-Psychoanalysis and Difference feminism

Modernist woman-centered writers employing psychoanalysis support the typical 'woman-

centerd' notion that women have a different self, identity and a different relation to others.
This self is valued positively as a source for social reform. Women-centered psychoanalytic
feminists see subordination as a source of insights, not simply as negative or lacking.
Advocates of psychoanalysis and Freud's work argue that sexual identities are not simply the
result of social imitation or modelling but are far more deeply internalised into the very
structure of one's identity. Freud's view was that gender difference was the basis of the
construction of identity itself. His work is usually seen as useful by feminists concentrating on
gender difference. Psychoanalysis argues that gender difference is what makes the self and
indeed underpins social life. Gender Difference feminists stress the role of the Mother in the
development of the self, in contrast to Freud himself who highlighted the Father. However, all
psychoanalytic feminists suggest that Freud's analysis can be employed to support a positive
re-valuation of women despite its male focus and bias. The inclination to stress the Mother
over the Father in feminist readings of psychoanalysis is only one instance of the diverse
interpretations of Freud's work.

-Freud's work and its uses for Feminism

Freud's work on the constitution of personality was the first comprehensive theorisation of
how infants come to be social human beings and has had the greatest impact on present-day
understandings of this process. All other approaches remain relatively 'fragmentary and
undeveloped'. In Freud’s essay entitled ‘Femininity’ he asks not who a woman is, but how a
woman is made. This is very different from simply assuming as is still usual today that one is
born a woman. Freud’s work questions gendered and sexual identities. Unlike much of
Western thinking, Freud doesn’t ignore children, nor see them as merely unformed adults.
Freud sees children as offering us insights into what we are and how we came into being.
Children become the key to understanding personality, social relationships and social
organization itself. Where Marx sees struggle everywhere ‘outside’ the self in the society,
Freud goes inside and says our very selves are composed of struggle and uncertainty. Freud
doesn’t accept that we are fixed creatures. Freud’s account also suggests serious problems in
undertaking social change. For some feminists, Freud provides a useful combination of ideas.
He can be seen as providing a space for change in gendered society in refusing simply
biological and deterministic accounts of gender and yet insisting that the psychic construction
of the gendered self is difficult to alter consciously.

-Freud’s account of the construction of the self and hence social organization

Freud sees all very young children in possessing libido that is a biologically based sexual or
life energy and as shapeless in the sense of having no distinct self or particular direction or
desires. The period from birth in which children experience pleasure in an amorphous,
unstructured way to beginning focus on their body, Freud called the pre-Oedipal period. He
identified this early period with an unstructured relation to the Mother, a symbolic period in
which the child at first doesn’t make distinctions but begins to become somewhat more
defined in terms of self/body and other. However, children begin to recognize themselves as
distinct from the Mother. They begin to develop a more clearly defined bodily sense of self, a
sexual identity, sense of self which is separated from the Mother.
The second period in children’s lives is called the Oedipal period. This period is marked by a
movement away from the Mother. While both boys and girls continue to see the Mother as
desirable, they begin to align with the Father, who represents what is separate, the notion of a
separate self. According to Freud, mother and father figures are concrete particular instances
that work as broad psychosocial symbols in the child’s world. The Father is described as the
third term, a representative male figure who steps in between Mother and Child. He is a figure
who appears as different from Mother and who stands for separation. However, to become
human, it requires a degree of rejection of the Mother and alignment with the Father. While
all children are require to move towards the Father, the movement towards selfhood/Father is
differentiated on the basis of biological sex characteristics. On the other hand, girls go
through a similar process but because of their physical similarity with the Mother figure, it
isn’t the same. They continue to have less marked boundaries between self, other and a
weaker sense of individual selfhood. Both boys and girls align with Father but in the case of
boys this is attained through identification while for girls alignment is established through
desire. Tensions, confusions, ambiguities, borne of the attempts in childhood to achieve some
form of self-resolution continue to mark adult lives. Femininity is not a neat unified place of
destination but a field of contestation. Indeed, for Freud, girls’ negotiation through the
psycho-social maze is more difficult since they must change not only the orientation of their
desire but also shift from sexuality associated with the Mother to a sexuality which is
associated with the Father. Freud claims that girls discover early on that men are more
powerful while they are deemed as belonging to the category of lesser status and can only
aspire to achieve what men are willing to allow or give them. In contrast, boys can go on
having Mother with little psychological effort, without being cast as lesser and at the same
time gain the rewards of being associated with the powerful. Many feminists see this
interpretation of gender and social power as showing how male dominance works and is
reproduced over time at both a societal and psychological level.