Women in science have been historically and cross-culturally few, isolated and undervalued. Interestingly, women have been prominent in the early days of several modern sciences (Hedy Lamar, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, etc.). Yet women have not been able to form a mutually supportive, mutually inspiring and enduring collective in any science but psychoanalysis, and later psychology and psychotherapy. How and why did this happen? Women were pioneers in psychoanalysis. But the women in psychoanalysis were not able to change analytic theory that positioned penis envy as the bedrock of femininity until a feminist collective strongly influenced mainly female analysts.
Fleck (1979) described the formation of what he called a “thought style,” a kind of consensus achieved in a particular time and place that generates all the concepts capable of being thought. This style develops in a “thought collective,” a group of people who have contact with one another. This contact can be through any medium, not just in person. It always results in a shift in thought. The knowledge gained in the thought collective is passed from an inner circle to a journal audience and to popular media. Communication in popular language involves increase in simplicity, certainty and vividness. This feeds back into the inner circle. I will show how this process has led to a change from second generation feminist thought to a profound change in psychoanalysis.
A major tenet of the second generation post World War II feminists was: The personal is political. This meant that politics impacts on personal life and that personal choices affect social arrangements.
First, the personal. Being brought up mainly by a grandfather I identified with work outside the home. Being part of a family supported by my mother's work outside the home I expected to be a breadwinner also. Being named for a paternal grandmother who supported her husband and fourteen children by her business as a flour miller, I aspired to be
like her as well. So I became an equality of opportunity feminist.
Second wave feminists Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Sherry Hite, Shulamith Firestone, and Ingrid Bengis, challenged the idea that women would be happiest being homemakers. They were reacting to a post-World War II American insistence that women belonged in the home and men in the workplace. Consequences of this were the decrease or elimination of equal opportunity for women, the devaluation of feminine “traits” and values, and lack of child-care options outside the home. American Freudian psychoanalysts “helped” their female patients adapt. But many educated and skilled women failed to thrive when deprived of intellectual and social stimulation and prevented from using their skills. The socially imposed aspects of femininity exacerbated what had always been a female dilemma: whether to spend one's energies on being a mother, a powerful person, or a sexually attractive woman (Hollander, N.). Women writers put it most eloquently. In a letter to her future husband, Jean Stafford wrote intensely, “I know this Cal, and the knowledge eats me like an inward animal: there is nothing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness” (Laskin, 2000, p. 110).
Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), embraced a demand for equality of opportunity, which was the feminist position that Freud himself maintained. But women who consulted the Freudians of their time had no idea of Freud's point of view. Indeed, some were counseled that they should look into the origins of their wishes to be treated more like men rather than act to satisfy these wishes. As a result, they thought that Freud was a patriarch since the Freudians they knew were busily promoting submission to the inequality of opportunity in their male dominated culture. What did feminists want?
Some second wave feminists worked toward women receiving equal treatment. This was a battle that had been won in the United States after the Civil War when so many young men were killed that many young women were not going to be able to find husbands and the rise of machines made it possible to run households with fewer servants. This led to the establishment of women's colleges: it also led to the institution of “women's professions”: primary school teaching, social work, and nursing. But after World War 1 men returning from war could not find jobs.
Veterans marched for jobs, eventually joblessness led to economic depression and socially women were seen as depriving men of their right to earn a living and support a family. For this reason, after World War II, women were persuaded or forced to retire from the paid workforce, marry and establish families in suburban settings while men commuted to work in the cities.
Betty Friedan was an educated woman who had become one of these suburban housewives. She found it a lonely and largely unfulfilling life. She wanted an end to the inequality of opportunity in the workplace and she wanted the support at home to use that opportunity. Her book addressed the problems of educated women who had been forced, seduced, or lured into suburban homes where they were alone or with young children all day. That those women were not happy with their homes, their household appliances, and their childrearing and household responsibilities was treated as their neurosis, not a social problem. Analysts tried to help them be content with what seemed to them to be very posh lives.
Sharing responsibility for housework and childcare is crucial to increasing job responsibility for women. In 1968, Alix Kates Shulman (1998) created a model plan for a marriage agreement to share household tasks that was reprinted in several major periodicals. Although her own marriage eventually fell apart, Shulman's attempt to make gender roles more equal had an effect on the ideals people espoused, though less impact on what they actually did in the home. Still, Shulman influenced the feminist movement and her ideas have changed the consensus of what women want.
