Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

CHAPTER TEN. PATTERNS OF ENGAGEMENT –THE RETURN OF THE
MOTHER
The 1980s saw a marked impact by feminist thought on psychoanalysis, which was to have
strategic importance for the evolution of religious and spiritual approaches. Feminism
demonstrated the dominant place of unquestioned assumptions by those in power, with the
ability to exclude or control. Feminist critiques questioned all assumptions and offered
academic, political, social, philosophical and cultural challenges to psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis needed to respond to these challenges if it were to retain legitimacy as a
means of discourse pronouncing on human personhood. This led to a re-reading of Freud
and psychoanalytic theory in which: the maternal was given prominence; the interactions
between mother/baby were seen very differently; new links were made to existing
psychoanalytic theory; new theories were developed by Chodorow (Chodorow 2005),
Benjamin and others; and there was a re-discovery or new awareness of the symbolic.
Freud’s writings on female sexuality (1931 SE 21) and femininity (1933 SE 22) examined
the idea ‘that for the little girl the mother as dispenser of the earliest bodily care is the object
of a particularly intense and long-lasting archaic cathexis’ (Kristeva 2005: 571). 257
However he interpreted this discovery through a male-orientated genital perspective
(Chodorow 1991) , 258 leading to a critical evaluation of Freud’s ‘inherent denial of the
power and fear of women, unthinking patriarchy and a narcissistic over-evaluation of the
penis’ (Barossa 2006). As early as 1922 Karen Horney challenged Freud’s understanding of
257 Cathexis is the English translation adopted by Strachey for Freud’s German term ‘besetzung’. ‘Cathexis
refers to the process that attaches psychic energy, essentially libido, to an object, body part, or psychic
element’ (Denis 2005b: 259).
258 ‘A Jew himself, Freud was following a long Hebraic tradition already familiar to us from the Old
Testament, Genesis in particular. Man came first, then women’ (Figes quoted in Mitchell 1974: 328f.).
114