Anatomy and Destiny of Gender in Freud and Some Contemporaries

L’Évolution Psychiatrique, n°80, 2015, p. 239-250.

Abstract

Objectives. This article aims to illuminate the presence of gender in Freudian propositions and among some of his contemporaries.

Method. We propose in this direction to reconsider Freud’s thought on anatomy and the psychic consequences of sexual difference, based on the critiques and divergences formulated in their time by Horney, Weininger but also Abraham, Ferenczi and Deutsch.

Results. It appears that gender was already at work even though it only appeared later as a conceptual and theoretical notion.

Discussion. Even if we had to wait for Stoller’s work in the 1960s to develop certain dimensions of sex, sexuation or sexual identity, we extract throughout the century a retrospective that allows us to return to Freudian propositions and measure their effects and relevance for contemporary clinical practice. We can notably support our appreciation of the factor of sexual difference that Freud bequeaths us to think beyond the rock of castration encountered by psychoanalytic treatment. Then we are encouraged to renew part of our thinking on the development of sexual difference from the experience of sexual difference and to revise with Freud the destiny of gender articulated with its biological determinants.

Conclusions. Gender then appears as an agent of disruption, capable of questioning psychoanalysis and, more interestingly, of defining itself in turn as a limit concept between the sexual and the social, and not only between sex and the social.

Abstract

Objectives. – This article aims at enlightening the presence of gender in Freud’s and some of his contempo- raries’ proposals.

Method. – We propose to reconsider Freud’s reflections on the “anatomy” and the mental consequences of the difference in gender, from the criticisms and differences formulated at the time by Horney, Weininger but also by Abraham, Ferenczi or Deutsch.

Results. – It appears that gender was already at work although it only appeared later on as an abstract and theoretical notion.

Discussion. – Although it was necessary to wait for the works of Stoller in the 1960s before developing certain dimensions of sex, sexuation or sexual identity, we have drawn up over the century a retrospective which allows us to return to the Freudian proposals and to measure their effects and their relevance with regards to the contemporary private hospital. Notably, we can support our appreciation of the “factor” of the sexual difference, which Freud bequeaths us to think beyond the “rock” of castration encountered in the psychoanalytic cure. We are hence encouraged to renew a part of our thoughts on the development of the difference of the sexes from the experiment of sexual difference and, to revise with Freud, the fate of the gender articulated in its biological determinants.

Conclusions. – Gender thus appears as an agent of disorder, capable of questioning psychoanalysis and, more interestingly, of defining itself in turn as a limit concept between the sexual and the social, and not only between the sex and the social.

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Gender appears to be a recent notion, or at least one that emerged after Freud and his contemporaries. Moreover, it is only in the last 30 years that gender has experienced its most significant development in public discourse, traversing all epistemological fields. But what was the situation regarding gender in Freud’s time? And what did his contemporaries say about it? These are our initial questions. For if many of Freud’s propositions are criticized based on “gender issues,” we can perhaps closely examine how the dimension of gender may have already been present and addressed at the time, even though it was not the subject of specific discourse. Gender translates something of sex by highlighting the gap between the anatomical and the psychic, the genital and the social, assignment and affirmation. When Freud reuses Bonaparte’s maxim “destiny is politics” to distort it into “destiny is anatomy” [1] (Freud 1924), the supremacy of the biological seems to impose itself as the only possible interpretation. And in this conception, the supremacy of sex over gender is then imposed, which would be pre-existing and superior in a hierarchical relationship. This reading goes completely against what gender raises and reveals about the processes of social and cultural constructions that underpin it, simultaneously illuminating the equally social construction of sex, stripped of its naturalness or genitiality, but not desexualized for all that. We owe this to the developments of critical theories, gender studies, cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, among others. This famous formulation by Freud and other propositions of psychoanalysis in general are criticized and accused of collaborating with the system of sexual norms that queer criticism tends to denounce in the wake of feminisms. Yet the “anatomical” in the maxim is not the “biological,” which for Freud remains a model of inspiration for the living. The anatomical cannot be understood here as encompassing the human body as an expression of nature; that would be to misunderstand Freud’s approach to the biological, which allows us to suggest that this reinterpretation of “anatomy is destiny” says much more than we can circumscribe, even through the critical approach it provokes. We are then invited to reread, with this illumination of gender and in detail, what Freud proposes as the psychic consequences of the difference between the sexes on the anatomical plane (Freud, 1925) [2]. For if gender today presents itself as a tool for critical analysis of certain Freudian propositions, we must also consider the criticisms that were contemporary to him, and notably those of certain female psychoanalysts of the time. This can be appreciated particularly from the exchanges and propositions of Abraham, Horney, and Deutsch, which we can partially revisit, on the question of “penis envy” and that of “feminine-masculine.” Next, we can examine the formulations of Weininger, who was not a psychoanalyst, but whose main published work includes some formulations that interest us because gender is present there, and discusses the positions of Freud, Stoller¹ and also Lacan.

