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EVA MARCUSCHAMER

Occupational Choice: Life Choice

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Choosing a career is the most important life decision made in adolescence, it is a part of personal identity success and, in reality, is more of a permanent choice than choosing a partner, considering that 50% marriages today end in divorce. According to researchers only 70% of high school juniors are aware of their future occupation choice. The rest don’t know much as of now and will choose once this vital stage is over. Out of confusion and fear, they will choose any option – the one of their friend, the one their mother told them, the one that their girlfriend or boyfriend likes, the one they can, the one their father finds prestigious and so on.

Once we realize the relevance of choosing an occupation, we need to think about what kind of people we are when it comes to making a decision. However, self-knowledge is not an easy thing to do. Therefore, some young people are going to take a series of psychological tests, with the mistaken idea of attending an event, similar to a tarot reading, “to be told what they are good at and what they can do for life”. I have found that these young people are almost never satisfied with the results of the psychological tests, some are more confused, others are angry and what happens next will depend on their personality. There are some who, fearing commitment, let others take the decision for them or simply don’t decide for them, they become paralyzed and ask society to give them some time not to think: they leave hajshará, study English or computers or go to work with their father or uncle, to see what happens. There are other young people who have a particular fear of failure, are interested in studying, are informed, are looking for options but cannot choose because they fear they will not stand out, not be successful and could spend eternity looking for an option finding that there is always something better than they thought.

Some of them choose a career because they think it is successful and once they are in it, they move on to another and so on until they arrive desperate to a professional asking for help. It has been found that 30% of high school students will have certain problems choosing a future occupation and require the assistance of a professional to do so. If we become aware of this problem, it will be easier to ask a professional for help in a preventive way instead of waiting till the teen reaches a desperate point. The problem of decision is linked to the development of identity, in a way that an arrest in this process will require deeper psychological help to solve it.

And what about their parents in the meantime? Clinical experience shows them desperate, with too much desire to help their children without knowing how and not being able to explain why there are more problems now to choose an occupation than in the past. Let’s look at the circumstances: there are currently more than 220 degrees to choose from and more than a thousand technical careers. Studies conducted at the beginning of this millennium warned us that technical careers are the careers of the future. A wiring technician has more income than a communication graduate, a manicurist earns with each client at home the equivalent of a psychological consultation, of course we are talking about specialized technicians versus professionals from one of the most offered careers in Mexico. However, parents want their children to have a professional career in spite of the socio-professional reality of Mexico, that is, in spite of the supply and demand for employment in their locality. It is time to inform us about the situation in our country and what kind of professionals it requires. Informing ourselves about the socio-professional field is an important task that must be the consequence of self-knowledge. That is to say, you don’t buy the furniture before buying the house, just as you can’t find out about the races, their supply and demand as well as the field of work before you reflect on the following question: Who am I? That’s right, we have to look within ourselves for the personality characteristics that define us, the activities that we like, those that we dislike, our abilities, potentials and limitations, our values and what we intend to achieve in the future with the chosen occupation. Then we’ll turn to the world of information. This is not an easy task either, because although in this day and age we are updated with a click on Google, scholars have proven time and time again that in this information age what stands out is disinformation.

One of the consequences of this problem is that out of 220 degrees that exist, only 10 are the most populated, that is, 56% of the population of the Mexican Republic is enrolled in careers like : Accounting, Law, Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Communications, Psychology, Normal Educators, Administration, Architecture and Medicine. This translates to seeing engineers driving a taxi or doctors in the restaurant industry. But above all, in the desperation of many who, after finishing a profession, do not find work.

