Dr. Richards' paper is a concise review of the cross fertilization between feminism and psychoanalysis over a period of approximately five decades. It covers many key developments in this sometimes uneasy rapprochement, but fails to mention a concomitant circumstance that is crucial to an understanding of the events she describes. I refer to the remarkable transformation of psychoanalysis itself, from what originally was a profession practiced almost exclusively by men, to one that has become, overwhelmingly, the province of women. This change occurred in approximately the identical five decades covered by Dr. Richards' survey, impelled by several conjunctures.
Among the first was the challenge to the hegemony of Freudian theory by Melanie Klein and her followers, whose reversal of the formulation that the function of the object is to gratify the drives was momentous and revolutionary. Here was a woman proposing that what is fundamental to the psyche is the relationship, with its origins in the link between mother and child, not the reduction of organ tensions that had long been an axiom of psychoanalytic theory. Moreover, she promulgated her theory in the teeth of the most powerful possible opposition, while blithely maintaining that she was simply adhering to the essentials of Freud's thinking. An indispensable corollary of her position was that the most elemental formative experience of personality occurs in earliest infancy during the time Freud had called the oral period, and that, therefore, the crucial influence in the life of a child is its relation to its mother, and not the oedipal struggle with the father to which Freud had assigned primary importance.
Melanie Klein's first analyst was Sandor Ferenzci, whose divergent views on the seduction theory and active therapeutic methods led to a rift with Freud. Her second analyst was Karl Abraham, another intimate of Freud's who, in disagreement with the master, emphasized the pregenital stages of development as predominant. By the time Klein emigrated to London in 1926, there were several influential female members of
the British Psycho-Analytical Society, including Susan Isaacs, Paula Heimann, and Joan Riviere, who supported her in the struggle against Anna Freud, regarded as the heir apparent to her father's theoretical and organizational authority. Of course, there were other woman analysts who stood by Anna Freud: for example, Kate Friedlander, Dorothy Burlingham, and Barbara Lantos. Still others, among them Sylvia Payne, Ella Freeman Sharpe and Marjorie Brierley, attempted to reconcile the competing factions.
My point, here, is that significant female representation in the British Society, no matter their allegiance to Klein or Freud, provided a climate that was highly favorable to the emergence of new and profoundly influential strains of psychoanalytic thought that reflected a uniquely feminine cast of mind. The body of theory and practice thus formed was quickly carried to other parts of the world where it took root and flourished. The singularly stringent Kleinian version of object relations theory eventually spread northward from Argentina and other Latin American enclaves to the United States, where, softened and liberalized, it constituted a major element in the foundation of what became the Relational Turn.
Another momentous occurrence that contributed to the feminization of the psychoanalytic profession took place in November 1988, when the law suit brought against the American Psychoanalytic Association by four psychologists, alleging restraint of trade, was settled without a trial. As part of the settlement, the American conceded to psychologists and other mental health professionals the right to obtain the training necessary for their becoming psychoanalysts with full certification and unencumbered by the waivers that formerly had prevented them from practicing. The gates were thus opened for the women who, already, comprised a large majority of the mental health professions, to apply for and be accepted for training in institutes approved by the American.
Even prior to that, however, the number of woman candidates in the many non-medical psychoanalytic institutes had increased exponentially. In New York City, for example, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research had been founded in 1958 by a group of women who were psychoanalytically experienced, accomplished, and sophisticated. They were called “the Founding Mothers,” only somewhat
facetiously, chiefly by the men who later joined the institute. Although the William Alanson White Institute had always been somewhat receptive to woman candidates, their numbers rose significantly during the four or five decades in question, especially beginning in the mid 1950's, when it discontinued the practice of denying non-MD graduates certification as psychoanalysts and, at the same time, admitted more psychologists for training. Likewise, the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University, established in 1961, attracted progressively greater numbers of woman candidates whose responsibilities as wives and mothers were more easily interwoven with a scheduling of courses, supervision, and clinical work that was designed with greater flexibility than those of the older, free-standing, traditional institutes.
Postdoc was also the first training establishment to bestow formal acceptance on the Relational Turn in psychoanalysis, by creating a track under that rubric, alongside its extant Freudian, Interpersonal-Humanistic, and Independent tracks. This innovation resulted, in large part, from pressure exerted by the increasing numbers of female graduates and candidates who embraced relational theory and practice as far more congenial to their perception of themselves as women and healers. Relational perspectives were also seen as consistent to a significantly high degree with the evolving spectrum of feminist thought.
