Is There a War on Women in Psychoanalysis?: The Disappearance of a Group of Women Leaders

Some older members of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society remarked that in the 1950s and 1960s there was a group of prominent women analytic leaders at BPSI. They were training analysts, writers, and teachers active in the society and in the community. They were succeeded primarily by men. The question arose Was that an expression of “the war on women”? This paper explores and discusses this question. Although there were some expressions of resentment at being “dominated” by women, the answer appears to be more complex. For various reasons there was not a group of younger women available to move into this role at that time. The reasons for this are described—including the need for a medical degree for psychoanalytic training, the cultural postwar pressures in the United States for women not to work, and the institutional structural problems making it difficult for women candidates, such as ambivalence about pregnancy and the delays in changes in theory to enter the curriculum. This made for discrepancies between theory and the experience of candidates. The earlier group of women were mostly trained in Europe and the implications of this are described. In the years when the leadership was primarily male, decisions subtly reflected this.