Relational No More: Defensive Autonomy in Middle-Class Women

This essay focuses on what I perceive to be a change in the psychic structure of many middle-class white heterosexual women. Before discussing that change, I want first to delineate the model that I have developed to think about the relation between the psychic and the social. In investigating this link, I have been influenced by social theorists and analysts too numerous to mention. Primary among my influences, however, are two sources: first, Frankfurt School theory as initially set forth by Horkheimer and Adorno (1944), Marcuse (1955), and Fromm (1941, 1955, 1962, 1970) and later as elaborated by Jacoby (1975, 1983), Kovel (1988), and Sloan (1996). My second influence is psychoanalytic feminism, and here I would particularly cite the work of two feminists who were themselves influenced by the Frankfurt School: Chodorow (1978) and Benjamin (1988). Frankfurt School models center on the damage done by capitalism to capacities for relatedness and autonomy. The etiology of this damage is traced to commodity fetishism and the abstract equivalence that money imposes on all things (the eclipse of use value by exchange value). The processes of reification that subtend these phenomena cause relations to both self and others to be experienced as relations between things. The etiology is further traced to the encroachment into ever more spheres of daily life of what they call technical or instrumental rationality, that form of reason used to dominate nature and make processes of production more efficient. A precept of Frankfurt School thinking is that the individual called for in the best of Enlightenment thought, one capable of critical reflection and of capacities for what Benjamin calls subject–subject relating, cannot emerge in a capitalist system based in exploitation, relations of abstract exchange, bureaucratization, and industrialization of both work and leisure time. The theorists were some of the first to draw on psychoanalysis to explain what the damage wrought by