ritics of our gender arrangements, by the sexual bigotry that is built into the Freudian perspective. But I am disinclined to let the presence of that bigotry deflect my attention from the key to a way out of our gender predicament that Freud, in a sense absent-mindedly, provides. Feminists’ preoccupation with Freud’s patriarchal bias, with his failure to jump with alacrity right out of his male Victorian skin, seems to me wildly ungrateful. The conceptual tool that he has put into our hands is a revolutionary one. –(Dinnerstein, 1976:xi) The aspect of Freudian theory that is most criticized by feminists is the emphasis on penis envy and the view that our lives must be determined by our anatomy. Many critics have pointed out that women have many anatomical features and capacities that men lack. Why should girls be the ones to envy and boys be the ones to fear loss? Boys might observe that only women have breasts; later, they learn that only women can bear children. Why not "breast envy" or "womb envy"? Freud failed to look at the situation from the female perspective, and it is blatantly obvious in his beliefs on female development. There are large numbers of females and males who consider themselves to be students of Freudian theory. It must be understood however that just because they believe in and support most of the major principles that Freud chose to elaborate on, does not mean that they are without their own various arguments against some of his beliefs. Karen Horney (1885-1962) was a psychoanalyst and a student of Freud. She believed that Freud’s theory of female psychosexual development reflected a deep male bias, and that it did not make sense to assume that a woman is mentally affected by a wish for attributes of the opposite sex. She also notes that what Freud described as characteristics of the "Masculinity Complex" (egocentric ambition, envy, and the desire for dictatorial power) are exhibited by n...
