"IT is only when individual women allow themselves to feel the fully force of their own desires - to achieve in a personal way, to have status, to be in control, to shine - that they will release the energy that is needed to move forward socially and politically.
This was the passionate flash of thought that had my pencil marking two heavy lines in the margin. This was the ardour and intensity that I had been waiting for, the clue to how we might discover the way we could live now, the exit from the seemingly endless patterns of a repetitively gendered existence. This is the book that Maureen Gaffney can write and this is the book to which I look forward.
Which is not to deny that Gaffney justifies her reputation as a highly respected and very experienced psychologist in this compilation of her weekly column in The Irish Times. The problem with reading a book of 47 articles of 1,500 plus words each is that you have either already read them in their original form as newspaper columns or, if not, your appetite is whetted but unsatisfied. There are too many big ideas getting too little treatment.
The issues of identity formation for toddlers, teens, adolescents and adults and the differences between men and women require the writer to repeat the same psychological presuppositions as her starting point. Marital and extramarital sex, the crisis of sexuality in the church, gay and lesbian relationships even what it means to be Irish beg for in depth treatment. The painful and prevalent aspects of "the way we live now" - alcohol, domestic violence and incest - are not treated at all.
The problem with Freudianism, psychology and statistical studies is that they tend simply to describe current cultural realities, without raising the question of how such realities might be formed. Too much description and too little analysis can leave us chickens confused who comes first, us or the egg? Is this the way we are, or the way we have learned to be?
Gaffney tells us that children prefer to play with their own sex "as they try to learn their gender roles". Boys value independence and make rules so as to dominate and organise competitive aggression in public spaces. Girls value mutuality to negotiate social bonding in the private spaces of their homes and gardens. Not surprisingly, we find that we import these techniques into adult life and with predictable results: "The worlds of work, sport and politics are generally organised in hierarchies by and for men." And, we might add, the family and the church, two not inconsequential institutions in our lives.
Is it really true to say that "traditionally" women were "once" undermined in family life by their deeply internalised fear of being "selfish"? I think we have made a beginning, but this problem is not yet consigned to history (or even her story). The old jurisprudential debate of what "is" and what "ought to be" lives on here are we born with gender roles inscribed on our chromosomes - as these articles seem to accept or imply - or ought we to give full force to our own desires, to imagine and create a new way of being?
Gaffney's reflections are often engaging she suggests as a new model for fathers St Christopher with a child on his shoulders rather than St Joseph "boxed in as The Worker". However, I suspect that in a future work she will be even more educational, when she takes the opportunity to move forward from what is now almost conventional politically correct wisdom to an analysis of the psychological aspects of our lives that will enable us to reach our potential.
Freeing us to move beyond old descriptions that cement gender roles, even in the light of equality and emancipation, is the obvious next step for a thinker such as this. Watch out for this woman when she moves from the solid foundation of her grasp of a descriptive psychology to give full reign to the force of her creative imagination and desires.
