This essay was first delivered as a lecture to the Center for Modern Psychoanalysis in New York, December, 2008. It will be published in the Center’s journal Modern Psychoanalysis, Spring 2010. I first explore how women have been represented in psychoanalytic thought, then discuss the development of second- and third-wave feminism, considering how a plurality of women’s movements emerged, worldwide,which represent women quite differently. The essay concludes with some thoughts on how third-wave feminism’s representations of women might inform psychoanalysis.
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Over the past 40 years, let us say since 1968, there has been a profound change in the way psychoanalysts, in all schools, have imagined women: who they are, what lines of development are typical of them, what they want, how they live. There has been an effort to leave behind the construction of a representative woman, existing outside of any context, any environment in order to imagine “women” as a collective embracing all women in their diversity, in their diverse contexts. In psychoanalysis there has also been an effort to avoid under-standing women on the model of a representative generic man,existing outside of any context, any environment. That is, the idea that a woman is a not-man or a man manqué or a deficient,lacking man has been jettisoned. This change has meant that the representative man has begun to disappear, too, although this process is less advanced because thinking in terms of the generic man is still congruent with prevailing patriarchal cultural norms.
Psychoanalysts, like the general public, are still entranced by the question that troubled Freud: “What do women want?” But most realize at the same time that this question, which implies that someone should step forward with a single solution to the mystery, a single key to its locked door, is really designed to introduce a bold answer that will allay the generalized anxiety disorder of all contemporaries, male and female, who assume that the mystery of what women want is the mystery of why the sexes are so continually at war. Although it retains its allure, the question is now known by many to arise from the wish-laden domain of myth making.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF RECENT PSYCHOANALYTIC TRENDS
Before I go on to connect this profound change in psychoanalysis with changes in the larger world, I would first like to track the change historically for it is always illuminating to explore the specific forces and factors that have promoted a change (and inhibited it) and to keep in mind the specific ingredients of change that are still with us and those that were left aside,unexplored, as roads not taken. One of these roads not taken is,it seems to me, especially important for understanding the re-visionary road psychoanalysis did take—and the roads it might take.
Even after Freud’s 1931 essay “Female Psychology,” in which he admitted there were many things he did not know about female psychology and that others—the poets perhaps—might know or would come to know, Freudians quite normally wrote books with “female psychology” in their titles. (Not so many were entitled “male psychology” since that was assumed to be much better mapped territory.) The important collection of papers called Female Psychology: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Views (1977 )continued the tradition. But in that collection, as in other books of that time, readers could see that the edifice surrounding the answer to Freud’s question was collapsing. (Not Freud’s own answer, which he had declared inadequate, but the edifice created out of the Freud-inspired speculating and weaving together of psychoanalytic ideas, from the late 1920s reactions to Freud’s views up until the early 1970s.) Even though there was still an assumed representative female in this collection of psychoanalytic views, no women of non-heterosexual sexual preference were discussed, no women with histories of trauma, none with minority status based on race or class, or, for that matter, none with any kind of power, this representative female was not considered in the Freudian manner as not-male. Further, the beginnings of a kind of pluralization were apparent in the questions raised about what constituted normal female development and about whether the concept of normality that had been deployed in Freudian psychoanalysis was inhibiting.
Within a decade, by the 1980s, the traditional psychoanalytic focus on the intrapsychic life and development of “woman” had been completely abandoned by many within psychoanalysis and certainly from every disciplinary direction outside of psycho-analysis where feminists were trying to appreciate the diversity of women’s lives and the multiplicity of types of factors influencing them. Not only had the Freudian “female” and Freudian notions of normal female development almost vanished, but methodological questions about how to consider intrapsychic experience in relation to other people (and their psyches), to environments, to relationships, and to observers were every-where in evidence, a thousand forms of them blooming. Child psychoanalysis was dominated by various kinds of efforts to illuminate “the interpersonal world of the infant,” a phrase that still echoed the old habit of abstraction—the “infant,” not “infants”—but actually referenced work that was more contextual and relational.
In many ways, the situation was comparable to the one that Freud had faced in the years when he developed psychoanalysis. He had started off with an utterly traditional nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric notion that each disease has a cause, a pathogen, so he had looked for the single cause of hysteria and found it in “precocious sexual experience” (as he announced in the 1896 paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria”).The same cause lay behind obsessional neurosis, he then announced, which allowed him to think that both neuroses share a single cause, so a general causal theory of neurosis was in view. Because Freud also held to the traditional idea that once a pathogen is isolated, the disease can be cured by eliminating the pathogen (and perhaps its carrier), he went after the “precocious sexual experience” in his patients. His technique was to get the patient to talk about her precious sexual experience and its perpetrator and then, didactically, to explain to the patient that this experience was the cause of subsequent distress. He applied psychoanalytic theory to the wound and awaited an abreaction or a catharsis. When it became apparent to him that neither his assumption of a single cause nor his assumption of a single modality of cure was right, Freud was left confronting a great diversity of phenomena that his over-general assumptions had obscured.
