ARE WE BECOMING ANDROGYNOUS?

THE MAKING OF THE ANDROGYNOUS PERSON & THE COLLAPSE OF GENDER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© November 17, 2008

“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves. We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996)

A WRITER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

You use your lack of training as a clinical psychologist to dismiss the likelihood of having valid insight to PTSD. Yet, you introduce a valid hypothesis regarding the escape from death as a source of PTSD.

This disorder often focuses on foot soldiers that see the enemy in life or death situations. In reading this, I recalled my father. He was a gunner’s mate on a destroyer escort in the Pacific. He and his ship were in the historic naval battles at Midway, Guadalcanal and the Coral Sea. He was an alcoholic, sometimes violent.

When I was very young, in the Fifties, he would get drunk and talk about his war experiences. His ship was torpedoed. Many sailors above and below his deck were killed. He took shrapnel in his hand. He recalled seeing the Sullivan brothers as they were transferred to the Juneau, a munitions ship which he saw blow up, I think, at the battle of Midway. He talked about the sharks and kamikazes. And nearly always questioned, "Why am I here, why did I make it when so many others didn't?"

The thing that really scared and scarred him, I know this because he talked about it the least and not until the Sixties, was witnessing an atom bomb test explosion at Bikini Atoll.

While people built bomb shelters and talked about how they might survive an A-blast, he knew the futility. Think of how few people in the world have seen a nuclear weapon explode. Even firsthand he said the power released was unimaginable. That might have traumatized him and others more than all the battles.

Some people consider themselves lucky to survive and revel in their good fortune. Others question it interminably. The questioning raises a variety of doubts. Doubts leave the door ajar for all sorts of demons to escape into one's consciousness.

Some are strong (I don't like the use of that word here) enough to vanquish the demons, others choose to dull the visions through drugs and alcohol, and some seek "professional" help. Unfortunately, the professionals sometimes make mistakes and refute the claims because they might not fit the clinical model. The personal battle goes on.

Humans are resilient, as E so aptly demonstrates by accepting that the other candidate winning is not prelude to disaster. It is that resilience that confuses professionals. Each of us in our past has been given reasons to believe things will or will not improve. Our experiences and what we have been taught lead us to march forward, change paths or turn back.

When things were difficult, my mom would always tell me, "Better days are coming." It was sort of a Little Orphan Annie philosophy grown out of the Great Depression.

Better days did come. And they went. And they returned.

Maybe PTSD wasn't recognized as much after WWII because those armed forces were somewhat calloused to trauma. They "gutted it out" through psychologically trying episodes in belief of better days to come. That might sound as if to justify professionals who fail to recognize PTSD. This generation of soldiers (Iraq and Afghanistan) brings with them a very different life experience. In this, “everybody wins” society, they might not have had the opportunities to learn resilience.

Sorry for the long rambling response.

M

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:


M,

I have a clinical bent mainly through extensive reading along with course work in the discipline, but as I told BB I could not be a clinician.

A colleague of mine wanted me to go in with her practice remembering me from school. I sat in on a few sessions and determined that the people she was treating could afford the luxury but didn't need it.

Another reason was I always became exhausted doing seminars, and felt this would be exacerbated in the more personal arena.

The third reason I found clinical psychology more about methods and models than people.

That said I see the value of confession. BB was reared a Protestant and feels Catholic Confession is a little absurd. People confess their sins and then repeat them, which they do. We like to tell someone our secrets. That is the value of ministers, rabbis and other religious. They listen confidentially and help us drive our demons to the surface, where they no longer turn our stomachs into chambers of acid. A valued friend does the same thing. Confession is good for the soul.

Your father’s military experience was horrific. Words cannot measure its horror. WWII in the Pacific was a terrible war. I captured a glimpse of this from that wounded soldier who stayed with us in the 1940s. He rented a room while surgeons repaired with plastic surgery the cheeks of his butt blown away on Guadalcanal. The surgery was done at US Schick General Army Hospital in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa.

I can't imagine witnessing the explosion of an atomic bomb, as did your father. My wonder is if he was poisoned with radiation.

My da died of multiple myeloma when he was forty-nine, a disease of the blood making machine of the bone marrow, better known as a form of leukemia. He always wondered if atomic tests conducted in the western United States were a contributor. I've wondered the same.

It seems when they were doing all those tests they knew little of how harmful they might be to people thousands of miles away.

Regarding PTSD, I believe it is far more common than we think. Traumatic death and dying are not confined to the battlefield, but are part of everyday life. I know PTSD is identified with military combat but life has become a combat zone of death and dying if not identical to this syndrome certainly of amazingly similar conditions.

When I was young, my cousin returned from WWII to his wife and lovely child intact. The boy, Billy, five years old, contracted spinal meningitis and died within 36 hours of the disease being diagnosed.

