chodorow.pdf

Mothering, Object-Relations, and the Female Oedipal Configuration

Author(s): Nancy Chodorow

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Feb., 1978), pp. 137-158

Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177630 .

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MOTHERING,OBJECT-RELATIONS,

AND THE FEMALEOEDIPALCONFIGURATION

NANCY CHODOROW

Many feminists have come to recognize that psychoanalysis, as

a theory of the social production of gender and sexuality, must be

a central component of feminist understanding.1 My own work

within this tradition argued for the importance of the fact that

women, and not men, are primary caretakersof children.2 I have

suggested that the mother-daughterrelationship contributes in

fundamental ways to the characterof the feminine psyche, as well

as contributing to the creation of a male-dominant psychology in

men.

In this article, I extend my argument: in a new interpretation

of the feminine oedipus complex, I suggest that because women

mother, the oedipus complex is as much a mother-daughter issue

as it is one of father and daughter, and that it is as much concerned

with the structure and composition of the feminine relational ego

as it is with the genesis of sexual object choice. The father-daughter

relationship is constructed during the oedipal period; however,

that relationship can be understood only in terms of and in the

context of a daughter's continuing relationship to her mother.

Heterosexual orientation is for most girls a product of their oedipal

experience. But, the principal significance of the feminine oedipus

complex consists not only in the construction of this orientation

but in the creation of a feminine sense of self-in-relationship that

underlies the emergence of sexual orientation itself. I examine the

emergence of a relational complexity in the feminine sense of self

and women's internal relational stance, and demonstrate that ex-

clusive commitment to men, in spite of behavioral heterosexuality,

is never completely established.

For Freud and the early analysts, the major oedipal task was

preparation for heterosexual adult relationships. Given this, a

girl's major "task" is to become oriented to men. In the traditional

paradigm, a girl must change her love object from mother to father,

her libidinal mode from active to passive, and finally her libidinal

137

138

Nancy Chodorow

organ and eroticism from clitoris to vagina. A boy has to make no

such parallel changes.3

There is no question that heterosexual orientation is a major

outcome of the oedipal period for most girls, and that the tradi-

tional psychoanalytic account of the development of female sex-

uality, and the growth of the girl's relationship to her father des-

cribes this. There is some question, however, about how we should

read this outcome. Freud and his colleagues put us in a peculiar

position here. On the one hand, they assume that heterosexual

orientation and genital (vaginal) primacy is biologically normal,

and is women's biological destiny. This assumption, psycho-

analyst Roy Schafer points out, is based on an unstated but strong

evolutionary value system in which "nature has its procreative

plan," "individualsare destined to be links in the chain of survi-

val," and "it is better for people to be 'natural'and not defy 'the

natural order.' "4 Only from this evaluative viewpoint can psycho-

analysis take all other forms of sexuality to be arrestsin develop-

ment, illness, inversion, perversion: "we are operating in the realm

of societal value systems concerning taken-for-granted evolutionary

obligations; we are not operating in any realm of biological neces-

sity, psycho-biological disorder, or value-free empiricism."5

On the other hand, psychoanalytic clinical findings indicate that

there is nothing inevitable, natural or preestablished in the develop-

ment of human sexuality. Moreover, clinical case materials, and

the theory derived from them, indicate that sexual orientation and

definition is enforced and constructed by parents. Parents are

usually heterosexual and sexualize their relationship to children

of either gender accordingly, employing socially sanctioned child-

rearingpractices (including, with few exceptions, the approval of

psychoanalysts).6 We can, then, take the psychoanalytic account

to describe the genesis of heterosexual orientation in women. But

we must reject any assumption that what this account describes is

natural, self-evident and unintended. To the contrary, it seems to

be both consciously and unconsciously intended, socially, psycho-

logically and ideologically constructed. And it is not inevitable.

