Psychoanalysis and Women

Contemporary Reappraisals

Judith L. Alpert, Judith L. Alpert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135061883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Relaciones interpersonales en psicología

Within the psychoanalytic framework, there is a growing body of research and thinking about female development. In addition, there is ongoing research within other areas of psychology, such as developmental psychology and social psychology, which has important implications for an understanding of women's adult development. Often these research findings are not readily available to the analytic community, nor has much of the research been incorporated into a psychoanalytic framework.

Psychoanalysis and Women broadens analytic thinking by integrating contemporary literature from psychoanalysis with that of other areas, both within and outside psychology, which has implications for the undertanding of women's development. This literature is conceptualized within a psychoanalytic framework. A basic premise underlying this book is that psychoanalysis needs continuing review and revision in terms of what women and men are about and a continuing focus on whether and how unfounded biases prevent analysts from understanding patients. The present volume considers how sexism and feminism are affecting psychoanalysis and exemplifies how the emerging field of psychoanalysis of women and the issues its existence raises should be conceptualized. It also exemplifies some of the positive contributions that a feminist outlook gives to the study of human behavior and should esxpand the range of hypotheses that we have about people.

|I| Overview

1 Women's Development in Analytic Theory

Six Decades of Controversy

ZENIA ODES FLIEGEL

The last two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the issues, first raised in the 1920s, surrounding Freud's formulations on feminine development. In the intervening period, the historic controversy around this subject was seemingly all but forgotten, with classical literature generally reflecting on unquestioning acceptance of the validity of Freud's views. Even Horney's followers tended to neglect her pertinent early work — perhaps because much of it was written in a Freudian idiom incompatible with her later formulations. Her scattered papers on feminine psychology were not collected and reissued until 1967, posthumously.

Within the mainstream of Freudian analysis, it is only with the current reexamination of this area of psychoanalytic theory that earlier questions and dissents have been rediscovered. In recent years references to Horney and Jones, the central figures in the original debate, have become almost routine in writings on this subject; yet there is great variation in the way they are referred to and in what aspects of their views are chosen for citation. Relatively few Freudian analysts, even if in substantial disagreement with Freud in this area, acknowledge any merit to the views of the early analytic dissenters.¹ Yet the influence of those dissenters is still felt indirectly. Often, nuances in current formulations can be better understood when related to the early history and to earlier polarized positions; in fact, Freud's own formulations can best be grapsed in that light, since they were forged in the context of the early polemics. In addition, as a result of the original controversy and the fact that it eventually became schismatic, positions in this area were codified and hardened to an extraordinary degree, becoming almost a matter of doctrinaire loyalty.

As is by now well known, in the 1920s and early 1930s there was within Freud's inner circle an intense controversy over feminine psychology — a controversy more extensive than is quite apparent from the printed record. The original debate, much of it conducted out of print, was recorded in a fragmentary and partly submerged way.² More important, without scrutinizing the dates of the relevant papers or their original presentations at various congresses, it is not always clear who is answering whom or where. The import of the various contributions to the debate is by no means self-evident; they can easily be misapprehended and they often are.

The most common misapprehension is to regard Freud's revolutionary"³ 1925 paper as marking the beginning of the controversy. The present chapter attempts to show that the 1925 paper was written in what was already a polemical context. After some of the relevant sequences are described, a sampling of contemporary research reports and their conceptualizations are placed in relation to the views of the original participants in order to offer a perspective on the current literature.

The Great Debate

The main protagonists in the early controversy were Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, and, of course, Freud. Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, Helene Deutsch and Otto Fenichel played important parts; others were involved peripherally. The key papers were two by Horney (1924, 1926), three by Jones (1927, 1933, 1935) and three by Freud (1924, 1925, 1931). There were important papers by Lampl-de Groot (1927) and Helene Deutsch (1930, 1932); Femchel's (1930, 1934) role was interesting, and Melanie Klein (1928) was an important background figure.

