Women Need Not be Castrated or Unfathomable (response article)

Charles understands very well that psychoanalysis as a whole tends to be blamed for the short-sighted theories of some of its great thinkers who were very much a product of their eras, cultures, and psyches. Those who blame psychoanalysis for its myopia about women don’t understand that it has evolved over the decades, much like any other body of thought or knowledge. Its perspective has changed as society has also changed. If Freud were writing today, he might have a more expansive and accurate view of women.

Nonetheless, as Charles points out, male theorists like Jacques Lacan at the end of the 20^th century were as mystified by women as Freud was in 1925. Perhaps fearful of them is the better way to put it. The “Dark Continent” is an apt metaphor; Africa has long been seen as dangerous and unexplored. Mystery, danger, and fear often go hand-in-hand in the psyche.

It is interesting that analysts, whose role is to explore, can brand more than half the human race as a mystery or unfathomable. Of course, analysts meet people inside and outside their offices who cannot be understood and remain mysteries in varying degrees. However, are our psychoanalytic thinkers looking for a way to avoid knowing more about all women? Are they saying “we give up”? Charles notes in an insightful passage that “Perhaps, in part, what is insidious is the externality of the gaze on women that runs through the history of psychoanalytic ideas.” Why the need for this externality, this distance? Why shroud women in mystery?

Perhaps the answer lies with mothers, who are mysterious creatures to their children, particularly their preverbal and pre-Oedipal children. It is possible our great thinkers have been held back by the taboo and prohibition against knowing too much about their mothers. Maybe unconsciously they fear that getting a better understanding of the female psyche would be to see their mothers as symbolically naked.

However, there is more than taboo at work in the relegation of women to the Dark Continent. Charles writes about men’s need to view women as castrated and their need to see themselves as

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more powerful because they have penises and women don’t. The male need to symbolically castrate and weaken women has many contributing factors; one undeniably is the fear of being overwhelmed and engulfed in the way that boys can be by their mothers. By consigning women to the ranks of the castrated, our forbearers have maintained not only their safety but also their dominant role in the psychoanalytic world. As Charles notes, it is a role that was largely unchallenged for decades, even by women analysts and thinkers.

She writes at the end of her paper: “When we close ourselves off to aspects of being human, those aspects wither and the quality of life is diminished.” The inability of male theorists to explore the female psyche has left us the poorer.

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