Freudian Analysts/Feminist Issues (review)

Freudian Analysts/Feminist Issues. By Judith M. Hughes (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999) 222 pp. $35.00.

This book is divided into five sections, each with an introduction and conclusion. Each section reviews prominent psychoanalytic theorists: Helene Deutsch, Eric Erikson, Carol Gilligan, Karen Horney, Robert Stoller, Nancy Chodorow, and, finally, Melanie Klein in a chapter in which the author includes herself as a theorist. These sections are organized according to "the notion of science as a selection process" (1).

Hughes places the theorists into categories of selection by tracing their conceptual linkages and histories. The categories refer to variants of the concepts of evolutionary selection. The first category, "Retrogression," a backward or reversed movement, refers to Deutsch, who described female development in psychoanalytic terms. The designation is chosen because Hughes views Deutsch's theories as a retrogression. The female came into being by a series of deprivations.

The second category, "Epigenesis," includes Erikson and Gilligan. This description is based on a theory that describes a person's sequential differentiation on the model of embryological development. Erikson traces development along essentially male lines. Gilligan, although an admirer of Erikson, writes about female development as different than male. Her work rests on the identification and understanding of women's "voice." To place it narrowly in the categories of stage theory, even though it was a critique of Lawrence Kohlberg's moral developmental stages, seems not to address her major contributions.

The third category, "Sexual Selection," is about Horney. The fourth, "Artificial Selection," addresses Stoller and Chodorow, and the final one, "Natural Selection," includes Klein and the author.

Hughes is interested in the choices that the various theorists made concerning which part of Freudian theory to address, and how they describe and integrate concepts of the body, gender identity, and sexuality. These are important issues of considerable interest. However, the summaries of the theorists' main points often do not necessarily resonate with other readings and understandings of them. The biographical details are interesting, but they, too, are selective, and sometimes critical. Moreover, the issues discussed often do not seem to be the central ones. For example, in the section concerning Erikson and Gilligan, the components of the theories that the author criticizes seem to have been chosen to fit into her arbitrary categories of selection. Her speculations about the theorists' motives also seem arbitrary despite their intelligence. For example, she writes, "About whom was Erikson speaking, about Freud or about himself? Here he constructed Erikson the narrator by identifying with his Freud. Here he displayed a striking feature of the persona he was to recreate time and time again: a sensibility that encompassed masculine and feminine alike" (35).

Hughes describes Horney's work as intent on "rescuing the psychology of women from the condescension of men" (82). She effectively summarizes some of Horney's achievements and comments on the absence of generalizations about sexual difference in her later work. The category, "Sexual Selection," seems to refer to tensions both between the sexes and within females.

To lump Stoller and Chodorow together seems to misrepresent their respective standpoints; the label of "Artificial Selection" seems unclear. The author, however, describes important historical perspectives--particularly with respect to the circumstances that led Stoller to develop an overgeneralized theory--and scatters interesting biographical references throughout.

In the final section, Hughes categorizes herself with Klein, writing, "Klein stressed the multiplicity and variety of sexuality. In so doing she remained faithful to Freud's conception of sexuality as made up of components and of the complete Oedipus complex as made up of both positive and negative aspects. I have continued in similar vein, and have pointed to the possibility of multiple gender identities, a possibility that follows from the notion the ego is fissionable" (162). The concept of multiple gender identities is interesting and controversial. It is not elaborated sufficiently in this context to be persuasive. Nor is the connection between Hughes and Klein entirely convincing. This intriguing book, however, raises provocative...