Vida uses extensive quotations of Ferenczi's writings on female sexuality to demonstrate his attempts to appreciate the experience of women. The passages illustrate Ferenczi's sensitivity to the role of the environment in shaping women sexually, and the neglect of those considerations by Freud, in his male-centered approach to understanding sexuality. One of several passages from Ferenczi's Clinical Diary anticipates Horney's view that it makes no sense to think of the vagina as "undiscovered" by the psyche in childhood; another passage proposes that Freud's blindness to female sexuality had its origins in his need to ignore it in his mother. Ferenczi believed that "normal" development of children is so routinely disturbed by adults' insensitive or traumatizing behavior that healthy development cannot yet be described.