IT would be half-wrong to say it started with Sigmund Freud. It did not really start, in America, until the 1940s. And then again, it was less a start than the prevention of an end. The old prejudices – women are animals, less than human, unable to think like men, born merely to breed and serve men – were not so easily dispelled by the crusading feminists, by science and education, and by the democratic spirit after all.women less than men They merely reappeared in the forties, in Freudian disguise.
The new mystique is much more difficult for the modern woman to question than the old prejudices, partly because the mystique is broadcast by the very agents of education and social science that are supposed to be the chief enemies of prejudice, partly because the very nature of Freudian thought makes it virtually invulnerable to question.
I question its use, not in therapy, but as it has filtered into the lives of American women through the popular magazines and the opinions and interpretations of so-called experts. I think much of the Freudian theory about women is obsolescent, an obstacle to truth for women in America today, and a major cause of the pervasive problem that has no name.freud and feminism
Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on freedom from a repressive morality to achieve sexual fulfilment, was part of the ideology of women’s emancipation. The lasting American image of the ‘emancipated woman’ is the flapper of the twenties: burdensome hair shingled off, knees bared, flaunting her new freedom to live in a studio in Greenwich Village or Chicago’s near North Side, and drive a car, and drink, and smoke, and enjoy sexual adventures – or talk about them.the so-called emancipated woman And yet today, for reasons far removed from the life of Freud himself, Freudian thought has become the ideological bulwark of the sexual counter- revolution in America.
Freud, it is generally agreed, was a most perceptive and accurate observer of important problems of the human personality. But in describing and interpreting those problems, he was a prisoner of his own culture. As he was creating a new framework for our culture, he could not escape the framework of his own. Even his genius could not give him, then, the knowledge of cultural processes which men who are not geniuses grow up with today.
The physicist’s relativity, which in recent years has changed our whole approach to scientific knowledge, is harder, and therefore easier to understand, than the social scientist’s relativity. It is not a slogan; but a fundamental statement about truth to say that no social scientist can completely free himself from the prison of his own culture; he can only interpret what he observes in the scientific framework of his own time. This is true even of the great innovators. They cannot help but translate their revolutionary observations into language and rubrics that have been determined by the progress of science up until their time. Even those discoveries that create new rubrics are relative to the vantage point of their creator.
The whole superstructure of Freudian theory rests on the strict determinism that characterised the scientific thinking of the Victorian era. Determinism has been replaced today by a more complex view of cause and effect, in terms of physical processes and phenomena as well as psychological. Even Freud himself cannot be explained by his own deterministic, physiological blueprint though his biographer traces his genius, his ‘divine passion for knowledge’, to an insatiable sexual curiosity, before the age of three, as to what went on between his mother and father in the bedroom.
Freud grew up with this attitude built in by his culture – not only the culture of Victorian Europe, but that Jewish culture in which men said the daily prayer: ‘I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast not created me a woman,’ and women prayed in submission: ‘I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou has created me according to Thy will.’religous sexism
Freud’s mother was the pretty, docile bride of a man twice her age; his father ruled the family with an autocratic authority traditional in Jewish families during those centuries of persecution when the fathers were seldom able to establish authority in the outside world. His mother adored the young Sigmund, her first son, and thought him mystically destined for greatness; she seemed to exist only to gratify his every wish. His own memories of the sexual jealousy he felt for his father, whose wishes she also gratified, were the basis of his theory of the Oedipus complex.
