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Essays, articles, and papers
All papers in this section ©2002 Franni Vincent : they are here for your information, and I'm happy to discuss the ideas & content -contact me at franni@cantab.net .However, do remember that some have been available on the web since my time at Cambridge University: before you're tempted to use whole paragraphs from them, remember your tutor's probably already read them... |
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An evaluation of Freud's contribution to our understanding of gender difference.(Footnotes are in the process of being formatted - see end comment)
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There is probably no way as a woman to approach any examination of Freud without being forced into examining one's own identity politics. When speaking of the anger than Freud engenders, there has been no escape from positioning self not just as female, but as one who has chosen at times to pursue 'masculine' ambitions, and has spent much time at the lesbian end of the sexual continuum. For he has been passed down to these selves, 'phylogenetically', as the arch devil of patriarchy. We may never before have read his words on penis envy, but his mythical penis has been before our eyes ever since we can remember. As we plough through his theories, we are forced to ask ourselves; have I ever personally envied a penis? No, but I would agree only too well with Irigaray - I have envied the power which is attached to it. Do I regard my own sexuality as a product of an incomplete adaptation to true femininity? Do I consider that in choosing my own sex as preferential love objects, I am continuing in an infantile state of bisexuality? With an emphatic "No" to both questions, I turn to Freud.
In this context, we approach with trepidation any attempt at objective analysis. There is first to be taken into consideration the fact that he did perhaps, in the words of Robin Fox, ask the right questions. In setting out to explain gender differences, Freud tackled in a full-frontal manner the question of anatomy. No coy closing the bedroom door, or keeping one foot on the floor would suffice: Freud trawled what would have been in his day, the depths of 'depravity'. At a time when Radclyffe Hall could be prosecuted for the fairly innocuous descriptions of lesbian affections in The Well of Loneliness, Freud examines in anatomical detail, processes which included incest (whether in reality or fantasy), masturbation, anal sex, child sexuality, fetishism. All these play a part in establishing gender difference, according to Freud's theories.
Yet how much faith can we put in the theories of a person who talks of the 'problem' of femininity thus;
For Freud, the problem presented itself in the form of the restless, dissatisfied 'neurotic' women who found their way to his consulting rooms. Freud used the data from their problems to formulate late his theories of gender difference.
The processes of gendering as described by Freud are based partly on biologism, partly on his theories of how complexes contribute to the process. Briefly, the infant is born into a state of bisexuality, the shaping of his desires still plastic, to be acted upon by external and internal forces combined. As evidence of this , Freud cites the presence in both sexes of the rudimentary sexual organs of the other, all be it in an 'atrophied' state, claiming that
The child at this stage is, he says, 'polymorphously perverse' 3, taking sensual pleasure in touching, sucking, an unspecified greed which shapes itself a sexual object - the mother or wetnurse who satisfies the desires by allowing the child to suck, who during the cleansing process give pleasurable genital contact, who becomes the recipient of the child's love and its sexual wishes. The initial sources of sensual pleasure are oral and anal; an equal joy in feeding and excreting. Gradually the child discovers itself, the sensual turning to sexual , as it develops a 'masculine' sexuality in its discovery of the pleasures of masturbation, which, according to Freud, is carried out in the same way, whether manipulating penis or clitoris.
So far, the only unease we might feel is over the 'evidence' that a child's sexual focus might have developed; according to Freud, by the time a child's third or fourth year is reached s/he has developed a rudimentary sexual awareness which directs itself towards a love object - either the mother or the female carer. Any autoerotic activity is focused on the desire for this love object, which the child wants to possess in a 'masculine' way - with either penis or clitoris. This incestuous desire is something which has to be suppressed
Part of Freud's 'proof' is that if incest was not universal, there would not be proscriptions against it in almost all societies. Murder and incest, the two 'ingredients' of the Oedipal Complex, are punished in all societies, even the most primitive 5 thus they are 'natural' to humans.
But there is at the back of our minds the consideration that what Freud is doing is taking as his data the 'neuroses' of his patients, and from this assuming that the neurotic structures were only a variation of those structures by which all humans acquired their sexual identity. Again, we might question what would happen if the child had never seen the genitals of the opposite sex. We search our own memories, and wonder if we actually linked the sight of a small boy urinating against a tree with the idea that this was anything connected with babies. Freud overcomes these obstacles: the child as an infant supposedly too young to understand might have watched his parents naked, or failing that, he explains, there is the 'racial memory' - phylogenetically transmitted information passing to the child from earlier generations. Seduction by an adult is obviously a possibility, but Freud prefers to downplay this. Any 'evidence' offered by the patient is translated into a wish to hide their initial infantile masturbation. However it comes about, the discovery that she does not have the correct equipment to carry this out the desire to possess her mother is supposedly one of the causes of the female child blaming her mother
Why should girls presume mothers responsible, yet boys fear the father will castrate them thus making them as inadequate as their mother or sister in the world is not totally clear. Do we as girls need to see the penis itself to recognise that all power is male: until recently, all figures of authority in church, politics, the media, the university, and probably the home were perceived as male.
