FEMINISM, FREUD, AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION
Freud has been criticized frequently, and correctly, for the male bias or androcentrism of his Oedipal theory of religion and culture. Without doubt, his Oedipal paradigm situates woman in a secondary role. She is the object of incestuous desire in the fantasy of the male child, she is a morally inferior being without a strong superego, and she is excluded from the work of culture. The Oedipal theory, many have argued, rests upon an assumption of female inferiority. Freud's analyses, these theorists conclude, seem to support a broad-based misogynist ideology. His remarks on the origins of religion and morality in The Ego and the Id are often cited as illustrations of this Oedipal androcentrism: “Religion, morality, and a social sense—the chief elements in the higher side of man—were … acquired phylogenetically out of the father-complex … the male sex seems to have taken the lead in all these moral acquisitions” (SE 19: 37; see Rizzuto 1979: 42). Similarly, many have pointed critically to Freud's remarks in Civilization and Its Discontents suggesting that women are the enemies of culture. Less capable than men of renunciation and sublimation, Freud argued, women “come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence.” Instead, “the work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more diffcult tasks
Nor have Freud's speculations about morality and gender escaped critique. Many have noted the androcentrism in his assessment of women's morality in “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” where he states, “I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men” (SE 19: 257; see Van Herik 1982).
In Freud's Oedipal writings on civilization, religion, and morality, then, his androcentrism stands out in vivid relief. The psychologist of religion David Wulffsummarizes the foundations of the feminist critique: “Freud's psychology of religion is … clearly centered in masculine reactivity. It is the male's ambivalent relationship with his father, both in his own and in the race's childhood, that lies at the core of religion as Freud views it” (Wulff 1997: 285). This androcentrism is clearly evident in Freud's Oedipal analyses of religion. His critics are correct to challenge and critique his approach. Freud's texts, however, can be read in other ways. My project is what I call “analytic,” rather than “critical” or “inclusive” (Jonte-Pace 1997b, 2001).
Feminist scholars have reacted to Freud's androcentric accounts of culture and religion in one of these three major ways. Feminist “critical” reactions have challenged psychoanalysis for its androcentrism, dismissing Freud for constructing a virtually “womanless” theory, for assuming masculine normativity, and for portraying women as physically, morally, and intellectually deficient (Friedan 1963, Millet 1970, Greer 1971, Sprengnether 1995, Kofman 1985, 1991). Sarah Kofman, for example, a French theorist interested in literature, gender, and psychoanalysis,
Feminist “inclusive” reactions to Freud, on the other hand, seek a psychological theory of religion which incorporates and attends to women's knowledge and experience. These theorists have often turned away from Freud and toward the alternative methodologies developed by object-relations theorists (Winnicott 1972, Klein 1975) and self psychologists (Kohut 1971). This vein of psychoanalytic feminism attends to the maternal-infant bond in the earliest, “pre-Oedipal” months of life (Chodorow 1978, 1989, Benjamin 1988, Flax 1990, Sprengnether 1995).[2] Mary Ellen Ross and Cheryl Lynn Ross, for example, argue that many aspects of religious ritual and liturgy “can be comprehended within the psychoanalytic interpretation of ritual if such interpretation is extended to include the pre-oedipal period of life” (1983: 27). These authors show that the characteristics of the Roman Catholic Mass “Xow from what is essentially an experience of God as Mother” (1983: 39). By investigating the mother-child relationship in the pre-Oedipal period as the psychological source of religious ideas and experiences, feminists have succeeded in avoiding psychoanalytic androcentrism by developing more “inclusive” psychologies of religion, ritual, morality, and belief (Gilligan 1984, Ross and Ross 1983, Jonte-Pace 1987, 1993, Jones 1996, Lutzky 1991, Raab 1997, Goldenberg 1990).
Feminist theorists in the psychology of religion who pursue the “analytic” project, the project which most directly informs this study, have initiated a rather different enterprise. Developing a partnership between psychoanalysis and feminism, these theorists have inquired
An important voice in the analytic project is that of Juliet Mitchell. In her groundbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), Mitchell cautioned feminist critics against dismissing psychoanalysis, arguing that “psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one.” She insisted that “a rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud's works is fatal for feminism” (1974: xiii). In her view, Freud's goal was to show how a patriarchal culture creates hierarchically gendered beings and how a phallocentric and patricentric world turns infants into gendered women and men. Mitchell suggested that Freud's notion of penis envy, often rejected by feminist critics of psychoanalysis, could be reconceptualized in social and cultural terms. If the phallus is a symbol of the systems of social power and authority from which women in patriarchies are excluded, then penis envy is a way of describing a feminist concern for equality in the social, political, and economic arenas.
Mitchell's concern was to defend Freud's theory of the construction of gender in patriarchal culture. Her focus was not religion. Her work nevertheless points toward new possibilities for the psychology of religion. Influenced by Mitchell's approach, feminist theorists in religious studies have begun to consider how psychoanalysis might provide the methodology appropriate for an analysis of gender, of androcentrism, or of misogyny in religion and culture (Goldenberg 1997).
