Un Homme Manqué

Alfred Adler

Freud was both admiring and critical of Adler (see Hoffman 2001). He noted that Adler’s ideas “will make a great impression, at first damaging psychoanalysis very much.” He criticized Adler for focusing on surface phenomena (ego psychology) rather than on the unconscious and for ignoring the psychology of libido—sexuality (Nunberg and Federn 1974, p. 147; Ansbacher and Ansbacher 1956, pp. 70–71). Clearly for Freud, the major point of divergence concerned the importance of libido. Adler consigned the sexual drive to a subsidiary position, maintaining in 1908 that the aggressive drive was primary (Ansbacher and Ansbacher 1956, pp. 34–38) and in 1911 that “the libido cannot in any way be regarded uniformly as the driving factor” (Nunberg and Federn 1974, p. 102). In examining Adler’s influence on Freud, we have to note Freud’s defensiveness when addressing Adler’s conception of the aggressive drive. Freud at first argued against the importance of aggression as a drive (because of his preoccupation with the primacy of libido theory). When he did acknowledge the need for an aggressive instinct in psychoanalytic theory he differentiated his conception of it from Adler’s by calling it the destructive instinct or death instinct (1909, p. 140n). And only later, in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (Freud 1926, p. 102), did Freud come to stress the role of defense against aggression in the development of Hans’s phobia.

Masculine Protest

The major Adlerian construct with which Freud engaged was the “masculine protest.” It is notable that Freud did not efface the term; instead, he repeatedly addressed the differences between his conception of libido theory with Adler’s conception, which he considered superficial. As late as “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), Freud stated his disagreement with Adler.

I will examine some of Freud’s texts in an attempt to understand his repeated assertion that Adler’s concept of masculine protest is more adequately understood psychoanalytically as castration anxiety and penis envy. This repeated assertion leads me to conjecture that there may have been a personal reason for Freud’s trying to reconcile Adler’s ideas with libido theory. This ongoing process may have exaggerated Freud’s conception, in which a woman was considered to be, in Jones’s phrase, un homme manqué. An important aspect of Freud’s conception of women as inferior versions of men is his developmental supposition that prepubertal children do not distinguish between the sexes, with both boys and girls considering the male phallus the universal genital. This idea dates back to 1897 (Freud 1897, p. 270). However, as Balsam notes, the notion did not become memorialized as theory until 1908, with the publication of “On the Sexual Theories of Children.” The contiguity between Freud’s 1908 publication and Adler’s initial discussion of the masculine protest at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society lends credence to the conjecture that Adler’s ideas stirred Freud’s preconceived notions about men and women, which he then elevated to the level of theory. In fact, Freud’s peremptory dismissal of Horney’s and Jones’s arguments in the 1920s and early 1930s indicates that his rebuttal of their arguments was personally, rather than scientifically, motivated.

Balsam implies that Freud’s letters to Eduard Silberstein, his friend during adolescence (Boehlich 1990), indicate that the adolescent Freud understood the intrinsic value of women. However, as with many of Freud’s writings, one can elicit contradictory ideas from those letters. For example, one can infer in these adolescent notes the personal roots of Freud’s defensive need to consider women inferior to men. For example, the adolescent Freud maintained that a man could allow himself to lose control of his passions and to slacken his morality because a man is “his own legislator, confessor, and absolver.” By contrast, a woman has “no inherent ethical standard.” Therefore, a woman can act correctly only if she keeps within the bounds of convention; she can never be forgiven if she rebels against convention (Boehlich 1990, p. 92; Hoffman 1996, p. 24). Furthermore, Silver (1991) conjectures that the sixteen-year-old Freud’s repudiation of his passionate feelings (with oedipal overtones) contributed to his theoretical conception of the repudiation of femininity by both men and women.

It is my contention that Adler’s construct of the masculine protest (i.e., the repudiation of the feminine) was consistent with and corresponded to Freud’s defensive views about women, which he then incorporated into libido theory.

Adler’s Discussions and Freud’s Responses

On November 7, 1906, at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg and Federn 1962, pp. 36–47), Adler presented a paper, “On the Organic Basis of Neuroses,” drawn from a book he would publish the following year (Adler 1907). Freud noted the “great importance” of Adler’s work, especially the concept of compensation for organic inferiority (Nunberg and Federn 1962, p. 42). Over time, Freud translated this term into castration anxiety in boys and penis envy in girls. This translation persisted in Freud’s theorizing, leading to the conclusion that primary penis envy is universal in girls, given that the male genital is considered the universal genital by both boys and girls.

One of the first detailed case descriptions, which Freud considered to be evidence against Adler’s ideas occurred at the October 30, 1912, meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (Nunberg and Federn 1975, pp. 108–112). The next day he wrote to Ferenczi that he had made an “energetic advance against Adlerian rubbish” (Freud 1912). However, reading the summary in the Society Minutes one finds a lack of clarity and an ambiguity in Freud’s theoretical construction. On the one hand he said that “what speaks particularly against Adler’s conception of the universality of the masculine protest is the fact that there are cases in which no trace of penis envy can be found” (p. 109). Yet he also implies that penis envy is a universal determinant of women’s neurosis (“the girl feels her clitoris is inferior” [p. 110]). Is penis envy universal or does it occur only in neurotic women? That seems unclear.

