The ideas set forth by Arlene Kramer Richards in “Rage and Creativity: How Second-Generation Feminist Thought Collective Influenced Psychoanalysis,” and the rich contributions of her discussants, led me to think about the links between longing, ambition, and prejudice. In her paper, Richards identifies herself as an “equal opportunity feminist.” To me, that implies both a philosophy and a modus operandi based on inclusiveness and fairness. As an advocate of “equal opportunity,” I want to focus my discussion on how an interplay of institutional policies, prejudicial behavior, and patriarchal structure can thwart ambition. This is a continuation of my desire to understand what some people confront when they overcome, or attempt to overcome, arbitrary barriers steeped in racism, sexism or social snobbery (A. K. Richards and L. Spira, 2012; see Appendix). Here, also, I will mention particular points from the discussions of Richards' work in this volume that address my interest and illuminate the role of thought collectives as potentially empowering forces.
How many women have been told they are being too ambitious when they set their sights on something a person in power thinks should be beyond their reach? In part, it is these institutionalized, restrictive voices that gave rise to the resurgence of feminism in the 1960's and 1970's. As Arlene Kramer Richards explains, during this wave of second generation feminism, many women set about taking charge of their destinies, claiming the power to decide who they w/could become. Some gathered in groups to share their thinking, feelings, and experiences and to gain support for their aspirations. With that encouragement, many women began speaking up for themselves and, in the process, experienced an important source of power.
The psychological benefit of having one's voice heard, even when the tone is angry, is beautifully described in this volume in two contributions, one written by Sandra Cohen and the other by Paula Ellman. In another essay, Merle Molofsky, who identifies as a mother, wife, humanist and feminist, uses her independent voice as a writer and psychoanalyst. It was not always that way, she says. As a young woman, she asked her boyfriend's permission to attend a consciousness raising group. He angrily said, “No,” adding that such groups were only for lesbians, to him, a devalued group. At that time, it was not unusual for young and even older women to ask for permission to do things outside their roles as mother, wife or girlfriend. Molofsky did not attend that consciousness raising group but she did regain her voice and eventually found a very different kind of person with whom to establish a marriage based on equal collaboration. She says, “The value we most need is to create balance, by adding connectivity to independence.”
Some of the voices in the women's movement emphasized equal pay for equal work and quality child care. Some wanted safe spaces to shelter from domestic abuse. Some focused on issues having to do with women's bodies and sexuality. In Dorothy Holmes' scholarly discussion here, she expands on the categories of “equal opportunity” feminists and “difference” feminists as mentioned by Arlene Kramer Richards. One thing many women expressed and share today is the wish to be seen and understood as an individual and not as a category. Looking at contemporary women, it is clear that no woman can speak for all women. Breaking the glass ceiling might be a major priority for some women, but others are still fighting to earn a decent minimum wage that puts food on the table. While some women are calling for women to “lean in” others are calling for men to “lean out” (The New York Times, Oct. 2019).
Pioneering women psychoanalyst, whose work is now highly regarded were people who formed and shared their ideas even if doing so meant being ignored by the power structure of the time. Arlene Kramer Richards, Nancy Kulish, and Rosemary Balsam describe the situation for women psychoanalysts during the time of the 2nd generation feminists. Kulish points out that energy coming from psychoanalysts who trained originally in disciplines other than psychoanalysis, e.g., Nancy Chodorow, helped empower women psychoanalysts to formulate their ideas about women's psychology, including a final debunking of penis envy, well-discussed
here by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau. Why do revisions in theory about women's bodies and psychical impact matter? Nancy Goodman, in her up close and scholarly contribution, here, speaks to this question. She says that she found gender specific theory empowering as it allowed her as a woman psychoanalyst to listen to herself and to her patients in new ways. It expanded our listening and our idea of unconscious fantasy with its metaphors and defenses, as she so artfully points out.
Margaret Morgan Lawrence, M.D., an African American woman, who eventually became a child psychoanalyst, was the first African American graduate of New York Psychiatric Institute and the first African American woman certified in psychoanalysis at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.
