Individualizing Gender and Sexuality

Theory and Practice

Nancy J. Chodorow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136719462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Nancy Chodorow, in her groundbreaking book The Reproduction of Mothering, quite simply changed the conversation in at least three areas of study: psychoanalysis, women's studies, and sociology. In her latest book, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, she examines the complexity and uniqueness of each person's personal creation of sexuality and gender and the ways that these interrelate with other aspects of psychic and cultural life. She brings her well-known theoretical agility, wide-ranging interdisciplinarity, and clinical experience to every chapter, advocating for the clinician's openness, curiosity, and theoretical pluralism. The book begins with reflections on Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, followed by considerations of Melanie Klein and Stephen Mitchell, as well as on her own work and on the postmodern turn in psychoanalytic gender theory. Subsequent chapters address contemporary clinical-cultural issues such as women and work, women and motherhood, and men and violence. Concluding chapters elaborate on the multiple ingredients and the personal affective, conflictual, and defensive constellations and processes that create sexuality and gender in each individual. Ending with a chapter on homosexualities as compromise formations, Chodorow deepens her account of clinical individuality and sex-gender transference-countertransference while bringing her readers back to Freud and to the many strands that followed, as she consolidates a consistent line of interest in sexuality and gender, theory and practice, sustained over a lifetime.

Chapter 1

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Psychoanalysis and women from margin to center

A retrospect

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For a volume of The Annual of Psychoanalysis on psychoanalysis and women, I was asked, along with several other contributors, to write an autobiographical essay on my own professional trajectory in relation to psychoanalysis and women. The chapter traces my writing from the beginning of second-wave feminism, in the late 1960s, through my analytic training and almost to the present, and it alludes to some personal biographical factors that may also have played a role in my intellectual development and the character of my thinking. I suggest that such multiple factors inform all psychoanalytic writings on sexuality and gender. ¹

I, as a woman, ask in amazement, and what about motherhood?

Karen Horney (1926)

But, in contradistinction to Freud, we are assuming that the castration complex in female children is a secondary formation and that its precursor is the negative oedipal situation.

Jeanne Lampl-de Groot (1927)

The reader may ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and “masquerade” … they are the same thing.

Joan Riviere (1929)

Psychoanalysts need (at least) two stories—external and historical, internal and psychological—to understand our field, its practitioners, its history, its theoretical and clinical developments. We find this confluence first in Freud, excluded from the professoriate and research because of Jewishness, whose personal psychology—especially his driving ambition and willingness to engage in and reveal his own self-analysis—combined with his work with patients, early collaboration with Breuer, and studies with Charcot and Bernheim, all these factors together enabling him to discover the methods and theories of psychoanalysis.

Among the classic 1920s and 1930s psychoanalytic contributors to the psychology of women, we find the same confluence. Deutsch, Horney, Bonaparte, Lampl-de Groot, Klein, and others, all these women spoke from within the field, from their unique individuality, and from their psychological response and position as insider-outsiders, at both center and margin: women practitioners in a field that was more welcoming than almost any other but that at the same time put at its core a masculine norm. We find Horney’s autobiographical exclamation, Lampl-de Groot’s tentative disagreement with Freud (buried, I note, midparagraph 10 pages into her paradigm-shifting article), Riviere’s ironic musings. So, too, my own intellectual trajectory is situated in history, in my personal psychology, and in my self-location, historically created and driven from within, at both margin and center.

IDENTITY AND ORIGINS, MARGIN AND CENTER

In the spring of 1969, I went to my first conference on “women’s liberation.” I was 25 and a budding social scientist about to switch from anthropology to sociology, with an (already greatly overdetermined) interest in child development and the relations of psyche and culture. I had made it my business intuitively to choose an undergraduate field—anthropology— in which there had been an unusual number of prominent women and in which I could actually work with women professors. Influenced by and influencing psychoanalysis in the 1930s, psychological anthropology, my own subspecialty, had even investigated the psychology of gender in culture (Margaret Mead, for example, in the 1920s and 1930s, and my own teachers, Beatrice and John Whiting, in the 1940s and 1950s). However, with few exceptions neither psychoanalysis nor anthropology had in recent years focused on or problematized women or gender.

For me, as for numbers of women of my generation, the women’s movement exhilarated and propelled us into awareness. When I entered a graduate program in sociology in the fall of 1969, I wrote what would become my first published essay, “Being and Doing: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Socialization of Males and Females” (1971). At the time, American feminists had begun to conceptualize and document sexism in political, economic, and familial institutions in terms of men’s behavior toward women. Sexism was external, and although the personal was political, this meant that feelings and primary relationships were caused by external forces, not that we needed to investigate their internal constitution and creation.

