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This book is an impressive, learned critique of Freud's view of women, not by any means a fully articulated subject but expressed in ambivalent, contradictory, and anxiety-laden statements throughout his career. The Oedipus complex emerges as a defense against women that idealizes patriarchy and patriarchal structures in a male-dominated society. Freud believed, at least for mythological purposes, that women bear the symbolic wound of castration. The clitoris, therefore, is a masculine organ and “the little girl's pleasure in it is phallic,” which creates “an insuperable barrier to his understanding of female sexuality” (p. 53). Sprengnether tries to grapple with Freud's many statements about women and especially his phobic responses to the figure of the mother. The Spectral Mother focuses on the ghostlike, preoedipal mother, who is “a figure of subversion, a threat to masculine identity as well as to patriarchal culture” (p. 5). Freud is uneasy with the issue of maternal power, and matriarchy is unintegrated into his intellectual system.
Sprengnether has some fascinating speculations about Freud's psychobiography, especially his own homoerotic attachment to Fliess. Much centers on Emma Eckstein, on