Thank you Alison for bringing in the Interpersonal psychoanalytic tradition to our discussion of how psychoanalytic thought collectives were influenced by second wave feminism. Both the European immigrants who brought Freud's drive psychology and those who were immersed in ego psychology thought a lot and based their theories on the motivating effects of the body. But the mainly American Interpersonal tradition based its theory on the mind shaped by human interaction. This made the physical differences between the sexes more relevant and more critical to the drive theorists and the ego psychologists, while it was less prominent in the thinking of the inter-personalists. So there was less change needed in inter-personalist theory than in drive or ego psychology.
Indeed, I remember reading Harry Stack Sullivan's clinical vignette of a woman with postpartum depression whom he treated by recommending that she go back to work. As it happened, the case meant a lot to me at the time because my parents, my close extended family, my neighbors and my friends all thought I was either dumb or crazy to want to go to graduate school when I had a doctor for a husband and three lovely children to take care of. I was startled to find that my analyst thought the same way. It made for some great battles. But my husband and my son supported me in pursuing my career. My daughters were still too young to weigh in on that. And they liked that we all went to school together on the Riverside Drive bus and had lunch together and went back on the bus together,
They were not so happy on the evenings when I went back to class, but their willingness to put up with all that meant a lot.
I had grown up in a family in which my mother supported herself and my father, and helped to support my grandparents and her three younger
brothers. They were recent immigrants who got to the U.S. just in time for the depression. My mother had a marketable skill. She made hats. She worked until I was born and went back to work soon after. So when I asked where my mother was, it was always at work. I always wanted to go to work. My grandfather was a laundryman, so he could and did take me to work with him. As the family changed, my father got a job, and I went to live with my parents, my mother gave up working to stay home like an American lady and play mah jong. She seemed to me to be depressed from then on. She was a perfect example of the point Betty Friedan had made. My analyst eventually put up with this genetic explanation.
It seems to me that you knew a similar culture. In addition, as you experienced Jewish culture, women were regarded as different from and equal to men. Since both you and your husband saw things that way, there was no conflict. To the extent that you were a mother of boys there was no competition with you. So there was a sense that your boys could grow up to be men who would treat women with respect.
What about boys who grow up in less ideal circumstances? Would you expect the same for them? Do you expect that of your patients? Your supervisees? Your students? How would you react to men who do not respect women? What could be done to change their attitudes? Do you have a relationship that could be thought of as a thought community that deals with such issues? Can we be that thought community?