Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Lacan, Klein, Winnicott and Their Feminist Interlocutors

What can psychoanalysis teach us about human psychological development in general and human sexual development in particular? Can the development of both men and women be captured in one general psychoanalytic framework or are two different explanatory schemes required? How has psychoanalysis evolved since Freud in the way it accounts for femininity, women’s psychological development and the role of the mother in her child’s development? In this course, we will examine leading psychoanalytic accounts of human development, as well as feminist critiques and applications of these accounts. In the first part of the course, we will study some of Sigmund Freud’s classical texts which deal with sexual development, while discussing the relations between repressed ideas, bodily symptoms and the talking cure, as well as the seduction hypothesis, infantile sexuality and the Oedipal Complex. We will also consider some of Freud’s late writings about female sexuality and femininity, as well as early critiques by Karl Abraham, Karen Horney, and Helen Deutsch regarding Freud’s views on feminine development. In the second part of the course, we will discuss Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of human development, focusing on his characterization of both pre-Oedipal development and the Oedipal Complex. We will then examine three leading French feminist accounts: Simone de Beauvoir’s attempt to reconcile femininity and agency, Luce Irigaray’s critique of Freud and Lacan and her own account of feminine subjectivity, and Julia Kristeva’s use of the semiotic and her alternative account of the pre-Oedipal period. In the third part of the course, we will examine key psychoanalytic ideas from the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, while paying close attention to their emphasis on the mother’s role in child development. We will then study Nancy Chodorow’s incorporation of object relations into feminist theory in her well-known book The Reproduction of Mothering, as well as more recent applications of Kleinian and Winnicottian ideas to feminist theory.