We are deeply honored to be asked to respond to Arlene Richards' evocative and rich paper, as she raises the question of the impact of the feminist movement on current psychoanalytic theory. She cites the remark that the “personal is political” and shares some of her own history as it has contributed to her ways of thinking. This resonated deeply for us, as many of the topics she discusses link to our personal and shared histories as well.
We met when we were both studying child psychoanalysis with Anna Freud. As well as discovering many intellectual and political affinities, we found that, despite our disparate backgrounds, we could both consider ourselves “2nd-generation feminists.” By this we mean that our parents already lived ideals of equality and collaboration. Jack's mother arrived as a 16-year-old immigrant in Montreal, and led her union out on strike as a shop steward 2 days later. When she and Jack's father married, they ran a series of corner grocery stores together and other businesses for the rest of their lives. Kerry's parents shared activities and responsibilities, including those of non-sexist child rearing, and supported her voice and that of other disenfranchised groups from the outset. So it wasn't surprising that we began writing papers and remodeling houses together.
That's all fun and interesting, but why were we in London in the first place and how does that relate to Arlene's paper? She draws on and evokes numerous deep and significant areas of thinking and understanding, each of which deserves its own discussion or detailed examination. Here we will select only one or two points for elaboration and raise questions and ideas for the ongoing discussion.
We had to travel to London to obtain psychoanalytic training because we
could not train in the United States in the 1960s. Jack was a Ph.D. clinical psychologist, advised by members of the admissions committee at a prestigious American institute just to lie in signing the form promising never to treat patients. Let's note that corruption is often a feature of authoritarian systems, with hypocrisy practiced to bolster the status quo. Unwilling to lie and wishing for child training (which was also then unavailable in its own right), Jack left the country. Kerry was a non-medical woman, equally interested in child analysis, who discovered that there was no chance of training in America, and went to the epicenter of the field in London.
There are some contextual factors that we find relevant. One is that the conflicts and tensions Arlene addresses apply mostly to American psychoanalysis, and specifically to the American Psychoanalytic Association as it was until 1989. Given that APsaA restricted its membership up till then to physicians, most of whom were the products of medical schools with strict racial, religious, and gender quotas, APsaA was a group of white men, inevitably subject to conscious and unconscious biases and ideas deriving from their very identities. Part of that history had also involved excluding child analysts, the majority of whom were women mental health professionals originally trained in other disciplines (note our reluctance to label them “non-medical,” as if medical were the norm and standard, just as male development was considered by many psychoanalytic theorists to be the standard, with women as deviations. In many societies, adult analysis is ‘normal’ with child analysis an application or just absent). Sexism ran deep in establishment American psychoanalysis, as did other 'isms, perhaps even more deeply buried, like racism and antisemitism, as well as childism, so often linked with misogyny and sexism.
An alternative spirit sprang up in the “independent” North American societies, where people of different backgrounds were welcomed and encouraged and many female mental health professionals trained as psychoanalysts. This tradition finally was welcomed into the mainstream of international organized psychoanalysis, when the North American independent groups began to be recognized by the IPA in the 1980s. We could consider whether this represents another confluence of thought collectives, this time those of women analysts from different regions. The joining together of American women psychoanalysts from the independent
societies with others from Europe and Latin America has borne wonderful fruit in the IPA's Committees on Women and Psychoanalysis (COWAP), Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis (COCAP), Child Abuse, Refugees and more.
In Europe, there had always been many women analysts; in fact, Freud's early Vienna circle included as many women as men, and they played crucial roles in teaching and the development of theory and technique. Despite official exclusion from studies of medicine and other professions, powerful, effective women were drawn to Freud's theories and felt liberated by his views on sexuality in both men and women. For instance, Lou Andreas Salome was often consulted by Freud to increase his understanding of women's subjective sexual experience and for a time she was Anna Freud's analyst. She was married with a child, had affairs with prominent intellectuals like Nietzsche and Rilke, and wrote important contributions to psychoanalysis on female sexuality—indeed a prototype of a liberated woman, but not so unusual in the early years of European psychoanalysis.
