Abstract
In these revisionist times, classical psychoanalytic constructions of femininity, long the focus of controversy and debate, give way to new formulations, new narrative models. Theorists who participate in this revisionist project seek to understand female development on its own terms, moving away from the masculine focus that entered into Freud’s constructions of gender difference. In Electra vs Oedipus, the 2011 translation of her 1997 book, Hendrika C. Freud writes with a wisdom that is shaped by her therapeutic work with women, helping them understand the profound impact of their positioning as daughters in relation to their mothers and, often enough, in turn, as mothers to their daughters. Calling upon the cultural vocabulary of myth to modify classical psychoanalytic views of the centrality of Oedipus, Freud positions Electra as her mythic model, making the case for “the fateful struggle of Electra as a paradigm for conflicts in female development” (p. 3). Over the course of chapters that make steady use of clinical material to work out theoretical insights, while incorporating historical perspectives on motherhood, the myth of Electra serves to highlight mother-daughter conflicts as a central dynamic in the emotional lives of women.
Particularly poignant for Hendrika Freud is the tension between symbiotic longings and murderous hate that shapes Electra’s relationship with her mother, and it is this deeply ambivalent relationship that emerges as her focus. It allows for a rich and broad consideration of permutations in mother-daughter relationships, with the awareness that her women patients occupy one or both of these roles. This use of myth can be compared to the work that Nancy Kulish and Deanna Holtzman (2008) carry out in A Story of Her Own, with some salient differences. Myth offers to all three psychoanalysts a cultural storehouse of narrative models, whose variants prove useful in framing unconscious fantasies and reconfiguring female development. Nevertheless, Kulish and Holtzman criticize the phallocentrism they see as intrinsic to oedipal terminology, invoking Demeter and Persephone as an alternative to oedipal constructions of femininity that emphasize castration, penis envy, and the equation of baby with phallus; in place of Oedipus, they refer simply to triangulation.
This is in contrast to the approach of Hendrika Freud, who retains the use of Oedipus to underscore the importance of the oedipal triangle in the development of girls, as well as boys, while criticizing the failure of early analysts to appreciate the impact of the girl’s attachment to the mother. (She speculates that Freud’s analysis of his daughter Anna may have led him to emphasize the girl’s oedipal relationship with the father, to the relative exclusion of the mother, given that Anna’s attachment to her father figured so much more prominently in her emotional life.) The tension between Electra and Oedipus that her title conveys allows her to use Electra to elaborate more fully the permutations of mother-daughter relationships in the lives of women. Thus, she retains the concept of an oedipal stage while bypassing the phallocentric aspects of a developmental model that names only Oedipus.
What is it about myth that attracts contemporary writers in search of new formulations? Myth constructs a scene and populates it, allowing for narrative representation that involves characters and conflict, action in time. While the narrative universe of myth—the world of the story—may reflect patriarchal values in the distribution of roles, positions, and relationships, traces of resistance are also discernible in accounts of actions that disrupt a fixed order. Moreover, myths exist in their variations: there is no one authoritative version. Considering myth as part of an ongoing process of cultural transmission that involves both continuity and change, we can see its appeal to contemporary writers as varied as the Dutch psychoanalyst Hendrika Freud, the American clinician theorists Kulish and Holtzman, and the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. For each, myths are old stories whose variations open up new views of women’s relationships to others and to themselves, including their own bodies.
Citing the work of Kulish and Holtzman on reconsidering the oedipus complex in light of separation issues in women’s lives, Freud underscores the exclusiveness of the mother-daughter dyad as a hindrance to the triangulation of the oedipus complex and the process of individuation, as well as a way of avoiding aggression (pp. 11–12). This is where she diverges from Kulish and Holtzman, who challenge the developmental sequence that identifies the mother-daughter dyad as primitive precursor to the oedipal triangle; they argue instead for the girl’s ongoing participation in a dyadic relationship as a constitutive feature of her femininity. Freud recognizes that connectedness is a fundamental feature of feminine subjectivity, but sees the “symbiotic illusion” that daughters so often suffer from as an impediment to women’s autonomous functioning. She takes great care to differentiate between the pathological issues that bring patients to her, on the one hand, and the constitutive elements of femininity that derive from a deep sense of mother-daughter connectedness, on the other.
