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Gender, Mothering And Relational WorkEllen Ramvi; Linda Davies

First published on: 29 April 2010

To cite this Article Ramvi, Ellen and Davies, Linda(2010) 'Gender, Mothering And Relational Work', Journal of SocialWork Practice, 24: 4, 445 — 460, First published on: 29 April 2010 (iFirst)To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/02650531003759829URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02650531003759829

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Ellen Ramvi and Linda Davies

GENDER, MOTHERING AND RELATIONAL

WORK

Relationships are fundamental to the work of teachers, nurses and social workers. Women byand large staff these occupations which are also called ‘relationship work’. In this article wecompare the feminine ideal (often implicitly derived from a maternal ideal) with the idealheld by female relation workers. We suggest that taken for granted ideals of perfectionism inmothering are carried into relation work by the female relation workers themselves and thesociety at large. As a consequence, female relationship workers have a constrained portraitof themselves, leaving little opportunity and permission to explore the difficult emotionaland situational complexities that they experience in their professional practice.Psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives allow challenging of these constraining implicitideals. We argue the need for an expanded ideal that allows for negative feelings, creativityand uncertainty in professional relationships.

Keywords gender; professional relationships; relation work; object relationstheory; feminine ideal; professional development

Introduction

Occupational groups like social workers, nurses and teachers have been calledrelational workers (Moos et al., 2004), i.e. professionals who work in close personalcontact with other people and for whom empathy and the ability to build relationshipsare crucial. Kristin, a Norwegian student teacher, expressed this about the challengesshe faces when going into work (Ramvi, 2007): ‘I think it is easy enough to get theknowledge the student needs. The problem is in a way when it is people involved,quite simply’. In other words, Kristin is not afraid of a lack of knowledge and skills, butthat the personal and relational side of her work challenges her.

Establishing relationships is to encounter vulnerability both within oneself and theother, and this calls forth every aspect of the professional’s self. In relationship work itis therefore important to acknowledge that the personal, social, and professional selvescannot be separated. Ruch (2005) uses the term relationship-based practice andexplains that this is to focus on the client, the professional self, the organizationalcontext, and the knowledge informing practice. ‘Caring’ professionals (Baines et al.,1998) is another way of naming the same occupation groups, where the use of the term‘caring’ signals that the work that takes place in the context of relationships in which

Journal of Social Work Practice Vol. 24, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 445–460

ISSN 0265-0533 print/ISSN 1465-3885 online q 2010 GAPS

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the norms of obligation, responsibility, and feelings of affection and resentmentintertwine (Baines et al., 1998, pp. 4, 5). Foster (2001) talks about helping professionsand their ‘duty to care’ which requires being emotionally ‘in touch’. The professionalsinvolved in relationship based work or caring professions have in common, in otherwords, a personal and emotional professional role that relies on relationships.

Another common feature is that by and large women staff these occupations.Women in general are expected to be nurturing, emotionally expressive, communal,and concerned about others (Valian, cited in Solari, 2006). Some will argue that thisexpectation is positive for women in professional relationship work, something thatmakes the identification with their work easier because the role is close to their genderidentity (Leidner, 1991). We want to argue against the latter, and suggest that femalerelationship workers instead have a constrained portrait of themselves, leaving littleopportunity and permission to explore the difficult emotional and situationalcomplexities that they experience in their professional practice. In this article we areplacing emotional life and gender at the heart of relationship work.

In writing this article we draw on insight from our experience both as researchersand professionals within child protection work, and nursing and the work ofelementary school teachers. We draw on material from a study on teachers (Ramvi,2007) to illustrate and ‘represent’ the relationship workers’ experience in which Bion’s(1962) theory of ‘learning from experience’ was used to explore the teachers’conditions for growth and development. It became clear how closely connected theteachers’ self-image was to their relationship with their students. This study suggeststhat if teachers are to learn from experience, schools must allow room forreconciliation between the teachers’ ideal and the reality they confront in practice.In this article we want to take this analysis further through applying a gendered analysisin understanding the construction of the ideal that teachers hold. We address this issueby asking: how does the fact of being a woman affect their ideal of professionalism inrelationship based work? We want to compare the feminine ideal (often implicitlyderived from a maternal ideal) with the ideal of female relation workers. We will arguethat the work, gender and identity are enmeshed in relationship work.

Our account of relationships in this article will build on object relations theory.This is also the recent feminist and psychoanalytic accounts of mothering (Doane &Hodges, 1992; Parker, 1997; Hollway, 2006; Featherstone, 2001). We will suggestthat these theoretical perspectives allow for the challenge of the taken for granted idealsof perfectionism in mothering. We make explicit the constraints that female relationworkers experience in implicitly carrying this ideal with them into their relationaloccupations.

