And interesting quote from the book 'This Changes Everything' by Christina Robb:

According to Freud, Piaget, Erikson, Kohlberg, and other psychologists who theorized about human development, most women did not develop in the "normal" human way. They meant most women did not build a strong ego to defend themselves from other egos and did not strive to stand alone, to win, to be "independent" individuals who prized above all their power to reason abstractly. Of course, Carol (Gilligan) knew, in the part of her mind that came up with all those inappropriate questions, that no one is independent, that everyone depends on many people every day, no matter how independent they believe themselves to be. But she also knew that the major theories of human psychology upheld a separate self as the be-all and end-all of growth.

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This message has been edited. Last edited by: HowardW,

Howard.

I am woman. Hear me roar.

lol

Howard - I'm not much of a Freud person. He had a problem with his mother and I suspect that might have influenced him against women and made him become more oriented towards men. I really believe he disliked women. He also had an obsession with sex, and would translate almost every dream in a sexual context. Hmm... That doesn't do it for me.
I am personally far more interested in Carl Jung....the two were once close but had a falling out. Jung considered the domestic threesome in Freud's home unacceptable amongst many other things. As to whether there is any truth to their personal domestic problem I don't know, but they sure are very different. Jung's psychology is based on spirituality/metaphysics/former lives, etc, which seems to make far more sense than Freud's theories.

“Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”

I totally agree with that one.

Did you ever hear of Roger Woolger? He studied traditional Psychology at Oxford and at the end of his 3rd year he was ready to quit. He forced himself through the 4th year and headed straight over to the Carl Jung Institute
and continued his studies there. I know him personally. Quite a nice fellow, and possibly the most well known Jungean analyst today.

"Jung" he told me "had a problem with reincarnation". So I asked them how he meant that since Jung openly speaks of reincarnation in his books and in terms of his patients. "No", Woolger said, " he could never figure out whether we totally reincarnate or whether part of ourselves, or a higher self remains behind".
That's one of the many stories that stayed with me.

quote:

Originally posted by --Kate:
Howard.

I am woman. Hear me roar.

lol

**Hello Kate - The 'frowning face' puzzles me a bit. The quote basically suggests that men, generally speaking, are confused about their inter-dependent relationship, and that women don't tend to develop this "normal" confused ideology.

Of course, things seem to have changed a bit since Gilligan made these observations. Apparently men no longer have a monopoly on strong abstract egos and a strong desire to 'stand alone'.

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I consider Carol Gilligan to be a brilliant and courageous psychologist, ethicist and feminist, who went up against the male dominated institutions in her field and showed us a theory of ethical development that was very different in its very nature than any the males in her field had conceived, and, as she's suggested, that blindness is because of their very cultural conditioning. I for one am grateful for the insights she's shared and for yet another deep insight into the claustrophobic nature of patriarchy.

One of the important features of moral development she was able to expose is it need not move step by step through hierarchical stages, as others like Kohlberg and Maslov had posited, but that it could move in gestalt leaps through independent insights. I, for one, thought this insight exposes a paradox and probably a deep flaw in the ideology of individual independence that male-based development versions stress, because it indicates a strange paradoxical inversion of the belief in the final outcome itself, in that the very nature of that form of thinking leads, through an almost inevitable set of competitive interactions, to defending the "strong" notion of an independent self, and to a self reflective formulation of systemic patriarchy and dominance, therefore not necessarily to an evolved and self actuated independence as the males envisioned. I've cited her work a number of times on this board.



CAROL GILLIGAN

quote:

My work is grounded in listening. (p. xiii)

To have a voice is to be human. To have something to say is to be a person. But speaking depends on listening and being heard; it is an intensely relational act. By voice I mean something like what people mean when they speak of the core of the self. Voice is natural and also cultural. It is composed of breath and sound, words, rhythm, and language. and voice is a powerful psychological instrument and channel, connecting inner and outer worlds. (p. xvi)

. . . the so-called objective position which Kohlberg and others espoused within the canon of traditional social science research was blind to the particularities of voice and the inevitable constructions that constitute point of view. (p. xviii)

Psychological theorists . . . implicitly adopting the male life as the norm, have tried to fashion women out of a masculine cloth. (p. 6)

In the life cycle, as in the Garden of Eden, the woman has been the deviant. (p. 6)

(In a Different Voice -- selected passges)

Morning, Howard,

Sorry about the frowny face. Good topic to introduce.

Another excerpt from the book:

Autonomous and independent men were admired; autonomous and independent women were seen as unfeminine, callous, and self-absorbed. And when women acted the way they were supposed to--loving and caring instead of autonomous and independent--most men and women considered them immature.

**(Independent individuals - Ha! That's a good one.)


(cont.):
Gilligan had uncovered her first paradox: "The very traits that have traditionally defined 'goodness' of women, their care and sensitivity to the needs of others, are those that mark them as deficient in moral judgment." But what if women really weren't children? What if men weren't the only adults? What if the habits of paying attention to relationships and of feeling and thinking at the same time were not, as Carol wrote, a "developmental deficiency" but simply the result of "a different social and moral understanding"?

Then Carol let a young woman in her study of Harvard students speak. The woman described her personal morality, a way of thinking and feeling all at once that was not like anything the male theorists who were seen as authorities had observed. "I personally don't want to hurt other people. That's a real criterion for me. It underlies my sense of justice. It isn't nice to afflict pain. Not hurting others is important in my own private morals," the student said. "My main moral principle is not hurting other people as long as you aren't going against your own conscience and as long as you remain true to yourself." And she added, "There are no moral absolutes."

Because she says there are no absolutes, the student disqualifies herself from top ranking on Kohlberg's scale. This woman was saying she doesn't act out of obedience to an abstract principle that she uses as a standard.

**And there we have it...if a person wants to be "normal", they need to detach from reality and live life according to a concocted mental abstraction.

Wa-la: Muslim abstraction believers killing Christian abstraction believers, Christian abstraction believers killing Muslim abstraction believers, Palistinian abstraction believers killing Jewish abstraction believers (and vice versa), Sudanese nationalistic abstraction believers killing other fellow Africans............

It's amazing (and often tragic) what humans will do to one another on behalf of an abstract belief or ideology.

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