1. The Destiny of Anatomy

What do notably the women psychoanalysts of the time say? Freud’s proposition on penis envy is widely taken up and commented on by women psychoanalysts, notably on the occasion of the publication of Freud’s article devoted to feminine sexuality (Freud, 1931). Yet, well before the publication of his 1925 article on the consequences of anatomy, Freud is already discussed very directly in the articles of Abraham, Horney or Deutsch who have produced very important clinical observations and theoretical elaborations on the castration complex in woman, and its consequences on understanding sexual development. Freud’s article only finds its full meaning when restored in this context of crossed propositions. For the feminine approach is not absent from analytical elaborations of the time, quite the contrary. Horney and Deutsch discuss point by point, from their own clinical experience, Freud’s observations and deductions, and what they advance in turn does not fail to nourish Freud’s reflections. The influence of feminine analytical thought would merit being specially developed, unfortunately we cannot engage it here. After 1931 and On Feminine Sexuality, other texts appear and extend the debates, such as Femininity in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1933).
Horney on her side, publishes in 1939 New Ways in Psychoanalysis, where her disagreements with Freud become more precise. She tries to open some work paths from what she encountered as therapeutic and theoretical impasses, requiring revising, according to her, certain data of the psychoanalytic corpus. The Freudian conception of femininity deserves in her eyes to be approached in a critical process, to note the lack of consideration of the weight of social and cultural determinants on women, seen in complement to biological determinants too highlighted in her eyes. Moreover, her clinical experience as a woman psychoanalyst has given her the opportunity to note that penis envy does not constitute a universal of sexuality development, and that it cannot moreover, from her point of view, be conceived principally on the anatomical factor, so much its force of suggestion with patients seems to respond to other factors, from which she suggests in conclusion:
But as it has a principally biological orientation Freud cannot, on the basis of his first propositions, see the full significance of these factors. He does not see to what extent they influence desires and attitudes, and he cannot evaluate the complexity of interactions between cultural conditions and feminine psychology. I suppose that everyone agrees with Freud in saying that differences in sexual constitution and functions influence mental life. But it seems unconstructive to speculate on the exact nature of this influence. The American woman is different from the German woman, both are different from certain Pueblo Indian women. New York society makes the New York woman different from the Idaho farmer’s wife. Cultural conditions engender specific qualities and faculties, different in women as well as in men – that is what we can hope to understand.
Deutsch publishes in 1945 The Psychology of Women. This work takes up her first advances of 1925 and extends her reflections. On feminine psychology, she devotes the last chapter to the psychoanalytic conception of this question in its relations with the social condition. She develops a reading and analysis of the history of three generations of Russian women caught up in the revolutionary momentum and war of the time, which places the political dimension of the question of feminine psychology very much in the forefront during this period of world conflict, particularly from their integration into the country’s economic life. Deutsch clearly pleads for recognition of another way of seeing and reading social and cultural interactions, in order to identify their psychic repercussions which she suggests must be reconsidered in importance. The sociological gaze invites itself into the discussion in an even more emphatic way.
But not all women psychoanalysts necessarily gave support to this possible controversy of the little girl’s penis envy, so easily contestable, to also highlight what of psychic development and unconscious motives constitutes in penis envy a first-order psychic creation, without necessarily contradicting social and environmental or feminist considerations. Thus Marie-Christine Hamon’s work, through its developments and its title, rightly refers us to this interrogation on the relations of necessity and contingency when she titles her book Why Do Women Love Men? And Not Rather Their Mother?
So here we are at the dawn of the second half of the 20th century, the social, the cultural and the economic make themselves heard all at once as unavoidable elements of theoretical elaboration and conceptual propositions in general psychology. Psychic development, personality, mental disorders are put in discussion with factors that must be distinguished between those we can designate as being environmental, and others that we call sociological, economic, political or cultural. Not that environmental or cultural factors had been disregarded by Freud before. We can very well maintain that the Oedipus complex is a socio-cultural moment par excellence (relations with parents, confrontation with social rules and fundamental prohibitions, individual positioning in the collective landscape), and not only an intra-psychic event. But from now on, in the post-war moment, which also corresponds to Freud’s disappearance, the methodology of conceptual, discursive and reflexive elaboration undergoes important mutations. New paradigms in intellectual approaches are born in Europe and across the World. Sometimes neglected factors (social, cultural) before now become the object of all attention. This upsets forms and contents, and effects too. The dimension of gender can then only appear in this conceptual landscape, given the social and cultural stakes we have just evoked.

4. Weininger

When Freud wrote his article “Some Psychic Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925) [2], he introduced it with the reservation of a man who felt he lacked time to complete his work, yet was determined to publish some elements of his research in anticipation, at the risk of a certain haste, regarding a point he believed to be of “universal scope,” particularly because it focused on the fate of the little girl and no longer solely on the little boy:

“When we examined the first psychic configurations of sexual life in children, we regularly took the male child, the little boy, as our object. In the little girl, we believed, it must have happened similarly, but nevertheless, in a certain way, differently. Where in the developmental path this distinction is to be found, that did not become clearly apparent” ([2], p. 193).

If psychoanalysis may have no desire to do anything with gender, gender does not leave psychoanalysis alone, and this does not date from yesterday. What we have just traversed illustrates what it was in the past, but current events still water us, and perhaps more, with elements of debate. The year 2013 will remain for a long time the one that saw the unfolding of discussions on the so-called marriage for all law. On this occasion, psychoanalysis has not ceased to be taken as reference or to task to defend or counter, most often to counter, arguments in favor of equality between citizens in the name of the right to marriage.
Gender manifested itself in these movements and controversies, notably under the features of the feminine-masculine dialectic, to reveal that not even psychoanalysis can hold a supposed knowledge capable of bordering this affair to the point where some would like to see it maintained, static, where the sexual would cease to gesticulate. But it is nothing of the sort. The analysis or simple reading of exchanges between parliamentarians when they rely on psychoanalysis or psychoanalyses, demonstrate, one more, that even psychoanalytic theories produce effects of norms and therefore effects of gender norms, and that this is an effect of theorization, not of the cure. For psychoanalysis deserves, and we thereby express our point of view, to be reaffirmed as a normative experience at the height of the subject’s normativity when the cure aims to illuminate its processes, outside of prescriptions or moralizing suggestions.
Then gender plays all its work of trouble, when it does not leave sex alone, and when it relaunches by the same occasion the sexual that interests us so much. In leaning over gender, as others have leaned over something of this order that did not yet bear the name, we confirm the immense privilege we have to rely on the sexual, even if it sometimes borders on politics, a politics of the sexual no doubt, for lack of being able to politicize sex which always escapes being only an instant of the sexual, just like gender.
Moreover, these public debates reveal with efficiency that in professing in the name of psychoanalysis in society, it is at best one’s own analysis and one’s own couch that find themselves exposed, and not lines of conduct or moral values or even some rules that psychoanalysis would have erected when it has flushed them out while moving toward the unconscious. The unconscious knowledge that the cure makes accessible does not return from the shadow to be engraved in stone, while we strive, through the cure, to lighten precisely the trace in the unconscious text.
Psychoanalysis confirms in a certain way the interest of gender and its limit, which in no way invalidates its usefulness as a critical tool of analysis and agent of trouble capable of provoking incessant prospections and investigations likely to support the desire for analysis sometimes, subjective creativity very often.
A certain dimension of gender was therefore indeed present in the reflections of Freud and his contemporaries, notably around questions linked to sexual difference and to anatomy and their cultural destinies. Thanks to reading these ancient elements, we can differently engage our dialogue with gender issues and progress in the exchange and interaction of psychoanalysis with society. For if gender as such is not a psychoanalytic concept, it nonetheless remains an object of direct or indirect interest that does not date from yesterday, and that we must consider seriously.

