Horney, Karen (1924). On the genesis of the castration complex in women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5: 50–65.
Riviere, Joan (1929). Womanliness as a masquerade. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10: 303–313.
Following the First World War, there was a major move for the advancement of women, and for them to become professionally qualified. At the time, the newness of psychoanalysis made it more open to women than the older professions were. As well as an interest in child analysis, women analysts began to be provoked by Freud’s obfuscation of women’s sexuality and development:
Freud has more than once commented on the fact that our knowledge of the early stages in female development is much more obscure and imperfect than that of male development, and Karen Horney has forcibly, though justly, pointed out that this must be connected with the greater tendency to bias that exists on the former subject.
[Jones, 1927, p. 459]
Women psychoanalysts began to take questions about female sexuality as their field of enquiry. Helene Deutsch (1925), Josine Muller (1932), Joan Riviere (1929), and others (e.g. Payne, 1936) joined Horney (1924*, 1926, 1933) in this debate, which has continued into the modern period of psychoanalysis (for instance, Arden, 1987; Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1981; Chodorow, 1996; Raphael-Leff & Perelberg, 1997). Freud’s case load was predominantly women (e.g., all five cases in “Studies in hysteria”, Breuer & Freud, 1895) yet his theory was formulated in terms of male sexuality, based rather explicitly on his own Oedipus complex.
Freud assumed women’s development was an analogy of the male, until his paper on “Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes” (Freud, 1925j). Karen Horney had challenged the standard opinion, at the time, that a woman’s castration and Oedipus complexes derive from her penis envy (see Abraham, 1921) and argues, with clinical vignettes, that this is a neurotic camouflage in which an identification with father and the impossible envious wish for a penis overlays an envy of mother and her capacity to bear children. This follows what might possibly be thought of as a characteristic Berlin approach, stemming from Abraham, in which development consists of varying, alternating, and unstable identifications with mother and with father, as much as it depends on the libidinal stages.
I have chosen the paper republished here (Horney, 1924*) because of its clinical emphasis, rather than the later paper published in 1926. In his 1925 paper on anatomical differences, Freud acknowledged Horney’s divergent direction from his; and in 1926 Horney responded. She referred in the later paper (Horney, 1926) to the sociologist, Georg Simmel (1911), claiming that it is not merely the bodily difference between the sexes, as Freud claimed, but that the difference itself is viewed from a masculine set of values, which are prevalent socially. She extended her thesis by saying that the male fear of castration is complemented in the female by fear of vaginal damage. The woman therefore flees from the female position towards a male identification and wish for an undamaged penis. Society itself flees in parallel from a female perspective, a thesis elaborated further in a later paper (Horney, 1933).
The link that is suggested in Horney’s paper between a vagina and the psychological conception of an inner space where fantasy resides, has enriched the notion of f/phantasy. Together with Klein (1928), Horney derived the very concrete idea of inner space as complicated identifications from Abraham (1924). And Klein influenced many in the British Society with these emphases that originated in Berlin. One of those she influenced was Joan Riviere. Riviere’s paper, republished here, followed a similar direction, analysing the complex layering of identifications with mother and father. In certain types of women, the identification as a woman can have a rather thin, mask-like quality. Riviere followed Klein’s recent views on the Oedipus complex in the separate genders (Klein, 1928), and this rested on similar sources, such as Abraham’s work, which influenced both Horney and Klein. Riviere’s clinical descriptions are an early example of the “as-if personality” later formulated by Helene Deutsch (1942) and, together with her later paper (Riviere, 1932), it places Riviere at the origins of the development of modern psychoanalysis of femininity and of feminism. Freud (1933a), somewhat in response to these contributions, supported these notions, but still stressed the progression and regression though the libidinal phases, rather then the complex alternating identifications.
Female sexuality has become a major intellectual and political issue in recent decades and, when a psychoanalytic perspective is employed in these debates, these two papers, by Horney and Riviere, are the important and challenging starting point.
Abraham, K. (1921). Manifestations of the female castration complex. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 3: 1–29.
Abraham, K. (1924) [1973]. A short study of the development of the libido, viewed in the light of mental disorders. In: K. Abraham (Ed.), Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (pp. 418–501). London: Hogarth.
Arden, M. (1987). “A concept of femininity”: Sylvia Payne’s 1935 paper reassessed. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 14: 237–244.
Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895d). Studies in hysteria. S.E., 2: 1–335. London: Hogarth Press.
Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1981). Sexuality and Mind. London: Virago.
Chodorow, N. (1996). Theoretical gender and clinical gender: epistemological reflections on the psychology of women. Journal of the American Patial Association, 44S: 215–238.
Deutsch, H. (1925). The psychology of women in relation to the functions of reproduction. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 6: 405–418.
Deutsch, H. (1942). Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to schizophrenia. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 11: 301–321.
Freud, S. (1925j). Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes. S.E., 19: 243–247. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1933a). New introductory lecture: Feminity. S.E., 22: 112–135. London: Hogarth Press.
Horney, K. (1926). The flight from womanhood: the masculinity-complex in women, as viewed by men and by women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 7: 324–339.
Horney, K. (1933). The denial of the vagina—a contribution to the problem of the genital anxieties specific to women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 14: 57–70.
Jones, E. (1927). The early development of female sexuality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 8: 459–472.
Klein, M. (1928). Early stages of the Oedipus conflict. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9: 167–180.
Müller, J. (1932). A contribution to the problem of libidinal development of the genital phase in girls. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13: 361–368.
Payne, S. (1936). A conception of feminity. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 15: 18–33.
Raphael-Leff, J., & Perelberg, R. (1997). Female Experience. London: Routledge.
Riviere, J. (1932). Jealousy as a mechanism of defence. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 13: 414–424.
Simmel, G. (1911) Philosophische Kultur. Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot.
Karen Horney
Whilst our knowledge of the forms which the castration complex may assume in women has become more and more comprehen-sive,1 our insight into the nature of the complex as a whole has made no corresponding advance. The very abundance of the material collected which is now familiar to us brings to our minds more strongly than ever the remarkable character of the whole phenomenon, so that the phenomenon in itself becomes a problem. A survey of the forms assumed by the castration complex in women that have hitherto been observed and of the inferences tacitly drawn from them shows that, so far, the prevailing conception is based on a certain fundamental notion which may be briefly formulated as follows (I quote in part verbatim from Abraham’s work on the subject): Many females, both children and adults, suffer either temporarily or permanently from the fact of their sex. The manifestations in the mental life of women which spring from the objection to being a woman are traceable to their coveting a penis when they were little girls. The unwelcome idea of being fundamentally lacking in this respect gives rise to passive castration phantasies, while active phantasies spring from a revengeful attitude against the favoured male.
