Abstract
Nancy J. Chodorow is one of the few scholars and clinicians whose work has transformed both her academic discipline—sociology—and psychoanalysis. She remains at the top of the list of those who are responsible for the fruitful cross-fertilization of academic study and the talking cure. She has her roots in hybrid psychoanalytic traditions, combining the best of classical and contemporary approaches. Though she regards herself as a contrarian, I have never encountered another psychoanalytic theorist who is less contentious or defensive—which makes her writing a pleasure to read.
Born in New York City in 1944, Chodorow began her teaching career at Wellesley College in 1973 and a year later moved to UC Santa Cruz, where she taught until 1986. In the mid-1980s she began training at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, thus beginning a second career as an analyst. She completed her university career at UC Berkeley, teaching until her retirement in 2005. But “retirement” is misleading, for she gave up her fulfilling life and work on the West Coast to return to the East Coast, where she continued her life’s passion, combining psychoanalysis, sociology, and feminism. She is currently a part-time Lecturer in Psychiatry, Cambridge Health Alliance, Harvard Medical School, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
Chodorow’s 1978 book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender—her barely revised 1974 dissertatiom at Brandeis—was groundbreaking. The book represented a new direction in psychoanalytic thinking. She carefully balanced a commitment to psychoanalysis with the need for reform. “Psychoanalytic theory remains the most coherent, convincing theory of personality development available for an understanding of fundamental aspects of the psychology of women in our society, in spite of its biases” (p. 142). Patriarchal biases, she persuasively shows in The Reproduction of Mothering, suffuse Freud’s—and his followers’—theorizing on female psychology. She offers example after example of how psychoanalytic theorists have implied that the preoedipal development of girls is somehow inferior to that of boys. Implicit throughout this early book is the belief that we do Freud a disservice if we accept his claims unquestioningly. In 1996, the journal Contemporary Sociology chose The Reproduction of Mothering as one of the ten most influential books of the past quarter-century.
Chodorow’s next books continued her inquiry into the complexity of gender from an interdisciplinary point of view using psychoanalytic, sociological, and feminist theory. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989), Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994), The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999), and Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012) have all demonstrated interdisciplinary sophistication, as does her new book, The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye, a title that conveys her twin focus.
If Chodorow were in the humanities rather than the social sciences, it would have been easier for her to incorporate psychoanalytic theory into her academic discipline. From its inception, psychoanalysis has flourished in the humanities, particularly in my own discipline, literature. Freud, after all, “discovered” the oedipus complex while reading Greek and Elizabethan drama. In his legendary October 15, 1897, letter to his confidant Wilhelm Fliess (Masson 1985), Freud acknowledges love for his mother and jealousy of his father and then turns to Oedipus Rex and Hamlet for literary support for his new theory of the mind. Nor was this the only time Freud expressed indebtedness to the humanities. Upon being celebrated on his seventieth birthday as the “discoverer of the unconscious,” Freud rejected the title. “The Poets and Philosophers before me have discovered the unconscious,” he admitted; “I have discovered the scientific method with which the unconscious can be studied” (Lehrman 1940, p. 164).
Empirical proof is not a disciplinary requirement in the humanities, but it is in the social sciences, where psychoanalysis continues to be viewed with widespread skepticism. Throughout her long career, Chodorow has confronted this intellectual wariness, and despite recognition of her work she remains, by her own admission, an outsider, like some of the analysts who have most influenced her, such as Erik Erikson. In a chapter aptly called “Why Is It Easy to Be a Psychoanalyst and a Feminist but Not a Psychoanalyst and a Sociologist?”—which began as her presentation upon being honored by the American Psychoanalytic Association Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) in 2004—she offers vivid examples of being an outlander. She described herself in one of her early talks as a “Jewish New Yorker who grew up in California and who as a preschooler wanted to be a cowgirl (or cowboy)” (p. 227). She gives other examples of being an outsider, including, as she wryly admits in the self-reflective section of her application to the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, being an “Eastern European rather than German Jew” (p. 227). She cites a student’s amused observation about her at a professional conference: “Nancy, have you noticed? All of the feminists at this meeting are in the humanities, except you, and all the social scientists except you are men” (p. 227). Rarely are psychoanalysts or academics so self-disclosing; moreover, it is rare to come across a distinguished scholar, teacher, and clinician who is so candid, modest, and authentically human.
The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye is a collection of essays, originally appearing as journal articles or invited talks, with a single thematic focus: the articulation, as the book’s subtitle suggests, of a new American independent tradition that she calls intersubjective ego psychology. Essay collections sometimes make for difficult reading because of inconsistences in tone or audience or because the essays were written for different audiences, but Chodorow deftly integrates the chapters, and there is little repetition. Part I, “From Freud to Erikson,” explores the missing link between psychoanalysis and the social sciences, emphasizing the sociocultural side of ego psychology. Part II, “The Psychoanalytic Vision of Hans Loewald,” celebrates a long-neglected theorist whose work has in recent decades been embraced by analysts across the theoretical spectrum. Part III, “American Independence: Theory and Practice,” considers other authors central to the intersubjective ego tradition, including James McLaughlin and Warren Poland. Part IV, “Individuality as Bedrock in the Consulting Room and Beyond,” examines the fraught relationship between psychoanalysis and the social sciences, including the gains and losses implicit in a one-person perspective in the former and insufficient attention to the individual in the latter. In the book’s afterword, Chodorow boldly proposes a new academic discipline or department, individuology, where the main focus is on the complexity of individuality.