We note that the example of the boy serves as a starting point; Freud does not here embark on a completely new path, but intends to base his new reflection on his initial findings. The Oedipus complex is:

“the first station we recognize in the boy. [. . .] That the boy’s Oedipal position belongs to the phallic stage and that it perishes due to castration anxiety, thus due to narcissistic interest in the genital organ, I have explained elsewhere. Understanding is made more difficult by the complication that the Oedipus complex itself, in the boy, is predisposed in a double sense, active and passive, which corresponds to bisexual predisposition. The boy also wants to replace the mother as the father’s love object, which we designate as the feminine position.” ([1], p. 193).

This summary is very instructive, as it reveals the historical priority of the little boy in Freud’s theoretical constructions, but also some important elements that must be emphasized to understand the propositions concerning the little girl. We note, firstly, the psychic ambivalence of the positions identified. Secondly, the presence of crucial moments identified and proven by experience that Freud intends to rediscover in the model of the little girl, even if it means perhaps forcing adherence, namely the Oedipus complex (which remains a masculine model), castration anxiety as an event resolving a developmental phase, and psychic bisexuality illustrated by the ambivalence of positionings. We can ask ourselves whether Freud, having elaborated these elements concerning the boy, did not try to apply them to the girl, to make theoretical propositions on sexual life complementary, whose coherence always needed to be strengthened among his disciples or detractors? This could be seen as a kind of superimposition of the boy’s model onto the girl. But is that truly what Freud is doing here? Karen Horney writes this:

“In some of his later works, Freud has drawn attention with increasing insistence to a certain partiality in our analytical research. I refer to the fact that until very recently, only the minds of boys and men were taken as objects of investigation. The reason is obvious. Psychoanalysis is the creation of a masculine genius and almost all those who have developed its ideas have been men.” ([3], p. 48).

Where Freud applies the boy-girl distinction without explicit explanation, which we can read as a gender distinction, Horney, for her part, exposes it as a motive.

Relying on the Oedipus complex model (initially a masculine model), Freud encounters significant problems in his attempt to account for feminine specificities, problems that are notably cultural, and we detect in them a dimension of gender that was not named as such at that time. Indeed, in striving to identify similarities in the developmental paths of boys and girls, he seeks to transpose the major elements known in the boy to the girl, which proves complicated: “The little girl’s Oedipus complex contains one more problem than that of the boy” ([2], p. 194). Freud fails to provide the logic capable of supporting the psychic development explaining that the girl abandons the mother to adopt the father as an object, even though the mother constitutes the girl’s first object, just as for the boy. This is an immense question, and one that we must also reread in light of the issues that interest us here, because Freud very explicitly testifies to his methodical doubt when he refuses to take for granted, or even for logical, the affective movement by which the little girl seems to be seized. We could say here that the heterosexuality (which is a poor way of translating her choice of object from mother to father) of the little girl is not self-evident for Freud, contrary to what is sometimes read in his proposition. The Oedipal perspective seems to lack an element specific to the girl, which would give its application the interest that Freud was able to justify for the boy. He then turns to what he believes to be of major importance in this stage, which he had already qualified as

“phallic” or the stage of discovery and narcissistic investment of the genital zones: the influence of the genital, at a certain moment of development. However, he does not approach the genital dimension as a source of psychic truth, which clearly invites us to question the attachment to the innate nature of sex, which in Freud would have engaged his theoretical elaboration, as some critics have believed they could point out: “In short, the genital zone is discovered sooner or later and it seems unjustified to attribute psychic content to the first activities related to it.” ([2], p. 195). Here Freud commits what could be called a gender distinction.

Differently, he imagines a story of the discovery of the boy’s genital zones by the girl, and vice versa: “She notices the strikingly visible and well-proportioned penis of a brother or playmate, immediately recognizes it as the superior counterpart to her own small, hidden organ, and has thenceforth succumbed to penis envy.” ([2], p. 195). Paradoxically, the scenario of the same stage is not written identically for the boy, for whom the effect of castration only intervenes on the occasion of a deferred action favorable to its triggering, whereas for the girl, “Instantly, her judgment and decision are made. She has seen it, knows she does not have it, and wants to have it.” ([2], p. 196).

