Mothering and Psychoanalysis: Clinical, Sociological and Feminist Perspectives

Perspectives

Mothering and Psychoanalysis: Clinical, Sociological and Feminist Perspectives

Copyright 2014 Demeter Press

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1. Motherhood–Psychological aspects. 2. Motherhood–Social aspects. 3. Psychoanalysis–Social aspects. 4. Psychoanalysis and feminism. 5. Women psychotherapists. I. Bueskens, Petra, 1972-, editor

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Table of Contents

Dedications

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Petra Bueskens

Section I: The Therapist as Mother

1 Interview with Ilene Philipson

Ilene Philipson Interviewed by Petra Bueskens

2 Is Therapy a form of Paid Mothering?

Petra Bueskens

3 The Mother in Attachment Theory and Attachment Informed Psychotherapy

Dianna Kenny

4 There is No Longer Room for Me on your Lap: How Being Pregnant and Becoming a Mother Impacts the Therapy Relationship

Elisabeth Shaw and Jan Breckenridge

Section II: The Mother in Therapy

5 Maternally Speaking: Mothers, Daughters, and the Talking Cure

Lynne Layton

6 Dark Animus: A Psychodynamic Interpretation of the Consequences of Diverted Mothering among African-American Daughters

S. Alease Ferguson and Toni C. King

7 Mothers at the Margins: Psychodynamic Therapy with Mothers in the Welfare System

Tony Talevski

8 Melissa: Lost in a Fog: Or How Difficult is This Mommy Stuff Anyway?

Maura Sheehy

9 Too late: The Reproduction and Non-Reproduction of Mothering

Nancy Chodorow

Section III: Mothers in Art and Culture

10 ‘They’ve taken her!’ Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Mediating Maternity, Feeling and Loss

Caroline Bainbridge

11 Framing the Mother in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel

Penelope Ingram

12 Fetish Operations in the Photographs of Sally Mann

Berkeley Kaite

13 Artistic Expressions of MaternalJouissance– Beyond the Phallus

Hadara Sche an Katzav

Section IV: Mothers in Theory and Practice

14 Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity

Alison Stone

15 Mothering the Other: Psychoanalytic Understandings of Becoming a Mother to a Second Child

Nollaig Frost

16 Maternal Ambivalence and Ideal Mothering: Can the Two Go Together?

Rivka Tuval-Mashiach and Shirit Shaiovitz-Gourman

17 Exploring the Possibility of a Positive Maternal Subjectivity: An Introduction to Lisa Baraitser’sMaternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption

Julie Rodgers

18 Mapping the Mother inFrance and India: Cross-Cultural Applications of Psychoanalytic Theory

Anu Aneja

Section V: Mothering, Therapy Culture and the Social

19 The Tyranny of Intimacy: The Intersection of Feminism and Therapy Culture - Excerpt from Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions and the Culture of Self-Help

Eva Illouz

20 Beyond the Paradigm War: Good Psychotherapy is Sociological

Petra Bueskens

21Mum’s the Word: Therapy Culture and Maternal Ambivalence

Katie Wright

22 Globalization, Psychoanalysis, and the Provision of Care: Commentary on Arlie Hochschild’s and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Global Woman

Steven Botticelli

23 Maternal Publics: Time, Relationality and the Public Sphere

Lisa Baraitser

24 Contributors Biographies

Dedications

To Nick who made it all possible.

And to Mia, Sophia and Tom who made me what I am.

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks go to Professor Andrea O’Reilly for her patience and wisdom through-out the writing of this book. She has allowed me to move this deadline without judgment or criticism so many times I have lost count. Her support and friendship are a blessing and her passion for motherhood scholarship is unparalleled. I also give thanks to the Demeter Press publication team: Lyndsay Kirkham, Angie Devau, Tracey Carlyle and Renee Knapp who have all done a wonderful job as midwives of this book!

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who forced me to clarify what this book was about and to expand the theoretical lens to include context for articles outside the conventional psychoanalytic canon and for some very practical advice on how to hold the different discourses of motherhood studies, psychoanalysis, feminism and social theory together. In encouraging an inter-disciplinary focus while pushing me to clarify what this book was trying to do, I think they helped make it a better book.

I would also like to thank all the contributors to this book who, in the first instance, had enough faith in the project to submit their work and, in the second, and, in the second, to stay with it through several rounds of revisions. They have also stayed with the project even as it took longer to produce with the birth of my (third) baby and a new academic job.

I would like to thank cover artist Matt Cheyne for allowing me to use his exquisite image The Pythia and for his excellent graphic design skills that he offered gratis. I would like to thank my Head of School Professor Ione Lewis for being a supportive, flexible and family-friendly boss and in particular for allowing me to work from home. I would also like to thank her for some last minute and very helpful editing of my own chapter in section 1. I would like to also acknowledge the generous support made by my home institution the Australian College of Applied Psychology

I would like to thank my partner Nick Wong for his many hours of support with this project - both caring for our children and making home with all that that entails practically and emotionally, and for helping me with reading drafts of my writing, correcting typos and making sure all the references were in the right style and format. This literally saved me hours of time. Thank-you for this and so much more Nick!

To Sarah Hewat for twenty years of friendship, support, love and understanding that is the emotional cornerstone of my life. Our snatches of time away from work and kids are like oxygen for my soul.

I would also like to thank my parents, Jenny and Rolf Bueskens, who have provided loving care of our daughter Sophia through-out the early stages of writing and for being enthusiastic and supportive about my many and varied projects.

I would also like to thank Brooke Ward for her more recent and very special care of Tom enabling me to go on the final stretch of writing and editing.

There are many others who have been supportive in the background while this project took -shape. Thank-you: Pia, Beck, Petr, Eve, Zoe, Sophia, Milly, Peg, Tony, Annshar, Miri and Meg for conversation, laughter, joy and commiseration.

