Psychoanalytic Feminism

First published Mon May 16, 2011

This article will discuss psychoanalytic feminism, not feminist psychoanalysis (i.e., except indirectly, it will not address ideas about developing feminist principles in clinical practice, although most of the authors discussed below are trained analysts). Psychoanalysis develops a theory of the unconscious that links sexuality and subjectivity ineluctably together. In doing so, it discloses the ways in which our sense of self, and our political loyalties and attachments, are influenced by unconscious drives and ordered by symbolic structures that are beyond the purview of individual agency. It might appear at the outset that any alliance between feminism and psychoanalysis would have to be coordinated on treacherous ground: in Sigmund Freud's lecture on Femininity, for instance, while discussing the riddle of femininity (Freud 1968 [1933], 116) or of sexual differentiation, Freud's rhetoric impeaches women as the problem (113) and excuses members of his audience from this indictment by offering the hope that they are more masculine than feminine (117). Many feminists have been wary both of the biases contained in Freud's oratory and of the overt content of his claims. This article will explain how and why feminist theory has, nonetheless, undertaken a serious reading of Freud and developed careful analyses of his fundamental concepts, working out their limits, impasses, and possibilities. In the same essay cited above, Freud writes that psychoanalysis does not try to describe what a woman isthat would be a task it could scarcely performbut sets about enquiring how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition (Freud 1968 [1933], 116). In using the term bisexual, Freud refers to a quality of the sexual instinct, not a relation to a sexual object (which would be denoted by the term inversion); the bisexual child is one who psychically is not yet either a man or a woman, whose instinctual life functions prior to sexual difference. Freud here portrays femininity as one trajectory of the Oedipal Complex and indicates that sexed identity is a fragile achievement rather than a natural given or essence. By circumscribing the terrain on which the psychoanalytic account of sexual difference moves, and by seeing unresolved, even unresolvable, riddles where others might see the work of nature or culture, Freud problematizes any causal, seamless, or direct tie between sex, sexuality, and sexual difference. Psychoanalytic inquiry does not fit comfortably with, and even unsettles, biological theories of sex and sociological theories of gender, thus also complicating the sex/gender distinction as it has often been formulated in feminist debates. While sex and gender are sometimes construed in feminist theory in terms of the contrast between biology and culture, or nature and nurture, Freud's theory, as discussed below, challenges these dualisms, developing an account of the sexual drive that traverses the mental and the physical, and undergoes idiosyncratic vicissitudes rather than assuming a uniform anatomical or social shape. Whatever the hazards of Freud's writings on women, then, his work

explores in new ways the meaning and possibilities of sexed identity. Likewise, as I will argue below, psychoanalytic feminism interrupts many assumptions about what feminism is and the conceptual and material objects it theorizes, including especially the very concept of woman. In unsettling our understanding of this concept, psychoanalysis also poses questions to feminism about the value of difference and the quest for equality, and the unresolved tensions between these divergent pursuits. While there is no doubt a vast ouvre of disparate positions that might fall within the framework of psychoanalytic feminism, what is shared in common is a descent from, respect for, and some minimal borrowing of Freudian accounts of the unconscious, even while criticizing and/or revising his theoretical apparatus. Any properly psychoanalytic theory must at the least offer an account of the unconscious and its bond with sexuality and, arguably, death. Precisely this descent, however, has also provided a barrier to feminist deployment since Freud is sometimes read, at least superficially, as proffering misogynist, and perhaps Procrustean, elaborations of psychic structuration, curtailing and diminishing the diversity of individual women's experiences into a restricted and unvarying formula that will fit within its own theoretical parameters. Nevertheless, Freud's reflections and hypotheses concerning hysteria, the Oedipal Complex, female sexuality and femininity, and women's role in civilization, among other ideas, have provided the volatile grounds, the sites of contention, for feminist re-articulation. Before any of the multiple and divergent articulations of psychoanalytic feminism can be discussed in more detail, we must thus first establish their historical roots and the conceptual terrain on which they arise. Since a great deal of psychoanalytic feminist theory is specifically concerned with revising the Oedipal narrative of Freud, this article will devote particular attention to Freud's theories of the unconscious as they pertain to the Oedipal Complex.

