McSwain: How did you come to psychoanalysis?
Chodorow: As an undergraduate anthropology major, I was interested in psychological anthropology and socialization. With the women's movement, which coincided with my starting graduate school in sociology, I, along with others, became passionately concerned with finding out not only about the social and cultural aspects of male dominance and sexual inequality, but also how aspects of femininity and masculinity were internal, tenacious, and difficult to change, even when people wanted to change them. We wanted to understand cultural gender and how that got “inside the head”—what it meant for people to be “masculine” or “feminine.” Around that time, a professor of mine, the psychoanalytic sociologist Philip Slater, suggested to me that one could not understand personality and socialization if one did not understand the unconscious. It didn't take very much reading for me to be convinced that he was right.
Two questions particularly interested me, and those both led to The Reproduction of Mothering. I wanted to know what it was about masculinity that needed—and this need seemed prevalent not only in our culture—to insist on male superiority and to see such radical difference between masculinity and femininity. And the answer seemed, cross-culturally, to have to do with a son's having to repudiate his mother and his identification with her. Also, I became interested in mother-daughter relationships, and I had, I suppose, an intuitive sense that this relationship was central to feminine personality. I could find very little written on the mother-daughter relationship in sociology, anthropology, or even, in a general way, in psychoanalysis. But I did find some analysts, like Lampl-de Groot, Deutsch, Alice Balint, and Enid Balint, who had written perceptively about aspects of this relationship. They supported what had come to be my own insight—gleaned, actually, from what we used to call a women's group (in this case one that talked about mothers and daughters)—that issues of separation and connection seemed to be very central to this relationship and to the daughter's sense of developing self. So in both cases it seemed that the mother-relation was central to the development of gender personality, to the selfhood of women and of men, and to their sense of gender identity.
I was also fortunate to have been introduced early in my study of psychoanalysis to object relations theory, and I was able to apply a sort of methodology about the development of the self and its inner object world to a comparison of female and male development. Object relations theory oriented me to a developmental theory that made the relation to the mother important, which was what I was also finding as I explored gender development. I would not have received such an orientation from a more classical approach, which ties gender development much more to the oedipal period, sexuality, and the father.
Of course, I also ran into all the problems in the psychoanalytic literature that have now been so well documented and that I also wrote about—how this literature reduced feminine personality to female sexuality; how it used a male norm of development, seeing primary masculinity in both sexes and primary femininity in neither; and how it viewed mothers as objects, seen exclusively from the viewpoint of the child, rather than as subjects. I connected this objectification of mother and lack of attunement to maternal subjectivity to the literature's theoretical tendency (as well as the culture's and the male writer's tendency) to take male children as the developmental and experiential norm. As my colleague Susan Contratto and I wrote in “The Fantasy of the Perfect Mother,” women writing about the mother-daughter relationship and about female development also, for the most part, see this relationship and development from the child's perspective and see mothers as objects more than subjects. Nevertheless, the girl, or woman writer, also on some level identifies herself as mother, or potential mother, and thus at least senses that the mother has her own selfhood or subjectivity.
McSwain: How did you move from these interests to wanting to be a clinician?
Chodorow: By the time I published The Reproduction of Mothering, in 1978, it seemed to me that I had said about as much as I could say without having clinical experience. I had said quite a lot and had been, I think, insightful about analytic understanding of development. I was able to develop ideas about the different construction of the male and female self and their differently put together inner object worlds. But there was a kind of understanding of the psyche that, I thought, could not really be achieved without clinical experience. This intuition about clinical experience may also have been because my theoretical orientation was toward British object relations theory, which points in a distinctly interpersonal or interpersonally constructed intrapsychic direction. That is, object relations theory presumes at least a two-person intrapsychic stance and, historically, our understanding of self in relation to other intrapsychically comes from the analytic encounter.
As a sociologist interested in psychoanalysis—which is extremely unpopular in the “scientific” social sciences like sociology and psychology (not to mention economics or political science)—I am very much at the humanistic, interpretive end of the spectrum of the social sciences: In academia, psychoanalysis is very much located in the humanities, especially in literary criticism but also to some extent in history, philosophy, and anthropology. At the same time, I am sufficiently an “empirical” social scientist to have wanted some kind of empirical grounding for my work. I had been in anthropology, and I believed that, just as one cannot be an anthropologist without going into the field, experiencing that encounter with the “other,” immersing oneself to understand a culture from within, one needs clinical immersion to understand the psyche from within. You can go a certain distance on your own analysis; many psychoanalytically oriented academics have done so. (I think you may even be able to distinguish those who have been analyzed from those who have not from something in the quality of their writing). I wanted to know what clinical work was like; I wanted to have that experience. I think also, less honorably, that I wanted to be taken seriously by analysts, and most analysts are very, very reluctant to read outside of their field. They really give legitimacy only to people who have been trained—I think to their detriment, because so much interesting, groundbreaking work on psychoanalysis is going on outside the profession.
