Problems in Freud’s Psychology of Women

The Problem of Women’s Morality and Objectivity

What sense, if any, could Freud have been making when he characterized women as being less moral than men? Consider what he said:

. . . for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their superego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. . . . that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility—all these would be amply accounted for in the modification of the formation of their superego . . . [1925, pp. 257–258].

Freud was well aware that many or most men manifest serious deficiencies in conventional moral rectitude. He saw this in their personal lives: think of the men in the Dora case (1905a). He saw it in their professional lives: consider the scandalous way in which he was treated by his colleagues in medicine and psychiatry. And he saw it in the lives of men as citizens: recall his remarks on the First World War (1915b). More than once he expressed plainly his low estimate of the morality of most people in the world he knew. Consequently, in his generalization about women’s morality, he could not have meant most men, at least not in that sense of the word moral.

In one respect, he seemed to be referring to a certain quality of moral rigidity characterizing men more than women. Men’s moral stands seemed to him much less easily swayed by emotional appeals or so-called subjective impressions than those of women. Men seemed more consistently to affirm and abide by abstract and so-called objective principles. Although it could be argued effectively that the idea of this quantitative sex difference rests on a selection of criteria that is biased in favor of men, and so more or less begs the questions, I shall by-pass this issue in order to stay close to Freud’s line of thought, and I shall grant, though only for the sake of critical analysis, that this difference is real. Most psychoanalysts would, I think, infer from the “fact” of this quantitative difference that men have a greater capacity for isolation of affect. Like many others, Freud did estimate that hysterical proclivities are more commonly encountered in women and obsessive proclivities in men, and he did portray isolation of affect as a peculiarly obsessive mechanism (1926). Consequently, it seems to follow from Freud’s generalization that obsessive natures are more moral than hysterical natures. But the proposition makes no sense, and this for two reasons. One is that, although obsessives differ from hysterics in at least certain aspects of their morality, it is meaningless to suggest that it is possible to measure such differences on a single scale or indeed on any scale, for these are no scalar quantities that are in question; they are modes of response or configurations of attitude and behavior. One would only be imposing a value judgment in the guise of making an empirical quantitative comparison. Apparently following the conventional patriarchal approach of his time, Freud was in this sense confusing values and observations. (In another sense, which is irrelevant here, there can be no value-free observations.)

In addition to this logical objection to the invidious comparison, there is a psychoanalytic objection to be raised. Even assuming this isolation and this rigidity to be true differentiae, a psychoanalyst could never accept the obsessive as a more definite morality or a firmer one. This is so because obsessive morality is founded on reaction formation against anal-sadistic tendencies, intellectualization, irrational and savage unconscious guilt, and much devious immorality for which atonement must be continually made or which must be “magically” undone; additionally, obsessive tendencies toward scrupulosity serve as unconscious equivalents of masturbation and torture. The obsessive model is, according to psychoanalytic understanding, a poor model of morality, indeed. And if one were to argue on behalf of milder or more neutralized versions of this morality, one would still have to compare them with milder or more neutralized versions of hysterical morality, and so one would still have to face the other problems I have just raised. The charge of reductionism or genetic fallacy would have to be made against both or neither of these references to the infantile psychosexual prototypes of morality.

Thus far, Freud’s quantitative comparison of the morality of men and women does not seem to stand up. Let us therefore examine it from another viewpoint. Freud also seemed to be assuming that holding to moral stands once taken, regardless of consequences in one’s own personal relationships, is a sign of firmer morality, and that men clearly surpass women in this regard. There are additional grounds for entertaining this interpretation of Freud: he did think the predominant danger situation in the lives of women is loss of love, whereas that position in the lives of men is occupied by castration (1926); and since castration anxiety is considerably more narcissistically detached a concern than fear of loss of love, in its being more remote from the immediate vicissitudes of love relationships, it provides a more impersonal foundation for moral activity. In Freud’s final theory of development, this castration anxiety is the chief incentive for the renunciations and identifications that constitute the influential superego organization (1923a). Freud concluded that girls, already believing themselves to have been castrated, lack the same incentive as boys to become moral, and consequently seek solace and restored self-esteem in being loved by men and receiving babies from them (1925).

In this context Freud was clearly not appreciating two factors, one being the part played in the girl’s development by the example of the active, nurturant mother who has her own sources of pride and consolation, and the other being the part played by the great variety of positive environmental emphases concerning girls and women. His attention was fixed on the decisive part played in the girl’s development by one set of unconscious equations: my lost penis = father’s actual penis = the baby given me by father’s penis.

