Most of the key concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis were either adapted from fin de siecle psychiatry or invented by Freud himself. When Laplanche and Pontalis surveyed these terms in their remarkable lexicon, first published in French in 1967, “gender” was not on their list. It is not indigenous to psychiatry or psychoanalysis, but came from 1960s feminists who, in the era of structuralist theorizing, knew that for linguists sex is not in any simple way referenced in the gender of nouns. There are Indo-European languages with three genders—feminine, masculine, and neuter—and languages with only two; languages in which la lune is feminine and le soleil masculine, while in others the genders are reversed for no obvious reason; languages in which a girl and a woman are both neuter, for example, das Maedchen and das Weib. Gender, feminists understood, is categorization, culturally shaped and culturally shaping.
But by the late 1960s, there was also a growing recognition of what feminists called “gender” among psychoanalysts, particularly those engaged in empirical research. Robert J. Stoller published his enormously influential Sex and Gender in 1968, but John Money and his sexologist colleagues at Johns Hopkins had begun the investigations that culminated in Man and Woman, Boy and Girl (1972) in the 1950s. These writers were, in turn, indebted to a critique of Freud's views on female (not male) development that began in the 1930s with essays by Karen Horney, Ernst Jones, and Sylvia Payne, and continued in the 1940s with contributions by Gregory Zilboorg and Phyllis Greenacre, all of whom argued against the idea that femaleness begins at puberty when a girl abandons focus on clitoral sensation for vaginal. Horney and Jones argued for “primary femininity” and an inborn maturational program headed for heterosexuality, which implied a paradigm shift away from Freud's general focus on masculinity and his idea that femininity is, basically, a retreat from masculinity governed by envy of the masculine phallus.
Although feminists of the “second wave” embraced this paradigm shift, to which they had also contributed so much, they did not usually accept the new analytic biological emphasis, but, rather, adopted the “cultural Freudianism” of Horney and others (including cultural anthropologists like Margaret Mead) who had explored the influence of culture on (particularly) female development. “Gender” was the word that had emerged by the 1970s to refer to the components of femininity and masculinity that growing up in a language and a culture adds to one's biological or innate femaleness and maleness. So, despite the contributions of analyst critics of Freud, the slow importation of “gender” into psychoanalysis is a case of identification with the aggressor, for gender was the leading feminist weapon with which Freud's views on female psychology were criticized. Paradigmatically, Simone de Beauvoir had insisted in Le deuxieme sexe (1949) that “woman is not born, but made,” which meant that anatomy is not destiny as Freud seemed, most of the time, to argue and which the “primary femininity” position actually perpetuated.
Even though Freud was the chief target of both psychoanalytic and feminist critique and even while his bias was being quite definitively repudiated, he was also, paradoxically, a great inspiration for his own overthrow. At the end of his 1920 case study of the 18-year-old female homosexual, Freud had clearly distinguished physical sexual characteristics from mental sexual characteristics of the sort known as Weiblichkeit and Männlichkeit, and he had gone on to note—very radically—that there is no fixed relation (including causal relation) between these two ingredients of sexuality and the third, type of object choice. He was also clearly aware that femininity and masculinity have not just biological, but sociological, and psychosocial dimensions and that, as technical terms, they were seldom clearly used. Freud was also, throughout his
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Ph.D., has a private practice in Manhattan and is on the faculty of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. She is the author of many books and essay collections, including a biography of Anna Freud and The Anatomy of Prejudices.
oeuvre, an exponent of universal primary bisexuality—despite the fact that this concept should have made him question his privileging of masculinity (his “phallocentrism,” as Ernest Jones called it). But in his three late essays dealing with female sexuality, Freud had tilted more and more toward consideration of the “psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes,” and seemed to retreat from his more radical positions. Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and other analysts who influenced de Beauvoir had both protested this tilt and repudiated Freud's contempt for arguments supporting the equality of women. But the early critics did not invent a term to compass mental sexual characteristics (both femininity and masculinity) or to link these to sociocultural influences as later feminists did with gender (embracing both femininity and masculinity).
Like the nature vs. nurture binary, to which it is related, the sex vs. gender binary, has for its whole career been wrapped in controversy and subject to pendulum swings. Until the 1970s, the determinative role of “sex” (biological femaleness and maleness, not any intersex condition) was the chief site of questioning the binary. Among analysts, the primary femininity argument was as important in that questioning as were any emphasis on gender identity (the term for conscious and unconscious awareness of being one sex or the other) or any emphasis on gender role (the term for behavior, particularly in relation to other people and social norms that evaluate gender, promoting or demoting behaviors). Robert Stoller, for example, accepted the primary femininity argument, but proposed that both females and males develop preoedipally a core gender identity, that is, a sense of “I am female” or “I am male,” which usually, but not always, accords with their physical sexual characteristics.
