Historically, psychoanalytic writing and everyday language have referred to “woman” as a unitary entity; psychoanalysis has compared “the man” to “the woman” “the boy” to “the girl.” Recent feminist and postmodernist writing has taught us to be wary of such singular referents and of theories that employ them. In particular, psychoanalysis has often been criticized for the limited class and cultural location of its clinical sample of the empirical “women” upon which its purportedly universal theory of femininity has been developed. When we interrogate Freud's writings, however, we find that his and other psychoanalytic references to “woman” are in dialogue with an emphatically plural account of a multitude of “women.” Freud's descriptions of women and of his interactions with them comprise a large cast of characters, a pantheon of higher and lesser ideal-typical goddesses and mortals to complement and accompany Oedipus, Narcissus, Moses, and others in psychological glory or ignominy. We also find actual, historically specific, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century named and nameless women in clinical cases and vignettes.

This essay enumerates these women. I describe a number of implicit axes that differentiate them. Freud describes woman as subject of her own psyche, that is, as living experiencer of self and conscious and unconscious mental processes, as subject to herself. Woman as subject expands into woman as subject-object, that is, object to her own subjectivity as she internally relates to and identifies with or against another internally experienced woman.