[The divided female--motherhood and public culture]

The author compares "individual" motherhood, common in countries like Switzerland and the Federal Republic, with the "social" motherhood characteristic of a Mayan peasant culture in Yucatan. She discusses various psychoanalytic conceptions of motherhood, for instance, Freud's and Winnicott's. She argues that the ideological concept of the missing penis actually expresses the very real cultural deficiency of women. The retention of such ideological concepts prevents the actual conditions from being acknowledged in psychoanalytic theory. This, in turn, blocks the change in paradigm necessary for an adequate metatheoretical handling of gender differences.