Tables and chairs, beds, mirrors, a clock to remind the happy couple of the passage of time, an armchair for an hour’s pleasant daydreaming, carpets to help the housewife keep the floors clean, linen tied with pretty ribbons in the cupboard and dresses of the latest fashion and hats with artificial flowers, pictures on the wall, glasses for everyday and others for wine and festive occasions plates and dishes ... and the sewing table and the cosy lamp, and everything must be kept in good order or else the housewife who has divided her heart into little bits, one for each piece of furniture, will begin to fret. And this object must bear witness to the serious work that holds the household together, and that object, to a feeling for beauty, to dear friends one likes to remember, to cities one has visited, to hours one wants to recall. ... Are we to hang our hearts on such little things? Yes, and without hesitation. ...women as homemakers
I know, after all, how sweet you are, how you can turn a house into a paradise, how you will share in my interests, how gay yet painstaking you will be. I will let you rule the house as much as you wish, and you will reward me with your sweet love and by rising above all those weaknesses for which women are so often despised. As far as my activities allow, we shall read together what we want to learn, and I will initiate you into things which could not interest a girl as long as she is unfamiliar with her future companion and his occupation ...male/female roles in the home
What is the good of your feeling that you are now so mature that this relationship can’t do you any harm? . . . You are far too soft, and this is something I have got to correct, for what one of us does will also be charged to the other’s account. You are my precious little woman and even if you make a mistake, you are none the less so.... But you know all this, my sweet child ...husband as a father figure
The Victorian mixture of chivalry and condescension which is found in Freud’s scientific theories about women is explicit in a letter he wrote on
In his whole presentation, it never emerges that women are different beings – we will not say lesser, rather the opposite from men. He finds the suppression of women an analogy to that of Negroes.Black
Since all of Freud’s theories rested, admittedly, on his own penetrating, unending psychoanalysis of himself, and since sexuality was the focus of all his theories, certain paradoxes about his own sexuality seem pertinent. His writings, as many scholars have noted, give much more attention to infantile sexuality than to its mature expression. His chief biographer, Jones, pointed out that he was, even for those times, exceptionally chaste, puritanical, and moralistic. In his own life he was relatively uninterested in sex. There were only the adoring mother of his youth, at sixteen a romance that existed purely in fantasy with a girl named Gisele, and his engagement to Martha at twenty-six. The nine months when they both lived in Vienna were not too happy because she was, evidently, uneasy and afraid of him, but separated by a comfortable distance for four years, there was a grande passion of 900 love letters. After their marriage, the passion seems to have quickly disappeared, though his biographers note that he was too rigid a moralist to seek sexual satisfaction outside of marriage. The only woman on whom, as an adult, he ever focused the violent passions of love and hate of which he was capable was Martha, during the early years of their engagement. After that, such emotions were focused on men. As Jones, his respectful biographer, said: ‘Freud’s deviation from the average in this respect, as well as his pronounced mental bisexuality, may well have influenced his theoretical views to some extent.’
Less reverent biographers, and even Jones himself, point out that when one considers Freud’s theories in terms of his own life, one is reminded of the puritanical old maid who sees sex everywhere. It is interesting to note that his main complaint about his docile Hausfrau was that she was not ‘docile’ enough – and yet, in interesting ambivalence, that she was not at her ease with him, that she was not able to be a ‘comrade-in-arms’.
But, as Freud was painfully to discover, she was not at heart docile and she had a firmness of character that did not readily lend itself to being moulded. Her personality was fully developed and well integrated: it would well deserve the psychoanalyst’s highest compliment of being ‘normal’.
But he then reproaches himself:
So, he eventually wrote her, ‘I renounce what I demanded. I do not need a comrade-in-arms, such as I hoped to make you into. I am strong enough to fight alone.... You remain for me a precious sweet, loved one.’ Thus evidently ended ‘the only time in his life when such emotions [love and hate] centred on a woman’.
The marriage was conventional, but without that passion. As Jones described it:
There can have been few more successful marriages. Martha certainly made an excellent wife and mother. She was an admirable manager – the rare kind of woman who could keep servants indefinitely – but she was never the kind of Hausfrau who put things before people. Her husband’s comfort and convenience always ranked first.... It was not to be expected that she should follow the roaming flights of his imagination any more than most of the world could.