McSwain: That leads to another issue that you have written about a lot: your conviction that we need to keep the bridges open between feminism and psychoanalysis.
Chodorow: Yes. I sometimes think of myself as doing nothing but straddling bridges and writing, in parts of Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, as if all I am doing is trying to make connections among people. As I have argued, it's not simply a question of creating connections. When you don't recognize the connections between psychoanalysis and other kinds of thinking—in general as well as in the particular case of psychoanalysis and feminism—you are not seeing linkages that are already there. They don't have to be created. Freud made gender and sexuality central to his theory and practice, and analysts since Freud have also made them central. These are also the very elements that go into feminist theory and practice, which are about gender and sexuality. Freud argued that men and women value their genitals and their being differently. He argued that women feel inferior; he made disparaging remarks about feminists in almost all his later writings on women; he made sure to say that he was challenging feminists. He wrote about the social, cultural, and psychological situation of women as early as Studies on Hysteria. Those linkages have been there from the beginning.
I think also—and some analysts are very cognizant of this—that the ingredients of fantasy are partly linguistic and cultural. People develop their own individual fantasies, but the material at hand comes from the culture too. That's an inextricable linkage. Once we recognize that gender identity—boyness and girlness, sexual fantasy, images of people, desire, erotic scenarios— gets meanings from the cultural system, then we're in the arena of feminism. In our practices, so much developmental and clinical discussion centers on women and men, their roles, their situation. We have debates about the analytic stance; unspoken issues about masculinity and femininity are linked or played out, as people talk about “the analyzing instrument,” or “the surgical model” versus being more empathetic, or the “holding environment,” or corrective emotional experience. Part of what is being debated has to do with masculinity and femininity.
That's the linkage on the psychoanalytic side. On the other side, of course, is that a feminism that does not have a psychology cannot be a complete feminism, because gender is a combination of culture, psyche, and social organization.
Analysts must recognize, I believe, how much they, as cultural beings, take from outside, both implicitly and explicitly, for instance, when they use literature to confirm or create their theories: What kind of cultural stories are the Oedipus myth and Hamlet? But my concerns are more general than gender alone. I don't see how analysts can maintain, as some do, that their “science” is so sui generis, that findings or theories or interpretive strategies in other areas are not relevant. There are certainly unique aspects to the analytic situation, the analytic encounter, and unconscious mental functioning that analysis itself understands best, but this analytic understanding is not radically and absolutely different from other modes of thinking. For instance, if, when feminist scholars in the academy analyze literature or when developmentalists observe babies, they are speaking to issues that analysts also speak to, analysts must take the findings and analyses of those writers seriously.
This is a sort of hobby horse of mine. When you are in the university, you don't isolate yourself; the “real” intellectuals, the “cosmopolitan” intellectuals don't. They don't think it's enough to know their own field; they need to know what's happening in different disciplines. The institutional history of psychoanalysis has moved us away from that view.
McSwain: You are one of a growing number of women candidates these days. How do you think psychoanalysis will be affected by the greater numbers of women entering? I am told that approximately 40% of candidates accepted for training in the last several years have been women.
“… There is some spoken and unspoken unease about women entering the field—a worry that women demedicalization and declining status go together.”
Chodorow: That's an interesting question. You know, women used to be in the field of psychoanalysis in fairly great numbers. I became interested in that about 10 years ago and did research on early women psychoanalysts. I interviewed women who had been born before 1910 and had trained in the 20s, 30s, or early 40s. I also interviewed some men of the same cohort, and some of the women's offspring. It appears that probably in Europe and certainly in the United States, there were more women in psychoanalysis proportionately than in almost any other predominantly male profession. It was quite striking, how open to women psychoanalysis was in that early period. But then, in the 50s, 60s, and probably 70s in the United States, though not in Europe, there was a radical closing down, and very, very few women entered the field.
