The power of anatomy to gras
Can psychology do any better? We are used to consider masculine and feminine as mental qualities as well, and have also carried thenotion of bi-sexuality over into mental life. We speak of a human being, whether male or female, behaving in amasculine or a feminine way. But you will at once observe that that is simply following the lead of anatomy andconvention. You can give the concepts of masculine and feminine no new content. The difference is not apsychological one; when you say `masculine,' you mean as a rule 'active', and when you say 'feminine' you mean'passive.' Now it is quite true that there is such a correlation. The male sexual cell is active and mobile; it seeks outthe female one, while the latter, the ovum, is stationary, and waits passively. This behaviour of the elementaryorganisms of sex is more or less a model of the behaviour of the individuals of each sex insexual intercourse. The male pursues the female for the purpose of sexual union, seizesher and pushes hisway into her. But with that you have, so far as psychology goes, reduced the quality ofmasculinity to thefactor of aggressiveness. You will begin to doubt whether you have hit upon anythingfundamental here, when you consider that in many classes of animals the female is the stronger and moreaggressive party, and the male is only active in the single act of sexual intercourse. That is the case, forinstance, with spiders. The functions of caring for the young, and of rearing them, seems to us soessentially feminine, are not, among animals, always associated with the female sex.
In some species of animals,quite high in the scale, one finds that the sexes share inthe duties of looking after the young, or even that the male devotes himself toit alone. Even in the sphere of human sexual life, one soon notices howunsatisfactory it is to identify masculine behaviour with activity and femininewith passivity. The mother is in every sense of the word active in her relationswith her child; it is just as true to say that she gives suck to the child, asthat she lets it suck her breasts. The further you go from the sexual field in thenarrower sense of the word the more apparent it becomes that the two ideas donot coincide. Women can display great activity in a variety of directions,while men cannot live together with their kind unless they develop a high degreeof passive pliability. If you thereupon say that these facts precisely provethat men and women are psychologically bi-sexual, I shall infer that you havedecided to identify activity with masculinity and passivity with femininity. ButI advise you not to do that. It seems to me to serve no good purpose and togive us no new information. One might make an attempt to characterisefemininity psychologically by saying that it involves a preference for passiveaims. That is naturally not the same as passivity; it may require a good dealof activity to achieve a passive end. It may be that the part played by womenin the sexual function leads them to incline towards passive behaviour andpassive aims, and that this inclination extends into their ordinary life to a greateror less degree, according to whether the influence of her sexual life as amodel is limited or far-reaching. But we must take care not tounderestimate the influence of social conventions, which also force women intopassive situations. The whole thing is still very obscure. We must notoverlook one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctuallife. The repression of their aggressiveness, which is imposed upon women bytheir constitutions and by society, favours the development of strong masochisticimpulses, which have the effect of binding erotically the destructivetendencies which have been turned inwards. Masochism is then, as they say,truly feminine. But when, as so often happens, you meet with masochism in men, whatelse can you do but say that these men display obvious feminine traits ofcharacter?
You are now prepared for the conclusion that psychology cannot solve the riddleof femininity. The solutionmust, I think, come from somewhere else, and it cannot come until we have learnt ingeneral bow the differentiation of living creatures into two sexes came about. We know nothing whateverabout the matter, andyet sex-differentiation is a most remarkable characteristic in organic life, and one bywhich it is sharply cutoff from inanimate nature. Meanwhile we shall find plenty to occupy ourselves with in thestudy of those humanindividuals who are characterised as manifestly or preponderantly female by the possession of female genitals.It is in harmony with the nature of psycho-analysis that it does not try to describe what women are that would be a task which it could hardly perform but itinvestigates the way in which women develop out of children with their hi-sexualdisposition. We have learnt a certain amount about this recently, thanks to the fact that several excellent women analysts have begun to work on the problem. A special piquancy has been lent to the discussion of this subject by the question of the difference between the sexes; for, whenever acomparison was made which seemed to be unfavourable to their sex, the ladies were able toexpress a suspicion, that we, the men analysts, had never overcome certain deep-rooted prejudices against the feminine, and that consequently our investigations suffered from bias.
On the other hand, on the basis of hi-sexuality, we found it easy to avoid any impoliteness. We had only to say: `This does not apply to you. You are an exception, in this respect you are more masculine than feminine.'