That limitless subservience of woman taken for granted by Freud’s culture, the very lack of opportunity for independent action or personal identity, seems often to have generated that uneasiness and inhibition in the wife, and that irritation in the husband, which characterised Freud’s marriage. As Jones summed it up, Freud’s attitude towards women ‘could probably be called rather old-fashioned, and it would be easy to ascribe this to his social environment and the period in which he grew up rather than to any personal factors’.
Whatever his intellectual opinions may have been in the matter, there are many indications in his writing and correspondence of his emotional attitude.
Jones also remarked:
Freud was also interested in another type of woman, of a more intellectual and perhaps masculine cast. Such women several times played a part in his life, accessory to his men friends though of a finer calibre, but they had no erotic attraction for him.
These women included his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, much more intelligent and independent than Martha, and later women analysts or adherents of the psychoanalytic movement: Marie Bonaparte, Joan Riviere, Lou Andreas-Salomé. There is no suspicion, however, from either idolators or hostile biographers that he ever sought sexual satisfaction outside his marriage. Thus it would seem that sex was completely divorced from his human passions, which he expressed throughout the productive later years of his long life in his thought and, to a lesser extent, in friendships with men and those women he considered his equals, and thus ‘masculine’. He once said: ‘I always find it uncanny when I can’t understand someone in terms of myself.’
As the eminent psychoanalyst Clara Thompson put it: ‘Freud never became free from the Victorian attitude towards women. He accepted as an inevitable part of the fate of being a woman the limitation of outlook and life of the Victorian era....
What did Freud mean by the concept of penis envy? For even those who realize that Freud could not escape his culture do not question that he reported truly what he observed within it.
The desire after all to obtain the penis for which she so much longs may even contribute to the motives that impel a grown-up woman to come to analysis, and what she quite reasonably expects to get from analysis, such as the capacity to pursue an intellectual career, can often be recognised as a sublimated modification of this repressed wish.
‘The discovery of her castration is a turning-point in the life of the girl,’ Freud went on to say. ‘She is wounded in her self-love by the unfavourable comparison with the boy, who is so much better equipped.’
What was he really reporting? If one interprets ‘penis envy’ as other Freudian concepts have been reinterpreted, in the light of our new knowledge that what Freud believed to be biological was often a cultural reaction, one sees simply that Victorian culture gave women many reasons to envy men: the same conditions, in fact, that the feminists fought against. If a woman who was denied the freedom, the status, and the pleasures that men enjoyed wished secretly that she could have these things, in the shorthand of the dream, she might wish herself a man and see herself with that one thing which made men unequivocally different – the penis. She would, of course, have to learn to keep her envy, her anger, hidden: to play the child, the doll, the toy, for her destiny depended on charming man. But underneath, it might still fester, sickening her for love. If she secretly despised herself, and envied man for all she was not, she might go through the motions of love, or even feel a slavish adoration, but would she be capable of free and joyous love? You cannot explain away woman’s envy of man, or her contempt for herself, as mere refusal to accept her sexual deformity, unless you think that a woman, by nature, is a being inferior to man. Then, of course, her wish to be equal is neurotic.feminist look at penis envy
It is recognised now that Freud never gave proper attention, even in man, to growth of the ego or self: ‘the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment’. Analysts who have freed themselves from Freud’s bias and joined other behavioural scientists in studying the human need to grow, are beginning to believe that this is the basic human need, and that interference with it, in any dimension, is the source of psychic trouble. The sexual is only one dimension of the human potential. Freud saw women only in terms of their sexual relationship with men. But in all those women in whom he saw sexual problems there must have been very severe problems of blocked growth, growth short of full human identity – an immature, incomplete self. Society as it was then, by explicit denial of education and independence, prevented women from realising their full potential, or from attaining those interests and ideals that might have stimulated their growth. Freud reported these deficiencies, but could only explain them as the toll of ‘penis envy’. He saw that women who secretly hungered to be man’s equal would not enjoy being his object; and in this, he seemed to be describing a fact. But when he dismissed woman’s yearning for equality as ‘penis envy’, was he not merely stating his own view that women could never really be man’s equal, any more than she could wear his penis?failiures of the penis envy theory
Freud was not concerned with changing society, but in helping man, and woman, adjust to it. Thus he tells of a case of a middle-aged spinster whom he succeeded in freeing from a symptom-complex that prevented her from taking any part in life for fifteen years. Freed of these symptoms she ‘plunged into a whirl of activity in order to develop her talents, which were by no means small, and derive a little appreciation, enjoyment, and success from life before it was too late’. But all her attempts ended when she saw that there was no place for her. Since she could no longer relapse into her neurotic symptoms, she began to have accidents; she sprained her ankle, her foot, her hand. When this also was analysed, ‘instead of accidents, she contracted on the same occasions slight illnesses, such as catarrh, sore throat, influenzal conditions or rheumatic swellings, until at last, when she made up her mind to resign herself to inactivity, the whole business came to an end).
