Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, is known today for his theory that women suffered from penis envy; they envy boys for having a penis, and they blame their mothers for not giving them one. Like many sexologists of the time, he saw women as sexually passive; Freud explained that women engaged in sex only because their penis envy drove them to birth male children to ‘gain’ a penis. A theory of women as castrated men reflected the dominant ideology of Freud’s time, but his serious status lent academic weight to patriarchal beliefs that women lacked the moral strength to be in positions of authority (penis envy means that they cannot fully develop the superego), and were supposed to be sexually passive — merely interested in the reproductive outcome.
It follows that in a patriarchal society, to be exalted as feminine, women must take pleasure in being dominated and excluded from decision-making in the public sphere, and Freud’s work holds up this idea of femininity being subordinate to masculinity. These pillars of mental subordination and sexual passivity, mean that psychoanalysis is often viewed as the intellectual battering ram to women’s liberation, and Freud’s work has understandably earned him much hostility from the feminist movement.
Enter Juliet Mitchell: British feminist and psychoanalyst, described by Eurozine as: ‘One of the most influential figures of second-wave feminism and contemporary psychoanalytic theory.’ “It started off as simple curiosity about why American feminists were so hostile to Freud,” she says, describing the first spark of interest that was to become her 1974 groundbreaking work, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women. She went to the library in the U.S that she had used since childhood, “…just to read what Freud had to say about women. I went there in June and came back in September, having read all his twenty-three volumes of work.”
From the late 1970s, Mitchell, trained as a psychoanalyst. “I went into psychoanalysis from feminism, from the sexual side and the political side. My questions for psychoanalysis were from politics, such as whether psychoanalysis could help understand the position of women.”
She began to see links between Marxist theories of women’s role in industrialisation and how they were perceived by psychoanalysts. They’re the reproducers of the labour force, the ‘angel at home’ under Marxist theory. Her studies concluded that the more primitive a culture’s form of work and production, the greater the importance given to sex differences, because ‘women-as-reproducers’ remain chief items of exchange. The power fathers have to trade daughters in primitive societies, is, to Mitchell, the root of patriarchy. As societies advance and the productivity of labour develops, the exchange of labour for money between classes becomes the glue that holds society together but women are still the subordinate supporters of the men and the prime caregivers but in this role as the parent; women have the power to socialise children in the ways of gender equality. Mitchell says patriarchy will ultimately fall apart with the exposure of the contradictions beneath its ideology.
Originally published at www.tedxsalford.com on October 4, 2014.