Feminist theorists writing on mothering have underscored both the idealizationand denigration of mothers. This literature has identified the idealization of maternalfigures portrayed as intuitive nurturers, naturally equipped and readily available tomeet all the needs of their children (Chodorow & Contratto, 1992). Theorists havealso underlined the denigration of mothers who fail to live up to the impossible ideal ofthe all-giving and selfless nurturer. This binary understanding of good and bad mothersreinforces the persistence of mother-blame and its internalization of guilt by womenwhen their children experience problems.

While relationships are fundamental to the work of teachers, nurses and socialworkers, relationships implicitly informed by a one-sided ideal of maternal perfection,

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self-sacrifice and endless nurturing are oppressive for these workers. We will argue theneed for an expanded ideal that allows for negative feelings, creativity and uncertaintyin their relationships at work.

Gender relations

Gender is one of our culture’s two or three primary frames for organizing socialrelations (Ridgeway, 2009). Leidner (1991, p. 158) emphasizes the paradox thatconsiderable flexibility of notions of proper gender enactment does not seem toundermine the appearance of inevitability and naturalness that continues to support thedivision of labour by gender. Throughout the twentieth century, occupations likenursing, elementary school teaching and social work have been identified with‘women’s work’. These occupations are gendered, not only because the work is femaledominated, but because these occupations are performed within a ‘masculinised’organization (Britton, 1997). Britton argues: ‘ . . . the structure underlying all modernbureaucratic institutions is profoundly masculinised’ (1997, p. 814). In suchorganizations masculinity is valued but femininity is not.

A complex set of social processes is captured by the category ‘gender relations’(Flax, cited in Featherstone, 2001) and masculinity cannot be understood except inrelation to femininity and vice versa. It is critical to question the premise that men andwomen can be separated into distinct opposed or unchanging moral categories(Gerson, 2002; Moi, 2004). Moi (2004) criticizes Gilligan’s research as sexist, inopposing a masculine ‘ethic of justice’ against a female ‘ethic of care’. A moraldichotomization of gender leads to a gender stereotyped way of thinking, a way ofthinking that reduces our lived experience to two simple gender based categories.

Gendered stereotypes or ‘rules of gender’ (Ridgeway, 2009, p. 149) reflect ourbeliefs about how ‘most people’ view the typical man or woman (Eagly & Karau, andFiske, cited in Ridgeway, 2009, p. 148). These ‘rules’ are not just individual beliefs,but are culturally hegemonic beliefs. Within what Ridgeway calls the ‘primary personframe’, the instructions of behaviour encoded in gender stereotypes are exceedinglyabstract and diffused. She contrasts this with the ‘institutional frameworks’ (e.g. thework place) that are much more specific with defined roles and expected relationsamong them. However, we argue that in relationship work the institutional frame isless specific because the role is both personal and professional. Thus the primary personframe becomes more powerfully relevant for relationship workers, both because theinstitutional frame is less specific and because organizational activities are gendered.

In this article we do not want to undertake universalist theorizing about theposition of women within relationship work. However our goal is to put sex on theagenda to understand the particular emotional difficulties in doing relationship workthat women experience. Together a psychoanalytic and a feminist conception ofpractice may capture an aspect of a very complex and contradictory set of socialrelations (Flax, cited in Featherstone, 2001). We bring to light similarities between aprofessional ideal among female relation workers and our cultural view of femininityand motherhood.

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Maternal perfectionism — a one-sided view

Many women describe becoming a mother as a life changing experience. Discourses

constructing mothers abound in the literature. It could be the self-sacrificing saintly

carer in the house; the selfish overindulgent woman; and the sinister all-powerful

monster (Kaplan, cited in Cole, 2007). There is also a discourse of care which idealizes

mothers as carers and nurturers, conceptualizing women as strong in the face of

adversity and emotionally resilient (Mirza & Blackmore, cited in Cole, 2007).In the nineteenth century the ideal mother would guide children to moral

perfectionism. In the twenty-first century the notion of good womanhood is still potent

(Kennedy, 2009). Our society still attaches a heightened moral value to motherhood

with pressure to become the perfect idealized mother. Mothers themselves of course

also hold these fantasies. We can acknowledge this for example by the way many

women feel incapable of admitting the negative feelings they may have towards their

new baby after childbirth because they feel they are unnatural and that they would be

judged as such. Kennedy (2009) identifies mythologies around ‘good womanhood’ in

her work as a court psychiatrist that permeates decision-making. She claims that

prosecutors often seek to present women on trial as unnatural. Motz (2009) found that

the fact of maternal abuse can be overlooked in the face of the dearly held beliefs about

the sanctity of motherhood and the protective nature of the so-called ‘maternal

instinct’. In contemporary child-rearing manuals, the message is conveyed that a good

mother knows naturally how to mother if she will only follow her instinct.The denial of negative feelings and sentimentalization of motherhood can help to

explain the pain for professionals, as well as the public, in recognizing and processing

seemingly unbearable material that challenges deeply held ideas about mothers. Cooper