Freud advances step by step in a construction that aims to describe developmental specificities, while maintaining an important place for previously discovered elements, perceived as crucial, and having become indispensable to sexual life in general. Thus, the little girl’s path distinctly differs from the boy’s, precisely because it identifies how these common elements are illustrated in a certain way in the boy, and in another way in the girl: the triggering and resolution of the Oedipus complex differ between boy and girl. This intellectual realization is very interesting, because here Freud is not content to propose a model that would be the reverse of another. If fundamental markers persist, clinical experience compels him to formulate theoretical propositions to account for what experience teaches him, even if it means confessing his embarrassment. For example, in the continuity of “penis envy,” Freud explores the difference in the relationship to onanism between girls and boys:

“I cannot explain this revolt of the little girl against phallic onanism otherwise than by the hypothesis that this pleasure-bearing activity is severely spoiled for her by a parallel factor. This factor would not have to be sought far: it could only be the narcissistic injury connected with penis envy, the warning that on this point one cannot truly confront the boy and that the best thing is therefore to abstain from any competition with him. In this way, the knowledge that the little girl gains of the anatomical difference between the sexes distances her from masculinity and masculine onanism, and pushes her into new paths, which lead to the blossoming of femininity.” ([1], p. 199).

Can destiny be conceived in Freud’s mouth as in that of Napoleon Bonaparte? We spontaneously associate it with destiny and destiny neurosis. Freud uses this designation of neurosis to translate the prophetic character of certain neurotic dispositions or constructions. The future is decided there less than it is undergone. Is this applicable to anatomy? Anatomy evokes the organism, organs, the genital apparatus among others. And this is what Freud is talking about when he takes up Napoleon Bonaparte’s phrase. It is not a question of the body, another notion of which we can say that it is a product and not data, but rather a result of the investment of anatomy, of libidinal investment. It is never reducible to the materiality of the physiological and organic body, but it is determined by the psychic intervention of the subject.
Can anatomy carry in itself destiny in the sense of what would impose itself on the subject, and of which the latter would subjectively make himself the actor along the way? This version leads to saying that if one is born with an anatomy perceived as such, destiny is not a priori to recognize oneself in it. This works on condition of inscribing as a preliminary that non-conformity to expectations does not enter as possible destiny, but as non-destiny, because if from this we can pass to that of recognizing oneself in it or being invited there by destiny itself, what remains of anatomy carrying this future? Nothing. Freud would then propose in this formula a perspective incapable of being realized, destiny imposing itself on anatomy and not the reverse, which moreover remains more consistent with the notion of destiny neurosis and the hypothesis of the unconscious as well.
When Freud writes his article Some Psychical Consequences of the Difference Between the Sexes at the Anatomical Level (1925), he introduces it with the reserve of a man who thinks he lacks time to accomplish his work and yet decided to publish some elements of his research in anticipation, at the risk of certain haste, about a point he believes to be of universal scope, particularly from examining the fate of the little girl and no longer only of the little boy:
When we examined the first psychical configurations of sexual life in the child, we regularly took as object the male child, the little boy. In the little girl, we thought, it must happen similarly, but still, in a certain way, differently. At what point in the developmental course this distinction is to be found, this did not succeed in revealing itself clearly (p. 193).
The boy served as the first clinical support for constructing the theory, but now experience invites Freud to reconsider the fate of the girl as different, and therefore requiring of him a new theoretical proposition in relation to this experience.
We note that the boy’s example serves as a starting point. Freud does not resume here a completely new path, but indeed intends to pose his new reflection based on his first acquisitions. The Oedipus complex is:
the first station that we recognize in the boy. That the boy’s Oedipal position belongs to the phallic stage and that it perishes through castration anxiety, therefore through narcissistic interest in the genital organ, I have explained elsewhere. Understanding is made more difficult by this complication that the Oedipus complex itself, in the boy, is predisposed in a double sense, active and passive, which corresponds to bisexual predisposition. The boy also wants to replace the mother as the father’s love object, which we designate as the feminine position (p. 193).
This summary is very instructive, for we find there the historical priority of the little boy in Freud’s theoretical constructions, but also some important elements that must be highlighted to read the propositions concerning the little girl. We note first the psychic ambivalence of the positions identified. Second, the presence of crucial moments identified and confirmed by experience that Freud intends to find in the little girl’s model, if necessary by forcing adherence perhaps, namely the Oedipus complex (which remains a masculine model), castration anxiety as a resolving event of a developmental phase, psychic bisexuality illustrated by the ambivalence of positions. We can ask ourselves whether Freud, having elaborated these elements vis-à-vis the boy, did not try to make them valid in the girl, to make theoretical propositions about sexual life complementary, whose coherence always needed to be strengthened with his disciples or detractors? This can be appreciated as a sort of plastering of the boy’s model onto the girl. But is this really what Freud accomplishes here? Karen Horney writes this:
In some of these recent works, Freud has drawn attention with increasing insistence to a certain partiality of our analytical research. I refer to the fact that until a very recent time, only the minds of boys and men were taken as objects of investigation. The reason for this is obvious. Psychoanalysis is the creation of a male genius and almost all those who have developed its ideas have been men (p. 48).
Where Freud applies without explicating the boy-girl distinction that we can read as a gender distinction, Horney exposes it as a motive.
Based on the model of the Oedipus complex (initially a masculine model), Freud comes to identify important problems in his attempt to account for feminine specificities, problems that are notably of a cultural order and we discern there a dimension of gender that is not named thus at this time. Indeed, attaching himself to extracting similarities of path in the developments of boys and girls, he seeks to restore the major elements known in the boy in the girl, which proves complicated: The little girl’s Oedipus complex contains one more problem than the boy’s (p. 194). Freud does not succeed in making the logic capable of supporting the psychic development explaining that the girl comes to abandon the mother to adopt the father as object, even though the mother constitutes the first object of the girl just as for the boy. This is an immense question, and one that we must also reread in light of the questions that interest us here, for Freud testifies very explicitly to his methodical doubt when he refuses to take as acquired, nor even as logical, the affective movement of which the little girl seems taken. We could say here that the little girl’s heterosexuality (which is a bad way of translating her object choice from mother to father) is not self-evident for Freud, contrary to what is sometimes read in his proposition. The Oedipal perspective seems to lack an element proper to the girl, which would restore to its application the interest that Freud was able to justify with the boy. He then turns to what he thinks has major importance in this stage that he has already then qualified as phallic or stage of discovery and narcissistic investment of genital zones: the influence of the genital, at a certain moment of development. However, he does not approach the genital dimension as a source of psychic truth, which invites us to question very clearly the attachment to the innate nature of sex, which in Freud would have engaged his theoretical elaboration, as certain critiques have believed they could note: In short, the genital zone is discovered one day or another and it seems unjustified to attribute psychic content to the first activities relating to it (p. 195). Here Freud commits what could be called a gender distinction.
Differently, he imagines a history of the discovery of genital zones of the boy by the girl, and reciprocally: She notices the penis, strikingly visible and well-dimensioned, of a brother or playmate, immediately recognizes it as the superior counterpart of her own small and hidden organ, and she has henceforth succumbed to penis envy (p. 195). Paradoxically again, the scenario of the same stage is not written identically in the boy, for whom the castration effect only intervenes on the occasion of a favorable aftereffect to its triggering, while for the girl, In the instant, her judgment and her decision are stopped. She has seen it, knows she does not have it and wants to have it (p. 196).
Freud advances step by step in a construction that tends to describe developmental specificities, while maintaining an important place for previously discovered elements, perceived as crucial, and having become unavoidable in sexual life in general. Thus, the little girl’s path comes to distinguish itself clearly from that of the boy, by the very fact of identifying there the way in which these common elements find themselves illustrated in a certain way in the boy, and in another in the girl: the triggering and resolution of the Oedipus complex differ between the boy and the girl. This intellectual realization is very interesting, for here Freud does not content himself with proposing a model that would be the right side of a reverse side. If fundamental markers persist, clinical experience constrains him to formulate theoretical propositions to account for what experience teaches him, even if it means confessing his embarrassment. For example, in the continuity of penis envy, Freud explores the difference in relationship to onanism of the girl and the boy:
I cannot explain this revolt of the little girl against phallic onanism other than by the hypothesis that this pleasure-bearing activity is harshly spoiled for her by a factor playing in parallel. This factor, one would not have to seek far: it could only be the narcissistic wound connected with penis envy, the warning that on this point one really cannot confront the boy and that the best is therefore to abstain from all competition with him. In this way the little girl’s knowledge of the difference between the sexes at the anatomical level distances her from masculinity and masculine onanism, and pushes her into new paths, which lead to the flowering of femininity (p. 199).
This leads him to distinguish a fundamental difference of the Oedipus complex in the boy and in the girl, with regard to castration anxiety, which in the boy signs the peril of the Oedipus complex while in the girl it makes it possible and inaugurates it. It is interesting to note that in this conception, Freud consolidates an approach to sexual difference – from anatomical effects to psychic libidinal investments – which absolutely prevents considering the boy and the girl in a relationship of developmental complementarity, or of mirror resolution of affective and sexual psychic development. By noting these nuances from a search for the effectiveness of processes thought common, the path of flowering of femininity opens here toward a horizon that remains to be constructed, toward investments and identifications that remain to be described. The boy model no longer appears so relevant to describe feminine sexual development which seems to take its independence. Another gender appears in fact, as empirical and clinical necessity on the Freudian path.

