Abstract
Certain potential precursors to heterosexual women’s experience of partner infidelity are explored as these dynamics unfold within the oedipal crisis—the “betrayal” by the oedipal objects. As each child moves into the oedipal phase, he or she comes to recognize not only desire for the mother, but the mother’s desire for the father. A doubling of this experience of “deception,” encountered first in relation to the mother, and then repeated with the father, may be especially pronounced for a girl, as she is likely to inhabit more fully her bisexual potential in negotiating the expected shift of object choice from mother to father. “Deceived” by her primary maternal oedipal object, a girl sets forth toward her paternal oedipal object with “fidelity” already an issue, and with faith in her mind’s ability to determine reality already shaken. Undermined trust in self and other is the context in which she begins the oedipal relation to her heterosexual object. This path is quite distinct from that traveled by the heterosexual boy. Clinical material illustrates the assault on one’s mind, on one’s confidence to determine what is true, that is a central aspect of both oedipal and adult betrayal.
We know that one of the most excruciating experiences for many people in our culture is the confrontation with a spouse or partner’s sexual infidelity—what we curiously refer to as “cheating.” Whether as lay people or as clinicians, we are all too familiar with the emotional devastation wrought by this sort of betrayal. A tsunami of jealousy, rage, and grief sweeps one along in a nasty current, all available energy expended in the effort to avoid being dragged under. Most succumb. Months, even years, may go by before the debris is cleared away and any equilibrium restored. Some couples seem to weather the storm, but it is unclear whether their relationship is made stronger in the face of such destruction or is merely able to persevere with a damp chill. For many couples, infidelity is often the end of the road, the relationship damaged beyond repair, whether that is apparent immediately or not.
It is evident that the piercing sense of pain involved in infidelity penetrates to the hearts of both women and men. 1 Few are immune. In “The Impulse to Infidelity and Oedipal Splitting,” Josephs (2006) locates the deepest roots of these dynamics in the oedipal complex. The oedipal child of either sex feels betrayed by the realization that the desired parent has “run off” with the other parent. Josephs delineates a defensive organization where, in adulthood, passive is turned into active as people are motivated to cheat. Instead of being the “cheated upon” oedipal child, one becomes the “cheater” in one’s adult relationship. This pattern of defense involves a reversal as one identifies with the “cheating” parent.
Although Josephs illustrates with a female case example, I suggest that the defensive pattern he describes has traditionally tended to be more a male response to oedipal wounding. 2 By contrast, I am considering the direct repetition, rather than reversal, that I believe has tended more typically to characterize female experience: a woman has been more likely to reexperience being cheated on, a repetition of the original oedipal injury in being the passive recipient of betrayal. As she likely felt as a small girl, she has been “dumped” for someone more desirable. Once again, she has lost not only her love object but her self-esteem. As I will illustrate, she may also feel that she has lost her mind.
Men as well can certainly experience being distraught to the extent of feeling that one is losing one’s mind. While I hope to illuminate this element of being on the receiving end of infidelity in using a female case example, this aspect of my thesis is not specific to one gender. However, I also wish to explore particular aspects of the heterosexual female oedipal trajectory in light of how they might bear on the experience of adult infidelity. I will not be addressing the multitude of complex determinants involved in gender development and sexual object choice, both preoedipally and beyond, that will of course play a significant role in defensive styles, in propensity toward infidelity, and/or in a vulnerability toward losing trust in one’s own mind. My focus will be on the direct repetition of the experience of deception as that is fully registered, unobscured by defensive denial or attempts at omnipotent reversal.
To provide a context in which to develop my thesis, let me describe the oedipal scene a girl is likely to engage. My specific emphasis is on the dual nature of the girl’s erotic object choice: the mother is the first object of desire before the addition of the father in what is (heterosexually) a refocusing of desire (Freud 1933; Halberstadt-Freud 1998). The girl’s oedipal desire for her mother has been traditionally referred to as the “negative” oedipal, but I have proposed that it be thought of as the primary maternal oedipal situation (see Klein 1928, 1945) to better reflect its developmental timing and intensity (Elise 2000b). The desire for the father—the so-called “positive” oedipal configuration—is added in what is typically a “secondary” paternal oedipal situation intertwining with the girl’s already established love affair with her mother. If we take seriously the duality of the girl’s oedipal picture, we see that she has two “opportunities” to be “dumped.”
In investigating these particularities of the female oedipal configuration, I have conceptualized that through an experience of oedipal defeat in relation to both mother and father, a female sense of inadequacy and shame can be internalized, and accepted as one’s identity (Elise 1998a, 2000a,b, 2002a, 2008). This more typically female response to a sense of shame in perceiving oneself as an oedipal “loser” stands in contrast to what is more likely a male phallic-omnipotent defensive pattern. 3 For both sexes, oedipal defeat in relation to either parent results in a sense of disappointment and deflation regarding one’s sexed body and one’s romantic aspirations. However, as much of the psychoanalytic gender literature attests, defenses against injured narcissism tend to become gender-specific. Males are more likely to turn passive into active, in a manner that might be thought of as counterphobic: instead of accepting defeat, a male will likely attempt to triumph sexually. Such attempts at reversal usually require multiple repetitions. For females, living out a dejected, deflated stance (classically understood in a limited way as penis envy) sends them in the direction of inhibition and failure to actualize desire (Elise 2000a,b, 2008). These gendered tendencies, multiply determined, are used and further entrenched in contending with oedipal challenges.
I now want to explore certain quite specific potential precursors to women’s experience of partner infidelity as these particular dynamics unfold within the oedipal crisis—the “betrayal” by the oedipal objects, plural. While not the single relevant factor, this doubling of deception is, I believe, especially pronounced for a girl, as she is likely to inhabit more fully her bisexual potential in negotiating the expected shift of object choice from mother to father. 4 As each child moves into the oedipal phase, he, or she, comes to recognize not only his or her own desire for the mother, but the mother’s desire for the father. This recognition of the mother’s desire going elsewhere can feel to the child like a betrayal by the mother: “I thought you were mine alone, but now I see that you’ve been involved with him all along!” For both sexes, deception takes place first in relation to the maternal object, who is, as Freud (1933) put it, a “faithless seducer.”
