Artist’s Salon: FREUD'S WOMEN PROBLEM—A PRESCRIPTION OR A DESCRIPTION?

The question of Freud and his women—and Freud's women problem—has dogged psychoanalysis in the intervening century after its birth. Although psychoanalysis was invented by a patient, not a doctor, and by a woman, not a man, the question, so aptly phrased by Juliet Mitchell, of whether Freud offered women a description of patriarchy and how it quite literally made them sick, or was writing up a prescription that would assimilate them into patriarchy, has remained open and the site of much consternation. Looking at both Freudian and anti-Freudian attitudes and uses of psychoanalysis, women, and feminism, Hannah Zeavin in this lecture points us toward a feminist Freud for the 21st century. Zeavin appears as part of the Clayman Institute’s Artist's Salon series, coordinated by Writer in Residence Moira Donegan.