ABSTRACT
S. Freud had spent many years writing his first psychoanalytic publication, The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he advanced the principles of his new doctrine. Freud, of course, shared his contemporaries' conceptualizations and philosophers' customary ways of dividing the world into dualities such as nature/culture, sea/land, liquid/solid, capital/labor, male/female. The handful of followers who chose to take Freud seriously and to explore his views also were living with the unexamined dualisms. Since men's psyches could not be explored without considering their relation to women, particularly to their mothers, women ipso facto were part of the Freudians' subject matter—even though men alone participated in the formulation of early hypotheses. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud essentially relied on his self-analysis, on his associations to dreams, daydreams, wishes, experiences, and literature that were derived from his own unconscious. Freud and his disciples agreed that the castration complex is caused not only by biological factors but by psychological and social ones as well.
