Mass media has, for several years, been calling psychoanalysis into question. This ‘exploration’ of psychoanalytic thought goes along with some idea that it is about sex and its secrets (which it partially is) and has been conducted at a frighteningly low level of enquiry and false assumptions. Psychoanalysis, at present, is one of the attempts to face up to a disturbing social reality as to the mutilation of women which cannot be totally explained in rational sociological terms, and therefore has to be explained in terms of the unconscious in both men and women. This inevitably leads us to the question of gender construction. Sexism and oppression of women contain the root of all subsequent scapegoatings, and sado-masochistic practices evident in classism, bigotry, racism. The ‘collective unconscious’ defence against understanding