(2000).

Studies in Gender and Sexuality 1: 69-77

On the Problem(s) with Keeping Difference(s) Where They Belong

Response to Lynne Layton

Donna Bassin, Ph.D.

If they see breasts and long hair coming they call it woman, if beards and whiskers they call it man: but look, the self that hovers in
between is neither man nor woman.
Devara Daslmayya (10th century)

The difficulties of managing differences without splitting occupies Layton and the three papers she critiques. Ironically,
while working through my reactions and preparing a written response to her paper, I found myself struggling with the differences
between me and her. Appreciative of Huck Finn's pragmatic advice that when you are on a raft together you want everyone to get
along, I attempted to get inside of Layton's logic. I certainly do not want to whitewash the legitimate differences that exist (more
about those later), but I do see much of the variance on this gender/sex raft as reflecting something about the complexity and
elusiveness of our subject and evoking the blind manelephant parable, something about the particular piece of the raft we are
clinging to.
I don't want to go from gender splitting to hair splitting, but Layton's project of encouraging clinicians to question the
conveyance of gender in hierarchical binary terms seems right in line with the efforts of Bassin, Elise, and Stimmel to clinically
deconstruct polarized intrapsychic organizers and critically theorize alternatives. Unfortunately, Layton reads

Donna Bassin, Ph.D. is a Member and Faculty at the Institute of Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). She most recently edited Female Sexuality:
Contemporary Engagement.
- 69 -

these contributions as an uncritical reification of gender in binary terms, and in doing so she forecloses a more finely tuned and
nuanced reading of our differences. While Layton is sensitive to the destructive authority of discourse, her categorical readings of
my workreductionistic, mainstream (read reactionary), sexist, and heterosexistis only like a magician's feat inviting the
audience to accept a presumption that will help them interpret what they later perceive. Layton pushes the cited texts with vision
and useful challenge, but her tone evoked my fear of the wrath of the critic, making it difficult for constructive and nondefensive
crossthinking.
I am in accord with Layton's concern for the lack of mainstream attention to the specifics of bisexuality as a legitimate sexual
practice and her efforts to recognize bisexualities as a sexual solution independent of heterosexualities and homosexualities. In all
fairness, though, Elise (1997, 1998)1 and Sweetnam (1996) have already begun to rectify this lack. But I do not understand why
current attention to psychic bisexuality has to negate detailing the specificity of sexual variation and fluid object choice.2 A
theory of self does not negate a theory of desire, nor should the latter be seen as more progressive than the former.
Even with a concerted effort to elaborate the opportunities of bisexuality as psychic state and as sexual practice, Layton's
bottom line suggests that the very reference to masculinity and femininity, with their entrenched and problematic associations to
both traditional psychosexual theory and social gender, perpetuates a heterosexists bias. While I do not believe that we are at the
outer limits or have exhausted the potential of psychoanalytic theory to oust a most crippling patriarchal gender structure,
Layton's strategy suggests the need for an overthrow of the psychosexual solution. In contrast, the varying strategies of Bassin,
Elise, and Stimmel might be called subversive attempts to revisit some of the ambiguities, contradictions, and (un)conscious,
ideologically imbued traditional psychoanalytic concepts with a postmodernist disposition. Layton's dismissal of the relevant
theoretical backgrounds and the specific goals presented in each paper leave the treatment strategies that mark these postclassical
perspectives unjustly simplified. Her exclusion of the specific revisions that Bassin, Elise, and Stimmel have each made to the
classical psychosocial narrative does, in fact, lead the reader back to the old rigid organization of gender identity.

1 Elise (1998) in particular has noted that psychoanalysis, with its ego ideal of heterosexual marriage, has inhibited a psychological understanding of bisexuality
as sexual object choice.
2 I am in sympathy with the dilemma of the son who, while wearing one of two ties given to him by his mother, was asked by her, What's the matter? Don't
you like the other tie?
- 70 -

Traditional psychoanalytic theory suggests that a child's perception of genital difference initiates his or her infantile theory

