“Denying my existence”

Demanding institutions to replace the mother's gaze

Oxford University is reportedly in a state of ferment over the Oxford Union’s decision first to invite Kathleen Stock to speak, and then not to back down in the face of trans activist protests. The Student Union LGBT body was required to take down a statement demanding Stock’s invitation be rescinded, and hit back alongside other pro-gender supporters with an open letter stating that “"We believe that trans students should not be made to debate their existence.”

Stock, meanwhile, responded to the BBC story linked above in a statement that declared “Nobody is debating the existence of trans students, we are discussing how the demands of a radical group of trans activists - many of whom are not trans - affect other people.”

How can the two sides face such total mutual incomprehension? I think the key term here is “existence”, and that what’s going on here is not one side or the other being disingenuous or evil. Rather, unlike Stock (and the great many others for whom going un-affirmed is not an existential attack), those who take this stance really truly believe it. It seems to me that those who experience the world this way simply don’t have an inward sense of being a complete person, except inasmuch as this is scaffolded from outside.

What is going on here?

A few years back I wrote a long essay in Palladium about how this reflects a worldview that rejects shared meanings as oppressive by definition, in favour of radical self-creation. But the problem with insisting that you are the sole arbiter of yourself is that self-creation means nothing until someone else agrees with the truth of whatever you’ve created.

For the paradox is that the invasive gaze of the Other, laden with unwanted and oppressive shared meanings, is simultaneously the source of suffering and salvation. The gaze of the Other is experienced as a hostile and violent invasion, forever imposing unlooked-for social meanings that constrain the liberty of each sacred self. But it is also the only source of the ‘validation’ that will reassure each individual that their self-creation project is real, true and accepted.

In other words: you are not allowed to define me, because only I can do that. But unless you see agree that I am what I say I am, I’m nothing at all. You have, in other words, attacked my existence itself.

It’s clear from the intensity of efforts to legislate against the withholding of recognition that people who experience themselves, and the gaze of the Other, in this way genuinely experience not being validated as a kind of existential annihilation. What puzzles me is this: how did we get here? How did we arrive at a point where it is a matter of self-evident natural justice that the thoughts of others should be amenable to control and redirection in this way, in order to scaffold selves that seem unable to keep their shape without this support?

Whatever it is, it’s been going on long enough that people who experience the world in this way are reaching adulthood in large numbers now. I won’t try and explore all hypotheses here, and will certainly revisit this theme in further posts; but my initial thought is to revisit one of the psychodynamic theorists most influential in thinking about early infancy: Donald Winnicott.

In Playing and Reality we find an analogue of the “validation” now routinely demanded by student activists, and whose withholding is experienced as an attack on existence itself. It’s just that Winnicott sees this as first occurring between a mother and baby. The experience of seeing oneself reflected in the mother’s face, he suggests, is fundamental to the formation of self: “the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face”.

At the earliest stage, Winnicott argues, babies don’t experience themselves as distinct from their environment; and the first glimmer of a sense that they are a ‘self’ as such comes from seeing themselves perceived by their mothers. Winnicott calls this “the mother’s role of giving back to the baby the baby’s own self” and argues that, as a child develops, this very first mirror extends to include the reflected selves that come back from all family members: “the opportunities the child gets for seeing the parents and others looking at themselves.” These, he suggests, are fundamental to the emergence of consciousness, and more broadly to a mature understanding that “self” and the world are two separate things, that interact without being coextensive.

The mother’s face, then, wordlessly grants the baby his or her very first experience of recognition by the Other. And if he’s right, my hunch is that these profoundly un-scaffolded selves in campus politics - selves who furiously reject the idea that the world is not co-extensive with their defensively buttressed self-definition - are a long-term consequences of widespread early maternal deprivation. That is, of infants for whom there was no one consistent face looking back, at a stage where that reflection was of fundamental importance to the formation of an integrated psyche.

Of course there are likely other factors involved, too; things are never monocausal. But Winnicott points out that for all the profound importance of the maternal gaze, it’s easy to dismiss as trivial:

"the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there. All this is too easily taken for granted. I am asking that this which is naturally done well by mothers who are caring for their babies shall not be taken for granted.

And taking this for granted is precisely what we have been doing now, for decades. Fully one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of having a baby. And even in European countries where maternity provision is more generous, the political winds blow relentlessly toward “liberating” mothers from babies - a phenomenon lauded as social progress by the Left, and economic progress by the Right. What discursive space is there, against such pressure, for taking seriously the gift of recognition afforded a very young infant by his or her mother?

This is all just a hunch at the moment. But I suspect that if research were conducted into the early infant experience of those fragile, un-scaffolded selves now demanding an institution politics of recognition you would find attenuated, interrupted or absent maternal relationships (for example via very early daycare) strongly represented.

In other words, that somewhere near the root of the gender-self-identification movement is a profound lack of early maternal regard. And that this spurs angry demands for what are in effect recognition reparations - just delivered by law, policy and institutions rather than mothers. And, thus, that the politics of recognition, and of “debating trans people’s existence”, is in part a long-term consequence of erasing the psychic work mothers do and pretending we can have a social fabric without it. It is a bitter and eloquent irony, that this movement should pour so much energy into erasing women today.