You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The emancipation of women/the women's movement and the birth and development of psychoanalysis are events deeply identified with the twentieth century. The relationship between the two, however, has not always been easy, despite the fact that both movements are identified with enlightened and progressive aspects of our culture. Psychoanalysis, like the women's movement, has come a long way in its effort to deal with issues of purported differences between men and women in regard to the nature of their development, personalities, and sexuality. There can be no question that Freud and the early psychoanalysts gave women and the concept of female development a great deal of attention; but, while there can be no claim of neglect of women, the attention that was given and Freud's view of female development have met with resistance almost from their inception.
Initially, Freud's view of women was accepted by the majority of psychoanalysts of his day, including those few early female psychoanalysts who, with apparent disregard of the paradox between the psychoanalytic view of femininity and their own functioning as professional women, accepted the notion that to be female was to be shaped by penis envy. Furthermore, they agreed to a generalized picture of women that depicted them as having more narcissism and masochism than men and, perhaps most unkindly, as having a weaker, less demanding set of standards, i.e., a lesser superego.
In his own day, Freud was confronted with Karen Horney's spirited refutation of his view of women. She believed that Freud's theories of female development represented a matured version of the phallic boy's view of women. Beyond Horney, whose status as a revisionist separated her from the mainstream of the American Psychoanalytic Association membership, there were few other critics of the phallocentric view of development within the classical psychoanalytic movement. Hence this view, which would have all women dealing continually with their inferi