In this formulation we have it assumed as an axiomatic fact that females feel at a disadvantage in this respect of their genital organs, without this being regarded as constituting a problem in itself— possibly because to masculine narcissism this has seemed too self-evident to need explanation. Nevertheless, the conclusion so far drawn from the investigations—amounting as it does to an assertion that one-half of the human race is discontented with the sex assigned to it and can overcome this discontent only in favourable circumstances—is decidedly unsatisfying, not only to feminine narcissism but also to biological science. The question arises, therefore: Is it really the case that the forms of the castration complex met with in women, pregnant with consequences as they are, not only for the development of neurosis but also for the character-formation and destiny of women who for all practical purposes are normal, are based solely on a dissatisfaction with the fact of womanhood— a dissatisfaction due to her coveting a penis? Or is this possibly but a pretext (at any rate, for the most part) put forward by other forces, the dynamic power of which we know already from our study of the formation of neurosis?
I think that this problem can be attacked from several sides. Here I merely wish to put forward from the purely ontogenetic standpoint, in the hope that they may contribute to a solution, certain considerations which have gradually forced themselves upon me in the course of a practice extending over many years, amongst patients the great majority of whom were women and in whom on the whole the castration complex was very marked.
According to the prevailing conception the castration complex in females is entirely centred in the “penis-envy” complex; in fact the term “masculinity-complex” is used as practically synonymous. The first question which then presents itself is: How is it that we can observe this penis-envy occurring as an almost invariable typical phenomenon, even when the subject has not a masculine way of life, where there is no favoured brother to make envy of this sort comprehensible and where no “accidental disasters”2 in the woman’s experience have caused the masculine role to seem the more desirable?
The important point here seems to be the fact of raising the question; once it has been put answers suggest themselves almost spontaneously from the material with which we are sufficiently familiar. For supposing we take as our starting-point the form in which “penis-envy” probably most frequently directly manifests itself, namely, in the desire to urinate like a man, a critical sifting of the material soon shows that this desire is made up of three component parts, of which sometimes one and sometimes another is the more important.
The part about which I can speak most briefly is that of urethral erotism itself, for sufficient stress has already been laid on this factor, being as it is the most obvious one. If we want to appraise in all its intensity the envy springing from this source we must above all make ourselves realize the narcissistic overestimation3 in which the excretory processes are held by children. Phantasies of omnipotence, especially such as are of a sadistic character, are as a matter of fact more easily associated with the jet of urine passed by the male. As an instance of this idea—and it is only one instance amongst many—I can quote something I was told of a class in a boys’ school: when two boys, they said, urinate to make a cross the person of whom they think at the moment will die.
Now even though it is certain that a strong feeling of being at a disadvantage must arise in little girls in connection with urethral erotism, yet it is exaggerating the part played by this factor if, as has hitherto been done in many quarters, we straightway attribute to it every symptom and every phantasy of which the content is the desire to urinate like a man. On the contrary, the motive force which originates and maintains this wish is often to be found in quite other instinct-components—above all in active and passive scoptophilia. This connection is due to the circumstance that it is just in the act of urinating that a boy can display his genital and look at himself and is even permitted to do so, and that he can thus in a certain sense satisfy his sexual curiosity, at least as far as his own body is concerned, every time he passes urine.
This factor, which is rooted in the scoptophilic instinct, was particularly evident in a patient of mine in whom the desire to urinate like a male dominated the whole clinical picture for a time. During this period she seldom came to the analysis without declaring that she had seen a man urinating in the street, and once she exclaimed quite spontaneously: “If I might ask a gift of Providence it would be to be able just for once to urinate like a man.” Her associations completed this thought beyond all possibility of doubt: “For then I should know how I really am made.” The fact that men can see themselves when urinating, while women cannot, was in this patient, whose development was to a great extent arrested at a pregenital stage, actually one of the principal roots of her very marked “penis-envy”.
Just as woman, because her genital organs are hidden, is ever the great riddle for man, so man is an object of lively jealousy for woman precisely on account of the ready visibility of his organ.
The close connection between urethral erotism and the scop-tophilic instinct was obvious in yet another patient, a woman whom I will call Y. She practised masturbation in a very peculiar way which stood for urinating like her father. In the obsessional neurosis from which this patient suffered, the chief agent was the scoptophilic instinct; she had the most acute feelings of anxiety consequent on the idea of being seen by others whilst thus practising masturbation. She was therefore giving expression to the far-back wish of the little girl: I wish I had a genital too, which I could show, like father, every time I pass urine.
I think, moreover, that this factor plays a leading part in every case of exaggerated embarrassment and prudery in girls, and I further conjecture that the difference in the dress of men and women, at least in our civilized races, may be traced to this very circumstance that the girl cannot exhibit her genital organs and that therefore in respect of her exhibitionistic tendencies she regresses to a stage at which this desire to display herself still applied to her whole body. This puts us on the track of the reason of why a woman wears a low neck, while a man wears a dress-coat. I think too that this connection explains to some extent the criterion which is always mentioned first when the points of difference between men and women are under discussion—namely, the greater subjectivity of women as compared with the greater objectivity of men. The explanation would be that the man’s impulse to investigate finds satisfaction in the examination of his own body and may, or must, subsequently be directed to external objects; while the woman, on the other hand, can arrive at no clear knowledge about her own person, and therefore finds it far harder to become free of herself.
Finally, the wish which I have assumed to be the prototype of “penis-envy” has in it a third element, namely, suppressed onanistic wishes, as a rule deeply hidden but none the less important on that account. This element may be traced to a connection of ideas (mostly unconscious) by which the fact that boys are permitted to take hold of their genital when urinating is construed as a permission to masturbate.
Thus a patient who had witnessed a father reproving his little daughter for touching that part of her body with her tiny hands said to me quite indignantly: “He forbids her to do that and yet does it himself five or six times a day.” You will easily recognize the same connection of ideas in the case of the patient Y., in whom the male way of urinating became the decisive factor in the form of masturbation that she practised. Moreover, in this case it became clear that she could not become completely free from the compulsion to masturbate so long as she unconsciously maintained the claim that she should be a man. The conclusion I drew from my observation of this case is, I think, quite a typical one: girls have a very special difficulty in overcoming masturbation because they feel that they are unjustly forbidden something which boys are allowed to do on account of their different bodily formation. Or, in terms of the problem before us, we may put it in another way and say that the difference in bodily formation may easily give rise to a bitter feeling of injury, so that the argument which is used later to account for the repudiation of womanhood, namely, that men have greater freedom in their sexual life, is really based upon actual experiences to that effect in early childhood. Van Ophuijsen at the conclusion of his work on the masculinity-complex in women lays stress on the strong impression he received in analysis of the existence of an intimate connection between the masculinity-complex, infantile masturbation of the clitoris and urethral erotism. The connecting link would probably be found in the considerations I have just put before you.
