I was just reading this passage from William Marston’s psychological treatise, Emotions of Normal People, in which he describes his scientific observations of sorority initiation rites. And…well, I couldn’t resist sharing. Enjoy!
In the spring of the freshmen year, the sophomore girls held what was called “The Baby Party”, which all freshmen girls were compelled to attend. At this affair, the freshmen girls were questioned as to their misdemeanors and punished for their disobediences and rebellions. The baby party was so named because the freshmen girls were required to dress like babies.
At the party, the freshmen girls were put through various stunts under command of the sophomores. Upon one occasion, for instance, the freshman girls were led into a dark corridor where their eyes were blindfolded, and their arms were bound behind them. Only one freshman at a time was taken through this corridor along which sophomore guards were stationed at intervals. This arrangement was designed to impress the girls punished with the impossibility of escape from their captresses. After a series of harmless punishments, each girl was led into a large room where all the Junior and Senior girls were assembled. There she was sentenced to go through various exhibitions, supposed to be especially suitable to punish each particular girl’s failure to submit to discipline imposed by the upper class girls. The sophomore girls carried long sticks with which to enforce, if necessary, the stunts which the freshman were required to perform. While the programmed did not call for a series of pre-arranged physical struggles between individual girls…frequent rebellion of the freshman against the commands of their captresses and guards furnished the most exciting portion of the entertainment according to the report of a majority of the class girls.
Nearly all the sophomores reported excited pleasantness of captivation emotion throughout the party. The pleasantness of their captivation responses appeared to increase when they were obliged to overcome rebellious freshman physically, or to induce them by repeated commands and added punishments to perform the actions from which the captive girls strove to escape….
Female behaviour also contains still more evidence than male behaviour that captivation emotion is not limited to inter-sex relationships. [Marston’s emphasis] The person of another girl seems to evoke from female subjects, under appropriate circumstances, fully as strong captivation response as does that of a male.
Dr. Psycho, a psychologist like Marston, is forced to participate in sorority hazing rituals, from Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman #5.
The index for our ongoing roundtable on Marston’s Wonder Woman is here.
I wish that the idea that such wackiness is “normal” could get more traction… not the specific activities per se, but the whimsical carnivalesque aspects of it all.
Well, Marston felt the specific activities were normal. Submission and dominance were the basic “normal” emotions in his view.
He was actually responding specifically to Freud and behavioral psychologists who tended to study abnormal psychology, I think (Ben would know better than I would…) So I think he was explicitly trying to foster the idea that kink was normal, at least in some sense. There’s no doubt that he thought that lesbianism and erotic affection between women was normal — even probably normative, to some degree.
If Marston didn’t think that Freud also thought that “kink was normal,” then he wasn’t reading Freud very well. Freud’s dominant focus was on “everyday” neurotics, not psychotics or abnormal psychology. The books on jokes and slips of the tongue are specifically devoted to the role of the unconscious in everyday life.
Well, Marston could well not be reading Freud well…or I could not be reading Marston well reading Freud (also perhaps not well.)
Still, my general take on Freud is that he thinks everyone is abnormal — so it’s normal to be unhealthy and neurotic, in the sense that it’s typical, but not in the sense that it’s healthy. The Oedipus complex is something to be overcome, ideally, or worked through.
Marston seems to believe that everyone’s abnormal kinks are healthy and normal, more or less (especially women’s.)
Well, here’s what Marston says of Freud, at least in part:
He then goes on to argue that love is giving, not appetite.
That last quote, that love’s normal expression involves sexual appetite between opposite sexes, seems like what I was getting at, at least to some degree. Freud sees perversion everywhere, so it’s normal in some sense, but it’s not normative — it’s unhealthy, and needs to be cured, which is why even healthy people need psychoanlysis. Marston sees love, in whatever form, as normative — even as sacred. The baby party isn’t the sign of unresolved conflicts or appetites misdirected. The sorority sisters don’t need psychoanalysis; if anything, they just need more baby parties.
Freud (like Marx, St. Paul, plenty of others) makes an extremely compelling analysis, even based on pretty grandiose (and, in Freud’s case, morally culpable) leaps. The institutional intervention advised as a solution is invariably the pitfall. You could just be aware that there is sexual energy in all human interactions (and that economic oppression is endemic to complex societies, and that love renders meaningless all systems of obedience and retribution), and find a way to take those things seriously in practice without dominating people. Tall order however.
I love this passage from Emotions of Normal People. This is more Marston explaining why Freud is confused.
He was a great writer, damn it, goofy pseudo-psychobabble and all.
That first quote (that explicitly mentions Freud) seems to be more critiquing “psycho-analysts” than Freud himself, unless I too am misreading.
It doesn’t seem that separable to me? Freud certainly himself focused more on sex than love, which seems to be what Marston is critiquing.
Not to be dense– but is the difference that the (feminine) joy of submission is interpreted by Marston as love and by Freud as rape fantasy? I could certainly see that as a glass half-empty/full conundrum. Maybe all love is rape fantasy. Maybe all power lust is rooted in dysfunctional dominance. I don’t know that psychology (like many social sciences) has much of a method of analysis outside of its confused disciplinary presumptions– which, in the case of psychology, seem to be largely involved with proper techniques of policing and incarceration. Thus the interest in bondage.
I just wrote about 18,000 words on rape in Freud and Marston, believe it or not.
I guess as a brief summary — I really don’t think Marston confuses rape and love, whereas Freud absolutely confuses rape and rape fantasy (by essentially erasing the former.) A lot of the difference has to do with Marston’s idiosyncratic but very real commitment to political female liberation. You could see Marston in some sense as wanting to eliminate rape in order to make the world safe for rape fantasies, I think — whereas Freud (at least later in his career) wanted to use the existence of rape fantasies to deny the existence of rape.
I presume you brought in some Andrea Dworkin then… disentangling rape from power relationships that are always imbued with sexual energy is no mean feat. A salvific mission of redemption even.
I didn’t bring in Dworkin! Duh. I did talk about a number of feminist writers who had written specifically about incest, though, and they were all heavily influenced by Dworkin, I’m pretty sure.