(2005, cited in Motz, 2009) for example, describes the profound difficulty for child

protection workers in acknowledging and acting on evidence of severe abuse in the case

of Victoria Climbie, stating that: ‘The workers in Victoria’s case both saw and did not

see what was in front of their own eyes’ (Cooper, 2005, cited in Motz, 2009, p. 8).In our cultural ideology the idealization and sentimentalization of motherhood runs

hand in hand with their denigration (Chodorow & Contratto, 1992). In a culture where

dominant constructions of the ‘good mother’ as an idealized nurturer persist, guilt and

anxiety experienced by mothers towards their child will intensify. Expressing

ambivalent feelings is culturally taboo. Chodorow and Contratto (1992, p. 65) claim

that the quality of rage we find in ‘blame-the-mother’ literature is because: ‘psyche and

culture merge here and reflexively create one another’. The underlying unconscious

rage has its roots in superego and omnipotent fantasies of care and repair, reified by

management and government directives (Davies, 2008). We have to turn to object

relations theory to understand how the unrealistic and one-sided ideal also stems from

the inner world of mothers themselves. This theoretical lens acknowledges the

contradictory emotions inherent in all relationships. Psychoanalytic ideas offer

relational understandings of intrapsychic experience and explain why it can be difficult

to see even what is in front of your own eyes.

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Feminist and object relations’ conceptions of practice

We all know by experience that to love and care for other people can be difficult attimes. In some situations we can recognize feelings of anger, hostility, envy etc., but inothers we are not aware of these feelings, we just act upon them. Parker (1997, p. 17)describes maternal ambivalence as an emotional position constituting a ‘complex andcontradictory state of mind shared variously by all mothers, in whom loving and hatingfeelings for children exist side by side’. Ambivalence is central to mother–childrelationships, according to Parker, and yet it is ‘curiously hard to believe in’ (1997,p. 17) and very painful to experience.

The psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion (1962) formulates his thoughts on emotionallearning through the concepts of projective identification and container–contained.Mother–child communication is presented as a prototype or model for understandingimportant dimensions within relationships.1 The person looking after the child musthave the ability to receive the child’s ambivalent feelings and contain them, so that thechild can gradually learn to contain them itself. Bion describes this as learning fromexperience. Emotional learning is thus understood as the ability to contain the feelingsone has in relation to the interactions one is a part of.

Yet the ability to hold on to ambivalent feelings and to sustain successful caringrelationships with others requires depressive position functioning (Klein, 1949) and isrecognized as a challenge throughout our life. Ambivalence is threatening to ouridentity. In contrast, paranoid–schizoid position functioning (Klein, 1949) is a state ofmind in which we use the unconscious dynamics of splitting and projection to ridourselves of conflict (Foster, 2001, p. 81). This is how our view becomes ‘one sided’,and blinds us to what is really going on in our relationships. When confronted withthe unbearable we stop thinking and avoid giving meaning to these experiences(Rustin, 2005).

Processes of projection, introjection and identification between mother and infant(Bion, 1962) show the mutuality in this relationship. It is not just the child who isdependent on the mother but the mother is also dependent on the child. In Winnicott’stheory a basic dialectic is presented where mother and infants create each other, amutual ego-development. Winnicott (1985) is known for his expression: ‘There is nosuch thing as a baby, only a mother and a baby’. It becomes a circle reaction; where thechild feels like being held, and the mother feels like being a good mother. The circlecan, of course, also be negative.

This same analysis can be extended to address the working relationships ofteachers, nurses and social workers. There is projection and identification in bothdirections from the client/student to the workers and from the workers to theclient/students. This provides a frame to understand how boundaries betweenrelationship workers and client/students are built and how the workers’ identitiesdevelop and how threatening it can be when these identities are challenged. It isimportant to emphasize that the relationship can both provide growth but alsoregression, both for the worker and the client/student.

Likierman (1988) envisages that mothers have their own ‘interests’ within themother–child relationship and this idea is fruitful in the comparison with relationshipworkers. Likierman herself draws a parallel to adults in making the point that wewouldn’t doubt for a minute that both parties have a need for mutual ‘self-expression’

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in the case of a mature relationship (1988, p. 29). She wants to highlight the point thata mother loves her child for her own sake as well. She is of the opinion that we are indanger of idealizing altruism in the role of being a mother if we don’t think in this way.