When we accompanied an American colleague to his first IPA Congress in Rome in 1989, he was momentarily flabbergasted walking into the first plenary—“There are so many women!” he exclaimed. Not quite like APsaA meetings! We had had a similar experience in reverse, when we arrived in Michigan in 1977 to discover that the psychoanalytic society had only one full female member. APsaA did catch up, at least externally, so that now there are more women candidates than men, and more female members. But those many women who joined APsaA through the turn of the 20th century did not join as blank slates. Not only were they often well-trained, distinguished, and experienced already, but they were also the product of the times. They had been part of the feminist surge that generated fundamental examination of identity, development, relationships, our very grasp of bodies, minds, and beings who identified as female. They embodied the confluence of two thought collectives.
Arlene supplies an important corrective to the caricatured Freud so demonized by many American feminist thinkers and writers, but also notes those important female psychoanalytic thinkers marginalized in American psychoanalysis over the first century. We would add to this list the work of Judith Kestenberg, an acute clinical observer of and
staunch proponent of little girls' own subjective sexual sensations and experience, as well as an innovative theorist on mind-body relationships. Freud, in his discussion of the case of “Dora,” and Anna Freud, in her first published paper, when she was in her twenties, discussed female masturbation. Anna Freud's paper was written only a few years after such luminaries as Ernest Jones were still stating as fact that masturbation was a harmful cause of neurasthenia! We wonder if mid-20th-century American psychoanalysis, still dominated by white men, had difficulty incorporating theories articulated by a non-medical woman, and even pushed some of Anna Freud's ideas to distorted extremes in aridly formulated “ego psychology.”
If Freud had truly been such a male chauvinist denigrator of women, then his daughter Anna Freud would not have become the world-renowned figure she was. We were puzzled by Arlene's omitting her from the list. In an international survey of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in 1971, Anna Freud was named their most outstanding colleague. Her 1936 book revolutionized psychoanalysis, pulling the field back from exclusive emphasis on drives and the unconscious to a richer, metapsychological formulation that encompassed the defenses, the ego and superego, and girls and women as agents of their own sexuality throughout development. Yet, as soon as ten years after her death in 1982, her work was rarely cited, taught, or acknowledged.
Anna Freud was not only a central figure in the history of psychoanalysis, but also made lasting contributions to “civilization,” as Freud exhorted all analysts to do. Her work in the War Nurseries in London during the Blitz established that separation from parents was more traumatic for babies and children than the bombs. Her efforts to underscore the primacy of keeping parents and children together in stressful circumstances were extended to hospital settings; the impact of these ideas changed pediatric hospital practice throughout the world, so that now it is taken for granted that parents stay with their child as much as possible. The three volumes of “In the Best Interests of the Child” revolutionized the basis of legal approaches to child and family issues around the world. This was a woman born in 1895, the last of six children, the daughter of a world-famous Victorian man. Yet he was also the kind of man who encouraged, supported and did not interfere with her growing power and influence. When she died in 1982 she was the most important psychoanalyst in the
world, but now very few American psychoanalysts refer to her.
What happened? Is it a continuation of the same anti-feminine and anti-child prejudice that dominated American APsaA psychoanalysis until the late 1980s? Arnie Richards has written a powerful exposition of the Communist affiliations of many of the American-born leaders of mid-20th-century American psychoanalysis. His work generates an intriguing hypothesis about the authoritarian bent shared by APsaA and the Communist Party. How do these relate and what might have been their impact on beliefs in hierarchy and their often accompanying sense of superiority to women and other populations seen as inferior?
The only psychoanalytic group ever to be disaffiliated by APsaA was the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. The story promoted was that Richard Sterba, a prominent analytic emigré, who had exemplified integrity when he had refused the Nazi invitation to head up the Vienna Society and the international psychoanalytic press (Verlag), was somehow misusing some funds. The reality was that both Richard Sterba and his non-medical wife Editha were close colleagues of Anna Freud. They had promoted her ideas about defense analysis and child work, and in Michigan they were analyzing non-medical people training to become psychoanalysts, people like Selma Fraiberg, Marvin Hyman, and Bertram Karon. These activities directly challenged and undermined the hegemony of APsaA, just as Anna Freud had challenged the adult-centric bias of the IPA in 1971. The New York psychoanalyst who spearheaded the disaffiliation is one of those identified by Arnold Richards as a Communist; that analyst also claimed the disaffiliation and reaffiliation, excluding the Sterbas, of the Michigan Society as the action he was most proud of in his career.