I think that one effect of that early female participation was that psychoanalysis took the psychology of gender very seriously. Freud says, “Hey, now that there are all these women analysts, they've made me rethink female personality and femininity.” A really radical reconsideration of female psychology, of the meaning of gender, of childhood, is long overdue in psychoanalysis. I am especially concerned about the extent to which the mother is not theorized in psychoanalytic theory. Or she is objectified, and development is seen entirely from the point of view of the child. Analysts still talk easily about “bad mothers.” And I hope that female participation will have an effect on that attitude (but I don't see it so far). In the early period there was also a certain unease about all these women. Part of psychoanalysis' reaction was to try to become hyperprofessional and hyperscientific, to assert that we really are a traditional science, a branch of medicine, or “our science,” which, as some feminists have suggested, means, culturally, something more masculine, than, say, a “soft”—interpretive or interpersonal—theory, or a helping profession.
There are some typical concomitants of feminization. As professions feminize, their status gets lower (or, as their status gets lower, they admit women). Psychoanalysis has always been in an ambiguous position. It has been, as I see it, at the lower status end of the medical hierarchy—psychiatry isn't as prestigious as, say, surgery, and the clinical end of psychiatry is less prestigious than the biopsychological end—and at the soft end of academic psychology. But it's on the high-status end of the mental health professions like social work and clinical psychology. The status of psychoanalysis in any case is not where it was in the 50s and 60s. I'm not sure whether the current feminization is a consequence of its lower status or partly a cause, but it is probably a consequence. Men are not as interested in entering the field as they once were.
Also, I think that both cause and consequence of the increase of women in the field is the much greater consideration given these days to more relational theories, to Kleinian theory, object relations theory, and self psychology. I am talking here about American psychoanalysis; the rest of the world has always been more open, more syncretic and inclusive. The entrance of women may contribute to a reevaluation of certain female theorists such as Klein and Horney.
I would not say that any of this is directly caused by having more women in the field, but part of it has to do with women coming into the field: revaluation of women theorists who opposed Freud; more interest in interpersonal theories; more regard for things like empathy and countertransference. The literature of the early 50s revealed a new attention to countertransference. I'd say that the writers of more than half the major articles were women. Women seemed more willing to say, “Let's look at me: what am I thinking? How does this affect the analysis?,” rather than
seeing themselves as an external scientific instrument. Even when they wanted to limit and restrict the definitions or impact of countertransference—and many did—they thought it should be looked at.
Generally, that's what feminization does: It makes disciplines more open to less rigid, less scientistic ways of thinking; it lowers their status (or responds to lowered status); it broadens the interpersonal nature of theory; it makes us consider women and children; and, we hope, it will make us reconsider men as well.
McSwain: What about the position of women within psychoanalysis? From your interviews with older women analysts, you conclude that their positions were mainly in teaching as opposed to writing or politics, that teaching was their sphere of influence. Do you think that situation will remain the same, or do you think it will change?
Chodorow: I think that there was a link between the politics and the teaching of psychoanalysis, so that those women were very powerful. As I said in “Varieties of Leadership Among Early Women Psychoanalysts,” when you compare the percentage of women in psychoanalysis with the percentage of women who were training analysts and the percentage of women who were straight-out political officers (presidents and the like), there were disproportionally more training analysts and disproportionally fewer office holders than the proportion of women. Insofar as the training analyst has very high status, maybe even higher than the officer, the situation wasn't so bad for the women; as a matter of fact, it was good.
But nowadays, I don't see much reflection of the growth of women in the field either in the changing political structures or in increased appointments as editors, or on the Editorial Boards of the prestigious journals, or on the Boards of Education. Their absence from such positions may be because women are still at the candidate or recent graduate stage. Nonetheless, if we look at who are the officers or who runs for office in The American, we see that only a few have been women. I think two were president—Grete Bibring in 1962 and Rebecca Solomon in 1979—and two—Sara Bonnett and Joan Fleming—chaired the Board on Professional Standards in the late 50s and early 60s.
I don't know whether more women in the field will make a difference. Psychoanalysis has always been peculiar in not being very gender sensitive about women practitioners, even as it has been hypersensitive about clinical and developmental differences between men and women. I discovered in my research that, even when many women were in power, they did not necessarily think of themselves as women; nor did they try to make sure to keep women in positions of influence. Professionally, they did not see themselves as gendered. And that neglect was quite detrimental to women. In the 50s, in several large institutes—for instance, in Boston, Chicago, Washington—there were large numbers of women training analysts, but those institutes were accepting hardly any women candidates. The women did not notice that few women were being accepted; they didn't have a gender consciousness that would say, “We should have women as well as men as candidates.”
McSwain: The situation appears to be quite different now.