He did not immediately give up the idea of a single cause; he just turned to an alternative one, the Oedipus complex. In “The Interpretation of Dreams” Freud (1900) tried to show that the Oedipus complex and its childhood wishes lie at the bottom of every dream, no matter how diverse the disguising dreamwork and the manifest content of the dream may be. The same, he argued, is true of hysteria with all its multitude of symptoms and conversion symptoms (and one might add from a contemporary perspective, its historical and cultural specificity of manifestation). Similarly, he turned to a new treatment modality. Instead of applying psychoanalytic theory, he waited until the Oedipus complex began to play out—like a current onset of fever—in what he called “the transference,” and then he analyzed it there, interpreting (not explaining) the transference, bit by bit,image by image, as he had learned to interpret dreams. Freud had had the insight (which he had struggled toward in the Dora case) that each person’s particular way of repeating—indeed,compulsively repeating—her oedipal scenario, or disguising it in dreams, demands a particular interpretative treatment. By the time he focused his attention on narcissism and studied the war neuroses during the First World War, eventually discover-ing a narcissistic neurosis to make a trio of neuroses, Freud was thinking in terms of a plurality of unconscious oedipal-scenario types: hysterical, obsessional, and narcissistic. These he came to call character types, thereby connecting his work with a long Greco-Roman tradition of character study—the very tradition that the poets who might understand female psychology had inherited. Freud (1916) celebrated this new direction in his work with a series of brilliant essays on “Some Character-Types Commonly Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work” and later in his reflections on the three basic unconsciously determined but environmentally shaped character types in “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930) and ”Libidinal Types” (1931). Despite the continued pull of his hopes for a single cause and single treatment mode, Freud said that each kind of neurosis is “over-determined,” that is, it is fed by many springs, and every treatment must steer clear of the kind of single-story suggestibility typical of hypnosis and typical of his own early cathartic and didactic methods. There may be character types, but each per-son’s character is a particular story constructed, as it were, into her or into him as a lived personality.
When psychoanalysts in America and Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s managed to free themselves to a great degree of the image of “female psychology” and began to confront the diversity of women’s experiences, they did not, however, return to take up the unfinished, indeed, still quite unexplored, new direction that Freud had indicated: the direction of plural oedipal stories and characterology. This new direction could have led to consideration of multiple female psychologies and to the conclusion that there is not one universal Oedipus complex with three characterological variants, but a plurality of oedipal variants—just as the anthropologist Malinowski had argued in the 1920s against the rigid, obsessional, and narcissistic opposition of Ernest Jones, a Freudian more Freudian than Freud. Instead,the meeting of feminism and psychoanalysis in the late 1970s focused on the project of freeing women from being thought of psychoanalytically as failed men; it emphasized sexual difference and developmental lines specific to women. It also, generally, focused on the importance of the mother (rather than just the father) in preoedipal and oedipal development of infants and children and on the “reproduction of mothering” (Nancy Chodorow’s phrase) in girls.
It seems to me that if the characterological road had been taken decisively, we would have today a psychoanalysis much more richly concerned with the fate of the ego instincts for relation-ship seeking and ego preservation and ego-ideal formation in various familial and cultural contexts. The traditional Freudian emphasis on sexuality and aggression would have given way to an emphasis on innate sociability and the ego instinctual drive for relatedness. Instead, drive theory—and especially the ego instincts that disappeared into the life instincts and were contrasted to a truly mythic death instinct in 1920—was pushed aside, criticized as insufficiently attentive to object relations as it was in the British object relations tradition and in the feminist appropriation of that tradition. The ego instincts, which are about finding and clinging to objects to satisfy hunger and need for care, protection, and love, disappeared and were not heard of again.
Further, if the characterological road had been taken, I think we would be talking about preoedipal mothering and about the Oedipus complex in various forms as parts of what might be called a “family complex.” The Oedipus complex would have come to be understood as a part of the family complex that had been taken or mistaken for the whole, synecdochically, and there would be more attention not just to mothering per se, which is universal, but to its many variants. We would be exploring and cataloging how children internalize from infancy onward family and extended family (cultural) relationships of many sorts, not just the parental ones, and how the whole cluster of any child’s internalized vertical (adult-child) and lateral(child-child) relationships, developing from infancy forward,becomes the nucleus of that child’s character. The clusteral types are plural for both women and men, but different for men than for women, first and foremost for the reason that the 1970s feminists had emphasized: namely, girls retain their primary relation to their mother as an identification, while most,although not all, boys struggle for dis identification with the mother. Women are also differently related to and identified with other women and men and girls and boys in their nuclear and extended families because they grow up in patriarchy, that is, they grow up “the second sex,” dominated, not well educated, constricted in many ways, not accustomed to agency but only to obedience or accommodation or self-sacrifice.