The reluctance to admit to the negative emotions they experience may leavemothers with no place to turn to diffuse or process their feelings of ambivalence andguilt. Instead, women fear social denigration as failed mothers. In this picture there islittle room for ambivalence, hate, and aggression etc., in our understanding of normalmaternal emotions. This unrealistic portrait of maternal caring implicitly informs theideal of caring that relationship workers carry (Davies et al., 2007).

To rectify this distorted picture, we will address a ‘two-sided’ ‘psycho-social’subject, which posits an understanding of ourselves and others as influenced by bothinner (psychic) and outer (social) phenomena (see Hollway & Jefferson, 2003;Froggett, 2002). Drawing on object relations theory, Hollway and Jefferson (2003,p. 24) describe the psycho-social subject this way:

It is psychic because it is the product of a unique biography of anxiety-producinglife events and the manner in which they have been unconsciously defendedagainst. It is social in three ways: first: because such defensive activities affect andare affected by discourses (systems of meaning which are a product of the socialworld); secondly, because the unconscious defences that we describe areintersubjective processes (that is, they affect and are affected by others); and,thirdly, because of the real events in the external, social world which arediscursively and defensively appropriated.

The subject both possesses an unconscious dimension and at the same time isunderstood as operating in a social world of gendered relations and hierarchies, etc.The psycho-social subject has agency though is not necessarily in a position to exercisethis reflexively (Frost & Hoggett, 2008, p. 440). The psycho-social subject, in otherwords, is not necessarily knowledgeable about herself (her actions, feelings andrelations).

In the next section, we will illustrate these ideas through an examination of studentteachers in Norway.

The case of teachers

Relationship work suffers from a peculiar degree of integration of the professional andthe personal where the professional and personal ideals are intertwined. We want toillustrate how the everyday life of a female relationship worker is influenced by a mix ofthe ‘feminine’ and the ‘maternal’ and of the private and the professional. To illustratethis we use material from a one-year fieldwork project at two different Norwegianmiddle schools. In Ramvi’s (2007) PhD dissertation a full methodological discussion ofthe project may be found (see also Ramvi, accepted). The main informants were twoteachers (Kristin and Solveig, both 26 years old) in their first year of work (2002–2003) after graduation from Teachers’ Training College. They were observed in theirdaily life, in the classroom, in the staffroom, and at different staff meetings. After thefieldwork had gone on for some time and various events had taken place, other teachersand the rest of the school administrations from the two schools were included in the

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sample.2 The two newly trained teachers nevertheless formed the base as keyinformants. Data were collected through more or less structured conversations withteachers and by field observation. In many situations the conversations were recordedfor later transcription. Field notes were also taken on a regular basis.

The empirical research method was influenced by ethnographic fieldwork (Atkinson &Hammersley, 1998), free association narrative interview (Hollway & Jefferson, 2003) andthe clinical infant observation method (Miller et al., 1989), each adding somethingimportant to the researcher’s ability to grasp the teachers’ emotional experience.

The study clearly showed that maintaining strong ideals was important in theteachers’ work and in their sense of themselves as developing professionals. Here wewant to reflect upon these teachers’ ideals from both a gendered, as well as apsychodynamic point of view. To set the context for this study, we first present a briefsummary of the contemporary discourse around female teachers in Norway when thisstudy was undertaken.

The discourse of the feminization in school

Schools have been much debated in Norway lately. In particular, the results from thePISA investigation3 provoked and fuelled public debate, and the academic quality inschools was questioned. This investigation claimed that boys do less well than girls inalmost every respect, and there were assertions that a ‘feminization’ of the school wasone of the reasons for the bad PISA results. It was argued that the feminized school isoverly concerned with emotions and relations and not adequately concerned with factsand subject content. ‘Feminization’ is also seen as partly responsible for the superiorschool achievement of girls over boys (the feminized school suits girls’ passivecharacteristics such as submission and self-deprecation at the expense of the activecharacteristics of dominance and self-aggrandizement attributed to boys).

Despite this claim Bakken et al., (2008) found in a review of empirical research ofthe schools’ role in sex discrimination that there is little empirical support for theaccount of boys as losers and the girls as winners in the contemporary school. Bakken’sreview also found little support for the assertion that it is a feminization of the schoolthat is responsible for boys’ lower marks.

The debate both among politicians and researchers has been characterized by astereotyped and archaic view on gender categorizing ‘the masculine’ and ‘thefeminine’, and has been suffused with pervasive blaming of teachers. This ‘teacherblame’ echoes the discourse of mother blame, which we will return to later. Now letus turn to the teachers’ own account of ideals and relationships.