In approaching the study of the sexual development of women we start with two preconceptions: firstly, that, as in the case of men, the constitutionwill not adapt itself to its function without a struggle; and secondly, that the decisive changes will have been set in motion or completed before puberty. Both of these preconceptions turn out to be justified. Further, a comparison with what happens in the case of the boy shows us that the development of the little girl into a normal woman is more difficult and more complicated; for she has two additional tasks to perform, to which there is nothing corresponding in the development of the man. Let us follow the parallel from the very beginning. Certainly the original material is different in the boy and the girl; it does not require psycho-analysis to find that out. The difference in the formation of their genital organs is accompanied by other bodily differences, which are too familiar for me to need to mention them. In their instinctual disposition, as well, there are differences which fore shadow the later nature of the woman. The little girl is as a rule less aggressive, less defiant, and less self-sufficient; she seems to have a greater need for affection to be shown her, and therefore to be more dependent and docile. The fact that she is more easily and more quickly taught to control her excretions is very probably only the resultof this docility; urine and stool are, as we know, the first gifts that the child can offer to those who look afterit, and control over them is the first concession which can be wrung from the instinctual life of the child. One gets the impression, too, that the little girl is more intelligent and more lively than the boy of the same age; she is more inclined to meet the external world half way, and, at the same time, she makes strongerobject-cathexes. I do not know whether the view that she gets a start in development has been confirmed by more exact observations, but in any case it is quite clear that the little girl cannot be called intellectually backward. But these sexual differences are of no great importance; they can be outbalanced by individual variations. For the purposes which we have immediately in view they may be left on one side.
Both sexes seem to pass throughthe early phases of libidinal development in the same way. One might have expected that already in the sadistic-anal phase we should find that the girl showed less aggressiveness; but this is not the case. Women analysts have found from the analysis of children's play that the aggressive impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired as regards copiousness and violence. With the on set of the phallic phase the difference between the sexes becomes much less important than their similarities. We are now obliged to recognise that the little girl is a little man. As we know, in the boy this phase is characterised by the fact that he has discovered how to obtain pleasurable sensations from his little penis and associates its state of excitation with his ideas about sexual intercourse. The little girl does the same with her even smaller clitoris. It seems as though with her, all her masturbatory actions center round this penis-equivalent, and that the actual female vagina is still undiscovered by both sexes. It is true that, here and there, reports have been made that tell us ofearly vaginal sensations as well; but it cannot be easy to discriminate between these and anal sensations or from sensations of the vaginal vestibule; in any case they cannot play a very important role. We may assume that, in the phallic phase of the girl, the clitoris is the dominant erotogenic zone. But it is not destined to remain so; with the change to femininity, the clitoris must give up to the vagina its sensitivity, and,with it, its importance, either wholly or in part. This is one of the two tasks which have to be performed in the course of the woman's development; the more fortunate man has only to continue at the time of his sexualmaturity what he has already practised during the period of early sexual expansion. We shall return to the part played by the clitoris, but shall now pass on to the second task with which the girl's development is burdened. The first love-object of the boy is his mother, and she remains as such in the formation of his Oedipus-complex, and, ultimately, throughout his whole life. For the little girl, too, her mother must be her first object (together with figures of nurses and other attendants that merge into hers) ; the first object-cathexes, indeed, follow the lines of the satisfaction of the great and simple needs of life, and the circumstances in which the child is nursed are the same for both sexes. In the Oedipus situation, however, the father has become the little girl's love-object, and it is from him that, in the normal course of development, she should find her way to her ultimate object-choice. The girl has, then, in the course of time to change both her erotogenic zone and her object, while the boy keeps both of them unchanged. The question then arises of how this comes about. Inparticular, how does the little girl pass from an attachment to her mother to an attachment to her father? or, in other words, how does she pass from hermasculine phase into the feminine phase which has been biologically markedout for her?
Now it would provide us with an ideally simple solution of the problem if we could assume that, from acertain age onwards, the elementary influence of hetero-sexual attraction makes itself felt, and draws the little girl towards men, while the same principle allows the boy to keep to his mother. One could even assume further, that, in doing this, children are following a hint given them by the sexual preferences of their parents. But things are not so convenient as this. We hardly know whether we can seriously believe in the mysterious and unanalysable force, of which the poets sing so enthusiastically. Painstaking investigations have resulted in findings of quite a different kind, the material for which, at all events, was easily obtainable. You must know that the number of women who until late in life remain tenderly attached to father-objects, or indeed to their real fathers, is very large. We have made the most surprising discoveries about these women who display intense and prolonged father-fixations. We knew, of course, that there had been an earlier stage in which they were attached to their mother; but we did not know that it was so rich in content, that it persisted so long, and that it could leave behind it so many occasions for fixations and predispositions. During this time, their father is no more than an irksome rival. In many cases the attachment to the mother lasts beyond the fourth year; almost everything that we find later in the father relation was already present in that attachment, and has been subsequently transferred on to the father. In short, we gain the conviction that one cannot understand women, unless one estimates this pre-oedipal attachment to the mother at its proper value.