Freud’s conclusion seems inevitable: it is not only that women crave unconsciously to be loved, invaded, and impregnated, but that they bend their morality all too readily in order to fulfill these cravings; their fear of disapproval often overrules whatever independent sense they may have of what is right for them and others. No Freudian psychoanalyst would deny the applicability of these propositions to many segments of the significant problems presented in analysis by typical neurotic women in this culture. But surely every such analyst would affirm as well that, whatever the castration anxiety of men might have to do with superego structuralization, typically that anxiety is so unresolved, so persistent, and so intense that it continuously incites men to violate conventional morality. When Freud cautioned against overestimating the degree of true superego formation in people in general, he must have meant men in particular.

More remains to be said about superego morality. For Freud, the unconscious infantile superego was the foundation of individual morality and established its character. His immediate developmental concern in working out his superego theory was to give an account of how and why the incest taboo is established and secured. He did not address himself particularly to the concept of reality-attuned, organized, adaptive moral codes as, later on, Hartmann was to do (1960). That Freud had some definite ideas along this line is suggested in many places in his writings. These ideas are also implied in the dictum that, according to Hartmann, he was fond of quoting: what is moral is self-evident. But in his psychoanalytic writings, he did not sharply distinguish between superego and moral code.

Generally speaking, the consequences of drawing this distinction have been insufficiently appreciated. One such consequence is a radical alteration of our idea of superego, for now we are able to see that superego is not morality at all, nor can morality grow out of it alone, for superego is fierce, irrational, mostly unconscious vindictiveness against oneself for wishes and activities that threaten to bring one into archaically conceived, infantile danger situations. As Freud described it, unconscious superego is mostly a demonic aspect of mind ¹ ; and as he developed this theory of it, it is his Death Instinct enshrined in psychic structure (1923a, 1930). This is the sense of Freud’s conclusion that one aim of therapeutic analysis is to reduce superego influence on ego functioning (1933); by this, he did not mean any reduction of morality.

This severe authority does generally enforce respectful observance of certain fundamental personal, familial, and societal taboos. In this respect, it is a powerful set of primitive prohibitions and policies of self-punishment. But at the same time Freud also demonstrated that this authority may be subversive of people’s achievements, their love, and even their moral codes, for, like any harsh and arbitrary authority, it continuously incites rebellion, hatred, and self-destructiveness. Superego can even make criminals of people. Whatever superego does contribute toward eventual morality requires considerable tempering before that morality can be secured, and certainly superego cannot temper itself; it cannot achieve its own independence of its being and its emotional origins.

It follows that Freud may have drawn exactly the wrong conclusion from his theory. If, on account of her different constellation of castration concerns, a girl does not develop the implacable superego that a boy does, then at least in this respect she might be better suited than a boy to develop a moral code that is enlightened, realistic, and consistently committed to some conventional form of civilized interaction among people. And perhaps that is the truth instead and the basis of another widely held view of women that Freud ignored in this connection: women as the guardians of civilized conduct and morality. ² Probably no one factor or description could state the whole truth in this regard. One remains dissatisfied both with Freud’s estimate of men’s and women’s moralities and with his assuming that one may measure and generalize in this respect.

Can one be satisfied with Freud’s related view that women are less objective, lucid, and acute in comprehension than men (1920)? Here, Freud was implying that, as well as less superego development than men, women manifest less ego development (though when he said this, in 1920, he had not yet formulated his structural theory; but see also his paper of 1931). The derivation of this generalization is the same one I presented of Freud’s estimate of women’s morality: briefly, that an already castrated being’s incentive for development is weaker than that of a being fearful of castration; that castration anxiety is the greatest spur of all to ego development, as to superego development.

If we again agree provisionally that there are or may be sex differences in ego development, how are we to construe them? As in the case of morality, I suggest that these are not measurable differences in degree of development. Certainly one can measure the degree of development of single skills or functions according to the rules for applying specific scales to performances elicited by standardized methods. And certainly one can make informal estimates of this circumscribed sort, with the naked eye as it were. But, taken as a whole, differences between men and women in ego functioning are qualitative, corresponding to modes of functioning rather than amounts. Contrary to Freud, there can be no final authority on the question of whether one mode of functioning is superior to another, for the question makes sense only in a context of values. Modes may be described, and different modes may be contrasted, but only a taken-for-granted patriarchal value system could lead to Freud’s unqualified statement about women’s relative mental incompetence.

Furthermore, there are contradictions to be noted. For example, if women are, as Freud believed, more intuitive and keenly empathic than men, are they not thereby manifesting another kind of acute comprehension? The difference then would not lie in acuteness at all, but in the judge’s estimate of worth. Additionally, there hovers over all these considerations the major questions of whether or in which respects these differences do exist, and, if they do, whether they are inevitable or are enforced or at least exaggerated by methods of rearing and educating boys and girls differently in and for a phallocentric world. There is also the hard question posed by wide individual differences within the sexes.