Chodorow: I think it is. But continued improvement in the situation will take some attitudinal changes. My impression is that there is some spoken and unspoken unease about women entering the field—a worry that women, nonmedicalization, and declining status go together. Analysts seem to feel freer to voice this unease publicly and not feel that they have to take the politics and relations of gender as seriously as people in other fields do. Analysts can come right out and say that there are problems in having more women.
Certainly more women will be involved in psychoanalysis; clinical fields in psychology are becoming feminized; very few men are going into these fields. There are more women in medicine now, of whom a disproportionate number in go into psychiatry. While most psychiatrists these days go into the more physiological, neuropsychological ends of the field, the psychiatrists who do become clinicians are more likely to be women. I think more gender consciousness and a concerted effort to promote women, to appoint women as training analysts, and to put women into political structures and positions of editorial power would be a very important move.
McSwain: As there are increasingly more women in psychoanalysis and the meaning of gender is spotlighted, I think women candidates will often want to have women as training analysts and supervisors. In that vein, when you interviewed these women analysts, what went on in your mind about your relationship with them?
Chodorow: I wrote about that in Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, in a chapter called “Seventies Questions for Thirties Women.” What went on in my mind changed over the course of my doing the research. Originally, I was just stunned: here I was, a young feminist, finding a field where there were so many important women. I could see this by looking at journals; I went to a mid-70s conference on early psychoanalysis in Boston, and half the participants were women. I think that I had an idealized model—there was a “grand old woman” quality to what I was trying to find. Many women professionals want to find women forebears, or “role models”; they don't want to have to think that their training and intellect came only from men. Virginia Woolf said, “We write through our mothers; we think through our mothers.” I think there was some of that in me. I had just written The Reproduction of Mothering, in which I talked about the actual mother-daughter relationship. Now I think that I was looking in some way at the professional mother-daughter relationship. I came to see that the women I interviewed had views very different from mine.
McSwain: Were you disappointed by what you found?
Chodorow: At first I was disappointed, but later I was not. At first, I was trying to find out, “Did they ever think about femininity? Was that central?” They didn't, very much. And I could not understand that. The debates on femininity of the 20s and 30s were very passionate. They were strong and strident, and writers took intense positions. I didn't find that passion in my interviews. Of course, the lack of concern about female psychology and the reported lack of concern in the past may be partly a product of the women's memory; but, mainly, I found that the women I interviewed had a very different way of dividing the world than do feminists of our generation. Those women had a kind of a gender-blind notion of the profession, in spite of the fact that the content of the theory and practice was so much about men and women. They saw, for instance, transference and dreams as most important. Many child analysts were mainly interested in ego defenses: They were trying to be go-fers for Anna Freud, to find ego defenses for her. Of course, Anna Freud, who was so influential for the early child analysts and for analysts in this country, was trying to be as a-gendered as she could possibly be. And her lack of interest and her inattention to female psychology probably contributed to a general lack of interest in it.
I wanted to know where my interviewees gender consciousness was. I came to see how different gender consciousness can be for different people. At home and with their families, my interviewees were very aware of being gendered; there was no questioning of roles, as there is today. They were the mothers; they were the wives; they took care of the house (often with the help of servants). There was no questioning of the gender division in the home. They believed in a natural familial division of labor and maternality. And yet, for them, the professional world was different, partly because the European attitude was somewhat different about women in the professions.
“There is still, I think, a prevalent notion among psychoanalysts that gender is not constructed, that it is really somehow natural.” As psychoanalysts, we are working within a model of gender that has been challenged by a lot of people—historians, anthropologists, others in academia who would say, “No, we
can see very much that gender is constructed; it hasn't always been like this. The deepest levels of the gendered and sexed, unconscious, constructions of maternality and sexuality, are historically and culturally varied. There is no biological bedrock.
I hope my analytic training and experience as a clinician will enable me to understand and document further the complex interactions among any individual's unique psychodynamic processes, unconscious fantasies, object-relational history and self-construction, and these culturally and historically situated meanings.
McSwain: How is it for you to be a candidate?
Chodorow: First, it has been really wonderful, as I have written. I have a deeply enriched sense of what psychoanalysis and the psyche are about. However, analytic training widens the split of being in different worlds and trying to bridge them; of constantly feeling that, in some ways, full participation in the institute and in the academy is not possible—especially for an academic who is also a mother. There are limits to how much you can do and how many classes, symposia, and committee meetings you can go to. And, on a more theoretical level, I think I need to learn to feel comfortable with a mode of analysis of gender and of psyche that is for some analysts “nonanalytic”—not exclusively about unconscious conflict—and for some academic feminists and social scientists too general, ahistorical, and outmoded.