Freud - Complete Works (805 page)

   At this point we must give
separate accounts of the development of boys and girls (of males
and females), for it is now that the difference between the sexes
finds psychological expression for the first time. We are faced
here by the great enigma of the biological fact of the duality of
the sexes: it is an ultimate fact for our knowledge, it defies
every attempt to trace it back to something else. Psycho-analysis
has contributed nothing to clearing up this problem, which clearly
falls wholly within the province of biology. In mental life we only
find reflections of this great antithesis; and their interpretation
is made more difficult by the fact, long suspected, that no
individual is limited to the modes of reaction of a single sex but
always finds some room for those of the opposite one, just as his
body bears, alongside of the fully developed organs of one sex,
atrophied and often useless rudiments of those of the other. For
distinguishing between male and female in mental life we make use
of what is obviously an inadequate empirical and conventional
equation: we call everything that is strong and active male, and
everything that is weak and passive female. This fact of
psychological bisexuality, too, embarrasses all our enquiries into
the subject and makes them harder to describe.

   A child’s first erotic
object is the mother’s breast that nourishes it; love has its
origin in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment. There
is no doubt that, to begin with, the child does not distinguish
between the breast and its own body; when the breast has to be
separated from the body and shifted to the
‘
outside
’ because the child so often finds it
absent, it carries with it as an ‘
object
’ a part
of the original narcissistic libidinal cathexis. This first object
is later completed into the person of the child’s mother, who
not only nourishes it but also looks after it and thus arouses in
it a number of other physical sensations, pleasurable and
unpleasurable. By her care of the child’s body she becomes
its first seducer. In these two relations lies the root of a
mother’s importance, unique, without parallel, established
unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest
love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations - for
both sexes. In all this the phylogenetic foundation has so much the
upper hand over personal accidental experience that it makes no
difference whether a child has really sucked at the breast or has
been brought up on the bottle and never enjoyed the tenderness of a
mother’s care. In both cases the child’s development
takes the same path; it may be that in the second case its later
longing grows all the greater. And for however long it is fed at
its mother’s breast, it will always be left with a conviction
after it has been weaned that its feeding was too short and too
little.

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   This preface is not superfluous,
for it can heighten our realization of the intensity of the Oedipus
complex. When a boy (from the age of two or three) has entered the
phallic phrase of his libidinal development, is feeling pleasurable
sensations in his sexual organ and has learnt to procure these at
will by manual stimulation, he becomes his mother’s lover. He
wishes to possess her physically in such ways as he has divined
from his observations and intuitions about sexual life, and he
tries to seduce her by showing her the male organ which he is proud
to own. In a word, his early awakened masculinity seeks to take his
father’s place with her; his father has hitherto in any case
been an envied model to the boy, owing to the physical strength he
perceives in him and the authority with which he finds him clothed.
His father now becomes a rival who stands in his way and whom he
would like to get rid of. If while his father is away he is allowed
to share his mother’s bed and if when his father returns he
is once more banished from it, his satisfaction when his father
disappears and his disappointment when he emerges again are deeply
felt experiences. This is the subject of the Oedipus complex, which
the Greek legend has translated from the world of a child’s
phantasy into pretended reality. Under the conditions of our
civilization it is invariably doomed to a frightening end.

   The boy’s mother has
understood quite well that his sexual excitation relates to
herself. Sooner or later she reflects that it is not right to allow
it to continue. She thinks she is doing the correct thing in
forbidding him to handle his genital organ. Her prohibition has
little effect; at the most it brings about some modification in his
method of obtaining satisfaction. At last his mother adopts the
severest measures; she threatens to take away from him the thing he
is defying her with. Usually, in order to make the threat more
frightening and more credible, she delegates its execution to the
boy’s father, saying that she will tell him and that he will
cut the penis off. Strange to say, this threat operates only if
another condition is fulfilled before or afterwards. In itself it
seems too inconceivable to the boy that such a thing could happen.
But if at the time of the threat he can recall the appearance of
female genitals or if shortly afterwards he has a sight of them -
of genitals, that is to say, which really lack this supremely
valued part, then he takes what he has heard seriously and, coming
under the influence of the
castration complex
, experiences
the severest trauma of his young life.¹

