ABSTRACT
According to Judith Kegan Gardiner, psychoanalysis is useful lor feminists because it purports to tell us what gender means–that is, how persons become psychologically feminine or masculine. Freud claimed that the father-dominated Oedipus complex originated this binary division, but more recent English and American psychoanalytic theory pushes gender asymmetries back to the mother-dominated pre-oedipal period of a child’s life. Gardiner shows how feminist critics use psychoanalytic concepts to analyse gendered subjects in relation to the texts they write and read – through authors’ projections, characters’ motives, readers’ responses, and other structures latent in texts.
She begins with feminist applications of some basic Freudian concepts: the unconscious, the infantile origin of adult emotion, and the symbolic expression of unconscious wishes in art. After surveying some other psychological approaches (derived from Jung and Piaget), she turns to post-Freudian theories: ego psychology and identity theory, transference phenomena, new theories about narcissism, and ‘object relations’. She concludes with the explicitly feminist reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow and Adrienne Rich. Their insights into mothering and its effects on female personality, she suggests, offer models of the ways women writing and reading enter into texts in order to use them in a process of self-definition.