The attainment of heterosexual orientation as the psychoanaly-

tic account describes it also involves an identification on the part

of children with parents of their own gender-a boy with his father,

a girl with her mother. A boy gives up his mother in order to avoid

punishment. But he identifies with his father in order to gain the

benefits of giving rather than receiving punishment and of being

masculine and superior (he develops "what we have come to con-

sider the normal male contempt for women").7 A girl identifies

with her mother in their common feminine inferiority and in her

The Female OedipalConfiguration

139

heterosexual stance.8 (According to the account, she also prepares

through this identification for her future mothering role.) The pro-

cesses in this identification are not necessarily conscious (super-ego

formation, for instance), but the choice of parent to identify with

clearly is. Both in clinical examples and in theoretical formulations

this identification is a learning phenomenon: children learn their

gender and then identify and are encouraged to identify with the

appropriateparent.9

My analysis here examines how conflictual relationships (object-

relations) during the oedipal period become defensively appropri-

ated and internalized by growing girls so that they transform their

internal object world-their inner fantasized and unconsciously ex-

perienced selves in relation to others. These object-relations grow

out of contemporary family structure and are mutually created by

parents and children. I am not so concerned with the traditional

psychoanalytic account-with feminine heterosexuality, genital

symbolization, sexual fantasy, conscious masculine or feminine

identification-as with the kind of social and intrapsychic relational

situation in which that heterosexuality and these identifications

get constituted. Psychoanalysts, by contrast, in their emphasis

upon the difficult libidinal path to heterosexuality, have passed

over the relational aspects of the situation. The traditional account,

concerned with heterosexual orientation, focuses on a girl's attrac-

tion to her father. I demonstrate the continuing significance of a

girl's relation to her mother throughout the oedipal period. Sexual

orientation is in the background here. My account does give us a

fuller understanding of women's heterosexuality in our society,

but as part of a more general understanding of women's internal

and external relational position.

Similarly, I argue that the way gender personality is constituted

in the oedipus complex does not have to do only with identification

processes-children becoming like, or modifying their egoes to be

like, their parents. Rather, the ego in its internal relational situation

changes, and changes differently, for boys and girls. Boys and girls

experience and internalize different kinds of relationships; they

work through the conflicts, develop defenses, and appropriate and

transform the affects associated with these relationships differently.

These object-relational differences, and their effect on the kinds of

defenses, splits and repressions in the ego, better explain important

differences in masculine and feminine personality and the import-

ant aspects of feminine personality that emerge from the oedipus

complex than does the more conscious and intended identification

with the same gender parent.

140

Nancy Chodorow

I will not evaluate here all the debates about "female sexuality"

that have taken place within psychoanalysis.10 It is enough to re-

iterate that there seems to be physiologically only one process of

female orgasm, and that psychoanalysts have foundered in all at-

tempts to define activity and passivity unambiguously, or without

resort to normative conceptions. Sexual phenomena gain psycho-

logical meaning mainly from specific social relationships themselves

and the way these are internally appropriated and transformed, and

from normative definitions of the sexual situation imposed upon

and learned by members of particular societies. In the social (and

psychoanalytic) case at hand, the normative definition of the situa-

tion is an assumption that heterosexual genitality is a major desired

developmental goal and the oedipus complex is the first arena in

which that goal is negotiated.

In the classical account of the feminine oedipus complex, a girl

totally rejects her mother when she discovers that her mother can-

not give her a penis: "Whereasin boys the Oedipus complex is

destroyed by the castration complex [a boy gives up sexual desires

for his mother out of fear of castration by his father], in girls it is

made possible and led up to by the castration complex."11 Penis

envy-the feminine form of the castration complex-leads a girl to

turn to her father exclusively, and thenceforth to see her mother

only as a sexual rival. This account stresses the completeness of

the girl's turn to her father and rejection of her mother, and the

depth of her hostility: "the girl abandons the mother as a love

object with far more embitterment and finality than the boy."12

Such a view, though theoretically attractive in its retention of

views of the feminine and masculine oedipus complex as mirror

opposites, was too simple to encompass even Freud's own clinical

findings.13 To begin with, a girl enters the triangularoedipus sit-

uation later, and in a different relational context than a boy. Even

when she does so, a girl does not give up this preoedipal relation-

ship completely, but rather builds whatever happens later upon

this preoedipal base. Freud's characterizationof the girl's pre-

oedipal connection to her mother as "attachment," emphasizes

this persistence, by pointing to the dual nature of attachment:

a girl actively attaches herself, and chooses her attachment, to her

mother, and at the same time is passively, and not as a matter of

choice, attached-an appendage or extension. Freud's usual term-

cathexis-implies, by contrast, only activity and direction. A girl,

then, retains a sense of self and relation to her mother which has

preoedipal, or early developmental, characteristics: She is preoccu-

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