With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the word \u201cPatriarchy\u201d burst into the public arena with greater currency than ever before.\u00a0 We were confronted with calls to \u201cSmash the Patriarchy\u201d and invited to follow \u201cThe Week in Patriarchy\u201d under the banner of The Guardian<\/i>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Why does it have such a grip on the social unconscious?\u00a0 Taking as her starting point the relational turn in psychoanalysis, Naomi Snider challenges Freud\u2019s account of patriarchal authority as a necessary evil designed to quell our antisocial drives.\u00a0 By nature, we are relational beings, driven toward mutual understanding and connection rather than power and domination.\u00a0 Patriarchy\u2019s persistence rests, then, not on the containment of our destructive impulses, but on the stunting of our relational capacities.\u00a0 Bringing research on development into conversation with psychoanalytic literature, the presenter will show how our initiation into patriarchy involves an encounter with irreparable loss.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Such a formulation leads us to ask: in what ways does this psychosocial understanding of patriarchy demand a reckoning with our understanding of psychoanalysis\u2014as both a theory of the mind and a clinical praxis?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 As we help our patients grapple with encounters with loss and injustice\u2014both suffered and inflicted\u2014can we offer a way forward that takes us beyond the cycle of splitting and \u201cdoer-done to?\u201d\u00a0 What, too, can we add to the larger political conversation?\u00a0 In short, in what ways can psychoanalysis help repair the ruptures that patriarchy (and all forms of social hierarchy and division) inflict?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the word \u201cPatriarchy\u201d burst into the public arena with greater currency than ever before.\u00a0 We were confronted with calls to \u201cSmash the Patriarchy\u201d and invited to follow \u201cThe Week in Patriarchy\u201d under the banner of The Guardian.\u00a0 Despite moves toward greater gender equality, patriarchy persists as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"template":"","level_of_course":[984],"class_list":["post-27465","courses","type-courses","status-publish","hentry","level_of_course-continuing-professional-development"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n