ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a personal, quasi-ethnographic narrative about being a feminist, psychoanalyst, and sociologist. Freud had a deep interest in society and culture, yet psychoanalysis and sociology begin from opposing premises. For sociology, life comes from without; for psychoanalysis, we create our lives from within. Psychoanalysis also began, with Studies on Hysteria, from interests in sexuality, femininity, and gender. Women psychoanalysts were found throughout the psychoanalytic world. Second-wave feminism brought both a critique of psychoanalysis and a new psychoanalytic feminism. This history formed the setting for my own experience. Beginning with The Reproduction of Mothering, my work received contradictory recognition–awards and criticism–within sociology. Unlike the preceding era, when throughout the academy social scientists and departments could be found that brought psychoanalysis to anthropology, sociology, history, and political science, now critique and distance were the norm. By contrast, my mother-daughter theory and comparisons of female and male development were drawn on by feminists throughout the humanities, to study women writers, women portrayed in literature from the Greek myths forward, and gendered assumptions in political theory and philosophy. This chapter describes my personal trajectory and that of psychoanalysis, feminism, and psychoanalytic feminism in the social sciences and the humanities.
