ABSTRACT
By the end of World War II, Freudian notions were being bandied about in the culture. Although feminism then was at a low ebb, it was assumed that psychoanalysis, though far from popular, could free repressed women to lead relatively emancipated lives. Some blamed the Freudians for having masterminded the shift in Americans' dominant beliefs. Even though it always had been taken for granted that men were superior to women, this assumption appeared to be reinforced by the Freudian notion that going against it would increase women's unconscious guilt. The concepts of penis envy and the castration complex were easy marks, especially for those who were ignorant of the internal controversies and the reformulations the subjects were engendering among the Freudians themselves. The violent and often vicious attacks on Freud and Freudians in the late 1960s were not coming from feminists alone but were part of larger cultural forces.
