The fact that the female child’s anxiety concerns the inside of her body explains to a large extent, I think, why in her early sexual organization the part played by the vagina should be overshadowed by the activity of the clitoris. Even in her very earliest masturbation phantasies, in which she transforms her mother’s vagina into an instrument of destruction, she shows an unconscious knowledge about the vagina. For although, owing to the predominance of her oral and anal tendencies, she likens it to the mouth and to the anus, she nevertheless thinks of it in her unconscious, as many details of her phantasies clearly demonstrated, as a cavity in the genitals which is meant to receive her father’s penis.

But beyond this general unconscious realization of the existence of the vagina the small girl also often possesses a quite conscious knowledge of it. Analysis of a number of small girls has convinced me that, in addition to those quite special cases mentioned by Helene Deutsch in which the patient has undergone sexual assault and defloration and has in consequence obtained a knowledge of this sort and been led to indulge in vaginal masturbation, many small girls are consciously aware that they have an opening in their genitals. In some instances they have got this knowledge from mutual investigations made during sexual games with other children, whether boys or girls; in others, they have discovered the vagina for themselves. However, they undoubtedly have a specially strong inclination to deny or repress such knowledge—an inclination which springs from the anxiety they feel in regard to this organ and to the inside of their body. Analyses of women have shown that the fact that the vagina is a part of the interior of their body, to which so much of their deepest anxiety is attached, and that it is the organ which they regard as pre-eminently dangerous and endangered in their sadistic phantasies about copulation between their parents, is of fundamental importance in giving rise to sexual disturbances and frigidity in them and, in particular, in inhibiting vaginal excitability.

There is a good deal of evidence to show that the vagina does not enter upon its full functions until the sexual act has been performed. And, as we know, it often happens that the woman’s attitude to copulation is completely altered after she has experienced it and that her inhibition in regard to it—and, before the event, such an inhibition is so usual as to be practically normal—is often replaced be a strong desire for it. We may infer from this that her previous inhibition was in part maintained by anxiety and that the sexual act has removed that anxiety. I should be inclined to attribute this reassuring effect of sexual intercourse to the fact that the libidinal satisfaction which she receives from copulation confirms her in the belief that the penis she has incorporated during the act is a “good” object and that her vagina does not have a destructive effect upon it. Her fear of the internalized and external penis—a fear which has been all the greater from being unverifiable—is thus removed by the real object. In my view, the girl’s fears concerning the inside of her body contribute, in addition to the operation of biological factors, to prevent the emergence of a clearly discernible vaginal phase in her early childhood. Nevertheless, I am convinced, on the strength of a number of analyses of small girls, that the mental representation of the vagina exerts its full share of influence, no less than the mental representation of all the other libidinal phases, upon the infantile genital organization of the female child.

The same factors which tend to conceal the mental function of the vagina in the girl go to intensify her fixation on the clitoris. For the latter is a visible organ and one which can be submitted to reality tests. I have found that clitoral masturbation is accompanied by phantasies of various descriptions. Their content changes extremely rapidly, in accordance with the violent fluctuations which take place between one position and other in the early stages of the girl’s development. They are at first for the most part of a pregenital kind; but as soon as the child’s desires to incorporate her father’s penis in an oral and genital manner grow stronger they assume a genital and vaginal character (being often already accompanied, it would seem, by vaginal sensations) and thus, to begin with, take a feminine direction.

Since the little girl begins to identify herself with her father very soon after she has identified herself with her mother, her clitoris rapidly takes on the significance of a penis in her masturbation phantasies. All her clitoral masturbation phantasies belonging to this early stage are dominated by her sadistic trends, and that appears to me decisive for the fact that they, and her masturbatory activities in general, diminish or cease altogether when her phallic phase comes to an end, at a period when her sense of guilt emerges more strongly. Her realization that her clitoris is no substitute for the penis she desires is, in my opinion, only the last link in a chain of events which determines her future life and in many cases condemns her to frigidity for the rest of her days.

 

Klein, Melanie. “The Effects of Early Anxiety Situations on the Sexual Development of the Girl.” 1932. The Psychoanalysis of Children. London: Virago, 1989. 194-239.