Reflection on Chodorow’s “Gender, Relation, and Difference in

Psychoanalytic Perspective”
Fariha Sameen

S193CPS14

Chodorow presents the idea of gender—and by extension, gender difference—as being created
relationally and socially. She places as the starting line of this relational creation, the earliest
mother-child relationship and the process of separation-individuation that leads the individual
to realizing themselves and the other as separate beings.

Within her theorization then, being a man is the relational position of being “not woman” and
masculine identity is formed through a rejection of one’s femininity. This is so, because the
male child is taught to socially construct his identity through a rejection of the feminine
capacities he has developed through his relationship with the mother. The man is relegated to
the position of loss and the phallus is decentred: A marked contrast from the psychoanalytical
theories that posit femininity as the position of loss1.—

“Boys and men come to deny the feminine identification within themselves and those feelings
they experience as feminine… They come to emphasize differences, not commonalities or
continuities, between themselves and women…” [Chodorow; 1997; p.16]

All babies regardless of whether male or female, start their lives from a state of complete
merger with the caregiver, usually the mother. At this stage, the child recognizes the (m)other
as only a narcissistic extension of the self. It is only through the process of separation-
individuation that the (m)other is recognized as an object away from the dyadic relationship
they share with the child.

1
The construction of femininity as loss of the phallus is mentioned by Hook in his paper
‘Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference’.
This idea recourses to that the male penis which is the more visible phallus in comparison to the female
clitoris, is what advents the realization of both subject-object difference as well as, gender difference
for the child. Since at this stage, the child equates size to importance, the girl child experiences her first
sense of being inferior to—lacking something—in comparison to her male counterpart.
True separation however, is the ability to realize the (m)other as not just a separate object
from the self, but also as an object who has their own subjective identity. An identity that while
different from the self’s, is still related and influential. This true separation according to
Chodorow, does not occur for the boy child whose social sex typing demands he actively and
constantly work towards emphasizing a difference from the mother and rejecting the
unconscious and innate identification with her.

Patriarchal social systems devalue both the mother, as well as the feminine maternal attributes.
The symbiotic mother-child relationship is cast in a feminine light within patriarchal
constructions: The boy’s closeness to the mother (or really, any female who performs the
caregiving function to any degree) is often shamed. Being the “mama’s boy” is an embarrassing
role to occupy and one often observes young boys reject the mother’s care in the presence of
his peers. The boy within the pre-oedipal dyad with the mother actively constructs his
masculine identity around “not being (not needing) the mother.”

One might in this light, view the social construction of masculinity as a hyper-masculinity,
staged upon the relationship of hyper-differentiation. Since masculinity’s earliest foundations
are set in the denial of pre-oedipal and unconscious relations with feminine states, it is a
negative identification. It is described in “is not’s” rather than in “is’s”. Thus, masculinity
finds itself working constantly trying to qualify as a certain “not being”—it is set in crisis.

Chodorow says that femininity does not find itself in the same existential crisis; the girl doesn’t
feel the need to deny an innate masculinity to become feminine.

This particular theorization shakes up a hegemonic patriarchal construction that places

masculinity as the goal. In this light, one might also be able to understand transgender*
identities through the psychoanalytical, pre-oedipal processes of separation-individuation.
However it is in this possibility that the theorization can be criticized:

While one might be able to construct male-to-female and/or femme-aligned trans-identities in

this light. One cannot help but wonder how Chodorow’s theorization would extend to
understand female-to-male and/or masculine-aligned trans-identities without accidentally
invalidating them.