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In this article, Tyson challenges the well-known classical Freudian ‘bedrock’ conceptualization of the psychology of women. , in his original essay on psychosexual development ‘The three essays’ (1905), subsequent writings as in ‘Some psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes’ (1925), and particularly in ‘On femininity’ (1933), set the ‘bedrock’ psychoanalytic understanding of women which has permeated our theoretical understanding of women and clinical work for many years. He emphasized this position in a later paper, ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’
We often feel that, when we have reached the wish for a penis and the masculine protest, we have penetrated all the psychological strata and reached ‘bedrock’ and that the task is accomplished. And this is probably correct, for in the psychical field the biological factor is really rock bottom. The repudiation of femininity must surely be a biological fact, part of the great riddle of sex.
Although Freud modified, changed and extended many aspects of his theory, his understanding of women remained unchanged over the long years of his productive life. In his last years he summarized his position in ‘The outline of psychoanalysis’:
The female genitals long remain unknown… with the phallic phase in the course of it, the sexuality of early childhood reaches its dissolution. Thereafter boys and girls have different histories… both start off from the premise of the universal penis. But now the paths of the sexes diverge.
In this ‘Outline’ or summary written close to the end of his life Freud reaffirms his belief in the primary developmental importance of sexuality and in the ‘universal penis’ as the psychic ‘bedrock’ of psychosexual development in the first three years of life of the girl. The divergence in the developmental path of the girl is determined by the discovery of the anatomical differences between the sexes. Thus, ‘penis envy’ becomes an ongoing major organizer of subsequent