The Infantile Genital Organization

A short paper of 1923, subtitled "An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality", in which Freud corrects a passage of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. There he had held that infantile sexuality resembles the adult form in its object choice but lacks, or only imperfectly achieves, the primacy of the genitals. He now argues that at the height of infantile sexual development interest in the genitals and genital activity become dominant, hardly less than in maturity. What sets this infantile genital organization apart is that for both sexes only one genital, the male one, is taken into account: there is no genital primacy but a primacy of the phallus. Freud says he can describe the process only in the boy. The boy assumes that every being has an organ like his own and directs his sexual curiosity at it. When he discovers that girls lack it, he first denies what he saw, then supposes it will grow, and at last concludes that it was there and was taken away, through castration. Freud holds that the castration complex can be understood only from this origin in the phase of phallic primacy, and traces to it much of men's contempt for and horror of women, citing Ferenczi's reading of the Medusa's head. The child generalizes the lack only slowly, keeping the penis for respected women such as the mother until his theories of birth, and the vagina remains undiscovered. The paper ends by tracing how the polarity of the sexes changes through development: subject and object, active and passive in the sadistic-anal organization, phallic and castrated in the infantile genital organization, and male and female only at puberty.