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.
Development
1923
critiqued by Karen Horney
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.
In The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and by Women (1926);New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939);On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women (1923)
Undated
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.
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)
Relations
- 1923 critiqued by Karen Horney
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.
- 1926 diverged into Womb envy
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.
Works
- 1905
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Freud's three essays, published by Deuticke in 1905, deal with the sexual aberrations, with infantile sexuality and with the transformations of puberty. Together they argue that the sexual drive is present from infancy, that it is made up of component drives bound to erotogenic zones, and that it reaches its adult genital form only through a course of development. Later editions added an account of the pregenital organisations of the libido.
- 1923
On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women
Horney's first paper against the received psychoanalytic account of femininity was read at the Berlin congress of 1922 and published in 1923. Analysts had taken it as given that women suffer from their sex and envy the man his penis, and that the female castration complex follows from this. Horney asks whether the view owes its self-evidence to masculine narcissism. She also notes that it is unsatisfying, for biological thinking, that half of humanity should be discontented with its sexual role. She breaks the girl's penis envy into three components: urethral erotism, the wish to look and to show, and suppressed masturbatory wishes. In each the little girl is at a real disadvantage, but none of them makes her feel primarily inferior. From analytic material she argues that the decisive process lies in the Oedipal phase. The girl passes through an intense, fully feminine love for the father, including the wish for a child from him. When that love is disappointed she gives him up as an object and identifies with him instead, so that the wish to be a man covers a renounced femininity. That identification is one core of the castration complex. The other is the fantasy of having been castrated within the love relation to the father, from which women's vindictive attitudes toward men derive. Her conclusion is that wounded femininity creates the castration complex, and that women, like men, are made neurotic by their failure at the Oedipus complex. The same identification with the parent of the other sex underlies both homosexuality and the castration complex.
- 1926
The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and by Women
In this 1926 paper Horney asks how far the psychoanalytic account of female development has been shaped by the fact that its authors were men. She starts from the philosopher Georg Simmel's argument that our whole culture is a masculine culture, in which the standards of objectivity are in practice male standards. Psychology has observed women from the man's standpoint too. Setting the accepted analytic ideas about the girl side by side with the ideas a little boy forms about girls, she finds that the two largely coincide. She reads Ferenczi's genital theory as an expression of the male view of motherhood. Against that view she stresses the undeniable physiological superiority that motherhood gives women. She also stresses the intense envy of motherhood (Mutterschaftsneid) that boys and men feel toward pregnancy, childbirth, the breast and nursing. She suggests that theories which devalue motherhood may serve an unconscious male tendency, and that men's drive to creative work may draw on their small share in bearing children. The girl's masculinity complex appears as a secondary flight from womanhood. It is driven by guilt and anxiety over Oedipal wishes for the father and by genital anxieties, and the paper holds that the vagina plays a part in early female genital life. This flight is reinforced by the actual disadvantage of women in social life. Horney calls for attention to the interaction between psychic and social factors.
- 1939
Horney's second book takes up Freud's theory point by point, to separate what she held to be its lasting findings from the premises she thought had hampered it. She keeps what she calls Freud's fundamental findings: that psychic processes are strictly determined, that actions and feelings may have unconscious motives and that resistance guards them, the role of emotional forces and conflict, repression and the other defences, the meaning of dreams, the formative power of early experience, transference and free association. She rejects his instinct theory and the mechanistic and evolutionistic thinking beneath it, together with his neglect of culture. Her thesis is that psychoanalysis should outgrow the limits set by its being an instinctivistic and a genetic psychology. She says that she is not founding a new school. Successive chapters re-examine the libido theory, which she judges unsubstantiated, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, feminine psychology and the death instinct. They also treat the emphasis on childhood, transference, culture and neurosis, the ego and the id, anxiety, the super-ego, neurotic guilt feelings and masochistic phenomena. In place of instinctual drives she puts neurotic trends. These are strivings for safety and satisfaction, such as the need for affection or for perfection, by which a person who feels helpless in a hostile world copes with it in some measure of safety. Anxiety arises when such a safety device is endangered. The last chapter, on therapy, sets as its aim restoring the patient to themself, so that the safety devices are no longer needed and spontaneity returns. Horney acknowledges debts to Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Harald Schultz-Hencke and Max Horkheimer. She credits Fromm with showing how central the loss of self is to neurosis.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and by Women1926Evidence for a relation
- New Ways in Psychoanalysis1939Evidence for a relation
- On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women1923Evidence for a relation
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality1905Evidence for a relation