Introduction

Mothering, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy and Sociology: Intersections and Antinomies

PETRA BUESKENS

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, it had no mother.

Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch104)

Can women be good-enough mothers and still be subjects in their own right?

Wendy Hollway (Capacity to Care65)

INTRODUCTION

This book brings together the different disciplinary strands of psychoanalysis, sociology and feminism to consider motherhood and mothering. The psychoanalytic focus includes both theoretical and clinical applications ranging from textual analyses of films, books, art and popular culture through to qualitative research on mothers, clinical case studies and reflections on therapeutic technique. The sociological focus includes a critique of therapy culture (Furedi 22-23) and its gendered implications with special reference to care—the care of mothers and of therapists - as well as the relationship between psychotherapy, capitalism and the culture industries. Feminismiswoventhroughouttheseanalysesfunctioningasaninternalcritique of both psychoanalysis and sociology usefully extending their range and reciprocal influence.

I have organized the material around five core themes: (1) the therapist as mother, (2) the mother in therapy, (3) mothers in art and culture, (4) mothers in theory and practice, and (5) sociological interventions in therapy culture. It endeavors to generate dialogue across disciplinary borders demonstrating key contributions each field makes to the other. While not all the papers are interdisciplinary (given that feminism and feminist theory is generated from within disciplines), each chapter integrates at least two of these perspectives in order to explore the topic of mothers, motherhood, and/or mothering;¹taken together the volume integrates psychoanalytic, feminist and sociological perspectives.

In many ways this is an impossibly eclectic book; it didn’t emerge out of a conference on a specific theme, or the collected papers from a particular school of thought under an overarching mentor; rather it grew organically out of the interdisciplinary interests of myself and the authors who contributed chapters. In addition, I have selected key chapters for re-print that address the intersections between the maternal, the psychic and the social such that the volume functions as both a compendium and a selection of new work in the field, which is not really a field but rather an intersection of scholarly and clinical disciplines. In practice this means seasoned scholars such as Lisa Baraitser, Alison Stone, Lynne Layton and Eva Illouz as well as legends in the field such as Nancy Chodorow - are placed alongside emerging scholars and practicing therapists and counsellors whose work and interests are more practice based. This makes for a diverse volume at both disciplinary and methodological levels. While some scholars are working on more theoretical levels, others are working with clinical material, some are focused on the application of psychoanalysis to culture, while others are explicitly critical of the enterprise of analysis and therapy more generally. In addition, while I have used the more orthodox terms psychoanalysis and sociology in fact some practitioners in the volume see themselves more as psychodynamic practitioners and others as simply using psychodynamic concepts; likewise, sociological covers a theoretical or experiential emphasis on the social more broadly and includes both well recognized sociological concepts and social theory as well as empirical sociology.

When I began formulating ideas for an edited collection I was inspired by Arlie Hochschild’s work on the commercialization of care—in particular the extent to which paid caring was increasingly replacing unpaid forms of care—and indeed filling what Hochschild has memorably called a care deficit (Commercialization of Intimate Life 214), essentially created by though not the responsibility of - women leaving the home and entering the paid workforce over the last 40 or so years. She outlined a particular scenario which resonated with me of a woman whose therapeutic work on herself involved accepting her fundamental aloneness. Her emotion work consisted of ridding herself of emotional needs with a view to being fully self-reliant (20-22). This way she wouldn’t have to suffer the standard female fate of economic and emotional dependence on a man. The therapeutic ethos in this incarnation preaches self-restraint and autonomy at the expense of relationship while embracing the neo-liberal masculine ideal.

This got me thinking about my own work as a therapist, and how this is a form of paid care, indeed paid mothering that, paradoxically, cultivated vulnerability yet promoted self-reliance. At first I thought the connection between mothering and psychotherapy was quite revelatory; that is, until I began re-reading the object relations, attachment and relational theorists who implicitly and, on occasion outright, stated that the therapist was a replacement mother.²Synthesizing Hochschild’s insights on the commercializationofcarewiththematernalturninpsychoanalytictheoryandpractice was the initial impetus for the book. From here the project flourished as the abstracts arrived and took theory and practice in a multitude of directions. Theunitingthreadwasthecentralityofthemotherwhetherastherapist, patient, parent, paradigm, protagonist, research subject or shadow in the text.

This collection is not only a contribution to psychoanalytic feminism, then, it is also, and importantly, a contribution to the feminist and sociological critique of the institution of therapy and the role of the therapist. Examining the maternal turn³in psychoanalytic theory and practice and the numerical rise of women in the profession, the first section of this book seeks to shed light on the feminization of therapy (Philipson 22) and, by implication, the feminization of care. In addition it explores the reciprocal impact of mothering on therapy and therapy on mothering; the middle sectionsexplorepsychoanalytictheoriesofmaternalsubjectivityincultural, artistic, theoretical and empirical (research) contexts. Here we see the multiplicity of maternal subject positions and the key shift, in more recent feminist scholarship, to theorizing maternal experience and agency. The third section involves a return to the social considering the mutual imbrication of feminism and therapy and how this, again, has shaped discourses of subjectivity, mothering and care.

The turn to a mother centered perspective has been recently defined by Andrea O’Reilly as matricentric feminism (25)—a branch of feminism that places the concerns, problems, insights and vantage point of mothers at the centre. For O’Reilly, this is a corrective to a predominantly womancentered perspective, as necessary as those put forward by lesbian women, women of color or, more recently, third-wave and queer feminists. This move in fact speaks of the feminist success of the separation of womanhood from (patriarchally enforced) motherhood, since now the mother can talk back to feminism. In her own recent work on motherhood Lisa Baraitser makes a similar claim in her assertion that we need to ...repeat the secondwave move to uncouple maternity and femininity ... this time ... for the sake of the maternal (10). In other words, we aren’t just freeing women from the institution of motherhood (Rich 20), but recognizing the mother as a unique and fruitful subject position from which to generate knowledge. A focus on mothers shifts our epistemological, political, social and psychic horizons as this volume attests.

