The term was coined in 1927 by Ernest Jones, as part of his debate with Freud over the role of the phallic stage in childhood development, when he argued that "men analysts have been led to adopt an unduly phallocentric view".
[2][3] Drawing on the earlier arguments of Karen Horney,[4] Jones, in a series of articles, maintained the position that women were not disappointed creatures driven by penis envy.
[7] Jacques Derrida challenged his thesis as phallocentric, and the charge was taken up by second-wave feminism,[8] extending the focus of protest from Lacan to Freud,[9] Psychoanalysis, and male-centered thinking as a whole:[10] the way that "[t]he phallus, the center of meaning, became man's identity with himself... a masculine symbolic".
[13] Others, like the English feminist Jacqueline Rose, while accepting that "Lacan was implicated in the phallocentrism he described,"[14] nevertheless considered his analysis important for understanding how women were constituted as a split subject in society.
From a postcolonial perspective, however, such theoretical debates revealed the irrelevance of first-world feminists, with their phallocentric preoccupations, to the ordinary life of the subaltern woman in the Third World;[15] and third-wave feminism, with its concern for the marginalized, the particular, and for intersectionality, has also broadly seen the theoreticism and essentialism of feminism's earlier concern for phallocentrism as irrelevant to daily female experience.