Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Trauma: Some Reflections on the Work of Janet Walker

Diane Waldman

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I met Janet Walker when she got her first full-time teaching job at the University of Denver in the 1980s. When I saw her application and dossier I was thrilled, because I knew of her exciting dissertation research, but I was worried that people in my department would perceive her work as too close to mine. Fortunately, we had a chair at the time who thought you hired the best person who applied, and that one way to build a department was through people with similar interests who could collaborate. He was so right; it was the start of a wonderful working relationship and a decades-long friendship. In this brief essay I will be talking about Janet’s work in the early part of her career, both her brilliant solo work and a few of the things we worked on together, and I’d like to conclude with a few words about the nature of collaborative work in the humanities and the joy of working with Janet.

Reading over some of the early work we did together, a 1985 review of E. Ann Kaplan’s Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera[1]

and a 1990 essay on John Huston’s 1962 film Freud,[2] I was struck by our attempts to intervene in a then-polarizing debate over the usefulness of psychoanalysis for feminist film studies. Arguing that the reception of Ann’s book was symptomatic of this debate, we emphasized the intellectual necessity of her project and the skillful integration of psychoanalysis and historical methodologies in the film analyses, but we were dissatisfied with something we were all struggling with: theorizing the role of history and conceptualizing the cinema spectator. In the Freud essay, which was to have been a methodological piece among other things, we returned to this debate, arguing that as film critics we found psychoanalytic models that explore the relation of the spectator to the text and the operations of the film work useful and convincing but, as feminists, only to the extent that they address the masculinist biases inherent in the theory and its application to film analysis.

Janet’s response to this debate in her solo work was to brilliantly historicize the relationship between women and psychiatry. In her 1993 monograph Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, based on her doctoral dissertation, she was concerned “to show how two institutions, American psychoanalytic psychiatry and Hollywood cinema . . . were absolutely central to the formation of feminine psychosexuality and women’s life experience.”[3]

Here she combined amazing primary research into discourses that circulated through psychiatric journals, marriage manuals, pharmaceutical advertisements, and correspondence between the psychoanalytic community and the film industry with nuanced textual analyses of ten Hollywood films from the post-World War II period through the early 1960s. Who, reading that book, could forget learning that most lobotomy and shock therapy patients in the United States were women because it was thought they could more easily go back (post-surgery or post-therapy) to supposedly mindless domestic duties,[4] or seeing pharmaceutical ads exhorting doctors to prescribe medications for the patient who won’t ‘fit in’”?[5]

But lest anyone think from these particular examples that Janet’s research and textual analyses only support the notion of postwar psychiatry as conformist “adjustment” therapy oppressive especially to women but also to men, one of the strengths of Couching Resistance, figured in its title, is the way it restores a sense of resistance and debate to both institutions—psychoanalytic psychiatry and Hollywood cinema—in this historical period. In other words, Janet’s research and textual analysis of the films themselves restore to these institutions debates over such things as best practices in treatment, the role of the analyst, and gender. She sees in both a trajectory from the representation of the analyst as an authoritative and all-knowing figure adjusting women to conformist norms to films and other discourses that represent the analyst as troubled and doubting (the “fallible Freud,” as Janet terms it in her concluding chapter)[6]

and/or are sympathetic to women patients’ resistance to unjust treatment.

For a moment I’d like to go back, however, to our essay on Freud, because it was here that we tried to work out some of our ideas about feminism and psychoanalysis, reality and fantasy, ideas that Janet brilliantly elaborated and extended into her ground-breaking work on trauma, memory, and their representation. In the Freud essay we argued that both in Freud’s writing and even in a cinematic text—Huston’s film—that appears to tell and endorse the orthodox story of the origins of psychoanalysis (i.e., that psychoanalysis was born when Freud stopped believing his female patients’ stories of incest and child sexual abuse and understood such narratives as fantasy) there was a rejection of this either/or view of fantasy vs. reality, Oedipal desire vs. the reality of incest and child sexual abuse.

Given the constraints of a short essay, I will keep my remarks in this area of trauma, memory, and their representation relatively brief. But I want to acknowledge how drawing upon the insights of new historiography and contemporary psychological work on the nature of traumatic memory, Janet develops her notion of the traumatic paradox—the idea that the amnesias, mistakes, and distortions of memory often used to discredit the testimony of survivors of incest, the Holocaust, and other catastrophic events are in the very nature of traumatic memory—and that realist aesthetic modes may not be the best strategies for representing these vicissitudes of memory. And I want to mention here the importance of this work for intervening in the so-called “False Memory” debates over the veracity of recovered memories of incest and child abuse and the importance of first publishing this work, in “The Traumatic Paradox: Documentary Films, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events” essay[7]

in the premiere journal of feminist studies, Signs. This placement showcased the wonderful work being done by both independent experimental documentary filmmakers and by film and media studies scholars to advance our thinking about these issues and it did so for an interdisciplinary feminist audience. And of course, Janet fully elaborates these ideas in her seemingly audacious but thoroughly convincing pairing of films and videos about incest and about the Holocaust in her 2005 book Trauma Cinema.[8]

