Arlene Kramer Richards' paper “Rage and Creativity: how Second-Generation Feminist Thought Collective influenced Psychoanalysis” offers us an opportunity to examine the interplay between feminist development and the development of psychoanalytic theories of femininity. Richards offers us a review of the contributions of Second Wave feminist thinkers and the social context that gave rise to them. She also welcomes us to come to know some of her own personal narrative, both in terms of her family history and her professional development as a psychoanalyst, with regard to her own feminine identity formation, inviting a sense of intimacy as we read her contribution.
Richards poses the question “What did feminists want?” This is reminiscent for me of the recent COWAP (IPA Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis) Conference entitled “What Do Women Want Today?” in Washington D.C. on November 2019, organized by Margarita Cereijido and Nancy Goodman, North American COWAP members, at which Richards presented, along with a number of other leading female psychoanalytic thinkers from North and Latin America. Presenters offered ideas on themes such as “Liberating ‘female’ from ‘femininity’” (Rosemary Balsam); “The feminine: plurality of desires” (Leticia Glocer Fiorini); “What women want and what is wanted of women” (Richards, herself); “What should a wife want?” (Janice Lieberman); and “Self-agency in the feminine: what females need today” (myself). The Conference offered opportunities to collaborate on these relevant topics that are very much alive, topics where societal context and psychoanalytic thought intersect. Richards' contribution emphasized the central place of equality for the woman, equality of opportunity, as she likewise emphasizes to us in this paper. For me, as I suggested in my conference presentation, crucial
to having equal opportunity is the woman finding her self-agency, her voice, the only way she can have her grounding in her selfhood, direction, identity. Agency accompanies sexual and gender identity—not just accepting the assignment of gender identity, but choosing it. Also, agency encompasses aspects of unconscious fantasy that provide the scaffolding of the inner world and includes introjected cultural conceptions (Ellman & Goodman, 2017).
Issues of women's equality and self-agency continue to have a central presence in popular culture. With the fairly recent outbreak of Covid-19, many television series have been quite popular, and recently suggested to me was a 4-episode television series entitled “Unorthodox” that poignantly captures these principles of equality of opportunity and of self-agency. The series (based on the autobiographical memoire of its producer) depicts a young woman, Esty (for Esther) raised in a sect of Hasidic Jews in New York, and her flight from her community as she poignantly discovers her voice, once outside the restrictive confines of her prior highly ritualized life. Esty lived according to the strictures of her religious community, and was raised by a loving, religiously observant grandmother, as her mother had left the community when she was three years old; Esty was falsely told that her mother had abandoned her and was “dead,” even though her mother fought as best she could to keep Esty, failing in the end in the midst of threats of legal proceedings. Esty had a secret with her grandmother—the secret was her exquisite singing voice. Because of Hasidic prohibitions against women performing in any way, Esty's voice was not permitted to be heard. Esty made the decision to leave her newly matched husband and community, seemingly because of the loveless marriage of which the only aim was to procreate in the most dispassionate mechanistic (and painful) way. Not only was sexual intercourse terribly unpleasant for Esty, but also her husband proclaimed to her that he wanted a divorce because “something was wrong with her,” and her mother-in-law made frequent unannounced visits to lecture her on the need to make her son feel like a “king” in the bedroom. Upon discovering her pregnancy (her husband did not yet know) Esty took flight to Berlin using the German citizenship her German mother had left her with (offering her a way out of the imprisonment of the community). It was with her departure from her religious community, and from the tight hold of her grandmother (her grandmother died of a heart
attack on the same day Esty auditioned at a music conservatory in Berlin, symbolically freeing her from her past) that Esty could take her own life path. Esty found her voice, found her agency, found what she longed for, thereby enabling her to pursue the equal opportunity to set her direction in her life. This series is a moving narrative of a woman finding equality, the freedom to choose. In keeping with concerns of feminine equality, also new to television is a series entitled “Mrs. America,” an excellent depiction of the early 1970's Second Wave feminist movement at the time of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment which includes portrayals of Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chrisholm, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Phyllis Schlafly. There is no coincidence that the “Mrs. America” series, speaking to the critical importance of the woman having charge of her body, is of popular interest now when Roe v. Wade is under attack. Now is a time that calls for revisiting the minds and thinking of the Second Wave feminists.
Richards offers the crucial consideration that Freudian thinking is not necessarily anti-feminist as espoused by Carolyn Heilbrun, the first woman to be tenured at Columbia University. Richards gives careful thought to enumerating the female analysts, Clara Thompson, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein and many others in all global regions who “have thought and written about the female experience in non-subservient ways” (p. 5).
In her discussion of equality, Richards likewise recognizes the place of Difference, in her consideration of the “Difference feminist” whose first interest was in what they did not want in sex, and insisting on sexual freedom. Also, Richards calls our attention to the consciousness raising groups where speaking, expressing feelings, wishes and fears—having a voice—was greatly valued.
“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 of women and to correct Freud's idea that difference is dangerous because it can used invidiously to justify lesser opportunities for women than for men” (p. 7-8). The right to equality, Richards reminds us, particularly with regard to equal protection, must address the problems of rape, involuntary sterilization of poor women,
uninvestigated side effects of birth control pills and abortion rights, the rights over decisions about one's own body.
