Concept
Womb envy
The envy of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, of the breasts and of suckling, that Karen Horney in 1926 found in boys and men and called Mutterschaftsneid, envy of motherhood; the English name womb envy attached to her idea later. She set it beside the girl's penis envy as its counterpart, suggested that men's drive to creative achievement partly compensates for it, and argued that the psychoanalytic picture of women as lacking reflects a masculine point of view.
Development
1926
introduced by Karen Horney
Horney's own word was Mutterschaftsneid, envy of motherhood; the English name womb envy came to be attached to the idea later.
In The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and by Women (1926)
Relations
- 1926 introduced by Karen Horney
Horney's own word was Mutterschaftsneid, envy of motherhood; the English name womb envy came to be attached to the idea later.
- 1926 diverges from Penis 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.
Works
- 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.
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