Freud - Complete Works (764 page)

   We shall return to the part
played by the clitoris; let us now turn to the second task with
which a girl’s development is burdened. A boy’s mother
is the first object of his love, and she remains so too during the
formation of his Oedipus complex and, in essence, all through his
life. For a girl too her first object must be her mother (and the
figures of wet-nurses and foster-mothers that merge into her). The
first object-cathexes occur in attachment to the satisfaction of
the major and simple vital needs, and the circumstances of the care
of children are the same for both sexes. But in the Oedipus
situation the girl’s father has become her love-object, and
we expect that in the normal course of development she will find
her way from this paternal object to her final choice of an object.
In the course of time, therefore, a girl has to change her
erotogenic zone and her object - both of which a boy retains. The
question then arises of how this happens: in particular, how does a
girl pass from her mother to an attachment to her father? or, in
other words, how does she pass from her masculine phase to the
feminine one to which she is biologically destined?

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   It would be a solution of ideal
simplicity if we could suppose that from a particular age onwards
the elementary influence of the mutual attraction between the sexes
makes itself felt and impels the small woman towards men, while the
same law allows the boy to continue with his mother. We might
suppose in addition that in this the children are following the
pointer given them by the sexual preference of their parents. But
we are not going to find things so easy; we scarcely know whether
we are to believe seriously in the power of which poets talk so
much and with such enthusiasm but which cannot be further dissected
analytically. We have found an answer of quite another sort by
means of laborious investigations, the material for which at least
was easy to arrive at. For you must know that the number of women
who remain till a late age tenderly dependent on a paternal object,
or indeed on their real father, is very great. We have established
some surprising facts about these women with an intense attachment
of long duration to their father. We knew, of course, that there
had been a preliminary stage of attachment to the mother, but we
did not know that it could be so rich in content and so
long-lasting, and could leave behind so many opportunities for
fixations and dispositions. During this time the girl’s
father is only a troublesome rival; in some cases the attachment to
her mother lasts beyond the fourth year of life. Almost everything
that we find later in her relation to her father was already
present in this earlier attachment and has been transferred
subsequently on to her father. In short, we get an impression that
we cannot understand women unless we appreciate this phase of their
pre-Oedipus attachment to their mother.

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   We shall be glad, then, to know
the nature of the girl’s libidinal relations to her mother.
The answer is that they are of very many different kinds. Since
they persist through all three phases of infantile sexuality, they
also take on the characteristics of the different phases and
express themselves by oral, sadistic-anal and phallic wishes. These
wishes represent active as well as passive impulses; if we relate
them to the differentiation of the sexes which is to appear later -
though we should avoid doing so as far as possible - we may call
them masculine and feminine. Besides this, they are completely
ambivalent, both affectionate and of a hostile and aggressive
nature. The latter often only come to light after being changed
into anxiety ideas. It is not always easy to point to a formulation
of these early sexual wishes; what is most clearly expressed is a
wish to get the mother with child and the corresponding wish to
bear her a child - both belonging to the phallic period and
sufficiently surprising, but established beyond doubt by analytic
observation. The attractiveness of these investigations lies in the
surprising detailed findings which they bring us. Thus, for
instance, we discover the fear of being murdered or poisoned, which
may later form the core of a paranoic illness, already present in
this pre-Oedipus period, in relation to the mother. Or another
case: you will recall an interesting episode in the history of
analytic research which caused me many distressing hours. In the
period in which the main interest was directed to discovering
infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that
they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in
the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand
that hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from
real occurrences. It was only later that I was able to recognize in
this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the
typical Oedipus complex in women. And now we find the phantasy of
seduction once more in the pre-Oedipus prehistory of girls; but the
seducer is regularly the mother. Here, however, the phantasy
touches the ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by
her activities over the child’s bodily hygiene inevitably
stimulated, and perhaps even roused for the first time, pleasurable
sensations in her genitals.

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   I have no doubt you are ready to
suspect that this portrayal of the abundance and strength of a
little girl’s sexual relations with her mother is very much
overdrawn. After all, one has opportunities of seeing little girls
and notices nothing of the sort. But the objection is not to the
point. Enough can be seen in the children if one knows how to look.
And besides, you should consider how little of its sexual wishes a
child can bring to preconscious expression or communicate at all.
Accordingly we are only within our rights if we study the residues
and consequences of this emotional world in retrospect, in people
in whom these processes of development had attained a specially
clear and even excessive degree of expansion. Pathology has always
done us the service of making discernible by isolation and
exaggeration conditions which would remain concealed in a normal
state. And since our investigations have been carried out on people
who were by no means seriously abnormal, I think we should regard
their outcome as deserving belief.

