Women Showing Off - Notes On Female Exhibitionism

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
http://apa.sagepub.com Women Showing Off: Notes on Female Exhibitionism

Rosemary H. Balsam J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2008; 56; 99 DOI: 10.1177/0003065108315686 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/56/1/99
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Rosemary H. Balsam
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WOMEN SHOWING OFF: NOTES ON FEMALE EXHIBITIONISM

The limitations of the phallocentric cast of earlier psychoanalytic formulations of female exhibitionism linger into the present. In part this connects to certain historical expectations for womens social behavior, and to the vicissitudes of Freuds insufficient knowledge of women in his libidinal psychosexual phasing used as a basis for analytic understanding. The contemporary fade of libido theory contributes to the neglect of such topics as they relate to the biological body. Yet ease and conflict regarding conscious and unconscious female body image representations related to that stepchild of theorypregnancy and childbirth in particularplay a major role in female body display. Recognition of such body fantasies and female body meanings from early childhood into maturity tends to be marginalized within all of the psychoanalytic theories current today. The focus here on female exhibitionism suggests a normative spectrum for pleasurably active sex seeking and pleasurable procreative desire and fantasy that is present in a females use of her body and which (of course, but secondarily) can become caught up in conflict. Two cases accenting analyses of female showing off behavior are included.
Exhibitionism: In the broadest sense, the act of attracting attention to the self. One of the paired component or partial instincts that Freud (1905) described as part of infantile sexuality, exhibitionism is evident in the childs wish to exhibit the body, especially the genitals, particularly in the phallic phase. It is closely related to scopophiliaexhibitionism involves turning the looking impulse onto the self. Other parts of the body as a whole may replace the genitals, or achievements and behavior may be displayed instead. . . . In psychoanalysis the term is used mostly in its non-perverse meaning. . . . MOORE AND FINE (1995)
xhibitionism in females, as well as being a sexual and active provocation directed at desiring others, is closely linked to fantasies about being watched that relate to procreation. The onlookers become
Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale Medical School; Staff Psychiatrist, Department of Student Health, Yale University. Submitted for publication May 28, 2006.
DOI: 10.1177/0003065108315686
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sexually aroused, or yearn, envy, and affirm the performers vital and mysterious bodily importance as females. In other papers I have used extended case material of women to demonstrate the centrality of the female bodys significance for psychic representation in all stages of a womans development, as opposed to the old (and even contemporary, at times psychologically compelled) ubiquitous limited comparison, positive or negative, between female and male external genitals. A girls or womans unconscious and conscious reactions to her bodys capacity for childbearing, to her corporeal capacity to deliver a baby into the world, are especially emblematic for behavior focused on the body as female per se (Balsam 1994, 1996, 2001, 2003). Exhibitionism, as a prototypical body behavior, is worth looking at from this angle, especially as an opportunity to develop novel psychoanalytic formulations on female soma/psyche dynamics, using case demonstrations of showing off that connect to fantasies of childbirth. Exhibitionism is ambiguously defined in the world of biosocial behavioral disciplines that include psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the humanities. In the English language, adding the suffix -ism to create a noun merely connotes, say, the practice of [exhibiting] . . . the result of [exhibiting] or the qualities characteristic of [exhibiting] and only lastly an abnormal condition caused by [exhibiting] . . . (Websters Dictionary 1979). As a paraphilia in the DSM-IV categorizations, exhibitionism (302.4) takes the last meaning a step further into a medicalized and legal world of assessment that for this diagnosis specifies sexually dysfunctional recurrent fantasies about, urges toward, or acts of genital exposure to unsuspecting strangers. Psychoanalysis, placing itself closer than psychiatry to the humanities in matters of subjectivity, and as a subjective science in which the subject is our object of study/expertise (Bonnie Litowitz, personal communication 2006), or as a qualitative social science (Chodorow 1999), finds itself in ambiguous definitional places. For example, modern psychoanalytic gender study, to which this topic of exhibitionism relates, is at a crossroads with clinical psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic critical theory, feminist and queer theory, social and evolutionary psychology, and medical sciences of the body such as brain, genetic, and endocrinological studies. The non-perverse meanings of exhibiting, as well as its socially abrasive aspects, are interesting to all of these fields, each of which would employ a different emphasis. The standard psychoanalytic definition (see my epigraph from Moore and Fine) is broad, and implies the Freudian psychological developmental line that parallels a biological theory of growth. The 100
specific childhood roots of exhibitionism could allude to their repetitions in adult life, covering the range from a temporary preoccupation, to characterological features, to acute transgressive showings of any part of the body or mind, or indeed even to showing the genitals to strangers. My emphasis will be on the subjectivity of female patients who in talking about their bodies and their exhibit warrant the suffix -ism, as in actions and characteristics of showing off. They may not describe the phenomena to their analysts in any DSM-IV alarming way. I have chosen individuals on the dramatic side to convey this as a common phenomenon rooted in the clinically and theoretically underdescribed pleasures in the female body. I would like to make a case (with many caveats) for the usefulness of retaining aspects of Freuds old libido theory, the idea of psychosexual phases (reformed to include fully both sexes and bisexuality), and ego psychology in these matters. In contrast to all the new analytic theories beginning with the emergence of self psychology in the 1970s, the body for Freud was refreshingly of prime interest. The emergence of postmodern sex theory in the United States later in the 1990s further diluted the biological body by radically