In Angela Carter's formulation, surrealism, a synthesis of Freud and Hegel, and the surrealists, Freudians themselves proffered an image of woman as the source of mystery and otherness that arose not only from its roots in Neoplatonic philosophy, but also in psychoanalytic theory. While Carter would distance herself from psychoanalytic theory more overtly after her radicalization in the late 1960s, she was already disagreeing with the notion that the West's Oedipal configuration was the requisite form for the maturation of an individual. In a similar way, Carter's speculative fiction of the 1970s uses psychoanalytic theory to show the forces that construct the contemporary form of Western patriarchy. It is possible that Carter encountered Lacan in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, where de Beauvoir incorporates Lacanian theorization into her own existential analysis. Wolf-Alice takes on this significance as well, and we are to read her as a literalization of pregendered, pre-Oedipal, libidinous selfhood.