Abstract
Many practicing analysts share Nancy Chodorow’s sociocultural history. We grew up in an era when heterosexual object choice was “normal”; penis envy, even in its shibboleth form, was central to analytic thinking; gender was one of two things, male or female; and sexuality was private and phallocentric.
Although sixty years later feminism has changed our culture, the general public is reading about parenting of gender-fluid children in settings that support full self-expression (Padawar 2012), and APsaA’s Committee on Gender and Sexuality generates position papers on societal and clinical issues, there are analysts who still struggle with oversimplified thinking.
Chodorow’s most recent book, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice, is an elegant antidote to any lag in one’s appreciation of the complexity of the issues. The candor, intelligence, and creativity of the author models a probing scientific spirit and an appreciation for subtlety and individuality. The book is a tour through theory where the focus is gender and sexuality and the outcome is a compelling education in critical thinking. A founding feminist, a founding American relational thinker, a sociologist devoted to understanding the internal development of the individual as opposed to external social structures, and a classical-modernist psychoanalyst, Chodorow is all these things yet remains free of any particular school of thought. She charts her own course.
The book is a collection of essays written between 1971 and 2005 and viewed by her in 2011. She introduces each chapter/essay in a way that informs the reader of the original context and purpose of each essay (or invited talk), and she critiques and updates herself in elucidating, fascinating ways. She is in conversation with her readers: updating, expanding, focusing our attention.
A special feature of this book is the opportunity to get to know Nancy Chodorow. She is as courageous and purposeful in her inclusion of autobiographical information as she is in her career-long ability to challenge accepted theory or the absence thereof. Her strong, clear voice comes through explicitly and implicitly as she details the trajectory of her career as an academic in sociology and a clinician in psychoanalysis. A well-developed theme in this book, and in her career, is her penchant for looking closely at precisely what is taken for granted, assumed to be true, and therefore remains unexplored. In asking simple questions, she moves to the heart of the matter, in all its complexity.
The book begins with the chapter “Psychoanalysis and Women from Margin to Center: A Retrospect.” It offers an important overview of psychoanalytic thinking about women and of Chodorow’s academic and clinical career. She is able to present her intellectual trajectory from historical and personal perspectives in the synthesizing manner that characterizes all her work. We are introduced to her immense theoretical contributions and, importantly, to both the general cultural and the specific personal contexts in which they developed. The origins of her strong voice come alive as she shares her personal experience of living on the margin as a childhood transplant from New York to the rural mid-Peninsula, pre–Silicon Valley of California and her centering identifications with educated “pioneer women” on the maternal side of her family and, on her physicist father’s side, “an especial capacity to see linkages and structure—connections among widely disparate scientific theories and discoveries, often heard of years apart—in ways that enabled him to conceptualize comprehensively, leaving nothing out . . .” (p. 5).
In this introductory chapter, Chodorow shows how the history of psychoanalytic attention to the psychology of women has been characterized by an insider-outsider reality. Beginning with Freud, who remained on the margin of academe, in part because of his Jewishness, but who possessed personal qualities that resulted in extensive original work, the relation of “margin to center” has typified the work of both early and later female analysts who have written about the psychology of women from the perspective of their individual experience, relatively unburdened by the masculine norm that until recently has characterized our field.
Chodorow situates herself in this margin-to-center cultural and intellectual field. She entered the academy in the midst of early feminism, when sexism was seen as the result of external forces. She shows how her early interest in why so little attention was given to the internal roots of sexism led to her unfolding appreciation of the existence of masculinities, femininities, and sexualities—present in a person’s conscious and unconscious identifications, fantasies, and experiences of desire—that result in a unique and complex experience of gender and sexuality for each individual.
Chodorow’s gift has been her challenge to accepted norms. She takes a single, self-evident feature of psychic or cultural experience—for example, the fact that women mother—and develops a theoretical advance. As a graduate student she wrote “Being and Doing: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Socialization of Males and Females” (1971), in which she took up sexism and challenged the accepted view that male dominance is universal. In locating men’s sense of dominance internally, in their dread of women and fear of their own femininity, she began a foundational theoretical thread. Her proposition that men and women have asymmetrical bisexual identifications led her to consider how the way women mother shapes gender development in children. The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), the published version of her doctoral dissertation, is a radical theoretical reframing of female development that shifted the focus away from female sexuality and an accepted phallocentric view, to a relational view in which oedipal asymmetries are noticed and “heterosexual knots” considered. She brought an object relations perspective to the question of gender and sexuality. In “Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation” (1992) she deepened the argument for multiple determinants of sexual orientation. Again she advanced our theoretical and clinical perspective by “problematizing” the accepted norm—in this case, that of heterosexuality.