There are many theoretical reasons why this pluralistic characterological road was not taken (or retaken) in the 1970s although some parts of it were, of course, investigated. But the most influential reason, I think, was contextual: psychoanalysts of that period found themselves in the middle of an extraordinary social phenomenon that nearly destroyed psychoanalysis. In that moment of extreme crisis, no one was in the mood to follow a path Freud had pointed to, but that had been little explored by him or by his immediate followers. And, perhaps just as importantly, that crisis left psychoanalysis largely isolated from feminist work that took place outside of psychoanalysis during and after the crisis—a point that I will return to. The seeds for this crisis were sown by the scientific discovery in the 1960s of physical child abuse (the battered child syndrome), which ushered in a period of discovery of childhood sexual abuse in the late 1970s and early 1980s in America and in Europe. The charge was made that this discovery had been slowed or even blocked because Freud had turned away from his discovery of childhood sexual abuse (“precocious sexual experience”) and set psychoanalysis on the wrong road of too much emphasis on the Oedipus complex and oedipal fantasies of sexual seduction. Psychoanalysis was charged with being the great obstacle to the discovery of childhood sexual abuse. The most polemical anti-psychoanalytic book of the period, Masson’s (1984) The Assault on Truth, actually went further and accused Freud and then all Freudians of duplicitously covering up child sexual abuse in their theories and practices. European and American feminists in great numbers believed this accusation and castigated Freudian psychoanalysis for denying, particularly, father-daughter incest, which child protection services and the emergent international field called “Child Abuse and Neglect” (CAN) were then documenting.
Almost all of institutional psychoanalysis, after some intense resistance to acknowledging the crisis that had arisen, became involved in a collective hand-wringing over Freud’s abandonment of the idea that precocious sexual experience was the sole cause of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. The idea that psychoanalysis had taken a fundamentally wrong turn was hardly a spur for reconsidering any features of psychoanalysis’s history other than the unhelpful binary that was then set up in a weak effort at re-form: attention to intrapsychic life vs. attention to trauma. No sooner had the reformist idea that psychoanalysis had neglected the study of not just sexual abuse, but trauma in general—including the contemporary traumas related to the Vietnam War that psychiatrists studied and added, in 1980,to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) under the title “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder”—been established than psychoanalysis was attacked from another angle by a motley coalition of critics with quite a different agenda. Their agenda can be summarized under the title of Faludi’s (1991) best-selling book of the period: Backlash:The Undeclared War against American Women.
In the decade of the 1970s, during which childhood sexual abuse (along with all kinds of violence against women) figured intensely in the American and European public consciousness,psychoanalysis seemed retrograde and obstructionist to all feminists concerned with exposing sexist abuse. To many feminists,the project of a rapprochment between feminism and psycho-analysis in order to revise the Freudian theory of “female psychology” seemed a waste of time since to them it was part of an obsolete, misogynistic science. In the 1980s, as America took a radical political turn toward conservativism and a backlash developed against the feminist emphasis on violence toward women and against the discovery of childhood sexual abuse, psychoanalysis was also labeled part of the problem by conservatives who wanted to attack feminism itself. So psychoanalysis was a target for both feminists and conservatives—a war on two fronts.
The forces of backlash had three major weapons. They said that many accusations of child sexual abuse were false and based on manipulation of children’s memories and fantasies by lawyers and therapists; and they even invented a disease, false memory syndrome. Second, they said that many therapists, particularly those specializing in recovered memories, were using Freudian theory to induce their patients to “recover” from repressed abuses that had never happened. Third, they said that the discoverers of sexual abuse were emphasizing abuse in the family and by fathers when the real problem was in community settings like preschools and involved vast conspiracies of pedophiles, including ritual and satanic ritual abusers. Freudian psychoanalysis got implicated in all these charges because it was the theory of childhood fantasy, of repressed memory, and of nuclear family pathology. Ironically, it was tarred by conservatives with the same brush that was used to tar the feminists who had been so critical of Freudianism in the 1970s: Freud and the feminists were anti-traditonalist, anti-moral, and anti-family. Sexual revolution and social degeneracy were the enemies in this socially conservative and religiously fundamentalist backlash.