Chodorow’s vision of intersubjective ego psychology combines two major antagonistic schools, ego psychology, as formulated by Heinz Hartmann, and interpersonal psychology, as defined by Harry Stack Sullivan. She shows in Part I how Erikson and Loewald each contributed to a distinctly American independent tradition, the former through his intersubjective eight stages of development, the latter through his writings on life history. Interested in both the intrapsychic and the relational-interpersonal, Chodorow coins the expression “relational individualism” (p. 5) to describe her synthetic approach. She respects the European origins of psychoanalysis but does not share American psychoanalytic institutes’ excessively deferential dependence on the old world. “Like the characters in a Henry James novel, these institutes seem convinced that what is European must be better and that European critiques and dismissals of naive, provincial American thought and practice were right all along” (p. 7).
The reference to James is significant, for like the novelist, Chodorow sees accurately the clash between the old and new worlds, past and present. The original ego psychologists were critical of countertransference, she reminds us, advocating Freud’s neutral, scientifically objective stance—a position that he theorized in a series of influential articles but never put into practice. By contrast, American analysts are much more attentive to countertransference, which they define in a larger, more positive way. Contemporary American analysts see countertransference, their own subjectivity, as potentially more of a help than a hindrance to their understanding of a patient. One of the distinctively American characteristics of psychoanalysis is an emphasis on equality rather than hierarchy.
Thanks in part to her sociological training, Chodorow recognizes the significance of Erikson’s work on ethnicity, which is central to his identity theory. “Erikson was obsessed with identity, especially with the particulars of racial-ethnic-cultural identities, spoiled and outcast identities, and identity fragments that must, somehow, be cemented into a psychologically working whole” (p. 13). Few people realize that Erikson left UC Berkeley early in his career rather than take a loyalty oath. Erikson was the “war babies’ psychosocial theorist” (p. 76), and Chodorow took, as a Radcliffe undergraduate in the mid-1960s, his enormously popular course on identity and the life cycle. “Erikson shows us that listening with a psychoanalytic ear gives depth and richness to what we see with a sociological eye, and that looking through a sociological eye gives depth and richness to what we hear” (p. 87). As if confirming Nietzsche’s observation that one repays a teacher badly by remaining a student, Chodorow points out that Erikson’s personal conflicts—he changed his name several times in search of his biological parents—contributed to the formation of his identity theory.
Unlike Erikson, arguably the most famous twentieth-century American psychoanalyst, Hans Loewald has only recently begun receiving the recognition he deserves, apart from his classic 1960 essay “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis.” That recognition will grow, as Chodorow argues throughout Part II. She cites a comment she made about Loewald in 1989, a remark that is no less true of herself. He is an “insistent synthesizer rather than polarizer within psychoanalytic discourse, committed to and able to maintain himself as a drive theorist, ego psychologist, and object-relations theorist who respects self psychology, while also remaining fully enmeshed in the clinical situation that ultimately provides psychoanalysis its truths” (p. 94).
Noting that some of Loewald’s assumptions on primary oneness and symbiosis are no longer clinically valid, Chodorow favors using the insights of related fields, such as neuroscience and cognitive and developmental psychology, to confirm or disconfirm psychoanalytic theory. “It can only harm and marginalize our field to dismiss such evidence” (p. 97). Providing close readings of Loewald’s writings, Chodorow argues that no psychoanalyst since Freud has had a more developed theory of how the mind works. Loewald “integrates, in noncontradictory ways, many positions that we have historically polarized” (p. 142). Humility compels Chodorow to use “we” here, but it would be more accurate to say that she follows Loewald’s tradition as a synthesizer and integrator of historically (and sometimes hysterically) polarized theory.
Chodorow affirms in Part III of The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye the foundational paradox of psychoanalysis: self-knowledge is based on the assumption of not-knowing, mainly because the mind is divided within itself. She expresses other paradoxes, including one articulated by Warren Poland in his 1996 book Melting the Darkness: “How can it be that no man is an island and that at the same time every man is an island?” (Chodorow 2020, p. 153; Poland 1996, p. 33). Lest we not recognize the allusion, it’s from John Donne’s Meditation XVII, written in 1628, leading to the words “for whom the bell tolls,” used by Hemingway as the title of his 1940 war novel. This example of intertextuality shows how literature shapes psychoanalysis, first through Poland’s influential book and then through Chodorow’s.