However, Freud insists that in both boys and girls, the fears of castration rather than abstract perception of power play an important part in the development of the gender differences. The Oedipal and Castration complexes are essential to both sexes in their progression from bisexual infancy to normal heterosexual adults. The desire for the father, which follows the rejection of the mother is essential for the girl to complete her 'struggle' towards normal female sexual desire for a male. To believe this would imply that the girl is rejecting her mother out of the fear that she has been castrated by her. The boy, on the other hand, is supposed to have his sexual feelings towards the mother held in check by the fear that his father will castrate him for desiring the female that he himself owns. Out of the castration also comes, supposedly, the narcissism which is the mark of all normal mature females. Rather than Wollstonecraft's explanations that the reward society offers of a husband has encouraged the development of charm, cunning and manipulation, Freud has the women valuing their charms more highly out of the disappointment they feel at the 'loss' which they must have experienced. Modesty, a supposedly 'feminine' virtue which translates in Freud's view as the more emotionally loaded term 'shame', is also a product of the desire in their adult state to hide their castration.8 For little boys , process is far simpler. He has no need to transfer his sexual activity either to an 'object' of a difference sex, or to a different site in his own body. He can continue his love for his mother in choosing a mate who has her attributes, and will never be expected to endeavour the two part struggle which faces his sister. The castration complex produces effects which will lead him along his separate and different path; the 'paternal agency [is] internalised', the fear leads to the development of his own super ego (necessary for the individual male to take his place in the community, and for the continuation of the process in the next generation), and he retains a 'disparagement of women' through out his adult existence. 9
The girls task is far more difficult. She starts as a 'little man' in her phallic phase, where sexuality is 'masculine'. Freud presuming
Part two of this struggle is the transference of the 'object cathexes', which has initially in both sexes settled on the person who supplies the satisfaction of the infants vital need - hunger- to the male parent. In doing she will have become 'normal'.
Finally, for those women who complete the struggle towards normality, there is the selection of their future sexual partner. Again, the desire for a penis of their own leads them to select a male out of the narcissism engendered from their 'loss'. The male is supposedly selected ideally on the basis that this is the closest equivalent to what they would have become, had they not been castrated by their mother. 11: As we shake our heads in disbelief, we might enquire why, if the girl's love object has been her father, why the ideal choice of adult love object should not be the male she is able to attract (passively...) who most resembles her father. But this is not, according to Freud, the way the process should continue; the girl ideally transforms her husband into a child, thus re-experiencing and recreating the first ideal sexual relationship she had, that with her mother. Should her husband instead be transformed into her father, the relationship would, supposedly result in her later rejecting the husband. 12 As we try to sift through the logic, it is as if Freud is forcing his way through the realities of what he is faced with: dissatisfied women, trapped in marriages which they have no legal or socially acceptable exit from, little opportunity to achieve any recognition as a person in their own right outside. So he deduces that women have less sense of justice, less capacity for sublimating their instincts, weaker 'social' interests, and that the struggle to achieve 'femininity has exhausted the possibility of the person concerned'. We are left with the sight of an intellectually able woman of the time, intelligent, not fully occupied by home or maternity, desirous of a say in political and social affairs, and frustrated in both, turning in her frustration for help. The result prior to Freud might have been a dose of Chloral and being sent back home to lie in a darkened room, with no intellectual stimulation , as a 'cure'13... was Freud's psychoanalysis and 'explanation' for her an improvement or a confirmation that she had been the recipient of injustice.
The girl does not submit easily to not having a penis; when she realises what her symbolic castration means socially, she has, Freud feels the choice of one of three paths. She translates the desire as an adult into ambition, enters intellectual (ie masculine) professions in order hopefully to gain one. This forms part of the explanation, says Freud for the unequal distribution of both envy and jealousy between the sexes. What other option has she, after all; faced with a selection, she can choose if not to make the difficult transition through to 'normal' femininity, says Freud, only to reject sex altogether. Normal femininity for Freud includes sublimating the wish for a penis into the wish for a baby (which the girl presumes initially the father will supply). What advantages for her are there in these choices? Freud makes it clear that femininity is the 'preferred ' choice, and sexual abstinence is for him another turning on the road to neurosis. And then there are those who chose the final option:
Freud has concluded that these women are abnormal, may possibly chose partners of their own sex, and Freud has labelled them as 'regressive' or suffering from 'arrested development'. There is no thought that all humans might desire to fulfil their potential along similar paths. It would have been simpler to assume that either the sexual desire for the opposite sex was automatic, or that the child was following the example of its parents. Freud's attempt at explanation could then be viewed as a positive attempt to deal with the cases where sexuality and sexual desire could not be put down to instinct alone, and where maternity, a biological necessity for the survival of the human race, was rejected. If biology alone provided the explanation, there would , after all be few cases of deviation from the norm. Those that existed perhaps due to biological abnormality (eg hermaphroditism), or the lack of opportunity for access to appropriate role models of heterosexual parenting (eg being orphaned). What has Freud contributed 'in the final analysis', to our understanding of gender difference? We have his contribution, as Kate Millett accuses, that the man and his followers played in
Where he could have taken what he saw in his patients lives and exposed the waste of talent, energy and intellect that was occurring in forcing these women into traditional roles, he chose to ignore their dissatisfaction with the limited choices and opportunities which society had offered them. Psychoanalysis became a tool for control as Millett sees it:
Freud's explanation could have marked the end of optimism for women; we are back with Rousseau's assumption that women are not intellectually fitted to be anything more than companions to men. Freud's view of woman's function is that of marriage and maternity.
