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There are many reasons why Sigmund Freud began in the mid-1920's to be more sensitive to the importance of the early mother–child relationship in female and male development. He had been challenged theoretically a decade earlier by Jung's interest in mothering and in the Great Mother, and Lou Andreas-Salomé too, who might be considered the Muse of Freud's science, had reminded him of the theories of matriarchy swirling among anthropologists. Then in 1924 Freud had been challenged again by both Otto Rank's birth trauma theory and Sandor Ferenczi's “theory of genitality” with its emphasis on normal regression to the mother and to the mother's womb in sexual intercourse (regressions that Ferenczi held to be common to men and to women, even though he had difficulty in making his case for women in Thalassa: Towards a Theory of Genitality) (Ferenczi, 1933). Freud had also acknowledged that his own reconsideration of the psychodynamics of anxiety, including in the war neuroses, and the new definition of anxiety that he made public in his 1926 work, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, had led him to question whether anxiety over loss of maternal love was not central to female development, as castration anxiety was to male development. There were also many stirrings of discontent with his views on female psychology among the older of his female followers, such as Helene Deutsch in Vienna and Karen Horney in Berlin. But, to judge from his correspondences, Freud's clinical work in the mid-1920s seems to have stood crucially behind the momentous sentences on preoedipal female development standing at the beginning of the 1931 essay “Female Sexuality.”