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 RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES
LEWIS ARON AND ADRIENNE HARRIS
Series Editors

Volume 1 Volume 14
Rita Wiley McCleary - Conversing with Stephen A. Mitchell & Lewis Aron, eds.
Uncertainty: Practicing Psychotherapy in a Relational Psychoanalysis:
Hospital Setting The Emergence of a Tradition
Volume 2 Volume 15
Charles Spezzano - Affect in Psychoanalysis: Rochelle G. K. Kainer - The Collapse of the
A Clinical Synthesis Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration
Volume 3 Volume 16
Neil Altman - The Analyst in the Inner City: Kenneth A. Frank - Psychoanalytic
Race. Class. and Culture Through Participation: Action, Interaction.
a Psychoanalytic Lens and Integration
Volume 4 Volume 17
Lewis Aron - A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality Sue Grand - The Reproduction of Evil:
in Psychoanalysis A Clinical and Cultural Perspective
Volume 5 Volume 18
Joyce A. Slochower - Holding and Steven Cooper - Objects of Hope:
Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective Exploring Possibility and Limit
Volume 6 in Psychoanalysis
Barbara Gerson, ed. - The Therapist as a Volume 19
Person: Life Crises. Life Choices, Life James S. Grotstein - Who Is the Dreamer Who
Experiences. and Their Effects on Treatment Dreams the Dream?
Volume 7 Volume 20
Charles Spezzano & Gerald J. Gargiulo. eds. Stephen A. Mitchell - Relationality:
Soul on the Couch: Spirituality. Religion. and From Attachment to Intersubjectivity
Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis Volume 21
Volume 8 Peter Camochan - Looking for Ground:
Donnel B. Stem - Unformulated Experience: Countertransference. Epistemology.
From Dissociation to Imagination in and the Problem of Value
Psychoanalysis Volume 22
Volume 9 Muriel Dimen - Sexuality. Intimacy. Power
Stephen A. Mitchell - lrifluence and Volume 23
Autonomy in Psychoanalysis Susan W. Coates, Jane L. Rosenthal & Daniel
Volume 10 S. Schechter, eds. - September 11:
Neil 1. Skolnick & David E. Scharff, eds. Trauma and Human Bonds
Fairbairn, Then and Now Volume 24
Volume 11 Randall Lehmann Sorenson
Stuart A. Pizer - Building Bridges: Minding Spirituality
Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis Volume 25
Volume 12 Adrienne Harris - Gender as Soft Assembly
Lewis Aron & Frances Sommer Volume 26
Anderson, eds. Emanuel Berman - Impossible Training: A
Relational Perspectives on the Body Relational Psychoanalytic View of Clinical
Volume 13 Training and Supervision
Karen Maroda - Seduction, Surrender; and Volume 27
Transformation: Emotional Engagement in the Carlo Strenger - The Designed Self:
Analytic Process Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Identities

Volume 28
Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, eds.
Relational Psychoanalysis. Vol. II
Gender as Soft Assembly

Adrienne Harris
The case material in chapter 10 appeared originally in the author’s chapter, “Relational Mourning in a
Mother and Her Three‑Year Old After September 11,” in September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds, edited
by S. Coates, J. Rosenthal, and D. Schechter (The Analytic Press, 2003).

Routledge Routledge
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© 2009 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper

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International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑88163‑498‑3 (Softcover)

Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, trans‑
mitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
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system, without written permission from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data

Harris, Adrienne.
Gender as soft assembly / Adrienne Harris
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0‑88163‑370‑4
1. Sex (Psychology). 2. Gender identity. 3. Psychoanalysis. 4. Developmental
psychology. I. Title.