In following a heterosexual trajectory, a boy has to “master” this situation in relation to the mother (Kernberg 1991, 1995). Josephs (2006) holds (correctly, I believe) that the usual pattern is for the boy to turn passive into active—to become the betrayer—in order to tolerate continued desire for a female as his internalized oedipal object. A boy will more likely use unconscious identification with the maternal figure as the unfaithful object in order to ward off future betrayals by a female—a vindictive as well as preemptive strategy. The boy can also directly identify with a sociocultural image of the paternal figure as the one to “play the field,” thus using a gendered, generational transmission to ratify a defensive approach to relating. He will be the one to do any deceiving.
I am, however, particularly interested in thinking about how a girl might register a sense of erotic betrayal by her mother (first preoedipally, then oedipally, desired). Unlike a boy, who will likely evidence some protest, a girl is expected to swallow her betrayal by the mother. It is supposedly a non-event. As Schafer (1974) has emphasized, societies insistently attempt to steer each generation of children along a heterosexual path: “And this learning will be very much under the influence of some care-taking presence” (p. 470). Kernberg (1991) refers to the development of the girl’s “tacit understanding of the ‘underground’ nature of her own genitality” (p. 356). This erasure is culturally supported by denying the intensity of her erotic desire for the mother and by redirecting her to the paternal object. Altman (1977) describes the girl’s giving up of her mother as first love object as an “act of renunciation [preparing her for ‘renunciation in the future’] for which there is no counterpart in the boy” (p. 48). In turning to the father, a girl then has to traverse the entire experience of oedipal desire and betrayal all over again in relation to the father—a “double whammy.”
Kernberg (1991) speaks of the daughter’s “leap to the father” as requiring greater relational trust in that the father is an object less known than the mother. We might consider what this greater trust would be based on—wishful thinking, a fantasy that “this one will be mine”? Kernberg identifies a “secret hope of eventually being accepted” by the father (p. 356). But the father is already with the mother; a girl knows this oedipal fact from her experience of her mother’s betrayal. Not only can she feel “dumped” by the mother; she is sent off to consort with her father, who she knows in advance will never be hers alone.
I think of this dynamic as the harem mentality: an unconscious, passive resignation in the female to “accept” and endure male infidelity/nonmonogamy. The girl registers on a deep psychic level that she is defeated in advance, and yet she sets forth anyway. This is her heterosexual trajectory, and much, both culturally and in internalized early object relations, supports this path. While hoping for a new outcome, she is unconsciously prepared to submit to the inevitable. I suggest that the experience of betrayal by the mother may set the stage for this dynamic of submission, which usually is understood solely at the level of culture, in terms of patriarchal power and privilege. Given this early shaping of internalized object relations, in an ironic twist of gender the father may be the original “other woman.” It may be “matriarchal” power—the mother’s desire for, and choice of, the father—that is key in understanding female submission to male infidelity. Such submission does not imply any lessening of conscious distress when confronted with an actual, or feared, infidelity.
As I have said, my aim here is twofold: (1) to investigate the impact of infidelity in its assault on the mind as a risk/vulnerability for both genders, and (2) to analyze this tormenting drama in adult relationships to tease out certain unique elements of the female heterosexual oedipal configuration. Investigation of this oedipal situation, though focused in the female direction, should nonetheless help us in dealing clinically with the trauma of the adult experience of betrayal, in either gender. Although gendered trends may exist, the experience of any individual is unique and may or may not fall along gendered lines. I do believe, along with Josephs (2006), that much of the trauma for adults in dealing with sexual betrayal involves the resurfacing of oedipal wounding. Much of what is painful in the present and/or dreaded in the future has already occurred in the archaic history of our object relations. A deeply buried devastation from the past is mapped onto the present or onto the feared future.
I now move to a clinical example that will put a human voice to what can be consciously accessible in an adult. Direct, conscious recall of oedipal betrayal would be rare, especially as such betrayal by the mother would have occurred for a girl at a very young age and then be overlaid by extended experience with the father. Yet this excerpted material does lay out the phenomenology of the experience of adult betrayal, especially in the assault on one’s sense of reality, and I am using it to illustrate this particularly painful experience. I will then move from the vignette to a discussion of relevant oedipal factors that may be evident in the work with this woman.
Case Illustration
I was stunned one day to hear myself being vehemently accused of “cheating on” one of my female patients. Eva spit out her rage at me: “I feel totally betrayed by you; you’ve been seeing her [another patient] all along! I feel like you’ve been lying to me all along, and for how long, I don’t even know.” What made this declaration even more startling was the fact that this patient is not psychotic, as it might well seem, but a well-grounded, warmly related professional. We were three years into an analysis of predominantly neurotic conflicts carried out within a generally positive transference. The reader will of course wonder what had provoked this outburst of outrage that seemed to be taking the form of a psychotic transference regression in an otherwise quite sane patient. What had driven her “insane”?
A change in our schedule one day resulted in a “collision” between Eva and this other female patient in my waiting room. In agreeing to see Eva at an earlier hour that day, I had inadvertently set the stage for her to arrive just when this other woman was leaving. It turned out that they recognized each other from their jobs in a rather large corporate world, where Eva felt they “eyed” one another from a distance on a regular basis. Now for a moment they had stood a few inches apart, face to face, staring at one another before each moved on.
I was quite unprepared for the powerful impact of Eva’s reaction to the realization that I was working with this known “other woman.” The felt sense of the sexual nature of the betrayal became clear as she continued her accusation: “It’s as if my husband cheated on me!” She well knew of course that I have other patients, some of them other women. This knowledge in no way diminished the shocked reaction she had to actually seeing this other patient in what was a brief and, on the surface, generally unprovocative encounter. To Eva it was very provocative, “sickening knowledge,” as she put it: “I felt like I might vomit, or even faint.”