Once after a conference at a community school, a very angry mother confronted me with a hundred teenagers saying that studying was not the only option for young people, that it was expensive to send their children to school and that school was not for everyone, that there were very successful people without a profession and she gave the example of the inventor of Youtube. With sadness and concern, I replied that 53% of the Mexican population between the ages of 15 and 19 do not attend school, so they will not have the opportunity to study a career either. And while it’s true that we live in an age where a football player like Kaka can earn ten million euros a season, which means much more than Donald Bitzer (inventor of the plasma screen) is given annually to do research. It is also true that Jawed Karim, inventor of the Youtube site, did it without having finished a degree, but few know that despite being a member of a large empire he returned to Stanford University to finish his studies. What is definitive is that among our young people, there are very few Kaka or Karim, and we have no choice but to study in order to compete with the productive force of our country and to be able to become independent from our parents and make a home. In Mexico, a messenger can earn 3,000 pesos a month and an industrial engineer can earn 18,000 pesos a month (see http://boletin-infomail.typepad.com/2007.pdf ), and it is true that in this society we need messengers as well as engineers, the decision is up to the young people, what kind of occupation do they want to have? What do they care more about, salary or a job that they are passionate about? What is more important, money or prestige? What does success mean to them? The truth is that today, the more prepared you are, the more successful, prestigious and rewarding you can be and the more you can become. This means, speaking at least two languages, having postgraduate studies or technical specialization, and doing exchange programs with other universities to get to know other cultures. And this is only possible when we have chosen an occupation that we are passionate about and that matches the occupational needs of our community.

The time when businesses were being passed from generation to generation is dying out, family businesses are becoming less and less, leaving young people looking for their own income and parents offering them the tools to choose an occupation which gives them a lifestyle.

When we choose something, an activity, a piece of clothing or a dish to eat, we also renounce something. That is why we say that every choice involves a loss and every loss involves a grief. This is a necessary state of pain to say goodbye and to get rid of things, situations or people that we cannot have, realize or remain in them. However, the grief that is part of choosing an occupation is different because it holds the promise of a better future. To choose an occupation is to choose to be an adult, not easy at this time when we all want to be children without responsibilities, of pure pleasure without obligation, of effortless enjoyment. This difficulty is the product of the post-modernity that brought with it uncertainty and has left us with the only alternative of turning our eyes to values, to the solidity of permanence, to stability.

How to choose an occupation in the light of post-modernity? Parents have the difficult task of understanding that it is their children’s responsibility to choose an occupation, which does not mean deciding for them. We know the fact that our children are growing up means mourning the loss of the small and dependent children who needed much more from us to be able to do their activities; the parents of young children are idealized, perfect, they are the ones who know everything and do everything well, while the parents of teenagers are the obsolete ones, the ones who know almost nothing, the ones who are out of fashion and therefore, the ones who are hardly taken into account anymore.

Friends and other adults replace parents by making tolerance a difficult and unique task for parents of adolescents. This brings mixed, ambivalent emotions: on the one hand, a loving taste for seeing them grow up and capable of doing things, and on the other hand, pain because they have displaced us, because we are no longer indispensable as when they were little. We will have to give up our leading place in society for the love of our children, and that is a narcissistic and painful loss for us. Even if we know very well and understand that this is part of the life cycle, we have to be prepared. As we are good players of the life, we will have to give them our place, but not without a cost of loving pain.

While the task of adolescents is to take charge of this vital moment, to find a way to know themselves, their interests, values, abilities, their way of being and informing themselves: to know what happens beyond the borders of their room or the fashionable den. Occupational identity is a task that is renewed throughout life, with every job, every achievement, every failure; we live an adventure that allows us to know ourselves.
There are no recipes for success, you have to know it to taste it, venture to try it and dedicate yourself to enjoy it.

Jealousy and envy

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Love is so much more authentic when it is born out of sympathy and not desire, because it’s the only way to keep it from getting hurt. Durrell

Freud (1922) first formulated the mechanism of pathological jealousy in the Schreber case and then elaborated it in his article “On some neurotic mechanisms in jealousy, paranoia and homosexuality”. However, he first makes a valuable contribution on normal jealousy by his distinction:

“…in essence, they are composed by grief, pain for the object of love that is thought lost and for the narcissistic forehead, insofar as it can be distinguished from the others; in addition, by feelings of hostility towards the preferred rivals and by a greater or lesser amount of self-criticism, which wants to make the self responsible for the loss of love. These jealousies… take root in the depths of the unconscious, take up again the earliest motions of infantile affectivity and spring from the Oedipus Complex or from the brothers of the first sexual period” (p. 217).