Here I should point out that Freud’s social critics are close to Freud in a fundamental sense. Freud, too, presented the world as phallocentric, though he had in mind the world as it exists in psychic reality, whereas his critics are referring to the actual formative and normative environment. And yet, what of it? Let us grant the primary or tremendous importance of psychic reality: then we would expect it to shape the comprehension of social reality, to constitute a significant part of the social reality one encounters as other people, and, historically, to determine much of the content and organization of social reality—to all of which real adaptations would have to be made. Consequently, the child’s sexual identity would be defined by that “complemental series” of inner and outer influences that Freud regularly invoked in his developmental propositions. Additionally, Freud relied heavily, in his final theory of ego and anxiety, on the idea of the infant’s prolonged helplessness and the consequent importance of the environment, both as it really is and as it is in psychic reality: this means that external reality and psychic reality shape each other. In this light, one may view Freud’s more thoughtful feminist critics as exploring the following questions concerning sexual identity: To what extent does societal indoctrination shape psychic reality and regulate the development of skills, attitudes, and ideas and values about oneself in relation to others? And how are any such societal influences mediated by family roles, schooling, and the actualities of later existence as well as by anatomical-physiological differences between the sexes? These questions are not alien to Freudian inquiry, especially when it is informed by ego psychology and adaptive considerations. What is problematical is the patriarchal bias in Freudian conceptualization and emphasis, a bias involving taken-for-granted models of masculine and feminine roles in our society. ³

One must conclude that Freud’s estimates of women’s morality and objectivity are logically and empirically indefensible. In large part these estimates implement conventional patriarchal values and judgments that have been misconstrued as being disinterested, culture-free scientific observations.

The Problem of Neglected Prephallic Development

This is the problem created by Freud’s having tried to account for women’s personality characteristics and problems mainly in terms of the phallic phase. It is necessary to put this problem in theoretical perspective before coming to the problem itself. Accordingly, I shall first discuss in some detail certain general features of Freud’s theorizing that seem to account for his having based so much of his theory of psychosexual development on anatomical genital factors.

The problem of neglected prephallic development was introduced into Freud’s theorizing, and thus into his comparative views on men and women, by his adhering to a biological, evolutionary model for his psychology (Schafer 1970). This model requires a teleological view of the propagation of the species (see, e.g., Freud 1933, p. 131). That is to say, it requires the assumption that individual human beings are destined to be links in the chain of survival. This assumption necessarily implies the idea that genital sexuality is the culmination of psychosexual development, and that idea, in turn, necessarily implies that anything else is an arrest of development and so must be, in some sense of the so-called natural order of things, unnatural, defective, or abnormal. Accordingly, pregenital pleasures, being nonprocreative, belong at best to foreplay in adult sexual life; otherwise they are perversions. And homosexuality, being similarly nonprocreative, is to be viewed not as an alternative to genital heterosexuality but as a so-called inversion. One observes in this entire line of thought the operation of an implicit but powerful evolutionary value system. According to this value system, nature has its procreative plan, and it is better for people to be “natural” and not defy “the natural order.” The propositions are not neutral.

Here is one of the great ironies in the history of psychoanalysis: even after Freud gave up the idea of an instinct of self-preservation and in general de-emphasized his ideas about very specific instinctual drives, he continued to adhere to this line of thought and valuation, and in so doing, contradicted his major clinical observations and conclusions. Clinically, even as early as his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905b), he had come to realize that genital heterosexuality is a difficult, imperfect, more or less precarious achievement, and that this is so because it is a psychological as well as a biological eventuality. Biology provides chiefly the stimuli, especially the insistent and potentially painful stimuli of bodily needs, and the sensuous zones; it is experience in human relationship that defines and emphasizes specific aims and objects. The attainment of genital primacy is therefore very much a matter of the child’s learning certain lessons about sexual pleasures and dangers, and its developing some type and degree of mastery of both of these. This learning and striving for mastery will, of course, involve many animistic, illogical, unrealistic, and symbolic infantile mental processes; these processes, usually ignored or underestimated by the cultural revisionists, are among the phase-specific features of early psychosexual development. And this learning will be very much under the influence of bodily experience in the context of some care-taking presence. But however crude, it is learning.