Now we should very much like to know what the libidinal relations of the little girl to her mother are. The answer is that they are manifold. Since they pass through all the three phases of infantile sexuality, they take on the characteristics of each separate phase, and express themselves by means of oral, sadistic-anal, and phallic wishes. These wishes represent active as well us passive impulses; if one relates them to the differentiation of the sexes which comes about later (which one should avoid doing as far as possible), one can speak of them as masculine and feminine. They are, in addition, completely ambivalent—both of a tender and of a hostile-aggressive nature. It often happens that the hostile wishes only become apparent after they have been turned into anxiety-ideas. Itis not always easy to point out the way in which these early sexual wishes are formulated. What is most clearly expressed is the desire to get the mother with child as well as the corresponding one, to have a child by the mother; both belong to the phallic phase, and seem sufficiently strange, though their existence is established beyond all doubt by analytic observation. Theattraction of these investigations lies in the extraordinary facts which they bring to light.Thus, for instance, one discovers the fear of being murdered or poisoned, which may later on formthe nucleus of aparanoic disorder, already present in this preoedipal stage and directed against the mother. Or, to take another case. You will remember that interesting episode in the history of analyticalresearch which causedme so many painful hours? At the time when my main interest was directed on to thediscovery of infantilesexual traumas, almost all my female patients told me that they had been seduced bytheir fathers. Eventually I was forced to the conclusion that these stories were false, and thus Icame to understand that hysterical symptoms spring from phantasies and not from real events. Only laterwas I able to recognise in this phantasy of seduction by the father theexpression of thetypical Oedipus-complex in woman. And now we find, in the early pre-oedipal historyof girls, the seduction-phantasyagain; but the seducer is invariably the mother. Here, however, the phantasyhas a footing in reality; for it must in fact have been the mother who aroused (perhaps for the first time)pleasurable sensationsin the child's genitals in the ordinary course of attending to its bodily needs. I dare say that you a reprepared to suspect that this description of the richness and strength of the sexual relations of the little girl to her mother is very much exaggerated. One has, after all, plenty of opportunity of watching little girls, and one notices nothing of the sort. But the objection cannothe sustained. One can see enough of such things in children, if one understands how to observe them and, besides this, you must consider how little the child is able to give preconscious expression to its sexual wishes, and how little it can communicate them. We are therefore actingentirely within our rights in studying the subsequent traces and consequences of this emotional field inpersons in whom these developmental processes show a particularly clear, or even exaggerated, growth. Pathology, as you know, has always assisted us, by isolation and exaggeration, in making recognisable things which would normally remain hidden. And since our researches have been carried out on people who are by no means grossly abnormal, we may, I think, consider the results of them worthy of belief. We will now turn our attention to the question of why this strong attachment of the girl to her mother comes to grief.
We are aware that that is what usually happens to it; it is fated to give way to an attachment to her father. And here we stumble on a fact which points in the right direction. This step in development is not merely a question of a change of object. The turning away from the mother occurs in an atmosphere of antagonism; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. Such a hatred may be very marked and may persist throughout an entire lifetime; it may later on be carefully over compensated; as a rule, one part of it is overcome, while another part persists. The outcome is naturally very strongly influenced by the actual events of later years. We will confine ourselves to studying this hatred at the actual time at which the turn towards the father takes place, and to inquiring into its motives. We are then met by a long list of complaints and grievances, levelled at the mother, which are intended to justify the antagonistic feelings of the child; they vary much in value, and we shall examine them further.