Naomi Weisstein (Brownmiller, 2000) was a cognitive psychologist who could not get a job because she was a woman. She attacked analyst Erik Erikson for valorizing “inner space” in women and Bruno Bettelheim for asserting that a woman's primary satisfaction was in her becoming “the womanly companion” of a man.
Carolyn Heilbrun (1979), the first woman to be tenured in Columbia University's English department, resigned to write a book about her view of what the feminist agenda should be. For Heilbrun, equality must be thoroughgoing: there must be equality in household tasks, equality in educational opportunities, and equality in taking male ideals and male
models of achievement and using them to establish a life of satisfying femaleness. She criticizes “psychoanalytic conservatism according to which any emotional attachment, genital or not, that women formed with other women was pathological” (p. 38).
Heilbrun uses Freud as the symbol of all that is anti-female in society when she says: “There is strong evidence, in short, that accomplished women in male-dominated professions are, as the phrase goes, male-identified. Freud and especially his followers have perhaps irremediably damaged that phrase, leaving one with the sense of a sexually disoriented woman, of someone with gender confusion. Nothing could be further from the truth. These women accept allegiance with the males of whose group they are a part, even while themselves wholly female in their sexuality and gender identity” (p. 46). Heilbrun criticizes the women who worked with Freud and those who have become analysts since for becoming apologists for female subservience. That this criticism is not true is clear from the work of Clara Thompson, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, and countless others in South and North America and in Europe who have thought and written about the female experience in non-subservient ways.
Heilbrun was so determined to prove that Freudian thinking was anti-feminist that she ignored the opportunities that psychoanalysis offered to women who made careers as analysts. She failed to read their staunch defenses of feminist values. But even if they had supported the predominantly male-centered theoretical points of view that some male analysts propounded, they would only have been acting as Heilbrun herself advocated professional women should act: exactly like the men in their disciplines.
Germaine Greer's (1970) understanding of the “Freudian” developmental psychology of women is that it goes from penis envy to the passivity of the mature woman. From subject, she declines into a toy for men. She contends this is illustrated in the popular imagery of the missionary position and all the paraphernalia of pornography. In this sense she is similar to the Lacanian feminists who believe that female desire is valuable. Anselma Dell'Olio (1998) saw the dilemma in feminism as a clash between equality and difference: Are you an equality feminist or a difference feminist? That was the watershed question then, around
1969-1970, and, in many ways, it still is now ….
Other Second Wave feminists valorized the differences between men and women. A radical moment in feminism was the publication of Anne Koedt's (1971) paper “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Reprinted widely, it was the clearest challenge to the then accepted view among Freudian ego psychologists that the source of much unhappiness among women was failure to achieve “vaginal orgasm.” Once the idea that vaginal orgasm was somehow more mature than, and preferable to, orgasm achieved in any other way was challenged, the way women were treated in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy had to change as well.
Some feminists devalued sex. Dana Densmore (1998) put it this way: “We thought that the ideology of sex as a need was a myth perpetrated by men for their own convenience. We took for granted and, indeed, would have insisted on our own sexual freedom. But we classed sex with other enjoyable but optional activities: fun at the beach, ice-cream sundaes, amusement park rides. We might choose to do any of these occasionally, but we would consider the price that was paid. If the price was too high, any could be passed up without regret” (p. 87).
Jo Freeman (1998) believed that the sex versus intimacy issue was paramount. For Roxanne Dunbar (1998) and other feminists in Cell16, the Boston feminist group, Freud was anathema for his belief that sex was a primary drive.
Meredith Tax (1998) asserted: “By psychology we didn't mean Freud, we meant the way it felt to be a woman” (p. 312). Difference feminists were first interested in what they did not want in sex. Abortion and rape were the two big issues. They recognized that pregnancy as the result of unwanted sexual encounters was something every woman feared from puberty to menopause. There were no consequences to the man for conceiving a child with a woman with whom he was not intimately involved. But the woman was faced with catastrophe. By 1968 there was increasing pressure for abortion law reform, which was increasingly tied to other health issues such as involuntary sterilization of poor women and the uninvestigated side effects of birth control pills (Wolfson, 1998).
Susan Brownmiller (2000) reported rape, prostitution, marriage, motherhood, and the sexual abuse of children as the issues that galvanized speak-outs in New York and formed the basis of consciousness raising groups in neighborhoods all over New York, Boston and other cities during the 1970s. These groups, based on the Freudian model of talking about fears and wishes rather than suppressing them, became the stepping stones to speaking aloud and powerfully the thoughts and feelings that women had been suppressing and suffering from. In this way, women's liberation led from silent suffering to something more closely approximating equality of opportunity to speak out publicly.