This same author wrote that infidelity or the impulse to commit it reactivates the jealousy of the second degree or projected jealousy. This desire to commit infidelity may be a passage to action or to remain repressed in the unconscious. In the married couple, the father of psychoanalysis tells us, the fidelity required has to overcome multiple obstacles, such as, for example, that another person seems sexually attractive to you:

“…those who refuse to experience such temptations feel its pressure so strongly that they often turn to an unconscious mechanism to relieve it and achieve such relief and even complete absolution from their moral conscience, projecting their own impulses to infidelity upon the person to whom they must keep it…” (p.218).

These jealousies have as their unconscious content the fantasy of infidelity itself, this translates into a slight flirtation of both spouses, which is equivalent, according to Freud, to a return to fidelity. These slight advances in infidelity protect the couple against the passage to the act because they generate the jealousy that leads in turn to the assessment of the other member of the couple. Thus, the desire for a foreign object is satisfied in one’s own object. While the delusional jealousy, or jealousy of the third kind also covers up one’s own infidelity but with an object of the same sex which is homosexual.

Many others since Freud have made interesting contributions to the understanding of jealousy. In the following, we will offer different complementary opinions that allow us to show the intrapsychic mechanisms that intervene in the genesis of the sick jealousy whose approach varies according to the different theoretical frameworks.
Jealousy is a universal experience; it is the most primitive characteristic for both humans and mammals. Jealousy, in a number of circumstances, is related to the feeling of disability experienced by the infant during the breastfeeding period.

Fenichel (1935) says that the difference between pathological and normal jealousy is similar to the difference between grief and melancholy. Unlike envy, the experience of jealousy involves three people. It is possible to hypothesize about its origins at the moment when the child acquires the ability to distinguish the people around him. The time, in which you can distinguish your self from others, establish a certain degree of object constancy and have certain representations of the self and the object.

The intrusion of a third person into the mother and child dyad by either the father, siblings or any other person is inevitable. Therefore, all children know the feeling of jealousy as soon as their self allows its conceptualization. Psychoanalysts tend to think that the existence of childhood jealousy in adult life can produce monogamy, while the Oedipal conflict makes it difficult to maintain (Horney, 1928).

According to Fenichel (1935) this type of behaviour in the person offers an economic advantage to the libido. From a psychoanalytical point of view, very little attention has been paid to the differences between the clinical syndromes of jealousy. However, the intra-psychic elements of jealousy remain an intellectual challenge among scholars.

In this regard, Waelder (1951), says that the projected jealousy is derived in both men and women from their own infidelity, from their own impulses that have succumbed to repression. Every day we realize that the faithfulness required in marriage is tested daily by the temptation of the other. Anyone who denies this statement will be driven into infidelity by using the unconscious mechanism of mitigation; consciousness is absolved by projecting one’s own impulses of infidelity on one’s partner.
The urge to infidelity is denied, this puts pressure on the consciousness which translates into feelings of restlessness. To get rid of this feeling, the person places attitudes on him or her that he or she “believes” to be observed in his or her partner, inferring that he or she is greatly tempted to commit adultery. Thus, the projection, rather than being a primary response, becomes a complex mechanism whose ingredients are the denial of one’s own urgencies, the desire to displace guilt and the exaggeration of any observed attitude.

In this respect, Fenichel (1935) warns that in this type of jealous or compulsively unfaithful personalities, the loss of love or the search has to do with the aspiration to possess a partial object to incorporate it orally. This is related to a fantasy of stealing from the mother. In Kleinian terms, the fantasy of theft is related to the inner contents of the mother’s body, that is, its nourishing, reproductive and creative capacity. As Riviere and Fenichel (1935) say, oral fixations play an important role in the development of pathological jealousy.

For Stoller (1975) jealousy is an experience of apprehension, anxiety, suspicion or distrust in the face of the loss of something valuable, it can be a person or his love. When associated with a sexual partner, jealousy may involve feelings of possessiveness toward the person or their affection as a valuable object. Usually they appear before the existence of rivalry with a third person, the one who suffers from jealousy feels afraid of the intrusion that this person may commit within his loving relationship.