BF175.5.S48H37 2004
155.3’2‑‑dc22 2004051994

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For Robert Sblar
 ó
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Preface to Paperback Edition xi
Introduction 1

I. RELATIONAL DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY 23

1 Multiple Selves, Multiple Codes 25

2 Timelines and Temporalities 49
3 Chaos Theory as a Model for Development 73

II. GENDER AS SOFT ASSEMBLY 99

4 Gender Narratives in Psychoanalysis 101

5 Tomboys’ Stories 131
6 Gender as a Strange Attractor:
Gender’s Multidimensionality 155
7 Genders Emerge in Contexts 175
8 Chaos Theory as a Map to Contemporary Gender Theorists 191

vii
viii Contents

III. DEvEloPmEntAl thEoRy AnD RESEARCh 215

9 Developmental Applications of nonlinear Dynamic

Systems theory: learning how to mean 217
10 Dynamic Skills theory: Relational mourning as Shared
labor 243

Endnotes 263
References 279
Subject Index 309
Author Index 315
 Acl~nowledgments

A book requires a host of helpers. There is the particular solitude

in clinical work and writing that produces in me the need for
community and conversation. In that regard, I have been blessed
with amazing colleagues. Above all, my work is tremendously indebted
to the original group of people gathered together by Stephen Mitchell
to launch Psychoanalytic Dialogues, a group in which thinking about
and evolving relational theory was always encouraged. Steve Mitchell
and Emmanuel Ghent, above all, mentored and inspired and supported
this work. Lewis Aron, Neil Altman, Anthony Bass, Philip Bromberg,
Muriel Dimen, and Jody Davies are colleagues who have provided a
crucible of hard work, fun, invention, and opportunities.
The other journal that is intellectual home to me is Studies in
Gender and Sexuality. The people who began that journal have been
the closest companions and the deepest sources of influence and inspira-
tion: the editors Virginia Goldner and Ken Corbett, along with Susan
Coates, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, and Muriel Dimen.
Because this book is in the Relational Perspectives Book Series,
series editors Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Aron read many drafts and
pushed me to speak clearly no matter how complex I wanted to make
things. I have a particularly strong tie to Lewis Aron, with whom intel-
lectual and professional collaborations go back now over 20 years. We
have engaged in a steady evolution of projects that have been fruitful
sources of growth and learning for me.
Friends, colleagues, and family read and critiqued chapters of this
book. My thanks to Beatrice Beebe, Muriel Dimen, Susan Coates, Bob
Sklar, and Nancy Chodorow, along with Lew and Steve.

ix
x Acknowledgments

I also want to acknowledge the help and influence of many col-

leagues, intellectual comrades, and mentoring figures: Glen Gabbard,
Sam Gerson, Rita Frankiel, Lynne Layton, Roy Lilleskov, Shelley
Nathans, Maureen Murphy, Donald Moss, David Olds, Barbara and
Stuart Pizer, Ellen Rees, Karen Rosica, Roy Schafer, Sue Shapiro, Doris
Silverman, Steve Solow, Elizabeth Bott Spillius, Donnel Stern, Ruth
Stein, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Lynne Zeavin, and staff and friends at
the Austen Riggs Center: Gerald Fromm, Craig Piers, John Muller,
Jane Tillman, and Ed Shapiro.
At The Analytic Press, I have had the great good fortune to have
received careful editing and assistance of a caliber that is absolutely
unique in contemporary psychoanalytic publishing: Thanks to Paul
Stepansky, Eleanor Kobrin, Nancy Liguori, and Joan Riegel.
Thanks to Alexandra Todorova for scrupulous editing and biblio-
graphic help.
To my family-Kate, Justin, Lorna, and Norah (and I will sneak
Rosie into this list) and above all to Bob Sklar, a model of writerly disci-
pline and so many other matters as well-much love and thanks.
 Preface to Paperback Edition

In 2005, when I was publishing this book on gender, I was noticing the
power of the Internet to aid in the constitution of groups and identity-
based institutions in which gender and sexuality were at the core of sub-
jective experience. I was struck by the comparison of this modern eruption
of new forms of power and discourse with the longer road to space and
status in the civil rights movement, women’s liberation and feminism,
and in gay liberation. Movements of liberation which took a century now
intersect and interact with social and libratory movements which emerged
within a decade of new technology, new forms of communication and
globalization. Today, three years after my book appeared, the transforma-
tion of the social and interpersonal world in which gender, sexuality and
subjectivity are under construction and debate in clinical space and cyber
space is even more dramatic. I would say the term I would most like to
invoke in thinking about gender is ‘radioactive’. It’s a term I borrow from
Janine Puget who used it to describe the particular way historical forces
enter clinical and personal life.
I employ this term ‘radioactive’ here to suggest that gender acts like
a magnet, an intense ‘hot’ formation bringing down and into play many
probably quite unrelated processes. In Gender as Soft Assembly I am pre-
senting a view of gender as loaded with fantasy, the target of many violent
and deep ideas and affects and expectations. Gender soaks up many mean-
ings, not necessarily inherently related to the categories themselves. Gen-
der terms and sexual practice terms simply do a huge amount of cultural
and psychic labor. Gender is sometimes hinged, sometimes unhinged to
desire and sexuality. Gender comes in many saturations. Both within any

