Abstract
Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering altered the landscape and trajectory of second-wave feminism. Most feminists at this time identified psychoanalysis with Freud, rejecting him and his theories as a means of analyzing women’s oppression. Chodorow argued, in contrast, that psychic structures are social, rather than natural/biological phenomena. Bypassing Freud, she made use of post-Freudian object relations theory to make the case that exclusive female mothering engenders the psychic structures in boys and girls that reproduce themselves over time. Changing the social structure that ensured women’s mothering, she maintained, would lead to more flexible roles for women in society and a diminishment (if not end) of women’s oppression. She made a compelling case for gender equality, which, in combination with other social movements in succeeding decades, transformed the status of women in society. In this essay, I trace my indebtedness to her core insight that psychic structures derive from social structures and how that conception has informed my own critique of the Oedipus complex, how psychoanalytic theory has evolved post-Freud, and how these altered conditions may better serve women and the cause of women’s equality.
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Notes
- 1.
Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
- 2.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
- 3.
I am thinking of NOW, the national political movement sparked by Betty Friedan, founded in 1966, and the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), created in 1977 to foster women’s studies within and outside of the academy. Another landmark moment was the publication of MS Magazine (1972), which helped to establish and popularize the term “Ms.” over the standard “Miss” or “Mrs.” Grass roots movements, of course, preceded, supported, and sustained these developments. I recall, for instance, the creation of women’s bookstores, domestic violence centers, lesbian resource centers, coffeehouses, writing retreats, and alternative learning institutes in the Twin Cities, beginning in the early 1970s and continuing to this day. Women my age will also remember the establishment of the journals Women’s Studies (1971), Frontiers (1975), Signs (1975), and Sinister Wisdom (1976), in addition to the founding of feminist presses such as Virago (1973), Calyx (1980), Kitchen Table (1980), and Cleis (1980).
- 4.
I discuss the preoedipal turn in psychoanalytic theory in Madelon Sprengnether, Mourning Freud (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). See also Joel Whitebook, Freud: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- 5.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977).
- 6.
This is a very highly condensed summary of my views on Lacan and French feminism. For more nuanced accounts see Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), and my article Madelon Sprengnether, “Feminist Criticism and Psychoanalysis,” in A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gill Plain and Susan Sellars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 235–263.
- 7.
Object relations theory presumes that infants do not thrive outside of the context of relationship. The work of John Bowlby, based on infant and early childhood observation, demonstrated how children in orphanages whose physical needs are attended to but neglected in terms of loving interaction, fail to develop normally. It would seem that we need a loving, or at least attentive, caregiver in order to invest in life. The British school of object relations theory absorbed this primary understanding, while focusing on specific aspects of the mother/infant relationship and creating a body of theory based on the assumption that infants’ first attachments are to their mothers. Margaret Mahler elaborated the theory of an original mother/infant symbiosis, from which the child must slowly disengage in order to create an independent selfhood. The assumption that boys, because of their gender difference from the body of the mother, struggle harder than girls to differentiate from their mothers flows from this concept. Given how little we know about infants and how strong the cultural biases are in favor of relegating the functions of early infant caretaking to women and mothers, I think that the idea of mother/infant symbiosis should be held in suspension. See John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (London: Hogarth Press, 1959); Margaret Mahler, On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation (New York: International Universities Press, 1968).
It is true (to date) that human gestation requires the body of a woman in order to come to fruition. Yet we remain in the dark about the possible meanings of this experience. For the mother, the act of giving birth is a profound but also disruptive experience, separating her from the fetus she has carried for nine months. Perhaps the infant registers its expulsion as equally disruptive? How can we know? Otto Rank, one of Freud’s closest colleagues, thought so, describing this event as a trauma. If Rank was right, perhaps our first experience of being in the world is separation, rather than fusion. The myth of birth we choose to embrace is significant in my view because it affects how we conceptualize the drama of human development. Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth (New York: Robert Brunner, 1952 [1924]).
- 8.
Deconstruction, a strategy of reading and interpretation introduced by Jacques Derrida, holds that binary categories automatically privilege one term over the other. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivack (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Luce Irigaray’s influential work applies this axiom to the categories man/woman and masculine/feminine. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
- 9.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
- 10.
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 Vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953, 1955, 1957).
- 11.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).
- 12.
The literature on trauma, from a psychoanalytic perspective as well as from personal testimony, is too vast to cite here. That said, I want to call attention to an excellent history of the use of this term/concept. See Bessel van der Kolk, Lars Weisaeth, and Onno van der Hart, “History of Trauma in Psychiatry,” in Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 47–74.
- 13.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1920), 1–64.
- 14.
The starting point for most contemporary theorists of trauma is this famous study, induced by Freud’s connection between his grandson’s game and the phenomenon of “repetition compulsion,” witnessed in some soldiers returning from the Front. It remained for others to elaborate on his speculations in order to articulate a full-fledged theory of trauma and how it affects the brain, body, and psyche. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
- 15.
Sprengnether, Mourning Freud.
- 16.
