Object Relations Theory and Feminism: Strange Bedfellows

Abstract

In past decade, there has been a marked increase in feminist social, psychological, and cultural analyses grounded in psychoanalytic theory. Prominent feminists such as Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Carol Gilligan have all offered analyses of contemporary gender relations and cognitive styles based, in part at least, on object relations theory, whose foundations are rooted in psychoanalysis. 1 It is a curious note that psychoanalysis, which in sixties and seventies drew wrath of feminists for its reductionist approach to gender (anatomy is destiny) and its misogynist notions of penis-envy, vaginal orgasm, and mother blame, has now become such a ripe source of feminist theorizing. Another common feminist criticism of psychoanalytic theory was that it traced all aspects of social functioning back to psychodynamics of nuclear family and to individual psyche. In opposition to this psychoanalytic stance, feminist cry that the personal is political attempted to locate roots of female oppression both in individual lives of women and within broader context of society and social institutions. Individual personality was viewed as inseparable from a larger social fabric.