ELAINE HOFFMAN BARUCH
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sent, if fathers become mothers, one may well ask oneself who will
play the role of separators?
EHB:
Couldn't they both be? Couldn't both sexes be both nurturers
and differentiators somehow?
JK:
I would like to think so, but it would be very difficult. What
seems more likely is that many borderline children will be pro–
duced, and it will become necessary to find a third party, that is to
say, the school, all those medical sectors of the different "psy's":
psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, who will play the
paternal role . The number of helping institutions for early child–
hood, for school children, that are forming now in our society is
extraordinary, and one may well ask oneself what their function
is. These people, of course, replace the failed mother, as is re–
marked only too often, but it is above all to replace the nonexis–
tent father: to play the role of the separator, of someone who com–
forts the mother in order to permit her to take her role in hand.
The question is not so much what must be done in order that
women be happy, but what is to be done in order to allow children
to develop so they will accede to the various elements of human
culture. And I think that what interferes with that access is the
underestimation of the paternal function.
EHB:
Nancy Chodorow, whom I mentioned before, would say that
the function of the father has nothing to do with his sex, and that
someone female could play the same role of separator.
JK:
Yes, certainly; that's why I say "a third party," who could be the
woman psychotherapist to whom one can bring the child.
EHB:
Let me get back to that problem of not being able to overcome
the biological fact of the mother carrying the child, never mind
rearing it. How would you feel if the biological revolution were to
go so far that the reproduction of the infant took place outside the
womb? Would you welcome that possibility, which I no longer
think is quite so much of a fantasy as we had considered it even
five years ago?
JK:
I think that we are all caught up in moral scruples, and we tell
ourselves that in the near future such a prospect is to be avoided,
for ontological and ethical reasons, for the various experiments
which could be done in this area should have guarantees. We
aren't very clear in what domain, but we have the impression that
we are exposing ourselves to an arbitrariness which is not very far
from the experiments of the Nazis that hover on the horizon . This
