Compare And Contrast Freud And Horney's View Of Women

"Compare and Contrast Freud and Horney's View of Women"

Freud viewed women as incomplete men, lacking a penis and a mature superego. He based most of his views of women on his concept of penis envy. Penis envy is the concept that women view themselves as castrated males and therefore envy the penis. For the most part, it seems to me that Freud really never paid much attention to women. His psychosexual stages were largely related to men however according to our textbook, women took up most of his practice so one would assume he would have relied on women more to report his findings. This lack of "importance" of women in Freud's research clearly demonstrated the times in which he lived in.

Karen Horney, unlike Freud, believed that women didn't result from penis envy that it was instead the men that suffered from womb envy. Womb envy is described as the expressed jealousy over women's ability to bear and nurse children. This theory along with Freud's theory referring to the libido are quite similar in the sense that they each suggest that one gender is secretly jealous of the organ that the other gender possesses. Unlike Freud, Karen's views were not because of the times in which she lived in but instead she suggests that women feel inferior because we have for so long allowed men to tell us that we are inferior. Also, Karen proposes that men, because they cannot give birth to children, make up for this by working to gain impressive accomplishments.

Karen differed very much from Freud, however it was stated that one of the biggest criticisms people held against her was the fact that she relied too heavily on his work. Nevertheless, she was in the end considered by many to be the first theorist to stress female psychology.