Discussion of “The Psychodynamics of Aggression in Women”

The title of this talk, “The Psychodynamics of Aggression in Women,” prompted some fantasies in me. Some of these were pleasurable, some defensive and hostile. Some memory bits came back concerning how women's activity, creativity, ideas, and also aggressiveness have been reacted to in the big world and also in the analytic world. There has been a lot of negativity, from the downgrading of Eve for acting on her healthy curiosity and thus presumably bringing about the banishment from Eden, to the resistance against women getting into the professions and other exclusive areas of work, to the overt and covert prohibitions against women enjoying the scientific apple, or the intellectual apple or even the sensual apple. I thought briefly about the Freudian conclusions that because of a fatal flaw in anatomy, women must be forever envious and inferior, and that out of this derives their jealousy, devious aggressiveness, lack of moral fiber, and passivity.

But, knowing what Dr. Symonds represents, I reassured myself quickly that in this talk, the divisiveness and competition between men and women would not be perpetuated. And, of course, the only sex linkage he has made is that culture tries to mold women and men into behaving and even into feeling in sex-specific ways and that it has succeeded in this often unnatural result to a considerable degree. Dr. Symonds draws on his extensive experience with a wide variety of people: adolescents, authoritarian symbols such as police, and criminals and victims. From his Horneyan position, he finds that aggressiveness stems from a similar intrapsychic source in both women and men, and not from a genetic or anatomically inevitable one.

The larger question of whether there is or is not any innate psychological difference between the sexes is, in my view, still quite uncertain, and research is still in the earliest stages in this area. This research is being done through cross-cultural comparisons, biochemical and hormonal studies, genet