destabilizing categories of sexual difference. Urgent questions that arose regarding sex and gender ontology and foundationalism affected theory in many fields, including psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Butler 1993; Goldner 2000; Dimen 2000). Sex and gender categories have since been considered highly fluid and are regularly believed to be not sustainable on grounds of essential, binary sexual differences. In many of the influential new psychoanalytic theories of gender, biology has been sidelined as irrelevant, while objectrelational intersubjectivity is privileged. Benjamin (1995), for example, who theoretically synthesizes many writers, intensely scrutinizes affects, meaning, fantasy, mother-baby interactive psychology, fathers and daughters, identificatory love, and recognition of the other, and very usefully challenges binary oppositions in prevailing attitudes, yet she treats the body as if it were missing. More recently, it is not that the word body has been absent from psychoanalysts preoccupations, or from their book titles. For example, The Embodied Subject: Minding the Body in Psychoanalysis, edited by John Muller and Jane Tillman (2007), is a series of essays essentially on theory construction, in which embodiment in psychoanalysis is used in a kind of double entendrethe body as a trope for psychological containment. There are many other examples in which peripheral aspects of the body are employed only secondarily to further enrich theories of the mind. If in our theoretical progress it
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seems important to deconstruct categorizations, as a renunciation of our inheritance of an old-fashioned, linear psychoanalytic theory, we risk rendering redundant the otherwise grounding holistic differences between males and females as categories that still do hold, after all, for the macrostructure of the biological body. No matter how our minds work, individuals are still housed in sexed bodies, the majority of which are capable of procreation. I would argue that analytic thinking about sex and gender can benefit still from maintaining certain aspects of its original biological emphasis. Central here is Stollers fortuitous separation of the concepts of sex and gender in the 1970s. Sex in this scheme is biologically fundamental, and concerns only body morphology and physiology, whereas gender, indeed as fluid as postmodern thinkers note, and the site of much of our sentient individuality, is the minds interpretation of this body and experience. This dual set of concepts allows for the legitimacy and usefulness of the postmodern challenge to the severely limited binary gender categories of the pasta challenge in tune with the gendered fantasies and enactments encountered in the clinical settingwhile recognizing a persons simultaneous need to manage and integrate his or her usually stable bodymorphological assignment and the secondary sexual characteristics of the mature female or male body. The dual processes of sex and gender can come together dynamically in harmony or in conflict (or both) at each juncture of development throughout the life cycle. Following this scheme, my focus in this paper is on the biologically sexed adequate female body that I argue has inherent capacities to bring joy to its owner. Excessive pain and difficulty, when they occur, can be viewed as secondary expressions of conflict and development gone awry.1 Because Freud (1905) so vividly illuminated the childhood roots of exhibitionism, the desire to look and be seen is still located psychically as stemming from a developmentally ancient desire by psychoanalysts of various schools. When it comes to adult male exhibitionism, the -ism connoting pathology and social boundary crossing is clear. If a man shows his naked, usually erect penis where it is not welcome, this behavior is considered deviant. If an adult woman shows her naked, sexually charged parts in public or to attract the gaze of an onlooker, the worlds response is sharply split. On the one hand the social response has often been severe
1 This is a direct reversal of the original Freudian notion that pleasure for females can be only hard-won, by working against the grain of a natural biological deficiency.
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and condemning; on the other, encouragements abound for female exhibitionists and scopophilic entertainment and profit. From the inner subjectivity of the woman, my main focus, neither global license nor condemnation is easy to categorize. The females relationship to her body throughout life allows her to confront (even if she cannot integrate) her biological capacities for procreation from the earliest times. Their links to her sexual seeking capabilities are intricately entwined, and at times the two will overlap. Sex and procreation, I contend, need not be split into binary, either/or categories in assumed intractable conflict; indeed, they may articulate in womens for the most part pleasurable exhibitionistic desire. Critics of my view about how thoroughly embedded even in tiny girls is the potential notion that their bodies must be exactly like their mothers in the ability to produce babies reprise the classical position that a preoedipal level of development puts strict limitations on the girl childs information about her future adult capabilities. We need not deny the girls other nongenital fantasies or her elaborations on other attitudes that are environmentally present. In the case of the body per se, infantile fantasies can be comparative; they are based on watching, feeling, and hearing grown-up physical activities. Why then is the mothers pregnancy not granted the same major level of exposure and encoding vis--vis the childs curiosity and perceptions as the primal scene or the sight of the penis? Reactions to the growth of a baby inside the mothers body are no more a test of a childs mental exactitude than the other acknowledged and storied nursery preoccupations with the parents bodiesbut they all are equal opportunity events for body comparisons, mirroring, and related fantasy.
C A S E P R E S E N TAT I O N : M S . A
Ms. A, an elegant married woman in her mid-thirties with a four-year-old daughter, was very aware of the effects on onlookers of her tall carriage, turquoise eyes, and wavy black shoulder-length tresses. At our first meeting, her fashionable trouser suit was chic, tailored with a hint of lace at the throat, and I noticed that the band of her watch was exactly the same color as her eyes. Over time one could tell she was aware of her looks: the textures and colors of her clothing and accessories were exquisitely chosen to highlight today her pearly skin, tomorrow her smooth throat, and the day after the sparkle of her eyes or her long limbs. She related in a friendly and articulate manner. Her main complaints were about her love relationships.
