The Third Step: Freud, the Feminists, and Postmodernism

If psychoanalysis is at once a body of knowledge, a theory of human nature, and a method of cure, as Sigmund Freud once said, then the way we think about people and the way we help them are mutually implicated. One of the implications of the feminist critique is that we do not always think about people, women and men, in the most helpful way. Despite the best intentions, our thinking often re-creates the problems we set out to solve in the first place. In fact, I will argue that the reinstallation of gender stereotype is a major problem in one branch of psychoanalytic feminism, and it impels what I am calling the Third Step.

The need to consider how we think about women and men is not, on the surface, self-evident. After all, it would seem pretty clear that, in the ordinary course of events, women, for example, are women, mostly we know one when we see one, and we have a general idea of the difficulties they confront. We would just like to figure out how to help them figure out what they need to do to make their lives easier, if not better. Who women and men are, however, is not actually so clear.’ The multiple and conflicting views of women in psychoanalysis epitomize this point: Freud, for example, developed and embraced one particular characterization of women (1924, 1925, 1931, 1933), but some people, like Karen Horney (1923), disagreed with it right away, even as others embrace it still.

Freud's view of women, which is what I call the First Step, articulated what anthropologists call “folk science,” the often tacit prejudices that, in each culture, constitute common sense. Although Freud's work tended to be scholarly and revolutionary, still the main thrust of his findings in this area was to codify unexamined popular assumptions about women and, implicitly, men. It is well known that the stereotype of women endowed by his thought with scientific prestige is mitigated, particularly in footnotes, by