Female Sexuality

The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies

Russell Grigg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781782200222
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913679
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"Undoubtedly, 'Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women,' is an underrated paper. This may be due to its not being published in English until 1924, well after Freud introduced the term 'masculinity complex' into his own writings. However, Van Ophuijsen's paper was originally presented to the Dutch Psycho-Analytical Society much earlier, on 23rd June 1917. It was published in German the same year and in Dutch the following year. The term 'masculinity complex' is in fact van Ophugsen's invention and Freud acknowledges his debt in his 1919 paper, 'A Child is Being Beaten'. It is also in the present paper that various manifestations and possible consequences of penis envy are first clearly expressed, just as the libidinal investment in the 'virile' erogenous zone is linked to the attachment to the mother. This last point is particularly important, and Freud will later appeal to it in explaining the phallicism of the little girl. The material van Ophuijsen draws on derives from five case studies of obsessional women. One of the cases, who is here simply referred to as H., is subsequently discussed by Jeanne Lampl de Groot in her 1928 paper, 'Evolution of the Oedipus Complex in Women', a discussion Freud alludes to in his 'Female Sexuality' of 1931. The analysand was referred to Lampl de Groot because of difficulties encountered in the transference to a male analyst. It is also worth noting that van Ophuijsen takes her to be an obsessional, while Lampl de Groot diagnoses hysteria. Van Ophuijsen's starting point concerns one aspect of the theory of penis envy; namely, that it derives from the sense a woman has of having been injured in infancy through no fault of her own and hence she will blame her mother for having brought her into this world as a woman instead of a man. This matches some character types encountered in analysis, van Ophuijsen conjectures. He also points out that this turning against the mother is, as with the castration complex, founded on a belief in the possibility of possessing the penis. The difference between the castration and masculinity complexes is that the sense of guilt attached to the former is absent from the masculinity complex, in which, on the other hand, what predominate are the sense of having been wronged and accompanying bitterness and reproaches. Moreover, the term is intended to connote the presence of a form of rivalry with men rather than the presence of any overt masculine characteristics.
Finally, one should note the connection between the masculinity complex and the urethral erotism which van Ophuijsen explains in terms of a regression to the auto-erotic stage later tackled by other analysts such as Karen Homey."

1

Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women

J. H. W. Van Ophuijsen (1917)

International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 5(1924):39-49

Undoubtedly, ‘Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women,’ is an underrated paper. This may be due to its not being published in English until 1924, well after Freud introduced the term ‘masculinity complex’ into his own writings. However, Van Ophuijsen’s paper was originally presented to the Dutch Psycho-Analytical Society much earlier, on 23rd June 1917. It was published in German the same year and in Dutch the following year.

The term ‘masculinity complex’ is in fact van Ophugsen’s invention and Freud acknowledges his debt in his 1919 paper, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’. It is also in the present paper that various manifestations and possible consequences of penis envy are first clearly expressed, just as the libidinal investment in the ‘virile’ erogenous zone is linked to the attachment to the mother. This last point is particularly important, and Freud will later appeal to it in explaining the phallicism of the little girl.

The material van Ophuijsen draws on derives from five case studies of obsessional women. One of the cases, who is here simply referred to as H., is subsequently discussed by Jeanne Lampl de Groot in her 1928 paper, ‘Evolution of the Oedipus Complex in Women’, a discussion Freud alludes to in his ‘Female Sexuality’ of 1931. The analysand was referred to Lampl de Groot because of difficulties encountered in the transference to a male analyst. It is also worth noting that van Ophuijsen takes her to be an obsessional, while Lampl de Groot diagnoses hysteria.

Van Ophuijsen’s starting point concerns one aspect of the theory of penis envy; namely, that it derives from the sense a woman has of having been injured in infancy through no fault of her own and hence she will blame her mother for having brought her into this world as a woman instead of a man. This matches some character types encountered in analysis, van Ophuijsen conjectures. He also points out that this turning against the mother is, as with the castration complex, founded on a belief in the possibility of possessing the penis. The difference between the castration and masculinity complexes is that the sense of guilt attached to the former is absent from the masculinity complex, in which, on the other hand, what predominate are the sense of having been wronged and accompanying bitterness and reproaches. Moreover, the term is intended to connote the presence of a form of rivalry with men rather than the presence of any overt masculine characteristics.

Finally, one should note the connection between the masculinity complex and the urethral erotism which van Ophuijsen explains in terms of a regression to the auto-erotic stage later tackled by other analysts such as Karen Homey.

