Freud - Complete Works (744 page)

   With many women we have the
impression that their years of maturity are occupied by a struggle
with their husband, just as their youth was spent in a struggle
with their mother. In the light of the previous discussions we
shall conclude that their hostile attitude to their mother is not a
consequence of the rivalry implicit in the Oedipus complex, but
originates from the preceding phase and has merely been reinforced
and exploited in the Oedipus situation. And actual analytic
examination confirms this view. Our interest must be directed to
the mechanisms that are at work in her turning away from the mother
who was an object so intensely and exclusively loved. We are
prepared to find, not a single factor, but a whole number of them
operating together towards the same end,

   Among these factors are some
which are determined by the circumstances of infantile sexuality in
general, and so hold good equally for the erotic life of boys.
First and foremost we may mention jealousy of other people - of
brothers and sisters, rivals, among whom the father too has a
place. Childhood love is boundless; it demands exclusive
possession, it is not content with less than all. But it has a
second characteristic: it has, in point of fact, no aim and is
incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction; and principally for
that reason it is doomed to end in disappointment and to give place
to a hostile attitude. Later on in life the lack of an ultimate
satisfaction may favour a different result. This very factor may
ensure the uninterrupted continuance of the libidinal cathexis, as
happens with love-relations that are inhibited in their aim. But in
the stress of the processes of development it regularly happens
that the libido abandons its unsatisfying position in order to find
a new one.

Female Sexuality

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   Another, much more specific
motive for turning away from the mother arises from the effect of
the castration complex on the creature who is without a penis. At
some time or other the little girl makes the discovery of her
organic inferiority - earlier and more easily, of course, if there
are brothers or other boys about. We have already taken note of the
three paths which diverge from this point: (
a
) the one which
leads to a cessation of her whole sexual life, (
b
) the one
which leads to a defiant over-emphasis of her masculinity, and
(
c
) the first steps towards definitive femininity. It is not
easy to determine the exact timing here or the typical course of
events. Even the point of time when the discovery of castration is
made varies, and a number of other factors seem to be inconstant
and to depend on chance. The state of the girl’s own phallic
activity plays a part; and so too does the question whether this
activity was found out or not, and how much interference with it
she experienced afterwards.

   Little girls usually discover for
themselves their characteristic phallic activity - masturbation of
the clitoris; and to begin with this is no doubt unaccompanied by
phantasy. The part played in starting it by nursery hygiene is
reflected in the very common phantasy which makes the mother or
nurse into a seducer. Whether little girls masturbate less
frequently and from the first less energetically than little boys
is not certain; quite possibly it is so. Actual seduction, too, is
common enough; it is initiated either by other children or by
someone in charge of the child who wants to soothe it, or send it
to sleep or make it dependent on them. Where seduction intervenes
it invariably disturbs the natural course of the developmental
processes, and it often leaves behind extensive and lasting
consequences.

   A prohibition of masturbation, as
we have seen, becomes an incentive for giving it up; but it also
becomes a motive for rebelling against the person who prohibits it
- that is to say, the mother, or the mother-substitute who later
regularly merges with her. A defiant persistence in masturbation
appears to open the way to masculinity. Even where the girl has not
succeeded in suppressing her masturbation, the effect of the
apparently vain prohibition is seen in her later efforts to free
herself at all costs from a satisfaction which has been spoilt for
her. When she reaches maturity her object-choice may still be
influenced by this persisting purpose. Her resentment at being
prevented from free sexual activity plays a big part in her
detachment from her mother. The same motive comes into operation
again after puberty, when her mother takes up her duty of guarding
her daughter’s chastity. We shall, of course, not forget that
the mother is similarly opposed to a boy’s masturbating and
thus provides him, too, with a strong motive for rebellion.

Female Sexuality

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   When the little girl discovers
her own deficiency, from seeing a male genital, it is only with
hesitation and reluctance that she accepts the unwelcome knowledge.
As we have seen, she clings obstinately to the expectation of one
day having a genital of the same kind too, and her wish for it
survives long after her hope has expired. The child invariably
regards castration in the first instance as a misfortune peculiar
to herself; only later does she realize that it extends to certain
other children and lastly to certain grown-ups. When she comes to
understand the general nature of this characteristic, it follows
that femaleness - and with it, of course, her mother - suffers a
great depreciation in her eyes.

   This account of how girls respond
to the impression of castration and the prohibition against
masturbation will very probably strike the reader as confused and
contradictory. This is not entirely the author’s fault. In
truth, it is hardly possible to give a description which has
general validity. We find the most different reactions in different
individuals, and in the same individual the contrary attitudes
exist side by side. With the first intervention of the prohibition,
the conflict is there, and from now on it will accompany the
development of the sexual function. Insight into what takes place
is made particularly difficult by the fact of its being so hard to
distinguish the mental processes of this first phase from later
ones by which they are overlaid and are distorted in memory. Thus,
for instance, a girl may later construe the fact of castration as a
punishment for her masturbatory activity, and she will attribute
the carrying out of this punishment to her father, but neither of
these ideas can have been a primary one. Similarly, boys regularly
fear castration from their father, although in their case, too, the
threat most usually comes from their mother.