Connecting the matricentric focus to questions of psyche and society this volume takes shape around a number of key questions: What does a sociological or social theoretical perspective offer psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in theory and practice? What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism and how does this impact our understanding of mothers? What does it look like—in theory and practice—to centre the mother’s subjectivity? How does being a mother or treating a mother (or both) shape therapy practice? How does psychoanalysis help us to understandmothersandmothering? Andhowcanwereadthelongstandingpsychic/social dichotomy internal to psychoanalytic theory through the subject position of the mother?

In this introduction I will focus on the psychic/social binary internal to feminist psychoanalytic theory as a way of providing a theoretical and historical context for the book. It will offer an exegesis of the main currents of feminist psychoanalytic theory (or those that inspired such work) with a view to reflecting specifically on the struggle between social and psychic explanations regarding the acquisition of gender identity, the nucleus of the neuroses, the position of the mother and maternal subjectivity. I shall, as part of this exegesis, endeavor to show a developmental line in psychoanalytic feminist theorizing concerning the mother. For those more seasoned readers, you may wish to skip this rather lengthy introductory section and move straight to the chapter summaries on page 36.

PSYCHOANALYSIS, FEMINISM AND THE MOTHER

I have found ...that people who know that they are preferred or favoured by their mothers give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakable optimism which often bring actual success to their possessors (Sigmund Freud)

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling, he retains through-out his life the triumphant feeling (Sigmund Freud)

While extolling the advantages of mother love in a number of famous quotes, Freud was particularly quiet on the subject of mothers, with his distinct stress on the father-son relationship as it played itself out in the Oedipus complex. The paucity of his analysis of mothers and his inability to conceive of female, let alone maternal, subjectivity on its own terms speaks of a curious gap in Freud’s thinking. As Roy Schafer put it,

That Freud was not prepared to think about mothers very far is ... evident in how little he said directly about them and about relationships with them, and, correspondingly, how little he said about how they appear in transference, the resistance, andtheformationoftheegoandsuperegosystems. Additionally, in his writings he showed virtually no sustained interest in their subjective experience—except for their negative feelings about their own femininity and worth. (357)

In place of substantive analysis, then, we find an uncharacteristic silence (and, in his own case, idealism). Despite the mother’s obvious centrality in the life of the young child, and therefore in his or her developing psyche, it seems the talking cure didn’t have much to say about mothers, at least not initially. This secondary place for the mother corresponded with women’s subordinate place within the family and in society at large. Although, as both Juliet Mitchell and Nancy Chodorow have argued, Freud came closer to the importance of the mother-child relation, especially as it plays out for the daughter, much later in his career (Psychoanalysis and Feminism 55-6;The Reproduction of Mothering95). For Freud, the potency of the mother-daughter relation was a significant and unexpected discovery - one he likened to the discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization behind the Athenian one (Female Sexuality 226). His discovery was nonetheless conceived of as an Oedipally determined, pre-Oedipus phase (Mitchell 53). In other words, the mother was defined by her place in relation to the father and son and their patriarchal prerogatives rather than elaborated in her own right; she was "pre-Oedipal" rather than simply maternal.

Not surprisingly, the central place of motherhood in psychoanalysis is fraught terrain for feminists given the historical legacy of ignoring, subjugating or pathologizing mothers. To add to this, or perhaps simply to contextualize it, is Freud’s pervasive sexism. Feminists, at least since Freud’s day, have been wary about many of the convictions and postulates of psychoanalysis when it comes to women: penis envy (Some Psychical Consequences 252); the assumption that all desire is male and hence, as Freud put it, the little girl is a little man (Femininity 118); the corresponding assumption that clitoral orgasm is immature (Three Essays220); through to the more abstract propositions regarding women’s weaker super-egos and apparent inability to sublimate their passions; their associated vanity and narcissism; their supposed preference for sons over daughters; their passivity and masochism; and apparent inability to psychologically develop after age 30 (Femininity 135). In Freud’s infamous words, Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own (Some Psychical Consequences 133).

On the other hand, Freud’s insistence on polymorphous perversity, his refusal to assign a natural sexuality or gender to the sexed body and thus his inherent flexibility with regards gender identity, sexual pleasure and expression; his insistence on the centrality of childhood experience; his discovery of the unconscious and thus the ubiquity of repression, ambivalence and conflict in human life; his insistence on theorizing female sexuality and frustration; and his willingness to revise his own theories (including regarding women), have ensured an ongoing, if fraught, dialogue with feminists and feminism. It is not only that feminists have criticized psychoanalysis, then, it is also that they have been enriched by it; and, in turn, have contributed to and created fundamental innovations in both theory and practice.

SEARCHING FOR ORIGINS

Psychoanalysis begins with the discourse of the hysteric filtered through the eyes of Freud and his mentor Joseph Brauer;⁴it begins, in other words, with a narrative about female sexuality. It is through hysteria that psycho analysis was invented and thus, as a range of theorists have observed, hysteria was simultaneously psychoanalysis’ discovery and its creation; in effect both the symptom and the cure arrive coterminously on the historical stage (Freud-Halberstadt; Yarom; Bernheimer 1; Rose; Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism48; Mitchell,Mad Men and Medusas).

