You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Nancy Chodorow is perhaps best known for her book entitled The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1978) in which she explores the impact on boys and girls and later on men and women of the fact that women are primarily responsible for the care of children. Since the appearance of that first book, she has continued to write about issues pertaining to gender and psychoanalysis in such works as Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1991), Femininities, Masculinities, and Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994), and Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012). In The Power of Feelings (1999), her interests expanded to the variety of psychoanalytic perspectives and the reciprocal impact of psyche and society.†
In her most recent book, The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye, she provides a unique synthesis of contemporary psychoanalytic developments and explores the emergence of an American independent tradition and its theoretical framework, intersubjective ego psychology, which she argues have had a significant impact on contemporary psychoanalysis in the United States and which she finds the most coherent combination of sociological and psychoanalytic ideas.
In this essay, I intend to examine the nature of her larger vision as she considers how the individual psyche reciprocally interacts with the social world. Chodorow draws from her knowledge of sociology and psychoanalysis, the foundations of her professional training, as well as from works in the humanities. Her own biography is linked with her training as she describes the major impact of her personal life on the development of her interests and ideas.
Chodorow was born in 1944 to a Jewish family in New York. Her father moved between New York and California because of his work as a physicist involved in the war effort. Her birth during war, her experiences of this time, her own family’s fracturing with her father’s frequent travel made the experience of