I had the privilege and good fortune of being a member of the first graduating class of the Contemporary Freudian Society, Washington DC (then the New York Freudian Society), and seven women from my cohort upon graduating formed a study group where our first project was to write about our analytic listening. We studied as a group what was on our minds the moment before we spoke to our patients, in our effort to trace the mind of the analyst in the process of forming their interventions. We seven, presented for our first time at the IPA Congress in Barcelona in 1993—seven young non-M.D. analyst women—assigned two prominent male analyst discussants: Michael Feldman and Jorge Canestri. We found comfort and strength in the femaleness of our group. Our next study group topic took us more closely into the area of femininity and women. In our ongoing case discussions we discovered a lag between our theories and our clinical practice, where we identified an emphasis in our clinical work on penis envy as bedrock. In spite of the many then current readings on feminine development and psychology, we found that we were all too rooted in an older classical view of Freud's. It was through our discussions that we created an expansion of space in our thinking to hear more possibilities of meanings of penis envy and female body concerns and we reported on the effect of our self-study in writing and publishing of “Hearing what cannot be seen: a psychoanalytic research group's inquiry into female sexuality” (1996). This work led us to follow up with examining the further development of our listening to our female patients. Our interest was to create an open way of listening that would serve to consolidate our patients' feminine identifications and provide a forum to mediate the work on gender difference. As a group we wrote, presented at an IPA Congress, and published “The Riddle of Femininity: The interplay of primary femininity and castration complex in analytic listening” (2001). I now reflect back on our work, our female analytic training cohort joining to study and develop our feminine analyst identities, a kind of analytic consciousness-raising group, which led not only to our productive work as a group, but also to our further differentiating our analytic identities beyond our studying and writing together as a group. We each developed out of the group in different ways. The group served the effective function of the female container for the development of our separate female analyst identities.
Richards' ideas on the thought collective are quite relevant, both its power to influence and open thinking and also, if too extensive, its potential to constrain thought. Feminist rage made for furthering policy and laws that were more adequately protective of women's rights. Richards ends her paper referencing the recent film “One Child Nation” that records the experiences of a town in China during the ‘one child policy’ and evidencing the policy as a war on women and their bodies. Richards offers her analysis of this policy and describes it as effecting the reversal of the helpless infant position in relation to the all-powerful mother, essentially “a backlash against the newly empowered women in China” (p.10). This phenomenon is emblematic of “the masculine protest” articulated by both Adler and Freud, the deep anxiety in men about their feminine identifications, based on the dread of the male rendered helpless in the hands of women. Resulting is the fear and repudiation of passivity and femininity, often presenting as both fear and hatred of women. The hypermasculinity we bear witness to, a kind of masculine masquerade, Richards describes as “the macho independence” (p. 12). Jessica Benjamin, in her recent keynote presentation at the COWAP conference in Mexico City, conducted virtually due to Covid-19, spoke to the repudiation of femininity constituting the definition of masculinity, along with denigration and projection of all vulnerability into a feminine object. There remains the enduring belief that the powerful mother can undo masculinity. The infant is dependent on the mother for regulation, and without being able to mitigate those early effects of helplessness, the construction of masculinity aims to solve that problem. Chodorow (2003) describes the psychic ‘fault lines of masculinity’ as based on a dual repudiation: a) of the mother identification and b) of the identification with the little boy as opposed to the adult man. In this sense masculinity is defined by negative identifications as ‘not female’ and not ‘a boy.’ Vulnerability is split off, projected and expunged, and the sadistic paternal ideal becomes an eroticized hard masculinized object. There remains a profound fear of fragmentation and loss of self-cohesion that comes to be combined with ideas of gender. The masculine armor becomes a solution as the helpless woman represents the needs of the baby-self (Benjamin, 2020).
When Richards speaks to “Difference” and the “difference feminists,” I believe she is calling attention to the idea of the recognition of the
other. The resolution of the oedipal complex, the movement into the depressive position, the possibility of the creation of the triangular space, the third, creates a place of equivalency, where the other is seen in like terms, where violence and subjugation are no longer necessary, where perspective shifts. Here, creative thought becomes possible, and vulnerability is not attacked. Carol Gilligan, in her keynote plenary at the 2020 American Psychoanalytic Association meetings in New York, offered a new rich, powerful read of the Old Testament story of Eve as a story of resistance to patriarchy. Eve's opposition to Adam is actually her being the “help-mate”—“the sustainer beside him” (which is what the Hebrew actually translates, “helper by opposing”); Adam needs Eve to help him with what he cannot do on his own, that is, to help him break out of patriarchy. The recognition of the difference of the other offers the opportunity to open a third space, not one of subjugation but one, according to Benjamin (2020), of creativity, affirmation of lawfulness, and sharing witness to the trauma of violence. Women, like the original icon of Eve, can become the feminine container where mutuality is possible if difference is allowed.
I thank Richards for her meaningful contribution that is evocative of continued thought for us all.