To an ever-increasing extent the Oedipus complex reveals its importance
as the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood. After
that, its dissolution takes place; it succumbs to repression, as we say,
and is followed by the latency period. It has not yet become clear,
however, what it is that brings about its destruction. Analyses seem to
show that it is the experience of painful disappointments. The little
girl likes to regard herself as what her father loves above all else;
but the time comes when she has to endure a harsh punishment from him
and she is cast out of her fool’s paradise. The boy regards his mother
as his own property; but he finds one day that she has transferred her
love and solicitude to a new arrival. Reflection must deepen our sense
of the importance of those influences, for it will emphasize the fact
that distressing experiences of this sort, which act in opposition to
the content of the complex, are inevitable. Even when no special events
occur, like those we have mentioned as examples, the absence of the
satisfaction hoped for, the continued denial of the desired baby, must
in the end lead the small lover to turn away from his hopeless longing.
In this way the Oedipus complex would go to its destruction from its
lack of success, from the effects of its internal impossibility.
Another view is that the Oedipus complex must collapse because the time
has come for its disintegration, just as the milk-teeth fall out when
the permanent ones begin to grow. Although the majority of human beings
go through the Oedipus complex as an individual experience, it is
nevertheless a phenomenon which is determined and laid down by heredity
and which is bound to pass away according to programme when the next
pre-ordained phase of development sets in. This being so, it is of no
great importance what the occasions are which allow this to happen, or,
indeed, whether any such occasions can be discovered at all.
The justice of both these views cannot be disputed. Moreover, they are
compatible. There is room for the ontogenetic view side by side with the
more far-reaching phylogenetic one. It is also true that even at birth
the whole individual is destined to die, and perhaps his organic
disposition may already contain the indication of what he is to die
from. Nevertheless, it remains of interest to follow out how this innate
programme is carried out and in what way accidental noxae exploit his
disposition.
We have lately been made more clearly aware than before that a child’s
sexual development advances to a certain phase at which the genital
organ has already taken over the leading role. But this genital is the
male one only, or, more correctly, the penis; the female genital has
remained undiscovered. This phallic phase, which is contemporaneous with
the Oedipus complex, does not develop further to the definitive genital
organization, but is submerged, and is succeeded by the latency period.
Its termination, however, takes place in a typical manner and in
conjunction with events that are of regular recurrence.
When the (male) child's interest turns to his genitals he betrays the
fact by manipulating them frequently; and he then finds that the adults
do not approve of this behaviour. More or less plainly, more or less
brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part of him which he values
so highly will be taken away from him. Usually it is from women that the
threat emanates; very often they seek to strengthen their authority by a
reference to the father or the doctor, who, so they say, will carry out
the punishment. In a number of cases the women will themselves mitigate
the threat in a symbolic manner by telling the child that what is to be
removed is not his genital, which actually plays a passive part, but his
hand, which is the active culprit. It happens particularly often that
the little boy is threatened with castration, not because he plays with
his penis with his hand, but because he wets his bed every night and
cannot be got to be clean. Those in charge of him behave as if this
nocturnal incontinence was the result and the proof of his being unduly
concerned with his penis, and they are probably right. In any case,
long-continued bed-wetting is to be equated with the emissions of
adults. It is an expression of the same excitation of the genitals which
has impelled the child to masturbate at this period.
Now it is my view that what brings about the destruction of the child’s
phallic genital organization is this threat of castration. Not
immediately, it is true, and not without other influences being brought
to bear as well. For to begin with the boy does not believe in the
threat or obey it in the least. Psycho-analysis has recently attached
importance to two experiences which all children go through and which,
it is suggested, prepare them for the loss of highly valued parts of the
body. These experiences are the withdrawal of the mother’s breast - at
first intermittently and later for good - and the daily demand on them
to give up the contents of the bowel. But there is no evidence to show
that, when the threat of castration takes place, those experiences have
any effect. It is not until a fresh experience comes his way that the
child begins to reckon with the possibility of being castrated, and then
only hesitatingly and unwillingly, and not without making efforts to
depreciate the significance of something he has himself observed.
The observation which finally breaks down his unbelief is the sight of
the female genitals. Sooner or later the child, who is so proud of his
possession of a penis, has a view of the genital region of a little
girl, and cannot help being convinced of the absence of a penis in a
creature who is so like himself. With this, the loss of his own penis
becomes imaginable, and the threat of castration takes its deferred
effect.
We should not be as short-sighted as the person in charge of the child
who threatens him with castration, and we must not overlook the fact
that at this time masturbation by no means represents the whole of his
sexual life. As can be clearly shown, he stands in the Oedipus attitude
to his parents; his masturbation is only a genital discharge of the
sexual excitation belonging to the complex, and throughout his later
years will owe its importance to that relationship. The Oedipus complex
offered the child two possibilities of satisfaction, an active and a
passive one. He could put himself in his father's place in a masculine
fashion and have intercourse with his mother as his father did, in which
case he would soon have felt the latter as a hindrance; or he might want
to take the place of his mother and be loved by his father, in which
case his mother would become superfluous. The child may have had only
very vague notions as to what constitutes a satisfying erotic
intercourse; but certainly the penis must play a part in it, for the
sensations in his own organ were evidence of that. So far he had had no
occasion to doubt that women possessed a penis. But now his acceptance
of the possibility of castration, his recognition that women were
castrated, made an end of both possible ways of obtaining satisfaction
from the Oedipus complex. For both of them entailed the loss of his
penis - the masculine one as a resulting punishment and the feminine one
as a precondition. If the satisfaction of love in the field of the
Oedipus complex is to cost the child his penis, a conflict is bound to
arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of his body and the
libidinal cathexis of his parental objects. In this conflict the first
of these forces normally triumphs: the child’s ego turns away from the
Oedipus complex.
