AGAINST THE NEOCONSERVATIVES FREUD VERSUS FEMINISM

...Now, were there definitive, independent evidence that Freud's theory is correct, the few women who wanted to elevate woman's estate would have to realize the insurmountable obstacles facing them...

...Obviously, Mitchell does not count the women's movement a success...

...Before advocating conscious political change, it is important to know what one cannot rationally expect...

...It was not oversight or a lack of concern for women, but his fundamental theoretical perspective that blocked such considerations...

...Women therefore can justly be regarded as secondary to men within society as well as within the family...

...The act of exchange holds a society together: the rules of kinship (like those of language to which they are near-allied) are the society...

...But all that she can consistently urge now is an "abolitionist" perspective...

...Freud's theory provides a powerful explanation for why female children will grow up to be women who accept the inferior allocations of status in a masculine culture or, much less frequently, grow up to be women who rebel against their subordinate status but at the cost of sacrificing what is perceived to be their womanhood...

...For only if it is a passing cultural phenomenon can there be any hope for psychic and social liberation...

...From a Freudian point of view, Mitchell's answer must be "no...

...Mitchell appears reluctant to draw this moderately conservative message from Freud...

...In fact, Mitchell concludes, "the reproduction of the ideology of human society is thus assured in the acquisition of the law by each individual" (emphasis added...

...A large portion of woman's own estate therefore is constructed by men...

...212...

...Of course, to hold women responsible for claiming their freedom does not deny men's responsibility for the situation in which women now find themselves...

...It would not necessarily enable us to change our inheritance...

...It is disturbing that someone so committed to changing the social position of women does not concede any existential ground to women in our society...

...She is both a most sophisticated Freudian theoretician of feminism and a major figure in the radical feminist movement...

...If a woman's deferential behavior is multiply caused by nonconscious factors—for example, by an unconscious desire for a penis—and also by socioeconomic discriminations, and if one cause, say economic discrimination, is eliminated, she will still remain an object rather than an agent of her own transformation, even if her behavior changes as a consequence...

...Given Freud's theory, an equalization among the sexes is an unrealistic hope, since woman's situation is to a large extent a product of unconscious socialization, and socialization is certainly not so amenable to revolutionary change as is economic or political policy...

...She does not, of course, claim that Freud himself discovered the path of liberation: that discovery is her own task...

...Women are now the second sex in part because men were historically the first occupants of the more advantageous situation, capable of imposing their self-definitions upon women...

...Mitchell accepts the notion of an inherited collective unconscious, which Freud developed late in his life—a concept that is by far the least well-developed part of Freud's theory...

...Christopher Lasch, a defender of Freud's and of Mitchell's analyses, argues that "psychoanalytical theory cannot be refuted...

...Mitchell's own politics finally reemerges from the pile of Freudian analysis: it is a politics closely resembling that of her first work, Woman's Estate...

...Despite the persistence of patriarchy, Mitchell's answer is "no...

...In Woman's Estate, Mitchell's explicit aim was "the liberation of women and the equality of sexes, not the abolition of the family" (emphasis added...

...Do not let us forget," Freud warned, "that the demand for equality in a group applies only to its members and not to the leader...

...She does not tell us in Psychoanalysis and Feminism what her position on this question is, although she insists that the patriarchal nuclear family is not synonymous with the nuclear family itself...

...It is dismaying, therefore, that she does not discover useful revisions of Freud in any of the alternative radical and feminist theories to which she turns in the second half of Psychoanalysis and Feminism...

...Here she borrows from LeviStrauss, attempting to eliminate any doubts that we still might have concerning the correct status of the family in Freudian theory: the patriarchal family has been a cultural rather than a biological necessity...

...3 Indeed, were Freud's theory shown by Mitchell to be correct on other grounds, how could we criticize it for leading to conclusions we find unpleasant...

...Thus, according to Freud, it is the very presence of the male's penis that renders both female adult and female child at a disadvantage within the family.' In addition, the development of a superego in men and its relative absence in women meant for Freud that it was men who made civilization and cultural progress possible...

