INTIMATE STRANGERS

by Lillian B. Rubin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 1983

Rubin is a psychotherapist and researcher on the family (Women of a Certain Age, 1979) who bases this look at conflict in marriage on clinical practice and interviews with 150 couples, ages 25 to 55--a good place to start formulating hypotheses, perhaps, but not necessarily conclusions. Rubin contends that gender differences arise not only from different messages transmitted to boys and girls, but from boys' and girls' diametrically opposed reactions to separating from mother in childhood. Because girls identify with mother, they remain closer and more connected--so that throughout Life they have little trouble expressing intimacy, but fear being consumed by the person to whom they feel connected. Their ego boundaries are therefore not well-defined. Men, on the other hand, must begin to identify with father or other males in childhood, so they are basically torn from their intimate emotional connection with mother. Their ego boundaries are therefore so well-defined as to be rigid, while their internal emotional connectedness has been severed. In the area of sex, for example, women complain that they want emotional intimacy first, while men counter that it proceeds from the act of sex. What's happening here, Rubin maintains, is that women in their closeness with another female (mother) in childhood recognize society's traditional split of the emotional and the erotic, and choose the former; men, cut off from that primary early emotional connection, choose the latter. Rubin agrees with recent feminist psychoanalytic theory that women's economic dependence on men has been confused with emotional dependence, and it is the men who are truly dependent on women for emotional nurturance. (When asked if they would ever remarry if something were to happen to their spouses, almost all the men answered in the affirmative, while the women, particularly those whose marriages had already been long term, were generally reluctant to commit themselves.) Plausible speculation, though by no means conclusive.

Pub Date: May 20, 1983

ISBN: 0060911344

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION