1.
Psychoanalytic feminists explain women’s oppression as rooted
within psychic structures and reinforced by the continual repetition
or reiteration of relational dynamics formed in infancy and
childhood. Because of these deeply engrained patterns, psychoanalytic
feminists wanted to alter the experiences of early childhood and
family relations, as well as linguistic patterns, that produce and
reinforce masculinity and femininity. Critical of Freudian and
neo-Freudian notions of women as biologically, psychically, and
morally inferior to men, psychoanalytic feminists addressed political
and social factors affecting the development of male and female
subjects. Like radical feminists, they saw as key issues sexual
difference and women’s “otherness” in relation to men.
2.
The two major schools of psychoanalytic feminism are Freudian and
Lacanian. Freudian feminists, mostly Anglo-American, are more
concerned with the production of male dominance and the development
of gendered subjects in societies where women are responsible for
mothering, whereas Lacanian feminists, mostly French, analyze links
between gendered identity and language.
3.
Early “feminist” appropriations of Freud in the work of Alfred
Adler, Karen Horney and Clara Thompson emphasized the uniqueness of
each human being over rigidly gendered developmental tracks and
explained women’s psychic pathologies as generated and sustained by
their inferior social status within patriarchy, rather than
biologically determined lack. These theorists reinterpreted some
women’s neuroses as creative attempts to address ongoing social
subordination.
4.
Later feminist appropriations of Freud critique the “traditional”
family structure in which primarily women mother and assume other
care-taking responsibilities. In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy
Chodorow, for instance, argued that differential experiences in
infancy orient girls and boys toward different developmental paths,
with boys definitively separating from their mothers to identify with
the father’s social power and girls developing a more
symbiotic/continuous sense of self in relation to the mother. These
relational dynamics that emphasize autonomy and separation for boys
render men emotionally stunted and less capable of intimate personal
relationships, but better prepared for public life and the world of
work. Girls, who in contrast develop as subjects in closer relation
with their mother, have more fluid psychic boundaries that facilitate
a greater capacity for intimacy but leave them less prepared to
negotiate the public sphere. Chodorow and other object relations
theorists advocated dual parenting as one way to eliminate the
characterological imbalances generated by gendered extremes, as
children would be able to view both parents as
individuals-in-relation, experience men and women as both self- and
other-oriented, and view both sexes as inhabiting private and public
domains.
5.
Putting into practice Chodorow’s theoretical restructuring of the
family would, of course, require considering some substantial changes
in current policies and practices: reasonable parental leave,
adequate compensation for part-time work, quality childcare staffed
with both male and female caretakers, and early/elementary education
with both male and female teachers.
6.
Psychoanalytic feminists in the Lacanian mode privileged the analysis
of self-construction through discourse over the biological and
psychosocial implications of parenting, arguing that, in order to
alter gender relations, we need to change language. In Lacanian
psychoanalysis, the phallus is symbolic of the child’s entry into
language and culture under “The Law of the Father,” and Lacanian
feminists wanted to interrogate and resist oppressive constructions
of gender and sexuality encoded in language.
7.
One group of French Lacanian feminists – including Luce Irigarary,
Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement – is known for their project of
“ecriture feminine,” an attempt to write from or to discursively
embody the position of woman in order to challenge women’s
positioning in phallogocentric culture. These writers argued that
women needed to forego neutral, scientific masculine language and
embrace a rebellious creativity based in subjective experience of the
body and the feminine. In this they attempted to realize a
female/feminine sex/subject outside of patriarchal definitions of
woman. For Irigaray and Cixous, this involved celebrating women’s
diffuse and autoerotic sensuality, in contrast to the linear, focused
dynamic of “phallic” sex, as well as critiquing the symbolic
order through parody.
8. Some classic psychoanalytic feminist texts:
Judith
Butler, Gender Trouble
Nancy
Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering
Helene
Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”
Teresa
DeLauretis, Alice Doesn’t and The Practice of Love
Dorothy
Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur
Elizabeth
Grosz, Volatile Bodies
Luce
Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One
Julia
Kristeva, Desire in Language and Tales of Love
Juliet
Mitchell, Women’s Estate and Psychoanalysis and Feminism
Jacqueline
Rose, Feminine Sexuality
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