PANY Scientific Meeting Summary

Melitta and Otto Sperling Memorial Lecture
Monday, October 17, 2005, 8:30 pm
Einhorn Auditorium, Lenox Hill Hospital
131 East 76th Street, New York, NY

A Language of Silence: Remarks on the History of the Female
Body in Psychoanalysis

Rosemary H. Balsam, MD (by invitation)
Training and Supervising Analyst, The Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT

Introduction by Leonard L. Shengold, MD

Summary

There is a strong tradition of female silence as a virtue that goes back for centuries. The author will examine the possibility that even in contemporary psychoanalysis we may still encounter this silence, especially in matters of the body, despite women's participation in the modern culture of public discourse. Reflecting on the role of the female body in psychoanalytic theory, the author’s contention is that it has often been distorted and misunderstood. In the past we encountered as fundamental, a female body with an addendum of a penis: nowadays we encounter a female body that is fragmented. The biological body continues to be exceedingly problematic to integrate into the study of its mental representations in gender theory.

The theories of the various eras reflect these body distortions. Do the analysts' theories help produce the voice of the patient? Does the patient also produce the analysts' theory? Wordless tableaux that invite "interpretation" can take the place of the subject's own verbalization. These gaps and silences, covered over by received theory, can occur in analyses as transference-countertransference aspects of a patient’s internalized past with a "knowing" elder – whether female and male. Thus the impact of her inner world in response to the healing authority may help to contribute to obfuscations in the theory of female gender development.

The author explores how a vigil seems to persist for this "feminine silence." She will exemplify the dilemmas by drawing a brief parallel between analysands at the turn of the 21st century and the hysterics of the Saltpêtrière at the turn of the 20th century.