Was Freud Misogynistic? No. Here Is Why the Question Itself Is Confused.

Before You Decide What Freud Was, Look at What He Replaced

In the 19th century, women who exhibited symptoms that did not fit any other medical category — chronic fainting, partial paralysis, convulsions, emotional volatility, breathing difficulties, sexual expression considered excessive — were diagnosed with hysteria.

Hysteria was not understood as a psychological condition. It was classified as a form of insanity, specifically as a disease of the womb. The word itself comes from the Greek hystera, uterus. The theory held that the womb was a defective organ in a defective sex, prone to malfunction, capable of causing mental and physical disturbance, and requiring physical intervention.

Women diagnosed with hysteria — and the diagnosis was applied to a substantial portion of the female population in some studies, by some estimates as much as a quarter of women at some point in their lives — were treated.

The treatments were brutal. They were not fringe practices performed by quacks. They were standard medical interventions performed by respected physicians in respected institutions across Europe and the United States.

Surgical interventions. Clitoridectomy — the surgical removal of the clitoris — was performed on women diagnosed with hysteria, particularly those whose symptoms involved any sexual expression considered inappropriate. Ovariectomy — the surgical removal of the ovaries — was performed for similar reasons. These were major surgical interventions performed for what we would today consider behavioral or psychological reasons.

Manual interventions. Physicians treated hysteria by manually inducing what was called "hysterical paroxysm" — a euphemism for orgasm — through digital genital stimulation. This was understood as a medical treatment, billed as such, performed by physicians on female patients considered too disordered to be treated through speech. Mechanical devices were eventually developed to reduce the physical labor required of physicians performing this treatment.

Institutional confinement. Women diagnosed with hysteria were committed to asylums. 19th century asylum conditions involved physical restraint, isolation, water immersion treatments designed to produce shock or near-drowning, dietary restriction, and punishment for behaviors considered manifestations of the disease.

Domestic restraint. For women treated outside asylums, the prescribed treatment was often the "rest cure" — extended bed rest, isolation from intellectual stimulation, prohibition of writing and reading, and total dependence on caretakers. The cure was famously documented by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in "The Yellow Wallpaper," which describes a woman driven into actual madness by the treatment for her supposed madness.

This is what was happening to women diagnosed with hysteria in the period that produced Freud. The patients who became his first analytic cases were women who had received, or were at risk of receiving, these treatments.

What Freud Did

Freud said hysteria was not insanity.

He said the women diagnosed with hysteria were not psychotic, not delusional, not suffering from a diseased organ that required surgical intervention. He said their symptoms were meaningful — that they expressed psychological conflicts that could be addressed through speech.

He sat down with female patients. He listened to them describe their lives, their families, their childhoods, their fears, their desires. He treated what they said as significant.

The implications were enormous. If hysteria was not a disease of the womb, ovariectomy was not a treatment. If hysterical women were not insane, asylums were not where they belonged. If their suffering had psychological meaning, then listening to them was the appropriate medical response — not restraint, not surgery, not manual intervention by male physicians on female bodies.

This is the practice that became psychoanalysis. The talking cure was developed in this context, with these patients. Every form of psychotherapy that exists today descends from this gesture.

This is the historical reality. Freud is the man who said the female patients his profession was institutionalizing and mutilating were not insane and should be heard. Whatever theoretical errors are attributed to him, this is what he actually did.

Now, the Theoretical Question

Once you have the historical reality in view, the contemporary accusation looks different. The accusation typically points to specific concepts — penis envy, castration, the feminine — and reads them as evidence of misogyny. To address this seriously, you have to understand what these concepts actually are. And here Lacan's rereading of Freud is essential, because Lacan formalizes what Freud was already doing in language that is harder to misread.

The accusation rests on a category error: reading Freud's symbolic concepts as if they were biological claims. Reading the phallus as if it were a penis. Reading castration as if it were a literal anatomical operation. Reading the feminine as if it were a property of women.

These readings are mistakes. They are not how the theory functions. And once you understand the theory on its own terms — particularly through Lacan's clarification — the misogyny accusation collapses.

The Symbolic and the Real

Psychoanalysis from its inception operates with a distinction that is fundamental to everything that follows: the distinction between the symbolic and the real.

The symbolic is the order of language, of signifiers, of structure. It is the realm in which subjects exist as speaking beings, organized by the law, by lack, by desire. Everything that has meaning has it in the symbolic register.

The real is something else entirely. The real is what resists symbolization. It includes biological substance, anatomical fact, the body insofar as it is not yet symbolized. The real is what cannot be reduced to language.

Lacan's contribution here was to formalize what was already operative in Freud. Freud's writing sometimes slides between registers — using anatomical language for symbolic operations in ways that have allowed careless readers to assume he was making biological claims. Lacan tightens the screws. He makes explicit that when Freud talks about the phallus, the phallus is not the penis. When Freud talks about castration, castration is not surgery. When Freud talks about sexual difference, sexual difference is not the difference between male and female bodies.

This is the framework. Once you have it, you can read Freud correctly. Without it, you read him as if he were a 19th century gynecologist making claims about women's bodies. He was not.

The Phallus Is Not a Penis

The clearest case is the phallus.

In casual reading of Freud, the phallus is assumed to be the male organ. The theory then appears to claim that female subjects are deficient, lacking, defined by what they do not have. The misogyny reading follows directly from this assumption.

The assumption is wrong.

In psychoanalysis as Lacan reads it, the phallus is a signifier. It is not the body part. It is the symbolic operator that marks the place of lack — and the lack in question is not the lack of a male organ in female bodies. It is the constitutive lack of every subject who comes into language. The phallus is what no subject possesses. It is what organizes desire precisely because it cannot be had.

