Hypatia

Hypatia 17.3 (2002) 277-279

Book Review

Psychoanalyses/Feminisms

Psychoanalyses/Feminisms. Edited by Peter L. Rudnytsky and Andrew M. Gordon. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Psychoanalyses/Feminisms is a provocative collection of articles that emerged from a conference sponsored by the Institute for Psychological Study of Arts and the Women's Study Program at the University of Florida. The essays examine, through myriad approaches, the enormous transformative power that both feminism and psychoanalysis have wielded on literary, film, and cultural theory in the twentieth century.

The editors organize the volume around four primary themes. The first, "Rereading Freud," provides expansive readings to several of Sigmund Freud's primary texts. Madelon Sprengnether's "Mourning Freud" takes a biographical approach to Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), exploring the etiology of Freud's Oedipus complex by examining Freud's troubled relationship with his father. Likewise, collection coeditor Peter Rudnytsky's "'Mother, Do You Have a Wiwimaker, Too?': Freud's Representation of Female Sexuality in the Case of Little Hans" provokes a feminist reading of Freud's Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1908), a case history that explores the narrative of Little Hans, a boy who fears his mother's absence of a "wiwimaker." The final essay in this section, Ranita Chatterjee's "Of Footnotes and Fathers: Reading Irigaray and Kofman," takes an approach different from Sprengnether and Rudnytsky. Chatterjee prefers not to decipher Freud's primary texts, but instead chooses to examine Luce Irigaray and Sarah Kofman's treatment of Freudian works. She addresses the intellectual rift between the two feminist theorists, ultimately concluding that Kofman privileges Freud's masculine discourse.

The second theme, "Refashioning Femininity," applies psychoanalytic theory to support literary critique and explores how characters exhibit traits of female dependency, sadism, masochism, and masquerade in literary texts. Patricia Reid Eldredge's "Marlene, Maggie Thatcher, and the Emperor of Morocco: The Psychic Structure of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls," applies Karen Horney's work toward understanding gender dependency and domination as applied to Churchill's play. David Galef's "Dishing it Out: Patterns of Women's Sadism in Literature" provides a solid, accessible psychoanalytic discussion of sadism and explores patterns of women's sadism in a variety of literary texts ranging from Marge Piercy, William Faulkner, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon, Ken Kesey, and many others. The third essay, and perhaps the most intriguing of this section, is Véronique Machelidon's "Masquerade: A Feminine or Feminist Strategy," a critique of Joan Riviere's "Womanliness as Masquerade" (1929). Machelidon argues that Riviere's text functions as a metadiscourse in masquerade and reads Riviere's text as rhetorical performance, designed [End Page 277] to appeal to her mentors Ernest Jones and Freud. Machelidon critiques the nuances of masquerade, which can function either as a peculiarly feminist subversive strategy to undermine phallogocentric dominance or as a means to reinforce the performative role of female passivity.

"Gendered Mirrors" is the third theme in the collection, and the three essays in this section are fashioned to refract the Lacanian metaphor of the mirror, particularly as viewed through the lenses of feminist perception. The essays attend to a central question in both psychoanalytic and feminist critique, namely, where does the Self end and the Other begin? Like David Galef's essay on sadomasochism in the previous section, Barbara Schapiro's "Sadomasochism as Intersubjective Breakdown in D. H. Lawrence's 'The Woman Who Rode Away'" explores how sadomasochism and narcissism take shape within a literacy context. Schapiro applies Jessica Benjamin's feminist psychoanalytic study, The Bonds of Love, to D. H. Lawrence's "The Woman Who Rode Away," arguing that Lawrence, often maligned and considered a strongly misogynistic author, instead may be viewed as a writer willing to critique the "tragic consequences" of masculinity. The second essay in this section, "'He's More Myself Than I Am': Narcissism and Gender in Wuthering Heights," is an exceptionally well-written discussion by Michelle A. Massé regarding the function of narcissism in the work of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, providing keen insight into the character of...