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In the final paragraph of this book, Judith Van Herik explains why a person interested in feminist questions has reason for encountering Freud's writings: first, to "delineate and criticize the misogyny in Freud's psychology of women"; second, to "see how he accounts for gender asymmetry analytically"; and third, to see how "gender asymmetry is central to Freudian criticism in general and criticism of religion in particular."
"Gender asymmetry" is, stated simply, the way in which men in a patriarchal society view women, i.e., expecting that they should be fulfilled by being passive, submissive, and compliant to the men. The author's purpose in establishing and describing the gender asymmetry of patriarchal societies is not to explain the inadequacy of Freud's psychology of women so that she can develop a more useful and more accurate understanding of women, but rather to invalidate Freud's critique of religion. For Van Herik, Freud's attempts at understanding the complex questions about the basis of religious faith and the nature of religious experience are invalid because his incomplete and faulty theories about the development of the female are at the basis of his critique of religion. She also argues that Freud's acceptance of the nineteenth century rationalist position that religion is the product of the human mind and condition (i.e., the need to deal with fears engendered by the knowledge of one's mortality, the acknowledgment of one's insignificance in the face of the universe and the unknown, and the narcissistic hurt contained in the idea that each person's existence is due only to chance) is merely the result of his own theory of projection. She ignores the historical context in which Freud wrote, particularly the influence of the philosopher Feuerbach.
One difficulty for this reader was the tedious repetition of her thesis, especially after the careful, scholarly build-up of her arguments concerning gender asymmetry. Simply quoted, it is that "Freud h