Sigmund Freud and the Feminine: Women, Identity, Construction of Femininity

"What does woman want?" Sigmund Freud asked after a lifetime of research. He never found a final answer.Hardly any thinker wrote about women as intensively as Freud, and hardly any as controversially. His theories of femininity move between analytic brilliance and remarkable blindness. This book traces Freud's engagement with the feminine: from his hysterical patients through the notorious theory of penis envy to the feminist debates that fundamentally reread his work.It also tells of the women who shaped Freud, patients, colleagues, and critics, and hears those who contradicted him: Karen Horney, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. A chapter examines his model of id, ego, and superego, how he distinguished the female psyche from the male, and why that distinction remains politically and culturally explosive.It ends in the present: What does Freud's theory still mean for our understanding of femininity, for eating disorders, social media, MeToo, and ongoing conflicts over gender and identity?