Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Nancy J. Chodorow

It is not as if women choose to favor their daughters over their sons, and it is not as if women reject their sons. It is important to remember that much of this is happening at an unconscious level. This special connection is felt by the daughter and incorporated into her psyche, or ego.

Thus, her daughter can also become a mother someday. Indeed, they lead to an essential difference in the mother-daughter relationship as compared to the mother-son relationship (Chodorow, 1999a).Īccording to Chodorow, when a woman becomes a mother, the most important aspect of her relationship with any daughter is the recognition that they are alike. Chodorow believed that social structure and culture were important, but she insisted nonetheless that the biological differences between males and females could not be dismissed.

Chodorow acknowledged that many feminists felt obliged to choose between a biologically-based psychology of women and mothering (the essential Freudian perspective) versus a view in which the psychology of women and their feelings about mothering were determined by social structure and cultural mandate. Twenty years later, she wrote a new preface for the second edition, in which she had the advantage of looking back at both the success of her book and the criticism that it drew from some. In 1978, Chodorow published The Reproduction of Mothering. The person best known today for attempting to combine elements of Freud’s theory with an objective perspective on a psychology of women is Nancy Chodorow (1944-present), a sociologist and psychoanalyst who has focused on the special relationship between mothers and daughters. Deutsch (1973) wrote that she had great admiration for Marie Bonaparte as a person and a scholar (Deutsch knew Bonaparte personally), but Deutsch found little of interest in Bonaparte’s strict application of Freudian theory to the psychology of women. Some 50 years earlier, Helene Deutsch had suggested that women do not seek to become mothers due to penis envy, but rather they want to replace passive femininity with an active role as a woman and mother (Deutsch was analyzed and trained by Sigmund Freud himself Deutsch, 1944, 1945, 1973, Sayers, 1991). She did not suggest that Freud was necessarily right about the psychological development of women, but she did emphasize the importance of object relations theory and the interactions between mothers, their children, and families as a whole (Mitchell, 2000). In 1974, Juliet Mitchell suggested that Freudian psychoanalysis offered an important means for understanding the psychology of women, and that feminism should embrace Freud’s theoretical perspective.

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Nancy J. Chodorow