With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the word “Patriarchy” burst into the public arena with greater currency than ever before. We were confronted with calls to “Smash the Patriarchy” and invited to follow “The Week in Patriarchy” under the banner of The Guardian. Despite moves toward greater gender equality, patriarchy persists as a social hierarchy and a set of gender-based norms which is psychologically harmful to both men and women. Why does it have such a grip on the social unconscious? Taking as her starting point the relational turn in psychoanalysis, Naomi Snider challenges Freud’s account of patriarchal authority as a necessary evil designed to quell our antisocial drives. By nature, we are relational beings, driven toward mutual understanding and connection rather than power and domination. Patriarchy’s persistence rests, then, not on the containment of our destructive impulses, but on the stunting of our relational capacities. Bringing research on development into conversation with psychoanalytic literature, the presenter will show how our initiation into patriarchy involves an encounter with irreparable loss. Patriarchy, by rupturing connection and shaming the capacity to repair, sets in motion a defensive psychology of disavowal and dissociation that in turn upholds and reinforces the patriarchal order.
Such a formulation leads us to ask: in what ways does this psychosocial understanding of patriarchy demand a reckoning with our understanding of psychoanalysis—as both a theory of the mind and a clinical praxis? The idea that patriarchal norms are both psychologically defensive and constricting, as well as socially harmful, places psychoanalysis at the apex of the struggle for both psychological freedom and social justice. How can we as psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists help our patients gain a greater awareness of, and to challenge and resist, these culturally scripted and psychologically defensive ways of thinking and behaving? As we help our patients grapple with encounters with loss and injustice—both suffered and inflicted—can we offer a way forward that takes us beyond the cycle of splitting and “doer-done to?” What, too, can we add to the larger political conversation? In short, in what ways can psychoanalysis help repair the ruptures that patriarchy (and all forms of social hierarchy and division) inflict?