Thank you Kerry and Jack for your thoughtful discussion. You have added something that the discussion clearly needs: a point of view that connects many forms of prejudice and many forms of disrespect of the people seen as other and therefore lesser. I agree that racism, childism, anti-feminism, anti-Semitism, anti-Native Americanism, and anti-immigrant acts and statements are all destructive. I also agree that Anna Freud's career is proof of her father's respect for women. Psychoanalysis was ready for powerful women, and even a first female president of the IPA. And a second. But I think that feminism has had some useful consequences: more women doctors, more women lawyers, more women in Congress, more girls sports teams, more women on the Supreme Court, more women owning our own businesses, more women daring to do math, more women willing to report rapes, more women willing to ask for help with severe superegos. And there are other things those late 20th century viragoes helped change. The point here is that a circle of like-minded people can form a thought collective that can change the ways other thought collectives think.
I really loved your point about rage preventing creative thought. I think one person's rage can translate into another person's thought and create a climate of opinion that can change thinking and behavior. I suppose that idea comes from my experience of the student protests when Vietnam awaited any student whose GPA did not measure up. Their rage changed what their parents, friends and eventually political representatives thought. They forced an end to the senseless war. Even if the enraged person does not directly change her environment, her passion can inspire others. Those others can state her position in perhaps less passionate but more persuasive terms. They can negotiate.
It has become fashionable among young women to disavow feminism,
especially the feminism of their mothers and grandmothers. My paper was an attempt to show the positive effects of the feminist movement on psychoanalytic theory about female development.