On reading this thoughtful, scholarly paper, I was aware that the author, like myself, is a psychoanalyst, and that we both remember, and experienced, the impact of the second generation feminist wave on our lives, on our ways of conceptualizing and responding to the established social and political norms growing up, coming of age, and determining the arc of our adult lives.
To respond to this paper is to begin at the beginning, to remember what growing up female in Brooklyn in my family of origin was like, and to consider what the concept of a thought collective means to me.
Genesis: I was born in 1942, to working class Jewish parents who were self-educated and highly cultured, valuing art, music, literature, and politically ultra-left wing.
I was the first born child, a girl, and my brother was born just before I turned three years old. Thus I was born into a gendered situation.
There is a clichéd belief that in Judaism, since Jews are waiting for the Messiah, and there is no question that the Messiah is going to be male, Jewish parents favor their sons, since any Jewish boy could grow up to be the Messiah. I did not experience any sense of either my brother or myself being privileged by our parents for any reason. I was not privileged for being the elder, or for being female, and he was not privileged for being the younger, or for being male. We were treated equally.
Growing up in the 1940's, and becoming an adolescent in the 1950's,
meant growing up and coming of age in a markedly sexist culture. But growing up and coming of age in my family provided an experience different from what I experienced in the larger society.
I grew up in an egalitarian family. My parents shared similar values, similar interests, made important decisions together, and they shared responsibility for the household and childcare equally. Since my father worked six days a week until he retired, my mother did somewhat more housework than he did, but he certainly did his share of the housework. He liked food preparation, and although the family had a limited budget, and our food was simple, he liked the visual aspect of preparing food, and would make very basic salads appealing, cutting green peppers into rings, and cutting lemons into wedges to be used to dress the salad, for instance. When my parents considered my brother and me mature enough to come home after school to an empty house, my mother got a job as well, to bolster the family income.
The neighborhood where we lived was primarily Jewish, primarily lower middle class and working class, with a sprinkling of genuine middle middle class families, and the social norms were different from what I saw at home. People lived in two-family and three-family houses, often with extended families in those houses. Some houses had porches, some had stoops. On weekends, in fair weather, when people gathered outdoors, the men would talk about sports and cars. When I heard my father joining in, I was puzzled. He didn't really know much about cars, didn't like driving, and didn't care for sports. My parents' friends, who did not live in our neighborhood, but with whom we socialized frequently, since a husband and wife couple ran a salon every weekend, were intellectuals, and talked knowledgeably about politics, controversial issues, and culture. I asked him why he joined in the kind of conversation the men on our block favored. He answered that he did so to be sociable, not because he was interested in what they cared about. He cared about them, not their interests.
The women on our block didn't work. In fair weather, weekdays and weekends, they would gather on someone's porch, and play mahjong. Perhaps they played indoors in cold or inclement weather, but I wouldn't have known that. My mother detested gambling, detested card playing and mahjong, and of course did not join them. She considered games of
chance a waste of time. She wanted intellectual companionship.
So I grew up aware of a social norm that divided activities by gender, different activities for men and women, and an alternative social norm in which men and women spent time together sharing ideas in serious conversation. Except—isn't there always an “except”? Except that the two dear friends of my parents who ran a salon every weekend, all weekend long seemed to be very gendered. She spent her time in a tiny galley kitchen, tending to food preparation. All weekend long she roasted turkeys and baked apple pies. No other food was served, but she rarely seemed to leave the kitchen, the galley kitchen that wasn't large enough to accommodate one chair for her to sit! And he socialized, mingled, talked, encouraged everyone else to talk. Nonetheless, men did not dominate the discussion. Everyone who had knowledge, or an opinion, talked. I was used to hearing women talk enthusiastically about ideas.
My father was a clerk in a bookstore. He loved his job, because he could talk literature, art, ideas, with the customers. And he could bring home books! When I was not yet a teenager, my father gave me The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir when it was first published in English in 1953. Why? We never talked about why. He gave me many books that he thought I might enjoy reading. But I sure could speculate why.
My father had five sisters, and he was the only boy. He told me that all his life he never saw his mother sleeping. She was up before anyone else in the household awoke, and even when he was a teenager and came home fairly late in the evening, she was still awake, still working. She cooked, she cleaned, she scrubbed. She ironed all the frilly dresses her daughters wore. His father was a plasterer, worked on construction sites, and came home with dirty clothes. His mother scrubbed his clothes clean in the bathtub, using a washboard.
There is a Yiddish word, “balabusta,” derived from a Hebrew phrase bá'alat habáyit, which means mistress of the house. It is used as a form of praise, implying a hard-working woman who devotes herself to maintaining a well-run household. I know my aunts, my father's sisters, were proud of their mother's skills as a balabusta, and those of them who married and had children when they were young devoted themselves to maintaining a well-run household. I think my father saw excess in the
devotion to housework, and wanted something else for me!
Genesis ends with adolescence. In adolescence, the realities of social attitudes toward the behavior of women and men, girls and boys, became paramount. I learned that who I was did not fit the social norms of my peers, of the world outside my family, and I automatically conformed in a superficial way, and yet could not help being myself.
I shall draw a veil over the conflicts and rebellions and acting out of my adolescence, and address the issues Arlene raised by considering my frustrations of early adulthood, of marriage, childcare, and more. These experiences, like the experiences of childhood and adolescence, shaped the psychoanalyst I was going to become—although I did not know I could become a psychoanalyst until I was in my 30's.