2. Boys and Girls are Different

The Oedipus complex, which ends (in the boy) or opens (in the girl) with the threat of castration, marks a time concerning the child’s libidinal investments and identifications. Freud notes that the way the Oedipus complex is experienced and traversed by the child – and there is therefore a difference between the boy and the girl that the consequences of anatomy could explain – radically defines what becomes of libidinal investments:

“[. . .] the Oedipus complex is something so significant that the way one became involved in it and the way one got rid of it cannot remain without consequences. In the boy [. . .], the complex is not simply repressed; it literally shatters under the shock of the threat of castration. His libidinal investments are abandoned, desexualized, and partly sublimated, his objects incorporated into the ego [. . .].[. . .]. In the girl, the motive for the ruin of the Oedipus complex is missing. Castration has already produced its effect [. . .]. This is why the latter [the Oedipus complex] escapes the fate reserved for it in the boy; it can be slowly abandoned, liquidated by repression, and its effects displaced far into what is the normal psychic life of women.” ([2], pp. 200–201)

For Freud, it follows that the superego never constitutes itself as harshly in women as in men in terms of demands, which are erected on the incorporations of formerly invested objects, and whose stakes require defending against them by prohibiting them. The difference in character he highlights in this passage of the article regarding men’s greater sense of justice than women’s is presented as a hypothesis. It can be judged sexist, but it can also be read in reverse, mocking men for not being as capable as women of detaching themselves from their desires when they force themselves to forbid them for fear of losing what they consider most precious among their objects. This is what Ferenczi, whose assessments between men and women differ from Freud’s, suggests:

“Of course, the old question of the superiority or inferiority of one of the two sexes will arise in many minds. I believe that a psychoanalyst cannot unequivocally resolve this problem. I have already said that I consider the female organism to be more finely differentiated; one could add: more highly evolved. Woman is innately more sensible and better than man; the latter must contain his brutality by a more vigorous development of intelligence and the moral Superego. Woman has more finesse in her feelings (moral) and sensitivity (aesthetic) [ ].” ([4], p. 74).

But how can we not also read in Ferenczi a gallantry towards women that might today be labeled as polite sexism? Freud, for his part, responds to this in anticipation:

“In these judgments, one will not be misled by the feminist challenge, which seeks to impose upon us a complete parity of evaluative position between the sexes, but on the other hand, one will readily grant them that the majority of men also fall far short of the masculine ideal, and that all human individuals, due to their bisexual predisposition and cross-heredity, combine masculine and feminine characteristics within themselves, so that pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructs with uncertain content.” ([1] p. 201).

