Freud - Complete Works (766 page)

   What I have been telling you here
may be described as the prehistory of women. It is a product of the
very last few years and may have been of interest to you as an
example of detailed analytic work. Since its subject is woman, I
will venture on this occasion to mention by name a few of the women
who have made valuable contributions to this investigation. Dr.
Ruth Mack Brunswick was the first to describe a case of neurosis
which went back to a fixation in the pre-Oedipus stage and had
never reached the Oedipus situation at all. The case took the form
of jealous paranoia and proved accessible to therapy. Dr. Jeanne
Lampl-de Groot has established the incredible phallic activity of
girls towards their mother by some assured observations, and Dr.
Helene Deutsch has shown that the erotic actions of homosexual
women reproduce the relations between mother and baby.

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   It is not my intention to pursue
the further behaviour of femininity through puberty to the period
of maturity. Our knowledge, moreover, would be insufficient for the
purpose. But I will bring a few features together in what follows.
Taking its prehistory as a starting-point, I will only emphasize
here that the development of femininity remains exposed to
disturbance by the residual phenomena of the early masculine
period. Regressions to the fixations of the pre-Oedipus phases very
frequently occur; in the course of some women’s lives there
is a repeated alternation between periods in which masculinity or
femininity gains the upper hand. Some portion of what we men call
‘the enigma of women’ may perhaps be derived from this
expression of bisexuality in women’s lives. But another
question seems to have become ripe for judgement in the course of
these researches. We have called the motive force of sexual life
‘the libido’. Sexual life is dominated by the polarity
of masculine-feminine; thus the notion suggests itself of
considering the relation of the libido to this antithesis. It would
not be surprising if it were to turn out that each sexuality had
its own special libido appropriated to it, so that one sort of
libido would pursue the aims of a masculine sexual life and another
sort those of a feminine one. But nothing of the kind is true.
There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the
feminine sexual functions. To it itself we cannot assign any sex;
if, following the conventional equation of activity and
masculinity, we are inclined to describe it as masculine, we must
not forget that it also covers trends with a passive aim.
Nevertheless the juxtaposition ‘feminine libido’ is
without any justification. Furthermore, it is our impression that
more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed
into the service of the feminine function, and that - to speak
teleologically - Nature takes less careful account of its demands
than in the case of masculinity. And the reason for this may lie -
thinking once again teleologically - in the fact that the
accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the
aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent
of women’s consent.

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   The sexual frigidity of women,
the frequency of which appears to confirm this disregard, is a
phenomenon that is still insufficiently understood. Sometimes it is
psychogenic and in that case accessible to influence; but in other
cases it suggests the hypothesis of its being constitutionally
determined and even of there being a contributory anatomical
factor.

   I have promised to tell you of a
few more psychical peculiarities of mature femininity, as we come
across them in analytic observation. We do not lay claim to more
than an average validity for these assertions; nor is it always
easy to distinguish what should be ascribed to the influence of the
sexual function and what to social breeding. Thus, we attribute a
larger amount of narcissism to femininity, which also affects
women’s choice of object, so that to be loved is a stronger
need for them than to love. The effect of penis-envy has a share,
further, in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to
value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their
original sexual inferiority. Shame, which is considered to be a
feminine characteristic
par excellence
but is far more a
matter of convention than might be supposed, has as its purpose, we
believe, concealment of genital deficiency. We are not forgetting
that at a later time shame takes on other functions. It seems that
women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions
in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique
which they may have invented - that of plaiting and weaving. If
that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive
for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the
model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at
maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step
that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one
another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only
matted together. If you reject this idea as fantastic and regard my
belief in the influence of lack of a penis on the configuration of
femininity as an
idée fixe
, I am of course
defenceless.

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   The determinants of women’s
choice of an object are often made unrecognizable by social
conditions. Where the choice is able to show itself freely, it is
often made in accordance with the narcissistic ideal of the man
whom the girl had wished to become. If the girl has remained in her
attachment to her father - that is, in the Oedipus complex - her
choice is made according to the paternal type. Since, when she
turned from her mother to her father, the hostility of her
ambivalent relation remained with her mother, a choice of this kind
should guarantee a happy marriage. But very often the outcome is of
a kind that presents a general threat to such a settlement of the
conflict due to ambivalence. The hostility that has been left
behind follows in the train of the positive attachment and spreads
over on to the new object. The woman’s husband, who to begin
with inherited from her father, becomes after a time her
mother’s heir as well. So it may easily happen that the
second half of a woman’s life may be filled by the struggle
against her husband, just as the shorter first half was filled by
her rebellion against her mother. When this reaction has been lived
through, a second marriage may easily turn out very much more
satisfying. Another alteration in a woman’s nature, for which
lovers are unprepared, may occur in a marriage after the first
child is born. Under the influence of a woman’s becoming a
mother herself, an identification with her own mother may be
revived, against which she had striven up till the time of her
marriage, and this may attract all the available libido to itself,
so that the compulsion to repeat reproduces an unhappy marriage
between her parents. The difference in a mother’s reaction to
the birth of a son or a daughter shows that the old factor of lack
of a penis has even now not lost its strength. A mother is only
brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is
altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all
human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition
which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can
expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in
her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not made secure
until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as
well and in acting as a mother to him.

