The story of psychoanalysis began with men trying to understand women through the study of hysteria and more significantly through the lens of male experience, with male experience being seen as the ‘norm’.
Freud studied under the French neurologist Charcot who gave famous lectures about women with hysteria, at Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris. There is a well-known picture which hangs over Freud's couch at his home in Hampstead, London of Charcot giving his lecture – Charcot stands addressing his all-male audience whilst his medical specimen, a woman being supported to stand by another man, reclines backwards in a semi-conscious state. In many ways this picture holds everything that we're talking about today: it is an open statement about the position of women at this time. They are there to be interpreted and understood by the men around them with the supposition that the men know better than the women themselves. Freud is often portrayed as the hero of the scene, the one who broke through the exposition of women as specimens at the Salpêtrière and began listening to what they had to say. Which raises the question as to whether talking to women made them less of a specimen or continued their medicalisation. What they had to say was still seen through the same lens.
Freud's understanding of what these women were saying was first accepted as factual accounts of male violence against women, but Freud then abandoned these testimonies and consigned them to fantasy as this fitted better into his evolving theoretical constructs. This shift in Freud's thinking became known as his abandonment of the seduction theory: the emphasis shifted from believing the idea that women's lived abuse was the source of illness, to believing that this lived abuse was an intrapsychic phenomenon originating in the internal instinctual need to release tension (Abrams 2009, p. 127).
There have been what Ahbel-Rappe (2006, p. 172) calls ‘truly iconoclastic versions’ of the history of psychoanalysis that describe
Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory as ‘a grave mistake, that psychoanalysis itself was conceived in and as an “assault on truth”’. Masson (1984) is one of the key analysts leading this criticism of Freud, although it should be pointed out that this viewpoint was raised in 1971 by Florence Rush at a presentation at the New York Radical Feminists Rape Conference and in her book published in 1980. This claim has of course been contested, not least of all by Laplanche and Fletcher, Fletcher arguing that ‘Freud himself simplified his original theory in the interest of emphasizing the contrast with his later discourses’ (Aron & Atlas 2015, p. 770).
However, what is of more significance is not the theoretical debate as to whether Freud did abandon the actual seduction of women or not, although that is of course important, but the effects of this shift on today's psychoanalytic thinking and practice. There is a clear message here about who can be trusted to speak women's narratives. The more reliable narrator is the predominantly male analysts' interpretation of women's infantile sexuality. Women cannot be trusted to tell their own version of events, and what is more significant than an actual sexual assault or rape is the story of their internal psychosexual development. The woman's trauma is less important than the male interpretation of her internal world. This set the tone not only for psychoanalysis to be an ‘assault on truth’ but, more significantly, an assault on women's truth. Those who disagreed with Freud about the importance of the impact of sexual abuse, such as Ferenczi, who focused on the impact of lived sexual trauma, were denigrated (Aron & Frankel 1994, p. 293). Of course, it was not just Ferenczi who was being denigrated, it was also women's accounts of their experience, this ‘denigration’ becoming ‘baked in’ to psychoanalytic thinking. The message that was given was that women's lives could be downgraded, be less important than men's, without any thought as to why this was happening. This can be seen as the ‘origin story’ for misogyny in psychoanalysis that has continued to be an accepted blind spot in psychoanalytic trainings, institutions, and therefore psychoanalytic practice, ever since.
What is fascinating about Freud and psychoanalysis is that what Freud was proposing and conceptualising was beyond groundbreaking – it was
revolutionary. He described the existence of an unconscious and tested all societal norms by identifying sexuality in young children, describing young children's sexual desire for their parents. Yet, when it came to patriarchal attitudes and values, the thinking seemed to stop. There was a blind spot.
Two of the fundamental cornerstones of Freudian thinking – psychosexual development and the Oedipus complex – reinforce patriarchal values. In his outlining of the key stages of growth in psychosexual development, the glaringly important stages of menarche (the first period) and menstruation are ignored. This perhaps would not be important if the tone set by this lack of attention to even stereotypical female development had been redressed.
Freud's description of the Oedipus complex transparently put women in an inferior position. Indeed, a successful resolution of the Oedipus complex for Freud meant that the girl would come to terms with her inferiority of not having a penis and would content herself with the possibility of having a baby. The relevance of this for the current context is that whilst these theories have been challenged, redescribed, updated, the terms ‘Oedipus complex’ and ‘Oedipal issues’ are still in current usage, often without an updated understanding of these terms being given. It is curious that these terms are still accepted in use given the inherent and explicit misogyny that they express.
But what is it we are talking about when we use the term ‘misogyny’? Kate Manne, in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, defines it as ‘the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy – a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender amongst other factors’ (Manne 2019, p. 78). We also know that when misogyny is viewed through the lens of intersectionality, misogyny has a greater impact and is more pernicious for women and girls of the global majority, from poorer socio-economic backgrounds, and for queer women and non cis-gendered women.