As Kristine Klement has recently pointed out, as an illness hysteria confounds medical science for it lacks an organic cause. What hysteria demonstrates is that there is more to illness than the body, and more to the mind than conscious thought (Feminism Beyond Hysteria). It was this language of the body that Freud began to read as meaningful in the early days of psychoanalysis. As he famously observed hysterics suffer from reminiscences (Studies11) however it was the shift from treating these memories as real to imagined that marked the decisive turn to psychoanalysis proper. At this point Freud stopped believing the surface of what his (mostly female) patients said and started to hear the fantasies, wishes and desires embedded in their symptoms. He therefore abandoned the seduction theory in a move that has remained deeply problematic for feminists ever since (principally because it involved denying the veracity of women’s claims of sexual abuse).⁵

It was on this politically fraught basis that Freud founded his two key discoveries: the unconscious and infantile sexuality and began to map their relation. In particular, the unconscious repression of desire that came to form the basis of his theories of the Oedipus and castration complexes and, by association, sex and gender. When he followed his royal road all the way to the unconscious what Freud found was a bisexual, polymorphous, infantile sexuality that required punitive patriarchal policing to acquire its hetero-normative, age specific, genital cast.

For Freud, who was principally concerned with the psychic effects of the social, including how patriarchal social order was inculcated and reproduced, the mental effect of the trauma was of greater significance than whether it was real or imagined, social or psychic in origin - a point we shall return to. It was the mental representations of these relations that constituted the focus of his inquiries. The abandonment of the seduction theory was, in effect, the abandonment of an understanding of human beings that prioritizedthe socialoverthe psychic, or the real over the imagined. It is important to note, it was not that Freud thought real world events such as the sexual abuse of children didn’t happen (he most certainly did) or that the women he treated were liars, it was rather that he was concerned with a different question: Is there a realm outside conscious awareness that con tains troubling content? And, if so, what is the content and structure of this realm and what is its role in the etiology of neurotic illness?

What was missing in these early explorations, and what Freud came increasingly to identify in the last years of his life, was the mother, or, to put it in more psychoanalytic terminology, what was missing was a rich and nuanced understanding of the pre-Oedipal relations between mother and infant and how these come to shape, underscore and undermine identity, including in particular feminine identity. In this early period, the mother emerged only as an absence, an unexplained hole in the text, through which the deeper meaning of the child’s (and in particular, the daughter’s) attachment fell. She would appear but only later—indeed 35 years later— when Freud finally acknowledged that beneath the girl’s Oedipus complex was her deep homosexual tie to her mother; such was the strength of this tie that the little girl in Freud’s estimation never fully resolved her Oedipus complex. She was never comfortably reconciled with either femininity or heterosexuality. She would want ongoing ties to her mother (and mother substitutes), children and closeness to women to round out her psychosexual life.

Freud postulates a constitutive bisexuality that is forced by culture more or less successfully into normative heterosexuality. On our journey through the phallic and Oedipal phases we are required to answer the question: AmI(psychologicallyspeaking)amanorwoman? (Kahane22, Yarom 1119)⁶Or, to put it another way: shall I haveor shall I bethe mother? The refusaltoanswerthisquestionandtakeupaposition,asitwere, produced hysteria in both men and women.⁷Juliet Mitchell has also argued that the failure to attend to hysteria as equally a male disorder has produced theoretical gaps (Reply 220;Mad Men and Medusas). It is for this reason that many feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have claimed the hysteric as a rebellious icon of feminist resistance (Cixous 47; Gallop; Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas75; Showalter 286-288). As Jane Gallop says,

Freud links hysteria to bisexuality; the hysteric identifies with members of both sexes, [s/he] cannot choose one sexual identity ... If feminism is the calling into question of constraining sexual identities, then the hysteric may be a protofeminist. (cited in Showalter 288)

Herrefusalofsexualdifferenceunderthetermsofpatriarchyiswhatdefines the hysteric’s illness. As Jacqueline Rose says,

...feminism starts precisely from that difference [sexual difference] which it then addresses to psychoanalysis as a demand, the demand for the theory of its construction. Feminism, therefore, first turns to psychoanalysis because it is seen as the best place to describe the coming into being of femininity, which, in a next stage, it can be accused of producing, or at least reproducing ...(Rose 27-8)

This is the conundrum thereafter of feminism’s relation to psychoanalysis: how to integrate the discovery of the unconscious and of sexuality with the external realities of women’s lives under patriarchy. Already at its inception there was a psychic/social schism at the heart of the psychoanalytic project that took shape, interestingly enough, around the construction of femininity beginning with the daughter’s relation to her putatively castrated mother. Sociology was its Achilles heel, insofar as the most damaging critiques of psychoanalysis came from those decrying its lack of social and political attentiveness (Karen Horney, Erich Fromm and the NeoFreudians in the first instance and feminists as well as Marxists thereafter); its apparent blindness to power and, worse, its collusion with, and perpetuation of, power. Was psychoanalysis simply an expositor or a creator of this truth (regarding penis envy, the acquisition of gendered identity, heterosexuality, and the like)? In my own reading, psychoanalysis functionsasbothandcontainswithinitselfaradicalcore—preciselytheinstability of categories of normal and, beyond this, of the coherent, self-knowing subject—that can be used effectively to undermine any normative accounts of sex and gender, including, ironically, its own.

The question for psychoanalytic feminist theorists, then, is this: how canwesalvagewhatisrevolutionaryinboththeconceptualandthepolitical sense in psychoanalysis from what is reactionary and oppressive? And, for those theorists that accept classical Freudian ideas—the Oedipus and castration complexes for example—that others do not, a way of thinking through the differences productively. Importantly, feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have always brought psychoanalysis back to this point: the intersection of the psychic and the social, precisely because we have a stake in both positions; both in the sociological reconstruction of gender relations as power relations (inside and outside the family) and in recognizing the psychic or unconscious as a field that troubles normative accounts of gender and sexuality.