...So, while she is anxious to criticize the view that the patriarchal nuclear family is a biological given, Mitchell accords that same family structure a peculiar cultural permanence that transcends its objective social necessity...

...9Of course, other important aspects of Freud's theory may remain: e.g., the notion of the necessary trade-off between sexual freedom and the progress of civilization...

...Freud, she has argued, "did not believe things were biological, instinctual and changeless: he thought they were cultural...

...by `empirical evidence' in the form of experimental psychology but only by a counter-theory...

...I shall argue, however, that Freud's theory—even with Mitchell's revisions—is too deterministic to serve feminist goals...

...The unconscious," Mitchell later argues, "is everyman's heritage of how mankind lives...

...They are brought by social scientists to their work, and function as selective lenses enabling them to impart theoretical coherence to their work...

...In this sense, I think, 210 social scientific theories are not distinct from moral theories: justification of each must be "a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitting together into one coherent view...

...But the very system of exchange, or exogamy, that makes civilized culture and stable societies possible also places women in an unequal position, for they are universally the objects rather than the agents of exchange: "Whatever the nature of the society...

...But what is unreasonable is her defense of Freud against Beauvoir's claim that Freudianism, like Existentialism, is also a philosophy that includes (or, I would say, facilitates) certain normative aims...

...A non-Freudian feminism would direct our efforts, instead, toward a more egalitarian restructuring of the family...

...First, there is no clear way to change the patriarchal nuclear family in Freudian theory, given the enormous power accorded to the unconscious...

...The simplest answer is that it is the correct theory and that we had better face up to its pessimistic implications...

...That Mitchell claims for Freudian theory the status of science is not unreasonable...

...10 Or, as Mitchell puts it: "We are each huge and contain multitudes— multitudes in whose names we create ourselves and together with whom we continue our cultural heritage, passing on to others the way of our lives in the language of our unconscious...

...New York: Time Books, 1973), p. 181...

...Perhaps the only conscious motives Freud distrusted more than those of individuals were the professed aims of the members of mass movements...

...that neither Freud nor Mitchell has offered adequate evidence for the view that woman's consciousness is determined by an inherited patriarchal culture...

...But the openness of the future largely depends upon the nature of the explanation one provides to account for woman's present estate...

...The existence of a collective unconscious is certainly the most unscientific of Freud's theoretical concepts...

...However, even if universally available, it would not do much more than allow women to become aware of their unconscious patriarchal inheritance...

...4 Women, lacking a well-developed superego, never really contribute (except passively) to the development of civilization...

...The Freudian theory she develops places two enormous obstacles before her feminist goals...

...Women thus become the equivalent of a sign which is being communicated...

...rather, the psychology which has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand, in the first place, why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.' Recently, however, there have been signs among feminists of a sympathetic interest in psychoanalytic theory...

...In Pyschoanalysis and Feminism, the best work by a feminist writing from a Freudian perspective, Mitchell has mustered new arguments to defend Freud's case concerning women, and in the process she has undermined several previous critiques of Freud simply by distinguishing between psychoanalytic theory as a means of explaining and a means of justifying the situation of women in modern society...

...In Part II of Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mitchell criticizes Simone de Beauvoir for faulting psychoanalysis on the grounds that its implications are undesirable: "concerned to assert a philsophy, de Beauvoir has had to find the source of her rejection of psychoanalysis in its implications alone...

...Freudianism is defended as the correct scientific analysis of woman's present, subordinate condition...

...Why did it fail...

...I want to stress that this failure is not limited to women...

...I I None of the basic concepts of grand social scientific theories arise directly out of empirical observations...

...It is surprising, although on consideration understandable, that Mitchell never even considers psychoanalysis as a potential means to women's liberation...

...In Woman's Estate, Mitchell looked toward a political mass movement of women to challenge the existing social institutions that relegated women to the private domain and to the less rewarding occupations...

...But it is not clear that Mitchell would want to save this side of Freud's argument...

...the theories of Levi-Strauss and Marx, she adds, can aid us in discovering why woman's condition was originally created by men and why the reasons for its creation have now been superseded...

...And before restricting feminist options to the overthrow of the nuclear family, one should look more carefully at how far an egalitarian redivision of labor within the family, coupled with significant economic and political reforms, can take us toward the goals of individuality, socioeconomic equality, and human dignity...

...Yet, the analysis she has chosen provides her only with a tool for explaining why women (and men) can be expected to act against their own rational interests—a tool that serves in fact to undermine our political hopes...

...Any valid psychological explanation will begin with the family that first socializes us all, but because women are socialized from the start not only by another woman but also by one person, their father, who does not share their subordination...

...But if, as Mitchell argues, "capitalist society establishes the family in the context of its redundancy," why then does the patriarchal, nuclear family persist in contemporary capitalist societies...

...Pointing to the enormous contribution they willingly make to society in raising children, many women claim to be a "separate but equal" rather than a "second" sex...

...However, in Mitchell's understanding of culture, things like the nuclear family remain changeless despite their biological and instinctual superfluity...

...Thus Mitchell, remaining faithful to Freud, must accord enormous explanatory significance to the unconscious...

...That the patriarchal nuclear family has structured woman's consciousness and her aims in a passive direction is an invaluable insight...

...This differs significantly from the part of Freud's theory that stipulates mechanisms by which character traits develop within a child's lifetime...

...All the members must be equal to one another, but they all want to be ruled by one person...

...3 All references not otherwise identified are to Psvchoanal vsis and Feminism (New York: Pantheon, 1974...

...Woman, being for various other reasons in a weak position vis-a-vis man, passively integrated that imposed definition of herself...

...Mitchell attempts to do much more in Psychoanalysis and Feminism than to vindicate Freud...

...The movement's beginnings were marked by an attack upon what were seen as the rationalizations of Freudian theory for the subordination of women...

...But her task is difficult, for she recognizes that the patriachal family not only has preceded bourgeois society and survived the collapse of capitalism in many countries, but has also coexisted with recorded human civilization...

...But its virtue is that it accords to victims of oppression an ability to change their situation, imposing upon them a corresponding responsibility for change...

...However, they have yet to do the work necessary (and now possible) to extricate themselves from their historical inheritance and to live authentic, self-determiningrather than reflexive—lives...

...women within revolutionary feminism can be the spearhead of general ideological change as the working class is the agency of the overthrow of the specifically capitalist mode of production...

...II Mitchell's critical aims are as ambitious in Part II of her book as her constructive aims in Part I: here she takes on such diverse thinkers as Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Kate Millett...

...Given our incomplete scientific knowledge of the causes of human actions and consciousness, the moral component of a social theory can be a ground for accepting as well as rejecting its analysis...

...Grown men become the creators and primary protectors of morality and cultural norms, according to Freud: "The male sex seems to have taken the lead in all these moral acquisitions [religion, morality, and a social sense...

...205 Mitchell's account of Freud's theory captures all the subtleties of his explanation of why women are socially and psychically underdeveloped relative to men...

...One might look to John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women as a preliminary model...

...Mitchell, like other radical Freudians, tries to call into question the necessity of the patriarchal nuclear family...

...In theory, of course, an explanation is possible...

...Mitchell, I think, is correct in believing that to understand woman's present situation one needs the tools of a depth psychology...

...Male and female children start out with equal desires and needs in the nuclear family according to Freud: each is attached to and desires to possess his or her mother...

...7See Freud, New Introductory Lectures (New York: Norton 1964), p. 124...

...14For an excellent analysis of this sort, see Nancy Chodorow's recent work, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978...

...Mitchell defends Freud against this common charge of determinism in a puzzling fashion by pointing out that: Freud's science uses the concept of overdetermination...

...16 I wish to thank Michael Doyle, Abigail Erdmann, Sanford Levinson, Susan Okin, and the editors of Dissent for their helpful comments...

...Although women have subordinate roles in our society, they have not been forced into them by men—at least not in any simple sense of "force...

...15 Mitchell, I believe, would want to accept Beauvoir's conclusion in The Second Sex that "in order to explain her limitations, it is woman's situation that must be invoked and not a mysterious essence...

...There Lasch applauds Mitchell's criticisms of feminist revisionists of Freud, concluding that "Freud tells us far more about women's degradation than the enemies of Freud can even begin to tell us...

...Mitchell's perspective relieves women of responsibility for their situation, but to be relieved of all responsibility may also entail 211 being deprived of all dignity...

...Mitchell objects to the existential component of Beauvoir's theory because existentialism is a philosophy (a "system of belief' is Mitchell's alternative term) and because it is a philosophy that discounts the significance of the unconscious...

...A theory of human behavior positing multiple causation may be more subtle or sophisticated than a unicausal model, but it is no less troubling to anyone committed to the view that people are to some significant extent creative, not created, beings...

...There she proposed, among other things, a new differentiation of functions: freeing women from the necessity of bearing children and freeing the decision to reproduce from the expectation that the mother will be the major child-rearer and housekeeper...

...I shall argue, however, that Mitchell's refusal to assess Freud's theory on the basis of its implications rests upon a naive conception of the status of that theory as a science, and on a mistaken assumption that "hard" empirical evidence is available to prove his theory (as a whole...

...Since she is committed to the Freudian model, she cannot say that biological sexual differences have no independent causal impact on the dependency of women within the family, but neither is she willing explicitly to accept the more 208 pessimistic implications of a Freudian explanation: that women will be the second, subordinate sex as long as the family exists...

...A sociological explanation is plausible: the feminist revival of Freud in the '70s may be connected to the failure of the women's movement in the late '60s...

...Another potential path to woman's liberation follows from the view that the superiority accorded to the penis within the nuclear family is a symptom of the general superiority of men in society rather than a cause of women's subordination...

...By defining woman as "other," man had projected onto her all that he wished to deny in himself, but at the same time wished to receive from someone else in psychological as well as material assistance...

...However, the Freudian model she has chosen in Psychoanalysis and Feminism will not take her to the egalitarian, pluralist solution she preferred in Woman's Estate, a society in which a variety of family structures are recognized as legitimate, each of which accords relatively equal status to its adult members...

...It would be difficult to provide a comprehensive alternative theory that is both internally consistent and compatible with equality...

...At the same time, the belief that an egalitarian restructuring of the nuclear family will elevate women to a position equal to that of the "first" sex, while irreconcilable with Freud's theory, is by no means irrational...

...Mitchell recognizes that the oppression of women is not a straightforward case of exploitation...

...neither he nor Mitchell offers any hypotheses of how such an unconscious is passed along between generations...

...In order to call in good faith for women to liberate themselves, one must build a theory that admits that they are capable of perceiving their interests and of engaging in responsible political action...

...2See, e.g., Christopher Lasch's review, "Freud and Women," New York Review of Books, October 3, 1974, pp...

...Let me begin by asking why—given all he has become notorious for saying about woman, her penis-envy, her narcissistic, masochistic, and hysterical tendencies—does a feminist writer want to revive Freud's theory...

...In Freud's view, psychoanalysis can provide us with the truth...

...Unlike Freud's and Marx's theories, these are normative philosophies (ideologies) rather than sciences of human behavior...

...The basic Oedipal situation the female child faces will remain the same in any family structure consisting of one male and one female parent...

...In addition to having less active aims than men (who primarily wish "to love" rather than "to be loved"), women's moral development is stunted by the family...

...Neither Levi-Strauss nor Marx enables Mitchell to surmount the basic obstacles Freud's theory places in the way of woman's liberation: that women are transformed from bisexual beings into the subordinate sex by the nuclear family and that civilization (not just bourgeois society) is dependent upon that "holy family" for its stability, perpetuation, and progress...

...However similar in some respects, women's oppression is distinct from that of blacks: we have been more acquiescent in our subordination despite the smaller (though by no means insignificant) number of barriers to our entry into the public domain...

...8It is significant that Freud never considers equalizing roles within the family and socioeconomic positions within society as a solution to woman's psychic underdevelopment...

...She elevates Freudian theory to the explanatory framework we need in order to understand the psyche of woman in modern society and the possibilities for her liberation...

...Freud has been defended not only against those overtly hostile to psychological theory in general but also against feminist revisionists...

...But the truth will not set us free...

...But it is surely as plausible to hypothesize that woman's consciousness is less than totally determined by her historical inheritance...

...Since feminist issues are among the most important on the political agenda today and we are now pressed to take some provisional stand on questions of social determinism versus human autonomy, why choose the more deterministic view if we have no hard evidence on either side...

...Mitchell does not take this path, perhaps because she realizes that though it would make the destruction of the family unnecessary, it would do so only at the cost of overturning Freud's own psychological model of sexual development, replacing it with the view that sexual differences within the family are a reflection of nonsexual—e.g., socioeconomic— differences between men and women...

...But she argues first that Freudian theory leaves open certain paths for the liberation of women, and then that these paths can be more clearly mapped by following the leads of LeviStrauss and Marx...

...6 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: Bantam, 1965), pp...

...Perhaps it points her toward a society in which the nuclear family has been overcome...

...The social conditions of work under capitalism potentially contain the overthrow of the exploitative conditions into which they are harnessed and it is these same social conditions of work that make potentially redundant the laws of patriarchal culture...

...Thus, although Mitchell still appears to be concerned with the possibilities of transforming patriarchal society through collective action, she fails to see how far her political hopes are from Freudian possibilities...

...Will, for example, a restructured (nonpatriarchal) nuclear family eliminate women's psychic subordination...

...in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of countless egos...

...We may therefore expect that the family will be more central to an explanation of women's subordination than to an explanation of the continued oppression of blacks...

...But one cannot in good faith adopt Freud's analysis of how woman's estate is created and perpetuated and at the same time reject the pessimistic implications of that analysis...

...The need for the patriarchal family within civilization, she argues, has never been a biological one...

...Psychoanalysis would be at best a very longterm solution, one not now available to the majority of women (or men...

...Mitchell, however, chooses to carry the enormous burden of conservative Freudian analysis with no compelling reason or justification...

...5 For a challenge to this contention, see Women, Culture and Society, Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds...

...13John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 579...

...But surely this does not make the matter any better...

...and they seem to have been transmitted to women by cross-inheritance...

...The only potential "solution" Freudian analysis offers to this bleak view of our potential for liberation operates (at least initially) on an individual level: psychoanalysis...

...Some theories can be rejected as being less comprehensive and as making less sense of the same observations than others...

...12 So, indeed, even if Freud's is a scientific theory, as Mitchell claims, we might still argue that a necessary component of that theory is its compatibility with our firmest intuitions concerning the nature of woman and the possibilities for her conscious liberation...

...But when little girls realize that by comparison to males they are castrated, they reject their similarly penis-less mothers...

...Unfortunately, we are never told...

...and that in the absence of 204 such evidence, there are more plausible premises upon which to base a theoretical position...

...it is women who stand at the heart of the contradiction of patriarchy under capitalism...

...All this suggests that some psychological explanation of the subordination of women is necessary to supplement explanations couched in political and economic terms...

...See also p. 581...

...2 Juliet Mitchell, the English writer, has been an intellectual leader of this movement to defend Freud and Freudianism...

...Mitchell perhaps would not want to go that far, but to be consistent with her Freudian analysis and her feminist commitments she must call for the destruction of the nuclear family...

...10The Ego and the Id, p. 28...

...This is a complex notion of "multiple causation" in which the numerous factors can reinforce, overlap, cancel each other out, or contradict one another—a very different proposition from that suggested by simple determinism...

...Can anything short of the complete destruction of the nuclear family liberate women...

...Along with Mitchell, we would have to swallow our pride as women and begin to wonder how, given Freud's theory, we happened to have such pride...

...The first is that they fail to take the unconscious (as Freud understood it) seriously, the second that they are unscientific...

...Therefore, I am interested not only in demonstrating that Mitchell's defense of Freud fails, but in what that failure—since it is so significant—can tell us about the problems of woman's estate...

...A little boy on the other hand need never abandon his active desires...

...Why then choose Freud's theory if you are ultimately interested in finding a way for women to get themselves out of their present situation...

...It is the working class as a class that has the products of its social 206 labour privately appropriated by the capitalist class...

...But unlike Freud (and Marx), she sees the need for a separate cultural revolution to overthrow the patriarchal family: A specific struggle against patriarchy—a cultural revolution—is requisite...

...First, following Mitchell's insight, any adequate explanation of woman's estate must consider the psychological dimensions of her present situation: what socialization within an inegalitarian (patriarchal) family structure does to women's conscious aims and unconscious desires...

...He is simply "taught" by the threatening authority of his father to shift his active desires to a safer female object—i.e., away from his mother...

...The Oedipal situation pushes female children into a passivity toward their fathers and later, by extension, their husbands...

...207 Let us assume that women find some way to overcome the burden of their unconscious, and therefore are prepared to challenge the institutions that have subordinated them...

...16 Notes 'Reprinted as "Psychology Constructs the Female," in Radical Feminism, Anne Koedt et al., eds...

...Third, using the insight of Beauvoir's existentialism, this theory would characterize human nature in such a way as to allow for rational political action among both women and men...

...The marks of womanhood are akin to scars: "masochism," "passivity," "vanity," `jealously," and "a limited sense of justice" all follow from woman's place in the family...

...Here is one plausible reason why a radical feminist writer would want to adopt a Freudian framework...

...4 The Ego and the Id (New York: Norton, 1962), p.27...

...To a revisionism of Freud and Marx, Beauvoir added an existential philosophy...

...The ability to change would entail another theory, one that accords the unconscious less permanence and the conscious more independent control...

...The original biological family was transformed long ago by the taboo on incest, a taboo essential for societies to cohere: "This prohibition [on incest] forces one family to give up one of its members to another family...

...67-68...

...Mitchell needs then to take Freud off his pedestal and to recognize that his social theory, like every other, will facilitate some moral judgments and some political actions rather than others...

...12-17...

...In addition, Freud tried to tell us that civilization would be threatened by the breakdown of the patriarchal nuclear family, since the foundation of morality and culture—the male superego— would thereby lose its raison d'être...

...Neither Mitchell nor Levi-Strauss explains why the objects of social exchange must always have been women rather than men (indeed this is a disputed contention), 5 but the question of how patriarchal civilization developed is not one with which I now wish to burden Mitchell's analysis...

...Only male children will be psychologically forced to integrate the moral prohibitions placed upon them by their fathers, and they will thereby develop a superego...

...6 Freud concluded that people are horde animals, always unconsciously seeking to be led by a (male) chief...

...Its function was clear: by viewing men and women as makers of their own meaning in life, as self-creative beings, Beauvoir had a powerful (though partial) explanation both of why women had become the second sex and of how they might extricate themselves from their present situation...

...120f course, theories in both science and social science still can be partially assessed on the basis of empirical observations...

...Here she invokes a neo-Marxist analysis: advanced capitalist civilization has passed beyond the point where it "needs" its discontents, whether they be the discontents of alienated labor or of sexism: Under capitalism, just as the economic mode of production contains its own contradiction, so too does the ideological mode of reproduction...

...I can only offer some suggestions...

...The more crucial question is whether this cultural necessity for male dominance still exists...

...Naomi Weisstein's "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law," widely read among feminists of the New Left, represented the prevailing attitude toward psychological theory: Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know...

...Stanford University Press, 1974...

...it is always men who exchange women...

...Whether or not Freud took the nuclear, patriarchal family as a quasi-biological given, Mitchell clearly is anxious to establish the cultural relativism of the patriarchal family...

...Many philosophers of natural science now argue that this is also true of "hard" scientific theories...

...Yet, her interpretation of Freud's theory lends itself to a still more conservative lesson...

...Feminist aspirations need not be directed to abolishing the nuclear family—the only logical choice that Mitchell's Freudianism leaves open...

...Freud's analysis by contrast is couched in deterministic terms...

...The latter sort of explanation may be valid but will certainly be insufficient to explain why a majority of women have not yet rebelled against their unequal status...

...Since I take Beauvoir's Second Sex to be by far the most intellectually compelling of the feminist books Mitchell examines and also the one closest in spirit to Mitchell's own work, I will concentrate upon her critique of that work...

...Even if Freud's explanation of women's subordination is not a biological one, it still requires us to believe that the psychic and social subordination of women will persist so long as the family exists...

...It is unfortunate that Mitchell has rejected entirely these insights of Beauvoir's work just as it would be unfortunate if we failed to accord any weight to the unconscious and to cultural determination...

...These are goals worthy of theoretical as well as practical pursuit...

...thus the future remains largely open...

...In its extreme form, Beauvoir's existentialism is too voluntaristic...

...15 Finally, such a theory would make explicit its prescriptive purposes: in attempting to discover the preconditions for equality between the sexes, it would also assess the extent to which that equality is possible and desirable, and the value of achieving or trying to achieve it within some sort of familial structure...

...What are the consequences for feminism— especially for the feminist view of the family— of Mitchell's adoption of Freudian theory...

...Is this meant to imply that we might abolish the former without destroying the latter...

...In the process of this paternal "education," a little boy develops his own moral conscience (superego), thereby transcending the Oedipus complex on his way to becoming a mature man...

...But first we must ask for that independent evidence necessary to support Freud's theory of femininity and the collective unconscious...

...Women therefore were not originally responsible for their situation...

...She seeks a means for rational, collective action among women...

...but Mitchell gives us no indication in Psychoanalysis and Feminism of what such a society would look like...

...They are not happy ones...

...Despite her earlier disclaimers concerning the idea of a collective unconscious, Mitchell attributes the persistence of the patriarchal family beyond the era of its social necessity to its ideology, passed down for centuries through our collective, cultural unconscious: "The patriarchal law speaks to and through each person in his (and her) unconscious...

...Second, even were we to find some agent of change, it is not clear whether changing the family (without destroying it) eliminates women's psychic subordination...

...13 Justifications of both sorts of theories are only established once the starting points are accepted (in Freud's case, his basic view of human nature) and the conclusions are recognized as plausible (that women have little or no opportunity for self-conscious liberation...

...14 Second, such a theory would consider how past and present economic and political barriers to woman's equality reinforce the psychological dimension of her estate...

...11"Freud and Women," p. 12...

...8 Then one no longer has Freud's theory of sexual development, only Freudian imagery.' At times Mitchell seems to be moving in this direction...

...Existentialism views people as having made certain choices in life, or as having abdicated choice, 209 and therefore as at least partially and potentially self-determining...

...Mitchell has two fundamental criticisms of all of these works—each revealing her intended faithfulness to Freud...

...Affirming that woman's consciousness is unconsciously molded by a sexually inegalitarian inheritance, Mitchell's analysis must lead one to wonder whether woman can ever consciously rid her estate of that entailment...

...Their originally active desire to possess their mothers is transformed into a passive desire to be possessed by their fathers...

...The same situation has been interpreted much less favorably by other women, but the comfort and value, if not satisfaction, that a significant proportion of women find in families cannot be doubted...

...One might, of course, still claim that Freud's analysis is correct, despite its pessimistic implications concerning woman's future...

...She rightly takes Freud to have been more concerned with explanation— although I shall argue that explanation in Freud's theory connects more closely to a political position than Mitchell recognizes...