The Potential of Theory: Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship

Through a close reading of Klein and Irigaray's work on the mother-daughter relationship via the Electra myth, Jacobs diagnoses what she considers a fundamental problem in psychoanalytic and feminist psychoanalytic theory. She shows that neither thinker is able to theorize the mother-daughter relationship on a structural level but is only able to describe its symptoms. Jacobs makes a crucial distinction between description and theory and argues that the need to go beyond description and phenomenology toward the creation of a structural theory is the only way that feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis can avoid reproducing the terms of the male imaginary. The essay concludes by arguing that theorization of the mother-daughter relationship can only be achieved if we analyze manifestations of the mother-daughter relationship in clinical, cultural, and mythical material through the framework of a foreclosed or absent underlying maternal law.