Ambivalences Among Freudians and Feminists

The relationship between Freudians and feminists is both symbiotic and ambivalent. Sometimes, they stand shoulder to shoulder, other times they face each other across an unbridgeable abyss — depending on the prestige and importance each of them is accorded at a specific time, in a specific context, and along what issues each of them is internally divided. Their relationship depends, also, on new and original interpretations of psychoanalysis, on an upsurge or turn in feminist theory. Occasionally it changes with the reformulation of a long-forgotten Freudian concept by an impressive personality. Reinterpretations of the Freudian unconscious are in constant flux; their appeal is rising and falling about as regularly and unpredictably as the weather or the stock exchange in New York. And feminists keep redefining and rethinking their views of psychoanalysis.

The frequent simplifications of academic disputes and therapeutic fads, which soon get amalgamated in public perceptions and in some sort of hypothetical solutions, always claim to explain too much. That professors thereby add to a pervasive confusion results, also, from the deeply implanted post-modernist credo that theory, as distinguished from practice, will solve all of our dilemmas. The belief that we will be able to create the perfect, or at least near-perfect society has become deeply imbedded.

According to Webster's dictionary, theory is a supposition explaining something; a doctrine or scheme of things resting merely on speculation; a hypothesis or philosophical explanation. By the 1960s, however, the belief in the progression of history, in the ultimate success of the struggle by the working classes, began to assume that Marx's hypothetical laws soon would become realities. This belief was bolstered by Louis Althusser (1965), who maintained that his Marxist theory, uncontrovertibly, would bring about the revolution, especially because he incorporated a Lacanian