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FEMALE SEXUALITY

BY

SIGM. FREUD

I

In that phase of children’s libidinal development which is characterized
by the normal Œdipus complex we find that they are tenderly attached
to the parent of the opposite sex, while their relation to the other
parent is predominantly hostile. In the case of boys the explanation
is simple. A boy’s mother was his first love-
object ; she remains so,
and, as his feelings for her become more passionate and he understands
more of the relation between father and mother, the former inevitably
appears as a rival. With little girls it is otherwise. For them, too,
the mother was the first love-
object ; how then does a little girl find
her way to her father ? How, when and why does she detach herself
from her mother ? We have long realized that in women the develop-
ment of sexuality is complicated by the task of renouncing that genital
zone which was originally the principal one, namely, the clitoris, in
favour of a new zone-
the vagina. But there is a second change
which appears to us no less characteristic and important for feminine
development : the original mother-
object has to be exchanged for
the father. We cannot as yet see clearly how these two tasks are
linked up.

We know that women with a strong father-
attachment are numerous
and need not by any means be neurotic. In studying this type I
have made some observations which I propose to communicate here
and which have led me to a certain view of female sexuality. I have
been struck, above all, by two facts. First, analysis has shewn that
where the attachment to the father was peculiarly strong it had been
preceded by a phase of equally strong and passionate attachment
exclusively to the mother. Except for the change in the object, the
love-
life had acquired hardly a single new feature in the second phase.
The primary mother-
relation had developed in a very rich and many-
sided way.

Secondly, I learnt that the duration of this attachment to the
mother had been greatly underestimated. In a number of cases it
persisted well into the fourth and, in one, into the fifth year, so that
it comprised by far the longer period of the early sexual unfolding.
Indeed, one had to give due weight to the possibility that many a

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woman may remain arrested at the original mother-attachment and
never properly achieve the change-over to men.

These facts show that the pre-Œdipal phase in women is more
important than we have hitherto supposed.

Since there is time during this phase for all the fixations and
repressions which we regard as the source of the neuroses, it seems
that we shall have to retract the universality of the dictum that the
Œdipus complex is the nucleus of neurosis. But if anyone feels
reluctant to adopt this correction, he need not do so. For, on the one
hand, we can extend the content of the Œdipus complex to include
all the child’s relations to both parents or, on the other, we can give
due recognition to our new findings by saying that women reach the
normal, positive Œdipus situation only after surmounting a first
phase dominated by the negative complex. Actually, during this
phase, her father is not much more to a little girl than a troublesome
rival, even though her hostility towards him never reaches such a
pitch as does the boy’s. We have, after all, long given up any
expectation of a neat parallelism between male and female sexual
development.

Our insight into this early, pre-Œdipal phase in the little girl’s
development comes to us as a surprise, comparable in another field
with the effect of the discovery of Minoan-Mycenaean civilization
behind that of Greece.

Everything connected with this first mother-attachment has
in analysis seemed to me so elusive, lost in a past so dim and shadowy,
so hard to resuscitate that it seemed as if it had undergone some
specially inexorable repression. But possibly I have received this
impression because, when I have analysed women, they have been
able to cling on to that very father-attachment in which they took
refuge from the early phase of which I am speaking. It would in fact
appear that women-
analysts—for instance, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot
and Helene Deutsch—had been able to apprehend the facts with
greater ease and clearness because they had the advantage of being
suitable mother-substitutes in the transference-
situation with the
patients whom they were studying. I have not indeed succeeded in
completely unravelling any of the cases in point and will therefore
confine myself to communicating my most general conclusions and
giving only a few examples of the new ideas which have suggested
themselves to me. Amongst these is my conjecture that this phase
of mother-attachment is specially closely connected with the etiology

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FEMALE SEXUALITY

of hysteria (this is indeed by no means surprising when we reflect
that both the phase and the neurosis in question are characteristically
feminine); further, that in this dependence on the mother we have
the germ of later paranoia in women.¹⁾ For it appears that this
is the surprising, yet regular, dread of being killed (? devoured) by
the mother. It would seem obvious to conjecture that this anxiety
corresponds to the hostility which the child develops towards her
mother because of the manifold restrictions imposed by the latter in
the process of training and physical care, and that the immaturity of
the child's psychic organization favours the mechanism of projection.

