Article
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2007) 12, 323–331. doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100141
Discussion of Sue Grand's Maternal Surveillance: Disrupting The Rhetoric of War
Lynne Layton1
1Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
Correspondence: Lynne Layton, 253 Mason Terrace, Brookline, MA 02446, USA. E-mail: llayton@bidmc.harvard.edu
Abstract
The commentary draws out some of the implications of Dr Grand's paper, Combat Speaks: The Gendering of War and War Resistance, focusing specifically on that aspect of gender identity formation that blocks our capacities to discover the way we are mutually implicated in each other's lives and losses. The suggestions in Dr Grand's work about diagnosis and about what it means to be psychoanalytically empathic are elaborated. The paper also relates Dr Grand's comments on different modes of vision to feminist film discussions of the 1970s and 1980s.
Keywords:
mutual implication and mutual interdependence, empathy, normative unconscious processes, gender identity, distinction
