The Untold Story - Page 12

 

Once I recalled my memories of pleasure with my mother, I could understand better the confusion I experienced when she'd shift from being in relationship with me to teaching me what I needed to do in order to have "relationships" in the world at large. There was one incident around In a Different Voice, when she spent an entire day reading galley proofs with me, which was so meaningful to me, especially given the substance of that book. We sat on the red sofa in my living room together, and then after we finished, she picked up one of the pillows and said, "You have to remember to fluff up these down pillows," which I heard as a criticism of my housekeeping. So there it was, both sides of our relationship.

PN. So much of your work has been about voice and the psychological costs of feeling silenced. You've just described people taking issue with your voice. What was it like to have your own voice challenged in that way?

CG: The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard. When people talk about me or my work in ways that have little or nothing to do with me or with what I've written, or when they speak about me as though I don't know the first thing about research, I wonder what's going on. For example, In a Different Voice isn't a book about how all men differ from all women--I give examples of men using the "different voice" and of women speaking about rights and justice, and say clearly that I'm contrasting two ways of imagining self and relationship that leads to different ways of speaking about moral problems. My title is In a Different Voice, not "In a Woman's Voice"--the question is different from what, and I contrasted women's voices with what was then the voice of psychological theories. The danger, for me, lies in starting to doubt my own writing. Virginia Woolf writes about this danger for women writers, when the infection enters the sentence and you begin within your sentences to double-think yourself in anticipation of not being heard.

PN: Critics have either loved or hated The Birth of Pleasure. How do you understand the intensity of the reaction?

CG: Well, I'm writing about pleasure and also about leaving patriarchy, which are two fraught subjects. I link tragic love stories with the initiation into patriarchy and then show how the findings of contemporary research provide us with a map showing points of resistance and ways leading out of destructive cycles. It isn't surprising to me that people might disagree with me or argue that the evidence I present doesn't support my interpretation. What surprised me was the vehemence and the personal nature of the attacks, which had little to do with the argument of the book, but more with my past work or with the structure of the book, which was incomprehensible to some readers. But I was writing about dissociation, how to break through a wall that separates you from what you know, and I followed an associative method, because you can't argue your way out of dissociation. The structure of the book is orchestral, or like a tapestry with different threads woven together to show a pattern. I wanted to recreate for the reader the journey I had taken in coming to see what I saw. My title, The Birth of Pleasure, reflects the importance of the research I did with girls in leading me to these insights (the Psyche myth that frames the book ends with the birth of a daughter named Pleasure) and also announces a paradigm shift--from a paradigm grounded in experiences of loss ( The Birth of Tragedy ) to one grounded in experiences of pleasure. One colleague speaking of her own experience in reading the book, said: "This book unsettles an adaptation," which is what I intended.

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