THE DEBATES ON FEMININITY: 1920 — 1939

From the outset Freud was charged by women analysts with sexism and with missing key elements of female and, by association male, psychology. Karen Horney was the most prominent analyst who challenged Freud on his sexism in the now famous debates on femininity in the 1920s and 30s. In particular his idea of penis envy in the young girl (and indeed adult woman) struck Horney as an obvious reversal of the truth.⁸She pointed out what has become a feminist truism since: that it is far more likely, given women’s comparatively superior reproductive apparatus, that it was in fact men who suffered womb envy. She defined this broadly as the envy of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, as well as of the breasts and of the act of suckling (The Flight from Womanhood 59).

Horney, along with her fellow Neo-Freudians Erich Fromm, Ernest Jones and Clara Thompson, rejected many of thepsychologicaltheories of Freud and replaced these with sociological readings defining neurosis as a response to external circumstances or reality, including the reality of sexism (On the Genesis of the Castration Complex 42). For Horney, women were burdened by a patriarchal culture and psychoanalysis was limited in its capacity to truly understand this because of its own patriarchal biases. This position has remained fundamental to the feminist critique of psychoanalysis and to the rejection of over-determined psychic explanations.

What the early mothers of psychoanalysis such as Horney, Deutsch and Klein offered was a new focus on women’s psycho-sexual development, including the centrality of mothers and motherhood (Sayers 3). Some have suggested that Freud’s own writings on femininity were motivated by his wish to keep up with the early female analysts (Roazen). Others have contended that these debates stalled precisely because they were fought on opposing terrain—the psychic and the social respectively. Mitchell, for example, notes that the debate over femininity in the 20s and 30s saw the crystallization of two opposite positions (121)—the psychic and the social respectively—and ...as far as psychoanalysis went, the debate really ended in the thirties—it ended in an impasse because the concepts did not tally (130). It is this binary, as we shall see, that continues to animate and define contemporary feminist readings of psychoanalysis and the maternal.

MELANIE KLEIN, DONALD WINNICOTT AND THE TURN TO THE MOTHER

Psychoanalytic theory made a decisive turn to the mother in the writings of Melanie Klein and later object relations theorists.⁹She turned her theoretical and clinical gaze to the pre-Oedipal period and the infant’s intense, albeit phantasised, relation to the mother. Klein saw her work remaining firmly within Freudian drive theory, nonetheless her theories inaugurated a key shift to earlier stages of development and the primacy of the mother in the child’s—and thus the adult’s mental life (Love, Guilt and Reparation; Envy and Gratitude).

For Klein, the mother—and, more specifically her breast is the first internalised love object for the infant; however, unlike later object relations theorists, she did not posit a blissful symbiotic union; rather, for Klein, the infant is beset by hostile fantasies and primitive aggressive wishes that are gradually, though never completely, overcome. Klein introduced the concept of splitting (good from bad objects and complete objects into partial ones) and detailed the intra-psychic processes of introjection and projection in the acquisition of an internal sense of self and other. Her key theoretical contribution lay in her delineation of two developmental positions: the paranoid-schizoid position associated with the infant’s omnipotent fantasy to possess, control and destroy the mother; and the depressive position defined by anacceptance of the mother asa separate other who is not (and never was) under the infant’s control. As the infant comes to recognize the mother as a whole object, a being who exists independently of his or her wishes, the infant arrives at the more integrated depressive position (Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms 176-235).

Klein’s theories emphasized the primacy of the mother for psychological development and in turn relegated the father, the Oedipus complex, and castration to a secondary role. As Doane and Hodges observe,

In Klein’s work, the oedipal struggle is subsumed and consequently redefined in terms of depressive anxiety and the attempt to restore the mother as a whole object. At Klein’s developmental turning point, she emphasizes depressive anxiety rather than castration anxiety ... Moreover, since depressive anxiety is never fully overcome,the subject is never nished with the mother.Ultimately the work of symbol formation, art and culture themselves, can be attributed to our attempts to make reparation, to regenerate the mother ...(my emphasis 11-12)

For Klein, the mother is an internal spectral figure whom we seek—in unconscious phantasy - to devour, destroy, and finally repair in our greed, envy, fear and guilt. The empirical reality of her is almost irrelevant in this picture. Klein’s interest is not with the real mother that has come to dominate later object relations theory but with thematernal imagoor unconscious representation of mother (her breasts, milk, insides, body parts, genitals etc) in relation to the fulfillment and frustration of drives. She is a figure of phantasy, splitting, introjection and projection.

Klein’s student Donald Winnicott shifted this internal focus to the external environment mother (The Development of the Capacity for Concern 75). In this sense, he was much more concerned with the actual practices of care than with the intrapsychic realm of phantasy. Winnicott introduced the idea of the good enough mother as she who provides the right balance of love and loss; beginning in total devotion and slowly failing the infant so that he can adjust himself to reality. In this view the mother holds, gratifies, contains, mirrors and frustrates the infant with a view to facilitating his or her separate sense of self and capacity for basic relatedness (The Capacity to be Alone 30-35). Importantly, for Winnicott, the mother cannot be perfect and gratify the child’s every wish, or the child cannot see her and therefore him or herself—as a separate person. S/he remains stuck in a hallofmirrors. Alternatively, ifsheisnotgoodenough(i.e. consciouslyor unconsciously rejecting, abandoning, or absent) the child’s immature ego is called on to regulate itself producing a false self—somebody who seeks to please others and consequently struggles to feel authentic.

For Winnicott, the therapist also has to adopt the standpoint of the goodenoughmothercreatingaholdingenvironmentforthepatientand allowing him or her to develop ego strength with a view to facilitating the emergence of a true self (The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship 49, 46). The therapist is cast in the role ofreplacement motherameliorating the purported neglect and damage of the real mother (The Mirror Role of the Mother and Family in Child Development).