* * *

In his essay on ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work’, Freud writes:

As we learn from psycho-analytic work, women regard themselves as having been damaged in infancy, as having been undeservedly cut short of something and unfairly treated; and the embitterment of so many daughters against their mother derives, ultimately, from the reproach against her of having brought them into the world as women instead of as men.¹

These lines came to my notice at the very moment when my attention had been directed in a small sequence of cases to a particular form of reaction to the complex referred to, and when I believed that in one case I also had determined some of the conditions of its origin. In the following paper I will give an account of my conclusions.

The type of reaction with which we are concerned is, in common with the castration complex in women, founded on a belief in the possibility of possessing a male genital organ. The chief difference between the two lies in the fact that a consciousness of guilt belongs to the castration complex. The loss, the damage, or the faulty development of the genital organ is supposed to be the result of wrong-doing, often punishment for a sexual lapse. The feeling of guilt is absent in the cases of which I shall speak here—not always, of course, completely, but the feeling of having been ill-treated and the consequent reaction of bitterness is in all very strongly developed. In view of this second group of cases, in which the protest (which seeks to make up for the want) is predominant, I propose to introduce the term ‘masculinity complex’.

The origin of the masculinity complex is, of course, to be traced to the sight of a male organ, belonging either to the father or the brother, or some other man; and in the history of most women patients, and without exception in those with a strongly-marked masculinity complex, there is found the memory of such an observation and of the comparison of the patient’s own body with that of a man. In one of the cases I have analysed, the patient, D., tells me quite clearly that the wish to be a boy developed from the desire to be able to urinate like a boy, after she once saw a boy perform this act. This incident has determined till to-day the manner of her sexual satisfaction through masturbation. Another patient, H., was able to observe her father and uncle, who were not ashamed to urinate before her.

Yet the question arises, by what instincts the phantasy of masculinity is nourished, and how it is that the phantasy, in spite of later experience and information, not only continues to exist but even causes women frequently to behave as though they possessed male genitals. A patient, P., tells me that for some time past in urinating she has given up a sitting for a standing position, nominally because her hip-joints have become too stiff. She also sits down as though she had to guard against crushing her genitals, as if they were male organs.

Recollection of the masculinity complex does not always exist in consciousness, at any rate in the primitive form of a belief in the possession of a male genital. Often the recollection only becomes conscious during discussion of the so-called masculine attitude. But in every case it requires close study to establish that the complex is still effective in its original form in spite of repression or experience.

The small sequence of cases which first turned my attention to the complex consists of five patients, who were suffering from psychasthenia with obsessions, otherwise called obsessional neurosis. I have been able to observe four of them for quite a long period; the fifth, however, gave up the analysis very soon. But this fifth patient came to me for treatment just after I had learnt to take sufficient notice of the phantasy of being a man. All the facts of her case pointed to her as the type sketched by Freud in the lines quoted above; and I think, therefore, it will be agreed that there can be no misunderstanding about this statement of hers: ‘Often when I am restless and don’t know what to do with myself I have a feeling that I would like to ask my mother to give me something that she cannot give me.’ The behaviour of one of the four other patients had for a long time inclined me to think that in her case also the problem was the influence of her unconscious wish to be a man. For instance, her obsessional movements in lying or sitting down are of such a kind as to give one the impression that she has to make the same overtures to the sofa or chair that a cock makes to his hens. Only a short time ago she said to me, ‘I feel as though I coquetted with the sofa.’ It might perhaps be not without significance that three of the five patients informed me of their own accord that they possessed ‘Hottentot nymphae’; this fact, which they had already noticed very early in their lives, led them to the conviction that they were different from other women. I did not find to any great extent in any of these cases what is called a masculine disposition; nor indeed a masculine appearance and expression, a contempt for men, or a predilection for masculine activities. I would rather define the attitude present as one of rivalry with men in the intellectual and artistic spheres. A pronounced homosexual component makes no difference to this, as the resulting rivalry in sexual matters expresses itself only in symptoms and symptomatic acts.

Returning to the question put above, we may state that we have already learnt from experience, when the recollection of an observation or of an event is being retained and used as the starting-point for a new phan-tasy-system (screen-memory), that we then have to do with the return of a repressed wish under fresh distortion. We are tempted to surmise such a return from the unconscious when a girl reacts to the experience of seeing or observing a male genital organ with the violent, embittered thought, ‘Why haven’t I anything like that?’ or ‘I ought to have had one too’; or on the other hand with anxiety and a consciousness of guilt, ‘I might have had one too—what a pity that I injured myself to such an extent’; or with the expectation, ‘It won’t be long before I grow one too’; or even with the reassurance, ‘Yet I do possess one!’ These are only examples of such a reaction; there are still a number of another kind, and the form of the bodily symptoms almost always present changes with these reactions. For instance in place of the genital so passionately desired, there is usually felt to be a ‘wound’, which is either painful or irritating, according to the manner in which the patient regards the lack of the organ.

