Woman and her Discontents. A Reassessment of Freud's Views on Female Sexuality

The vast dimensions of the subject of female sexuality have obliged me to limit my field rather carefully. I have therefore taken as my starting point Freud's own views on female sexuality. As we all know, Freud was a true scientist and his career was a voyage of discovery, during which new vistas kept presenting themselves; and so, of course, we have to reckon with Freud's changing views, for some of them were altered quite radically in his later years. Some, however, were retained relatively unchanged, and it is these steadfastly held opinions that led to a controversy, which became particularly lively in the 1920s. The opposition was led largely by women analysts, but they had the powerful support of Ernest Jones. This controversy is part of the intellectual environment in which Melanie Klein's lines of thought and clinical activity took shape, and so one begins to appreciate how far-reaching have been its consequences.

I have attempted to discover some of the germs of Freud's views on female sexuality by scrutinizing his early published works and the correspondence with Fliess. The first important statements emerged in 1894–95, in Draft G of the Fliess papers (Freud, 1950a) and in the paper on anxiety neurosis published on 15 January, 1895 (Freud, 1895). Draft G is remarkable for the so-called sexual diagram; the same ideas are presented purely verbally in the 1895 paper, where Freud makes it quite clear that his view of the sexual process applies, in the first instance, to men. I will quote:

In the sexually mature male organism sexual excitation is produced—probably continuously—and periodically becomes a stimulus to the psyche. … This somatic excitation is manifested as a pressure on the walls of the seminal vesicles, which are lined with nerve endings; thus this visceral excitation will develop continuously, but it will have to reach a certain height before it is able to overcome the resistance of the intervening path of conduction to the cerebral cor