Gender On the Modern-Postmodern and Classical-Relational Divide: Untangling History and Epistemology

Abstract

This essay considers the historical periodization and epistemology of psychoanalytic thinking about gender. Overlapping historically with feminism itself, psychoanalytic thinking about gender has two periods of efflorescence, the 1920s and 1930s, and the contemporary period beginning in the 1970s. Two divides have characterized our gender thinking, the modern-postmodern and the classical-relational. From the early theorizing of the 1920s and 1930s until around the early 1990s, most psychoanalytic thinking about gender should be considered modernist, as it draws on traditional views of scientific evidence and holds more universalistic and dichotomized conceptions of men and women. In the contemporary period, although postmodernism tends to be associated with relational psychoanalysts and modernist thinking with classical analysts, the divisions overlap. The author argues that considering any psychoanalytic theory as "premodern" is misleading: from its inception, psychoanalysis formed part of modernism.

Paola on the couch: The quest for feminine identity in an empirically supported psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a trans woman.

“…This reductionist view—Freud himself admitted to an incomplete understanding of women’s psychology (Freud, 1931/1953)—was effectively challenged by authors such as Melanie Klein (1928); Karen Horney (1924, 1926); Clara Thompson (1953), and Robert Stoller (1968, 1976), whose seminal works contributed deep elaborations on feminine psychology to psychoanalytic theory, contrasting Freud’s phallocentric paradigm and general Victorian thinking. In the 1980s and 1990s, the works of several authors—mainly with a relational psychoanalytic background—began to explore the intersection of psychoanalytic practice, academic research, and feminist theory (Benjamin, 1988, 2002; Butler, 1995, 2004, 2011; Chodorow, 2005; Corbett, 2008, 2009; Dimen, 2013; Ehrensaft, 2011; Elise, 1997; Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Goldner, 2014; Halberstam, 1998; Harris, 2008; Layton, 1998; Lingiardi, 2015; Silverman, 1992; see also González, 2019). These works paved the way for a disentanglement of gender identity from anatomy.…”

Writing Gender with Sexuality: Reflections on the Diaries of Lou Sullivan

“…Beginning largely in the 1980s and flourishing in the 1990s, psychoanalysis and related academic disciplines developed an extensive literature on the vicissitudes of gender (see, e.g., Benjamin 1988;Butler 1990Butler , 2004Chodorow 2005;Corbett 1996Corbett , 2008Dimen and Goldner 2005;Elise 1997Elise , 1998Fausto-Sterling 2000;Grosz 1994;Halberstam 1998;Harris 2009;Layton 1998;Silverman 1992). This literature reacted critically to the essentialist reductionism of gender in the shadow of an unreconstructed theory of sexuality.…”

‘What's Going to Happen Now?’ Changing Care Relations in a Psychosocial Context

“…While the relationship between external and internal worlds is a central psychoanalytic preoccupation, the mutual influence of the wider cultural setting (rather than the maternal or family environment) and the internal world has been taken up by a smaller number of analytic and social theorists. Following Freud (, ), notable examples include the work of Fromm (), Adorno (), Elias (), Lasch (), Chodorow (), Benjamin () and Peltz (). Layton () suggests that dominant cultural assumptions crucially influence the internal world of the self, often in deeply traumatic ways.…”