They were a young couple, she beautiful and he Hollywood handsome. He died psychologically that day, developing heart trouble and physically dying young. She persevered, remarried, and now in her late 80s, has lived a full and productive life with the same sparkle in her eyes of her youth.

The death of little Billy reduced his father to a shadow of himself. He had been a premiere miler going to the Chicago Games in the 1930s and running a 4:38 mile, which was outstanding for the time. Was he suffering from PTSD? I think so.

I agree humans are resilient but death for some throws them off their compass. It would seem men more often than women. I sense that an internal gyro is part of our instinctive makeup, but requires attention. This gyro can get clogged and the mind malfunctions as the arteries can get clogged and the heart malfunctions. The athleticism of the spirit is critical to the health of this instinctive gyro.

Death is a normal experience of us all, but dealing with death in blunt pessimistic terms as Schopenhauer suggests is often less apparent, as I show in my piece, "Is Your Life A Novel?" Schopenhauer saw optimism as a denial of reality. Conversely, he didn’t see pessimism as the negative as our culture sees it, but in terms of essence.

Life is full of trauma, and when the demons it unleashes surface, we are ready for them if our instinctive gyro is working and if we are in touch with the reality of our experience. If not, if we dodge or deny it, then we are likely to resort to all kinds of artificial palliatives including but not limited to drugs and alcohol.

Your mother was a saint as I think most mothers are. My empirical work has suggested mothers are usually the strong parent. Why so?

Most mothers seem to have their feet firmly planted in reality while their husbands often display the waxed wings of Daedalus and attempt to soar into the sun. We know what happened to Daedalus. Mothers accept their lot, and make the most of it. But maybe this, too, is changing.

A chief engineer at Honeywell was demoted, given an office next to mine, and no work to do but kept on full salary. He went to pieces, became an alcoholic, and then died far before his time.

An executive secretary at Honeywell was demoted, about the same time, given an office and no work to do but kept on full salary. She radiated charm and good will, coming to the office with a large smile on her face. She would do her nails, call friends, read her magazines, and paperbacks, or run off to the plant cafeteria to have a coffee. She also could be seen to be writing letters to friends on a company provided typewriter, or leaving early for a hair appointment, manicure, or an early film, day after day after day.

The job was the chief engineer's life. The job was a means to an end for the executive secretary.

The chief engineer had pride and worried about what others might think, feeling humiliated having no work to do. The executive secretary couldn't care less what others thought seeing her good fortune as a blessing in disguise, as her life was outside work.

In a curious way, we are losing your mother’s “better days are coming,” or a philosophical acceptance of the hand that is dealt. We see more women, and even mothers acting like men with a chip on their shoulders.

We have gone full circle to become androgynous with the characteristics of male and female seemingly to melt into a single prideful masculine. I say this as I listened on C-Span to our first female four-star general talk about her challenges and problems in the same corporate-speak of her fellow male four-star generals. She has joined the all boys club.

It is why I think so many female CEOs have failed, as they become A-type personalities, the model of romantic self-destruction and aesthetics machismo of the male dominated Boardroom.

My BB is a better executive than I ever was and she is not an A-type personality, but gets the job done.

My daughter, Laurie, is a stronger leader and more mature adult than either of my sons. She has been at the very top of the food chain or the top one/tenth of one percent of American households in income, and now struggles to keep her family together without apology or self-pity but most importantly, without remorse.

My son-in-law hasn’t worked in five years and is in excellent physical health, and holds a doctor in jurisprudence, but still remains wounded, still suffers what I call PTSD after seeing his many businesses die around him. It is a traumatic shock to the system, but why him and not her?

Why do I bring PTSD up? Men outnumber women eight to one as patients in military hospitals and outpatient clinics for PTSD, and I’m talking about tens of thousands of women formerly in the combat zones of Afghanistan and Iraq who somehow have avoided PTSD.

I suspect mothers have unwittingly given birth to unintended consequence by forgiving their sons for deviant behavior while punishing their daughters for the same deviance.

Mothers make excuses for their sons’ behavior but not for their daughters’. A girl in her early teens with raging hormones likes to dress up, wear makeup and go to parties. Many concerned mothers often call her slut. A boy in his early teens with raging hormones likes to party and has lots of girlfriends, not to worry, he is simply sowing his wild oats.

Mothers of my generation made strong daughters and weak sons. Now, I see both sons and daughter displaying a common weakness. Am I wrong? Am I misguided? Perhaps, but that is what I have observed.

Be always well,

Jim

PS I saw the film “The Fighting Sullivans” in 1944 (before you were born) starring Thomas Mitchell as the father. The five Sullivan brothers wanted to be on the same ship and went down with the Juneau in 1942. Your father was in touch with a part of history when he saw them transfer to their vessel.