. Feminist Criticism of Psychoanalysis

Even in Freud's circle, not all analysts agreed with Freud's assessment and there were debates concerning women's sexuality and the roles of castration and penis envy therein, notably among Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones, Helene Deutsch, and Karen Horney. Horney in particular argued for an inherent feminine disposition that is not merely a secondary formation premised on castration and she took issue with the ostensible effects of penis envy and women's supposed feelings of inferiority. As with some later feminist criticisms of Freud, Horney attempted to retrieve female sexuality, and by extension a valid form of feminine existence, by appealing to a genuinely independent nature and holding culture culpable for women's subordinate status. By thus reasserting the primacy of biological and social forces, however, Horney disputes precisely the idea that is central to Freud's hypothesis and that marks psychoanalysis as a unique field of inquiry, that of a distinctive psychical realm of representation that is unconscious.

Somewhat later, Simone de Beauvoir addressed the discourse of psychoanalysis in The Second Sex (1989 [1949]), devoting an early chapter to her distrust of The Psychoanalytic Point of View (Beauvoir 1989, 3852). Like Horney, Beauvoir denounces Freud's idea that there is but one, masculine, libido and no feminine libido with its own original nature (Beauvoir 1989, 39). Freud, in her view, takes for granted what he needs to account for, namely the value placed on virility. Beauvoir takes Freud to task for not considering the social origins of masculine and paternal power and privilege and deems his theory inadequate to account for woman's otherness. If women envy men, she argues, it is because of the social power and privilege they enjoy, and not because of anatomical superiority. Unlike the determinisms and objectifications of human life offered by biological science (which treats human beings as determinate objects in the natural world and thus not as free or self-determining subjects with agency), but similar to the economic monism of historical materialism (Beauvoir 1989, 52), psychoanalysis is characterized by Beauvoir as sexual monism (Beauvoir 1989, 52): everything in its purview is interpreted through a single lens. Beauvoir indicates at the opening of the chapter that psychoanalysis offers a perspective which she does not intend to criticize as a whole (Beauvoir 1989, 38), especially since it does understand that no factor becomes involved in the psychic life without having taken on human significance (Beauvoir 1989, 38), but she questions both its dogmatic reliance on determinate elements of development and its embarrassing flexibility on a basis of rigid concepts (Beauvoir 1989, 38). Most seriously, in Beauvoir's view, psychoanalysis allots to women the same destiny of self-division and conflict between subjectivity and femininity that follows from social dictates and biological norms. Psychoanalysis presents the characteristics of femininity and subjectivity as divergent paths, incompatible with one another. Women might be able to be full persons, subjects with agency, but only at the expense of their femininity; or they can embark on the course of femininity, but only by sacrificing their independence and agency. This either/or between the masculinization of subjectivity and the submission to femininity retains the moral, political, and metaphysical opposition between free self-creation and corporeal incarceration that precludes the possibility of being both a woman and a subject. Beauvoir alleges that psychoanalysis holds women to a fixed destiny, a developmental and teleological life process, precisely insofar as it defines subjects with reference to a past beyond their control. By assigning to women an essence or determinate identity, the psychoanalytic reliance on sexual categories once again renders woman as the other to a subject rather than a subject herself, and thereby denies her existential freedom. In Beauvoir's view, however, if women are not themselves subjects, but that in contrast with which men's subjectivities are constituted, they are still freely responsible for this situation, insofar as women collaborate in this process by seeing themselves through the eyes of men, justifying their existence through their romantic relationships, and attempting to mirror men's being. By casting women's otherness as an effect not only of their social situation (with its power relations), but also of their choices (and hence responsibility),