These considerations, which constitute the answer to our initial question about the reason why “penis-envy” is of typical occurrence, may be summarized shortly as follows: The little girl’s sense of inferiority is (as Abraham has also pointed out in one passage) by no means primary. But it seems to her that, in comparison with boys, she is subject to restrictions as regards the possibility of gratifying certain instinct-components which are of the greatest importance in the pregenital period. Indeed, I think I should put the matter even more accurately if I said that as an actual fact, from the point of view of a child at this stage of development, little girls are at a disadvantage compared with boys in respect of certain possibilities of gratification. For unless we are quite clear about the reality of this disadvantage we shall not understand that “penis-envy” is an almost inevitable phenomenon in the life of female children, and one which cannot but complicate female development. The fact that later when she reaches maturity a great part in sexual life (as regards creative power perhaps even a greater part than that of men) devolves upon a woman—I mean when she becomes a mother—cannot be any compensation to the little girl at this early stage, for it still lies outside her potentialities of direct gratification.
I shall here break off this line of thought, for I now come to the second, more comprehensive, problem: Does the complex we are discussing really rest on “penis-envy” and is the latter to be regarded as the ultimate force behind it?
Taking this question as our starting-point, we have to consider what factors determine whether the penis-complex is more or less successfully overcome or whether it becomes regressively reinforced so that fixation occurs. A consideration of these possibilities compels us to examine more closely the form of object-libido in such cases. We then find that the girls and women whose desire to be men is often so glaringly evident have at the very outset of life passed through a phase of extremely strong father-fixation. In other words: They tried first of all to master the Oedipus complex in the normal way by retaining their original identification with the mother and, like the mother, taking the father as love-object.
We know that at this stage there are two possible ways in which a girl may overcome the “penis-envy” complex without detriment to herself. She may pass from the auto-erotic narcissistic desire for the penis to the woman’s desire for the man (= the father), precisely in virtue of her identification of herself with her mother; or to the material desire for a child (by the father). With regard to the subsequent love-life of healthy as well as abnormal women it is illuminating to reflect that (even in the most favourable instances) the origin, or at any rate one origin, of either attitude was narcissistic in character and of the nature of a desire for possession.
Now in the cases under consideration it is evident that this womanly and maternal development has taken place to a very marked degree. Thus in the patient Y., whose neurosis, like all those which I shall cite here, bore throughout the stamp of the castration complex, many phantasies of rape occurred which were indicative of this phase. The men whom she thought of as committing rape upon her were one and all unmistakably father-imagines; hence these phantasies had necessarily to be construed as the compulsive repetition of a primal phantasy in which the patient, who till late in life felt herself one with her mother, had experienced with her the father’s act of complete sexual appropriation. It is noteworthy that this patient, who in other respects was perfectly clear in her mind, was at the beginning of the analysis strongly inclined to regard these phantasies of rape as actual fact.
Other cases also manifest—in another form—a similar clinging to the fiction that this primal feminine phantasy is real. From another patient, whom I will call X., I heard innumerable remarks constituting direct proof of how very real this love-relation with the father had seemed to her. Once, for instance, she recollected how her father had sung a love-song to her, and with the recollection there broke from her a cry of disillusion and despair: “And yet it was all a lie!” The same thought was expressed in one of her symptoms which I should like to cite here as typical of a whole similar group: at times she was under a compulsion to eat quantities of salt. Her mother had been obliged to eat salt on account of hæmorrhages of the lungs, which had occurred in the patient’s early childhood; she had unconsciously construed them as the result of her parents’ intercourse. This symptom therefore stood for her unconscious claim to have suffered the same experience from her father as her mother had undergone. It was the same claim that made her regard herself as a prostitute (actually she was a virgin) and that made her feel a compelling need to make a confession of some kind to any new love-object.
The numerous unmistakable observations of this kind show us how important it is to realize that at this early stage—as an ontogenetic repetition of a phylogenetic experience—the child constructs, on the basis of a (hostile or loving) identification with its mother, a phantasy that it has suffered full sexual appropriation by the father; and further, that in phantasy this experience presents itself as having actually taken place—as much a fact as it must have been at that distant time when all women were primarily the property of the father.
We know that the natural fate of this love-phantasy is a denial of it by reality. In cases which are subsequently dominated by the castration complex this frustration often changes into a profound disappointment, deep traces of which remain in the neurosis. Thus there arises a more or less extensive disturbance in the development of the sense of reality. One often receives the impression that the emotional intensity of this attachment to the father is too strong to admit of a recognition of the essential unreality of the relation; in other cases again it seems as though from the outset there had been an excessive power of phantasy, making it difficult to grasp actuality correctly; finally the real relations with the parents are often so unhappy as to account for a clinging to phantasy.
These patients feel as if their fathers had actually once been their lovers and had afterwards been false to them or deserted them. Sometimes this again is the starting-point of doubt: Did I only imagine the whole thing, or was it true? In a patient whom I will call Z., of whom I shall have to speak in a moment, this doubting attitude betrayed itself in a repetition-compulsion which took the form of anxiety whenever a man appeared attracted to her, lest she might only be imagining this liking on his part. Even when she was actually engaged to be married she had to be constantly reassuring herself that she had not simply imagined the whole thing. In a daydream she pictured herself as assailed by a man whom she knocked down with a blow on the nose, treading upon his penis with her foot. Continuing the phantasy, she wished to give him in charge but refrained because she was afraid he might declare she had imagined the scene. When speaking of the patient Y., I mentioned the doubt she felt as to the actuality of her phantasies of rape, and that this doubt had reference to the original experience with the father. In her it was possible to trace out the way in which the doubt from this source extended to every occurrence in her life and so actually became the basis of her obsessional neurosis. In her case, as in many others, the course of the analysis made it probable that this origin of the doubt had deeper roots than that uncertainty, with which we are familiar, about the subject’s own sex.4
In the patient X., who used to revel in numerous recollections of that earliest period of her life which she called her childhood’s paradise, this disappointment was closely connected in her memory with an unjust punishment inflicted on her by her father when she was five or six years old. It transpired that at this time a sister had been born and that she had felt herself supplanted by this sister in her father’s affections. As deeper strata were revealed it became clear that behind the jealousy of her sister there lay a furious jealousy of her mother which related in the first instance to her mother’s many pregnancies. “Mother always had the babies”, she once said indignantly. More strongly repressed were two further roots (by no means equally important) of her feeling that her father was faithless to her. The one was sexual jealousy of her mother dating from her witnessing parental coitus at a time when her sense of reality was sufficiently awakened for it to be impossible for her any longer completely to incorporate all that she saw in her phantasy of an experience undergone by herself. It was a mishearing on her part which put me on the track of this last source of her feeling: once as I was speaking of a time “nach der Enttäuschung” (after the disappointment), she understood me to say “Nacht der Enttäu-schung” (the night of the disappointment) and gave the association of Brangäne keeping vigil during Tristan and Isolde’s love-night.