In the 1930's, Margaret Morgan, later, Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, a well-qualified graduate of Cornell University, applied to Cornell Medical School and was rejected. Race? Gender? After all, being rejected or blocked from fulfilling one's ambition is part of the collective history of many women, particularly members of marginalized minority groups.
The New York Times, in a recent obituary about her, says that the Dean told her she would not be admitted because an African American male whom they had admitted (many years before) did not “work out.” Eventually, she learned what the Dean meant by his not “working out.” That male medical student died from TB before he could graduate!
Who can ensure they will not die at an inconvenient time? To me this weird explanation for racial profiling captures the irrational aspect of prejudice as discussed by Bird (1957), a psychoanalyst.
Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence (then, Margaret Morgan) continued in her pursuit of a medical education and was accepted at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. There, she found a more benign gatekeeper, one willing to open a door rather than shut out a qualified applicant who did not fit the usual medical school profile. However, her admission was contingent upon her accepting that white patients might not allow her to treat them. One can only imagine how this caveat stung.
At that time, she was one of ten women students and one of a very few
African American students at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. After graduation, she applied for an internship at Babies Hospital and was rejected. Racism and sexism once more joined to keep the door locked; the doctors' residence did not accept women and the nurses' residence would not accept a Black woman. Yet, she found an alternative path that resulted in a long, stellar career. In one of her psychoanalytic papers (1982), she cites Dr. Charles Lawrence, III, who believed that the purpose of segregation is to define as (inferior) not to separate. This seems applicable to sexism as well as racism.
If a “thought collective” existed at a time when prejudice and racial separatism was the norm, who would have been in her “thought collective” or her support network? Certainly, the expectation must have been that she model herself after the male medical students and doctors. But as Schmidt-Hellerau cautions us here, where women identify with the macho aspects of their male colleagues, there is a loss to them and to what they might contribute.
Perhaps she was able to rely almost exclusively on an internalized supportive voice developed during her upbringing. We know that such supportive voices can be internalized from interactions with parents, teachers, mentors, friends and religious and social groups. They are also nourished by the satisfaction in personal achievements. These voices fuel us when, without external support, we are made to feel unwelcome. Or, perhaps her ambition was strong enough to empower her, to allow her to put aside the indignities and loneliness she must have experienced. An article about her mentions that she had a mentor, the only African American doctor on the faculty, Dr. Charles Drew, whom her daughter, Dr. Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, says was an encouraging voice (as reported in Health Matters). Dr. Benjamin Spock was a person she encountered in her professional training who she came to admire; the admiration was for his manner with his child patients, not because he was a member of the power structure.
Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence must have known at the outset that she would be one of a very few, or even a first. Perhaps some people prepare themselves beforehand to weather negative pushback. Perhaps Dr. Lawrence prepared herself to encounter racism and sexism as she approached a border marked, “Reserved for white men.” Pioneers like her
and like those referred to by Arlene Kramer Richards, including Karen Horney and Melanie Klein, pave the way for others who do not fit the established profile. Sometimes where there is a “closed” mind policy, those with the “different” voice, e.g., Klein and Horney, decide to take their ideas elsewhere and start what Arlene Kramer Richards describes as a “thought collective.” As many here have pointed out, through all these efforts, profiles change and many women are freer to express their voices.
As we see from the rationale given for Margaret Morgan's (later, Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence) rejection by Cornell medical school, one failure, or, perceived failure, by a minority person who is for all intents and purposes a “first,” closes doors for other members. Former First Lady Michelle Obama reports that she understood that fact very early and kept it in mind in her role as First Lady (On Becoming, 2018). When a “first” succeeds there is an extraordinary pressure. The “good enough” that might be acceptable for the dominant group is not good enough for a first. She must work a lot harder. This reality can overly strain one's ego, an often ignored negative result of prejudice.
