When I started my psychoanalytic training in the 1980s, psychoanalysis was still a male dominated profession. Today, when I go to psychoanalytic meetings, it is highly visible that the majority of my colleagues are women. However, the assignments of keynote speakers and panel contributors seem to continue a preference for male colleagues. Is this cultural, psychological, or merely accidental? Anyhow, 107 years after its formation the members of the IPA elected its first female president in 2017, Virginia Ungar from Buenos Aires.
I learned a lot from Arlene Kramer Richards' paper on how a Second Generation Feminist Thought Collective Influenced Psychoanalysis. Even the notion of a Feminist Thought Collective was new to me; and so was the amazing fact that it was only (or first) in psychoanalysis, that women were able to form a mutually supportive, inspiring, and enduring collective. This is good to know, because despite the lingering idea that it is the exceptional individual (man) who makes and breaks history, it is the power of collectives that decide over the endurance of conventions as well as the acceptance of innovations. To bond in collectives inherently increases the power of women, and the question is: how does their influence show and what does it achieve?
Collectives can be characterized by a particular “thought-style,” they are, what Kramer Richards references with Fleck's term, “thought collectives,” a notion that reminds me of Thomas Kuhn's studies on paradigms. Kuhn saw the readiness for change in purely rational terms: when a guiding scientific paradigm has grown inadequate to solve emerging problems, it will eventually be overthrown by a new paradigm, which enables better results, thus be more satisfying for the researchers, which helps them to eventually move towards working under the new paradigm. In a long-term perspective we may observe something similar in psychoanalysis: a focus-shift from Oedipus to Narcissus to Object-Relations to Container to Alpha/Beta, which is not quite as scientific and superseding as Kuhn had it, but fits the principle of building new thought
collectives—commonly called psychoanalytic “schools (of thought).” These new schools, after first being exciting and attractive, tend to petrify or wilt when they defensively conserve their way of thinking by excluding “deviant” colleagues, those who think “outside the box.” If feminist thought-collectives set out to open psychoanalysis towards a specifically female “thought-style” and content, we may gather that the paradigm change they achieved has at no point been an easy feat. Kramer Richards explores how feminist “thought-collectives,” overcoming the barriers of prejudice, culture, convention, and competition, gained the necessary self-assertion to make meaningful change in psychoanalysis.
To my delight, Kramer Richards, a declared “equality of opportunity feminist” values, Freud's “feminist position,” which feminists themselves often cast into doubt. Of course, Freud grew up in the cultural climate of Vienna's turn of the century, and he could be called a “patriarch” in his Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. But even though he was (as we all are) a child of his time, he more importantly was a proponent of the Enlightenment and as such much too interested in all aspects of the human mind to disregard women and their thinking. His letters to Martha and his daughters show a great deal of respect, curiosity, admiration, and affection. He did admit that his understanding of female sexuality hadn't gotten very far, and his normative statements about the maturity of vaginal orgasm seem to have be more a brain-child than related to his psychoanalytic explorations. But what earned him the feminists' resentment was the notion of “penis envy.”
It always seemed unfortunate to me that this notion was taken by its critics as an offense to women. The painful “ugliness” of envy, and the idea that envying the penis confirmed the inferiority of the female genitals (which effectively was how this concept was used by generations of analysts) contributed to the widespread outrage it drew in feminist circles. But here is how Freud, comparing both sexes, saw it: The little boy, when he catches sight of a girl's genitals, “sees nothing or disavows what he sees” (1925, p.252), which eventually leads him to belief in the threat of castration.
“A little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it, knows that she doesn't have it, and wants to have it.” (1925, p.252 my italics)
This immediate wish to have what another has is a totally natural urge in every child. Also, it is easy to see the penis and hard to discover and picture the hidden vagina. Nowadays, parents do a better job in explaining the visible and the invisible, which helps—but does it eliminate penis envy? Taken as a metaphor, penis envy still represents socially or culturally engraved gender norms and expectations, the very thing the feminists have been fighting against for decades. When a patient of mine complained: “Why was my brother allowed to climb a tree and I was not?” she spoke of the inequality of opportunity based on the only tangible difference between her and her brother. Needless to say, one doesn't climb a tree with the penis, but that's what the parental verdict seemed to claim. She envied him for the greater freedom and the more adventurous life he was granted. We can call this “penis envy.” Envy always embraces a high valuation of something one lacks, combined with a sense of injustice. Psychoanalysis can transform neurotic impotence, helplessness, and shame that is stuck in penis envy into authentic self-confidences, pride, and goal oriented creativity—the recognition that, sure, a girl can climb a tree and much more. Thus the penis in “penis envy” is a shortcut or denominator for everything that stands in the way of realizing equal opportunity, while remaining an object of desire. Anger and rage related to penis envy express self-assertion, the energy that wants to ascertain equal opportunity. I agree with Kramer Richards that penis envy should no longer be regarded as “the bedrock of femininity,” and Freud's subsequent deduction of the inferiority of the female superego even turned things on its head (if anything women tend to be more superegoish than men). But to delete the notion of “penis envy” from the psychoanalytic literature would seem to me more a conceptual loss than a win.
