Freud - Complete Works (745 page)

Female Sexuality

4601

   We seldom hear of a little
girl’s wanting to wash or dress her mother, or tell her to
perform her excretory functions. Sometimes, it is true, she says:
‘Now let’s play that I’m the mother and
you’re the child’; but generally she fulfils these
active wishes in an indirect way, in her play with her doll, in
which she represents the mother and the doll the child. The
fondness girls have for playing with dolls, in contrast to boys, is
commonly regarded as a sign of early awakened femininity. Not
unjustly so; but we must not overlook the fact that what finds
expression here is the
active
side of femininity, and that
the little girl’s preference for dolls is probably evidence
of the exclusiveness of her attachment to her mother, with complete
neglect of her father-object.

   The very surprising sexual
activity of little girls in relation to their mother is manifested
chronologically in oral, sadistic, and finally even in phallic
trends directed towards her. It is difficult to give a detailed
account of these because they are often obscure instinctual
impulses which it was impossible for the child to grasp psychically
at the time of their occurrence, which were therefore only
interpreted by her later, and which then appear in the analysis in
forms of expression that were certainly not the original ones.
Sometimes we come across them as transferences on to the later,
father-object, where they do not belong and where they seriously
interfere with our understanding of the situation. We find the
little girl’s aggressive oral and sadistic wishes in a form
forced on them by early repression, as a fear of being killed by
her mother - a fear which, in turn, justifies her death-wish
against her mother, if that becomes conscious. It is impossible to
say how often this fear of the mother is supported by an
unconscious hostility on the mother’s part which is sensed by
the girl. (Hitherto, it is only in men that I have found the fear
of being eaten up. This fear is referred to the father, but it is
probably the product of a transformation of oral aggressivity
directed to the mother. The child wants to eat up its mother from
whom it has had its nourishment; in the case of the father there is
no such obvious determinant for the wish.)

Female Sexuality

4602

   The women patients showing a
strong attachment to their mother in whom I have been able to study
the pre-Oedipus phase have all told me that when their mother gave
them enemas or rectal douches they used to offer the greatest
resistance and react with fear and screams of rage. This behaviour
may be very frequent or even the habitual thing in children. I only
came to understand the reason for such a specially violent
opposition from a remark made by Ruth Mack Brunswick, who was
studying these problems at the same time as I was, to the effect
that she was inclined to compare the outbreak of anger after an
enema to the orgasm following genital excitation. The accompanying
anxiety should, she thought, be construed as a transformation of
the desire for aggression which had been stirred up. I believe that
this is really so and that, at the sadistic-anal level, the intense
passive stimulation of the intestinal zone is responded to by an
outbreak of desire for aggression which is manifested either
directly as rage, or, in consequence of its suppression, as
anxiety. In later years this reaction seems to die away.

   In regard to the passive impulses
of the phallic phase, it is noteworthy that girls regularly accuse
their mother of seducing them. This is because they necessarily
received their first, or at any rate their strongest, genital
sensations when they were being cleaned and having their toilet
attended to by their mother (or by someone such as a nurse who took
her place). Mothers have often told me, as a matter of observation,
that their little daughters of two and three years old enjoy these
sensations and try to get their mothers to make them more intense
by repeated touching and rubbing. The fact that the mother thus
unavoidably initiates the child into the phallic phase is, I think,
the reason why, in phantasies of later years, the father so
regularly appears as the sexual seducer. When the girl turns away
from her mother, she also makes over to her father her introduction
into sexual life.

Female Sexuality

4603

   Lastly, intense
active
wishful impulses directed towards the mother also arise during the
phallic phase. The sexual activity of this period culminates in
clitoridal masturbation. This is probably accompanied by ideas of
the mother, but whether the child attaches a sexual aim to the
idea, and what that aim is, I have not been able to discover from
my observations. It is only when all her interests have received a
fresh impetus through the arrival of a baby brother or sister that
we can clearly recognize such an aim. The little girl wants to
believe that she has given her mother the new baby, just as the boy
wants to; and her reaction to this event and her behaviour to the
baby is exactly the same as his. No doubt this sounds quite absurd,
but perhaps that is only because it sounds so unfamiliar.

   The turning-away from her mother
is an extremely important step in the course of a little
girl’s development. It is more than a mere change of object.
We have already described what takes place in it and the many
motives put forward for it; we may now add that hand in hand with
it there is to be observed a marked lowering of the active sexual
impulses and a rise of the passive ones. It is true that the active
trends have been affected by frustration more strongly; they have
proved totally unrealizable and are therefore abandoned by the
libido more readily. But the passive trends have not escaped
disappointment either. With the turning-away from the mother
clitoridal masturbation frequently ceases as well; and often enough
when the small girl represses her previous masculinity a
considerable portion of her sexual trends in general is permanently
injured too. The transition to the father-object is accomplished
with the help of the passive trends in so far as they have escaped
the catastrophe. The path to the development of femininity now lies
open to the girl, to the extent to which it is not restricted by
the remains of the pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother which she
has surmounted.

Female Sexuality

4604

   If we now survey the stage of
sexual development in the female which I have been describing, we
cannot resist coming to a definite conclusion about female
sexuality as a whole. We have found the same libidinal forces at
work in it as in the male child and we have been able to convince
ourselves that for a period of time these forces follow the same
course and have the same outcome in each.

   Biological factors subsequently
deflect those libidinal forces from their original aims and conduct
even active and in every sense masculine trends into feminine
channels. Since we cannot dismiss the notion that sexual excitation
is derived from the operation of certain chemical substances, it
seems plausible at first to expect that biochemistry will one day
disclose a substance to us whose presence produces a male sexual
excitation and another substance which produces a female one. But
this hope seems no less naïve than the other one - happily
obsolete to-day - that it may be possible under the microscope to
isolate the different exciting factors of hysteria, obsessional
neurosis, melancholia, and so on.