Whilethisperspectivehastheadvantageofrenderingvisiblethepsychic work of both mothers and therapists, it has the decidedly conservative overtoneofde-contextualizingandblamingmothers(though, interestingly, not therapists!). The environment of the mother herself, and specifically, patriarchal, capitalist social structure, is ignored in this account (Riley 82; Doane and Hodges 21). In addition, there is no real elaboration of maternal subjectivity other than in terms of infantile needs; indeed, even the mother’s autonomy is defined in terms of the infant’s need to be frustrated! Moreover, the unconscious dimensions of psychic life are almost entirely abrogated in favor of the real. Implicit in Winnicott’s conception of health is a subject no longer divided between conscious thought and unconscious fantasy, or struggling over sexuality and social prohibitions. All pathology is therefore located outside the individual in the ostensibly deficient care of mothers.

Two historical developments that run in parallel, then, but do not intellectually converse, are the emergence of post-Kleinian object relations theory on the one hand, and second wave feminism on the other. As the good enough mother takes hold of psychoanalytic theory, the problem with no name—the bored mother, the mother who thinks house-wifery and childcare are not good enough collide (Friedan 15). As Doane and Hodges note, the radicalism of Klein, her refusal to define good enough mothering in terms of the infant’s empirical needs, was superseded by an emphasis on the social relationship between mother and infant (20-21). The turn to mothering, then, was defined by an implicit conservatism; it came with a host of assumptions and admonitions about how mothersshould behave that typically presupposed the strictures (and privileges) of white middle-class, stay-at-home mothers.

SECOND WAVE FEMINISM: REJECTING AND RECLAIMING PSYCHOANALYSIS

Early second wave feminists by and large rejected psychoanalysis. Already Simone de Beauvoir’sThe Second Sex(1949) had rejected psychoanalysis on grounds of Freud’s lack of attention to the social circumstances of the girl child that, in de Beauvoir’s view, explained her envy of male privilege rather than male genitals (305-307).¹⁰She repudiated Freud’s theories of the unconscious and of sexuality setting the tone for those who followed. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Shulamith Firestone’sThe Dialectic of Sex(1970), Kate Millet’sSexual Politics(1970), and Germaine Greer’sThe Female Eunuch(1971) all rejected Freud’s theories on the grounds that they were misogynist, biologically reductionist, irrational and culture blind. While often acknowledging Freud’s genius, there was a rejection of both the central tenets of psychoanalysis and their pernicious application in psychotherapies that tended to pathologise women’s resis tance to patriarchy—or what Greer tersely called the psychological sell (103).¹¹

Not until Juliet Mitchell’sPsychoanalysis and Feminism(1974) was there a serious engagement with Freud from a feminist perspective. Her abiding point was that psychoanalysis was a description rather than a prescriptionof women’s lives under patriarchy (xv) - an account that has been disputed repeatedly and not without merit (Jackson 80-92; Chodorow 141 2). For Mitchell, feminists had mistaken the explanation for expectation. This seems an optimistic reading, one that cannot be sustained by many of Freud’s postulates, nonetheless it captures a critical dimension hitherto overlooked by feminists, and that is psychoanalysis’ emphasis on the un conscious. Mitchell stressed that Freud was concerned not with social reality per se, but withthe mental representation and revolt against that reality. It is this insight with all its radical import that she brought to the feminist table.

Mitchell presented Freud’s theories to a new generation of readers, insisting that without attention to context and a close reading of the original texts, Freud’s ideas necessarily sound retrograde and misogynist (351). For Mitchell, it was only in a close reading of Freud’s overall oeuvre that one could appreciate the importance of his contribution (especially given his many significant revisions). In particular, she felt that feminists had rejected the wrong Freud—a misrepresented and much maligned caricature based on de Beauvoir’s initial rejection of Freud’s early writings (301).

Mitchell’s focus was on Freud’s twin discoveries: the unconscious and sexuality and, more specifically, on Freud’s adumbration of the laws that govern unconscious mental life. Time and again she pointed out the erroneous conflation between social and psychic reality—insisting that to judge Freud’s interpretation of unconscious (repressed) thought against the truth of actually existing relations was to miss the point—it was in effect to compare psychic apples with social pears (8). For Mitchell, the feminist critique involvedaliteralizationprogramme(347)thatreducedtheunconsciousto the common sense surface which Freud had originally punctured; this had the effect of neutralising and misreading his most significant contribution.

... [I]nbelievingthatFreudadvocatednormality, andindenying anything other than the processes of conscious rationality, theseaccountsthemselvessubscribetosuchnotions. Consciousness, rationality, social actuality are all... (354-5)

Mitchell highlighted the descending scale of opposition to Freud¹²among feminists noting that in America there was almost total hostility (she cites the example of an early second wave feminist pamphlet in which Freud’s face had been turned into a dartboard with the caption: Misogynist (Male) III); in England there was general prejudice with emerging interest; in Scandinavia surprise but also keen responsiveness; and in France there was a significant women’s liberation group calledPsychanalyse et Politique, which took seriously the concepts offered by psychoanalysis as a way of understanding women’s oppression (297).

Out of this latter group the so-called French feminists emerged including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous. These thinkers were trained in Lacanian psychoanalysis although rejected his phallocentrism and developed their own theories concerning maternal subjectivity andjoiussance.The Lacanian return to Freud, with his distinct emphasis on castration and lack, functioned as their point of departure. Here sexual difference is attained through an acceptance of phallic lack—in the boy’s case because he cannot trump the father, and in the girl’s because she has no access to the paternal signifier (or phallus). The precondition for entering the symbolic order - Lacan’s term for the realm of culture, language and ideas - is the acceptance of castration and, by definition,the relinquishment of union with the mother.The Lacanian return to Freud was thus the return of the centrality of the Oedipus and castration complexes, albeit in a new linguistic cast, to the centre of psychoanalytic theory. Here sex and subjectivity are mutually constitutive; in other words, the subject is sexed as a precondition of his or her entry into language and culture (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis).

