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About 17 years ago, I gave a paper called ‘Psychoanalysis and feminism and psychoanalysis’. It was the era when books were appearing all the time with such titles ccentury’ (16).1 It feels somewhat strange to see this fundamental relationship reintroduced as the object of a history. But that is perhaps the way with generations and wheels, and 17 years may be a long time in cultural studies.
The ‘initiating impulse’ of Mari Jo Buhle's Feminism and Its Discontents was to develop ‘the problems and issues within feminist scholarship’ (20), more specifically to restore ‘feminist “theory” to the realm of “thought” […] at the nexus between feminism and psychoanalysis’ (21). Following a premise that the two bodies of thought ‘developed dialogically’, she explains their modernity thus:
Feminism and psychoanalysis together share a large responsibility for […] the distinctly modern spectacle of ‘consciousness of self. Distantly grounded in the humanistic legacy of the Renaissance, psychoanalysis and feminism both concern the meaning of individuality in a secular society and, as philosophical systems, gained coherence only as [the twentieth] century began. Psychoanalysis took shape as a clinical or therapeutic method, feminism as a political strategy. The two systems occupied a common domain as theories of human liberation, even at subsequent moments of conflict or competition. (3)
This premise could be seen as less obvious than Buhle claims. Indeed, as she shows in her introductory chapter, this understanding of the liberatory significance of psychoanalysis—rather than, say, the unleashing of chaos that Freud predicted in his epigraph to The Interpretation of Dreams,2 or the socially conservative aspects many have seen in his later meditations—stems from a particular positioning which is fundamental to her own viewpoint. Hers is an exclusively USA-based perspective on both psychoanalysis and feminism. Thus the story begins in 1909, in an effective opening scene, with Freud's Cla