The Polemics

We start with Horney's first paper, "On the Genesis of the Castration Complex in Women" (1924), originally delivered at the 1922 Berlin Congress. On the face of it, nothing in its contents is incompatible with Freudian theory as articulated up to that point, though the formulations on feminine psychic development are richer and more complete than those Freud had been able to offer; ideas presented here anticipate some very modern contributions.⁴

Among the central points of the later controversy were Horney's suggestion that early pregenital penis envy (later designated as "primary penis envy") be differentiated from a subsequent, more intense form. For the latter she posited different origins within the vicissitudes of the female oedipus complex and regarded it as the more important nucleus of what might develop into a neurotic "castration complex" or "masculinity complex" in adult women. What represented a new departure was that she undertook to analyze both the primary and the secondary forms of penis envy into their psychic components, rather than taking them as self-evident and self-explanatory reactions to the girl's factual constitutional inferiority. Thus Horney saw the origins of primary penis envy in the little girl's relative disadvantage in relation to three pregenital components: (1) urethral erotic omnipotent fantasies arising out of children's narcissistic overvaluation of excretory processes; (2) exhibitionistic and scoptophilic wrshes in which the little boy has an advantage due to the visibility of his genital; and (3) suppressed masturbatory wishes, since the girl may interpret the boy's ability to handle his genital during urination as permission for him to masturbate.

This primary penis envy was distinguished by Horney from a later, more complex defensive formation in which, as a step in the resolution of the girl's oedipal attachment, she attempts to identify with the father. This step may be only a transitory phase in her development, or it may become fixed in a neurotic masculinity complex. Crucial to these formulations is the underlying idea, later to be argued forcefully by Jones (1935), that the little girl's oedipal attachment develops out of her innate femininity undergoing its own maturational processes.⁵ According to Horney's thesis, supported by extensive case material, the little girl, both disappointed and threatened by her oedipal attachment to her father, later renounces her oedipal wishes and replaces them with an identification. This in turn reinforces preexisting preoedipal penis envy. Such defensive oedipal resolution is seen as the more potent force in keeping the "masculinity complex" alive in adult women; Horney assigned a secondary role to the regressive factor, whereby early preoedipal penis envy is revived by such an identification.

Also important to the subsequent debate was Horney's emphasis on the oedipal girl's disappointment in her wish to be given a child by the father, illustrated with a case where "by a process of displacement the penis had become the object of envy in place of the child" (p. 59). One more element among Horney s many reported observations should be mentioned: she regarded as fundamental a "basic fantasy of having suffered castration through the love relation with the father" and designated it as "the second root of the whole castration complex in women" (p. 63). Here, the girl defends against her wishful but guilt- and anxiety-laden castration fantasies with the opposite fantasy of possessing a penis: "The identification with the father doesn't carry with it . . . guilt but rather a sense of acquittal. For . . . from the connection . . . between the ideas of castration and the incest fantasies relating to the father . . . being a woman is in itself felt to be culpable" (p. 65).

In comparing this work with some of Freud's subsequent formulations, one can hardly escape the judgment that Horney is more "Freudian" here than Freud. She stresses the importance of infantile sexual fantasy; Freud is to cling to "reality" in search for explanations. Freud showed no recognition of how consistent Horney's work was with the main lines of psychoanalytic theory. One can only guess why he found this remarkable paper so unacceptable; masculine narcissism as a factor in shaping psychoanalytic formulations, explicitly referred to by Horney, may have played a part. Perhaps more important, her thesis also implies the existence of an intrinsic, pleasure-oriented feminine sexuality. Despite his well-known stress on the importance of sexuality generally, this idea was apparently profoundly alien to Freud's thought. As early as 1905 Freud defined libido as "invariably and necessarily of masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women" (p. 219). This he reiterated several decades later (1933): "The juxtaposition 'feminine libido' is without any justification" (p. 131).