Many are obvious rationalisations, and we have yet to find the true source of the antagonism. I hope you will bear with me, if on this occasion I conduct you through all the details of a psycho-analytical investigation. The complaint against the mother that harks back furthest, is that she has given the child too little milk, which is taken as indicating alack of love. Now this complaint has a certain justification in the civilised humanfamily. The mothers often have not enough nourishment for their children, and content themselves with nursing them for nine months or six or even less. Among primitive peoples children remain at the breast for as long as two or three years. The figure of the wet-nurse is as a rule merged in that of the mother; where this does not take place, the complaint against the mother takes another form, namely, that she sent the nurse, who was so ready to feed the child, away too soon. But whatever may have been the true state of affairs, it is impossiblethat the child's complaint can be as often justified as it is met with. It looks far more as if the desire of the child for its first form of nourishmentis altogether insatiable, and as if it never got over the pain of losing the mother's breast. I should not be at all surprised if an analysis of a member of a primitive race, who must have sucked the mother's breast when he could already run and talk, brought the same complaint to light. It is probable, too, that the fear of poisoning is connected with weaning. Poison is the nourishment that makes one ill. Perhaps, moreover, the child traces his early illnesses back tothis frustration. It requires a good deal of intellectual training before we can believe in chance; primitive and uneducated people, and certainly children,can give a reason for everything that happens. Perhaps this reason was originally a motive (in the animistic sense). In many social strata, even to this day, no one can die, without having been done to death by some one else,preferably by the doctor. And the regular reaction of a neurotic to the deathof some one intimately connected is to accuse himself of beingthe cause of the death.
The next accusation against the mother flares up when the next child makes its appearance in the nursery. If possible this complaint retains the connection with oral frustration: the mother could not or would not give the child any more milk, because she needed the nourishment for the new arrival. In cases where the two children were born so close together that lactation was interfered with by the second pregnancy, this complaint has areal foundation. It is a remarkable fact that even when the difference between the children's ages is only eleven months, the older one is nevertheless able to take in the state of affairs. But it is not only the milk that the child grudges the undesired interloper and rival, but all the other evidences of motherly care. It feels that it has been dethroned, robbed and had its rights invaded, and so it directs a feeling of jealous hatred against its little brother or sister, and develops resentment against its faithless mother, which often finds expression in a change for the worse in its behaviour. It begins to be `naughty, 'irritable, intractable, and unlearns the control which it has acquired over its excretions. All this has been known for a long time, and is accepted as self-evident, but we seldom form a right idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacious hold they have on the child, and the amount of influence they exert on its later development. These jealous feelings are particularly important because they are always being fed anew during the later years of childhood, and the whole shattering experience is repeated with the arrival of every new brother or sister. Even if the child remains its mother's favourite, things are not very different; its demands for affection are boundless; it requires exclusive attention and will allow no sharing whatever. A potent source of the child 'santagonism against its mother is found in its many sexual wishes, which change with its libidinal phases. Thesecannot, for the most part, be satisfied. The strongest of these frustrations occurs in the phallic stage, when the mother forbids pleasurable activities centring round the genital organs —often with an accompaniment of harsh threats and every indication of disapproval—activities to which, after all, she herself stimulated the child. It might be thought that we had here motives enough for the little girl's alienation from her mother. In that case it might be our view that estrangement follows inevitably from the nature of infantile sexuality, from the child's unlimited demands for love and the unfulfillable nature of its sexual wishes. One might even believe that this first love relation of the child is doomed to extinction for the very reason that it is the first, for these early object-cathexes are always ambivalent to avery high degree; alongside the child's intense love there is always a strong aggressive tendency present, and the more passionately the child loves an object, the more sensitive it will be to disappointments and frustrations coming from it.
In the end, the love is bound to capitulate to the accumulated hostility. Or, on the other hand, one might reject the idea of a fundamental ambivalence of this kind in the libidinal cathexes,and point to the fact that it is the peculiar nature of the mother-child relationship which leads, equally inevitably, to the disturbance of the child's love, since even the mildest form of education cannot avoid using compulsion and introducing restrictions, and every such encroachment on its freedom must call forth as a reaction in the child a tendency to rebellion and aggressiveness. A discussion of these possibilities might, I think, bevery interesting, but at this point an objection suddenly arises, which forces our attention in another direction. All of these factors—slights, disappointments in love, jealousy and seduction followed by prohibition—operate as well in the relationship between the boy and his mother, and yet are not sufficient to alienate him from the mother object. If we do not find something which is specific for the girl, and which is not present at all, or not present in the same way in the