even among psychoanalytic theorists) approach to male dominance, one that derives it from a primitive and universal male fear of the female body, we denaturalize male domination and come to understand it as a historically derived condition, a condition that could change in history as well (Bloch 1991a, 1). Our very psyches are formed in historical, socio-cultural conditions through the discursive practices in which we are socialized (including ideationideas are thus material facts as well).
20
We take as natural and universal certain psychic inclinations, which can be shown to be culture-specific.
21
Psychoanalysis may have produced, indeed seems to have produced, an account of the formation of the psyche in our culture; its claims to transcultural adequacy, however, are not ineluctable.
22
Although in this book I have not made any case or argument for the specific material determinants of male dominance in ancient Judaism, I believe that I have shown that the sort of psychoanalytic explanation that locates male dominance systems in allegedly universal fears of female power going back to earliest childhood are invalid for this cultureand thus for all, because such theories only derive their explanatory power from the very claim to universal applicability. Other cross-cultural studies also support this questioning of the location of male
|
 | | 20. This sentence was inspired by remarks made by Carol Delaney at Stanford University, when I presented this text to a cultural studies colloquium there. Of course, she is not responsible for the actual form that her inspiration took here.
|
| | 21. Camille Paglia's work (1990) is an excellent example of how this error is perpetuated in a context that is not explicitly psychoanalytic; she insists on generalizing that which is found in our Western (broadly understood) cultural formation to all of humanity by assuming that it is an essential, psychic reality.
|
| | 22. I have been properly chastized (as the book goes to press) by Ruth Stein, who writes in a letter of November 25, 1991:
|
| | I agree that the claim that cultural and historical phenomena can be explained wholly or even mostly by psychoanalytic tools is foolish. Nevertheless, I find that in such areas as literary theory, cultural theory, etc. one very often talks of psychoanalysis in a very loose, undiscerning, and not updated way, and whenever I read such general(izing) statements about psychoanalysis, I automatically hear myself asking "
which
psychoanalysis?"
|
| | Stein is undoubtedly correct. I am
not
attempting here to discredit psychoanalysis, a practice that has benefited me beyond description, but only to challenge a certain model of explanation for male domination once very current in psychoanalytic circles and still, I think unfortunately, alive, to wit, that men universally fear, reject, loathe women's bodies because of the experiences of early childhood. I am convinced that such loathing is not a psychic universal but a cultural production, and to the extent that psychoanalytic thinkers no longer hold such views, my descriptive terms need modifying.
|
|
|