Concept
Penis envy
In Freud's account of female development, the girl's envy of the penis on discovering the anatomical difference between the sexes, which he held to drive her turn from the mother to the father and her wish for a child in its place, and to persist in adult women as a sense of inferiority or a masculinity complex. Karen Horney and others contested its primacy from the 1920s, treating it as secondary or culturally reinforced rather than a biological given.
Read more- Broader concept
- Castration complex
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 4
- Related
- Womb envy
critiqued by
- Karen Horney 1923 From her congress paper of 1922 onward Horney questioned the view that penis envy is primary and decisive for women, calling it unsatisfying for biological thinking and a product of masculine bias; by 1939 she read it as culturally reinforced.
diverged into
- Womb envy 1926 Horney framed envy of motherhood as the male counterpart of penis envy, reversing the direction of envy and so denying penis envy its place as the single key to sexual difference.
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud Freud first described the girl's envy of the penis in "On the Sexual Theories of Children" (1908), used the word Penisneid from 1913, and set it out in the section on children's sexual researches that he added to the Three Essays in 1915.