Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis

The year is 1909. The speaker is Sigmund Freud. The woman in the front row, admiringly but insistently coaxing the master of psychoanalysis to say more about women and sexuality, is anarchist and free-love advocate Emma Goldman. This symbolic moment is the ideal place to begin describing the convoluted 90-year tango that is the history of feminism's relationship with psychoanalysis.

Mari Jo Buhle, a professor of American Civilization and History at Brown University, has written an academic study which exhibits all the virtues and some of the failings of the genre. Although long, earnest, and prone to sudden squalls of mode words like "discourse" and "heuristic," Feminism and Its Discontents is also carefully researched, cautiously neutral, and lucidly written. Informative subhistories detail how "second wave" feminism transformed Freud from icon into ogre, why key male pundits such as Laing, Lasch, and the Frankfurt Schoolers were so influential, and how Nancy Chodorow and others partially rehabilitated Freud's reputation.

One depressing feature of this material--which comes out starkly but in a way that makes you wonder if the deadpan author is being deliberately ironic--is the relentless egotism, narcissism, and sanctimoniousness of most players on both sides. Buhle's own intellectual standards throw into sharp relief the taste for rhetoric and special pleading of so many of the figures for whom she accounts.

In recent years, the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition has had to work overtime just to preserve some vestiges of intellectual respectability, having been attacked from a variety of critical vantage points (see, for example, Frederick Crews's searing indictment in The Memory Wars). Since we owe the very idea of "moving beyond Freud" largely to feminist writers, Buhle's history is especially timely. --Richard Farr