In working to comprehend the emotional intensity for Eva of what had occurred—a felt sense of catastrophe—the reference to her husband cheating on her sexually called my attention to oedipal dynamics and the question of whether I was a paternal or a maternal figure at this point, or both. The family history included the reality that her father had cheated on her mother when Eva was about seven. Even at her young age, Eva gleaned a fair amount about the nature of her mother’s distress. Thus, with his affair her father had symbolically cheated on Eva and cheated her out of a secure home and family, as well as out of a positive identification with a mother loved faithfully by her husband.
Additionally, as I am theorizing, the less consciously accessible emotional reality of feeling cheated on by both parents in the oedipal drama played a part in her reaction. The transference reflected this bisexual multilayering. In the somewhat more accessible gender link between husband and paternal figure, I represented the oedipal father cheating on her with another woman. This connection placed the other patient as the “other woman,” whether mother or mistress. On a deeper level, I represented the maternal oedipal figure cheating on her with the father. Here the other patient figured as the parental couple’s “love child”—the patient’s sibling rival. In associating, Eva could recall that at age four, shortly after the birth of her sister, she announced to her mother, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you!” 5 Her mother “looked strange” and replied, “Girls don’t marry their mothers.” Eva reflected: “I felt something . . . quite bad; I would now say crestfallen . . . confused, and alone.”
Adding to the mix was relevant history in Eva’s adult life. In her late twenties, before her marriage in her mid-thirties, Eva had been in a relationship for four years when she discovered that her partner had been having an affair for a number of months. The couple had stopped at a local drugstore. Eva’s boyfriend went into the store while she remained in the car listening to the radio. As she leaned forward to switch stations, she noticed the corner of a piece of paper wedged deeply between the seats. Extracting this document from its hiding place, she saw it was a letter from a woman who clearly had accompanied the boyfriend on his recent trip to Los Angeles. The letter’s contents conjured up images of hotels, restaurants, beaches, a naked woman, sex.
Eva vividly described this moment as “beyond horrible—a moment that had no end, no next moment”; it was “beyond words,” she said, “as if my breathing had stopped. Something in my chest or stomach was bursting, caving, imploding; to say popping is not enough, more like those movies when the nuclear reactor is melting down—there’s panic, a threat of time pressure and annihilation, everything’s shaking apart with increasing ferocity. And then I realized, it wasn’t the woman, the sex, the trips, all of which were horrible, but the truly devastating knowledge was the realization of a reality that I hadn’t been aware of, but that was true and that had been happening over some time.” As Eva paused, I commented, “Your past was no longer your past.” She replied, “No, it wasn’t; I’d been lied to for some time and my reality that I’d lived was not true—it was dissolved in seconds, shaken apart, as if my memory banks were melting down.” In response to Eva’s profound experience of cognitive and emotional dissonance, I simply acknowledged, “What had been real was no longer true.”
For Eva, lived truth turned out to be a fiction and was replaced with a horrible nightmare that was true. Over time she made continued attempts to find words to describe this powerfully traumatic experience: “I will never forget that moment, like when people have near-death experiences where their life narrative unfolds before their eyes while time ‘stands still.’ Something about shock, impending annihilation, sudden realization—all seemed to have the power to change or even stop the normal passage of time. In one moment, I realized I had been deceived over a substantial period of time. This knowledge was much more disturbing than even those brutal images of the sexual infidelity—my boyfriend and some other woman in bed together.”
I said, “You didn’t think—before—that anything could be worse than that.”
“No, and I had also always thought that I’d know if something on that level was wrong long before any actual sex. I’d have clues, hints that things between us were dulling out, that some emotional distance had set in, or that my boyfriend seemed to be going through some kind of crisis affecting his self-esteem. I’m aghast to have been so absolutely unaware, and yet people will say, ‘Oh, there must have been signs; you just looked the other way.’ But I don’t think that is it. I felt cheated of the truth, deceived regarding reality; it’s not solely about sex. People always refer to cheating as the sex.”
“It’s the infidelity with the truth that feels most devastating,” I said.
“Yes, and I never would have believed I would be saying this.”
In offering this limited case material, I hope to call attention to the sense of mental confusion that can result from the discovery of a lie about what has been taking place over time. The fact that affairs have usually been occurring for some time leads, on discovery, to a need to rewrite one’s personal history. In being cheated of the truth, something one has lived has no longer taken place; how can that be? This unraveling of history—a retroactive reconfiguring (see Faimberg 2005a,b; Eickhoff 2006; Perelberg 2006, 2007, 2008)—is profoundly disturbing to one’s sense of reality testing, and leads to doubt, often crippling, about one’s ability to determine what is true. This assault on truth can be as disruptive as the sexual intimacy with a third party, or even more so. I believe it is this aspect of infidelity, destabilizing to both women and men, that often eludes clear recognition by patients, and even by clinicians: one loses trust not only in the other’s love, but in one’s own mind, in one’s hold not only on the object but on reality.
Before discovering her boyfriend’s affair, Eva had believed that her stance on infidelity was such that she would never be able to come to terms with a sexual intimacy between her man and another woman—the relationship would be over, period. She had felt she would never recover from vividly upsetting images of other women she could not erase. But when Eva was actually confronted with the reality of her boyfriend’s affair, it was the assault on her sense that she could trust her own mind to tell her what was, and was not, real that proved to be the biggest stumbling block to any reconciliation. To her great surprise, Eva found herself, though extremely distressed, able to cope with the sex involving the other woman. She could actually take in and believe that the other woman was not that emotionally significant to her boyfriend, and that he was willing to give up the affair, clearly wanting to continue the relationship with Eva. Even though it “gave her the creeps” to imagine her boyfriend and this woman in bed together, “him touching her naked body, making love to her,” this distress slowly abated over the next months.
What held fast for much longer, and what was the actual downfall of the relationship, and now a continued source of anxiety and “paranoia” for Eva in her marriage, was a fear of being cheated on again because she could not detect the truth. This fear of the future shadows her marriage, though she is with a man who from all impressions is loving and devoted. That is the core question: how much does being loving and devoted count? Since Eva had not suspected the first time, what would or could she rely on to tell her if anything similar was occurring? If she indeed had had “her head in the sand” the first time, there would be something to work through and change regarding her denial. But her four-year relationship with her boyfriend had shown no signs of deteriorating, or of emotional flatness; sex was gratifying and often quite passionate.