II

I have begun by stating the two facts which have struck me as
new: first, that the great dependence on the father in women merely
takes over the heritage of an equally great attachment to the mother
and, secondly, that this earlier phase lasts longer than we should have
anticipated. I must now go back a little in order to insert these new
conclusions in their proper place in the picture of female sexual develop-
ment with which we are already familiar. A certain amount of repeti-
tion is here inevitable. It will help our exposition if we constantly
compare the course of female development with that of the male.

First of all, there can be no doubt that the bisexual disposition
which we maintain to be characteristic of human beings manifests
itself much more plainly in the female than in the male. The latter
has only one principal sexual zone–only one sexual organ–whereas
the former has two: the vagina, the true female organ, and the clitoris,
which is analogous to the male organ. We believe that we may justly
assume that for many years the vagina is virtually non-existent and
possibly remains without sensation until puberty. It is true, however,
that recently an increasing number of observers have been inclined
to think that vaginal stirrings are present even in those early years.
In any case female geniality must, in childhood, centre principally
in the clitoris. The sexual life of the woman is regularly split up into
two phases, the first of which is of a masculine character, whilst only
the second is specifically feminine. Thus in female development there
is a process of transition from the one phase to the other, to which

¹⁾In the well-known case reported by Ruth Mack-Brunswick ('Die
Analyse eines Eifersuchtswahnes' Internationale Zeitschrift für Psycho-
analyse, Bd. XIV, 1928) the direct source of the disorder was the patient's
pre-Œdipal (sister) fixation.

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there is nothing analogous in males. A further complication arises
from the fact that the clitoris, with its masculine character, continues
to function in later female sexual life in a very variable manner, which
we certainly do not as yet fully understand. Of course, we do not
know what are the biological roots of these specific characteristics of
the woman, and we are still less able to assign to them any teleological
purpose.

Parallel with this first great difference there is another, which
concerns the love-object. The first love-object of the male is the
mother, because it is she who feeds and tends him, and she remains
his principal love-object until she is replaced by another which resem-
bles her or is derived from her. With the female too the mother must
be the first object, for the primary conditions of object-choice are the
same for all children. But at the end of the girl’s development it is
the man–the father–who must come to be the new love-object;
i.e. as she changes in sex, so must the sex of her love-object change.
What we now have to discover is how this transformation takes place,
how radical or how incomplete it is, and all the different things that
may happen in this process of development.

We have already observed that there is yet another difference
between the sexes in their relation to the Œdipus complex. We have
the impression that what we say about that complex applies in all
strictness only to male children and that we are right in rejecting the
term ‘Electra complex’ which stresses the analogous situation of the
two sexes. It is only in male children that there occurs the fateful
conjunction of love for the one parent and hatred of the other as
rival. It is thereupon the discovery of the possibility of castration,
as evidenced by the sight of the female genital, which necessitates
transformation of the boy’s Œdipus complex, leads to the creation
of the super-ego and thus initiates all the processes that culminate in
enrolling the individual in civilized society. After the father-institu-
tion has been internalized so as to form the super-ego, the next task
is to detach the latter from those persons of whom it was originally
the psychic representative. In this remarkable course of develop-
ment the agent employed to restrain infantile sexuality is precisely
that narcissistic genital interest which centres in the preservation of
the penis.

One residue of the castration complex in the man is a measure of
disparagement in his attitude towards women, whom he regards as
having been castrated. In extreme cases this inhibits his object-

