Psychoanalyses / Feminisms

Book excerpt: Bringing together twelve provocative and iconoclastic contributions by leading scholars and new voices, this book probes the complementary yet contested relations between various forms of contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism. The intention is not simply to juxtapose these two preeminent intellectual movements of the twentieth century, but to highlight the manifold nature of each. The contributors use and interrogate Freud, Lacan, Klein, Irigaray, Riviere, and Jessica Benjamin, as well as object-relations theory, self psychology, and Horneyan theory as they discuss the work of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Emily Bronte, Virginia Woolf, and Kathy Acker. If feminism has insisted that "the personal is political", psychoanalysis argues that no realm of human life is impervious to unconscious motives, which may subvert a subject's avowed intentions. Although Freud remains a point of reference, he is now important as a symptom of the crises of Western patriarchal culture as well as for his epoch-making theoretical ideas. Because feminism and psychoanalysis unsettle each other's complacencies, they rekindle their own radical potential, and what may be perhaps termed their "marriage" has proven, as this book amply shows, to be both enduring and fecund.