17. Freud’s views on women were equally controversial
In a 1925 paper on the anatomical differences between men and women and how they contribute to the individual psyche, Freud wrote, “Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own”. It was just one of many controversial comments Freud produced about women, which were written at the height of the suffragist era and the resulting change of women’s place in society. Freud in many places and times made clear his belief that women were inferior to men, though he also made it clear on several occasions that he did not fully understand them.
“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?‘”, he once wrote. Many of his writings on women were challenged at the time he made them, by colleagues and by the emerging female practitioners of psychotherapy and students of the human psyche. Even Freud’s granddaughter Sophie came to reject Freud’s thoughts on women, and on the human mind in general, comparing him to Adolf Hitler by calling the two of them “false prophets of the twentieth century”.