Eva’s boyfriend had not seen his affair as emotionally meaningful. Having grown up in a cultural context (not uncommon) where it was taken for granted that even married men would not “limit” themselves sexually to one woman, he did not show either the emotional distance or the guilt that might have been the tip-off in another man. He did not act guilty, because he did not actually feel much guilt, and the circumstances of his work life offered plenty of opportunity for infidelity without any apparent change in the pattern of his relationship with Eva. In his worldview, he was truly quite connected with Eva and genuinely distraught when she left him. There had been no identifiable clues to alert her, warn her in advance, and allow her possibly to avert a potential affair.
“I have never been so confident or arrogant,” Eva lamented, “that I assumed that an affair couldn’t possibly happen to me, but I had always believed that I would see a shift in the emotional ‘weather’ of the relationship in order to be able to predict trouble—like hurricane warnings. I was totally hit by surprise, and I still don’t feel I could go back and do it any differently.”
I said, “That experience of profound surprise created a sense of being crazy, unmoored from reality, with no sense of how to tell what was really happening.”
“And when a woman does start to suspect the truth, she’s usually told, ‘you’re crazy!’ by the man. The whole thing’s a mind fuck. He’s not just fucking some other woman, he’s messing with your mind.”
Discussion
The Inextricable Nature of Sexuality, Triangularity, and Infidelity
This case material portrays quite vividly what it can be like to be on the receiving end of adult sexual deception. Of course, we have just one woman speaking, and a full understanding of her reactions would have to include consideration of her particular history and the complex determinants of her character. I propose, however, that there is something to attend to here that illuminates what often is present in people who have been deceived, yet equally often is obscured. To address this more general relevance, I want to extend my consideration of the oedipal situation. In developing my theoretical formulation, I will explicate and integrate a specific contribution of contemporary Kleinian and French analytic thinking that I feel is extremely useful in getting at the “shock value,” within the unconscious, of normative oedipal development. I will then link this thinking to contemporary Freudian and object-relational models more established in American psychoanalysis.
In contemporary Kleinian theorizing, the oedipal complex is understood as a fundamental dynamic of the mind, one that then structures the mind (Britton 1989; Steiner 1989). Exclusion from the parental sexual couple poses a foundational challenge to the perception of reality: “This turns on the subject’s response to witnessing a relationship . . . from which he is excluded” (Rusbridger 2004, p. 733). The child is faced with the recognition of a new, centrally important, and reconfiguring idea; his or her mother is “involved” with someone else.
Rusbridger (2004) identifies two links, separate in nature, between the three figures of mother, father, and child: the sexual link between the parents, and the link of dependency from the child to each parent. Although the parental sexual link has created the dependent child, from the child’s perspective the chronology is reversed. First there is (after “oneness”) the dependent dyadic link to the mother and then to the father. The erotic link to each parent starts to form as the child moves into oedipal experience.
Specifying a crucial gender difference, Green (1992, p. 141) describes the oedipus complex as an “open triangular structure in which the mother occupies the place of the central link, for she is the only one who has a double bodily relation with both the father and the child. . . . what is essential seems to be situated in the moment of transition when the fusional relation of the dyad—doubled or complemented by the thought of the father in the mother’s mind—is followed by the moment when he effectively appears in reality” (cited and translated in Van Haute 2005, p. 1675). I emphasize that for both sexes the erotic link to the mother has been strengthening as the child transitions from dyadic to triadic (oedipal) relating (see Ogden 1989a,b). It is only then that the child discovers a sexual link between the mother and her mate, and the oedipal father “arrives.” In the substrate of the mind, a startling sense of shock and disruption ensues. The unwelcome reality to the child of not being the sole object of the mother’s desire is at first denied.
This traumatic 6 discovery is for some time hoped to be a fiction, only imagined, not true. The difficulty in differentiating reality from fiction captures a core aspect of the oedipal situation concerning what is real and true. Contending with ambiguity constitutes the crucial unconscious dilemma facing the oedipal child regarding the sexual relation between the parents, experienced as a betrayal, an “infidelity,” committed by the mother.
Rusbridger (2004) speaks of “reactions to moments of meaningfulness” (p. 731) in the child’s confrontation with the oedipal drama. Although we know that meaning is built up over time, recognition of a new, fundamentally important, and reconfiguring idea strikes like a bolt of lightning. Momentous change often occurs in a moment, not typically in external reality, but in a feeling of surprise and shock that creates the sensation of a traumatic encounter. As Green (1992) has noted, the mother’s desire for, and bodily relation with, both partner and child places her, not the phallus, as the central link. Rupture of the mother-child dyadic union is blamed on the “moment” of the father, a moment that takes bodily shape in the image of a powerfully aggressive phallus. For the girl as well as the boy, the moment of the father represents a primal “castration” in breaking up the experience of omnipotent fusion with the mother, a “displacement from the centre of the world” (Rusbridger 2004, p. 735). The relationship both to time and to one’s personal history is destabilized. Meaning cascades backwards, seemingly washing away what has gone before.
Oedipus and Après-coup
No learning is more crucial than coming to terms with developmental surprises. Life offers many surprises, some quite unpleasant. We think of separateness, exclusions (gendered and generational), and mortality (McDougall 1986), each imposing a new understanding of self and other. Oedipal betrayal, especially, is a surprise with the power to generate complex retroactive meaning regarding object ties.
In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, we see just how powerfully retroactive meaning can assail the mind. Oedipus, in a blinding realization, undoes in a moment the history he believed he had lived; everything is changed, the nature of all actions, all relationships. This ancient drama exquisitely captures certain aspects Freud identified as crucial to the normative developmental crisis he named after its tragic hero. Freud, in a more one-person psychology, focused on the registration of guilt for one’s incestuous desires. Object relations theory allows for a more developed conceptualization of the experience of the wrongdoing of others: being “lied to and cheated on” by one’s parents (Josephs 2006). I am focusing on oedipal “retroactivity” as an assault on the as yet unsteady foundation of the mind.