Freud concludes his article by supporting his propositions with his clinical experience, and relativizing their scope by the necessity of both clinical and theoretical confirmation, which he states is not entirely acquired, referring to the works of his contemporaries: Karl Abraham (1921) [5], Karen Horney (1969) [3] and Hélène Deutsch (1925) [6].

In summary, anatomy is not irrelevant – but does not govern everything – in the establishment of developmental paths of sexuality and the recognition of sexual difference between boys and girls on the psychic plane; this is what Freud states. And he adds that the consequences (character) of these paths are not automatic – only identifiable or not in clinical practice – due to an initial indifference between boys and girls: the psychic bisexuality common to all (which is not bisexuality as an object choice), and cross-heredity (through parents) from which everyone benefits in a singular way. The reserved and unpredictable outcome of the Oedipus complex, which must be “gotten rid of,” determines in these paths the extent and strength of the child’s libidinal investments (identification, object choice, incorporation). We are certainly very far from a literal reading of “Anatomy is destiny,” which definitively cannot be retained as representative of Freud’s elaborations on sexual difference, and the place of the genital in the determination of sex beyond the genital, in accordance with Freudian psychosexuality, which remains above all a psychic issue. Without needing to add that the Oedipus complex thus exposed very explicitly pertains to an eminently social and cultural, relational moment where we cannot recognize a supposed Freudian biological totality. The cultural rather than bodily scope of this anatomy traversed by the Oedipal moment could be read today as Freud’s consideration, as we have just seen in detail, of a dimension not designated as gender, but which obviously approaches it. A gender, not only opposed to the genital of sex, but indeed a gender as a vector of sexuation, of sexual identification. A gender that is not content to explore sex relations, but which proves to be a very useful prism for exploring the difference between the sexes as a consequence of the experience of sexual difference. That being said, what we read as the possibility of gender with Freud does not correspond to current understandings of gender (Scott, 2012) [7], including in the field of gender studies, where it is often confined to a discriminatory reading of nature and the social, whereas psychic experience urges us to refine the delicate embroidery that binds them.

The Oedipus complex which ends (in the boy) or which opens (in the girl) with the threat of castration, marks a time which concerns the child’s libidinal investments and identifications. Freud notes that the way in which the Oedipus complex is experienced, traversed by the child – and there is therefore a difference between the boy and the girl that the consequences of anatomy could explain – radically defines what becomes of libidinal investments:
the Oedipus complex is something so significant that the way in which one was engaged in it and the way one got rid of it cannot remain without consequences. In the boy, the complex is not simply repressed, it literally flies into pieces under the shock of the castration threat. Its libidinal investments are abandoned, desexualized and partly sublimated, its objects incorporated into the ego. In the girl, the motive for the ruin of the Oedipus complex is missing. Castration has already produced its effect. This is why the latter [the Oedipus complex] escapes the destiny reserved for it in the boy, it can be left slowly, be liquidated by repression, and its effects displaced far into what is the normal soul life of woman (p. 200-201).
It results for Freud that the superego is never constituted as harshly in woman as in man in terms of requirements, which are erected on the incorporations of formerly invested objects, and whose stakes impose defending oneself from them by forbidding them. The character difference that he emphasizes in this passage of the article about the greater sense of justice in man than in woman is delivered as a hypothesis. It can be judged sexist, but it can also be read on the reverse side and mock the man for not being as capable as the woman of releasing himself from his desires when he obliges himself to forbid them to himself for fear of losing what he takes to be the most precious among his objects. This is what Ferenczi suggests on his side whose appreciations between men and women are distinguished from those of Freud:
Of course, there will arise there, in the minds of many, this old question of the superiority or inferiority of one of the two sexes. I think that a psychoanalyst cannot resolve this problem unequivocally. I have already said that I held the feminine organism to be more finely differentiated; one could add: more highly evolved. Woman is innately more sensible and better than man; the latter must contain his brutality by a more vigorous development of intelligence and moral Superego. Woman has more finesse in her feelings (moral) and sensitivity (aesthetic) (p. 74).
But how not to also read in Ferenczi, a gallantry toward women that could today be accused of polished sexism. Freud on his side responds to it in anticipation:
In these judgments, one will not let oneself be led astray by the contestation of feminists, who want to impose on us a complete parity of position of appreciation between the sexes, but on the other hand one will readily grant them that the majority of men also remain far behind the masculine ideal, and that all human individuals, as a result of their bisexual predisposition and crossed heredity, unite in themselves masculine and feminine characters, so that pure masculinity and pure femininity remain theoretical constructions with poorly assured content (p. 201).
Freud concludes his article by supporting his propositions from his clinical experience, and relativizing the scope of these by the necessity of a clinical and theoretical confirmation, which he says is not entirely acquired by referring to the works of his contemporaries: Karl Abraham (1921), Karen Horney (1969) and Helene Deutsch (1925).
In summary, anatomy is not for nothing – but does not preside over everything – in the establishment of developmental paths of sexuality and recognition of sexual difference of boys and girls on the psychic level, that is what Freud says. And to add that the consequences (character) of these paths have nothing automatic – only identifiable or not in the clinic – due to an initial indifference between boys and girls: the psychic bisexuality common to all (which is not bisexuality as object choice), and crossed heredity (by parents) from which each benefits in a singular way. The reserved and unpredictable outcome of the Oedipus complex from which one must get rid determines in these paths the extent and force of the child’s libidinal investments (identification, object choice, incorporation). We are assuredly very far from a possible literal reading of Anatomy is destiny, which definitely cannot be retained as representative of Freud’s elaborations on sexual difference, and the place of the genital in the determination of sex beyond the genital, in accordance with Freudian psychosexuality, which remains above all a psychic stake. Without need to add that the Oedipus complex thus exposed very explicitly pertains to an eminently social and cultural, relational moment where we cannot recognize a supposed Freudian biological whole. The cultural rather than corporeal scope of this anatomy traversed by the Oedipal moment could be read today as the consideration, we have just seen it in detail, by Freud, of a dimension not designated by gender, but which obviously approaches it. A gender, not only opposed to the genital of sex, but indeed a gender vector of sexuation, of sexual identification. A gender that does not content itself with exploring sex relations, but which proves to be a very useful prism for exploring sexual difference as a consequence of the experience of sexual difference. This being said, what we read as possibility of gender with Freud does not correspond with current acceptations on gender (Scott, 2012), including in the field of gender studies, where it is often confined to a discriminating reading of nature and the social, where psychic experience enjoins us to refine the fine embroidery that links them.

