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Alas, poor Freud and poor misrepresented psychoanalysis. Here is yet another volume of angry debunking and misguided vitriol. The current example of this sadly fashionable genre is Menstruation and Psychoanalysis, by Mary Jane Lupton. The author, a professor of English at Morgan State University in Maryland, here extends her academic province to include psychohistory and psychobiography as disciplines accessible to literary criticism of the feminist persuasion. No matter that the author appears to lack any solid understanding of psychoanalysis, either theoretical or clinical—she still writes of phallocentrism, Freud's dream analysis, Lacan, and assorted theories of female psychosexuality with careless abandon.
Lupton's central thesis is that psychoanalysis, both as theory and institution, has failed to acknowledge the major importance of menstruation and its great potential for positive impact on men, women, and children. She wants psychoanalysis to be a crusader for greater menstrual/feminist consciousness as part of an increasing respect for the feminine source of reproductive power and nurturance. Psychoanalysis is here assigned an almost utopian mission to use a “theoretics of menstruation” to change not only its own viewpoint but the entire social order. According to Lupton, if psychoanalysis could proclaim the “positive aspects of menstrual blood” (p. 205), the structure of family life and quality of sexual dialogue in contemporary culture could be thereby enhanced.