Professional ideals about a good relation

One of the main findings of the study is that the teachers’ identity is strongly linked totheir professional ideal. The intertwined professional and personal role was evident forboth male and female teachers. Gunnar said: ‘You are a teacher with your wholebeing’. However, a culturally feminine ideal — whether wanted or not — in someway structures identity for all women. Thus, just as we know there are highexpectations to be a good mother, it also became evident that the teachers had veryhigh expectations (ideals) of themselves as good teachers.

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The main informants, Kristin and Solveig, both linked their self-image to the kindof relationships they had with their students. They had high ambitions for how thisrelationship should be, ideally. On the basis of their accounts it was possible to definegood contact between teacher and student as a relationship of trust where both showthat they care about each other; the student by being open and willing to talk abouthimself or herself, and the teacher by offering care and concern. This kind of ‘goodrelationship’ makes the teachers feel they are good teachers.

There was little to indicate that teachers were aware of how personal theirdescriptions of the student–teacher relationship were. Kristin said, ‘we’re notsupposed to be a mother to our students’. At the same time, Solveig referred to thestudents in her classes as ‘my “kids”’. She said for example: ‘I have to look after mykids’, ‘people had better not be nasty to my kids’ and the like.

Solveig is very concerned with relationships and says: ‘You cannot do anythingwith the students unless you have a relationship with them. You will not mean anythingto them’. Let us use some of her account to illustrate how a good relation with studentsis connected to her self-esteem. Solveig describes a relationship with Espen which shecharacterizes as good. Espen had shown her ‘incredible trust’ she said. Solveig in turnhad felt:

Care — terribly much care. I try to explain to him why it is so important that heworks, and that I am concerned about him ( . . . ) when you get such a relationshipof trust with a student, you know them better and you know they care for you.( . . . ) I am very concerned with respect and trust towards the student and clearly Iappreciate when the student gives me the same back, that they come to me withtheir problems, that they open up. Then I feel I have done what I want to do.

Solveig thinks of another good experience with a student and speaks about Laurawho came to talk to her: she ‘unburdened herself’, said Solveig. Solveig felt thesituation was good because: ‘She (Laura) contacted me. I experienced it as showingtrust. It warms me. Why me? ( . . . ) Then I feel that I have achieved something. Then Ihave shown myself to be that person that I want to be’. Solveig elaborated what shemeant by ‘a person that I want to be’:

That is a person that people can come to. I want to be a person the students knowcares, and wants to offer much. I would have done everything for them, I wouldhave gone and picked them up at home if I knew it would help, and . . . that is theperson I want to be, and . . . I hope that I manage to keep at it. So [in therelationship with Laura] I got a confirmation, in a way, for my own part . . . I musthave done something right.

Solveig’s ideal is also largely concerned with what she ‘accomplishes’ in herrelationship with students or what she fails to accomplish. She said:

The change I have tried and hoped to accomplish in him, to build his selfconfidence . . . and so [she did not succeed] ( . . . ) Now it was just to get himthrough the school year. And when I started to realise that, I was very frustrated. . . you are not able to do the job you intended to do.

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As a consequence of not being able to accomplish the change ‘in’ the student shewanted, the student seemed less important to Solveig. It made her distance herselffrom him, wanting to remove the student in question — mentally or physically.

What about difficult relations?

Since a good relation with a student gave the teacher a feeling of being a competent,good teacher, it was important to understand what teachers did when they did not havethis good connection, when they disliked the students. However, during the individualinterviews in the fieldwork, not a single teacher said that they disliked students. Tora,an experienced teacher said: ‘I must not show a student that I don’t like him. I mean,it’s not permitted not to like a student’.

The pressure to have a good relationship with the students was so strong that apoor relationship could not be described. Poor relationship implied negative feelingsaimed directly at students. Feelings like this could not be spoken of. They spoke insteadof absent relationships. Absent relationships could certainly make teachers feelinadequate, but this, they were able to articulate. Kristin, for example, described astudent who gave little response to her and who never asked for contact. She said thatstudents like him were the most difficult:

I am afraid of not meaning something to him. He gives me the impression that I donot mean anything to him. So I am afraid that he will have a feeling that he does notmean anything to me, if you understand? ( . . . ) I am afraid that because I do not getto know him he feels that I do not care.

Solveig also experienced a student she didn’t connect with as the most difficult. Ina conference with Solveig, a student had just answered monosyllabically: ‘don’t know’,‘sure’. Solveig said:

Strange stuff. I see myself as straightforward. As a rule, I get a good connectionwith most. But to sit with a student where you are absolutely unable to connect( . . . ) I feel . . . I feel very insecure, I sink as a person. Thus the confidence Inormally have, the faith I have in everything and . . . being able to stand in front ofpeople . . . everything fell apart in that situation. The student dominated with notanswering . . . and shut me out . . . and [it was] . . . terrible. She shut mecompletely out . . . I meant nothing.

