ABSTRACT
Feminists and feminist movements have functioned within this context. At the turn of the century, most American feminists belonged to the northern or the southern upper classes and supported the downtrodden: They had helped to abolish slavery and enact women's suffrage, and they propped up poor immigrants and exploited workers. During the student rebellions of 1968, New Left radicals, along with their feminist constituents, denounced psychoanalysis as conservative and elitist and ignored the fact that the earlier and "deviant" emigre Freudians such as Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and Wilhelm Reich, had introduced the Freud-Marx syntheses that were to revolutionize modern society. Psychoanalytic therapies, in spite of temporary setbacks and new reincarnations, also grew by leaps and bounds, as did a bevy of national and international organizations. And Freudian women, just like their male colleagues, were extrapolating from their own experiences and insights to improve their theories.