I see in oedipal betrayal a subjective experience of temporality where meaning travels backward and suffuses one’s object-relational past, creating a new history that is now personally registered (though not “remembered”) as immensely painful. A complex analytic literature focuses on “tricks with time” at play in, and plaguing, personal subjectivity (Loewald 1972; Winnicott 1974; Thomä and Cheshire 1991; Green 2002, 2008; Birksted-Breen 2003; Faimberg 2005a,b; Sodré 2005; Eickhoff 2006; Pine 2006; Perelberg 2007, 2008, 2009; Fiorini and Canestri 2009). Each of these conceptualizations addresses the nonlinearity of time in psychic life—a bidirectionality such that in various circumstances past meaning can be reconfigured, retranscribed, by retrospective attribution. 7
With the classical Nachträglichkeit, a later event in life gives new, traumatic (sexual) meaning to a past event, registered as disturbing at the time it occurred but not understood then in its full implications. In this process, when translated and expanded as après-coup, “a rewriting of the past occurs when new understanding leads to an altered comprehension of history. . . . Rather than causal connection and linearity [between earlier and later events], there is realization” (Pine 2006, p. 251). In yet another conceptualization of the strange workings of nonlinear psychic time, Winnicott (1974) focused on the additional element of fear of the future as the only way to represent a breakdown in the past. 8 His formulation regarding confusion of past and future is quite relevant to my thesis, and to my understanding of Eva’s clinical material.
Winnicott (1974) identified a fear of a future breakdown as a disguised registering of a past breakdown that “has already been” (p. 104), where the ego-organization has been threatened. Because a patient confuses the past with the future, the fearful event “cannot get into the past tense” and the patient “must go on fearing to find what is being compulsively looked for in the future” (p. 105). Although Winnicott was addressing “psychotic core” dynamics surrounding primitive agonies before there is a “unit-self,” I believe this anxious mixing up of past and future can also be operative at oedipal levels of development, when once again the ego is threatened and maturational processes may suffer a reversal. 9 The concept of the repetition compulsion (Freud 1914), traditionally used to explain neurotic, oedipal conflicts where the past is unconsciously re-created and relived in the present, does not usually get at the inchoate sense of a threat in one’s future that Winnicott illuminated.
Eva could not work through her fear of a future betrayal by her husband until the trauma in her recent past with her boyfriend’s infidelity was understood in the light of her childhood experience of oedipal trauma—something that could not be directly recalled, but only reconstructed after being experienced in the present tense of the transference. As Winnicott states, it is only when the threat to the ego is fully felt in the transference that “this past and future thing then becomes a matter of the here and now” (p. 105). For Eva, the “here and now” was triggered by the waiting-room experience that her female analyst was cheating on her. The ambiguity of her conscious association, “as if my husband cheated,” left room for links to both paternal and maternal oedipal betrayals.
I am emphasizing that with oedipal betrayal and subsequent adult deceptions, the truth is the traumatic event, and does reconfigure one’s personal history, rather than necessarily referring back to any previously registered, concrete event. As Perelberg (2009) states, “The oedipus complex retrospectively retranslates earlier experiences in terms of après coup” (p. 137)—an oedipal restructuring of earlier life where one had been innocent of the knowledge that any painful “event” is taking place. I would say that for adults deception constitutes foreclosure of the possibility of registering past events as problematic. Truth becomes the trauma in that it refers back to an absence of any earlier event that would have undone the deception. Deception constitutes a trauma based on a non-event—something that did not occur in the individual’s experienced history, an “absent event”—where the revelation of the deception is the event that is traumatic. 10
The painful realization of oedipal truth sends further pain flooding back into the past, thus spoiling far more than the present moment and future prospects. This strange sequencing can occur with betrayals at both the time of the oedipal crisis and later, in adulthood. As the oedipal reality of the triadic, sexual nature of the relationship to the parents unfolds and the primal scene is comprehended, the child realizes that the parents’ adult sexuality has been right there all along. Known reality is reconfigured: “Oh, is that the nature of your relationship? I didn’t realize you were involved sexually. I thought it was just we two.”
We see film representations of this scene in the infinite repetitions of an adult walking in on a lover in bed with another. In this fraught situation, incredible violence frequently takes place. 11 Sexual jealousy and competition are center stage, yet the thwarted wish to be the only one is not the sole problem. Tucked into this riveting scene is the shock to one’s sense of reality—the crushing attack, within one stunning moment, on one’s understanding of one’s history with a loved other. This attack on the sense of reality constitutes a level of threatened danger to the psyche different from that posed by sexual jealousy, narcissistic injury, and the resulting sense of shame.
Danger Situations
Josephs (2006) identifies parental “unfaithfulness” as a betrayal trauma, and as a universal danger situation (Freud 1926) in the form of narcissistic injury and humiliation. The danger is to one’s sexual self-esteem in the face of parental disloyalty. Although in his early work Freud (1910) discusses at length the narcissistic injury of parental betrayal as a “mortal blow,” Josephs notes that “Freud does not cite sexual betrayal in his listing of the universal situations of danger” (p. 425): “By the mid-1920s, castration has become the central situation of danger in the Oedipus complex without much further reference to the trauma of the desired parent’s infidelity” (p. 425). I am following Josephs in including oedipal betrayal as a basic danger situation, though my emphasis differs regarding the nature of the danger. Josephs focuses on the fundamental doubts about the loyalty of the loved one; I focus on fundamental doubts about the capacity of one’s mind to detect danger, and the threat to one’s mind—one’s mental functioning—of such danger. One is contending not just with an injury to one’s sexual self-esteem—a bruised ego—but with a deeper threat to one’s trust in one’s own sanity.
Oedipal danger situations call back up and take their shape from more primitive “calamities” (Freud 1926; Brenner 1982). Freud’s list of danger situations included loss of the object, loss of the object’s love, and castration. Freud felt that even the fear of castration worked back to the “trauma of birth . . . the earliest and original danger-situation” (p. 141). It seems evident that a most fundamental danger situation would involve the inability to tell truth from falsehood, reality from fiction—equivalent to a quasi-psychosis, where one is “losing” one’s mind. How else does one know what is going on in the present except by what has happened in the past? One’s history confers a relative confidence about what will happen in the future. Some ability to predict the future and to protect oneself, at least to some extent, is based on a sense of good reality testing in the past. We rely on signal anxiety built up from past experience (Brenner 1982). One can lose the object, the object’s love, even self-love; none of these losses is as threatening as a fear, or felt sense, of losing one’s mind.
