Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Paperback)

by Mari Jo Buhle (Author) "In 1909, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, Sigmund Freud joined other renowned scholars and delivered a..." (more)
Key Phrases: genital transference, psychoanalytic misogyny, flight from manhood, United States, New York, Karen Horney (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The year is 1909. The speaker is Sigmund Freud. The woman in the front row, admiringly but insistently coaxing the master of psychoanalysis to say more about women and sexuality, is anarchist and free-love advocate Emma Goldman. This symbolic moment is the ideal place to begin describing the convoluted 90-year tango that is the history of feminism's relationship with psychoanalysis.

Mari Jo Buhle, a professor of American Civilization and History at Brown University, has written an academic study which exhibits all the virtues and some of the failings of the genre. Although long, earnest, and prone to sudden squalls of mode words like "discourse" and "heuristic," Feminism and Its Discontents is also carefully researched, cautiously neutral, and lucidly written. Informative subhistories detail how "second wave" feminism transformed Freud from icon into ogre, why key male pundits such as Laing, Lasch, and the Frankfurt Schoolers were so influential, and how Nancy Chodorow and others partially rehabilitated Freud's reputation.

One depressing feature of this material--which comes out starkly but in a way that makes you wonder if the deadpan author is being deliberately ironic--is the relentless egotism, narcissism, and sanctimoniousness of most players on both sides. Buhle's own intellectual standards throw into sharp relief the taste for rhetoric and special pleading of so many of the figures for whom she accounts.

In recent years, the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition has had to work overtime just to preserve some vestiges of intellectual respectability, having been attacked from a variety of critical vantage points (see, for example, Frederick Crews's searing indictment in The Memory Wars). Since we owe the very idea of "moving beyond Freud" largely to feminist writers, Buhle's history is especially timely. --Richard Farr --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Psychoanalysts have made many attempts to modify the central importance Freud initially attributed to the concept of penis envy in female psychological development. According to Buhle, professor of history at Brown University, the transformations of psychoanalytic understandings of women can be seen, to a large extent, as responses to feminist criticisms. Although it's unquestionable that feminism has influenced psychoanalysts' revisions of Freud's theories about women, this history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism fails to clarify how the most significant modern psychoanalytic theories of female psychology differ from Freud's and, consequently, what feminism's role has been in influencing these changes. Nowhere does the author discuss the real conceptual differences between recent psychoanalytic theories of women's psychological development and Freud. Rather than addressing the substance of post-Freudian theories, this book simply describes them. For example, Margaret Mahler's account of the early interactions between mother and infant is presented schematically and as a counterpoint to Freud's "masculine bias." Remaining unexplored, therefore, is the extent to which modern psychoanalytic theories preserve, rather than destroy or overturn, the core of Freud's views on women in the light of feminist criticism.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 452 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (November 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674004035
• ISBN-13: 978-0674004030
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,439,343 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars for Content, Three for Analysis, June 16, 2007

By	Daniel Raphael - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is an excellent historical overview of feminism as it developed in the United States, specifically in its engagement with the then-new perspectives of Freud's system of understanding. The major feminist figures, their views, and the backdrop of the times in which they acted upon the cultural and political stage, are all well-presented. The original enthusiasm of many feminists for psychoanalysis and for Freud is made clear by the author. That the process of disenchantment took place over a span of decades and closely corresponded to major revisions of Freudian psychoanalysis by the "neo-Freudians," is similarly made plain. The author is to be commended for laying out this history in a very methodical and accessible fashion.

Beyond providing information, this book has a major deficit: the author cannot bring herself to baldly state that feminism and feminists have come to be rife with major contradictions, though she usually presents their views well enough. (A noticeable exception is her labeling Camille Paglia an 'antifeminist', with no definition or proof provided to bolster this characterization.)

The last sentence in the book is apparently supposed to act as an adequate summary: that whatever else one may say, ideas clearly matter. This is as weak as it is revealing...for if *that* is the product of having laid out a welter of irreconcilable positions and perspectives that are all to be called 'feminist', then one has displayed ideas in such a state that their "mattering" consists of nothing more than intermorganatic dissonance.

Once again--this is a book well worth reading, notwithstanding the author's wish to gloss over the chaotic and jumbled state of contemporary feminist theory. Useful as a history, it does nothing to resolve feminism's apparent intellectual dead end, a cul de sac wherein the author has had to admit that feminists even disagree as to whether there is such a thing as 'woman'.

1 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect, June 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Hardcover)

As a male I now appreciate feminism more than ever. Buhle is rich in recording women's movements from 1909 to date. Particularly interesting is how most men grow into jerks--and stay that way--and why women's power is so far reaching into men's lives that it is--that it shows us--everyday.