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Ms. A had divorced two years earlier. She never seemed able to sustain a boyfriend for more than six months thereafter. As we talked more, it became obvious that she was a psychologically minded person with abundant energy and talents in her field of work, but with significant anxieties about intimacy. I recommended analysis. I will tell her analytic story emphasizing the meanings of her use of her body, in her life and in our work together. Ms. A was the fourth of five children in a Midwestern family. Her father, a building contractor, was successful and wealthy; her mother was a teacher. Everyone in her family was highly intelligent, and she, like her siblings, was always head of the class; they all went to Ivy League colleges and professional schools. The fifth sibling, the baby, four years her junior and the only boy, had been killed by a car as he crossed the road to the shops opposite their home. He was eight when he died and she twelve and in puberty, just taking an interest in boys. Ms. A had been very close to him; in fact, she said, I couldnt wait for him to be born. I was devastated when he died. Her eyes glistened with tears in the telling. She rightly felt that his life and premature death had a great deal to do with her present difficulty in sustaining close relationships with boys, as she called her lovers. Her lifestyle at this juncture included a live-in nanny and work in a nearby town for the advertising branch of a big construction company, where she was getting rapid promotions. Her job, to which she was dedicated, involved presenting her firm and visiting dignitaries with pitches for allegiances with advertising interests. It was-fast paced work that depended for its success not only on her business smarts but also on her persuasiveness in creating financial deals. Many of the members of her audience were males. I heard the following kind of statement as a commentary on her perception of how these onlookers were responding to her sexualized business come-on: I can tell when they light up, put the spotlight on me; when they gesture toward me, when they are captured by my graphics, and when they stumble when talking to me afterward and avert their gaze one-to-one but still give stealthy glances at my boobs or ass [giggles]. I can tell the ones that are totally intrigued. And then they phone afterward, ask me to drinks, and then I know Ive got them. Her excitement in the telling and her pleasurable wriggle on the couch caused her phone to fall out of her pocket and onto the floor. I asked her what she made of that moment. A phone-fall! Just as I was thinking of that last one Joe and his phone-call . . . oh I dont know 104
. . . suppose I want you to witness somethinglike how it is I get them to fall for me. In this session, about two years into her analysis, Ms. A had analogized me to her watching mother, fearing my disapproval of her unbounded pleasures in showing off, as she called it. Later she fantasized envy on my part. She was sure I would want her to be safely married and more stay-at-home; there, we agreed, she (and I) would in her imagination be protected from these shameless adventures. We worked on how she attributed shame-provocation to me in my analytic role of asking for more detail, and she was regularly angry at my intrusion into an inner life she had preferred to keep private from grown-ups, especially senior women like me. We thus were involved in her oedipal configurations. Her father had been a dashing guy in her estimate, and she consciously saw her mother as pretty dowdy and in truth no match for me. These classically oedipal scenarios illuminated the great trauma of Ms. As life. Albert, her little brother, had been her favorite, born just when she was at the height of excited curiosity about babies in Mommys tummy. He died when she was becoming excited about assuming at last the longed-for shape of a mature woman. Being a highly competitive child, with both her older sisters and her mother, she began to remember as a young girl actively yearning to be the same shape as her mother. I thought her shape was so greatI still am drawn to doodle these pumpkin shapes over and over in every gorgeous detailed texture with my felt colored pens. The features of the mothers body that she stressed were the big abdomen, the feel of the hidden creatures motions and kicks inside, and her mothers big breasts. Evidence that we were dealing with materials that were partly unconscious emerged in dreams, or in references right in the office. One such was her reaction to a painting by Georgia OKeeffe. For Ms. A the voluptuous red and purple flowers were associated to images of the vulva, the introitus, and the vaginal canal, and at times to images of genitals interlocked in coitus. Ms. A then remembered being especially fascinated and excitedly horror-struck by how her baby brother got out of the mothers vulva. She talked intensely to her bigger sisters, even in later years, about her curiosity regarding childbirth. The girls shared fantasies and giggles. They were preoccupied with how the head of a baby could get out of their mothers vulva. How much did it hurt? Did she bleed? Buckets worth? Did she scream? Was it fun? Ohmy-god! How could they witness this for themselves? They lay in bed together some nights that must have been in the first years of little
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Alberts life, endlessly wondering what it would be like to do that that is, give birth some day and have sex with a man. We looked at each other to see how we grew as one or another reached puberty. We endlessly compared our sizes. Unfolding these stories bit by bit in the context of daily happenings, or in reference to something about my behavior or her fantasies about it, Ms. A re-created both a past history of her female body preoccupations and her successful sublimations in her present work life. Occasionally she would speak about her fascination with her little brothers baby body, but she was more interested in her fathers attitudes to sex, and in glimpses of his body, than she seemed to be in the little brother. Familial sexual associations emerged in her associations as she talked of having sex with one of her boyfriends or feeling competition with a girlfriend. Ms A. did not seem to me to be very troubled with penis envy in a rivalrous way, as are some women who view their brothers more as peers, or as sexed and gendered favorites of the parents. The death of her brother may have rendered this material more repressed than this treatment allowed to surface. Ms. A had vaguely at first, and then with stronger conviction because of the accounting of various family scenes, remembered having had a secret crush on her father; she suspected herself that she could easily imagine having wanted his baby, but in association it seemed to be her baby. In fact, in speaking of her daughter one day and remarking that the girls coloring was similar to that of her own father, Ms. A touched on the idea that this child was in fantasy the child of her oedipal longings. That proved to her that she was the head of her class, triumphing over her mother and sisters. She came to an insight that her young husband and other males were boys because none of them could measure up to Dad. Being Daddys girl had been greatly prized, but it was Mothers body that had been the richest source of envy and admiration and mystery for these girls to share in this family. The 101 percent, the grade to beat, the clinched deals: the big payoff. The measure of success was to be filled with the essence of their mothers power in order to get a male sexually interested and to end up with the best prize of all, ones own baby production. Each business presentation that Ms. A gave to her audience of males was therefore a vehicle to show her wares, to compete unconsciously with her mothers body, especially in its potentially procreative state. Her psyche had the fluidity of an artist in her ability to regress, fantasize, and play out a past superimposed on a present and still utilize the interconnections between past and present, animated now as the analysis progressed, propelling a present tense without losing touch with her reality. 106