A repetition-compulsion in this patient spoke in language no less clear: the typical experience of her love-life was that she first of all fell in love with a father-substitute and then found him faithless. In connection with occurrences of this sort the final root of the complex became plainly evident: I allude to her feelings of guilt. Certainly a great part of these feelings was to be construed as reproaches originally directed against the father and then turned upon herself. But it was possible to trace very clearly the way in which the feelings of guilt, especially those which resulted from strong impulses to do away with her mother (to the patient this identification had the special significance of “doing away with her” and “replacing her’) had produced in her an expectation of calamity, which of course referred above all to the relation with her father.5
I wish especially to emphasize the strong impression I received in this case of the importance of the desire to have a child (from the father).6 My reason for laying stress upon it is that I think we are inclined to underestimate the unconscious power of this wish and in particular its libidinal character, because it is a wish to which the ego can later more easily assent than to many other sexual impulses. Its relation to the “penis-envy” complex is twofold. On the one hand it is well known that the maternal instinct receives an “unconscious libidinal reinforcement”7 from the desire for a penis, a desire which comes earlier in point of time because it belongs to the auto-erotic period. Then when the little girl experiences the disappointment described in relation to her father she renounces not only her claim upon him but also the desire for a child. This is regressively succeeded (in accordance with the familiar equation) by ideas belonging to the anal phase and by the old demand for the penis. When this takes place that demand is not simply revived, but is reinforced with all the energy of the girl-child’s desire for a child.
I could see this connection particularly clearly in the case of the patient Z., who, after several symptoms of the obsessional neurosis had vanished, retained as the final and most obstinate symptom a lively dread of pregnancy and childbirth. The experience which had determined this symptom proved to be her mother’s pregnancy and the birth of a brother when the patient was two years old, while observations of parental coitus, continued after she was no longer an infant, contributed to the same result. For a long time it seemed that this case was singularly well calculated to illustrate the central importance of the “penis-envy” complex. Her coveting of the penis (her brother’s) and her violent anger against him as the intruder who had ousted her from her position of only child, when once revealed by analysis, entered consciousness heavily charged with affect. The envy was, moreover, accompanied by all the manifestations which we are accustomed to trace to it: first and foremost the attitude of revenge against men, with very intense castration phantasies; repudiation of feminine tasks and functions, especially that of pregnancy; and further, a strong unconscious homosexual tendency. It was only when the analysis penetrated into deeper strata under the greatest resistances imaginable that it became evident that the source of the “penis-envy” was her envy on account of the child which her mother and not she had received from her father, whereupon by a process of displacement the penis had become the object of envy in place of the child. In the same way her vehement anger against her brother proved really to have reference to her father, who she felt had deceived her, and to her mother who, instead of the patient herself, had received the child. Only when this displacement was cancelled did she really become free from “penis-envy” and from the longing to be a man, and was she able to be a true woman and even to wish to have children herself.
Now what process had taken place? Quite roughly it may be outlined as follows: (1) the envy relating to the child was displaced to the brother and his genital; (2) there clearly ensued the mechanism discovered by Freud, by which the father as love-object is given up and the object-relation to him is regressively replaced by an identification with him.
The latter process manifested itself in those pretensions to manhood on her part of which I have already spoken. It was easy to prove that her desire to be a man was by no means to be understood in a general sense, but that the real meaning of her claims was to act her father’s part. Thus she adopted the same profession as her father, and after his death her attitude to her mother was that of a husband who makes demands upon his wife and issues orders. Once when a noisy eructation escaped her she could not help thinking with satisfaction: “Just like Papa”. Yet she did not reach the point of a completely homosexual object-choice; the development of the object-libido seemed rather to be altogether disturbed, and the result was an obvious regression to an auto-erotic narcissistic stage. To sum up: displacement of the envy which had reference to children on to the brother and his penis, identification with the father, and regression to a pregenital phase all operated in the same direction—to stir up a powerful “penis-envy” which then remained in the foreground and seemed to dominate the whole picture.
Now in my opinion this kind of development of the Oedipus complex is typical of those cases in which the castration complex is predominant. What happens is that a phase of identification with the mother gives way to a very large extent to one of identification with the father, and at the same time there is regression to a pregenital stage. This process of identification with the father I believe to be one root of the castration complex in women.
At this point I should like to answer at once two possible objections. One of them might run like this: such an oscillation between father and mother is surely nothing peculiar. On the contrary, it is to be seen in every child, and we know that, according to Freud, the libido of each one of us oscillates throughout life between male and female objects. The second objection relates to the connection with homosexuality, and may be expressed thus: in his paper on the psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman Freud has convinced us that such a development in the direction of identification with the father is one of the bases of manifest homosexuality; yet now I am depicting the same process as resulting in the castration complex. In answer I would emphasize the fact that it was just this paper of Freud’s which helped me to understand the castration complex in women. It is exactly in these cases that, on the one hand, the extent to which the libido normally oscillates is considerably exceeded from a quantitative point of view, whilst, on the other hand, the repression of the love-attitude towards the father and the identification with him are not so completely successful as in cases of homosexuality. And so the similarity in the two courses of development is no argument against its significance for the castration complex in women; on the contrary, this view makes homosexuality much less of an isolated phenomenon.
We know that in every case in which the castration complex predominates there is without exception a more or less marked tendency to homosexuality. To play the father’s part always amounts also to desiring the mother in some sense. There may be every possible degree of closeness in the relation between narcissistic regression and homosexual object-cathexis, so that we have an unbroken series culminating in manifest homosexuality.
A third criticism which suggests itself here relates to the temporal and causal connection with “penis-envy” and runs as follows: Is not the relation of the “penis-envy” complex to the process of identification with the father just the opposite of that depicted here? May it not be that in order to establish this sort of permanent identification with the father there has first to be an unusually strong “penis-envy”? I think we cannot fail to recognize that a specially powerful “penis-envy” (whether it is constitutional or the result of personal experience) does help to prepare the way for the changeover by which the patient identifies herself with the father; nevertheless, the history of the cases I have described, and of other cases as well, shows that notwithstanding the “penis-envy” a strong and wholly womanly love-relation to the father had been formed, and that it was only when this love was disappointed that the feminine role was abandoned. This abandonment and the consequent identification with the father then revives the “penisenvy”, and only when it derives nourishment from such powerful sources as these can that feeling operate in its full strength.
For this revulsion to an identification with the father to take place it is essential that the sense of reality should be at least to some extent awakened; hence it is inevitable that the little girl should no longer be able to content herself, as she formerly did, simply with a phantasied fulfilment of her desire for the penis, but should now begin to brood upon her lack of that organ or ponder over its possible existence. The trend of these speculations is determined by the girl’s whole affective disposition; it is characterized by the following typical attitudes: a feminine love-attachment, not yet wholly subdued, to her father, feelings of vehement anger and of revenge directed against him because of the disappointment suffered through him, and last but not least, feelings of guilt (relating to incestuous phantasies concerning him) which are violently aroused under the pressure of the privation. Thus it is that these broodings invariably have reference to the father.
