Rocking the Cradle

Classics in psychohistory: I start rummaging through the attics of my intellectual life and come upon the texts that have most influenced my own perspective. The first, and in some ways most enduring, is Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. I’ve come a long way in my own work from anything like an orthodox Freudianism, but the problem of collective forms of emotional life has never been far from my mind—pressingly near these days, when the voices of political reason cannot be heard above the shrill clamor of Us (the U.S.) and Them (all those who dare to criticize Us/the U.S.).

Next I’d mention Harold D. Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics and Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther, the two books that most helped to shake me free from political science. Then, a leftward and philosophical step further down the road, the writings of Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich­-and, closer to the political bone, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth. But­-with the exception of The Autobiography of Malcolm X­-no book contributed as much to reorienting my thinking as Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur (first published in 1976, now available from Other Press with a moving afterward by Adrienne Harris).

Mermaid is complex and multi­dimensional. Dinnerstein wove anthropological, historical, political, philosophical, and psychoanalytic threads into a tapestry of (as she put it) our “sexual arrangements and human malaise.” I say a tapestry because the book is as unusual and nonlinear in its organization as it is in its argument. The chapters are arranged with intervening notes and asides; discussion boxes point forward and backward within and between chapters; and the reader is given a choice of which chapters to read in which order. At the same time, the exposition is driven by a powerful and precisely focused analysis: what we

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now would term our “gender identities” are set very early, in the practices of early childhood care, and in complicitous fashion by men and women. Men and women agree to granting or imposing upon women a monopoly of infant care. The con­sequence is the emergence, splitting off, and repression of a realm in which the hands that rock the cradle rule the world. These competent (seemingly even magical) maternal hands are not to rule the “larger” world, however, the one in which masculine industry and power are to be displayed and deployed. She rules in her place, he in his, but the two domains do not exist on the same plane. Mother, earth mother, Mother Nature ­-she will always find herself beneath and supporting him, also resented by him, devalued by him, and despoiled by him

Dinnerstein believed that the phantasmal quality of our sexual arrangements permitted the enactment of massively destructive tendencies, ecological ones most obviously. She called for and hoped that a change in parenting practices might have far-reaching consequences: if men and women shared the burdens and rewards of child­care and if children had the experience of being nurtured by both men and women, we all might be forced to see more clearly and take responsibility for our destructiveness. She also hoped that breaking down the defenses against what is now the mother-world would open up deeper and more genuine possibilities for animal-erotic gratification. In this latter regard she stands as counterpart and critic of Brown and Marcuse, who share with her the aim of enriching our sensuality and sensuousness, but without her keen understanding of what inhibits and distorts them.

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