Today, when women’s equal intelligence has been proved by science, when their equal capacity in every sphere except sheer muscular strength has been demonstrated, a theory explicitly based on woman’s natural inferiority would seem as ridiculous as it is hypocritical. But that remains the basis of Freud’s theory of women, despite the mask of timeless sexual truth which disguises its elaborations today.advocating for equality, failiures of Freud to do so
Because Freud’s followers could only see woman in the image defined by Freud – inferior, childish, helpless, with no possibility of happiness unless she adjusted to being man’s passive object – they wanted to help women get rid of their suppressed envy, their neurotic desire to be equal. They wanted to help women find sexual fulfilment as women, by affirming their natural inferiority.claiming Freud promoted biological inferiority
But society, which defined that inferiority, had changed drastically by the time Freud’s followers transposed bodily to twentieth century America the causes as well as the cures of the condition Freud called penis envy.
The literal application of Freudian theory can be seen in these passages from Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, by the psychoanalyst Marynia Farnham and the sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg, which was paraphrased ad nauseam in the magazines and in marriage courses, until most of its statements became a part of the conventional, accepted truth of our time. Equating feminism with penis envy, they stated categorically:
Feminism, despite the external validity of its political programme and most (not all) of its social programme, was at its core a deep illness. ... The dominant direction of feminine training and development today ... discourages just those traits necessary to the attainment of sexual pleasure: receptivity and passiveness, a willingness to accept dependence without fear or resentment, with a deep inwardness and readiness for the final goal of sexual life impregnation.feminism is an illness
It is not in the capacity of the female organism to attain feelings of well-being by the route of male achievement.... It was the error of the feminists that they attempted to put women on the essentially male road of exploit, off the female road of nurture....male and female fullfillment is unequal
The psychosocial rule that begins to take form, then, is this: the more educated the woman is, the greater chance there is of sexual disorder, more or less severe. The greater the disordered sexuality in a given group of women, the fewer children do they have.... Fate has granted them the boon importuned by Lady Macbeth; they have been unsexed, not only in the matter of giving birth, but in their feelings of pleasure.educated women lose their womanhood
Thus Freud’s popularisers embedded his core of unrecognised traditional prejudice against women ever deeper in pseudo-scientific cement. Freud was well aware of his own tendency to build an enormous body of deductions from a single fact – a fertile and creative method, but a two-edged sword, if the significance of that single fact was misinterpreted. Freud wrote Jung in 1909:
Your surmise that after my departure my errors might be adored as holy relics amused me enormously, but I don’t believe it. On the contrary, I think that my followers will hasten to demolish as swiftly as possible everything that is not safe and sound in what I leave behind.
