ABSTRACT
Freud’s views, which see women as disadvantaged and marginalised in our society, are well represented in the feminist dialogue, even today. However, in one of his last papers published in 1931, entitled “Female sexuality”, Freud makes the point that maybe both sons and daughters feel a peculiarly archaic ambivalence towards their first identificatory object—their mother—because of the deep imbalance of power in that relationship. Jane Temperley takes up this point in a paper entitled “Our own worst enemies: unconscious factors in female disadvantage” (1984), suggesting that this ambivalence results in women championing an equality with men that is actually a denigration of what is specifically feminine: motherhood. You may remember that I took issue with Freud over the fact that he did not take into account that girls have the ability to give birth to the human infant.