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   A woman’s identification
with her mother allows us to distinguish two strata: the
pre-Oedipus one which rests on her affectionate attachment to her
mother and takes her as a model, and the later one from the Oedipus
complex which seeks to get rid of her mother and take her place
with her father. We are no doubt justified in saying that much of
both of them is left over for the future and that neither of them
is adequately surmounted in the course of development. But the
phase of the affectionate pre-Oedipus attachment is the decisive
one for a woman’s future: during it preparations are made for
the acquisition of the characteristics with which she will later
fulfil her role in the sexual function and perform her invaluable
social tasks. It is in this identification too that she acquires
her attractiveness to a man, whose Oedipus attachment to his mother
it kindles into passion. How often it happens, however, that it is
only his son who obtains what he himself aspired to! One gets an
impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase
apart psychologically.

   The fact that women must be
regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt related to
the predominance of envy in their mental life; for the demand for
justice is a modification of envy and lays down the condition
subject to which one can put envy aside. We also regard women as
weaker in their social interests and as having less capacity for
sublimating their instincts than men. The former is no doubt
derived from the dissocial quality which unquestionably
characterizes all sexual relations. Lovers find sufficiency in each
other, and families too resist inclusion in more comprehensive
associations. The aptitude for sublimation is subject to the
greatest individual variations. On the other hand I cannot help
mentioning an impression that we are constantly receiving during
analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful,
somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use
of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis.
A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her
psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up
final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others.
There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the
whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward
insusceptible to influence - as though, indeed, the difficult
development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the
person concerned. As therapists we lament this state of things,
even if we succeed in putting an end to our patient’s ailment
by doing away with her neurotic conflict.

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   That is all I had to say to you
about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and
does not always sound friendly. But do not forget that I have only
been describing women in so far as their nature is determined by
their sexual function. It is true that that influence extends very
far; but we do not overlook the fact that an individual woman may
be a human being in other respects as well. If you want to know
more about femininity, enquire from your own experiences of life,
or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and
more coherent information.

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LECTURE XXXIV

EXPLANATIONS, APPLICATIONS AND ORIENTATIONS

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN
, - Perhaps you will allow me for once, as a relief
from the dry tone of these lectures, to talk to you about some
things which have very little theoretical significance but which
concern you closely in so far as you are friendlily disposed to
psycho-analysis. Let us imagine, for instance, that in your leisure
hours you take up a German, English or American novel, in which you
expect to find an account of contemporary people and society. After
a few pages you come upon a first comment on psycho-analysis and
soon afterwards upon others, even though the context does not seem
to call for them. You must not imagine that it is a question of
applying depth-psychology to a better understanding of the
characters in the book or of their actions - though, incidentally,
there are other and more serious works in which an attempt of that
kind is in fact made. No, these are for the most part facetious
remarks intended by the author to display his wide reading and
intellectual superiority. Nor will you always form an impression
that he really knows what he is talking about. Again, you may go as
a recreation to a social gathering - and this need not necessarily
happen in Vienna. After a short time the conversation turns upon
psycho-analysis and you will hear the greatest variety of people
passing their judgement on it, mostly in voices of unwavering
certainty. It is quite usual for the judgement to be contemptuous
or often slanderous or at least, once again, facetious. If you are
so imprudent as to betray the fact that you know something about
the subject, they fall upon you with one accord, ask for
information and explanations and soon convince you that all these
severe judgements had been arrived at without any basis of
knowledge, that scarcely any of these critics had ever opened an
analytic book or, if they had, had gone beyond the first resistance
aroused by their contact with this new material.

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   You may perhaps expect an
introduction to psycho-analysis to give you instructions, too, on
what arguments you should use to correct these obvious errors about
analysis, what books you should recommend to give more accurate
information, or even what examples you should bring up in the
discussion from your reading or experience in order to alter the
company’s attitude. I must beg you to do none of this. It
would be useless. The best plan would be for you to conceal your
superior knowledge altogether. If that is no longer possible, limit
yourself to saying that, so far as you can make out,
psycho-analysis is a special branch of knowledge, very hard to
understand and to form an opinion on, which is concerned with very
serious things, so that a few jokes will not bring one to close
quarters with it - and that it would be better to find some other
plaything for social entertainment. Nor, of course, will you join
in attempts at interpretation, if unwary people repeat their
dreams; and you will resist the temptation to curry favour for
analysis by retailing reports of its cures.