Psychoanalysis and Feminism. By Juliet Mitchell. New York:  Vintage Books, 1975.

This paperback edition of Mitchell's effective but—because it is not written in a style that is appropriate for a mass audience—not yet widely read book, confutes the view held by

the greater part of the feminist movement [that] has identified Freud as the enemy. It is held that psychoanalysis claims women are inferior and that they can achieve true feminity only as wives and mothers. Psychoanalysis is seen as a justification for the status-quo, bourgeois and patriarchal, and Freud in his own person exemplifies these qualities. I would agree that popularized Freudianism must answer to this description; but the argument of this book is that a rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud's works is fatal for feminism. However it may have been used, psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a partriarchal society, but an analysis of one …. Feminist critics of Freud have … extrapolated his ideas about femininity from their context within the larger theories of psychoanalysis. [In addition, the feminist movement,] if less deliberately …, has embraced the alternative radical psychologies developed by Wilhelm Reich's work on sexuality

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and R. D. Laing's on the family …. But it seems to me that we have turned things on their head by accepting Reich's and Laing's analyses and repudiating Freud's …. Reich's political and Laing's sociological observations provide us with a good deal of important material, but I do not believe that we can use these observations until we have freed them from the dubious theoretical and philosophical frameworks in which they are set [pp. xiii-xx].

The book should be read, or at least sampled, by any who reject Freudian-based analysis because they “disbelieve in penis envy.”