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of sexuality. This infantile theory of difference, more accurately called a fantasy of difference, then shapes girls' and boys'
negotiations through the psychosexual/social tasks in front of them. Layton misperceives my work as if I were reiyfing these
childhood fantasies into normal, fixed events confined to one sex or the other, whereas my aim was to deconstruct these concrete
and categorical readings of anatomical difference and reproductive role.
The phallic logic of the opposition of difference rather than an appreciative recognition of differentiationa difference that
is not reductively equated with anatomy or reproductionhas always been considered within psychoanalytic theory to be only an
interim theory of the child (hence phalliccastrated gives way to masculinefeminine). Traditional theory, however, despite its
attention to the limitations and distortions of this childhood position, has also succumbed to this same confabulation. Layton's
concern that the use of cross-sex representations and cross-gender identification, from the preoedipal period, fixes rather than
defends against gender polarities is accurate only within the logic of the oedipal position. This logic, organized by repudiation and
splitting, has narrowed our knowledge of the domain of sexuality. Loewald's (1979) reformulation of the oedipal complex as an
ongoing engagement during the life cycle, based not on a castration model but on an active urge for emancipation, rescues the
oedipal logic from this presymbolic outcome.
As Benjamin (1988, 1995) has demonstrated, it is the logic of the oedipal mind that creates the opposition between object
love and identification as well as the observed organization of the subjectobject hierarchy. She argues that this logic, despite its
support in psychoanalytic theory, is not the final achievement. Postmodernist challenges to such arcane notions as a fixed linear
model of development, an either/or model of reality and illusion, and the identity-desire opposition, have evoked the emergence
of other psychic logics.
The logic of a position of transitionality or a postoedipal stage3 deconstructs rigid gender identity categories and
transcends false gender polarities, thus supporting an appreciation of differentiation rather than an opposition of difference. The
redemptive vision, if there is any, is not bisexuality per se, but rather the capacity of the psyche to become mindful that rigid
gender identity in adult life is a defensive strategy of splitting. The alternative is to use symbolization to play with difference.
Miss A is a case in point.

3 Loewald (1979) would refute the static connotation of a stage, as he viewed the Oedipus complex as an ongoing repetitive engagement and reengagement
with an active urge for emancipation.
- 71 -

Miss A, not Ms. A, and How about Miss B?

In line with my request for a respectful appreciation of difference, I want to reiterate the specific and limited goals of my
paper. Miss A, (not Layton's Ms. A), began treatment overwhelmed by her intense curiosity, penetrative wishes, and fears of
damage to herself and others. Her goals for treatment were to alleviate her fear of driving and her inability to enjoy sexual and
emotional intimacy with her male lover. My theoretical moves from the case of Miss A were a revisiting of the psychoanalytic
construction of a genital stage that was melded, despite Freud's attempted deconstruction, with socially prescribed gender roles in
the service of reproduction. I attempted to elaborate the possibilities of a female genital stage4 (outside the either/or of
phallic-oedipal organization, which even at its most metaphoric register could only view heterosexuality as a proposed solution to
the repudiation of countergender wishes (see Bergmann, 1988, and Kernberg, 1991). In contrast to that view of heterosexuality, I
suggested that
heterosexual functioning5 that fixates on one organ mode (and more about this misinterpretation later) or one gendered identification
at the expense of the other although culturally normal, such rigid gender roles may involve a developmental arrest or a
defensive character structure [Bassin, 1996, p. 184].

My other challenge was to the either/or truth of female sexuality represented by the bifurcated positions of the Freud and
the Vienna school, or Jones and the London school. The either/or positioning pits a female heterosexual genital stage as
compensation for lack against a natural outcome of anatomy and same-sex identification. Montrelay's (1978) and Breen's
(1993) interpretation that the truth might encompass

4 I noticed on rereading my paper, a problematic changea typo, or more likely a grandiose slipfrom my initial statement of a female genital stage at the start
of my paper to the female genital stage at the conclusion. I stand behind a female genital stage, referring to one possibility among others. Chodorow's (1996)
reflection on what is it that pushes us to overgeneralize rather than report on individual cases is worth consideration.
5 I am certainly not aware of all the ghosts that inhabit my writing and thinking, and I have no problem examining, as Schwartz (1998) has the assumption of a
heterosexual orientation and parenting within my contributions. All treatment and scholarship must be able to absorb and self-correct for the impact of
unconscious ideologyour own personal and group-affiliated symptoms. Schwartz's critique, however, also discusses the constructive contributions of my
work in understanding certain lesbian fantasy and sexual performance.
- 72 -