One sexual issue that became important as the women's liberation movement grew was the issue of lesbianism. Radical feminism encouraged this but was also torn apart by the argument that to be a true feminist, one had to hate men and love women. In the midst of this, the idea that rape was the terror that held women back from full participation in the world was articulated for the first time. Kate Millett's (1970) Sexual Politics was the origin and Brownmiller's (1975) Against Our Will was the fully developed statement that led to change in rape laws and practices that finally allowed women some measure of protection from the fear of rape. Combined with child and spousal abuse laws, these laws made women more equal by allaying the fear and shame that had attached to their victimhood. At least two modern Freudian woman psychoanalysts have since asserted that rape is the female fear equivalent to male castration fear (Bernstein, 1993; Richards, 1996).
While Freudian thinking about the importance of feelings and the usefulness of talking about feelings had an important influence on feminism, the effect of feminism on Freudian thinking has been to re-affirm Freud's championing of equality for women and to correct Freud's idea that difference is dangerous, because it can be used invidiously to justify lesser opportunities for women than for men. The revision of the theory of the superego to account for the moral integrity of women based on their concern for human values and people's feelings, and the concomitant increase in the respect accorded to difference has changed psychoanalysis profoundly.
The new appreciation of women's conflicts, fears, and pleasures has changed attitudes of analysts toward female analysands. Connectivity
has been added to independence as a value. Concern for the welfare and feelings of others has been spotlighted in psychoanalytic theory. This led to a great focus on narcissistic pathology as a reflection of lack of empathy and to a new concept of the relationship between self involvement, self cohesion, self-esteem and the way people are treated in a social context. Crucially, Freud's idea that penis envy is the bedrock of femininity has dropped out of the analytic literature entirely.
A very important effect of feminist thinking has been in the area of understanding the importance, value, and potential of parenting, so that the old idea that only mothers can be caregivers has been deleted from Freudian thought. An important analytic response to the call for less sexist and more human child rearing was investigated by Lynne Rubin in a dissertation on fathers who take paternal leave to bond with and care for their infant children. Ernest Abelin's (1971, 1980) work on the importance of paternal care in early infancy is another analytic response to the feminist critique. Important work on analysis with gay and lesbian patients, a compendium on female psychology by Eleanor Schuker and Nadine Levinson , the supplements on female psychology in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the emergence of the journals Gender and Psychoanalysis and Studies in Gender and Sexuality are all responses to the feminist critiques. Feminism has a debt to psychoanalysis, but analysis is also indebted to feminism. Feminist rage fueled by injustice has been a spur to creativity in the analytic world.
Fleck marveled that it took psychoanalysis to recognize child sexuality, even though the evidence was there in everyone's memory and observation. It took a group of people interested in the psychology of motivation to make the observation together and convert it into a scientific fact. The social reinforcement perpetuates the fact. “A thought collective exists wherever two or more persons are actually exchanging thoughts” (Fleck L. 1979, p. 102).
When such a collective extends in time it constrains thought. Patient and analyst constitute such a collective. Psychoanalysis as a field is such a collective. So is the IPA. And the second generation feminists constituted such a collective. Did that collective influence the psychoanalytic collective? One way it could have done so was through the feminist academic thought collectives.
In 1989 Chodorow answered that question this way: For the most part psychoanalysts do not seem to be aware of or to care much about the enormous exciting ferment in psychoanalytic feminist theory that is in the forefront of a number of academic disciplines (p. 179).
It took a long time, but the feminist thought collective affected the psychoanalytic thought collective so strongly that current day analysts take as a fact that female psychology does not either begin or end with penis envy. It took women psychoanalysts as a collective within the analytic field to see the scientific fact that women are constituted of our biology, our history, and the social circumstances in which we live.
Is all this purely history? No. A strongly moving example of the persistence of unfair treatment of women is presented in the 2019 film “One Child Nation.” The film records the experiences of residents of one town in China during the years of the One Child Policy. Unlike birth control attempts in India, for example, there was no enforced sterilization of men. A man could have as many babies as he could persuade or force women to carry. A man who fathered multiple babies suffered no consequences. There is no mention in the film, just as there is no record in China, of men being forcibly sterilized. The policy was a war on women, women's bodies, and, in particular, against women's fertile bodies. It was a war against mothers and potential mothers. Psychologically, it was a war against all mothers. The individuals who thought it up and those who carried it out were expressing their own feelings as well as participating in the national plan. Psychologically, they were reversing their own position as helpless infants of all powerful mothers. The one child policy deprived China of a whole generation of workers, and many potential wives and mothers, and enough young people to care for the elderly. It was an economic mistake that unleashed deep psychological resentments.
