64
PARTISAN REVIEW
choanalysts can be attacked with justi ce when they separate the chi ld's
development from social circumstances and regard the psychosexual
phases as subject excl usively to interna l psychobiological laws. Still,
besides the unconscious and the socia l factors , we must take into
account the biological factors that are intertwined with them. Al–
though Freud overestimated the psychic effect of the anatomical
difference between the sexes-and sometimes underestima ted socio–
cultural influences-and although he unmistakably fell victim to
some of the prejudices of his time, we should not underes tima te his
brilliant and subtle gift for observation. For although his theories
about women were one-sided in many respects, no one could equal him
in pointing out feminine psychic developments and structures of
behavior formed during centuries of oppression . The young girl's
psychosexual development was not a mirror image of the boy's, as
Jones and Horney assumed. Freud was primarily concerned with the
description and analysis of psychical processes. In response to our
criticism that he fail ed to take the psychic conseq uences of social
injustice sufficiently into account, he would very likely have reminded
us that we too, like others before us , underra te the influence of
conscious and even more of unconscious fantasies and emotions on our
perception and psychic assimilation of the environment.
Freud himself was deceived by such an error when at the begin–
ning he took his female patients' reports of their seduction by their
fathers at face value, as descriptions of genuine external reality.
Without his gradual and laborious realization tha t these stori es repre–
sented mostly "the vicissitudes of instincts" -repressed infantil e wishes
that subsequently assumed the character of psychic rea lity–
psychoanal ysis would never have come into ex istence and the Oed ipus
complex would never have been discovered. It is important to stress this
fact repeatedly, for all too often we revert to a pre-Freudian stage of
thought, speaking as if there is a directl y percepti ble, conscious cause–
and-effect connection between psychi c experi ence and social or bio log–
ical events. Even Wilhelm Reich, who made efforts in the cause of the
liberation of both sexes, ultimately fell victim to simplification. For
him fantasy was fact: if it failed to refl ect extern al reality it was seen as
neurotic and irrelevant. According to Reich , n euros is would vanish in
a society freed of all sexual repression . He was of course unacquainted
with Marcuse's concept of repress ive desublimation. Yet in his own
private life, sexual liberation had limits determined by sex: in accor–
dance with the old doubl e moral standards he judged male and female
marital infidelity quite differentl y, as the biography by his wife, lise
