“Breaking the Law,” A Metaphor for Female Empowerment Through Aggression: Women in Film

This article evolved from the collective learning experience of a study group whose focus was current psychoanalytic writings about female developmental theory. Readings during a three-year span included The Stone Center Papers; In a Different Voice (1982) by Carol Gilligan; Toward a New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller; The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein; The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) by Nancy Chodorow; The Creation of Patriarchy (1986) by Gerda Lerner; The Bonds of Love (1988) by Jessica Benjamin; Women's Ways of Knowing (1986) by Belenky et al.; and various papers by Karen Horney, Virginia Clower, Doris Bernstein, and Henri Parens.** From these readings and subsequent discussions, a picture of a woman, a woman quite different from the one described by Freud, began to emerge. Freud's description, developed in the 1920s and 1930s, was held on to by psychoanalytic theorists until the mid-1970s. Finally, in the past decade, as revisionist themes have taken better hold, women have been credited with their own unique, intrinsic, pleasure-oriented libido, and with a developmental line separate from that of men. In other words, the theory has become less phallocentric. There has also been a shift in emphasis toward pre-oedipal development for little girls,