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.

The Castration Complex

The identification with her father which the girl displays so clearly in the phallic phase, and which bears every sign of penis-envy and castration complex, is, as far as my own observations go, the outcome of a process comprising many stages. In examining some of the more important of these steps we shall seen in what way her identification with her father is affected by anxiety arising from her feminine position and how the masculine position she adopts in each of her phases of development is superimposed upon a masculine position belonging to an earlier phase.

  When the female infant gives up her mother’s breast and turns to her father’s penis as an object of satisfaction she identifies herself with her mother. But as soon as she suffers frustration in this position too, she very speedily identifies herself with her father, who, in her phantasy, obtains satisfaction from her mother’s breast and entire body, that is, from those primary sources of satisfaction which she herself has been so painfully forced to relinquish. Feelings of hatred and envy towards her mother as well as libidinal desires for her, go to create this earliest identification of the girl with her sadistic father, and in this identification enuresis plays an important role.

  Children of both sexes regard urine in its positive aspect as equivalent to their mother’s mild, as they unconsciously equate all bodily substances with one another. My observations go to show that wetting, in its earliest meaning in the sense of a positive giving act and of a sadistic inversion, is an expression of a feminine position in boys as well as in girls. It would seem that the hatred children feel towards their mother’s breast for having frustrated their desires arouses in them, either simultaneously with their cannibalistic impulses or closely following them, phantasies of injuring and destroying her breast with their urine.

  As has already been said, in the sadistic phase the girl puts her greatest belief in the magical powers of her excreta, while the boy makes his penis the principal executant of his sadism. But in her, too, belief in the omnipotence of her urinary functions leads her to identify herself—though to a lesser extent than does the boy—with her sadistic father, to whom she attributes special urethral-sadistic powers in virtue of his possession of a penis. Thus wetting very soon comes to represent a masculine position for children of both sexes; and in connection with the girl’s earliest identification with her sadistic father it becomes a means of destroying her mother; while at the same time she appropriates her father’s penis in her imagination by castrating him.

  The girl’s identification with her father on the basis of his introjected penis follows closely, in my experience, upon the primary sadistic identification she has made with him by means of wetting. In her earliest masturbation phantasies she has identified herself alternately with each of her parents. The feminine position which is associated with the internalization of her father’s penis makes her afraid of her father’s “bad” penis which she has internalized. But this anxiety leads to a strengthening of the identification with her father, for in order to counter this fear she activates the defensive mechanisms of identification with the anxiety-objects. Her possession of the penis she has stolen from him arouses a sense of omnipotence which increases her faith in her destructive magic through her excreta. In this position her hatred and sadism against her mother becomes intensified and she has phantasies of destroying her with the help of her father’s penis; while at the same time she satisfies her feelings of revenge against the father who has frustrated her and finds in her sense of omnipotence and in her power over both parents a defence against anxiety. I have found this attitude especially strongly developed in some patients in whom paranoid traits predominated; but it is also very powerful in women whose homosexuality is deeply coloured by feelings of a hostile rivalry with the male sex. It would thus apply to that group of female homosexuals, described by Ernest Jones, to which I referred earlier.

  The possession of an external penis would help to convince the girl in the first place that in reality she has that sadistic power over both her parents without which she cannot master her anxiety, and in the second place that the penis, as a means of sadistic power over her objects, is evidence that the internalized dangerous penis and the introjected objects can be overcome; so that having a penis ultimately serves to protect her own body.

  While her sadistic position, reinforced as it is by her anxiety, thus forms the basis of a masculinity complex in her, her sense of guilt also makes her want to have a penis. The real penis she desires will now be used to make restitution towards her mother. As Joan Riviere has observed, the girl’s wish to compensate her mother for having deprived her of her father’s penis furnishes important additions to her castration complex and penis-envy. When the girl is obliged to give up her rivalry with her mother out of fear of her, her desire to placate her and make up for what she has done leads her to long intensely for a penis as a means of making restitution. In Joan Riviere’s opinion the intensity of her sadism and the extent of her capacity to tolerate anxiety are factors which will help to determine whether she will take up a heterosexual line or a homosexual one.

  We must now examine more closely why it is that in some cases the masculine position and the possession of a penis are an indispensable condition without which the girl cannot make restitution to her mother. Early analysis has demonstrated the existence in the unconscious of a fundamental principle governing all reactive and sublimatory processes, which demands that restitutive acts must adhere in every detail to the damage that has been done in phantasy. Whatever wrongs the child has done in phantasy in the way of stealing, injuring and destroying it must make good by giving back, putting to rights and restoring, one by one. This principle also requires that the same sadistic instruments (i.e. penis, excrements, etc.) that have been used to damage and destroy shall be once more turned into “good” things and be used as a means of making well. Whatever harm the “bad” penis or “bad” urine have done, the “good” penis or “good” urine must put right again.

