The Law of the Mother

Perhaps the primary way feminist scholarship has tackled the mother/daughter relationship is through some version of psychoanalysis. This is not surprising, as the psychology of the mother/daughter relationship has been the central focus for mainstream scholarship, even when analyzed sociologically. The influence and impact of Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering cannot be overestimated. The appeal of Kleinian object relations theory to feminists is in some ways quite obvious. More than any other psychoanalytic theorist, Melanie Klein and her followers brought the mother back into psychoanalysis, where the reign of the Oedipus complex had kept her in a rather passive and secondary position. Object relations, with its focus on the preoedipal years and on the active position of the mother as the first "object" the infant encounters, has been eagerly taken up by feminists as a key to unlocking the process of gender formation.

With the feminist inflection Chodorow gives object relations, the daughter as well as the mother assumes a new importance and centrality. No longer is the drama of the daughter's development playing second fiddle to the "genderless" (male) child. This psychological development is seen in the social context of parenting practices that locate the mother as the primary parent of both female and male children. Nevertheless, this social context is more often than

not given mere lip service rather than integrated thoroughly into the object relations analysis.

Chodorow's arguments are by now well known, so I will simply review them here. Indeed, I want to avoid arguing with the "truth value" of her claims because that is always a fruitless project when engaging with psychoanalysis, which clearly involves a certain leap of faith. Central to this leap of faith is a belief that early childhood experience is fundamentally determining. Gender formation in this context is understood as being formed primarily in the child's earliest years. From this basic psychoanalytic assertion, issues for adult women can be understood as having their origin in early childhood experiences and structures. I would want to hold on to an idea of gender formation that sees the construction of femininity, for example, as a much more contradictory and drawn out process that does not begin and end before age three but evolves throughout our lifetimes. Indeed, I would want to maintain an understanding of gender formation and the replication of patriarchy generally as a contradictory process in which the paradigm of female parenting is but one instance in a plethora of structured relationships and formations.

However, my major interest in Chodorow's work—and that of other psychoanalytic feminists—is as it informs both popular and feminist representations of mothers and daughters. How does it relate to the paradigm exemplified by the work of Adrienne Rich? What other discourses (about parenting, psychology, women) intersect with it? Most important, what are the implications of this discourse for the construction of ideologies of mothers and daughters?

Starting from the basic fact that only women mother, Chodorow argues that the experience of being mothered has different psychological consequences for boys and girls. For both boys and girls, the first object choice is the mother. But in order for boys to differentiate, to understand themselves as "subject," they must assume a gender identity that is not female (not mother). For girls, the process of individuation is quite different. Built on a primary sense of unity and continuity with the mother, a girl's gender identity is formed not in opposition to her first object choice, but in continuity with it. The results of this differential process of psychological development should be quite familiar to feminists who know Carol

Gilligan's work on moral development. Chodorow sees women's psychology as more relational and with less firm ego boundaries because of the continuity with the mother. In her view, and that of others such as Jane Flax, women therefore have problems with autonomy and differentiation, with a sense of separate "selfhood" arising out of the patterns of child rearing. As Iris Young says in summarizing Chodorow:

Because of her own gender identity, the mother identifies with her girl child more than with her boy child. In relating to her daughter she unconsciously replays many of the ambiguities and identifications she experiences with her own mother. The mother thus often tends to relate to her daughter more as an extension of herself than as a separate person. . . . The mutually reinforcing identification of mother and daughter results in the girl's acquiring a sense of separate identity later than boys, and never acquiring a sense of separation from others as strong as the boys.^[15]

Clearly, Chodorow is not only addressing the question of how mothering is reproduced but how, through this reproduction, patriarchy itself (or at least the psychological "types" needed to maintain it) is reproduced. Women's mothering provides the grist for the mill of unequal gender relations, and the mother/daughter relationship proves particularly helpful in reproducing the psychological patterns that maintain patriarchy. It follows, then, that Chodorow's "solution" (as well as that of Dorothy Dinnerstein, author of another influential text on mothering, The Mermaid and the Minotaur ) is shared parenting. Only when "mothering" becomes a task performed by both sexes will we be able to break this cycle that assures a masculine identity formed in opposition to mother/woman and a feminine identity formed in continuity with that very same mother.

