The Birth of Pleasure, by Carol Gilligan

Lisa Appignanesi takes issue with the debasement of the idea of 'trauma' into everyday misery

There are times when the Atlantic is so wide and stormy that English can be tossed in at one end and come out the other in a voice that makes French or German seem far more familiar. This book, which sets out to chart a "new map of love" using Apuleius' tale of Cupid and Psyche as its compass, marks one of those moments.

It's not so much the words psychologist Carol Gilligan uses, though the meanings that have clustered round some of these occasionally make one a little dizzy. Nor is it her snippets of case history or autobiography, or dazzling range of sources: from the Bible to Proust, Freud, Anne Frank and Ondaatje. So it has to be the tone.

Oracular, incantatory, inspirational, Gilligan makes me feel I should be leaping up in my pew, joining the revolution which will link love to knowledge, pledging my allegiance to the traumatised sisterhood she describes as dissociated from its deepest self by a patriarchy that wounds its sons as well as daughters. Here I am, allergic to flags, worrying away and asking questions, even as I note islands of brilliance in this perplexing book.

In 1996 Time magazine named Carol Gilligan one of the 25 most influential people in the US. Her first book, In a Different Voice (1982), had explored the different trajectories boys and girls take in their moral development. It became a bestseller, changing both popular awareness and academic psychology in the US. Gilligan was the first to counterpoint a male ethics of rules and justice with a woman's ethics of relationship, responsibility and care. As professor of gender studies at Harvard and a psychotherapist, she carried on working with adolescent girls, mapping their points of silence and helping women find their authentic "voice". She also worked with couples in crisis. The Birth of Pleasure draws on that work.

Gilligan's underlying claim is that patriarchy (defined as the hierarchical rule of the fathers or law), even though challenged by democracy (which rests on an ideal of equality in which everyone has a voice), continues to instill in all of us a tragic narrative, in which love inevitably leads to loss, and pleasure is associated with death.

The foundational stories of Western civilisation – Oedipus, the Oresteia, the Fall – are, Gilligan writes, stories of trauma, "that shock to the psyche that leads to dissociation: our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves". We are all "trauma survivors", unable to feel authentic, split off from our souls.

I don't know whether it's an asset to democratise the sphere of trauma and dissociation. The slippage in these words, from initial use in relation to experiences such as the Holocaust and Vietnam, then to abuse, and now to everyday misery, seems just a trifle radical. Meaning becomes emptied out. If we're all wounded sufferers with little responsibility for our state, why not just revert to the language of Original Sin?

Late in the book, Gilligan does a fine exposition of the early Freud. She then parts company with the Freud of the tragic, patriarchal Oedipus, that drama of bad parenting, incestuous desires, self-sacrificial daughters. But perhaps what this later Freud, along with those tragic stories of love and conflict, show us is that we're dynamic beings: whatever our loves and pleasures, it's often difficult having a mind. The Fall doesn't just happen once and traumatise us forever. Life may be a roller coaster, but we're sometimes in the driver's seat.

Gilligan's choice of the story of Cupid and Psyche as one which provides a new vision of love is hardly a tale where understanding between the sexes is instantaneous. Psyche may get there in the end and give birth to the child Pleasure, but only after a long struggle with blind love, jealous mother-in-laws of the order of Venus, not to mention envious sisters. Love and knowledge don't come easy. I guess that's why we have therapists.

Lisa Appignanesi's 'Freud's Women' (written with John Forrester) is published by Penguin