By contrast to this trend, “Being and Doing” located the origins of male dominance not externally but internally, in men’s dread of women and fear of their own internal femininity, and it suggested that men’s and women’s bisexual identifications were asymmetrical, the man’s more threatening. I contrast women’s more easily attained feminine identity, based on “being,” with men’s constantly challenged masculine identity, based on “doing,” and I describe a “self-perpetuating cycle of female deprecation” (Chodorow, 1971, p. 41) in which mothers transmit to daughters their own anxieties and conflicts about femininity. The chapter cites only one psychoanalyst, Karen Horney, and its title, “Being and Doing,” created in 1969, fortuitously anticipates terms found in Winnicott (1971), whom I had never heard of. I draw idiosyncratically upon a wide range of psychological anthropology, psychology research, and psychoanalytic sociology.

This first publication of mine inadvertently anticipates many of the themes found in subsequent psychoanalytic rethinkings of femininity, as well as constituting a protomodel of my own later work. My argument here, as in many later writings—the intuitively natural mode in which I think, but a mode that has been challenged by my more recent desire to write from within the clinical moment—begins with a single, self-evident, taken-for-granted but previously unnoticed or unstudied feature of the psychic or cultural world and elaborates the consequences of this fact from within.² In what would become characteristically Chodorovian fashion, I unabashedly invent theory, putting together observations from different studies and drawing upon evidence and (sometimes apparently contradictory) theories from a variety of fields.³

In “Being and Doing,” the self-evident observation is that male dominance seems to be universal. I ask: How can we account for this? In my next publications—“Family Structure and Feminine Personality” (1974, written in dialogue and dividing the territory of psyche, culture, and society with Sherry Ortner (1974) who wrote on culture and Shelly Rosaldo (1974) who wrote on society), “Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots” (1976), and The Reproduction of Mothering (1978)—I begin from the observation that women mother, a completely self-evident, taken-for-granted fact that at the same time had been hitherto almost theoretically and clinically unremarked (Stoller is the exception here). As is well known, following from this I develop claims that the mother-daughter relationship must be central to female psychology and that the fact that everyone’s primary caregiver is a woman must be important to children’s gender development and to the relations between the sexes, creating, as I called them, oedipal asymmetries and heterosexual knots. In “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation” (1992), I begin from further observations on heterosexuality, noting that it has been taken for granted as normative, not only culturally but within psychoanalysis, and that it has therefore not been studied. I ask: What if we treat heterosexuality as problematic, as we have done with homosexuality and the perversions?

In The Power of Feelings (1999b), I begin from clinical individuality— the obvious fact that each person who walks into the analyst’s consulting room is unique. In relation to psychoanalysis, I elaborate the claim that our universalistic developmental theories and theories about the content of unconscious fantasies of self and other, including those about gender and sexuality, do not take account of this clinical individuality. Also beginning from basic psychoanalytic principles—the demonstrated existence and effect of dynamically unconscious mental processes, thoughts, and feelings; the fact that meaning comes from within as much as from without—I argue against the taken-for-granted assumption, found in feminist poststructuralism, cultural studies, and social science, that people are shaped culturally and discursively rather than creating their own psyches from within.

Just as with the classical writings on female psychology, there is some implicit autobiographical input in my contributions. I do not think that without a personal analysis, a strong mother and maternal lineage, and early experiences of finding myself a cultural outsider,⁴ my writings would have the emotional and affective solidity and resonance that they possess. Yet, in spite of being of the feminist generation who believed that the personal was political and knowledge perspectival, and that the female scholarly “I” should replace the male objectivist view from nowhere, my writings, at least until well into the 1990s, do not begin from a female experiential voice. My voice seems characterized by clarity and confidence, even by a certain courage: “This is what I think, there is no other way I can think, all I can do is present it to you, as directly as possible.” When I first presented “Family Structure and Feminine Personality” to a group of feminist English faculty in the Boston area in 1972, I was accused of being too confident and “writing like a man”: How could I begin so directly, “I propose here a model … ” (Chodorow, 1974, p. 45)? I was shocked, in 1978, upon first encountering l’écriture feminine, to find that French feminists such as Irigaray and Cixous believed that traditional language and modes of argument were phallologocentric (Chodorow, 1979).

My voice echoes, perhaps, those no-nonsense, speak-your-mind, midwestern and western pioneer lineage women with whom I grew up, or my Jewish New Yorker mother and aunts, all of whom had been professionals—teachers, librarians, scientists, social workers, musicians—before marriage and some afterward, those women of that prefeminine mystique 1890–1920 birth cohort with higher education and professional participation than those who came before or after them. In my voice, there is also a paternal identification—hence, writing like a man. My father, an eminent professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford and a Silicon Valley pioneer, once told me (at least, this is my screen memory) that while he was not a great theoretical physicist, he had an especial capacity to see linkages and structure—connections among widely disparate scientific theories and discoveries, often heard of years apart—in ways that enabled him to conceptualize comprehensively, leaving nothing out, how these principles and discoveries might all be put together to work perfectly in a new instrument or process.