In effect, Freud had shown that for human beings there is nothing inevitable about propagating the species. This is truly a revolutionary discovery; because we know only societies that, owing to various combinations of need and tradition, are geared for creating children, we tend to take it for granted that procreativity is a central and inevitable aspect of human beings, as of other animals. It need not be argued here that, in crucial respects, human beings differ fundamentally from other animals, and it was Freud’s clinical contributions that made it possible to realize in how many ways and how insistently societies steer children from their infancy toward procreative male and female roles. However imperfectly, we are continuously preparing children in our society to become fathers and mothers in nuclear families. Freud also showed, and especially emphasized, that, from the standpoint of the child, this indocrination impinges on, and to a large extent is understood in terms of the child’s own wishes to be in the procreative role; these are wishes based on the child’s identifications, rivalry, love, infantile fantasies, sensuous desires, and other variables familiar from clinical work. But there is no sense of assuredness among the members of our society that the child’s own procreative wishes would or could by themselves finally establish their own primacy; and so, implicitly and explicitly, we plan the child’s psychosexual development. We turn out men and women who will have children in nuclear families, too, and who, in turn, will prepare their children to continue this pattern and will think it good and natural to do so and live so.

Although it is fruitless to speculate about how children would develop in this respect if left to their own devices, we can further consider the place of learning in procreative genitality because there are other and real types of control situations. For instance, in our society we often observe children and adults who have been indoctrinated by parents to hold ideal conceptions of sex roles other than the traditional procreative ones. These are the psychologically masculinized daughters and psychologically effeminized sons. Moreover, procreation is not an inevitable consequence of the pleasures of sexual excitement and orgasm; nor is heterosexual genital intercourse the only route to these pleasures.

Considerations such as these highlight the centrality of learning in the human being’s movement toward procreativity. Consequently, we need not and should not assume a self-fulfilling instinctual drive toward propagation of the species. Nor is it logical to argue that some drive of that sort has to be operative, even though it is not amenable to our isolating it and studying its action, for if we cannot study it, we have no right to speak of its existence or to build it into the foundation of our theories, as Freud did. ⁴

Finally, with regard to unlearned influences on psychosexual identity, it must be noted that Freud never really integrated his references to constitutional differences in the strength of masculinity and femininity with his psychological propositions about sexual development. Furthermore, he did not—indeed, could not—demonstrate that he regularly encountered these differences in the neurotic people with whom he was working.

Thus, it is one great consequence of Freud’s discoveries that our psychoanalytic explanations may no longer presuppose any natural or pre-established culmination of human psychosexual development. Another consequence, corollary to the first, is that psychosexual outcomes other than reproductive genitality are called illnesses and arrests in development only from the standpoint of the values and associated child-rearing practices common to most members of a society. In speaking of perversions and inversions and their cure, we are operating in the realm of societal value systems concerning taken-for-granted evolutionary obligations; we are not operating in any realm of biological necessity, psychobiological disorder, or value-free empiricism. There is no established relation between these value systems and psychoanalytic insights, though there may be between these value systems and religion or existential choices. None of which is to deny, of course, that clinical psychoanalysis can and does often greatly reduce profound and painful conflicts in these areas, or that it may be legitimate or even inescapable to define illness in terms of value systems. But we should know that this is what we are or may be doing.

The argument may be pursued by emphasizing Freud’s helping us to understand the socially widespread intense revulsion toward, and derogation and persecution of so-called sexual deviants. He showed that these violent reactions arc founded on three factors: a degree of precariousness in the heterosexual genitality attained by most nondeviant people; a greater or lesser dread common to these people of succumbing to modes of gratification that would disconfirm their heterosexual genitality; and some readiness on their part to project their repudiated desires onto others and then persecute them. This precariousness expresses various unconscious fixations on and regressions to homosexual and pregenital pleasures, and this dread and persecution reflect the intense, partly incorporated social pressures against assuming these deviant sexual roles. These pressures have, of course, impinged on the child’s archaic fantasies of pleasure, destruction, castration, loss of self and others, and loss of love and security; and they have been understood in terms of these fantasies and gained much of their great power from them. Along the same line, Freud helped us to see through and beyond our society’s many hypocritical moralistic attitudes toward pleasure of all sorts and its usually excessively confining sense of decorum, especially with regard to sexuality. But this understanding of sexual development and sexual attitudes must be predicated on the proposition that human sexuality is indeed psychosexuality. The concept psychosexuality excludes a sexuality of blind instincts culminating in propagation of the species, as in nonhuman organisms (though even for them this simple statement is no longer really acceptable); and it excludes a sexuality simply of erotic techniques and orgasmic adequacy. Psychosexuality means mental sexuality, that is, a sexuality of meanings and personal relationships that have developed and been organized around real and imagined experiences and situations in a social world.

Freud disregarded this consequence of his own revolutionary clinical discovery. He persevered with the biological, evolutionary model and value system. Just as his doing so greatly confounded his metapsychological theorizing (Schafer 1973a), it limited his clinical view of development prior to the phallic phase; thereby, it interfered with his developing an altogether satisfactory developmental psychology of girls—and of boys as well. The fact that psychoanalysts, in following Freud, tend to regard and name these early phases the pregenital and preoedipal phases betrays the relevant bias and limitation in traditional thinking.