Within psychoanalysis, the position of women has been one of its theoretical battles, a battle at times more prominent than others, but with
a striking consistency: there is a remarkable disappearing act staged for the women who have taken part in them, and their contributions have been dismissed or relegated to a ‘special interest’. This is a process paralleling what has happened to women in psychoanalysis. In the one arena where unconscious processes should be thought about and the givens of patriarchy challenged, the world of women has become just that – a ‘world’ of women, split off and separated from the patriarchal ‘norm’ of men. The fact that writers who challenge the role of women in psychoanalysis either self-label as feminists or are labelled as feminists reflects that the mainstream remains non-representative of women's experiences.
It is curious to think about what we are actually talking about when we say ‘feminist psychoanalysis’. Do we mean psychoanalysis that refers to women only and interests specifically related to women and what those ‘interests’ might be, or do we mean psychoanalysis that is being seen through a different theoretical lens? The latter would have a much wider meaning, but if we mean a psychoanalysis coming from a different theoretical perspective, then what is the perspective that we are implicitly accepting as the non-feminist one? What are we calling that one? Does this non-feminist perspective need to be the ‘niche’ viewpoint rather than the other way round? Alongside this is the more important question of what, how and why a non-feminist uninclusive viewpoint has come into being and continues to be substantiated without reflection or significant change. In short, alongside the papers and books that are labelled ‘feminist psychoanalysis’, where are the papers and books that are, or should be, labelled patriarchal, misogynistic, colonial, racist, transphobic and/or homophobic psychoanalysis? Or are those pieces of writing the ones that are accepted as part of the iconic psychoanalytic canon of work?
In psychoanalytic literature there is still a well-documented lack of written interest in physical events that have traditionally been seen as pertaining to women, such as menstruation, miscarriage, childbirth and menopause. To quote the Yale Professor of Psychiatry, Rosemary Balsam, there is a 'manic depressive rhythm of response that echoes the classic rhythm of interest in female issues in the upsurge of focus, excitement
and enthusiasm that is followed by a more enduring level of symptomatic ennui on the topic in our field' (Balsam 2015, p. 102).
So in concrete terms is there evidence for misogyny in psychoanalysis/psychotherapy? If we look at some statistics from some of the key psychoanalytic institutions, there may be some indicators of the presence of misogyny, especially given the predominance of women in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy:
The International Psychoanalytic Association, founded in 1910 by Freud, has appointed twenty-five presidents, all of whom were men until the first female president was appointed in 2017 (Chamberlain 2022, p. 25).
In the British Psychoanalytical Society, there is a slightly higher presence of women: of the thirty appointed presidents to date, eight have been women (Chamberlain 2022, p. 25).
According to the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), in a 2016 member survey, 74 per cent of members were female, 24 per cent were male (Chamberlain 2022, p. 25).
Former chairs of UKCP: since it was formed in 1989 to date, of the 13 chairs that have been in post, nine have been men, four were women (Chamberlain 2022, p. 25).
The Mary Sigourney award, honouring outstanding psychoanalytic achievement worldwide, was eponymously founded by a woman in 1989. Of the awards given to date, 91 of the recipients have been men, 22 women; 19 organisations received it.
Of course, it would be naive to suggest that a greater representation of women or non-binary people would be the only marker demonstrating a lack of misogyny and phallocentrism within the structures of psychoanalysis, as clearly much more needs to be in place than simply statistical evidence. However, this glaring lack of representation does demonstrate a nonchalance, arrogance or perhaps lack of willingness within psychoanalytic structures with regard to paying attention to
basic indicators that demonstrate that there might be a problem with inclusivity.
In ‘Gender as Perspective: The Ongoing Psychoanalytic Privilege of the Penis“, Terhaar (2020) argues that psychoanalysis is ‘founded on a view of human nature that is masculine’ (p. 302) and that ‘psychoanalytic theories have espoused white, heterosexual, male experience, without it being recognised as a particular perspective’ (p. 303). Since the establishment of the psychoanalytic movement there have been women who have tried to challenge this viewpoint but who have been ignored, dismissed or relegated to a feminist niche. Margarete Hilferding, the first woman admitted into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, in 1911 presented her first and only paper speaking about women not only as caregivers but also as sexual beings and spoke of the physical impact of childbirth to Freud's group, but this was discarded with little if no consideration. Karen Horney, who directly challenged Freud on his view of female development, was dismissed from the Psychoanalytic Institute in New York (Chamberlain 2022, p. 10).