The heterosexism of this "solution" should be obvious in that it assumes a parenting couple that is heterosexual. If "dual parenting" is advocated so that the child receives a "balance" of parents of both genders, what would we make of a homosexual couple for which no such "balance" exists? Here, too, the dual parenting answer can unwittingly participate in the social condemnation of single parents as they become defined by the absence of this "ideal" model of egalitarian heterosexuality. In addition, "dual parenting" has severe limitations as an answer to patriarchal social relations in which real questions of power, coercion, and male violence cannot be simply "parented" away.

Both Dorothy Dinnerstein and Jane Flax take up the same line of argument concerning the negative effects of women's mothering on social life as a whole (Dinnerstein) and on daughter's sense of selfhood specifically (Flax). For Dinnerstein, the results of women's exclusive mothering has been that men are compelled to control themselves, women, nature, and culture in order to contain symbolically the fear of the all-powerful and terrifying mother. Dinnerstein attributes all the oppressive relations of the modern world to mother-dominated children.^[16] So long as mothers "rule" the cradle, they will create fundamentally warped human psyches, individuals whose fear and terror of that awesome maternal power lead them on a path of destructiveness and consent to violence. The prevailing conditions of gender inequality are just one aspect of the larger and more profound malaise.

Jane Flax's work, dealing much more specifically with mother/daughter relationships, takes both the Chodorow and Dinnerstein positions to their logical conclusion. Jane Flax is also an object relations theorist, but (like Dinnerstein) she generalizes these psychic foundations further than Chodorow in claiming: "The repression of early infantile experience is reflected in and provides the grounding for our relationship with nature. This is true, as well, of our political life, especially the separation of public and private, the obsession with power and domination, and the consequent impoverishment both of political life and of theories about it." Flax here, in quite orthodox psychoanalytic fashion, moves outward from the repression of infantile experience to the panorama of social ills. The agency for this repression is the mother. Flax thus pathologizes Chodorow's description of the mother/daughter relationship: "The development of women's core identity is threatened and impeded by an inability to differentiate from the mother. I see as a central problematic in female development the very continuity of identity with the mother." Flax sees an "endless chain of women tied ambivalently to their mothers, who replicate this relation with their daughters" because of their inability to deal with their anger at their mothers and their inability to fully separate from them.^[17] Separation for the daughter is more difficult because, as Flax sees it, the important "symbiotic" experience is never "enough":

The feeling that women often report of not having had enough of something, of being cheated, is also related to the inadequacies of the sym-

biotic phase. It is not that women lack the experience of being nurtured; but it is rather that their experience takes place within a context in which the mother's conflicts render the experience less than optimal. . . . If the symbiotic experience has not been adequate, the process of separation and individuation that follows is also more difficult.^[18]

Kim Chernin, writing in this object relations tradition but focusing more specifically on women and eating disorders, starkly reinforces the belief that the key to women's emotional and psychological problems can be found in their relationship with their mothers: "If we are to understand the contemporary struggle for female identity, we must place it in relation to this fateful encounter between a mother whose life has not been fulfilled and a daughter now presented with this opportunity for fulfillment." Chernin's book is an endless cataloguing of the mother's failed life and how it impinges on the budding independence of the daughter to such an extent that the daughter is forced to engage in self-destructive behavior (anorexia and bulimia) in order to call attention to it: "Because her mother cannot give her what she needs—cannot enter with full understanding into her struggle, cannot model for her its potential resolution—she reaches for food in place of the mother and thereby incurs the terrible danger of becoming everything she most fears to be: a human being for whom the question of rightful development has not yet been formulated."^[19]

Flax and Chernin, too, by implication, see women as faced with a dilemma: "To be loved and nurtured, and remain tied to the mother, or to be autonomous and externally successful, to be like a man."^[20] All the contradictions of Flax's position are wrapped up in this sentence, for the options are to be tied to mother versus to be like a man. In her choice of words, Flax betrays her inheritance of patriarchal ideologies of apronstrings and clinging, dependent mothers. One is either tied to mother, bound to her, or "like" a man. But how is this dilemma any different from the dilemma splashed across the pages of the women's magazines? Mainstream culture has always depicted those options and dilemmas for "today's woman": she can either be homebound and mired in the dependent domesticity of motherhood and mother's life or join the man's world of work and autonomy but risk losing her "femininity" and becoming an unloved and unloving "career woman." Why should feminists help maintain this false polarity?