In Freud’s major systematic statements, he repeatedly indicated that real mental development begins and is crystallized during the time of the passing of the Oedipus complex, which is the very time when the foundations of procreative genitality are being decisively laid. For example, Freud spoke of the ego as at best a rudimentary organ before this time. Also, he seemed to underestimate the influential fantasies of incorporated parental figures and other “presences” that seem to abound during the very early years and to persist to some extent thereafter. Further, Freud held that it is not only the superego structure which is established during the resolution of the Oedipus complex, but the structured and structuring ego as well (1923a); for only then, on the strength of its new identifications and the desexualized energy now available to it for sublimated activity, does the ego begin to function as an organized, independent, and influential agency.

In his structural theory of mental development, Freud provided no fully adequate and integrated treatment of the acquisition of language, habit training, oral and anal fantasy life, consolidation of narcissism, rudimentary character formation, and many other early factors. Despite his tremendous discoveries concerning just these prephallic factors, Freud still put the phallus, oedipal fantasies, castration anxiety, and procreation in the center of his developmental theory. And yet one can only begin to comprehend the development of the phallic phase and the Oedipus complex and the possibility of their coming to any resolution whatsoever on the basis of considerable prephallic ego development (Schafer 1968b).

This centering on ultimate procreative genitality explains some of the imperfections of Freud’s psychology of women. The essential point may be developed through consideration of Freud’s having pretty much taken for granted the girl’s catastrophic response to her discovering the anatomical difference between the sexes and her basically implacable envious attitude thereafter. Freud was remarkably incurious about the background of these reactions. He did refer (almost in passing, it seems) to speculative ideas put forward by others concerning the girl’s being primed to respond thus catastrophically by prior losses of breast and feces; otherwise, he was silent. Similarly, with regard to the danger situations of loss of love object and loss of love, which precede the era of castration concerns, Freud’s comments remained schematic as well as isolated from considerations of the extremity of the girl’s reaction to the anatomical difference.

We encounter the same problem even in Freud’s major revisionary efforts of 1931 and 1933. Although there he stressed the pregenital girl’s activity, her mother’s “sexual seduction” of her through bodily ministrations, the girl’s natural ambivalence toward her mother and her struggle with her over masturbation, he did not present these variables as the foundations of the castration shock. These variables remained isolated. Soon they would be superseded by the beginning of the “feminine [phase] to which she [the girl] is biologically destined” (1933, p. 119; emphasis added). Here there is no sense of developmental continuity.

To mention only one more problem: Freud was too quick to favor the designation penis envy for the complex array of feelings, wishes, and fantasies of which penis envy is, after all, only a part, though often a most intense and consequential part. Here, the influence of phallocentrism can hardly be overlooked.

Insofar as it is the hallmark of psychoanalytic investigation, and particularly of Freud’s thinking, that it always presses its questions further and further in the interest of establishing the fullest understanding possible of the particularity of response on the part of individuals in specific circumstances, especially when these reactions are intense, disturbing, profoundly formative, and enduringly influential, it is all the more remarkable that at this point there are virtually no questions forthcoming. It is as if it is sufficient just to know that girls assume they are phallic in the way boys are, and that they pursue active as well as passive aims until the terrible time of revelation, mortification, and envy. But it is not sufficient. The psychoanalytic clinician as well as theorist must remain curious and so must go on to ask: Why is the girl so extremely mortified and envious? Her mortification and envy are not explained by the fact of her simply seeing the difference; nor are they explained by her having previously maintained unchallenged her assumption that she and the boy are anatomically alike. To begin to answer the question at all satisfactorily, one must assume that, before the time of mortification and envy, it was already terribly important to the girl that there be no differences between herself and boys. And to make that assumption is to land smack in the middle of so-called pregenital mental development. At this point, this phasic location can no longer seem quite so pregenital, in any case. In effect I am arguing that we cannot have a simple, self-evident shock theory of the girl’s extreme mortification and consequent penis envy. That the girl reacts this way indicates that she is already heavily invested in and worried about genital comparison and intactness. Freud’s consistently restricted view of these developments is evident in the way he contrasted to the boy’s initial “irresolution and lack of interest” the girl’s response to having to face the anatomical difference: “She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it [the penis] and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (1925, p. 252).

