Psychoanalysis and feminism have from the first been natural, albeit on occasion strange, bedfellows. This is because both psychoanalysis and feminism are about the return of the repressed: in psychoanalysis the patient's repressed desire and rage, in feminism the repressed subjectivity and the silenced voices of women. It is perhaps no accident that Bertha Pappenheim, a woman suffering from hysteria—a malady thought to be caused by a uterus that refused to know its place—named psychoanalysis the talking cure. There have of course been missteps along the way. What woman wants was for decades claimed by psychoanalysis to be the penis she was told she envied—she didn't—although she may indeed have wanted—when it pleased her. Fortunately the genius of Freudian psychoanalysis with its free associative method and privileging of the unconscious was that it offered feminists the means of deconstructing its phallocentric theories and replacing them with ideas more reflective of women's actual experience.
In 2012 I was invited to teach self psychology in Wuhan, China by Arnold and Arlene Richards who had established an experimental program there teaching psychoanalysis to Chinese psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. I thought I was going there once for eight days but have been part of this program for nine years along with Arlene and Arnie and a group of wonderful colleagues, some of whom are contributors to this volume of papers responding to Arlene's “Rage and Creativity: How Second Generation Feminist Thought Collective Influenced Psychoanalysis.” To date we've been to Wuhan some fifteen times. Psychoanalysis didn't exist in China in 2012 but as a result of our program and others it has caught on like summer fire.
All of us have found the energy, intelligence and passion with which our Chinese students have responded to us transformative, but the impact Arlene Richards has had on these students, especially the women, is difficult to describe. In a culture where women have been horribly
discriminated against for millennia, up through and including the years of the sexist one child policy (during which girls often learned that at their birth their fathers and grandparents left the hospital in disgust, female fetuses were routinely aborted, and female infants given up for adoption or even killed), Arlene Richards is a figure of profound reverence. At the celebration that concludes every “training” her students —men and women but women most ardently—dance around her, sing to her, shower her with gifts. Every woman wants a picture with her they can show their families and post online. Arlene represents wisdom, eminence, graciousness, and perhaps above all the power they have largely thought the exclusive province of divinity.
In America we have spent three and a half years in the death grip of a tyrant whose rapacious patriarchy has been supported by an army of largely but not entirely male apparatchiks wholly incapable of independent thought. They are engaged in a war on truth. Opposition is silenced, science mocked, and the free press reviled as the enemy of the people.
The project resulting in this volume represents an antidote. Each collaborator was invited to riff on “Rage and Creativity.” Where they went was entirely up to them. The result is an expressionist tapestry figuring forth the sort of thought collective Arlene's essay celebrates. Everyone's hope is that the project will generate new writing, new subjects for conference panels, new professional relationships, new politics that will support the ongoing forward movement of feminist psychoanalysis. In addition to the talking cure Bertha Pappenheim called the work of psychoanalysis chimney sweeping. We don't sweep chimneys these days. But stirring up trouble is perhaps what feminism and psychoanalysis do best.
–Jeffrey Stern, Ph.D., Faculty, The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, past President The Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, Associate Editor of the Annual of Psychoanalysis, Visiting Professor at Wuhan University, China. Publications on self psychology, Shakespeare, literature and film. Recent Publications: “Desperately Seeking Ivan or Healing the Vertical Split in Almodóvar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” in Pedro Almodóvar: A Cinema of Desire Passion and Compulsion, edited by A.K. Richards, L. Spira with M. Molofsky IPBooks, and “The Pilgrim's Progress: A Therapist and Patient Journey to London” in Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.