-Psychoanalysis and Difference feminism

-women have a different self, identity and relation to others

-Freud argues that sexual identities are internalized into the structure of one’s identity
-Freud’s work is seen as useful by feminists concentrating on gender difference
-Gender Difference - conflict between the Mother and the Father

-Freud's work and its uses for Feminism

-Freud’s work – the first comprehensive theorization and has had the greatest impact on
present-day understandings of this process
-all other approaches are fragmentary and undeveloped
-in “Femininity”, Freud asks how a woman is made
-Freud’s work questions gendered and sexual identities
-not children but unformed adults
-children are the key to understanding personality, social relationships and organization itself
-Freud provides a useful combination of ideas

-Freud’s account of the construction of the self and hence social organization

-children possess libido (a biologically based sexual or life energy

-pre-Oedipal period
-children – distinct from the Mother
-the Oedipal period
-the Father – a representative male figure who steps in between Mother and Child
-the Father – stands for separation
-girls go through a similar process because of their physical similarity with the Mother figure
-both boys and girls align with Father – boys through identification and girls through desire