A Feminist'S Look at Freud'S Feminine Psychology

The psychology of women is admittedly incomplete and fragmentary, and sometimes it does not sound altogether flattering. You must not forget, however, that we have only described women in so far as their natures are determined by their sexual function. The influence of this factor is, of course, very far-reaching, but we must remember that an individual woman may be a human being apart from this. If you want to know more about feminity, you must interrogate your own experience, or turn to the poets, or else wait until Science can give you more profound and more coherent information.¹

Sigmund Freud

This paper is an attempt to assess Freud's psychology of women after interrogating my own experience and the experiences of other women. Rieff⁹ illustrated Freud's misogyny and showed how he portrayed girls as being something less than boys. The New Introductory Lectures¹ are filled with deprecations of women. Freud wrote that women had best leave things of the mind alone, because these interfere with the exercise of their sexual function. He charged that the sexual and intellectual are incompatible in women. The function of psychoanalysis in men is to develop their capacities, sexual and otherwise; in women it is to resign them to their sexuality. He explained that the underestimation of women is rooted in biology itself. He presented two images of the female character: seductress (thus men are justified in having a certain fear or dread of women, as when coitus discharges tensions and makes the penis flaccid) and mother (passive and a source of unqualified affection). Freud did allow that the intellectual inferiority characteristic of most women might be attributed to the extraordinary mental repressions under which they mature in our culture. Yet, in the final analysis, his personal intuitions mastered him, and cultural causes were slighted in favor of biological differences and “innate” inferiority. Freud took women down from the Victorian model of chastity and gave them