Post by Erica Chan on May 3, 2010 18:31:39 GMT -5
Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy, is a fascinating and diverse compilation of essays edited by Azizah Y. al-Hibri and Margaret A Simmons. With essays ranging from 'Plato, Irony and Equality' by Janet Farrell Smith to 'Humanism, Gynocentrism and Feminist Politics', it offers a great variety for people to sink their teeth in!
The book can be found in the Matheson Library, General Collection. The number is 305.4201 H625H.
If you want to get a sneak preview, here's an extract from one of the first essays that caught my eye.
By Eva Feder Kittay
Feminists have long bristled at, argued over, and offered reinterpretations of Freud’s concept of penis envy. And for good reason. The concept, asi t functions within Freudian theory, is crucial to Freud’s conception of female sexuality. Indeed, Freud claimed that this envy was a ‘primary narcissistic wound’ for the woman and, as such constituted a central element in her personality formation. Without validating the notion of penis envy, I want to raise the question why psychoanalysis has never embraced the concept of a parallel envy on the part of men which, similarly, might constitute a primary narcissistic wound for them. Such envy I designate ‘womb envy’, for short, meaning by the term not merely envy of the specifically named organ but of the entire complex comprising a woman’s distinctive physiology and capacities as these relate to childbearing.
…
The argument presented in this paper is a metapsychological one. I am not here adducing evidence of a clinical sort for the existence of womb envy nor presenting a theory in which womb envy might play a role. Rather, the paper is an effort to understand, from a feminist perspective and using the method of a philosophical critique, how a theoretician and clinician as astute as Freud could miss the significance of a concept such as womb envy. What we find is that an androcentric perspective as so strongly influenced Freud’s scientific enterprise that he fails to see female sexuality as having intrinsic value and is thus led to represent her maternal capacities and desires as emanating from her deficiencies as a male. This, in turn leads him to misconstrue significant elements of male sexuality.
…
Freud’s treatment of the concept of femininity is significant to philosophically-minded feminists on two grounds. First it offers a case study for the philosophical investigation of how a male-centered perspective can distort a psychology which fails to recognize its originating stance. Second, feminist philosophers cannot ignore development in psychoanalytic theory. Despite the difficulties philosophers of science have attempted to call our attention to, psychoanalysis remains the most cogent account of the development of the human personality. Chodorow (1978) has recently exhibited the power psychoanalysis can have for explaining the formation of those personality traits that a society deems necessary for the maintenance of a particular power relation between the sexes. If as Juliet Mitchell (1975) has argued and Chodorow has recently demonstrated, psychoanalysis has immense power for understanding how the internal colonization of women is maintained, then it is important that we get the theory right.
…
There are several reasons to expect that Freudian psychoanalysis might have developed a concept of womb envy. Freud himself wrote three significant studies which involved the expression on the part of males for the desire to bear a child or to have womanly organs, viz Dr Schreber (1911), the Wolfman (1918), and Little Hans (1909). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1928) includes amongst the painful disappointments of childhood, ‘the child’s own attempt to make a baby himself, carried out in tragic seriousness [which] fails shamefully.’ (p. 43). Earlier, Freud (1908) had written, in regard to children’s theories of anal birth, ‘It was only logical that the child should refuse to grant women the painful prerogative of giving birth to children. If babies are born through the anus, then a man might give birth just as well as a woman… a boy [can therefore] imagine that he, too, has children of his own, without there being any need to accuse him… of feminine inclinations. He is merely giving evidence… of the anal eroticism which is still alive within him.’ In addition, as early as the 1920s many prominent analysts discussed the envy men feel toward women’s parturition and sexual organs; some, like Melanie Klein (1921), stressing the envy both sexes experience with regard to the sexual organs and functions of the other sex. Finally, within Freudian theory itself, at least two important doctrines would appear to demand a concept of womb envy, that of our inherent bisexuality and the positing of an ‘ancient symbolic equivalence’ between penis and baby.
Womb envy, huh? What do you think?
The book can be found in the Matheson Library, General Collection. The number is 305.4201 H625H.
If you want to get a sneak preview, here's an extract from one of the first essays that caught my eye.
Extracts from 'Rereading Freud on 'Femininity' Or Why not Womb Envy?
By Eva Feder Kittay
Feminists have long bristled at, argued over, and offered reinterpretations of Freud’s concept of penis envy. And for good reason. The concept, asi t functions within Freudian theory, is crucial to Freud’s conception of female sexuality. Indeed, Freud claimed that this envy was a ‘primary narcissistic wound’ for the woman and, as such constituted a central element in her personality formation. Without validating the notion of penis envy, I want to raise the question why psychoanalysis has never embraced the concept of a parallel envy on the part of men which, similarly, might constitute a primary narcissistic wound for them. Such envy I designate ‘womb envy’, for short, meaning by the term not merely envy of the specifically named organ but of the entire complex comprising a woman’s distinctive physiology and capacities as these relate to childbearing.
…
The argument presented in this paper is a metapsychological one. I am not here adducing evidence of a clinical sort for the existence of womb envy nor presenting a theory in which womb envy might play a role. Rather, the paper is an effort to understand, from a feminist perspective and using the method of a philosophical critique, how a theoretician and clinician as astute as Freud could miss the significance of a concept such as womb envy. What we find is that an androcentric perspective as so strongly influenced Freud’s scientific enterprise that he fails to see female sexuality as having intrinsic value and is thus led to represent her maternal capacities and desires as emanating from her deficiencies as a male. This, in turn leads him to misconstrue significant elements of male sexuality.
…
Freud’s treatment of the concept of femininity is significant to philosophically-minded feminists on two grounds. First it offers a case study for the philosophical investigation of how a male-centered perspective can distort a psychology which fails to recognize its originating stance. Second, feminist philosophers cannot ignore development in psychoanalytic theory. Despite the difficulties philosophers of science have attempted to call our attention to, psychoanalysis remains the most cogent account of the development of the human personality. Chodorow (1978) has recently exhibited the power psychoanalysis can have for explaining the formation of those personality traits that a society deems necessary for the maintenance of a particular power relation between the sexes. If as Juliet Mitchell (1975) has argued and Chodorow has recently demonstrated, psychoanalysis has immense power for understanding how the internal colonization of women is maintained, then it is important that we get the theory right.
…
There are several reasons to expect that Freudian psychoanalysis might have developed a concept of womb envy. Freud himself wrote three significant studies which involved the expression on the part of males for the desire to bear a child or to have womanly organs, viz Dr Schreber (1911), the Wolfman (1918), and Little Hans (1909). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1928) includes amongst the painful disappointments of childhood, ‘the child’s own attempt to make a baby himself, carried out in tragic seriousness [which] fails shamefully.’ (p. 43). Earlier, Freud (1908) had written, in regard to children’s theories of anal birth, ‘It was only logical that the child should refuse to grant women the painful prerogative of giving birth to children. If babies are born through the anus, then a man might give birth just as well as a woman… a boy [can therefore] imagine that he, too, has children of his own, without there being any need to accuse him… of feminine inclinations. He is merely giving evidence… of the anal eroticism which is still alive within him.’ In addition, as early as the 1920s many prominent analysts discussed the envy men feel toward women’s parturition and sexual organs; some, like Melanie Klein (1921), stressing the envy both sexes experience with regard to the sexual organs and functions of the other sex. Finally, within Freudian theory itself, at least two important doctrines would appear to demand a concept of womb envy, that of our inherent bisexuality and the positing of an ‘ancient symbolic equivalence’ between penis and baby.
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Womb envy, huh? What do you think?