femininity and its discontents
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eview 80 2005 c 2005 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/05 $30 www.feminist-review.com (24–43)
the psychoanalytic institution, the assumption that psychoanalysis depoliticizes the woman analysand). In this context, therefore, the common theory/practice dichotomy has a very specific meaning in that psychoanalysis can only be held accountable to ‘practice’ if it is assumed not to be one, or if the form of its practice is taken to have no purchase on political life. This assumes, for example, that there is no politics of the psychoanalytic institution itself, something to which I will return. Both these points – the wider history of how psychoanalysis has been placed or discarded by our dominant culture, and the detaching of psychoanalysis from its practical and institutional base – are related, in as much as they bring into focus the decisions and selections which have already been made about psychoanalysis before the debate even begins. Some of these decisions I would want to argue are simply wrong; such as the broad accusation of chauvinism levelled against the psychoanalytic institution as a whole. In this country at least, the significant impetus after Freud passed to two women – Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Psychoanalysis in fact continues to be one of the few of our cultural institutions which does not professionally discriminate against women, and in which they could even be said to predominate. This is not, of course, to imply that the presence of women inside an institution is necessarily feminist, but women have historically held positions of influence inside psychoanalysis which they have been mostly denied in other institutions where their perceived role as ‘carers’ has relegated them to a subordinate position (e.g. nursing), and it is the case that the first criticisms of Freud made by Melanie Klein can be seen to have strong affinities with later feminist repudiation of these theories. For those who are hesitating over what appears as the present ‘impasse’ between feminism and psychoanalysis, the more important point, however, is to stress the way that psychoanalysis is being presented for debate, that is, the decisions that have already been made before we are asked to decide. Much will depend, I suspect, on whether one sees psychoanalysis as a new form of hegemony on the part of the feminist intelligentsia, or whether it is seen as a theory and practice, which has constantly been relegated to the outside of dominant institutions and mainstream radical debate alike – an ‘outside’ with which feminism, in its challenge to both these traditions, has its own important forms of allegiance.
components of the culture In England, the relationship between the institution of psychoanalysis and its more general reception has always been complex, if not fraught. Thus in 1968, Perry Anderson could argue (Anderson, 1968) that major therapeutic and theoretical advances inside the psychoanalytic institutions (chiefly in the work of Melanie Klein) had gone hand in hand with, and possibly even been the cause of the
Jacqueli
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