It appears that even in adulthood an assault on truth has the capacity to disrupt our minds—our going on being—if only for a few moments, and that this assault can be quite destabilizing. We see with Eva that the sudden realization of a reality of which she had been unaware created a sense of reality dissolving, being “shaken apart, as if [her] memory banks were melting down.” As she evocatively described, the boundaries of time seem to dissolve as one hovers in an endless moment—a sense of time “standing still.” 12 Dislocated in time and space, one temporarily loses hold on the coordinates of one’s being.
As I am indicating, questions regarding reality are central to the oedipal task and need to be worked through over time. The oedipal child must come to grips with the grim realization that the parents, though they do indeed love the child, have indeed “cheated” on him or her by their “affair” with one another. It is a very confusing situation. Perplexing questions abound. The child is left to wonder, painfully ponder, how much having a loving and devoted parent counts for in protection against betrayal. We can see that these are the very quandaries adults struggle with in the face of sexual betrayal.
Moving fully into the oedipal situation, and negotiating its challenges toward optimal resolution, rests on the fundamental recognition of the sexual independence of the mother’s desire, something neither sex is eager to accept. Simply put, the mother’s adult heterosexuality, when comprehended, is an affront to the child’s dyadic omnipotence. Here “heterosexual” translates in the child’s mind to “other (than with me) sexuality.” The mother’s sexual partner being of a gender other than herself is not here critical; her partner being other than her child is key. The child is not developmentally ready to perceive this “other-sexual” reality for some time, and to do so is rarely a smooth ride. Eventually, it is hoped that each child will come to some sort of personal conviction regarding triadic oedipal reality that then becomes foundational for going forward. But first quite a lot of psychic work must be done, and in times of stress this work can be undone, and vulnerable individuals can become “undone.”
In situations where one is confronted with infidelity in an adult relationship, oedipal dilemmas are revisited, often traumatically. The ability to determine, “Did this betrayal really happen, or am I crazy and making it up?” is challenged once again. Questions of how to proceed in responding to a suspected infidelity generate strong feelings of anxiety and self-doubt. Determining truth against a series of logical dismissals rests on trust in one’s “intuition”—an emotional conviction such that one is not dissuaded by clever denials.
Many adults shore up their defenses against contending with oedipal-level threats: denial shows up as a refusal to see or register the meaning of what is right in one’s face. Many couples go along in a marriage where infidelity is intuitively known, but not directly acknowledged, as both agree to look the other way. Josephs (2006) has delineated another defensive strategy—preemptively doing to others what you don’t want done to you (again). I have been exploring the situation where one is not defending against, but experiencing anew, the original trauma. Unconscious fantasy regarding the oedipal situation is evoked, and typically becomes a waking nightmare as the adult relationship devolves into a repetition. This catastrophe certainly can occur for men as well as for women.
Gender, Danger, and Deception
I have suggested that particular aspects of the female heterosexual oedipal configuration—the dual nature of erotic “betrayal” more likely encountered—may be an additional factor shaping women’s experience of erotic deception: This specific patterning of early object relations, combined with many other aspects of gender development and powerful sociocultural forces, may contribute to a female propensity toward being in the position to reexperience, rather than defensively reverse, the pain of oedipal betrayal. It is in the reexperiencing (for either gender) that the full impact of the assault on truth is laid bare. These most powerful dynamics regarding sexual exclusion unfold within the primary maternal oedipal situation. Both boys and girls are confronted, affronted, by the mother’s sexual desire going elsewhere, most typically to the father. Within a heterosexual trajectory, this defeat is one the boy must surmount, the girl accept.
For the girl, the mother’s desire for the father represents not only desire for another, but for another sex altogether. Often a new sibling provides incontrovertible evidence of a mother’s infidelity (Freud 1910, 1919), intensifying the sense of injury in a most poignant manner. The girl realizes that her wish to have a baby with her mother is doomed. And unlike the situation of a boy, this disappointing matter cannot be attenuated by the fantasy of a future adult capacity to impregnate the mother. Freud (1931), surprised by the degree of activity in the girl’s early relationship with her mother, noticed that it is once she turns to the father that passive trends prevail.
When a girl does take her father as her oedipal object (likely overlapping her wish to retain her mother in that capacity), confusion is compounded. She is redirected from the mother to the father in the immediacy of the disturbing realization of parental “infidelity.” The girl may feel she cannot obtain either object. With the oedipal father arriving “later” in development, from outside the symbiotic orbit and in the context of evident parental sexuality, he is more likely to be suspected already of being a “known womanizer.” I am suggesting that these oedipal particularities for the girl may be an aspect of why women can be relatively “accepting” of infidelity in men—they are somewhat inured to male infidelity by their experience with the oedipal transition in object choice. 13 Unlike the boy, the girl moves on to a second, less archaic object toward whom the girl is already alerted to his lack of faithfulness: “I know you’re involved with my mother. I found that out when she betrayed me with you.” The oedipal girl is less able to maintain the innocence needed even to generate the unconscious fantasy that she is her father’s first love. The daughter may hope for a new commitment of faithfulness from her father, but this wish is likely registered as on shaky ground, at best. Doubt regarding self and other is the context in which the girl begins the oedipal relation to her heterosexual object, with faith in her mind’s ability to determine reality already shaken. This path is quite distinct from that traveled by the boy.
