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Chair: Dr Irene Cairo
Panelists: Dr Julia Braun, Dr Nancy Chodorow, Dr Yolanda Gampel
In Irene Cairo's introduction to the panel, she posited her discomfort with the traditional definition of the “feminine” as an equivalent of “fragile,” “delicate,” “passive” and probably intellectually weak. But because the subject of this congress was precisely “the feminine” and the challenge was to define it from our psychoanalytic point of view, it occurred to her that the contribution of women in times of social change would add another dimension to this subject. What that in mind, she invited three contributors, women psychoanalysts living in different social contexts: Julia Braun from Argentina, Nancy Chodorow from the USA and Yolanda Gampel from Israel.
Julia Braun was the first presenter. She titled her paper “Madres of Plaza de Mayo. A counterfactual social feminine movement.” The history of “Madres de Plaza de Mayo” originated during the Argentinian dictatorship in 1977, when a group of mothers began to gather on the Plaza de Mayo square, in front of the House of Government, demanding information about their “disappeared” sons and daughters of whom nothing was known. The mothers claimed them alive and demanded punishment for those who had “disappeared” them.
Why did mothers do this, and not fathers, who although they set out to do it several times, never achieved it? The group started out with men and women bound to “disappeared” people in different degrees of kinships or ties: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. The men in the group gradually dropped out, while the women stayed on for several years. Braun pointed out that there were attempts at male groupings that did not prosper. Also, statistics show that there were higher morbidity and mortality rates among the fathers than mothers of the “disappeared.”
The mothers were not allowed to demonstrate standing still, and this is what made them start on their rounds, which have gone on since 1977 and have since been adopted by