I was, am, in two minds about talking about misogyny; it's such a thuggish binary. Kate Manne's definition of misogyny as patriarchy's police force, enforcing gender norms, is helpful. As is Adam Phillips' notion (in his review of Manne's book) of a ‘plot against women's pleasure’. But for me misogyny remains difficult to think with: it's too vast, too brutal, too binary. It belongs to a world with no complexity of genders and sexualities: men and women, male and female, and boys will be boys. It's oppressive to think with – like the patriarchy it polices. It claims to know who's who; the antithesis of the analytic understanding that we go on not knowing – and not understanding ourselves.
As in the case of feminism, which in the 1980s – and here I'm going back to what for me were formative times – quickly needed to become feminisms plural, we can think in terms of misogynies plural: the border forces that patrol for that domineering binary. And we need to think in terms of all the other injustices, inequalities and hostilities with which misogyny intersects. Misogynies, plural – not least queer misogyny, misogynoir, or transmisogynies – are urgent for psychoanalysis to address, and I hope we talk about them together later.
I could now talk about ways in which feminist thinking has already challenged misogynistic ideas and practice in psychoanalysis, or about the transformative potential for us of Laplanchian concepts,1 but instead, I'm going to talk about where we come from and about what persists and remains difficult to dislodge, on the way to different ideas and practices. This backward look means that I'll focus a lot on misogyny in a heterosexual, apparently binary context. When we talk about misogyny in the context of British psychoanalysis – by which I mean a cultural environment of misogyny, the misogyny psychoanalytic practice tries to address, and also the misogyny and restrictions that may still inhabit it – aren't we ‘really’ talking about the mother and the maternal, about women as mothers? That's my first focus.
My second is women's desire, pleasure and creativity, and not just hostility to them, but women's hostility. I'm still thinking about women who are mothers, but taking the issue further, with the example of Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work (2001) and its reception, which often seemed to express internalised misogyny.
My third focus will draw psychoanalysis and women's desire a bit more forcibly together, to explore what is happening between a woman and a man, both of whom have a passion for psychoanalysis, one of whom is enormously influential, the other less than she should be, I think. They are Winnicott and Marion Milner.
So to begin at the beginning: the weeds of fear or hate that grow within patriarchy are to do with women being mistaken for, reduced to, or identified with mothers. Here woman is not an open category; here women are mothers, only mothers, and only women are mothers; which can also mean that the only real women are mothers, that is, that reproductive capacities are what differentiate people, and reproduction is idealised as the defining feature of women. Difference is pinned to anatomy; anatomy and identity are taken to match. That women – all people who identify as feminine – may arouse ambivalence or anxiety because of other differences, is not what's being thought about. So it's a double problem: being other than a mother is trouble, but being a mother is also already troubling.
And misogyny attacks not even mothers plural, but the mother, and not women, plural, but woman – even, as in Winnicott's writing, repeatedly, woman, capital letters. More than once his writing slips from identifying unacknowledged dependence on our mothers as what we fear, as the problem, to fear of woman,2 – a phantasm, a definition of misogyny, though not named as such. In the slippage between mothers and the mother and woman lies unexplored experience and everything that women are or want to be, other than being mothers in all their diverse ways. Here too is everything else about gender that needs to be voiced; that is, the ways in which, when gender is at stake – and we are talking about gender as well as sex – it's channelling a host of other issues and asymmetries besides. We move from the problem of unacknowledged
dependence to the problem of what remains unacknowledged when thinking grinds to a halt at this notion of woman, in those capital letters. And come to think of it: is dependence – which in this writing has morphed into fear – so fearful, if individualistic self-determination, self-containment and self-mastery aren't over-valued, and vulnerabilities denied or disavowed?
Central to the British psychoanalytic tradition, which seemed to go on talking about men and women as male and female, has been the mother and the maternal relation, which still by and large shored up the Oedipal and the paternal and the familial. When women, plural, in all their differences and diversity, are reduced to a fixed and generic woman, who in turn is tacitly reduced to mother, it remains more difficult to analyse hostilities towards women or the feminine, or to develop ideas and practices through which psychoanalysis can not only grow out of its misogynies plural, but also offer a site that women can turn to in hope of finding out more about themselves, a site which affords them uncertainty, ambivalence, wildness if they want – and plenty of not knowing, and more liveability.
I'll move on now to say something about hostility between women, which we might think of as a form of internalised misogyny.
My example is responses to Rachel Cusk's, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother, published some twenty years ago, which among other things voices ambivalence about being a mother. Responses were, let's say, mixed. Among the reams of comments on Mumsnet, the self-righteous, hateful, neoliberal responses seem so far from acknowledging the violence of their attack that it's difficult not to read them as pulsing with internalised misogyny. Here are a couple of examples (not among the most savage):
‘I worry about these sort of books, because they seem to normalise feelings of rage and hatred towards one's children … it really isn't natural or ok to be feeling like this […] I hope that people who do would seek help.‘
‘just stop feeling so damn important’.