Josephs (2006) notes the “widespread double standard that makes it more permissible for men than women to have affairs and more permissible for betrayed men than betrayed women to openly avenge themselves against their unfaithful lovers” (p. 429). I agree with Josephs that gender-specific cultural sanctions (based on patriarchal power relations) play a crucial role in shaping incidence of, and reactions to, infidelity. These sociocultural influences gain in strength as they become internalized in the deepest strata of the psyche through developing object relationships. I address oedipal aspects of this double standard that can further entrench gender asymmetry 14 in responses to sexual betrayal. Josephs gives an eloquent description of people who “would rather undo the narcissistic injury of their own betrayal traumas by turning passive into active than by acknowledging their own hurt, humiliation, impotent rage, and paranoid dread of being betrayed once again” (p. 429). While this description can certainly apply to either gender, it tends to resonate in the masculine direction. The defensive organization detailed by Josephs is based on the evasion of “full awareness of the exquisite human vulnerability to the trauma of seduction and betrayal in our most intimate and trusting relationships” (p. 435). My conceptualization rests not on the evasion of awareness of one’s vulnerability to betrayal, but on the human struggle to come to terms with the threat posed by this awareness.
Issues in Clinical Treatment
With several female patients I have treated, 15 the reaction to news of an infidelity focused at first on the sexual betrayal and the threat to the relationship. But far more pronounced and prolonged over time was the anxious preoccupation with a need to “reconstruct” past reality. Efforts to go back in time, approximating the duration of the affair, focused on intensive searches through phone records, credit slips, e-mail logs, appointment books, and the like. Various occasions were reconsidered in their new significance: “Oh, when we were there, he had just been with her; when he gave me that gift, he had just bought something for her.” Such research, and contemplation of the resulting data, was excruciatingly painful, yet continued to have a sense of vital urgency.
These women could not go forward until each had revisited the past and brought what she thought had been occurring into alignment with what actually had been the case. The entire period of time absorbed in this effort was one of great anxiety and mistrust blanketing all object relationships, including the transference. It was as if each woman had stepped “off the page” that everyone else, including me, was on in order to pursue an obsession for which only she understood the crucial need. It was only when I could appreciate and interpret the imperative to regain a grasp on the past, in order to restore confidence in the capacity for reality testing, that this fact-finding mission could gradually abate. But this eventual restoration was preceded by a grueling period of intrapsychic chaos.
I am not proposing that this experience is the same for every woman or man who is betrayed. Responses to passionate betrayal will likely differ in emotional intensity from reactions to infidelity in a marriage that might be stable, but stale. The passionate nature of the couple, and of their personal temperaments, the libidinal intensity of erotic desire for the partner (and earlier, for the oedipal parent), all play a part in the intensity of the felt sense of betrayal. The degree of hurt in the injured love will surely depend on the vitality of the felt sense of connection to the love object.
I do want to emphasize the vulnerability in even the most psychologically healthy to a significant degree of regression and destabilization in the face of such betrayal. Although Eva was quite “unhinged” in her waiting-room encounter with my other patient, she retained her hold on the “as if” nature of the experience: it was as if I had cheated on her. It was primarily in her associations to the “meltdown” after her former boyfriend’s betrayal that this relatively healthy woman was able to give evocative expression to powerful states of affect in the face of traumatic realization. Eva’s history had unraveled, not her mind. Instead, her highly developed capacity to symbolize intense subjective experience allowed her to articulate, quite poignantly, what might be imagined to be the oedipal child’s challenge on the cusp between dyadic and triadic relating, where the ego is wobbly even in the healthiest people. Such experience occurring so early in development is not easily accessible to conscious recall. However, once betrayed as an adult, the “paranoia” and vigilance regarding a feared repetition is given force by the unleashing in adult life of what has lain dormant (repressed) from the oedipal phase.
One can witness a similar example of relatively sane women describing insane states in the 2008 remake of the 1939 film The Women. 16 Consider this dialogue between mother and daughter regarding the affairs of what is revealed only in this exchange to be both their husbands. The daughter, having just found out about her husband’s betrayal, speaks with evident irritation toward her mother: “Please don’t tell me to pretend that nothing happened: you have no idea how this feels.” But her mother surprises her daughter with her own revelation: “Well, let me try: it feels like someone kicked you in the stomach; it feels like your heart stopped beating; it feels like that dream—you know, the one where you’re falling, and you want so much to wake up before you hit the ground, but it’s all out of your control. You can’t trust anyone anymore. No one is who they say they are. Your life is changed forever and the only thing to come out of the whole ugly experience is that no one will ever break your heart like that again.” The idea that “no one is who they say they are” penetrates to the core of my thesis: How does one trust oneself to know when people are who they say they are, and when they are not?
Although to speak, as I have done, about quite primitive danger situations could give the impression of preoedipal trauma, I am attempting to link the destabilizing aspects of the oedipal situation with earlier danger situations in order to emphasize the aspect of “slippage” backward under psychic distress (see Brenner 1982). As Freud (1926) stresses, while “the danger of psychical helplessness is appropriate to the period of life when his ego is immature. . . . Nevertheless, all these danger-situations and determinants of anxiety can persist side by side and cause the ego to react to them with anxiety at a period later than the appropriate one” (p. 142). I hope to illustrate the regressive potential of oedipal betrayal, as I believe this gives us another level of insight into the severity of various breakdowns related to infidelity, including murderous rage, psychotic depressions, phobic anxieties, and compulsive fact-finding missions that seem never to end.
I am theorizing, in keeping with Freud (1926), that oedipal calamities hark back to the most primal anxieties and can render almost anyone vulnerable to regression to a primitive core. With adult erotic deception—so destabilizing due to its oedipal roots—it is important to remember that those roots rest in preoedipal soil. 17 Confidence in one’s mind, the normal sequence of time, and the reality of one’s personal history, all can come into question. A painful event in an adult relationship, backlit by oedipal dynamics, gives rise to and determines the shape of one’s fear of an anticipated future repetition. Not only can repetition replace the remembering of oedipal history (Freud 1914); fearful anticipation can as well: “I hope this never happens to me (again).” Instead of the dread being nameless (Bion 1962), here it is named, but still with no conscious link to one’s childhood—until, as we see with Eva, one further detail is put most profitably into place in the transference regression.
