section_path: Ideas/Femininity and female sexuality
section_name: Femininity and female sexuality
paragraph_text: Femininity and female sexuality
  
  Freud's account of femininity is grounded in his theory of psychic development as it traces the uneven transition from the earliest stages of infantile and childhood sexuality, characterised by polymorphous perversity and a bisexual disposition, through to the fantasy scenarios and rivalrous identifications of the Oedipus complex and on to the greater or lesser extent these are modified in adult sexuality. There are different trajectories for the boy and the girl which arise as effects of the castration complex. Anatomical difference, the possession of a penis, induces castration anxiety for the boy whereas the girl experiences a sense of deprivation. In the boy's case the castration complex concludes the Oedipal phase whereas for the girl it precipitates it.
  
  The constraint of the erotic feelings and fantasies of the girl and her turning away from the mother to the father is an uneven and precarious process entailing "waves of repression". The normal outcome is, according to Freud, the vagina becoming "the new leading zone" of sexual sensitivity, displacing the previously dominant clitoris, the phallic properties of which made it indistinguishable in the child's early sexual life from the penis. This leaves a legacy of penis envy and emotional ambivalence for the girl which was "intimately related to the essence of femininity" and leads to "the greater proneness of women to neurosis and especially hysteria." In his last paper on the topic Freud likewise concludes that "the development of femininity remains exposed to disturbance by the residual phenomena of the early masculine period... Some portion of what we men call the 'enigma of women' may perhaps be derived from this expression of bisexuality in women's lives."
  
  Initiating what became the first debate within psychoanalysis on femininity, Karen Horney of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute set out to challenge Freud's account of femininity. Rejecting Freud's theories of the feminine castration complex and penis envy, Horney argued for a primary femininity and penis envy as a defensive formation rather than arising from the fact, or "injury", of biological asymmetry as Freud held. Horney had the influential support of Melanie Klein and Ernest Jones who coined the term " phallocentrism " in his critique of Freud's position.
  
  In defending Freud against this critique, feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose has argued that it presupposes a more normative account of female sexual development than that given by Freud. She finds that Freud moved from a description of the little girl stuck with her 'inferiority' or 'injury' in the face of the anatomy of the little boy to an account in his later work which explicitly describes the process of becoming 'feminine' as an 'injury' or 'catastrophe' for the complexity of her earlier psychic and sexual life.
  
  Throughout his deliberations on what he described as the "dark continent" of female sexuality and the "riddle" of femininity, Freud was careful to emphasise the "average validity" and provisional nature of his findings. He did, however, in response to his critics, maintain a steadfast objection "to all of you... to the extent that you do not distinguish more clearly between what is psychic and what is biological..."