The term 'penis envy' was coined by Sigmund Freud as part of his theory of psychosexual development. This theory argues that a child progresses through five stages namely, the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital. On way to evolving into a healthy adult, a child has to negotiate each of these stages of sexual tension. In his 1908 article "On the Sexual Theories of Children", Freud explains penis envy as the jealousy, deprivation, and inferiority supposedly experienced by female children on the realization of their biological lack of a penis. With little to no empirical or clinical evidence, Freud’s interpretation not only proved to be unreliable and controversial within the field of child psychology but portrayed the limited existence of research on female sexuality. In this blog post, I argue that Freud, by giving biological explanations, neglects socio-cultural and environmental factors to explain the tendency of inferiority within women vis a vis man.
In his theory, Freud explains that during the phallic stage (around 3-5 years), “girls hold their mother responsible for their lack of a penis” (Freud 1933). In other words, a girl may begin to resent her mother for her apparent castration or the failure to provide her daughter with a penis. He claimed that this penis envy progresses over time, and upon knowing that her mother cannot provide her with a penis, the daughter turns to her father with similar hopes. Subsequent desires of giving birth to a son also spring from this background. Freud argued that through paternal proximity and the desire to have a male offspring, women can fulfill their desire to have a penis of their own. Instead of differentiating between male and female sexuality, he simply extended his notion of male sexuality to women, thus reducing women to a version of men without penises (Cohler & Galatzer-Levy, 2008).
Freud considered the penis as the 'normal' in defining sexuality. Psychoanalysis based on Freudian theory considers men as superior beings and women are nothing more than 'broken' or 'defective men'. This male-centric approach was however severely criticized and challenged by many researchers. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney critiqued this concept arguing that there was nothing factual in them and they merely representative of symbolic and metaphorical ideas. “Horney argued that penis envy was a symbolic longing for the social prestige and position that men experience” (Brannon, 2011, p. 107). Horney’s reasoning states that the feeling of inferiority faced by women is only due to the social privileges enjoyed by men. In other words, women do not feel inferior due to their biological/literal lack of penises, but rather because not being male restricts them from certain aspects of privilege, freedom and social status.
Similar to Horney, Clara Thompson, a prominent psychoanalyst debunked this concept as she argued that “cultural factors explain the fact that women feel inferior about their sex and have a consequent tendency to envy men; envy of social superiority is masked as envy of sexual superiority. Furthermore, the clinical picture of penis envy has little to do with sexual life” (Grotjahn 1945). Thompson questions whether this biological interpretation is enough to determine the feeling of inferiority experienced by women. Or does the metaphorical lack of a penis contribute towards the cultural factors which lead to women feeling inferior about their sex? With lives lived in dominantly patriarchal societies with centuries of sexist subjugation, sexual violence against women and just the lack of basic privileges it is no surprise that women feel a deep sense of inferiority, which has nothing to do with any penis-related longings.
Horney’s and Thompson’s arguments, while challenging Freudian thesis, add an extra dimension by considering socio-cultural aspects that can provide possible explanations to the sense of inferiority and envy that Freud outlines. Freud’s concept of penis envy emerged in the mid 20th century in a patriarchal environment where women were even denied the right to vote. The penis carries a social, metaphorical and historical significance that makes men seemingly socially superior to women. Perhaps it was this context that Freud used to provide an explanation to feelings of female insecurity rather than examine deeper complex socio/historical realities.
References
Brannon, L. (1996). Theories of Gender Development. In Gender: Psychological perspectives(Sixth ed., pp. 104-108). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Cohler, B. J. & Galatzer-Levy, R. M. (2008). Freud, Anna, and the problem of female sexuality. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 28, 3-26.
Horney, K. (2013). The Problem of Feminine Masochism. The Psychoanalytic Review, 675-694.
Grotjahn, M. (1945). Penis Envy in Women. Psychoanal. Q., 14:274
Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality (PFL 7) p. 195-6
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