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FEMALE SEXUALITY

choice, and, if reinforced by organic factors, it may result in exclusive
homosexuality. Very different is the effect of the castration complex
on the girl. She acknowledges the fact of her castration, the conse-
quent superiority of the male and her own inferiority, but she also
rebels against these unpleasant facts. So divided in her mind, she
may follow one of three lines of development. The first leads to her
turning her back on sexuality altogether. The budding woman,
frightened by the comparison of herself with boys, becomes dissatisfied
with her clitoris and gives up her phallic activity and therewith her
sexuality in general and a considerable part of her masculine pro-
clivities in other fields. If she pursues the second line, she clings in
obstinate self-assertion to her threatened masculinity; the hope of
getting a penis sometime is cherished to an incredibly late age and
becomes the aim of her life, whilst the phantasy of really being a man,
in spite of everything, often dominates long periods of her life. This
‘masculinity complex’ may also result in a manifestly homosexual
object-choice. Only if her development follows the third, very
circuitous path does she arrive at the ultimate normal feminine atti-
tude in which she takes her father as love-object, and thus arrives at the
Oedipus complex in its feminine form. Thus, in women, that complex
represents the final result of a lengthy process of development; cas-
tration does not destroy but rather creates it, and it escapes the strong
hostile influences which, in men, tend to its destruction—in fact, only
too often a woman never surmounts it at all. Hence too the cultural
effects of the break-up of this complex are slighter and less important
in women than in men. We should probably not err in saying that it
is this difference in the inter-relation of the Oedipus and the castra-
tion
complexes which gives its special stamp to the character of woman as
a member of society.²

²It is to be anticipated that male analysts with feminist sympathies,
but our women analysts also, will disagree with what I have said here.
They will hardly fail to object that such notions have their origin in the
man’s ‘masculinity complex,’ and are meant to justify theoretically his
innate propensity to disparage and suppress women. But this sort of
psycho-analytic argument reminds us here, as it so often does, of Dos-
tojewski’s famous ‘stick with two ends.’ The opponents of those who
reason thus will for their part think it quite comprehensible that members
of the female sex should refuse to accept a notion that appears to gainsay
their eagerly coveted equality with men. The polemical use of an
obviously leads to no decision.

286

We see then that the phase of exclusive attachment to the mother,
which may be called the pre-Œdipal phase, is far more important in
women than it can claim to be in men. Many phenomena of feminine
sexual life which were difficult to understand before can be fully
explained by reference to this phase. For example, we had noted
long ago that many a woman who takes her father as the model for
her choice of a husband, or assigns her father’s place to him, yet in
her married life repeats with her husband her bad relations with her
mother. He should have succeeded to her relation with her father,
but in reality he takes over her relation to her mother. This is easily
explained as an obvious case of regression. The mother-
relation was the original one, upon which the father-
relation was built up; in married life the original basis emerges from
development to womanhood consisted mainly in transferring affective
ties from the mother to the father-object.

With many women we have the impression that the period of their
maturity is entirely taken up with conflicts with their husbands, just
as they spent their youth in conflict with their mothers. In the light
of what I have now said we shall conclude that the hostile attitude to
the mother is not a consequence of the rivalry implicit in the Œdipus
complex, but rather originates in the preceding phase and has simply
found in the Œdipus situation reinforcement and an opportunity for
asserting itself. Direct analytic investigation confirms this view.
Our interest must be directed to the mechanisms at work in the turning
away from the mother-object, originally so vehemently and exclusively
loved. We are prepared to find not one solitary factor but a whole
number of these contributing to the same end.

Amongst these factors are some which are conditioned by the
circumstances of infantile sexuality in general and so hold good equally
for the love-relations of boys. First and foremost we must mention
jealousy of other persons–brothers and sisters and rivals, amongst
whom is also the father. Childish love knows no bounds, it demands
exclusive possession, is satisfied with nothing less than all. But it
has a second characteristic: it has, besides, no real aim; it is incapable
of complete satisfaction and this is the principal reason why it is
doomed to end in disappointment and to give place to a hostile atti-
tude. Later on in life, the lack of ultimate gratification may conduce
to a different result. This very factor may ensure the undisturbed
continuance of the libidinal cathexis, as is the case in love-relations
inhibited in their aim. But in the stress of the processes of develop-

287

ment it regularly happens that the libido abandons its unsatisfactory
position in order to find a new one.

