Psychoanalysis and Women: A Personal Thirty-Five-Year Retrospect

As psychoanalysts, we always need (at least) two stories—external and historical, internal and psychological—to understand the history of a field. Sometimes, as in the case of women in psychoanalysis, we also need a third—an understanding of the confluence of innovation, intuition, and perspective brought by those trained in the field but for personal or cultural reasons on its margins. Externally and historically, Freud's (and Breuer's) work with patients and his studies with Charcot and Bernheim led him first to discover the methods and theories of psychoanalysis. Freud's ambition, in the context of his blocked access to a traditional academic career, led him to pursue these discoveries. All along, his personal psychology and capacity to access this were crucial—to his discovery of the Oedipus complex, to his dream analysis, and to his understanding of sexuality and psychopathology.

Among the classic 1920s and 1930s psychoanalytic contributions to the psychology of women, we find a range of positions. All these women spoke from within the field, from within their unique psyches, and from their psychological response and position as insider-outsiders, at both center and margin—women practitioners in a field that was more welcoming than almost any other but that at the same time put at its core a masculine norm that devalued them. Most explicitly autobiographical, we find Karen Horney's refreshing and rare self-reference: “I, as a woman, ask in amazement, and what about motherhood?” (1926, p. 60), and we also find her, like Freud, using social theory and literature, for example, Simmel, Schiller, and Homer, to support her radical arguments. In her essay, clearly partly autobiographically inspired, that speaks to the psychological dilemmas of being a professional and a woman, Joan Riviere is less confrontational but no less radical, as she muses candidly about the genuineness of masquerade: “The reader may ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between