When Women Turn to Matters of the Mind : As More and More Women Become Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Psychoanalysts, Theories That Once Seemed Unshakable Are Being Questioned, and ‘Far Out’ Ideas Are Moving Into the Mainstream

The great question ... which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, “What does a woman want?” --Sigmund Freud

If Freud were alive today, he most likely would be surprised to learn that what increasing numbers of women want is to become psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.

So many women, in fact, that people in those fields and their professional organizations are beginning to talk about the “feminization” of psychology and psychiatry.

In psychology, women accounted for 58% of the Ph.D. degrees granted in 1990; as recently as 1968, women earned just 20% of the degrees. At the same time, the American Psychiatric Assn. reports that women have moved into that field at a rate 61% higher than a decade ago.

Speculation about what this portends seems limitless. It ranges from debates about gender and how human beings develop, to a reaction against what many feminists perceive is an almost knee-jerk “blame mom” bias, to reframing basic questions about separation, parenting and sexuality.

On at least one thing is consensus: There’ll be some changes made. Some have already begun, either in the mainstream or the margins.

Says Mary Beth Kenkel, clinical psychologist and academic dean of California School of Professional Psychology-Fresno:

“It’s a struggle. The more established people tend to be white males, and the Establishment labels some of these new ways of thinking as ‘far out,’ ‘fringe,’ ‘lunatic.’ They’re marginalized and ignored. But as more women enter the field, they will force this thinking into the mainstream.”

Well into a recent daylong course on feminist psychoanalytic theories, workshop leader Carla Golden suggests a break.

Golden, of Ithaca College in New York, has been giving an overview of theories developed in the past 25 years, going back to include works of pioneers such as Karen Horney and her views on penis envy.

Horney’s theories--that girls envy the power and privilege associated with a penis more than the organ itself--have become more mainstream than marginal by now. But this conference is sponsored by the Assn. for Women in Psychology, a 1,650-member group that San Francisco psychotherapist Elizabeth Friar Williams says considers itself on “the cutting edge of what is going on in feminist psychology.” One does not have to go far at the gathering to come close to that edge:

* As participants filter down the hall of the Sheraton Hotel in Long Beach, they pass the open door of the workshop on “The Metaphor of the Container.” As described in the conference program, the workshop will provide “an exploration of boundary, woman’s body as metaphor and the return of the feminine to the realm of therapy.” Inside the room, about a dozen women sit on the floor in pairs and alone, quietly working with modeling clay.

* Later, it is standing room only for Ellyn Kaschak, a psychologist from San Jose State, and her workshop on a “New Psychology of Women’s Experience.” Kaschak tells her listeners, “We do our psychological work based on masculine epistemology. Take rape and battering: ‘Was she asking for it?’ ‘Who is asking for it and who is not?’ Anybody in a female body is asking for it.”

Tracing feminists’ work since the early ‘70s, she concludes: “Once we’ve disowned everything, deconstructed everything, we have to move into our world.” Much revision has been too narrow, she tells them, and still looks at early childhood experience against the norm of an idealized white middle-class nuclear family--father at work, mother at home, extended family elsewhere--ignoring “the fact that few live in that arrangement globally or here.”

* At yet another session, sociologist Bette Tallen says the co-dependency movement has become an industry, her tone making industry sound like racket . She deplores the proliferation of for-profit 12-step programs for every addiction--including addiction to addiction--and the acres of shelf space devoted to self-help books, many written by women who consider themselves feminists.

Most programs and books are aimed at women, and Tallen does not question that women sometimes feel better through them. But women are being blamed again, Tallen says, and asked to think of themselves as sick.

(Men can be co-dependents as well, she acknowledges, but “to be a co-dependent is to be a woman or to be like one.” Tallen cites common characteristics in the way both women and co-dependents often are defined--care-taking, low self-worth, control, denial, weak boundaries, dependency.)

“The addiction movement has thoroughly co-opted women’s pain and anger,” she says, and “it depoliticizes feminism.”

In 1942, Betty Friedan graduated summa cum laude in psychology from Smith College. She did graduate work in psychology, but left the field to marry, mother three children and write on the side. Later, she thanked a number of prominent psychologists for an unusual education, “although I have not used it as I originally planned.”

That thank-you note appeared in her introduction to “The Feminine Mystique.” Published in 1963, it helped launch the modern women’s liberation movement.

The feminine mystique--that women find fulfillment and happiness only in their proper roles as wives, mothers and homemakers--caused “the problem that has no name,” Friedan wrote. Socialized in a patriarchal society, women were unhappy, depressed, anxious and feeling invisible, as if they were non-persons.

That mystique, she continued, “derived its power from Freudian thought,” especially as it became popularized in America, promoted by women’s magazines and opinion makers.

Friedan did not want to detract from Freud’s unarguable genius and contributions, she wrote, but she did call attention to his cultural bias which saw women as inferior and subordinate to men and regarded the male as the norm in human development theory. It was a bias perpetuated by his followers, including Helene Deutsch in her definitive “The Psychology of Woman.”