There is another, far more specific motive for the turning away
from the mother, arising out of the effect of the castration-
complex on the little creature without a penis. Some time or other the
girl makes the discovery of her organic inferiority, of course earlier
and more easily if she has brothers or other boy companions. We have
already noted the three paths which diverge from this point : (a) that
which leads to the suspension of the whole sexual life, (b) that
which leads to the defiant over-emphasis of her own masculinity, and (c) the
first steps towards definitive femininity. It is not easy to say precisely
when these processes occur or to lay down their typical course. Even
the point of time when the discovery of castration is made varies and
many other factors seem to be inconstant and to depend on chance.
The condition of the girl’s own phallic activity plays a part, as also
whether it is discovered or not, and how far it is hindered after the
discovery.

The little girl generally finds out spontaneously her mode of
phallic activity : masturbation of the clitoris, and in the first instance
it is no doubt unaccompanied by phantasies. The way in which the
tending of the child’s body influences the awakening of this activity
is reflected in the very common phantasy of seduction by her mother,
her wet-nurse or nursemaid. Whether little girls practise masturbation
more rarely and from the beginning less energetically than little boys
is a point which we must leave undecided : quite possibly this is the
case. Actual seduction is likewise common enough, either at the
hands of other children or of nurses who want to soothe the child,
send her to sleep or make her dependent on them. Where seduction
intervenes, it invariably disturbs the natural course of development
and often has profound and lasting consequences.

The prohibition of masturbation may, as we have seen, act as an
incentive for giving the habit up, but it may also operate as a motive
for rebellion against the person who forbids, i.e. the mother, or the
mother-substitute who later regularly merges into the mother. The
defiant persistence in masturbation would appear to open the way to
masculinity. Even when the child does not succeed in mastering her
habit, the effect of the apparently unavailing prohibition is seen in
her later efforts to free herself at all costs from a gratification which
has been made distasteful to her. When the girl reaches maturity
her object-choice may still be influenced by this purpose, to which she

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has firmly adhered. Resentment at being prevented from free sexual
activity has much to do with her detachment from her mother. The
same motive recurs after puberty when the mother takes up the duty
of protecting her daughter’s chastity. Of course, we must remember
here that the mother opposes masturbation in the boy in the same way,
thus providing him also with a powerful motive for rebellion.

When a little girl has sight of a male genital organ and so discovers
her own deficiency, she does not accept the unwelcome knowledge
without hesitation and reluctance. As we have seen, she clings
obstinately to the expectation of acquiring a similar organ sometime,
and the desire for it survives long after the hope is extinguished.
Invariably the child regards castration in the first instance as a mis-
fortune peculiar to herself; only later does she realize that it extends
to certain other children and at length to certain adults. When the
universality of this negative character of her sex dawns upon her,
womanhood, and with it also her mother, suffers a heavy loss of credit
in her eyes.

Very possibly this account of the little girl’s reaction to her impres-
sion of castration and the prohibition of masturbation will strike the
reader as confused and contradictory. That is not altogether the
writer’s fault. A description which fits every case is in fact almost
impossible. In different individuals we find the most various reactions;
even in the same individual contrary attitudes exist side by side.
With the first intervention of the prohibition there begins a conflict
which from that moment will accompany the development of the
sexual function. It is particularly difficult to get a clear insight into
what takes place because it is so hard to distinguish the mental pro-
cesses of this first phase from the later ones by which they become
overlaid and distorted in memory. For example, the fact of castra-
tion is sometimes construed later as a punishment for masturbation,
and its infliction is ascribed to the father; of course, neither of these
ideas can be the original one. With boys also it is regularly the father
from whom castration is dreaded, although in their case, as in the little
girl’s, it is mostly the mother who utters the threat.

However this may be, at the end of this first phase of attachment
to the mother there emerges, as the strongest motive for turning away
from her, the child’s reproach that her mother has not given her a
proper genital, i.e. that she was born a woman. A second reproach,
not going quite so far back, comes as rather a surprise: it is that the
mother gave the child too little milk and did not suckle her long enough.

