Strollerderby : Freud

Blended Family Works With Therapy

Brett Singer — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:30:00 GMT

Here's the story / of a lovely lady / who was living with three very lovely girls…

And so on. You know it, don't you? If not, here's a refresher:

And here's Jamie Foxx singing it, just because it's funny.

For the Bradys, it looked so easy. Real life is rarely that simple. So Claudia Gryvatz Copquin and her boyfriend Glen Ames decided to move in together, they sought help from a therapist.

In general, I'm a believer in therapy. I find that it helps me, and I've known many people who benefited from talking things over with a professional. But when someone says, "I wish the therapist could move in with us," my eyebrows go up like Mr. Spock when Doctor McCoy says something particularly illogical. (Except that I can't raise just the one brow the way Spock does. Must be a Vulcan thing.)

But things like who sleeps in which bed? That's too much. Seriously, what happened to, "This is what we're doing, deal with it"? If that seems harsh, or unrealistic, OK, maybe. Still, where do you draw the line? Do you call the therapist every time?

Apparently this couple does. In fact /They didn’t commit to living together until receiving a go-ahead from the therapist. “It gave us confidence,” Mr. Ames said./ And Ms. Copquin told the therapist "I wish you could move in with us."

I'm sure the therapist is thrilled. Mo' money! But I think that's too much dependance on outside help. If each person had their own shrink, I might feel differently. I'm not sure why but that seems more productive. If you trek the whole family over to the office whenever there's a fight over the remote control, what kind of life is that?

Source: NY Times

Image: Wikipedia

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A Mother Stalks Her Young Son’s Crush

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“He did not linger long enough for me to squash him completely into myself….”

The above is not, unfortunately, a sentence from a soft core porn novel. It is an excerpt from a New York Times essay in which a mother describes her obsessive, jealous, and blind love for her nine-year-old son. Thanks to Jezebel for directing me to this gem of a Modern Love piece.

The only thing creepier than the essay’s title—“The Tiny Hand that Robs the Cradle”—is the fact that this tiny hand belongs to a third grader who has a crush on the author’s son. Somebody call a family therapist, stat.

Kate Krautkramer is a teacher at her son Sarvis’ school. When she learns that one of his classmates has scrawled “I ‘heart’ Sarvis” in the bathroom stall, she completely loses her mind. In hopes of discovering the identity of this “little vixen” who was so unforgivably bold as to publicly proclaim an interest in her little boy, the jealous mother turns first to the principal, then to her son’s female classmates, who all “acted innocent in their double braids tied with impossibly pink ribbons.”

With no leads, Krautkramer takes to using the bathroom stall with the Sarvis graffiti every single day. She leans her body against her son’s name and traces the heart with her hand. She comforts herself with the thought that “Graffiti Girl,” as Kautkramer derisively terms her son’s classmate, “didn’t know Sarvis the way I knew Sarvis, no matter what the bathroom wall proclaimed.” But she also torments herself with thoughts of one of Sarvis’s nine-year-old peers “turning her 18-inch hips just so for the very first time, or taking a try at batting her lashes.”

I understand that there is irony at work in this essay. Yet no amount of irony can take away the extreme mortification the author’s son will have to withstand for the rest of his life, now that his mother has publicly confessed not only to having Oedipal urges that would make Freud blush, but also to being clinically insane.

Besides, the irony frequently gives way to disturbingly honest reflection: “I knew it was only an innocent crush, yet I truly lamented that some little girl was pushing my boy into a vaguely sexual consciousness.” Actually, neither Sarvis nor his classmate are displaying any "sexual consciousness." They’re just kids. The mother is the one who sexualizes youth by referring to the girls’ “tiny blue jeans and frilly tops,” and by describing Sarvis’s hair as “brown ringlets” that “hung in heart-stopping whorls down his neck.”

