Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A British Sociologist's ViewVirginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Elizabeth AbelMelanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory. C. Fred AlfordThe Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Jessica BenjaminBetween Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Teresa BrennanFeminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. Nancy ChodorowPsychoanalysis and . .

Abstract

SYCHOANALYTIC FEMINISM has now established itself in a certain way academically, but the closer one looks at this new field, the more complicated the relationships between feminisms and psychoanalyses become. At first sight, it is easy to point to two books that have dominated feminist thinking about psychoanalysis and provided flags under which the two main parties have rallied. Psychoanalysis and Feminism by Juliet Mitchell, a British socialist feminist, was published in 1974. It argued that the Freudian tradition (which includes Jacques Lacan) provided an understanding of paternal power in the feminine unconscious that feminism needed if it was to grapple successfully with a patriarchal cultural order. The Reproduction of Mothering by Nancy Chodorow, an American feminist sociologist, was published in 1970. It argued that attending to the neglected mother and daughter, through the framework of the object relations school within psychoanalysis, would offer feminism a more relevant model for understanding gender.1 The inflhence of these two books has been immense. Mitchell's book has come to stand for psychoanalytic purism and Lacanianism, while Chodorow's has come to represent a much more popular feminist eclecticism. The authors-both of whom have subsequently turned to psychoanalytic training (Mitchell sooner and Chodorow later)-to a large extent have continued to elaborate and defend the arguments they made in those classic texts. Both, however, have dispensed with or radically changed the social dimensions of the original arguments. Mitchell had set the conclusion of Psychoanalysis and Feminism within an Althusserian Marxist framework of ideology and cultural revolution, now lost from