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Silas Warner began by presenting a succinct review of Freud's views stressing Freud's doubts about his understanding of women's sexuality. Freud viewed psychosexual development in the male and female child as being almost mirror images of each other. For both, the mother was the libidinal object. In the phallic phase, the boy cathects his penis, fears its loss, and is aware of rivalling his father. Concurrently, the girl makes the “momentous discovery” that she is already castrated, as she has no penis. This creates penis envy for which she blames her mother.
Warner delineated the impact of this phallocentric theory, and the later developments in Freud's theories about women emphasizing Freud's impression that the female's path to adult sexuality was more difficult than the male's; passivity was linked to femininity, activity with masculinity. He then summarized Mary Jane Sherfey's work in 1964 integrating embryologic data with modern psychoanalytic theory. The Eve-out-of-Adam myth was thereby reversed, and the clitoral versus vaginal orgasm was also left outdated, as confirmed by the research of Masters and Johnson. Warner then reviewed the efforts of revisionists of Freudian theory, including Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Marie Bonaparte, Sandor Ferenczi, and Sandor Rado.
Judith E. Vida outlined Sandor Ferenczi's contributions and orientation. She noted that Clara Thompson credited her analysis with Ferenczi with bringing her to life. Vida's presentation brought Ferenczi to life for the audience, stressing that treatment, not theory, mattered most to him. She proposed that his technical experiments were moving psychoanalytic treatment from a predominantly paternal countertransferential treatment mode to a maternal one. This shift was vigorously resisted and maligned for various social and psychodynamic reasons.
Ferenczi (1873-1933) was Freud's chief intimate and regular travelling companion, brilliant and, according to Ernest Jones, had “a remarkable f