A traditional stance toward voice continues. In the present period, I find myself uncomfortable with and resistant toward the postmodern locutions and wordplay that became so prominent in academic feminism and the humanities more generally and that, in psychoanalysis, characterizes relational more than classical writing. Thus, although I have written (Chodorow, 1989b) that the great difference between women psychoanalysts of the second and third psychoanalytic generations and feminist psychoanalysts of my generation was that for us the theoretical was personal—that we evaluated psychoanalytic theories of femininity against our personal experience—it is not the case that I explicitly brought in my own personal experience, or shifted voice, in making my theoretical arguments. I begin from experience, from a freedom to challenge, and from a sense that knowledge is perspectival and derived from power, but I have found myself on the classical-modernist side (or somewhere in the middle; see Chapter 6⁵), in psychoanalysis, as in feminism, of a divide about evidence and language (a place perhaps more characteristic of analysts who were trained in the “mainstream” institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association).

These qualities of invention, starting from the unremarked and taken-for-granted, synthesizing disparate or surprising theories and observations in a not theoretically monolithic, interdisciplinary, almost structural template, and using traditional approaches and language that are theoretically steeped but quite straightforward, characterize many of my writings.⁶ Yet these same qualities, which also gave my work a relative independence—that is, I respond to trends that seem relevant to my thinking and am careful to cite relevant work, but I do not fit easily into a school, probably by conscious and unconscious intention—have meant that my work has always received attention somewhere, but often belatedly, and not necessarily from its intended audience. The Reproduction of Mothering was immediately recognized and lauded within the feminist humanities, ambivalently accorded admiration but also widely criticized in my then-exclusive field, sociology, and only noticed within psychoanalysis many years later. Articles that became classics, widely reprinted and cited, were originally rejected by leading psychoanalytic journals for being “not psychoanalysis” (for example, “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation”) or severely criticized by editorial readers for feminist journals for being intersubjective and reflexive rather than statistical (e.g., “Seventies Questions for Thirties Women,” 1989b).

I have not, it seems, wanted to be placed, and others have not wanted to place me. Even as I originated the idea that feminine personality is founded on relation and connection and named women’s self in relationship, I am not a self-in-relation theorist, and I have been criticized by those who are for not understanding the mother-daughter relationship (Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, & Surrey, 1991). Although I was one of the first American psychoanalysts to make British object relations theory central to her or his theorizing (in 1974, I cite Alice Balint, Fairbairn, & Guntrip; in 1978 also Michael Balint & Winnicott) and have been recognized as a founding American relational thinker (Mitchell & Aron, 1999), I do not consider myself a relational psychoanalyst.

When I was honored by CORST (the Committee on Research and Special Training that enables academics to be trained in the American Psychoanalytic Association), I titled my talk, “Why It Is Easy to Be a Psychoanalyst and a Feminist, But Not a Psychoanalyst and a Social Scientist,” and I joked that I had considered calling the talk “From Margin to Margin and Back Again.” There, I described the experience in 1979 of simultaneously receiving the Jessie Bernard Award for The Reproduction of Mothering from the American Sociological Association and being in a symposium on the book, later published in Signs (Lorber, Coser, Rossi, & Chodorow, 1981), in which Judith Lorber observed, “When I read The Reproduction of Mothering, I found to my disappointment that it is primarily an exegesis of psychoanalytic theory and therefore, in my eyes, a lesser contribution to the sociology of gender than Nancy Chodorow’s earlier, short pieces” (p. 482), and Alice Rossi said, “I was not prepared for so extended an exegesis of psychoanalytic theory past and present … what constitutes ‘evidence’ in Chodorow’s book [?] … does her central insight require the burden of so much psychoanalytic theory?” (p. 493). Only Rose Coser enthusiastically supported my use of psychoanalytic theory in the work.

At sociology meetings for years afterward, I would wander into session after session on gender, feminist theory, or mothering, only to hear someone saying, “We can take seriously five different understandings of sexual inequality (or women’s mothering), but Chodorow’s individualistic psychology is not one of them.” A former student, Michigan professor of sociology Karin Martin, remarked, when we were at the meetings of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, that of the faculty present, all the feminists were in the humanities, except me, and all the social scientists, except me, were men.

My sociology colleagues were right to be uneasy. Even as I have drawn upon many theories, my “field” has always been, basically, psychoanalysis. I have always been interested in the complexities of individuality and in studying people, and I think that the absence of serious attention to individuality as a field of study in its own right is a great lack in the academy. I have never studied groups, institutions, organizations, stratification, collective behavior, or any other typical sociological topic, and I do not do research. I came to feminism in the first place partly because it called for an understanding of the psyche.

Yet, even as sociological colleagues were excoriating my individualistic psychology, colleagues in the humanities—in literary criticism, philosophy, and political theory—were writing books and dissertations based on my work. My focus on the mother-daughter internal world and its sequelae opened new vistas for understanding women authors, women characters in women’s novels, and imagery, metaphor, and characteristics found in women’s writing. My characterization of the female psyche, in terms of relation and connection, and my noting the defensive denial of connection and dependency in men, served as a basis for thinking in moral philosophy and epistemology and for critiques of normal science, classical political theory, and so forth. For many practitioners of these literary and textual-theoretical academic feminisms (at least until the poststructural and L...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Psychoanalysis and women from margin to center: A retrospect
• Part I Theorists and theory 1905–2005
• Part II Gender and sexuality in consulting room and culture
• References
• Index