Penis envy

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The term penis envy was coined by Sigmund Freud . The assumption that women unconsciously envy the male sex for his penis is both a famous and generally controversial thesis of classical psychoanalysis .

meaning

Freud first hinted at his thesis of penis envy in 1908 in the essay on infantile sexual theories ; later he included them in detail in the second edition of the Three Essays on Sexual Theory and in a few other articles. According to Freud's own statement, the thesis goes back to the descriptions and dreams of his patients.

According to Freud, penis envy arises as a fantasy of the little girl who becomes aware of the anatomical sex difference between man and woman in the course of her childhood development . According to Freud's drive theory , this happens with the phallic phase around the third to fifth year of life. The girl realizes that she does not have a penis and develops the unconscious fantasy that she has been neutered . As a defense against this fantasy, which goes hand in hand with the feeling of inferiority, the girl develops envy of the man's penis. This envy could express itself in different forms:

  • as a wish for a child as a penis substitute and related to this as a wish to possess the father incestuously ,
  • More general than the desire to have a man's penis during sexual intercourse , which, according to Freud, is also related to the woman's greater jealousy
  • as a denial of one's own penislessness in the form of adopting behavior and role models with male connotations.

The penis envy is accompanied by the oedipal constellation of a rejection of the mother (also fantasized as castrated and inferior) with simultaneous desire by the father. The penis envy is the equivalent of the male fear of castration and is ultimately based on the same fantasy - with the crucial difference that the girl experiences himself as already castrated , while the boy only feels threatened by the castration .

reception

Freud was heavily attacked for accepting female penis envy. Especially from the feminist side it was criticized that with his penis envy thesis Freud tried to scientifically substantiate the alleged inferiority of women and thus try to reproduce it. The assumption of penis envy is part of a "phallocentric" or " phallogocentric " thinking ( Luce Irigaray according to a formulation by Jacques Derrida ), according to which masculinity appears as the normal case and femininity only as its lack and deficit . The concept of penis envy could therefore - so the criticism - be seen as an expression of Freud's own patriarchal thinking.

The concept of penis envy has also been criticized in that the reasons for penis envy are not based on differences in anatomy, but can be based on envy of social inequality. Stavros Mentzos explains that, analogous to penis envy, there is a clinically demonstrable bearing envy in many men, which is remarkably little mentioned in the literature. The doctor and psychoanalyst Karen Horney recognized female penis envy in principle, but contrasted it (in the 1920s) with a theory of male womb (mother) envy. According to their analysis, this manifests itself in an envy of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. She explained that in a male society it is easier to suppress male envy than female penis envy.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sigmund Freud, Contributions to the Psychology of Love Life III: The Tabu of Virginity (1917/18), In: Study edition vol. V, p. 224 f.
  2. ↑ Stavros Mentzos: Neurotic Conflict Processing , Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1994, ISBN 3-596-42239-6 , page 100 f.
  3. ↑ Christof Goddemeier: Karen Horney: Power of Self-Realization In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt, Nov 2010.

literature

  • Sigmund Freud : About infantile sex theories (1908), In: Study edition Bd. V, Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer 1972, pp. 169-184
  • Sigmund Freud: The infantile genital organization (1923), In: Study edition Bd. V, Frankfurt a. M .: Fischer 1972, pp. 235-241
  • Sigmund Freud: About some consequences of the anatomical sex difference (1925), In: Study edition vol. V, pp. 253-266
  • Jacques Lacan : About the meaning of the phallus (1958), In: Schriften II, Berlin / Weinheim: Quadriga 1991 (3rd edition), pp. 121–132
  • Luce Irigaray : Speculum , mirror of the opposite sex (1974), Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 1980
  • Luce Irigaray: The gender that is not one , Berlin: Merve 1979
  • Christiane Olivier: Jokaste's children. The psyche of women in the shadow of their mother , Munich: dtv 1989, ISBN 3-423-15053-X