Papers by virginia goldner
Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims, 2016
Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Jul 15, 2004
This paper describes an integrative approach for treating couples in abusive relationships. Becau... more This paper describes an integrative approach for treating couples in abusive relationships. Because of the power inequities that often obtain in such cases, the therapist faces special challenges. Both partners must be defined as clients, yet the two are not on equal footing. Sustaining moral clarity in a context of such psychological ambiguity is crucial, and it requires skills beyond those we typically associate with the art and craft of the interview. A mutative factor in any therapy requires bearing witness to injustices large and small-leading the author to raise questions about the place of the moral work of psychotherapy in our therapy-saturated society. She poses an urgent social question: Is it possible to intervene therapeutically in abusive relationships to make love safer for women and less threatening to men? F OR 15 YEARS, FROM THE MID-1980S TO THE LATE 1990S, I WAS DEEPLY engaged in a clinical research project that was developing ways to understand and work with couples embroiled in what I reluctantly call domestic violence. Feminists have deconstructed this term many times over, making the point that it buries the horrible reality of the abuse situation in an ideologically obfuscating word, domestic, as if it is domesticity itself that hauls off and hits Mrs. Rivera (Johnson,
Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Jul 1, 1999
Over the past 12 years, the Gender and Violence Project at the Ackerman Institute has been engage... more Over the past 12 years, the Gender and Violence Project at the Ackerman Institute has been engaged in the complex task of conceptualizing and treating domestic violence within a feminist-informed, conjoint framework. This work has meant that we have had to ask and answer many philosophical and moral questionsnot just technical ones. We have had to be very clear about our definition of violence in intimate life since such definitions determine the socioprofessional context in which violence is treated and the moral and legal stance taken toward it. From a feminist perspective, intimate violence is a criminal act, the effort by a male perpetrator to control, intimidate, and inflict harm on his partner-victim. Given this framework, it seem obvious that such behavior should be punished within the criminal justice system and that mental health professionals should position themselves as advocates for the female victim. But conceptualizing intimate violence from a psychological perspective has very different programmatic implications. (Here I refer to all psychologically centered views, which include, but are not limited to, cognitive-behavioral, psychiatric, psychodynamic, and systemic.) Thinking in these clinical languages foregrounds the idea that men's ongoing violence toward their partners is the outcome of their psychological inability to contain their rage, and their partner's inability to separate from them. Clearly, within this domain of meaning, both partners are, in different ways of course, coparticipants in runaway behavioral patterns. What is needed is treatment, not punishment, provided by psychotherapists who, as always, should maintain a neutral stance toward both partners, since both are struggling with an overwhelming emotional process. These schematic summaries capture crucial dimensions of the dynamics of abusive relationships. Their fundamental limitation is that each alone is a profoundly inadequate basis for understanding this complex social problem. Indeed, in our work we have found that no single paradigm can provide an adequate account of, or an effective treatment for, violence in intimate relationships. Some who have held a feminist position have minimized the emotional complexity of abusive relationships. There are a multitude of factors, other than the abuse of power, that operate to keep partners attached to and embroiled with each other. Leaving out the complexity of emotional attachment, for example, adds to the burden of confusion these couples experience, since they live with many intense and contradictory feelings about one another. We have found (Goldner, Penn, Sheinberg, & Walker, 1990) that romantic attachment and a profound sense of bonding often coexist with coercion and abuse.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1991
This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural cate... more This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural category. Without succumbing to a nonpsychoanalytic notion of androgyny, the argument developed here challenges the assumption that an internally consistent gender identity is possible or even desirable. Beginning with the idea that, from an analytic perspective, the construct of "identity" is problematic and implausible, because it denotes and privileges a unified psychic world, the author develops a deconstructionist critique of our dominant gender-identity paradigm. It is argued that gender coherence, consistency, conformity, and identity are culturally mandated normative ideals that psychoanalysis has absorbed uncritically. These ideals, moreover, are said to create a universal pathogenic situation, insofar as the attempt to conform to their dictates requires the activation of a false-self system. An alternative, "decentered" gender paradigm is then proposed, which conceives of gender as a "necessary fiction" that is used for magical ends in the psyche, the family, and the culture. From this perspective, gender identity is seen as a problem as well as a solution, a defensive inhibition as well as an accomplishment. It is suggested that as a goal for analytic treatment, the ability to tolerate the ambiguity and instability of gender categories is more appropriate than the goal of "achieving" a single, pure, sex-appropriate view of oneself. C ONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYTIC THINKING ABOUT GENDER has resulted in a profound critique of Freud's phallocentric theories of male and female development. While there is no simple consensus among the many competing perspectives now being developed, most
Family Process, Mar 1, 1985
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Apr 3, 2017
ABSTRACT Muriel Dimen was singular—but also multiple. A brave risk taker, wearing her vulnerabili... more ABSTRACT Muriel Dimen was singular—but also multiple. A brave risk taker, wearing her vulnerability. A mentor showing her uncertainty. She created a hybrid form of written address in which the formal and the colloquial, the public and the intimate, the erotic and the traumatic, the put-together and the broken-up shared the stage, speaking not as one but as multiples. The world without her feels like an endless absence.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Aug 23, 2002
ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Jul 4, 2014
