Arlene Richards has written a spirited, highly readable, and useful bird's eye view about (especially second wave) feminism in the United States, and how it has affected psychoanalysis and vice versa. She ends by talking of feminism in China and Third World countries, and wonders how much people could actually stand the result of those women scholars who advocate extreme behavioral rebellion against males and society, in order to try to re-socialize girls to refuse their submissive status quo. She raises (perhaps indirectly) the question of what has (or has not) been learned by women and the movement from about WWI onwards, including in the world of psychoanalysis; and what has been translated into psychosocial values that improve the present psychosocial position of women. Her central thesis is expressed on page 19: “Feminist rage fueled by injustice has been a spur to creativity in the analytic world.” I agree with this, and add here my own sense of a continuity in this struggle, while recognizing improvements since the 1970 watershed.
Dr. Richards addresses the mobilization of women's creative abilities in the 1970s to form working groups. This was a substantial change. She identifies this as the process of a “thought collective,” which seems a useful way of thinking. It helped individual women to emerge from their isolation, urged along by storied leaders and feminist writers (well-documented here) who became public figures. This created much stronger group voices with which to air complaints and support each other's life complexities—a positive alternative to suffering in the previously expected silence. Hopefulness was in the air, and fueled women's attempts to look for better solutions in their lives. Some of the problems back then were due to a lack of the opportunity to work outside the home—work once perceived as the bailiwick of men alone. WWII had necessitated
that women join the work force, but once men were demobilized, the jobs had once more returned to them. Women, however, by then had had a taste of the pleasures of the work world. Education and the labor situation for females has definitely improved socially over the years, especially in the last 50, affirmed by a US Labor Department Blog in 2017: “The proportion of women with college degrees in the labor force has almost quadrupled since 1970. More than 40 percent of women in the labor force had college degrees in 2016, compared with 11 percent in 1970.”
Arlene does not mention that it remains, however, that high-paying high-echelon jobs for women are still few (if increasing) in 2020, and that the glass ceiling, say, in the business world, is barely cracked. So even though there is a far greater acceptance of women's desire to work outside the home, the old “gender problems” abide in many sectors. Arlene interestingly describes at the end of her piece, a labor crisis in 2019 among miners in Appalachia, where men were forced out of their very “masculine” jobs as miners, and a need to re-tool was evident. But the old gender complications surfaced. The wives left the hearth and became nurses to support the families. But their husbands opted awkwardly to be “at-home” fathers rather than themselves becoming nurses or health care workers, rejecting the opportunity to stay in the work world. Arlene points out that these jobs were “too soft” for them. Apparently, in that modern society, not much changed about male attitudes about women – but the women's life situations, by their own report, were still improved by the opportunities they took advantage of to work outside the home.
Attitudes towards females, of course, are linked to their childbearing and child raising, which kept women homebound. Feminist writers attacked this arrangement in particular in the 1970s. I think that it is hard to review this literature as a batch, as Arlene does here, and as it relates to psychoanalysis, because some authors are more interested in completely conscious attitudes, whereas others pay more attention to the disavowed and unconscious attitudes that can shine through. Therefore, at times, based on conscious complaints, some feminists naively postulated that women could and would readily give up child-raising if only men were more eager to take it over. The latter position did not take into account the possibility of women's complicated conscious and unconscious ambivalence about giving the baby over to someone else—even the father—after
having carried and given birth to a child; or struggles with the deep internalization of a woman's own mother that can be activated in pregnancy that will affect her attachment style. There is evidence, however, that these socially progressive suggestions as a whole bore some fruit, mostly in building women's collective confidence to step further into the work force, and also to feel freer to seek outside help in caring for their babies. Mothers were and are on the whole less condemned socially in the US for this practice than pre-1970. (Of course the Victorian era in Europe and females in the “upper classes” had yet another set of social disapprobations, where looking after babies was considered menial and thus ‘the mother’ in the household did not engage in much hands-on care. These culture and era shifts are complex enough to warrant closer inspection than is possible in this format.)
I would contend, however that there may be much less relative success in the more complex and deep psychological issues that result in the way many women see themselves, are seen, and are treated both in their being backward about assuming social equality (in the way that Arlene describes personally), and in their being able to recognize their valuable differences to men in very important ways. I see a continuing struggle in this regard, reflected in society, that is also an opportunity for psychoanalysts to help, given our own on-going work to become more enlightened in our theory-making.
Dr. Richards says enthusiastically that the feminist awakening “process has led to a change from second generation feminist thought to a profound change in psychoanalysis.” I am rather less sanguine than Arlene is about the “profound” change in psychoanalysis. I do acknowledge some change in psychoanalysis—especially in the clinical arena. The “good news” here—and Arlene perhaps means this aspect—is a sea-change in daily psychoanalytic practice. No longer are women confronted by analysts (mostly male but also female analysts who used to follow party lines, as it were) telling them that their main troubles were (their “inevitable”) “penis envy,” and that the way to improve their lives was to become more positively involved with their husband's successes!
