FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS AT ODDS

Author: By Louise J. Kaplan

Date: SUNDAY, May 17, 1998

Page: D2

Section: Books

``Difference,'' a term crucial to dialogues between feminists and psychoanalysts, has two meanings. The first, arising from what is generally called ``Difference theory,'' refers to explorations of the emotional and intellectual characteristics that distinguish ``woman'' from ``man.'' The second refers to binary difference -- male/female, mind/body, production/reproduction. By setting up differences as dichotomies, binary configurations repress and subdue the ambiguities inherent in difference.

Buhle's historical analysis is governed by binary logic. The centerpiece of her narrative, the difference/equality binary, concerns the dilemma of whether feminist interests are best advanced through a focus on the differences between the sexes or on a common humanity that would accord to women social, political, and economic rights equal to those enjoyed by men.

Instead of questioning the wisdom of posing difference as antithetical to equality, Buhle, the Harrison S. Kravis professor of American civilization at Brown University, goes on to structure the dialogues between feminists and psychoanalysts around issues of equality, humanism, and the ``modernist project of selfhood.'' This strategy effectively limits dialogue to Anglo-American feminists and American revisionist psychoanalysts and excludes European thinkers, classical Freudians, and any feminist or psychoanalyst engaged in other forms of dialogue. Difference remains as a discontent to be cured, and only dialogues purged of uncertainty, contradiction, and difference are given expression.

Buhle feels most comfortable with American-bred, Neo-Freudian ``self-in-relation'' theories -- object relations, interrelational, intersubjective, and self psychologies. In these familiar contexts she is less intolerent of difference and therefore more able to make the sharp distinctions that such an ambitious historical venture requires. Just as often, however, ``self-in-relation'' theory becomes another opportunity for erasing differences. For example, Buhle assigns the blanket term ``relational'' to any theory she regards as ``genuine psychoanalytic feminism.''

In the concluding paper, Buhle describes Freud's rescue by the French feminists at the 1979 conference called ``The Future of Difference.'' Like many other American feminists nurtured on the project of selfhood, Buhle felt threatened by this ``stunning return engagement'' of European doctrine. Yet two influential American feminists, Carolyn Burke and Jane Gallop, welcomed the ``French Detour,'' predicting that it would show American feminists how to ``think `difference' differently'' and enable them ``to approach psychoanalysis as `an important strategic weapon' against patriarchy.''

In support of her position, Buhle raises the equality/elitism banner. Claiming that difference feminists neglect racial and class inequalities and the plights of ordinary women in favor of elitist theoretical discourse, Buhle concludes that difference theory has already ``reached a dead end.'' As the citation for this pronouncement, Buhle's notes record the demise of the quite alive and very active deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida (who she says shifted, ``in the last book before his death, back to Marxism'').

Barbara Johnson's ``The Feminist Difference'' is testimony that the dialogues between difference feminists and psychoanalysis is ongoing and vigorous. In this marvelous collection of essays, Johnson, Fredrick Wertham professor of law and psychiatry in society at Harvard University, demonstrates that the interrogation of difference is crucial to dialogue. Moreover, the difference/equality binary is exposed as a device for forestalling dialogue. For Johnson, difference is not a symptom but the very soul of feminism. She reads the contradictions, ambivalences, and impasses within feminism as indications of a revitalizing transformative process.

Constructed around juxtapositions of literary, psychoanalytic, legal, philosophical, poetic, and cinematic texts, Johnson's essays aim to demolish the binaries implicit on the pairings. Thus the texts are strategically set along the fissures of binary difference, bringing together such oddly paired couples as Toni Morrison with Sigmund Freud, Nella Larsen with Heinz Kohut, Patricia Williams with Rene Descartes, John Keats with Jane Campion. The ensuing dialogues resist the binaries and erode their power, opening each text to be read in a new and surprising way.

The first essay, ``Is Female to Male as Ground Is to Figure?'', epitomizes the remarkable dexterity of Johnson's thought. By placing Freud's case of Dora alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne's ``The Birthmark'' and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's ``The Yellow Wallpaper,'' Johnson reveals and questions the therapeutic impulse within feminism. In all three narratives, a female is subjected to the therapeutic zeal of a male doctor and in each instance, after resisting and trying to express the ``composite'' and ``interwoven'' otherness that is herself, the woman gradually renounces herself in order to conform to the idealized femininity assigned to her by patriarchy. In observing how the aesthetics of cure models itself on medical cure, Johnson warns about the ``therapeutic haste toward closure'' within feminism. ``Feminism,'' she says ``is structured no less therapeutically than the normalizing patriarchal therapies it is designed to combat.''

Several essays juxtapose a text written by an African-American with a psychoanalytic one. As the insulations of psychoanalysis are invaded by a cultural form from outside, the openings created within a psychoanalytic text open psychoanalytic insights to a cultural form ``disjunctive to its original imperatives.'' As psychoanalytic theory addresses issues of race, the ``Jewish question'' that haunted Freud's discoveries is shown to have been inside psychoanalysis all along.

In ``Muteness Envy,'' the unravished bride of quietness in Keats's ``Ode on a Grecian Urn'' speaks to the mute and eventually ravished and mutilated heroine of Campion's ``The Piano.'' Johnson's elaboration of this dialogue reveals that Freud's penis-envy theory, like many other theories about the inscrutable female, is a symptom of male envy of the power of women's silence. The dialogue ``tells the truth behind the beauty of muteness envy.''

Johnson's exquisite meditations on literature, psychoanalyisis, race, and gender offer compelling evidence that literary discourse is not merely theoretical nor indifferent to social and cultural inequalities. Literature is the place where the impasses of feminist theory and thought can be guarded from the anxieties that lead to therapeutic closure.