Here is a seminal fantasy scenario that will demonstrate her attachment to her body and her urges to show it off to gain a pleasurable yield of some sort from a malea yield that usually was somehow always connected to her female sexual ability and her pride in thoughts of procreating and producing: Many times Ms. A talked of being called up to the podium to give a PowerPoint presentation. (The phallic reference titillated her, but the associative tilt was to her own female power pointthe vulva, clitoris, and opening to the vaginaher cunt or hot point, as she felt free to say to me or quip with computer lingo after several years.) She reported a fantasy of taking off her panties, lying down, opening her legs, and feeling erotic as she imagined showing her vulvaas she said, pink, pouting, slightly open and dampto the male onlookers for whom she was showing off. The fantasy would occur when she was excited by clients to attract their business. She felt playful and elated about it, in the early years with pangs of the forbidden, as she told it to me. Sometimes she confessed that she would go afterward to a nearby bathroom to masturbate. In her accompanying fantasy, her excitement would culminate with the image of the head of a baby coming through her widely stretched perineum, to be followed by the rest of its slithery form. The sexual excitement that accumulated as she progressed in her floor show seemed to demand this masturbatory outlet. This is by no means the first time I have encountered masturbatory, highly excited orgiastic fantasies about giving birth. They contain sadomasochistic components of fantasizing the pleasure of anticipated relief in an explosive birth that is paid for by a painful buildup of tension. Anal fantasy is often more closely related to these birthing scenarios than male phallic fantasy is, but in the sense of anally passing great gifts. Such fantasies are woven into active female body autoeroticism, analogous perhaps to male masturbatory fantasies of pleasurable explosion in orgasm. There is undoubted unbridled aggression melded with erotic pleasures in these fantasies. In listening closely to these urges of Ms. A, I could not detect tonalities of coexistent loss, or the characteristic inadequacy or anxiety associated with a feeling of being a fraud in public or with acute depressive feelings of loss (the signs of which Ive come to think of as associations to activated fantasies of vulval damage, as in phallic castration fantasies that are often accompanied by penis envy). Ms. A sometimes recalled being thrillingly stimulated sexually by the examining fingers of her obstetrician while in the lithotomy position during prenatal examinations. Her associations led frequently to all kinds
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of feelings and sensations about giving birththe show beforehand in the bursting of the waters, the stretching, the pushing, the crowning of the head. And her main memories in this regard would return to her mother and other womens crowning gloriestheir babies. An analytic reader may well wonder how this birthing preoccupation was influenced by the death of the little brother, and may accurately surmise that Ms. As repeated baby-making fantasy was shaped by her wish to make up to her parents for the family loss. A reader could also intuit that the sexually tantalizing elements of Ms. As floor show might also encode fears of direct sexual fantasy about her father or actual sex with other males. A reader could also wonder about her homosexual titillation of her sisters (and her analyst as transferential sister) and her maternally derived procreative pregenital fantasy systems. Her showing off on the podium, after all, is filled with the buildup of sexual tension. Elements of being a tease and of the inhibition of heterosexual directness were also analyzed here, reminiscent of patterns that have been reported about the sexual behavior of exotic dancers, yet Ms. A was still capable of cocreating the big deal for her firm. She did not become paralyzed in a teasing mode. Later in the treatment she actually had a relationship with a male boss, and terminated while pregnant for the second time, with plans to move from the area. Her great enjoyment in her theater of PowerPoint presentation continued. In this account I have purposely emphasized the analysis of the excitements and pleasure encoded in Ms. As psyche. In addition, I have noted her aggressive and defensive uses of sexuality to control men and have them do exactly what she wants. Partly this expressed her deep resentment about her parents preoccupation with the now idealized brothers death. It also expressed her wish to have controlled her brother better, and her guilt about her fantasied role in his death. There were many twists and turns in these aggressive and sadistic desires that we learned about that had male aspects as well as the female ones I have presented. But my report is meant to bring forward the pleasurable creative forces that might have been passed over given a different emphasis, but that lent full spirit to her joie de vivre.
C A S E P R E S E N TAT I O N : M S . B
Ms. B, an art student whom I saw in intensive psychotherapy, was a young woman with an avid stage mother. She had spent the year she was sixteen 108
being a swimsuit model. It was perfect for me. I thought of myself as being entirely a grown-up. I was showingshowing off gloriouslyI was displaying everything I hadand I knew from Mother it was goodthats the other side of those conventional warnings about being sluttish and sexy and show-offy. It dawns on you that she thinks youre powerful and that youre incredibly, unbearably enticing. I longed to be pregnantI used to push my smooth little belly out a little bit, daring to displayhere folks, this is what I have . . . look at my lithe little belly . . . itll grow big some day . . . look at my crotch . . . its pretty, its wet . . . dirty thoughts . . . I knew I was safe on the runway. Mother liked watching. Look Mother, everybodys watching me. . . . They think Im good. They want to feast their eyes on me. And of course, at this moment in the process the everybody watching included me. Ms. B was excited to display herself to both her mother in the past and me in the present, even if old guilts and anxieties about competing with her adoring and punitive mother image would emerge. The patients stated and unstated questions in the transference were: Can I compete with you? Can I show my sex? Can I display my body to youin image, in metaphor, in words? Will you admire me, permit me, encourage me, get anxious, angry, retaliate? Do you need to insist always that you are bigger than me as a femaleweightier, more fecund, biggerbreasted? Let me show you my stuff, shed say to me when she brought in artwork. She regularly criticized the art on my walls as amateurish and fantasized that I had done them myself in my spare time. At these times I was more in the despised father transference. Showing (and showing off) was a very important aspect of this young womans identity as a female. Her internalized male elements2 concerned dynamics of concealment and shame.3 Her father she thought of as sweet but easily dominated by her mother. Uncles in her family were losers. Her younger brother was a drug addict. Ms. B did not expect much from men, and we worked over many disappointments and dashed hopes that she had experienced, as well as her linked despising of me in the transference.
2 Here I do not mean on my part any stereotypic masculine societal evaluation, but experience-near elements for her as an individual that are associatively connected to her own father and to her experiences, attitudes, and memories vis--vis other males in her life (Balsam 2001). 3 Paradoxically, for old theory proponents who believe that sexed lines of development are inherently in conflict, and who would therefore be compelled to see this denigration of males as a female defense against unconsciously desired maleness, the prideful female body dynamic also would be perceived as a defense against obviously male desirable features.