But among feminists, the determinative influence of sex was usually downplayed or rejected, and gender identity became virtually synonymous with sexual identity. They stressed children's early identifications with one parent or the other and the impact of differences in child-rearing and parental attitudes toward female and male children, and they explored societal divisions of labor, particularly the sexism reflected in those divisions. Their critique of psychoanalysis often focused on Freud's notion of penis envy in women, which, as noted, had served Freud as the main explanation for why girls, for whom the mother is the first love object, as she is for boys, usually turn to a male object. To the claim that girls seek in their male objects the penis they do not have, and that this same lack and desire move them to desire a male child, feminists countered that girls envy and desire the penis because it is valued and privileged generally by phallocentric culture—that is, by the culture of male narcissism, known sociologically as “patriarchy.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, when gender was being explored by feminists and imported into psychoanalysis, the theoreticians most important to psychoanalysis were feminists who actually trained as psychoanalysts, chiefly Juliet Mitchell in England and Nancy Chodorow in America. In France, too, feminists like Julia Kristeva sought training, but they were much more influenced by Jacques Lacan than by either Freud or Freud's critics like Horney. Their critique was, so to speak, psycholinguistic and emphasized that gender is part of the unconscious that is shaped like a language.
While psychoanalysis was being challenged by feminists without and within on the sex vs. gender axis, the Gay Liberation Movement focused on the third ingredient of sexuality Freud had articulated, choice of object. With astonishing swiftness, this challenge highlighted a newly named prejudice, “homophobia,” and accomplished a category shift: Homosexuality was depathologized, and dropped from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973. But, ironically, the newly important concept of gender came to the fore in a new pathology a decade later, gender identity disorder. Debate still surrounds this GID, with its emphasis on whether a child's or an adult's gender identity is dysphoric or not, and the debate has been engaged and extended by transsexuals and transvestites questioning the way in which they have been interpreted, as homosexuals and bisexuals had in the early 1970s.
This clinical development and debate had some impact on feminist theorists who, from the 1980s forward, were, however, chiefly influenced by object relations theory, by French feminism, and by both European and American versions of postmodernism. “Gender” began to take on new meanings, with an emphasis on how gender is scripted (or narrativized) and/or performed. In a social era of widespread gender-bending (both unconscious and conscious) and changing social roles (like parenting for non-heterosexuals of all sorts), the word began to designate a goal or something like an ego ideal, an identity either socially constructed or individually constructed (a matter of choice of gender). But at the same time, the very idea of normal gender development, or, to use the more prescriptive term, normativity, came under attack as vehemently as had, in earlier times, specific gender norms. Gender, which had once functioned as a liberationist tool to free people from “anatomy is destiny,” began to be seen by some postmodernist theorists as needing a revolution or at least a
reform of its own. Some argued for jettisoning the concept, others proposed redefining it as a necessary fiction, needed for identity or prevention of lack of identity but not to be unselfconsciously embraced. Others wanted to deconstruct the entire sex/gender binary. This era of debates is well represented in the journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, the editors of which are key contributors to the debates.
In this complex history of a word, so impossible to summarize adequately in a few words, one feature has been a constant: Because “gender” is a key site of prejudices, polemic in its use and over its usage produces counter-polemic, lash produces backlash, to an extent that gives support to the argument from philosophers of science that individual and cultural perceptions of sexual difference underlie all conceptual binaries. The repressed (or temporarily defeated) always returns, and there is always a struggle not to be trapped in the words that were used to avoid being trapped by words. Among some postmodernist theorists who criticized the idea of gender normativity, there is currently much effort to recover sex or the body (minus destiny), and to learn from medical specialties from endocrinology to neurology (minus their old patriarchal biases). From the psychoanalytic side, there is much attention to how sex is influenced by gender—the binary being read in the opposite from usual direction.
The great advance for psychoanalysis that this complex history has brought about is an appreciation of the complexity and variability over the lifespan of each individual's sexed-and-gendered development as well as of cultural diversity and the complexity of cultural influence on individuals and groups. But the current situation is also novel (and especially chaotic) because almost all adult peoples who have felt themselves pathologized are represented in the current debates and the developmental stages of the word “gender” itself—shaped by its use by feminists, then by queer theorists, then by transgender theorists, many writing autobiographically—are known to all now, 150 years after Freud's birth as a male infant of yet to be determined gender.