It is not surprising that Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence's psychotherapeutic work with African American poverty stricken families was focused on finding and interpreting ego strengths of the family members (Margaret Morgan Lawrence, 1982). The families and children seen in the therapeutic nursery setting were assigned to a multi-disciplinary team making use of principles from psychoanalytic developmental theory. She believed that each of the individuals in the families who were seen in that milieu had unrecognized inner resources and ego strengths that needed to be uncovered and built upon. Her actions and interventions were designed to support the patients' self-esteem. She did not let a young male patient destroy an artwork that he had created in his therapy (Margaret Morgan Lawrence, 1999). The message was that what came from him was not garbage; rather as a creative production it was an expression of self to be valued. Perhaps such interventions on her part were one way of showing “Black lives matter.” The therapeutic nursery setting, and family psychotherapy program, during her auspices can be likened to a thought collective. There, ego psychology and “massive-dose” therapy (her term) can be considered a philosophical stance directed to empowering both patient and staff.
As I understand Bird's (1957) idea, prejudice is a negative, irrational thought that functions as an idée fixe. The prejudiced person, unconsciously identified with the hated object, must separate himself/herself from him/her. In this example, what is projected and condemned is ambition (which Bird suggests may derive from the condemnation of oedipal wishes and sibling rivalry). To paraphrase, ‘I am not the audaciously ambitious one deserving of wrath. You are the one deserving of contempt when you want what society deems out of bounds for you and your group.‘
While Bird's ideas and treatment helped his patient, Stoute (2017) cautions the psychoanalytic community that explaining prejudice as only rooted in oedipal conflict avoids the reality of the impact of culturally transmitted prejudice on African Americans and others. Her review of the early psychoanalytic literature points out how African Americans were disparaged and stereotyped.
It is easy to understand how the negative thoughts that are part of prejudice spark negative actions, although Bird (1957) focused on thoughts not actions. I remind myself that negative actions are fueled by thoughts, affects, poorly resolved conflicts and negative experiences.
In their discussion here, Novick and Novick point out the presence of institutional sadomasochism that drives prejudice.
Interestingly, Kerry Kelly Novick, here with Jack Novick, reports that she had to go to England and the Anna Freud Center to find training as a child psychoanalyst. She did not let circumstances quash her ambition. I wondered whether the unavailability of a program suitable for her was because the establishment considered work with children less important than work with adults. In my professional experience, most of the work with children and their parents was assigned to social workers, my professional group, one heavily composed of women, and excluded from training at APsaA membership Institutes for many years.
Jack Novick, encountering a different issue that also threatened to interfere with his professional development, describes how he turned to the legal system to prevent the Institute where he was a member from
disallowing him to teach others who were not members of an APsaA Institute training program. The message, among other things, was that outsiders are not worthy of being taught what Jack Novick had learned. Perhaps, they were seen as too ambitious.
Future thought collectives within psychoanalysis might put ideas like those discussed by Harris , and mentioned here by Kulish, in the forefront. Harris does not hold to the idea of fixed and inborn feminine and masculine characteristics. She (2011) points out that even in a cohort group—a young women's sports team—she observed difference and what she describes as “emerging and unpredictable desire for bodies, power and intimacy.”
Hart (2019) whose discussion of diversity in a recent volume of TAP, where he focuses on the importance of understanding the multiple ways in which diversity might be considered, reminds us that we might have to come out of our comfort zone as we widen our scope. As we think about our binary view of gender, he suggests that those steeped in this traditional idea of gender become more accustomed to accepting that the pronoun “they” might refer to one individual. He cautions that focusing on the issues, experiences, and dynamics of a particular aspect of diversity loses breadth, just as focusing on the multiplicity of one's diversity, loses depth. As I understand Hart, contemporary psychoanalysis needs to find a balance between breadth and depth as it strives toward inclusion. One hopes that a thought collective considering race and diversity, similar to the one that led to changes in how we understand women and their ambition, holds promise.
Rosemary Balsam, here, speaks to how she benefited from psychoanalytic journal issues that addressed single topics, such as gender. She points to former JAPA editors, Harold Blum and Arnold Richards, who published single issues devoted to one subject, often topics formerly underrepresented in the literature. Such collections allow a reader to consider different perspectives, deepen knowledge about a particular subject and potentially generate further explorations.