Both by talking about good relationships and absent relationships, the teachersillustrated their high ideals of mutual recognition and trust in relationships. It is clearhow personally they experienced their role, and how dependent their self-esteem isupon the relationship with the student. The data suggest that teachers also have theirown strong needs for confirmation in a student–teacher situation (cf. Likierman’spoint that a mother doesn’t just see herself as a responsive care giver; she wants toknow that she’s a good mother, someone the child wants for a mother, someone who ispersonal and not just functional).

Through a psychoanalytic lens there is something omnipotent about the teachers’relational ideal, an omnipotent belief that their ever increasing personal involvementwas the route to success. It can be interpreted as stemming from a narcissistic aim,

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namely teachers’ need to hold onto their self-image by idealizing the potential for goodrelationships and the fundamental belief in the good of humanity. Tora said: ‘I have abasic belief that everyone wants to be good, that we all want to make others happy.I don’t think people really are destructive’.

While ‘liking’ the student was clearly considered necessary to have a good relation,and therefore feel like a good teacher, this ideal became even more complicated by afeeling of being ‘seen through’ by the students. Kristin said: ‘I think the student sees usas open books’. In this instance, negative feelings complicate the teacher’s ability to bea good teacher. When you are supposed to show that you ‘like all’, it is impossible tohave negative feelings, especially if you feel that you can be ‘seen through’.

Thus when the situation feels impossible the teachers distance themselves fromtheir relationships with students in order to maintain an omnipotent way of relating.With a high ideal it is easy to fail when confronting reality. Both Solveig and Kristinwere afraid of not being the ideal person they wanted to be. The relationships withtheir students verified whether they were able to be that person or not.

They don’t talk about relationships

Despite the view that their relationships with their students are very important to beable to do a good job, it was not evident how teachers acted on this conviction. Thiswas reflected in a theme in the focus group interviews where Trine (47 years) said:‘Conversations like this (where they discussed relationships and focused on poorrelationships), I cannot remember having had [such conversations] with my colleagues’.The teachers often spoke about the students in the teachers’ room and with each other,but in a way that Kristin describes as, ‘Today he did this’ and ‘Do you know what hesaid to me?’ and the like. They exchanged stories over which they shook their heads orlaughed. The teachers have in other words a work environment where theyunconsciously defend against recognition of their own emotional discomfort.

Although there was an acceptance among leaders and teachers about theimportance of reflection on their work relationships, at the same time it seemeddifficult to put into practice. Something kept the teachers stuck in the concrete day-to-day planning and prohibited them from reflecting upon difficult relations. One reasoncould be that relationships are too difficult to talk about. The teachers’ frustrationswere often connected to infringement in relationships, e.g. being lied to, feeling abreak of trust etc. When this happened they felt ‘used’, felt ‘powerlessness’, ‘anger’etc. It is difficult to put feelings like this into words for both male and female teachers,and again we are confronted with how personal the role of a teacher is. Gunnar said:‘One could talk about being a teacher as a professional, but a large part of our job,especially in relationships, is about your own nature. It is not so easy to talk to othersabout your whole being’. Erling commented to Gunnar: ‘Yes it is easier to talk aboutold Pythagoras, than how to handle a student’.

Another fact was the teachers had little experience engaging in each other’sproblems. Hilde talked about a staff meeting saying: ‘What surprised me was that theteachers who have worked here a long time, many of them were quiet, didn’t sayanything. I missed that, because I really wanted to hear others, eh . . . experiencedteachers. ( . . . ) They said nothing about their experience’. Some teachers had

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experienced peer supervision but it had ended because it was not ‘popular among theteachers. It was very scary’.

An unwritten rule was recognized among the teachers that teachers must notcriticize each other’s way of teaching. Kristin describes this unwritten rule:

I don’t interfere in your things, and you don’t interfere in mine. ( . . . ) My thingsare, for example, my subject and the students I teach, the way I choose to teachthem and how I organize the teaching. That’s my business. We often havediscussions about this and that, and then it’s fine to say what you like, that’s noproblem, but then you are speaking more generally.

Within a work culture characterized by not interfering with each other and havingdifficulties talking about relationships, teachers can be overwhelmed by the individualfeelings of responsibility for their students, and the guilt feelings connected to this.Solveig said she experienced ‘panic’ at having the responsibility and control foreverything in a class. Anne said she felt responsible when things went wrong, whenthere were problems with the class. It comes back to her, as she said:

You’re left with a feeling of sort of having failed too, because you can’t turn thestudent around and make him do what you want and what’s normal ( . . . ) It reallyall comes back to you. Because you feel responsible for the class as a whole, whenyou have a problem in the class, it comes back to you and you’re thinking: whatcan I do so that we don’t have that problem?

