Summary Of What If Freud Were Phyllis By Gloria Steinem

Steinem Project #1 In Gloria Steinem’s satirical article “What if Freud were Phyllis?” which she wrote in 1994, she puts a female perspective on Sigmund Freud’s male-centric theories. Steinem turns Sigmund into the female Phyllis and focuses on all the male-centered theories he had come up with and flips it, making the women the superior gender and therefore central to psycho-analytical theories. I agree with her conclusion that personality is influenced by culture and the environment and not in our biology like Freud believed. I also overall agree with Steinem’s version of Sigmund Freud’s points and the critical and satirical way in which she goes against many of Freud’s main points in his personality theories. Steinem’s first major point

Women are superior “painters, sculptors, musicians, poets, or anything else that demands creativity” and this is based on the fact that women have a womb which is the center for creativity (Steinem, p. 50). Men also can’t get high end job in the culinary world because they have odd, sunk-in breasts that lack substance. Therefore, they can not be a chef or a nutritionist or anything that has to do with anything to do with the sense of taste. Also due to women are the only gender involved in childbirth they should be the only gender to receive important medical jobs like surgeons, doctors, and physicians. Men’s “lack of firsthand experience with birth and nonbirth” meant that their reason ability and sense of ethics was lacking and therefore could not pursue jobs in any law or law enforcement field (Steinem, p. 50). Altogether, Steinem makes this point to prove that Freud’s ideas that men were superior to women in the work field due to their possession of a penis was preposterous. She’s saying satirically that genitals have little to do with the quality of work that men and women can

Phyllis discovered that testyria, which was “a disease marked by uncontrollable fits of emotions… so peculiar to males,” can be related to the testicles (Steinem, p. 51). Testyria is also correlated with the conditions including depression, paralysis, and in extreme cases self-harm, including slitting the skin of the penis in an attempt to imitate female organs. This example that Phyllis discovers is an exact replica of Sigmund’s theories about hysteria and how it occurs only in women based on the concept of their “wandering womb” and their fits of neurosis. Through different studies and findings in the nineteenth century, the term hysteria has changed. Now in the definition of hysteria in the dictionary it says: hysteria is found in both genders and is sometimes considered a psychological disorder related to high levels of stress in both males and females. Since after World War I, the term hysteria is often connected to the symptoms of PTSD and that is common in both men and women coming back from the war. This is just another example of one of Freud’s concepts turning to be completely false and he used this as an easy out to describe a variety of problems occurring in his female patients without doing the necessary psychological testing to find out what was really