Female Self Representation and the Unconscious: A Reply to Amy Galen*

In a recent defense of orthodox psychoanalytic hypotheses about female psychosexual development, Amy Galen emphasizes the concept of the unconscious, a concept she claims is denied by feminists. Her conclusion, like Freud's, is somewhat pessimistic: a new social order, she contends, would effect little change in the unconscious, since “the unconscious meaning of being female is defined primarily by anatomy and its representation in the mind of the child.”4^a

Long before modern feminists took issue with such a hypothesis, however, Freud himself recognized the inadequacies of the concept of the unconscious. The ego psychology he subsequently inaugurated,2 although not yet fully appreciated by feminists, promises to enrich the feminist perspective as well as the psychoanalytic one. For mental representation, including the representation of what it means to be female, is not something innate, invariate, and immutable; it is, rather, a complex ego function. As normal development proceeds, the symbolic constructions of childhood-undifferentiated, irrational, fantasy-based-are continuously modified and integrated with representations of “reality.”

But the problem of reality deserves more consideration than it has yet received. Even after the advent of ego psychology and the study of the ego as the mental structure differentiated through reality testing, the term reality remained axiomatic rather than explicitly defined in Freudian theory. Freud was not concerned with philosophical