Both biological men and biological women relate to the phallus from the same structural distance. Neither has it, neither is it. The fantasy of having it, of being it, of being its bearer — these are fantasies, structural positions taken up by subjects in the symbolic, not anatomical realities. A man's penis is not the phallus. A woman's "lack" of a penis is not the lack of the phallus, because the phallus is not the kind of thing one has or lacks in the biological sense.

This is not a clever reinterpretation imposed on Freud after the fact. This is what the theory actually says when read on its own terms. Lacan made it explicit because Freud's German sometimes obscured it. But it was always there.

Castration Concerns Every Subject

The same logic applies to castration.

In psychoanalysis, castration is not the removal of genitals. It is the symbolic operation by which the speaking subject is constituted as such. To be a subject of language is to be subject to the symbolic order — which means being subject to the law, to the impossibility of having or being everything, to the lack that is constitutive of desire.

Castration in this sense concerns every neurotic subject. Not just men, not just women — every subject organized by language and the law. The casual reading takes castration to be a male anxiety about losing the penis. This is wrong. The Freudian-Lacanian concept of castration is the structural condition of being a speaking subject at all.

Read this way, the accusation that Freud's framework is masculinist falls apart. The framework does not privilege the masculine over the feminine. It describes a structure that organizes every speaking subject, regardless of biological sex. The differences between subjects are differences in how they take up positions within this structure — not differences in their underlying capacity to be subjects.

The Feminine Is Not the Property of Women

The most decisive Lacanian contribution to this question comes in the late teaching, in the formulas of sexuation. Lacan formalizes what was implicit in Freud: sexual difference in psychoanalysis is not the biological difference between male and female bodies. It is a structural difference in how subjects relate to the phallic function and to jouissance.

Lacan distinguishes a "masculine" position and a "feminine" position. These are positions in the symbolic. They are not properties of biological men and biological women.

The masculine position is one of total subjection to the phallic function. It is organized entirely by the symbolic, by the law, by the limits that constitute the field of desire. Subjects in the masculine position experience jouissance as phallic — as bounded, structured, located.

The feminine position is different. It is not entirely contained by the phallic function. There is something in the feminine that exceeds the symbolic, that escapes the phallic organization. Lacan calls this "supplementary jouissance" — a jouissance not phallically structured.

The crucial point: any subject can occupy either position. Many biological men occupy the feminine position. Many biological women occupy the masculine position. Sexual difference in psychoanalysis is not the difference of bodies but the difference of structural positions toward the phallic function.

This is not equality flattening. The two positions are different — they organize subjects differently, produce different relationships to desire, have different clinical implications. But the difference is not a hierarchy of value, and it is not aligned with biological sex.

To call this framework misogynistic is to misread it completely. The framework does not assign women to a deficient position. It does not assign anyone to any position based on anatomy. It describes structures that any subject can occupy, in different combinations and degrees, depending on their particular history of subjectivation.

Reading Freud Through Lacan

When contemporary readers accuse Freud of misogyny, they almost invariably do so by collapsing the symbolic into the real. They take "penis" to mean penis. They take "castration" to mean castration. They take "feminine" to mean female. None of these readings is correct, and the framework that demonstrates this most clearly is the Lacanian one.

Lacan's rereading of Freud was not a polite addition. It was a clarification of what was at stake. The Lacanian formulas — the symbolic, the imaginary, the real, the formulas of sexuation, the distinction between the phallus and the penis — these are tools that make Freud readable correctly. Without them, Freud's terminology can mislead. With them, the framework reveals itself as what it always was: a structural account of the speaking subject that is not reducible to anatomy.

This is not a defense based on selective reading. It is what the theory says. Freud, as Lacan clarified, was not a 19th century gynecologist making claims about female bodies. He was the founder of a clinical practice and a theoretical framework that refused to reduce the subject to anatomy — at a moment when that reduction was being performed surgically, in operating theaters, on women.

What Remains

There are real critiques of Freud. He was a man of his time. Some of his casual remarks about women, made outside the framework of his theoretical concepts, are dated. Some of his clinical decisions are questionable by contemporary standards. He was not a saint, and there is no need to make him one.

But the theoretical framework — castration, the phallus, sexual difference, the unconscious — is not misogynistic. Read through Lacan's clarification, it is one of the few clinical frameworks that explicitly refuses to reduce subjects to their anatomy. It treats every speaking being as a subject of desire and language, organized by symbolic structures that any subject can occupy in different ways.

The accusation of misogyny against Freud, as a totalizing judgment, is wrong. It depends on a misreading. Once the symbolic and the real are kept distinct — which is the foundational gesture of psychoanalysis — the accusation has no purchase.

Freud was the person who said women diagnosed with hysteria were not insane. He was the person who said they should be heard. He was the person whose framework, clarified by Lacan, treats the masculine and feminine as structural positions rather than biological properties. This is not the work of a misogynist. It is the work of someone who, in 1900, refused to do to women what his profession was already doing to them — and built a clinical practice that, more than a century later, remains the only place where the speaking subject is fully respected as such.

References

• /Lacan, J. (1958). The Signification of the Phallus. In Écrits.
• /Lacan, J. (1972-73). Seminar XX: Encore.
• /Mitchell, J. (1974). Psychoanalysis and Feminism.
• /Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (1985). Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne.
• /Freud, S. & Breuer, J. (1895). Studies on Hysteria.
• /Showalter, E. (1985). The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980.
• /Maines, R.P. (1999). The Technology of Orgasm.
• /Gilman, C.P. (1892). The Yellow Wallpaper.