Beauvoir and the critique of male overvaluation in Freudian psychoanalysis

Abstract

According to Freud, women are strongly influenced by the negative Oedipus, being destined to live the passive condition of sexuality, thus, not only does it not encourage female autonomy, but describes femininity based on the male model. In this way, Beauvoir’s critique of psychoanalysis starts from the idea that the possibility of something like a female destiny does not exist. Beauvoir affirms that the condition of immanence to which women find themselves in our society, is based on the socialization to which they are submitted, depriving them of the transcendence. Starting from reading of Beauvoir’s work, we seek to understand the situation of women considering their historical contexts, in order to claim their ontological possibilities of freedom, problematizing the place imposed on them by culture and reinforced by the male overvaluation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.