The backlash in its most extreme form, which had taken the form of moral panic or mass hysteria about predatory pedophiles and satanic ritual abuse, had died down by the mid-1990s, and so-called RMT (Recovered Memory Therapy) was on its way to being definitively discredited, which meant, fortunately, that it was decoupled from its alleged source in Freudian theory. But during this two-decade-long period of the discovery of childhood sexual abuse and then the backlash against that discovery, from approximately 1980 to 2000, the entire theoretical effort from within psychoanalysis to reconsider women—prompted by the earlier fruitful alliance of psychoanalysis and feminist criticism—was under the shadow of the charges and countercharges that came to be known as the “Freud Wars.” Nonetheless, the progress that had been made in reconsidering female psychologies, noted earlier, did not disappear, and sev-eral features of it became consolidated conceptually. First, the helpful concept “gender” was assimilated into psychoanalysis from various feminist sources and was used to elaborate more fully than had Freud’s term “mental sexual characteristics” all the factors influencing women’s (and men’s) development that were not biological sexual factors, i.e., not chromosomal sex,hormonal sex, or anatomy and not sexual instinctual drives intheir biological aspect. This gender concept aided psychoanalysts in saying there are different ways to become gendered, to come into a particular gender identity. Unfortunately, however,many analysts held on to the idea that there are only two genders: masculine and feminine.
Second, the concept homophobia was articulated at the same time that the American Psychiatric Association depathologized homosexuality, and this move aided psychoanalysts in saying sex and gender development results in different types of sexual object preference—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and fluctuating—each of which is “normal development” (if that concept is used meaningfully, that is to say, if normal development leads to ability to sustain a non-perverse, mature relation-ship with another whole person). It became less customary to take object preference as the essential element of a person’s self and sense of self (the part of identity determining the whole of identity). Third, along with attachment theory, the new field of trauma studies and neuroscientific research on the nature of human memory had given psychoanalysts tools to continue the process of exploring how intrapsychic fantasies and structuration relate to external events. Dissociative states and various kinds of fragmentations of identity became central to psychoanalytic theory and therapy and were applied to the study of women.
Fourth, evolutionary theorists, zoologists, and anthropologists,influenced by changing sexual and social mores, looked out upon the animal kingdom, and especially at the animals evolutionarily closest to human—the chimpanzees and the bonobos—and observed that among these near-kin sexual behavior serves two different and not very compatible purposes in evolutionary terms. It serves reproduction, and for reproduction heterosexual intercourse is required. But it also serves group and subgroup formation and group maintenance, which look very different in the two primate groups because they live under different environmental conditions. All-male subgroups are bonded by the members’ homoerotic behaviors, as are all-female subgroups; intergenerational subgroups bond with diverse practices, from grooming to masturbation. Members of a group may find that their erotic attention is divided between their subgroup or groups and the heterosexual male-female reproductive dyad. These observations led evolutionists to understand that among humans, too, the sexual drive ending in re-production co-exists with other drives or other interests that are just as normal and essential for life and survival. Among these other drives and interests are the ego instincts that I mentioned before, i.e., the sociability and self-preservative instincts.
In the last decade, as the wars and backlashes over feminism and discovery of sexual abuse subsided, psychoanalysts of all schools faced a need for further synthesis of developments in psychoanalysis—many of which took place in the shadows during the Freud Wars decades—and specifically for synthesis of developments in the domain of female psychologies. Although this need is being faced, I think it is also important to consider what is happening now in a wider context—in the wider world—that has not yet, although I think eventually it might, influenced the current synthesizing effort. While psychoanalysts and others in America and Europe concerned with female psychologies were caught up in the huge upheaval that was the discovery of child sexual abuse in America and Europe, a truly monumental shift took place globally. I wonder whether we, as psychoanalysts, can read that shift for its implications about women’s developments. What does it tell us about the domain that we are learning to consider, i.e., the interface of unconscious factors and environmental ones.
A CHANGING WORLD OF WOMEN
Historians agree that there have been two major waves of feminism: the one that arose in the late nineteenth century and crested with the achievement of women’s suffrage, starting in New Zealand in 1912 and continuing to the United States in 1919, and the one that arose after the Second World War and reached a decade-long crest between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, before the backlash that I described above. The two periods of rethinking the psychology of women in psychoanalysis coincide with these two waves: the first was in psychoanalysis and was led by women psychoanalysts like Karen Horney; the second was between psychoanalysis and second-wave feminism. In the wider world, there is now a third wave of feminism grow-ing up almost everywhere in the world, and not led by women in North America and Europe. Before asking what it might mean to psychoanalysis, I will describe it through quick sketches, using highly visible events and developments.