Pao (1969, quoted by Pierloot, 1988) tells us that pathological jealousy can be understood as a persistent egoistic state that is installed due to conflicts triggered by homosexual and oral sadistic impulses, including those within narcissism and melancholy. This is consistent with what Schmideberg (1953, quoted by Pierloot 1988) says: oral, anal and genital factors contribute to feelings of jealousy.

For Glover (1949), for example, some components of jealousy may be the following:

  • Envy: envy is a component of jealousy, it is part of a triangular relationship and occurs when the jealous person feels that he or she not only has to take care of the loss of the object, but has already lost it. If this is the case, the opponent is envied for possessing the woman or for her ability as a lover. It is important to mention that when speaking of a lost object this author refers to a partial object.
  • The desire to be like the other, to emulate him, is not present in jealousy. Metapsychologically this feeling is connected with the identification and idealization that can serve an adaptive function to manage anger or a narcissistic wound.
  • The narcissistic wound is probably the same in both jealousy and envy, however, in jealousy there is a greater awareness of guilt and of having failed.
  • There is more anger in jealousy than in envy.
  • The estrangement for the possession of the object occurs in both states, but in the case of jealousy there is also an element of loss.

There are other authors who think that the jealous person needs his or her
partner as an object that helps to preserve his or her self-esteem. Lagache (1947, quoted by Pierloot 1988) describes the love of a jealous person as a captive love contrasted with a detached love. The former wants to possess and assimilate his partner, the desire is insatiable and the partner is always experienced as a loving object of rejection. Introducing a rival offers the possibility of an honorable explanation for the rejection.

Moulton (1977) argues that men who marry women who have a stable career appear externally proud of them but somehow rely on the female strength to relieve them of the responsibility of being the breadwinner. Many men are unaware of their great need to have a strong and reliable mother with them.

This only becomes apparent when the wife becomes very successful, too busy, earning a lot of money and even being a financial help to achieve family goals. If the husband denies her independence, he becomes jealous and very competitive with his wife, in this case, she may feel that she is not loved and may use her strength against him instead of with him or for the sake of family unity (ibid.).

Pierloot (1988) states that there are some people who constantly seek confirmation of their suspicions, that their partner is unfaithful. Their conduct is based on an internal conviction, independent of any possible arguments or elements of reality. They make titanic efforts to provoke each other’s suspicions. They torment their partners to force them to confess their infidelity. By making special arrangements, they even try to push their partner into infidelity. The person seems to need to live through this uncomfortable and painful situation.

Therefore, this author points out that jealousy is an emotional state caused by the idea that another person has taken an object, as a rule, a loving object, which by right belongs to an individual, or at least that one has to share that object with another person.

There are authors who point out (Fisher, 1974; Lobsenz, 1977) that jealousy does not have a practical function since it is considered an out-of-date reaction that arises from a deficit in self-esteem as well as from an inappropriate desire to control the couple’s behaviour. However, regardless of the decline of monogamous relationships in our contemporary societies, Mullen (1991) insists that jealousy still has social relevance and interpersonal meaning since it is usually a response to infidelity, which has a moral dimension.

As for the strategies that exist to tolerate jealousy with the unfaithful couple Sinclair (1993) considers that there are three basic areas to analyze:
1. The ambivalent feeling towards the unfaithful partner that takes the form of hostility to the break-up; doing everything possible for reconciliation regardless of the price to be paid (future lack of trust, doubts about the integrity of the partner, honesty etc.); or investigating with the spouse what attracted him/her to the other partner in order to find a possibility of recovery of the partner.
2. Rivalry with the lover through: sexual fantasies; aggression with the lover; exchange of information between the faithful partner and the lover in order to review the validity of their interpretations of the reality of the situation and protect themselves from manipulation of the infidel (although these encounters are excessively painful for both parties).
3. Sexual compensation with a quarter; that is to say, for the recovery of self-esteem the faithful couple looks for a substitute that can be with the intention of provoking jealousy, a fourth person with whom they can negotiate, find someone with whom they can make an alliance, thus repeating the behaviour of the unfaithful couple.

