Nancy Chodorow

Nancy Chodorow posits that women identify rather readily with their mothers. Therefore their ego formation is less strong, their boundaries of self more permeable. I am not that way, and I think perhaps it might be explained by the unusual formation of my Oedipus complex (to use the term in a broad generic sense, to mean one's relationships with one's parents in general).

I may have had a pretty diffused identity (and therefore seemingly feminine) up to a particular point. Most people brought up in Rhodesia had something of a tribalistic cultural influence, and were neo-Romantics rather than bourgeois individuals. (The lack of development of the industrial complex made this so.)

There are certain traditions of misogny in many traditionalist cultures, and in my family (especially and particularly on my father's side) this appears to have been quite the case. There is an almost fundamentalist Islamicist notion, that I have seen applied to each of my female cousins (on my father's side of the family) that when girls are in danger of becoming women and thus developing into sexual beings, they develop the devil inside of them. So, even before this process of puberty begins, they must be beaten down emotionally (if not always physically) into extreme submission. This was the policy that was applied that seems to have resulted in both of my female cousins (from different families) running away from home. In my case, my father would suddenly lose his temper for no apparent reason, and chase me up and down the supermarket isles. Thus, I grew up to realise that I was hated by my father, for who I was, and that I would have to develop extremely strong ego boundaries, separating him and me, if I was to survive.

I couldn't identity with my mother, because she representing the predicament I would be in (of inability to help me or herself) if I had much weaker ego boundaries (which the onslought of animosity from my father was presumably supposed to bring about.) Thus I did not grow up with a nurturing and pacifying relationship with my mother, but rather with the pre-established psychic principle that I would have to struggle to the death against my father in order to win my own survival.

The outcome of my success in this endeavour made me, in turn, rather thickskinned and in terror and incomprehension of those who are able to go through life with rather thin ego boundaries. Don't such people realise that they are on the verge of psychic suffocation, as well as physical and emotional violence, up to and including death?

I cannot understand Nancy Chodorow's formula, suggesting that as a woman I shouldn't be feeling this way.