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Under the conditions of modern civilization this may very often be
quite true, but certainly not so often as is maintained in analysis.
It would seem rather that this complaint expresses the general dissatis-
faction of children who under our monogamous civilization are weaned
at the age of from six to nine months, whereas the primitive mother
devotes herself exclusively to her child for two or three years. It is
as if our children remained for ever unappeased, as if they had never
been suckled long enough. But I am not sure whether, if one analysed
children who had been suckled as long as those of primitive races, one
would not encounter the same complaint. So great is the greed of the
childish libido! If we survey the whole range of motives brought to
light by analysis for turning away from the mother: that she neglected
to provide the little girl with the only proper genital organ, that she
did not feed her enough, compelled her to share her mother’s love with
others, never fulfilled all the expectations of the child’s love and,
finally, that she first excited and then forbade her daughter’s own
sexual activity—all these seem inadequate as a justification of the
hostility finally felt. Some of these reproaches follow inevitably from
the nature of infantile sexuality; others look like rationalizations
devised later to explain the uncomprehended change in feeling.
Perhaps the real fact is that the attachment to the mother must
inevitably perish just because it is the first and the most intense,
similarly to what we so often find in the first marriages of young
women, entered into when they were most passionately in love. In
both cases the love-relation probably comes to grief by reason of the
unavoidable disappointments and an accumulation of occasions for
aggression. As a rule second marriages turn out much better.

We cannot go so far as to assert that the ambivalence of emotional
cathexes is a universally valid psychological law, that it is quite
impossible to feel great love for a person without the accompaniment
of a hatred perhaps as great, and vice versa. Normal adults do,
undoubtedly, succeed in separating these two attitudes and do not
find themselves compelled to hate their love-objects and love as well
as hate their enemies. But this seems to be the result of later develop-
ment. In the first phases of the love-life ambivalence is evidently the
rule. Many people retain this archaic trait throughout life; it is charac-
teristic of obsessional neurotics that in their object-relations love and
hate counterbalance one another. In members of primitive races also
we may say that ambivalence predominates. We shall conclude,
then, that the little girl’s vehement attachment to her mother is

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strongly ambivalent and that, reinforced as it is by the above other
factors, it is precisely this ambivalence which determines the child’s
turning away from her. That is to say, it is the consequence once
more of one of the universal characteristics of infantile sexuality.

An objection immediately presents itself to the explanation I have
suggested: ‘How is it that boys succeed in keeping intact their
attachment to the mother, which is certainly no less strong than the
girl’s?’ An instant answer is: ‘Because boys are able to deal with
their ambivalent feelings towards her by transferring all their hostility
to the father.’ But, in the first place, we should be chary of asserting
this until we we have exhaustively studied the pre-Œdipal phase in boys
and, secondly, it would probably be more prudent altogether to admit
that we have not yet got to the bottom of processes which, after all,
we have only just come to know of.

III

Another question is this: ‘What exactly is it that the little girl
demands of her mother? What is the nature of her sexual aims
during the period of exclusive attachment to her mother?’ The answer
which we gather from the analytic material is just what we should
expect. The little girl’s sexual aims in relation to her mother are both
active and passive and are determined by the different libidinal phases
through which the child passes. Here the relation of activity to
passivity is specially interesting. It is easy to observe how, in every
field of psychic experience and not merely in that of sexuality, an
impression passively received evokes in children a tendency to an
active response. They try to do themselves what has just been done
to them. This is part of their task of mastering the outside world,
and may even lead to their endeavouring to repeat impressions which
they would have good reason to avoid because of their painful content.
Children’s play, too, is made to serve this purpose of completing and
as it were, annulling a passive experience by active behaviour.
When, in spite of resistance, a physician has opened a child’s mouth
to examine its throat, the same child will, after he has gone, play at
being ‘the doctor’ and will repeat the same forcible procedure on a
little brother or sister, as defenceless against him as he was against
the physician. We cannot fail to recognize here a revolt against
passivity and a preference for the active rôle. This swing-over from
passivity to activity does not take place with the same regularity and
vigour in all children: in some it may not occur at all. From their

291

behaviour in this respect we can draw some conclusion as to the
relative strength of the masculine and the feminine tendencies which
will be revealed in their sexual life.