It is this negative hallucinating of women that has been well documented in the history of many other disciplines, even more so when the women are of colour, but despite, or perhaps because of, Freud's lack of understanding of women and the reification of Freud, the negative hallucinating in psychoanalysis continues unquestioned. On most psychoanalytic training courses, the history of psychoanalysis is given in the same way that history has traditionally been taught: a male whitewash, with the exception of women such as Klein and Anna Freud who have continued the male narrative in psychoanalysis, in Klein's case expounding and deepening the misogyny, particularly when it came to looking at menstruation. Klein saw menstruation as the physical manifestation of loss, not just of missing the opportunity to reproduce but also a reminder of not having a penis, ‘equivalent in the unconscious to having actually been castrated and having forfeited the possibility of having a child’ (Klein 1932, p. 306).
To give one example of the absence of attention given to women, the beginning of 2023 saw an outpouring of horror, disgust and, among other
things, a concretising of fear as the extent of misogyny in the London Metropolitan Police became clear. The details of serving police officer David Carrick's violent and sexual crimes against women were disclosed to the media (over 17 years, he carried out 49 offences, which included 71 instances of sexual violence, and was found guilty of 24 counts of rape. In 2025, he was found guilty of a further 9 offences, including 2 offences of rape and 6 offences of indecent assault). The misogyny was not new; what was new was having such a back catalogue of evidence of a culture that permitted such hatred against women.
His case added to the outrage caused by the rape and murder of Sarah Everard in London in March 2021 by police officer Wayne Couzens, during Covid lockdown. Sarah, who was 33 years old, was walking home at 9pm at night in South London and was stopped by Police Officer Couzens who showed her his police ID. It is believed that he claimed to arrest her at this point to get her into his car; in the hours that followed he raped and strangled her.
In December 2021, two police officers were jailed for the sharing of intimate photos of the dead bodies of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. The bodies had been found in a park in London following a violent and unprovoked murder. The photos were taken by the very police officers who had been given the duty of protecting their privacy in death. Carrick's crimes felt like a final confirming exposé of the institutionalised misogyny in the force that serves the paternal function of law and order in society.
As a cis-gendered woman working and living in London, I am acutely aware of the fear spikes in myself, and other women I talk to, following coverage of cases such as Carrick's. The cracking and disintegration of the foundations of the given patriarchal authority become palpable and I reflect on the authority figures and history of my own professional institution. I am also aware of the layered multiplicity of responses that these cases evoke in all people, especially those identifying as men, and the sense of precarity, fragility and guilt that bubbles up when the givens of authority are problematised, and internalised misogyny has a light shone on it. I have become aware of my own internalised misogyny and
prejudices about women, of what it means for me to work therapeutically, of what it means for me as a woman to receive a referral from a man I have never met before and whom I am now meeting by myself in a consulting room.
In recent years there have been significant changes in awareness of the risk and abuse that women face in their everyday lives: for example, the #MeToo movement, the Everyone's Invited movement, and the Reclaim These Streets marches and campaign in the UK. What has perhaps gone without notice is the lack of attention paid to these matters in psychotherapeutic trainings, conferences, and articles, and in psychoanalysis.
Following Everard's murder, the results of a survey (Johnson 2022, p. 57) found that in the UK:
26 per cent of women had stopped leaving home alone at night;
50 per cent of women said that they would feel unsafe after dark walking on their own in a quiet street near their home.
It is curious that, in our profession, it did not seem to be felt that there was a need to address this or look at our own roles in this context. What might it mean to be a male therapist working with a female analysand when 50 per cent of men said that they had changed their behaviour in the aftermath of Sarah Everard's murder? What might it mean to be a male therapist sitting opposite a woman at a time when the vulnerability and anger felt by many women in the presence of an authority figure has been brought into sharper focus? What does it mean for a female therapist to sit with a male analysand against an active backdrop of debate and protest about the prevalence of male violence against women?
I wonder how many training institutions, supervisors or governing bodies have highlighted or even discussed issues such as lone working policies or safety considerations for meeting new clients or how to manage threatening situations. I am not talking so much about the need for such policies and guidance, which should be in place. I am highlighting the fact that the assumption in psychotherapeutic thinking is based on the
tradition of the ‘fathers’ and cannot consider other experiences outside being ‘male’ in psychoanalysis.
When beginning to work as a therapist, a colleague and senior analyst discussed with me what I might anticipate in my first session with my analysand, including practicalities such as considering how long it might take me to reach the waiting room and at what time the session should start, all helpful considerations in preparing for the reality of this first meeting. I mentioned that I would ‘obviously’ sit nearest to the door; he looked perplexed and politely enquired as to why that was important to me. I explained that in my previous work in NHS in-patient services, it had been standard practice when meeting alone with a new patient that you would sit to the nearest exit so that you could leave the room quickly if needed. The senior analyst questioned if I would really be able to leave a room and moved on without giving me the chance to reply that, on various occasions, I had done exactly that to get additional support.
