Diversity and Psychoanalysis

One of the pleasures, as opposed to the anxieties, of preparing for this conference, has been to reread Psychoanalysis and Feminism, and in doing so to reconnect with many of the issues of the early seventies. I think that the convening of this conference is testimony to the classic status of this book, and to all the work and thought that have flowed from it. Psychoanalysis and Feminism has been part of the framework within which many of us have pursued our very diverse feminist and psychoanalytic goals over the last 20 years. And this is so, even if our goals have been very different from those expressed in the book. I want to emphasize this rich diversity both in psychoanalysis and feminism, a diversity which is very much represented here today and, I hope, one which we can stay with. The diversity encompasses a whole range of clinical and theoretical positions and projects, yet it can still be brought under the same heading. This is, I think, evidence of how much there still is to discuss and how much, as feminists in the nineties, we still do desire and perhaps need to find ways of talking to each other.

One of the questions that has always been of issue, and remains so, is what kind of relationship do we envisage between psychoanalysis and feminism? What is the nature of the ‘and’ between these two terms? In Psychoanalysis and Feminism Juliet Mitchell argued strongly that feminism needed psychoanalysis; and she put this in terms, as she saw it then, of the relationship between political practice and theory, in which feminism constituted the practice, and psychoanalysis the theory. She raised the question of whether the relation between feminism and psychoanalysis was equivalent to that between class struggle and Marxism, whether the analysis of ideology that she saw psychoanalysis as providing could inform the struggle against women's oppression.

The notion of psychoanalysis as providing an analysis of patriarchal ideology and of cultural transmission has been a