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Science, psychoanalysis and gender

Science, psychoanalysis and gender. Science and gender ideology. Our ideas of (modern) science: reflect gender ideology (gender studies brings new knowledge about very diverse fields) (gender studies is not only about women/femininity). Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

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Science, psychoanalysis and gender

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  1. Science, psychoanalysis and gender

  2. Science and gender ideology Our ideas of (modern) science: reflect gender ideology (gender studies brings new knowledge about very diverse fields) (gender studies is not only about women/femininity)

  3. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) • Knowledge as power (Nietzsche: will to power) • Knowledge/science: “Empire of Man over Nature” • “I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave”

  4. Gendered metaphors of science • Nature: feminine, fertile, passive, subjugated, virgin, unknown, unexplored, untouched • Cognition/science: mastery, domination (sometimes „penetration”, violence, rape) • Master-scientist --- enslaved nature • „hard” sciences, facts vs. Humanities • „reál” vs. „humán” • Result: ecological catastrophe (Avatar) • New paradigm: sustainable development

  5. Object-relations theory (Winnicott) • Self and other: separation – merging • Intersubjectivity: (anxiety) of merging • Science: separation, objectification • Objectivity, rationality, impersonality vs subjectivity, emotionality, human involvement • Non-science: „motherly”, feminine

  6. Joseph Glanvill (1661) • “Where the Will [here it means carnal desire] or Passion hath the casting voyce, the case of Truth is desperate. … The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden; and our Understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the Mother of our miseries”. Truth has no chance when “the Affections wear the breeches and the Female rules”.

  7. Witchcraft (as repressed female knowledge) 1 • “the reality of witchcraft effectively attested to the gravity of the dangers represented by women—dangers against which reason and the new science promised protection” (Keller 60).

  8. Witchcraft 2 „All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable ...Wherefore for the sake of their lusts [women] consort with devils” (Malleus Maleficarum, 1486)

  9. Witch, herbalist woman • 19th century: medium or hysterical patient

  10. Medicalisation of the female body The femaly body remains a „problem” Eg. pregnancy James McGrigor Allen: ‘Every woman is ... Always more or less an invalid.’ Sir Allmouth Wright (bacteriologist): ‘There is mixed up with the women’s movement much mental disorder’ Criminal pathology (Lombroso: La donna delinquente) Witch replaced by „Victorian madwoman”

  11. Hysteria: ‘the female malady’ Hysteron - womb wandering womb theory (Plato) Physical or mental? Charles Kingsley: ‘We must steer clear of the hysteric element, which I define as the fancy and emotions unduly excited by suppressed sexual excitement” (1870)

  12. Jean-Martin Charcot Neurologist in the Salpȇtrière hospital in Paris Tuesday sessions ‘la grande hystère’; ‘stigmates’ (‘stigma diaboli’)

  13. André Brouillet: Charcot in the Salpetriere (1887)

  14. Iconography of hysteria

  15. hypnosis

  16. ‘la grande hystère’: ‘arc en cercle’

  17. Charcot Stigmata: symptoms between attacks „stigma diaboli” in the Malleus Maleficarum Hypnosis Role of words Hysteria: imitation of an illness Emphasis shifts from illness to patient

  18. Sigmund Freud

  19. Freud’s insights „We are all ill” – normality is not God-given but a shifting category (patient and analyst)

  20. The couch

  21. ‘The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is: WAS WILL DAS WEIB?’ (Freud’s letter to Marie Bonaparte)

  22. Freud’s insights 2 • (female) sexuality is sg natural • repression • Men enjoy the privilege of „double sexual morality” (women suffer more from repression) • Harmful nature of restrictive ideas of femininity

  23. Hysteria reinterpreted as neurosis When women are ‘subjugated to the disillusionment of marriage, fall ill of severe neuroses which permanently darken their lives” ‘the cure for nervous illness arising from marriage would be marital unfaithfulness’

  24. Freud’s insights 3 • Reinterpretation of motherhood as full of „sexuality • (vs Madonna and child image) • „Ladies and gentlemen”: Freud addressed women • Freud listened to women

  25. Leidengeschichte (stories of suffering) Talking cure Hypnosis vs. Free association Reading symptoms

  26. ‘Women always make the best psychoanalysts – until they fall in love, and then they make the best patients’ (A. Hitchcock: Spellbound) Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Marie Bonaparte, Helen Deutsch, Török Mária, Joan Riviere, Nancy Chodorow

  27. The Dora case study (‘Fragments of an Analysis of a case of Hysteria’, 1901-1905) Ida Bauer ; Herr and Frau K.

  28. ‘On Femininity’ ‘the development of a little girl into a normal woman is more difficult and more complicated, since it includes two extra tasks to which there is nothing corresponding in the development of a man’ ‘the little girl is a little man’ Penis envy, castration complex ‘women must be regarded as having little sense of justice’

  29. Nancy Chodorow ego psychology, psychosociology Parenting Identification with the mother: personal, concrete, felt, individual - No need for a fantasy support figure Identification with the father: positional, abstract, cultural The psychosocial dynamics of families

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