The problem of the readiness for castration shock is not the whole of the difficulty. In his quest for particularity of explanation, the psychoanalyst must also ask about the apparent precariousness of the girl’s self-esteem in the face of the genital discovery, however and whenever it is made. Indeed, in Freud’s theory this precariousness is presented as so great that the collapse of self-esteem in the context of the castration fantasy is held to be a decisive and permanent influence on the woman’s entire mental development and organization. As Freud was to put it much later on, penis envy was the “bedrock” of her neurotic problems (1937). But, again, where are Freud’s questions in this regard? It was he, after all, who taught us how to establish through psychoanalysis the historical background and determination of psychological traumata. ⁵

Even after making allowances for due restraint on speculation, one may still argue that Freud was in a logical and methodological position to at least raise these questions about the readiness for mortification and envy and the precariousness of self-esteem. The answers, about which I shall have more to say later, would have to center on the girl’s relationship with her mother during the first years of her life, and they would establish the profound importance of this relationship throughout the remainder of the daughter’s existence—as of the son’s. That Freud did not raise these questions seems to be in large part an expression of his being preoccupied with the organs of reproduction, in consequence of his commitment to an evolutionary model and value system. On this account, Freud neglected to a noteworthy degree two interrelated psychological variables, one being manifestations of mind prior to the time of the phallic phase and the Oedipus complex, the other being the powerful role played by learning in the development of sexual attitudes, roles, and subjective experience. Far more than it should have, anatomy had become Freud’s destiny.

Anatomy and reproduction, and anatomy and mind: the links were forged. Despite Freud’s keen awareness of early mental functioning, he developed no psychological way of taking it into account. Mostly he biologized the early mental processes by relegating them to instincts, instinctual energy, processes, and principles, such as the pleasure principle, the primary process, and the repetition compulsion; and he viewed each of these as seeking to gratify its own aims in its own way; thereby he anthropomorphized them, that is, reintroduced psychological propositions by the back door of biology (Grossman and Simon 1969; Schafer 1972, 1973a,b).

A psychological approach to the prephallic period must center on the girl’s primary, mind-formative, certainly intensely and complexly physical, and ultimately indestructible relationship with her mother. Freud, however, was mostly concerned to explain the girl’s turning from her mother to her father as lover and sire of her children. In this effort, he portrayed the girl as having simply turned against her mother and, together with that, against her own identification-based active orientation and her clitoris. But, to be consistent with psychoanalytic propositions and findings, one must see the girl and, later, the woman as being in a profoundly influential, continuously intense and active relationship, not only with her real mother, but with the idea and imagined presence of her mother, and with her identification with this mother; one must also see her as integrating her clitoris firmly into her sexuality. Whatever the girl’s narcissistic vulnerability at the time of the castration shock, it would have its history and find its meaning in this matrix. Although Freud approached this consistency in some of his later papers, he did not achieve it.

Freud’s value-based interpretation of his investigations is further evidenced in a limitation of his approach to the problem of the analysis of transference. Typically, he construed the transference he had observed as based on the ambivalent tie to the father of early childhood. Even in his paper of 1931, in which he was reconsidering his psychology of women and beginning to emphasize the importance of the pregenital relation to the mother, he suggested that it would be female analysts particularly who would be the ones to work out the child’s early relation to the mother. Thereby he continued to neglect the essentially androgynous role of the psychoanalyst in the transference; for the male analyst this means his female as well as male identity in this central aspect of his work. There is little evidence of Freud’s having been alert to or impressed by maternal transference to the male analyst—or, for that matter, by maternal countertransference on the part of the male analyst.

It is not inaccurate to attribute to Freud a relative neglect of bisexuality, even though that concept and the relevant observations are such central elements in his theory of development. This neglect is evident in his discussions not only of transference, but of resistance, ego and superego formation, and other topics as well (Schafer 1973b). He was preoccupied with the father’s position in a way and to a degree that stunted his conception of the mother’s status in the family and thereby her stature in his theory. Again, for his theory of development the important thing was to get the girl to become feminine and ready to receive love and babies passively from an active man, thereby to continue to propagate the species. For this, Freud thought he needed a sustained phallic perspective. But that perspective is not inclusive enough for his own psychoanalytic discoveries.

The Problem of Naming

Now we must consider how such designations as feminine, passive, and active behave in descriptive and explanatory propositions. This is the problem of naming.

To designate is also to create and to enforce. By devising and allocating words, which are names, people create entities and modes of experience and enforce specific subjective experiences. Names render events, situations, and relationships available or unavailable for psychological life that might otherwise remain cognitively indeterminate. Consequently, whether or not something will be an instance of masculinity or femininity, activity or passivity, aggression or masochism, dominance or submission, or something else altogether, or nothing at all, will depend on whether or not we consistently call it this or that or consistently do not name it at all, hence do not constitute and authorize its being. Similarly, to the extent that we link or equate such names as, for example, femininity and passivity, we exert a profound and lasting formative influence on what it is said to be like to be feminine or passive. Logically, there is no right answer to the questions, what is masculine and what is feminine and what is active and what is passive. There are no preconceptual facts to be discovered and arrayed. There are only loose conventions governing the uses and groupings of the words in question. And these conventions, like all others, must manifest values.