case of the boy, we shall not have explained the ending of the girl attachment to her mother. I think that we have discovered this specific factor, a place where we might indeed have expected it, but in a surprising form. In a place where we might have expected it, I say, for it lies in the castration complex. The anatomical distinction between the sexes must, after all, leave its mark in mental life. It was a surprise, however,to discover from analyses that the girl holds her mother responsible for her lack of a penis, and never forgives her for that deficiency. You will note that we ascribe a castration-complex to the female sex as well as to the male. We have good grounds for doing so, but that complex has not the same content in girls as in boys. In the boy the castration-complexis formed after he has learnt from the sight of the female genitals that the sexual organ which he prizes so highly is not a necessary part of every human body. He remembers then the threats which he has brought on himself by his playing with his penis, he begins to believe in them, and thence forward he comes under the influence of castration-anxiety, which supplies the strongest motive force for his further development. The castration-complex in the girl, as well, is started by the sight of the genital organs of the other sex. She immediately notices the difference, and—it must be admitted—its significance. She feels herself at a great disadvantage, and often declares that she would 'like to have something like that too,' and falls avictim to penis-envy, which leaves ineradicable traces on her development and character formation, and, even in the most favourable instances, is not overcome without agreat expenditure of mental energy. That the girl recognises the fact that she lacks a penis, does not mean that she accepts its absence lightly. On the contrary, she clings for a long time to the desire to get something like it, and believes in that possibility for an extraordinary number of years; and even at a time when her knowledge of reality has long since led her to abandon the fulfilment of this desire as being quite unattainable, analysis proves that it still persists in the unconscious, and retains a considerable charge ofenergy. The desire after all to obtain the penis for which she so much longs may even contribute to the motives that impel a grown-up woman to come to analysis; and what she quite reasonably expects to get from analysis, such as the capacity to pursue an intellectual career, can often be recognised as a sublimated modificationof this repressed wish
One cannot very well doubt the importance of penis-envy. Perhaps you will regard the hypothesisthat envy and jealousy play a greater part in the mental life of women than they do in that of men as anexample of male unfairness. Not that I think that these characteristics are absent in men, or that they have no other originin women except envy of the penis, but I am inclined to ascribe the greater amount of them to be found in women to this latter influence. Many analysts, however, tend to minimize the importance of this first wave of penis-envy in the phallic phase. They think that the signs one comes across of this attitude in women are in the main a secondary formation, which has come about through regression to the early infantile impulse in question on the occasion of some subsequent conflict. Now this is one of the general problems ofdepth psychology. Inthe case of many pathological—or merely unusual—instinctual attitudes, forexample with all sexualperversions, the question arises how much of their force is to be attributed to earlyinfantile fixations and how much to the influence of later experiences and developments. It is almost alwaysa question of complemental series, such as we have postulated when dealing with the aetiology of the neuroses. Both sets of factors share in the causation in a varying proportion; a less in the one set will be balanced by a more in the other. The infantile factor in every case paves the way; it is not always the decisive force, though it often is. But with regard to the particular case of penis-envy, I should like to come down decidedly infavour of the preponderance of the infantile factor. The discovery of her castration is a turning-point in the life of the girl. Threelines of development diverge from it; one leads to sexual inhibition or to neurosis, the second to a modification of character in the sense of masculinity complex, and the third to normal femininity. We have learnt a good deal, though not everything, about all three. The fundamental content of the first is that the little girl, who has hit her to lived a masculine life, and has been able to obtain pleasure through the excitation of her clitoris, and has connected this behaviour with the sexual wishes (often of an active character) which she has directed towards her mother, finds her enjoyment of phallic sexuality spoilt by the influence of penis-envy. She is wounded in her self-love by the unfavourable comparison with the boy who is so much better equipped, and therefore gives up the masturbatory satisfaction which she obtained from her clitoris, repudiates her love towards her mother, and at the same time often represses a good deal of her sexual impulses ingeneral. No doubt this turning away from her mother does not come to pass at one blow, for at first the girl looks on her castration as a personal misfortune, and only gradually extends it to other females, and eventually to her mother. Her love had as its object the phallic mother; with the discovery that the mother is castrated it becomes possible to drop her as a love object, so that the incentives to hostility which have been so long accumulating, get the upper hand. This means, therefore, that as aresult of the discovery of the absence of a penis, women are as much depreciated in the eyes of the girl as in the eyes of the boy, and later, perhaps, of the man. You all know what an overwhelming aetiological importance is attributed by neurotics to their masturbatory practices. They make them responsible for all their troubles, and we have the greatest difficulty in getting them to believe that they are wrong. But as a matter of fact we ought to admit that they are in the right, for masturbation is the executive