Jessica Benjamin's fascinating and erudite book, The Bonds of Love , takes up where Chodorow left off. In what is an attempt in many ways to break free of the acultural limitations of Chodorow's analysis, Benjamin presents a compelling argument for the relationship between gendered patterns of domination and submission and the vicissitudes of the modern "administered society" of capitalist patriarchy. Although a significant advance from Chodorow's early work, Benjamin nevertheless replicates many of its fundamental assumptions. First, she engages in what I can only call the "great psychoanalytic leap." That is, Benjamin starts out by expressing her dismay at the persistence of the sorry state of gender polarity and then jumps from there to the necessity for a psychoanalytic interpretation: "The fundamental question we must consider is why these positions continue to shape the relationship between the sexes despite our society's formal commitment to equality; what explains their psychological persistence?"^[21] In the first place, it is doubtful that the United States (for example) really has a formal commitment to equality between the sexes. But even if it did, formal commitment can by no means be equated with socially/politically enacted commitment. Benjamin does her own argument a disservice with this sort of tendentious logic and seriously downplays an analysis of the political persistence of patriarchy (a word she herself rarely uses).

Benjamin is, at least, honest about her psychoanalytic commitment to the determining quality of early childhood experience. Like Dinnerstein, she wants explicitly to locate the generative moment of the culture of domination in the culture of the cradle: "I will show how the structure of domination can be traced from the relationship between mother and infant into adult eroticism, from the earliest awareness of the difference between mother and father to the global images of male and female in our culture. We will begin with the conflict between dependence and independence in infant life, and move outward toward the opposites of power and surrender in adult sexual life." Thus, once again, woman's mothering (albeit constructed not entirely by her) is seen as the great thief that steals away male nurturance and, most important for this study, female independence: "The female difficulty in differentiation can be described almost as the mirror image of the male's: not the denial of the other, but the denial of the self. Thus the fact of women's mothering not only explains masculine sadism, it also re-

veals a "fault line" in female development that leads to masochism."^[22]

This model of complementarity and this insistence upon a dualistic framework for understanding psychological development is itself problematic. Fundamentally, this reasoning can't allow for the active reality of male power to enter into its equation because that would disrupt the complementarity in her logical apparatus. More to the point, we are once again faced with the insistence (this time a feminist one) that daddy may make the world go round, but it's mommy who makes our heads spin. Even very well meaning feminist therapists like Susie Orbach, although careful to note that mothers are not consciously out to "get" their poor daughters when they oppress them with their own repressed desires and dreams, still understand mothers as nothing more than the willing accomplices to the act of constructing a subordinate female psyche:

The mother-daughter relationship is the site in which the preconditions are established for the taking up of this sex role. At the same time it prefigures future relationships. In other words, within this relationship, the mother exercises restraint about meeting the needs of her daughter. . . . At the same time, she may thwart her daughter's initiatives, supporting instead aspects of her behaviour that conform with appropriate notions of 'feminine' activity.^[23]

Benjamin herself is very explicit about the deleterious effects of mother/daughter togetherness on the daughter's psyche:

Mothers tend to identify more strongly with their daughters; whereas they push their sons out of the nest, they have greater difficulty separating from daughters. Thus it is more likely that girls would fear separateness and tend to sustain the tie to mother through compliance and self-denial. If not acute, this tendency would be unremarkable. But the girl's relationship to the mother, emphasizing merging and continuity at the expense of individuality and independence, provides fertile ground for submission.^[24]

Benjamin returns once again to what has now become a familiar theme in the literature on divorce and single-parent families: the restoration of the missing father. Although she is quick to point out that male identification is not the whole answer for women ("failures in the struggle for recognition cannot be fully repaired by using a male identification to revolt against the mother"), she comes

perilously close to just such a position, not coincidentally echoing Flax's limited options for women: "Lucy had unequivocally made the choice to beat back maternal power with paternal power, to find liberation in the father. But to do this, she was always having to struggle against her father—his command of and contempt for her, her mother, and women in general. Lucy's choice had led her to a common daughter's dilemma: How to be a subject in relation to her father (or any man like her father)? How to be like her father and still be a woman?"^[25] In the choices the patient "Lucy" is offered by the feminist psychiatrist, the mother as a subject in her own right (and therefore as an option for identification with the daughter) is completely absent. "Maternal power" here is ever present, but the specific mother as subject seems once again to have receded in favor of the more tantalizing possibilities of identifying with the contemptuous father (while still remaining, of course, a "woman"). Identification with the mother (and implicitly with other women) can here be understood only as a regressive move back into the bonds of (maternal) love.