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For example, though she wished her Dad would show more excitement about her career, in reviewing her mothers intense and unrelenting involvement with her throughout her life, she thought that her stage mother had sidelined him; then again, he passively participated in assuming this minor position. She perhaps overvalued herself as female, but she genuinely felt that she had a lot of talent to show off. Her attitude, in contrast to the old phallocratic position linking passivity inevitably to femininity, the essence of herself as female was deeply connected to an outgoing and active display of herself. At times it could become a defensive buffer against intolerable helplessness, but at other times it seemed free and pleasurable. After about a year in treatment, she revealed to me that her mother had in her youth actually been an exotic dancer in a big-city nightclub. This emerged during a session of tears about how her disorganized and impecunious father had not paid her tuition bill. She was enraged, as was her mother. The father was the main source of a spotty family income. This rage triggered a set of fantasies about selling her body and being a prostitute to support herself. She grew excited about this prospect and sounded to me as if on the verge of taking action. She reported the approval of her mother. There was an air of Damn you, Dr. B! in the sessions, which we connected to her hope that I would waive my fee to save her from the streets. Again I was in the worthless male role. New material then began to emerge about the mothers past. Ms. B with her mothers collusion went on the internet, allegedly to research the possibility of work with escort services (to me rather shady-sounding). She breathlessly reported the websites she had found and admitted taking great pleasure in her fantasy of me watching her exploring the nude and explicit postings of female predatorsqueens of the jungle she called themwho were searching for johns to prey on. She accurately sensed my anxiety in the countertransference, though it stemmed from reasons different from those she imagined. From her point of view I was anxious because I was torn in my desire to encourage her, so that we could have this delicious shared secret of how she was supporting herself financially, a secret that made her specially interesting to me and allowed us to share our contempt for the establishment and authority, which she also saw me as a part of and which would surely find her immoral. It was obvious that within this split I was at last in the approved sphere of her attachment to her mother-power. In her imagination the despised father stood outside, watching, rebuking, and rebuffed. The girls could make it on their own by force of their own sexual ability to use males for their own ends. The photos 110
on the internet that she was drawn to most were pictures of pregnant prostitutes. Ms. B, now in competition with these edgy women, began to imagine herself pregnant and to experience an even greater thrill in showing herself on the internet. She vividly recalled her modeling experience as a teenager. She perceived these women to be very proud of themselves and gleefully untroubled by their public display. She identified with their possible wish to shock conservative people like me, who are part of the problem and not part of the solution. Again I was in the degraded male position of duplicitous power. I was a deadbeat dad, whose pretense of virtue was exposed in the thought Look what youre making me do; yet this posture was also a defense against the pleasures of showing and being admired and acquired for moneya deep internalization of her mothers value system. All he ever wanted from my mother must have been sex, she said bitterly of her father. All I ever wanted from you was your fee, I added. Ms. B wept. She longed for me to take care of her like a good father, in a pregenital sense of making her feel protected like a baby. But I think I have told enough of this treatment to demonstrate the exhibitionistic Ms. Bs use of her body. The dynamics of Ms. Bs strong desire to display and show her female body attributes were accompanied by more conflict than Ms. A evinced, and arose from a much more complexly disturbed background and set of family relations. However, what their inner stories have in common is evidence of strong attachments and confidence in their bodies as pleasurable and female, with well-developed body images of their powers to attract males, compete with females sexually, and procreatively and/or sexually attract females. Ms. Bs less conflicted ties to her own body had been reinforced successfully by and with her mother, though not in a manner that is stereotypically healthy, given their twin-like closeness. Her mother and she reflected each other more as twin peers than as mother and daughter. Ms. B voiced notions of exaggerated and defensive idealized female self-sufficiency, as if her mother alone had created a classic Madonna-whore split often seen in males. She was also engaged with pregnancy and birthing in relation to her desires to show and sell her art or her body, signifying defensive abilities to manage on her own without needing parents. As young girls Ms. A and Ms. B had acquired early on a confidence in their female bodies that I propose connects to a pleasurable and pleasureseeking female autoerotism and body attachment that is expressed within the girls biological growth trajectory and the matrix of familial embodied
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relationships, and is especially impacted by the mothers experience with her own body. The patterning can be traced into more mature sexed and procreative transformations and into adult relationships and work. As a young artist Ms. B was intensely gratified to show her own work, the product of her sublimations and creativity. Ms. A, too, easily sublimated into work her sense of her female attributes.