For post-Lacanian feminist thinkers such as Irigaray and Kristeva, it is the recognition of lack or castration that brings language and the symbolic into being, and thus there is no outside gender, no social realm beyond sexual difference. As a consequence, their prevailing goal is to render this difference visible—to restore to the feminine, and to a lesser extent, the maternal, a symbolic recognition largely absent in culture to the detriment of women and girls. It is re-inserting the feminine into culture not simply as man’s (erotic) other but as an independent female/maternal subjectivity that their project largely lies (Irigaray The Bodily Encounter with the Mother 531-540; Kristeva Stabat Mater 133-135). Although this strategy is complicated by the simultaneous rejection of the symbolic (as patriarchal) andconcomitantvalorizationofpre-symbolic,pre-Oedipal,ostensiblyfeminine, modes of being. We see this line of thinking continued in the more recent work of Bracha Ettinger with her innovative artistic and theoretical work on the matrixial gaze and matrixial borderspace considering the linkages between the intra-uterine co-mingling of fetus and mother and the concomitant capacity for a relational rather than objectifying ethic and gaze (The Matrixial Gaze; The Matrixial Borderspace).

In the decade after Mitchell’sPsychoanalysis and Feminism,and with the translation of Irigaray’s and Kristeva’s work into English, a burgeoning of feminist interest in psychoanalysis unfolded. There was a renewed attempt to explain the psychic and social origins of gender, and indeed the same (unresolved) conflicts that emerged in the debates over femininity in the 1920s and 30s re-presented themselves. Unlike Mitchell who emphasized the intra-psychic, U.S. psychoanalytic feminists (or feminist psychoanalysts) like Nancy Chodorow and later Jessica Benjamin drew on object relations—specifically the British middle school starting with Winnicott, and its transatlantic permutations in the work of Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg in combination with earlier work by Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm. Like the culturalist or Neo-Freudians before them, Chodorow and Benjamin were concerned less with with sexuality and repression, or phantasies of the mother, and more with the conscious and unconscious internalization of real or actually existing relations between mothers and infants.

In addition to these developments there were a spate of books on mothering as the second-wave feminists came of age and became mothers themselves. Adrienne Rich’sOf Woman Born(1976), Nancy Friday’sMy Mother Myself(1977), Jane Lazarre’sThe Mother Knot(1976), Dorothy Dinnerstein’sThe Mermaid and the Minotaur(1976)¹³and Nancy Chodorow’sThe Reproduction of Mothering(1978)¹⁴defined a new waveoffeministwritingthatattemptedtocometotermswithmotherhood and the mother-daughter relationship. With the exception of Rich, these works typically assumed the vantage point of the daughter—often, the angry, conflicted or enmeshed daughter—and, in this sense, constitute an historically and developmentally specific reading of the mother (Chodorow and Contratto 79-83). What we see in the psychoanalytic feminist writings after the second wave is a move beyond simply opening the doors of psychoanalysis to feminism and in some senses remaining faithful to orthodox analysis (as we see in Mitchell), but an attempt to make psychoanalysis their own and in the process reconfigure the position of the mother and the daughter. Let us consider this development further.

MAKING SPACE FOR THE MATERNAL: NANCY CHODOROW AND JESSICA BENJAMIN

Nancy Chodorow’s landmark textThe Reproduction of Motheringredefined the field of psychoanalytic feminism as well as the sociology of gender while also anticipating the relational turn in psychoanalysis. Chodorow reread Freud’s theory of femininity using an innovative synthesis of object relations theory, sociology and feminism with a view to explaining what had hitherto been taken for granted: namely why women mother (47). After identifying the historical specificity of the modern nuclear family - what sheaccuratelydefinedasthemaledominantfatherabsentfamily(40, 175)Chodorow looked to the psycho-sexual foundations of gender-identity formation for her explanation of why women mother.

In a sense Chodorow picks up where Winnicott left off by considering both the social context of the mother and the gendered ramifications of early maternal care. Chodorow defines the modern nuclear family as a particularhistorical formation with lasting effects on the psyche and, in this sense, posits a direct relationship between social arrangements and psychic structures. This makes them amenable to social change, which is the political core of the book - specifically in its call for shared parenting (215).

For Chodorow both the male and the female child begin life matrisexual, (95) not bisexual as Freud contended, experiencing themselves as physically and psychically contiguous with the mother. Gradually infants come to see themselves as separate beings however this has a different quality for male and female infants. In particular, the mother—who, in Chodorow’s schema, we assume is a relatively isolated stay-at-home mother - has a stronger identification with her daughter. She holds her psychically closer as a consequence of their embodied likeness and the associated conscious and unconscious activation of her own infancy. The daughter, in turn, identifies with her mother both as her primary carer and as a person of the same sex. The daughter and the mother are, in this sense, mutually identified at two levels (generation and gender) creating a more intense and, as a result, a more ambivalent relationship (109-110, 204; Family Structure and Feminine Personality 48-49).

