The problem of silence in feminist psychology

Feminist Studies

Volumn 22, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 603-625

  Mahoney, Maureen A ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0030240841     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3178132     Document Type: Article

References (58)

1. Psychoanalytically oriented feminist theorists have been among the few who have engaged the issue of the relationship between postmodernism and relational psychology directly. See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990) for a useful overview. Elizabeth Abel's "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions," in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 184-204, also takes up object relations theory and Lacanian psychology and charges both theoretical perspectives with paying insufficient attention to the social context of gender relations.
2. Psychoanalytically oriented feminist theorists have been among the few who have engaged the issue of the relationship between postmodernism and relational psychology directly. See Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990) for a useful overview. Elizabeth Abel's "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions," in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 184-204, also takes up object relations theory and Lacanian psychology and charges both theoretical perspectives with paying insufficient attention to the social context of gender relations.
3. The "authentic voice" position infuses the writing not only of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]), but also Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues. (See Judith Jordan et al., Women's Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center [New York: Guilford Press, 1991]; Mary Field Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind [New York: Basic Books, 1986]; and Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991]).
4. The "authentic voice" position infuses the writing not only of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]), but also Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues. (See Judith Jordan et al., Women's Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center [New York: Guilford Press, 1991]; Mary Field Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind [New York: Basic Books, 1986]; and Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991]).
5. The "authentic voice" position infuses the writing not only of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]), but also Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues. (See Judith Jordan et al., Women's Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center [New York: Guilford Press, 1991]; Mary Field Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind [New York: Basic Books, 1986]; and Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991]).
6. The "authentic voice" position infuses the writing not only of Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982]), but also Jean Baker Miller and her colleagues. (See Judith Jordan et al., Women's Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center [New York: Guilford Press, 1991]; Mary Field Belenky et al., Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind [New York: Basic Books, 1986]; and Dana Crowley Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991]).
7. Susan Gal, "Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender," in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 175.
8. See Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), on the distinction between women and Woman.
9. See Gal. Similarly, Japanese businessmen may mobilize silence as a sign of power-in a negotiation, the most silent participant is the one with the most control over decision making. (Robert Cunningham, personal communication, February 1994).
10. Carla Kaplan, "Narrative Contract and Emancipatory Readers: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," The Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (1993): 93-119.
11. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, introduction to Listening to Silence: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5.
12. This perspective is represented clearly by Judith Butler's work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
13. Psychologists in Britain and France have developed a postmodernist account. See, for example, Julien Henriques et al., Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (New York: Methuen, 1984); and Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (New York: Norton, 1982).
14. Psychologists in Britain and France have developed a postmodernist account. See, for example, Julien Henriques et al., Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (New York: Methuen, 1984); and Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (New York: Norton, 1982).
15. See Maureen A. Mahoney and Barbara Yngvesson, "The Construction of Subjectivity and the Paradox of Resistance: Reintegrating Feminist Anthropology and Psychology," Signs 18 (autumn 1992): 44-73.
16. Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 319. Nathanson's chapter on withdrawal explicates the links between shame, humiliation, and withdrawal and the importance of therapy in providing a "safe" setting in which to voice shameful memories.
17. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994).
18. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994).
19. I am grateful to Jessica Benjamin for her thoughtful comments about the issue of idealization.
20. Nathanson too recognizes a positive moment in the withdrawal response to shame that allows an individual to recover self-esteem and return more fully into the world of others (322).
21. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 72, 5, 78, 73.
22. See Mahoney and Yngvesson for a discussion.