A result of a ‘culture of blame’ was that the teachers had a great unmet need forrecognition and confirmation amongst each other. A ‘common agreement’ of notcriticizing each other had developed. There was also a tendency for the teachers todefend their own class and their own student. For, as one teacher said, ‘it’s reallyourselves we are defending’.

Being a woman in relationship work

Culture of blame

Even if women today claim the right and the need to seek autonomy and personalgratification beyond caring commitments, a feminine maternal ideal underpinswomen’s practice of relationship work. What we are confronted with in the case ofteachers is similar to the fantasy of the perfect mother (Chodorow & Contratto, 1992)that mothers experience.

The view in our society on ‘doing’ of gender is evident in the contemporaryNorwegian critique of the school in general and of the individual teacher in particular.Women workers dominate teaching and the work is thus associated with femalefeatures. In the ‘teacher blame’ occurring in Norway, culturally feminine features areattributed to female teachers (e.g. to be emotional and concerned with care) andsubsequently teachers are criticized for exactly the same attributes (i.e. too much‘cosiness’ in the school means that the students are not learning enough). A psychicunderstanding is that we split via projective identification human capacitiesinto dichotomously defined attributes of gender that are then ascribed to teachers.

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For the government and public the gender segregation in the school becomessomething negative as evident in the Norwegian discourse on teachers. The society‘blames the teachers’. In turn, the teachers blame the students who are seen to frustratethe teachers’ perfectionism, or gendered ideal of themselves as good teachers.

The professional duty to care is, in other words, accepted by female teachersthemselves, their organizations and by society at large. An external culture of blame,which seeks to apportion blame and individualize failure, will, according to Foster(2001), produce even greater levels of anxiety than the relation work itself produces,with the result that individuals are even more likely to resort to splitting as a defenceagainst the pain of this experience. The teachers try to eliminate ‘teacher-blame’ andthe feelings of personal responsibility by building a collective social defence system(Ramvi, 2007) where, for example, no one criticizes each other and no one talks abouttheir relationships.

Implications for change

It is important to move beyond the mythical ideal of the perfect relationship(in relationship work) implicitly adopted from our fantasy of the perfect mother, butstill be able to draw on the mother–child relationship as a model for how contact andcommunication are built in relationships. Object relations theory provides anopportunity to understand the simultaneous dynamics of individuality andintersubjectivity that can support the argument that self-differentiation and thecapacity to care may enhance each other (Hollway, 2006).

Female teachers as well as all teachers and relationship workers in general need toaccept the feeling of being a person who is capable of both good and bad feelings andactions. Without this acceptance, it is difficult for relationship workers to verbalizenegative or hostile feelings towards those in their care. What we have argued in thisarticle is that it is even harder to accept this as a woman, because of a gendered idealconnected to relationships. It is painful to recognize oneself as a professional who is notable to live up to the implicit ‘maternal ideal’ towards students or clients. The teachersare afraid of being found at fault. The teachers’ ideal is to be able to integrate and giveevery student equal treatment and learning opportunities. The anxiety of not being ableto know and like and be fair to all students is threatening to their professional identityand to their gendered view of women in relationships. Instead, relationship workersshould be able to accept themselves as vulnerable and ‘good enough’, not perfect.There should be opportunities to be reflective about their own work.

The feminine gendered ideal of a good relationship underlies the practice ofteachers and other relation workers but is clearly not explicitly recognized. In women’swork the typically feminine is not subject to examination, while in men’s work there isoften an emphasis on typically masculine characteristics required, claims Britton(1997). She also argues that with gender neutral training, women will not be preparedfor the job. She refers to women entering male dominated work, but we argue that thisis the same problem for women entering female dominated work. In relationaloccupations dominated by women, interpersonal skills are taken for granted and areseen as natural and a matter of course (both for men and women). In this way supposedfeminine characteristics associated with relationship work are implicit and therefore

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not explicitly addressed. At the same time, the value placed on gender neutralityprevents an examination of a distorted feminine ideal connected to relation work.

These ideals do not constrain male relation workers in the same way. Standards ofhegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995) encourage men to perform caring tasks froman emotionally safe distance (in Solari, 2006). Raising these issues in the training ofrelationship workers or at the workplace runs the risk of being characterized asessentialist or sexist [this is also argued, for example, by Benjamin (1988) and Britton(1997)]. Gender neutral training thus leaves women in female work as inadequatelyprepared for the challenges they will actually face on the job as they are when theyenter male dominated work. They are not equipped to recognize their own tendencyto identify with a gendered ideal of relationships, and the difficulties connected withsuch distorted ideals.

