The Freudian Mystique: Freud, Women, and Feminism

by Samuel Slipp

Book Overview

"Lucid and convincing...Makes clear that Freud's] vision was limited both by the social climate in which he worked and the personal experiences he preferred, subconsciously, not to deal with."--Los... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814779689
• ISBN13: 9780814779682
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 1 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Mostly hits the nail on the head

I've just been reading The Freudian Mystique by Samuel Slipp. I enjoyed it up to a point, although I found some of the assumptions in an an otherwise well written and well considered book to be a trifle too slick. Slipp perceives, as I do, that is is the fear of the mother during the pre-Oedipal stage of childhood development that is behind social misogyny in the broader sphere of life. A terrible recollection of the mother as monstrously abandoning or monstrously engulfing is the source of patriarchal views about women. Such normatively accepted social evaluations are actually based upon primitive defence mechanisms: the splitting of ego along with projective identification onto women of the images engendered during infantile psychosis -- that is, when the child feels overwhelmed by the mother and distrustful of her, on the basis of her much larger size and power in relation to the child. I had noticed this phenomenon writ large a few times myself, when it appeared to me that those who demonstrably had very little power in society (such as myself in some instances) were considered by key males (and indeed, up to a point, by males in general) to have no limitations in power whatsoever, but in fact to be terrifyingly powerful in our situation of complete lack of resources. So I understand then that the power that is projected onto me and other women is simply not real, but derives, somehow from the mind of the observer. The strongest points in Slipp's book are his production of this analysis in scholarly terms, and his explanations as to why Freud himself avoided delving into the pre-Oedipal dimensions of psychological relations. Apparently it had to do with Freud's early emotional abandonment by his mother, as she dealt with bereavement, which led to his splitting his ego into two in relation to her -- he had to believe that she could do no wrong, otherwise the terrible feelings of abandonment he had experienced at this early stage would re-enter his consciousness and overwhelm it. So the pre-Oedipal aspects of development were best avoided by Freud, who needed to repress his own experiences of this stage. The weakest points are a partial reversion to biologism. If women are by nature more in tune with the pre-Oedipal field (which is dubious), then how to explain Nietzsche and Bataille? Slipp's arguments could have been extended to show that when Nietzsche chose to reclaim what had previously, in Western culture, been considered part of the feminine preserve -- ie. irrationality and sexuality -- that he gained his mystical sense of the value of this irrationality through an ecstatic encounter with the pre-Oedipal dimension, experienced as the ontological core of the human psyche. Thus that which was culturally attributed to the feminine was re-appropriated in the philosophical reworkings of Western cultural ideas, and became attributed as masculine. Slipp does note this last point concerning cultural reappropriation, but doesn't recognise tha