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Since the Black Lives Matter movement, many psychoanalytic training committees have had to wrestle with how to de-colonise their curricula, as well as turn their listening ears to how doing a training feels different when you are B.A.M.E. On these issues the writings of Davids (2011), Dennis et al. (2020) have all been critical. Now, thanks to Michaela Chamberlain’s brave and pithy publication, Misogyny in Psychoanalysis, our field has another important avenue along which we can travel if we want to make psychoanalysis fit for purpose in its second century of life.
If the first century of psychoanalysis involved putting the unconscious firmly at the heart of human behaviour by using the powerful technique of free association to enliven and enrich our own and patients’ lives, perhaps our second century will see us working towards making psychoanalysis - in theory, practice and training - a welcoming place for people of all classes, ethnicities and genders.
Chamberlain’s book is small but mighty, in that into her five short chapters she packs such a fascinating and diverse range of subjects, all of which circle around the key question, ‘How does misogyny hide in plain sight in psychoanalysis?’ Her journey into this fraught domain began over a decade ago when she was working as an honorary psychotherapist for a London NHS Trust. Every month, her patient went psychotic for just a few days when she ovulated. Chamberlain went to her supervisor asking for papers relating to menstruation expecting her helpful supervisor to be her usual fount of knowledge. But instead there was a long pause, followed by, ‘You write such a paper and I will help you edit it’.
Shocked by the evident gap in interest in the female experience of menstruation, Chamberlain then stumbled on area after area where misogyny appeared rampant, yet seemed to hide in plain sight. She wondered why it was that psychoanalysts such as Karen Horney, then later on Juliet Mitchell and Jessica Benjamin among them, who