Freud - Complete Works (765 page)

   I believe we have found this
specific factor, and indeed where we expected to find it, even
though in a surprising form. Where we expected to find it, I say,
for it lies in the castration complex. After all, the anatomical
distinction must express itself in psychical consequences. It was,
however, a surprise to learn from analyses that girls hold their
mother responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her
for their being thus put at a disadvantage.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4727

   As you hear, then, we ascribe a
castration complex to women as well. And for good reasons, though
its content cannot be the same as with boys. In the latter the
castration complex arises after they have learnt from the sight of
the female genitals that the organ which they value so highly need
not necessarily accompany the body. At this the boy recalls to mind
the threats he brought on himself by his doings with that organ, he
begins to give credence to them and falls under the influence of
fear of castration, which will be the most powerful motive force in
his subsequent development. The castration complex of girls is also
started by the sight of the genitals of the other sex. They at once
notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance
too. They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to
‘have something like it too’, and fall a victim to
‘envy for the penis’, which will leave ineradicable
traces on their development and the formation of their character
and which will not be surmounted in even the most favourable cases
without a severe expenditure of psychical energy. The girl’s
recognition of the fact of her being without a penis does not by
any means imply that she submits to the fact easily. On the
contrary, she continues to hold on for a long time to the wish to
get something like it herself and she believes in that possibility
for improbably long years; and analysis can show that, at a period
when knowledge of reality has long since rejected the fulfilment of
the wish as unattainable, it persists in the unconscious and
retains a considerable cathexis of energy. The wish to get the
longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute
to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she
may reasonably expect from analysis - a capacity, for instance, to
carry on an intellectual profession - may often be recognized as a
sublimated modification of this repressed wish.

   One cannot very well doubt the
importance of envy for the penis. You may take it as an instance of
male injustice if I assert that envy and jealousy play an even
greater part in the mental life of women than of men. It is not
that I think these characteristics are absent in men or that I
think they have no other roots in women than envy for the penis;
but I am inclined to attribute their greater amount in women to
this latter influence. Some analysts, however, have shown an
inclination to depreciate the importance of this first instalment
of penis-envy in the phallic phase. They are of opinion that what
we find of this attitude in women is in the main a secondary
structure which has come about on the occasion of later conflicts
by regression to this early infantile impulse. This, however, is a
general problem of depth psychology. In many pathological - or even
unusual - instinctual attitudes (for instance, in all sexual
perversions) the question arises of how much of their strength is
to be attributed to early infantile fixations and how much to the
influence of later experiences and developments. In such cases it
is almost always a matter of complemental series such as we put
forward in our discussion of the aetiology of the neuroses. Both
factors play a part in varying amounts in the causation; a less on
the one side is balanced by a more on the other. The infantile
factor sets the pattern in all cases but does not always determine
the issue, though it often does. Precisely in the case of
penis-envy I should argue decidedly in favour of the preponderance
of the infantile factor.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4728

   The discovery that she is
castrated is a turning-point in a girl’s growth. Three
possible lines of development start from it: one leads to sexual
inhibition or to neurosis, the second to change of character in the
sense of a masculinity complex, the third, finally, to normal
femininity. We have learnt a fair amount, though not everything,
about all three.

   The essential content of the
first is as follows: the little girl has hitherto lived in a
masculine way, has been able to get pleasure by the excitation of
her clitoris and has brought this activity into relation with her
sexual wishes directed towards her mother, which are often active
ones; now, owing to the influence of her penis-envy, she loses her
enjoyment in her phallic sexuality. Her self-love is mortified by
the comparison with the boy’s far superior equipment and in
consequence she renounces her masturbatory satisfaction from her
clitoris, repudiates her love for her mother and at the same time
not infrequently represses a good part of her sexual trends in
general. No doubt her turning away from her mother does not occur
all at once, for to begin with the girl regards her castration as
an individual misfortune, and only gradually extends it to other
females and finally to her mother as well. Her love was directed to
her
phallic
mother; with the discovery that her mother is
castrated it becomes possible to drop her as an object, so that the
motives for hostility, which have long been accumulating, gain the
upper hand. This means, therefore, that as a result of the
discovery of women’s lack of a penis they are debased in
value for girls just as they are for boys and later perhaps for
men.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4729

   You all know the immense
aetiological importance attributed by our neurotic patients to
their masturbation. They make it responsible for all their troubles
and we have the greatest difficulty in persuading them that they
are mistaken. In fact, however, we ought to admit to them that they
are right, for masturbation is the executive agent of infantile
sexuality, from the faulty development of which they are indeed
suffering. But what neurotics mostly blame is the masturbation of
the period of puberty; they have mostly forgotten that of early
infancy, which is what is really in question. I wish I might have
an opportunity some time of explaining to you at length how
important all the factual details of early masturbation become for
the individual’s subsequent neurosis or character: whether or
not it was discovered, how the parents struggled against it or
permitted it, or whether he succeeded in suppressing it himself.
All of this leaves permanent traces on his development. But I am on
the whole glad that I need not do this. It would be a hard and
tedious task and at the end of it you would put me in an
embarrassing situation by quite certainly asking me to give you
some practical advice as to how a parent or educator should deal
with the masturbation of small children. From the development of
girls, which is what my present lecture is concerned with, I can
give you the example of a child herself trying to get free from
masturbating. She does not always succeed in this. If envy for the
penis has provoked a powerful impulse against clitoridal
masturbation but this nevertheless refuses to give way, a violent
struggle for liberation ensues in which the girl, as it were,
herself takes over the role of her deposed mother and gives
expression to her entire dissatisfaction with her inferior clitoris
in her efforts against obtaining satisfaction from it. Many years
later, when her masturbatory activity has long since been
suppressed, an interest still persists which we must interpret as a
defence against a temptation that is still dreaded. It manifests
itself in the emergence of sympathy for those to whom similar
difficulties are attributed, it plays a part as a motive in
contracting a marriage and, indeed, it may determine the choice of
a husband or lover. Disposing of early infantile masturbation is
truly no easy or indifferent business.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4730