Bill and Jane," a couple I saw many years ago, are placeholders for all the anguished, angry, exh... more Bill and Jane," a couple I saw many years ago, are placeholders for all the anguished, angry, exhausting, and poignant partners who have made their mark on my work as a clinician and theorist. They inspired and defeated me in equal measure, and they ground this essay, which attempts to bring together many of the theories I have fallen in love with over the years. Psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and systems theory, of course, but also developmental and attachment theory, Fonagy's work on mentalization, the strategic family therapies, and containing all of these, the relational turn. I have tried to capture the intellectual synergy of putting all these discourses to work, and to work on each other, all of which is necessary when treating couples on the brink. Any couples therapist knows the drill. Two partners who politely introduce themselves, tolerating the necessary small talk and business details with appropriate compliance, but clearly itching for the moment when, having now placed themselves in your esteemed professional hands, they can finally let loose and leave the mess to you. Of course it's too early to be forced into the position of containing the extreme states and dangerous ways of people you don't know from Adam. But whether too early in the treatment, or too late in your day, these people will have their way with you. As you probe for some history and context for the emotion-drenched enactment that will wait no longer, the ferocity and volatility of the couples' initial presentation can often feel ramped up for the benefit of the therapist, evoking one's experience of patients labeled borderline, who tend to conflate showing with being, feeling with influencing. The borderline analogy is meant to be suggestive, but it is also technical. Most of the partners in our office practices do not have severe personality disorders, but "pathology" is, of course, context dependent. No one is immune from the contagion of reactivity, and few amongst us can resist the siren call of a fight (sometimes to the death) over who gets to inhabit the victim position-the pleasure in that pain being that the other gets branded the perpetrator. Couples on the brink are trapped in a particularly toxic strain of that process, one that can overwhelm and envelop everyone in their wake, often causing couples therapists to experience the kind of secondary trauma that Gabbard (1986), in describing the treatment of borderlines, called a "physiological countertransference"-pounding heart, dry mouth, trembling limbs.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Apr 12, 2011
Transgender subjectivities are paradoxical in that they both undermine the gender binary and rati... more Transgender subjectivities are paradoxical in that they both undermine the gender binary and ratify it. The contradictions inherent in trans require that we consider trans as more of a process than a thing in itself, a gerund, rather than a noun or adjective, a continuous work in progress, rather than a static fact of the self. But despite cultural upheavals and increasing tolerance, we still want our gender straight up. While we approve and often applaud efforts at excellence in masculinity and femininity (including surgery) that are sex and gender concordant, we are still deeply disturbed by any efforts toward confounding that gender, or crossing over to the "other" one. new combinations of new shapes and new kinds." (Chasseuget-Smirgel 1983, p. 288). "I name myself a transsexual because I have to, . . . but the word will mean something different when I get through using It" (Stryker, 1998, p. 18). When 18th-century Europeans were studying other cultures, they slowly began to realize that those "other" people were also studying them, that the object of their gaze was also another subject gazing (Aron, 1996). The problematic of the individual being both subject and object of the regulatory gaze, serving sometimes as its agent and instrument, and at other times becoming its object and effect, concerned Foucault for most of his career, and remains central to any account of the relations between trans subjects and mental health professionals, no matter how progressive or "off the grid" we may consider ourselves to be. In Foucault's (1988) idiom, "the gaze" was meant as a visual metaphor, in the sense that "to see something" is to apply a language or mathematics to the thing seen, so that it is constituted by the observer in terms of one's preferred and available categories. Foucault went on to show how the human sciences produce the subjects who are the objects of their gaze, by separating, classifying, ranking, and evaluating persons in hierarchies of normality and morality that, as has demonstrated, are hopelessly entangled. When we ask who is looking and who is being seen, who is being named and who is doing the naming, when we query the epistemological politics of classification, diagnosis, and identity politics more generally, and then consider the one-and two-person psychology of such practices-we are working at the site where minds meet discourse, an intersection critical to the understanding
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 4, 2022
ABSTRACT Sam Guzzardi’s essay bridges cultural, political, and clinical registers in his discussi... more ABSTRACT Sam Guzzardi’s essay bridges cultural, political, and clinical registers in his discussion of a dense and heartfelt treatment of a genderqueer subject, who comes increasingly into their multivalenced subjectivity as the years unfold. The therapy is rigorous, creative, and poignant.
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Sep 3, 2018
American Psychological Association eBooks, Sep 11, 2007
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Jan 15, 2002
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Oct 2, 2018
Sexual harassment, unlike rape, is a project of leisurely objectification that depends, for its e... more Sexual harassment, unlike rape, is a project of leisurely objectification that depends, for its erotic charge, on the perversion of consent. Unlike rape, where consent is vanquished, or erotic mutuality, where it is ratified, the pleasure of sexual harassment is that "consent" is coerced, that is, it is "consent" under duress. Under these conditions, which slowly dismantle the personhood of the victim, the issue becomes one of reality testing. "Just say no" is not an option when the question at hand is "What just happened?"
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Oct 2, 2017
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Mar 15, 2005
ABSTRACT
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Jan 15, 2004
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Apr 4, 2003
Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense materiality of gender and sexuali... more Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense materiality of gender and sexuality, both in theory and, for many, as lived experience. But where gender has moved to the ironic, sexuality still holds the space for the authentic. Gender now seems squarely ...
Family Process, Sep 1, 1998
The ideas presented in this essay were developed through an intensive 12-year collaboration with ... more The ideas presented in this essay were developed through an intensive 12-year collaboration with my close colleague and co-investigator, Gillian Walker, ACSW, who is writing a forthcoming article on more recent aspects of the work of the Gender and Violence Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family. In the cases presented in this essay, Virginia Goldner was the therapist and Gillian Walker was the consultant.
Family Process, Dec 1, 1990
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Papers by virginia goldner