Psychoanalysis as a critical theory of gender

Jane M. Selby

pp. 307-318

in: Stam, Leendert Mos, Warren Thorngate, Bernie Kaplan (eds), Recent trends in theoretical psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

This paper evaluates Lacanian inspired appropriations of psychoanalytic theory which address questions of psychological gender. Central to this is Mitchell's 1974 classic Psychoanalysis and Feminism. I examine the Oedipal Complex and the writers Spivak and Irigaray in order to gain insight into a contemporary impasse. There is the problem of the profound masculinism of psychoanalytic theory epitomized by Lacan's observation that Woman does not exist. At the same time there is the need to link the knowledge of the ubiquity of gender inequality with an awareness of how the sexes need not be, and are often not, different in any fundamental ways. I move the debate away from an evaluation of any "real" sex differences and towards the ways in which it is difficult for us to evaluate gender in anything other than sexist ways.

Cited authors

Lacan Jacques