TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2007//
TI  - The Potential of Theory: Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray, and the Mother‐Daughter Relationship
JO  - Hypatia
A1  - Jacobs, Amber
SP  - 175
EP  - 193
VL  - 22
IS  - 3
N2  - Through a close reading of Klein and Irigaray's work on the mother-daughter relation' ship via the Electra myth, Jacobs diagnoses what she considers a fundamental problem in psychoanalytic and feminist psychoanalytic theory. She shows that neither thinker is able to theorize the mother-daughter relationship on a structural level but is only able to describe its symptoms. Jacobs makes a crucial distinction between description and theory and argues that the need to go beyond description and phenomenology toward the creation of a structural theory is the only way that feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis can avoid reproducing the terms of the male imaginary. The essay concludes by arguing that theorization of the mother-daughter relationship can only be achieved if we analyze manifestations of the mother-daughter relationship in clinical, cultural, and mythical material through the framework of a foreclosed or absent underlying maternal law.<p /> 
LA  - 
SN  - 0887-5367
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01096.x
ID  - ref1
ER  -