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Departing from the need of psychoanalysis to purge itself of some of its scientific assumptions, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl challenges Freud's phallocentric understanding of female psychology. While penis envy is obvious in many clinical contexts, it is not generally an identity-determining factor and need not be considered as arising at any particular developmental moment, but rather assumes different forms at different developmental stages. Neither anatomy nor instinctual drives are destiny, and erotogenic zones do not reflect any inborn program of biological maturation. The mature individual envisioned in the new feminist psychoanalysis is not simply someone who has negotiated transformations of puberty, achieving a satisfaction of genital sexuality, but one who is capable of loving outside the original family, someone who has developed self-esteem and relational capabilities. Such a person fulfills the ideal of the so-called cultural feminism.
Both the Freudian phallocentric and the preoedipally oriented relational psychoanalysis are rejected by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl as being inadequate. Both the old model of inborn sex difference and the new model of socially constructed gender difference emphasize male-female difference and sustain either/or thinking. Young-Bruehl also cautions against therapeutic practices which celebrate