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.
In a recent interview1, Adam Phillips ventured the hypothesis that psychoanalysis was invented to address the problem of misogyny. This was a bold and unusual statement, and though we've long been initiated into Phillips's refreshing, even scandalous, takes on often otherwise mundane or familiar assumptions, this seemed, at least to me, an astonishing statement, striking not because it was outlandish, but because it was utterly, perceptively true.
Of course, psychoanalysis generally presents a different picture of itself, a picture of progressive self-knowledge, even liberation. Such is also the picture commonly painted of the democratic project, or at least of democracy as theory. In practice, democracy has inevitably reiterated patriarchy and has absorbed its underlying misogyny. Since the days of Pericles, democracies have preached equality and inclusiveness while in practice merely establishing new sorts of invidious hierarchies. Democracies have enslaved; they have colonized; they have subjugated the “other” — the taboo, the strange, the marginal, and, above all, the feminine. But the degradation of women, as noted by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, is fundamentally anti-democratic. Misogyny (which he traced to the fear of being indebted to and subjugated by mother) goes hand in hand with authoritarianism, with the cult of power. He thus anticipated our contemporary global-flirtation crisis with autocracy, fascism, and pseudo-masculinist discourses.
It is a commonplace of psychoanalysis that our own founding father, Sigmund Freud, injected his own misogyny into our theories, lacing psychoanalysis's origin story with a foundational violence that similarly amplified the voice of patriarchy, even as he contrarily appealed to the voice of Eros, the voice of desire. The feminine was degraded, and the vagina in particular bore the brunt of the injury, being cast as inferior, as a wound, a mark of castration. Other groups, such as homosexuals and borderline personalities,