential explanations as well e.

While no explicit discussion of treatment implications is offered, psychodynamic practitioners may benefit from an understanding of the cognitive-affective bases of primary process thinking and facilitate access and adaptive use in treatment with the goal of increasing creativity and insight. Psychodynamic researchers will benefit from the review of Rorschach and APS methods to further investigate primary process in any relevant context of inquiry. Informed by both classical and contemporary psychoanalytic views of defense ranging from Spitz, A. Anyone interested in empirical investigation of defenses will be impressed with the reliability and validity she has established for the DMM assessment of denial, projection, and identification.

In doing so, Cramer also examines a number of theoretical propositions derived from psychoanalytic theories of defense employing both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs. Based on her research program, convincing evidence is presented that these defenses can be reliably coded in TAT responses of children and adults. In addition, the use of these defenses changes with maturation in accordance with a psychoanalytic model of defense chronology i.

Cramer presents evidence that indicates increasing understanding and awareness of a defense mechanism is associated with its decreased employment, supporting the psychodynamic assertion that defenses operate unconsciously. She also clearly shows empirical support for three additional tenets of defense theories: Cramer notes that neither classical nor contemporary defense theories posit central assumptions regarding gender differences. However, informed by the works of S. Freud, Deutsch, and Erikson, she derives two basic dynamic hypotheses.


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First, defenses that are directed outward and externalize conflict and affect e. Second, defenses that modify internal reality e. Cramer reviews a broad range of studies utilizing the DMM and other methods supporting her psychoanalytically informed predictions, particularly in regard to the use of denial and projection. Her final discussion of gender differences in the implications of using the same defense is less clearly written and digestible, if only because the DMM results appear much more complex than those presented earlier in the chapter.

Consistent with basic distinctions in internalizing vs. In contrast, females who use more masculine defenses tend to exhibit healthy adjustment. When adults of either gender rely predominantly on denial, they tend to exhibit immature, anxious, egotistical, and unstable personalities. Where does this leave us? This exemplary empirical research program clearly supports many tenets of psychodynamic theories of defense.

Significant advances are made in theorizing about gender differences as well. Although complex at times, the empirical results tell us that further exploration of gender and defense is an especially fruitful domain for advancing psychoanalytic theory.