How Gender Relations Have Changed in the Last 100 Years and Why It Is So Difficult to Talk about Them in the Psychoanalytic Context On a History of Injurious Constellations

摘要

The author proceeds on the premise that gender identity can only be conceptualized as gender in relation(s) in which changes in one partner will necessarily affect the other. Accordingly, she discusses the psychoanalysis of gender difference as proposed by Freud and the changes it has undergone since in terms of a theory of relations in which an altered view of one's own gender will necessarily bring about a change in one's view of the other gender, irrespective of whether this is intentional or not. The author investigates the way in which female and male psychoanalysts from the 1950 s to the present have defined their own gender identity, concluding that in both cases discussions on changes in the psychoanalysis of gender difference have largely taken place on a same-gender basis. One of the main reasons for this, she contends, is that psychoanalysis is neither theoretically nor methodologically equipped for an engagement with this issue from an inter-gender perspective. Psychoanalysts themselves feel too bound up in the whole matter to be able to reflect adequately on what they experience every day.