Eva’s fear of the future, in terms of (mis)trusting herself, her husband, and her analyst, could not be alleviated until the trauma with her boyfriend was affectively recognized for its roots in her past. A narrative construction of oedipal injuries in relation to mother and father, which for the most part could not be directly recalled, was accessed only when those injuries surfaced in the transference. Working through these issues to a more solid sense of personal security was achieved only by acknowledging the power of betrayal as experienced in the analytic relationship. Although unconscious processes do not proceed in accord with linear time, unconscious contents can be modified over time and are not immune to change (Hanly 2009). When healing can take place, painful experiences from the past, frozen in time, “can take their place in the temporal sequence of the individual’s life . . .” (p. 31). This re-placement in time allows traumatized individuals to move into the present with their future truly in front of them rather than a mirage of the past.
Conclusion
Undermined trust in one’s mind in relation to one’s objects has far-reaching consequences. The rebuilding of trust, often referred to after marital infidelity, is usually understood to mean trust in the partner to care enough not to cheat again, not to wreak any further such havoc on the relationship. By contrast, I am underscoring the much more difficult and complex task of rebuilding trust in the self—specifically, trust in one’s mind, one’s capacity to differentiate truth from fiction, to detect deceit.
Clearly, both women and men suffer greatly in this area. It is in how these anxieties and powerful passions are handled that certain gendered patterns may show up. Although counterexamples are plentiful, and cultural variations are significant, gendered trends may exist. Men are just as anxious as women about being cheated on, but may tend to gain more of a sense of conscious control through defensive identification and reversal. Men tend more often to be preoccupied with a fantasy of self as the one to cheat, even if this is never acted on. Women seem to be more vulnerable to continual conscious anxiety regarding a feared repetition of being cheated on, and to a sense of not trusting their own mind. My intent has been to explore a certain aspect of female development, in order to expand further awareness of the specific challenges the oedipal situation presents for girls.
As each of us has had the normative developmental experience that our oedipally desired parents have all along been selling us a bill of goods, pretending they were ours alone, this trust in one’s mind to detect deceit in loved and loving objects is on a fundamentally shaky foundation. This fault line of doubt is attested by the anxiety and insecurity the issue of fidelity raises in so many people. Having begun with the metaphor of a tsunami, I find that I have now come to images of an earthquake. The issue of infidelity, with its oedipal substrate, does indeed seem to be something of a “natural disaster” with its seismic capacity to shake the bedrock of our being, to knock our feet out from under us. It is true in nature that an earthquake often leads to a tidal wave of massive proportions. Similarly, in development the fault line of oedipal betrayal and doubt can lead to an adult wave of destruction—the danger in erotic deception being the assault on truth.
Footnotes
Personal and Supervising Analyst and faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; Associate Editor, Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
This paper was first presented for the Doris Bernstein Memorial Lecture, IPTAR, May 2, 2008, New York.
1.
Due to the complexity of considering various oedipal configurations and sexual orientations, I will limit my focus throughout to heterosexual dynamics. For other paths, see Lewes (1988), Isay (1989), O’Connor and Ryan (1993), Burch (1997), Magee and Miller (1997), and Elise (1998b,c, 2002a,
).
2.
U.S. statistical data on rates of infidelity in heterosexual couples show that women are “catching up” with men. My thesis bears on what has been a trend toward a long-standing, cross-cultural gender asymmetry in this area, but I want to note this recent shift in incidence of infidelity.
3.
An extensive analytic literature on gender development, beginning with Freud (1924, 1925, 1931, 1933), addresses the prevalence of phallic-narcissistic and active trends in males, and passivity and inhibition in females. See especially Kernberg (1991, ) regarding the greater tendency for boys to turn passive into active and for inhibition in girls, as erotic desire unfolds in relation to the stimulating, yet oedipally unobtainable mother.
4.
The potential for “doubled deception,” inherent in psychic bisexuality, can be evident in boys’ development as well; however, homoerotic oedipal object choice is much more discouraged in boys than in girls. Girls are expected to shift away from the already established homoerotic tie with the mother; in male development, oedipal choice of the father is normatively foreclosed.
5.
I am reminded of another little girl, who stated definitively to her mother, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry Daddy, but first I will marry you.”
6.
In both British and French conceptualizations, normative aspects of development can be thought of in terms of their traumatic elements. This use of “traumatic” differs from what is typically understood in trauma theory as deriving from severely pathological object relations and child abuse (see, e.g., ) or devastating external events (violence, natural disasters) that ideally would be avoided. This distinction needs to be kept in mind throughout; I am not suggesting that oedipal challenges, temporarily “traumatic” in the unconscious, constitute psychopathology or a malevolent external event. In conceptualizing normative oedipal trauma, we might think of the analogy to healthy muscle development where weaker tissue needs to be broken down and temporarily “damaged” by exercise in order to build it back stronger.
7.
Regarding Nachträglichkeit and après-coup, almost all the authors cited above speak to the varying translations, different definitions, and conceptual complexity, even in Freud’s initial usage, all of which are the subject of significant current debate.
8.
Winnicott’s treatment of temporality in “Fear of Breakdown” (1974) is referred to as an outstanding illustration both of Nachträglichkeit (Eickhoff 2006) and of après-coup (Faimberg 2005a,).
9.
10.
Parents now tell children from their earliest years that they are adopted; this is not traumatic knowledge. In earlier decades, revealing this knowledge later in development was a revelation found to be so disturbing that parenting practices changed. Otherwise, the people closest to one—one’s parents—were felt to have deceived with a lie encompassing one’s entire past life. Then the truth became traumatic.
11.
“Crimes of passion” constituted a legally recognized form of “temporary insanity” where one is driven mad by sexual betrayal.
12.
13.
Being inured speaks to an experience of subjugating oneself to a situation that feels unavoidable, not to an absence of emotional distress. (For instance, one would not conclude that women in a seraglio were happy about sharing a husband.)
14.
Altman (1977) links oedipal development to gender asymmetry in “steadfastness of commitment” to love requiring the capacity for “renunciation of alternative possibilities” (pp. 47–48). See also Kernberg (1991, ).
15.
Clinicians may also encounter this symptomatic pattern in work with male patients.
16.
One notes, by the generic nature of the title, that The Women could be any women, or all women: being on the receiving end of infidelity is identified as a female thing, a mother-daughter thing.
17.
Kleinians themselves do not think in terms of a preoedipal phase, placing as they do the oedipal complex very early in development. I am speaking to a more general psychoanalytic understanding.