I would add nonverbal or unrepresented states of being to this list, as this area of psychoanalytic theory is relatively new, hence unexplored. The preoedipal turn in psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on early childhood development naturally leads in this direction as infants only gradually become speaking subjects, and much of what they remember from their early lives is lost as they mature. Also, the concept of the suppression of memory formation in trauma theory raises the question of how traumatic experience is registered in the psyche. Lastly, Lacan’s focus on the Imaginary has inspired many of his followers to emphasize aspects of the unconscious that are inaccessible, or only indirectly accessible, to language. See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok The Shell and the Kernel (1994) for an explication of how trauma enigmatically inscribes itself in language and Annie Rogers’ A Shining Affliction (1995) and The Unsayable (2006) for examples of the clinical uses of Lacanian theory in the treatment of traumatized children.
- 17.
For a useful overview of Freud’s relationships with women, see Lisa Appignanesi and John Forester, Freud’s Women (New York: Basic/HarperCollins, 1992); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Freud on Women: A Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). This includes citations from his texts on girls and women, with commentary provided by the author (1990). For views of Freud provided by two of his significant women admirers, see Hilda Doolittle [H.D.], A Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1974 [1956]); and Ernst Pfeiffer, ed. Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas Salomé Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966 [1985]).
- 18.
I am speaking of feminism both in the United States and in the world at large. There was a period of time during the 1990s when US feminism seemed to lose momentum, as younger women, having gained ground in the professions, preferred not to call themselves feminists. The next generation has brought new life and energy to the movement, especially around issues of sexual harassment, equal pay, domestic violence, and rape. I was personally moved to read Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky, which demonstrates the degree to which women in developing countries lack the basic rights and freedoms that US feminists have long taken for granted. Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (New York: Knopf, 2009). Their documentation of the practices of forced prostitution, honor killing, genital cutting, female infanticide, and the denial of education to girls reminded me of Mary Daly’s early feminist work which called attention to similar historical atrocities (Indian bride burning, Chinese foot-binding, African genital mutilation, and European witch burning). Daly was a lesbian feminist philosopher and theologian, and her argument focuses on patriarchy as a system that oppresses women. See Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), Kristof and WuDunn are investigative reporters, who ground their position in research, individual interviews, and statistics. Despite these differences, Daly, Kristof and WuDunn, in their emphases on specific instances of women’s oppression, have much in common.
- 19.
For an overview of the intersections between literary and psychoanalytic feminism over the course of the last half-century, see Sprengnether, “Feminist Criticism and Psychoanalysis”.
- 20.
Benjamin, The Bonds of Love.
- 21.
Muriel Dimen, Sexuality, Intimacy, Power (New York: Routledge, 2014).
- 22.
Adrienne Harris, Gender as Soft Assembly (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 2005).
- 23.
Barbara Almond, The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
- 24.
In their recent book Why Does Patriarchy Persist? Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider answer this question by “connecting the persistence of patriarchy to the psychology of loss” (143). They argue that the onset of puberty involves a psychic sacrifice for both boys and girls, although in an asymmetrical fashion. While boys suppress the awareness of feelings of tenderness and affection in the service of assuming a prescribed masculine identity, girls begin to lose confidence in their ability to voice their own thoughts and feelings in the service of sustaining their relational ties to others. This bifurcation exaggerates and reifies the culture’s perceptions of sexual difference, hence also perpetuating the structure of patriarchy. The implication of this argument is that an acknowledgement or realization of this process offers the means to end it. Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2018).
- 25.
The turn to ancient myth offers other possibilities than the myth of Demeter and Persephone, although this option remains relatively unexplored. Carol Gilligan, in The Birth of Pleasure offers an alternative by exploring the Greek myth of Amor and Psyche. Her reading of Psyche’s violation of the taboo on looking directly at the face of her (nighttime) lover offers an interpretation of female self-assertion that has an unusually positive outcome: the birth of their child, named Pleasure. Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure (New York: Knopf, 2002).
- 26.
Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman, A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
- 27.
Sigmund Freud, “A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession,” in Standard Edition, Vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1916), 337–338.
- 28.
For an exploration of the figure of Baubo, in myth and in art, see Winifred Milius Lubell, The Metamorphosis of Baubo: Myths of Woman’s Sexual Energy (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994).
- 29.
Baubo’s gesture of lifting her skirts and provoking Demeter’s laughing response resonates in my memory with Hélène Cixous’ essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” where she makes the case for a liberated form of women’s writing. In The Spectral Mother, I expressed skepticism about the possibility of a gender-based form of writing with the power to subvert, if not overthrow patriarchy. Cixous herself implied that the subversive practice she advocated could also be embraced by men, although she was not entirely consistent in this. Rereading her essay now, I am struck by the extraordinary lyricism and energy of this piece, which induces in the reader an almost hypnotic state. Rhetorically, it is a tour de force, including the now famous lines: “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.” Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–893. In Lubell’s account, Medusa, a separate character from Baubo in mythological terms, nevertheless has ties to her in the manner of her representation: a woman’s head surrounded by writhing snakes. Baubo figurines often show a woman’s face in the place of her pudendum, hence perhaps inspiring Freud’s assumption that the sight of an adult woman’s genitals strikes a paralyzing fear in men, who regard women as castrated.
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Sprengnether, M. (2021). The Impact of Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering and Its Implications for the Future. In: Bueskens, P. (eds) Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55590-0_6
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