In this way, women in relation work resort to what Ridgeway (2009) calls ‘aprimary cultural frame’ of gender to guide them in their role, and thus are more likelyto enact essentialist expressions of gender. This became evident in the study of teacherswho were not aware of how closely connected their professional ideal was to afeminine, maternal ideal. On the contrary, their ideal was not explicitly spoken of andthis left each female teacher alone to struggle to find a realistic ideal when they beginworking. The image of gender-neutrality thus contributes to hindering women’spossibilities to explore or overcome their constrained gendered ideal of relationships atwork.

In a study of burnout, Vanheule & Verhaeghe (2004)4 found it likely that burnoutamong relation workers is linked to people’s expectations concerning the outcomesthey aim to realize. Burnout coincides with the experience of not succeeding in theirprofessional encounters and with difficult interpersonal relations betweenprofessionals, on the one hand, and clients, colleagues and superiors, on the otherhand. The primary characteristics of high-scoring respondents on burnout in Vanheuleand Verhaeghe’s study have strong similarities with the characteristics of the femaleteachers presented in this paper. Vanheule and Verhaeghe claim that high-scoringrespondents see it as a duty to help, they clearly long to affect clients and fantasizeabout achieving clear results in working with them. This echoes Solveig’s description:‘The change I have tried and hoped to accomplish in him’. Vanheule & Verhaeghe(2004) suggest that low-scoring respondents on burnout have a less crystallized imageof the outcome they aim for.

There is a strong overlap between what Vanheule and Verhaeghe calls ‘self definedaims’ and what we refer to as the gendered maternal ideal among female relationshipworkers. Women’s gendered ideal may promote crystallized images of how a goodrelationship should be (guided by her primary cultural frame of gender). If so, aconsequence according to Vanheule and Verhaeghe could be that women in relationwork have more difficulties in establishing a reasonable and functional distance fromtheir students which in the long run may lead to a dysfunctional distance thatsometimes ends in generalized cynicism.

The ‘free speech’ (Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2004) or ‘reflective spaces’ (Foster,2001) we suggest for female relationship workers is both recognition of the anxiety inthe relationships and the need to examine the power of invisible gendered maternalideal guiding such relationships. Relationship workers need space and time wherenegative and ambivalent feelings can be openly discussed. One of the key areas where

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this change could be pursued is in the arena of supervision. Adopting psychoanalyticallyinformed supervision practices could guide an examination of the complexrelationships that develop within relational work and attend to the suppressedemotions and motivations that are not necessarily clearly apparent to workers. Theirsubjectivity could be seen as a developmental journey where they can incorporateambivalence and a range of emotions in their relationship based work and this lays theground for creativity in their practice. It is also important to introduce realisticappraisals of what can and cannot be done (Ruch, 2005).

Formative and ongoing training of teachers and other relationship workers needsto include opportunities to internalize the knowledge of how their psychologicaldynamics influence relationships and decisions in the workplace. The integration ofideas from feminist theory with psychoanalytically derived ideas makes an importantcontribution to a mature understanding of relationship based work.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a 12-month (2008/2009) Canadian government Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (a programme in Foreign Affairs and InternationalTrade-Canada) at McGill University, Montreal, Canada for Ellen Ramvi.

Notes

1 This comparison has a long tradition in object relations theory (e.g. Klein, 1959;Money-Kyrle, 1961; Salzberg-Wittenberg, 1970).

2 The researcher spent 326 hours over 99 days in fieldwork. Twelve individual teacherinterviews were conducted at one school (some of them several times, eight womenand four men), and eight individual teachers at the other school (some of them severaltimes, seven women and one man). Four focus groups were also conducted, two ateach school.

3 PISA: The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment.4 Vanheule and Verhaeghe have studied professional burnout (Vanheule et al., 2003;

Vanheule & Verhaeghe, 2004) from a Lacanien point of view of intersubjectivity.

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Ellen Ramvi, PhD, is an associate professor, in the Department of Health Studies, at the

University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research interest focuses on professional

development, relationship-based practice, gender, psychoanalysis and organizations.

Dr Ramvi is a member of the International Research Group for Psycho-Societal Analysis

(IRGPSA) and the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations

(ISPSO). Address: The Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Stavanger, 4036

Stavanger, Norway. [email: ellen.ramvi@uis.no]

Linda Davies is Full Professor in the School of Social Work, McGill University. She has

conducted research and authored numerous publications in the area of mothering,

fathering and child welfare practice. Address: School of Social Work, McGill University,

3506 University, Montreal H3A 2A7, Quebec, Canada. [email: linda.davies@mcgill.ca]

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