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This book is a monograph of passionate critique concerning the forms of misogyny to be found embedded in various psychoanalytic concepts, theories, practices and institutions. The book's brevity, Michaela Chamberlain says, is to render it
accessible to anyone with an interest in psychoanalysis. It is welcome to have a renewed focus on misogyny and to be reminded once again of its persistence and insidiousness. Chamberlain suggests that misogyny is internalized by both men and women, forming a ‘misogynistic introject’ (p. 56), which is passed through generations of psychoanalysts via the teachings and trainings: ‘It engenders entitlement in male psychoanalysts and shame and otherness in female psychoanalysts’ (p. 56).
Throughout, Chamberlain makes creative use of examples drawn from the work of women artists, especially those who use their own bodies as the artwork. She writes: ‘Women are punished for the desire that men have for them …’ (p. 22), and too often this is accompanied by the male need for control over women, as a denial of their own dependence. Abuse and physical violence are the more extreme forms of misogynistic hatred, some of which have been written about from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Here the kind of psychoanalytic misogyny Chamberlain sees as perpetuated against women is to be found in theories—something we might construe as symbolic violence—and in practice, in the many uncomfortable and discriminatory but familiar experiences that she illustrates in personal and clinical anecdotes. She also describes the frequent splitting of women's sexuality from their supposed maternal and nurturing capacities.
Chamberlain mainly takes aim at Freudian theory, arguing that misogyny is inherent right from the start in classical and contemporary formulations of the Oedipus complex and in theories of female psychosexual development that are based on differences seen as inferiority, lack or deficit. She briefly mentions the many feminist critiques, from Karen Ho