The development of third-wave feminism can be charted most simply by looking at the agendas and achievements of the four UN-sponsored World Conferences on Women—the first in Mexico City in 1975, where the UN Decade for Women commenced,the second in Copenhagen in 1980, the third in Nairobi in 1985,and the fourth in Beijing in 1995. A fifth conference has finally been scheduled for 2010 in Sofia, Bulgaria after a difficult backlash period of 15 years. But during the backlash hiatus, the third wave of feminism has continued to gather force, as it has continued to reflect the vision necessary for its emergence—a vision that had begun to be articulated in the Platform for Ac-tion that came out of the 1995 Beijing conference. Section 13 of that platform anticipates my description of that vision: “Women’s empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power, are fundamental for the achievement of equality, development and peace.” This statement documents that the women meeting in Beijing assumed that achieving “equality, development and peace” for all humankind, for the species, is now, primarily, women’s work, and women, primarily, will bring it about. The message was that in an unequal, unevenly developed, and unpeaceful world no woman would be well advised to wait for the protective call “women and children first!” to come from the patriarchy;women and children must be put first by women, for the sake of all. To use evolutionary terms, women are the subgroup needed for survival.
At Beijing and since then the world has become densely populated with women’s groups of all sorts, from the informa to the formally administrated, UN-registered NGOs (non-governmental organizations). (Half of the women-related NGO’s now registered at the UN did not exist in 1995.) Groups,circles, solidarities are known to be the momentum, the drive,of the third wave. There is no fear that the organizations will conflict or overlap or fall into a hierarchical arrangement: the more groups the better, the vision says, as the number is head-ing toward an envisioned tipping point when how women are in groups will be how people are on the planet, when a momentum will become a species change, a new habituation. The theory of change that subtends third-wave feminism is a theory of tipping points reached as the number of women involved in groups and in change increases exponentially. Third-wave feminism is not concerned with women’s liberation as a revolutionary project; it is concerned with women’s organization or mobilization as an evolutionary project, a change in the species.
All over the world there are action groups like the original suffragette groups; there are consciousness-raising groups like the ones that drove the second-wave women’s liberation movement;there are even conversational salons like the protofeminist Enlightenment salons. But there are also groups of every other conceivable kind: groups for rural women, for urban professionals,for students, for women subject to particular oppressions (like lesbians) or particular exploitations (like sex workers). There are groups of young women, middle-aged women, older women;groups for economic development, for saving the environment,for women’s and children’s rights and legal redress, for political action. There are groups like UNIFEM dedicated to networking and non-hierarchical linking of other groups. Feminist publishing houses and newspapers now exist the world over, as do all kinds of means and media for meeting and exchanging stories and information and projects. A women’s rights movement has grown into a leading agenda-setting part of the larger human rights movement, and the force behind a less well-articulated children’s rights movement. Tremendous progress has been made in organizing and in achieving declared goals for women and more generally for humankind and the earth and peace on earth.
While this monumental organizing action has been going on,more women than men have been entering the workforce in every region of the world except Africa, and in the workforce they form women’s workforce groups. The gap between boys and girls who are being educated has narrowed, and women’s illiteracy rates have shrunk in every part of the world, making women more able to organize groups. The average life expec-tancy of women has increased in developing countries (a sign of improvement in women’s health), as the child mortality rate has decreased; and 50 percent of the world’s women have access to modern contraception. This progress owes much to the decision of the World Health Organization to prioritize women’s health, prenatal care, and children’s health. More women a reentering into politics, particularly at local levels, and in 25 of the world’s nations women make up more than 25 percent of those in national government. Rwanda has become the first state in which women constitute more than 50 percent of it selected representatives. Legislative changes in all regions offer more protection for women’s rights, and in many regions liberalization of marriage laws has become an established trend. Inmost of the countries of the Northern Hemisphere, if not yet the Southern, women are marrying at later ages, or not at all, after attaining an education.1
But the counterforce to these signs of progress is all too obvious;you can see it in the way third-wave women have experienced both success and defeat at the UN. For example, on November 21, 2007, the UN General Assembly’s draft resolution on the right to food was passed with only one negative vote, from the United States. The resolution protests that each year more than six million children die before reaching the age of five from hunger-related illness and that women and girls are disproportionately affected by hunger, food insecurity, and poverty. Girls are twice as likely as boys to die from malnutrition and prevent-able childhood diseases, and it is estimated that almost twice as many women as men suffer from malnutrition. In these statistics the gender discrimination and inequality that are central to all the world’s grave problems stand out clearly—and the world-wide backlash aggravates them. But the resolution itself is testimony to the successful policy strategy of third-wave feminism,i.e., a strategy of “gender mainstreaming” that makes clear the role of gender in every grave problem and builds attention to gender into every proposed solution.