  Let us consider the case of girl who has centred her sadistic phantasies more especially around the indirect destruction of her mother by her father’s dangerous penis and who has identified herself very strongly with her sadistic father. As soon as her reactive trends and her desires to make restitution set in force, she will feel urged to restore her mother by means of a penis with healing powers and thus her homosexual trends will become reinforced. An important factor in this connection is the extent to which she feels that her father has been incapacitated from making restitution, either because she believes that she has castrated him or has put him out of the way or has transformed his penis into a “bad” one, and that she must therefore give up hope of restoring him. If she believes this very strongly she will have to play his part herself, and this again will tend to make her adopt a homosexual position.

  The disappointment and doubts and the sense of inferiority which overtake the girl when she realizes that she has no penis, and the fears and feelings of guilt which her masculine position give rise to (in the first place towards her father because she ahs deprived him of his penis and of the possession of her mother, and in the second place towards her mother because she has taken her father away from her), combine to break down that position. Moreover, her original grievance against her mother for having prevented her from getting her father’s penis as a libidinal object joins forces with her new grievance against her for having withheld from her the possession of a penis of her own as an attribute of masculinity; and this double grievance leads her to turn away from her mother as an object of genital love. On the other hand, her feelings of hatred against her father and her envy of his penis, which arise from her masculine position, stand in the way of her once more adopting a feminine role.

  According to my experience, the girl, after having left the phallic phase, passes through yet another phase, a post-phallic one, in which she makes her choice between retaining the feminine position or abandoning it. I would say that by the time she has entered upon the latency period, her feminine position which has attained the genital level and is passive and maternal in character and which involves the functioning of her vagina with reference to its psychical representative, has been established in all its fundamentals. That this is so becomes evident when we consider how frequently small girls take up a genuinely feminine and maternal position. A position of this kind would be unthinkable unless the vagina was behaving as a receptive organ. As has already been pointed out, important alterations take place in the function of the vagina as a result of the biological changes the girl undergoes at puberty and of her experience of the sexual act; and it is these alterations which bring the girl’s psycho-sexual development to its final stage and which make her a woman in the full sense of the word.

  I find myself in agreement on many points with Karen Horney’s paper, “The Flight from Womanhood,” in which she comes to the conclusion that the vagina as well as the clitoris plays a part in the early life of the female child. [She points out that] it would be reasonable to infer from the later aspects of frigidity in women that the vaginal zone is more likely to be strongly cathected with anxiety and defensive affects than the clitoris. She believes that the girl’s “incestuous wishes are unerringly aimed y her unconscious at the vagina.” According to this approach, frigidity [in later life] ought to be considered as a manifestation of defence against those phantasies which so greatly threaten the ego.

  I also share Karen Horney’s opinion that the girl’s inability to obtain any certain knowledge about her vagina or, unlike the boy who can inspect his genitals, to submit it to a reality test in order to find out whether it has been overtaken by the dreaded consequences of masturbation tends to increase her genital anxiety and makes her more likely to adopt a masculine position. Karen Horney furthermore distinguishes between the girl’s secondary penis-envy, which emerges in the phallic phase, and her primary penis-envy, which rests upon certain pre-genital cathexes such as scoptophilia and urethral erotism. She believes that the girl’s secondary penis-envy is used to repress her feminine desires; with the dissolution of her Oedipus complex she invariably—though to varying degrees—not only relinquishes her father as a sexual object but at the same time also moves away from the feminine role, regressing to her primary penis-envy.

  The views I put forward in my paper “The Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict” concerning the final stage of the girl’s genital organization agree in many essentials with those which Ernest Jones came to at about the same time. In his paper, “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” he suggests that the vaginal functions were originally identified with the anal, and that the differentiation of the two—a still obscure process—takes place in part at an earlier stage than is generally supposed. He assumes the existence of a mouth-anus stage which forms the basis of the girl’s heterosexual attitude founded on an identification with her mother. According to his view, the normal girl’s phallic phase is only a weakened form of the identification made by homosexual females with the father and his penis, and is, like it, pre-eminently of a secondary and defensive character. 

  Helene Deutsch is of a different opinion. She assumes, it is true, the existence of a post-phallic phase during which the final outcome of the girl’s later genital organization is prepared. But she believes that the girl does not have any such thing as a vaginal phase at all, and that it is the exception for her to know anything about the existence of her vagina or to have any sensations there, and that therefore when she has finished her infantile sexual development she cannot take up a feminine position in the genital sense. In consequence, her libido, even in so far as a feminine position is being maintained, is obliged to retrogress to earlier position dominated by her castration complex (which in Helene Deutschs view precedes her Oedipus complex); and a backward step of this kind would be a fundamental factor in the production of feminine masochism.