Feminism as Facilitation and Resistance: The Question of Penis Envy

Whether it is called the women's movement or the “condition of women question” as it was in the nineteenth century, feminism represents a powerful political and moral force in our society, and it is as well to look again at some of the ways it may be affecting psychoanalytic theory. Has the work of feminists within psychoanalysis (Horney, 1926, Jacobson, 1937; Thompson, 1942, Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1970, 1976, Irigaray, 1977, Chodorow, 1989; Fliegel, 1986; Mayer, 1985, Bernstein, 1983, 1990; Gilligan, 1986; Benjamin, 1986) facilitated more open and flexible ways of formulating central problems in female psychology? Or has feminist thought, even within psychoanalysis, represented a resistance to unconscious conflict over femininity and its core fantasies? This discussion of feminism and the psychoanalytic theory of femininity connects with the topic of countertransference interferences in the analytic process We must ask whether, and how, our strongly held views concerning the nature of femininity — and particularly the nature and sources of “penis envy” — affect the way in which, at an unconscious level, we stimulate, monitor, and guide psychoanalytic change in our patients (Sandler, 1993).

Because penis envy is so important in the development of the girl's attitude toward her own body and its functions, and because it has been used as a short form for such a variety of representations and symptoms, penis envy was for a long time accepted by many in psychoanalytic investigations as an interpretation beyond which one could not go,