The first sexual or sexually tinged experiences of a child in its
relation to the mother are naturally passive in character. It is she who
suckles, feeds, cleans and dresses it, and instructs it in the performance
of all its physical functions. Part of the child’s libido goes on clinging
to these experiences and enjoys the various gratifications associated
with them, while another part strives to convert them into activity.
First, the process of being suckled at the mother’s breast gives place
to active sucking. In its other relations with its mother the child
either contents itself with independence (i.e. with successfully perform-
ing itself what it previously submitted to passively) or with actively
repeating in play its passive experiences, or else it does really make the
mother the object in relation to which it assumes the rôle of the active
subject. This last reaction, which comes into play in the form of real
activity, I long held to be incredible, until experience removed all my
doubts on the subject.

We seldom hear of a little girl’s wanting to wash or dress her mother
or tell her to perform her bodily functions. Sometimes she says:
‘Now let’s play that I am mother and you are child’; but generally
she fulfils these active wishes indirectly in playing with her doll, she
herself representing the mother and the doll the child. The fact that
girls are fonder of playing with dolls than are boys is commonly
interpreted as an early sign of awakened femininity. This is quite
correct, only we must not overlook the fact that it is the active side of
femininity which finds expression here and that the little girl’s prefer-
ence for dolls probably testifies to the exclusiveness of her attachment
to her mother, accompanied by total neglect of the father-object.

The very surprising sexual activity of the little girl in relation to
her mother manifests itself in chronological succession in oral, sadistic
and finally even phallic impulses directed upon her. It is difficult to
give a detailed account of these, because often they are dim impulses
which it was impossible for the child to grasp psychically at the time
and which were only interpreted later, and express themselves in
analysis in forms that are certainly not the original ones. Sometimes
we find them transferred to the later father-object, where they do not
belong and badly interfere with our understanding of the situation.
We find aggressive oral and sadistic wishes in a form forced on them
by early repression, i.e. in the dread of being killed by the mother—a

292

dread which on its side justifies the death-wish against her, if this enters
consciousness. It is impossible to say how often this dread of the
mother draws countenance from an unconscious hostility on her part,
which the child divines. (The dread of being eaten I have so far found
only in men ; it is referred to the father, but is probably the result of
the transformation of oral aggressive tendencies directed upon the
mother. The person the child wants to devour is the mother who
nourished him : in the case of the father there is no such obvious
occasion for the wish.)

The women patients characterized by a strong attachment to the
mother, in whom I have been able to study the pre-Œdipal phase,
have all told me that when their mother gave them enemas or rectal
douches they used to offer the strongest possible resistance and react
with fear and screams of rage. This is probably very usual or even
universal with children. I only came to understand the reasons for
this specially passionate struggle through a remark by Ruth Mack-
Brunswick, who was studying these problems at the same time as I
was. She said that she would compare the outbreak of fury after an
enema with the orgasm following on genital excitation. The accom-
panying anxiety should be construed as a transformation of the desire
for aggression which had been stirred up. I believe that this is actually
the case and that, on the anal-sadistic level, the intense passive excita-
tion of the intestinal zone evokes an outbreak of desire for aggression,
manifesting itself either directly in the form of rage or, as a conse-
quence of suppression, as anxiety. In later years this reaction seems
to die away.

In considering the passive impulses of the phallic phase we are
struck by the fact that girls regularly charge their mothers with
seducing them, because their first or at any rate strongest genital
sensations came to them when they were being cleansed and tended by
their mothers (or the nurses representing them). Mothers have often
told me that they have observed that their little daughters of two or
three years old enjoy these sensations and try to get their mother to
heighten them by repeated touching and rubbing of the parts. I
believe that the fact that the mother so unavoidably initiates the child
into the phallic phase is the reason why in the phantasies of later
years the father so regularly appears as the sexual seducer. When
the girl turns away from the mother she transfers to the father at the
same time the responsibility for introducing her to sexual life.

Finally in the phallic phase strong active wishes towards the

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mother also make their appearance. The sexual activity of this
period culminates in clitoral masturbation ; probably the child accom-
panies this with images of her mother, but whether she really imagines
a sexual goal and what that goal is my experience does not make clear.
It is only when all her interests have received a fresh impetus through
the arrival of a baby brother or sister that we can clearly recognize
any such goal. The little girl, just like the boy, wants to believe that
she has given her mother this new child, and her reaction to the event
and her behaviour towards the child are the same as his. I know this
sounds quite absurd, but perhaps only because the idea is such an
unfamiliar one to us.

