Nancy J. Chodorow

Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity.

This feminist study of relations between sacrifice, gender, and social organization reveals sacrifice as a remedy for having been born of woman, and hence uniquely suited to establishing certain and enduring paternity. Drawing on examples of ancient and modern societies, Nancy Jay synthesises sociology of religion, ethnography, biblical scholarship, church history, and classics to argue that sacrifice legitimates and maintains patriarchal structures that transcend mens dependence on womens reproductive powers.

Gender as a personal and cultural construction

_I -W R I T E T H I S A R T I C L E motivated by my concern (with Mahoney and Yngvesson 1992) that recent academic feminist theory seems to have moved away from psychology. I believe that two directions in contemporary feminist thought underlie this move. My article tries to accommodate one of these directions; it takes issue with the other. For despite the recent disenchantment with psychology, the ongoing development of psychoanalytic feminism as an academic enterprise suggests that some feminists continue to think that the psychology of gender is important. We turned to the psychology of gender in the first place because it seemed directly, experientially important to our lives as women and because we thought that there was something in psychology that helped account for the tenacity of gender relations. First, contemporary feminism has been rightfully wary of universalizing claims about gender and of accounts that seem to reduce gender to a single defining or characterizing feature. Psychological claims of all sorts have been a special focus of this criticism. Psychoanalytic feminism, feminist psychologies, and feminist psychoanalysis and therapy (the last of these not so much noticed by academic feminists) have not paid sufficient attention to differences and variation among women and to the variety, instability, multiplicity, and contested nature of gender meanings. Psychoanalytic feminism and other feminist psychologies also often claim a single factor or aspect of psychology as most important in defining women or femininity. I offer in this article a more clinically and less theoretically or developmentally based way of thinking about psychological gender in order to respond to these feminist criticisms of psychology and psychoanalysis while at the same time retaining insights from psychology that feminism has found useful. Such an approach also pro

Mothering, Object-Relations, and the Female Oedipal Configuration

Many feminists have come to recognize that psychoanalysis, as a theory of the social production of gender and sexuality, must be a central component of feminist understanding.1 My own work within this tradition argued for the importance of the fact that women, and not men, are primary caretakers of children.2 I have suggested that the mother-daughter relationship contributes in fundamental ways to the character of the feminine psyche, as well as contributing to the creation of a male-dominant psychology in

Oedipal Asymmetries and Heterosexual Knots

One of our most common everyday perceptions is that heterosexual couple relationships are difficult. This article argues that these difficulties are not accidental but systematically created as part of the reproduction of the family. The psychoanalytic account of feminine and masculine oedipal development shows that a family structure in which women mother produces women and men with asymmetrical relational needs and wants. These lead people to form heterosexual relationships containing contradictions, which tend to undermine them.

Too late: Ambivalence about motherhood, choice, and time

This paper explores a particular constellation of fantasies and defenses that in some women leads to the delay of childbearing. Destructive wishes towards the womans own womb and her mothers lead to behaviors that sabotage fertility and pregnancy. These wishes and behaviors meet up with an unconscious belief in and commitment to time standing still, and with cultural tropes and trends that obscure intrapsychic conflicts and denials about motherhood, aging, and time. Analysis, like childbearing, is constrained by the reality of time, and the complex untangling and connecting of these three not obviously related threads may not occur until it is, for the woman who wants a child, too late.

The psychoanalytic vision of Hans Loewald

Hans Loewald is a comprehensive and original theorist on a par with any major post‐Freudian thinker, yet neither his ideas nor his person have become the basis for a Loewaldian school or approach, and he is not as well known as other innovators of comparable quality. In this paper the author attempts to characterize the scope and depth of Loewalds theory‐his vision of the psyche and psychic life, or metapsychology, his characterization of the psychoanalytic process, and his vision of the clinical and human goals of psychoanalysis. She suggests that Loewald holds in all of these realms, and without apparent contradiction, a doubled‐emphatically ego‐psychological and emphatically object‐relational‐perspective, and an equal commitment to both the first topography and the structural theory. His views throughout are undergirded by a bi‐directional developmental view that centers on differentiation and integration. The paper includes brief reflections on how to assess psychoanalytic theories, like Loewalds, developed before empirical research that seems to challenge them.

