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In the last twenty years, a paradigm shift has been occurring in Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory and practice. This shift is still in course. Its outcome is uncertain, however, for, while it is being promoted and celebrated, it is also being criticized and rejected within the world-wide guild of psychoanalysts. Further, the history, causes, implications, and meanings of the shift have only begun to be studied, and it has not generated a critique in its own terms—a psychoanalytic critique. That is, it has not gotten to the point of depoliticizing. Polemic is still its mode, and it is marked—pro and con—by vying for leadership, for influence, for historical place, and for succession, which might mean, in the paradigm shifters’ camp, triumph over Freud or, at least, the capacity to go on without looking constantly backward to the founder.
Two dimensions of this shift are, however, completed and no longer have an atmosphere of battle about them. First, there is general agreement that psychoanalysis needs to be—and to an extent has been—purged of its period-piece scientific assumptions; that is, purged of its nineteenth century mechanistic concepts, its Helmholtzian hydraulic metaphors, its Darwinian teleological supports for prescriptive notions of normality, its reductive biologism, and its consistently dualistic esprit de systeme. Second, there is general agreement that Freud's views of female psychology were (in Ernest Jones's term) “phallocentric” and need revision. Of the plethora of revisions that have been offered, it seems to me that two have passed into common Anglo-American acceptance. Little girls, one new clinical consensus states, have genital sensations and are aware of their genitals earlier than Freud thought and probably prior to their consciousness of sexual difference. A