xi
 Introduction

1 want to engage in a cross-disciplinary dialogue about the develop-

ment of a "relational" subject and to make this dialogue meaning-
ful to clinical psychoanalysts. The developmental story I want to
tell is one that braids bodily and intrapsychic life with historical and
social forces. My interlocutors come from academic developmental psy-
chology, from the cognitive sciences, from linguistics and philosophy of
mind, and from the wide-ranging practices of gender theory, feminism, 1
and queer theory.
The theoretical music being composed can be dark or light. Some
writers are caught up in the losses and emptiness of identity, some in
the deep enmeshment of body and psyche, and some in the sliding and
playful paradoxes of performance and authenticity. All the writers and
theorists I engage with in this book struggle with both the necessity and
the instability of many powerful but unsatisfying binaries: self-other,
inside-outside, male-female, performed-real, core-variation, empty-
full, body-mind, intrapsychic-interpersonal, essence-construction.
For me, the most powerful psychoanalytic writing maintains a scru-
pulous vigilance over two contradictory pressures on meaning making.
First, we have to notice the power in organizing polar structures: mom-
dad, boy-girl, gay-straight, connected-separate. These formations give
coherence and heft to our experience. Simultaneously, we have to no-
tice the great creative potential released when these polarities are
deconstructed. Each organizational form yields particular pleasures and
constrictions. There is the deep expansiveness that comes from recog-
nition and belonging, and there are the quirky spurts and frissons when
the unexpected, the transgressive, the novel emerge into view. This may,
2 Introduction

indeed, be one powerful developmental process-the dialectical move-

ment from coherence through differentiation to new integration. It is a
process one sees in all the great developmental theories: Piaget, Werner,
Vygotsky, Baldwin, and in the psychoanalytic developmental theories:
Freud, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Loewald, Klein.
In this book, I look at development through the lens of relational
psychoanalysis. Hardly more than a decade after Greenberg and
Mitchell (1983) first outlined the relational model as an alternative to
classical theory, in particular to American ego psychology, Aron (1996)
wrote a historical summary of the evolution and emergence of this pow-
erful perspective that has altered the theoretical landscape of psycho-
analysis. 2 He notes that there are a number of different ways to describe
this history and that the unique theoretical integrations depend greatly
on the institutional and personal history of the writer. It is perhaps one
of the hallmarks of relational theory that it has fostered many distinct
and creative ways of making use of the relational two-person, intersub-
jective approach to considering clinical treatment and forms of psychic
life.
Writing this book about development caught me up in a demand-
ing developmental crisis of my own. Simply put, I am rooted in several
distinct language worlds: clinical practice, social theory, and develop-
mental psychology. I believe that language and speech (in oral or writ-
ten form) always carry myriad object relations. Speech is always dialogic
even when it is part of self-reflection or self-regulation. There is always
a listener even if that listener is hidden or latent and not even clear to
the speaker. So, when people from different disciplines try to speak to
each other, the struggle is to make the ideas from an other, foreign
mode of work-work addressed to another, less visible cast of charac-
ters-seem more like the familiar talk of close kin. 3
One of the earliest developmentalists, James Mark Baldwin (1904),
considered an interdisciplinary approach essential to the understand-
ing of a person's growth both as an individual experience and as a so-
cially mediated process. At my most optimistic, I operate out of the
deep conviction that Baldwin articulated over a century ago, namely,
that cross-disciplinary integrations are crucial to theory building. At its
most troubling, my predilection for synthesis is an insistence on sitting
in the middle of traffic.
To my chagrin, I find myself writing a book that depends on three
ideas that have often aroused antipathy in an audience of clinical psy-
choanalysts. First, I take up the question of developmental models at a
Introduction 3