The turning-away from the mother is a most important step in
the little girl’s development : it is more than a mere change of object.
We have already described what takes place and what a number of
motives are alleged for it ; we must now add that we observe, hand in
hand with it, a marked diminution in the active and an augmentation
of the passive sexual impulses. It is true that the active impulses
have suffered more severely from frustration : they have proved
totally impracticable and therefore the libido has more readily aban-
doned them. But the passive trends also have not escaped disappoint-
ment. Frequently, with the turning-away from the mother there is
cessation of clitoral masturbation, and very often when the little girl
represses her previous masculinity a considerable part of her general
sexual life is permanently injured. The transition to the father-object
is accomplished with the assistance of the passive tendencies so far
as these have escaped overthrow. The way to the development of
femininity then lies open to the girl, except in so far as she is hampered
by remains of the pre-Œdipal mother-attachment which she has passed
through.  

If we survey the phases of feminine sexual development I have
described, there is a definite conclusion about femininity as a whole
which we cannot resist : the same libidinal forces, we have found, are
at work in female and in male children, and we have been able to
convince ourselves that for a certain period these forces take the same
course and produce the same results.

Subsequently, biological factors deflect them from their original
aims and conduct even active and in every sense masculine strivings
into feminine channels. Since we cannot dismiss the notion that
sexual excitation is derived from the operation of certain chemical
substances, it would at first seem natural to expect that some day

294

biochemistry will reveal two distinct substances, the presence of which
produces male and female excitation respectively. But this hope is
surely no less naïve than that other one which has happily been
abandoned nowadays, namely, that it would be possible to isolate
under the microscope the different substances which produce hysteria,
obsessional neurosis, melancholia, etc.

In sexual chemistry, too, the processes must be rather more com-
plicated. For psychology, however, it is a matter of indifference
whether there is in the body a single sexually stimulating substance,
or two, or an endless number. Psycho-analysis teaches us to manage
with a single libido, though its goals, i.e. its modes of gratification,
are both active and passive. In this antithesis, above all in the exist-
ence of libidinal impulses whose goals are passive, the rest of our
problem is contained.

IV

A study of the analytical literature on this subject makes evident
that it already contains everything that I have said here. This paper
would be superfluous were it not that in so obscure a field of research
every account of any worker’s direct experience and the conclusions
to which he personally is led may be of value. I have, moreover, I
think, defined certain points more precisely and shewn them in stricter
isolation than has hitherto been done. Some of the other writings on
the subject are confusing because they deal at the same time with the
problems of the super-ego and the sense of guilt. This I have avoided,
and also, in describing the various outcomes of this phase of develop-
ment, I have refrained from touching on the complications which arise
when a child, disappointed in her relation with her father, returns to
the abandoned mother-attachment, or in the course of her life
repeatedly shifts over from the one attitude to the other. But just
because this article is only one contribution amongst others I may be
dispensed from an exhaustive survey of the literature on the subject
and will confine myself to indicating the more important points on
which I agree with some or differ from other writers.

Abraham’s description of the ‘Manifestations of the Female
Castration-Complex’¹ is still unsurpassed, but one would like it
to include the factor of the original exclusive attachment to the

This Journal, Vol. III, 1922, p. 1.

295

mother. With the principal points in Jeanne⁴ Lampl-de Groot’s⁵
important work I am in agreement. She recognizes that the pre-
Œdipal phase is completely identical in boys and in girls, and she
affirms (and proves from her own observations) that the little girl’s
attitude towards the mother includes sexual (phallic) activity. The
turning-away from the mother is traced by this writer to the influence
of the child’s perception of castration, which forces her to abandon
her sexual object and often at the same time the practice of mastur-
bation. The whole development is described in the following formula :
the little girl has to pass through a phase of the ‘negative’ Œdipus
complex before arriving at the positive. There is one point in which
I find her account inadequate : she represents the turning-away from
the mother as merely a change of object and does not show that it is
accompanied by the plainest manifestations of hostility. To this
factor complete justice is done in Helene Deutsch’s latest paper on
the subject,⁶ in which she also recognizes the little girl’s phallic
activity and the strength of her attachment to her mother. H.
Deutsch states, further, that in turning to the father the little girl
follows her passive tendencies (already awakened in her relation with
her mother). In her earlier book⁷ this author was still influenced
by the endeavour to apply the Œdipus scheme to the pre-Œdipal
phase and for this reason she interpreted the little girl’s phallic activity
as an identification with the father.

