This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Chodorow, N. J. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Chodorow, N. J. Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Gender On the Modern-Postmodern and Classical-Relational Divide: Untangling History and Epistemology

75 Richdale Avenue #4, Cambridge, MA 02140, chodorow{at}berkeley.edu

This essay considers the historical periodization and epistemology of psychoanalytic thinking about gender. Overlapping historically with feminism itself, psychoanalytic thinking about gender has two periods of efflorescence, the 1920s and 1930s, and the contemporary period beginning in the 1970s. Two divides have characterized our gender thinking, the modern-postmodern and the classical-relational. From the early theorizing of the 1920s and 1930s until around the early 1990s, most psychoanalytic thinking about gender should be considered modernist, as it draws on traditional views of scientific evidence and holds more universalistic and dichotomized conceptions of men and women. In the contemporary period, although postmodernism tends to be associated with relational psychoanalysts and modernist thinking with classical analysts, the divisions overlap. The author argues that considering any psychoanalytic theory as "premodern" is misleading: from its inception, psychoanalysis formed part of modernism.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 53, No. 4, 1097-1118 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/00030651050530040301


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?