Mary and Rhoda (their real names) were the training supervisors during my first year in grad school. There were 20 students from three different area schools. I was lucky to have Mary who was both intelligent and warm. Rhoda may have known her stuff but she was hard. Her students complained and Mary’s supervisees thought Rhoda ruined the weekly staff meeting. I volunteered to speak up at the next meeting and they all said they would back me. I spoke up and was left alone to face Rhoda’s wraith. They meant well, but she was scary.
Jeff, a fellow Hunter student ‘explained this’ (mansplaining?) “Look, she’s old and past her sexual desirability, in her 50s (so was Mary, BTW) and you are still young enough (I was 32) to have the sexual energy.” I was very uncomfortable with his describing me that way; maybe he thought he had the right to do it or assumed I would be flattered. I was mostly bothered that he reduced Rhoda’s nasty demeanor to being an envious old woman. I argued with him, but of course, he was right, dontcha know.
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Throughout the hundreds of years of witch trials in Europe and America, being old was often considered a crime worthy of a witch trial. Being old and not sexy meant a woman would be malevolent unless she were too sexy which was also dangerous.
The history of witchcraft in 17th century America includes trial by water. Throw a suspected witch into a pond. If she is a witch, the pure waters will reject her, and she will float to the top and be executed. If she was innocent they tried and usually failed to get her out before she ceased breathing.
Fast-forward to the late 20th century. After grad school, I attended one of the ubiquitous post-grad therapy institutes in the greater NY metro. Mine was pretty eclectic, covering mostly the British School of Object Relations, Kohutian Self Psychology, and the like. Forty years later, I am grateful for what I learned there and integrate most of it into my work, which today includes cognitive and behavioral work. I just wish they had taught Jung.
The entire faculty acknowledged Freud as the father of psychoanalysis, which is what we were being taught. They revered him with no worship. My favorite supervisor, Manny, once asked me, “I wonder if penis envy exists for women, I know men have it, but do women?”
We had two faculty members and one student who were total believers. Penis envy is not just curiosity or the desire to have one, wishing that appendage was forever attached for the advantages, no. Penis envy works this way: Girls are happy with themselves until they view a penis. It doesn’t matter what age she is; as soon as she sees one, she is thrown into the depths of despair, inferiority, and shame, which will guide everything in her life forever. Her only chance is a good analyst who will help her recognize and admit to this so she can get on with life as a lesser, but mature being. A woman’s maturity and mental health depend on her acknowledging her inferiority because of a body part. There you go, ladies, that explains it all. Don’t argue of even think about it.
Back to witches. Dr. Bob M. was a true believer. I made the mistake of asking, “What about females with no brothers who never saw a penis until adulthood?” Instantly I had floated to the top of his pond, I could vision him angrily pointing his index finger at me as he ‘calmly’ stated that what I just said was proof of penis envy. (Mine or his?) I knew better than to mention the older sisters who wanted to know what was wrong with their baby brothers.
The student was Dr Jim, he was a PhD and the only male in our group of 5 with four female social workers. When we were handed reading assignments from psychoanalytic journals he would question if the class, including himself, was up to reading this. We ‘girls’ just read and discussed while he worried. He also had his proof. The story was, that a girl got her first period her mother said she would get her a pad, the girl thought she said ‘pan’ and since pans have handles which are phallic symbols, well, you know the rest.
Having learned my lesson, I never mentioned that little kids, boys, and girls, usually thought that people with unusual growths such as warts were gross, not something to be envied or feel inferior to, but as I said, that lake was cold.
Dr. Susan was an instructor so easy to ridicule or parody that describing her fills me with guilt. As an older teen, she was in analysis with a man who later became a widower. Susan then married him and mothered his son, having no children of her own. She often came to class in a red blazer, white blouse, and pleated skirt, looking very much like a Catholic schoolgirl and not the sexy kind.
Our classes consisted of her teaching us that every woman’s destiny was penis envy and mental health was admitting that and accepting the role that came with it.
I set up a small conference for area therapists. These were the days when everything was done by mail. Dr. Susan signed up to teach one seminar on penis envy, of course. When the applications were returned only 5 women signed up, that was “proof” that all women suffered. There were two sessions with three options. Hers was in the first group and she planned to be driven back to the city immediately after. While other presenters attended other sessions, she had no intention of that. When none of those who signed up attended her class, she gracelessly sat in the hall until taken home rather than attend someone else’s. The saving grace for her was that she had more “proof”
One day in class someone presented a case. Her patient’s husband demanded and would only have oral sex. I did ask if it was reciprocal, and no, it wasn’t. Dr. Susan and I were both getting hot under the collar about it. Wow, could it be that we agreed on something? I was annoyed by the selfishness. Her problem, however, was that the woman was infantilizing her husband by not insisting on intercourse and thus she was castrating him which, wait for it, was proof of …..Penis Envy! Witches were accused of stealing men’s penises, even though none ever went missing. The water was getting colder.
This is well in my past and I can joke about it. Most of my institution’s people, students, and instructors paid no attention to it. I used the valuable information from the sources that made sense and left the rest.
Recently, I got a new patient, a woman in her 70s who grew up as the second daughter of a large Catholic family in the northeast. Her father worked during the day and went to the bar with his friends at night, coming home long enough to make another baby. Her sister had left by the time her mother got cancer, leaving her to care for the mother and younger sibs by herself. After her mother died, the kids were her responsibility. She went to the priest for help. He angrily told her that her father was a good Catholic man who made a lot of babies and she would go to Hell for talking badly about him.
Fortunately, she did see a psychiatrist who told her that if she didn’t leave and move in with her sister he would have her committed to a mental hospital. That was in the day when a commitment would be months or years. She went to her sister’s.
She got married and had a couple of kids but her life was a struggle to escape her upbringing mentally. She had gone into therapy with a woman while in her 30s in New York hoping to get rid of this past and the trauma from a rape when she was a child. She hoped that she would get help.
She found a woman therapist who spent 2 years and 9 months talking to her about her “penis envy.”
And suddenly I stopped laughing, it wasn’t amusing at all.