Feminist Consequences

Theory for the New Century

Elisabeth Bronfen, Misha Kavka

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780231530149
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Exploring the status of feminism in this "postfeminist" age, this sophisticated meditation on feminist thinking over the past three decades moves away from the all too common dependence on French theorists and male thinkers and instead builds on a wide-ranging body of feminist theory written by women.

These writings address the question "Where are we going?" as well as "Where have we come from?" As evidenced in the essays compiled here, the multiplicity of directions available to this new feminism ranges from poststructuralist academic theory through cultural activism to re-readings of law, literature, and representation. Contributors include Mieke Bal, Lauren Berlant, Rosi Braidotti, Elisabeth Bronfen, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Drucilla Cornell, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Beatrice Hanssen, Claire Kahane, Ranjana Khanna, Biddy Martin, Juliet Mitchell, Anita Haya Patterson, and Valerie Smith.

Feminist Consequences, representing the forefront of international feminist thought, marks a new and long-desired stage of feminist criticism where women are themselves making theory rather than reacting to male production.

PART 1

Whatever Happened to Feminism?

Chapter 1

Psychoanalysis and Feminism at the Millennium

JULIET MITCHELL

In the last two decades there has been an untold gain in the understanding of the psychological and representational effects of sexual difference. Yet despite this, the politics of the original feminist turn to psychoanalysis for a means of analysis of the internalization of women’s secondary status seems finally to have run out in the sands of postmodernism. Is there something inherently apolitical in psychoanalysis? Does its self-described nonpolitical discourse draw all hopefully radical uses of it (of which there are other instances than feminism) into its apolitical, therefore potentially reactionary net? Alternatively does the recurrent, cyclical demise of feminism temporally turn a radical investigatory mode, which is psychoanalysis, apolitical? Or both?

Even if articulate feminism predates psychoanalysis by at least a hundred years there is a way in which they are bedfellows. This complicates the question of politics. The contemporary relative inactivity of political feminism is matched by its successful proliferation and assimilation into a natural discourse. The same is true of psychoanalysis. In both cases the weakening of the radicalism of the center is the strengthening of the margins of each. Radical, white, heterosexual feminism has become, as it were, third world, black, or lesbian feminism; radical, heterosexual psychoanalysis has become homosexual/lesbian psychoanalysis. Once separate, they can each assume a new radicalism. These margins belong only to their own enterprises—there is rarely a shared constituency between, say, third world feminism and an interest in radicalizing psychoanalysis. It would seem to be their conjuncture that draws both to a hegemonic-conservative center. This observation suggests that an inherently conservative pull within each might reflect something they share. The most obvious candidate would be some conservative force within their overlapping provenance of sexuality. This would go sharply against the frequent observation that psychoanalysis becomes conservative when various developments within it (such as Jungianism) drop the emphasis on sexuality in the hopes of making it more acceptable. Yet, there is in fact suggestive evidence that sexuality may be the conservative candidate in the epidemic reduction of both feminism and psychoanalytic psychotherapy to a shared concern with whether or not recovered memories of sexual abuse are true or false. The Recovered (or False) Memory movements indicate that something inherently apolitical about sexuality comes to the fore when there is an alliance of this kind. It is not that the issue of abuse is not crucial—it clearly is. The problem is how to make sure that the “personal is the political.” All too easily it is the political that becomes the personal, with all the dangers of witch-hunting that that implies.