   Even in sexual chemistry things
must be rather more complicated. For psychology, however, it is a
matter of indifference whether there is a single sexually exciting
substance in the body or two or countless numbers of them.
Psycho-analysis teaches us to manage with a single libido, which,
it is true, has both active and passive aims (that is, modes of
satisfaction). This antithesis and, above all, the existence of
libidinal trends with passive aims, contains within itself the
remainder of our problem.

Female Sexuality

4605

IV

   An examination of the analytic
literature on the subject shows that everything that has been said
by me here is already to be found in it. It would have been
superfluous to publish this paper if it were not that in a field of
research which is so difficult of access every account of
first-hand experiences or personal views may be of value. Moreover,
there are a number of points which I have defined more sharply and
isolated more carefully. In some of the other papers on the subject
the description is obscured because they deal at the same time with
the problems of the super-ego and the sense of guilt. This I have
avoided doing. Also, in describing the various outcomes of this
phase of development, I have refrained from discussing the
complications which arise when a child, as a result of
disappointment from her father, returns to the attachment to her
mother which she had abandoned, or when, in the course of her life,
she repeatedly changes over from one position to the other. But
precisely because my paper is only one contribution among others, I
may be spared an exhaustive survey of the literature, and I can
confine myself to bringing out the more important points on which I
agree or disagree with these other writings.

   Abraham’s (1921)
description of the manifestations of the castration complex in the
female is still unsurpassed; but one would be glad if it had
included the factor of the girl’s original exclusive
attachment to her mother. I am in agreement with the principal
points in Jeanne Lampl-de Groot’s¹ (1927) important
paper. In this the complete identity of the pre-Oedipus phase in
boys and girls is recognized, and the girl’s sexual (phallic)
activity towards her mother is affirmed and substantiated by
observations. The turning-away from the mother is traced to the
influence of the girl’s recognition of castration, which
obliges her to give up her sexual object, and often masturbation
along with it. The whole development is summed up in the formula
that the girl goes through a phase of the ‘negative’
Oedipus complex before she can enter the positive one. A point on
which I find the writer’s account inadequate is that it
represents the turning-away from the mother as being merely a
change of object and does not discuss the fact that it is
accompanied by the plainest manifestations of hostility. To this
hostility full justice is done in Helene Deutsch’s latest
paper, on feminine masochism and its relation to frigidity (1930),
in which she also recognizes the girl’s phallic activity and
the intensity of her attachment to her mother. Helene Deutsch
states further that the girl’s turning towards her father
takes place
viâ
her passive trends (which have already
been awakened in relation to her mother). In her earlier book
(1925) the author had not yet set herself free from the endeavour
to apply the Oedipus pattern to the pre-Oedipus phase, and she
therefore interpreted the little girl’s phallic activity as
an identification with her father.

  
¹
The author’s name was given when it
appeared in the
Zeitschrift
as ‘A. Lampl-de
Groot’, and I correct it here at her request.

Female Sexuality

4606

   Fenichel (1930) rightly
emphasizes the difficulty of recognizing in the material produced
in analysis what parts of it represent the unchanged content of the
pre-Oedipus phase and what parts have been distorted by regression
(or in other ways). He does not accept Jeanne Lampl-de
Groot’s assertion of the little girl’s active attitude
in the phallic phase. He also rejects the ‘displacement
backwards’ of the Oedipus complex proposed by Melanie Klein
(1928), who places its beginnings as early as the commencement of
the second year of life. This dating of it, which would also
necessarily imply a modification of our view of all the rest of the
child’s development, does not in fact correspond to what we
learn from the analyses of adults, and it is especially
incompatible with my findings as to the long duration of the
girl’s pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother. A means of
softening this contradiction is afforded by the reflection that we
are not as yet able to distinguish in this field between what is
rigidly fixed by biological laws and what is open to movement and
change under the influence of accidental experience. The effect of
seduction has long been familiar to us and in just the same way
other factors - such as the date at which the child’s
brothers and sisters are born or the time when it discovers the
difference between the sexes, or again its direct observations of
sexual intercourse or its parents’ behaviour in encouraging
or repelling it - may hasten the child’s sexual development
and bring it to maturity.

Female Sexuality

4607

   Some writers are inclined to
reduce the importance of the child’s first and most original
libidinal impulses in favour of later developmental processes, so
that - to put this view in its most extreme form - the only role
left to the former is merely to indicate certain paths, while the
intensities which flow along those paths are supplied by later
regressions and reaction-formations. Thus, for instance, Karin
Horney (1926) is of the opinion that we greatly over-estimate the
girl’s primary penis-envy and that the strength of the
masculine trend which she develops later is to be attributed to a
secondary
penis-envy which is used to fend off her feminine
impulses and, in particular, her feminine attachment to her father.
This does not tally with my impressions. Certain as is the
occurrence of later reinforcements through regression and
reaction-formation, and difficult as it is to estimate the relative
strength of the confluent libidinal components, I nevertheless
think that we should not overlook the fact that the first libidinal
impulses have an intensity of their own which is superior to any
that come later and which may indeed be termed incommensurable. It
is undoubtedly true that there is an antithesis between the
attachment to the father and the masculinity complex; it is the
general antithesis that exists between activity and passivity,
masculinity and femininity. But this gives us no right to assume
that only one of them is primary and that the other owes its
strength merely to the force of defence. And if the defence against
femininity is so energetic, from what other source can it draw its
strength than from the masculine trend which found its first
expression in the child’s penis-envy and therefore deserves
to be named after it?