ABSTRACT
The Freudian myth or theory traces the Oedipus complex back to the dawn of history and helps to define the need for a cultural revolution that transcends a mere change in power or institutions and breaks the cycle of rebellion and submission. Freudian feminists advocate more than an expanded role for men in child care. In company with other feminists, and with the Freudian left as a whole, they demand the abolition of the family, on the grounds not only that it oppresses women but that it produces an acquisitive, aggressive, authoritarian type of personality. Hence the Freudian feminists’ ‘challenge to traditional psychoanalytic definitions of autonomy and morality’ and their attempt ‘to articulate conceptions of autonomy that are premised not simply on separation, but also on the experiences of mutuality, relatedness, and the recognition of an other as a full subject’.
