Woman’s Story-A Disruptive Act

Review essay of Jerome A. Winer, James Anderson, and Christine C. Kieffer, eds., Psychoanalysis and Women The Annual of Psychoanalysis Vol. XXXII (Hilsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2004) ISBN 0-88163-421-2, pages 253, $37.50.

Carol Gilligan wrote “…I came to a sudden and…startling realization that to bring women’s lives into history was a disruptive act. It would change the account of both life-history and history by illuminating a reality of connectedness where separateness had been assumed” (p. 132). The impact of women’s history is everywhere, in every field of endeavor and human thought. Changes in human practice come more slowly. Errors and abuses based on an assumption of male subjectivity and male supremacy abound. But women’s voices grow louder and more determined—speaking in behalf of the mutuality of relationships and the inter-connectedness of all humanity.

Women have spoken with particular cogency from the heart of psychoanalysis, despite its patriarchal origins and early leanings. As a method of listening and gathering data from the depths of the human mind it has provided a fertile ground from which women’s story can be told. Psychoanalysis and Women has assembled a striking collections of articles that document the history and evolution of its “founding mothers”—the likes of Edith Jacobson, Marion Milner, Therese Benedek, Dorothy Burlingham, and Anna Freud—as well as later contributors to its theory and practice.

I have often wondered how Freud himself might react, not only to the disruptive acts but also to the seismic shifts that have occurred in psychoanalysis, due in large part to the influx of women and their perspective. Would he welcome and incorporate a relational perspective? Would he consider the reality of seduction in the lives of many women and children or would he ignore it as have other monolithic institutions? Allow me to pursue this line of thinking as I reflect on the articles collected here.

The first section of Psychoanalysis and Women presents clinical material including an in-depth study of a cancer patient and an examination of “defensive autonomy” in white heterosexual middle class women. Joyce McDougal writes with her customary clarity and compassion of a woman whose self-hatred had taken residence in her body as a deadly form of breast cancer. An unloved child, the patient felt that she could survive but could not live. In short, she had become her cancer. The article describes the poignant interplay of patient and therapist as the patient was able to let go of death and fully embrace her cancer treatment. Freud himself struggled with cancer and I would conjecture that he would have welcomed the opportunity to speak of his illness, even to analyze its psychological roots in his own history with a compassionate analyst such as Dr. McDougall.

The theoretical section takes up, among other issues, the topic of passivity from a number of vantage points as delineated by Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva and Ethel Spector Person. Benjamin deconstructs the equation of femininity with passivity, contending that “passivity is not a pre-existing ‘thing’ that is repudiated by the male psyche; rather it is constructed by it” (p. 45). Rather than viewing the female as a “container”, designed to hold male tension and discharge, she presents an intersubjective economy between two subjects who can both contain and discharge in mutual regulation. Her concept depends upon a mother as subject, not the invisible mother of Freud’s poor Dora or the ‘holding environment’ of later theorists. We know that “Mother” was a particular blind spot for Freud and for early psychoanalysis in general as was the daughter in the father-daughter relationship. Christine Kieffer points out the paucity of literature about the latter relationship except when it is focused on father-daughter incest. She then goes on to provide a unique perspective on the Pyrrhic victory suffered by the favored daughter, the so-called Oedipal victor, who becomes a mere extension of her father’s projections and wishes. Again I wonder whether Freud would have recognized in this description the shadow of his own daughter Anna.

Personal narratives of women in the forefront of psychoanalysis and feminism comprise the fourth section of this volume. We learn of the

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meeting and subsequent communication of Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin. Brenda Solomon describes her supervision with Therese Benedek and Marian Tolpin in the Chicago Institute. Malkah Notman recounts her participation in a ten-year psychoanalytic workshop which included Carol Gilligan and other noted women theorists.

The authors recount the history of their consciousness-raising and the evolution of their thinking. Chodorow describes her early dismissal of biological determinism and her subsequent reappraisal, forged by clinical experience and her own experience with motherhood, of the importance of puberty, menarche, the potential for pregnancy, pregnancy and childbirth in female development and psychic representation. Her training and experience finally led her to the notion of the clinical individual who cognizes experience with body, family, culture and dominant relationships to give unique meaning to gender and self. It is Chodorow’s contention that “beginning with Freud, there is no single femininity, masculinity, or sexuality; we have misread him if there is” (p. 118). We have focused on the well-known and tortuous path to normative femininity. But this approach ignores the many women he studied, treated and worked with who had their own ideas about femininity and could, in no way, be reduced to a singular “woman.”

In the last section of the book Marian Tolpin presents a provocative article on the case of Dora as a timely opportunity for Freud to revise his ‘mistaken’ seduction theory. She also reviews his lengthy search for a “normal female castration complex” and the corroboration he sought from aspiring female analysts. We learn of the contribution of early female pioneers such as Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham who translated Freud’s beginning recognition of the importance of the mother into the origins of parent-infant observation in psychoanalysis. Therese Benedek, another pioneer, further elaborated the significance of empathic communication between mother and child. While remaining committed to Freud’s theory, she focused on the transactional nature of parent-child interaction and translated her findings into the therapeutic relationship which author, Erika Schmidt, argues became a prototype for two-person relational psychology.

Schmidt points out that Benedek understood Freud’s ideas about women in historical context. In light of his sensitive work with patients and colleagues she did not believe him to be a misogynist. Following that line of thinking, I believe that Papa Freud would be quite proud of Psychoanalysis and Women. He would be excited to know that his theoretical daughters have minds of their own such that they can modify, enlarge, deepen and even disrupt his theory to explain phenomena that he could only begin to understand.

As a ‘first wave’ psychoanalytic feminist I am thrilled with the volume. In the last several weeks it has become my bedtime reading, a position usually accorded only to top-rated page-turning fiction. The poignant clinical descriptions, the clear explanations of theoretical shifts, the personal narratives of consciousness-raising, and the biographies of courageous women pioneers have grabbed me at my core. It places in perspective the changes initiated by women in the field and, as such; I believe it is a “must-read” for serious students of the history of psychoanalysis. It confirms yet again the message at the heart of psychoanalysis, that, given sufficient exploration of the human mind and its intricacies, all of us, including Freud, can change.

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