I have described elsewhere how this turning away takes place. The
object-cathexes are given up and replaced by identifications. The
authority of the father or the parents is introjected into the ego, and
there it forms the nucleus of the super-ego, which takes over the
severity of the father and perpetuates his prohibition against incest,
and so secures the ego from the return of the libidinal object-cathexis.
The libidinal trends belonging to the Oedipus complex are in part
desexualized and sublimated (a thing which probably happens with every
transformation into an identification) and in part inhibited in their
aim and changed into impulses of affection. The whole process has, on
the one hand, preserved the genital organ - has averted the danger of
its loss - and, on the other, has paralysed it - has removed its
function. This process ushers in the latency period, which now
interrupts the child’s sexual development.
I see no reason for denying the name of a ‘repression?to the ego’s
turning away from the Oedipus complex, although later repressions come
about for the most part with the participation of the super-ego, which
in this case is only just being formed. But the process we have
described is more than a repression. It is equivalent, if it is ideally
carried out, to a destruction and an abolition of the complex. We may
plausibly assume that we have here come upon the borderline - never a
very sharply drawn one - between the normal and the pathological. If the
ego has in fact not achieved much more than a repression of the complex,
the latter persists in an unconscious state in the id and will later
manifest its pathogenic effect.
Analytic observation enables us to recognize or guess these connections
between the phallic organization, the Oedipus complex, the threat of
castration, the formation of the super-ego and the latency period. These
connections justify the statement that the destruction of the Oedipus
complex is brought about by the threat of castration. But this does not
dispose of the problem; there is room for a theoretical speculation
which may upset the results we have come to or put them in a new light.
Before we start along this new path, however, we must turn to a question
which has arisen in the course of this discussion and has so far been
left on one side. The process which has been described refers, as has
been expressly said, to male children only. How does the corresponding
development take place in little girls?
At this point our material - for some incomprehensible reason - becomes
far more obscure and full of gaps. The female sex, too, develops an
Oedipus complex, a super-ego and a latency period. May we also attribute
a phallic organization and a castration complex to it? The answer is in
the affirmative; but these things cannot be the same as they are in
boys. Here the feminist demand for equal rights for the sexes does not
take us far, for the morphological distinction is bound to find
expression in differences of psychical development. 'Anatomy is Destiny'
to vary a saying of Napoleon's. The little girl's clitoris behaves just
like a penis to begin with; but, when she makes a comparison with a
playfellow of the other sex, she perceives that she has 'come off badly'
and she feels this as a wrong done to her and as a ground for
inferiority. For a while still she consoles herself with the expectation
that later on, when she grows older, she will acquire just as big an
appendage as the boy's. Here the masculinity complex of women branches
off. A female child, however, does not understand her lack of a penis as
being a sex character; she explains it by assuming that at some earlier
date she had possessed an equally large organ and had then lost it by
castration. She seems not to extend this inference from herself to
other, adult females, but, entirely on the lines of the phallic phase,
to regard them as possessing large and complete - that is to say, male -
genitals. The essential difference thus comes about that the girl
accepts castration as an accomplished fact, whereas the boy fears the
possibility of its occurrence.
The fear of castration being thus excluded in the little girl, a
powerful motive also drops out for the setting-up of a super-ego and for
the breaking-off of the infantile genital organization. In her, far more
than in the boy, these changes seem to be the result of upbringing and
of intimidation from outside which threatens her with a loss of love.
The girl's Oedipus complex is much simpler than that of the small bearer
of the penis; in my experience, it seldom goes beyond the taking of her
mother's place and the adopting of a feminine attitude towards her
father. Renunciation of the penis is not tolerated by the girl without
some attempt at compensation. She slips - along the line of a symbolic
equation, one might say - from the penis to a baby. Her Oedipus complex
culminates in a desire, which is long retained, to receive a baby from
her father as a gift - to bear him a child. One has an impression that
the Oedipus complex is then gradually given up because this wish is
never fulfilled. The two wishes - to possess a penis and a child -
remain strongly cathected in the unconscious and help to prepare the
female creature for her later sexual role. The comparatively lesser
strength of the sadistic contribution to her sexual instinct, which we
may no doubt connect with the stunted growth of her penis, makes it
easier in her case for the direct sexual trends to be transformed into
aim-inhibited trends of an affectionate kind. It must be admitted,
however, that in general our insight into these developmental processes
in girls is unsatisfactory, incomplete and vague.
I have no doubt that the chronological and causal relations described
here between the Oedipus complex, sexual intimidation (the threat of
castration), the formation of the super-ego and the beginning of the
latency period are of a typical kind; but I do not wish to assert that
this type is the only possible one. Variations in the chronological
order and in the linking-up of these events are bound to have a very
important bearing on the development of the individual.
Since the publication of Otto Rank's interesting study, The Trauma of
Birth, even the conclusion arrived at by this modest investigation, to
the effect that the boy's Oedipus complex is destroyed by the fear of
castration, cannot be accepted without further discussion. Nevertheless,
it seems to me premature to enter into such a discussion at the present
time, and perhaps inadvisable to begin a criticism or an appreciation of
Rank's view at this juncture.
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