Sigmund Freud's ideas permeate our everyday thinking about life, love, gender, the family, and the relation between the sexes. These ideas took on their shape and substance in the same period that "the woman question" became a burning issue. Sometimes championed as a liberator of women, Freud has also been virulently attacked for his theories of the feminine and for elevating his personal prejudices to the height of universal pronouncement.

Freud's Women examines biography, case history, dreams, correspondence, journals, and theory to chart Freud's views on femininity. It also tells the many stories of Freud's women and explores their influence on him and his on them: dutiful daughter Anna, who carried on his work; the novelist and turn-of-the-century femme fatale, Lou Salomete Marie Bonaparte, who mixed royalty and perversity with effortless ease and became the head of the French psychoanalytic movement; the early hysterics who were the cornerstone of psychoanalysis--all these and more emerge vividly from the pages of this important study as it assesses Freud's contemporary legacy.