Stephen,
I am bored today and stuck in my office.
In a message dated 8/25/99 10:52:49 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<<"I cannot escape the notion (although I hesitate to give it
expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is
different from what it is to men.
At first read, it says different, not inferior. Difference does not mean
deficit in and of itself unless one considers the political and power issues
as to what is reinforced and/or punished by society.
<<Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of
its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character-traits which
critics of every epoch have brought up against women--that they show less
sense of
justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great
necessities of life, that they are more often influenced in their
judgements by feelings of affection or hostility--all these would be
amply accounted for by the modification of their super-ego which we
have already inferred. >>
This seems very close to Gilligan's line of reasoning, no? The possiblity
that men and women have different ways of approaching certain situations
should not be considered a deficit.
<<Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of
its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. >>
In fact the above seems to intimate that society's requirement of the
superego for males may be too detached and strict (i.e., "require it to be.")
Along this line of reasoning, the person who wrote this (Freud?) seems to be
arguing that a large part of the superego is formed in reponse to the demands
of a particular culture and that those demands may differ by sex.
RJ