Freud responded to Horney's 1924 paper with two of his own (1924; 1925).⁶ The first of these, "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex," written within a year of Horney's publication in German and still rather sketchy as concerns girls, marked a new departure. As the editors of the Standard Edition noted, Freud (1924) for the first time stressed differences in oedipal development in boys and girls.⁷ Although in turning his attention to girls Freud confesses that here his material "becomes more obscure and full of gaps" (p. 177), he nevertheless goes on to outline aspects of his subsequent theory. He declares: "Anatomy is Destiny" (p. 178), and reasons that for the girl, without the castration threat "a powerful motive also drops out for the setting up of a superego and for her breaking off of the infantile genital organization" (p. 178). He further asserts that it is the girl's wish for a penis which leads to her wish for a baby: "She slips — along the line of a symbolic equation . . . from the penis to a baby" (pp. 178-179) — an exact reversal of Horney's (1924) suggested "process of displacement" from baby to penis. Freud's idea that the girl lacks a powerful motive for renouncing the oedipal position similarly counters Horney's thesis, based as that was on the girl's need to retreat from oedipal guilts and anxieties. Freud concludes his discussion by reiterating: "It must be admitted, however, that in general our insight into these developmental processes in girls is unsatisfactory, incomplete and vague" (1924, p. 179).

This abrupt reversal or his own previous ideas, bounded by two disclaimers of insight, suggests that something other than ordinary evolution of thought was involved. Following so closely upon Horney's paper, it suggests rather a move to stake out territory and possibly also to signal displeasure. The latter possibility is supported by an interjected remark: "Here the feminist demand for equal rights for the sexes does not take us far" (p. 178). Freud reemphasized this sentiment a year later: "We must not be deflected from such conclusions by the denials of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes as completely equal in position and worth" (1925, p. 258, italics added).

Freud's (1925) landmark paper, "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes," develops further the themes sounded in 1924. Like its antecedent, it is bounded by disclaimers, both within and outside its actual text. As late as December 1924, Freud wrote to Abraham, in response to a related question: "I do not know anything about it. As I gladly admit, the female part of the problem is extraordinarily obscure to me" (Abraham and Freud, 1965, p. 379); and a year after offering his definitive formulation (one he would reaffirm in all subsequent writings on femininity), he elsewhere stressed once again the limits of his understanding in this area: "We know less about the sexual life of little girls than of boys. But we need not feel ashamed of this distinction; after all, the sexual life of adult women is a dark continent' for psychology" (Freud, 1926, p. 212).

In 1925, however, Freud offered his theory of the girl's psychosexual development. A juxtaposition of relevant passages from Freud's 1925 paper with Karen Horney's thesis again shows a reversal of the latter; this time it is more complete — an almost faithful mirror image of Horney's thesis. Freud wrote:

In girls the Oedipus complex is a secondary formation. The operations of the castration complex precede and prepare for it. . . . there is a fundamental contrast between the two sexes. Whereas in boys the Oedipus complex is destroyed by the castration complex, in girls it is made possible and led up to by the castration complex [p. 256, emphasis in the original].

Here, the girl develops her oedipal wishes and feminine attitude towards her father as a consequence of frustrated phallic jealousy, and by way of forced resignation to her castrated condition.⁸

The only explicit reference to Horney occurs in the final paragraph of Freud's 1925 paper:

In the valuable and comprehensive studies on the masculinity and castration complexes in women by Abraham (1921), Horney (1923), and Helene Deutsch (1925) there is much that touches closely upon what I have written but nothing that coincides with it completely, so that here again I feel justified in publishing this paper [p. 258].

It is difficult to guess here whether, as Jones (1933) was to suggest with reference to another point, Freud actually misunderstood Horney sufficiently not to recognize how antithetical their formulations were, or whether this was Freud's way of being polite. Freud's introduction to his paper clearly shows that without allowing time to verily his ideas through further clinical observation, he now felt under pressure to offer his own formulations on questions he had for a long time kept in abeyance; it also shows a need to offer justification for taking such an uncharacteristic course. Freud explained this departure from his usual procedures on the basis of his limited life expectancy, reduced case load, and the availability of collaborators to confirm or deny the validity of his proposed formulations. There was an invitation here, along with an effort to preserve scientific objectivity: "On this occasion, therefore, I feel justified in publishing something which stands in urgent need of confirmation before its value or lack of value can be decided" (p. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Overview
• Freudian Theory & Beyond
• Female Patient
• Female Analyst
• Epilogue
• Author Index
• Subject Index