Melanie Klein in 1934, when describing the depressive position, says that the baby is beginning to realize that he is separated from the mother. He is confronted with his inferiority and the feeling of envy towards the mother and has to face frustration, guilt and anxiety at the loss of the mother. In order to remain in a narcissistic, undifferentiated position, he attacks his internal objects, which leaves him submerged in a world without love, which he will recover with his maternal loving acts.

Seeing the younger sibling attached to the mother’s breast is a factor that connects envy and jealousy with oral eroticism. Melanie Klein (“Envy and Gratitude”, 1957) gives envy a central place in personality development, which is derived from Abraham’s description of the oral phase.

The envy for Klein (Ibid.) is operative from the beginning of life with the existence of primary envy to the mother’s breast based on the idea that the baby feels that the breast possesses everything he desires, that the milk and love he possesses are unlimited for his own gratification, even since he is well nourished.

The baby’s attitude towards the breast includes the desire to possess it as the source of all good, but also to attack it sadistically, devour its contents or spoil it by putting faeces and urine in it. The destructive part of envy is crucial in the formulation of Klein’s theory; however, it must be differentiated from the feeling of voracity because it has to do with devouring and incorporating the contents of the chest, without necessarily destroying it. In incorporation destruction is accidental, in envy it is primordial, it incorporates, but it does not destroy or annihilate as in envy. When the envied object is damaged and cannot be received it can result in a state of deprivation that becomes voracious.

Klein also says that excessive envy in a person can have profound consequences for personality development. It diminishes the person’s ability to enjoy and interferes with the neutralization of aggressive impulses. It can also be associated with an early sense of guilt that becomes a vicious circle of envy, guilt over envy, inhibition of guilt gratification, voracity/guilt, among other things. As another way of understanding infidelity, Klein brings the notion that early guilt in the baby with the mother can quickly lead from orality to premature genitality, leading to obsessive masturbation and promiscuity.

Pierloot (1988), for his part, quoting Riviere, says that she considers jealousy as a defence mechanism against envious impulses, which corresponds to Klein’s (1957) conception of child development. The envy goes first to the primary object, the mother’s breast.

In the first stage of the Oedipus complex it is directed towards the combined couple, based on the fantasies of the mother’s body inhabited by the partial objects breast, penis and babies. Jealousy to a certain extent surpasses envy, hostile feelings are directed against the rival so that the loving object can be preserved.

Stoller (1975) considers jealousy to be a phenomenon that is more mature than envy because it is related to the complexity of the triangular relationship with objects. It’s a more complex feeling that can include envy as a form of jealousy. Jealousy invariably involves three or more people. The confusion that exists between the distinction between jealousy and envy can be clarified in the following concept:

“…jealousy has its roots in envy, envy is always present in jealousy, jealousy can hide envy or envy can hide jealousy. This distinction is basic, to face the technical difficulties that may arise while interpreting pre-oedipal or oedipal contents within the psychoanalytic treatment”.

In jealousy, says Glover (1949), there are two components that are not found in envy:
a) There is an unconscious homosexuality, which causes strong tension. In a couple relationship, there is a homosexual impulse and a heterosexual impulse, however, the former is unconscious.
b) Suspicion, this is a paranoid characteristic of jealous people. This is not an affective state but the consequence caused by defences such as projection, projective identification, and externalization of libidinal or aggressive feelings.

A couple in a satisfying love relationship challenges the envy and resentment, always present in those who are excluded and those regulatory agencies and distrustful of the conventional culture in which they live. (Kernberg,1988).

Role of the mirror of the mother and the family in the development of the child

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Winnicott’s approach to the mother-baby relationship began with his work as a paediatrician and later as a psychoanalyst. His training led him to state some important things such as: “There is no such thing as a baby, if I am in front of a baby, I will surely also be in front of someone who will take care of him.”1 From this moment on, all the work of this author was based on the nature of the mother-baby relationship; he focused on the emotional development centred around this first relationship. He stopped seeing the person as an isolated being and started seeing an individual in relation to his mother. Although it was not his intention to show that the patient-analyst relationship is a replica of the early mother-baby relationship, he acknowledged that the model of the mother is good enough and should be brought into the analytical situation. The function of the analyst is to return to the patient what he or she brings, to reflect to the patient what he or she can see in him or her.

