For women all aspects of their lives, not only the sexual, are patterned by the sexed difference in permissiveness for aggression. Aggression in psychoanalysis is not a word with a negative meaning, it denotes motivation: the drive to accomplish or attain what is desired, and it runs the gamut of activities to do with initiating, in and out of bed. Denied aggression, in the psychoanalytic story, paves the way for difficulties in initiating sexual or other ambitious activities. Anger about denied aggression in the bedroom and the boardroom shares a common history: there is a gender-based inequality on what kinds of aggression are welcomed and permitted.
In his first piece of writing on Eros, Viennese physician and psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud wrote in 1912 that Eros could be thought of as a subterranean reservoir having two streams – Sinnlichkeit and Zaertlichkeit – the sensual and the affectionate currents, the former corresponding to possessive lust and the latter to tender affection. Healthy love, wrote Freud, involved both the lustful stream that pushed for individual sexual satisfaction and the tender affectionate stream that delayed gratification for the sake of the other person and tempered violence in the interest of affection.
This useful definition of Eros as a stream with two currents, one affectionate and the other lustful, has been tainted by the idea that the two currents are split along the lines of biological gender, an idea in which Freud was also complicit. In the popular imagination, women are brimming with affectionate Eros (“naturally” maternal), and men with lustful Eros (“naturally” aggressive). The splitting and rendering of possessive lust and tender affection fails to recognise the aspiration to Freud’s “healthy love” in the many humans, who, regardless of gender, most often have needs for possessive lust as well as tender affection.
While Freud himself had not problematised the gendering of lust and affection it, one of the thinkers in Tamil Nadu’s women’s Self-Respect movement had. In a 1931 article in the political magazine Kuti Arcu, Tamil political activist TD Gopalan accuses middle-class Tamilians of falsely splitting and gendering lust and love. Women, wrote Gopalan, had equal wishes for Kadal (desirous possessive erotic love), Anbu (affectionate tender love), and Inbam (ecstatic pleasure that could be derived from sex, relationships, experiences, and achievements).
Predating post-Freudian feminists who would go on to the same conclusion, Gopalan pointed to social and child-rearing practices – not anatomy – as responsible for differences in desire. Social practices, he wrote, taught women that they needed to protect themselves from lustful men, severing the relationship between lust and affection in the eyes of women, and creating an aversion to sex by cutting off its streams of Anbu (affection) and ecstatic pleasure (Inbam) and presenting Kadal (desirous possessive erotic love) as unbridled lust.
Gopalan’s article was written against the backdrop of the public debate on birth control in India in the 1920s and 1930s that could be read as the first (small, regional) wave of a women’s sexual rights movement in contemporary India. In keeping with the conventions of that historical time period, the article restricts its supportive comments on women’s sexual agency to heterosexual love, but it is still remarkable as an early voice against gender role rigidity in the realm of Eros. Gopalan’s article conceptualises erotic injustice in the language of forbidden carnal knowledge. Giving women the impression that lust was outside them and not inside, he wrote, limits the imagination of both genders to the vulnerability of women and the aggression of men, which in turn restricts women’s pleasure.
Contemporary psychoanalysis locates the genesis of women’s denied aggressive identification in a missing or absent father or father-like figure. As American psychoanalyst Adrienne Harris writes: “The socialisation of aggression remains one of our primary gender-linked experiences.” Harris emphasises that the aggressive drive is furthered in the imagination by secure attachments to men, because men are the characters in the world whose aggressive performances are comfortably received.
Women, Harris says, cleanly experience healthy sexual aggression when there is no pull backwards for gendered femininity, and no parental preference for a non-aggressive child. Though we know from science that the testosterone that powers “natural” aggression is mediated by venues for aggressive performances as much as it is by biology, aggression in boys is still considered “natural” –including by their mothers – which gives boys an advantage in developing their aggression.
In the psychoanalytic story, for a girl to feel that her aggression is welcomed as natural, she needs the presence and availability of her father in early life as an object of love and identification. As much as the mother’s body is the site of erotic love where identification is built, so is the father’s, though the latter is far less discussed. The documented absence of fathers in early child-rearing for generations of Indians has impacted women’s experience of aggression as a form of identification.
Why does Harris say that aggressive identifications for women are primarily built through fathers and through relationships with men? Why can’t women easily build aggressive identifications with mothers? For a number of reasons, mothers don’t seem to function as a site of aggressive identification for their daughters. First, the idealisation of women’s peacefulness, empathy, and relatedness, makes the mother less available as an object on which to build the aggressive imagination. Second, while this may change, for now it continues to be the case that women so often feel out of control and anxious about their hatreds and envies, they cannot offer the girl child the substrate upon which to build her healthy aggression. When female role models in aggression are available they are still difficult to imitate due to various systemic structures in the outside world that reward women for being nurturing or beautiful objects, but rarely reward women for being aggressive subjects. These systemic structures that reward women’s beauty but not their agency are mirrored and internalised in the imagination.
Excerpted with permission from Women’s Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress, Amrita Narayanan, Oxford University Press.