  
¹
Castration has a place too in the Oedipus
legend, for the blinding with which Oedipus punishes himself after
the discovery of his crime is, by the evidence of dreams, a
symbolic substitute for castration. The possibility cannot be
excluded that a phylogenetic memory-trace may contribute to the
extraordinarily terrifying effect of the threat - a memory-trace
from the prehistory of the primal family, where the jealous father
actually robbed his son of his genitals if the latter became
troublesome to him as a rival with a woman. The primaeval custom of
circumcision, another symbolic substitute for castration, can only
be understood as an expression of submission to the father’s
will. (Cf. the puberty rites of primitive peoples.) No
investigation has yet been made of the form taken by the events
described above among peoples and in civilizations which do not
suppress masturbation in children.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

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   The results of the threat of
castration are multifarious and incalculable; they affect the whole
of a boy’s relations with his father and mother and
subsequently with men and women in general. As a rule the
child’s masculinity is unable to stand up to this first
shock. In order to preserve his sexual organ he renounces the
possession of his mother more or less completely; his sexual life
often remains permanently encumbered by the prohibition. If a
strong feminine component, as we call it, is present in him, its
strength is increased by this intimidation of his masculinity. He
falls into a passive attitude to his father, such as he attributes
to his mother. It is true that as a result of the threat he has
given up masturbation, but not the activities of his imagination
accompanying it. On the contrary, since these are now the only form
of sexual satisfaction remaining to him, he indulges in them more
than before and in these phantasies, though he still continues to
identify himself with his father, he also does so, simultaneously
and perhaps predominantly, with his mother. Derivatives and
modified products of these early masturbatory phantasies usually
make their way into his later ego and play a part in the formation
of his character. Apart from this encouragement of his femininity,
fear and hatred of his father gain greatly in intensity. The
boy’s masculinity withdraws, as it were, into a defiant
attitude towards his father, which will dominate his later
behaviour in human society in a compulsive fashion. A residue of
his erotic fixation to his mother is often left in the form of an
excessive dependence on her, and this persists as a kind of bondage
to women. He no longer ventures to love his mother, but he cannot
risk not being loved by her, for in that case he would be in danger
of being betrayed by her to his father and handed over to
castration. The whole experience, with all its antecedents and
consequences, of which my account has only been able to give a
selection, is subjected to a highly energetic repression, and, as
is made possible by the laws operating in the unconscious id, all
the mutually contending emotional impulses and reactions which are
set going at that time are preserved in the unconscious and ready
to disturb the later development of the ego after puberty. When the
somatic process of sexual maturation puts fresh life into the old
libidinal fixations which had apparently been surmounted, sexual
life will turn out to be inhibited, without homogeneity and fallen
apart into mutually conflicting urges.