Fortunately, there are differences between men and women (beyond penis and vagina), the emphasis of which Kramer Richards associates to the Second Wave feminists, who focus on connectivity, “concern for the welfare and feelings of others” and the value of caretaking. The idea had to be broached that these capacities are not “girly things”, that boys too need to develop concern and care for the other. But as I have elaborated elsewhere (Schmidt-Hellerau, 2006), there may be different ways and means to connect and take care. O'Connell (2005) describes how he and his wife took care of their little daughter when she stepped in a bee's nest and was stung many times: besides tending to the hurt the mother
soothed her daughter's pain and anxiety by staying up with her at night and talking about all aspects of the terrifying experience, while the father started to plot and eventually executed with the little girl a plan (a “military operation”) to take out the bee nest. These are two necessary and complementary ways of taking care of the child and thereby teaching her how to take care of herself. As the example shows, the maternal care was focused more on the body and the inner world of the child, while the paternal care strategized with the girl how to defend herself in the external world. Does this sound like a stone-age cross-cultural tale of women tending the hut and men hunting for food? What the example shows is a predilection, an inclination, not a limitation. Freud, distinguishing the biological and sociological differences between men and women concluded “that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense. Every individual on the contrary displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex” (1905, p. 220). Acknowledging the differences and their mixtures, Freud conceded that certain fixed gender role assignments are imposed by societies, but he suggested that in the long run they can only be maintained if they are met by some somatic compliance, an innate/biological tendency that goes along with them. Thus, the aim cannot be to deny such differences (as Kramer Richards quotes Jean Stafford: “there is nothing worse for a woman than to be deprived of her womanliness”), the aim has to be of valuing male and female qualities equally—in fact, appreciating that the one group of qualities (male or female) would fail if it were not complemented by the other. Thus if women in order to succeed would try to copy men or be even more macho than their male colleagues, they would not only discredit their womanliness, they would also devalue and forego the specific contribution they can make in any field.
As a case in point, let me add the example of my particular area of research, a revision of Freud's drive theory (Schmidt-Hellerau, 2018), namely the concepts of the death drive, aggression, and the disappearance of Freud's self-preservative drive. Retrieving and repositioning the concept of a preservative drive, I posit that humans are not only driven to have sex, they are also driven to rescue, nurture, and protect themselves as well as their objects, to connect with others in concern for their welfare and the wish to take care of them. My conceptual revision of
Freud's drive theory followed rational criteria, and, I always felt, anyone could have done this work—but clearly it would have to be a woman. Because a woman has a greater awareness of and interest in the issues of self- and object-preservative needs.
Freud, the man, who started out with a self-preservative and a sexual drive, had focused most of his explorations on sexuality, and in his 1920 revision he almost dropped his self-preservative drive and left us with sexuality and aggression as the two basic drives. We could call this the male tilt of psychoanalysis. I always thought that Freud would have agreed with my resurrection and reconceptualization of his self-preservative drive and all it entailed. Still to open my colleagues to this new “female paradigm” has not been easy. That caretaking is on equal footing with lovemaking, equally valuable and necessary—and always part of it—seems to be a notion senior colleagues who grew up under Freud's male paradigm are reluctant to accept.
Change is achieved with snail's pace, as the saying goes. Slowly but surely women, once encouraged by psychoanalysis to raise their voices, have eventually made themselves heard in psychoanalysis. “Feminism has a debt to psychoanalysis, but analysis is also indebted to feminism,” as Kramer Richards writes, and she adds that “rage fueled by injustice has been a spur to creativity in the analytic world.” When a woman's “soft voice of reason” is ignored, rage screams, an emphasis on what she has and wants to contribute. And now and then she is heard here and there. Over time the predominantly female theme of self-and object-preservation is establishing itself in psychoanalysis. The need to take care of oneself, the other, and the environment has to be considered—pathological preoccupation / obsession with, or negligence of, preservative issues should be analyzed and worked through. It is necessary to do this within the female paradigm, on a par with, not as a fallout of the male paradigm. The perseverance of the feminist thought collective has worked the ground and opened the intellectual and emotional space in psychoanalysis to perceive and study this in new ways.