I saw this very clearly in the patient Y., whom I have already mentioned more than once. I told you that this patient produced phantasies of rape—phantasies which she regarded as fact—and that ultimately these related to her father. She too had reached the point of identifying herself to a very great extent with him; for instance, her attitude to her mother was exactly that of a son. Thus she had dreams in which her father was attacked by a snake or wild beasts, whereupon she rescued him.
Her castration phantasies took the familiar form of imagining that she was not normally made in the genital region, and besides this she had a feeling as though she had suffered some injury to the genitals. On both these points she had evolved many ideas, chiefly to the effect that these peculiarities were the result of acts of rape. Indeed, it became plain that her obstinate insistence upon these sensations and ideas in connection with her genital organs was actually designed to prove the reality of these acts of violence, and so, ultimately, the reality of her love-relation with her father. The clearest light is thrown upon the importance of this phantasy and the strength of the repetition-compulsion under which she laboured, by the fact that before analysis she had insisted on undergoing six laparotomy operations, several of which had been performed simply on account of her pains. In another patient, whose coveting of the penis took an absolutely grotesque form, this feeling of having sustained a wound was displaced on to other organs, so that when her obsessional symptoms had been resolved the clinical picture was markedly hypochondriacal. At this point her resistance took the following form: “It is obviously absurd for me to be analysed, seeing that my heart, my lungs, my stomach, and my intestines are evidently organically diseased.” Here again the insistence on the reality of her phantasies was so strong that on one occasion she had almost compelled performance of an intestinal operation. Her associations constantly brought the idea that she had been struck down (geschlagen) with illness by her father. As a matter of fact, when these hypochondriacal symptoms cleared up, phantasies of being struck (Schlagephantasien) became the most prominent feature in her neurosis. It seems to me quite impossible to account satisfactorily for these manifestations simply by the “penis-envy” complex. But their main features become perfectly clear if we regard them as an effect of the impulse to experience anew after a compulsive fashion the suffering undergone at the hands of the father and to prove to herself the reality of the painful experience.
This array of material might be multiplied indefinitely, but it would only repeatedly go to show that we encounter under totally different guises this basic phantasy of having suffered castration through the love-relation with the father. My observations have led me to believe that this phantasy, whose existence has indeed long been familiar to us in individual cases, is of such typical and fundamental importance that I am inclined to call it the second root of the whole castration complex in women.
The great significance of this combination is that a highly important piece of repressed womanhood is most intimately bound up with the castration phantasies. Or, to look at it from the point of view of succession in time, that it is wounded womanhood which gives rise to the castration complex, and that it is this complex which injures (not primarily, however) feminine development.
Here we probably have the most fundamental basis of the revengeful attitude towards men which is so often a prominent feature in women in whom the castration complex is marked; attempts to explain this attitude as resulting from “penis-envy” and the disappointment of the little girl’s expectation that her father would give her the penis as a present, do not satisfactorily account for the mass of facts brought to light by an analysis of deeper strata of the mind. Of course in psycho-analysis the “penis-envy” is more readily exposed than is the far more deeply repressed phantasy which ascribes the loss of the male genital to a sexual act with the father as partner. That this is so follows from the fact that no feelings of guilt at all are attached to “penis-envy” in itself.
It is specially frequent for this attitude of revenge against men to be directed with particular vehemence against the man who performs the act of defloration. The explanation is natural, namely, that it is precisely the father with whom, according to the phantasy, the patient mated for the first time. Hence in the subsequent actual love-life the first mate stands in a quite peculiar way for the father. This idea is expressed in the customs described by Freud in his essay on the taboo of virginity; according to these the performance of the act of defloration is actually entrusted to a father-substitute. To the unconscious mind, defloration is the repetition of the phantasied sexual act performed with the father, and therefore when defloration takes place all those affects which belong to the phantasied act are reproduced—strong feelings of attachment combined with the abhorrence of incest, and finally the attitude described above of revenge on account of disappointed love and of the castration supposedly suffered through this act.
This brings me to the end of my remarks. My problem was the question whether that dissatisfaction with the female sexual role which results from “penis-envy” is really the alpha and omega of the castration complex in women. We have seen that the anatomical structure of the female genitals is indeed of great significance in the mental development of women. Also, it is indisputable that “penis-envy” does essentially condition the forms in which the castration complex manifests itself in them. But the deduction that therefore their repudiation of their womanhood is based on that envy seems inadmissible. On the contrary we can see that “penisenvy” by no means precludes a deep and wholly womanly love-attachment to the father and that it is only when this relation comes to grief over the Oedipus complex (exactly as in the corresponding male neuroses) that the envy leads to a revulsion from the subject’s own sexual role.
The male neurotic who identifies himself with the mother and the female who identifies herself with the father repudiate, both in the same way, their respective sexual roles. And from this point of view the castration fear of the male neurotic (behind which there lurks a castration wish upon which, to my mind, sufficient stress is never laid) corresponds exactly to the female neurotic’s desire for the penis. This symmetry would be much more striking were it not that the man’s inner attitude towards identification with the mother is diametrically opposed to that of the woman towards identification with the father. And this in two respects: in a man this wish to be a woman is not merely at variance with his conscious narcissism, but is rejected for a second reason, namely, because the notion of being a woman implies at the same time the realization of all his fears of punishment, centred as they are in the genital region; in a woman, on the other hand, the identification with the father is confirmed by old wishes tending in the same direction, and it does not carry with it any sort of feelings of guilt but rather a sense of acquittal. For there ensues, from the connection I have described as existing between the ideas of castration and the incest-phantasies relating to the father, the fateful result, opposite to that in men, that being a woman is in itself felt to be culpable.
In his papers entitled “Trauer und Melancholie”8 (“Grief and melancholia”) and “The psychogenesis of a case of female homosexuality”,9 and in his Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, Freud has shown more and more fully how largely the process of identification bulks in human mentality. It is just this identification with the parent of the opposite sex which seems to me to be the point from which in either sex both homosexuality and the castration complex are evolved.
1. Cf. in particular Abraham, “Manifestations of the female castration complex” (1921), International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. III, p. 1.
2. Cf. Freud, “Tabu der Virginität”, Sammlung kleiner Schriften, Vierte Folge.
3. Cf. Abraham, “Zur narzisstischen berwertung der Excretions-vorgänge in Traum und Neurose”, Internationale Zeitschrift, 1920.
4. Cf. the explanation Freud gives of doubt as doubt of the subject’s capacity for love (hate).
5. [While revising the translation of this paragraph I wrote competition-repulsion instead of repetition-compulsion!—Trans. Ed.]
6. Cf. O. Rank’s paper “Perversion und neurosis”, published in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. IV, Part 3.
7. Cf. Freud, “Über Triebumsetzungen insbesondere der Analerotik”, Sammlung kleiner Schriften. Vierte Folge.
8. Sammlung kleiner Schriften. Vierte Folge.
9. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I, p. 125.