What did the female psychoanalysts of the time say, in particular? Freud’s proposition on “penis envy” was widely taken up and commented on by female psychoanalysts, particularly following the publication of Freud’s article dedicated to female sexuality (Freud, 1931) [8]. However, long before the appearance of his 1925 article on the consequences of anatomy, Freud was already being discussed very directly in the articles by Abraham, Horney, and Deutsch, who had produced very important clinical observations and theoretical elaborations on the castration complex in women, and its consequences for understanding sexual development. Freud’s article only finds its full meaning when restored to this context of intersecting propositions. For the feminine approach was not absent from the analytical elaborations of the time, quite the contrary. Horney and Deutsch discussed point by point, based on their own clinical experience, Freud’s observations and deductions, and what they put forward in turn did not fail to nourish Freud’s reflections. The influence of a feminine analytical thought would deserve to be developed specifically; unfortunately, we cannot undertake it here. After 1931 and “On Female Sexuality,” other texts appeared and extended the debates, such as “Femininity” in the “New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (Freud, 1933) [9].

Horney, for her part, published New Ways in Psychoanalysis [10] in 1939, where her disagreements with Freud became clearer. She attempted to open up new avenues of work based on the therapeutic and theoretical impasses she encountered, demanding, in her view, a revision of certain data within the psychoanalytic corpus. The Freudian conception of femininity, in her eyes, deserved to be approached critically, to highlight its lack of consideration for the weight of social and cultural determinants on women, seen as complementary to the biological determinants that she felt were overemphasized. Furthermore, her clinical experience as a female psychoanalyst gave her the opportunity to observe that “penis envy” does not constitute a universal aspect of sexual development, and that, from her perspective, it cannot primarily be conceived based on the anatomical factor, as its suggestive power with patients seems to respond to other factors, from which she concludes:

“But as he has a primarily biological orientation, Freud cannot, on the basis of his initial propositions, see the full significance of these factors. He does not see to what extent they influence desires and attitudes, and he cannot evaluate the complexity of the interactions between cultural conditions and feminine psychology. I suppose everyone agrees with Freud that differences in sexual constitution and functions influence mental life. But it seems unproductive to speculate on the exact nature of this influence. The American woman is different from the German woman; both are different from some Pueblo Indian women. New York society makes the New York woman different from the Idaho farmer’s wife. Cultural conditions engender specific qualities and faculties, different in women as well as in men – this is what we can hope to understand.” [10].

Deutsch published The Psychology of Women [11] in 1945. This work revisits her initial advances from 1925 and extends her reflections. On feminine psychology, she dedicates the last

chapter to the psychoanalytic conception of this question in its relations with social conditions. She develops a reading and analysis of the history of three generations of Russian women caught up in the revolutionary fervor and war of the era, which strongly highlights the political dimension of the question of feminine psychology during this period of global conflict, particularly from their integration into the country’s economic life [11]. Deutsch clearly advocates for the recognition of another way of seeing and interpreting social and cultural interactions, in order to grasp their psychic repercussions, whose importance she suggests needs to be reconsidered. The sociological perspective is invited into the discussion in an even more emphatic manner.

However, not all female psychoanalysts necessarily supported this possible controversy of the little girl’s “penis envy,” so easily contestable, to also highlight what, from psychic development and unconscious motives, constitutes in “penis envy” a first-order psychic creation, without necessarily contradicting social and environmental or feminist considerations. Thus, Marie-Christine Hamon’s work, through its developments and title, rightly refers us to this questioning of the relationship between necessity and contingency when she titles her book Why do women love men? And not rather their mother? [12].

Thus, at the dawn of the second half of the 20^th century, the social, cultural, and economic suddenly made themselves heard as indispensable elements of theoretical elaboration and conceptual propositions in general psychology. Psychic development, personality, and mental disorders are discussed with factors that must be distinguished between those we can designate as “environmental” and others we call “sociological,” “economic,” “political,” or “cultural.” Not that environmental or cultural factors had been disregarded by Freud before. We can very well argue that the Oedipus complex is a socio-cultural moment par excellence (relations with parents, confrontation with social rules and fundamental prohibitions, individual positioning in the collective landscape), and not just an intra-psychic event. But now, in the post-war period, which also corresponds to Freud’s disappearance, the methodology of conceptual, discursive, and reflective elaboration undergoes significant mutations. New paradigms in intellectual approaches emerge in Europe and across the world. Factors sometimes neglected (social, cultural) before are now the object of all attention. This overturns forms and contents, and also effects. The dimension of gender can then only appear in this conceptual landscape, given the social and cultural stakes we have just evoked.