The dismissal of masculine strivings as the “real” (unconscious) motive (the result of the masculine protest) and its replacement with castration anxiety and penis envy became ubiquitous in Freud’s thinking: “Castration phantasies are extremely frequent in women, though not to be sought behind every vomiting fit, of course. For example, everything that is correct in Adler’s assumptions may be reduced to penis envy and fear of castration” (Freud 1913, p. 112). Further, in his “History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” Freud (1914) notes that “the ‘masculine protest’ undoubtedly exists, but. . . . it is impossible, and is disproved by observation, that a child, whether male or female, should found the plan of its life on an original depreciation of the female sex and take the wish to be a real man as its ‘guiding line’. Children have, to begin with, no idea of the significance of the distinction between the sexes; on the contrary, they start with the assumption that the same genital organ (the male one) is possessed by both sexes; they do not begin their sexual researches with the problem of the distinction between the sexes, while the social underestimation of women is completely foreign to them” (pp. 54–55). As one can see, a ubiquitous question persists: is penis envy universal or not?

In his final discussion of the matter, in the 1930s, Freud argued against Horney and Jones, noting that his data did not tally with their idea that penis envy and masculine strivings are defenses against feminine wishes: “if this defence against femininity turns out to be so vigorous, from what other source can it derive its strength if not from that striving for masculinity which found its earliest expression in the child’s penis-envy and might well take its name from this?” (Freud 1932, p. 296). He asserted that his data did not tally with Horney’s conclusion (1926) that penis envy is a secondary phenomenon defending against feminine wishes or with Jones’s idea (1927, 1933) that the phallic phase is secondary in girls (Freud 1931, p. 243)—in other words, that the phallic phase is a defensive organization.

Conclusion

Balsam concludes her discussion noting that “we seem to have come full circle from Freud’s post-1908 ‘certainty’ about sexuality to a rich and complex state of knowledgeable uncertainty about sex and gender, while we have taken on board his method and helpful approach to exploring the mind. In the spirit of Freud’s pre-1908 attitude to females, we can opt to nurture our willingness to explore, and to be prepared for surprise and discovery, when honored by our patients’ free associations about sex, gender, and their procreative bodily experiences, epic but still unsung” (p. 85).

However, can one really listen to a patient’s free associations without a theory as to how to organize the flow of thoughts and their interruptions (defenses)? It is important to note, as Schlesinger and Schuker (1990) have, that “the roots of theory are fundamentally unconscious, so no one is free from possible collusions” (p. 225). Such unconscious influences lead to automatic assumptions. An example of this dynamic occurred in the early 1990s, when I first submitted a blinded paper on femininity for publication. An anonymous reviewer repeatedly referred to the author as “she,” as if only a woman could have written the paper.

Freud worked within a patriarchal culture that influenced his development, especially during adolescence, when his fertile mind promoted creative transformations of his rich cultural heritage. He thus came to approach his ideas in a way not just authoritative, but authoritarian. Contemporary theorists, working in a multicultural, poststructural milieu, are attuned to a wider array of influences and ideas.

This multiplicity, of course, influences the development of psychoanalytic theories, not only about women but about the fluidities of sex and gender. If this is so, however, why is the study of female psychology left, to this day, mainly to women? A search of the PEP database for articles with the word women in their title (conducted December 25, 2016) yielded twenty-two papers that were cited at least five times in the past five years. ¹ Three of these articles were written by men, one of them me (Hoffman 1999). One of these three articles was a book review. In addition, one other article among the twenty-two included a male as a second author. Two of the articles were by Balsam (2003, 2008).

Of the articles with women in the title that were cited at least ten times in the past five years, one was by Chodorow (1996), one by Elise (2000), and three by Horney (1924, 1926, 1933). Horney’s “Flight from Womanhood” (1926) was the most cited article in the past five years (twenty-five times). Certainly the test of time indicates the importance of Horney’s work from almost a century ago. Since Freud understood the importance of defenses, why was he so dismissive of Horney’s and Jones’s conceptualization of defensive penis envy and the defensive nature of the phallic phase? In his analysis of a homosexual woman, Freud (1920) understood the role of defense when she takes the role of a masculine lover (see Hoffman 1996, p. 32). Yet when Horney and Jones contradicted Freud’s theory of primary penis envy in women, Freud could not seem to appreciate their stress on the defensive avoidance of female desires. Why?

Fliegel (1973) notes that perhaps Freud considered Horney’s theories reflective of “an intrinsic pleasure-oriented feminine sexuality” (p. 388; see Hoffman 1996, p. 34). ² It seems to me that Adler’s masculine protest indeed gives us a clue. One can understand Adler’s ideas as a way to understand how a man or woman feels about his or her body and how that bodily experience drives the person’s motives for pleasure. Perhaps such a direct examination of feminine desires by Horney and Jones provoked phallocentric defenses in Freud, defenses that had been active, unconsciously, at least since adolescence, as I have suggested.

Even in our supposedly liberated age, many men need to valorize their phallic prowess and in that way devalue the status of women, or avoid women, whom they find threatening. Can that be a reason why most analysts who write specifically about female psychology are women? As one of the handful of men who have written in this area, I have attempted to unearth some of the personal roots of my interest in the subject. With Freud’s extensive writings so easily available, understanding the development of his theory can help each of us understand how we too have gravitated to one theory or another. In reflecting on Rosemary Balsam’s important contribution to understanding Freud’s evolving theories, we have an opportunity to reflect on our own predilections. It has been an honor to join her in this project.