ABSTRACT
Nancy Chodorow, in her book The Reproduction of Mothering, offers a classic critique of both biological and certain psychological accounts of mothering. In terms of problems with certain psychologies, she writes: Role training, identification, and enforcement certainly have to do with the acquisition of an appropriate gender role. The having of a child is often explicitly located as within a “psychological” realm in the terms Chodorow uses: as the fulfilment of an internal need or desire beyond an external social instruction or expectation. Chodorow suggests that a different kind of psychology, or a different understanding of psychology, is appropriate to account for a tenacity and quality of motherhood and the wish for motherhood. The “realistic” for Juliet Mitchell is not necessarily a causal factor for psychic experience, while she sees it as such for Chodorow: changes in the gender of child-caring individuals will change the gender-roles of the child in turn.