agent of infantile sexuality, from the faulty development of which they are suffering. The difference is that what the neurotics are blaming is the masturbation of the pubertal stage; the infantile masturbation, which is the one that really matters, has for the most part been forgotten by them. I wish I could find an opportunity for giving you a circumstantial account of how important all the factual details of early masturbation are in determining the subsequent neurosis or character of the individual concerned—such details as whether it was discovered or not, how the parents combat edit or whether they permitted it, and whether the subject succeeded in suppressing it himself. All these details will have left indelible traces upon his development. But in fact I am reiieved that it is not necessary for me to do this; it would be a difficult and weary task, and at the end you would embarrass me because you would quite certainly ask for some practical advice as to how one should behave towards the masturbation of small children as a parent or educator. The history of the development of girls, which is the subject I am telling you about, offers an instance of the child itself striving to freeitself from masturbation. But it does not always succeed. Where penis-envy has aroused a strong impulse against clitoritic masturbation, but where the latter will not give way, there follows a fierce battle for freedom, in which the girl herself takes over, as it were, the rule of the mother whom she has set aside, and expresses her whole dissatisfaction with the inferior clitoris, by striving against the gratification derived from it. Many years later,when her masturbatory activity has long ago been suppressed, we may find an interest persisting which we must interpret as a defence against the temptation, which she still fears. It finds expression in feelings of sympathy for persons to whom she ascribes similar difficulties; it may enter into her motives for marriage, and may indeed determine her choice of a husband or lover. The settling of the problem of infantile masturbation is truly no easy or unimportant task. When the little girl gives up clitoritic masturbation, she surrenders a certain amount of activity. Her passive side has now the upperhand, and in turning to her father she is assisted in the main by passive instinctual impulses. You will see that a step in development, such as this one, which gets rid of phallic activity, must smooth the path for femininity. If in the process not too much is lost through repression, this femininity may prove normal. The wish with which the girl turns to her father, is, no doubt, ultimately the wish for the penis, which her mother has refused her and which she now expects from her father. The feminine situation is, however,only established when the wish for the penis is replaced by the wish for a child— the child taking the place of the penis, in accordance with the old symbolic equation. It does not escape us that at an earlier stage the girl has already desired a child, before the phallic phase was interfered with; that was the meaning of her playing with dolls. But this play was not really an expression of her femininity, it served, in identifying her with her mother, the purpose of substituting activity for passivity. She was the mother, and the doll was herself; now she could do everything to the doll that her mother used to do with her. Only with the onset of the desire for a penis does the doll-child become a child by the father, and, thence forward, the strongest feminine wish. Her happiness is great indeed when this desire for a child one day finds a real fulfilment; but especially is this so if the child is a little boy, who brings the longed-for penis with him. In the idea of having a child by the father, the accent is often enough placed on the child, and not on the father. Thus the old masculine wish for the possession of a penis still shows under the completely developed femininity. But perhaps we should rather think of this desirefor a penis as something essentially feminine in itself. With the transference of the child-penis wish on to her father, the girl enters into the situation of the Oedipus-complex. The hostility against her mother, which did not require to be newly created, now receives a great reinforcement, for her mother becomes a rival, who gets everything from her father that she herself wants. The girl's Oedipus-complex has long concealed from us the pre-oedipal attachment to her mother which is so important and which leaves behind it such lasting fixations. For the girl, the Oedipal situation is the conclusion of a long and difficultperiod of development, it is a kind of temporary solution of her problem, astate of equilibrium which is not lightly to be given up, especially as the onset of the latency period is not far off. And here we notice a difference between the two sexes in the relation between the Oedipus-complex and the castration-complex,a difference which is probably a momentous one. The boy's Oedipus-complex, in which he desires his mother, and wants to get rid of his father as a rival, develops naturally out of the phase of phallic sexuality. The threat of castration, however, forces him to give up this attitude. Under the influence of the danger of losing his penis, he abandons his Oedipus-complex; it isr epressed and in the most normal cases entirely destroyed, while a severe super-egois set up as its heir. What happens in the case of the girl is almost the opposite. The castration-complex prepares the way for the Oedipus-complexinstead of destroying it; under the influence of her penis-envy the girl is driven from her attachment to her mother, and enters the Oedipus situation, as though it were a haven of refuge. When the fear of castration disappears, the primary motive is removed, which has forced the boy to overcome his Oedipus-complex. The girl remains in the Oedipus situation for an indefinite period, she only abandonsit late in life, incompletely. The formation of the super-ego must suffer inthese circumstances; it cannot attain the strength and independence which give it its cultural importance and feminists are not pleased if one points to the way in which this factor affects the development of the average feminine character.
