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.
The contemporary project of understanding and deconstructing gender could be described as the tracing of dialectical connections of gender experience to social formations, to intrapsychic life, and to the life of the body. By dialectical, I mean that we see gender as emergent from relationships, embedded in cultural and social forms and that body ego and psychic structure coconstruct each other. The relational perspective in particular has tried to eschew or minimize the search for origins and essential bedrock structures that dictate and form particular psychological or interpersonal outcomes.
Another strong feature of the gender theory that has been developed in this journal (Benjamin, 1991; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991; Kaftal, 1991; Aron, 1995) and elsewhere (Benjamin, 1988; Flax, 1990; Harris, 1991, 1996; Chodorow, 1992, 1994; Mitchell, 1996) has been a critical attention to the rigidity and constrictions in so much dichotomizing in gender analysis. The brutality of these oppositions, both as they inform theory and as they live painfully in analytic dyads and in individual lives, is of increasing concern. This perspective is by no means unique to the relational school. There is a strong and sophisticated critique of phallic monism from within the neo-Freudian tradition in France (Torok, 1971, Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1971; McDougall, 1989) and from the philosophic feminism of Irigaray (1985). One line of that theoretical tradition has developed in American Freudian theory