Fathers and daughters women and femininity

Abstract

The Ph.D. research, undertaken within a clinical research paradigm, is titled Fathers and newlineDaughters: Women and Femininity . The research is an engagement with the question of newlinewomen s subjectivity, specifically looking at it through the daughter s relationship with her newlinefather, in the Indian context. It engages in depth with existing psychoanalytic literature on newlinefemininity, female development and fathers, such as works by Jessica Benjamin, Adrienne newlineHarris, Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Julia Kristeva, Rosine Perelberg and Michael Diamond. newlineFurther, the study suggests that when looking at women s subjectivity, the role of patriarchal newlinemandates that exist in a culture, cannot be ignored. The research leans on psychoanalytic newlinethinking that brings together ideas of working in the clinic and social justice such as work by newlineLynne Layton and positions itself both as an attempt to recognize a protest that many women newlineare expressing against the oppression as well as a mourning for all that has been lost for newlinewomen over generations. The present study is primarily based on therapy work carried out with three women and newlinefurther supported by therapeutic encounters with seven women. Relying on a relational model newlineof the subject, with its focus on the unconscious aspects of the mind and use of techniques of newlinefree association, transference-counter transference, reveries and analysis of dreams, the study newlineexplores the father-daughter relationship and how it impacts women s subjectivity, as it came newlineto be in the clinical encounter. It seeks to explicate a unique vantage offered by clinical newlinenarratives and captures a position that may be touched upon or inhabited in processes of newlinebecoming, in relationships and lives. newline