What Do You Want?
Polly Young-Eisendrath opens Women and Desire with a question that, in twenty years of practicing psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, she found bewilders most women: what do you want? Many cannot say what they desire. She writes as a Jungian analyst, a feminist, a mother and a student of Zen Buddhism, and the book is her attempt to explain why the question is so hard for women to answer and how they can learn to answer it.
The title phrase comes from Jacques Lacan. Reading a biography of him, she met his claim that “women want to be wanted, not to be loved.” She found Lacan arrogant and sexist and the remark uncomfortably true. Ten years of listening to women persuaded her that he had described the problem accurately and explained it wrongly. Where Lacan saw a normal part of female character, she sees a damaging affliction of development in societies where women are expected to please men, one that can shape a woman’s life from adolescence through old age.
Wanting to Be Wanted
Her definition is compact: “Wanting to be wanted is about finding our power in an image rather than in our own actions.” A woman caught in it tries to appear attractive, nice, good or worthy to someone else and leaves her own feelings and wants undiscovered. Others are expected to supply her sense of worth, and she ends up resentful because she has traded away her real needs. “Wanting to be wanted is not codependency,” she insists. In her account it is a desire for power and control that has been hidden and transformed, the result of constraints that still make direct female power look suspicious or dangerous to women and men alike.
Her first case is Anne, a professor and dean whose life looks enviable and who feels that it is out of her control. Anne accepts a dinner invitation she does not want and only discovers her resentment at the table. A free yes, Young-Eisendrath argues, requires the ability to say no.
Ragnell, the Hag and the Muse
The book’s governing story is the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Lady Ragnell. King Arthur must learn what women desire above all else, and the hideous Ragnell gives him the answer: “What a woman desires above all else is the power of sovereignty, the right to exercise her own free will.” The spell that made her a hag breaks completely when Gawain declines to choose her shape for her and leaves the choice to her.
From this tale Young-Eisendrath draws two figures that recur throughout the book. The hag-bitch is the demanding woman whose desires are imagined as monstrous and soul-sucking. The muse, the desire-awakening maiden, is the beautiful figure who remains “always under the control of her master.” Here the book sets out its central distinction between the Subject and the Object of Desire, and a woman who identifies with being the Object does not feel that her life belongs to her. Princess Diana, whom she calls the cultural muse of our time, is the book’s cautionary example, and Ragnell is its model of a woman who states her desires calmly and directly. The chapter gives the line the whole book returns to: “If wanting to be wanted is a matter of image, then wanting to be loved is a matter of heart.”
Beauty and Sex through the Looking Glass
The second chapter takes up the refrain she calls female power is beauty. Girls learn early that they exist in the ways they see themselves reflected, and the thin “anorectic woman-child” of fashion becomes the muse of the era. Pandora, fashioned by the gods as a gift to men and a punishment for them, supplies the template of the beautiful woman judged to be empty of a heart. The result is a double bind: whether a woman fears being seen as the hag or longs to be seen as the muse, she is “damned if we are ugly and damned if we are beautiful.” The way out begins with becoming Subjects of appearance, who use dress and style for their own pleasure.
The third chapter follows the same bind into sexual life. Anxious self-consciousness about appearance blocks the loss of ordinary boundaries that sexual passion needs. Her account of low female desire turns on pleasure. Desire is present only when something that was pleasurable is now missing, so “If you haven’t tasted the pleasure, then you won’t feel the desire.” Many women substitute what she calls the seduction of power for pleasure of their own, and some come to treat refusal as their only freedom: “In this period of feminism many mature women feel freer to say No to sex, but they are not free to find Yes.” Her retelling of Psyche and Amor follows a woman who loses an idealized lover and passes through tasks, two deaths and a rescue before she becomes his equal.
Mothers, Money and the Hungry Ghost
The fourth chapter names “hothouse mothering,” an anxious and idealized absorption in the child that treats the mother as the most critical ingredient in its development. Drawing on Adrienne Rich and the English psychiatrist Ann Dally, she argues that leaving mothers alone with small children all day is a recent arrangement, and that attachment research is misused when it is cited for the singular importance of a full-time mother. The idealized mother has a partner in the archetype Jung called the Divine Child. Her retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which the boastful miller becomes a miller’s wife, shows a daughter whose gifts are spun into gold for a parent’s need to seem important. She borrows Neville Symington’s phrase “discordant source” for the unconscious pain and frustration that take the place of autonomy, and the little man’s own words become her image of the child’s autonomy: “Something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world.”
The fifth chapter turns to money. A woman who cannot support herself, she argues, cannot freely choose a relationship, because choosing it means being able to leave it. She takes Ronald Fairbairn’s term “mature dependence” for the goal of adult life: “There is no real independence for humans, because we always need and depend on others; independence is an illusion.” Shopping, she shows, was designed to multiply desires that can never be satisfied. The Buddhist realm of the Hungry Ghosts, creatures with narrow, raw throats and swollen bellies, gives her an image for compulsive shopping, shoplifting and binge eating. Her client Cassandra, a shoplifter, recovers through a project of her own, an animal sanctuary.
Expanding the Self and the Paradox of Freedom
The sixth chapter asks how women can take up a spiritual life when the great religions have cast them as selfless mothers, childish beings or temptresses. She defines spiritual development as “a lifetime engagement with a transcendent source that is intimate and Other,” and holds that it matters especially in the second half of life. Teachings about letting go of the self can mislead women who never had the personal sovereignty such teachings assume, and she cites the feminist theorist Demaris Wehr on spiritual abuse. Her alternative to letting go is expansion: “If we expand the self, then we don’t have to give it away.” Her own return to her Zen community, and the feminists she describes inside Judaism, Catholicism and Buddhism, show women testing their traditions as they practice them.
The seventh chapter gathers the argument. “Personal sovereignty or autonomy means feeling free to choose and to intend your actions.” It differs from assertiveness and independence, and it always works within real limits. Marla, whose refusal of sex had looked to her like liberation, learns the book’s rule about choice: “Unless you have two options, you don’t have a choice, and Marla had only one option.” The paradox of autonomy is that becoming a Subject of one’s own desires teaches a woman her limitations and her dependence on others, and Young-Eisendrath finds in this lesson the ground of an ethical and compassionate life.
Beside the Jungian Books on the Feminine
Women and Desire belongs on the shelf with the Jungian writing on feminine psychology. Irene de Castillejo’s Knowing Woman builds a feminine psychology from ordinary women’s experience, and Young-Eisendrath works the same way, from her clients’ marriages, mothering, money and faith. Marion Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection reads perfectionism and eating disorders through the body; Young-Eisendrath’s pages on thinness and binge eating reach a related diagnosis through the cultural image of the muse. Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche reads the tale of Psyche as a map of feminine development, and her retelling stresses that Psyche is rescued by others before she becomes Amor’s equal. Claire Douglas’s The Woman in the Mirror and Demaris Wehr’s Jung and Feminism bring feminist questions to Jung’s ideas of the feminine, and Young-Eisendrath writes in that post-Jungian line while relying on Jung’s theory of complexes. Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet treats eros as founded on lack, and Young-Eisendrath’s last chapter describes the same structure from the consulting room: craving is based on absence, and only a woman who knows her desires can choose among them.