Joan Riviere
Every direction in which psycho-analytic research has pointed seems in its turn to have attracted the interest of Ernest Jones, and now that of recent years’ investigation has slowly spread to the development of the sexual life of women, we find as a matter of course one by him among the most important contributions to the subject. As always, he throws great light on his material, with his peculiar gift both clarifying the knowledge we had already and also adding to it fresh observations of his own.
In his paper on “The early development of female sexuality”1 he sketches out a rough scheme of types of female development, which he first divides into heterosexual and homosexual, subsequently subdividing the latter homosexual group into two types. He acknowledges the roughly schematic nature of his classification and postulates a number of intermediate types. It is with one of these intermediate types that I am to-day concerned. In daily life types of men and women are constantly met with who, while mainly heterosexual in their development, plainly display strong features of the other sex. This has been judged to be an expression of the bisexuality inherent in us all; and analysis has shown that what appears as homosexual or heterosexual character-traits, or sexual manifestations, is the end-result of the interplay of conflicts and not necessarily evidence of a radical or fundamental tendency. The difference between homosexual and heterosexual development results from differences in the degree of anxiety, with the corresponding effect this has on development. Ferenczi pointed out a similar reaction in behaviour,2 namely, that homosexual men exaggerate their heterosexuality as a “defence” against their homosexuality. I shall attempt to show that women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.
It is with a particular type of intellectual woman that I have to deal. Not long ago intellectual pursuits for women were associated almost exclusively with an overtly masculine type of woman, who in pronounced cases made no secret of her wish or claim to be a man. This has now changed. Of all the women engaged in professional work to-day, it would be hard to say whether the greater number are more feminine than masculine in their mode of life and character. In University life, in scientific professions and in business, one constantly meets women who seem to fulfil every criterion of complete feminine development. They are excellent wives and mothers, capable housewives; they maintain social life and assist culture; they have no lack of feminine interests, e.g. in their personal appearance, and when called upon they can still find time to play the part of devoted and disinterested mother-substitutes among a wide circle of relatives and friends. At the same time they fulfil the duties of their profession at least as well as the average man. It is really a puzzle to know how to classify this type psychologically.
Some time ago, in the course of an analysis of a woman of this kind, I came upon some interesting discoveries. She conformed in almost every particular to the description just given; her excellent relations with her husband included a very intimate affectionate attachment between them and full and frequent sexual enjoyment; she prided herself on her proficiency as a housewife. She had followed her profession with marked success all her life. She had a high degree of adaptation to reality, and managed to sustain good and appropriate relations with almost everyone with whom she came in contact.
Certain reactions in her life showed, however, that her stability was not as flawless as it appeared; one of these will illustrate my theme. She was an American woman engaged in work of a propagandist nature, which consisted principally in speaking and writing. All her life a certain degree of anxiety, sometimes very severe, was experienced after every public performance, such as speaking to an audience. In spite of her unquestionable success and ability, both intellectual and practical, and her capacity for managing an audience and dealing with discussions, etc., she would be excited and apprehensive all night after, with misgivings whether she had done anything inappropriate, and obsessed by a need for reassurance. This need for reassurance led her compulsively on any such occasion to seek some attention or complimentary notice from a man or men at the close of the proceedings in which she had taken part or been the principal figure; and it soon became evident that the men chosen for the purpose were always unmistakeable father-figures, although often not persons whose judgement on her performance would in reality carry much weight. There were clearly two types of reassurance sought from these father-figures: first, direct reassurance of the nature of compliments about her performance; secondly, and more important, indirect reassurance of the nature of sexual attentions from these men. To speak broadly, analysis of her behaviour after her performance showed that she was attempting to obtain sexual advances from the particular type of men by means of flirting and coquetting with them in a more or less veiled manner. The extraordinary incongruity of this attitude with her highly impersonal and objective attitude during her intellectual performance, which it succeeded so rapidly in time, was a problem.
Analysis showed that the Oedipus situation of rivalry with the mother was extremely acute and had never been satisfactorily solved. I shall come back to this later. But beside the conflict in regard to the mother, the rivalry with the father was also very great. Her intellectual work, which took the form of speaking and writing, was based on an evident identification with her father, who had first been a literary man and later had taken to political life; her adolescence had been characterized by conscious revolt against him, with rivalry and contempt of him. Dreams and phantasies of this nature, castrating the husband, were frequently uncovered by analysis. She had quite conscious feelings of rivalry and claims to superiority over many of the “father-figures” whose favour she would then woo after her own performances! She bitterly resented any assumption that she was not equal to them, and (in private) would reject the idea of being subject to their judgement or criticism. In this she corresponded clearly to one type Ernest Jones has sketched: his first group of homosexual women who, while taking no interest in other women, wish for “recognition” of their masculinity from men and claim to be the equals of men, or in other words, to be men themselves. Her resentment, however, was not openly expressed; publicly she acknowledged her condition of womanhood.
Analysis then revealed that the explanation of her compulsive ogling and coquetting—which actually she was herself hardly aware of till analysis made it manifest—was as follows: it was an unconscious attempt to ward off the anxiety which would ensue on account of the reprisals she anticipated from the father-figures after her intellectual performance. The exhibition in public of her intellectual proficiency, which was in itself carried through successfully, signified an exhibition of herself in possession of the father’s penis, having castrated him. The display once over, she was seized by horrible dread of the retribution the father would then exact. Obviously it was a step towards propitiating the avenger to endeavour to offer herself to him sexually. This phantasy, it then appeared, had been very common in her childhood and youth, which had been spent in the Southern States of America; if a negro came to attack her, she planned to defend herself by making him kiss her and make love to her (ultimately so that she could then deliver him over to justice). But there was a further determinant of the obsessive behaviour. In a dream which had a rather similar content to this childhood phantasy, she was in terror alone in the house; then a negro came in and found her washing clothes, with her sleeves rolled up and arms exposed. She resisted him, with the secret intention of attracting him sexually, and he began to admire her arms and to caress them and her breasts. The meaning was that she had killed father and mother and obtained everything for herself (alone in the house), became terrified of their retribution (expected shots through the window), and defended herself by taking on a menial role (washing clothes) and by washing offdirt and sweat, guilt and blood, everything she had obtained by the deed, and “disguising herself” as merely a castrated woman. In that guise the man found no stolen property on her which he need attack her to recover and, further, found her attractive as an object of love. Thus the aim of the compulsion was not merely to secure reassurance by evoking friendly feelings towards her in the man; it was chiefly to make sure of safety by masquerading as guiltless and innocent. It was a compulsive reversal of her intellectual performance; and the two together formed the “double-action” of an obsessive act, just as her life as a whole consisted alternately of masculine and feminine activities.
Before this dream she had had dreams of people putting masks on their faces in order to avert disaster. One of these dreams was of a high tower on a hill being pushed over and falling down on the inhabitants of a village below, but the people put on masks and escaped injury!
Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it—much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove that he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the “masquerade”. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial, they are the same thing. The capacity for womanliness was there in this woman—and one might even say it exists in the most completely homosexual woman—but owing to her conflicts it did not represent her main development, and was used far more as a device for avoiding anxiety than as a primary mode of sexual enjoyment.
I will give some brief particulars to illustrate this. She had married late, at twenty-nine; she had had great anxiety about defloration, and had had the hymen stretched or slit before the wedding by a woman doctor. Her attitude to sexual intercourse before marriage was a set determination to obtain and experience the enjoyment and pleasure which she knew some women have in it, and the orgasm. She was afraid of impotence in exactly the same way as a man. This was partly a determination to surpass certain mother-figures who were frigid, but on deeper levels it was a determination not to be beaten by the man.3 In effect, sexual enjoyment was full and frequent, with complete orgasm; but the fact emerged that the gratification it brought was of the nature of a reassurance and restitution of something lost, and not ultimately pure enjoyment. The man’s love gave her back her self-esteem. During analysis, while the hostile castrating impulses towards the husband were in process of coming to light, the desire for intercourse very much abated, and she became for periods relatively frigid. The mask of womanliness was being peeled away, and she was revealed either as castrated (lifeless, incapable of pleasure), or as wishing to castrate (therefore afraid to receive the penis or welcome it by gratification). Once, while for a period her husband had had a love-affair with another woman, she had detected a very intense identification with him in regard to the rival woman. It is striking that she had had no homosexual experiences (since before puberty with a younger sister); but it appeared during analysis that this lack was compensated for by frequent homosexual dreams with intense orgasm.
In every-day life one may observe the mask of femininity taking curious forms. One capable housewife of my acquaintance is a woman of great ability, and can herself attend to typically masculine matters. But when, e.g. any builder or upholsterer is called in, she has a compulsion to hide all her technical knowledge from him and show deference to the workman, making her suggestions in an innocent and artless manner, as if they were “lucky guesses”. She has confessed to me that even with the butcher and baker, whom she rules in reality with a rod of iron, she cannot openly take up a firm straightforward stand; she feels herself as it were “acting a part”, she puts on the semblance of a rather uneducated, foolish and bewildered woman, yet in the end always making her point. In all other relations in life this woman is a gracious, cultured lady, competent and well-informed, and can manage her affairs by sensible rational behaviour without any subterfuges. This woman is now aged fifty, but she tells me that as a young woman she had great anxiety in dealings with men such as porters, waiters, cabmen, tradesmen, or any other potentially hostile father-figures, such as doctors, builders and lawyers; moreover, she often quarrelled with such men and had altercations with them, accusing them of defrauding her and so forth.
Another case from every-day observation is that of a clever woman, wife and mother, a University lecturer in an abstruse subject which seldom attracts women. When lecturing, not to students but to colleagues, she chooses particularly feminine clothes. Her behaviour on these occasions is also marked by an inappropriate feature: she becomes flippant and joking, so much so that it has caused comment and rebuke. She has to treat the situation of displaying her masculinity to men as a “game”, as something not real, as a “joke”. She cannot treat herself and her subject seriously, cannot seriously contemplate herself as on equal terms with men; moreover, the flippant attitude enables some of her sadism to escape, hence the offence it causes.
Many other instances could be quoted, and I have met with a similar mechanism in the analysis of manifest homosexual men. In one such man with severe inhibition and anxiety, homosexual activities really took second place, the source of greatest sexual gratification being actually masturbation under special conditions, namely, while looking at himself in a mirror dressed in a particular way. The excitation was produced by the sight of himself with hair parted in the centre, wearing a bow tie. These extraordinary “fetishes” turned out to represent a disguise of himself as his sister; the hair and bow were taken from her. His conscious attitude was a desire to be a woman, but his manifest relations with men had never been stable. Unconsciously the homosexual relation proved to be entirely sadistic and based on masculine rivalry. Phantasies of sadism and “possession of a penis” could be indulged only while reassurance against anxiety was being obtained from the mirror that he was safely “disguised as a woman”.
To return to the case I first described. Underneath her apparently satisfactory heterosexuality it is clear that this woman displayed well-known manifestations of the castration complex. Horney was the first among others to point out the sources of that complex in the Oedipus situation; my belief is that the fact that womanliness may be assumed as a mask may contribute further in this direction to the analysis of female development. With that in view I will now sketch the early libido-development in this case.
But before this I must give some account of her relations with women. She was conscious of rivalry of almost any woman who had either good looks or intellectual pretensions. She was conscious of flashes of hatred against almost any woman with whom she had much to do, but where permanent or close relations with women were concerned she was none the less able to establish a very satisfactory footing. Unconsciously she did this almost entirely by means of feeling herself superior in some way to them (her relations with her inferiors were uniformly excellent). Her proficiency as a housewife largely had its root in this. By it she surpassed her mother, won her approval and proved her superiority among rival “feminine” women. Her intellectual attainments undoubtedly had in part the same object. They too proved her superiority to her mother; it seemed probable that since she reached womanhood her rivalry with women had been more acute in regard to intellectual things than in regard to beauty, since she could usually take refuge in her superior brains where beauty was concerned.
The analysis showed that the origin of all these reactions, both to men and to women, lay in the reaction to the parents during the oral-biting sadistic phase. These reactions took the form of the phantasies sketched by Melanie Klein4 in her Congress paper, 1927. In consequence of disappointment or frustration during sucking or weaning, coupled with experiences during the primal scene which is interpreted in oral terms, extremely intense sadism develops towards both parents.5 The desire to bite off the nipple shifts, and desires to destroy, penetrate and disembowel the mother and devour her and the contents of her body succeed it. These contents include the father’s penis, her fæces and her children—all her possessions and love-objects, imagined as within her body.6 The desire to bite off the nipple is also shifted, as we know, on to the desire to castrate the father by biting off his penis. Both parents are rivals in this stage, both possess desired objects; the sadism is directed against both and the revenge of both is feared. But, as always with girls, the mother is the more hated, and consequently the more feared. She will execute the punishment that fits the crime—destroy the girl’s body, her beauty, her children, her capacity for having children, mutilate her, devour her, torture her and kill her. In this appalling predicament the girl’s only safety lies in placating the mother and atoning for her crime. She must retire from rivalry with the mother, and if she can, endeavour to restore to her what she has stolen. As we know, she identifies herself with the father; and then she uses the masculinity she thus obtains by putting it at the service of the mother. She becomes the father, and takes his place; so she can “restore” him to the mother. This position was very clear in many typical situations in my patient’s life. She delighted in using her great practical ability to aid or assist weaker and more helpless women, and could maintain this attitude successfully so long as rivalry did not emerge too strongly. But this restitution could be made on one condition only; it must procure her a lavish return in the form of gratitude and “recognition”. The recognition desired was supposed by her to be owing for her self-sacrifices; more unconsciously what she claimed was recognition of her supremacy in having the penis to give back. If her supremacy were not acknowledged, then rivalry became at once acute; if gratitude and recognition were withheld, her sadism broke out in full force and she would be subject (in private) to paroxysms of oral-sadistic fury, exactly like a raging infant.
