Unlike many Freudian critiques, Ms Brickman deftly balances her call for reconstruction with a valorizing of the revolutionary and emancipatory aspects of Freud's thinking.
Thus, according to Ms Brickman, the construct of primitivity is continually prone to slippage and conflation with the racially inflected meanings that position those not embodying the ideal of the Western masculine subject as prior to and inferior.
However, in her deconstruction of Freud's theories of the unconscious Ms Brickman uncovers an emancipatory potential in Freud's thinking.
Ms Brickman demonstrates how Freud situates dependency and femininity as indicative of an inferior past.
For Ms Brickman many later theoretical developments in psychoanalysis do provide antidotes to these problematics.