During the period since the 1995 Beijing conference, while third-wave feminism was gathering force and while, at the same time, a formidable backlash from threatened patriarchal institutions was resisting it, the gender mainstreaming strategy grew more and more powerful. Its strength came in part from the fact that the opposition of “the patriarchy” had become so obvious and was so obviously given its rationale by the fundamen-talisms that developed within all the world’s major religions. These fundamentalisms focused on constraining women and indoctrinating and punishing children. The backlash dictated that the plight of women and children not be highlighted, not be prioritized; on the contrary, women and children were to be even more forcefully kept in their place, within what analysts would call “the oedipal family.” To confront the backlash,particularly in its religious ideological forms with all their regressive consequences, third-wave feminists have had to continuously rethink their own images of women and children. This meant, ultimately, rethinking their notions of women’s agency,emphasizing how women’s agency is in and through relations with other women. The idea that the way to address sexism and the centuries-long ignoring of women’s rights was to reform patriarchal institutions and hope for male protection abruptly receded. A new emphasis on women’s groups and institutions and women as institution-builders came to the fore. In psycho-logical terms, the idea that only women who are male-identified can be active, can be agents, was understood to be a masculine idea, a way of keeping women in their place, a way of criticizing women’s initiatives.
It is important to note that this was not a move in the direction of separatism, a strategy that had been advocated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in America and Europe, when radical feminists had argued that, because women would always be second-class citizens in patriarchal institutions, they should withdraw and build their own institutions—from political parties to health clinics to banks. Separatism was never a strategy that could be useful outside of certain specific social strata in America and Europe, and the third-wave strategy that came to the fore in the late 1980s and was articulated in 1995 in Beijing was carefully distinguished from it. No visions of all-women utopias were offered. Facing the worldwide backlash against women, the majority of the internationally networked feminists shifted to considering how women could exercise their agency and build multitudes of institutions that were both sustainable by women and relatively impervious to backlash. The institutions envisioned were not separate from patriarchal, male-dominated institutions; they were connected to them, but on the condition that they not be under their authority or susceptible to being inhibited by them or being dependent upon them. They were set up to be able to grow into leadership organizations on the theory that progressive change builds upon and depends upon change in women’s status and power. In every way, it was grasped that images of women as dependent had been the essence of female vulnerability within all kinds of institutions, starting with families. Agency through relations with other women and sustainability became key concepts. And in the domain of child rearing or preparation of the next generation, development from healthy dependency to agency through relations with other women and sustainability became the ideal, especially for girls.
As I noted before, this shift is evident in the statements issuing from the World Women’s Conference in 1995 and in the planning for the 2010 conference. But I think that it also shows up clearly—boldly—in the statements of the women who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize since 1990—an almost two-decade period in which the prize has been awarded to five women when only six had won it during the prize’s entire previous existence. I will also add to the list a man, Muhammad Yunus, who won in 2006, along with his mostly female colleagues in the Grameen Bank. Yunus worked with the same third-wave feminist assumptions that the women who have won the prize share.
Yunus’s work dates from before the backlash of the 1980s and resulted in an institution, the Grameen Bank, that was impervious to the backlash. A Bangladeshi economist who earned his doctorate in America, Yunus returned to his country after its liberation war in 1971 and became involved in the national poverty reduction program after the 1974 famine. While he was teaching in Chittagong University, he discovered that the women of a nearby town, Jobra, who made bamboo furniture,were inhibited in the amount of bamboo they could purchase by having to pay for it with high-interest loans. Yunus experimented with making the women small loans at low interest and discovered that they could, with this capitalization, quickly expand their businesses and pull themselves and their families out of poverty. He went on to institute the microcredit business plan by creating the Grameen Bank (the Village Bank), and by 2008 the bank was serving almost ten million small borrowers in Bangladesh. It also sponsored a system of solidarity groups in which the members support each other to secure the loans and make sure that all members are able to pay them back. That is, the women form a group that shares the borrowing risk. The Grameen Bank itself has diversified into units supporting all kinds of ventures, and the model of microfinancing has spread all around the world, including to the United States.
Since its inception, 94 percent of the Grameen Bank’s loans have gone to women because Yunus believed that women, who suffer disproportionately from poverty, are more likely than men to use their earnings to support their families and raise and educate their children as well as possible. 2 He realized that in poor women’s lives the female solidarity groups were key to the borrowers’ sense of belonging and their efforts for a better future. They did not expect support from their husbands, and they certainly did not get it from the Muslim clergy who had, in the 1980s, told women who borrowed from the Grameen Bank that they would be denied a Muslim burial.
Wangari Maathai, who, like Yunus, was born in 1940 and educated in the U.S., founded the Green Belt Movement in her native Kenya in 1977 and came to be known as “The Tree Mother of Africa.” In her environmental work, which eventually brought her to found the Mazingira Green Party in Kenya and to work internationally to unite green parties and Young Greens groups, Wangari Maathai always stressed that women were the primary keepers of the environment. The green belt movement employed women as tree planters and farmers, providing many a route out of poverty, and then trained them for political environmental work, turning the cause of environmental activism into a much more general support of women working and taking initiative. Maathai herself paid a direct price for tal activism into a much more general support of women working and taking initiative. Maathai herself paid a direct price for her vision when her husband divorced her, arguing successfully in a Kenyan court that he deserved the divorce because his wife was too difficult to control, too strong. When she protested the judge’s concurrence with this complaint, she ended up jailed for contempt. But the movement she inspired and led continued, and she has recently held environmental portfolios in the national government.
