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In her wide-ranging, thought-provoking paper, “Freud, the Birthing Body, and Modern Life,” Rosemary Balsam adds to her growing oeuvre furthering the psychoanalytic understanding of women and the female body. In the paper she shows how despite Freud's early appreciation of biological femaleness, he moved away from that understanding by 1908. His ideas about women were then distorted by his exaggerated phallocentric views on women, which were to prevail in psychoanalytic theory for many decades. This occurred despite the astute clinical and theoretical discussions by Karen Horney (1924, 1926, 1933) and Ernest Jones (1927, 1933, 1935; see Hoffman 1996). These phallocentric views have in recent decades been challenged, with Balsam, drawing on her clinical and theoretical acumen, among those at the forefront.
In this discussion I try to expand on Balsam's understanding of Freud's thinking, which led him to devalue the biological underpinnings of femaleness. This thinking included his assertion that prepubertal children of both sexes consider the male genital universal; female genitals, accordingly, were viewed as inferior to male genitals by both men and women. Balsam (p. 62) notes that Freud's transition, from appreciating the biological uniqueness of females to seeing them as defective males, occurred when he felt that “he was ‘obliged to recognize that the little girl is a little man’ and that early vaginal sensations ‘cannot play a great part’ ([Freud] 1933, p.149).” Balsam documents how Freud first discussed this idea in 1908, in “On the Sexual Theories of Children,” affirmed the theory in