Nancy Chodorow
Background
Nancy Chodorow was born January 20th, 1944 in New York City.
Her father, Marvin,
was a professor of applied physics. She married Michael Reich, a professor of
economics and had two children with him, Rachel and Gabriel. The couple
separated in 1977.
Education
Nancy received her BA from Radcliffe College. She was
trained by Beatrice and John W.M. Whiting in culture and personality
anthropology. Looking back, these teachings were prefeminist because the nature
of her studies was gender and generation sensitive. Some books that influenced
her personality anthropology studies are Erik Erikson’s Childhood
and Society, Oscar Lewis’s Children
of Sanchez and Ruth Benedict’s Patterns
of Culture. They all focus on how the individual creates a self and psyche
under certain cultural and social conditions, and how these conditions shape
and yet constrain psychological experience.
In graduate school, she studied readings on father-son,
father-daughter, and mother-son relationships, but was unsatisfied with not being
able to find theories on mother-daughter relationships. She formed a
Mother-Daughter group that first met in 1968 to better understand these
relationships. The focus of the group was emotionally charged issues, and involved
discussion and analysis to raise consciousness about psychodynamic
understanding. Some of the issues that were explored included shame, guilt,
anger, different family alliances, and desires about maternal presence or
absence.
She received her PhD from Brandeis University in 1975. She
studied under Philip Slater and was influenced by his protofeminist
psychoanalytic sociology, and he advised her to focus more on the unconscious
in order to better understand personality.
Professional Life
Nancy is a professor of sociology at the University of
California at Berkeley. Her work is highly influenced by Karen Horney’s work,
whose early essays on femininity strongly questioned Freudian theory. Melanie
Klein is another early female psychoanalyst she identified with. Nancy’s
personal and cultural circumstances led her to feminism and feminist
psychoanalysis.
Her interests in her field include psychoanalytic theory
and clinical methods, gender and sexuality, psychoanalytic sociology and
anthropology, and feminist theory and methods. She challenges Freud’s claims
for the biological foundation of gender personality and roles, and looks to
understand the near-universal secondary status of women. Nancy also generated
the idea that femininity is more easily obtained than masculinity, which is
attained through doing rather than being, and performance rather than identity.
Another point she makes is that the separateness and individuation of the male
can be a defense mechanism rather than a triumph.
She has
published four books: The Power of
Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999), The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989),
and Femininities, Masculinities,
Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994). In The Reproduction of
Mothering,
she develops an account of the adolescent creation of a female self connected
to mother and in a bisexual oedipal triangle, and of a male self that becomes
preoccupied with rejection of dependence, and separateness.. This book won an
award from the ASA, and along with Feminism
and Psychoanalytic Theory led to focused articles on her theories in America
and abroad. Her books provide parameters for psychotherapists treating women,
who need new ways of understanding what their patients/clients tell them.
The concept of why women desire motherhood is central to
Nancy’s studies. She uses Freudian psychoanalytic theory to argue that young
girls remain identified with the mother even after the Oedipus complex detaches
the male child from his mother. She believes that the acceptance of the
domestic ideal is the foundation of the oppression of women, and asserts a
model of women with positive feminine qualities and self-valuation against
Freud’s model of the inferior, castrated female.
According to Nancy, daughters who are raised by their
mothers and develop a desire to be a mother herself. However, to develop a
masculine identity, boys will repress their relationship with their mother (and
indeed other women in their lives). The notion of male superiority thus arises.
When raised by their mothers, girls never identify themselves as separate from
their mothers in the way that boys do.
Nancy considers revised psychoanalytic and feminist
theories to be the most powerful account we have of the gendered and sexual
psyche. In it she sees the potential to improve self-understanding,
psychological change and emotional well-being.
Relevance to Class Material
Freudian theory, revolutionary in the field of psychology,
is phallocentric and androcentric in nature. By integrating Freudian theory
with a feminist perspective, Nancy Chodorow has achieved great recognition in
feminist psychology. I think in order to widen one’s perspective on the broad
and complex subject of psychology, it is important to acknowledge revisions and
criticisms made on even the most well-recognized schools of thought. In this
class we’ve learned that feminist psychology spans across a wide variety of
specialty areas, because gender intersects through most if not all of them.
Resources
“Becoming a Feminist Foremother” (1996), Nancy
Chodorow, Feminist
Foremothers in Women's Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health, Volume 1 by Ellen
Cole, Esther D Rothblum, Phyllis Chesler
Half
the Human Experience: The Psychology of Women, Janet Shibley Hyde, Chapter 2
“Nancy Chodorow” (2011), Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition
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