   Along with the abandonment of
clitoridal masturbation a certain amount of activity is renounced.
Passivity now has the upper hand, and the girl’s turning to
her father is accomplished principally with the help of passive
instinctual impulses. You can see that a wave of development like
this, which clears the phallic activity out of the way, smoothes
the ground for femininity. If too much is not lost in the course of
it through repression, this femininity may turn out to be normal.
The wish with which the girl turns to her father is no doubt
originally the wish for the penis which her mother has refused her
and which she now expects from her father. The feminine situation
is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced
by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the place of a penis
in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence. It has not
escaped us that the girl has wished for a baby earlier, in the
undisturbed phallic phase: that, of course, was the meaning of her
playing with dolls. But that play was not in fact an expression of
her femininity; it served as an identification with her mother with
the intention of substituting activity for passivity. She was
playing the part of her mother and the doll was herself: now she
could do with the baby everything that her mother used to do with
her. Not until the emergence of the wish for a penis does the
doll-baby become a baby from the girl’s father, and
thereafter the aim of the most powerful feminine wish. Her
happiness is great if later on this wish for a baby finds
fulfilment in reality, and quite especially so if the baby is a
little boy who brings the longed-for penis with him. Often enough
in her combined picture of ‘a baby from her father’ the
emphasis is laid on the baby and her father left unstressed. In
this way the ancient masculine wish for the possession of a penis
is still faintly visible through the femininity now achieved. But
perhaps we ought rather to recognize this wish for a penis as being
par excellence
a feminine one.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4731

   With the transference of the wish
for a penis-baby on to her father, the girl has entered the
situation of the Oedipus complex. Her hostility to her mother,
which did not need to be freshly created, is now greatly
intensified, for she becomes the girl’s rival, who receives
from her father everything that she desires from him. For a long
time the girl’s Oedipus complex concealed her pre-Oedipus
attachment to her mother from our view, though it is nevertheless
so important and leaves such lasting fixations behind it. For girls
the Oedipus situation is the outcome of a long and difficult
development; it is a kind of preliminary solution, a position of
rest which is not soon abandoned, especially as the beginning of
the latency period is not far distant. And we are now struck by a
difference between the two sexes, which is probably momentous, in
regard to the relation of the Oedipus complex to the castration
complex. In a boy the Oedipus complex, in which he desires his
mother and would like to get rid of his father as being a rival,
develops naturally from the phase of his phallic sexuality. The
threat of castration compels him, however, to give up that
attitude. Under the impression of the danger of losing his penis,
the Oedipus complex is abandoned, repressed and, in the most normal
cases, entirely destroyed, and a severe super-ego is set up as its
heir. What happens with a girl is almost the opposite. The
castration complex prepares for the Oedipus complex instead of
destroying it; the girl is driven out of her attachment to her
mother through the influence of her envy for the penis and she
enters the Oedipus situation as though into a haven of refuge. In
the absence of fear of castration the chief motive is lacking which
leads boys to surmount the Oedipus complex. Girls remain in it for
an indeterminate Iength of time; they demolish it late and, even
so, incompletely. In these circumstances the formation of the
super-ego must suffer; it cannot attain the strength and
independence which give it its cultural significance, and feminists
are not pleased when we point out to them the effects of this
factor upon the average feminine character.

New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis

4732

   To go back a little. We mentioned
as the second possible reaction to the discovery of female
castration the development of a powerful masculinity complex. By
this we mean that the girl refuses, as it were, to recognize the
unwelcome fact and, defiantly rebellious, even exaggerates her
previous masculinity, clings to her clitoridal activity and takes
refuge in an identification with her phallic mother or her father.
What can it be that decides in favour of this outcome? We can only
suppose that it is a constitutional factor, a greater amount of
activity, such as is ordinarily characteristic of a male. However
that may be, the essence of this process is that at this point in
development the wave of passivity is avoided which opens the way to
the turn towards femininity. The extreme achievement of such a
masculinity complex would appear to be the influencing of the
choice of an object in the sense of manifest homosexuality.
Analytic experience teaches us, to be sure, that female
homosexuality is seldom or never a direct continuation of infantile
masculinity. Even for a girl of this kind it seems necessary that
she should take her father as an object for some time and enter the
Oedipus situation. But afterwards, as a result of her inevitable
disappointments from her father, she is driven to regress into her
early masculinity complex. The significance of these
disappointments must not be exaggerated; a girl who is destined to
become feminine is not spared them, though they do not have the
same effect. The predominance of the constitutional factor seems
indisputable; but the two phases in the development of female
homosexuality are well mirrored in the practices of homosexuals,
who play the parts of mother and baby with each other as often and
as clearly as those of husband and wife.