An Outline Of Psycho-Analysis

4999

   It is no doubt true that the
impact of the threat of castration upon a boy’s budding
sexual life does not always have these dreaded consequences. It
will depend once again on
quantitative
relations how much
damage is done and how much avoided. The whole occurrence, which
may probably be regarded as the central experience of the years of
childhood, the greatest problem of early life and the strongest
source of later inadequacy, is so completely forgotten that its
reconstruction during the work of analysis is met in adults by the
most decided disbelief. Indeed, aversion to it is so great that
people try to silence any mention of the proscribed subject and the
most obvious reminders of it are overlooked by a strange
intellectual blindness. One may hear it objected, for instance,
that the legend of King Oedipus has in fact no connection with the
construction made by analysis: the cases are quite different, since
Oedipus did not know that it was his father that he killed and his
mother that he married. What is overlooked in this is that a
distortion of this kind is inevitable if an attempt is made at a
poetic handling of the material, and that there is no introduction
of extraneous material but only a skilful employment of the factors
presented by the theme. The ignorance of Oedipus is a legitimate
representation of the unconscious state into which, for adults, the
whole experience has fallen; and the coercive power of the oracle,
which makes or should make the hero innocent, is a recognition of
the inevitability of the fate which has condemned every son to live
through the Oedipus complex. Again it was pointed out from
psycho-analytic quarters how easily the riddle of another dramatic
hero, Shakespeare’s procrastinator, Hamlet, can be solved by
reference to the Oedipus complex, since the prince came to grief
over the task of punishing someone else for what coincided with the
substance of his own Oedipus wish - whereupon the general lack of
understanding on the part of the literary world showed how ready is
the mass of mankind to hold fast to its infantile
repressions.¹

   Yet more than a century before
the emergence of psycho-analysis the French philosopher Diderot
bore witness to the importance of the Oedipus complex by expressing
the difference between the primitive and civilized worlds in this
sentence: ‘Si le petit sauvage était abandonné
à lui-même, qu’il conservât toute son
imbécillité, et qu’il réunît au
peu de raison de l’enfant au berceau la violence des passions
de l’homme de trente ans, il tordrait le col à son
père et coucherait avec sa mère.’² I
venture to say that if psycho-analysis could boast of no other
achievement than the discovery of the repressed Oedipus complex,
that alone would give it a claim to be included among the precious
new acquisitions of mankind.

  
¹
The name ‘William Shakespeare’
is very probably a pseudonym behind which a great unknown lies
concealed. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a man who has been
thought to be identifiable with the author of Shakespeare’s
works, lost a beloved and admired father while he was still a boy
and completely repudiated his mother, who contracted a new marriage
very soon after her husband’s death.

  
²
[‘If the little savage were left to
himself, preserving all his foolishness and adding to the small
sense of a child in the cradle the violent passions of a man of
thirty, he would strangle his father and lie with his
mother.’]

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   The effects of the castration
complex in little girls are more uniform and no less profound. A
female child has, of course, no need to fear the loss of a penis;
she must, however, react to the fact of not having received one.
From the very first she envies boys its possession; her whole
development may be said to take place under the colours of envy for
the penis. She begins by making vain attempts to do the same as
boys and later, with greater success, makes efforts to compensate
for her defect - efforts which may lead in the end to a normal
feminine attitude. If during the phallic phase she tries to get
pleasure like a boy by the manual stimulation of her genitals, it
often happens that she fails to obtain sufficient satisfaction and
extends her judgement of inferiority from her stunted penis to her
whole self. As a rule she soon gives up masturbating, since she has
no wish to be reminded of the superiority of her brother or
playmate, and turns away from sexuality altogether.

   If a little girl persists in her
first wish - to grow into a boy - in extreme cases she will end as
a manifest homosexual, and otherwise she will exhibit markedly
masculine traits in the conduct of her later life, will choose a
masculine vocation, and so on. The other path leads by way of
abandoning the mother she has loved: the daughter, under the
influence of her envy for the penis, cannot forgive her mother for
having sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped. In her
resentment over this she gives up her mother and puts someone else
in her place as the object of her love - her father. If one has
lost a love-object, the most obvious reaction is to identify
oneself with it, to replace it from within, as it were, by
identification. This mechanism now comes to the little girl’s
help. Identification with her mother can take the place of
attachment to her mother. The little daughter puts herself in her
mother’s place, as she has always done in her games; she
tries to take her mother’s place with her father, and begins
to hate the mother she used to love, and from two motives: from
jealousy as well as from mortification over the penis she has been
denied. Her new relation to her father may start by having as its
content a wish to have his penis at her disposal, but it culminates
in another wish - to have a baby from him as a gift. The wish for a
baby has thus taken the place of the wish for a penis, or has at
all events split off from it.