Multiplicities and uncertainties of gender. Commentary on Ruth Stein's >analysis of a case of transsexualism<

  • This article discusses binary, or dichotomous, thinking as it develops in normal classification, in pathological splitting, and in shifts of cultural awareness such as that from Classicism to Romanticism. It relates these to states of subjective and objective self-awareness as induced and regulated by the early parental environment. A number of clinical examples demonstrate how pathological splitting may arise and how the therapeutic process works to alter dichotomous thinking and raise it to higher levels of integration. It also suggests that a similar process of integration can take place over time in our historical understanding of cultural paradigm shifts. We do not know the Hells and Heavens of people we pass in the street. There are two possible perspectives. According to the first, on a miniscule ball of earth, in a smudge of mold called a city, some microorganisms move around, less durable than mayflies. And the internal states of [such] beings, deprived of any reason for their existence, perfectly interchangeable, what importance can they have? According to the second perspective, that of a reversed telescope, every one of these beings grows up to the size of a cathedral and surpasses in its complexity any nature, living or inert. Only in the second case can we see that no two persons are identical and that we may at best try to guess what is going on inside our fellow men [Milosz, 1986, p. 120].

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Metadaten
Author:Sheldon Bach
Parent Title (English):Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 08 (1998), pp. 657-673.
Document Type:Articles
Language:English
Year of first Publication:1998
Release Date:2017/11/20
Format:xerox upon request / Fotokopie auf Anfrage
IdNo:Bach_S_1998
Erich Fromm's Library and Erich Fromm Archive:Articles / Artikel
Licence (German):
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