Because Freud says you have.
Don't worry though, apparently this is normal. Personally I recall worrying about tests, messing up at meets or games, and when I will get to eat my next slice of king cake. I do not recall becoming distraught over penis envy, but perhaps Freud might say I have simply repressed this memory.
According to Freud, "penis envy" is a stage that young girls go through as they progress towards a mature female sexuality and gender identity. It also triggers the beginning of the Electra complex (when girls start becoming less attached to their mother and begin instead to compete with her for attention and love from the father). Freud also theorized about castration anxiety in boys, but that's not the subject of this post.
Freud said that this is a girl's thought process as she grows up:
- Soon after the libidinal shift to the penis, the child develops her first sexual impulses towards her mother.
- The girl realizes that she is not physically equipped to have a heterosexual relationship with her mother, since she does not have a penis.
- She desires a penis, described as penis envy. She sees the solution as obtaining her father's penis.
- She develops a sexual desire for her father.
- The girl blames her mother for her apparent castration (what she sees as punishment by the mother for being attracted to the father) assisting a shift in the focus of her sexual impulses from her mother to her father.
- Sexual desire for her father leads to the desire to replace and eliminate her mother.
- The girl identifies with her mother so that she might learn to mimic her, and thus replace her.
- The child anticipates that both aforementioned desires will incur punishment.
- The girl employs the defence mechanism of displacement to shift the object of her sexual desires from her father to men in general.
- -Wikipedia
Also, penis envy later becomes simply the wish "for a man" or a baby.
I mean, I really like how he assumed that all women have a deep longing to "have a man" and to have a child.
Now, of course, this theory has been heavily criticized (along with many other Freudian theories). First of all, many people object to the idea that female sexuality is somehow dependent on having a penis and therefore on men. The idea has been denounced as "patriarchal, anti-feminist, and misogynistic and represent[ative of] women as broken or deficient men."
A German psychoanalyst named Karen Horney actually came up with the idea of "womb envy" and thought that the acceptance of Freud's ideas goes hand in hand with "masculine narcissism."
One particular viewpoint that I thought more reasonable was Clara Thompson's idea, which she wrote about in her 1943 paper "Women and Penis Envy." She said that "penis envy" is not really a desire for a physical penis, but a social desire for the benefits of "the dominant gender," calling it a "sociological response to female subordination under patriarchy."
Thoughts?
1 comment:
Ah, a perfect example of why I think Freud is somewhat…mistaken…in his ideas. I mean, did he ever stop to consider just where he gets these theories from? Now, I’m no expert, but perhaps Freud is projecting—one of the defense mechanisms of the human mind, according to his daughter Anna. Perhaps he’s just a strange, strange weirdo who was attracted to his mother and so believes that every human is attracted to their parent of the opposite sex. Did he ever consider THAT? Probably not, because he is in denial (another defense mechanism) that he’s the only one attracted to his own parents. Now, once upon a time, he probably realized this information; but then (as my theory goes) he was so horrified at being an outlier, and aghast that his own behavior and creepy urges were simply unexplainable, that he repressed (yet another defense mechanism) this knowledge and then, to compensate, came up with a huge long theory about why boys are attracted to their mothers—and why girls are attracted to their fathers and somehow, someway, wish to have male organs even when they probably don’t even know what that means at such a young age.
I honestly want to know how Freud came up with this stuff. Like…did it come to him in a dream or something? I mean—“penis envy,” really?!? What?!? How can he apply this idea to every girl/woman ever? I wonder what his wife and daughter thought about this idea. Oh, yeah, and his lover—who just happened to be his wife’s sister. And why does he assume every woman wants a man? In fact, his own daughter, Anna, was lesbian. Are these harebrained theories simply ways for Freud to gain attention?
“Freud said this penis envy grows over time and manifests in a daughter's love for her father and the desire to give birth to a son, because those are as close as a woman can get to having a penis of her own.”
……okay, Freud, okay. You are really pushing it, dude.
“Having no protuberant genitalia to protect, girls never acquire morality and need guidance from fathers and, later, husbands.”
Uh, what? How did you jump from genitalia to morality? You know what, never mind. I don’t even want to know.
“Whereas men are predestined to become increasingly moral, women are predestined to lie and connive in order to get a man to impregnate them—and, of course, give them moral guidance.”
Okay, thank you. Maybe YOU, Freud, need some guidance. Because you are wrong. Very, very, wrong. And you need help. Lots of it.
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