For example, in our society we often merge words pertaining to social values such as status and so-called breeding with words pertaining to sexual identity. To be a lady in the sense of a fine lady and to be feminine may be set up as equivalents, with the consequence that a woman who does not act ladylike, according to a certain conception of that word, may be said to be not feminine. In this instance, not feminine might mean rude, loud, socially too forward, sexually too adventurous, intellectually too serious, or cosmetically too casual or vivid. Thus, to say that a woman is not feminine is often a way of saying that she does not act or look like a woman “ought to” act or look. An additional part of this poor lesson is the implicit idea, “She is bad.” In this way, verbal conventions that implement value judgments are passed off as simple and unequivocal facts—and are so learned by children (Hartmann 1960).

Clinical psychoanalysts have much occasion to observe and modify the disturbing influence of cultural, familial, and individual conventions regarding the valuative use of words or names and of their groupings and equations, especially in the case of words pertaining to sexual identity, aggression, and personal worth.

In this third and final (and all-too-brief) section of my discussion, I shall concentrate on one strategic problem of naming: how Freud used the words active and passive in relation to the words masculine and feminine. Freud showed some awareness in this regard that he was using and devising verbal conventions. In one place he said, “Maleness combines [the factors of] subject, activity and possession of the penis; femaleness takes over [those of] object and passivity” (1923b, p. 145). In another place he said, “we call everything that is strong and active male, and everything that is weak and passive female” (1940, p. 188). Except for his reference to the penis, which, being an empirical rather than a defining proposition, is out of place in the first statement, Freud seemed to know that he was not making empirical assertions about how women really and necessarily are. In many places he even insisted that women come in all kinds, as do men. What was wanted was merely a suitable rubric for such personal characteristics as weakness and passivity. The names he chose were masculine and feminine (or male and female), and so, within this verbal convention, a woman is masculine to the extent that she is active and strong, and so on (see, e.g., 1933, pp. 114–117).

Whatever one’s criticisms of this choice of names, such as that it both implies and enforces a derogation of women, it seems thus far that Freud was proceeding logically. In fact, however, he repeatedly lost his bearings and did not keep definition distinct from observation. Freud’s logical sophistication did not stop him from making all sorts of conventional patriarchal statements about what women are actually like and should be like (e.g., submissive to their husband’s authority). Such statements suggest that all kinds of “right” answers about sexual identity are being dictated by a pair of biological principles—the masculine and the feminine. Freud’s repeated remarks about constitutional strength of masculinity and femininity reveal this to be so.

One may trace this same confusion developing in the course of Freud’s “Female Sexuality” (1933). What was masculine and feminine, like what was moral and objective, seemed to be self-evident to him. His attempt at definitional rigor succumbed to this complacency. For Freud, then, feminine comprised passive, submissive, and masochistic; it meant the willing object of the man’s biologically natural sexual and aggressive activity. It does sound as if now the continuation of the species has been scientifically guaranteed. So, incidentally, has the continuation of the patriarchal social order, which, in his theories at any rate, Freud seemed to take uncritically as Reality. To put it another way, normative links were assumed between, on the one hand, female-feminine-passive-submissive-masochistic, and, on the other hand, male-masculine-active-dominant-aggressive; this being so, a change of any one term would necessarily imply a change of all the others linked to it.

In trying to explain how women get to be as they allegedly are, particularly in terms of their attempts at resolving their penis envy, Freud made many fundamental and grand discoveries. Nevertheless, he was begging the question in at least two different ways. One was his presupposing that in fact women get to be essentially passive, submissive, and masochistic. The other was his presupposing that it is their psychobiological destiny to get to be as he said they are. Consequently, he worked with a simplified view of women, and he paid scant attention to the questions whether and to what extent girls are continuously being seduced and coerced into being “that way” by members of a society committed unconsciously, if not consciously, to guaranteeing that outcome.

