The idea of a real event has haunted much of recent feminism's engagement with psychoanalysis, for the psychoanalytic conception of fantasy is often perceived as being at odds with the real-life events which explain or inflect women's place in the culture. There have been Jeffrey Masson's and Alice Miller's widely publicized critiques of Freud's move away from the seduction theory of neurosis to the theory of the Oedipus complex, which put sexual fantasy at the fore of both personality formation and illness.
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