L I T E R AT U R E R E V I E W
My rationale for next looking at the literature, before further discussing exhibitionism issues, is that I want to draw the readers attention to the exceptionally scant psychoanalytic literature on the topic. Based on private discussions of my point of view on womens positive desire to show their bodies, on my public presentations on the topic, and on analysts informal accounts of experiences in their offices that tend to confirm my point, my impression is that I am far from alone in appreciating a spectrum of female body issues and their mentalization that concern exhibition. These phenomena in womens psychology range from a virtual lack of references to the body in extremely repressed patients, to their most flamboyantly dominant presence in patients associations, to instances of socially transgressive manifestations. Most often we analysts are focused on the defensive nature of the showing, and on the undoubtedly significant encoded aggression of the uses of the body for malignant enticement and manipulation. I certainly appreciate these important strands in the activities and fantasies in the cases of Ms. A and Ms. B, but often such formulations defensively overlook the powerful female pleasures that patients are also conveying. There is but a single paper on the topic of female exhibitionism in a search of the PEP CD Archive up to 2002. This paper, published in 1971 by George Zavitzianos, is the story of a female college student who, among other actions, drove down the highway without panties, aware that truckers were ogling her from their elevated perches in their cabs. This paper predictably ignores (although it beautifully records) the young womans memories of her intriguing (to me) reactions as a little girl to feeling painfully insignificant bodily in comparison to her heavily pregnant mother; it also records the complicating experiences of traumatic sexual abuse by the mother and beatings by the father. The author instead focuses on the abstraction of her female genital as painfully penis-deficient (probably then the only classical dynamic female body formulation that this analyst 112
would have considered). While noting that female exhibitionism had never before been a topic in the literature, and fetishism only rarely, Zavitzianos presented an argument compelling in its logic and well stated, were one to begin with the mathematical equation vulva and vagina equal penis absence: The very fact that the woman has no penis, and feels this as a narcissistic mortification makes her replace the infantile desire to expose all other parts of the body, with the exception of the genitalia. Since displaced exhibition cannot reassure against castration fear it cannot develop into an actual perversion (p. 298). Ergo, exhibitionism exists in women only as a compensation for not being male. Nor does this theoretical lens allow for the existence of female fetishists. Alternative interpretive schemas might of course occur to a modern analyst in response to this material. Recorded but not included in Zavitzianoss formulation was the fact that this student analysand went on her highway spree right after an analytic hour. Perhaps, feeling sexually excited in the transference, she was acting out a fantasy of being big enough (like her sexual, procreative mother) and tempting enough to take on in fantasy tough truckers resembling her violent father, as displacements from taboo excitements with her analyst. I read into the story many elements of female-to-female competition and revenge toward the mother, as well as pained and triumphant comparisons of female bodies that I think are more obvious than any penis reference. Other interpretations might occur to other analysts, but my point is that if the idea of an interpretation based on the female body does not occur to an analyst, for whatever reason, then it will not appear as a notable dynamic in the case formulation. A paper by nonpsychoanalytic psychology researchers from Leeds (Hugh-Jones, Gough, and Littlewood 2005) affirms too that the literature on sexual exhibition virtually omits reference to the experience of women (p. 261). Though in a different mental health discipline, they, like me, cite references from the 1970s that declare that unlike a man, a woman cannot become erotically aroused by exposing her genitalia. These authors connect these sentiments to a cultural discourse that eschews any notion that female sexuality can be independent or assertive but rather considers it passivea familiar and widespread position not confined to Freud alone. (Elise [personal communication 2006] and many other writers, especially in the last two decades, have challenged this idea, but their critique has not yet been absorbed into psychoanalytic thinking.) The Leeds group cite one case of female exhibitionism reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry (Hollender, Brown, and
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Robach 1977). This is a story of an exotic dancer who flashed open her coat at the door of her club to attract patrons by the sight of her naked body. The dynamics that were stressed in this paper were (in tune with my own proposal) the notable difference between male and female exhibitionists. However, it concluded, based on a self psychological formulation, that because females exhibit only to assuage feelings of worthlessness, there is nothing sexual present. The Leeds researchers talked on the internet to female exhibitionist subjects. They did discourse analysis on the questionnaires and interviews. Recognizing the flaws of this design, however, they felt that the evidence they could garner just from listening to what the women said about themselves led them in directions other than the ones they had anticipated: poor self-esteem, poor body image, or feelings of worthlessness as the trigger for these activities. The researchers were struck by how positively these women viewed these opportunities for body display, as they described greatly enjoying showing off to be admired and affirmed in having a desirable body by an interested audience. In fact, the dancers believed that they did it for personal fulfillment, and they tried to preemptively counter any accusations of moral irresponsibility. Of course analytic audiences will say correctly that we have only very controlled, consciously crafted information to go on. But this research shows us also that psychoanalysis needs to be part of an ongoing attempt to better understand female psychology, and that old shibboleths are hard to relinquish. When the horse of exhibitionism comes up for discussion, the cart of fetishism is seldom far behind. Agreement with Freud regarding the concept of identical castration anxiety for both sexes is what has automatically linked the constellations of exhibitionism and fetishism. The latter has been described as consistent with male body dynamics. Given my view of female exhibitionism as based in part on female sexual and procreative seeking activities, however, I would reserve female fetishism for females who have taken on, for whatever reasons, male-type dynamics and so like men suffer castration anxietyor a specific form of genital anxiety in women (Dorsey 1996). More papers have been written on fetishism in women than on female exhibitionism. The papers I have read (e.g., a 1989 paper by David Raphling) seem to be again formulated from the point of view that the male organ is the only one that women recognize. In the case presented by Raphling. the womans recorded response to her mothers body and her fantasies of pregnancy are recorded in the 114
text, but again the female body is granted no significance in the formulation. This is such a regular feature of both child and adult published cases that it deserves to be noted. If one calculates solely by the equation baby equals penis, a rationale exists to ignore another equation: baby equals female baby-making equipment. An interesting book by Louise Kaplan (1991) deals with female perversions, with much stress on socialized gender roles. Certainly her women draw attention to their bodies. I am in agreement with her stress on female sexuality as the inner genital sensuality described by Judith Kestenberg, and with her sense that female perversions have dynamics different from those of male perversions. Unfortunately, her formulations of perversion are too transgressive and action-filled to help me much with an argument on behalf of an internal spectrum for everyday life. She argues less for motivations stemming from female sexuality than for a cultural overdomination of womens infantile gender ideals and social gender stereotypes. She finds a search for love, and for parental and social approval, and often an exaggerated femininity that covers unconscious masculinity. (Because I agree with Elises critique of socially gendered confusions [1997], I try not to use femininity at all in its stereotypic meaning in my writing or teaching, as it is too hard to assume that we are all speaking of the same quality. I confine femininity to an individuals familial connections with qualities of the female figures she herself internalizes.