   We will now turn our interest on
to the single question of what it is that brings this powerful
attachment of the girl to her mother to an end. This, as we know,
is its usual fate: it is destined to make room for an attachment to
her father. Here we come upon a fact which is a pointer to our
further advance. This step in development does not involve only a
simple change of object. The turning away from the mother is
accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in
hate. A hate of that kind may become very striking and last all
through life; it may be carefully overcompensated later on; as a
rule one part of it is overcome while another part persists. Events
of later years naturally influence this greatly. We will restrict
ourselves, however, to studying it at the time at which the girl
turns to her father and to enquiring into the motives for it. We
are then given a long list of accusations and grievances against
the mother which are supposed to justify the child’s hostile
feelings; they are of varying validity which we shall not fail to
examine. A number of them are obvious rationalizations and the true
sources of enmity remain to be found. I hope you will be interested
if on this occasion I take you through all the details of a
psycho-analytic investigation.

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   The reproach against the mother
which goes back furthest is that she gave the child too little milk
- which is construed against her as lack of love. Now there is some
justification for this reproach in our families. Mothers often have
insufficient nourishment to give their children and are content to
suckle them for a few months, for half or three-quarters of a year.
Among primitive peoples children are fed at their mother’s
breast for two or three years. The figure of the wet-nurse who
suckles the child is as a rule merged into the mother; when this
has not happened, the reproach is turned into another one - that
the nurse, who fed the child so willingly, was sent away by the
mother too early. But whatever the true state of affairs may have
been, it is impossible that the child’s reproach can be
justified as often as it is met with. It seems, rather, that the
child’s avidity for its earliest nourishment is altogether
insatiable, that it never gets over the pain of losing its
mother’s breast. I should not be surprised if the analysis of
a primitive child, who could still suck at its mother’s
breast when it was already able to run about and talk, were to
bring the same reproach to light. The fear of being poisoned is
also probably connected with the withdrawal of the breast. Poison
is nourishment that makes one ill. Perhaps children trace back
their early illnesses too to this frustration. A fair amount of
intellectual education is a prerequisite for believing in chance;
primitive people and uneducated ones, and no doubt children as
well, are able to assign a ground for everything that happens.
Perhaps originally it was a reason on animistic lines. Even to-day
in some strata of our population no one can die without having been
killed by someone else - preferably by the doctor. And the regular
reaction of a neurotic to the death of someone closely connected
with him is to put the blame on himself for having caused the
death.

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   The next accusation against the
child’s mother flares up when the next baby appears in the
nursery. If possible the connection with oral frustration is
preserved: the mother could not or would not give the child any
more milk because she needed the nourishment for the new arrival.
In cases in which the two children are so close in age that
lactation is prejudiced by the second pregnancy, this reproach
acquires a real basis, and it is a remarkable fact that a child,
even with an age difference of only 11 months, is not too young to
take notice of what is happening. But what the child grudges the
unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the
other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned,
despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon
the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother
which often finds expression in a disagreeable change in its
behaviour. It becomes ‘naughty’, perhaps, irritable and
disobedient and goes back on the advances it has made towards
controlling its excretions. All of this has been very long familiar
and is accepted as self-evident; but we rarely form a correct idea
of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with
which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later
development. Especially as this jealousy is constantly receiving
fresh nourishment in the later years of childhood and the whole
shock is repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister. Nor
does it make much difference if the child happens to remain the
mother’s preferred favourite. A child’s demands for
love are immoderate, they make exclusive claims and tolerate no
sharing.

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   An abundant source of a
child’s hostility to its mother is provided by its
multifarious sexual wishes, which alter according to the phase of
the libido and which cannot for the most part be satisfied. The
strongest of these frustrations occur at the phallic period, if the
mother forbids pleasurable activity with the genitals - often with
severe threats and every sign of displeasure - activity to which,
after all, she herself had introduced the child. One would think
these were reasons enough to account for a girl’s turning
away from her mother. One would judge, if so, that the estrangement
follows inevitably from the nature of children’s sexuality,
from the immoderate character of their demand for love and the
impossibility of fulfilling their sexual wishes. It might be
thought indeed that this first love-relation of the child’s
is doomed to dissolution for the very reason that it is the first,
for these early object-cathexes are regularly ambivalent to a high
degree. A powerful tendency to aggressiveness is always present
beside a powerful love, and the more passionately a child loves its
object the more sensitive does it become to disappointments and
frustrations from that object; and in the end the love must succumb
to the accumulated hostility. Or the idea that there is an original
ambivalence such as this in erotic cathexes may be rejected, and it
may be pointed out that it is the special nature of the
mother-child relation that leads, with equal inevitability, to the
destruction of the child’s love; for even the mildest
upbringing cannot avoid using compulsion and introducing
restrictions, and any such intervention in the child’s
liberty must provoke as a reaction an inclination to rebelliousness
and aggressiveness. A discussion of these possibilities might, I
think, be most interesting; but an objection suddenly emerges which
forces our interest in another direction. All these factors - the
slights, the disappointments in love, the jealousy, the seduction
followed by prohibition - are, after all, also in operation in the
relation of a
boy
to his mother and are yet unable to
alienate him from the maternal object. Unless we can find something
that is specific for girls and is not present or not in the same
way present in boys, we shall not have explained the termination of
the attachment of girls to their mother.