To cite one more example: Shirin Ebadi, who in 2003 was the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, was directly affected by the fundamentalist backlash when she, the first woman to preside over a legislative court in Iran, was demoted to a secretarial position after the 1979 fundamentalist takeover. Unable to practice as a lawyer, she turned her attention to writing about issues that could strengthen the legal status of women and children and to leading campaigns that directly contributed to the large female vote in 1997 that spearheaded the election of the reformer Mohammed Khatami. During the years that followed, she defended people attacked by conservatives within the still theocratic government, and she established two NGO’s, The Society for Protecting the Rights of the Child that sponsored legislation against physical abuse of children and the Defenders of Human Rights Center. Both organizations have trained women activists and established links with inter-national organizations that sustain them with funds and protection against attacks from the regime, a strategy that, Ebadi hopes, will make it possible for dissidents to stay in Iran and notjoin the Iranians in exile. In her autobiography Iran Awakening,Ebadi (2006) summarizes her approach to legal and political activism:
In the last 23 years, from the day I was stripped of my judgeship to the years of doing battle in the revolutionary courts of Tehran,I had repeated one refrain: an interpretation of Islam that is inharmony with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith. It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who wish them cloistered. That belief, along with at change in Iran must come peacefully and from within, has underpinned my work. (p. 204)
It is in the spirit of third-wave feminism that the recent female Nobel laureates have themselves formed a group, the Nobel Women’s Initiative, and that among the activities that they sponsor and participate in is the “Global Call To Action” made by PeaceJam, a group that is working on one of the most wide-reaching—indeed, global—visions of a youth movement ever put forward. PeaceJam organizes working relations between the Nobel laureates and young people from all over the world aimed at initiating “one billion acts of peace,” i.e., aimed at reaching a tipping point into peace.
THIRD-WAVE FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Within the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA),although its membership includes many analysts who would identify themselves as feminists, there is no, or very little, inter-action with third-wave feminism. And the key strategic elements of third-wave feminism—the emphasis on women’s institutions and women as institution-builders and the emphasis on proliferating and networking women’s groups of all sorts and sizes as the momentum of change—are not part of the IPA’s own institutions. (Nancy Chodorow has made a historical and sociological study of this fact, which is not countermanded by the existence in the IPA of a committee on women and psychoanalysis, COWAP.) Similarly, the third-wave women’s experiences are not part of the theorizing about women that appears in its journal or in the regional journals like that of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Third-wave feminism has not had anything like the influence that second-wave feminism had upon psychoanalysis. Neither psychoanalysis as a cluster of institutions nor as a theory, not even as a revised and pluralized theory of female developmental types, has been affected by third-wave feminism.
Interestingly, and not surprisingly, the same could not be said of Jungian psychoanalysis (or analytic psychology), which has its basis in Jung’s celebratory ideas about the feminine principle,i.e., which begins from ideas about how women and men differ(although, of course, the feminine principle can be manifest in both sexes). In the Jungian camp, a very active group, or cluster of groups, going under the name Millionth Circle has formed. It is led, or perhaps inspired, by Jean Shinoda Bolen, a medical doctor in San Francisco and a best-selling author, whose first use of Jungian archetypes to talk about women was published in 1984: Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives. This book used seven goddesses of ancient Greek religion to represent different female types:
These powerful patterns—or archetypes—are responsible for major differences among women. For example, some women need monogamy, marriage or children to feel fulfilled. . . . Such women differ markedly from another type of woman who values her independence as she focuses on achieving goals that are important to her, or from still another type who seeks emotional intensity and new experiences and consequently moves from one relationship or one creative effort to the next. Yet another type of woman seeks solitude. (p. 1)
Jungian psychoanalysis is, basically, a characterology. It traveled on the Freudian characterological road not taken, and so it was well suited to meet the needs of third-wave feminism and to learn from third-wave feminism, particularly about the power potentialities in each character type. Jungian feminism is about agency, and Jungian feminist therapists share Bolen’s (1984) be-lief that, as she has said, “Women seek the help of a therapist in order to learn how to be better protagonists or heroines in their own stories” (p. ). To use historiographical terms, this therapy is about learning what story (in part told to you by others) you tell yourself and about learning to tell it differently, turning too other women as your hearers and helpers so that at a certain tipping point you become different.
