Psychoanalysis and Women's Liberation

One of the most significant social issues influencing our life today is the women's liberation movement. Throughout the world, in varying degrees and styles, women (one-half of the world's population) are stirring from their traditionally assigned position of submissiveness and dependency on men. Sexual stereotypes are fading. Old reliable guideposts of femininity and masculinity, of mental health and illness in men and women are no longer so reliable. If women are in West Point, and men are asking for alimony and paternity leave, then what is this world coming to? Yet changes are not coming about without resistance. Large numbers of people, both men and women, do not accept the fact that women's rights have been compromised or that there is anything to be questioned in the traditional male-dominated society. This profound resistance to attitudinal change extends to the professions of psychiatry and psychoanalysis and requires our attention. Once again, as so many times in history, experts are going about with blinders on, while the whole world is changing around them.

The field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis remains essentially unchanged. The dependent, self-effacing character structure, with its accompanying fear of self-assertion that society has assigned to women and has caused women so much distress throughout the ages, is still defended as biologically predetermined. Except for the theories of Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and Harry Stack Sullivan, and the psychoanalytic institutes based on these theories, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training espouses an unalterable, unbridgable difference between the personalities and character structures of men and women. In addition to the psychoanalytic programs, a study of psychiatric residencies by Reta D. Floyd, M.D., reported in Psychiatric News, September 2, 1977, states that

Most psychiatric training programs still hold fast to the basic tenets that find women stereotypically dependent, masochistic, narcissisti