We can think of ourselves as autonomous beings and yet we are all written by a history that precedes us. The tenets of meaning and being are established before we are born; we drink them along with our mother’s milk. Intergenerational trauma is fed through these pathways. Psychoanalysis has provided a means for inquiring into a personal narrative, but it also usefully informs a psychosocial approach through which we might catch hold of the invisible threads in which we are all embedded, and pull them, carefully, seeing where they lead and how they might be untangled. One thread in which we are all entangled is the misogyny at the heart of HIStory as it has been told that impedes the ability of the woman, in particular, to tell her own story. However, I would argue that this skewing of meanings leaves us all in some ways disenfranchised from the love and care that is at the heart – and the soul – of human becoming. To help participants reflect on how we might reposition ourselves in our own life narratives, I will invite them to consider the re-renderings of classic tales from Greek myth, such as those offered by Barker, Haynes, Heywood, Miller, and Saint as invitations to reflect on ways in which our beliefs may be driven by values we cannot consciously stand by. From such a position, we can think together about the values we do share, and how we might more consciously and actively stand by and for them. As greed and aggression threaten to destroy our planet, how might we bring forward the equally powerful values of love and care?

Across Western cultural, philosophical, and psychoanalytic traditions, women who speak truth are cast as unreliable narrators, labeled excessive, hysterical, prophetic yet unheeded; morally dangerous. Figures such as Cassandra, Medea, and Antigone reveal how feminine truth is not merely dismissed but actively disqualified, expelled from the symbolic order that defines knowledge, reason, and justice. Such exclusions function as both cultural narratives and psychic structures, reflecting social imaginaries shaping women’s relationships to their own knowing.

These figures mark the threat to established regimes of authority. Antigone highlights a crucial hinge in her insistence on a justice grounded in relational, ethical, and kinship-based obligations that override authority-sanctioned law. Her punishment reveals how justice systems preserve themselves by rendering such truths illegible, irrational, or pathological.

Against this backdrop, Elphaba, in Maguire’s 1995 Wicked, turns the Cassandra trope inside out. Elphaba is not tragic because her truth is unbearable, but because she occupies an unstable ontological position, as both intradiegetic and extradiegetic. The Witch is both written word and agent, simultaneously authored by the narrative and capable of rewriting it.

This dual position models a form of autopoiesis under conditions of epistemic injustice, a self-producing subjectivity forged when women are required to generate meaning, ethics, and action without institutional validation. From a psychoanalytic perspective, such narratives illuminate how feminine subjects come to internalize disbelief, split experience from symbolization, and yet, at times, cultivate alternative modes of truth grounded in relational responsibility.

Re-finding the feminine is not a recuperation of silenced voices alone, but a reconfiguration of the relationship between truth and justice. When women join together to sustain forms of knowing that exceed dominant epistemologies, truth is no longer doomed to prophetic failure. Instead, it becomes a collective ethical practice, one that insists that justice must be transformed in order for truth to be lived.

“You seem different today. Are you tired?” I ask the consulting clinical psychologist with whom I meet twice monthly. I attune to my perceived sense that she is less active and affectively engaged than usual. I worry she doesn’t want to meet with me. I ignore the sadness I feel over personal matters that I have preemptively set aside, thinking it can’t be discussed in this context, despite ample evidence to the contrary from previous meetings.

For women, trust and the capacity to use one’s voice are shaped by sociocultural conditions that influence relational development, expectations of care, and identity formation. Early relational patterns transmitted through attachment and social expectation shape women’s experience of closeness and belonging (Chodorow, 1978/1979), and their development is situated in relational ethics where voice and relationship are co-constructed (Gilligan, 1982). Further, women’s relationships evolve in patriarchal contexts that shape women perceptions of themselves and one another (Einhorn, 2021).

This project examines trust formation and identity development in a 1.5-year psychotherapy process group for professional women. Survey data will be gathered to better understand how trust is established and understood within the group. Consideration is also given to what is spoken, withheld, or consented to when the clinician also functions as researcher (Einhorn, 2023).

Group members will additionally be asked to briefly narrate “Her”-story that has emerged through group participation. Narrative is a core form of meaning-making through which realities—and selves—are constructed (Bruner, 1991). The hope is that narrating their story for this project will further amplify and consolidate processes that group-based trust enabled, making possible new tellings, revisions, and ownership of women’s stories: “Her-stories” emerging within community and against the backdrop of “His-tory.”