24,656
edits
Changes
→Freud and the Enigma of Feminine Sexuality
=Freud and the Enigma of Feminine Sexuality=
Freud based his theory of the Oedipus complex and infantile sexuality on the experience of boys, and at first he thought that the same process could simply be transferred to girls but in reverse. Gradually Freud was forced to acknowledge, by the weight of his own clinical experience and the research of his colleagues, that this was an untenable position. Two factors came into play here. First, the realization that, in the final phase of the Oedipus complex, its dissolution, it is not the genitals themselves that are in question but the presence or absence of the male genital organ, the penis. Second, a number of Freud's followers began to look much more closely at the pre-Oedipal phase of an infant's life and in particular at the importance of the mother/child relationship. Freud came to accept the importance of this early pre-Oedipal phase of development, but this meant that he had to revise his early conception of the Oedipus complex. In the pre-Oedipal phase both sexes are equally attached to the mother as the first love object and what Freud needed to explain was how girls shift from their mother to their father as a love object for the Oedipus complex to even start.
The Oedipus complex remains fairly straightforward for boys; they initially see their mother as a love object but slowly realize that their mother is also the love object of their father. The father thus becomes a rival for the mother and the boy fears that the father will cut off his penis. The boy resolves this dilemma by giving up the mother as a love object and identifying with the father. As compensation for giving up on the mother the boy will be able to have other women as love objects in the future. For girls, however, the Oedipus complex has to account for the process whereby girls first give up their initial love-object (the mother). The Oedipus complex for girls, thus, involves an extra, earlier, step. The girl transfers her love from the mother to the father, because she realizes that neither she nor her mother has a penis, in a process that Freud called penis envy. The mother is then transformed from an object of love to a rival for the father's affections. At first the girl devalues the mother because she does not possess a penis and then resents her for making her the same. The problem for Freud was that he simply could not then explain why a girl should give up the father as love object and re-identify with the mother.
The castration complex marks the conclusion and resolution of the Oedipus complex for boys, that is to say, boys give up on the other as love object. For girls, on the other hand, it is the castration complex that leads up to the Oedipus complex and there is no satisfactory resolution of it. The girl must accept that she does not have the penis in order to transfer her desire to her father, but in doing so she does not accept this loss without some kind of compensation. Freud speculated that this compensation takes the form of desiring a baby from the father and the female Oedipus complex culminates, not in the threat of castration, but in the desire for the gift of a baby from the father. Thus girls never fully resolve their Oedipus complex because they can never completely give up on the other as love object. As we can see, the Oedipus complex for girls is a much more complex affair than for boys and it is also deeply unsatisfactory as a concept.
Freud's speculations on the female Oedipus complex led him to explore the nature of feminine sexuality but resulted only in a series of unanswered questions. Until the end of his life Freud was bewildered by the enigma of feminine sexuality. He described femininity as a 'dark continent' and never resolved the question 'what does woman want?' In the 1920s the failure of psychoanalysis to adequately account for the development of female sexuality gave rise to what has been called the first great debate on feminine sexuality. This debate was initiated through a paper by one of Freud's closest associates, Ernest Jones (1879-1958), which drew responses from many of the most prominent women psychoanalysts of the time, including Karen Horney (1885-1952), Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and Joan Riviere (1883-1962) (see Juliet Mitchell's introduction to Feminine Sexuality (Mitchell and Rose 1982) for an account of this debate). Lacan's work on feminine sexuality is a continuation of these debates from the 1920s and 1930s and subsequently gave rise to the 'second great debate' in the 1970s and 1980s (see Brennan 1989).
=To Have or to Be the Phallus?=