Much of the argument turns on the meaning of passive. For Freud, masochism is the passive complement of sadistic aggression; submission is the passive complement of dominance; being loved, of loving; being looked at, of looking; and being impregnated, of impregnating (see, e.g., Freud 1915a). If all these passivities add up to femininity, we had better be clear about how Freud was using the word passive. The trouble is that Freud was not clear or consistent in his use of that word. At times he was even self-contradictory. First of all, he confused phenomenological passivity with passivity in the eyes of the psychoanalytic observer of behavior (Schafer 1968a). A clear example from psychoanalysis is the so-called fate neurosis in which, phenomenologically, one repeatedly experiences oneself as the unfortunate passive victim of circumstance, while the psychoanalytic observer of behavior sees the person in question as actively bringing about his or her own misfortunes, say as symbolic castrations for incestuous wishes or as abandonments in punishment for unconscious oedipal triumphs. Secondly, when Freud generalized about women’s passivity, he neglected such factors as unconscious identification with the partner in any significant relationship. These are factors whose importance he had been the very one to establish through his psychoanalytic method. In this connection, for example, the masochist is understood to be also unconsciously identifying with, and thereby vicariously enjoying the activity of, the sadistic partner; and to this one must add that moral masochists, at any rate, not only actively seek out and provoke the abuses they seem to suffer passively, but use their suffering to torment others. Thirdly, Freud repeatedly demonstrated how extraordinarily subtle and complex the interweaving of active and passive themes can be in any one person’s life, from which it follows that one-sided or simple characterizations of any significant project as active or passive hardly make sense, once one knows a given person and situation well enough. Yet Freud was not deterred from generalizing on the basis of such simplistic characterizations. Again, he dealt inconsistently with his own discoveries and conceptual perspective.

Perhaps most fundamental to the analysis of this problem of naming is that, in many crucial instances, the decision whether to speak of behavior or of aims or attitudes as active or passive is like the decision whether to say of a certain glass of water that it is half full or half empty. For example, to be exhibitionistic one must find a real or imagined audience and show oneself off, which is to be active; and it is to be looked at, which is to be passive. Another example: to be loved is to be passive, and yet there are so many ways of getting to be loved and of receiving love, all of which are forms of being active. One more example: does the penis penetrate the vagina or does the vagina receive the penis? Here I should point out that, immediately after the sentence I quoted earlier in this section, in which Freud grouped subject, activity, and possession of the penis as the referents of maleness, he went on to say, “The vagina is . . . valued as the place of shelter for the penis; it enters into the heritage of the womb” (1923b, p. 145): one must ask whether a place of shelter can be passive and whether a womb can be passive, or, to put it in terms of persons-in-relation, which are the proper ones, one must ask whether it makes any sense to say of a woman engaging in sexual intercourse that she is simply passive and whether it makes any sense to say of a mother that she is simply passive. Although Freud raised this last question (1933, p. 115), he did not draw its consequences for his general theory.

That Freud was not prepared to think about mothers very far is, as I noted earlier, evident from how little he said directly about them and about relationships with them, and, correspondingly, how little he said about how they appear in the transference, the resistance, and the formation of the ego and superego systems. Additionally, in his writings he showed virtually no sustained interest in their subjective experience—except for their negative feelings about their own femininity and worth and their compensatory cravings to be loved and impregnated, especially with sons. Consequently, Freud dealt with the feminine trends in men chiefly in terms of the two factors of castration and passive homosexuality, and he failed to consider in depth and systematically what more is entailed by being a woman and feeling like one in our society and how it might be different under other conditions. It seems that he knew the father and the castrate in himself and other men but not the mother and the woman.

To return to the idea of a fine lady: there is a Victorian precept that in sexual relations “a lady doesn’t move.” The modern psychoanalyst has to recognize this role, not as passivity, but as a desperate form of activity—a drastic inhibition required to play this inactivated part. The inhibiting may be carried out unconsciously and supplemented by conscious aversion, and the groundwork for this behavior would have to have been laid in early childhood, but it is activity nonetheless, at least as much as anything else is. It is from Freud particularly that we have learned about this unconscious activity. Yet, although Freud the clinician was ever alert to the many forms unconscious activity takes in the lives of women, Freud the theoretician, when dealing with the development of sexual identity, named this inhibition passivity and made it the crux of femininity.

Concluding Remarks

Freud was working within a nineteenth-century biological-medical tradition that was not of his making. He merely applied and extended the conventions that constituted that tradition. That tradition was marked by a fusion of mechanistic and evolutionary modes of thought and patriarchal complacency. It based itself on ruling principles of nature, such as survival; great natural polarities or dichotomies, such as activity-passivity and masculinity-femininity; and other broad generalizations designed to take nature by the throat. Additionally, it was a tradition of belief in the idea of value-free empiricism and of pride in the achievements of the utterly objective scientist, and so was philosophically too immature to appreciate what is better established today—namely, the pluralistic, relativistic, linguistic, and inevitably valuative aspects of the various forms of knowledge. Against these odds, Freud’s achievement is all the more impressive. Nevertheless, at this historical moment we are obliged to identify and clarify the problematical aspects and limitations of Freud’s contributions to the psychology of women. Much remains to be said on this subject, and on the correlated subject of the fear that haunts the lives of men, pervading their relationships with women as well as with men: the fear of being second best and second-rate themselves.