Liberating Women from Freud

Feminists consider Sigmund Freud one of history's leading male chauvinist pigs. No wonder. The master taught that women are far more masochistic and narcissistic than men and more prone to neurosis, that they are rigid and unchangeable by the age of 30, and unable to equal the high moral character of men. These doleful views flow from a single Freudian concept: penis envy. As Freud saw it, female identity grows from an infant girl's shocking discovery that she lacks a penis. Later, in about the third year of life, she carries this sense of castration and inferiority into the Oedipal cycle, blaming the mother for the loss of the penis, turning to the father as a love object, and converting the wish for a penis into a wish for a child. Childbearing and most of women's aspirations are thus, per Freud, attempts to compensate for the missing male organ, and penis envy becomes "the bedrock" of women's unconscious frustrations throughout life.

Despite dissent from a few of his early follower--, Freud's views quickly hardened into psychoanalytic dogma. Now, under pressure from feminists, orthodox Freudians seem to be giving ground. "Anatomy is not destiny," says Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, one of the voices for change. "Destiny is what people make of anatomy."

Doomed Castrates. Indeed, in a forthcoming special issue on female psychology, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association reveals a willingness to revise Freud. One common refrain among the writers: male prejudice and parental expectations create many more problems for women than Freudianism has so far acknowledged. Writes Virginia Clower of Washington, D.C.: "To the extent that our society continues to educate mothers and fathers who see their female children as biological castrates doomed to inferior psychological, moral and social development, we will continue to produce women who regard themselves as second class."

In general, the writers seek to preserve Freud's notions of penis envy and the castration complex, but argue that the effects are hardly as malign as Freud thought. Analysts William Grossman and Walter Stewart suggest that penis envy in adult women should be interpreted as the "manifest content" of a problem--in other words, it is merely a metaphor for whatever may be troubling a woman, and not a "bedrock" problem.

Other articles in the journal play down the importance of the castration complex, which Freud believed always preceded the Oedipus complex; he felt that the drive to love and bear children arises from woman's sense of being mutilated, her feeling of loss. Psychiatrist Henri Parens, for one, reports that his observations of children show that a sense of castration and penis envy sometimes occur after the Oedipal problem.

Thus female love can no longer be considered a defense or compensation for a lost penis. Other writers doubt that female gender identity--a child's sense of being a girl--stems entirely from a sense of castration and penis envy.

Though these revisions are small and perhaps arcane to the nonanalyst, they erode the idea that penis envy is the dominant, devastating factor in female experience. In fact, Clower suggests that there will be more changes when Freudians digest the mass of data accumulated in recent years about sexuality and child behavior. Says she: "Today, more than 40 years after Freud's original propositions, we are still talking about penis envy, female castration and woman's masculinity complex. Freud revised his theories many times as he accumulated new data and reached fresh insights. Contemporary analysts should do no less."

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