Fenichel⁸ rightly emphasizes the difficulty of recognizing in the
material produced in analysis what represents the unchanged content
of the pre-Œdipal phase and what has been distorted in the course of
regression (or some other process). He does not accept Jeanne
Lampl-de Groot’s view of the little girl’s phallic activity and he
protests against Melanie Klein’s ‘displacement backwards’ of the
Œdipus complex, whose beginnings she assigns to the commencement

⁴ In the Zeitschrift the author’s name was given as A. Lampl de Groot,
and I make this correction at her request.

⁵ ‘The Evolution of the Œdipus Complex in Women.’ This Journal,
Vol. IX, 1928.

⁶ ‘The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women.’
This Journal, Vol. XI, 1930.

⁷ Psychoanalyse der weiblichen Sexualfunktionen, 1925.

⁸ ‘The Pregenital Antecedents of the Œdipus Complex.’ This
Journal, Vol. XII, 1931.

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of the second year of life.⁹ This view of the date of origin of the
complex, which in addition necessitates modification of our view of all
the rest of the child’s sexual development, is in fact not in accordance
with what we learn from the analyses of adults and is especially
incompatible with my findings as to the long duration of the girl’s
pre-Œdipal attachment to her mother. This contradiction may be
softened by the reflection that we are not as yet able to distinguish
in this field between what is rigidly fixed by biological laws and what
is subject to change or shifting under the influence of accidental
experience. We have long recognized that seduction may have the
effect of hastening and stimulating to maturity the sexual development
of children, and it is quite possible that other factors operate in the
same way: such, for instance, as the child’s age when brothers or
sisters are born or when it discovers the difference between the sexes,
or, again, its direct observation of sexual intercourse, its parents’
behaviour in evoking or repelling its love, and so forth.

Some authors are inclined to disparage the importance of the
child’s first, most primal libidinal impulses, laying stress rather on later
developmental processes, so that—putting this view in its most
extreme form—all that the former can be said to do is to indicate
certain directions, while the energy with which these directions are
pursued is drawn from later regressions and reaction-formations.
Thus, for example, K. Horney is of opinion¹⁰ that we greatly over-
estimate the girl’s primary penis-envy and that the strength of her
subsequent tendency to masculinity is to be attributed to a secondary
penis-envy, which is used to ward off her feminine impulses, especially
those connected with her attachment to her father. This does not
agree with the impressions that I myself have formed. Certain as it is
that the libidinal tendencies are reinforced later by regression and
reaction-formation and difficult as it is to estimate the relative strength
of the various confluent libidinal components, I still think that we must
not overlook the fact that those first impulses have an intensity of
their own which is greater than anything that comes later and may
indeed be said to be incommensurable with any other force. It is
certainly true that there is an antithesis between the attachment to
the father and the masculinity-complex—this is the universal antithesis
between activity and passivity, masculinity and femininity—but we

⁹ ‘Early Stages of the Œdipus Conflict.’ This JOURNAL, Vol. IX, 1928.

¹⁰ ‘The Flight from Womanhood.’ This JOURNAL, Vol. VII, 1926.

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FEMALE SEXUALITY

have no right to assume that only the one is primary, while the other
owes its strength merely to the process of defence. And if the defence
against femininity is so vigorous, from what other source can it derive
its strength than from that striving for masculinity which found its
earliest expression in the child’s penis-envy and might well take its
name from this?

A similar objection applies to Jones’ view ¹¹ that the phallic phase
in girls represents a secondary, protective reaction rather than a
genuine stage of development. This does not correspond to either the
dynamic or the chronological conditions.

¹¹ ‘The Early Development of Female Sexuality.’ This JOURNAL,
Vol. VIII, 1927.