In the course of her theory-building, Chodorow became a clinical analyst. She moved intentionally though gradually from the classroom to behind the couch, a shift that was consonant with her interest in clinical individuality, an interest developed in The Power of Feelings (1999). Her brief preface to this new book includes a tribute to the importance of her early professorial career in the university classroom. She considers engaged students the best readers. This view is an important challenge to any current academic or clinical student of the sexualties, masculinities, and femininities. No matter one’s level of previous knowledge, an engaged reader is likely to find this book demanding and transformative. Navigating and absorbing the intellectual journey, the book offers and requires a reexamination of previous knowledge and sharpens clinical sensitivity.
I have focused on the first chapter because of its rich overview and articulation of themes. The remainder of the book is divided into two parts: “Theorists and Theory, 1905–2005” and “Gender and Sexuality in Consulting Room and Culture.” Part 1 begins with Chodorow’s 1999 reading of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It was written as an introduction to a Basic Books Classics edition of the work (Chodorow 2000). In it she brings Freud alive: his insights, passions, lacunae, the evolution of his theory and thought. Just as she elucidates the contradictions in the man, so she elucidates those in his work. She captures Freud’s work as a primarily developmental theory of continuity and consistency that contains inconsistencies and discontinuities, illustrating the complexity of the psychobiological and social factors in sexuality. She shows how a reconsideration of his seminal work advanced her own awareness of the importance of the body in psychosexuality and her thinking about bodily maternality.
The next chapter takes us to Chodorow’s rereading of Klein. Again her introductory comments about the origins of the essay are a wonderful read: analytic history, personal history, and social context come vividly alive. “From Subjectivity in General to Subjective Gender in Particular: Rethinking Melanie Klein, ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’”—the title gives us the gist of the essay. A close reading offers a beautiful example of how Chodorow enters into a theory, this time as a clinician as well as a scholar, and discovers what it offers her thinking on gender, how it “particularizes” complex internal mechanisms that contribute to a necessarily individualized sense of gender.
In her next chapter Chodorow reconsiders The Reproduction of Mothering. Thanks to the design of Individualizing Gender and Sexuality, we have the privilege of tracking Chodorow’s voice over nearly four decades. The body of the essay, her 1999 reconsideration of the work published in 1978 (but in process for some years before), is introduced from her perspective in 2011. Her integrity as a thinker is impressive. Although years later she is less impressed by the political orientation of feminism, she is consistent in her capacity for synthesis and incorporates for the reader her own scholarly and personal advances in her reconsideration of theory. She updates but is no apologist, and her contribution to our thinking about female development is monumental.
The last two chapters of Part 1 continue an oscillating and complementary juxtaposition of issues related to sexuality and gender. In chapter 5, “Prejudice Exposed: On Stephen Mitchell’s Pioneering Investigations of Psychoanalytic Treatment and Mistreatment of Homosexuality,” we are reminded of Mitchell’s early, thoughtful challenges to psychoanalytic pathologizing of homosexuality and recognize Chodorow’s identification with his synthesizing theoretical critique—rooted in ego psychology and object relations theory—of incorrect and incomplete assumptions about developmental issues that are as pertinent to heterosexuality as they are to homosexuality. The final chapter of Part 1, “Gender on the Modern/Postmodern and Classical/Relational Divide: Untangling History and Epistemology,” presents perhaps the most challenging aspect of the book for the clinical analyst. It is a detailed, informative, and impassioned exposition of premodern, modern, and postmodern gender theory, and a critique of psychoanalytic thinkers’ failure to recognize (or discover) relevant historical, literary, and social science works on the subject.
Part 2 is the clinical half of the book. Although the entire book is infused with her dual location in the consulting room and the university, the second half is closer to the daily life of clinicians and their patients: internal and external barriers to women’s work and achievement (chapter 7); the “too late” phenomenon in the pursuit of reproduction (chapter 8); violence, or hate and humiliation, as a factor in male development (chapter 9); same-sex/cross-generation identifications in the creation of feminine and masculine senses of gender (chapter 10). The final chapter is “Homosexualities as Compromise Formations.” Each chapter offers a rich portrayal of the complex factors that result in patterns and generalizable themes on the one hand and profound clinical individuality on the other.
Chorodow models a synthesizing mind at work to the benefit of the individual patient. There are moments in her clinical writing where the non-scholar clinician may feel wary of particular concrete formulations. But I doubt any reader of the volume will listen to patients in quite the same way after absorbing its contents. Chodorow brings us into her scholarly world at the same time she sensitizes us to the individuality of male and female development, an individuality that requires a deep awareness of complexity, of sexualities, femininities, and masculinities. This book is a marvelous and very particular excursion into a truism: there is no simple answer. It challenges us to remain alert to our premises, to pursue their validity, and to reject intellectual isolation.