ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud’s own ideas had always been cast in the perspective of the male; this was true although most of his early cases were women. One of the weakest spots in all Freud’s thinking was his outlook on women, which was later to be the point of departure for some of the earliest fundamental critiques of traditional analytic thought. In 1905 Freud had maintained that “libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.” The limitations of Freud’s fundamental bias were at least implicitly checked by the logic of his conviction that all people are inevitably bisexual. Helene Deutsch naturally began with an account of early childhood, since according to Freud it was the prime source of adult character. Freud understood the mother as an object of sexual desire and a source of sensual pleasure.