This is not to suggest that all new analysands need to be viewed with suspicion, or indeed that there should be a mandate for therapists to sit next to the nearest exit. But it did highlight for me the absence of thought around the fact that a woman's experience of being a therapist may well be different from a man's. The senior analyst had not even considered what it might mean for me as a woman to sit alone in a room with a man I had never met before and about whom I had minimal information.
This is in the context of the following statistics:
One in five women in England and Wales has experienced some form of sexual assault (Johnson 2022, p. 16).
One in five women has been a victim of stalking since the age of 16 years (80.4% of stalking victims are women) (Johnson 2022, p. 38).
71 per cent of women have experienced harassment in a public space (this increases to 86 per cent for 18–24-year-olds) (Johnson 2022, p. 43).
This lived experience was not that of the male senior analyst, nor has it been actively addressed by the discipline in which we are both trained.
It is this absence of thought about even basic differences between male and female identities that perpetuates the male gaze. In therapy, women are re-traumatised by being objectified in the one space where their subjectivity should be fully seen. Equally, for women studying psychoanalysis, unless attention is given to the previous traumas inflicted by the male gaze in psychoanalytic theory and practice, the repetition of these theories retraumatises and implicitly reminds women of what is being foregrounded, thereby also diminishing female subjectivity.
The clinical practice of analysis requires the prioritising of the deeply subjective, with attention paid to each person's experience and how they have made sense of the world. But what it seems to have missed is that in the intersubjective space created between analyst and analysand, there lies not only the analysand's unique experience of the family they were born into, the care they received and of course their own internal world, but also the influence of the socio-political context in which their family, their adult carers were brought up in, and also, importantly, the sociopolitical context that impacts the analyst and analysand themselves.
It is exactly this unconsciously absorbed socio-political context which is most likely to remain unconscious and undisturbed, particularly if there are benefits from the privileges the patriarchal system affords both analyst and analysand, both analyst and training analyst, both analyst and supervisor, as well as those in the training institution. In fact, I would argue that it remains so undisturbed that there has been little discussion or attention given to the widespread role male violence and abuse have on women's and girls' mental health. In a recent survey by the Royal College of Psychiatrists , the majority of respondents identified violence and abuse as the main contributor to women's mental illness. It would be interesting to know how such findings are factored into psychoanalytic assessments and understood from a gendered perspective.
Research carried out by Barendse and Byrne (2022) found that girls who show physical signs, such as breast changes, of entering puberty early are at higher risk of depression and anxiety. This increased risk may be for a number of reasons. As highlighted by the authors this area is under-
researched; however, they do link it to the increase in sexual harassment experienced by girls which is directly correlated to the timing of puberty.
If one thinks of the teenage girl going to therapy for depression and anxiety, it's interesting to think how her version of events might be interpreted. Does the therapist ask her about her relationship with her mother, father, siblings, peers, perhaps previous sexual relationships? One would hope so. Does the therapist note what she wears when she comes to therapy, how much make-up she wears, how short her skirt is, how she wears her hair, if she has nail extensions and false eyelashes, and link this to the depression and anxiety? Does the therapist consider who decided how ‘short’ short is for a skirt and why this would be of note? At what point might the therapist begin to wonder what it's like for her to navigate getting the tube, getting on the bus, constantly being looked up and down by men, experiencing street harassment and having knowledge, especially if she is in London at the moment that the police force that is meant to protect her is institutionally misogynistic.
Or is her depression formulated as internalised, unexpressed anger due to difficulties in individuating from her mother? Are her false eyelashes and acrylic nails seen as symptoms of sexualised behaviour due to low self-esteem, needing to hide who she is, or that she is following the current fashion trends that she and her friends bond over and through which they have fun expressing themselves. Or does she continue to be conceptualised by her analyst in the register Marguerite Duras relates to Lacan, ‘When Lacan says, “She knows, the woman knows …” Those are a man's words, a master's words … The reference is himself …‘ (Zambreno 2021, p. 154).
Eichenbaum and Orbach, in their book ‘What do Women Want’ (, in an updated foreword of , p. iii), assert that ‘men certainly continue to be baffled and even women themselves continue to be perplexed when faced with the question, What do women want?’ They suggest that the answer to the question is primarily to be interdependent with men and to have their emotional needs met. This may well be part of it, but perhaps the bigger part is for women not to have to define what they want and for the ‘want’ to be a fluid exploration that may sometimes
be about interdependency, but sometimes about much more, and for that experience not to be foreclosed and reduced. This would seem to be a basic need for people of all genders, and one that must also be applied to psychoanalysis so that what it is or needs to be can evolve and develop without being limited by a phallocentric focus or indeed a feminist one. The risk is cautioned against by Oscar Wilde:
if you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it: that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call a dynamic life … if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.