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Essential Papers on the Psychology of Women
Dr. Zanardi approaches the development of psychoanalytic theories of women on two the psychoanalytic and the political. The first part includes papers by Ruth Mack Brunswick, Melanie Klein, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, D. W. Winnicott, Joyce Macdougal, Edith Jacobsen, Annie Reich, and Judith Kestenberg, among others, illustrating the psychoanalytic development concerning female sexuality from the 1940s on. the different views - Freudian, Kleinian, Horneyan, object relation, and Lacanian - are presented, showing both American and European views to underline their theoretical differences. Controversial issues - phallocentrism, penis envy, homosexuality, masochism, wish for a child - are brought into focus and analyzed from different theoretical and clinical points of view.
The second part draws attention to the influence of the Women's Liberation Movement on psychoanalytic theory. The papers included show attempts to integrate psychoanalysis into the ideological political discourse. It includes the work of leading feminists and psychoanalysts in the United States and Europe, including Carol Gilligan, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Jean Baker Miller, Juliet Mitchell, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.
The second part draws attention to the influence of the Women's Liberation Movement on psychoanalytic theory. The papers included show attempts to integrate psychoanalysis into the ideological political discourse. It includes the work of leading feminists and psychoanalysts in the United States and Europe, including Carol Gilligan, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Jean Baker Miller, Juliet Mitchell, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva.
- GenresPsychoanalysis
510 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1990
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February 14, 2026
from "Women's Time" by Julia Kristeva:
The large number of women in terrorist groups (Palestinian commandos, the Baader-Meinoff Gang, Red Brigades, etc.) has already been pointed out, either violently or prudently according to the source of information. The exploitation of women is still too great and the traditional prejudices against them too violent for one to be able to envision this phenomenon with sufficient distance. It can, however, be said from now on that this is the inevitable product of what we have called a denial of the socio-symbolic contract and its counter-investment as the only means of self-defence in the struggle to safeguard an identity. This paranoid-type mechanism is at the base of any political involvement. It may produce different civilizing attitudes in the sense that these attitudes allow a more or less flexible reabsorption of violence and death. But when a subject is too brutally excluded from this socio-symbolic stratum; when, for example, a woman feels her affective life as a woman or her condition as a social being too brutally ignored by existing discourse or power (from her family to social institutions); she may, by counter-investing the violence she has endured, make of herself a 'possessed' agent of this violence in order to combat what was experienced as frustration--with arms which may seem disproportional, but which are not so in comparison with the subjective or more precisely narcissistic suffering from which they originate. Necessarily opposed to the bourgeois democratic regimes in power, this terrorist violence offers as a programme of liberation an order which is even more oppressive, more sacrificial than those it combats. Strangely enough, it is not against totalitarian regimes that these terrorist groups with women participants unleash themselves but, rather, against liberal systems, whose essence is, of course, exploitative, but whose expanding democratic legality guarantees relative tolerance. Each time, the mobilization takes place in the name of a nation, of an oppressed group, of a human essence imagined as good and sound; in the name, then, of a kind of fantasy of archaic fulfilment which an arbitrary, abstract and thus even bad and ultimately discriminatory order has come to disrupt. While that order is accused of being oppressive, is it not actually being reproached with being too weak, with not measuring up to this pure and good, but henceforth lost, substance? Anthropology has shown that the social order is sacrificial, but sacrifice orders violence, binds it, tames it. Refusal of the social order exposes one to the risk that the so-called good substance, once it is unchained, will explode, without curbs, without law or right, to become an absolute arbitrariness.
Following the crisis of monotheism, the revolutions of the past two centuries, and more recently Fascism and Stalinism, have tragically set in action this logic of the oppressed goodwill which leads to massacres. Are women more apt than other social categories, notably the exploited classes, to invest in this implacable machine of terrorism? No categorical response, either positive or negative, can currently be given to this question. It must be pointed out, however, that since the dawn of feminism, and certainly before, the political activity of exceptional women, and thus in a certain sense of liberated women, has taken the form of murder, conspiracy and crime.
The large number of women in terrorist groups (Palestinian commandos, the Baader-Meinoff Gang, Red Brigades, etc.) has already been pointed out, either violently or prudently according to the source of information. The exploitation of women is still too great and the traditional prejudices against them too violent for one to be able to envision this phenomenon with sufficient distance. It can, however, be said from now on that this is the inevitable product of what we have called a denial of the socio-symbolic contract and its counter-investment as the only means of self-defence in the struggle to safeguard an identity. This paranoid-type mechanism is at the base of any political involvement. It may produce different civilizing attitudes in the sense that these attitudes allow a more or less flexible reabsorption of violence and death. But when a subject is too brutally excluded from this socio-symbolic stratum; when, for example, a woman feels her affective life as a woman or her condition as a social being too brutally ignored by existing discourse or power (from her family to social institutions); she may, by counter-investing the violence she has endured, make of herself a 'possessed' agent of this violence in order to combat what was experienced as frustration--with arms which may seem disproportional, but which are not so in comparison with the subjective or more precisely narcissistic suffering from which they originate. Necessarily opposed to the bourgeois democratic regimes in power, this terrorist violence offers as a programme of liberation an order which is even more oppressive, more sacrificial than those it combats. Strangely enough, it is not against totalitarian regimes that these terrorist groups with women participants unleash themselves but, rather, against liberal systems, whose essence is, of course, exploitative, but whose expanding democratic legality guarantees relative tolerance. Each time, the mobilization takes place in the name of a nation, of an oppressed group, of a human essence imagined as good and sound; in the name, then, of a kind of fantasy of archaic fulfilment which an arbitrary, abstract and thus even bad and ultimately discriminatory order has come to disrupt. While that order is accused of being oppressive, is it not actually being reproached with being too weak, with not measuring up to this pure and good, but henceforth lost, substance? Anthropology has shown that the social order is sacrificial, but sacrifice orders violence, binds it, tames it. Refusal of the social order exposes one to the risk that the so-called good substance, once it is unchained, will explode, without curbs, without law or right, to become an absolute arbitrariness.
Following the crisis of monotheism, the revolutions of the past two centuries, and more recently Fascism and Stalinism, have tragically set in action this logic of the oppressed goodwill which leads to massacres. Are women more apt than other social categories, notably the exploited classes, to invest in this implacable machine of terrorism? No categorical response, either positive or negative, can currently be given to this question. It must be pointed out, however, that since the dawn of feminism, and certainly before, the political activity of exceptional women, and thus in a certain sense of liberated women, has taken the form of murder, conspiracy and crime.
January 11, 2025
Finally I've finished this great book! I'm still in awe of some of its articles. I have to say that I've learned that I've knew next to nothing regarding this matter and even after finishing the book, as I gained more knowledge, many more questions formed in my mind. I don't recommend the book to students of psychoanalytic literature who are new to this field, but if you know quite a bit about psychoanalysis generally or this field of study is deeply interesting for you, then you can read it.
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