How does gender identity emerge? What makes a child a boy or a girl? Psychoanalyst Serge Efez reflects on the feminine and masculine and defends the new gender order.
Serge Hefez, psychotherapist, author of The New Sexual Order (Le Nouvel Ordre sexuel, pourquoi devient-on fille ou garçon?, Kero, 2012).
Psychologies: You claim that male or female gender is not determined at birth. Can you explain it?
Serge Ephesus: Despite our biological sex, we are not born a girl or a boy, but become them. From birth, we are bombarded with prescriptions that tell us our gender. Sex and gender coincide when, in addition to the penis, a man has masculine identifications, as well as a way of living in his body and mind, which correspond to those characteristics that the culture indicates as masculine. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, children are assigned a gender before they understand the difference between the sexes. We are known to carry and feed children and also talk to them differently depending on whether they are boys or girls. By the age of one and a half to two years, children understand that they have genitals, and establish their connection with what others expect from them. Until the age of 4-5, this understanding remains unstable: boys still think that their penis can fall off, and girls that they can grow it.
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So, when raising children, they influence, accustoming them to be a boy or a girl?
S. E.: Moreover, in boys, their so-called female part is amputated, and in girls, the so-called male part. According to Freud, our personality is built around the poles: passivity / activity; merger/separation. On the one hand, the child enjoys complete passivity in the arms of his parents. On the other hand, he takes actions to separate: he refuses, pushes away, rejects, goes into the outside world. All children keep these two movements in themselves. Their environment subsequently interprets these positions as masculine or feminine and directs the child to the position that corresponds to his biological sex. The boy is pushed towards independence in action rather than in emotion; the girl is encouraged to be obedient, submissive, to pay attention to the desires of other people. Everyone loses universality, locks into their gender and interiorizes these unconscious and cultural notions of masculine and feminine.
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- Why are girls not like boys?
In the thirty years of your career as a psychoanalyst, have you noticed a change in the perception of the sexes?
S. E.: Yes, consciously and unconsciously, the vise is gradually unclenched. The youth grew up in a mixed atmosphere, with the idea that male and female are not two closed and incompatible universes. For girls, the change is clearly visible: they are encouraged to be independent and appropriate their active part, so their mental and concrete fate is not at all like the fate of their grandmothers. In turn, most boys no longer think that feminine means second-rate, unclean, or dangerous. They are also much less afraid of their own femininity. By the way, some go for homosexual experiments – to try – and this does not call into question their confidence that they are a man or a woman. Past generations did not allow themselves this. Or feel ashamed about it. Also, young people are more flexible in their perception of the dichotomy “mother-slut”, which has always been strong in the unconscious. The way men look at women has changed; in order to allow themselves to be pleased, men no longer need to humiliate women. And women move from one role to another with more freedom. Everyone looks at what is in him from the opposite sex, benevolently, and not with embarrassment or disgust, and no longer tries to get rid of it.
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- Men and women: why are we so different
Is the Oedipus complex obsolete?
“He is experienced less caricatured,” says psychoanalyst Serge Efez. “The task of psychotherapists is not to guard dogmas, but to make the initial concepts less strict and allow our patients to soften their internal conflicts and realize their full potential without feeling that the norm “presses” on them. Some psychoanalysts are pessimistic and believe that men and women no longer fulfill their roles as father and mother. Consequently, the children no longer understand what a man or a woman is, and plunge into confusion. I do not think so. Today, our view is changing, we see gender not as a binary choice, but as a continuum. This is what the Eastern philosophy of yin and yang tells us, recognizing these two inseparable essences that live in each of us. Each of us has two poles, male and female, between which we move.
Do men and women desire each other as much as before?
S. E.: Certainly! Over the past 30 years, all public opinion polls show that men and women are attracted to each other more and more, maintain a rich and harmonious sexual relationship. The realms of sex play are more open than before, everyone knows their partner’s body better, and we all fulfill ourselves better. Those who scream about a desireless hermaphrodite society are really only afraid of one thing: the disappearance of patriarchy. Behind this fear, which is most often expressed by men, lies the fear of their own feminization, the horror of passivity, the loss of their potency.
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Then how to explain to children what is a girl and what is a boy?
S. E.: Just because gender is based on social learning doesn’t mean anatomy doesn’t exist. The boy gives meaning to his penis as an erectile and penetrating organ, and the girl imagines her body as a body that can be penetrated, and then each imagines the pleasure that he will receive and that he will give to the other – all these are fundamental guidelines. This is not about neutralizing them, but about dismantling stereotypes. All this does not mean that a man is a conqueror and a woman is passive. Girls will be able to accept what is masculine in them, be whole persons, accept their power and not consider that they can exist only if they are an object for someone. Boys will accept their sensitivities, their emotions, and not be forced to push them away as a threat to feminization.
But perhaps in such an environment, children will lack guidance?
S. E.: It’s not like that at all! I believe that, on the contrary, young people today are much more open and respectful towards others. Having more freedom to live in their gender, they become more harmonious people, establishing relationships between the sexes based on communication, trust and intimacy. Society has undergone profound changes since the time of Freud, and with it the psyche of children has changed. Today, parents share their functions among themselves. Father and mother take turns either merging with the child, or forbidding, they caress him and push him to independence. And yet, children are well aware of the difference between genders, generations and taboos.
Read more:
- Mother and father: what’s the difference?
Gender issues cause controversy among psychologists, sociologists, philosophers… Why?
S. E.: First of all, because they concern how each of us personally masters his masculinity and his femininity, how gender determines our place in the world. Then, because these issues are never resolved. We are between two inner forces: one part of us is conservative, it clings to a reassuring certainty; the other is open, inventive, she loves freedom, which inspires and at the same time frightens us. And finally, because even if norms change, we are connected in our successive identifications to our parents and grandparents. If we, like some, argue that gender is a biological issue and forget its social dimension, this plunges us into even greater uncertainty … But at the same time, it does not avoid the unconscious conflicts that continue to worry us.
About it
The book “Boys and Girls – Two Different Worlds” by Valentina Eremeeva and Tamara Khrizman. Neuropsychologists explain in detail how (in different ways) we must teach and educate boys and girls in order for our children to be successful and live in harmony with themselves (Tuscarora, 2003).