[Essay] Feminist Critique of Psychoanalysis and Ego Psychology

Basically, psychoanalysis is a family of psychological theories and methods which claim to elucidate unconscious relations in a systematic way through an associative process (www.encyclopedia.com). In addition, the fundamental subject matter of psychoanalysis is the unconscious patterns of life revealed through the analysand's (the patient's) free associations. The analyst's goal is to help liberate the analysand from unexamined or unconscious barriers of transference and resistance, that is, past patterns of relatedness that are no longer serviceable or that inhibit freedom.

Apparently, in a short essay of this type it is hardly possible to give a detailed description of the complex problem which psychoanalysis and ego psychology presents. Basically, the general aim of Psychoanalysis and Ego Psychology with respect to feminist perspective is to bring out a harmonious functioning between the different parts of the personality, between the parts which are likely to create conflicts in the healthy and sick alike. These antagonistic strivings in the emotional life are experienced by everyone.

Since Freud, there have been within psychoanalysis tensions between universalizing and essentialzing claims about theoretical women in the developmental theory and the varieties of observations about clinical women in all their difference, context, individuality, and specificity. Similarly, contemporary feminism points us to the differences among women and to the multiplicities and individualities of gendered subjectivity, as well as to the fragmented, contradictory, multiple, and contextualized partialities of any one person's gendered and sexual subjectivity. Clinical understandings of gender and feminist theory here come together to document individuality and variation against the overgeneralizing, universalizing, and essentializing of psychoanalytic theory.

On the other hand, the fluidity and changeability of emotionally cast transferences in clinical experience make clear the specificity of any person's gendered subjectivity, a subjectivity we cannot capture in terms of monolithic claims about genital structure and function or preoedipal and oedipal developmental patterns. By staying with the clinical, we remember that any particular woman's or man's gender is a continuously invoked project in which self, identity, body imagery, sexual fantasy, fantasies about parents, cultural stories, and conflicts about intimacy, dependency, and nurturance are constructed, and that for each person we need to give an individual developmental, a transferential, and a cultural account fully to characterize these creations and transformations. Each person's gender also has its own emotional tonalities that accompany particular conflictual, defensive, and reparative fantasies.