The transitional phenomenon emerges when this author accounts for the way in which the baby separates from its mother to acquire a sense of self; this ability to use the transitional space represents the ability to live creatively1 and to feel real; the ability to be alone, in short, to form one’s self.

For Winnicott, the meaning of this gaze occupies the space of the intermediate, since for the baby, the real mother and her possibility of being a consistent and reliable object is very important, but this gaze that goes beyond the factual is the one that allows the individual to see the world in a creative way, internalizing first the experience of being looked at by the mother.

This experience occurs naturally during the first few weeks of the mother-baby relationship, when the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face. This author thinks that the baby depends on the mother’s facial responses while looking at her face and that allows him to develop a sense of true self. “To feel real is more than just existing, it is to find a way to exist as oneself, and to relate to objects as oneself, and to have a person within whom one can withdraw for relaxation”1 (pp 154).

In the same vein, Winnicott distinguished between the “needs of it”, that is, the impulsive desires and the “needs of self”. Of the latter, he stated that it wasn’t appropriate to say that they are gratified or frustrated, since it has nothing to do with the search for pleasure as a download, but simply find an answer in the object, or do not find it. These needs include the desire to be seen, recognized or understood, or to share one’s subjective experience with another human being. When these needs do not find an answer, the emotional reaction of the subject is not the one of frustration, but of emptiness and hopelessness. When they do find it, what emerges is not an experience of pleasure but of harmony and wholeness.

Recognizing the essential importance of these needs of an object relationship does not mean in any way ignoring the validity of the impulsive sexual and aggressive desires. These undoubtedly exist, but under normal conditions they only manifest themselves in the context of highly personal relationships. The norm is sexual desire as part of object love, and aggressive desire as part of object hate, both inseparable from the people to whom they are addressed.

Winnicott1 tells us that the child looks at the mother’s face and that what he sees in her is himself.

The mother’s face holds an important place in the emotional development of the child. It is sustained, manipulated and is presented as an object without passing through the experience of omnipotence, i.e. in the first stage, the baby is dealing with a subjective object that is created by him. This author says that the first thing that the baby does is to look at the mother’s face, which acts as a mirror and allows him to look back at himself, he sees himself through his mother’s eyes.

What does the baby see when he looks at the mother’s face? I suggest that he usually sees himself. In other words, the mother looks at him and what she seems to see is related to what she sees in him. This is all too easily taken for granted. I ask that we do not take for granted what mothers who care for their babies do well naturally. I can express what I mean by going straight to the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own state of mind or worse still, the rigidity of her own defences. In that case, what does the baby see?

What the author says is that there are times when the mother cannot look back, because the baby looks and does not see him/herself. When this happens, his/her creative capacity is atrophied. This maternal failure can lead the infant to try to find some meaning in what he or she looks at until it provokes a threat of chaos, and the way of looking changes because it no longer aims to look at itself but becomes a defence. So when the mother doesn’t respond, the mirror is something to look at, not something to look into. Winnicott calls this process of seeing oneself in the mother’s face apperception.

The process of apperception in which the baby looks at the mother’s face and sees himself, allows him to enrich his world of meanings in such a way that:
When I look, you can see me, and therefore I exist.
Now I can afford to look and see.
Now I look creatively and what I see, I also perceive.

Winnicott considers that the environment not only provides food and a welcoming temperature, but also the real and metaphorical holding of the baby, the possibility of being handled by a fellow human being as a specific action and also that of having objects in his environment. That is why the good enough mother – Winnicott’s synthesis – implies a double function: real and metaphorical: the mother or the one who officiates as such, must be present with continuity, and must be dedicated, sensitive, vulnerable, but at the same time resistant, capable of caring for her baby and willing to be fed by her. You will be able to hate her without fear of doing so, because you will be able to trust that you will not react as a result of her hatred. She will behave in a predictable, reliable way, although she will not “initiate” an action but will be attentive to your baby’s actions, stimulating your child’s creative impulse (spontaneous gesture). The gaze, like the mirror, is real and metaphorical; it comes from the mother and the baby, and after all the others, significant to the person. First it is the mother and then the family who take over this important function for the child’s psychic development. Winnicott also talks about the baby’s gaze, looks and seeks to find himself, although he does not always manage to receive what he gives. This is how the creative capacity of the infant is atrophied.