One question I have about the political efficacy of specific representational strategies: while I am utterly persuaded by Janet’s argument that the experimental works she champions more appropriately represent the nature of traumatic memory, I am less certain about claims for the political efficacy of such strategies over others. After all, in our introduction to our co-edited volume Feminism and Documentary, a culmination of our collaboration, weren’t we critical of the over-broad critique of realism that turned feminist film studies away from documentary and that, in our words, “obstructed discussion of specific issues, how to represent them, and how to think them through in ways that could advance feminist political practice?”[9]

Weren’t we critical of assumptions that formal strategies alone could determine reception?

Janet takes on such questions in Trauma Cinema. For example, in her section on representations of the Holocaust, she notes “A preference for adventurous depictions over conventional ones does not necessarily require the out-and-out rejection of the latter, and one discerns a generous measure of tolerance in scholars’ comparative surveys of various different Holocaust representations.”[10]

She goes on to cite Michael Rothberg’s Traumatic Realism: “Despite the risks of distortion and displacement, representations of all sorts—including documentary footage, historical documentation, fictional and nonfictional narratives, and so on—remain the only access to historical events. No pre-conceived evaluation of which media are appropriate or inappropriate . . . to a particular event can come to terms with either aesthetic representation, historical documentation, or the event they both seek to capture.”[11] I read this passage and I think I agree with him. But, Janet, of course, has an answer, and it is not just that she is “less tolerant,” as she somewhat facetiously postulates: it is that the practitioners of realist modes (such as Steven Spielberg or James Moll) do not need academicians’ defenses and we academics “can be of use not only in defending but also publicizing unconventional representations.”[12] In her critique of the realist and a celebration of the experimental, she reminds us of the ethics and politics of not only what we write but what we write about, an imperative across all of Janet’s scholarship.

I began by noting that I wanted to say a few words about writing and editing with Janet and I want to conclude with this. I mentioned that the first thing we wrote together was a review of E. Ann Kaplan’s Women and Film and we developed a working method where we would hash out ideas, agree on the overall shape and argument of a piece, divide up sections to write, exchange, read, revise, and revise again. In some cases, I remember who initially wrote what, and in others, I honestly cannot. As a writing and editing partner, Janet was generous, kind, creative, tough, smart, and scrupulously honest, and she always pushed me to do my best thinking and writing. There aren’t many models for collaboration in the humanities, where research and writing are more often solitary pursuits, but we developed a model that was so invigorating and intellectually satisfying that I’ve tried to emulate it in any collaborative work I’ve done ever since. As we said in our acknowledgements for Feminism and Documentary (and I do think this sentence was Janet’s), “Friendships formed or deepened through the process of sharing ideas are particularly sweet.”[13]

Notes

[1]Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, “Is the gaze maternal?,” review of Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera, by E. Ann Kaplan, Camera Obscura 13-14 (1985): 195-214.

[2]Janet Walker and Diane Waldman, “John Huston’s Freud and Textual Repression: A Psychoanalytic Feminist Reading,” in Close Viewings, ed. Peter Lehman (Florida State University Press, 1990), 282-299.

[3]Janet Walker, Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xiii.

[4]Ibid, 24-26.

[5]Ibid, 33.

[6]Ibid, 151-160.

[7] Janet Walker, “The Traumatic Paradox: Documentary Films, Historical Fictions, and Cataclysmic Past Events,” Signs Vol. 22, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 803-825.

[8]Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2005).

[9]Janet Walker and Diane Waldman, “Introduction,” in Feminism and Documentary, ed. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11.

[10]Walker, Trauma Cinema, 137.

[11]Ibid, 137, citing Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 234.

[12]Ibid, 137.

[13]Waldman and Walker, “Acknowledgments,” in Feminism and Documentary, vii.

Dianne Waldman is an Associate Professor Emerita in the Media, Film, and Journalism Studies department at the University of Denver, where she was also affiliated with the Gender and Women's Studies program. She is the co-editor (with Janet Walker) of Feminism and Documentary (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and co-editor (with Maureen Turim) of Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality with Adults (Routledge, 2024). She is the author of numerous essays on feminism and film history, film and social history, and popular culture and the law in such journals as Film History, Jump Cut, Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, and The Velvet Light Trap.