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Christina Wieland has written a passionate argument on the destructiveness of the Western psyche that is based on matricide and the need for cultural ‘self analysis’. Although the ideas are wide ranging, the book is very readable, well written, sometimes poetic and the arguments put forward to support her claims embrace psychoanalytic theory, ancient myths, fairytales, novels, films and clinical material. It is also an exploration of femininity which, she says, can only be understood in relation to masculinity.
Freud's theory of the development of masculinity through the castration complex and the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is carried through the book as it is examined and re-interpreted alongside the theories of other major psychoanalytical writers. Freud's model of masculine development as normal and femininity as a deviation from this basic model denies difference between the genders and considers women as not intact but castrated. Freud maintained that the only sexual organ known to pre-pubescent children was the penis. The contention in the book is that Freud was not only describing individual development, but also the Western psyche, which relies on splitting and repression for ‘normal’ functioning. He was describing a patriarchal society with a rigid family system, and a rigid, castrating, repressive super-ego, where women and children were possessions of the father. Woman, dispossessed of her generative organ and her active sexuality, bowed under the authority of the father and took the role of passive care-giver. It was a society that placed thinking and science above nature. Contemporary society is now changing and, Christina Wieland contends, is more destructive. There is an erosion of the authority of the father as the