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Sabina Spielrein, Helene Deutsch and Karen Horney, pioneer women in psychoanalytical movement, made original contributions to psychoanalysis as a subjective and intersubjective field. Their biographies and main psychoanalytical conceptions are addressed in this article, underscoring the originality of their contributions to the subject of symbolization, primitive experiences and intersubjectivity. Women’s mental life, as reviewed, is addressed by the three authoresses from an innovative angle, recognizing specificities of the feminine nature, and questioning classical infantile sexuality models. Besides the traditional conception that the same drives take different paths in female and male psychological structures, the present work underscores the fact that the pioneer psychoanalysts’ ideas point to the recognition of the existence of specific feminine drives. Over time, psychoanalytical theory has moved away from the initial phallocentrism and patriarchalism, as discussed, making room, in its therapeutic branch, for historically female attributes: empathy, intuition, primitive interaction, holding and containment. Although the ideas of these writers subsequently supported important theoretical conceptions in psychoanalytical building, they lack due recognition and tribute in contemporary psychoanalytical culture.
This article explores the hypothesis that there is a causal relation between historical ostracism and misogyny. Factors within the content of these women’s work and in their personal idiosyncrasies combined with prejudice and discrimination that was often disguised as academic disagreement seem to be relevant. Freud and Ferenczi’s classical ideas about feminine psyche, built around the conception of penis envy, as well as a universal phenomenon of “repudiation of femininity” are reviewed, contextualized and questioned under a different paradigm: the anxiogenic centrality of the primary object, that is, the feminine figure.
The Freudian concept of infantile narcissism is, in this article, reflected upon and expanded in order to integrate the strong ambivalent emotions the primary object potentially builds around itself. Through re-reading the Medusa myth, the author discusses the Thanatic fate of the primitive maternal figure. Persistent desire and the equivalent aversion and claustrophobic panic linked to the fantasy of (re)union with the maternal object underpin the hypothesis this paper poses, that is, matricide as a protofantasy in human mind, with its direct unconscious implications in culture and misogyny.