DISCUSSION
To talk of showing the body as the expression of a desire for sexual power, as an orgy of body narcissism, or as compensation for poor selfesteem, or to hold the behavior as evidence only of an infantile phallic narcissistic fixation or of a womans asexual pregenital issues is to tell pieces of the story. Other pieces concern the aweboth maternal and phallicwithin experiences of adolescent and adult sexuality, and the dread of being the body container of infinite maternal creativity and destructiveness. Such insights we owe to writers like Deutsch, Greenacre, Klein, Kestenberg, Kristeva, and many others who have portrayed the interior life. After Mahler wove separation issues between mother and child into the developmental sequence in the 1970s, many painful female body issues were automatically subsumed under problems of separation between mother and daughter. The frequently noted closeness between
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mothers and daughters tended to be seen as evidence of a primitive fixation reflecting an intense and pathological mirroring of same-sex bodies. There seemed little room for any model of closeness that might be consistent with a daughters health or enjoyment of her body. The idea of the mother as continuing owner of the daughters body and of pathological fusion for the daughter was assumed always to be expected in that early narcissistic territory of the daughters pregenital development. Hence exhibitionism in an adult female may well have been automatically subsumed under the umbrella of a pathological bid for separation and ill-directed freedom. This dynamic certainly exists (Shapiro 2006), but these days, in the light of insights afforded us by attachment theorywhich suggests an infants capacity for separateness greater than Mahler conceived, particularly as it affects mother-daughter dynamics (Bernstein 2004)closeness between mothers and daughters can be seen to undergo progressive transformations toward maturity (Balsam and Fischer 2006). Within this matrix, as with elements of Ms. Bs relations, there can be powerful affirmations for the female body and eroticism from a mother that at times may be overinvolved by some standards, or underinvolved for fear of her own sexuality (Marcus 2004). In this mother-daughter literature, the body itself tends to be a passing referent in terms of its use in solving other conflicts, or in the admixture of internalized object relations. If we acknowledge that female exhibitionism is a complex set of behaviors that is surely replete with compromise formations, the missing procreative piece is an important window into female fantasy life. Common though the phenomenon probably is, to my knowledge it has never been mentioned in the analytic literature. Showing off certainly concerns the inherent powers of the female bodyits beauty, ugliness, attractions, or repulsions for sure, but also the capacity for eliciting the fascination of others by displaying concealed mysterya vital aspect of which is the hidden power of conceiving, growing, and containing a baby. (I am not here privileging an actual concrete pregnancy and therefore do not address the literature on the actual condition of being pregnant, although obviously this feature too is displayed for strangers, especially when the pregnant woman wears the short tight T-shirts that are fashionable these days that bare the midriff!) The biological female baby-making, functioning in fantasy if not in fact, naturally exudes the promise of an aura of robust health, the promotion of curves in buttock and thigh, the hormone-related sheen to the skin and the hair, the emphasis of large, full breastsa female body feature much admired in most culturesand 116
is in general a celebration of the mature sexual body. The much admired youthful tiny waist (the opposite of pregnancy) can provoke a fantasy promise of magical elastic expansion to large proportions that echoes a human fascination with how the vagina can stretch for childbirth but recover its small dimensions. The patients position on the couch with the analyst hidden behind as spectator is a ready arena for a womans fantasy of being seen by a captive onlooker whose fantasy life in turn is to be titilated. There is much therefore one can hear in many womens associative communications that focuses on the appearance of the bodyin pain or in pleasure. Childbirth is a very special set of fantasies that specifically engages a womans genital exposure. How common this act is, and yet also how downplayed in psychoanalytic theory. Listening to Ms. As memories and body experiencesand to many other girls and women with similar thoughtsone can appreciate the worries or excitements about this kind of experience.4 Girls fantasies of the oral and anal periods, later transformed in the first genital period (Parens 1990) and now in the service of adult sexuality, are closely related to female body competence. The technical medical language of childbirth conveys the impact of the excitement, power, and activity of the event for the mother herself and for her attendants. As with Ms. As talk of showing, crowning, etc., many women know these moments well. Many remember them because the words accurately reflect the feeling tonalities they experienced. The preobstetrical folk history of midwifery may account for this. Few papers have taken childbirth itself as their subject. Deutschs cases in her chapter Delivery (1945) is therefore an outstanding contribution. Her experience-near intrapsychic inferences regarding different kinds of birthing experiences are unsurpassed. The admixture of joy, excitement, physical exertion, and exhilaration, the exultation in physical achievement, the fear of death and mastery over it, the mothers willingness to give her life for the sake of the life of the offspringall are rendered eloquently in this text, which is freer than her other chapters from her
4 I want neither to convey to the reader that I deny the pains in the frequent dark experiences of female sex and procreation, nor to seem that I am romanticizing the female condition in giving birth. But in order to challenge the veil of darkness, pain, and negativity surrounding female body experience that predominates in the psychoanalytic literature, I may well present female body pleasure in a way that will strike some as defensively unmodulated. This is not because the patients themselves were necessarily so one-sided but because I wish to highlight the articulated but much less acknowledged aspects.