Now what are the repressed impulses which, after the trauma of seeing a male organ, can find an outlet in the newly appearing idea of having such an organ? We may assume that these bear a certain relation or likeness to the content of the masculinity idea. In an allusive way the patients speak of this themselves, by making vague contrasts—and this often happens—between their masculine traits and their feminine inclinations, also quite well-known to them. Even when they do not mention the thing they seek, the meaning of their expressions is quite clear to the analyst. That is to say, they usually express a wish to take possession of a person, instead of devoting and subjecting themselves to him; or they have the feeling that they wish to penetrate someone else, instead of themselves being penetrated; or they remark that a state of tension would disappear if they could but give out something instead of taking something in. Such expressions are of course used then in a hyperbolical sense; but not seldom associations of this kind afford evidence that they should be taken to a certain extent literally—in fact, it is one of the several ways in which one can discover the masculinity complex in analysis.

At the central point of the childhood-reminiscences of one of my patients, whom I shall call H., and of whose analysis I shall give the most detailed account, there stands the following dream; it dates from about her fourth year when she still slept in her parents’ bedroom. She dreamed—it may perhaps be a mere phantasy—that she lay in bed and her mother stood near her. She had a surprisingly pleasant bodily sensation and her mother told her it was quite all right, there was no harm in it. Whereupon she experienced a kind of orgasm and awoke. To her astonishment and horror she found that she had soiled the bed. She called her mother, who came to her assistance without being angry. Since that time the patient has always remained shy, has had anxiety during the night, has suffered to an increasing extent from sleeplessness, and so has gradually developed a neurosis; this neurosis grew very much worse at the age of thirteen, when she lost her mother, and again at nineteen, when she lost her brother; its chief symptom is shyness with men. We may suppose that the sensations which the patient had in her dream were derived from her filled bladder, and that the emptying of it corresponds to the orgasm of the dream. Her feeling of shame and astonishment on waking prove to us that the girl must already have learnt to control the bladder-function. As a contrast there is in the dream a return to an earlier period before she had learned this control, associated with the idea of the methods of teaching her cleanliness: the mother near the bed, who tells her to let it happen, is obviously the mother who makes her use the chamber. Urinating into a chamber has had considerable significance to her; her father also helped her with this function later, and imitated the noise to her in order to make her urinate. And in addition she had in her early youth heard the sound of her father urinating in the next room.

The patient is very gifted musically and composed music even as a child. It often happened that while she sat on the closet she let a stream of water run from a tap in order to catch a melody from the noise. When she plays at a concert she often feels as though through her playing she were to put an end to the tension which she feels in the public or in an individual listener—sometimes the public is replaced by the composer. If she succeeds in feeling in this way, she plays well. From her associations there appeared an analogy in this with the childhood-situation in which by urinating she produced the noise which her father had either produced for her with his mouth or by urinating in another room; she transfers this detail, therefore, of her father-complex to the composer: The tension either actually felt or unconsciously existing in herself is projected into the audience or again into the composer. In addition her father has always encouraged her musical ambitions, with the result that the patient has identified herself with him in the musical sphere and has regarded herself as the instrument of his will. One very primitive expression of this identification is the idea of being her father’s genital organ.² One has only to remember her attitude at concerts, which I have just mentioned; she is to be the organ which provides relief for the tension she feels in the audience. The association of music with urination led to this phantasy. Moreover, she has already inferred a connection between the symptom of congestion (due to the pressure from constipation) and the reddened glans penis she had seen in her brother’s genitals, and had interpreted her convulsions of weeping as ejaculations. The sobbing and sighing which accompanies such a convulsion reminded her of what she used to hear in her parents’ bedroom.

In this connection the following fact is also of importance. The patient was awaiting her last examination at the Conservatoire and had considerable anxiety about it. A vision, as she calls it, came to her rescue in her need: Someone standing near her bed speaks to her during the night about her attitude to music and to her examination; she is to forget herself and to surrender herself entirely to the intentions of the composer, and give herself free rein. After the vision she fell into a state of exaltation, slept no more, but played very well at her examination. The agreement of this vision with the dream in childhood must of course occur to everyone; the identification with her father to which I have alluded above was also in operation in this experience.

