EDITH KURZWEIL
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these struggles don't directly reflect unconscious fantasies and are largely
verbal. It is easy to get carried away and
to
ignore the fact that Kristeva,
for example, has maintained, already for a number of years, that the un–
conscious cannot be politicized, since this confuses (conscious) political
and (unconscious) psychic resistance.
In
order to demonstrate by a very specific example that the applica–
tion of Freudian thought to feminism is culture-bound, I might summa–
rize the state of psychoanalytic feminism in Germany, which ever since
the end of World War II has followed an entirely different drummer.
Influenced by the Freud-Marx syntheses of the Frankfurt School
(including those of emigres Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Max
Horkheimer, and T. W . Adorno) and by Freudian psychoanalysts,
Alexander Mitscherlich convinced his compatriots that psychoanalytic
therapy alone might rouse their fellow Germans to liberate their psyches
from the Nazi past. Because this assumption cast psychoanalysis as a radi–
cal activity, it became the theory
par excellence
for the German left. The
psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich (1975), in fact, was the first promi–
nent German feminist. Essentially, psychoanalysts in Germany followed
most of the American ego psychologists' therapeutic practices. But they
also engaged in joint research with sociologists and psychologists and
were especially attuned to their patients' social milieu. The resulting
"socioanalysis," in turn, paid more attention to Freud's universalist the–
ses, such as
Totem and Taboo,
than did many American or French
Freudians.
Given the individual and social memories that "by necessity" were
driven into the unconscious after 1945 , and that must be made conscious
if, as Alexander Mitscherlich asserted, Germans were ever again to join
humanity, socioanalysis makes sense. Margarete Mitscherlich's (1985)
thesis that German women too had accepted Nazi doctrines and had
been implicated in the Nazi crimes, even as they had been victims of their
husbands and of Hitler's male followers, further extends this doctrine.
Consequently, Gen11an psychoanalytic feminists eagerly continue to mine
their own, their patients' and their society's unconscious by more or less
classical Freudian methods while adding whatever other social ingredients
they deem useful. In the process, they expect to be emancipated as
Germans and as women.
Inevitably, German feminists could not support the American femi–
nists' theories of the Second Wave. By 1990, this theorizing appeared to
have cut loose from its former moorings in women's social conditions,
and in the name of postmodernism gave rise to ever more imaginative
and amusing interpretations of literary and social texts that are meant to
shock. For instance, they looked at psychoanalytic texts in terms of