time when there is a wide range of questions about the utility or status
of developmental theorizing. Second, I try to stay mindful of the politi-
calor ideological dimension of psychoanalytic theories. The presence
of values, power, and social regulation is always hovering at the edge of
my consciousness, clinical or otherwise. It is one aspect of my interest
in social constructionism and postmodernism, both different ways of
understanding the presence and function of the analytic "third."
Third, this is a book about theories and the cross-talk among theo-
ries in different disciplines: psychoanalysis, developmental psychology,
language studies, and feminism. Let me take these problems up in turn.

WHY STUDY DEVELOPMENT?

This project began with the wish to rework early experiences in my

own professional and intellectual formation as a developmental psy-
chologist in the light of what I later learned in analytic practice. I was
trained to think about development with a strong functional emphasis,
development as a dynamic, dialectic, transformational process. Struc-
ture and the more straightforward descriptions of stages take a back
seat. The emphasis on process, self-organization, and function is fun-
damental to developmental psychologists like Baldwin, Vygotsky,
Werner, and, in certain respects, Piaget. 4 They were all, in different
ways, interested in the questions of what led a system to alter and dis-
equilibrate, what was continuous and what was transformed. How did
development cycle and oscillate between external and internal poles,
between simplicity and complexity?
In this book I explore how learning to speak, developing a mind,
or becoming gendered are always understood to be emergent in con-
text and therefore neither solely social and interactional processes nor
reified into simply endogenous experiences. Minds and bodies, words
and thoughts, are always constituted in histories. Historical, social, bio-
logical, and intrapsychic processes are always interacting, overlapping
open systems.
Generated in the philosophical light of James (1890, 1910) and
Peirce (1955), these ideas5 can be traced in developmental psychology
over the past century sometimes as a minor thread, sometimes in the
mainstream. In my view, these ideas are key for relational psychoanaly-
sis, a theory in which meaning making is an interactional, co-constructed
experience. Contemporary developmental researchers are increasingly
4 Introduction

interested in telling developmental narratives that weave together the

cognitive, the social, and the emotional domains of experience and
embed these phenomena in complex multiply intersecting interactions
(see, for example, Cicchetti and Beeghly, 1990; Cicchetti and Cohen,
1995; and Cicchetti and Toth, 1996 for "state of the art" readings of
developmental theory and research).
The Vygotsky scholar William Frawley (1997) puts it succinctly:

Social and computational mind come together in the way certain

parts of language, perched on the mind-world boundary, are used
by computational minds to mediate inside and outside during think-
ing. Individualism could not but be right on one score: the direct
mechanisms of mind are internal. But we simply cannot tell the tale
of the management of thinking, metarepresentation, inhibition, re-
covery from breakdown, self-talk, stance in problem solving, theory
of mind development and breakdown, and the frame problem as
an inside story [pp. 270-271].

There is a need to integrate computational mind with social mind and

I want to address that imperative here.
This Vygotskian perspective, which I share, is less focused on the
individual as simply endogenous and less dominated by old splits be-
tween reason and emotion and strictures of positivism and empiricism.
It is very evolved and alive in contemporary developmental work in the
cognitive domain and in the domain of social psychology, personality
development, and developmental psychopathology and in studies of
language development. 6 One common characteristic of all this work is
the determination to integrate complex intrapsychic process with field
theories that stress the constituting power of context and relationships.
It is this aspect of the work that makes for such good potential conver-
sation with relational theory.
Within psychoanalysis, Fonagy and Target work for a synthesis of
developmental psychopathology, philosophy of mind, and attachment
theory (Fonagy and Target, 2002, 2003; Fonagy et al., 2002). Fonagy's
model of the development of reflective functioning traces the evolution
of capacities for self-regulation and self-reflection from the relational
interactive grid of being thought about, felt about, and imagined. The
relationship becomes both the container and the product of mind. Rep-
resentation carries the object relation and is the outcome of its particu-
lar forms and evolutions. This is very akin to Vygotsky's more general
model of the dialectical interpenetration of dialogue and cognition.