The influx of women and their innovative contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice were a necessary and welcome corrective to the phallocentric culture that had become sclerotized under Hartmanian Ego Psychology. In this context, it must be recalled that the analysts who came to the United States as refugees from the European Holocaust of World War II, fell roughly into two groups according to their political inclinations: those who leaned to the left included Otto Fenichel, Sandor Rado, and Wilhelm Reich; those of a more liberal bent were represented by the Ego-Psychological troika of Hartman, Kris, and Lowenstein, and Heinz Kohut, the originator of Self-Psychology. No matter their ideologies, however, they shared both a susceptibility to dogmatism and a support for male preeminence in their profession.
Such qualities merged with the traditional, entrenchment of male privilege, power, and control in the United States medical profession to
produce a rendition of psychoanalysis that was authoritarian and dominated by men. Another force that conduced to this near monopoly was economic: psychiatrists had far lower incomes than their colleagues in other medical specialties and therefore tended to be more jealous of their status, prestige, exclusiveness and other prerogatives. Be it recalled that psychoanalysis became the dominant paradigm of psychiatry at a time when the psychiatric formulary was pitifully meager and, when this condition was changed by the discovery and use of new and more various psychotropic medications, fewer and fewer psychiatrists opted for psychoanalytic training, a circumstance that cleared opportunities for entry into the profession of unprecedented numbers of non-medical mental health professionals, most of whom, as I have already mentioned, were women.
At this point, I should like to consider some of the consequences of the current psychoanalytic incumbency of women. First, as I have already mentioned, it supplanted the classical imperative of the oedipus complex with its own canonical mother/child; self/other; breast/mouth; reciprocal gaze formulations. Second, its culturalist bias provided a refutation of Freud's popular aphorism, “Anatomy is destiny,” and at the same time, struck a blow against Freud's insistence on the coeternality and dialectical confrontation between eros and death. Henceforth, the belief in the inevitability of aggression and its sinister derivatives (sadism, hostility, ruthlessness, brutality, etc.) would be challenged with the assertion that these dark entities are attributable, ultimately, to corrupt societal institutions that are amenable to remediation. It was thus conceivable that malignant forms of aggression could be eradicated and humans might treat each other with kindness and respect. In addition, the culturalist perspective lent impetus to the necessity of social justice as a concept integral to psychoanalytic theory and practice. This, it may be noted, was a direct outgrowth of the restoration of Freud's seduction theory in the form of assumptions regarding the actual occurrence of myriad forms of child abuse and traumatization.
As feminized psychoanalysis evolved its own conventions, traditions, variations and value system, it also attained its own sclerosis in the form of political correctness, suppression of some salient forms of competitiveness and aggression, intolerance of certain types and contexts of dialogue, and a mammocentric hegemony to supplant that of
the phallus. Symbols of erection and all but the most mild assertions of masculine identity were disapproved of as sexist, abusive, oppressive and persecutory.
If drives are deemed primary and relationships secondary, Feminists infer that men are motivated by their impulses and are, therefore, by their very nature, ruthless, abusive, exploitive, and egocentric. By contrast they posit that the elemental considerations for women are compassion, nurturance, support, and dependence and that this makes them, by their very nature, vulnerable, generous, empathic, and altruistic. The attention Dr. Richards calls to the revision of Freud's theory of the superego “…to account for the moral integrity of women based on their concerns for human values and people's feelings…” constitutes a singular irony: the widespread application of Kleinian and Relational views afforded feminist theorists an axis on which to reverse the belief that compared to men, women were deficient in moral integrity. If relatedness is the quintessence of the feminine, and the satisfaction of drives of the masculine, the superiority of the female over the male superego is unarguable. The irony consists of the uninvited reappearance in a new guise, of Freud's maligned aphorism, “Anatomy is destiny.”
In the section of her paper titled “Equality,” Dr. Richards refers to so-called “women's professions,” citing primary school teaching, social work, and nursing, as examples. In another irony unanticipated either by Dr. Richards or the profusion of women in current practice, psychoanalysis has itself become a women's profession.
In a significant sense, the set of events I have tried to describe has amounted to nothing less than a revolution. Comparing the current order with the structure against which it set itself, one might justifiably conclude that there are now not one, but two psychoanalyses, the earlier male, and the later female; the earlier derived from the experiences, biases, and conceptualizations of men; the later from those of women. I would add that the foundational assumptions of each theory, together with the practices to which they give rise, are valid within their own frame of reference, and juxtaposing them in tandem and opposition would certainly conduce to the comprehensive enrichment and deepening of psychoanalytic understanding.