Articles for DWF
Reviews for DWF
Articles for DWF
Two students of Freud examine the enigma of Femininity,1976, Year I, n. 2,
pp. 79-100
Helen Deutsch and Karin Horney, two students of Freud, have carried forward the Freudian premises on female sexuality, but have reached opposite conclusions. It is important to compare these conclusions since each mirrors views that are widely held today.
Helen Deutsch completely accepts Freud's assumption that femininity is instinctive and biological, and holds that the female personality is distinguished by a specific eroticism, sublimated and spiritualised, which leads woman to identify with man, renouncing her own identity. She holds that the cause for this is masochistic passivity, that woman finds complete fulfilment in maternity, that this allows her to transfer her narcissism to her son, and to satisfy her own masochism in submission and self-sacrifice.
Karin Horney on the other hand has assimilated many of the new discoveries in ethnology and anthropology. She rejects the idea of the unchangeable nature of instincts. The Freudian theory of femininity, according to her, represents nothing more than the systematic presentation of the typical male ideas about woman. The way is thus open for research into the female personality, not determined by instinct, as posited by Freudian theory, but rather viewed as the product of masculine ideals for society.
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The feminine stereotype in student and professional training, 1977, n. 2,
pp. 48-56
It is a fact that
women, in a socially and culturally repressive system, are always twice repressed.
They live a double alienation. The arbitrary ideological basis for much psychological
research into professional and student training is no exception. Those analyses
which make use of the concept of instinctuality speak, when referring to women,
of "typical characteristics". They thus add to the already assumed
"innate characteristics" (also suffered by men) the double assumption
of "biologically determined characteristics".
Rita Gay examines some of the researches and tests on professional attitudes which are based on the polarisation, implicit or explicit, of masculine and feminine behaviour. This polarisation is intrinsic to the dominant ideology in a capitalist system. Thus, for example, women are accorded the attribute "intuitive" an ambiguous term, with no precise scientific content, ignoring the fact that certain patterns of thought and behaviour on their part, far from being spontaneous, are the reactions of the oppressed to demands, desires, threats and even violence on the part of their oppressor.
Starting from these typical and innate characteristics it is but a short step to single cut "feminine" preferences and "typically feminine" vocations, founded on a supposed maternal and altruistic outlook, an absence of enterprise and initiative. Women who exhibit tendencies which do not match this stereotype are considered masculine type women. Often, by interiorising these roles, women themselves come to share these assumptions.
Rita Gay deplores the fact that critical evaluation of these elements is lacking in this type of psychological research, and denounces the political use of theories which propel and confine women (and men too, in a different way) into particular professions and activities.
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Reviews for DWF
MITCHELL Juliey, Psicoanalisi e femminismo, Torino, Einaudi (Nuovo Politecnico),
1976
rev. by Rita Gay, Y. I, 1976, n. 3, pp. 167-169
MORGAN Patricia, Child Care: Sense and Fable, prefazione di H.J. Eysenck,
London, Temple Smith, 1975
rev. by Rita Gay, 1976, n. 1, pp. 148-150
Sesso amaro, Roma, Editori Riuniti, 1977
rev. by Rita Gay, 1977, n. 4, pp. 143-144
GIANI GALLINO Tilde, Il complesso di Laio. I rapporti familiari nei disegni
dei ragazzi, Torino, Einaudi, 1977
rev. by Rita Gay, 1978, n. 6-7, pp. 214-217
MORANDINI Giuliana, … E allora mi hanno rinchiusa. Testimonianze dal
manicomio femminile, Torino, Bompiani, 1977
rev. by Rita Gay, 1979, n. 10-11, pp. 226-228