Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.
Sigmund Freud
The Freudian thesis
Freud maintained a steadfast position regarding the problem of female sexuality. The specific developments on the subject were presented in his articles from 1931 and 1932 but his early works had already elicited oppositions among authors who were faithful to the use of the Freudian method and came to different conclusions. The discoveries made by the female analysts in the 1920s and 1930s were audacious, challenging Freudian conclusions. Starting from a consistent discussion based on clinical material, they went against the phallocentric position postulated by Freud. The female sexuality will be understood by the pioneer Karen Horney (1924) as an original psychosexual organization. The penis envy is not reduced to the castration complex but it is rooted in the most precocious unconscious experiences. Melanie Klein offers a broad theory on female sexuality. By dislocating the Oedipus Complex to the first year of life, it leads to the paradoxical recognition of precocious genitalization under the predominance of the pre-genital objects (Klein, 1928 / 1975). It offers the basis for what will serve as foundation to the questioning around the feminine, for a group of sophisticated women; the same who had previously had an impact on Freud’s specific developments on the subjects presented in his articles of 1931 e 1932.
In this sense, I would like to propose the reading of three fundamental articles by Freud, which allow the approach to successive reformulations of his position regarding femininity, so that we can measure the undeniable thoroughness to be attributed to the dialog with the British female psychoanalysts’ movement at a time when the London Society was a “woman-ridden society ”, in the words of Edward Glover in a letter to Ernest Jones (as quoted by Kristeva, 2000, p. 274)
The 1923 article “The child’s genital organization” is presented as the resumption of the ideas explored on Three Essays (Freud 1905), which established the basis for the Freudian conception of femininity. Fundamentally, since Three essays, Freud has shown us that sexuality does not have procreation as its main finality, the primacy of the sexual, nor the waiting for puberty to manifest itself. The hypothesis of a single, and a same, sexual apparatus is the basis for the infantile sexual theories.
On the two first pages of this short article from 1933, presented as: An interpolation into the theory of sexuality, Freud announces that the question of primacy is a point in which something new can be found. In the meantime, in Three Essays he ends up saying that “the primacy of the genitals” is not established, maybe slightly. However, he now argues that that there is an established primacy, but which concerns one single organ, that of the male sex. The idea of a sexual monism has been firmly stated since then: “What is present is not a primacy of genitals, but a primacy of the phallus” (Freud, 1923, p.142). Freud affirms:
“At the stage of the pre-genital sadistic-anal organization, there is as yet no question of male and female; the antithesis between active and passive is the dominant one. At the following stage of infantile genital organization, which we know about, maleness exists, but not femaleness. The antithesis here is between having a male genital and being castrated” (Freud, 1923, p. 145).
Only after the sexual development is completed in puberty – a set up which takes place in deferred action – the sexual polarity coincides with masculine and feminine. In a surprisingly brief formula, he concludes: “Maleness combines [the factors of] subject, activity and possession of the penis; femaleness takes over [those of] object and passivity” (Freud, 1923, 145).
We can, therefore, understand this statement as: the object is presented as heritage of the first stage (the first distinction subject / object); the passivity is originated from the anal-sadistic organisation. However, we unveil this reference to passivity as constituent to femininity. In this text, Freud (1923) considers that the activity / passivity, so far not attributed to a gender, is redistributed in the masculine- feminine pair according to a very linear model: “the sexual polarity coincides with male and female” (Freud, 1923, p.145).
The complexity in the idea of sexual passivity, however, had already been pointed out by Freud. In a note from 1915, year when he writes Instincts and their vicissitudes, in which he explores the modalities of transformation of an active form of satisfaction and its reversal into active goal, Freud declares : “The characteristic of exercising pressure is common to all instincts; it is in fact their very essence. Every instinct is a piece of activity; if we speak loosely of passivity instincts, we can only mean whose aim is passive” (Freud, 1915, p.122).
