The War against Women in Psychoanalytic Culture: Introduction to the Section

Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.- Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch"The war against women" refers to those interlocking systems of discrimination, ubiquitous in cross-cultural contexts, that aim to subjugate women. It is founded in the presumption that males are the superior gender in every facet of human life. The war often locates its justification in the misreading of religious doctrine and texts, ranging from the Holy Bible to the Koran. These distorted interpretations uphold the fallacy of the biologically innate supremacy and, thus, the privileged status of males. Societies worldwide create and legitimize such warped notions within the matrices of the prevailing moral code and laws. In these settings, the rise of violence, intra- or interregional, in the local neighborhood or between nations, is gender discrimination's certain bedfellow. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter (2014), among others, speaks out vociferously against such practices and shows us how the growing tolerance and expanding reach of violence is inimitably bound to the abuse of women.Spanning decades, scholars, feminists, and social activists have examined those societally sanctioned methods that have perpetuated the denigration and destruction of women. From psychoanalytic quarters, dozens of thinkers have come forward to discuss how Victorian rhetoric and culturally intoned biases shaped Freud's theorizations of gender and elevated male-oriented perspectives. The template Freud relied upon, characterized by a delimiting and dichotomous either/or construction, was the boy's body, against which the girl was presumed to feel lacking. While Freud's theories also offered the advantage of recognizing those cognitive constraints in children's misperceptions as they grasp for meaning in assessing anatomical differences, his further conceptualizations into the general psychological development of females was problematic and has been rightly challenged by contemporary thinkers. Cultural biases influenced the psychoanalytic canon that succeeded Freud, too. They have seeped into the contemporary scene in ways that are elusive, and for that reason, their messages exert a hidden and insidious power.How the war has been promulgated in psychoanalytic thought and culture will be explored in the five contributions to follow. There is no doubt that the abundant offerings will satisfy the broad intellectual tastes of our readership, whether one's predilection concerning the war leans toward considering a contemporary recontextualization of foundational tenets within the contemporary psychoanalytic setting, the domain of current clinical theorizing and its operationalization within the consulting room, third-wave feminism's reach into the current psychoanalytic conversation, or forms of institutional and organizational prejudice on the local and national levels.Samuel Abrams's tautly rendered text conveys an incendiary and revolutionary message that throws light upon the foundational fallacies upon which numerous psychoanalytic theories are structured and, in current times, mass-produced. He clarifies the important distinction between hypothesis-based theories and those that are hypostatized-based. Unlike the former, which can be tested by empirical measures that promote "real world discoveries," the latter category of theory-making is grounded in metaphorical constructions-usually concerning topics that are highly ambiguous in nature-that liken a concrete model to that obscure realm of investigation. The problem that Abrams foregrounds is that the heuristic bridge of simile all too readily becomes mistaken for a factually derived field of investigation. That Freud himself perceived the easy slip from "scaffolding" (the simile) to real structure (empirically derived fact) failed to stop him from dangling from his own petard. For instance, Abrams pinpoints the plethora of war-drenched metaphors that saturate Freud's theorizing concerning the psychological field: mental life as determined by "conflict," maturation and developmental processes as likened to migratory armies tasked to conquer adversarial forces; mental disturbances as "civil wars"; treatment strategies as "weapons" to be selected from a therapeutic "arsenal. …