Thank you Sandra for hitting the nail on the head. Your response to what women want is right on target. Women want a voice. Just like men want a voice. We all want to be in control of our own lives. Living in a social world limits the extent to which we can do that. Other people's rights and wishes clash with our own. Other people's needs sometimes come first. No one can get it all. But we can all at least have the right to say what we want without being shamed for saying it. And we can all have the right to say what we are afraid of without having to feel shame about that. And we can all ask the questions about morality that guide our own actions and those of others. And we can all come to the resolutions of our own conflicts that make sense to us.
Insisting on our right to be heard may be abrasive to those whose interests lie in our willingness not to bother them in pursuing their own agendas and maintaining dominance. So we do need to be willing to be abrasive. And we need to be willing to be rebellious when we are being mistreated. We do need to push back. In this sense we can understand those women who say “I am not a feminist.” They are the ones who want to keep the peace. They want to be liked. I believe that from a thought collective we can get the courage to be willing to be disliked by the oppressor. The answer to the fear of being disliked by the oppressors is in having a thought collective. If my sisters like me, I can tolerate being disliked by those who want to keep all of us down.
In this sense psychoanalysis does indeed have a potential for disrupting the social contract. The psychoanalytic ideal of speaking one's own truth, suppressing nothing, and respecting where one's own mind wanders, encourages analysands to speak out in other situations just as they do in the analytic space. And the analyst's respectful acceptance and response becomes what the analysand expects of other people. Expectation can
evoke a complementary response. So the willingness to accept rejection and the expectation of acceptance become complementary forces in the push to be what we want to be, and have what we want to have. Thank you Sandra for your courageous and encouraging response in this discussion.