Humanities Institute: Nancy Chodorow

Concepts of Self

“Could you direct me to the Individuology Department?” Psychoanalysis, the Academy and the Self

4:30-6:00 p.m.
Nancy Chodorow
Lecturer on Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance

Training and Supervising Analyst
Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute

Professor Emerita of Sociology and Clinical Faculty Emerita of Psychology
University of California, Berkeley

This lecture will suggest that the contemporary university is missing a field whose main focus is the study of individuality and the self. The presenter conceptualizes this field, provisionally named individuology, as on a continuum with the qualitative social sciences, and she sees psychoanalysis as providing a major theoretical grounding. Psychoanalysis gives us a comprehensive theory of individuality, and its methodologies could be and have been extended to non-clinical work. Although individuology overlaps with psychology, and several fields in the humanities draw upon psychoanalysis, the study of individuals requires on the one hand a more qualitative, interactive and intersubjective methodology than we find in contemporary psychology and on the other the study of people, not texts.

Nancy J. Chodorow is in private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Cambridge, MA. Her books include The Reproduction of Mothering (1978/1999); Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989); Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (1994); The Power of Feelings: Personal Meaning in Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Culture (1999); and Individualizing Gender and Sexuality: Theory and Practice (2012).

In addition to writings on gender and sexuality, she has written extensively on comparative psychoanalytic theory and technique, psychoanalysis and the social sciences, and Hans Loewald and the Loewaldian psychoanalytic legacy. Recent writings name a psychoanalytic “American independent tradition,” provisionally conceptualized as intersubjective ego psychology.