The “bad news” for me is that I am also very impressed with how groups (including psychoanalysts) regress too, unknowingly remain regressed
due to unconscious and disavowed mentation, and how deeply inscribed are assumptions that elements derived from being embodied as female is a problem for society. Lay people as well as analysts from all schools, for example, still need to compare, contrast and thus evaluate as “better” or “worse,” males vs. females, with the female portrayed as “lacking” in something. The equalities of “both/and” are often missing. Just read a few journal case reports randomly from this point of view as an experiment! This psychic evaluative situation I believe is regressive, but normalized since Freud affirmed it in 1908 and onwards. Incidentally, I do not agree with Arlene that Freud was so free of gender bias, just because he had favorite women like Helene Deutsch and many others who adored him, whom he encouraged professionally. He did not send his own daughters to Gymnasium, for example, indicating that their future would not be in the university. Freud was ambivalent. His bias was likely unconscious—he couldn't help himself. One cannot deny the negativity towards women in his writings that many of the mentioned feminists in Arlene's piece, noticed accurately! Nevertheless, it is also true, as Arlene notes, that his method, which he can be credited for inventing by being prepared to listen with great interest to women talking (a definite plus!), is and has been extraordinarily valuable to countless women's increased self-esteem.
One way that a contemporaneous unconscious fear of females can persist in psychoanalysis is in “gender blindness” in theory and in the conduct of therapy, rather than active “gender bias.” It is as if we were all “alike” and sex and gender history can be ignored, say in an exclusive focus on here-and-now transference/countertransference dilemmas. It is as if Freud made “too much” of it all. These asexual attitudes can flourish also where there is a preferred focus on “the archaic,” implying the everything important in psychic life is “presexual”. “Out” with drive theory and biology: “In” with philosophy and a disembodied mind! Two very recent presentations about Bionian theory that I have attended bring up this theme. One is in a search for “the erotic” in “the container,” and the other applies Bionian theory to an open question about where has sexual detail gone in current case reporting about adults. Another recent theme that I have been writing about myself is essentially my allergy to “the feminine” being used as a theoretic shorthand when thinking and theorizing about women. A close look at this term makes me want to
recommend that it be put on the shelf to accumulate dust because of its obfuscations and assumed value judgments!
Regarding our analytic history of thinking about female psychology—with the exception of Horney's excellent beginnings, for which of course she got punished by the New York Psychoanalytic Association, like the proverbial whistleblower, in 1941, and a few others—I have actually feared the ineffectiveness of struggling to articulate a psychoanalytic psychology of women that openly and consistently rejects Freudian comparisons and replaces it with a focus on the female. An example might be Arlene's comments about equating women's rape fears to men's castration anxiety. Yes, each embodied sex has its own severe anxieties based on reactions to their own anatomical vulnerabilities. Many women analysts have written excellent but sometimes just single random papers correcting clearly this or that element of Freudian thinking, and rightly placing it as culture and era-bound. These can get lost as single items. Compendiums and journals can help in forming “thought collectives.” Many single papers can be found in Shuker and Levinson's wonderful 1991 “Female Psychology: An Annotated Bibliography.” At the time, this book was a bible of information. I, for one, greatly benefited by their research and commentaries. This was before our present digital era which opened the readier ability to search for oneself in the PEP archive that was just being conceived in 1991. Further “thought collective” help was provided in the US by both Harold Blum and Arnold Richards in their roles as chief editors of JAPA. They gathered together in 1976 and 1996 batches of significant papers on “female psychology.” A new journal, “Studies in Gender and Sexuality” was initiated in 2000 by chief editors Virginia Goldner and Muriel Dimen. Bonnie Litowitz, as a JAPA chief editor in 2014, introduced a seminal paper of Julia Kristeva on maternal erotics to an American audience. Claudia Lament in 2015 collected papers on “The War against Women in Psychoanalytic Culture” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child; Jay Greenberg as the PQ chief editor had catalyzed many “conversations” from different points of view in his journal, some involving theory involving female development. Such publications and editors can be an enormous help in supporting “thought collectives” and bringing a topic alive to the general readership and to general analysts.
The founding of COWAP (Committee On Women) within the IPA in
1998, by the London social psychologist/psychoanalyst Joan Raphael-Leff, has also provided a crucial support system for further thinking about female development in psychoanalysis. But when I have looked at who contributes papers to these projects, I found that regrettably only a handful of male writers has actually been able to come out and declare Freud in error about women's “psychosexual phases.” I think that this is significant for our field as a whole as a sign of lack of acceptance in our field—and perhaps even a very subtle dismissal of new critical work as “woman talk.”
I thank Arlene Richards and Lucille Spira for their great energy and delight in this shared project that we all feel enthusiastic about, and their now opening this mode of keeping up a lively collegial interchange in this new way.