The Collusion with Patriarchy: a Psychoanalytic Account

This paper seeks an understanding within psychoanalytic theory for how people come to collude with patriarchal structures that oppress them. The bisexuality of the child, the distinction between basic and surplus repression and Horowitz ' analysis that surplus repression involves the repudiation of bisexuality is explored through the active and passive oedipal complexes Their 'normal ' result involves monogamy, hetero sexuality and the denigration of femininity. The paper concludes that the struggles for sexual liberation belong at the centre of the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy Ttie most important insight that feminist theory and practice has given to traditional Marxist theory is the insistence that the reproduction of the species, the institutions within which this occurs, and the entire network of relationships which result from it must be analysed if the nature of society is to be understood and transformed