6 - What does woman want? Feminism and psychoanalysis

Summary

The relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis has been intimate, if troubled, since its very beginnings. The question of “what woman wants” was central to the inception of psychoanalytic thought, even before Freud entered the scene, as we saw in our Introduction, via the case of Anna O. Yet, depending on which feminist analysis one reads, this “woman question” has been either totally manhandled by psychoanalysis, or treated in a most ground-breaking way. We might say feminists' disagreements over psychoanalysis mirror contentions at the heart of feminism in general. Are women's social disadvantages engendered by their biological differences from men? Or is culture paramount over nature, and the body? Is there a distinction between sex and gender, or was Freud right that “anatomy is destiny”? Can bodies simply be set aside in order to attend to social disparities? Or are there already more primary inequalities perceived at the level of anatomy?

Psychoanalysis has unwittingly become one battleground where such larger disagreements between feminists have been played out, not least because of certain, rather inflammatory, claims made by Freud – centrally the idea that girls experience “penis-envy” as a key part of their maturation. As we shall see, feminist contentions about psychoanalysis turn particularly on whether Freud's account of femininity described a particular, predominantly social, circumstance for women – and is thus a measure of how ideology affects the way the body is lived and interpreted – or if this account was prescriptive of how women's lives should be lived, due to fixed, anatomical factors.