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both these psychoanalytic schools underscores the contradictions and duality of female sexuality.
The restorative aha for Miss A was not, as Layton misinterprets, Miss A's use of the penis, but rather the development of
her ability to reown previously repudiated and projected aspects of herself and uncouple concrete anatomical difference from
psychic attributes and general bodily capacities. This new organization of structure-contents deconstructed Miss A's limited
connection between identity and desire and provided her with new mastery modes previously attributed to her lover. The
clinician's work on the couch is an attempt to address the sexism of the patient, and this is what I believe my work with Miss A
was about.
Layton neglects Miss A's significant dream (see Bassin, 1996, p. 165). The dream is not a mere detail of Miss A's case but
rather the embodiment of our work together and the theoretical gist of my paper. It was my head inside his body. I am making
love to a woman, but it is really him. I can feel the sensation of penetration. I am myself, and then I am him. I have an erection,
and it is obvious to him how I feel.
The very fact of the dream is suggestive of the deconstruction of Miss A's original categorical appropriations. In this dream,
rather than playing out one side of a gender polarity, Miss A maintains the tension through symbolization. This outcome does not
seem so disparate from Layton's vision that only a mode of relating based on mutuality and awareness of culturally induced
splits might produce a transgressive subject. Yes, Miss A was drawing on what we call phallic attributes,but the identifications
and fantasy were enjoyed and used deconstructively.6 Miss A relates her own successful task of moving within a symbolic
register with her disappointed realization that her beloved poet, Anne Sexton, had to commit suicide rather than symbolically let
an aspect of her inner life die.
The conflict for Miss A was not simply a function of gender socialization, as Layton argues. Layton presumes that Miss A's
visits to the closet (associated with her mother) were conflicted because in this family guidelines exist that strictly define what is
intrusive and what is

6 Layton is determined to prove that I am using a sexual polarity to deconstruct a gender polarity, a critique that has arisen in the butchfemme debates. Martin
(1998) supports Butler's (1993) cautious use of the lesbian phallus, which may redistribute symbolic activity and routes of desire, but without an equal
investment in feminine identifications may degrade female morphology. Her concern here is twofold: first, there is the danger of any theorizing that explicitly or
implicitly sanctions the improvement of women through masculinization; and, second, the resignification still reinforces heterosexual norms. On the other hand,
Hill (cited by Apter, 1998) views the butchfemme as altering and enlarging the feminine symbolic and as a useful opportunity to express one's masculinity
while remaining a woman.
- 73 -

forbidden. I don't disagree about the crucial role parenting plays in children's mastery of their sexuality. I, however, see other
variables at play as well. Conflict also exists in the very origin and operation of the body ego, where for example, the alternative
modes of organ experiences, that is, oral taking in and spitting out, anal retention and elimination, are formed and shaped in
interaction with the (m)other.7 Miss A felt over whelmed by sexual feelings for her mother as the intense nature of sexuality can
arouse anxiety in a young child. Bernstein (1990) has suggested that, in coping with exciting and chaotic bodily experiences, girls
may externalize these feelings onto the penis, which girls imagine might provide more control and mastery. Similarly, Kestenberg
(1956) observed that girls use dollsand maybe babiesas part of their wish for mastery over inner genital excitation.
Layton is troubled by what she views as my rooting in male genitalia Miss A's desire to penetrate, in contrast to her
redemptive vision, which locates girls' capacity for penetration, for example, in their experience with nongenital body parts
(sticking fingers in mouth or the nursing experience described by Elise). Once again, by excluding the section Notes Toward a
Reformulation of a Male Genital Stage and the contrasting case of Miss B, Layton (in light of how much of my original work
she does include) provides less than a fair presentation of my perspective. These two sections were deliberately included in my
original paper to serve as containing walls against misinterpretation. My male patient's overinclusive body ego experience was, in
fact, an example of feeding experience. An early childhood force-feed had led this man to a later problematic sexual enactment
with his female lover in which he was the aggressive maternal spoon rather than the submissive mouth. His unempathic
penetrating self was transformed with his ability to reach back to the other side of the feeding experience.
Miss B's case material, my example of the use of a penis as a body ego patch, an unusual concretization of relationships into
a body part does, in fact, support Layton's observation that a sex polarity fixes rather than contests gender polarities. Miss B's
penis was her power, just as the wafer is the body of Christ for devout Catholics. If Miss B, and not Miss A, was the origin of
my theoretical speculations, then Layton's argument would certainly appear indisputable.
I believe it is in accord with Butler's (1994) observation, and in fact, Horney's (cited in Paris, 1935) and Gillman's (1913)
observation before Butler, that we gain a glimmer of Layton's preferred route of escape from

7 During toilet training, for example, physically letting go can be experienced passively with regard to the body, but actively in response to mother's request.

