Oedipus in Brooklyn: reading Freud on women, watching Lena Dunham's girls.
Through an examination of Freud's Lecture 33, "Femininity" (1933), and "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), the author proposes a reading of Freud's description of the girl becoming a woman. Female development is retold as a melancholic narrative-one in which the girl's entrance into the positive Oedipus is founded on unconscious grievance and unmourned loss of the early relationship with her mother. Castration and penis envy are reconceived as melancholic markers-the manifest content of the subjectivity of refusal, loss, and imagined repair of the early maternal relationship. Lena Dunham's HBO television series Girls is analyzed as an illustration of these theoretical understandings.
Training and Supervising Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.
Lisa
L
Buchberg
D000293:Adolescent; D041923:Adolescent Development; D005260:Female; D057227:Femininity; D033062:Friends / Q000523:psychology; D006117:Grief; D006801:Humans; D007578:Jealousy; D009034:Mother-Child Relations / Q000523:psychology*; D009769:Object Attachment; D009813:Oedipus Complex; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011606:Psychosexual Development; D012747:Sexual Partners / Q000523:psychology; D019529:Sexuality / Q000523:psychology*; D013690:Television; D014473:Unconscious, Psychology; D014930:Women / Q000523:psychology*
Freud; Girls; development; female Oedipus; female sexuality; femininity; gender identity; melancholia; mother-daughter relationship; mourning; penis envy; phallocentricism; theory