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The problem of women's genital anxieties has been central to psychoanalysis from the outset. These anxieties include women's fears and fantasies that their genitals are damaged, disgusting, likely to be hurt, or just don't work right.
For many years, female genital anxieties were addressed from a phallocentric perspective. This view focused almost exclusively on the young girl's observation of the distinction between the sexes, and her resulting reaction to her perception of the missing phallus. That a girl's fear of genital damage might be shaped by the genitalia that she actually possesses, perceives, and values—this possibility was ignored or neglected.
Because the bodily experience of the genitals, and of the nearby anatomical parts that can be confused with them, occurs before the observation of the genital differences between the sexes, these early bodily experiences decisively influence the girl's interpretation of the later observation of genital differences. For over fifty years, these developmental realities were not given sufficient consideration primarily because Freud discounted the existence of the young girl's awareness of her vaginal sensations. A number of early articles took issue with Freud's views, but these were largely ignored until the mid-1970s.
More recent work has placed greater emphasis on how the nature of a girl's early awareness of the specific attributes and morphology of her own genitalia influence her subsequent psychosexual development.