Prologue

The view of females as inferior to males and the tendency of scientists to judge females by male standards has a long history. In her book Sexual Science Russett (1989) points out that Victorian anthropologists, biologists, and psychologists were so convinced that women were inferior that they inevitably were able to find “evidence” to support this conclusion, even if this required rationalization. Women were seen as playing an inferior part compared to men even in conception, the ovum being described as passive, the sperm filled with energy. Famous men of the age, such as Darwin, found it difficult to maintain their usual scientific objectivity in writing about women.

It was only natural that Freud, a product of the Victorian age, was influenced by the attitudes of that period. He too conceptualized women using males as the standard of comparison and therefore viewed women as deficient, for example, in superego development. Women puzzled him, witness his famous remark, “Was will das Weib?” (What does a woman want?”; Jones, 1955, p. 421). Freud was challenged in his views of female development by Jones, and also by Karen Horney and Clara Thompson. Women psychoanalysts have continued to be the most important influences in reshaping Freud's theories about female psychology, although others such as Helene Deutsch and J. Lampl-deGroot, were closely identified with Freud's ideas. Greenacre, Jacobson, and Kestenberg have made significant theoretical and clinical advances in this area.

The last two decades have seen a burgeoning of literature on