I am very grateful for the very thoughtful, well documented, and serious response from Nancy Kulish. She provides a detailed history of female psychoanalysts who preceded the Second Wave feminists of the post-World War II era. Those analysts provided the foundation on which the female analysts of the 1970s and 80s built a new understanding of female psychology that influenced analytic practice in almost universal ways. As Kulish demonstrates, the knowledge was there. Primary female identity was convincingly argued by Karen Horney. I am proud to have been influenced by her ideas. But analysts in the 50s and 60s in the United States were still clinically practicing as if penis envy were universal bedrock for female development and the major reason for neurosis in women. It took the influence of the Second Wave feminists to change that.
Another important issue Kulish points out is the issue of rape fantasies in female psychology. I posited rape fears as important factors in female fantasies. This was the opposite of what was the standard doctrine at the time. My point was that women do not long for rape, we are afraid of it. And as Kulish points out, these fears are all too likely to be corroborated by dangers in reality, Many women are really raped. And rape is far more common than male castration in reality. So the idea that rape fears lead to rape fantasies does not imply that little girls are wanting to be raped. Just the opposite. And it is the Third Wave feminists of our time who have documented date rape, campus rape, fraternity gang rape and other horrors perpetrated on young women.
The issue of equality for women is one in which the analytic world has followed rather than led in our understanding of women. I think that such issues as child care, maternity leave, equal pay for equal work, respect for “women's work,” like nursing, social work, nursery and primary
school teaching, and ending sexual harassment in the workplace have come mainly from outside our field. These issues have a profound influence on identity and self-respect. They have been addressed mostly by critics of psychoanalysis as it was in the 1950s. Now analysts are taking note of them. And they are being addressed in clinical practice.
I am especially grateful for Kulish's description of the women's group in psychoanalysis she attended. It was certainly helpful in both creating sisterhood within the group and publicizing the ideas of the women writing about female psychology at that time. And I believe that it encouraged her seminal (maybe I should say ovarian) idea of the Persephone Fantasy. That was a first: a real challenge to the idea that everyone's life fits the Oedipus myth. It was an explication of a fantasy constructed in the face of a conflict between wanting to remain a mother's best beloved and wanting to become an adult woman relating to a best beloved man. At the time it was viewed as a separation-individuation conflict. But the point was that we could look at other fantasies as well as the Oedipal one and understand the conflicts that our current women patients have in terms of their own experiences as well as the universal issues all humans have. So the Difference Feminist view received a major support from this line of thinking. We can now understand our patients better because of this contribution.