13 - Beyond the phallus: Lacan and feminism

Summary

Above all, spare us any father educators, rather let them be in retreat on any position as master.

In 1970s America, at the crest of second-wave feminism, Sigmund Freud was the man women loved to hate. They were not without reason. The medical specialty practiced in Freud's name by American analysts (mostly men) devoted itself not to helping patients (mostly women) discover their desire, but to enforcing ideas about “normal” femininity. To those beginning to question the conventions of domesticity and heterosexuality, psychoanalysis, with its talk of “female masochism” and “penis envy,” seemed the enemy of women's liberation. Freud's words were plucked out of context to prove it.

But in 1974, the British feminist Juliet Mitchell published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which would have enormous impact on a generation of women, both academic and activist. Mitchell wrote: “[a] rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud’s works is fatal for feminism. However it may have been used, psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one. If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we cannot afford to neglect it.”