A great strength of this book lies in its author’s understanding of unconscious communication across the generations. Abundant clinical examples demonstrate how embedded the mother-daughter relationship is in women’s lives, as it plays out over time in daughters who become mothers and those who do not, whether by choice or circumstance. Attentive to intergenerational links, Freud observes that motherhood is “at least a three-generational experience that awakens ancient fears and conflicts” (p. 21). Family history thus frames her accounts of individual patients, as she draws attention to patterns and repetitions. This sensitivity to the ways in which emotional attitudes, buried secrets, and old resentments reverberate from one generation to the next is a distinctive feature of her work.
The focus on Electra offers Freud a kind of shorthand notation for the intricate ambivalences that enter into mother-daughter relationships, viewed from the different perspectives of her patients as mothers and daughters. The myth underscores her insistence on the centrality of this relationship to any understanding of femininity. Strikingly, it organizes her inquiry into a whole spectrum of positions, including a chapter on the position of the mother who is rejected, a point of view she finds to be absent in both ancient and modern versions of the myth. One might compare this to the value that Kulish and Holtzman find in myth as a way of giving names to phenomena without fixing them rigidly into place in a developmental schema. Rather than accepting a myth as a coherent whole, they draw upon elements of myth in a somewhat improvisational manner, as a resource that helps to articulate patterns and work toward generalizations. The myths surrounding Demeter and Persephone, in their hands, offer shifting views of the mother-daughter relationship that allow greater space for depictions of specifically female pleasures in embodiment, including the little girl’s pleasure in bodily display.
Myth emerges as cultural process rather than fixed narrative in these approaches. By way of contrast and complementarity in the uses of myth, consider the work of Cixous, whose “Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) is by now a classic feminist manifesto, calling for new ways of experiencing femininity as abundance rather than lack. Using myth to battle myth, Cixous counters Freud’s reading of Medusa as a depiction of the horror of castration. For Cixous, difference becomes the occasion for a celebration of feminine difference: “You have only to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (p. 267). (Similarly, Kulish and Holtzman highlight the role of Baubo, the old woman who exposes her vulva to the grieving Demeter and thus brings her to a restorative laughter.) Affirming a distinctively feminine mode of expression that is rooted in the body, Cixous seeks to reverse and undo the gendered opposition of presence to absence, possession to lack. She proclaims the value of a feminine jouissance, an overflow of sensations that she links to a new form of expression; working with writing and femininity in the sense of fluids that overflow, she signals the white ink that inscribes a new kind of writing, an écriture féminine.
Both Catherine Clément and Hendrika Freud assign particular importance to hysteria in the development of psychoanalysis and in feminine development. Clément, who reads Freud with imaginative discernment, finds in Studies on Hysteria traces of Freud’s openness to the feminine in himself. (In The Newly Born Woman [Cixous and Clément 1975] she groups him with other male writers who share this quality, among them Flaubert and the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet.) For Clément, this receptivity on Freud’s part is integral to his discovery of the unconscious. Extending that process of inquiry, Cixous and Clément write to explore the resources of the unconscious, as a way of undoing the constraints of the binary thinking that delimits and limits gender.
I find it interesting that Freud brings her book to a close with a chapter on hysteria. Why this look to the past in a book that seeks to revise earlier formulations of feminine identity and relationship? Opening this chapter with an historical view, she reclaims the theoretical value of hysteria as a descriptive term that takes in women’s investment in bodily issues, as well as a specifically feminine sense of the porousness of the boundaries between self and other. (She also acclaims the value of Freud’s more tentative formulations in Studies on Hysteria over some of the more sweeping generalizations that inform later pronouncements.) Thus, hysteria becomes for Hendrika Freud almost another myth of femininity, in the sense that the qualities associated with it are so intimately caught up in women’s experiences of their bodies and their relationships. Her book is also very much a study of the transferential responses of women to a female therapist, yet another way in which this study highlights a rich and embedded network of relationships among women.