Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

by Janet Malcolm

led him to the inescapable conclusion that women, to whom the worst had already happened, must be less moral than men. “I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men,” Freud wrote in “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925). “Their superego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women—that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgments by feelings of affection or hostility—all these would be amply accounted for by the modification in the formation of their superego which we have inferred above.” He added, “We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denials of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth; but we shall, of course, willingly agree that the majority of men are also far behind the masculine ideal, and that all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual disposition and of cross-inheritance, combine in themselves both masculine and feminine characteristics, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content.”