There is a further contributory reflection: if both psychoanalysis and feminism have become in-turned and self-reflective and hence conservative in the West, another trajectory can be charted in former socialist countries. In these there is a rising tide of interest in both feminism and psychoanalysis, as well as in sexual exploitation. Indeed the timing of this is sufficient to make one wonder nervously if Lenin were not correct to castigate a concern with sexual emancipation, psychoanalysis, and feminism as bourgeois enterprises. That, however, would not only be too simple but would also only return us to its vulgarization in certain Marxist reactions against all three. This reaction was clearly utterly inadequate, unacceptable, and unproductive. It was a part of a masculinist ideology that drew the line against anything other than production and its allied social requirements as outside the bounds of political thought and action. The previous socialist regimes did not offer a theoretical space in which to articulate sexual difference. The official absence of discrimination militated against understanding its pervasive existence. That capitalism provides such a space is crucially important. It is no less important that this space of sexual difference opened up by capitalism is occupied by sexual exploitation, feminism, and an interest in psychoanalysis. Capitalism opens up the private but simultaneously closes the door on it as being outside the body politic. Sexuality, feminism, and psychoanalysis all march into this new area of privacy. But more than this, the ungendered citizen and worker in relation to the state occupied what space there was. Political feminism has to open the door to this—the original use of psychoanalysis was as an aid to finding the key. If the private is not made political, then it is a space of conservatism.

The second wave feminist turn to psychoanalysis, at least in France, England, Italy, Scandinavia, and the United States, came from a broad range of socialist concerns. In England and America the first questions addressed to psychoanalytic theory were not about sexuality but about kinship, the family, and ideology. The general context, however, in which those questions were asked was the sexual liberation of the sixties. An obvious common denominator of psychoanalysis and feminism was the place of sexuality. The original feminist enterprise became largely forgotten in the hegemonic seductions of the sexual and the representational. In the meantime there have been significant changes in Western family patterns that make the original enterprise pertinent, unless, that is, there is something inherent within “psychoanalysis and feminism” that prevents it contributing to an analysis that can be politically radical.

A Brief History: The War and Postwar Period

When it came into being during the sixties, second wave feminism inherited a situation in which the growth of what I will call “psychological motherhood” had helped to implement, indeed to promote, a postwar ideology of femininity as domestic, nurturant, expressive, intuitive, and so on—and, of course, their negatives. Psychoanalysis had been used by sociologists such as Urie Brofenbrenner in America to supplement the Parsonian functional account of the family. This argued for the need for an instrumental father negotiating the private/public divide and a mother providing the ground plan within the private sphere for emotional stability that would ensure boys would make good worker/fathers and girls good wife/mothers. British psychoanalytic object relations theory, save for a token acknowledgment of this father, focused almost exclusively on the mother’s tasks and the baby’s needs and emotions.

The situation in France was complicated by the oppositional role of Jacques Lacan. Lacan, returning to the radicalism of Freud, challenged Freudian orthodoxy within France but even more strongly was involved in a battle against the pervasiveness of ego psychology, particularly as it had developed within the United States. Emergent feminist analysts sided with Lacan before they deplored the phallocentrism of his reworking of Freudian theory.

The postwar use of psychoanalysis in Britain—on which I shall focus—was a humanist concern, yet some of its results were ultimately ideologically reactionary and stultifying for women. This was missed because of the combination of an unusual measure of gender equality within the psychoanalytical institutions and the overwhelming value placed on motherhood in the theory and clinical practice. The massive wartime evacuation of mothers and infants, and of children with their class teachers out of the bombed cities to the countryside shook received wisdom about families and social class. In brief, the assumption had been that improved physical conditions would be welcomed, most particularly by the poor. Until the Second World War the family was not regarded as universally important; in fact one aspect of the ideology of the family at the time almost translates into the equation that the well-to-do and the aspirant well-to-do had families while the poor had class or race. As it turned out, evacuated children overwhelmingly missed their homes, however impoverished or even dangerous these may have been. The subtle, painstaking, and thoughtful interviews of the children, analysis of the interviews, observations of behavior, interpretation of behavior, and theoretical postulates that resulted from this empirical work led to an obvious but highly problematic conclusion that still haunts us today: that in all but the most abusive situations, the family was best. There was a democratization in which everybody could and should have families. The later reaction against this must be set within this context.

The idea that the family was best was not incorrect on the obvious grounds that it was the wrong conclusion. In other words, the problem is not simply that quite clearly some families are not the best environment for their members. Rather, it was the wrong conclusion on the more radical ground that this answer missed the import of the discovery: why do children (and later it was realized this also applied to women) prefer bad families to no families? What makes a child run back to an abusive parent? And further-more, do they continue to prefer them? The mistake was that familiarity was equated with the family and an important opportunity to test both the significance of loss and the longer-term success of adaptation to change was missed. Reading the reports today makes it clear that the distressed evacuees would seem to have been missing the all-inclusive familiar “home” rather than the specificity of the nuclear family. This is not to underestimate the significance of mothers and fathers but to suggest that they do not come alone nor only in one shape and size.

