Abstract

Freud has been repeatedly attacked by feminists and by members of the psychoanalytic profession for having stamped psychoanalysis with a masculine bias. The “return to Freud” inaugurated by Jacques Lacan has sought to restore to psychoanalysis central Freudian concepts which the history of psychoanalysis, influenced by the ideological affinities of the institutions in which it is practiced, had eroded and even obliterated. This “return to Freud” has yielded a “new” Freud, who differs importantly from the Freud of the American ego psychologists so frequently denounced by Lacan, and who, from the point of view of women and feminists, presents somewhat different problems.