“Women just can’t win,” Los Angeles psychologist Toni Bernay says of that theory. “If a woman is aggressive, she is deviant, because it is her role to be passive. And if she is passive, she is deviant, because the human norm is male.”

In 1969, psychotherapist Williams walked up to a bulletin board in the Women’s Center on West 23rd Street in New York and tacked up her business card: “Feminist Therapy--Sliding Scale.”

“I immediately had a practice,” she recalls.

“We were showing you can’t understand women’s behavior unless you do an analysis of the society and what ails women.”

While few women seem to urge total rejection of traditional theory--including Freud’s--they do reject infallibility.

Describing Freud’s contributions within a cultural and historical context, Los Angeles psychiatrist Maria T. Lymberis says: “A hundred years ago, Freud began paying attention to women. He listened to them. This was a historical event.”

What he soon recognized, Lymberis says, was their suffering, as female patients revealed it through remembrance. Among the traumas revealed were early sex abuse, which Freud and his followers tended to regard as fantasy.

“He was appalled and so were his colleagues,” Lymberis says. “We can’t be too harsh on them. Everybody idealizes life.”

Women, including Freud’s own daughter, Anna, have contributed to psychology and psychoanalytic theory from the beginning. In developing their own theories, they often challenged Freud, as did pioneers such as Horney and Melanie Klein in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Historically, Los Angeles psychiatrist Marjorie Braude says, it has been difficult to reconcile feminism with “the original structure of psychiatry . . . . Psychiatrists have not been willing to relate strongly enough to women’s issues.”

In recent years women have had an impact within the American Psychiatric Assn., she says, mentioning a rape crisis manual developed by the women’s committee, a study that took on the issue of psychiatrist/patient sexual relations, and women’s insistence on taking violence, sexual abuse and incest more seriously.

Psychiatrist Doryann Lebe started the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles with 11 other psychoanalysts, both male and female, in 1990. It is open, she says, to all kinds of theories.

Although women in the profession have increased greatly in the past 20 years, she says, both men and women have been looking at differences in male and female development and asking what is gender, sexuality, masculinity, femininity. While it is still possible to find a rigid classical therapist, Lebe says, it is more common to encounter rigidity in patients:

“There will be people, both male and female, who don’t want to be questioned or challenged. They want to hold onto a very rigid view of how men should be, how women should be. It (questioning such views) rocks their sense of self and disturbs the way they’ve organized the world. It is very threatening.”

What does this mean for the patient?

Social psychologist Carol Tavris, author of “The Mismeasure of Woman,” sees “a zillion changes” that feminist psychotherapists are bringing to theory and practice, affecting female and male patients.

She says much female behavior, particularly in relationships, that was regarded as disturbed, pathological or deviant is being reinterpreted as healthy and strong coping mechanisms.

“In family therapy,” Tavris says, “it may change the patriarchal male bias about what the problem is and who has to change.”

Traditionally, she says of family therapy, “the mother is held accountable. She is the target of intervention” and the attitude seems to be, “Let’s fix her. Then she can fix things in the family.

“Now there’s a transformation of the old vision of the smothering, enmeshed mother taking place. Women’s concerns for their children are being seen now as normal signs of connection. Now, maybe it’s the absent father, the man perched on the roof outside, who is the problem.”

Tavris says it is not a question of replacing blame, which she calls a useless activity. Rather, “Everybody is going to have to budge a little, but there is much to be gained for men.”

There are, however, cautions and potential dangers. “The language of talking about feelings is a language women speak fluently,” Tavris says. “And it is the language of psychotherapy. It’s one of the reasons why women are drawn to psychotherapy. What concerns me is if it makes women’s way of doing things normal and sees men as different and deviant. Men feel put to a test (when asked to talk about feelings).

“They don’t know the rules, so they withdraw. . . . I think we misinterpret signs of male depression. We don’t recognize it. We misread a lot of stuff.”

Similarly, psychiatrist Lebe cautions that some feminist therapists “get so caught up in feminism that when working with men, they forget men have a different experience.”

During her co-dependency presentation, Bette Tallen told of a student who said she had been greatly impressed by Robin Norwood’s book, “Women Who Love Too Much.” The young woman told Tallen it helped her understand the feelings of the ex-husband who had battered her.

Perhaps, Tallen told the woman, a better book might be titled, “Men Who Hit Too Much.”

As psychotherapists speculate what the influx of women in their professions may bring to the thinking, many predict, even call for, new thinking about men.

“As feminist theory is developing, what is still missing is the role of fathers, the role of men,” psychologist Kaschak says. “We talk about women’s issues all the time. We need to talk about bringing up little boys differently.”

Ronald Fox, a clinical psychologist and dean of professional psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, says he hopes the rethinking that women are bringing to the field extends to men: “I think we need to take a step back and look at some of the things we thought we knew.”

At UCLA, social psychologist Helen Astin says the influx of women, plus an influx of cultural and ethnic diversity to the field, may have a profound effect on the whole notion of the male model as norm:

“We might get out of the mentality of ‘norm.’ We might look much more at the differences. I don’t think we can say any longer that white men are the norm,” says Astin. “Just look at California.”