The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender and Culture (review)

Like many travelers, I try to avoid airplane conversations by immersing myself in a book. I was using this book to that end when the Achilles heel of this method manifested itself: the woman in the next seat asked me what the book was about. But in a nearly unprecedented stroke of luck, fate had handed me an engaging and intelligent seatmate. After I tried to summarize the book, she told me a little story. She said that when she was eight years old, having just won an impromptu race arranged with several friends, and feeling happy and full of herself, she looked up and around to notice the beauty of the landscape, the trees, and the sky. She thought to herself, "I wish everyone could see this," and then almost immediately realized that no one else could. Her emotional state, her attachment and associations to the place where she had grown up, and any number of other factors combined to make her own perception of the situation unique.

Dress this up a bit, put it in the context of human immersion in culture, and you have a good part of this book. No two people ever understand or react to their culture in precisely the same way, for every person endows all aspects of the world they experience with meanings that are personal, based upon his or her unique situation. The enormous and timely contribution of The Power of Feelings is to make this point so clearly that no serious reader could miss it.

I have always been a little mystified about why such a simple point, which must be obvious to any one who has talked and listened to several people share the same cultural background, should need defending. But for complicated historical and political reasons, it does. Of particular relevance in this moment is that some aspects of contemporary postmodernist and poststructuralist thought have had the effect, within contemporary cultural anthropology, of reinforcing the cultural determinism of traditional American anthropology. Thus it is useful to have an author with an established reputation in women's studies, sociology, and psychology step up and speak plainly against the prevailing orthodoxy according to which discursive systems construct subjectivity.

As the subtitle of the book indicates, much of this book is devoted to the task of sorting through the implications of this anti-determinism in contemporary theories of gender, psychoanalysis, and psychological anthropology. Readers of this journal will presumably be most interested in the latter domain, and here I am happy to report that Chodorow provides a discussion of current work that is, to my knowledge, unequaled in its depth and clarity. I am particularly happy to see an at once critical and respectful discussion of work in "the anthropology of self and feeling," centering on the work of Catherine Lutz and my own teacher Michelle Rosaldo. Although I would argue that Chodorow does not fully appreciate the complexity of Lutz's arguments in particular, it is useful to have a fairly even-handed account that juxtaposes this work with that of more traditional thinkers in psychological anthropology.

In sum, I would encourage anyone who teaches psychological anthropology or similar courses to consider Chodorow's chapters on this topic for class use. However, ultimately this book aims at being more than a review of work in several different disciplines; Chodorow's intent is also to provide an account of just how cultural and psychological meanings work together in human life.

When it comes to providing a language for talking about this question—about how culture and subjectivity are mutually constructed—Chodorow relies heavily on psychoanalytic concepts. It is ultimately the subject's unconscious fantasies that imbue experience with meaning via the process of transference. Transference was originally conceived by Freud as the distortions in the relationship between patient and analyst that are introduced by the patient. That is, based in part upon the salient relationships of her past, the patient will...