Beyond the Dyad: Individual Psychology, Social World

I recent years analytic writing, presenting, and clinical discussion almost universally accord attention to the analytic dyad. My reflections here propose two kinds of reservation about this ubiquitous focus. On the one hand, it leads us away from the richness and complexity of the patient’s intrapsychic life—her clinical individuality—which psychoanalysis alone among the therapies works to expand. On the other hand, we err in thinking that the dyad is isolated, when in fact it is always situated beyond itself. My subject brings together my identity and personal passions as a psychoanalyst and my origins in sociology and anthropology. We can trace the history of this global march toward the dyad. First, our understanding of therapeutic action changed. Freud had discovered transference and argued that it was inevitable and indeed a resource: remembering requires repeating, and you cannot destroy someone in effigy (Freud 1912, 1914). Over time, anchored by Strachey (1934), analysts extended Freud to think that unless you were analyzing the transference in the here and now, real change could not happen. Working in the transference became a sine qua non of analytic action and the real work of analysis. This view noticed the patient’s mind alone. In the world of classical ego psychology, in which many American psychoanalysts grew up, clinical theory and the theory of technique taught that the analyst was an objective interpreter of the patient’s psyche, through reconstruction, dream interpretation, pointing to conflict, resistances, and defenses, and especially through observing and interpreting the transference, which the patient brought from the there and then to the here and now. Attending to DOI: 10.1177/0003065110372494 Nancy J. Chodorow BEYOND THE DYAD

A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE: READING LOEWALD THROUGH “ON THE THERAPEUTIC ACTION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS”

Hans Loewald’s classic paper, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” (1960), is one of our field’s most comprehensive and elegant accounts of the analytic attitude and stance that are required to enable a psychoanalytic process leading to psychic change, as well as a fine-tuned and original conceptualization of that change. The author shows how Loewald, while not including technical or interpretive recommendations or claiming a new metapsychology, elaborates the multiple facets of the relationship between analyst and patient and provides a subtly complex description of the epistemology of clinical work. His still-fresh formulations prefigure contemporary psychoanalysis.

REFLECTIONS ON LOEWALD'S “INTERNALIZATION, SEPARATION, MOURNING, AND THE SUPEREGO”

I found it a curious experience to be asked to comment on Loewald’s “Internalization, Separation, Mourning, and the Superego” (1962a; hereafter referred to as “Internalization”) and to think of its being chosen as one of two key articles published in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in the 1960s. On the one hand, the paper had personal meaning for me. It was the first paper I read by Loewald, assigned in a seminar for graduate students at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in 1972. I had immediately been taken with the paper (and with Loewald), as I have been with every rereading. On the other hand, although Loewald published what, in my opinion, may have been the most important psychoanalytic paper of that decade, certainly in North America, one of perhaps four or five of the most influential papers of the second half of the twentieth century, I had not been asked to comment on his “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis” (1960; hereafter referred to as “Therapeutic Action”). My commentary here will focus on what I take to be the place of “Internalization” in Loewald’s work and the character of the article as Loewaldian, as well as the key contributions of the article, including its relation to “Therapeutic Action” where relevant. Tentatively and suggestively, I will say where I think “Internalization” lo-

Born into a World at War: Listening for Affect and Personal Meaning

“Problems of patienthood are caused by outer and inner conditions,” Erik Erikson tells us (1964, 89). Outer conditions of war, politics, economics, and culture affect our thoughts and actions, but they do not, without being filtered through inner life, cause them. Inner conditions of temperamental propensity, affect, fantasy, and conflict predispose us to behave in certain ways, but they do not, apart from encounters with external reality, cause us to do so. This is a duality that challenges psychoanalytic theory and practice, from work with individual patients to psychocultural, psychosocial, or psychohistorical analysis. In another duality, psychoanalysis begins from the individual and provides, in fact, the most comprehensive theory of individuality. Yet from the beginning, in both its accounts of patients and the self-analytic writings of its founders, psychoanalysis has focused on patterns of fantasy, neurosis, character, and development that are widespread and has brought cultural, social, and historical factors into its theoretical and clinical reflections. My own work follows the Eriksonian precept. In The Power of Feelings (1999), I suggested that people create and experience social processes and cultural meanings not only materially and discursively but also psychodynamically—in unconscious, affect-laden, nonlinguistic, immediately felt images and fantasies that everyone creates from birth about self, self and other, body, and the world. Social and historical processes are given, and they will certainly lead to some patterns of experiencing (including those shaped by the family unit) in common, as I documented in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), but this experiencing will be refracted through personal