In Chodorow’s re-reading the girl has a considerably longer pre Oedipal period (something Freud also arrived at in his later work). She remains primarily attached to her mother into her fourth or fifth year and only ever partially transfers her affections to her father (Reproduction of Mothering 96; all further references to this work will be indicated by RM). The reso lution of her Oedipus complex is therefore never complete and remains permanently defined by a deep identification with her mother that is lived and re-lived in key lifecycle transitions (menstruation, coitus, pregnancy, parturition, lactation, menopause etc.). For Chodorow, like Freud, the daughter remains triangulated between her mother and father in her internal and external object world—a situation that persists into adulthood where she transfers this triangulation onto her primary love relationships (RM 124-127, 201, 207). In a perspicacious analysis, Chodorow updates Freud’s schema in her contention that most women end up genitally heterosexual while remaining emotionally oriented to women (mothers, sisters, daughters, friends) and to the recreation of the mother-child bond (Family Structure and Feminine Personality 53).

This recalls something of Klein’s point that we are never in fact done with our mothers. However it is not so much reparation as regeneration that Chodorow is interested in.It is women’s desire to recreate the experience of primary unity that serves as the unconscious and conscious drive to mother.Moreover, it is the emotional paucity of their relations with men, so often at variance with their internal template, that motivates women to recreate, albeit this time from the other side, the mother-child bond (RM 199-204)—and here Chodorow is clear that she is discussing the standard trajectory not homosexual or childfree variants (RM215; Reflection 342345).

The innovation of Chodorow is that she re-centered the motherdaughter relationship and in turn linked this not only to the reproduction ofmotheringbutalsotothereproductionofheterosexualityandultimately to patriarchy itself. Tying together sociological and anthropological studies of family structure and practice, Chodorow re-reads psychic structure through the lens of culture bringing them together in her assertion that we are all shaped by our common experience of being mothered by women. However, this mothering is itself culturally specific and, in a society that sequesters (most) mothers to the domestic interior while (most) fathers go out to work, a unique psychic structure emerges (of course there are other mothers who a required to work as we shall see.) For Chodorow this peculiar family structure produces relational women with relatively porous ego boundaries that facilitate precisely the kind of empathy and identification required to care for infants (and all others) and men with the comparatively firmer ego boundaries necessary for participation in the secondary institutions of society—the market, civil society etc. (RM7, 203-209; Reflection 339). In separating from the mother and identifying with their largely absent fathers, boys, and the men they become, no longer make emotional connection the central focus of their lives. This often leaves women wanting in their heterosexual relations, which is the second dimension of Chodorow’s layered explanation for why women mother. In effect, women mother because they are seeking an experience of primary connection they are unable to obtain in their heterosexual relationships. Furthermore, women’ssocializationorientsthemtocaregivingrelationsofthekind that they received from their own mothers.

Chodorow provides the other side of the psychoanalytic story here identifying the unique subjectivity of the daughter and how she is psychically primed to mother. This mothering mode is extended to all she does andindeeddefinesfemininity(regardlessofif awomanis amotherornotas her later work featured in this volume attests). However, as her critics have noted, Chodorowdoesawaywiththeunconscioushere, whichismorethan a repository of socialisation but also a site for the repression of literally unspeakable content. In Juliet Mitchell’s terms, Chodorow charts accessible preconscious [parental] identifications in an untransformed way, which by definition reflects ‘social reality’ (Reply 217). More recently, Alison Stone suggests that:

...what [Chodorow’s] theory seems to lack room for is the mind having any innate ways of fantasizing, such that we can never perceive the world purely as it factually is. Here ... she may indeed have failed adequately to distinguish empirical from psychical reality. (Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Maternal Subjectivity29)

Similar critiques have been made by Parveen Adams (40-52), Teresa Brennan (8-9), Jacqueline Rose (60, 90-1), and Doane and Hodges (33-52) who all fault Chodorow on her tendency to reduce the psychic to the social, and in turn, to suture over the subject’s split constitution. Integral to this critique is Chodorow’s reliance on object relations theory with its implicitly conservative tendency regarding good enough mothering.

Chodorow never fully reconciles the opposing epistemologies of her foundational theories insofar as object relations theory is ultimately conservative when it comes to mothers and finds it difficult to locate let alone explicate the mother’s subjectivity (she is invariably reduced to a container or a mirror who serves - or fails to serve - the child). Building on this foundation and sociologizing it creates a story about gender under patriarchy but it doesn’t necessarily envision a more radical maternal subject position, unless the mother is prepared to relinquish (i.e., share) her role. As Adams notes, the role itself—the historical specificity and construction of intensive mothering as what infants need—is not disputed by Chodorow (51). Secondly, there is an assumption that sharing care and becoming co-equal parents will abrogate the problem of gender. For her Lacanian feminist critics, this visionary alternative—a genderless world—is neither possible nor desirable. For post-Lacanian feminist thinkers, it is sexual difference (or castration) that brings language and the symbolic into being, and thus there is no outside gender, no utopia beyond difference. Teresa Brennan summarizes this point:

The arguments against Chodorow come to this: to see the nature of masculinity and femininity as the result of the internalization of the social relations governing parenthood is to reduce psychical reality to social reality. It is to make sexual difference the result of the social order rather than the foundation of the symbolic order; the symbolic is the means for taking in information about gender stereotypes. In other words, sexual difference is not only the result of socialization but its condition. (8)

In this schema sexual difference is not merely produced from the outside - from the structural and interactional specifics of society - but is that which is produced in and through (our entry into) language. The psyche, and here we are referring specifically to the unconscious, is a repository for repressed content—taboo fantasies and wishes precipitated by the laws of kinship and culture; it has its own existence ostensibly autonomous from empirical circumstances (I say ostensibly because, for me, neither pole— psycheorsocial—canbeisolatedasentirelyautonomousfromtheother—a point we shall return to).

There is a common sense appeal to Chodorow’s analysis, which is both itsstrengthanditsweakness. Ontheonehandsheexplainscommonlyexperiencedphenomena-womenwholovetoomuchandmenwhodon’tlove enough; men who resist yet