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Object relations theory, with its insistence on the social matrix of infant individuation, seems peculiarly well-suited to the feminist project of marrying social and psychoanalytic theory. Certainly this is the view developed in this collection of essays by US sociologist Nancy Chodorow.
She first airs themes familiar from her influential book The Reproduction of Mothering. Assuming teleologically, with functionalist sociology, that gender identity is a goal of development, Chodorow argues that in boys this identity is formed through negation of their earliest female-based identification with the mother - this in implicit contrast to the centrality accorded by Freud to phallic difference and the father in the genesis of sexed identity. Chodorow's contrary mothering thesis is instead elaborated in terms of Fairbairn's and Mahler's account of the infant's initial psychological oneness with the mother and subsequent separation-individuation from her. Individuation in boys, claims Chodorow, is precipitated by the mother's experience of their sexual difference from her. By contrast, and here Chodorow cites clinical evidence, mothers tend to over-identify with their daughters. The latter accordingly turn to the father not to gain a penis, as Freud claimed, but to separate from the mother. Men are therefore secondary to the mother in women's psychology, the resulting ‘heterosexual knots’ being the subject of Chodorow's next paper. Lastly, she ascribes to women's mothering our society's prevalent idealisation and excoriation of mothers and its emphasis on gender difference - the latter being an effect, she maintains, of men's need to stress such difference in establishing a separate male identity.
Going beyond these Reproduction of Mothering themes, the second half of this book is devoted to arguing the general superiority of object relations over instinct theory. First Chodorow deplores Herbert Marcuse and Norman Brown's celebration of individual instinct against its social