Winnicott1 places the transitional experience between the early emergence of consciousness and the sense of realizing otherness outside of oneself. In the transitional area, the self and the other are not oneself, nor are they two, but something that together form a field of interaction. The centre of the transitional experience has to do with an innate accommodation between the infant’s creativity and the world. The transition is a space of trust where the baby creates the object but the object was there, waiting to be created and catechized.

M is a girl who came for treatment a few months after giving birth to a beautiful baby girl to whom she could not meet her needs. M was overwhelmed by her terrible nightmares that followed her day and night; in that state it was difficult for her to distinguish the dream from reality. One day she came to consult with her little girl, she had had a nightmare, she dreamed that she was finding a woman, tearing her and then throwing her pieces down the street. That day she had brought her daughter to the clinic because she felt she could not care for her in this state and with these fantasies. When the little girl cried, M did not understand her crying, she covered her ears and if she could run out of the house she would do it; if not, she would disconnect, leaving her inconsolable until she connected with her again. M experienced her pregnancy tormented: by gaining weight, seeing her body “deformed” and “no longer attractive to her husband”, these were all her major concerns to taking care of a baby for the first time. That woman in her dream, dismantled, was her and as a way to beat herself up she became a photographer while she was going under treatment, at first she became fond of taking pictures of herself, the camera did the mirror function, the patient looked for her image, she wanted the camera to give her back something of her being, something that her depressed mother could not do. She learned to fix the photographs to remove her defects.She was excited to appear perfect. She took hundreds of photographs in which she felt beautiful, she perceived herself, but she didn’t look, as Winnicott would say, looking for something that would give her back something of herself. When the mother has not been able to do her mirror function, the person will not be able to see herself as she is, she will be in search of a look that integrates her: M was a very attractive woman when she felt well but when she did not, she appeared dirty and careless. She was obsessed with her body, wanted to operate on everything, correct her stomach and breasts, “make them perfect”. She played with her photographs until she reached the perfect image she was looking for, the longed-for look of her mother.

Conference for women entrepreneurs

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Dr. Eva Marcuschamer Stavchansky
How do we women want to be accompanied?

Most women marry for companionship and children, but children are not simply considered a blessing as they also include economic and emotional problems that we have to deal with.

Surveys indicate that after a few years of marriage, almost all women are less satisfied with the partnership with their husbands. With the arrival of children, men feel the need to work harder and better, and many wives begin to feel the loss of marital intimacy. When the children grow up and reach adolescence, let’s say after 20 years of marriage, only 6% are still very satisfied and 21% are very dissatisfied. However, it has been found that once children become independent, many of the marital problems diminish.
All we know now is that women are looking for more than just good sex; they are looking for love, respect, friendship, common interests and companionship. The question is, if there is no sexual gratification, companionship, emotional stability and children, why marry?

In the 1960s there was the idea that women’s employment should be lower than men’s and that they should submit their professional needs to those of men. By the 1970s, in many households, both partners were already working, but women continued to bear the greatest burden of household and child responsibilities, a situation that prevails to this day and which has become one of the greatest conflicts between working couples.

Men have gradually become more responsible towards domestic chores, and it has become apparent that the more educated men are, the more they participate at home. Among the intellectuals, mutual help exists more than in the middle and lower class couples where husbands still think that women are responsible for domestic tasks.

There is another social revolution that is taking place and at a much slower pace in Mexico, the participation of children in domestic chores.

Today, we see more men taking care of the household and successful women working because they are more productive than men. What is notorious is that there are two groups that have found it difficult to change the way they think about gender issues: the upper and lower classes, most of whom are housewives. In the middle class, however, both members of the couple work.