In regard to the father, resentment against him arose in two ways: (1) during the primal scene he took from the mother the milk, etc., which the child missed; (2) at the same time he gave to the mother the penis or children instead of to her. Therefore all that he had or took should be taken from him by her; he was castrated and reduced to nothingness, like the mother. Fear of him, though never so acute as of the mother, remained; partly, too, because his vengeance for the death and destruction of the mother was expected. So he too must be placated and appeased. This was done by masquerading in a feminine guise for him, thus showing him her “love” and guiltlessness towards him. It is significant that this woman’s mask, though transparent to other women, was successful with men, and served its purpose very well. Many men were attracted in this way, and gave her reassurance by showing her favour. Closer examination showed that these men were of the type who themselves fear the ultra-womanly woman. They prefer a woman who herself has male attributes, for to them her claims on them are less.
At the primal scene the talisman which both parents possess and which she lacks is the father’s penis; hence her rage, also her dread and helplessness.7 By depriving the father of it and possessing it herself she obtains the talisman—the invincible sword, the “organ of sadism”; he becomes powerless and helpless (her gentle husband), but she still guards herself from attack by wearing towards him the mask of womanly subservience, and under that screen, performing many of his masculine functions herself—”for him”—(her practical ability and management). Likewise with the mother: having robbed her of the penis, destroyed her and reduced her to pitiful inferiority, she triumphs over her, but again secretly; outwardly she acknowledges and admires the virtues of “feminine” women. But the task of guarding herself against the woman’s retribution is harder than with the man; her efforts to placate and make reparation by restoring and using the penis in the mother’s service were never enough; this device was worked to death, and sometimes it almost worked her to death.
It appeared, therefore, that this woman had saved herself from the intolerable anxiety resulting from her sadistic fury against both parents by creating in phantasy a situation in which she became supreme and no harm could be done to her. The essence of the phantasy was her supremacy over the parent-objects; by it her sadism was gratified, she triumphed over them. By this same supremacy she also succeeded in averting their revenges; the means she adopted for this were reaction-formations and concealment of her hostility. Thus she could gratify her id-impulses, her narcissistic ego and her super-ego at one and the same time. The phantasy was the main-spring of her whole life and character, and she came within a narrow margin of carrying it through to complete perfection. But its weak point was the megalomanic character, under all the disguises, of the necessity for supremacy. When this supremacy was seriously disturbed during analysis, she fell into an abyss of anxiety, rage and abject depression; before the analysis, into illness.
I should like to say a word about Ernest Jones’s type of homosexual woman whose aim is to obtain “recognition” of her masculinity from men. The question arises whether the need for recognition in this type is connected with the mechanism of the same need, operating differently (recognition for services performed), in the case I have described. In my case direct recognition of the possession of the penis was not claimed openly; it was claimed for the reaction-formations, though only the possession of the penis made them possible. Indirectly, therefore, recognition was none the less claimed for the penis. This indirectness was due to apprehension lest her possession of a penis should be “recognized”, in other words “found out”. One can see that with less anxiety my patient too would have openly claimed recognition from men for her possession of a penis, and in private she did in fact, like Ernest Jones’s cases, bitterly resent any lack of this direct recognition. It is clear that in his cases the primary sadism obtains more gratification; the father has been castrated, and shall even acknowledge his defeat. But how then is the anxiety averted by these women? In regard to the mother, this is done of course by denying her existence. To judge from indications in analyses I have carried out, I conclude that, first, as Jones implies, this claim is simply a displacement of the original sadistic claim that the desired object, nipple, milk, penis, should be instantly surrendered; secondarily, the need for recognition is largely a need for absolution. Now the mother has been relegated to limbo; no relations with her are possible. Her existence appears to be denied, though in truth it is only too much feared. So the guilt of having triumphed over both can only be absolved by the father; if he sanctions her possession of the penis by acknowledging it, she is safe. By giving her recognition, he gives her the penis and to her instead of to the mother; then she has it, and she may have it, and all is well. “Recognition” is always in part reassurance, sanction, love; further, it renders her supreme again. Little as he may know it, to her the man has admitted his defeat. Thus in its content such a woman’s phantasy-relation to the father is similar to the normal Oedipus one; the difference is that it rests on a basis of sadism. The mother she has indeed killed, but she is thereby excluded from enjoying much that the mother had, and what she does obtain from the father she has still in great measure to extort and extract.
These conclusions compel one once more to face the question: what is the essential nature of fully-developed femininity? What is das ewig Weibliche? The conception of womanliness as a mask, behind which man suspects some hidden danger, throws a little light on the enigma. Fully-developed heterosexual womanhood is founded, as Helene Deutsch and Ernest Jones have stated, on the oral-sucking stage. The sole gratification of a primary order in it is that of receiving the (nipple, milk) penis, semen, child from the father. For the rest it depends upon reaction-formations. The acceptance of “castration”, the humility, the admiration of men, come partly from the overestimation of the object on the oral-sucking plane; but chiefly from the renunciation (lesser intensity) of sadistic castration-wishes deriving from the later oral-biting level. “I must not take, I must not even ask; it must be given me.” The capacity for self-sacrifice, devotion, self-abnegation expresses efforts to restore and make good, whether to mother or to father figures, what has been taken from them. It is also what Radó has called a “narcissistic insurance” of the highest value.
It becomes clear how the attainment of full heterosexuality coincides with that of genitality. And once more we see, as Abraham first stated, that genitality implies attainment of a post-ambivalent state. Both the “normal” woman and the homosexual desire the father’s penis and rebel against frustration (or castration); but one of the differences between them lies in the difference in the degree of sadism and of the power of dealing both with it and with the anxiety it gives rise to in the two types of women.
1. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. VIII, 1927.
2. “The nosology of male homosexuality”, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, 1916.
3. I have found this attitude in several women analysands and the self-ordained defloration in nearly all of them (five cases). In the light of Freud’s “Taboo of virginity”, this latter symptomatic act is instructive.
4. “Early stages of the Oedipus conflict”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. IX, 1928.
5. Ernest Jones, “Early stages of the Oedipus conflict”, p. 469, regards an intensification of the oral-sadistic stage as the central feature of homosexual development in women.
6. As it was not essential to my argument, I have omitted all reference to the further development of the relation to children.
7. Cf. M. N. Searl, “Danger situations of the immature ego”, Oxford Congress, 1929.
* Paper delivered at the Seventh International Psycho-Analytical Congress, Berlin, September 1922.
† Article citation:
Horney, K. (1924). On the genesis of the castration complex in women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5: 50–65.
*Article citation:
Riviere, J. (1929). Womanliness as a masquerade. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 10: 303–313.