‘Who does she think she is?’ they seem to scream. That, or there's panic that Cusk has written the unsayable; she's let the cat out of the bag. Not really any more than Winnicott had already calmly spelled out many years earlier in ‘Hate in the Counter-transference’ (1949), but there you go … This policing is self-licensing, but the self that licenses is a woman who seems to identify with a fantasy of mother that is held to be sacrosanct. These attackers seem to meet other ways of being a woman who is a mother with unacknowledged fear or hatred. Now, I'm not claiming to know what's driving their response; what I do know is that Cusk experienced their words as hateful – not to mention misreading what she had written.
Let's hear Cusk herself, on the critical onslaught – and I'm now talking about formal, published reviews:
‘If everyone were to read this book the propagation of the human race would virtually cease, which would be a shame’ … ‘It might not occur to you that, just because it's a horrific experience doesn't make it interesting. If you had a baby, you did so because you wanted one’ … On and on it went, back and forth: I was accused of child-hating, of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering and, most often, of being too intellectual. One curious article questioned the length of my sentences: how had I, a mother, been able to write such long and complicated sentences?
What interests me are those sentences: her writing, the important – even life-saving – pleasure of writing the sentences she needed to write in order to convey her experience of the ‘psychical predicament of the new mother’ (Cusk 2008). In Cusk's words, specific kinds of writing help us ‘find a different way of living, by a different way of inquiring and listening’ to ourselves, to the worlds we inhabit, and to the stories that we want to tell of them (Cusk 2018). This sounds to me rather like something psychoanalysis would want. Why wouldn't psychoanalysis want this form
of pleasure and creativity and desire for women, mother or not? Not to mention wanting to offer a revitalising kind of environment in which ambivalence, not least maternal ambivalence, can be explored and lived with differently. And besides, a space where internalised misogyny, if that's what it is, which can't allow other women, mothers or not mothers, their different and diverse ways of living their ‘psychic predicaments’ as well as their pleasures, can be voiced, explored, worked through.
Now for my third focus, on what analysis can offer, in the form of Marion Milner and Winnicott. Did what Winnicott called fear of woman, capital letters, in some way unanalysed, give rise to the analytic turmoil that Milner describes later, in ‘Being in analysis with D.W. Winnicott’? She keeps wondering what happened; the short paper brims with her rather self-reproaching questions, about the why of what happened – and what didn't: ‘this being special was not what I really wanted, I wanted analysis’ (Milner 2012).
I don't know if you know the paper; it's a moving and devastating account of an analysis that took place although their lives were already very entangled. It took place in Milner's own consulting room; Winnicott sat in her chair, while she lay on the couch. Some time into the analysis, he had a heart attack. She told him, ‘If you don't leave Alice [his wife] I think you will die.’ He left Alice. Milner ended the analysis so as to be able to go on working with her patient ‘Susan’, who had been living with the Winnicotts (see Milner 1969).
Her next analyst, unlike Winnicott, was able to talk about sex, and told her: ‘If that's what you want, go and get it’, which, she writes, ‘I did’ (Milner 2012).
That's a very scant account of a quiet and intricate paper, from which I'm drawing out Winnicott's blindness in relation to Milner, to women and to his own desire, to what Milner calls, in shorthand, ‘sex’. This blindness seems at least on a continuum with unacknowledged misogyny, when misogyny has to do with policing women's pleasure, keeping them in their maternal place, and allowing fear to dominate. Milner seems to say that what couldn't be acknowledged was making his life unliveable (‘I think you will die‘); it was also, though she doesn't quite
say it, making the analysis impossible. Analyses aren't there to provide answers, but all being well they don't leave us feeling we have failed to ask questions, or even the ‘right’ question, as Milner expresses here – such as why had Winnicott offered to be her analyst (she hadn't asked him to be). Milner's questions seem to voice questions that Winnicott wasn't asking himself. The set-up did not afford Milner what she should at the very least have been able to hope for, and also for the most she could hope, for which anyone should be able to hope, which was to be analysed, for ‘analysis’.
Towards the end of the paper Milner gently wonders something which brings me sharply back to the here and now: she wonders, she doesn't claim to know; she wonders about Winnicott wishing to ‘have actually been born a woman’ (Milner 2012), a wish, she thinks, that never got anywhere, other than being projected onto her, onto her what he called ‘for ever starting again’.
The capacity to voice this kind of wish, and for psychoanalysis to offer a space for such wishes to be voiced, speaks to me across the years, and echoes what I hear in my practice now. And the question, which is as much a question for misogyny, is – and this is where I'll end – how best do we recognise the other's psychic reality? Anything but binary thinking is a good start …
Think, not least, of the significance of Laplanche in Avgi Saketopoulou's work, or for Judith Butler's engagement with psychoanalytic thinking since 2004.
In, for example ‘The Mother's Contribution to Society’ and ‘This Feminism’ , in Home is Where We Start From (1985).