Female Sexuality

4598

   However this may be, at the end
of this first phase of attachment to the mother, there emerges, as
the girl’s strongest motive for turning away from her, the
reproach that her mother did not give her a proper penis - that is
to say, brought her into the world as a female. A second reproach,
which does not reach quite so far back, is rather a surprising one.
It is that her mother did not give her enough milk, did not suckle
her long enough. Under the conditions of modern civilization this
may be true often enough, but certainly not so often as is asserted
in analyses. It would seem rather that this accusation gives
expression to the general dissatisfaction of children, who, in our
monogamous civilization, are weaned from the breast after six or
nine months, whereas the primitive mother devotes herself
exclusively to her child for two or three years. It is as though
our children had remained for ever unsated, as though they had
never sucked long enough at their mother’s breast. But I am
not sure whether, if one analysed children who had been suckled as
long as the children of primitive peoples, one would not come upon
the same complaint. Such is the greed of a child’s
libido!

   When we survey the whole range of
motives for turning away from the mother which analysis brings to
light - that she failed to provide the little girl with the only
proper genital, that she did not feed her sufficiently, that she
compelled her to share her mother’s love with others, that
she never fulfilled all the girl’s expectations of love, and,
finally, that she first aroused her sexual activity and then
forbade it - all these motives seem nevertheless insufficient to
justify the girl’s final hostility. Some of them follow
inevitably from the nature of infantile sexuality; others appear
like rationalizations devised later to account for the
uncomprehended change in feeling. Perhaps the real fact is that the
attachment to the mother is bound to perish, precisely because it
was the first and was so intense; just as one can often see happen
in the first marriages of young women which they have entered into
when they were most passionately in love. In both situations the
attitude of love probably comes to grief from the disappointments
that are unavoidable and from the accumulation of occasions for
aggression. As a rule, second marriages turn out much better.

Female Sexuality

4599

   We cannot go so far as to assert
that the ambivalence of emotional cathexes is a universally valid
law, and that it is absolutely impossible to feel great love for a
person without its being accompanied by a hatred that is perhaps
equally great, or vice versa. Normal adults do undoubtedly succeed
in separating those two attitudes from each other, and do not find
themselves obliged to hate their love-objects and to love their
enemy as well as hate him. But this seems to be the result of later
developments. In the first phases of erotic life, ambivalence is
evidently the rule. Many people retain this archaic trait all
through their lives. It is characteristic of obsessional neurotics
that in their object-relationships love and hate counterbalance
each other. In primitive races, too, we may say that ambivalence
predominates. We shall conclude, then, that the little girl’s
intense attachment to her mother is strongly ambivalent, and that
it is in consequence precisely of this ambivalence that (with the
assistance of the other factors we have adduced) her attachment is
forced away from her mother - once again, that is to say, in
consequence of a general characteristic of infantile sexuality.

   The explanation I have attempted
to give is at once met by a question: ‘How is it, then, that
boys are able to keep intact their attachment to their mother,
which is certainly no less strong than that of girls?’ The
answer comes equally promptly: ‘Because boys are able to deal
with their ambivalent feelings towards their mother by directing
all their hostility on to their father.’ But, in the first
place, we ought not to make this reply until we have made a close
study of the pre-Oedipus phase in boys, and, in the second place,
it is probably more prudent in general to admit that we have as yet
no clear understanding of these processes, with which we have only
just become acquainted.

Female Sexuality

4600

III

   A further question arises:
‘What does the little girl require of her mother? What is the
nature of her sexual aims during the time of exclusive attachment
to her mother?’ The answer we obtain from the analytic
material is just what we should expect. The girl’s sexual
aims in regard to her mother are active as well as passive and are
determined by the libidinal phases though which the child passes.
Here the relation of activity to passivity is especially
interesting. It can easily be observed that in every field of
mental experience, not merely that of sexuality, when a child
receives a passive impression it has a tendency to produce an
active reaction. It tries to do itself what has just been done to
it. This is part of the work imposed on it of mastering the
external world and can even lead to its endeavouring to repeat an
impression which it would have reason to avoid on account of its
distressing content. Children’s play, too, is made to serve
this purpose of supplementing a passive experience with an active
piece of behaviour and of thus, as it were, annulling it. When a
doctor has opened a child’s mouth, in spite of his
resistance, to look down his throat, the same child, after the
doctor has gone, will play at being the doctor himself, and will
repeat the assault upon some small brother or sister who is as
helpless in his hands as he was in the doctor’s. Here we have
an unmistakable revolt against passivity and a preference for the
active role. This swing-over from passivity to activity does not
take place with the same regularity or vigour in all children; in
some it may not occur at all. A child’s behaviour in this
respect may enable us to draw conclusions as to the relative
strength of the masculinity and femininity that it will exhibit in
its sexuality.

   The first sexual and sexually
coloured experiences which a child has in relation to its mother
are naturally of a passive character. It is suckled, fed, cleaned,
and dressed by her, and taught to perform all its functions. A part
of its libido goes on clinging to those experiences and enjoys the
satisfactions bound up with them; but another part strives to turn
them into activity. In the first place, being suckled at the breast
gives place to active sucking. As regards the other experiences the
child contents itself either with becoming self-sufficient - that
is, with itself successfully carrying out what had hitherto been
done for it - or with repeating its passive experiences in an
active form in play; or else it actually makes its mother into the
object and behaves as the active subject towards her. For a long
time I was unable to credit this last behaviour, which takes place
in the field of real action, until my observations removed all
doubts on the matter.