ABSTRACT
Karen Horney was perhaps the first mighty woman to challenge the Sphinx—in her case, the Egyptian half-male prototype of Greece’s half-woman in the person of Freud—and was herself a “[wo]man most mighty”. The misogyny of the male gender—the notorious misogyny in Freud’s theory—is a defensive strategy in which boys and the men they become try to diminish and contain women in order to feel better about themselves. The ancient seer Tereisias learnt this the hard way, as a transitorily transgendered woman who was then blinded by the gods for this dangerous insight. In a similar vein, an interdisciplinary caveat: whether or not unconscious fantasies about omnipotent women and the mythologies that reflect these translate into real power in social relations is moot. Melding cognitive psychological and sociological perspectives, and after exhaustive empirical research, the chapter emphasises the tenacity of a hierarchy in gender relations as in racism and other forms of discrimination and oppression.