4. Weininger

In 1923, Otto Weininger published Sex and Character [13]. His approach to the difference between the sexes is imbued with the naturalism of the era, and a certain Darwinism in his reflective method. However, throughout his imposing text, he advances some nuances that interest us, because gender is detected there without being fully named:

“Between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ […] there is an infinity of gradations, an infinity of ‘intermediate sexual forms.’ Just as physics reasons about ideal gases, that is to say, those rigorously obeying Boyle’s law [ ], so here we must posit an ideal man M and an ideal woman F without attributing to either of them a real existence that they do not possess, but as sexual types” ([13], p. 26).

“Thus, man and woman are like two substances distributed among individuals in varying proportions, without the coefficient of either ever being equal to zero. Experience shows us, in other words, neither men nor women, but never anything other than masculine and feminine” ([13], p. 27).

“As for the human being, one can say that psychologically, at least at the same time, he is either man or woman. Such unisexuality is not only confirmed by the fact that every individual who considers himself either as a man or as a woman will also, absolutely, consider his complement as representing the very type of either woman or man.[. . .] Thus, homosexual or lesbian couples always bring together two people, one of whom acts as the masculine element and the other as the feminine element, and this is crucial. It thus appears that the man-woman relationship is, at the decisive moment, fundamental, and cannot be surpassed” ([13], p. 80).

These formulations are unsettling. They bear witness to a naturalizing categorization, and at the same time to its transcendence by the emergence of a new appreciation oriented towards the individual’s inner feeling. This distinction refers to roles and types. Here Weininger is not far from Stoller’s propositions on gender identity, or Freud’s on the difference between the sexes, or even Lacan’s on sexuation. Let us see what Stoller, Freud, and Lacan respectively tell us.

Stoller: “[Gender] has psychological and cultural connotations, rather than biological ones. If the appropriate terms for sex are ‘male’ and ‘female,’ the corresponding terms for gender are ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’; the latter can be totally independent of sex. [. . .] Gender is the quantity of masculinity or femininity found in a person, and although there are mixtures of both in many human beings, the normal male obviously has a preponderance of masculinity and the normal female a preponderance of femininity.” ([14], p. 28)

Freud: “All human individuals, due to their bisexual constitution and cross-heredity, possess both masculine and feminine traits, so that the content of theoretical constructs of pure masculinity and pure femininity remains uncertain.” [2].

Lacan: “There is nothing more vague than belonging to one of these two sides [. . .]. I still have to detach myself from something that is a [. . .] supposition, a supposition that there is a male or female subject. It is a supposition that experience makes very obviously untenable. . . ”²

Thus, the three dimensions—Stoller’s gender, Freud’s psychic bisexuality, or Lacan’s sexuation of the subject—are present in filigree in Weininger’s propositions, under different terms, of course, but oriented towards perspectives that seem quite close to us. This is also what makes his statements sometimes contradictory or confusing when the reader might lose track of the sources or supports, sometimes naturalistic, sometimes spiritual or moral, that Weininger makes dance. Upon rereading these texts, in the aftermath of their publication, and thanks to the very recent French release of Weininger’s text, we can better appreciate the interest there has been in distinctly and specifically following these three possible avenues for exploring sex and gender in their psychic implications. We will have the opportunity to return to this point later.

5. Psychoanalysis and Gender

While psychoanalysis may not wish to engage with gender, gender, for its part, does not leave psychoanalysis undisturbed, and this is not a recent phenomenon. What we have just covered illustrates what it was like in the past, but current events continue to provide us with, and perhaps even more, elements for debate. The year 2013 will long remain the one that saw the unfolding of discussions on the so-called “marriage for all” law. On this occasion, psychoanalysis was constantly referenced or challenged to defend or oppose, most often to oppose, arguments in favor of equality among citizens in the name of the right to marriage.

Gender manifested itself in these movements and controversies, particularly through the male-female dialectic, to reveal that not even psychoanalysis can possess a supposed knowledge capable of containing this matter to the point where some would wish to see it maintained, static, where the sexual would cease to gesticulate. But this is not the case. The analysis or simple reading of exchanges between parliamentarians when they rely on psychoanalysis or psychoanalyses demonstrates, once again, that even psychoanalytic theories produce effects of norms and thus effects of gender norms, and that this is an effect of theorization, not of the cure. For psychoanalysis deserves, and by this we state our point of view, to be reaffirmed as a normative experience commensurate with the normativity of the subject when the cure aims to clarify its processes, outside of prescriptions or moralizing suggestions.

Thus, gender fully plays its disruptive role when it disturbs sex, and thereby revives the sexual, which interests us so much. By examining gender, just as others have examined something of this order that did not yet bear its name, we confirm the immense privilege we have in relying on the sexual, even if it sometimes borders on politics—a politics of the sexual, no doubt—for lack of being able to politicize sex, which always escapes being merely an instant of the sexual, just like gender.

Furthermore, these public debates effectively reveal that to speak in the name of Psychoanalysis in society is, at best, to expose one’s own analysis and one’s own couch, and not to present codes of conduct, moral values, or any rules that Psychoanalysis might have established when it uncovered them on its path towards the unconscious. The unconscious knowledge made accessible by the cure does not return from the shadows to be carved in stone, whereas we strive, through the cure, precisely to lighten its trace in the unconscious text.

Psychoanalysis confirms, in a certain way, the interest of gender and its limit, which in no way invalidates its usefulness as a critical tool for analysis and an agent of disturbance capable of provoking incessant explorations and inquiries likely to support the desire for analysis sometimes, and subjective creativity quite often.

A certain dimension of gender was therefore indeed present in the reflections of Freud and his contemporaries, particularly concerning questions related to sexual difference and anatomy and their cultural destinies. Thanks to the study of these older elements, we can engage differently in our dialogue with “gender issues” and progress in the exchange and interaction of Psychoanalysis with society. For if gender as such is not a psychoanalytic concept, it nonetheless remains an object of direct or indirect interest that is not new, and which we must consider seriously.

Declaration of Interests

The author declares no conflicts of interest in relation to this article.

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