A Conversation between Nancy Chodorow and Ilene Philipson

ABSTRACT

It is an immense pleasure to be here today with my mentor, Nancy Chodorow. In 1976 I entered graduate school in sociology specifically to study with Nancy. As an undergraduate I had read two brilliant articles that Nancy published as a graduate student prior to The Reproduction of Mothering, in which she used psychoanalysis “to account for the reproduction within each generation of certain general and nearly universal differences that characterize masculine and feminine personality and roles” (“Family Structure and Feminine Personality” in Rosaldo and Lamphere Women, Culture and Personality). I was dazzled. Nancy not only went on to chair my dissertation in sociology, but nine years later sat on my committee for my dissertation in clinical psychology that became On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy. We both now are psychoanalysts, sociologists and feminists. While we each have traveled down our own paths, I always have wondered how Nancy, as a graduate student at Brandeis, could write with such courage, conviction and, well, chutzpah, to take on the project of not only understanding why women mother, but how gender is socially reproduced across generations and cultures. I also took this as an opportunity to discuss how her thinking and interests have changed over time since the publication of her groundbreaking Reproduction of Mothering, a book that heralded a new era in our understanding of gender and psychoanalysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• mother
• mothering
• intersubjective ego-psychology
• sociology
• Loewald
• Erikson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy J. Chodorow

Nancy J. Chodorow, Ph.D., is author of The Reproduction of Mothering; Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory; Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond; The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture; Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Freud and Beyond; and The Psychoanalytic Ear and the Sociological Eye: Toward an American Independent Tradition. A book in her honor, Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering: Forty Years On (P. Bueskens, ed.), was published in 2020. Chodorow is Lecturer, Part-time, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance; Training and Supervising Analyst Emerita and Faculty, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Professor of Sociology Emerita, University of California, Berkeley; and Faculty, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

Ilene Philipson

Ilene Philipson, Ph.D., Ph.D., Psy.D., holds doctorates in sociology, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, a faculty member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and is in the private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Oakland, California. In addition to On The Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy, her books include Married to The Job; Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths; and Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination (ed). She has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and NYU.