23. Brown and Gilligan, 20, 6.
24. Ibid., 40, 36.
25. Jean Baker Miller, "Women and Power" (Work-in-Progress, Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, Wellesley College, 1982).
26. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), and "The Shadow of the Other(Subject): Intersubjectivity and Feminist Theory," Constellations 1, no. 2 (1994): 231-54. Also see Mahoney and Yngvesson.
27. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), and "The Shadow of the Other(Subject): Intersubjectivity and Feminist Theory," Constellations 1, no. 2 (1994): 231-54. Also see Mahoney and Yngvesson.
28. This argument builds on Jessica Benjamin's analysis in The Bonds of Love, shifting the emphasis from the struggle between dependence and independence to the struggle between silence and voice.
29. Patricia Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 56-79, esp. 63.
30. D.W. Winnicott, "On Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites," in D.W. Winnicott's The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1965), 179-92, esp. 179.
31. Ibid.
32. Brown and Gilligan, 9, 10. It is significant that, in the popular culture of the United States, the silence of adolescent boys is construed as an active struggle against parents and adults in general.
33. Brown and Gilligan, 11.
34. Carol Gilligan, "Remapping the Moral Domain: New Images of the Self in Relationship," in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 251.
35. Winnicott, "On Communicating and Not Communicating," 187.
36. Gilligan, In a Different Voice, 1, 2.
37. Brown and Gilligan, 3, 4 (emphasis added) 20-21, 36.
38. Ibid., 23.
39. D.W. Winnicott, "The Location of Cultural Experience," in D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1967; rpt., New York: Tavistock, 1982), 98.
40. For cross-cultural examples, see Mahoney and Yngvesson.
41. Winnicott, quoted in Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 94. See also 94-95.
42. Daniel Stern, The First Relationship: Infant and Mother (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
43. Daniel Stern, The First Relationship: Infant and Mother (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
44. Much of the research on the development of sex differences has focused on the assertion that girls are more relationally oriented than boys. Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], and, to some extent, Jessica Benjamin (The Bonds of Love), take this assertion as a description of reality and try to give a developmental account of how it came to be. Others (critics of Gilligan) argue that there is no empirical documentation of such a difference. (See, for example, Anne Colby and William Damon, "Listening to a Different Voice: A Review of Gilligan's In a Different Voice," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 29, no. 4 [1983]: 473-81). That the assumption of such a difference has influenced thinking about proper roles for women and men, at least since the nineteenth century in the United States, is indisputable.
45. Much of the research on the development of sex differences has focused on the assertion that girls are more relationally oriented than boys. Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], and, to some extent, Jessica Benjamin (The Bonds of Love), take this assertion as a description of reality and try to give a developmental account of how it came to be. Others (critics of Gilligan) argue that there is no empirical documentation of such a difference. (See, for example, Anne Colby and William Damon, "Listening to a Different Voice: A Review of Gilligan's In a Different Voice," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 29, no. 4 [1983]: 473-81). That the assumption of such a difference has influenced thinking about proper roles for women and men, at least since the nineteenth century in the United States, is indisputable.
46. Much of the research on the development of sex differences has focused on the assertion that girls are more relationally oriented than boys. Gilligan, Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], and, to some extent, Jessica Benjamin (The Bonds of Love), take this assertion as a description of reality and try to give a developmental account of how it came to be. Others (critics of Gilligan) argue that there is no empirical documentation of such a difference. (See, for example, Anne Colby and William Damon, "Listening to a Different Voice: A Review of Gilligan's In a Different Voice," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 29, no. 4 [1983]: 473-81). That the assumption of such a difference has influenced thinking about proper roles for women and men, at least since the nineteenth century in the United States, is indisputable.
47. Brown and Gilligan, 40.
48. Kaplan, 112. Jacobs, quoted in ibid., 99.
49. Kaplan, 112. Jacobs, quoted in ibid., 99.
50. Brown and Gilligan, 29.
51. Winnicott, quoted in Phillips, 70.
52. Indeed, this narrative about the isolation of mother and child, as if they interacted "in a bell jar," isolated from history and culture, is one of the major weaknesses of classical object relations theory. See Henriques et al.
53. Steedman, 2.
54. Ibid., 2, 6.
55. Abel, 191.
56. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1982), 17-18.
57. This latter experience is related to what has been termed the "impostor syndrome." See P.R. Clance, The Impostor Phenomenon: When Success Makes You Feel Like a Fake (New York: Bantam, 1985); see also Peggy McIntosh, "Feeling Like a Fraud" (Wellesley, Stone Center Working Papers Series, Paper no. 18, 1985).
58. This latter experience is related to what has been termed the "impostor syndrome." See P.R. Clance, The Impostor Phenomenon: When Success Makes You Feel Like a Fake (New York: Bantam, 1985); see also Peggy McIntosh, "Feeling Like a Fraud" (Wellesley, Stone Center Working Papers Series, Paper no. 18, 1985).