These historical events and issues bridge us to a further topic spurred by Arlene's paper. When we see the unequal treatment of any group with whatever designation (women, people of color, a variety of sexual orientations or identities, religion, children), we identify that as based on a prejudice—an unfounded belief that the target group is intrinsically different in some given biological way, inferior to the dominant group. Such a belief is used to justify the dominant group's efforts to own the others, to control and use them to serve their own needs. A psychoanalytic examination of prejudice should lead us to examine the motives of the dominant group, rather than focus on those characteristics of the
target group used to justify the bias.
When psychoanalysts study the motives of prejudice, we invariably find a need to deal with one's own sense of helplessness or defectiveness by externalizing them and dominating others. In our work we have discerned underlying sadomasochistic dynamics where the needs for safety and attachment, protection against trauma, and gratification come to depend on the sadistic power to dominate and control others and have them serve one's needs. The United States was built on many positive ideals and the courage of founders, immigrants and pioneers. But there is an equally strong and present historical residue of genocide and enslavement. These “other” people were there to be enslaved, denigrated, seen as inferior. American psychoanalysis has not somehow miraculously avoided this legacy.
Skipping ahead to the present, led by Arlene's reasoning in this paper, we have to acknowledge the sadomasochistic prejudices of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Until the late 1980s they felt justified to exclude and demean the skills and talents of non-medical analysts, especially women. Did these prejudices end with the legal resolution of the lawsuit that opened the doors of training to this “inferior” class of students? No more than societal racial prejudice ended with the election of the first African-American US President! In APsaA prejudice continued in relation to LGBTQ analysts and candidates, subtly perhaps with people of color, and openly against non-TAs and non-certified colleagues. Behind all these prejudices, camouflaged under the rationalizations of pseudo-scientific differences, was a clinging to sadistic power by those few in the ruling circle of BOPS.
Another relevant personal story—we returned to the US in 1977 when Jack was recruited as a tenured professor at the University of Michigan to head up the children's service in the Department of Psychiatry. We both joined the faculty of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Eventually we were accepted at APsaA, and both became certified in both adult and child psychoanalysis. We were also welcomed to the faculty of the New York Freudian Society, one of the premier independent groups that later joined the IPA, where we became training analysts. The lawsuit against APsaA to admit non-medical people for training was ongoing in the middle 1980s. Perhaps not realizing that Jack was not a physician, the new
Head of the MPI Education Committee at the party celebrating his appointment, hugged Jack and exclaimed, “We'll get those psychologists!”
At the same time, Jack was going through the process to become a training analyst at the Michigan Institute. During the final stage of the process, after passing through all the various hurdles, he received a phone call from a senior analyst at MPI seeking to prohibit him from teaching seminars to another local psychoanalytic group unaffiliated with APsaA, a group training psychologists and social workers. The prejudiced idea that non-medical people could not manage clinical responsibility was invoked and Jack was told there would be consequences if he persisted. Jack refused to accept this irrational authoritarian demand. There then ensued a mysterious silence and stall in the TA process, broken only when Jack was informed that they were not proceeding with his appointment. But they refused to offer an explanation. When the lawyers handling the lawsuit against APsaA, based primarily on the issue of restraint of trade, told their APsaA legal counterparts about Jack's situation, it became the tipping point. As the lawyers said, “They threw in the towel,” and the case was settled.
Most insidiously the prejudice continues in the form of childism, a term coined by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl to describe societal and institutional prejudices against children that ultimately allow for widespread physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Childism is an apt arena in which to learn more about the operating dynamics of prejudice in general, since the phenomena are often so vivid. It becomes very clear when parents display an irrational but rationalized compulsion to beat, control, own and dominate the child to serve their own needs. At the institutional level, the presence of childism is betrayed often by omissions, slights, and lack of prioritization of issues related to children and parents. We can also see how abused children deny and identify with the aggressor (Anna Freud's term). The abused often become abusers. We now have more female candidates and faculty in our institutes, yet abusive boundary crossing seems as prevalent as ever, and female candidates rarely complain!