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questionable theoretical categorizations. Pleasurable exhibitionism is paramount in these recorded experiences. (In spite of the evidence of primal pleasure that dominates her account, she stresses theoretically the masochism and narcissism of females as an explanation, as if direct pleasure in this female act must be explained away.) One woman patient of mine said, to show the world I have it in me to give a child into the world; another, He seemed to shout with joy as he squeezed out into the air. Im here, look at me! Look at her! She pushed me into life! Or, as a religious woman said: I felt like the Lord the Giver of Life. Body exposure and genital exposure is valued in this context, as well as a heightened appreciation and love of the organs that have produced this intense, unique, and exultant world, a world that will continue with the mothers exposing her full breasts of milk for the infant. For either sex, power and fantasies of omnipotence are important associations to exhibitionism. The exhibitionism of childbirth is an actively sexual and sensual, uniquely female body power display. Bergler (1959) described the fears that may be aroused in a woman anticipating childbirth in the context of postpartum depression. He addressed the issue of shame in the body display of giving birth. He described violations of modesty, and womens exhibitionistic fears and inhibitions. He says that the girls entire education emphasizes the idea of modesty. During pregnancy, he points out, and especially during the delivery, rules of decency are suspended. Not only the medical personnel but outsiders are involved, as eventually a pregnancy can no longer be concealed. The assumption here is that at base women are automatically dealing with modesty and shame. These days, considering the sights on the internet and in the streets, it seems that this modesty can no longer be seen as inherent in being female; rather, it is a cultural phenomenon that shifts from era to era, or a pathological symptom. Bergler implies, but does not find credible, modestys other side, which I emphasize in this paper: body exhibitionism and pride. George Simmel in the Berlin Poliklinik, like Bergler a man of his time, empathically pained, compared the vulnerability and shame of a woman in childbirth to an analytic patient on the couch. He asked: Why should a pregnant woman be humiliated, forced by medical educators to expose her most difficult hour to hundreds of students, onlookers, and audience members? (Danto 1999, pp. 12831284). The taboo, the fear and guilt of looking, and yet the urgent desire to look at the female in her most exposed and awesome corporeal task is reflected in Simmels comment. Many witnesses may not wholeheartedly want to look, as testified by the ambivalence of fathers in the delivery room. 118
Others may crowd the delivery room eager with their cameras, elbowing out the attending staff. Reactions range across the spectrum. Bergler and Simmel exemplify fear and awe so stirred up in the observer that they overidentify with the woman in pity, or shy away from the pleasure as a taboo. Bedside attendants of the event can become underidentified, cold and numbed by overstimualtion. The woman herself may be having a different experience concerning shame, because, I would argue, she has had a lifetime of preparation (for good or ill) and is totally absorbed in the given moment. I cannot recall any of my patients who are mothers (whether psychiatric patients or obstetric patients in the days when I delivered babies) telling me they were humiliated or ashamed by the exposure of childbirth at the time of delivery. Many delivering women themselves will talk more about the delight in seeing in the mirror the baby emerge, or they may talk of impatience at unnecessary time spent in the lithotomy position for the doctors convenience, when they feel an urgency to be with the infant and their husband or partner. Birthing mothers often take pleasure in the exposure of their powerful genitals and bodies in action, and pleasure in the general accolade of those in the delivery room. As Deutsch points out about the woman in childbirth, her awareness is narrowed by her absorption in the progress of the birth (p. 210). This means that her acuity vis--vis her bodily and inner processes is in an enhanced state. While analysis and other mental health disciplines either overlook female showing off as so normal that it deserves little comment, or emphasize only the most disturbing and unconsciously pathological nature of female showing off, the female vulva and vagina may be the most regularly exposed body opening (apart from maybe the throat and ears) that is acceptable in our society to be scrutinized by a stranger, the gynecologist. It is no wonder then that a patient like Ms. A can have many associations to these experiencesincluding pleasure. I do not mean to suggest at all that there is no room for pain, misery, anxiety, or conflict and doubts related to the body, but many of our clinical accounts and our emphases in theory still treat female body pleasure as a well-kept secret.
REFERENCES
BALSAM, R. (1994). Rational and irrational: Remarks on the clinical gendering of language in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 49:145159. (1996). The pregnant mother and the body image of the daughter. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44(Suppl): 401427.
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(2001). Integrating male and female elements in a womans gender identity. Journal of the American Pychoanalytic Association 49:13351360. (2003). The vanished pregnant body in psychoanalytic developmental theory. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 51:11531179. & FISCHER, R. (2006). Prologue. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 26:17. BENJAMIN, J. (1995). Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference. New Haven: Yale University Press. BERGLER, E. (1959). Psychoprophylaxis of postpartum depression. Postgraduate Medicine 25:164168. BERNSTEIN, D. (1990). Female genital anxieties, conflicts, and typical mastery modes. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 71:151165. BERNSTEIN, P . (2004). Mothers and daughters from todays psychoanalytic perspective. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 24:601628. BUTLER, J. (1993). Bodies that matter. In Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. M. Shildrick & J. Price. New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 235246. CHODOROW, N. (1999). The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender and Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. DANTO, E. (1999). The Berlin Poliklinik: Psychoanalytic innovation in Weimar Germany. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 47:12691292. DEUTSCH, H. (1945). The Psychology of Women: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation: Vol. II. Motherhood. New York: Grune & Stratton. DIMEN, M. (2000). The body as Rorschach. Studies in Gender & Sexuality 1:939. DORSEY, D. (1996). Castration anxiety or feminine genital anxiety? Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 44(Suppl.):283303. ELISE, D. (1997). Primary femininity, bisexuality, and the female ego ideal: A reexamination of female developmental theory. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 66:489517. FREUD, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Standard Edition 7:130243. GOLDNER, V. (2000). Reading and writing, talking and listening: Introducing studies in gender and sexuality. Studies in Gender & Sexuality 1:17. HOLLENDER, M., BROWN, C., & ROBACH, H. (1977). Genital exhibition in women. American Journal of Psychiatry 134:436438. HUGH-JONES, S., GOUGH, B., & LITTLEWOOD, A. (2005). Sexual exhibitionism as sexuality and individuality: A critique of psycho-medical discourse from the perspectives of women who exhibit. Sexualities 8:259281. KAPLAN, L. (1991). Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary. New York: Doubleday. MARCUS, B. (2004). Female passion and the matrix of mother, daughter, and body: Vicissitudes of the maternal transference in the working through of sexual inhibitions. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 24:680712.
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MOORE, B., & FINE, B., EDS. (1990). Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts. New Haven: Yale Universiry Press / American Psychoanalytic Association. MULLER J., & TILLMAN, J., EDS. (2007). The Embodied Subject: Minding the Body in Psychoanalysis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. PARENS, H. (1990). On the girls psychosexual development: Reconsiderations suggested from direct observation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 38:743772. RAPHLING, D. (1989). Fetishism in a woman. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 37:465491. SHAPIRO, B. (2006). Bound together in chronic pain and trauma: A study of two mother-daughter relationships. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 26:92-118. WEBSTERS DELUXE UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY (1979). 2nd ed. New York: Simon & Shuster. ZAVITZIANOS, G. (1971). Fetishism and exhibitionism in the female and their relationship to psychopathy and kleptomania. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 52:297305.
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