Abstract
Photo by Sabine Mirlesse
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It is both a pleasure and a challenge to introduce Carol Gilligan. The pleasure comes from the opportunity to speak about someone who has been a friend, an example of an outspoken intellectual whose perspective on the influence of society on the individual has helped me in working as a psychoanalyst to understand the importance of my patients’ developing what she would call “a voice of their own.” The challenge arises from the difficulty of introducing someone who undoubtedly is already known to anyone familiar with the history of feminism in the United States. In 1982, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development was published and over time established Carol Gilligan as a major voice in our understanding of the psychology of women; a voice with compelling power to resist the power of received wisdom and conventional psychological pronouncements about how women’s minds were thought to work, how women’s minds were inevitably different from those of men, who up to that point were deemed superior in rationality compared to their more emotional female peers.
Since its publication, In a Different Voice has sold more than 700,000 copies. It has been translated into at least twenty languages and appears on the reading list of courses in a wide range of disciplines, from women’s studies to ethics, at major universities around the world. Carol’s key insight is that men have determined the predominant views of women. In doing so, they managed to claim scientific status for what was largely their preferred vision of what a woman should be. Carol started with Freud—who, early on, listened sympathetically to the words of his female patients, but ultimately retreated into the world of oedipal fantasies—and carefully demonstrated his acceptance of the notion that women are inevitably inferior. For Freud “biology was destiny,” relegating women to a prescribed role in society and a fate of endless penis envy. On rereading In a Different Voice, with its stirring new introduction in the 1993 edition, I found myself understanding the uniqueness of Carol Gilligan as a feminist capable of having a voice free of anger against men, but enormously effective in the case she has made against patriarchy and its collective desire to hold on to a binary concept of men as strong and rational and women as emotional and weak. In her view, girls are endowed initially with assertive capacities that, in her research, are shown to be lost as the message of the dominant patriarchy is transmitted to them, with the result that their true voices are suppressed.
In the title of her plenary address, Carol includes the very important word “disrupting.” The concept of disruption has played a large part in her voluminous writings reporting the research she has conducted with her colleagues. In the many years since In a Different Voice was first published, Carol has expanded her contributions to areas beyond the psychology of women, consistently questioning false binary assertions about gender. What began as a documentation of women’s superior capacity for relationship and ability to connect with others grew into a plea for a human voice for everyone, for the idea that freeing women’s voices improved not just their lives but those of men as well, who would themselves have a more reasonable voice and more balanced and satisfying lives if only they freed themselves of the patriarchy’s influence.
Since leaving her professorship at Harvard, Carol has been a University Professor at NYU, a position that has given her the opportunity to expand her contributions to our understanding of issues of male dominance, of patriarchy and its implications, in the realm of politics. In 2009 she and David A.J. Richards published The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future, in which they traced the history of patriarchy, with its repressive political and social demands, and the rise of groups like African Americans (the civil rights movement) and the LGBTQ community (the gay rights movement) who have resisted the regressive demands of the patriarchal establishment. For anyone interested in understanding the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the tragic impact of his administration on the progressive and constructive direction the U.S. had taken, this book (and its 2018 sequel, Darkness Now Visible) is essential reading. Through documenting the history of patriarchy, they anticipated the reemergence of a “patriarch in chief” in the form of our current president, who embodies the essential qualities of patriarchy with its desire to return to “the bad old days” when women, blacks, and gays knew their place.
In the dark days of psychoanalytic training, way back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the establishment powers of APsaA excluded, with patriarchal confidence, qualified psychiatrists who were openly homosexual, indulged racism by ignoring the absence of representative numbers of African American psychiatrists, and in general favored a version of technique that, in the name of preserving the technical ideal of analyst anonymity, discouraged psychoanalysts from speaking out on social and political issues. Carol Gilligan’s voice, had it been heard then, would have been a needed corrective to our worst, now disavowed, tendencies. Carol and her husband, Jim Gilligan, himself an expert on violence and how to decrease its perpetration, have been a team lecturing tirelessly on the side of justice and reason whenever and wherever they could. Carol’s concept of voice, of the need to “see what you see and say what you see,” has been of great personal importance to me. The courage she displayed when she published research to challenge Lawrence Kohlberg’s conclusions about the differences between male and female approaches to moral judgment (1979) has served as an example for all those who see the injustices inflicted on women
Because of my long friendship with Carol Gilligan, I know a great deal about her that goes beyond having read all her books, including her novel, Kyra. She has approached life with a degree of vigor, a passion for intellectual thinking and debate, and, most of all, delight in being the mother of three accomplished sons and the grandmother of four grandsons and two granddaughters.
There was a time, not so long ago, when women who were successful in a career were seen as needing to sacrifice having a family. I remember watching Katherine Hepburn express this sentiment in her clipped and crisp New England accent: “You can’t have it all, this is what I tell young actresses.” What she meant was that you couldn’t have a great career like hers if you married and had children. Even as such an extreme position has faded, it isn’t unusual for many to believe that in having an ambitious and successful career, a woman will inevitably shortchange her children, leaving them without a strong platform of maternal devotion in their adult lives. Carol’s life shines a light on a very different picture. No amount of success, attention, and even celebrity has prevented her from being with her children and figuring centrally in their lives. Whether addressing the Knesset in Israel or at a dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard, Carol is that steady and engaging person who always retains a sense of accessibility to the other, to an appreciation of who they are and how to understand the world we all live in.
It is my great pleasure to share with you the opportunity to read Carol Gilligan’s “Disrupting the Story: Enter Eve.”