I personally believe that it was a backlash against the newly empowered women of China. It came just after the rise of a generation of women who were the first to escape foot-binding, and to get educations, and become workers outside the home. They were the first-generation of professional women, political leaders, and women of power in their culture. Exemplified by Jiang Qing (Madame Mao), they were seen as usurping male power, and were universally hated for that. The one child policy expressed all that.
Within these broad categories of equality and difference there are many weights of many values. For example, a story in the New York Times of September 14, 2019, tells of how coal miners losing their jobs in Appalachia adapted to the loss of their roles as wage earners. Their wives went to school and became nurses, thus supporting their families. Neither the reporter of the story nor any of her sources considered the alternative of the men going back to school, becoming nurses, and continuing in their roles as bread winners. The men chose to stay at home and do housework.
To me, this illustrates the deep and early learned value of not doing girly things being much more important that the later in life imperative to support the family. The newspaper story emphasized the men's reliance on female family members to help them with the at home chores. Clearly the men were not unambivalent about doing child rearing, shopping, preparing food, cooking, cleaning, repairs and other chores. Yet their work at home was what their wives had been doing when they worked in the mines. The men required more help with the housework than their wives had. Presumably this was because they found it more difficult to do this work than their wives had. Ambivalence uses energy, they clearly were ambivalent about staying at home.
The economic change has led to a change in women's values. One woman who went to work said: “Women now, they got a little taste of freedom,” Ms. Bowling said. “Men has been able to do whatever the hell they want for so long while women has had to sit in a chair and keep their legs closed and be nice and polite. Now they don't have to.”
Men, on the other hand, find the change more difficult: “The way of life is changing so bad,” Mr. Rose said. He grew quiet. “You'll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.”
The change Mr. Rose finds so hard to think about involves changes in gender roles that modify and even contradict what little boys learn early and that they reinforce in themselves and each other throughout their later years. Boys do not do girly stuff. Real men are not nurses; real men work hard with their muscles and their hands. Real men carry guns, shoot, dig, build, excavate, produce hard objects. Men who do fashion, hairdressing, nursing, teaching nursery school and other soft jobs are
not real men. They are sissies. They are as devalued as the women in their society have been.
Another hypothesis, suggested by Delia Battin, (2019) about why men do not become nurses in such a situation is that men want to be nursed, longing for the mothering they enjoyed in infancy. I believe that in this scenario men have pushed away the mothering that they shunned in favor of masculine self-sufficiency, therefore they still long for it but must abjure it in favor of macho independence.
In sum, while what women want is attuned to what men want women to want; what men want is to be lord of the manor, with a woman attuned to her man's every wish. And to the extent that this is true, patriarchy is entrenched while matriarchy, or even equality, is a hard sell.
Recent attempts to change have come from Third World feminists. Eltahawy (2019) posits anger, attention, profanity, ambition, power, violence, and lust as ways to fight against the power of patriarchy. She advocates socializing young girls to resist being influenced by patriarchy by fighting against it in all its forms. Her idea is not to win over the men who derive advantage from it, but to fight against them. Adichie (2017) advocates the same kind of social pressure with the mother as teacher for a girl from infancy onward. She emphasizes self-respect and self- actualization so that the mother is a model for the girl to identify with. She also suggests having the father be a full partner rather than a helper in raising the daughter. Refusing gender roles in girl's toys, interests and capabilities, accepting power in women, teaching daughters to read and question assumptions in language, not seeing marriage as an achievement, not seeing pleasing others as a goal, and accepting her own identity, physical body, and teaching her the words for her own sexuality. These ideas involve actively resisting sexism, but not in the angry key Eltahawy advocates.
So feminists now are advocating socializing girls as non-conforming with the larger society's patriarchal standards, thinking against the grain, being self-centered, abrasive, and strong. Will psychoanalysts accept such a stance? Are we ready to think of our patients as successful when they are rebellious? Are we able to see strong-willed, non-conformist women as our society's achievements rather than “ball busters”? Can we use the
influence of these modern feminists to create a new vision of our own work? As one who has achieved a partial and limited success in doing this, I am hoping that we can.