ABSTRACT
When German feminists "theorize," they do so in the "traditional" Freudian mode. Although in the former Bundesrepublik there are a few Lacanian enclaves as well, these do not have much, if any, impact on psychoanalytic practices or on the larger culture. Thus German feminism is carried forth by women psychoanalysts and by their collaborators in the social sciences. German feminism and psychoanalysis went hand in hand. Margarete Mitscherlich, who had a Danish father and a German mother, was the first German Freudian in a position to go to London after World War II in order to get psychoanalytic training. Mitscherlich first wrote on feminism in 1975 in Psyche. She did so in the post-war German manner of using psychoanalysis as social critique— that is, by postulating that German women who also had been raised by German mothers and under Nazism were "sharing" the character structure of German men.
