Between the Scylla of the Early Mother and the Charybdis of the Fatherlaw

The article rereads a classical case history, the German-American psychoanalyst Ruth Mack Brunswick's “The Analysis of a Case of Paranoia” (1929). The case is important for the psychoanalytic theory of femininity. It had great impact on Freud's coining of the term preoedipal, and on the establishing of the dogma of the specific feminine preoedipal phase, which supposedly lasted longer than that of the boy.

Measured against its importance for the psychoanalytic theory of femininity, the case history has attracted amazingly little interest, however. This is true also for feminist psychoanalysis. It has paid much more attention to Freud's analysis of Dora, which by contrast to Ruth Mack Brunswick's case history, did not have much impact on the psychoanalytic theory of femininity.

The article queries the preoedipal psychosexuality of the analysand. Instead it suggests a reading of her as engaged in a homosexual oedipal attachment to the mother and as walking the tightrope in a position in which gender difference has become a reality, but in which her gender identity is not fixed in a system of unchangeable binary stereotypes. The article suggests that classical psychoanalysis in some respects may meet feminist postmodern demands for subject-theories of nonfixed gender identities.