Beauvoir preserves women's freedom, unlike the psychoanalytic discourse that she claims rejects the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value (Beauvoir 1989, 45). Beauvoir's misgivings about Freud's account of femininity stem from two sources, a feminist suspicion that women, in psychoanalytic discourse, are understood on the basis of a masculine model, and an existentialist conviction that human beings are self-defining, choosing themselves through their own actions. Following her existentialist convictions, Beauvoir insists that even when women abdicate their freedom, they do so as agents responsible for their own destinies, not merely as passive victims following a developmentally determined fate. Following her feminist convictions, Beauvoir recognizes that women's choices may be constrained by powerful social and bodily forces, but insists that women nonetheless bear ultimate responsibility for realizing their own possibilities by emancipating themselves. Her reading of Freud is thus largely directed against the perceived determinism of psychoanalysis and less against the idea of an unconscious per se, although she does want to defend the notion of a unitary subject at the origin of choice, insisting that psychic life is not a mosaic, it is a single whole in every one of its aspects and we must respect that unity (Beauvoir 1989, 44), a supposition that certainly limits the affinities between existentialism and psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, Beauvoir's dispute with Freud appears to be less about whether constraint is part of our being in the world, and more about where that constraint is located: psychoanalysis locates constraint internally, in the constitution of the psyche itself, not only in the situations of social life, whereas Beauvoir locates it externally, in the cultural forces that impact even the most intimate sense of our own agency. Beauvoir thus claims that her own interpretations of women's femininity will disclose women in their liberty, oriented freely by the future and not simply explained by a past. She thereby ratifies the promise of existentialism for feminism. Beauvoir's own project of elucidating the paradoxical relation between femininity and subjectivity is nonetheless influenced by psychoanalytic concepts and appropriates its theoretical insights in various ways. The Second Sex highlights the practices by which women become women through their appropriation of bodily (sexual) difference, as well as the manner in which a human being generally is limited and compelled by bodily and unconscious forces. Indeed Beauvoir and Freud seem to agree that one is not born but becomes a woman, i.e., that femininity involves some sort of (social or psychical) process rather than a biological or natural given. Both are interested in the how of this process, how one becomes a woman, although, as discussed above, they disagree about what this how is. Moreover, in her articulation of women's ambivalent attitudes toward embodiment, sexuality, and maternity, Beauvoir is clearly indebted to the attention psychoanalytic practice gives to listening to women's first person narratives, interpreting the emotional impact of events that can not be easily categorized, and heeding attachments that carry both affection and resentment. Like Freud,

Beauvoir recognizes that we are embodied as sexual beings and that our bodies not only testify to our own finitude and limits but also matter as sites of encounters with others, encounters that are multivalentincluding loving connections and threatening defenses, moments of affirmation and of dissolution. Beauvoir refuses any political program that demands we deny our bodily possibilities in order to be fully human and proclaims that bodies and bodily difference are integral to projects of selfhood, and not merely accidental contingencies of a rational and disembodied mind. For Beauvoir, as for Freud, there is no such thing as a disembodied, nonsexed human being; any ideal of the human apart from sexual identity or difference is an abstraction that can only be affirmed on the basis of a mind/body dualism. Femininity for her is not merely a mystification that imprisons women's subjectivity (even if its social construal has had this effect). Finally, like Freud, Beauvoir is fully aware of the impact on children of their domestic situation, the way familial life resonates with meaning that informs not only intimate relations but relations to the larger world. Beauvoir's portrayal of living a feminine existence, of sexual difference as an embodied situation, developed through a series of phenomenological descriptions, tries to understand how women have been cast as other in the drama of masculine subjectivity and doubts the premise that this is an historical event, occurring at some definitive point in time. Beauvoir herself has often been (mis)read in a way analogous to her (mis)reading of psychoanalysis, as proferring a determinate succession of experiences for women, rather than describing socially extant processes. But The Second Sex depicts the effects on women's character of inequitable social arrangements; it neither proffers a normalized destiny for women nor presupposes a common metaphysical identity. Even so, in many ways Beauvoir's work is more easily aligned with the sociologically oriented AngloAmerican feminists than with Irigaray and Kristeva. 1. Psychoanalytic feminists explain womens 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 womens 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 womens psychic pathologies as generated and sustained by their inferior social status within patriarchy, rather than biologically determined lack. These theorists reinterpreted some womens 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 fathers 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.