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 - 74 -

hierarchical gender polarities.8 Butler (1994) writes: Sexuality that is liberated from feminism, will suspend the reference to
masculine and feminine, reinforcing the refusal to mark that difference which is the conventional way in which the masculine has
achieved the status of the sex which is one(p. 20).
That is, if the body is gendered at the discursive level, then the resignification of this discourse should reshape desire. Layton
relies on bodily experiences that are not postdated by gender or genitals, but are just part and parcel of being human, for the
disruption of hierarchical subjectobject relations and the resistance to normalization. This ideal, however, does not allow for the
(un)fortunate existence of fantasy or take into account our understanding of the limitations of children's ability to integrate reality
on the basis of their cognitive abilities.
And, while we may eventually conclude that the need to construct a developmental narrative of femininity may be primarily a
response to the patriarchal fantasy that constructs the female as a have-not, in effect we are still thinking from the position of
the little girl, who most understandably is putting in her claim for recognition. However, I cannot dismiss all the compelling
contributions from what has been referred to as a predominately female identity or Elise's (1997) better term, a primary sense of
femaleness. And furthermore I don't know whether all of us, assuming a choice, would want to personally and totally wipe out
our sexspecific erotics.
Layton evokes Fast and Erikson to refute my claim that the period of overinclusiveness, which includes modes of relating or
going at objects based on early body experiences, e.g. grasping, receiving, penetrating and inserting(Fast, 1984, p. 158), has
nothing to do with gender although they do evoke connections with genitals. Layton suggests that these modes are not arbitrarily
selected from the arsenal of what bodieswhich include hands, feet, mouths, as well as genitalscan do. Something has
certainly gone awry here. While I used Fast's notion of overinclusive

8 In a July 1935 talk to the National Federation of Professional and Business Women's Club Horney (Paris, 1935) suggested the danger, for women in a
patriarchal society, of too much interest in sex differences. Once and for all we should stop bothering about what is feminine and what is not. Standards of
masculinity and femininity are artificial standards. Paradoxical as it may sound, we shall find out about these differences only if we forget about them (pp.
237-238). Gillman (1913) argued that the differences between the sexes had become too extreme, and sex [differences] needed to lose their power to define.
Brown (1959) argued that borders, such as male and female, are problematic to human fulfillment. He suggested that an androgynous or hermaphroditic body,
not confined by sex, would be preferable. See also Le Guin (1941) where her characters become sexed only for the purpose of reproduction; at such a moment
one develops male genitalia, at the other, female genitalia.
- 75 -

and Erikson's organ modes as organizers of psyche material that get their underlying structure from the corporeality of the body,
but develop into psychic metaphors that do not properly belong to either biological sex(Bassin 1996, p. 158), I clearly stated
that I disagree with their conventional conclusion that countermodes (Erikson) and overinclusive states (Fast) must be repudiated
for the sake of anatomical conf luence and gender identity.9
According to Erikson, each body ego zoneoral-sensory, anal and genitalcan serve a number of social modalities or
inter-actional patterns of functioning (incorporative, retentive, eliminative intrusive and inclusive). Erikson's (1950) elaboration
of the bisexual disposition consisted of his observation that both sexes have a combination of all the modalities at their disposal
and thus similar experiences regarding, for example, their locomotion, sexual activities, mental and social intrusiveness. The
sexes differ only in regard to genital equipment and their respective future roles in the reproductive cycle. So while genitals may
come to represent, for example, intrusion or penetration (following the associations of Miss A), they are, in fact, modes from the
common ground of other organ zones in addition to general motility and locomotion. And only neurotics, as Erikson (1982)
suggested, would rather incorporate or intrude than enjoy the mutuality of genital patterns.
Layton's criticism of the fuzziness of an imaginary body ego, with its metaphoric networks and potential to slide from a
radical disjunction between anatomy and sexuality into a collapse between the two, is not a new criticism of my work. I am quite
aware that I am walking a dangerous edge. But, how does thought lose body? And can thought remain the same regardless of the
physicality of the thinker? If we were all built like worms, the statement that I was tall might not make any sense. The body is a
source of experience and a resource in describing mental life. Mind attempts to master body, but the body cannot be ignored.
Perhaps one day we will all be able to say, as one said to Moses, I AM WHO I AM.

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WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the owner of the PEP Archive CD and is copyright to the Journal in
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]

Bassin, D. (2000). On the Problem(s) with Keeping Difference(s) Where They Belong: Response to Lynne Layton. Studies in
Gender and Sexuality 1: 69-77

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the owner of the PEP Archive CD and is copyright to the Journal in
which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever.