Elaine Hoffman Baruch and Lucienne J. Serrano's Women Analyze Women and Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love
Coser, Rose Laub
WOMEN ANALYZE WOMEN: IN FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES, by Elaine Hoffman Baruch and Lucienne J. Serrano. New York: New York University Press, 1988. THE BONDS OF LOVE: PSYCHOANALYSIS,...
...It was not enough to see prostitution as part of the pathology of the class system, there was a whole literature—not necessarily of the highest order—that extolled the human virtues of prostitutes...
...the son will become the father, denying freedom and equality to others...
...And even more important, psychoanalysis is the first organized profession in which from the beginning women were treated exactly the same as men...
...Most are followers of Lacan (although they have broken with him individually, at different times), who deliberately favored theory over clinical work...
...On the social level, male rationality sabotages maternal recognition, while on the psychic level the oedipal repudiation of the mother splits her into the debased and the idealized objects...
...q 120 • DISSENT...
...Each of them is also like certain others: the French will be French, Anglo-Saxons will be Anglo-Saxons...
...Gender equalization requires, of course, a revision of oedipal theory...
...Anglo-Saxon thought usually has empirical reference...
...And it is more: an astute commentary on the contributions and foibles of the analysts presented in this book...
...She integrates into the psychoanalytic framework the concept of recognition, by which she means empathy or identification with the other...
...As Hanna Segal puts it, "I think Freud's theory that little girls think they have got the penis and then discover they don't is bunko...
...but her references are to the social world...
...The authors chose nine women from France, four from Britain, and five from the United States, most of them therapists...
...Here we encounter talk of the "archaic mother," the "phallic mother," the "devouring mother," the "all-powerful mother...
...British and American respondents give examples, usually from their cases, and in their theories refer to experiences with patients...
...Yet she goes on to propose a general strike of women: "We would no longer do the housework, we would no longer have children, we would no longer make love, nor would we go to the factory any more...
...the children "turn to mother and father for different things...
...Of special interest in this book is the interview with Jessica Benjamin...
...Mother-bashing is fashionable in this country as well...
...In the first, Baruch and Serrano present us with interviews with women analysts from France, Britaii,, and the United States, who not only tell how they use psychoanalytic theory in their analyses of women but also how they adapt psychoanalysis to a feminist orientation...
...It seems to me that all the language of culture favors a woman who is at the same time enclosed and enclosing...
...At the same time, the interviews reveal some national differences in psychoanalytic thought and intellectual orientation...
...And elsewhere she says: "The woman is enclosed in her kitchen as if in a prison...
...the issue is not how we become free of the other, but how we actively engage and make ourselves known in relationship to the other...
...Monique Schneider says, "I think that the primitive mother brings death to the extent that she denies or renders useless visions of mastery, of conquest with which men want to identify...
...If this isn't feminist, what is...
...All respondents are followers of psychoanalysis in that they accept theories of the unconscious and the psychoanalytic meaning of symbolism...
...One of the French analysts, Joyce McDougall— who came from New Zealand and was trained in London—is an exception...
...Even if the destructive mother is seen as part of a misogynist culture, why attach negative labels to the underdog...
...There is not a linear development "from oneness to separateness...
...But this raises another question...
...When [children] discover the biological sex differences, each sex wants what the other has" (Donna Bassin...
...Even Luce Irigary, whom I would consider the most radical feminist of all, says, "I don't particularly care for the term feminism...
...Whether they call themselves feminists or not, they all reject Freud's psychology of women, first of all the concept of penis envy...
...The symbolic structure of gender polarity produces the fantastic ideal of motherhood even as it stimulates the fear of destroying all maternal goodness...
...Benjamin's notion of interaction in her own book is useful for understanding the character of the interviews in Women Analyze Women...
...Benjamin's theory, together with Baruch and Serrano's volume of interviews, covers a wide span of dissenting psychoanalytic thought...
...Benjamin sees a basic tension between the assertion of self and recognition of the other, between a claim for independence and dependency on or attachment to the other...
...The son, after rebelling against paternal authority, may well want to reproduce it...
...It is to be hoped that recognition of the misogynist nature of such images will become more widespread here and will soon cross the Atlantic...
...The one who is dominant no longer recognizes the other...
...Why not...
...They are of the "I-am-not-a-feminist-but" variety...
...Little boys are also envious of the mother's role and her power to attract the father and make babies with him" (Joyce McDougall...
...In her interview she makes it clear that she does not mean to imply that dominance and submission are always differentiated by gender, only that our society and culture exercise pressure for a predominance of such gender differentiation...
...Nonetheless, it is hard to accept the inconsistency in the thoughts of Chassequet-Smirgel...
...They all amend psychoanalytic theory and criticize one or another of Freud's ideas, but they do so in individual ways...
...It should be clear that Benjamin departs from traditional psychoanalytic thought, where the desire for power is rooted in castration anxiety and in the aggressive instinct...
...Freud's reductionist view of the Oedipus legend treats only patricide and incest...
...For example, feminism as a great idea can become filled up with the content that only women are the bearers of some historical truths, just as people once thought that the proletariat was the bearer of the struggle for a just society...
...On the other hand, Freud was the first to treat women as human beings . . . he gave a proper place to female sexuality...
...New York: Pantheon Books, 1988...
...In her book, Benjamin uses feminist theory to analyze the psychology of domination and submission...
...For her, the basis for human development as well as for human togetherness and equality is mutual recogniWINTER • 1990 • 119 tion, that is, affective mutuality, the sharing of states of mind...
...As different as these analysts are, they have much in common...
...The fact that these analysts refrain from developing a common notion about gender similarities or differences is certainly to their credit...
...As a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a disciple of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin calls for a change in social organization and for a recognition of men and women as equal subjects...
...These two books come to the rescue...
...The exceptions are the literary critic Diana Trilling and Dorothy Dinnerstein, a professor of psychology and author of The Mermaid and the Minotaur...
...A total confusion of roles—the father who gives the child something to eat, who stays at home, the mother who goes to work...
...It is not just that every individual, beginning in infancy, is subject to the influence of others and has to be understood in relation to the environment...
...She believes, for example, that the oedipal organization refers to the structure of law and order...
...The "but" is important because they usually make what I consider feminist statements...
...The introduction to Women Analyze Women is a clear exposition of these trends...
...It was difficult for liberals to admit that some workers can be authoritarian, that some prostitutes are immoral and selfish, and that some mental patients are nasty, aggressive, and obnoxious...
...Francoise Petitot recognizes the social factor in gender differences: "It is primarily language that creates the difference...
...Benjamin develops a new theory of sadomasochism: both in exercising power and in submitting to it, each partner strives for recognition, but who will become object and who will become subject is socially patterned, whether in the relation between master and slave or in the relation between man and woman...
...During the years when the rights of mental patients were suddenly discovered, in the fifties, they were considered the purest, and their therapists were often seen as akin to brutal jailers (and some of them were...
...Benjamin's theorizing is a fine attempt to integrate feminist and psychoanalytic theories and in this way to contribute to the advancement of psychoanalysis itself...
...Joyce McDougall, for example, who believes that "perhaps the men of tomorrow may reconcile tender and erotic feelings better than the old generation," believes that women "are afraid of being abandoned, of losing their lovers...
...The contradictions in the French analysts' image of the mother have their parallel in the fact that they are ambivalent about calling themselves feminists...
...I wonder if this is really positive...
...But these analysts spell out gender differences as well as similarities...
...Reconciling psychoanalytic theory with feminism is no easy task...
...The image of the underdog was once the opposite: those who fought for the rights of the working class had a tendency to idealize the image of the Worker...
...THE BONDS OF LOVE: PSYCHOANALYSIS, FEMINISM...
...It is not clear whether perhaps Schneider doesn't mean to say that this destructive mother is the result of a patriarchal system, for she adds that "all possible dangers are put on her side in order to make the function of the father essential, so that the mother is the danger and the father the redeemer...
...She criticizes theories that single out mothers as bearing the responsibility for neurotic child development: "Psychoanalysis is always talking about what's good for the infant...
...And a little later: "It seems to me indispensable for the mental health of a child that there be a difference between father and mother...
...The girl would like a penis like her father...
...He doesn't treat the two matricides, those of the Sphinx and Jocasta" (Monique Schneider...
...In true Hegelian tradition (Benjamin was trained in the Frankfurt School), she sees in the ideal of freedom, paradoxically, the seeds of domination...
...but the negative image that was prevalent in psychology and psychiatry and that was propagated with such labels as the "overprotective mother," the "domineering mother," the "schizophrenegenic mother," has been pretty much given up by now by the more enlightened representatives of the professions— in part because in the United States one doesn't stay very long with the same theories, in part because it has been recognized by the more sophisticated intellectuals that these are cliches, in part because—I like to think mainly because—the women's movement has had its influence in uprooting sexist images...
...I am singling her out not only for this reason, but because of her recent book, The Bonds of Love...
...Yes, we say, the circumstances are terrible, women are being exploited and dominated, and hence they are archaic, primitive, destructive, domineering, what have you...
...Not only is her theory grounded in the real world (and please don't ask "what is real...
...She continues: "The attempt to grasp it in its entirety is probably even dangerous...
...Not only do parents shape their children's identity in accordance with the culture, but cultural patterns of polarity are being transmitted to young individuals directly...
...Those enlightened liberals would not consider the possibility that underdogs and victims are just like everybody else—good, bad, and indifferent...
...AND THE PROBLEM OF DOMINATION, by Jessica Benjamin...
...she kills an image that he wants to have of himself...
...The richness of these interviews comes, at least in part, from their not being merely responses to questions but being dialogues in which ideas emerge from the interaction between interviewer and respondent...
...There is a general tendency toward theoretical gender equalization...
...But it's not in the factory that we are most trapped—it is in the reproductive function...
...This adds to the intellectually gratifying reading...
...When the tension between dependency and independence becomes intolerable, the individual either gives up dependency and becomes dominant, or gives up independence...
...but what about the mother's needs...
...But with women and mothers this train of thought is being turned around...
...What is most striking in the interviews with French psychoanalysts is their conception of the infant's pre-oedipal stage...
...But then she disapproves of the sharing of parenting: "The father is close to his baby...
...118 • DISSENT Books Compare this with Hanna Segal, who believes that when two parents "share the child-rearing tasks, I don't believe they're identical...
...During the oedipal stage of development, the father becomes the symbol of separation and of denial of dependency...
...Men, on the other hand, are frantic about getting trapped into a situation from which they cannot escape, as terrified of this as women are of losing their security...
...The child's development is not just one of gradual separation from the mother, but consists in learning how to "recognize others...
...That is, she breaks, she destroys the image, she doesn't kill man...
...He represents the principle of freedom and independence...
...The French, by contrast, develop their theories in the abstract, hardly mentioning experiences with patients, and if reference there is, it is to myths or to the Bible...
...She speaks about the idealization of the father in existing theories: "The problem that we're trying to understand is either why the father is idealized the way he is, or why the mother is feared in the way she is...
...She states, "The man and the woman are essentially bisexual at the psychological level, for each of them identifies with the two parents and not only with the parent of the same sex," and she recognizes that "there isn't a complete separation of the sexes...
...At the same time she integrates psychological and sociological analysis to deal with the cultural polarity of gender...
...The one who is dominated is hungry for recognition and therefore accepts submission as a means for achieving it, yet remains insatiable, and continues the pattern in the face of frustrations, humiliations, and pain...
...for Benjamin, subject and object are engaged in interaction...
...Her judgment is unequivocal: "For me, feminism is a revolutionary and wonderful idea that we are seldom able to grasp in its entirety...
...This pattern is one in which there is a "gendered discourse," in which instrumental orientation and impersonality are considered masculine, separated from moral and emotional experience, which is considered feminine...
...there is a balance between them...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