It is natural to conclude that hearing has played a large part in the development of this interest in little H. We have already mentioned the fact that she listened when anyone passed water in the room, or in the next room. The patient suffered quite early from sleeplessness. At night she always felt obliged to listen, either to the music that was going on in the house, or lest burglars were in the room, or to hear what her parents were saying on the other side of the wall against which her own bed stood. This habit of listening had begun when she ceased to sleep in her parents’ room. I cannot prove that she had observed, or tried to observe, parental coitus on one or more occasions, but from what has been said above it is obvious that she had been greatly interested in what went on in her parents’ bedroom or bed. The reason for her sleeplessness was the tension produced by sexual curiosity.

The patient herself suggested that the childhood-dream might be due to her having witnessed parental coitus and that she probably identified herself with her father. It is a fact that many associations pointed to a possibility of this sort, but no recollection of it has come into consciousness. We know that children sometimes imagine that the man passes urine into the woman; it would be in agreement with this idea if we looked upon this dream as a homosexual coitus dream. Of course the material used to represent the fulfilment of the desire to perform coitus with the mother (or rather, to do with her what the patient thought her father did) is taken from an earlier period.

A whole series of recollections bear witness to infantile intimacy with the mother, and particularly to occasions when they went to the closet together and her mother passed urine as well as she herself. We may assume that the child’s wish to see what her mother looked like and how she did this was a preliminary phase of the later curiosity. Sometimes, too, little H. had difficulty in defecation; she suffered from constipation, and she clearly remembered that when she strained very hard her mother told her not to do so. When straining in this way she had a curious sensation in her head, a kind of giddiness, which recurred later accompanying her shyness. Here, the infantile situation in the closet has been transferred to later situations when she has been overcome by shyness. By means of displacement from below upwards, into which I do not wish to enter here, the mouth has become an anus and that which proceeds from the mouth, namely speech, is faeces and flatus. For instance, in talking to anyone, she is compelled to notice whether any odour proceeds from that particular person’s mouth. In the same way there has been a transference of details connected with the bladder-function, and to this is to be traced the struggle with fits of crying which is another of the symptoms connected with shyness.

Quite suddenly these intimate relations with her mother were stopped; she was no longer allowed to go to the closet with her, and so on. Suddenly, too, her relations with her father in these matters were forcibly interrupted. She was already suffering from sleeplessness, probably at the beginning of her fifth year, and she had formed a habit of calling her parents, whereupon she was helped on to the chamber. One night she called more than once and her father came in angrily and gave the unsuspecting child a box on the ear. She was much embittered by this and vowed to herself that she would never call out again. In order to attract her parents’ attention, or possibly to disturb them, she then bethought her of the plan of shaking her bed.

It is quite likely that being suddenly forced to give up her infantile pleasure for which no substitute was provided may have had a traumatic effect and have produced an embittered frame of mind, which might have been avoided if the parents had gone about her training in a less abrupt manner. We find something similar if we leave this period of the patient’s life and observe her in the following period when she was in the infants’ school and the first class of a preparatory school. She was compelled to go to school, and once more, at least so she thinks, the order was given quite unexpectedly. On one fateful day she was restless and lay down on a table and rolled about on it, without any definite idea of what she wanted. Whereupon she was suddenly told: ‘Now you will have to go to school.’ She has always felt this conduct on the part of her mother as a great injustice and it left its traces of resentment and anxiety—anxiety due to an uncertainty of what unpleasant thing might happen next because of something she quite innocently did or said. It was as if something had been taken from her, which she herself could not put into any definite words. But from that day on she inwardly resisted the rules made by those who brought her up, even though she seemed to submit and obey them. Her mental picture of the infants’ school is linked up with the recollection of several forbidden things, tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on the Editors
• Biographical Notes
• Introduction
• 1 Contributions to the Masculinity Complex in Women
• 2 The Castration Complex
• 3 Manifestations of the Female Castration Complex
• 4 Origins and Growth of Object Love
• 5 The Psychology of Women in Relation to the Functions of Reproduction
• 6 The Flight from Womanhood: The Masculinity-Complex in Women, as Viewed by Men and Women
• 7 A Contribution to the Problem of Libidinal Development of the Genital Phase in Girls
• 8 The Genesis of the Feminine Super-Ego
• 9 The Early Development of Female Sexuality
• 10 Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict
• 11 The Evolution of the Oedipus Complex in Women
• 12 Womanliness as a Masquerade
• 13 The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women
• 14 The Pregenital Antecedents of the Oedipus Complex
• 15 On Female Homosexuality
• 16 The Dread of Woman: Observations on a Specific Difference in the Dread Felt by Men and Women Respectively for the Opposite Sex
• 17 The Denial of the Vagina: a Contribution to the Problem of the Genital Anxieties Specific to Women
• 18 Passivity, Masochism and Femininity
• 19 Early Female Sexuality
• Bibliography
• Index