This paper looks at how, in his essay "Femininity," the father of
psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, defines the early intellectual
and emotional socialization of girls as a state of growing hostility towards the mother. It looks at how this initially hostile view of feminine consciousness and subconsciousness at the founding of
psychoanalysis assumes that many
feminist theorists would entirely disdain Freudian conceptualizations of the self, development, and the human psyche altogether, and how, indeed, many have. It also shows how other feminist theorists have attempted to reformulate Freud in a more creative and fertile fashion in terms of female subjectivity.