#nancy chodorow

The psychology of Nancy Chodorow lies behind an analysis of the Gothic plot of entrapment and escape from a labyrinthine castle as the girl’s difficulty in separating from the mother.

Maturity is not equated with independence though it includes a certain capacity for independence...The independence of the mature person is simply that he does not collapse when he has to stand alone. It is not an independence of needs for other persons with whom to have relationship: that would not be desired by the mature.

Chodorow argues throughout the book that if cultural meanings matter, they matter personally. They are projectively constructed, animated and creative. Reciprocally selves and emotions, however culturally labeled are, like gender, introjectively reshaped partially through unconscious fantasy through the unconscious inner world that develops from birth onward. Emotions may be culturally recognized or unrecognized, but they are directly felt and become implicated in unconscious aspects of the self and world (p. 171). Psychoanalysis allows for recognition and understanding of the personal meanings that create psychic life and give it “a glow.” Analysis enables an enfolding of the split off or repressed aspects of psychic life into the centered unknown that makes continuities of discontinuities (p 272). People fear that entering psychoanalysis will eventually stop a writer from writing or a painter from painting, that neurosis is the root of creativity and that psychoanalysis wishes to remove the latter along with the former. However, it is only the split off unconscious fantasy that cannot inform creativity or otherwise make life fuller. Unconscious fantasy, if not split off, has a potential to deepen experience and to enhance creativity (p. 273). Chodorow’s quest has been to direct the light of understanding towards the ways in which we create personal meaning and to explore the use and generation of intersubjective, cultural, and social meaning in the process of creation. She concludes her book with an affirmation of the personal and psychological. Chodorow asks that all of us become more conscious in our every day experience and sensitize ourselves to the power of feelings all around us.

Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) examines how models of subjectivity become shaped by narratives concerning gender. Motherhood, she argues, replicates a patriarchal ideology which supports the close bonding between mother and female child. She claims that sons are raised to become independent whereas daughters are trained to become mothers and that this training takes place by the mother enforcing the female child’s emotional and psychological dependency upon them so that they replicate such feelings of dependency, feelings which, considered in political terms, function to keep women within private, domestic spaces (which also makes it difficult for the daughter to psychologically separate from their mother). For Chodorow this ideological process only becomes visible when it is manifested in pathological terms, when ‘the mother does not recognize or denies the existence of the daughter as a separate person, and the daughter herself then comes not to recognize herself as a separate person’ but ‘as a continuation or extension of her mother’.

not-a-metaphor said:might sound stupid but could you simpy explain oedipal complex for young girls ? i kind of never really understood it and it frustrates me… thanks no matter what <3