Jeff Nagelbush wrote: �Since the development of the superego in males is one result of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the identification with the father, and since females do not have a similar experience, my question is not why did Freud think females had a weaker superego but how do females develop any superego at all?
Deb Briihl wrote �Women were viewed as being morally inferior, so the question was, how did they get that way? Answer, they don't go through the Oedipus complex, so they have a weaker superego than men do. It's a bit more complex that that, but that is the basic answer.� In fact the question Freud had to face was that, given that in males the dissolution of the Oedipus complex led to the development of the superego, what equivalent process led to females becoming moral beings? This is what he tackled in his late (1925+) female sexuality papers. (That they were inferior as moral beings is a view which informs Freud�s theorizing, but that was not what he set out to explain.) The female equivalent of the male superego develops as a result of her being driven out of her attachment to her mother through the influence of her envy of the penis, but in the absence of the (male) fear of castration she remains in the transitional Oedipal situation for an indeterminate length of time, and so doesn�t develop a fully independent superego. (Hey, I didn�t write this stuff! See *New Introductory Lectures* Chapter 33.) Rick Froman is mistaken when he writes that Freud �did not believe that females were jealous of their mothers and loved their fathers.� In �Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes� (1925) Freud wrote that the infant girl �gives up her wish for a penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child: and *with that purpose in view* she takes her father as a love-object. Her mother becomes the object of her jealousy.� (From �New Introductory Lectures� we learn that the little girl�s attachment to the mother �ends in hate�. If you haven�t noticed that, that�s because it�s �carefully overcompensated later on�!) Female infants do not reject their mother only because they she failed to provide them with a penis. According to Freud, they feared that their mother wanted to poison them, resented her for failing to feed them sufficiently, for arousing their sexual activity and then forbidding it, for never fulfilling their expectations of love, and (last but not least), for failing to provide them with �the only proper genital�. Freud dug up these reasons why the infant girl rejects her mother because he had long proposed that female infants had libidinal desires towards the father (the female equivalent of male Oedipal desires) and when he started to develop his theory of the psychosexual development of women he belatedly �discovered� that they had earlier been attached to their mother. So he had to hunt around for reasons (�which analysis brings to light�, in Freud�s words) to explain the switch from mother to father. (I trace the stumbling coming to fruition of these ideas in chapter eight of my book *Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud*.) Incidentally, Frank Cioffi once raised the interesting question of why it was that though Freud�s early patients were predominantly women, for some twenty-five years he provided only a theory of *male* psychosexual development. I suggest that this was because his theory had little to do with clinical observations and much to do with ideas dreamed up in his own head which he later �validated� by tendentious interpretation. Allen Esterson London --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