Let us now go back a little. We have mentioned, as the second possible reaction after the discovery of female castration, the development of a strong masculinity complex. What is meant by this is that the girl refuses, as it were, to accept the unpalatable fact, and, in an outburst of defiance, exaggerates still further the masculinity which she has displayed hit her to. She clings to her clitoritic activities, and takes refuge in an identification either with the phallic mother, or with the father. What is the determinant which leads to this state of affairs? We canpicture it as nothing other than a constitutional factor: the possession of a greater degree of activity, such as isusually characteristic of the male. The essential thing about the process is, after all, that at this point of development the onset of passivity, which makes possible the change over to femininity, is avoided. The most extreme achievement of this masculinity complex seems to occur when itinfluences the girl'sobject-choice in the direction of manifest homosexuality. Analytic experience teaches us, it is true, that female homosexuality is seldom or never a direct continuation of infantile masculinity. It seems to be characteristic of female homosexuals that they too take the father as love-object for a while, and thus become implicated in the Oedipus situation. Then, however, they are driven by the inevitable disappointments which they experience from the father into a regression to their early masculinity complex. One must not overestimate the importance of these disappointments; girls who eventually achieve femininity also experience them without the same results. The preponderance of the constitutional factor seems undeniable, but the two phases in the development of female homosexualityare admirably reflected in the behaviour of homosexuals, who just as often and just as obviously play the parts of mother and child towards each other as those of man and wife.
What I have been telling you is what one might call the pre-history of women. It is an achievement of the last few years, and you may have been interested in it as an example of detailed work in analysis. Since women are our theme, I am going to permit myself to mention by name a few women to whom this investigation owes important contributions. Dr.Ruth Mack Brunswick was the first to describe a case of neurosis which went back to a fixation in the pre-oedipal state, and in which the Oedipus situation was not reached at all. It took the form of paranoia with delusions of jealousy, and proved accessible to treatment. Dr. Jeanne Lamplde Groot has from her own unequivocal observations established the fact of the girl's phallic activities towards her mother which seem so hard to believe. Dr. Helene Deutsch has shown that the erotic behaviour of homosexual woman reproduces the mother-child-relationship. It is not my intention to trace the further course of femininity through puberty up to the time of maturity. Our views on the subject are indeed not complete enough for me to do so. In what follows, I will merely mention a few separate points. Bearing in mind the early history of femininity, I will emphasise the fact that its development remains open to disturbance from the traces left behind by the previous masculine period. Regressions to fixations at these pre-oedipal phases occur very often; in many women we actually find a repeated alternation of periods in which either masculinity or femininity has obtained the upper hand. What women call 'the enigma of woman' is probably based in part upon these signs ofbi-sexuality in female life. But another question seems to have become ripe for discussion in the course of these investigations. We have called the motor force of sexual life 'libido.' This sexual life is dominated by the polarity, masculine-feminine;one is therefore tempted to consider the relation of the libido to this polarity. It would not be surprising if it turned out that each form of sexuality had its own special form of libido, so that one kind of libido pursued the aims of the masculine sexual life, and the other those of the feminine. Nothingof the sort, however, is the case. There is only one libido which is as much in the service of the male as of the female sexual function. To it itself we can assign no sex; if, in accordance with the conventional analogy between activity and masculinity, we choose to call it masculine, we must not forgett hat it also includes impulses with passive aims. Nevertheless the phrase `feminine libido' cannot possibly be justified. It is our impression that more violence is done to the libido when it is forced into the service of the female function; and that—to speak teleologically—Nature has paid less careful attention to the demands of the female function than to those of masculinity. And—again speaking teleologically—this may bebased on the fact that the achievement of the biological aim is entrusted to the aggressiveness of the male, andis to some extent independent of the co-operation of the female.
The sexualfrigidity of women, the frequency of which seems to confirm this point, is a phenomenon which is insufficiently understood. Sometimes itis psychogenic, and, if so, it is accessible to influence; but in other cases one is led to assume that it is constitutionally conditioned or even partly caused by an anatomical factor.
