On the Psychosexual Development of the Female Child*

A great deal has been written lately about female sexuality but very little about the young girl's sexual development. Yet no reappraisal of the sexual life of the adult woman could be complete without a similar reappraisal of the events in the life of the young female child.

Freud (1905) considered the discovery of infantile sexuality as a major step in the evolution of his theory. He gave infantile sexuality singular prominence in normal development and in neurotogenesis. Despite this, however, many of the notions he proposed in his early papers, notions that were often based on single observations or extrapolations from the treatment of adult patients, were not tested systematically through direct observations and surveys of young children. The confirmation of the theory came mainly from observations in the analytic room, made during the analysis of young children. Since, however, child analysis has horrowed heavily from these same theoretical positions on infantile sexuality, one is justified in suspecting a certain circularity in the process of their confirmation.

The dilema of circularity, and the very fact that it is often difficult to obtain information about the first few years of life from strictly psychoanalytic experiments and observations, makes it necessary to seek confirmation, at least partly, elsewhere.

This paper will try to draw attention to two issues which, in my opinion, question the classic view of the psychosexual development