The fact that abortion was illegal pre-Roe vs. Wade, when the Supreme Court's 1973 decision created the right for women to obtain an abortion, had bearing on my life. My short story, “Miriam 1960,” in my collection of short fiction, Necessary Voices, published in 2019 by International Psychoanalytic Books, offers an utterly grim depiction of the process a pregnant, unmarried teenager went through, searching for, and finally obtaining, a backstreet abortion that sent her, nearly dead, to a city hospital emergency room. Fiction? The story is true.
In the 1970's, I was invited by friends to something I recently had had glimmers of, a “women's consciousness-raising meeting.” I was curious, and wanted to go. What did I do? I asked my then “boyfriend”—“Honey, may I go to a women's consciousness-raising meeting tonight?” He exploded into a diatribe about “lesbian feminists.” What did I do? I did not go.
Yet, the feminist movement was in the air.
Women who became psychoanalysts were learning an inspired and necessary discipline, theory and clinical practice, which sometimes was not commensurate with their own lived reality.
I remember an anecdote that I heard, midway through my formal psychoanalytic education, told in class by a faculty member. A feminist was referred by her husband's male analyst to another male analyst, who was
told to “bring her to her senses.” Instead, her analyst did what a good analyst does, and encouraged her to be true to herself. She became a well-known feminist. Fortunately, this outstanding male analyst listened to his analysand! And countless women benefitted from her activism.
The vocal leadership of feminists during that time, including the woman whose male analyst didn't try to “bring her to her senses,” eventually influenced me sufficiently. Yes, I ditched the “boyfriend.” Yes, I was learning to value my own thoughts and feelings.
Arlene, you cite Ludwig Fleck's ideas about thought collectives, “a thought collective exists wherever two or more persons are exchanging thoughts,” (Fleck, L., , p. 102). His contributions certainly are valuable, and he is an outstanding thinker. And yet, can we go beyond the specific thought collective that defines man and woman, masculinity and femininity, maleness and femaleness? Obviously, we have to do that!
When you described miners losing work, doing housework, and needing help, and when I read your discussion of boys not wanting to do “girly things,” I was reminded of a story I read when I was very young, a book my mother showed me. I believe it had illustrations by the noted artist Kathe Kollwitz. The story told of a peasant family where the husband and wife were arguing over whose work was harder, men's or women's. So they decided to change places to find out. Aha! Oh ho! Guess what! Yup, the husband could not keep up with what women's work entailed, while his wife easily did his work. Another instance of generalizations, of course, but it certainly created a sense of empowerment in me in the late 1940's.
Again, early in my psychoanalytic education, I took a class in the early writings of Sigmund Freud, in which we read the Dora case. I was disturbed by what I had read, and in class I asked, “Why would a 14-year-old girl be aroused by the embrace of a man in his 40's reeking of cigar smoke when she already expressed admiration for Madame K's ‘adorable white body‘?” I knew from my own life experience that I wouldn't have felt what Freud said Dora felt. A man in the class started referring to me as “the feminist,” and a woman in the class insisted that I should read Juliet Mitchell's work so that I could understand that “Freud really loved women.” Juliet Mitchell is a renowned feminist who made
an effort to reconcile Freudian thought with feminism, using Marxist thought. Yes, I read her work, and no, I don't think that all of Freudian thought can be reconciled with feminism.
Fortunately, we are capable of independent thought!
Given that I can disagree with Juliet Mitchell, and she and I both are women, it seems we need to be very careful about generalizations, about reifying the notion that what men want is universal for men, what women want is universal for women.
The notorious quotation from Freud—“What do women want?”—may not have been said by Freud. Nonetheless, we need to question the question.
A well-known feminist drive theorist, Doris Bernstein, made wonderful contributions to psychoanalytic developmental theory. She did not try to answer the question, “What do women want?” but, rather, she explored the psyche of a little girl, and thus, the psyche of a woman, in new ways.
Perhaps the value we most need is to create balance, by adding connectivity to independence. I am very grateful that you, along with your co-editor Lucille Spira, chose to publish my chapter in your book, Myths of Mighty Women: Their Application in Psychoanalysis (Karnac, ) in which I explored the thoughts and feelings of women who do Japanese taiko drumming. They sought balance, a sense of connection a sense of independence, a sense of self-expression, and a sense of power. In my chapter I pointed out that, ironically, the best feminist films emerged from a very male-centered culture, Japan, all directed by Japanese men. These sensitive filmmakers recognized women oppressed by a patriarchal society had needs, and rights.
Perhaps we can be both challenged and inspired by the publication, in 2012, by The MIT Press, of Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran, by Gohar Homayounpour. The author, Iranian-born, trained in the West as a psychoanalyst, moved back to the Islamic Republic of Iran to practice psychoanalysis. Of note: the great Iranian filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, wrote the Forward. Homayounpour writes poignantly about so many things, with a commitment to truth. “I feel more identified with everything and everybody in Tehran, which leads to a great deal more
emotional exhaustion in all scenarios, including with patients. It is also emotionally loaded, for at times I despise how I identify with people here. I have spent years separating myself from them, because I am not supposed to be who I was when I left” (p. 98). She dreads the return of the repressed, and realizes she has to deal with the anxiety it generates (p. 99).
Perhaps we too have to deal with the return of the repressed, the lingering, sometimes overpowering vestiges of gender roles, of who we may have been, of who we actually may be. We may have to continue the struggle against patriarchal standards, both external and internalized, using our “rage and creativity” in the service of freedom for all.
Amen, Arlene, to your powerful vision of hope for us as we are emancipated from restrictive gender roles.