section_path: Legacy/Feminism
section_name: Feminism
paragraph_text: Feminism
  
  The decline in Freud's reputation has been attributed partly to the revival of feminism. Simone de Beauvoir criticizes psychoanalysis from an existentialist standpoint in The Second Sex (1949), arguing that Freud saw an "original superiority" in the male that is in reality socially induced. Betty Friedan criticizes Freud and what she considered his Victorian view of women in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Freud's concept of penis envy was attacked by Kate Millett, who in Sexual Politics (1970) accused him of confusion and oversights. In 1968, Anne Koedt wrote in her essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm:
  
  It was Freud's feelings about women's secondary and inferior relationship to men that formed the basis for his theories on female sexuality. Once having laid down the law about the nature of our sexuality, Freud not so strangely discovered a tremendous problem of frigidity in women. His recommended cure for a frigid woman was psychiatric care. She was suffering from failure to mentally adjust to her 'natural' role as a woman.
  
  Naomi Weisstein writes that Freud and his followers erroneously thought his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor.
  
  Freud is also criticized by Shulamith Firestone and Eva Figes. In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Firestone argues that Freud was a "poet" who produced metaphors rather than literal truths; in her view, Freud, like feminists, recognized that sexuality was the crucial problem of modern life, but ignored the social context. Firestone interprets Freud's "metaphors" in terms of the facts of power within the family. Figes tries in Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) to place Freud within a " history of ideas ". Juliet Mitchell defends Freud against his feminist critics in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), accusing them of misreading him and misunderstanding the implications of psychoanalytic theory for feminism. Mitchell helped introduce English-speaking feminists to Lacan. Mitchell is criticized by Jane Gallop in The Daughter's Seduction (1982). Gallop compliments Mitchell for her criticism of feminist discussions of Freud but finds her treatment of Lacanian theory lacking.
  
  Some French feminists, among them Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have been influenced by Freud as interpreted by Lacan.
  
  Psychologist Carol Gilligan writes that "The penchant of developmental theorists to project a masculine image, and one that appears frightening to women, goes back at least to Freud." She sees Freud's criticism of women's sense of justice reappearing in the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Gilligan notes that Nancy Chodorow, in contrast to Freud, attributes sexual difference not to anatomy but to the fact that male and female children have different early social environments. Chodorow, writing against the masculine bias of psychoanalysis, "replaces Freud's negative and derivative description of female psychology with a positive and direct account of her own."
  
  In her analysis of Freud's work on religion in relation to gender, Judith Van Herik noted that Freud paired femininity and the concept of weakness with Christianity and wish fulfillment while associating masculinity and renunciation with Judaism.
  
  Toril Moi has developed a feminist perspective on psychoanalysis proposing that it is a discourse that "attempts to understand the psychic consequences of three universal traumas: the fact that there are others, the fact of sexual difference, and the fact of death". She replaces Freud's term of castration with Stanley Cavell's concept of "victimization" which is a more universal term that applies equally to both sexes. Moi regards this concept of human finitude as a suitable replacement for both castration and sexual difference as the traumatic "discovery of our separate, sexed, mortal existence" and how both men and women come to terms with it.