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In today's perspective, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Freud's work, itself, was in large measure a product of the fact that the faulty division of humanity into masculine and feminine was nearing the end of the line. Not that there is not a very real difference in masculine and feminine experience, but this difference had not been validly described. Freud's work was constantly revolving around the question of what is masculine and what is feminine. Old ways of thinking about this were clearly beginning to break down by the end of the nineteenth century. The first wave of feminism had sped the process along. Yet people were still suffering from the effects of the old and the challenge of the new. Remember Dora and her “intellectual pretensions,” compared to her brother, whose intellectual interests were to be respected.
On the one hand, precisely because Freud dared to penetrate so keenly beneath the surface of accepted societal forms, he soon realized that things were not as society said they were. Thus, his own work had the disruptive impact—from which there has ever after been no return—of demonstrating that there is no fixed masculinity or femininity; the development of that which is called by either name is only a stage in a long process which involves elements of both. Here Freud was revolutionary and liberating.
On the other hand, Freud returned in the end to fix it all anew, and this time even more firmly for moderns, because his prescriptions came to have the stamp of authority, even “science.” Granted that members of each sex may contain elements of the other, but still each must end up fitting almost the exact societal stereotype—or else suffer those horrible labels: “unnatural,” “sick,” “unfeminine,” or “a failure,” “unmanly,” and “effete.” The stereotypes were utterly clear. Men were to be dominant, at least potential “winners.” Women were to be losers— castrated, weak, submissive, followers. If women even protested this prescription, the prote