I also recognize that thought collectives are not always forces for growth; ideologies can imprison. The particular ideology of a thought collective
and the character of its members determines whether it is a force for growth or imprisonment. William Fried, in this volume, comes at this another way when he says that, “one might justifiably conclude that there are now not one, but two psychoanalyses, the earlier male, and the later female; the earlier derived from the experiences, biases, and conceptualizations of men; the later from those of women.” The implied question there is: How do the formerly ignored not identify with the aggressor?
As psychoanalysis widens its scope, we might think about how a concept like primary femininity may shift when we consider the impact on a girl's development when she is raised by two fathers. Will our ideas about what is primary to boys and girls shift with the growing changes in our definition of family or will such concepts not even be part of the discussion? This question came to me as I read about a gay father raising two daughters with his male partner who is also a parent to the girls. One father expressed the thought that girls' doll play might be different when raised by two dads. But he found himself surprised when his daughters play mommy and daddy rather than daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy (Gays with Kids; online site). When he told them it was fine for them to play mommy and mommy or daddy and daddy they responded that what they wanted to play was mommy and daddy. This father is learning to recognize and consider his girls' voices and agency. Kimberly Kleinman, here, suggests that thinking of caring for a child as a gendered activity is not beneficial and perhaps harmful.
Alison Feit, in her very creative discussion in this volume, highlights the factors in her development that led her to raise her sons to embrace both humanist and feminist values. Her hope is that they will continue to be the compassionate, nurturing, and active young men that she now witnesses through the lens of fulfilled motherhood. She reminds us that feminists are not born that way but that they internalize feminist values in a relational system; the overall environment counts too.
The world is changing. Institutional psychoanalysis is opening up, but what role psychoanalysis will play in the direction the world moves, particularly around attitudes steeped in prejudice and thwarted ambition, is a question. Will our collective voice turn to others previously excluded and welcome not only their presence but also their unique voices? Our
world has a long way to go toward respecting all of its citizens, particularly less privileged women, children and many members of marginalized minority groups. Perhaps thought collectives that address diversity can refine theory, define issues and empower people toward a better understanding of how the psychological and social interact. Sometimes a clinical setting, like the one Margaret Morgan Lawrence oversaw, one with a philosophical stance that flows from theory grounded in clinical research, can be a force to better understand the perceptions, feelings and behavior of cohort groups previously ignored. Where we confront prejudice, with its gatekeepers who attempt to stifle ambitions, fail to recognize strengths and silence opposing voices, we might all benefit from a team or “thought collective,” as Arlene Kramer Richards sees it, as a catalyzing force. But an interplay with the political and legal system seems essential in moving our society toward a feminist ideal of equality and opportunity.
As I read about Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence, and wrote my discussion, I wondered what it was like today for women physicians of color. Soon after, I got an answer. A recent New York Times article, “For Doctors of Color, Microaggressions Are All Too Familiar”, by Emma Goldberg, 8/11/2020, reported on the experiences of a number of women of color, all physicians in major hospitals or health care settings. One doctor, discussing what she experienced as a Black woman physician, said that even after she introduced herself as a doctor, she was mistaken for a food service worker or a janitor, and was asked by a patient if she was there to pick up the trash. Further, she pointed out that she does not believe that a patient would say that to a white male physician. This sounds familiar and resonates with the treatment of Dr. Margaret Morgan Lawrence discussed above. A question becomes: Racism, sexism, or a convergence of both?
Goldberg's article found that these microaggressions toward women doctors of color, routinely occur in medicine. According to the experts cited, such behaviors can have a negative impact on self-esteem, as I suggested in my discussion. What makes it even more challenging for the Black woman physician is that she might be the only one of her race in her medical setting and consequently is alone with her discomfort. One such physician says that she felt validated when she learned that others like her had similar negative experiences. To me, this supports Richards'
idea of the importance of a “thought collective” to empower. One interviewee suggests that the first step is to hear and validate the personal experience of the one who reports inappropriate and destructive behaviors steeped in racism; I add, rooted in sexism as well.
* No author attribution.