Julia Kristeva, another analytic theorist well known for her work in
Particularly significant in the “analytic” project is the work of the psychologist of religion Judith Van Herik. In Freud on Femininity and Faith (1982), Van Herik examined the role of asymmetrical gender categories in psychoanalysis, demonstrating that in Freud's Oedipal theory of religion, belief is equivalent to femininity, wish fulfillment, and Christianity. Morality, on the other hand, is equivalent to masculinity, the renunciation of wishes, and Judaism. Her work represents a “gender analysis” of belief and morality in Freud's work.
A group of scholars in Jewish cultural studies, among whom are Jay Geller, Sander Gilman, and Daniel Boyarin, has recently produced another set of important feminist analyses of Freud, gender, and religion. The work of these scholars has been instrumental in demonstrating that Freud's writings represent a response to an anti-Semitic ideology widespread throughout Wn de siècle Europe within which male Jews were coded as feminine, effeminate, or homosexual. Freud attempted to portray a masculinized Judaism, they suggest, in reaction against this feminization of male Jewishness.
This book is a contribution to the analytic scholarship in the feminist study of religion and psychoanalysis in that it does not simply dismiss Freud as a theorist whose attempt to rethink culture and the unconscious has no relevance for feminism, as the feminist critics of psychoanalysis have done. Nor does it dismiss Freud by looking elsewhere for theoretical models more “friendly” to women, as the inclusivists have done. Instead, it interrogates the Freudian corpus, discovering ways in
Like Mitchell, I believe that feminists cannot afford to neglect Freud's work. We can benefit from close attention not only to the Oedipal interpretation of the construction of gender in patriarchal culture defended by Mitchell, but also to the associations Freud traced in an incompletely developed non-Oedipal counterthesis. Just as Mitchell reframed the notion of penis envy as a feminist and social category, I suggest a rethinking of the notion of castration anxiety, arguing that it often slips beyond the boundaries of the Oedipal theory into the realm of a pre-Oedipal pattern of misogyny and death anxiety. Like Kristeva, I pursue Freud's deeper insights regarding gender and religion, especially when that pursuit takes us beyond Freud's Oedipal formulations and into the territory of the “abjection” of the maternal which Kristeva Wnds at the heart of subjectivity, religion, and the sacred. Like Van Herik, I am interested in constructing a feminist analysis of Freud's understanding of gender, religion, and culture. Just as Van Herik's examination of Freud's writings exposed the play of gender in conceptions of belief and morality, my inquiry into Freud's writing exposes the play of gender in fears and fantasies about mortality and immortality, Jewishness and anti-Semitism, secularism and the absence of God. And like Boyarin, Gilman, and Geller, I believe that Freud's writings on culture are best understood by attending to his cultural context. I explore ways in which, as an assimilated (or assimilating) Jew in an anti-Semitic culture, Freud attempted to theorize the gendered dimensions of his own Jewishness and the anti-Semitism of many of his contemporaries: in addition to a “masculinization” of Judaism, Freud's writings also contain an analysis of the associations of the Jew with the feminine or maternal and with death and the uncanny, both for the Jew and for the anti-Semite.
Although Freud is famous for asking the question, “Was will das
If Freud's speculations on misogyny can be understood as accurate accounts of the fantasies of men, are women exempt from these fears and ideas? I think not. Women within patriarchal societies share, to some degree, unconscious matriphobic ideas, fantasies, and ideologies lying below the surface of dominant patriarchal discourses. Freud's question, as I have revised it, “What do men think that women want?” can be expanded into the more comprehensive, if less elegant question: “What do we men and women fear that women (and mothers) want?”
Freud's answer to this question is complex. In Freud's texts, male (and female) fears involving misogyny and matriphobia lie in close proximity to religious fantasies of immortality and the afterlife, anti-Semitic and homophobic ideas about degenerate Jews, and fears of encroaching secularism. These are disturbing notions and fantasies, but they must be confronted and interrogated. Unconscious misogyny and xenophobia and their disastrous social consequences will not be eliminated without a careful analysis of their sources and manifestations. As Harold Bloom has said, “Freud's peculiar strength was to say what could not be said, or at least to attempt to say it, thus refusing to be silent in the face of the unsayable” (Bloom 1995: 113). Freud indeed attempted not only to say the unsayable, but to speak the unspeakable, to say not merely what cannot be said, but what must not be said because it is too
The unsayable and the unspeakable are dangerous and destructive only as long as they remain unthought, unsaid, or unconscious. Neither unconscious misogyny nor other forms of xenophobia, with all their tragic manifestations, will be eliminated without a careful interrogation of their sources and variations. Nor will conflicts over religion or its absence be resolved by turning away from an awareness of the tenacity of the fantasies and fears underlying religious belief and disbelief. As disturbing as they are, we need not turn away from these images, fantasies, and fears. Speaking the unspeakable about the self in the context of the “talking cure” can produce a liberating or therapeutic awareness of thoughts and memories that would otherwise become pathogenic. Similarly, speaking the unspeakable about culture, religion, and gender can be liberating or healing in broader contexts.