Betty Friedan announced in 1963 that Freud had made “the degradation of women…key to his theory of femininity” (p. 106). A generation of Americans believed her. When the feminist movement resurfaced in the late 1960s, Freud's antagonism to women was considered such a staple among patriarchy's evils that even readers of Good Housekeeping knew who to blame for their misery. Feminists hailed Horney and Thompson as psychoanalytic heroes who had struggled to stem the tide of Freudian oppression and been excommunicated from the analytic establishment in retaliation. If these direct attacks on Freud have waned in recent years, it is only because it looks unseemly to beat a dead horse all the way into the ground. His animosity toward women remains unquestioned.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's fine new anthology, Freud on Women, seems intended as a challenge to those who rail against Freud's misogyny without reading much of what he actually had to say about women. They will certainly have their chance to catch up