Freud did not question the part society played in the repression; yet if the penis seen (or not) and supposedly desired by his female patients is taken to represent male power in society, which has been withheld from them, then the explanations might make more sense.
If we agree with Firestone's emphatic comment, we can also agree that the fear of the worst excesses of patriarchal authority in society may exist in the nuclear family. The ways that boys and girls deal with the fear are different; the girl aligns herself with her father, becoming 'Daddy's Girl', the boy internalises the methods by which he will eventually wield his own rod of power. The hierarchy of power is obvious, and whether you had power in the family in Freud's historical era was indeed dependent on whether or not you had a penis. To turn it all on its head - let us look at the societies where penis envy seemingly doesn't exist.... the societies where men look after the babies, while women are out hunting, shooting, and politicking. Where the boy catches sight of his sister or mother's naked body, and immediately feel the shame of the grotesque lumps of flesh which his mother must have stuck on him as a punishment, at the same time as she sliced off his breasts. Is there any reason why this should sound so ludicrous? Yet why should Freud presume that maleness is better, that little boys do not in fact long for breasts, and the ability to experience childbirth. Why should a little girl not feel pride in the shape and power of her own body and its abilities? Why should she not see that as the norm, and see her brother's penis as a deformity? Should we make allowances, and say that Freud in his turn can only be examined in a historical context, with full allowances made for his own identity and that of his culture and class? Educated, bourgeois, subjected to a Viennese equivalent of a 'Victorian' upbringing, a product of a society whose patriarchal precedents were without alleviation, whose own sexuality would have been fixed in a time where ankles were not displayed, where 'legs' would be coyly described as 'limbs'... where he could write to a Wilhelm Fleiss that he should not allow his 'young wife' to view a draft of a lecture Freud sent on his theories... Or do we hold out for the argument that he recognised child sexual abuse on quite a large scale and wilfully chose to ignore it, because it was more comfortable to devise a myth of racial memory than face the consequences of his patients' similar descriptions of early sexual interference being reality rather than fantasy? He had a choice;
Do we excuse his cowardice from our privileged position of the 1990s, where abuse has been shown to be far more common than he could ever have realised, where the abuse itself is taken as given and debate turns only on whether the rituals accompanying the abuse are real, or a child's fantasy. Do we dismiss the explanation as the product of Freud's imagination, or be thankful that he did not chose to bury the 'evidence' entirely. His choice that the similarities of 'fantasies' could be phylogenetic data was one Freud himself was obviously not comfortable with, and feels the explanation can only be used
We have Freud to thank, perhaps, for much of our heritage of recent feminist literature; for every woman who, in the 70s read his explanation of gender difference and felt it so little coincided with her own experience, that she was moved to put pen to paper to create a new explanation of the same inequalities... Even for those who might accept that there was a great deal of truth in his theories that early childhood experiences set the pattern for adulthood, whether 'neurosis' or 'normal', might question how much his explanation has left out.
Freud's own fear of feminism, using the spectre of penis envy raised against intellectual women to disarm them was possibly understandable. In his own lifetime, women achieved their first taste of political power, their first taste of university education. Without some form of control,there was no doubt that patriarchal power would be threatened.
Freud provided a means of keeping the distinction blurred for at least two more generations. © 1996 Franni Vincent
Bibliography
Freud S Complete Works : New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Vol. 22 : 'Femininity' Freud S On Sexuality (penguin edition) includes 'Three Essays On Sexuality', 'Female Sexuality' 'Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes' Rosalind Coward Patriarchal Precedents Kate Millett Sexual Politics M Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Should an anti-dote to Freud be needed:Useful reading... and far less bile-inducing! Sylvia Walby Theorising Patriarchy
The Polity Reader in Gender Studies
Footnotes(Footnotes are in the process of being formatted - we live in hope that one day Bill Gates will realise that automatic transfer of footnotes from WORD to HTML just MIGHT be a better modification to go for than moving the SUM shortcut ever was...)
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BibliographyFreud: Complete Works : New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Vol. 22 'Femininity' Freud ; On Sexuality (penguin edition) includes 'Three Essays On Sexuality', 'Female Sexuality' 'Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes'
Rosalind Coward Patriarchal Precedents Kate Millett Sexual Politics
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