BOOKS
FREUD'S DAUGHTERS
MELANIE KLEIN: HER WORLD AND HER WORK. By Phyllis
Gross·
kurth:
Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00
THE FEMINIST LEGACY OF KAREN HORNEY. By Marcia Westkott.
Yale University Press. $20.00.
Freud's earliest disciples were male, but soon
psychoanalysis attracted a number of women who, like the men,
came to cure their own neuroses and stayed on to become analysts.
Like Freud, they wanted to know how their egos had been shaped in
response to their eternal world, but they ended up examining how
the place accorded to women in the world molded female personal–
ity. These were talented women, and many of them became the
mainstays of psychoanalysis.
Sabina Spielrein, for instance, after having collaborated with
Carl J ung in Zurich and then with Freud in Vienna, attempted to
bring psychoanalysis to the Soviet Union; after her analysis in
1925/26
Alix Strachey helped start and support the British society;
Eugenia Sokolnicka initiated the French society together with "the
Princess" Marie Bonaparte in 1926; Helene Deutsch was in charge
of candidates' training in Vienna as early as 1924. And by 1912,
child pedagogy, beginning with Hermine von Hug-Hellmuth, was
dominated by women who took it for granted that they ought to
understand their charges' unconsciousness -long before child
development became the centerpiece of psychoanalytic research.
Clearly, Freud allowed women to compete as equals, and whatever
chauvinism he was guilty of was cultural and theoretical rather than
intentional. After his death Anna Freud became his official heir, and
two of the most influential "dissidents" - Melanie Klein and Karen
Horney - were women.
The books under discussion pay tribute to these two women .
Westkott's
The Feminist Legacy oj Karen Horney
outlines how Horney's
insights might be useful to feminists; Phyllis Grosskurth's
Melanie
Klein : Her World and Her Work
maps the life of a feminine rather than
a feminist psychoanalyst. Both books address current preoccupa–
tions . Westkott responds to feminists who, until Juliet Mitchell
argued in
Psychoanalysis and Women
(1977) that exploring the cultural
elements of the Oedipus complex could be a boon to the women's