Despite the absence of depth or longitudinal research on the evacuee material, the conclusion was drawn that an infant and even a child needed a mother’s attention twenty-four hours a day. This infantile need now seems so axiomatic to us that we forget how historically specific is its assumption. Because the thesis was tied in with so many humanistic and democratic reforms, questioning it was, and to an extent still is, difficult. When it was challenged by second wave feminism, it was completely inverted rather than questioned; initially, radical feminism, in particular, saw to it that the mother was thrown out with the bath water.

British psychoanalytical work, then, saw the family and within this the “good-enough” mother as crucial. Nonmedical and thus lay and women analysts were important in the psychoanalytical institutions in England. (There was a quota system operating strongly against women in medical schools, making the openness of psychotherapy training attractive.) The wartime and postwar contexts together with the predominance of women analysts who originated from a pedagogic and/or social welfare background meant that the emphasis on motherhood as psychologically crucial both for women and for babies was far greater in Britain than it was elsewhere.

In America the psychoanalytical profession was by law exclusively medical/psychiatric; it was thus male-dominated. What minimal interest there was in maternity came up against what was perceived to have been a problem with American soldiers: postwar America became obsessed by the undesirable prevalence of effete “Momism” amongst its should-be heroes. The analysis offered was that the apparently dependent, shallow personality resulted from a too indulgent mother and an insufficiently strong father. The absence of the father’s protective, authoritative stance entailed that it had not been internalized as an ethical superego. American ego psychology thus emphasized the importance of the father where British object relations focused on the mother.

France had been occupied during the war. The psychoanalytical organizations had resisted the German attempt to enable them to “rescue” psychoanalysis by discarding their Jewish members. Some members had gone into exile, others had practiced in a reduced private capacity, others were killed, and a few joined the Resistance. When after the war it emerged from its dispersed or subterranean existence, it was to a psychoanalytic world dominated by the diverse but hegemonic ideologies of American practice. However, it brought its past with it. A list of the chapter headings of Elizabeth Roudinesco’s History of Psychoanalysis in France gives us a flavor of this past: “Surrealism in the Service of Psychoanalysis”; “Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Psychology”; “Writers, Literati, Dream-Devourers”; “Jacques Lacan: A Novel of his Youth.” Such a history could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be transposed to the Anglo-Saxon scene. Already political and literary, French psychoanalysis in its more radical versions just left women out of the picture. Jacques Lacan, however, had written on the family and spent some weeks in postwar London, where, strangely, he was impressed by the social engagement of British psychoanalysis. During this period of his temporary appreciation of things English, Lacan’s contempt for American ego psychology intensified.

In Britain and the United States the fifties saw the war and postwar radical observations of infants and children institutionalized in a profoundly conservative and inflexible ideological form: the married (two parents), two-children (first a boy and then a girl) nuclear family. Backed by psychoanalytical work, the emphasis of sociological work was on a notional parity of different roles within the couple. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who had been involved in United Nations studies of maternal deprivation, turned to ethology to urge the need of mother and child for each other, with the mother offering day and night attention, as fixed forever in “nature.” These ideologies did not operate in France, but in France anxiety about a chronically low birth rate led to the emplacement of many provisions to encourage and assist maternity.

However, in all the countries and overwhelmingly in Britain the demands of the economy were in unacknowledged but sharp contradiction to the promulgation of the particular fifties nuclear family as idea and practice. Although economic expansion was a stop-go affair, the dips in so-called “full-employment” were mere dimples: the economy wanted workers—whether immigrants, “foreign workers,” or women.

A brief and reductive account of women’s position in three of the countries where feminism was to engage prominently with psychoanalysis would run thus: the war had demanded women’s work; a working woman is nevertheless disrupt...