I have promised to put before you a few more of the mental characteristics of mature femininity, as we find them in our analytical observation.We do not claim for these assertions more than that they are true on the whole; and it is not always easy to distinguish between what is due to the influence of the sexual function and what to socialtraining. We attribute to women a greater amount of narcissism (and this influences their object-choice) so that for them to be loved is a stronger need than to love.Their vanity is partly a further effect of penis-envy, for they are driven to rate their physical charms more highly as a belated compensation for their original sexual inferiority. Modesty,which is regardedas a feminine characteristic par excellence, but is far more a matter of convention than one would think, was, in our opinion, originally designed to hide the deficiency in her genitals.We do not forget that, later on, it takes over other functions. People say that women contributed but little to the discoveries and inventions of civilisation, but perhaps after all they did discover one technical process, that of plaiting and weaving. If this is so, one is tempted to guess at the unconscious motive at the back of this achievement. Nature herself might be regarded a shaving provided a model for imitation, by causing pubic hair to grow at the period of sexual maturity so as to veil the genitals. The step that remained to be taken was to attach the hairs permanently together,where as in the body they are fixed in the skin and only tangled with one another. If you repudiate this idea asbeing fantastic, and accuse me of having an idee fixe on the subject of the influence exercised by the lackof a penis upon the development of femininity, I cannot of course defend myself.The conditions of object-choice in womenare often enough made unrecognisable by social considerations. Where that choice is allowed to manifestitself freely, itoften occurs according to the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl would haveliked to be. If the girl has remained attached to her father, if that is to say she has remained in theOedipus-complex, then she chooses according to a father-type. Since, when she turned from her mother to herfather, the antagonistic part of her ambivalent feelings remained directed on to her mother, such a choiceshould ensure a happy marriage. But very often a factor emerges which in general imperils such solutions ofthe ambivalence-conflict. The antagonism which has been left behind may follow in the wake of the positive attachment, and extend to the new object. The husband, who had in the first instance inherited his position from the father, comes in the course of time to inherit the position of the mother as well. In this way it may easily occur that the second part of a woman's life is taken up with a struggle against her husband, just as the shorter earlier part was occupied with rebellion against her mother. After this reaction has been lived out, a second marriage may easily turn out far more satisfactorily. Another change in a woman's nature, for which neither husband nor wife are prepared, may come about after the first child has been born. Under the influence ofher own motherhood, her identification with her mother may be revived (an identification against which she has struggled up to the time of her marriage) and may attract to itself all the libido that she has at her disposal, so that the repetition-compulsion may reproduce an unhappy marriageof the parents. That the old factor of lack of penis has not even yet forfeited its power is seen in the different reactionsof the mother according to whether the child born is a son or a daughter. The only thing that brings a mother undiluted satisfaction is her relation to a son; it is quite the most complete relationship between human beings,and the one that is the most free from ambivalence. The mother can transfer to her son all the ambition which she has had to suppress in herself, and she can hope to get from him the satisfaction of all that has remained to her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not firmly assured until the woman has succeeded in making her husband into her child and in acting the part of a mother towards him.
The mother-identification of the woman can be seen to have two levels, the pre-oedipal, which is based on the tender attachment to the mother and which takes her as a model, and the later one, derived from the Oedipus-complex, which tries to get rid of the mother and replace her in her relationship with the father. Much of both remains over for the future. One is really justified in saying that neither is overcome to any adequate extent during the process of development. But the phase of tender pre-oedipal attachment is the decisive one; it paves the way for her acquisition of those characteristics which will later enable her to play her part in the sexual function adequately, and carry out her inestimable social activities. In this identification, too, she acquires that attractiveness for the man which kindleshis oedipal attachment to his mother into love. Only what happens so often is, that it is not he himself who gets what he wanted, but his son. One forms the impression that the love of man and the love of woman are separated by a psychological phase difference.It must be admitted that women have but little sense of justice, and this is no doubt connected with the preponderance of envy in their mental life; for the demands of justice are a modification of envy; they lay down the conditions under which one is willing to part with it.
We say also of women that their social interests are weaker than those of men, and that their capacity for the sublimation of their instincts is less the former is no doubt derived from the unsocial character which undoubtedly attaches to all sexual relationships. Lovers find complete satisfaction in each other, and even the family resists absorption into wider organisations. The capacity for sublimation is subject to the greatest individual variations. In spite of this I cannot refrain from mentioning animpression which one receives over and over again in analytic work. A man of about thirty seems ayouthful, and, in a sense, an incompletely developed individual, of whom we expect that he will be able to make good use of the possibilities of development, which analysis lays open to him. But a woman of about the same age frequently staggers us by her psychological rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up its final positions, and seems powerless to leave them for others. There are no paths open to her for further development; it is as though the whole process had been gone through, and remained inaccessible to influence for the future; as though, in fact, the difficult development which leads to femininity had exhausted all the possibilities of the individual. As the rapeutists we deplore this state of affairs, even when we are successful in removing her sufferings bysolving her neurotic conflict.
That is all I had to say to you about the psychology of women. It is admittedly incomplete and fragmentary, and sometimes it does not sound altogether flattering. You must not forget, however, that we have only described women in so far as their natures are determined by their sexual function.
The influence of this factor is, of course, very far-reaching, but we must remember that an individual woman may be a human being apart from this. If you want to know more about femininity, you must interrogate your own experience, or turn to the poets, or else wait until Science can give you more profound and more coherent information.