From demanding emancipation to negotiating autonomy: conflicting identifications in a changing world

Abstract

In this paper I try to describe the central role that my involvement in the ideological climate of the seventies through participation in the feminist movement in Greece played in my professional practice as a psychotherapist and how these experiences informed a research project that I undertook in order to examine the changes in the identificatory process of Greek women. My personal, political and professional experiences interlinked in order to plan and realize this research project, which dealt with how femininity is constituted through the mother‐daughter relationship in a period when the traditional position of women is rapidly changing in Greece. The results of the research show the difficulty of the passage from emancipation to autonomy, from certainty to uncertainty, from a politics of identity to a politics of conflicting and contradicting identifications, which the postmodern subject has to go through.