While fully recognising that woman’s position is subjected to external influence, I venture to say that the fundamental identities ‘feminine-passive’ and ‘masculine-active’ assert themselves in all known cultures and races, in various forms and various quantitative proportions.feminie passivity, masculine activity
Very often a woman resists this characteristic given her by nature and in spite of certain advantages she derives from it, displays many modes of behaviour that suggest that she is not entirely content with her own constitution . . . the expression of this dissatisfaction, combined with attempts to remedy it, result in woman’s ‘masculinity complex.’idea of a masculinity complex
The ‘masculinity complex’, as Dr Deutsch refines it, stems directly from the ‘female castration complex’. Thus, anatomy is still destiny, woman is still an homme manque. Of course, Dr Deutsch mentions in passing that ‘With regard to the girl, however, the environment exerts an inhibiting influence as regards both her aggressions and her activity.’ So, penis envy, deficient female anatomy, and society ‘all seem to work together to produce femininity’.female anatomy as deficient
‘Normal’ femininity is achieved, however, only in so far as the woman finally renounces all active goals of her own, all her own ‘originality’, to identify and fulfil herself through the activities and goals of husband, or son. This process can be sublimated in non-sexual ways – as, for instance, the woman who does the basic research for her male superior’s discoveries. The daughter who devotes her life to her father is also making a satisfactory feminine ‘ sublimation’.femininity in submission Only activity of her own or originality, on a basis of equality, deserves the opprobrium of ‘masculinity complex’. This brilliant feminine follower of Freud states categorically that the women who by 1944 in America had achieved eminence by activity of their own in various fields had done so at the expense of their feminine fulfilment. She will mention no names, but they all suffer from the ‘masculinity complex’.indipendence equates to masculinity
How could a girl or woman who was not a psychoanalyst discount such ominous pronouncements, which, in the forties, suddenly began to pour out from all the oracles of sophisticated thought?
A New York analyst, one of the last trained at Freud’s own Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna, told me:
For twenty years now in analysing American women, I have found myself again and again in the position of having to superimpose Freud’s theory of femininity on the psychic life of my patients in a way that I was not willing to do. I have come to the conclusion that penis envy simply does not exist. I have seen women who are completely expressive, sexually, vaginally, and yet who are not mature, integrated, fulfilled. I had a woman patient on the couch for nearly two years before I could face her real problem – that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. One day she had a dream that she was teaching a class. I could not dismiss the powerful yearning of this housewife’s dream, as penis envy. It was the expression of her own need for mature self-fulfilment. I told her: ‘I can’t analyse this dream away. You must do something about it.’movement away from penis envy, individual rights for women
This same man teaches the young analysts in his postgraduate clinic at a leading Eastern university: ‘If the patient doesn’t fit the book, throw away the book, and listen to the patient.’listening to each woman as an individual But many analysts threw the book at their patients and Freudian theories became accepted fact even among women who never lay down on an analyst’s couch, but only knew what they read or heard. To this day, it has not penetrated to the popular culture that the pervasive growing frustration of American women may not be a matter of feminine sexuality. Freud was accepted so quickly and completely at the end of the forties that for over a decade no one even questioned the race of the educated American woman back to the home. When questions finally had to be asked because something was obviously going wrong, they were asked so completely within the Freudian framework that only one answer was possible: education, freedom, rights are wrong for women.harms of Freudian theory on women
But the practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy was not primarily responsible for the feminine mystique. It was the creation of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation researchers, and behind them the popularisers and translators of Freudian thought in the colleges and universities. Freudian and pseudo-Freudian theories settled everywhere, like fine volcanic ash. Sociology, anthropology, education, even the study of history and literature became permeated and transfigured by Freudian thought. The most zealous missionaries of the feminine mystique were the functionalists, who seized hasty gulps of pre-digested Freud to start their new departments of ‘Marriage and Family-Life Education’. The functional courses in marriage taught American college girls how to ‘play the role’ of woman – the old role became a new science. Related movements outside the colleges – parent education, child-study groups, prenatal maternity study groups and mental-health education – spread the new psychological super-ego throughout the land, replacing bridge and canasta as an entertainment for educated young wives. And this Freudian super-ego worked for growing numbers of young and impressionable American women as Freud said the super-ego works – to perpetuate the past.causes for feminist theory
The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, over-protective, life-restricting, future-deriving note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era – were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll’s house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science – anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now – kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.challenging the social norms