Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis 1st Edition

by Teresa Brennan (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

Review

`... [a] stimulating insight into recent American criticism ...' - Times Literary Supplement

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Routledge; 1st edition (August 10, 1989)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 280 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0415014905
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0415014908
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1390L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.98 x 0.64 x 9.02 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,352,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,633 in Journalism
- #4,489 in Medical Psychoanalysis
- #5,190 in Popular Psychology Psychoanalysis

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A LARGELY "LITERARY" EXAMINATION OF VARIOUS DEBATES

Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2013

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Editor Teresa Brennan has also written books such as The Transmission of Affect , History After Lacan (Opening Out: Feminism for Today) , Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy , etc. She wrote in the Preface to this 1989 collection of essays, "'Between aFeminism and Psychoanalysis' is based on a series of fifteen seminars given at Cambridge University ... from January to July 1987. The series was organized in an attempt to explore the often intense debates that have arisen around psychoanalysis, especially of the Lacanian type, and feminism... Mainly, the debates concern essentialism, the kind of symbolic law culture requires, sexual difference, how far knowledge is inherently patriarchal, and the practical and political use of psychoanalysis for feminism... In so far as debates on psychoanalysis and feminism have a common point of departure, it is feminism's concern with social transformation... the contributors are mainly literary theorists..." (Pg. vii)

She adds, "This introduction and to some extent this book is preoccupied with four stagnant issues in feminist, psychoanalytic thinking, and how to move beyond them. The issues are: the status of the Lacanian 'symbolic,' sexual difference and knowledge, the bearing of essentialism on feminist politics, and the relation between psychical reality and the social. If this introduction has a thesis, it is that thinking about these issues is deadlocked, of late, because their specific political OR psychoanalytic contexts have been neglected." (Pg. 1)

One essayist says, "If repudiation is always the repudiation of femininity, then in its own terms psychoanalysis can hardly blame feminism for an attitude which it has identified as inevitable... Psychoanalytically, it is impossible to adopt psychoanalysis ... it cannot but be repudiated. To put it bluntly, the knife that cuts both ways is also the three ways that fork only one way. You can't refute it; to which we may now add: you can only repudiate it." (Pg. 52-53)

Another says, "What I am trying to get to here is a new and different scene, at a new intersection of psychoanalysis, feminism, and the institution, where a radical deconstruction of the academic subject is taking place; where a radically new kind of knowledge is being produced; and where women are becoming radical agents of that new knowledge and of political change IF and WHEN they actualize freely the mutations and paradoxes I have been referring to." (Pg. 78)

Still another says, "I will challenge the view that the essentialist feminist position is apolitical or even potentially reactionary. On the contrary, I am in profound agreement ... that essentialism may be a necessary strategy. I will also assert that a feminist woman who is interested in thinking about sexual difference and the feminine today cannot afford not to be essentialist." (Pg. 92-93)

One essay argues, "With help of feminism psychoanalysis has achieved prominence in the literary institution via a critique of the ideological usage within its own institution. Literary criticism is one field in which a psychoanalysis-for-feminism has flourished, for it has tackled orthodoxy in psychoanalysis, hard to combat in the psychoanalytic institution itself. It has taken on the fight against patriarchy and indeed against any opressive system, considering in the process to what extent psychoanalysis might be 'refunctioned'... in order to become more political than it is claimed by some feminists to be already. Literary criticism has given women access to discourse as both writers and critics, something they have not been able to have directly in psychoanalysis or in politics." (Pg. 142)

While some readers might have wanted a less theoretical, more "nuts-and-bolts" approach dealing with practical matters affecting these two topics, the essays explore the areas that the editor wanted to cover.

Helpful

A LARGELY "LITERARY" EXAMINATION OF VARIOUS DEBATES

Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2013

Editor Teresa Brennan has also written books such as The Transmission of Affect , History After Lacan (Opening Out: Feminism for Today) , Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy , etc. She wrote in the Preface to this 1989 collection of essays, "'Between aFeminism and Psychoanalysis' is based on a series of fifteen seminars given at Cambridge University ... from January to July 1987. The series was organized in an attempt to explore the often intense debates that have arisen around psychoanalysis, especially of the Lacanian type, and feminism... Mainly, the debates concern essentialism, the kind of symbolic law culture requires, sexual difference, how far knowledge is inherently patriarchal, and the practical and political use of psychoanalysis for feminism... In so far as debates on psychoanalysis and feminism have a common point of departure, it is feminism's concern with social transformation... the contributors are mainly literary theorists..." (Pg. vii)

She adds, "This introduction and to some extent this book is preoccupied with four stagnant issues in feminist, psychoanalytic thinking, and how to move beyond them. The issues are: the status of the Lacanian 'symbolic,' sexual difference and knowledge, the bearing of essentialism on feminist politics, and the relation between psychical reality and the social. If this introduction has a thesis, it is that thinking about these issues is deadlocked, of late, because their specific political OR psychoanalytic contexts have been neglected." (Pg. 1)

One essayist says, "If repudiation is always the repudiation of femininity, then in its own terms psychoanalysis can hardly blame feminism for an attitude which it has identified as inevitable... Psychoanalytically, it is impossible to adopt psychoanalysis ... it cannot but be repudiated. To put it bluntly, the knife that cuts both ways is also the three ways that fork only one way. You can't refute it; to which we may now add: you can only repudiate it." (Pg. 52-53)

Another says, "What I am trying to get to here is a new and different scene, at a new intersection of psychoanalysis, feminism, and the institution, where a radical deconstruction of the academic subject is taking place; where a radically new kind of knowledge is being produced; and where women are becoming radical agents of that new knowledge and of political change IF and WHEN they actualize freely the mutations and paradoxes I have been referring to." (Pg. 78)

Still another says, "I will challenge the view that the essentialist feminist position is apolitical or even potentially reactionary. On the contrary, I am in profound agreement ... that essentialism may be a necessary strategy. I will also assert that a feminist woman who is interested in thinking about sexual difference and the feminine today cannot afford not to be essentialist." (Pg. 92-93)

One essay argues, "With help of feminism psychoanalysis has achieved prominence in the literary institution via a critique of the ideological usage within its own institution. Literary criticism is one field in which a psychoanalysis-for-feminism has flourished, for it has tackled orthodoxy in psychoanalysis, hard to combat in the psychoanalytic institution itself. It has taken on the fight against patriarchy and indeed against any opressive system, considering in the process to what extent psychoanalysis might be 'refunctioned'... in order to become more political than it is claimed by some feminists to be already. Literary criticism has given women access to discourse as both writers and critics, something they have not been able to have directly in psychoanalysis or in politics." (Pg. 142)

While some readers might have wanted a less theoretical, more "nuts-and-bolts" approach dealing with practical matters affecting these two topics, the essays explore the areas that the editor wanted to cover.

Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis 1st Edition

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