The conversation continues and both deepens and expands. We work with many college students and we are disheartened to see that bright, accomplished young women nevertheless still feel that they have to
submit to whatever desires their boyfriends articulate. What do the young men want their girlfriends to be? They want them to emulate porn stars, to dress and act the way women do in sadistic porn videos, to be at their beck and call sexually. The price of a relationship is compliance and submission, to act as a slave. Arlene describes progress within the field of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and attributes it to the impact of the thought collective of the political wave of feminism. But what we see all over the world of the abusive and murderous treatment of women and children, the persisting inequality in the actuality of concrete markers like pay scales, and ongoing social attitudes and relationships in supposedly ‘enlightened’ countries gives us pause and raises an uncomfortable question. What has feminism actually accomplished?
We make a distinction between anger and rage. We have characterized rage in our two-systems model of self-regulation as an overwhelming ego state in response to helplessness, in other words, a potentially traumatic experience if sustained. Anger, on the other hand, can function as a signal to fire the higher areas of the brain, to activate the (frontal cortex) ego to enlist its capacities in the service of identifying the issue, thinking, and planning an effective response to the insult. One can't write a book, run a company, plan a campaign of action, be a whistleblower when in a rage. We suggest that the second-wave feminists and their allied women analysts, both contemporary and subsequently, harnessed their anger effectively to access imagination, science, observation, experience, subjectivity, empathy and more to generate theories that are alive, realistic and useful.
Blaming Freud was and is a waste of time and energy, and we appreciate Arlene's effort to correct the record. In that spirit, it seems worth adding to her description some points arising from Freud's last writings, published posthumously in 1940. There he distinctly delineated and modified his concept of Eros. He designated one of the two basic instincts as Eros, whose aim is to bind together, to establish greater unities, and to preserve them. Freud called the energy of Eros libido, stressing that this should not be equated with sexuality alone, as is so often done even today. “The greater part of what we know about Eros,” Freud wrote, “…has been gained from a study of the sexual function, which, indeed, in the prevailing view, even if not according to our theory, coincides with Eros” (, p.151). We see this as relevant to thinking about prejudice,
as dominance and submission, the sadomasochistic closed-system functioning and gratification that enter into prejudice, stand in stark contrast to Freud's overarching characterization of Eros. Prejudice belongs squarely in the realm of sadomasochism. Arlene's thesis of two thought collectives coming together seems to us to express Freud's late conceptualization of the open-system binding together and uniting characteristic of Eros.
We suggest that the model of so-called normal femininity and masculinity described in classical psychoanalytic theory is actually one of pathology, that becomes oddly resonant in some of the difference-feminism thinking. Many women accept this myth that men are innately aggressive and that women are and should be more caring, loving and conciliatory. Female politicians like Hillary Clinton are often pushed in this direction, and even some female psychoanalysts try to paint women as more collaborative, better facilitators, less power-hungry, less personally ambitious than men. It was easy to turn Hillary Clinton's competence, skill, experience, intelligence and assertiveness into some witch-like danger and fear of difference. “Lock her up” was the war cry of the opposition in an effort to control and suppress the real power of her assertive competence. Such a model elucidates closed-system sadomasochistic self and other-representations of men and women built on a foundation of defensive externalizations of feared and despised aspects of the self, defined as such by cultural imperatives. Men repudiate their own nurturing and receptive dimensions and externalize them on to women; women, afraid of being seen as aggressive, externalize on to men. Thus, instead of the representations of gender roles becoming more overlapping, they have polarized further.
Given the conflation of assertion and sadistic aggression, many women don't know what to do with their anger and aggression and they suppress their assertion as well. Here our additional differentiation of assertion and aggression is critical. There is a cultural, male-centric unwillingness to distinguish between assertion, an open-system characteristic, and aggression that can manifest in both open and closed-system functioning. Aggression is what culturally defines masculinity. The gun culture in America relates to a masculine need to feel powerful and fearless, not a scared “pussy,” a derogatory name for female genitals.
We advocate using anger as a signal that can activate assertion to push back against and change theories that perpetuate prejudiced stereotypes, to effect legislation and be alert to biases of any kind, since they all operate on the same sadomasochistic principles. We should make sure that our President is not prejudiced, that the men in our lives, our analysts, partners, brothers and sons are not prejudiced, and assert ourselves if they are. The theory may have changed and many women may have changed but most men have not. They will not change until confronted by all people who will not tolerate the sadism of those in power.