A Clinical Report of Penis Envy: Its Multiple Meanings and Defensive Function

The analysis has revealed the following genetic formulation. During her first year of life Ann was close to and had her mother all to herself. With her mother's next pregnancy, she felt jealous, envious, angry, and resentful. She fantasied she had attacked both the baby and her mother's womb. When the baby was born she felt displaced and fantasied attacking and damaging his penis, which she perceived as his means of connecting with mother and the reason for his being favored. At this crucial time, being bitten by a dog and her mother taking her for rabies shots proved of paramount importance. At age five, as the patient turned to her father (oedipal stage), her mother became pregnant again. This reawakened all her conflicts and fears around the traumatic period when she was two years old. She turned back to her mother and devalued her father, not daring to experience envy, jealousy, hatred, and anger. To defend against such feelings, she identified with both her mother and the baby (the box fantasy). All this led to a neurotic tie to her mother which precluded her ability to compete successfully. She sabotaged herself professionally and chose men whom she perceived as damaged or different from father. So in the analysis, her initial oedipal wishes and conflicts covered her underlying wish for mother, which in turn was defensive regression from the wish for father.

Ann's later "penis envy"—the psychological consequence of many intrapsychic conflicts, fears, and defenses—was inevitably condensed with sociocultural influences. The sociocultural attitudes of overvaluation of males, her father's teachings of Judaism that "women are unclean," in addition to the fact that