The Early Development of Female Sexuality

Jones read this paper at the Tenth International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Innsbruck on 1 September 1927, and it appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis that October. He opens by endorsing Karen Horney's warning that knowledge of early female development is distorted by bias, suggesting that male analysts have taken an unduly phallocentric view that underrates the female organs. The paper draws chiefly on deep analyses, conducted at the same time, of five women with manifest homosexuality, and sets out to answer two questions: what in women corresponds to the male fear of castration, and what distinguishes the development of homosexual from heterosexual women. Jones argues that the first question is wrongly put. Because the genital plays so large a part in male sexuality, analysts tend to equate castration with the abolition of sexuality altogether, whereas in both sexes castration is only a partial threat. For the total and permanent extinction of the capacity, and the opportunity, for sexual enjoyment he proposes the Greek term "aphanisis", and he holds that this is the fundamental dread underlying all the neuroses; castration fear and thoughts of death are its nearest clinical expressions. Both sexes dread the same thing; they differ in how they imagine it coming about. For the boy it takes the active form of castration as punishment for a forbidden act. For the girl, who depends more on her partner's willingness for her gratification, the primary fear is separation: that the rival mother will come between her and the father or send her away for ever, or that the father will simply withhold gratification. Hence the deep fear of desertion. Jones connects this dependence on the partner's approval with Helene Deutsch's observation that the female super-ego, like the male, derives chiefly from reactions to the father. Building on Freud's account of the female Oedipus complex passing away through continued disappointment, Jones arrives at the formula that privation is equivalent to frustration: sheer non-gratification comes to mean deliberate deprivation by others. He goes further, proposing that guilt, and with it the super-ego, is built up from within to protect the child from the stress of ungratified libido and so to ward off aphanisis, by damping down wishes that cannot be fulfilled. External disapproval, once held to be the whole cause, is largely exploited by the child, who projects the inner danger outward and seizes on whatever "moral complaisance" (moralisches Entgegenkommen) the environment offers in order to signal the danger and erect a barrier against it. For the girl's early development, Jones accepts Freud's account but adds, in line with Melanie Klein's early analyses, direct transitions from the oral stage to the Oedipal situation: oral tendencies bifurcate early into clitoral and fellatio directions. In development towards heterosexuality, sadism sets in late, sucking passes into the anal stage, and mouth, anus and vagina form an equivalent series of receptive organs, a stage that amounts to identification with the mother. Penis envy always appears, but Jones, agreeing with Horney, Deutsch and Klein, distinguishes a pre-Oedipal (auto-erotic) from a post-Oedipal (allo-erotic) penis envy and holds the latter to be clinically the more important. It is a regressive defence, revived by the privation of never being allowed to share the father's penis or to obtain a child from him. Faced with aphanisis through this inevitable privation, the girl must renounce either her object, the father, or her sex, that is, her femininity. In the first case her feminine wishes develop on the adult plane and pass to more accessible objects; in the second the bond with the father is kept but turned into identification with him, a penis complex. The boy faces the parallel choice between renouncing his mother and renouncing his masculinity, so that one formula holds for both sexes: they must give up either their sex or their incest. In the homosexual solution the individual makes sexual integrity depend on possessing the organ of the opposite sex, directly or through identification. Jones suggests that the "phallic phase" Freud described in girls is probably a mild form of this father-penis identification, a secondary and defensive formation rather than a true developmental stage. Among homosexual women Jones distinguishes two main groups: those who keep their interest in men but want to be recognised by them as one of themselves, and those who have little interest in men and enjoy femininity vicariously through identification with a feminine woman, whom they gratify with a substitute for the penis, most typically the tongue. The decisive and apparently inborn factors are an unusual intensity of oral erotism and of sadism, which converge in an intensified oral-sadistic stage that he regards as the central characteristic of homosexual development in women; oral erotism predominates in the second group, sadism, with its biting and castrating phantasies, in the first. He adds that the heterosexual woman dreads the mother more, the homosexual woman the father, whose punishment is feared as desertion on the oral level and as beating or anal assault on the anal one. The paper introduced the term aphanisis and opened Jones's side of the debate with Freud on female sexuality.