Feminist Psychologies and Gendered Individuals

Abstract

Feminists have largely rejected a focus on biology in seeking to understand the origins of mental disturbance in general and of women’s mental disturbance in particular. Instead, many have turned to psychological theories, especially psychodynamic theories grounded in Freudian ideas, to provide the formulation for their analysis of mental disorder, drawing, like Freud, primarily on clinical data. In so doing they have paid particular attention to the way the psychological make-up of women is structured and shaped mainly in early childhood, making implicit or explicit comparisons with men’s psychological development. In this chapter I want to explore these feminist psychologies to see whether they provide fruitful ways of helping us to understand the gendered landscape of patient populations by casting light on how women’s and men’s psychological development may take rather different paths.

‘It is essential to understand clearly that the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, whose meaning seem unambiguous to ordinary people, are among the most confused that occur in science. It is possible to distinguish at least three uses. ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are used sometimes in the sense of activity and passivity, sometimes in a biological, and sometimes again in a sociological sense. The first of these three meanings is the essential one and the most serviceable in psycho-analysis. When, for instance, libido was described …as being ‘masculine’, the word was being used in this sense, for an instinct is always active even when it has a passive aim in view. The second, or biological, meaning of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ is the one whose applicability can be determined most easily. Here ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are characterised by the presence of spermatozoa or ova respectively and by the functions proceeding from them. Activity and its concomitant phenomena (more powerful muscular development, aggressiveness, greater intensity of libido) are as a rule linked with biological masculinity; but they are not necessarily so, for there are animal species in which these qualities are on the contrary assigned to the female. The third, or sociological, meaning receives its connotation from the observation of actively existing masculine and feminine individuals. Such observation shows that in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense. Every individual, on the contrary, displays a mixture of the character-traits belonging to his own and to the opposite sex; and he shows a combination of activity and passivity whether or not these last character-traits tally with his biological ones’ (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, quoted in Mitchell 1975: 46-7 [her italics]).