Clinical Uses of the Concept of Primary Femininity

Nancy Kulish opened the panel by noting that concepts of primary femininity have influenced a broad range of contemporary psychoanalytic writings on female development and psychology. She roughly defined the term primary femininity as referring to the idea that a little girl forms a sense of herself and her body first as a female. This, of course, contrasts with early psychoanalytic theory, in which female psychosexual development was conceptualized as initially masculine, with further development dependent on renunciation of that primary masculinity. As such, femininity was regarded as a difficult achievement, one based in a sense of deficiency. Many, including contemporaries of Freud such as Homey, Jones, and Greenacre, have criticized this theory as limiting our ability to understand female patients and have expressed contrary views.

However, as Kulish explained, the term primary femininity was first used in a different frame of reference. Stoller coined the term initially to refer to gender identity arising out of an early maternal matrix for both males and females. Chodorow's early writings, in keeping with this idea, considered the differential effects, for girls and for boys, of separation from same-sex and opposite-sex objects.

Kulish outlined how use of the concept of primary femininity to refer to primary gender identify focused psychoanalytic attention on a positive sense of femaleness and the role of the mother. Tyson has explored this area extensively. Bernstein, Mayer, and Richards have considered the bodily aspects of a primary sense of femininity that may underlie female genital anxieties. Further, writers such as Jones, Deutsch, and Parens have considered the concept in relation to bisexuality and homosexuality.