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To the Editor:
Both Muriel Dimen's “Third Step: Freud, the Feminists, and Postmodernism” and Michelle Price's discussion of that paper appearing in the December 1994 issue (55: 303-330) were profoundly stimulating to me despite our areas of contention.
Dimen and Price stress the inherent problem if one considers a person's sense of identity to be a stable construct. Their ideas reflect one current in psychoanalytic thinking, the postmodernist. To my mind, in its essence, it follows the tradition of Freud—that conscious personality cannot be understood as a stabilized unitary entity but rather as a result of a variety of paradoxical unconscious determinants.
Dimen maintains that although many women were relieved by the second wave of feminism, which held that not all women have to be mothers, some began to feel conflicted with this new sense of femininity. However, feminist theorists, particularly “difference feminists,” seemed to perpetuate a static conceptualization of the differences between men and women. In Dimen's view, the constructs of women created by these theorists do not allow for the multiplicity of values and behavior by individual women. Dimen proposes an approach for women to revalue the maternal, domestic, and interpersonal dimension of femininity within a feminist perspective. She believes that “in order to ameliorate women's lives, we need to destabilize the way we think of women.” Therefore, she proposes a “Third Step” in which one does not postulate that “women do this and men do that, women are like this and men are like that” (emphasis added). In this Third Step, Dimen stresses “the normativity of internal conflict, the rock on which the house of psychoanalysis is built.” Dimen states that the centrality of conflict is immaterial to “difference feminism” and insufficiently appreciated by “gender feminism.”
To illustrate her argument Dimen presents a vignette of a woman who was reluctant to cry on her therapist's shoulder (a woman) because she would