The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, And Psychoanalysis

The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis

A ghostlike object of simultaneous fascination and dread, the mother plays a marginal role in Freud's theoretical writings. Madelon Sprengnether finds Freud's attitudes toward the preoedipal mother to be a key to his theorizing on femininity. Sprengnether both looks at how Freud avoided issues involving the mother and undertakes a daring reinterpretation of the preoedipal mother from the perspective of feminist psychoanalytic theory.