EDITH KURZWEIL
17
Because psychoanalysis is one of the central ideas that changed the
thinking of our century (the others are Marxism and Darwinism), psy–
choanalysts everywhere kept extending and revising their theories of
drives and narcissism, and of personality structure and object relations, in
the hope of creating a radically better world that would help free indi–
viduals from their unconscious conflicts. This, of course, was a large
claim. But because, for instance, the innovative and outrageous French
psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, and the socially consc ious German psycho–
analyst, Alexander Mitscherlich, were addressing their own constituten–
cies, psychoanalysis in France and Germany played different roles and em–
phasized other than our taken-for-granted "American ego psychology" -
that is, the centrality of Freud's structural theory of id, ego and su–
perego.
Feminists' demands for equal rights with men in all economic, polit–
ical, social, and personal spheres usually have been boosted by insights
from Freudian theories, though not always directly. Complexities
abound: from its inception, psychoanalysis has been therapy, theory, phi–
losophy, and metapsychology all at once. Progress in each of these areas
inevitably meant that all the other areas had to be recast, so that psycho–
analysts had to function in a theoretical state of flux. Feminists have had
to navigate in male cu ltures, to chall enge specific discriminatory habits,
and to break down the boundaries of sexual domination by the men
they lived with, or decided to abandon. These men themselves were
brought up in the political order other men had created. Thus, to fur–
ther women's freedom feminists and most psychoanalysts had to deal
with and rethink the philosophies that were in vogue and to build on
the realistic (legal) options open, or about to open,
to
women. Only by
adapting their thinking and ideals to existing institutions could they
promote their ends. For instance, the women who in 1907 had to con–
tend with Fritz Wittels's argument that women's psychic makeup pre–
vented them from turning into competent physicians cou ld not possibly
envision the debate over the advantage of women obstetri cians over
males that would rage in the 1970s and 1980s. Freud sided against
Wittels, but the
Zeitgeist
did not allow for as strong a rebuttal as con–
temporary Freudians might advance. Yet then and since then women
have faced the cultural and interest-based resistance to equality that was
founded, at least partly, on the fact that women always (or at least for
some time to come) are the ones to bear children. To the extent that
women too had internalized these attitudes, they revealed their Janus–
faced existences.
All along, both feminists and psychoanalysts have addressed sexual
differences, but the ways in which they expected to resolve, minimize, or