It must be taken into consideration that the ground for the approach of femininity has been paved since Three Essays (Freud 1915) in which activity and passivity are constituted as a pair of opposites that precedes other opposite pairs phallic / castrated and masculine / feminine. According to Freud in the second stage of the pre-genital organization of the libido:
“the opposition between two currents, which runs through all sexual life, is already developed ; they cannot yet, however be described as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, but only as ‘active’ and ‘passive’. The activity is put into operation by the instinct of mastery through the agency of somatic musculature; the organ which, more than any other, represents the passive sexual aim is the erotogenic mucous membrane of the anus” (Freud 1905, p. 198).
All this will change a lot with the 1932 article Femininity, but before examining it, one must see the text of 1931, “Female sexuality”, which presents a paradoxical position: almost ten years apart from the text of 1923, it is conceptually very close to the previous one, but he announces however a change of point of view on the assignment of passivity to the feminine which will assert itself in the text that will come shortly after, in 1932, and which will establish a remarkable evolution.
Indeed, Female sexuality (Freud, 1931) is entirely in line with The infantile genital organization (Freud, 1923) and the primacy of the phallus. In a first part it can be considered that he develops the consequences of this primacy on the little girl, all organized around the absence of penis; in a second part it deals with activity / passivity by recognizing an important place of activity in the girl, equivalent to that in the boy – but this activity will remain for just a period of time, when the girl subscribes to her destiny as a woman – where “is observed a marked lowering of the active sexual impulses and a rise of the passive ones” (Freud,1931, p. 239).
In this article, Freud bases himself, sometimes pointing out differences, on Ruth Mac Brunswick, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot and Helen Deutsch. He also refers to Melanie Klein and to her position of anticipation of the Oedipus Complex postulated in her article Early stages of the Oedipus conflict, 1928, and discusses at length one article by Karen Horney.
However, a year later, in 1932, in the text Femininity, Freud renounces the idea of a complete suitability between the two couples masculine / feminine and active / passive that he had advanced in 1923; after recalling the living species in which the feminine is the most active and the situations in the human species where the woman is active, Freud “advise us” against the correspondence : “to make active” with ‘masculine’ and ‘passive’ with ‘feminine’. The question of passivity benefits from a much more subtle approach in this text: thus “to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity” (Freud, 1933, p.115).
To what extent does the opposition between activity and passivity have the place of representation of the sexes differences? According to Freud, this opposition takes place during the anal and phallic stages. Active and passive corresponding to phallic and castrated. The passive aim for the boy will then be associated with the castration anxiety. As for the girl, her sexual activity, originally of phallic character, will persist, shaped as the “penis envy”. The feminine will persist however as an enigma with its relation with the phallic libido.
A women ridden society
How not to attribute these considerable changes to the debates started by the female psychoanalysts, which took place between the 1920’s and 1930’s? Freud, in the conference written in 1932, once again makes a direct mention to these psychoanalysts.
“Since its subject is woman, I will venture on this occasion to mention by name a few of the women who have made valuable contributions to this investigation. Dr Ruth Mac Brunswick [1928] was the first to describe a case of neurosis, which went back to a fixation in the pre-Oedipus stage and had never reached the Oedipus situation at all. The case took the form of jealous paranoia and proved accessible to therapy. Dr. Jeanne Lampl-de Groot [1927] has established the incredible phallic activity of girls towards their mother by some assured observations, and Dr. Helene Deutsch [1932] has shown that the erotic actions of homosexual women reproduce the relations between mother and baby” (Freud, 1933, pp.130-131).
In this advance of the theory on female sexuality, which understands that the idea of activity and passivity does not exclude each other, the specificity of the feminine in regard to the so-called male libido is therefore left to be established.
Thirty years past, the heuristic fertility of this debate still reverberates, propelled by those analysts who have manifested their opposition to Freudian ideas on the female/feminine sexuality, saying no, each in their own way, to the phallocentric conception. In 1958, this controversy was taken on in its very basis by Jacques Lacan.