If Kautkramer’s goal is to make sure that her son never marries (or goes on a date), mission accomplished. No girl in her right mind would ever put up with this woman as a mother-in-law.

Photo: New York Times

Male Artists, Female Muses: Exploitation or Symbiosis?

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:30:00 GMT

In the wake of a heated debate Down Under on the line between art and child pornography, thanks to Jezebel for pointing out a fascinating piece by Guardian writer Kira Cochrane on the power dynamics at play in the relationship between model and artist. The discussion was launched by the recent sale (for 17.2 million Pounds) of Lucien Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (pictured). Although the painting obviously involves a male artist depicting a female nude, Cochrane argues that this is hardly a case of exploitation. Even the model’s posture depicts unself-conscious ease.

But Freud’s teenage daughters posing nude for him? That could be a different story, though both of the women report nothing but fond memories of the experience. We can all guess what Sigmund would say….

Cochrane further points out that almost every well-known muse/artist relationship involves a female muse and a male artist, which inevitably puts the male in a position of power and fame, while the woman passively supports his work behind the scenes. I would not argue that this relationship is inherently exploitative—many women have surely reveled in the role of muse—but it definitely has the potential to be so. In several infamous cases, this relationship has destroyed the lives of potentially great artists (Camille Claudel and Elizabeth Siddal, to name just two examples).

Most interesting to me was Cochrane’s citing of stats by the feminist artist group the Guerilla Girls, who found that less than 5 percent of the artists represented in the modern art sections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are of females. At the risk of getting booed out of the feminist blogosphere, here’s my take on these stats: while the dearth of female artists represented at the Met clearly indicates a female disempowerment that is too far-reaching to get into here, I don’t necessarily see a problem with the fact that the majority of nudes are women. I’m a straight woman, and I would rather look at naked women than naked men any day. I know I’m not alone in finding their bodies far more aesthetically interesting—and pleasing. Whether or not this preference is a result of cultural conditioning, I can’t say. I just know that I would not be pleased if half of the breasts in the Met were replaced with pectoral muscles.

Photo: Martin Goodwin

Anal-ysis

Jennifer Baumgardner — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:30:00 GMT

I have always thought of myself as anal-retentive, though I think what I really meant by that is organized and efficient. Recently, I’ve had cause to contemplate the phrase since my son, age 3 (almost), finally divested himself of diapers and the much less absorbent/somewhat less humiliating sibling product, Pull-Ups, and has entered Freud’s second psychosexual stage: the anal phase.

How do I know it’s arrived? Well, one evening about two weeks ago, during a dinner party, my son emerged from the bathroom stark naked, handed me a plastic spray bottle, and remarked, casually, “There’s poop in there.”

Sure enough, upon examination, there were three feculent malted milk balls rolling around in the bottle. But how did they get in there? Did he sit on the bottle, which would seem to place him in an even more developed psychosexual stage, or did he excrete somewhere else and then insert that ship into the bottle? I had to ask. “I pooped on the tile,” replied Skuli. “And picked it up with my hands.”

I thought that was the end of it, so to speak, but ever since the child started wearing underpants full-time, he’s been holding his bowels until the breaking point, then delivering in some dramatic, unexpected way. After two or three days of anal retention, we move into triage appropriate for labor and delivery of a baby, with him screaming “rub my tummy” then flipping over and demanding “rub my butt!” Finally, with a look of terror on his face, he will stand in the bathroom and begin to push, his face turning purple, the veins standing out on his neck.

My sister, ever able to fan the flames of my neuroses, called a few days into our new PSP (psychosexual phase). “I hope you aren’t rubbing his tummy,” she said. “According to Dr. Cohen”—the French celebrity pediatrician, who compellingly advises ignoring whatever is wrong with your child—“giving him attention will only make him more retentive.”

So, I’m committing to being less of a hands on bowel movement partner with Skuli and trying not to worry what his current rituals say about his future personality, according to Freud and this strangely charming autodidact.