Word: freuds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Feminists consider Sigmund Freud one of history's leading male chauvinist pigs. No wonder. The master taught that women are far more masochistic and narcissistic than men and more prone to neurosis, that they are rigid and unchangeable by the age of 30, and unable to equal the high moral character of men. These doleful views flow from a single Freudian concept: penis envy. As Freud saw it, female identity grows from an infant girl's shocking discovery that she lacks a penis. Later, in about the third year of life, she carries this sense of castration...
Despite dissent from a few of his early follower-, Freud's views quickly hardened into psychoanalytic dogma. Now, under pressure from feminists, orthodox Freudians seem to be giving ground. "Anatomy is not destiny," says Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, one of the voices for change. "Destiny is what people make of anatomy...
Doomed Castrates. Indeed, in a forthcoming special issue on female psychology, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association reveals a willingness to revise Freud. One common refrain among the writers: male prejudice and parental expectations create many more problems for women than Freudianism has so far acknowledged. Writes Virginia Clower of Washington, D.C.: "To the extent that our society continues to educate mothers and fathers who see their female children as biological castrates doomed to inferior psychological, moral and social development, we will continue to produce women who regard themselves as second class...
...general, the writers seek to preserve Freud's notions of penis envy and the castration complex, but argue that the effects are hardly as malign as Freud thought. Analysts William Grossman and Walter Stewart suggest that penis envy in adult women should be interpreted as the "manifest content" of a problem-in other words, it is merely a metaphor for whatever may be troubling a woman, and not a "bedrock" problem...
...psychoanalysts I've talked to are uncertain about my theory," says Robert Stoller, a psychoanalyst and professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine. No wonder. Stoller has managed to come up with a far darker view of sex than Freud's. His theory, which he admits he has put forth with some "trepidation": except for a few rare individuals, human sexual excitement is usually generated by hostility. If his thinking is correct, Stoller writes in the Archives of General Psychiatry, "we must bear the idea that sexual pleasure in most humans depends on neurotic mechanisms. It is disappointing...