The Women Who Talked Back to Freud

Freud's male-centred theory

Anyone with an interest in psychology will have come across the name Freud (Sigmund Freud), the founder of one of psychology's major schools of thought — psychoanalysis. In his theory of psychosexual development, children aged three to five are in the phallic stage, during which they grow close to the opposite-sex parent. Boys experience castration anxiety: aware of their own vulnerability and feeling threatened by their father, they fear that their genitals will be cut off by him. Girls, meanwhile, experience penis envy, coveting the genitals that boys have; when pregnant, they hope to give birth to a boy in order to make up for that penis envy. This famous concept has been criticised by modern feminists concerned with gender issues, who argue that it reflects a mindset that ranks men above women. In fact, a woman psychologist of the time, Karen Horney, also opposed Freud's view, arguing that he overlooked the influence of society on men and women. Another psychologist who studied social and cultural influences, Alfred Adler, likewise proposed that women's penis envy arises from social and cultural forces rather than from any biological difference — for example, women envy the freedom and rights that men possess and they do not. Karen Horney argued that men, too, experience womb and vagina envy, envying women's capacity to conceive and give birth; she suggested that this reproductive ability could raise women's social standing, and that this sense of inferiority spurred men's drive to get ahead, pushing them to strive for achievement in other endeavours.

Karen Horney's feminist psychology

Karen Horney was born in Germany and later moved to the United States. Feminism was on the rise at the end of the nineteenth century, and she was among the first women in the society of her day to study medicine. Karen Horney differed from other psychoanalysts in stressing how society shapes a person's development after birth — for instance, the moulding of gender images, and the differing influence that European and American societies exert on individual development. She was also one of the few scholars of her time to focus on gender issues. In studying women's psychology, she opposed Freud's view that women are inferior to men. She held that women are oppressed by a patriarchal society and so cannot develop in a healthy way, and that the image of women as gentle and selfless is not a product of biological sex differences but is shaped by social expectations. She argued that Freud's theory was built on nothing more than a gender-unequal society, and that under a different social and cultural influence, a woman's personality would have far more room to develop.

Karen Horney was undoubtedly a thinker ahead of her time. She not only challenged the male-centred psychoanalytic theories of Freud and others, but also examined topics such as the abuse of women and feminine psychology. As a psychologist who emphasised social influence, she put forward a number of new theories as well — for instance, her study of basic anxiety and her concept of the idealised self (the real self, the actual self and the idealised self), which interested readers are welcome to explore further.