Why do women like to work?

Because they do not want to be financially dependent on their husbands. Women will continue to be considered the second sex while being financially dependent on men. Some women remember their mothers asking their fathers for money and having little to say about family finances. It is true that the more financial resources a spouse brings to the marriage, the greater the negotiating power of the couple. And it is the power that affects the decision-making that any couple must make, from career advancement to the division of domestic work.

Another assumption is that women work because they don’t want to be trapped in the house, they don’t want to be part of a small world. The more educated women are, the more they seek to expand their horizons.

In addition to the increased lifespan of women, the parenting period is very short. If women become pregnant at 30 and life lasts until 80, they only spend a third of their lives as mothers. Many even stop working while their children are young and then return to work.

Today there are good marriages with minimal or bad sex and bad marriages with exceptional sex, before love made sex possible, but today young women have sex with several men and then fall in love and then decide to live together. However, sex and love are not the basis for a long lasting relationship, common interests, values and goals, mutual respect and moral commitment can be as valuable as sex, love or money in maintaining a union are required.

And while most couples today enter marriage on an equal footing in professional and work circumstances, married life is not truly egalitarian. There have been many surveys, interviews and evaluations indicating that husbands have a more positive view of marriage than their wives. Singles have more problems than married women, while women are better off single than married. And this may be because women are more stressed than their husbands because of their work and family obligations and also because they care for their children, their elderly parents and even sick relatives.

When the couple divorces, the woman loses more financially, they generally lower their standard of living by 27% while the men increase it by 10%. And this is because the mothers get custody of the children, and the help they receive is not enough, besides the fact that the women earn 75% of what the men earn, having custody of the children hinders their professional performance.

In second marriages, the husband will most likely marry someone younger than his former wife, and the wife will marry someone her age or older. Unfortunately there are fewer male candidates because there are more of older women than older men, so widows marry less than widowers. Another difference between men and women is the ability to reproduce; a woman in her fifties loses the chance to become pregnant, while men remain fertile almost all their lives.

Women have other advantages. They live an average of seven years longer than men. In addition to being able to carry children within their bodies, they establish a unique connection with their children through pregnancy and breastfeeding. They have more friends and relate better to men than vice versa.

One thing we have learned in the last 30 years is that marriage is not the only possibility in life, first because women are no longer financially dependent on men, and therefore, no longer have to marry to survive. It has been seen that women entrepreneurs marry less.

There is a phrase that says the more women are paid, the less they want to get married’ and what happens is that more than marriage, maternity has become a problem for working women given the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers. While the single woman earns 90% of what a man earns, a woman with babies earns 70%.

We are living in a time when there have never been more people living alone, more couples living together without marriage and more homosexual couples living together. There are cities and countries where laws exist for couples who live together without marriage in order to have equal rights. Also, more and more women do not want to have children. On the other hand, there are more single mothers as 40-year-old women choose to have a child without marrying the baby’s father. This has its consequences because it has been seen that these children will grow up with more financial deprivation than those who are raised by a two-parent family.

What does a woman expect when she gets married? At least 50 per cent of marriages that last a lifetime, people usually continue to marry forever in 86 per cent of cases; children are no longer expected to hold the couple together because children are known to create conflicts in a marriage, marriages that overcome the problems of children’s education are likely to achieve a strong union and this will depend on the degree of intimacy they achieve. Being the most intimate witness to another person’s life is appreciated over time and a couple will eventually have to overcome the problems of their children, the infidelity of one or both of them, the death of their parents, the struggle of their children as they grow up.

While it’s true that many spouses end their relationship when one of them has an affair, others don’t, because many people think their union is very special, even if they have extramarital relationships. In addition, since many people start their sex life before marriage, it is hoped that they will be in a monogamous relationship after the wedding. We all have temptations, men and women today have the same possibilities of being unfaithful. But infidelity does not always lead to divorce or permanent bitterness, a marriage relationship is not always a matter of sex, and often an extramarital relationship unites the couple after the event.

How do we relate to men? Through our relationship with our mother…..