But psychoanalysis does not have to reach for mystical notions of the feminine principle and of inborn archetypes to connect with third-wave feminism or to understand in psychodynamic terms the powerfulness of its theory and practice and what that theory and practice have to teach about how women can be powerful—or how they can be powerful in ways other than those in which the patriarchal narratives, including the original Freudian one, have imagined them to be. In recent years,Freudian-trained psychoanalysts have made a start by turning to the topic of what inhibits women from power or from be-ing powerful. For example, COWAP was one of the sponsors of a February 2000 international conference at Emory University entitled “Women and Power—Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women in Relationships, Groups, and Hierarchies.” The presentations were very illuminating about internal factors—I would call them ingredients or traits of character—inhibiting women. They touched on the following list of factors offered by Chodorow (2002): oedipal guilt; anxiety about separation, loss,or castration; being “wrecked by success” or by spoiling and self-spoiling powers of envy; grandiose narcissistic fantasies that lead to fears of humiliation; conflict about aggression; self-punitive superegos; survivor guilt; and “many other unconscious and conscious fantasies, all of these put together differently by different individuals” (p. 18). But the question, where do powerful women get their power? was hard to ask in this context of concern with inhibitions developed in and fostered by sexist societies. Within third-wave feminist groups, the answer to the question is simple: from other women who, as is so clear in the Grameen Bank example, share the risk of investing in a better future, and a better story for women and children.
CONCLUSION
In closing, I want to offer a way to translate this simple, powerful “sisterhood is powerful” declaration into psychoanalytic terms. What is it that women can give each other in groups? The experience of power, which can be simply defined in terms that are both psychoanalytic and political as acting together with equals. If a women’s group is non-hierarchical and non-prescriptive, truly a group of equals, it operates like a therapeutic situation, that is, it is aimed toward constantly revising the story (with many variants) of necessary submission and accommodation and self-sacrifice that women everywhere learn to tell themselves. The revision process requires safety and trust to promote openness and revelation of self, revelation of who you are. As a forum, the group operates as an expression of shared experience or healthy narcissistic transference. It allows all its members the experience of being understood, of experiencing from other members the sense that: “I have also been through something similar though not the same as what you are talking about.” The group can build on experiences of similarity and communality, not upon difference since the differences among women are differences of character type, not of sexually based mastery or rulership rooted in child-parent psychodynamics. Ruling over is the opposite of acting together.
A women’s group can aim toward action that reflects the biologically given female capacity for reproduction, which is family-group generation capacity and more generally a capacity for nurturance and generativity. The group aims to establish this capacity in the world outside of the home, augmenting the family circle by connecting it to other circles as its members act together. Power makes power. This is why third-wave theorizing places such stress on increasing participation and on tipping points of power. Men can have the experience of acting together as equals, but they cannot by virtue of their biology have the further experience of gestating future generations, future circles, of that acting-together experience. Thus their groups are always degenerating into groups of rulers and ruled, fathers and sons beset by succession crises or questions about how the group will be sustainable as the king grows old. The women’s group is inherently future-oriented, that is, it is for the women in it and for their children and grandchildren and the children they take responsibility for. They are not tied to the past or, as men are, to the status quo of patriarchal privilege because their experience of the past is that it enchains them, and they know that ultimately they have noth-ing to lose but their chains. This orientation to the future and to sustainability means that the group is not distracted from power augmentation and extension by a resort to violence or by the il-lusion, typically masculine, that using violence brings power. As Gandhi understood, women’s groups are inherently non-violent, and it is this that gives them the possibility of containing and channeling women’s aggression rather than turning violent or self-destructive.3 The model or group-ideal (like a collective ego-ideal) of a women’s power group is a female sibling group in which everyone grows up to be equal in opportunity and reward. It is not dominated by either fathers or mothers, in reality or internally, who view themselves as rulers or critics or dispensers of rewards. The mothers invoked in third-wave feminist visions,the ancestral mothers, are idealized mothers, wished-for mothers: generative toward the group members as the group members wish to be toward each other and their children. Not all women’s groups, of course, live up to the possibilities that I have described—but they do have these possibilities!
Notes
1 This paragraph is based on the compact world survey in The No-Nonsense Guide to Women’s Rights (van der Gaag, 2004).
2 At about the same time that Yunus set up the Grameen Bank, Allan Rosenfeld, then head of the World Health Organization, shifted the worldwide strategy of that organization toward prioritizing women’s health, prenatal
care, and early childhood interventions on the theory that a child who gets off to a healthy start in life has much better chance of growing up healthy and able to sustain development and that healthy women would be the best promoters of this understanding.
3 Gandhi said, “If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman.” See Usha Thakkar’s (2002) essay, “Breaking the Shackles: Gandhi’s Views on Women.”
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