As always, Chodorow seeks common ground when discussing the fierce debates that have roiled the psychoanalytic community. Her synthetic imagination is strikingly evident throughout Part III. Adapting the term “listening to” from the French analyst Haydée Faimberg (1996), she explains why it is superior to listening for, a more ideological approach. Even as Chodorow historicizes psychoanalytic controversies, she dryly admits that her account “threatens to spill over into caricature” (p. 157), a statement few theorists concede. She affirms pluralistic theory, choosing the best elements of disparate hypotheses in a way characteristic of American pragmatism. One of Chodorow’s favorite expressions is “rueful recognition” (as well as “rueful regret”), suggesting that it is painful to acknowledge blind spots in ourselves and others.
Chodorow calls both Hans Loewald and James McLaughlin quiet revolutionaries (another statement that can be made about Chodorow herself). McLaughlin (1918–2006) was a training analyst associated with the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute for over half a century. In the chapter “Listening to James McLaughlin,” she quotes a passage from his 2005 book The Healer’s Bent that contains the most poetic description I have read of the insights acquired through self-analysis. “They have been as fireflies: elusive on the wing and enigmatic in the grasp; illuminating in the moment seen, rather dull and diminished when closely scrutinized” (p. 172). Chodorow also pays tribute to Warren Poland, who in his 1997 plenary address to the American Psychoanalytic Association coined the expression “two-person separate” to describe how the analyst witnesses a patient’s suffering (p. 185).
In Part IV Chodorow identifies other contemporary analysts she considers American independents, including Dale Boesky, Judith Chused, Theodore Jacobs, Owen Renik, and Glen Gabbard. Summarizing the characteristics of the American independent tradition of analysis, she argues for a two-person psychology based on the co-construction of meaning. And yet she is quick to point out that “it is possible to be co-actor without claiming center stage or being co-star” (p. 205)—moves that may shift the primary attention away from the patient, where it belongs.
As an academic, I found the most intriguing section of The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye to be the afterword, provocatively titled “Could You Direct Me to the Individuology Department?” There is no such department, she laments, though there should be one in every major American university. The individuology department would be an interdisciplinary field of study combining the humanities, the social sciences, and psychoanalysis. “The absence of individuology in the academy, of a direct way to study individual selves, is a great lacuna, a missing piece, in our conception of what should be studied, learned about, and taught in our conception of academic knowledge” (p. 246). I would love to teach in the individuology department, and one of the required texts would be The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye.
I would urge my individuology students to read Chodorow’s footnotes carefully, for they are a scholarly treasure trove. Chodorow reveals her personal side there, telling us how she felt a decade after she taught her final graduate seminar at UC Berkeley, a course about her own work, inspired by her department chair’s recommendation, called “Chodorow on Chodorow: Theorizing and Theory.” She looks back on the course with fondness—and rueful irony. “There is nothing like using one’s own writing to enable a teacher fully to dig into what may be brilliant or original but is at the same time wrong, misguided, created by sleight-of-pen, and so forth” (p. 240, n.3). Another footnote is especially noteworthy, when she describes French analysts’ hostility toward empiricism: At the 2000 Delphi psychoanalytic conference, a French analyst assigned to introduce and chair an American infant researcher’s presentation announced that she did not believe in empirical research and then walked off the stage and left the room as the American was presenting. In France at a conference two weeks earlier, an American empirical researcher on psychoanalytic process had been booed off the stage as he tried to present. In my own limited experience, I have not seen or read of such dismissal—though of course I have seen and read radical disagreement—going in the other cultural direction [p. 70, n. 17].
The footnote offers not only a stark contrast between the French and American traditions of psychoanalysis but also an example of Chodorow’s evenhandedness. Indeed, her favorite rhetorical strategy in the book is “on the one hand, on the other hand,” which she uses more than a dozen times. Similarly, she rarely uses either/or constructions; almost always she uses both/and. Despite her knowledge that scholarly objectivity is illusory in the hermeneutic disciplines, she is scrupulously fair to all ideological positions and points of view. One cannot ask for more balanced, meticulous scholarship.
I must mention one more footnote that applies more to my discipline than Chodorow’s. “In the academic humanities, we find that psychoanalysis is thought to begin and end (with the exception of Lacan and related theorists) with Freud” (p. 169, n.2). She can’t understand the militant French opposition to ego psychology, nor can I. No scientist, she adds, believes that the contributions of Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, or Heisenberg are the last word in physics. “So it should be with psychoanalysis and its founder.”
Never judge a book by the cover, as the old adage goes, but one can learn much from an author’s acknowledgments. “Personal gratitude warrants a volume in itself” (p. xxiv), Chodorow writes, and then she gives us a four-page account of her personal and professional beholdenness. The reader of The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye also feels grateful. In her insights and her respect and love for psychoanalysis, Nancy Chodorow bequeaths us a noble vision of the impossible profession, one that in the hands of an expert clinician and theorist is eminently possible.